Ahhh…Toronto

Images like these make me miss Toronto.

{courtesy the amazing Toronto photo blog Daily Dose of Imagery}

Oily Yes Men

Nothing is more contentious nowadays than oil. Wars are fought over it and economies are dependent on it like heroin addicts looking for a fix.

Wired just published a great interview with YES MEN’s Andy Bichlbaum who, along with fellow Yes Men member Mike Bonanno, impersonated oil industry officials and announced a plan to turn human flesh into fuel at the Gas and Oil Exposition 2007 in Calgary, Alberta.

Can you imagine people’s faces then they heard, according to Wired Science:

“Without oil, at least four billion people would starve. This spiral of trouble would make the oil infrastructure utterly useless” — unless their bodies could be turned into fuel...

The impostors led growingly suspicious attendees in lighting Vivoleum candles made, they said, from a former Exxon janitor who died from cleaning a toxic spill. When shown a mock video of the janitor professing his desire to be turned in death into candles, a conference organizer pulled Bonanno and Bichlbaum from the stage. (interview link)

Here’s the press release the Yes Men produced…enjoy.

By the way, their website will provide you will hours of enjoyment as you learn about their successful pranks in France (where they insisted there is NO poverty) or at the WTO (where they suggested formalizing a model of slavery in Africa–the Voice of America fell for it and reported the plan).

Here’s a BBC video of a Yes Men prank that caused international headlines when they pretended to be a Dow Chemical spokesman admitting their fault in the horrific 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster that caused 22,000 deaths.

The Male Gaze: a review

My article original printed in the Brooklyn Rail (June 2007).

When I was in college in the 1990s, there was an emerging movement called Gay Art; it was akin to Feminist Art, but focused on radical Queer Theory and its impact on male gay identity. Gay Art embraced everyone from photographer Robert Mapplethorpe to artist Keith Haring, cartoonist Tom of Finland, filmmaker Bruce LaBruce and painter Attila Richard Lukacs.

The Male Gaze is a second look at a once-revolutionary movement that has lost some of its shock value yet continues to hold onto a very specific view of gay male aesthetics—not one that encompasses current political issues, like gay marriage or gay adoption, but that fixates on sex (official site). Male Gaze (or “Male Gays”) is more effectively viewed as a slice of a certain variety of queer art than as a show with its finger on the pulse of a new emerging gay art movement. The exhibition in the big PowerHouse Arena space (which also houses the PowerHouse Bookstore) mixes equal parts post-Woodstock hedonism and AIDS-era activism with images of gay masculinity and social networking photos culled from the Internet.

Conceptual framework aside, there are some keenly powerful pieces, like AA Bronson’s playfully narcissistic mirror portraits, “From Mirror Sequences” (1969). The artist creates a photographic “through the looking glass” vision, in which where the viewer’s gaze is refracted endlessly, always away from the subject’s crotch, a tactic that serves to highlight the missing erogenous zone. The corresponding curves of the round mirrors and subject’s limbs swirl in a visual whirlpool—it quietly sucks you in.

In contrast to Bronson’s heady reflections, Joe Ovelman’s Post-it notes from 2005 are coy and playful. They are super-minimal jottings in a bubbly script that makes everything seem witty and urbane, even the obnoxiously factual “Refuse to Pay More than $25 for a Nineteen Year Old” or “Promise to Sleep With Party Promoters.” They come across as fragments of New York cocktail conversation, preserved safely behind glass.

Another edgy talent is Qing Liu. His AIDS Walk images are sun-washed and uneventful, marking a humanitarian gesture with dull images, yet Liu’s word piece, simple scenarios of gay wish fulfillment written directly on the wall with a Sharpie marker, can be punchy and powerful.

Liu’s gay-friendly reality muses about Oprah coming out of the closet, Republican politician Mark Foley (who was embroiled in an intern sex scandal) getting shot, Laura Bush splitting with her husband and returning to her life as a librarian. The tone of Liu’s words are never overbearing; their mood is wistful and their ephemeral nature adds a degree of poignancy and protest to the words, like musings on a prison wall or the scratchings of a frustrated student on a desk or a chalkboard.

Along with Liu, whom I would consider a true find as a practitioner of a yet-to-be-defined style of new “gay art,” Slava Mogutin (his blog) is a talent with a powerful eye. Soviet dissident, blogger and porn star, Mogutin is also an accomplished photographer investigating male sexual identity. His “Red Cadet” (2000) is richly colored, flirty and playful. Another image, “Ilya (Gucci)” (2001), is a portrait of a body as merchandise: a young man crouches in a Gucci shopping bag on a wooden table against a backdrop of children’s wallpaper.

“Untitled (Kill the Poor)” by Robert Filippini (1997) is the most aggressive work in this show. His newsprint posters, with headlines like “RAPE THE UGLY” or “NAIL THE HUNGRY,” are sold for $10 apiece at PowerHouse Books, which, to complement the exhibition, has organized a table of gay-phenalia, including a limited edition work by Andrew Harwood, “Truckers Shower” (2004)—a signed bottle of Aqua Velva Ice Blue aftershave—as well as Karl Lagerfeld’s diet book and DVDs of Bruce LaBruce’s queercore flicks, like Hustler White, featuring hustlers and sex freaks.

I’m not convinced there is anything that should be labeled “Gay Art,” but if the term is simply a pretext to provide a forum for some interesting artistic talents to come together and exhibit interesting work, then there may be something there worth supporting, gay or otherwise.

Robert Filippini, “Untitled (Kill the Poor)” (1997). Variable & unique.
AA Bronson, “From Mirror Sequences” (1969). Courtesy the artist and powerHouse Arena.

Museums in Toronto & Kansas City Generate Major Buzz

The Royal Ontario Museum (known as the ROM by natives) is Toronto’s archaeological and historical museum that has a fantastic collection of Chinese art and dinosaur fossils.

In the midst of the University of Toronto campus, the ROM was a favorite place of mine to wander and spend time. Now the new $270 million addition by Daniel Libeskind has made the museum an international sensation–Liebeskind you’ll remember was the architect that was originally chosen for the WTC site, which as become a fiasco.

This structure began a small email discussion among some of my art-conscious friends. One called it a “wannabe building” (ouch!). And added, “Toronto is turning into a Chinese city, that is trying real hard to be a world capital. It may get there, but not with an immense amount of credibility.”

Another sarcastically chimed in “straight walls … ah, what a luxury!”

The only one who actually saw the newly unveiled wing reported back:

“The short version is that it’s better than expected inside, although with a fair amount of Libeskind ick…the “Spirit House”–a full height space between the four galllery floors, crossed by the walkways connecting the galleries–[is where] you’re suppposed to sit and meditate, while gazing up…I always thought people went to the ROM because they had dinosaur obsessed 9 year olds, not to meditate. The outside looks crappy — like a collapsing shed.“

The Toronto Star’s Chirstopher Hume, who I read a lot growing up, is more optimistic about the results (article). Two blogs are thrilled with the result…the Torontoist is obsessed with the building (proof) and Architechnophilia gives it a big thumbs up.

Here are some images from the opening weekend. And my favorite image from a great Toronto photo blog, Daily Dose of Imagery. Here is a post about the opening ceremony.

In Kansas City, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art added an addition of their own to their classical building and chose the brilliant and lesser known architect, Steven Holl, to do the honors. Known for its high-quality and finely selected collection, the Nelson-Atkins demonstrates that it continues to be a bastion of refined taste.

The new addition will house the museum’s collections of contemporary and African art and feature new galleries for rotating exhibitions of photography.

Check out The New Yorker’s wonderful slideshow of the building, photographed by David S. Allee (link). The venerable New York periodical clarifies, “The building consists of five freestanding structures—or lenses, as Holl calls them—cascading down one side of the museum’s sloping lawn and linked underground by a series of galleries.”

Critic Paul Goldberger has some very kind words for the structure:

“…[it] is not just Holl’s finest by far but also one of the best museums of the last generation. Its boldness is no surprise, but, in addition, it is laudably functional, with a clear layout, handsome and logically designed galleries, and a suffusion of natural light. Furthermore, Holl’s five glass structures, punctuating the hill, don’t mock the old building as you might expect; they dance before it and engage it.” (source)

Here are some great images at Designboom that show some interior shots, which aren’t as awe-inspiring as the exterior (link). Time Magazine also talks about it here.

It’s reassuring that museums are continuing to commission buildings that thrill.

Egoyan & Ataman Join Forces for Multimedia Installation in Toronto

Whenever Atom Egoyan zooms his video camera onto something, you know the product can be at times hermeneutic, but more often wonderfully lucid.

This year, the Armenian Canadian filmmaker has joined with Turkish artist, Kutlag Ataman, to create a multimedia installation slated to premier this Friday in Toronto as part of the new Luminato festival.

Based on the track record of each creative genius, the artistic dialogue between Egoyan and Ataman promises great things.

Born in Istanbul in 1961, Ataman studied film at the Sorbonne and at UCLA. He went on to win numerous awards for his films, including The Serpent’s Tale (1993) and Lola + Bilidikid (1998), which was the first film about the gay Turkish subculture which exists in Germany, before deciding to explore his ideas within an art environment. He was nominated for the London Tate Gallery’s Turner prize in 2004 and has been attracting an increasing amount of attention ever since (Tate/Turner factsheet).

Egoyan is also rooted in film, best known for his Academy Award nominated The Sweet Hereafter (1997). But the Canadian director has since branched out to direct opera and create art.

The joint work by this multi-faceted pair sounds intriguing, as this short blurb suggests:

“Auroras/Testimony” will be an exhibition of video portraits by artist Kutlug Ataman and filmmaker Atom Egoyan. Kutlug Ataman’s video is a portrait of his aging childhood nanny who also played the same role for Kutlug’s father. Atom Egoyan’s silent film is of an early twentieth-century actress, Aurora. (source)

Flash Art published an interview with Egoyan & Ataman this month and the article offers some insight into the common ground the two share:

Atom Egoyan (AE) – But I’m thinking about Ararat. Ararat is a film. People, especially many Turkish people, had an idea of the film without seeing it, and they would get very angry about it.
Kutlag Ataman (KA) – Yes, exactly…
AE - And to me the crucial moment was when Ararat was bought for distribution and it still wasn’t released because there was a nationalist wing who threatened to bomb the theater. They created violence against the distributor, and this became an installation.There was this epic, horrible, historical piece, and additionally an installation involving the circumstances of its premiere, which was happening outside of the film itself.
KA - You see, in my case, I have to be commercial now with the pressures that I have. I am willing to make more commercial films now, because otherwise I cannot exist in Turkey!
AE - There’s an interesting contrast between the Western idea of compensation, attention and distribution and the non-Western, more primal need for accessibility. We take accessibility for granted; we are very spoiled and we want something more substantial.
KA - The scary thing is that we all exist because of our stories, and if your stories are not told or preserved then your history doesn’t exist anymore. You have official history, or whatever, but your oral history, your mythology, is very important: you either exist or not. (PDF of Flash Art article courtesy Lehmann Maupin Gallery)

Fortunately, a friend has promised me to document the installation for my blog, so I will report back with her thoughts and images as soon as she returns.

AURORAS/TESTIMONY by Atom Egoyan, Kutlug Ataman (listing) – Artcore in Toronto’s Distillery Historic District (June 1 – 10, 2007)

Visiting Garine Torossian’s Cinematic Armenia

I missed my chance to see Garine Torossian’s newest film, Stone Touch Time, on MoMA’s big screen as part of the Canadian film festival last March, but fortunately I caught the flick in Toronto as part of the HotDocs festival in April.

I wanted to chime in about a filmmaker that is a long-time friend and someone who easily illuminates dark visionary corners that are both ponderous and meditative.

Since 1994, when her Girl From Moush short (see it at the end of this post) marked out a new terrain for experimental storytelling, Torossian has continued to forge a path unlike any other. Stone Touch Time is Torossian’s first attempt at a narrative feature film. Her diploma film at the Canadian Film School in Toronto, Hokees (2000), was a narrative experiment that wasn’t able to build on her established cinematic language and actually seemed crippled by it–but that’s another discussion.

In Stone Touch Time, Torossian finally breaks through into narrative success while not turning her back on her experimental heritage. The film is part of a continuing dialogue she enjoys with the work of fellow Armenian Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, and directly engages with his 1993 film, Calendar.

Like Calendar, Stone Touch Time follows diasporan Armenians (all women in Torossian’s case) as they travel to Armenia. One arrives for the first time, another (played by Arsine Khanjian) offers her views after a number of visits.

The beginning of the film starts with some of the stereotypes of visitors to Armenia, with the compulsory shots in Zvartnots airport (this airport has a special place for Armenians, and maybe it is only Armenians that start their Armenian journeys in the airport? I can’t imagine someone starting a documentary about London in Heathrow, usually airports are associated with departure, not arrival).

What makes the film noteworthy are the diversions in the script from conventional stories about Armenia, though the Armenian Genocide and the 1988 Gyumri Earthquake are given a great deal of attention. There is a segment on feminist artist Arevik Arevshatyan, as she talks about her work in a culture not accustomed to empowered individuals willing to challenge the mainstream.

Halfway through the film it becomes evident that Torossian hits her stride as the film transforms into a brilliant documentary about Armenia and its idiosyncrasies and quirks. Unlike Calendar, Stone Touch Time doesn’t seek to mythologize the Armenian identity or focus on the alienation some Armenians feel from their own “homeland”, it prefers to unravel complex reactions to a journey that is as much psychic as physical.

There is an element of Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera in this film, I doubt it is fully conscious on Garine’s part but the aesthetic texture of the silent movie classic somehow feels absorbed into her growing cinematic language (including the eerie similarity of the Vertov image I’ve posted and one of Garine with a camera in her film above)…the similarities are plenty but most obvious is the meandering camera and the visual distortion that results from double exposure in Vertov’s case and overlapping in Torossian’s feature (watch the Vertov classic here)–perhaps she should’ve called her film Woman with a Video Camera.

With Stone Touch Time, Garine has proven her gift at responding to the challenges of narrative in an open and malleable way. No longer are her films driven by their reliance on aesthetic innovation to drive their structure, they are growing more sensitive to storytelling as an important aspect of filmmaking.

The Armenia Garine projects onto the movie screen is not a conventional place, but its charm resonates with you as a land filled with endless humanity.

Girl From Moush (1994)

Coincidentally, the Calendar poster I’ve posted above was the original one designed by Garine Torossian for Egoyan’s film.

 

Look What Stumbled Out of Picasso’s Guernica

YOU Can Be Paris Hilton!

A professor from my alma mater, the University of Toronto, has pioneered a web-based software that uses facial-recognition algorithms to simulate plastic surgery, since I guess, the real thing can be dirty (for instance).

Try your own face at www.modiface.com, the results can be quite funny.

Here’s me crossed with Paris Hilton…………by the way, I’m almost ready to start a FREE THE OPPRESSED HILTON campaign!…oh wait, the kids at NYU beat me to it.

Canadians Feted in Paris

While I mentioned a few weeks ago that Arshile Gorky was being celebrated with two major exhibits in Paris, France, I didn’t realize that Canadian cinema is also being showcased in the French capital.

Not only is Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan being honored with a full retrospective at the Georges Pompidou Center (link), but Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin and Canadian actress/director Sarah Polley (who coincidentally starred in Egoyan’s Sweet Hereafter) are also enjoying their Paris moment–the former received a full page of breathless critical praise in the French daily Libération and the latter received good local reviews for her first feature film “Away from Her.”

Egoyan says it right, though I don’t know why he fixates on this idea of English Canada, I don’t consider myself an English Canadian,and I don’t know anyone who does–The Toronto Star reports:

“It is long overdue, but the French are finally catching up with the original and crazy vision of Guy Maddin,” said Egoyan. “Between the praise for Guy and the launch of Sarah’s film, this has been a big weekend for English Canada in Paris.” (source)(a CBC article)

Three Egoyan flicks you should definitely check out if you’re in Paris:

1. Next of Kin (1984)–one of the most poignant commentaries on identity in cinema
2. Speaking Parts (1989)–one of the highest points of postmodernism in all its complexity
3. Felicia’s Journey (1999)–I strangely saw this film with Jason (aka Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters) and it left me chilled to the bone

(complete Pompidou schedule)

Watch Out for Those Canadian Quarters!

The Toronto Star newspaper has reported that “an odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind the U.S. Defence Department’s false espionage warning earlier this year, the Associated Press has learned.”

Seems that some paranoid U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada filed confidential espionage accounts about these colorful coins (the first color coins in mass circulation) seemed “filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology.”

Canadian officials were not pleased by the hysterical claim and intelligence and technology experts are still scratching their heads as to why this got out of hand and, needless to say, they are “flabbergasted over the warning.” (source)

Seems the U.S. contractors didn’t know that coloring coins was popular in the Victorian era and Koreans made some Cloisonne coins back in the 19th C.

But there was some minor controversy a few years back when people realized that the poppy on the Canadian quarter could be rubbed off…the Royal Canadian Mint shot back that the color was designed to last three years (to represent the duration of the First World War which it commemmorated).