1977 vs Nineteen Seventy Seven

It turns out that reading online is easier if you just give numbers straight up as numerals versus spelling them out. Is it just another indicator that we're getting dumber as a whole? I don't think so, we live in information deluge... most of would prefer that 1 minute highlight reel version of 30 minute news broadcast. And if you got an email going over 50 words? Give me a call. Gotta write it though? If you really want me to take it seriously? Write a letter. I like real mail.

2 sides, 2 different coins

With Tony Blair speaking frank nonsense this week, it's refreshing to watch the Wu spin a masterpiece about it from the other side. It's like we're on earth, and they're on the moon.

RIP Sol Lewitt

The artist who coined "conceptual art" to describe his work and who co-founded Printed Matter amongst other achievements, is dead.

It's a new day.

4 great songs for April 4th

especially if you're into something else for today.

thanks to nichola-feldmann kiss and max dean for putting me on to this.

3 gems for April 3rd

1. Tom Burckhardt and his cardboard and india ink studio is amazing and some of his painting is kind of tight too.

2. The graphics of Eric Nitsche (1908-1998)

3. Max Dean's Chair

Bonus Beat:

Rirkrit Tiravanija is at OCAD tomorrow giving a lecture.

And oh yeah...

Looks fantastic. And the official website is awesome looking too.

Why is coke illegal?

In America, where racism is a omnipresent, it came down to racial fears.

A new take

Recycling in hip hop is nothing new. Excuse the pun. These two tracks are just excellent.

one
two

They have that kind of a Nouvelle Vague feel. Different, but not better. Just sweet.

Flows on top of flows...

200 carats in my b-boy pose, my milkshake sells way better than yours. And I only have Yoko Ono to beat? Winning is gonna be easier than defeat.

Granola Art

Paper Rad's Jim Jones - Photo: www.comicon.com

The online urbandictionary defines the colloquial adjective “Granola” as:

A person who dresses like a hippy, eats natural foods (granola), and is usually a Liberal, but in all other ways is a typical middle class white person, and is likely to revert back to being straight when they finish college.

eg. Did you see that granola chick at the farmer's market buying bean sprouts? Yeah, her new Volvo was parked next to me.

The other straightforward definition of a person deemed to be granola is simply hippie. One can be slurred for granola leanings for a myriad of reasons. But to be called granola is typically to be insulted or at least belittled. It is a term of judgmental derision that as an artist I am redeeming and applying it to an early 21st century postmodern art aesthetic: An unorganized, multifarious, raw and youthful movement rooted to hippies; it’s roots are important because granola’s main practitioners are a strain of hipster; the hip root that both lends itself to hippie and hipster is not an accident. The hippie concern for bright colored clothing, a stress for self expression, and the rebellion against the more conservative standards and values of mainstream society is well reflected in the hipsters concerns brightly colored 80s influenced clothing, independent music and culture and a stress on self expression.

In the visual arts the aesthetic of granola is primarily driven it’s formal qualities that are hugely influenced by cartoons and comic books. Granola arts practitioners such as Seth Scriver, David Shrigley, Jason McLean, Maura Doyle, Paper Rad, Dearraindrop, Kineko Ivic et al. all share some of the same things: bright colors, weird and strange and youthful subject matter, a gross fascination with childhood nostalgia, disregard for modernist influenced ‘good taste’, a strange breed of expressionism and perhaps the most damaging of all: the seeming lack any sort of intellectual rigor. Above all their target is the depth of the imagination: that deep and cavernous interior world that parents and teachers cannot penetrate and is deeply rooted to expressionism of the 20th century.

Honestly, at first I was just looking at bad art. I saw this art as lacking a certain level of quality that for me has been deemed a high quality, an art worthy of not hanging on gallery walls but art worthy of hanging on the National Gallery’s walls. Sometimes what I notice is that this art is no more than a doodle: in the case of Jason McLean’s cartoons, his art is just that… a doodle. Dearraindrop composes forms that are piled on with neon pinks and day-glo greens and the deliberately fluid drawn line that is supposedly liberating this art from modernist stodginess, it at once pins this runniness in the milk between the honey and the oatmeal and the organic flax of: Granola.

I remember seeing Maura Doyle’s and Annie Dunning's Lucky Stick for the first time. A twig with a piece of yarn and a small sign announcing that the stick is unlike the other sticks from the urban park it was found, this one chosen by the artist is lucky. The gesture of the Lucky Stick is childlike and rooted in nostalgia for childhood and naivety. One can pretend to hear a child in the park catching mummy's attention "I got a lucky stick! I got a luucky stiiiiiiick." Similarly, Paul Butler’s relational collage parties that bring people together to make art and to have fun together are an extension of kindergarten art class and absolutely not modeled after Fine Art crits with theory based professors. The latter is eschewed. Instant Coffee’s relational events do a similar thing. Bright, loud, lurid and fun are the keys and “professionalism” is seen as a threat: to be professional means buying into a system of quality that represents an old guard and it's rules that make the gallery a boring place and space. Granola art practitioners, it would seem, would be happy to be coddled back to the comfort of grandma’s kitchen table with some fresh paper and a set of fresh pencil crayons for a session of consilidated enjoyment. Before we fall in to the tired argument of ‘my kid could do that in 5 minutes’ let me make something clear: I don't think any could do it. I don’t dislike Granola Art. I don’t think it’s bad art.

In fact, the more I happen to see it, the more fond I become of it and the better I appreciate and understand it. I still don’t very much like it but then art is not always about liking disliking. More than anything it has been a personal challenge to my own perceived ideas and because it's challenging it holds merit. Art, art criticism and art history is about currents and placing them within some sort of framework that can help us understand the world around us, who we are and where we are and how all of it fits together. So what’s happening? Why are young, well educated artists, in rich 1st world countries choosing to focus their attention on faux naive pursuits of the pencil, brush, space and related experiments? That’s what I’m wondering.

In Toronto, I can place the influence of Kensington Market as important. The place is a geographical oddity in the midst of a modern global center. Hippies to left, hippies to the right, and more hippies per square meter than I've ever witnessed. The proliferation of organic produce, cheap eats, "bohemia", and the Anarchist Free School are big influences. But it doesn't really account for granola's American reach, unless we say that Toronto is influencing Paper Rad and dearraindrop. Perhaps it's not too outlandish.

The (biblical) painting of Nicolas Poussin

The Adoration of the Golden Calf
c. 1634
Oil on canvas, Iaid down on board, 154 x 214 cm
National Gallery, London

The Destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem
1637
Oil on canvas, 147 x 198,5 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

The Judgment of Solomon
1649
Oil on canvas, 101 x 150 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris

The Assumption of the Virgin
1650
Oil on canvas, 57 x 40 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris

It's amazing how composed Mary is in that last picture. It's amazing to think that people had no "rich" media to immerse themselves within; no internet, no camera on their cellphones, no video ipods, flat-screens. Painting was it. These paintings are full of narrative much like films are today, rich in color like films and full of information and content. Today's media mix today grants us all this and more except one thing that somehow can't be taken from painting: stillness. Modern media hums but even modern paintings sit even. The temper of composure remains in painting, as well as much sculpture, but it's only painting that can force a direct relation to the richness of film. I suppose film makers operate more like sculptors, working in the 3rd, and their end result is paint like with the added layer of sound and the 4th dimension. A wonderfully rich conflation. But then why the current rise and interest in painting again? Does sound and time play itself out in the perception of painting somehow that other media don't? Or is the noiseless calm of painting somehow one of culture's last refuges from our deluge of news, information, entertainment, and social clatter?

Images: Web Gallery of Art

Scaring the Shit out of Mexican Girls

The Painting of Mustafa Maluka

Is it just me, or does this dude seem to be painting cadavers? I haven't read his blog much so I can't read them properly. Nevertheless I like the juxtaposition of flat, bright color and the work up "skin" tonalities.

Link: mustafamaluka.com

Images: Michael Stevenson

The art of Alfredo Martinez

"I met Basquiat a few times, but we didn't really know each other. He would have paid more attention to me if I was a big-titted blonde."

Images: The Proposition

Ryszard Kapuściński, RIP

At a certain point, Kapuściński, was Poland's only foreign correspondent and was responsible for 50 countries. An amazing writer who can make you giggle the water up your nose and has a such a keen eye for description that can completely creep you out. I'll have to get reading more of his work...

Everything you wanted to know.

Canadian Diaspora and Art: Tonight!

**Should I Stay or Should I Go? Canadian Artists in the Diaspora**

*Alissa Firth-Eagland, Pierre Tremblay, Gareth Long, Will Kwan, Stephen
Fakiyesi*

Panel Discussion: *Monday, January 29, 2007 at 6pm*
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Hart House, University of Toronto

A panel discussion on the migration of Canadian visual artists into the international context. The discussion will focus on the effects of international residency opportunities and graduate programmes, artdealership in art market cities, and consider national representation through expatriot artists at major art events and biennials. The relationship between economic and cultural migration will be addressed to gauge the position and options available to Canadian visual artists and students.

*Panelists:*

*Alissa Firth-Eagland *has initiated artistic and curatorial partnerships between Scandinavia and Canada. She recently completed a curatorial residency at the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art. In 2007, she will present Finnish and Swedish video works at the 20th Images Film and Video Festival in Toronto.

*Pierre Tremblay *is a coordinator of le Fresnoy, a postgraduate residency in Tourcoing, France. He currently teaches in the Image Arts Department of Ryerson University, Toronto and has previously taught at Parsons School of
Design in Paris.

*Gareth Long *is currently completing his MA in Fine Art at Yale University. Exploring the formal space between video and sculpture has been a focus of his independent work and projects with the 640 480 collective. He has translated video in books and lenticular photographic prints.

*Will Kwan *is the Snider Lecturer in Humanities at University of Toronto-Scarborough. His work is included in the 2007 Biennale de Montréal and was recently a resident researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Holland. He has presented work at the 2003 Venice Biennale.

*Stephen Fakiyesi *will be included in AAHLuminex show at the Art Gallery of Mississauga and is collaborating on a childrens book. He recently completed his MA in Fine Art at the University of California-Los Angeles where he focussed on print making.

The panel will be moderated by *Tejpal S. Ajji*, curator in residence at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery.

--

Afterall, it's a small place.

10 points for David Hammons

Gotta love this.

The New Leipzig School

This New York Times article, though about a year old, details the rise of European painting in the German city of Leipzig. Hailed as the first significant art movement of the 21st century, the painters led by Neo Rauch have taken quite a traditional approach to painting and in doing so have created something new and fresh. Or at least the art world thinks so. I have mixed feelings. Though ever since seeing Tim Eitel's work, I've been quite seduced by it. Austere, quiet and dreary - it has a specific type of Eastern European poetic that rhymes just right.

Image: Tim Eitel's Liegender courtesy of Eigen + Art

Comet McNaught

The brightest comet ever can be easily seen be the naked eye especially by those in the southern hemisphere. Check the wiki page for instructions how to see it for yourself.

Photo: Wikipedia

The End of The World

So they updated the doomsday clock BUT The End of The World is still funny.