ART: Up from Mannerism
eye WEEKLY
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eye WEEKLY August 8, 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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ART ART
UP FROM MANNERISM
by
OLIVER GIRLING
Mannerism is too much with us -- especially with the millennium
breathing down our necks. This summer, for example, four ex-puppets
from old Gepetto McLaren's workshop called The Sex Pistols have taken
to the road, not in search of their author, but of lucre. Their sad-
sack rehashing of their one and only album shows that the boys never
got the original "concept," and now can only reproduce the packaging,
forever.
This is the essence of Mannerism, defined by The American College
Dictionary as "marked or excessive adherence to an unusual manner."
The term applies to literature as well, but nowhere is it more blatant
than in visual art. And it's visible in every category: abstraction,
figuration, installation, video, etc. The galleries are flooded, with
no federal relief-aid expected. Abstract painting is at major risk to
offend -- on Yorkville, on Spadina, in the west end. But High Realist
fetish art, whose patron saints are Bateman, Colville and Wyeth, is
also making a strong showing.
Dreary stuff it is, and it puts the gallery-going public in a foul
mood (I've noticed). So my summertime recommendation is to skip the
usual venues and try some new, strange neighborhoods.
Like Moss Park, two blocks west of the armory on Queen St. E., where
two galleries, Robert Birch and Painted City, have been operating for
about a year, alongside fine establishments like Artatorture Tatoos,
Who's On Fire Sports Bar, Kwasheba African Artisan, He And She
Clothing Gallery (where famous ex-dancer Marlene works) and the Acadia
Book Store. (Twenty years ago on the same block, Steve's Macedonian
Kitchen closed after a dispute with the LCBO and turned into John
Wilkinson's studio; Steven Leckie closed his Fleurs du Mal clothing
store there a year or two ago.)
Robert Birch has one of the best stables in town, featuring almost all
younger, not necessarily local, artists. Saskatoon artist Janet Warner
exhibited there in July -- iconic arrangements of small oil paintings
on board. Their subject is her own life, but they flow easily between
abstraction and figuration, without making explicit any narratives, or
any particular claims to meaning. Birch's September show will feature
Euan Macdonald's circular paintings, in oil paint on sheet-metal, as
well as computer animations of some of his pictures.
On semi-regular display in the back framing/storage space you can see
Peter Smith's oddball, transcendental wood reliefs representing both
spiritual and mundane subjects, Martin Pierce's extensively layered
paintings, Greg Angus' abstracts that bring to mind Japanese video-
animations, as well as Stacey Lancaster, Lorene Bourgeois, Richard
Storms, and others.
Two doors down, at Collette French's Painted City Gallery, the Milt
Jewel exhibition is in its last few days. He's showing a wide
selection of oil paintings and watercolors, often layering one image
over another. My favorites are the portraits, especially one called
Butterfield-Schwitters. The head of composer Christopher Butterfield
is painted on a mottled ground next to Kurt Schwitters. Not only do
they look alike, but I take the artist's proposition to be that their
work has connections (not a pairing I would ever have made myself).
This piece returns portraiture to an older sense of that discipline:
making cultural and memory connections through that apparently most
neutral of subjects -- the face.
Other strange-neighborhood galleries worth checking: Newman Gallery on
Walnut St. (north of King), the Lonsdale Gallery in Forest Hill
Village and the Koffler Gallery in North York.
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