ART (COVER STORY): Painting Busts Out In T.O.

[eye WEEKLY]

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eye WEEKLY November 24 1994
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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COVER STORY (ART) (ART) COVER STORY
review

DEAD INDUSTRY
To Nov. 26. 388 Carlaw, Unit w12.

PAINTING DISORDERS
To Nov. 26. 455 King St. W.

MUD
To Dec. 3. 59 Adelaide St. E., 363-6856.

THE BIG PICTURE
The cranky engine of art theory is running out of steam, as new
painting busts out all over Toronto

by
OLIVER GIRLING

It's only recently that art "Theory" has tried to privilege itself over
studio practice, its users claiming spectral powers of cultural
interpretation that necessitate leaving the nuisance art object behind.

But there are signs that this cranky engine is running out of steam.
New painting is busting out all over, under the aegis of a
multi-ethnic, all-ages, fully gendered group of practitioners, while
tenured Marxists and tenured Fascists are left together to pontificate
on their indigestible versions of determinism and essentialism.

The reason is obvious: art criticism is in a slough. Last week I read
three reviews of the de Kooning retrospective at the Metropolitan
Museum in New York: two parroted (without acknowledgement) a
40-year-old reading of the work by the formalist critic Clement
Greenberg; the third threw up its hands and proclaimed the artist to be
an untouchable American master.

Greenberg, along with his plagiarizing, contemporary acolytes, missed
the main point of the "Woman" paintings: the travesty (in the sense of
transvestism, gender scrambling, grotesque posing) in their depiction
of the female subject, their lampooning of the American media's
obsession with this icon and their frontal assault on a conventional
notion of beauty. Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons after him, weren't so
myopic: they picked up and developed these very themes.

But before we pillory the critics, let's remember that many
revolutionary critical advances in this century have come courtesy of
artists themselves, from the Futurist manifesto, to Dada, to Wyndham
Lewis' magazine Blast, to Marshall McLuhan's Counterblast, to the
proclamations of the Constructivists, to Paul- Emile Borduas' Refus
Globale in QuＣec, and so on. Works of art can be a most effective form
of criticism; in fact they always operate as call and response with
other artworks, even if critique isn't their primary objective.

INDUSTRIAL SCAPES

In the old Isaacs Gallery space on John St., a recent show called Posse
consisted of the work of six painters: Catherine Beaudette, Gerry
Collins, Clive D'Oliveira, Maria Gabankova, Doug Stone and Adriana Van
Drunen. Though the invitation picture -- in black-and-white, of
themselves lounging in the building's doorway, I take to be "gangsta
style," I understand the show's title to refer to the graffiti cells
who've operated in big North American cities since the '70s, starting
in New York.

In the '80s, some of the graffiti artists came into galleries --
Basquiat and Haring (dead), Scharf (hanging on in the nasty '90s), Rick
Prol (working for Kostabi), Futura 2000 (a New York City cop) and Ram
L. Zee (doing the European university circuit). Generally the form
works best and has remained outside: its beauty is in its economy of
means (the sprayed, oversized signature) and in the true vandalism of
its aspirations. (Chris Cran catches its spirit in the painting "My
Face In Your House.")

Metaphorically, the idea of the recent ad hoc collectives as graffiti
posses works. They're cooperative, non-hierarchical and their members
abet one another in the dissemination of signature, style and
commentary. At 388 Carlaw Ave. (Unit w12), the exhibition Dead Industry
is in its final days. It consists of the work of 19 artists in a
variety of graphic media. Unique among the shows discussed here, it is
accompanied by a manifesto of sorts, signed by Mikael Sandblom, one of
the artists. Sandblom claims a territory for the work between the sturm
und drang illustrations of Expressionism and the aridity of Conceptual
Art.

The description fits the artist's own paintings particularly well: they
collage photographic fragments, sometimes taken from Muybridge, with
sentence fragments on paintings of industrial buildings. Manrico
Venere, a photographer, is also looking at industrial buildings, but
unlike the Bechers, he cuts and collages them to create an industrial
landscape of the imagination.

Peter Taylor presents entertaining, scraffito-like paintings and the
artist No Way Instinct definitely has the best tag. Michael Cho is the
most provocative artist here: he combines "hot" images in the spirit,
though not the style, of David Salle. Sanja Huibner has, as a kind of
signature on her paintings, adopted an aluminum vent like the kind
Carlo Cesta often incorporates

DISORDERLY CONDUCT

Some of the artists in Dead Industry met a couple of years ago in an
exhibition called Diversity. They have that in common with the painters
in a much more central location: Painting Disorders.

But where Industry is delighted to dance among the ruins of structures
whose original purposes have become obsolete, Disorders takes a more
focused, strategic view of the place of painting in the information
age, proposing to use its traditional means to upset habits of viewing
that are on their way to becoming commonplace.

The six people in the show maintain fairly close professional links;
some have also shown together in Brooklyn. Mark Bell's Beach paintings
are insidious: when first seen they appear to be abstract monochromes,
but closer investigation reveals figures, barely discernable in the oil
(they're taken from the Canadian landing at Dieppe). So what at first
appear to be pieces in the tradition of abstract Modernism are in fact
tied to the tradition of History Painting. In the same room, Angela
Leach's meticulous criss-crossing lines in acrylic create spectacular
little op art pieces.

In the back room Eric Glavin and Sally Spath represent North American
and European approaches to abstract painting: Glavin's ironic and
hard-edged, Spath's black monochrome and brushy in a Hans Hartung vein.
But unlike that first, optimistic generation of abstractionists, the
mood has turned grim; non-objective art can live, but stripped of
Utopian illusions. Elizabeth McIntosh and Nestor Kruger combine
figurative elements in their work, Kruger in explicit landscapes and
houses derived from computer imaging, McIntosh in oblique collages
featuring passages of transparency and scumbling of paint.

McIntosh, along with Linda Watson, has also mounted work in the subway,
at the Ossington and St. George stations. At Ossington, Watson
interweaves Greek mythology with tales from the office, on Trans-Ad
boards. McIntosh has used light boxes, situated on five different
stairways inside the St. George station. This work is a brave attempt
at visual interference in the informational chaos of the transportation
system; for it to work optimally, they would need these images
reprinted in multiple editions and featured in many stations on the
line.

IN YOUR EYE

Finally, MUD is an exhibition of 20 artists (with which I'm involved)
at 59 Adelaide St. E. Its title is taken from a phrase Victor Burgin,
the British photo- textual artist, ripped off from Ruskin (and we come
to bury Burgin, not to praise him). The exhibition showcases a
cross-section of disparate painters, who unlike the artists in
Disorders, don't habitually work and show together. Its genesis was in
a meeting between Anda Kubis and Ewen Macdonald. At the graduating
exhibition of mutual friends, they agreed that there was a glaring lack
of a context in which their painting could be seen and considered,
indeed a very Torontonian intolerance toward it, and they decided to
find out if there were others feeling the same predicament.

Over the course of a year following, the nucleus of an exhibition
formed, then expanded, until a wide variety of painters, at different
stages in their careers, were represented. A catalogue was printed for
the show, with a commissioned essay (there is no curator) by Art
Gallery of Hamilton curator of contemporary art Ihor Holubizky. He
contextualizes the work in terms not only of the broader, international
contemporary painting scene, but in terms of cultural antecedents and
possibilities for reading the work using models from TV and cinema.

The work in it ranges from the painterly (Heinrich Wollflin's die
malerie), to the un-painterly, the goofball, the gnomic, the
sepulchral, paint-by-numbers, pop larceny and just plain wailing away.
The show holds three floors of a downtown, standard office building
(whose name used to be "NAME THIS BUILDING"). On two floors, the
standard fluorescent lights have been killed in favor of a warmer,
kinder gallery-style illumination. On the other, the fluorescents have
been left, to remind you where you are.

I could tediously adumbrate what everyone in the show is doing, but
that would leave no room for pictures, and besides, you can see for
yourselves. I'd rather give you Holubizky quoting Morton Feldman: "What
was great about the '50s is that for one brief moment -- maybe, say six
weeks -- nobody understood art. That's why it happened."

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