-
I used to assign Lum’s lovely essay, ”Encountering Chen Zhen: A Paris Portal” to my second-year students, hoping it would be a port of entry into both Lum’s work and Chen’s. There he recounts his visit in Paris with Chen Zhen and Xu Min, Chen’s wife and fellow artist, and speaks of the warmth he found with them, the discussions they had about art and migration, of Chen’s illness and how it had taught him to be “less proud,” of his interest in what being Chinese meant in Canada, and of Lum’s family history. Along the way, Lum introduces several works by Chen. I took the opportunity to point out the author’s undisguised admiration, noting that this was one of Lum’s gifts, a way of learning.
-
After days of historic high water and watching Venice’s warren of shops and restaurants struggle to survive, it was a relief to enter the graceful Palazzo Grassi and view Luc Tuymans’s La Pelle [The Skin.] It was as though we had left Tintoretto behind, left the damp over-decorated churches with their flooded floors, and the rotting palazzi strung out along the Grand Canal. But of course, that past is not past: Venice’s problems are due in large part to civil corruption, mass tourism, and the climate crisis, all of which are no less a part of the contemporary world than Tuymans’s drained meditations on the image.
-
“I do not mourn for what I have lost. For if there is one new art that we have had to learn, those of us who have been hunted down and forced into exile at a time hostile to all art, then it is the art of saying goodbye to everything.”
So wrote Stefan Zweig in his simple, lucid autobiography, The World of Yesterday. His liberal, pan-European views and his idealism appear naive now, but also more poignant, bearing like some battered raft so many ways of thought and feeling that time has swept away.
-
All too often we’re the ones who decide what time holds,” writes Javiar Marias, the great Spanish novelist. Or so says the narrator in Thus Bad Begins. In Kentridge’s case, this is nothing to lament; the choices of what to include, what to exclude are made so well. But the ability to choose what time holds is, in the end, illusory. There’s no way to keep Kentridge’s long frieze from itself becoming entangled with other times, with other works, especially here in this jumble, this Rome. Things force their way in.
-
I think of them often. I knew Felix best. Jorge I never knew well. I feared and admired AA’s bite and sophistication. But I looked up to them all and, now that the ashes of General Idea are scattered, I often find myself thinking of how Felix and Jorge died, or rather, how they lived, and made their work as death drew near. General Idea was, among so many things, an enquiry into what an artist might be. They claimed to be “a framing device within which we inhabit the role of the artist.” Pretending to pretend, they threw off alternative visions: babies, poodles, doctors, or poor pathetic hunted seals on an ice flow. Then Felix and Jorge stepped off this mortal coil. How they left is the last image they could leave us, their last heartbreaking exploration of the frame to which they devoted their lives.
-
Borrowed Light, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Volume 15, Number 1
Andy Patton, a Canadian artist whose work was featured in the 2014 exhibition Transformation of Canadian Landscape Art: Inside and Outside of Being at the Xi’an art Museum, discusses in his essay about the melding of the visual and the literary inherent in calligraphy that inform his work.
The most important things to paint are those which cannot appear. The heart of the matter is not trees and mountains, or portraits, or crosses as in Ding Yi’s paintings.[i] But the things which can appear are the only means painters have of gesturing towards what cannot appear. Time is one of those, ethics another. Time cannot not appear, since a painting is still. A space or a place can be depicted; I’m interested in places that are soaked in time.
[i] I am grateful to Lorenz Helbling of ShangArt for his generosity in taking the time to discuss the subtleties of Ding Yi’s work with me.
-
“Ron Benner and the Ecology of Limitations, “(essay on Ron Benner), in FoodCultures, edited by Barbara Fischer, YYZ Books, Toronto, 2000.
“Lustrous Surfaces of Gold, “(catalogue essay), in Christian Eckart: Disturbing Abstraction, ed: Mark Cheetham, ArtLab, Dept. of Visual Art, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, 1997.
“Cathy Orfald's Cat,” (catalogue essay) in Sheila Ayearst: The 401 TowardsLondon, London Regional Art & Historical Museums, London, Ontario, Sept.1995.
“A Compromised Light: Some Thoughts on Pierre Dorion's Self-portraits,” C magazine, Toronto, Winter 1995.
“Trousers on Head,” (catalogue essay) for Kim Adams, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, and Shedhalle, Zurich, 1992.
“Buchloh's History,” (essay) C magazine, Toronto, Ontario, Spring, 1985.
-
Carol Wainio is a wonderful and troubling painter. For decades, a constant inventiveness in the ways of handling paint, of creating figures and spaces, has distinguished her work. But this restless ingenuity doesn’t direct attention on the artist behind the work. Instead it feels necessitated – by what I can’t say, except that something seems to act on the paintings from outside. Once this might have been called “historical necessity,” when artworks were still understood as requiring that we change our lives. Wainio’s works could be taken as History Paintings (like Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People), though ones made for a world in which history seems to have vanished, leaving behind a wreckage through which she is picking her way.
-
Pain Not Bread is a collaborative writing group formed in 1990 by Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton. In Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, they occupy the border created by translation, allusion and echo, and make it into habitable space, a place where the subtle sensitivities of poets from the troubled late Tang Dynasty (Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, …) blend with our own millennial anxieties. What do poets do in a difficult time? It’s as though Pain Not Bread were talking and drinking with their Tang contemporaries on some old rickety ferry making its way back and forth between English and Chinese, Chinese and English, in the process weaving together a music of supreme nuance and tonal registration, a mode of speaking and feeling which is “undisfigured by sentiment” and yet riddled with its own mortality.