WhyteSpace

Boyle-ing over: The Sobey Finalists

I'm a moment or two late on this, but I wanted to note the finalists for the Sobey Art Award, that big, fat $50K prize that wealthy east coast grocery empire proprietors started handing out to an emerging artist every two years in 2002. The prize is more than money, as the first winner, Brian Jungen, can attest: It was the launching pad -- and deservedly so -- of a brilliant career that has gone nowhere but up. I interviewed Brian about a month ago, on the opening of his first career traveling retrospective, at its host, the Vancouver Art Gallery. If there's any way to get there, I suggest you do so. And fast. It's among the most worthwhile museum shows I've seen in a looooong time. That's one of his pieces, a patchwork facsimile of a west coast native mask he built from Nike Air Jordans. Amazing stuff.

But I digress. The 2006 Sobeys released their short list this week, culling one finalist from each of its five designated regions (weirdly bureaucratic and wrong-headedly PC for a private award, but I digress again): BC, the prairies, Ontario, Quebec, and the East. There are some odd ones, in my humble opinion: the BGL collective over Pascal Grandmaison or Nicholas Baier in Quebec, for example, or even Steven Shearer  -- to be fair, a sharp, obsessive archivist of faded youth subcultures (that's his stuff, at right) -- being chosen in BC over  3rd generation photo-conceptualists -- the region's international art-world mark -- Geoffrey Farmer and Damien Moppett.

But for me, the real surprise was right here in Ontario. Wayne Baerwaldt, who I'm usually happy to assume knows far more than me, looked at his semi-finalists, which included Will Kwan and Shary Boyle, and chose Janice Kerbel. Now Kerbel's work is interesting, in a highly conceptual, tightly-figured sort of way. She draws maps, diagrams, plots and plans that probe the highly-specialized world of criminality -- detailed plans of a bank that would facilitate a heist, for example, or a series of intricately marked decks of cards that would facilitate cheating. Interesting enough, conceptually; but a little flat, formally and aesthetically, for my liking.

And then, there's Boyle. Boyle's been something of an undergorund art world darling for several years now, showing mostly in the small, cozy rooms along the Queen West West strip. Her work had an immediate impact: Both dark and whimsical, her comic nightmarescapes and strangely tranquil, disturbing portraiture (that's one on the right) gained her a following first among her peers, in that fabulous mess of cross-disciplinary creative types that populate the downtown scene. 

Quickly, though, she became known in the broader art world as well, and rightfully so. She's traveled all over the world with her work, which, true to her roots in the create-at-all-costs world of Toronto's urban art world, comprises not just drawing and painting but projection,  sculpture and performance, too. She's not just a very good painter: she's representative of a moment, one that's unfolding here, now, before our eyes -- a cohesive movement that's broader, perhaps, than any other we've seen in the city. General Idea had three members. The Painters 11 had, well, eleven. As a Sobey finalist, Boyle would have been an ambassador for an entire community -- one that  embodies the current state of artistic production in the city. Now, I know 'Ontario' doesn't mean 'Toronto' only, but these moments are few and far between anywhere. I would have liked to have seen this one get its due.

Arnaud Maggs: A GG Award worth giving

Usually, I'm a little leery of the Governor General's art awards (or, if you prefer the official title, 'Awards in Visual and Media Arts'). Like most everything else to do with our maddeningly institutional culture, it's always seemed to me to be more a tokenistic, cheerleading effort to give momentary acknowledgment to the country's perennial cultural quandaries than it is a recognition of true merit. The awards are studiously politically correct -- to a fault -- in doling out honours across the regions (Kenneth Lochead, a member of the long-forgotten Regina Five painters, from the 60s) and disciplines (Micheline Beachemin, a maker of fabric, like the NAC's curtain).

More often than not, the GG Awards in this realm are also given to the also-ran marathoners of the art world: artists who have been able to stick around with no real ideas doing mediocre work for so long that, what the heck, let's give 'em an award, just for surviving! Think of it as the lifetime non-achievement award, with 2001 winner Tom Dean at the head of the list.

There's at least one exception this year: Photographer Arnaud Maggs. I interviewed Maggs back in 1999, on the opening of his retrospective at the Power Plant. I was a little non-plussed at the obsessive black-and-white portraiture that made up a lot of the show (the chilling, repetitive images of Joseph Beuys notwithstanding): Toronto quasi-celebrities and socialites in seemingly endless series of formal head-shots from varying angles. But my eye (along with my gut, and my heart) snagged hard in the larger gallery spaces that followed. Maggs had made a more recent project of photographing not people, but evidence, tiny personal traces of their existence: Hand made diaries, collections of letters, death notices, and in one instance, the diary of renowned French photographer Eugene Atget, photographed page by page.

But it was a wall of colour -- uncharacteristic, as Maggs has said colour makes him uncomfortable -- that hit hardest. An entire wall of the Power Plant was occupied by a grid of turn-of-the-century fabric tags that Maggs had discovered in Montpelier. The title is apt: Travail des enfants dans l'industrie(1994, shown above), the brightly-coloured tags were the remnants of an era of child labour in the textile industry, bearing the name of the child, and what was to be done with the material.

He had photographed the tags individually, in saturated colour, larger than life-size. The graphic elements almost overwhelmed -- they seemed painterly, not documentary, and removed from the drab realm of reality: Brilliant yellow, pink and blue, festooned with tidy script detailing the type of material, and the child assigned to it. It was at once obsessive and gorgeous, the colour and scale dazzling. But at the same time, the brutal reality from which they had been gleaned couldn't be ignored.

That tension, between the seductive visuals Maggs had created and the callous inhumanity they represented, produced a memorable internal wrestle in me. So much so that it's still here with me now, today. Maggs is almost 80 now, a late-comer to the art world; 30 years ago, when in his 50s, Maggs was a successful fashion photographer when, deadened by the superificiality of it, he turned to art. By that measure,  you could say he's only mid-career; if you met Maggs, you'd almost be convinced. Slight, rail-thin and impossibly spry, Maggs has a lot left to do before this career is done. Good thing. No also-ran here: Still collecting, still working, still creating, Maggs remains one of our best.

A final word: Nice to see a couple of other vinbrant creators honoured alongside Maggs today. Congrats to Peter Wintonick, the Montreal documentarian whose most famous film, Manufacturing Consent, inspired a generation of anti-consumerist activism; and independent curator and writer Peggy Gale, who has been a tireless thinker on the Canadian art scene. Well deserved.

Material Wonder: Richard Serra

Imagine the thrill an over-eager art fan would have gotten when opening the mailer from the Nicholas Metivier Gallery a couple of weeks ago: Richard Serra. Here. In Toronto. Not in a museum, but in the intimate confines of a King West gallery, where actual physical contact not only seemed possible but, if carefully played, probable.

So, setting out to the Saturday opening to realize my literal brush with greatness (I had planned to bull my way through the predictably thronging crowd, scrape my shoulder along the great man's back while he talked to someone important, all the while making it look like an accident), I was keyed up. Nervous, even.

Serra had been one of my early introductions to the muscular simplicity of Modernism. His early films, so focused on form and material, had captivated and perplexed me. It left me wanting more.

So I learned. I read. Then, in 1999, I saw: It was in Los Angeles, at the Geffen annex of the Museum of Contemporary Art, where I first came in contact with his work. Half a dozen thick sheets of metal, torqued in spirals and the size of a suburban home, sat arranged in the Geffen's space. These were his Torqued Ellipses, made in the mid-90s, an extension of his constant exploration of material and space. Imposing and elemental, a patina of rust had formed on them. You could walk up to them, inside them, along the curved pathway they created as they turned in on themselves. Once inside, they emanated a preternatural cool, something ancient and soothing. The space they carved, despite the chill, seemed, safe, warm and right.

This experience now at the front of my mind, imagine the disappointment. No crowd at the gallery -- just a small handful of like-minded acolytes and monied buyers. And no Serra. No Torqued Ellipses, either (no surprise there -- I'm doubt they'd fit down King Street, let alone in Nicholas's space).

What there were (and are, until April 1) are an array of Serra's intaglio prints. Not as imposing as building-size sculpture, true, but they're no less true (pardon the pun) to form: Simple, crisp shapes, with subtle curves, the pieces are, like all of Serra's work, intense studies of material, proportion and form (the image above comes nowhere near doing them justice). Some as large as 10 feet high, they draw the eye close, where the material, thick and black, is rippled with deliberate texture. But like much of Serra's work, the prints seem almost intuitive, self-directed - guided by Serra, more than made.

In a catalogue essay, David Hickey notes that, for an etching to be both an etching and a Serra "requires some doing and undoing in both categories." True enough. For Serra, what's left undone -- that space between intent and material urge to simply become -- calls up that old Modernist notion of essence: Material and form, achieving some kind of transcendent purity. It seems sort of naive to us now, I know; but every time I see Serra's work - and these prints are no exception -- I'm reminded the idea was right-headed and noble. And as Serra always shows me, perfectly relevant, in any era.