Robert Amos: Is Minimalism really worth mocking?Robert Amos / Times Colonist
September 25, 2016 05:00 AM
Untitled (Coke Zero) by John Boyle-Singfield Photograph By DARREN STONE, Times Colonist
Anybody here remember Minimalism? There was the long project of Modernism: from Impressionism toExpressionism, through Abstract Expressionism to Colour Field and Hard Edge. And, when there was hardly atrace of the artist left, we were offered Minimalism.
“It is also known for being anti-humanist in its attempted removal of the artist’s hand, and in its apparentlyemotionless intellectualism,” says John Hampton. And he ought to know — he is the curator of the showtitled Why Can’t Minimal? on now at Open Space Gallery (510 Fort St., 250-383-8833, until Oct. 22).
I remember Minimalism. As a student I stood before Donald Judd’s set of seven galvanized iron boxes, boltedonto the wall at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It was appropriately titled Untitled, and I found it … perfectly boring.
My art-history textbook explained: “Judd vehemently insists that primary structures or minimal sculpture — most specifically his own —constitutes a direction essentially different from earlier constructivism. The difference, as he sees it, lies in his search for an absolute unityor wholeness through repetition of identical units in absolute symmetry.” Yawn.
Judd seems to be a pompous emperor of art, long overdue for a new set of clothes, and this exhibit sets out to take the measure of himand his cohorts. Sent on tour by the Art Museum of the University of Toronto, this show presents 13 exhibits that refer specifically tocreations by the masters of Minimalism: Daniel Buren, John McCracken, Carl Andre, Hans Haacke.
I confess that those names aren’t really on the tip of my tongue. Anyway, none of those famous artists are in the show. It’s actually agathering of young artists from Toronto riffing on the old guys, joking them up a bit.
Like this: John Boyle-Singfield took as his inspiration Haacke’s proto-minimalist Condensation Cube. About 40 or 50 years ago, Haackesealed a small amount of water in a Plexiglas cube to make visible the circulatory systems that connect the interior with the exterior of theart object — condensation formed on the inside of the box!
And now, Boyle-Singfield’s recreation uses Coke Zero instead of water. (The catalogue helpfully defines Coke Zero as a “hyper-contemporary and commodified version of nothingness.”) So there you have it: a 12-inch-square cube containing approximately threelitres of Coke Zero, some of it condensing into droplets. Is it an homage? A remix? A joke?
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Here’s another one. Tammi Campbell made an impressive copy of a shaped canvas by Frank Stella, and titled it Pre Post-Painterly (AfterStella). It’s 46 feet 8 inches long and four feet high. Stella’s original hard-edge acrylic was done with masking tape and paint rollers, newmaterials that made this type of painting possible.
In writing about Stella and his big thing in the pamphlet, Hampton notes: “Minimalism has had, and continues to have, a gender problem.”He goes on to enumerate some traits of minimalism that are associated with masculinity: “rigidity, rationalism, professionalism,seriousness.”
No wonder Campbell took such delight in constructing her own Stella, correct in every detail, but without the paint. It’s just the maskingtape, put down and left in place. The emperor’s underclothes, you might say.
All this sent me to my dictionary to look up something. “Irony: a figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of thatexpressed by the words used, usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to implycondemnation or contempt.”
The subtle tape-striped panel Campbell made looks like respect, but if you are in the know, it’s mockery. Is Minimalism worth mocking?Does anyone remember?
Hampton’s little handbook is helpful. It brings up Robert Garnett’s definition of something he calls Abstract Humour: “not necessarily alaughing matter, it is more like being put in a ‘funny or preposterous’ situation, like that of a critic encountering a work of art that seems todisable one’s prior criteria for the success or failure of a work of art.” Perhaps this “disabling of one’s criteria” is what people go to artgalleries for these days.
The Toronto artists are not here just to ridicule. Some people love this Minimalist stuff. Hampton confesses that, “like any reasonablebeing, I do enjoy spending hours in front of a Sol LeWitt sculpture.” He explains that the artists in his show are using paradoxicalpropositions “to articulate new and playful ways of activating minimal art.” Since Minimalism was rigid at birth, and has been long deadfor all practical purposes, it certainly could use some activating.
So how does one activate that boring minimalist Donald Judd? John Marriott’s collage is only a sheet of computer paper with a fewimages printed on it, and off to the left he included a photo of the very Untitled piece I saw in Toronto years ago. In addition to Judd’sstairway of boxes, there is a picture of a cubic sculpture by Sol LeWitt and a photograph of a chimpanzee taking part in a psychologicalexperiment. The chimp is climbing over a bunch of boxes to get at a banana. And it’s not just any banana he’s after, but the banana on theVelvet Underground record cover by … Andy Warhol.
Get it?
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Robert Amos: UVic’s library a treasure trove of modern workRobert Amos / Times Colonist
October 2, 2016 05:00 AM
Drawing by Wyndham Lewis from his magazine Blast 2 (1915). Photograph By Submitted
A new book entitled Fronts of Modernity is the fourth volume published by and about the University ofVictoria’s libraries. It was created by assistant professor Matthew Huculak, who was assigned the task byuniversity librarian Jonathan Bengtsen in honour of the 50th anniversary of the university’s Special Collectionsand Archives.
Who knew that UVic was so richly endowed with original source materials of literary modernism? When UVicand Simon Fraser University were founded in the 1960s, the three university libraries in the provincestrategized their collecting activities.
Simon Fraser concentrated on the U.S.; the University of British Columbia chose to specialize in Canadian literature; and UVic focused itsattention on Britain. Librarian Roger Bishop was enthusiastic, literary lion Robin Skelton used his influence and a plucky young professorof English named Ann Saddlemyer took to the field. With good luck, good connections and a winning personality, Saddlemyer landed inthe centre of a field that at the time was not properly appreciated.
Last spring, I reviewed an exhibit of the library’s holdings of W.B. Yeats and his family, amassed for the university in its early days bySaddlemyer. About that time, a filing cabinet full of papers from Britain’s poet laureate John Betjeman came to Victoria, and had to beproperly looked into.
Reading this new book, I discovered that Victoria also has correspondence between Herbert Read and T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia”;important proof editions of the writings of Lawrence Durrell; and many original watercolours by Henry Miller.
An extraordinary gathering of materials by and relating to Wyndham Lewis, which was assembled by Cyril J. Fox over a lifetime, hasalready drawn scholars to Victoria. Letters and first editions by T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf also have a home here, andthere is an unexpectedly large cache of rare editions and early publications of James Joyce awaiting the attention of scholars.
This is Huculak’s particular field of interest, and since coming here, he brought to light the original files and photographs for the picturebook James Joyce in Paris, by the mid-century literary photographer Gisèle Freund, who was based in Paris from 1933 to 1967. Such arethe treasures waiting to be examined by UVic scholars.
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Fronts of Modernity was beautifully designed by Clint Hutzulak at Rayola Creative, and the look of the book alone makes it worthy of notein this art column. Hundreds of colour illustrations presented in an engaging layout give us a sense of the stationery, the postmarks andhandwriting in these gems of correspondence.
For example, we are shown a letter from Ezra Pound typed in blue on his block-printed stationery from Rapallo, Italy. This page includes afirst draft of one of his poems which has been extensively amended by the author with a fountain pen. With the advent ofword-processing and email, these sorts of artifacts represent forms of communication from another age.
Fronts of Modernity, ed. Matthew Huculak (University of Victoria Libraries, Victoria 2016, 144 pp.) is not for sale in shops, but can found atthe UVic Library, or can be accessed as a pdf file at no cost. Just go to http://bit.ly/2dekrWG (http://bit.ly/2dekrWG)
The Mayhew family has donated a tall bronze sculpture named Caryatid to the Royal B.C. Museum grounds. Created in 1971 by ElzaMayhew, one of the famed Limners group of artists, it joins another Mayhew sculpture named Spirit standing in the reflecting pool at thecentre of the native plant garden that fronts the Provincial Archives.
Other major installations of Mayhew’s work can be seen on the grounds of the University of Victoria and at Winchester Galleries.
This newspaper has already featured a story about the Millennium exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, but I can’t resist sharingmy enthusiasm for this extraordinary show.
In two large galleries, about 70 of the “greatest hits” of the Asian art collection have been selected by curator Barry Till to make anappearance, and every piece comes with a fascinating story. If you could choose just a few of our 250 pieces of carved amber or75 beautiful ivories of age and distinction, which would you pick? There is a scroll from the Dun Huang caves, five metres long, datingfrom the eighth century, and it’s one of three we own. A Tibetan tangka or painting on fabric is 400 years old and is unique amongreligious paintings in that it shows Kublai Khan.
You’ll see everything from oracle bones (16th to 11th centuries BC) to ink and colour paintings by Wu Guanzhong and Zhang Daqian, twoof the foremost Chinese painters of the 20th century. Sedan chair, folding screen, stone Buddhas from Afghanistan — I’ve visited threetimes already, and will return.
As Till has been threatening retirement for some time, and the gallery hopes to hear good news about its expansion and could close itsdoors for a while, this might be Till’s swan song. It would be hard to make a more stunning exit, but I’m in no hurry to see him go. Can wehope for a show of the greatest hits of the European and decorative arts, or a survey of top picks from Canada’s art history?
Last week, I wrote about the show Why Can’t Minimal? at Open Space (510 Fort St., 250-383-8833), and said that Tammi Campbell’slarge and clever takeoff on one of Frank Stella’s Notch paintings was all masking tape and no paint.
It turns out that Campbell fooled me. Helen Marzolf of Open Space wrote to set the record straight, pointing out that it’s actually a trompel’oeil realist painting in acrylic of masking tape. I’ll have to go back and have another look at that one. The exhibit continues until Oct. 22.
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