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Under An English Sky [Part II] : Christian Boltanski’s Les Archives Du Coeur At The Serpentine Gallery

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:41:59 +0000

London, Kensington Gardens, August, Sunday, blue skies, warmish. Just off the entrance to The Serpentine Gallery stands a temporary pavilion in hospital white. I approach the small building just as one of the last English heartbeats is recorded for posterity; that is, copied to a fat hard drive to be added to yet another fat hard drive then shipped to the uninhabited Japanese island of Teshima and digitally secured at the Benesse Art Site Naoshima…until Doomsday. This is the premise of the expanding and ongoing work of Christian Boltanski, Les Archives du Coeur , registering a rambling sample of the world’s pulse. Boltanski Beat: Charlotte Cooper with her heartbeat on CD, treasured souvenir of Christian Boltanski's Archives du Coeur Charlotte Cooper, an English teenager who with her mother trained down from Bristol to have the sound of her heart recorded for all time, emerges with her dog Toffee (on a outfit-matching pink leash), tenderly holding the two-minute CD of her heart’s lively beat, (she’s no

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Under An English Sky [Part II] : Christian Boltanski’s Les Archives Du Coeur At The Serpentine Gallery

Well, this is awkward: Snow warning at TIFF?

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:43:32 +0000

This could get ugly. My colleague Martin Knelman reported last week that Michael Snow, Canada's eminence grise of conceptual film, had sued the developers behind the construction of TIFF's Lightbox (and, ahem, condo tower) for breach of contract over a work he says was commissioned for the building. The developers, Daniels Corp., have replied they have no such contract with Snow (Snow's lawyer acknowledges there's nothing in writing, though he argues an “exchange of considerations” is legally binding.”) Slightly old news, perhaps, but when you think about it, it's a wily bit of PR on the part of the Snow Camp

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Well, this is awkward: Snow warning at TIFF?

Julian Schnabel: Picking up the pieces

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:47:20 +0000

It gave me exactly no pleasure today to shruggingly pan the AGO's Julian Schnabel show, Art + Film . More than anything, I guess I hated having to do it at all; so much ink has been spilled on Schnabel's art career over the years — most of it bloody — that I felt like my adding to the pile was an exercise in general futility. Still, everyone has to have a job, and part of mine, at least, is writing about shows, so I did what I had to in the space that I had to do it.

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Julian Schnabel: Picking up the pieces

Shhh — Goodwin open at the AGO

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:46:57 +0000

Though it doesn’t open officially until Sept.15, I discovered on a recent visit — to get another look at Julian Schnabel — that one third of the AGO's exhibition “At Work,” featuring three mini-solo shows in parallel from Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse and Betty Goodwin, quietly opened to the public Monday. It's the Goodwin portion of the exhibition, and, like Goodwin herself, it's a quietly intimate stunner. A few larger pieces hang on walls all their own, but the centrepiece, a vast collection of Goodwin's sketchbooks, sit in vitrines, revealing the moments that built her deeply personal practice.

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Shhh — Goodwin open at the AGO

Haunted: Luis Jacob at the Guggenheim

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 02:10:30 +0000

Also in New York, I fought the Saturday crowds to get a look at Haunted, the Guggenheim's extraordinarily thoughtful, well-mounted exhibition of contemporary photography and video. Thoughtful because, above it all, it strives to make connections beyond simple media and into the realm of idea, reference and intent, understanding formal concerns like appropriation — a huge current in the early moments of conceptualism, and a lingua franca of contemporary art today — and its connections across that epochal divide.

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Haunted: Luis Jacob at the Guggenheim

Big Bambu at the Met

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 01:43:22 +0000

As kind of a last minute thing, I took off to New York for the weekend, and in the 36 hours (minus sleep) I had to spend there, I managed to take in the Starn twins' (Mike and Doug's) mind-bendingly great (however oddly named) installation “You Can't You Won't You Don't Stop,” a vertiginously parasitic-seeming, two-story high tangle of bamboo installed on the roof deck of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That deck has always been one of my favourite places on earth, a rare oasis of tranquility amid the madness of the city; with the installation, you'd think its zen-like vibe would be disrupted by an inevitable sense of claustrophobia, but not really; rather, it makes you aware of not just itself, but the built structure with which it bluntly intervenes. In a revelatory sort of way, its chaotic, organic assembly of material counters the ordered stone structure of the building, that softening and and balancing both (its uncanny ordered filtering of the piercing sunlight was extraordinarily gorgeous, too).

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Big Bambu at the Met

Meanwhile …

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:37:32 +0000

I blathered on at length in the paper today about the ridiculously chock-full season of (mostly) goodness that awaits us this fall. I was ordered to cease and desist at the very long length at which it appeared, but even so, there were several things I omitted that I wish I hadn't. I'd love to hear what you're looking forward to that didn't make the list

"Yes, there is Canadian art." So says Denver. Yes: Denver.

admin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:15:51 +0000

This morning, a reader sent me a link to a story in the Denver Post by its Fine Arts Critic discussing a show of young Canadian artists there. He seems dumbstruck that not only are there people actually making art in Canada — the shock! — but that — Good God! — it's contemporary, topical, technologically savvy, and relevant ! ( The show includes Toronto artist Alex McLeod (above) and Sobey nominee Brendan Tang.

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"Yes, there is Canadian art." So says Denver. Yes: Denver.

Lace Design Work of Arpad Dekani

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 22:06:47 +0000

Illustration: Arpad Dekani Lace design c1908 Much of the early twentieth century revival of practical lace making, but more particularly that of designing lace within Hungary, can be attributed fairly squarely to Arpad Dekani. Professor Dekani, who started his career relatively humbly as a teacher at a provincial school in Hungary, eventually became a professor at the Arts and Crafts School in Budapest.

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Lace Design Work of Arpad Dekani

Artscape: Rant postscript

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:37:44 +0000

About that aforementioned rant: Of all the people to take umbrage with my litany of bellyaches in the paper today, Tim Jones, CEO of Artscape , was very upset with my characterization of his arm's-length city-associated agency as “tiny” (he didn't like “city agency” either). While it's completely true that, with the addition of the Wychwood Barns and the forthcoming Shaw/Givins School redux, Artscape's physical holdings are far from tiny in the literal sense, I was suggesting that, in the context of actually meeting the need of a perpetually migrant art community, Artscape, though it provides desperately-needed space buffered from the market, is barely a drop in the bucket when it comes to demand.