A few things:

1. Subscribe for email updates. I will send information about the projects that receive funding, as well as monthly updates about the status of the overall project.

2. Donate. Donations to supplement my personal investment will be very much appreciated. Every little bit helps, and will contribute to the facilitation of relational projects in the Toronto-area. Some of your donation may be used to cover operational costs. Please remember that the financials of this project are completely transparent. You can request a copy of the budget by email.

3. Give feedback. I’ve set up a feedback forum where you can leave (anonymous or not) comments about the site and project. I would love to know what you think. Alternatively, you can email me if you have any thoughts you’d like to share. Perhaps you know of a link/theory/article/artist/whatever that might be useful for tinygrants. Maybe I’m going about some aspect of the project completely backwards. Seriously, I want input!

4. I will be updating the blog on tinygrants regularly with project updates, research notes, and samples of existing work that fits into the tinygrants mandate. Add this link to your RSS reader or check back regularly.

5. Applications are due no later than 11:59 PM on Sunday, November 22, 2009. Click here to learn more about how to apply.

6. Spread the word!

Anyway, that’s that! I hope you like it. You can email hello@tinygrants.ca if you have any questions or comments.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Post tags: crcp, microfunding, ocad, relational practice, thesis, tinygrants

The impetus behind the project, besides the inspiration provided by Wooster Collective and Ché Francisco Ortiz, is that granting structures in Canada exclude two large groups of artists: student artists, and artists with small projects. I’m hoping that TINYGRANTS will be a plausible solution to fill this significant gap (but for the record, you won’t need to be a student in order to receive TINYGRANTS funding).

Here is a tentative mission statement. I’d love for everyone interested to submit an application once they’re available.

TINYGRANTS aims to facilitate short term interventions that foster creative collaboration, active participation and education opportunities through the distribution of small, non-renewable funding to artists at any stage in their career.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Post tags: community, education, intervention, microfunding, microgrants, relational aesthetics, thesis, tiny grants

At the time of the inaugural festival last year, I was taking a Community Arts class, and one of our assignments was to interview a community art project leader. Film festivals in general aren’t considered to be community art projects, but there was something about TPFF that made it feel like one. This interview — with Robert Allison, one of the founders of TPFF — is a year old, but I think it captures the significance of the festival and I hope it drives you to check it out this year.

TPFF runs from September 26 to October 2. Films are scheduled at Bloor Cinema, Toronto Revue Cinema, Jackman Hall (AGO) and Empire Studio 10 (Mississauga). Tickets are $10, or $7 for seniors/students/unwaged. I recommend getting a package of 10 tickets for $75. You can use the package to order multiple tickets for single screenings; share one with a friend.

Loss and losing. Grief, failure, brokenness, numbness, uncertainty, fear, the death of feeling, the death of dreaming. The absolute relentless, endless, habitual, unfairness of the world. What does loss mean to individuals? What does it mean to whole cultures, whole people who have learned to live with it as a constant companion?¹ – Arundhati Roy

A skeptic like myself will read the newspapers harbouring a vague suspicion toward anyone being heralded by the corporate media. It is this practice that led me, as a young teenager, to the other side of the Israel-Palestine conflict; the story less told, the story revealing illegal occupation, displacement, loss, torture, humiliation and exile. It seemed so easy to stand on the side of social justice, to recognize the wrongs that had been committed, supported and sustained by Israel and its allies, to be aghast at the imposed immobilization, the spontaneous, arbitrary demolition of Palestinian homes, the swelling settlements that encroached the borders of the land formerly known as Palestine. How does a country cease to exist? Who could support this violent, 20th century incarnation of imperialism? When would this be undone—and could it be?

My relief in knowing fragments of the Palestinian story was squandered by the constant reminders indicating that siding with Arabs was unpopular, was equal to siding with radicals, siding with suicide bombers, siding with a people that was deemed unworthy of its own land.

But slivers of hope exist, they have existed between then and now, and they have never been more optimistically manifested than in the inaugural Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF), which took place between October 25th and November 1st (2008) across four venues in both Toronto and Mississauga. It might not be a vast hope, or a promising one, but it is one that exists at last, and one that exists to be shared.

Film festivals aren’t traditionally considered community art projects, but with a mandate combining awareness, education and engagement, TPFF establishes itself as a collaborative group with open arms, reaching out and letting in, building momentum with prior individual film screenings that led to the conception of a fuller, more organized festival. Robert Allison, one of the core volunteers who founded the festival, spoke to me about TPFF, which he says, “belonged to everyone who chose to be a part of it.”

It was July 2006. Israel was dropping bombs on Lebanon. Over a thousand people were dead, Lebanese civil infrastructure was severely damaged, and nearly two million citizens—both Lebanese and Israeli—were displaced. Watching from Toronto, Robert Allison was angry. He ended up at a demonstration in an attempt to channel his outrage toward the unprovoked and undeserved brutality, but he wasn’t sure if it was the right outlet. Allison knew he wanted to make a contribution but kept asking himself, “Where am I comfortable?” And then, a tremendous opportunity presented itself. Allison visited Egypt and Lebanon, and after “standing in the ruins of where bombs had been dropped,” he found a new purpose for activism back home. When he returned to Toronto, it was already a year since the first bombs dropped. He wanted to show a film to commemorate the anniversary.

Allison’s history of showing marginalized films begins here, and his efforts have culminated into a full-fledged festival that focuses specifically on film works about and by Palestinians. It was during this process and configuration of individual screenings that Allison was convinced of the desperate hunger for knowledge and truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict amongst Torontonians—every time he showed a film at the Brunswick (which has since closed), he was screening to sold-out crowds that included innumerable unfamiliar faces—people he didn’t recognize from the activist community. By the time the second anniversary of the July War came around, Allison says that he and the people he was organizing with “were forming as a collective,” and it was around this time that he was coming into contact with film works that focused specifically on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Allison’s interest in this particular conflict had little to do with Israel or Palestine specifically. “One of the things that affected me about the whole issue was social justice. Right and wrong. I don’t care who’s doing the killing; I just know that killing is wrong. So I stand on the side of those being killed,” he says. By reframing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one of social justice, Allison was able to reach into other activist communities who would share in the process of proliferating awareness and education. By focusing on justice—instead of ethnicity—TPFF was able to “reach out to different communities” based on the mix of the collective, says Allison. They were also able to educate and breed empathy amongst people who had existing prejudices against Palestinians—including Allison’s father and grandmother. By expanding the terms of inclusion, by extending a hand to non-Palestinians, engagement beyond those already in the know was possible.

With the planning of a coherent festival underway, I ask Allison where TPFF found financial support. Although he wasn’t in charge of that aspect of the festival, he admits to taking a cue from his parents, who ran a theatre for ten years without receiving a dime of government funding. “The key is that they got to do what they want,” Allison says, while admitting that TPFF did receive nominal support from public funding bodies (the receipt of which was protested by Conservative bloggers in the city). “My personal feeling was that we should apply for the grants, but not rely on them,” he says. Instead, TPFF found the support of local businesses to fund the festival but more importantly, they partnered with local festivals and organizations to co-present films, creating an expansive network that colludes with other initiatives that are either ethnic-specific or arts-based. With an attitude that claims “we don’t need to do somersaults to get these people to support us,” Allison found that “people came out of the woodwork,” including Frederick, a French journalist-turned-restaurateur from Le Select Bistro who not only gave organizers free meals and donated cash to the festival, but distributed TPFF programs to his customers before and during the festival.

Programming the festival introduced new challenges that ensured little else but the promise of spontaneous improvisation. Allison’s only specification for screenings—which took place every Sunday in his home after a meeting with volunteer committee members—was that at least one Palestinian be present. Over 200 films were submitted to the festival, and though a rating system was devised, selections were made on a case-by-case basis. Allison shares a devastating story about Palestinian filmmaker Hanna Elias to exemplify this selection process. Elias, who teaches filmmaking to kids in Bethlehem, was traveling from Los Angeles to Bethlehem with a stopover in Switzerland, where he boarded an Israeli airline. Airline staff obliterated his film equipment and poured salt into an already deep wound by searching his personal belongings. Despite his films having exorbitant screening fees that the festival had already passed on, “you hear this story from him and you want to support this guy,” Allison says. “He’s going through hell.” Elias’s The Olive Harvest and The Mountain were both screened during TPFF to packed audiences.

The only guarantee in selecting films is that “it’s a balancing act,” says Allison. All told, the selection process allowed for another layer of community to emerge amongst committee members and filmmakers. Mohammed Alatar, director of The Iron Wall and Jerusalem: East Side Story said, “I don’t care about money, just show my film.” Other artists, like Palestinian filmmaker and producer Annemarie Jacir (the sister of visual artist Emily Jacir, whose installation came to A Space last year), were phenomenally accommodating in making professional connections for Allison to acquire films that seemed shrouded in red tape. And still other factors were working in TPFF’s favour.

Allison is conscientious of the apprehension sponsored events have to program this kind of content. “There’s a reason why 23 of the films were Canadian premieres,” Allison says, explaining that TPFF’s opening and closing films—Salt of This Sea and Slingshot Hip-Hop—were both turned down by the Toronto International Film Festival, even though they had been around the international film festival circuit and were Official Selections at Cannes and Sundance, respectively. He also notes that Hot Docs gave a total of six minutes to Palestinian content. The wedge created by reticence was enthusiastically filled by TPFF. “We created the space,” says Allison, and it was one where an existing community was fortified by the awareness and education of new audiences.

TPFF sold thousands of tickets in the eight days of the festival. That’s thousands of opportunities for awareness, education, empathy and hope. But Allison admits there were shortcomings, things that would certainly be applied in subsequent presentations of the festival: context, conversation, and educational materials. Allison’s first regret is that “we did not appropriately build in a mechanism for these people to talk about what they had just seen.” He also thinks that there should have been “information for people to walk away with.” Although many of the films explicitly used the political crisis as a backdrop to their stories, “we need to spend $2000 on educational materials,” says Allison. He also plans to continue individual screenings throughout the year, so that education doesn’t stop on November 2nd.

In crisis, solidarity breeds empathy, empathy breeds hope and hope breeds change. TPFF proves that solidarity can extend beyond the borders of ethnicity and touch the hearts and minds of Torontonians who know social injustice when they see it—and feel enough to contribute to its amelioration.

¹ Roy, Arundhati. “Come September.” Lannan Foundation Reading & Conversations. Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe. 18 Sept. 2002. 9 Aug. 2009. 11 Nov. 2008 <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=945405493000735497>.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | Comment | Post tags: film festival, palestine, robert allison, tiff, toronto, tpff

There are quite a few things that stood out to me in the pieces on exhibition at Angell Gallery. First of all, your use of buildings/dwellings (or objects that resemble either). Can you talk about the significance these sorts of spaces have in your work? (By the way, I thought the use of buildings/dwellings in your work read really well with De Feo’s portraits on maps).

Thanks, I had only seen De Feo’s work online and wasn’t even aware that they were all painted on maps, very cool relation!  I use buildings to signify human interaction/impact without having to include people. I try to build the habitats with a certain amount of anonymity so that they don’t necessarily refer to anything specific.  Although the landscapes are deserted they appear as though they could have been habitable.

I was also very drawn to how accurately you render real-life materials. There’s wood, acrylic (or plastic, or candy), shells, water. These materials co-exist in your environments with imagined materials as well. I notice as well that some of the imagined elements — namely, the bubble-like clouds — are suspended with string within your images. What is the relationship between reality and fiction in your work, and how do you balance the two? The clouds, for example, obviously don’t need to be hanging from strings, since you are fully designing the scene, and yet they do, as if it was a physical maquette.

It’s important for me to make sure that the objects look like they could exist in real life, but exist only as a representation (or maquette) of transforming matter.  By doing this I can remove site specific associations by making environments that are completely fictional.  That, and I really like train sets and models, so it ends up coming from a mix of aesthetic and conceptual  reasons.

Some of your work reminds me of old video games — and, sometimes, glitches in old video games. They also evoke a number of random things, like movies, candy, and children’s books. It’s an odd mixture of future and nostalgia. What sorts of visual experiences inform your work?

Any of those, sometimes music videos and art installations too.  Point-and-click adventure games made a huge impact on me because they had the luxury to pre-render scenes, which resulted in really great graphics that were incomparable in any other genre.  Granted they were probably the coldest type of game, but they seemed the most authentic to me.

Can you say anything specifically about the works that were selected to be in this exhibition? I found them to be a lot darker than some of your other work, both in colour and composition. They had a more sombre tone amongst them than I was expecting, considering the work I had seen on your website.

They are the newest work, except “City Flicker Stars” which was one of the first compositions I started and only recently finished for this show.  I think they are only half darker, maybe because I’ve been watching a lot of Hitchcock films.  I don’t really have a good answer for this one, I apologise.

And finally, a question you don’t have to answer, but I’m curious: How close are you to constructing these scenes in a giant warehouse so that people can walk through them and experience them physically?

Maybe one day.  I have been in talks with IMM Living about designing ceramic gifts through them, not really walk through-able but definitely physical!  I would really prefer to take an industrial design approach to making physical work and ensure it has another function other than being an art object.

What’s next for Alex? Apparently, lots of stuff. The group show, Peep Show at Lonsdale Gallery features work by McLeod, until September 27th, and his work will also be a part of their anniversary exhibition in November. South of the border, he will be exhibiting in a show upcoming at Concertina Gallery in Chicago. The summer group show at Angell is up until August 29th. Keep an eye on alxclub.com — McLeod updates frequently.

[Header Image: city flicker stars (detail) by Alex McLeod; courtesy of the artist. Rollover images for details.]

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: 3d rendering, alex mcleod, angell gallery, concertina gallery, landscape, lonsdale gallery, switch contemporary

It’s a rare thing for galleries to find themselves as the subject of an artist’s exhibition. Yes, there have been plenty of artists who have staged interventions within a gallery space (Vito Acconci); some who have made galleries the subject of their visual work (Michael Merrill); more who have temporarily modified the purpose of the gallery (Rirkrit Tiravanija). But galleries—specifically, representations of Toronto ones—lie at the forefront of Dax Morrison’s The Willing and Able, in a way that, though visually abstract, clearly eschews the hierarchical constructs of an art “scene,” quietly redefines a community as such, and sharply highlights a methodical process in a smirk-ridden nod to conceptualism.

The Willing and Able seems simple enough, with tall, lean vertical stripes of multi-coloured paint covering one wall, while a long list of Toronto galleries, in alphabetical order, sits on a perpendicular wall in undecorated black type. Although the visual result of Morrison’s installation appears minimalist in style, the precision with which it is implemented is highly (and obviously) labour-intensive. There are two-hundred and twelve, 1 5/8”-wide stripes in total, each painted flush with the next and stretching from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. The stripes themselves, painted using samples collected from the listed galleries, are ordered according to the alphabetical listing.

Morrison’s regimented practice for this exhibition started in January 2009, when he began crafting an extensive list of Toronto art galleries. Scouring the usual sources—Now Magazine, Eye Weekly, Mass Art Guide, Slate and the Yellow Pages—Morrison effectively establishes a text-based representation of the Toronto art scene, one that would lay the groundwork for his site-specific installation at YYZ. Morrison notes that galleries are usually divided into smaller subsections (private, commercial, public, artist-run, rental) and that this hierarchy is, he says, “constantly being reinforced not only between the different types of galleries, (an exhibition at a public gallery is more desirable than one at a monthly rental space), but also within these different segments, (one commercial gallery is better than another because it sells more or has higher profile artists).” Morrison wanted to present all of these spaces as equal participants in an art-based community, and in order to do so he uncovered the most common denominator amongst them: paint.

There is a level of tedium that laces every point of The Willing and Able, much of which existed prior to the exhibition itself and namely with Morrison’s attempt to establish contact with the galleries on his master list and finally collect the paint samples. Taking the list he developed in January (and continually updated through June), Morrison began getting in touch with the galleries, first by email or post (if an email address wasn’t available in the guides he consulted), and then in person. Patience and perseverance were at the crux of this process as, Morrison observes, each gallery is truly its own entity, and “what might convince one gallery to participate doesn’t necessarily work with the next. If there’s a large staff then you sometimes end up in a guessing game with regard to whom to ask. In other circumstances, you hope that the message you leave with the reception desk makes its way to the owner/director/decision maker(s).” Although his primary aim was to acquire a small sample of paint, his first goal was to get a response and a simple yes or no would do. The participants—the willing and able—were visited again to collect the sample.

The extent of toil employed by Morrison to enact The Willing and Able is finalized in the painted wall. Witnessing the installation of the project, one encounters roll upon empty roll of blue painter’s tape, painstaking climbs up and down a ten-foot ladder, hundreds of paint samples organized and arranged so they may be applied in the correct sequence. The result is visually sparse but requires acute patience and attention to detail to execute, particularly as well as Morrison has. It is, as he describes, “a painted wall,” but knowing the timeline of how that painted wall came to be is what makes The Willing and Able an extraordinary example of meticulous care and conceptual methodology; a methodology that Morrison has long excelled at.

Take, for example, “The Rent Gets Paid; Toronto,” a 2006 work that employs a similar methodology and visual effect. The process-driven piece is culminated in a single framed work that features a grid of red dots—the international gallery symbol for “SOLD”. Collected from ninety-two Toronto-based commercial galleries (or non-commercial spaces that occasionally sell artwork, like Open Studio and Red Head), the list was developed in the exact fashion that the list for The Willing and Able was. The dots are equally spaced along the matboard from left-to-right and top-to-bottom, according to the alphabetical listing of participants. Although the ubiquitous symbol is in and of itself rather innocuous, seeing ninety-two of them side by side reveals how loaded the red dot is within the context of an art gallery. The piece is a reminder of the diversity allowed within the term—the range in size and hue unveils how uniquely this symbol correlates to the institution it comes from. It likewise evidences the difficulty institutions themselves can have with the entire concept of the red dot—Clint Roenisch rejects the shape of the symbol in favour of a red star, while it is the colour itself that moves Jessica Bradley to opt for an orange dot instead. The same rejection of convention can be seen in The Willing and Able, where multi-coloured stripes punctuate the many shades and finishes of the white and grey stripes that surround them.

What does The Willing and Able and, certainly, the rest of Morrison’s oeuvre, say about convention, neutrality and hierarchy? For one, attempts to steer clear of either often seem sadly unavailing—in the case of Roenisch and Bradley, the desire to avoid the red dot ends up establishing a new one that fulfills the same communicative goal and carries the same symbolic meaning. As for the stripes in The Willing and Able, everything ends up looking like a neutral colour, even the bubblegum pinks and emergency oranges (noticeably, there are multiple samples of each). Morrison’s great effort is to treat each paint sample, each red dot, with equal space and unbiased sequence. In doing so he reveals not only the multiplicity between galleries, but also the common threads that link all of these spaces—and the people who visit them, and the artists who show in them—together.

Lead image: Detail of The Willing and Able by Toni Hafkenscheid.
Inset image: Installation view of The Willing and Able by Toni Hafkenscheid.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | Comment | Post tags: conceptualism, dax morrison, site-specific, the willing and able, yyz

Canadians largely perceive themselves as middle class. Canadians love the middle, not just because it’s safe but also because it’s inherently democratic and fair. But…if you become too different from the others, little bells collectively go ding-ding-ding, and you will be shunned and mocked. Your only option will be to leave the country. – Douglas Coupland, Souvenir of Canada 2, p. 126.

Canada is a geographically and demographically vast country. With 9,984,670 square kilometers of land and water,  an estimated population of 33,441,300 sprawled over ten provinces and three territories,  with over a hundred non-official languages spoken by said population,  the chances of crafting a universal Canadian experience are slim. This is a mere sample of indicators that speak to the difference and diversity of Canadians; a sample of indicators that proves the futility of arriving at an agreed-upon package that constitutes Canadian identity. Certainly, with as much difference as exists in Canada, each resident is privy to a unique experience of their country—depending on their age, ethnic origin, economic background, or place of residence; Canada has the potential to be many places at once. Despite this, the fruitless search for a collective Canadian experience is continually sought out. Erin Manning, in her deconstruction of a Canadian beer commercial, notes that, “the voicing of a nationalist sentiment…has been reiterated throughout Canadian history,”¹ and this seems to be a fact of Canadian life that artist and author Douglas Coupland actively indulges in. In his attempt to construct an anthology of authentic Canadian-ness, Coupland, in his books Souvenir of Canada and Souvenir of Canada 2, instead produces an exclusive view of Canada predicated on his inclusion within the dominant culture, and his location within an economic privilege that many Canadians do not have access to.

In an attempt to differentiate Canada from any other country in the world, Coupland uses Souvenir of Canada and Souvenir of Canada 2 to outline an “authentic” Canadian experience with the use of photography, ephemera, and text vignettes. The appearance and format of these books are important elements of their overall communication. Both books are highly polished, minimally designed, and, based on their identical production, are meant to be collected as a set. Their short, anecdotal musings are interspersed with images that represent, to the author, the products, places, materials, environments and experiences that, supposedly, all Canadians can relate to. Coupland often uses the phrase, “Only Canadians ever know that,”² (or some similar iteration,) at once implying that all Canadians know the obscure tidbits he speaks of, and that their knowledge is automatic by virtue of being Canadian. The images in both books are taken from a number of sources: some of them are still-life photographs that Coupland has produced as part of his artistic practice; some are picturesque landscapes from a variety of archive sources; some are reproductions of artworks that reference Canadian experience; others still are ad-like photographs of Canadian commercial goods. Each image contributes to the atmosphere of Coupland’s book—an atmosphere that would perhaps be quite different had someone else compiled it. Aside from Coupland’s pull as a living icon of Canadian literature, the books themselves as meticulous, professional products are easily touted as an authoritative perspective on Canadian experience. Their sheen makes them downright believable. But there is an enormous disparity between the content of the books—the Canada Coupland describes—and the experience of so many other Canadians who have not been exposed to the same privilege that Coupland has. This disparity is most aptly expressed in Coupland’s use of language when discussing First Nations.

Canada’s history of colonialism, and the subsequent (and continual) marginalization of First Nations populations within Canada, appears to be lost on Coupland who surprisingly uses the language of “us” and “them” to differentiate between the dominant culture (“us”) and First Nations populations (“them”). In fact, this divide (in addition to an economic one, which I will explore later,) is how Souvenir of Canada begins—setting an exclusionary tone for the rest of the series and identifying his audience (“us”) as members of the dominant culture. (Does this mean that First Nations or immigrant readers cannot relate to a Canadian identity or experience?) In “Baffin Island,” an appropriately landscape-themed vignette, and the first one in the book, Coupland recounts his numerous journeys by airplane across Canada’s “extreme northerly spots,”³ which he considers to be disconnected from the rest of the (urbanized) country:

There’s just all of this land down there, blank and essentially uninhabited, no roads or power lines—just land, and maybe a spot of lichen. There are parts of it even the Inuit must look at, shake their heads and shrug in wonder. Down there is the land that time and space forgot. Down there are the First Nations inhabitants—roughly twenty-seven thousand—of Nunavut, a new territory created in 1999.⁴

Coupland describes this region of Canada as a mass of landscape that is somehow not actually Canadian—so far removed from the “functioning society” of Canada that it can hardly be considered a relevant part of the country. He even deems the northern land forgotten by space and time—a supposed void of Canada (is there one?)—and correlates it to the place that the residents of Nunavut call home. “Even the Inuit…” implies that of all Canadians, only the Inuit is adequately qualified to judge uninhabitable terrain. The language and sentiment used by Coupland is alienating not only toward the First Nations population in Canada, but also to Canada’s large immigrant population, which comprises approximately 13 per cent of all Canadians.⁵ A few sentences later, Coupland says, “Do the Inuit visit Canada’s south, see trees and wonder the same thing about us—how can these people live in such a freakish place?”⁶ This remark underlines Coupland’s unapologetic and exclusionary view of a Canadian experience that he attempts to universalize, and reinforces the patronizing attitudes that media has adopted toward the First Nations population since the early twentieth century.

This language of “us” and “them” in the context of Canadian nationalism, belonging and citizenship is particularly problematic in light of Canada’s very recent (and current) history of co-opting First Nations’ material culture in order to create an alluring tourist industry for European visitors and settlers. As recently as 1992 (proving that this is not a problem of the past,) symbols of Native culture have been used by the dominant culture to construct a unified vision of Canada. Daniel Francis, in his book The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture, cites numerous examples of this phenomenon, most striking being an ad published in an issue of New York Times Magazine and paid for by the Canadian federal government. The headline read:

“Only in God’s Country could you meet such interesting souls.” A stunning photograph shows two figures, presumably Native people, seated on a sandy beach. They are both wearing large raven’s head masks, brightly painted, with long beaks. In the background, a third figure, carrying a ceremonial drum and wrapped in what appears to be a Chilkoot blanket, emerges from the mist at the water’s edge. Offshore, islands melt into a blue haze.⁷

This co-optation is dangerous not only because it communicates an experience that is, in fact, alien to most Canadians (less than 1% of Canadians identify as First Nations),⁸ but it is problematic in that the federal government, who conceived of the ad, has little First Nations representation within it. Francis believes that the dominant culture (including institutions) in Canada appropriates these symbols in an attempt to resolve their feeling of not belonging. Coupland does not fall into this trap but instead creates a new one. While overall, throughout both books, Coupland avoids using First Nations imagery and symbolism to construct his version of “Canadian-ness,” (although I will present an example where he does this on an employer’s behalf,) he further widens the gap of belonging. Instead of hinting at a feeling of not belonging (or infringing upon a land of which his ancestors were not the original inhabitants,) Coupland does not appear to believe that he and the First Nations population even co-exist in any way worth discussing. Additionally, he seems unaware of the fact that, as Manning puts it, the “propagandistic desire to coin ‘Canadian identity’ once and for all depends on the obfuscation of the history of Canadian nation-building which often continues to be narrated without drawing attention to the extermination and oppression of the native peoples.”⁹ Despite a brief entry including information about the genocide enacted (and being enacted) on First Nations by the dominant culture in a chapter called “Reserves,” Coupland fails to see that his entire Souvenir of Canada project is predicated on and made possible by this shameful facet of Canadian history.

In the “Reserves” vignette, the Native population of Canada is treated as ephemera of a nation instead of as an equal faction of citizenship. “Reserves” is one of the longer entries in the book, and although it includes apt questions about white-Canada’s relationship to “Indians,”¹⁰ it is largely rife with anecdotes that perpetuate the “Imaginary Indian” that Francis describes. An anecdote about a summer job Coupland held designing props for the Pope’s Vancouver visit includes this jarring admission:

In my case, one of the stadium’s…designs was to be a First Nations motif. I was told to mock up one quickly for a meeting, so I invented a fake thunderbird-motif flash sequence. The meeting went well, and a week later I was asked to prepare a flash-card sequence using genuine First Nations imagery. So I began to do research and generated designs.…As the day of the visit neared,…it was finally decided to go with the original fake thunderbird sequence because it looked the most “Indian-y.”¹¹

This design project illustrates the fictional “Indian” that European settlers invented and continue to perpetuate—when authentic Native culture is no longer sufficient for marketing and entertainment, let it be contrived by a white, middle-class designer who was admittedly exposed to very little Canadian history.¹² Coupland may not have learned much about Canadian history, but his experience as a writer and artist has allowed him extensive privileges of travel, and permit him to see Canada through the subjectivity of non-Canadians.

Many of Coupland’s musings about life in Canada are made possible by his economic position and the opportunities granted to him as a well-known cultural producer. Coupland often uses the rest of the world as a barometer of Canada’s “unified” culture, and by contrasting his Canadian experience with his experience in other countries he has visited, he is able to highlight what he believes are Canada’s quirks—a perspective many Canadians are not able to experience and therefore, one that many Canadians cannot share. The median after-tax income of Canadians is just over $23,000 per year,¹³ hovering just barely above the official poverty line.¹⁴ This limiting median bars many Canadians from partaking in activities such as noticing that the Robertson screwdriver is unique to Canada,¹⁵ or observing the differences between Atlantic and Pacific fishing.¹⁶ The Canadian-ness that Coupland describes throughout both books is one unhindered by marginalization and especially financial capacity. Returning to the vignette entitled “Baffin Island,” Coupland blankly outlines his privileged condition. The opening of the book is as follows:

I fly more than most people. On a recent flight to Frankfurt I sat and mapped out my past twenty years and made a count: I’ve flown across Canada a conservative total of fifty-five times, most likely more. And then there have been the times flying not strictly across Canada, but over it—to and from Europe—above Hudson Bay and the Ungava Peninsula, Ellesmere Island, Baffin Island…¹⁷

This show of mobility, in a Canadian-centric way, contributes to the notion of foreign validation described by S.M. Crean in “The Invisible Country,” wherein “Canadian art is good depending on how well it measures up in terms of Art, the art of the grand old imperial centres of Rome, Paris, London, New York and so forth.”¹⁸ Is Coupland an expert on Canada because he can assess it against the rest of the world? Coupland’s evaluative strategy is based heavily on his experiences with non-Canadians;¹⁹ experiences made possible by extensive travel. Indeed, even his experiences with Canadians are made possible by extensive travel—with such a vast amount of ground to cover in traveling across the country, it is likely that many Canadians will rarely visit outside of their home province. Because Coupland is so well traveled, are we obligated to believe him? Does his worldliness make him a better Canadian, or better equip him to describe what being Canadian is like? In reading both editions Souvenir of Canada, readers are expected to take his word for it.

Amongst the pages of Souvenir of Canada and Souvenir of Canada 2, many readers will likely find snippets of text and images that stir a touch of nostalgia. As an image of Canadian-ness, for all Canadians, however, the books largely communicate the experience of an upper-middle-class, white, English-speaking Canadian who has access and status gained by professional achievements. This limited view, touted as an “authentic” Canadian experience, preserves the alienation of marginalized and minority communities throughout Canada; a country whose geography and landscape is vast enough to allow for complex, intercultural interstices, connections, and webs, which Manning notes are “much more compelling.”²⁰ Ultimately, Coupland’s Souvenir of Canada series “perpetuates an exclusionary, racist and gendered locus of enunciation that is well-rehearsed in Canada”²¹ and surely leaves plenty of readers wondering how they fit into the puzzle of Canadian-ness.

Notes:
1 Manning, Erin. “I AM CANADIAN: Identity, Territory and the Canadian National Landscape.” Theory and Event. 4:4. 2000. 7.
2 Coupland, Douglas. Souvenir of Canada 2. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004. 29.
3 Coupland, Douglas. “Baffin Island.” Souvenir of Canada. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2002. 4.
4 Ibid.
5 This figure is expected to reach 20 per cent by 2017 and does not refer to first-generation-and-beyond Canadians. (“Ethnic diversity and immigration.” Statistics Canada: Canada’s national statistical agency / Statistique Canada : Organisme statistique national du Canada. 14 Mar. 2009 http://www41.statcan.ca/2007/30000/ceb30000_000_e.htm.)
6 Coupland, Douglas. “Baffin Island.” Souvenir of Canada. 5.
7 Francis, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992. 187.
8 “Aboriginal peoples.” Overview 2007. 17 Mar. 2009 http://www41.statcan.ca/2007/10000/ceb10000_000_e.htm.
9 Manning, Erin. “I AM CANADIAN: Identity, Territory and the Canadian National Landscape.” 30.
10 After using the term, Coupland asks, “Can we even use the word ‘Indian’ any more?” (Coupland, Douglas. “Reserves.” Souvenir of Canada. 98.)
11 Ibid. 95.
12 Ibid. 7.
13 “Selected Demographic, Cultural, Educational, Labour Force and Income Characteristics (830), Mother Tongue (4), Age Groups (8A) and Sex (3) for the Population of Canada, Provinces, Territories, Census Divisions and Census Subdivisions, 2006 Census – 20% Sample Data.” Census of Canada.
14 “Poverty Lines, 2001.” Canadian Council on Social Development / Le Conseil canadien de développement social. 13 Mar. 2009 .
15 Coupland, Douglas. “Hardware.” Souvenir of Canada 2. 38.
16 –. “Fish.” Souvenir of Canada. 24.
17 –. “Baffin Island.” Souvenir of Canada. 4.
18 Crean, S.M. “The Invisible Country.” Who is Afraid of Canadian Culture? General Publishing Co., 1976. 12.
19 See, particularly, “Canucks?” (7) and “Cheeseheads” (10) in Souvenir of Canada, though nearly every entry includes an anecdote with or about a non-Canadian.
20 Manning, Erin. “I AM CANADIAN: Identity, Territory and the Canadian National Landscape.” 13.
21 Ibid. 69.

Image, from the cover of Souvenir of Canada 2 from here.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Post tags: books, canada, daniel francis, douglas coupland, erin manning, national identity, nationalism, s.m. crean, souvenir of canada

Ray Kurzweil’s theory of the Singularity refers to the point in time when machines surpass human consciousness and improve their own design beyond the point of human conception.¹ It may seem like a paranoid theory developed in the wake of rapid technological advancements; a way to explain, if not justify, the ways in which processes of human life are continually being mechanized. But that is too simple. To consider the Singularity is also to consider the capacity of the human body, where it fails, and how it can be designed in a better, more efficient way. To consider the Singularity is also to consider the language we give to functioning and disfuctioning bodies; how language is not attributed to “normal” bodies but is vast in reference to ailing ones. Disfunctioning bodies are blind, disfigured, amputated, and so on. What happens when the emphasis is inverted, when disabilities become opportunities for extra-abilities? If Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s was about extending the scope of art and life, Conceptual art of the future will be about extending the scope of what it is to be human. Performance art has already achieved a certain degree of this, through challenging the limits of the body and using it as the site where art emerges. The era approaching the Singularity, however, will allow for the body to be used as a tool for art making; for using the body as the very mechanism that enables the production of art. Aimee Mullins and Rob Spence represent the re-articulation of disability as an opportunity for creative production that is made possible by a consilience between technological and artistic ingenuity. This paper will outline how their loss of conventional human ability becomes the hinge point for an ability that is unhindered by existing bodily design.

Aimee Mullins uses her disability as an occasion to redefine the usual notions of the aesthetics of the body. Although she had both legs amputated below the knee as an infant, instead of considering the compilation of her body as a condition, or a state of deficiency, Mullins has used art and imagination to develop enhancements to the natural body, most notably as three characters in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle 3. In his Cremaster Cycle series, Barney creates vivid, elaborate and bizarre scenes and narratives that explore the hybridity of the body. David Hopkins argues that perhaps Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is “a crisis of masculinity, tied up with the social shifts arising from women’s empowerment, as endemic to the 1990s. It seems more likely, however, that it dramatizes the desire to transcend human givens, to achieve bio-mechanical syntheses.”² I tend to agree with the latter, and the inclusion of Mullins in the third iteration of the Cremaster Cycle corroborates the desire for—and possibility of—physical enhancement and, perhaps, transcendence.

Mullins’s embodiment of three characters in the Cremaster Cycle 3 is evidence of the physical extension of the body that can occur through “disability.” Without human legs, Mullins’s limbs can take any form that the artist imagines, and in the case of Barney, they take the form of articulated cheetah hinds, a potato and beet garden, and glass. With the exception of the potato and beet garden legs, none of these creative visualizations would be possible with human legs and without digital manipulation. Mullins’s cheetah hinds positively defy the appearance of human legs, with an extra knee that appears backwards, paws that have a far smaller footprint than a human foot, and even a whipping tail. No human legs could be fashioned to look this way. This realm of possibility is especially apparent with the glass legs, which are in fact “optically clear polyurethane,”³ the stuff of bowling balls. Although the legs take human form, their material reveals that no human tibia or fibula is present. They are completely transparent, revealing what is set behind the legs, tracing the movement of the characters around her, even reflecting her own white dress. Mullins recognizes her involvement in the Cremaster Cycle 3 as being the point at which she realized that her “legs could become wearable sculpture,” and when she “started to move away from the need to replicate humanness as the only aesthetic ideal.”⁴ For Mullins, “poetry matters. Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object into the realm of art. It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look, and look a little longer, and maybe even understand.”⁵ Although the sculptural legs imagined and produced by Barney and Mullins do not take the dematerialized form that is characteristic of Conceptual art (and are obviously manifested as objects), the aim—of widening the scope of understanding and meaning—implies a similar impulse for production. For Mullins, using the possibility of her body is a political act; an act of asserting an identity (and ability) that defies the one assigned to her by popular opinion. The interstices of form, function and aesthetics provide a basis of production for Mullins—neither element should be valued independently but instead work together, overlap, and allow even more realms of possibility to be enacted upon the body.

Toronto-based filmmaker Rob Spence takes a similar approach to disability as Mullins, using it not as a point of deficiency but instead as a site of potential. Having lost his vision in his right eye in a shooting accident when he was 13, Spence was eventually covering his eye with a patch to conceal the disfiguration that his non-functioning eye had developed. After receiving a prosthetic eye that only served an aesthetic purpose, Spence decided to enlist the help of engineers to design a camera that could be implanted into his eye socket, with the capability to transmit data wirelessly.⁶ Calling himself an “Eyeborg,” Spence follows in the footsteps of artists like Stelarc, who believes that the design of the human body is obsolete,⁸ and engineers like Steve Mann, who has long been a proponent of wearable technology.  While placing a video camera in one’s eye has obvious implications regarding surveillance and privacy (and indeed this is an issue Spence hopes to illustrate),⁹ it also extends the capabilities of sight and memory. Because a camera is designed after the inherent function of the eye, Spence is re-articulating not only his physical body by implanting a technological camera into his eye socket, he is also making physical the neurological process of storing memory. Theoretically, if Spence were to keep his eye camera on, recording what he sees for 24 hours a day, he will have essentially designed a flawless memory, without relying on his brain to store and recall moments, conversations, disputes. In the realm of surveillance, this means back up.

The notion of “back up” surveillance has already been explored by Steve Mann as a subversive response to the proliferation of public watching that is enacted by institutions under the guise of preventing crime and terrorism. But it was Spence who envisioned it as an extension of his physical self (rather than as an accessory for his physical self). Coined by Mann as “sousveillance,” or inverse surveillance, the process involves bottom-up surveillance by ordinary citizens who would wear cameras in order to balance the number of surveillance mechanisms that exist in public space. Mann finds the justification for institutional surveillance to be extremely problematic, noting that an open-loop formula drives surveillance:

…without the normal feedback mechanisms that provide important checks and balances. Feedback is the simple process of observability-controllability like we find in a home thermostat. When the homeland gets too hot, the thermostat provides the checks and balances needed to shut off the furnace. But the secret burners under the political pressure cookers have no thermostat—nothing to keep them in a state of equilibrium or balance…¹⁰

It is not privacy that is the cause of the problem. It is not the unphotographed, unfingerprinted, unsurveilled citizens who are to blame, but, rather, it is the larger pressure cooking machinery that needs to be questioned.

By creating his personal experience-record as an Eyeborg, Spence becomes a perpetual sousveiller where the apparatus of recording is actually embedded directly into his physical body. Spence can expand on Mann’s idea of wearable technology precisely because he has an empty eye socket in which to install it. Extending the body in such a way not only addresses the political issues raised by Mann regarding surveillance in the public sphere, but also allows Spence, as an artist, to reinvent the tools of his profession as a documentary filmmaker. The potential allowed by Spence’s disability enables him to transform into a cyborg in a way than an able-bodied person cannot.

One of the anecdotes that Mullins shares during her talk at the TED conference is of a friend who encountered her for the first time since she acquired her new prosthetics that elevated her to a looming 6’1”. After Mullins described how great it was for her prosthetics to allow for variable height, her friend exclaimed, “But it’s not fair!”¹¹ This exchange reveals the tension that able-bodied people feel upon the realization that “disability” means nothing of the sort; that technology and science enable those that are traditionally deemed as lacking, or as having lost, to extend the abilities of their bodies beyond any natural human function.

I believe that an increased cross-disciplinary focus will make a place for itself in the future of Conceptual art, where the overlap of medicine, science, technology and art coalesce to expand our understandings of identity, the potential of the body and conversations about beauty and aesthetics. Concepts of the bionic or robotic body are always pitted against the moral implications of augmenting traditional and romantic notions of the natural body. The latter half of this dichotomy, however, already presupposes that the disabled body is not natural, which is why there is so much vocabulary to define it—to assign it as a difference from the expected forms and functions of a human body. What is challenging about the disabled body as an opportunity for an extra-abled body is that suddenly—and this is what glues people to the romanticism of the natural body—those of us without defects and deformations suddenly become less-abled than the body that can extend itself beyond human capacity.

Notes:

1 Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking, 2005: 7.

2 Hopkins, David. After Modern Art, 1945-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000: 245.

3 Mullins, Aimee. “How my legs give me super-powers.” TED Conference. Monterrey, California. Feb. 2009. TED. Mar. 2009. 31 Mar. 2009 http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics.html.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Spence, Rob. The Eyeborg Project. 04 Apr. 2009 http://www.eyeborgproject.com.

7 Birringer, Johannes H. Media & Performance: Along the Border. JHU Press, 1998. 61-62.

8 Mann, Steve. WearComp.org, WearCam.org, UTWCHI, funtain and Steve Mann’s Personal Web Page/research. 02 Apr. 2009 http://wearcam.org/.

9 Ganapati, Priya. “Eye Spy: Filmmaker Plans to Install Camera in His Eye Socket.” Wired Blogs. 4 Dec. 2008. 03 Apr. 2009 http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/eye-spy-filmmak.html.

10 Mann, Steve. “Sousveillance” WearComp.org, WearCam.org, UTWCHI, funtain and Steve Mann’s Personal Web Page/research. 02 Apr. 2009 http://wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm/.

11 Mullins, Aimee. “How my legs give me super-powers.”

Image: Screenshot of Aimee Mullins’s TED talk.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | Comment | Post tags: aimee mullins, disability, ray kurzweil, rob spence, steve mann, the singularity

Here is one of Moser’s comments that is most in line with how I feel about being a CRCP student:

Although each of Toronto’s university curatorial programs includes some sort of methodology course aimed at teaching the theoretical frameworks of art history and curation, the ways in which students apply this knowledge are not uniform.

I didn’t apply for CRCP in the hopes of becoming a curator, per se. The job interested (and still interests) me, and I had some curatorial experience when I applied. What attracted me most, however, was the opportunity to have an arts-focused education without having to make art. I’ve always known that I wanted to work in the arts sector, but for just as long I’ve known that I am no artist, and that no art school would magically transform me into one. In fact, my application to receive Advanced Standing was granted after I said, in a review, “I’m not a star artist, and OCAD won’t turn me into one after a year [of foundation studies].” The range of ambitions amongst my colleagues is quite vast. There are people who think they will be curators upon graduating, but there are also many of us who want to be teachers, conservators, writers and artists. There are also a number of us who have no bloody clue, and hope that grad school might help us figure it out.

Although the program is called Criticism and Curatorial Practice, I can’t say that I’ve learned much on the curatorial front. At OCAD, undergraduate CRCP students do not have a space. We have not hung work, or experimented in a gallery, or encountered challenges in presentation. Any curatorial projects assigned by instructors are hypothetical, meaning, we are not required to curate work that we could actually acquire to show. Meaning, budgets are never an issue, timelines are never an issue, artists’ availability is never an issue. Basically, reality is never an issue. I could curate a Caravaggio retrospective if I wanted to. To me, curatorial work is much more about working with limitations than having a boundless imagination. Of course, imagination plays a strong role and curatorial practice is nothing without it. But when it comes to what kind of curatorial skills I’ve developed in school, striking a balance between limitations and imagination is not one of them. I have made a concerted effort to use my school work as an opportunity to develop projects that could be implemented and installed in a real space. But there are so many hazy lines that school has not prepared me for.

The most beneficial aspect of my education has been, to me, the Criticism component, which accounts for approximately 99% of my course schedule. Learning about history, philosophy and criticism contextualizes a great deal of the art that I am familiar (or becoming familiar) with. This was one of my primary reasons for going back to school — I wanted to be able to look at works of art and know where they came from. OCAD has been spectacular in this regard, but it is only because of the freedom being a CRCP student allows. I am able to fill my schedule without any studio requirements, meaning my entire school career has been saturated with history, philosophy and theory. If I was in a studio program, I would only have the opportunity to take two or three history or theory classes a year, as opposed to the 10 I can take as a CRCP student.

I never dreamed it would happen, but learning about history, philosophy and theory has also provided a context in which to build my own artistic ideas and projects. As I said before, I never went to art school to become an artist. But being in CRCP, for me, has widened the scope of what it is to be an artist, and the prospect of being one (or not being one) is no longer predicated on my (in)ability to draw or paint. School has also provided me with an understanding of the systems and institutions that I need to know and work with in order to manifest my ideas.

I would also like to address Reid Shier’s question about artist-run centres. Shier asks, “If artists stop running artist-run centres, will they still need them?” This is a heavy question but in many ways I feel it is irrelevant. ARCs are hardly what their title implies anymore and besides, most of them don’t have curators, but boards and committees that determine their programming. Any CRCP grad thinking they’re going to strike it big with a creative curatorial gig at an ARC has been misguided by their own education.

While there is a place for questioning the need of the professionalization of curatorial practice, I would like to point out that a very small percentage of studio graduates go on to become successful, or even working, artists. There may not be room in the field for hordes of CRCP graduates, but I would argue that the likelihood of employment is about the same for any BFA graduate.

But to answer Moser’s rephrasing of Shier, “Do curators really need university curatorial programs?” The answer, ultimately, is no. No, you don’t need a formal education to be a good curator. The same way you don’t need a formal education to be a good artist. But am I better off in my own personal practice for having one? Yes. Without question, yes.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Post tags: c magazine, curatorial practice, education, gabrielle moser, university

Is it enough to put one’s feet on a piece of common land in order to claim it at once as one’s own? Is it enough to have the power to keep other men off for one moment in order to deprive them of the right ever to return? How could a man or a people seize a vast territory and keep out the rest of the human race except by a criminal usurpation — since the action would rob the rest of mankind of the shelter and the food that nature has given them all in common? (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, and Maurice Cranston. The Social Contract. New York: Penguin Books, Limited, 2004. 23)

(more…)

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: culture, gaza, israel, media, politics, war