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

What happens when money runs out? What happens when banks won’t lend, and when grant programs get cut? Microfinancing has been a growing trend in the last couple of years, and with Kiva — a microfinancing organization that typically lends to individuals in developing countries — launching their lending to U.S. citizens, its pertinence in the “developed” world is growing too. It seems an apt thing to apply to arts-funding as well. For $50, Ortiz engaged an entire community of people to unleash their creativity in a public space, and facilitated a fun, collective experience. Ortiz’s idea is so brilliantly simple — the chalk ensures that nothing is damaged; it’s a perfect material for drawing on concrete and asphalt; it inspires excitement in kids and nostalgia in adults — that it almost isn’t shocking that he did it on a dime.

Working within limitations can often be a true test of creativity. A microgranting funding model could challege artists who are up for it. And as for people providing the funds, wouldn’t it be interesting if, instead of buying a framed print or a painting or a glazed bowl, you funded a community or public art project and were named a partner or producer?

Wooster Collective is on to something.

Above image from Ortiz’s Flickr.

(Just to be clear — I do think that $50 is on the extremely low side of a microgrant. I believe in artists getting paid for their time, and I don’t think $50 did that in the case of Ortiz. But it seems to me that innovative, collaborative and community-minded projects can be executed for a couple of hundred.)

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: funding, interactivity, intervention, kiva, microgrants, wooster collective

The configuration of Michael Dudeck’s Parthenogenesis exhibition at the Pari Nadimi Gallery plays a supporting role in his performance within the gallery. Three mannequins are suspended from the ceiling to create a triangular formation, and each is embellished with a variation of gas masks, strips of leather, rope, or plastic bits to create hybrid, decidedly male creatures—half-human, half-renegade post-apocalyptic warriors. Pencil and mixed media drawings, sometimes embellished with text and sometimes maimed—ripped, burned, sewn, splattered and pasted over—hang on the walls, alongside a row of photographs depicting Dudeck, a self-proclaimed Witch Doctor, costumed and posed in various stages of his imagined becoming. At the rear of the space, an altar outlined by rolls of orange tape awaits use. Surrounded by tropes of ritual—bowls of sage and cedar, and bone-like tools and decorations—it is at this altar where Dudeck’s ritualistic performance takes place.

Atmospheric music¹ drones out of invisible speakers as Dudeck enters the space. Naked except for a coat of white powder, a fur-covered loincloth, a headdress bearing dreadlock-like ropes draping past his waist, and false yellow eyelashes, Dudeck solemnly enters the gallery carrying an orange iteration of the suspended mannequins, hoisted above his head. Dudeck is a worshipper, a master of ceremonies, conducting the ritual and offering the mannequin to each of the suspended gods by kneeling before them. Carrying the orange figure and placing it within the lines of the altar created by the rolls of tape, the ritual begins.

Before tending to the still, orange being, Dudeck lights the bowls of sage and cedar and blesses each of his drawings in careful ceremony around the room. Returning to the mannequin, Dudeck’s heavy breathing punctuates the ongoing soundtrack, his intake and output eventually turning into gutteral chants; notes held for longer intervals than seem humanly possible, and finally becoming frighteningly aggressive as his attention to the orange figure intensifies. The chants crescendo synchronically with the prepared soundtrack, becoming more and more musical as Dudeck honours the mannequin by breathing over its stiff limbs as if he was sucking out an evil spirit. Eventually Dudeck destroys the figure, much in the same way he has destroyed his drawings; the tape is unraveled and torn from the orange body, its left arm ripped from its plastic socket and placed on its chest along with the bones and skulls. Finally, in a conclusive act of transference, Dudeck removes his headdress and places it on the mannequin, carefully splaying the ropes over its body and placing the rolls of tape on its remaining limbs.

For as long as art has found meaning and purpose outside of organized religion, ritual, spirituality and shamanism have remained themes in all manner of visual media. Joseph Beuys heralded the healing powers of art and declared himself a Shaman; Mark Rothko believed his paintings to have transcendental powers. In both cases, viewers were made to understand art in a new way. For Dudeck, however, a burning question bubbles in the remnants of his performance: What, exactly, am I being asked to believe in?

Dudeck uses ritualistic, apocalyptic and dystopic language to describe his work, his biography sounding less like a statement of intent and more like a linguistic art piece in its own rite. He uses words like “vocation,” “migratory,” “nomadic,” and “transformation,”² implying divinity, ritual, passage and transcendence before the art even begins. His website is subtitled “Witch Doctor” and is divided into four sections: Sigils, Effigies, Rituals, and Scriptures. The website, as a documentation of Dudeck’s body of work, is the neo-Goth, neo-tribal, neo-colonial traipse of a pantheological observer who has plucked tropes of rituals and rites to exoticize a religion of his own, where he is at once God, Shaman, Witch Doctor, Priest, Apostle, Sensei, Rinpoche, Guru and Imam.

Who is the figure at the altar? Does Dudeck honour a mannequin, or is the mannequin representative of a once-living being? Does his use of a Bic lighter to ignite the sage indicate the effect of modernism on ritual, or is it a product of lazy artmaking? Ritual of the more legitimized variety—like church, for example—exists as it does after thousands of years of practice and millions of practitioners. Perhaps what Dudeck proves, then, is the arbitrariness of such ritual—the ease with which one can just make it up.

Parthenogenesis—a name science has given, by the way, to the miracle of Immaculate Conception—is an extension of Dudeck’s vast interest in ritualistic practice. It is completely appropriate, then, as a title for Dudeck’s performance—a ritual born without cause, substance or reason.

Notes:

1 “An ethereal soundscore by Robert Taite” (“Exhibitions: Michael Dudeck.” Pari Nadimi Gallery. 08 Feb. 2009 http://parinadimigallery.com/Site/index.php/exhibitions/show/michael_dudeck.)

2 “My vocation challenges the divide between human and animal, rational and emotional. It studies the intersections, where binaries bleed into one another. I work at a transdisciplinary level. I engage in migratory, nomadic procedures whereby I occupy ‘in-between’ spaces in pursuit of a turbulent vulnerability that offers the potential for transformation.” (Dudeck, Michael. MichaelDudeckWitchDoctor. 08 Feb. 2009 http://www.michaeldudeck.com/bio.html.)

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | Comment | Post tags: michael dudeck, pari nadimi gallery, performance

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

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Instead I’ll appreciate the performance on the basis of its ability to connect to an audience without actively engaging them. I am fascinated by the fact that commuters stopped and essentially participated in this freezing of time, instead of zipping through and pretending like nothing was going on. The curiosity and pause reach their pinnacle in an uproarious applause when the ‘agents’ resume their movement.

Impressed upon me is the significance of such a simple gesture (holding still for five minutes) inspiring applause in a public space like Grand Central Station. The audience had five minutes to establish that they were, in fact, an audience, and through conversation and questioning they reasoned what it was they were witnessing and collectively determined that its ending should be met with an appreciative gesture.

Nice work, Improv Everywhere. Wish I could have witnessed it firsthand.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2008. | Permalink | Comment | Post tags: art, audience, improv, participation, performance, spaces, video