Facing the monumental

The talk given by Rebecca Belmore and Wanda Nanibush discusses the works in Belmore’s exhibition, Facing the Monumental curated by Nanibush, first shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2018. In this discussion, they work their way through many of the works included in the exhibition. They talk about Belmore’s affinity and intuition for materials especially looking at how clay shows up in this exhibition. The below work is an image from the performance “Clay on Stone”. Nanibush discusses how with this exhibition they wanted to show Belmore’s more material and sculptural practice. This side of her work is less well-known than her performance practice. They tell stories about the processes and origins of the work, however, the bulk of the talk discusses the political content of the work. Belmore’s work is highly concerned with indiginous, class, racial, and environmental politics. All of these political concerns overlap in Belmore’s work, intermingeled with layers of reference to history, contemporary politics, and art. 

Belmore’s work has always stood out to me for its ability to be overtly political but not didactic. She is able to speak with a political voice but maintains an ineffability and poetics that escapes most highly political artists. I find artists who make an attempt to be politically direct often lose what makes an artwork exciting to me. That is the question, the openness to interpretation and expansive understanding. They fall into a prescriptive one-to-one translation of information into form. The Michael Murphy piece Truth to Power(below) is an example of this pitfall. Reading something like, “there are too many guns in America” or “America has a gun problem”. Belmore on the other hand while still being overtly political maintains layers of meaning and reference that give her work depth and allows us as an audience to find interest/ meaning from a wider range of vantage points. In her work Tower, one of the works in Facing the Monumental, she addresses homelessness, displacement, and gentrification. These themes are signified by many of the same strategies as Truth to Power. In both works, a found object acts as a signifier: guns to gun violence and shopping carts to homelessness. The objects are arranged in a way that also acts as a signifier: the shape of the US map for the US and a vertical stack for an apartment tower or a more general upward building. Even in this simplistic reading of Tower, the nuance is apparent in its far less direct correlation of signifier to signified, leaving more room for alternate readings. Unlike Truth to Power Belmore’s work continues to layer meaning and reference that creates room for a more expansive understanding By looking at the clay component of the work one can see how this work’s reading could shifted to dealing with violence against women. The color, shape, and orientation of the clay have a distinctly phallic shape. In Facing the Monumental, Tower was installed right next to Tarpaulin a work that is also made out of unfired clay and also deals with homelessness and displacement. The recessive and somewhat vaginal form of Tarpaulin counters the upright of the built structure of Tower. This combination could be read as a critique of systematic violence against women by highlighting the patriarchal nature of the structures that cause homelessness. What is exciting for me about these works is the fact that this is only one of many possible readings of this work. In fact, this is really just a reading that I pulled out of a hat and not one that I have felt when seeing the work. These works when shown separately can be read very differently. My personal reading of the work is much more centered around the invisibility of the humanity of the homeless, and a much looser idea of absence, presence, and dislocation. Belmore’s work allows for this breadth of understanding while maintaining its footing in a specific political issue.

Shit happens by Amy Silman

1. Something that “feels right” not a pursuit of beauty, but not captured by “ugly” something that is “Awkward,” something…
   Ineffability and intuition and feeling and evocation

2. Amy Silman’s article shit happens uses the imagery of excretion and ugliness to describe an art that hates beauty but is not ugly, she calls this awkward. She says that she is “searching rather earnestly for something I[she] don’t quite know”. I see here a connection to the literary Weird, also something close to the sublime. Again not quite the sublime but it’s kin, something found in the unknown that we as artists can sink endlessly into. The Weird comes to me through this text in the overlay of the familiar and the unfamiliar. It is not a liminal space, not a space between the known and the unknown but where they overlap, It is an “awkward” unknowing of the known. Mark Fisher in the “Weird and the Eerie” talks about the Weird as being found in this friction between the known(real) and the unknown(weird) and I think that the “Feels right” that Amy Silman and her friends are looking for are also found in this overlap.
3.  

3. I wonder if Amy Silman likes horror movies or books. The visceral the excretory the funny and the “thing that is familiar and not familiar”. The Thing, a movie that is about the familiar no longer being familiar, it is also about the visceral and the excretory. Is The Thing about what it is like to be an artist? no probably not. But let’s entertain the idea. For context: creature awakened in ice, infects the population of the remote camp, can’t tell who the monster is, gore and chaos ensue, trust is broken and none escape. Maybe in no one escaping The Thing, they never find the “just right” which would mean that The Thing is not about what it is to be an artist, but what it is to fail as an artist. 
4. Kafka and abstraction, trying to figure it out while doing it. Abstract painting as Amy Silman would have us believe is a process of trying to figure out how to do it while doing it. I think that waking up as a bug one day would also require a lot of figuring out. I am neither a bug nor an abstract painter and I wonder which I would find to be more awkward. Which would I more speedily figure out? The body changes all the time, though admittedly not so drastically or inconveniently as waking up a gigantic insect. However, might my transformation from a child have prepared me in some way for my metamorphosis into an insect? In Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa’s experience of being a bug is not entirely dissimilar from some of the more severe bouts of childhood akwardness. Would some of my experiences as a child have transferable skills to be a bug?

How Should Art Reckon With Climate Change?

This article in the New York Times written By Zoë Lescaze takes on the very large question of how art is to deal with climate change. The article first addresses the need for this kind of reckoning and goes on to dismiss the didactic and alarmist ways that this has been done siting the example of an iceberg melting in a town square. Probably referring to Ice Watch, by Olafur Eliasson and geologist Minik Rosing. The installation consisted of a circle of icebergs with a circumference of twenty meters that was installed at the Place du Panthéon during a Climate Change Conference. The article goes on to say that this functions as little more than propaganda and does not address the scope of the problem of climate change. This is probably true, however, I would say that there is a need for this, as well as the more eloquent and nuanced work that the article goes on to address. There needs to be constant alarm. Staying with Eliasson’s example, while this work is unable to address the scope of an issue as huge and nebulous as climate change very few things can achieve anything approaching that. The simple shorthand of the iceberg as a signifier of climate change still has a place, we need alarms.

The article goes on to discuss the relationships between depictions of landscape and our imaginings of landscape siting the sublime romantic paintings and contrasting them with more recent depictions of industry’s encroachment into the landscape. The article also addresses the contradictions of a contemporary art world that is trying to address climate change while being very environmentally unfriendly. Art fairs and shipments are extremely wasteful and have a large carbon footprint. Also looking at the contradictions in the funding of art institutions coming from BP and other major polluters. I think that criticism of funding this is more valid as it is a much greater contradiction than the use of airfare and inefficient shipping practices. For one this isn’t even an art-specific problem it is part of our much larger complicity in the systems that are driving climate change, systems that we as individuals and even professionals cannot functionally escape. There are great reasons to be critical of art fairs and it is essential to reduce waste and carbon emissions, however, the onus must always be on the major polluters, governments, and large corporations we need to use resources to combat the organizations who are doing the vast majority of the polluting. To squabble over personal responsibility plays into the hands of the organizations changing the climate.

Ending on John Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP, a concert on an organ begun in 2001 that will run for 640 years the article leaves us with a piece of work that is better than any other that I have seen, it anchors this discussion both of art and climate change and climate change more generally in the wider context of intergenerational time. It does not need to make a specific external reference it creates a microcosm of long-term thinking and responsibility. We cannot help but think of this existential threat of climate change, it is both humbling and hopeful.  

Dowsing for Remediation

In this article, Dowsing for Remediation, with Alana Bartol, written by Valérie Frappier, the artist Describes a body of work that invesitigates the historical resource extraction in the south of the alberta rocky mountains. 

The absence of mention of the ongoing coal mining only a handful of kilometers away struck me as an unaccoutable omission. It is hard to imagine that Bartol was unaware of these gargantuan open pit mines just over the BC border. One of the issuses that I see with this omission is that the focus on closed mines and the looming spectacle of a renewal of mining in the region. This makes this seem like this is an issue of reckoning with our past, ignoring the ongoing extraction that is happening in the very next valley. They talk about sacrifice zones, my conjecture here is that the moratorium on coal mining in the alberta rocky mountains made room in the alberta public’s conscience  for the sacrifice zone in the north namely the tar sands and other open pit mines. They were able to impose tis moratorium whil not even stoping open pit mining in the region of the southern rocky mountains. Just over the alberta border in very much the same region the mining continues, separated by whatis little more than a bureaucratic line in the coal. In a sort of slight of hand the governments of BC, Alberta, and Canada were able to fain consevation while continuing destructive extraction practices. 

The content of Bartols work seems to focus largely around reclamation as she says “You can’t restore soil after you remove it. You can’t restore a mountain after you literally take the top off it. And you’re not going to restore the vegetation. You’re not going to restore all the complexity of that landscape.” I have worked in the active mines in BC doing Reclemation for years, personaly planting tens of thousands native shrubs, trees, and grasses. There is even a strong possibly that this reclamation work was happening at the same time that Bartol was in the next valley. Working in these mines(five of them) I saw this extraction first hand working everyday in the mines I heard the daily blasts and watched the trucks haul coal freshly ripped out of the ground. Bartol is right these places will not be returned to their natural state. However, i think it would important to be aware of address the ongoing work that is beeing done. The reclamation work that Teck is doing on their mine sights is at times comically pathetic, literally planting little tufts of grass on a talings pile the size of a mountain and where a mountain once stood. I think that these reclamation actions seem in a large part a way of to permit to continue destuctive extraction processes. To rehabilitate tecks reputation more than the landscape. How ever there are people who really care and who are trying to bring the landscape back to a place where it can effectively function as an ecasysem. These reclamation efforts, some of them extremely similar to bartols own, are fraught with contradiction but are also of extreme relevance to bartols work.