AGOinsider: Many have considered your large-scale public works to be perfect replacements for some of the recently toppled colonial statues across the globe. How do you feel about this assertion? Did you ever think of these works as a type of monument?
TJP: I think of my figurative works as ‘sculptures about statues’. I wanted the work to make people aware of why monuments are built, what narratives are they trying to maintain? Who does that serve? Whilst it’s true that since 2020 the public has become far more conscious of the monuments that stand above them, it’s often been followed by a desire to simply replace individuals from history with different individuals from history. Whilst I do think that awareness of the full spectrum of contributions from within society is a very good thing, I don’t want to end up reinforcing a hierarchical system that is designed from the ground up to maintain the status quo in terms of power and privilege.
AGOinsider: What’s next for you and your practice? Are there any works in progress or upcoming projects you are excited about that you can share with us?
TJP: I’m working on various new bodies of work and have a good number of upcoming projects planned, but the one I’m really getting excited about (and can talk about) is my Windrush commission by Hackney Council in east London, U.K. I’m making two nine-foot amalgam bronze figures based on individuals in the borough who have connections to the Windrush immigration from the Caribbean of 1948. I’m half Jamaican and so it’s a huge honour to be making contemporary works connected to not only my own story, but to the lives of so many people in the U.K. and beyond. The sculptures will be publicly installed in the square outside Hackney town hall, it will be amazing to see them there as part of the fabric of London.
Within the Folds (Dialogue 1) is on view now outside of the AGO on the corner of Dundas and McCaul.
Life of a Craphead: KING EDWARD VII EQUESTRIAN STATUE FLOATING DOWN THE DON
In Oct–Nov 2017, performance artists Life of a Craphead gave a series of performances in which they dropped a life-size replica statue of King Edward VII into the Lower Don River. The sculpture floated down the river between Riverdale Park and Queen Street before it was retrieved for its next journey.
In Queen’s Park, Toronto, sits a 15-foot bronze equestrian statue of King Edward VII. The statue was originally erected in Delhi, India in 1922 to commemorate King Edward VII’s historic role as the Emperor of India. After independence in India, the statue was removed, to be destroyed; years later a prominent Toronto resident and art collector brought the statue to Toronto in appreciation of its craftsmanship. It was placed in Queen’s Park in 1969 despite public outcry and criticism.
Life of a Craphead’s project explored the histories and decisions that continue to shape Toronto’s public space and public art. Their performance created the illusion that this statue had been “dumped” in the Don River. With both humour and a sharp critical eye, the project addressed the persistence of power as it manifests in public art and public monuments – symbols that are often preserved in perpetuity, even when the stories we want to celebrate change.
In Queen’s Park, Toronto, there is a 15-foot bronze sculpture of King Edward VII on a horse, first erected in colonial India in 1922. Following India’s independence in 1947, it was removed and placed in storage. A prominent Toronto businessman and politician heard of its existence and paid for it to be moved to Toronto, citing his desire for a “great equestrian statue.” Despite protests from the public, the statue was placed in Queen’s Park in 1969. The statue still bears the original colonial plaque stating that the statue of the British King is of “The Emperor of India.” This is a performance where we dumped a life-size replica of the sculpture in the Don and it floated down the river for 4 weeks in October-November 2017. For the Don River Valley Park, curated by Kari Cwynar.
2. Dowsing for Remediation with Alana Bartol, Valérie Frappier, C Magazine 2022. PDF on blog.
3. Plastiglomerate: On Kelly Jazvac, Kirsty Robertson, e-flux journal, 2016. Article link
What is the ethical duty of artists?
Environmentalist Bill McKibben asked –
“Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” he wrote in an op-ed for Grist. “Compare it to, say, the horror of AIDS … which has produced a staggering outpouring of art that, in turn, has had real political effect.” For future generations looking back on the present, “the single most significant item will doubtless be the sudden spiking temperature. But they’ll have a hell of a time figuring out what it meant to us.”
What can art and artists actually do?
Chicago-based curator and early supporter of environmental art Stephanie Smith cautioned that a glut of superficially righteous exhibitions could give hits of easy virtue to viewers and museums alike –
“If sustainability or climate change become art trends du jour, we risk providing a palliative to ourselves and to our audiences without contributing much to artistic production, nuanced debate or lasting social change”
How are artists representing the environment?
Representing nature as the sublime and untouched – Thomas Cole
How are contemporary artists re-imagining our place in the natural world, and proposing alternative relationships with our environment?
Imagining alternative relationships – Mary Mattingly, Future Farmers
Just over a mile up the Bronx River from Hunts Point, Mary Mattingly has docked her newest floating project, Swale, a garden on a 130-by-40-foot steel barge. After discovering it is illegal to forage or even grow food in public parks in New York City, Mattingly conceived of producing a forest of edible plants on the water, to circumvent those laws and let people gather food for free.
The artists is interested in reciprocal relationships to land, and asks – “How do (I and other settlers) actually relate to land, and to what it’s already communicating?
She is exploring “extractive capitalism” while simultaneously “entangled with and benefitting from it.”
Kelly Jazvac– Plastiglomerates:
“In 2013, at the suggestion of oceanographer Charles Moore, geologist Patricia Corcoran and artist Kelly Jazvac travelled to Kamilo Beach, Hawaii to study a new stone formation. What they found was a new substance that was a mix of melted plastic and natural materials such as coral, sand, wood and volcanic rock. They called the stones “Plastiglomerate” and a co-authored manuscript of their findings can be found here: http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/24/6/article/i1052-5173-24-6-4.htm
“Human action on the beach had created what Corcoran and Jazvac named “plastiglomerate,” a sand-and-plastic conglomerate. Molten plastic had also in-filled many of the vesicles in the volcanic rock, becoming part of the land that would eventually be eroded back into sand.”
“The term “plastiglomerate” refers most specifically to “an indurated, multi-composite material made hard by agglutination of rock and molten plastic. This material is subdivided into an in situ type, in which plastic is adhered to rock outcrops, and a clastic type, in which combinations of basalt, coral, shells, and local woody debris are cemented with grains of sand in a plastic matrix.” (KJ) More poetically, plastiglomerate indexically unites the human with the currents of water; with the breaking down, over millennia, of stone into sand and fossils into oil; with the quick substration of that oil into fuel; and with the refining of that fuel into polycarbons—into plastic, into garbage. “
“The naming and dating of the Anthropocene, an as-yet formally unrecognized and heavily debated term for a geologic epoch evidencing human impact on the globe, relies “on whether humans have changed the Earth system sufficiently to produce a stratigraphic signature in sediments and ice that is distinct from that of the Holocene epoch.
Whichever (if any) start date is chosen, plastiglomerate—a substance that is neither industrially manufactured nor geologically created—seems a fraught but nonetheless incontrovertible marker of the anthropogenic impact on the world; it is evidence of human presence written directly into the rock.
After collection, the samples gathered at Kamilo Beach were analyzed so as to categorize the plastics and the natural sediments that together created the plastiglomerate whole. Following this, Jazvac showed the plastiglomerate in art exhibitions as sculptural ready-mades, to demonstrate human impact on nature.
Plastic soon shed its utopian allure, becoming hard evidence for the three c’s—the triple threat of capitalism, colonialism, and consumerism—as well as a kind of shorthand for all that was inauthentic and objectionable about postwar everyday life.
Plastiglomerate is a remainder, a reminder, an indicator of the slow violence of massive pollution. It brings together deep geological time and current consumerism.
Plastiglomerate is what Heather Davis calls “accidentally or incidentally” aesthetic. It is precisely the facticity of plastiglomerate, its infrangibility, its constituent components and analysis as both artwork and geological specimen that make it fascinating. Plastiglomerate demonstrates an already existent artistic relationship between human and planetary action that can’t really be improved by rendering that relationship as solely human. Or perhaps more disturbing still, it demonstrates the Anthropocene as a performance, an artwork with the end act of planetary destruction.
The ready-made geologic being of plastiglomerate speaks to more than pollution: also geology, the deep time of Earth, colonization, human-animal knowledges, currents of water, and the endless unfolding and collapse of life on Earth. We might conclude that “we have come into existence with and because of so many others, from carbon to microbes to dogs. And all these creatures and rocks and air molecules and water all exist together, with each other, for each other. To be a human means to be the land and water and air of our surroundings.”
Excerpts from Plastiglomerate: On Kelly Jazvac, Kirsty Robertson, e-flux journal, 2016.
Water covers 70 per cent of the earth’s surface. “It’s always the same and it’s never the same,” says Finnish artist Elina Brotherus. Hear her, Olafur Eliasson, Bill Viola, Marina Abramović and four other artists on the vital substance. Water: a place of danger and opportunity. American video artist Bill Viola, in whose work water is a stable participant, fell into a lake at the age of six and saw “probably the most beautiful world I’ve ever seen.” Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson uses water as an “element of something moving in an otherwise static landscape” in his 2014 installation ‘Riverbed’ and Danish artist group Superflex uses water in their “post-apocalyptic movie” ‘Flooded McDonald’s’. A substance with many uses, meanings and possibilities, Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi – praised for his ability to build innovative architecture on water – says: “There’s a whole life cycle in water, a whole economy.” Also featured in this video is Serbian artist Marina Abramović, Czech artist Klara Hobza and American artist Roni Horn.
Transform our experience of time/scale of our lives relative to the world – John Cage, Katie Patterson
From the Declaration of Responsibilities and Guarantee of Rights and Freedoms, Public Studio, 2018, Toronto.
Express hope/resist cynicism and apathy –
Transform/reduce environmental impact of art’s production and exhibition –
Tara Donovan and Piet Hein Eek – who have made discarded, everyday materials the centre of their work. Watch their exciting approach to re-using materials. “The materials wait to be used again.” British sculptor Phyllida Barlow (b.1944) uses materials from her former sculptures – from their experimental stage. To Barlow, sculpturing is not about perfection but about recovering lost moments. Flexibility is key to American artist Elliott Hundley (b. 1975), who uses materials he’s found washed up on a beach in his artwork. Wrapping paper, rocks and beads are all part of a magnificent collage pieced together by chicken wire and straight pins. “In a way the artist works with remnants, society’s remnants.” Danish poet, writer and artist Morten Søkilde (b. 1974) dubs himself “a thing-finder” and uses these things he finds on e.g. the street to create his poetic, dream-like miniature models. When re-using materials in such a manner, there are suddenly infinite possibilities, and one’s own ideas are the only limitation. American fabric sculptor and performance artist Nick Cave (b. 1959) describes his art as “a second skin that hides gender, race, class.” An array of discarded materials makes up his artwork, and he often frequents thrift stores and flea markets, searching for something “that has a pulse to it” and can be the beginning of something new. “It always starts with material,” says Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek (b. 1967), who uses e.g. scrap wood to build furniture – his goal being to optimize and take maximum advantage of the things around him. Starting out, people thought he was crazy to use leftover-material, but his approach has now set a new trend. American artist Tara Donovan (b. 1969) was initially drawn to everyday materials – such as straws – because they were easily accessible, inexpensive and mass-produced. She works to the point where the flexible material, which makes up her magical sculptures, transcends itself, thus creating a sort of artistic structure. All interviews by Marc-Christoph Wagner, Christian Lund and Jonas Hjorth, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Ron Benner’s Corn Roast at the Art Gallery of Guelph
Community Corn Roast + Fall Season Launch Wednesday, September 14, 2022 Community Corn Roast + Fall Season Launch Wednesday, September 14 | 5:30 – 8:30 pm Free | In person Donald Forster Sculpture Park Remarks at 6:30 pm | Exhibition walkthrough at 7 pm Celebrate the launch of the AGG’s upcoming season and the fall harvest with an opening reception on Wednesday, September 14 at 5:30 pm. As well as ᖃᐅᑕᒫᑦ | Qautamaat, the gallery’s new fall exhibitions include Anahita Norouzi: Planting Displacement, guest curated by Amin Alsaden, and Homecoming, featuring Anita Cazzola, Laura Grier, and Justine Woods and curated by Erin Szikora, recipient of the 2022 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators. Visiting artist Ron Benner brings his roving corn-roasting wagon, Maize Barbacoa, to the Art Gallery of Guelph for a Community Corn Roast. Part sculpture, part installation, part performance, enjoy fresh local corn and celebrate the artists and curators in attendance. Based in London, Ontario, Ron Benner’s artistic practice and research often focuses how the globalization of seed circulation and farming methods has impacted local communities and contexts, his work highlights the connections between colonization and commercialization and the loss of biodiversity as well as global indigenous traditions and cultures. Remarks are at 6:30 pm. From 7 – 8 pm, join curators Erin Szikora and Amin Alsaden, along with artist Anahita Norouzi for a casual walkthrough and introduction to the new exhibitions opening this fall. Bring your own blanket or lawn chair and settle in for good conversation about the exhibitions with friends and family, surrounded by the artworks in the sculpture park. Parking in Campus Lot P23 is FREE with access from College Ave. and MacDonald St. The AGG parking lot is closed during the event with the exception of limited accessibility parking. The event will be held outdoors and inside gallery spaces. For more information about AGG COVID-19 protocols, please visit our website. Registration is not required for this event.
Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental, in conversation with Wanda Nanibush, U of T, Daniels Faculty of Art and Design, 2018 (video)
In this video Rebecca Belmore and curator of the exhibit Wanda Nanibush discuss Facing the Monumental which was exhibited in 2018 at the AGO in Toronto.
The exhibit is a raisone of sorts and includes a great deal of work from throughout Rebecca Belmores career.
The two discuss the exhibit piece by piece in a non chronological order.
Another show that came to mind during this interview was Teras Terra,
I think my reason for thinking about these works comes from the fact its Marble like Bellmores Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) which is also rendered in marble.
For whatever reason this artist talk got me thinking about the art work of Irish Painter Gerard Dillon, maybe its the issue of indigenous soverignhty vs settler colonialism discussed and inherent in Mrs.Bellmores work that is also part of Some of Gerard Dillons Paintings? (not in a Canadian but in an Irish context) Im not totally sure…
I don’t really see a formal relationship between the works but maybe that is also part of it and I just don’t see it yet…
Reading Response 4
This isn’t a full response but the reading made me think of these images! Please see my others one for a full response.
This really big Iceberg floating by Newfoundland
These are some works by artist Andre Bloc
Reading response 3:
Timothy Morton
Reading Response 2:
How to Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy | Jenny Odell
I really appreciated this reading, the more I researched the text and read/watched interviews with Jenny Odell the more my interest grew. In general I understood the chapter and the book more generally to be arguing against the normative conceptions of productivity and the tying of time/productivity to work/capital… that is to say time must be spent working and most often working for money.
The surrealist painter, Giorgio de Chirico foresaw a narrowing horizon for activities as ‘’unproductive’’ as observation.
Looking at this quote from the reading one can begin to speculate and consider some deeper meanings later explored in the reading… A real life example I think of when considering this idea of valuing productivity ina capitalist sense first and foremost appears in something like the film industry in which movies that get large amount of studio funding and big budgets are most often those that can show big financial returns for example things like marvel superhero movies and other serialised never ending sequel films in comic book universe’s… however i would argue that just because these movies have big returns and are popular with the masses especially in the anglosphere and america does not make them worthy or more worthy than an arthouse / small budget etc film. I also believe it influences and forces itself upon the masses and limits our viewing of anything alternative from the hive mind…
’’Given how poorly art survives in a system that only values the Botton line, the stakes are cultural as well. What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest-destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is the impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious. ‘’
Giorgio de Chirico – Love Song
Some artists I thought about during the reading include:
Snowflake #4 2022 burned archival inkjet print 72 x 72 inInga DanyszIn Ancient Rome
Another Artist I thought of while reading this chapter was George Henry Longly.
I see these works as exploring ideas related to meaning and value within art, they are both cleanly produced images and video still which can be sold as art objects but also depict sculptural scenes which are-in some cases impermanent or commercial in quality.
Looking at this woodcut created for the St.Paul Minnesota (USA) Union Advocate Newspaper, which was discussed by Odell in some of her presentations on the book,
Below: A comedic play on the usual poster seen above^
Reading Response 1:
Patricia Kashian on Queer Mycology: Mycology as Revolutionary and Political Practice.
A key idea that grabbed my attention when listening to this podcast was Mrs. Kashian asked us to reconsider the ways in which we see fungi. I began to consider how she suggested the ways in which Fungi are viewed negatively despite their highly positive effects upon humanity and the world more genreally. Fungi have been used for tens of thousands of years if not longer as food, medecine among other things and may have even played a role in the development oif the human species as explored in the ideas of human evolution via psychadelic fungi.
I began to consider how fungi is avant garde, its goes and grows where it wants to … it forces us to see the world in a different way and
Artists I thought of during the podcast:
While listening I began to think of the ways in which binary views that are applied to the supposedly sinister fungi are applied to things in the world more genrally and how these binary and broadly brushed ideas and viewpoints might hinder aspects of artistic creation and production. An artist that comes to mind when I think of the avant garde as it applies to art is PAblo TOmek, a painter based in PAris and once a prolific wall painter and now prolfiic gallery artist, his work conurs to me relationships to the fungi… both are mis understood both chalklenge the norms of their respective landscapes adn are important to these landscapes. For the fungi they pop up as rouges in an otherwise semi uniform forest or grass patch… and much like these mushrooms Pablo’s painting would appear by his hand in the city scape braking through the usual and making us reconsider a previously passed by corridor or wall. Although many might not appreciate these wall works, many do and most will have some kind of changed perspective after seeing something rouge appear wheter it is pro-wall painting, anti wall [ainting or indifferent and just a registration of a visual disruption in an otherwise passed by space.
