ars longa, vita brevis

The installation of work of public art is a special moment, and for that we hold a small celebration and dedication. I would like to speak a bit about public art and how it is different from the domestic arts, those art works that we place in our homes or offices.

First of all – domestic art: easel paintings, watercolours, photographs, collages and montages, engravings and prints, glass and small cast sculpture, ceramics, needlework, found objects, action figures, Kinder Surprises, foreign money, postcards and greeting cards, fridge magnets . . . For all of the images I have a collected in my life I vainly try to find a place in my home. The most recent acquisitions find a prominent place in the living room or the study, the older pieces are relegated to a spare bedroom or hallway or stored in a closet, in a box. In my kitchen I hang posters and postcards and stick my son’s elementary school art work to the refrigerator – things that can be cleaned or thrown out or folded up and put away if damaged or no longer wanted. And in my bathroom, I try to find artwork that will withstand the dampness of the shower and perhaps articulate for me the romance of water and the banality of ablution.

Domestic art for me may be a little bit sentimental, recalling people I have known and worked with over the years, places I have been, or enthusiasms and interests that I have long since left behind. My domestic art might also be a charm, some dangling thing that is sweetly optimistic and speaks to my sunny side, or a talisman, a container for my fears and nightmares – an object that carries good luck, and wards off the bad.

What characterizes domestic art for me, however, is its temporality. We can change it according to our moods. We may acquire it impulsively, rearrange the furniture to accommodate it, paint the walls a different colour to frame it, then in a few months, or a year or two, grow tired of it. It gets knocked and jostled, acquires a wine stain from a party, a chip from the Nerf ball fight the boys had in the living room. The new girlfriend hates it. The old one takes it. Eventually it ends up in a garage sale. The life of an image begins again . . .

But a work of public art? Now that is a different life entirely. A work of public art is not an expression of personal taste or impulsiveness. Public art is a social activity from the beginning, the product of planning committees, juries, and advisory panels. The artist becomes a catalyst for the hopes and fears of the community. A public artwork may reflect a sentimental side or mark a milestone in the community’s history. In this way public art is not so different from its domestic cousin. The expression of the individual becomes the expression of the community.

Public art is different because it is made to endure, because the sun and the rain and the cold and the wind erode even stone over time. The surface must be resilient to withstand the probing and stroking of a million hands and the structure must be sound to support the climbing of a thousand children. Pubic art is made to endure the elements and in so doing, it lives a different life. We see it under different conditions. In the heat of the summer when we seek shelter from the sun and when shade seems hard to find, the artwork does not sweat. In the fall, when the wind blows cooler and the days begin to shorten, the artwork may begin to cast larger shadows, and glow in that peculiar orange light that I associate with autumn, and it will seem somehow strange that the artwork does not regret the passing of summer. In the winter, when we dress to ward off the cold, the artwork is naked but for a thin skein of snow or a decorative trim of icicles. It will appear to laugh at our frailty and our sensitivity to the cold. And in the spring it is new again, in those first warm sunny days, alongside the budding trees it shares that green and yellow light of the next growing season.

Carol Bradley's genius is to give what is durable – glazed and fired clay – the texture, sparkle and magic of lapping water, an image that is at once transitory and timeless. Where this artwork is placed, it won’t be climbed upon or receive the caresses of a million hands, but it will be there through the seasons and the years. In its position over the door I hope that it doesn't develop icicles. Carol has caught the blues, greens and turquoises we associate with a pool of water's colour refractions and she has given them back to us. In the summer when we are dry this Pool will signal the promise refreshment. In the winter, when we are cold, this Pool promises a tepid bath. For toddlers, Carol's Pool will always be associated with Water Babies, a first swim with a parent. For elementary school children, these colours and shapes will be associated with going to swimming lessons. For teenagers, this image of water will become a symbol of early romantic flirtations. For adults, the rippling surface of this artwork may come to represent the bittersweet discipline of regular physical exercise, or the pool lanes may become a symbol of a place of meditation and stress reduction from the burdens of work. Seniors will retain this image in connection with aquabics, the social life that this water activity affords them, and wonderful feeling buoyancy that water can give to an aging body.

The life of this mural will span generations whose memories of home, family and friends will take place under this sign. Children will be born, grow into adults and eventually die, yet the blue, green and turquoise of Carol's mural will continue to lap and sparkle – a constant in our always changing lives.

ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short)

Gordon Hatt, 2003

Interior Life: Paintings and Prints by Moira Clark

Ghosts, it has been suggested, are the product of our living with the physical artifacts of past generations. We associate objects with individuals – Robert’s tools, Lisa’s desk, Mary’s car. We do it collectively too – the family cottage, the community pool, the neighbourhood store. When confronted by the objects we associate with the dead and departed, when we handle these objects, we feel a connection to those people – their presence – and we call these presences ghosts.

Townscapes (including cityscapes and rural agricultural landscapes), Interiors and Still Life are genres of painting and photography that represent the artifacts of people. These types of representation are literally, “art about art.” That is to say, the objects represented are the artifacts of culture – public places and private homes, domestic furniture, plates, pitchers, bottles, and food, both plain and fancy.

As signs of culture, these types of representation have great flexibility and are capable of speaking to us in very subtle ways. The still life tradition that can be traced to Roman times, for example, may speak to a culture’s love of feasting, revelry or earthy humour. Dutch still life has been variously interpreted as celebrating national prosperity, or as a moral reminder of life’s transience. Abundance and scarcity, wealth and poverty, exoticism and simplicity have all been allegorized by the subjects of still life. Flowers in full bloom, ripe unblemished fruit and full pitchers of fresh milk have typically signalled a sanguine and optimistic attitude towards life. These are the still lifes in waiting rooms and Holiday Inns that make up much of the chintz and wallpaper of our lives.

In the modern period, artists followed Cezanne’s example and still life became a mute support for formal experimentation and abstract composition. In the nineteen-eighties, when traditional genre was reconsidered as art photography, still life, interiors and townscapes were once again understood as symbolic and meaningful. In contrast to traditional genre, a number of photographic artists began to produce pessimistic and highly self conscious images that embraced the representation of age through distressed and accreted surfaces (Roy Arden) material exhaustion and pollution (Edward Burtynsky), and obsolescence (Bernd and Hille Becher). More recently, the German photographer Andreas Gursky has produced large format, digitally manipulated images of super abundance in a dystopic vision of globalized production and international corporate anomie.

It is in this context that the still lives and interiors of Moira Clark stand in quiet opposition. Her interest in genre was stimulated while a student in the nineteen-seventies. At that time, still life, interiors and landscapes were seen as the beginning of a reductive process that lead inevitably to a painted abstraction of the physical world. However, Clark’s still life and interiors, while spare and economically rendered, resisted resolution into compositional abstractions. Instead, rhythmic composition, counter point, pattern and symmetry, traced from the objects of her environment, continued to retain a prosaic and human character.

It is difficult today to imagine just how hard it was to paint genre in the nineteen-seventies. In those years, art schools and public and commercial galleries were in the full embrace of abstraction. For artists like Moira Clark who wished to pursue subject matter in their art, printmaking was one of the few viable alternatives. In the print shop the artful manipulation of the techniques and disciplines of etching, lithography, and block printing took precedence over the ideological battles against representation. As a result, the print studio at York University and the co-operative Open Studio in Toronto provided supportive and stable environments for Clark and other artists who desired to make non-conforming art in a less hostile atmosphere.

The art historian Norman Bryson has suggested that one of the unique characteristics of still life is it’s timelessness. The conventional subject matter of still life, for example – food and food service objects – are virtually indistinguishable from generation to generation. A Roman still life with fruit, or a breakfast composition by Chardin look as edible today as when they were painted. Images like these collapse time into an unchanging and indifferent present, and here lies both still life’s appeal and it source of friction. For those who desire art to bridge generations and ages, still life can be a comforting reminder of constant unchanging values. But for those who feel that a contemporary art should address the dynamism and forces for change in the present, still life is potentially reactionary. Unless pessimistic and critical, like some of the contemporary still life photography that I have cited above, conventional still life proposes relative, detached values – it exists outside politics and the issue-oriented debates of the day.

Moreover, conventional still life poses the uncomfortable question of gender roles. Still life was considered a minor genre by the academicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – a suitable occupation ideally for a female artist. Of course, one today would never establish such a hierarchy and appoint women to its lower orders, yet the conventional still life may be an area of unconscious discrimination. Here again Norman Bryson sheds valuable light on the gender character of the still life. Comparing still lifes painted by male artists to those by female artists, Bryson notes that inevitably, those painted by males seem to occupy the perspectival centre of the visible universe, as though those objects, or those foods, were the sole and unique property and subject of the viewing artist. He notes however that still life, as painted by female artists, has the character of existing independently of the artist and viewer, as the tools and products of work – not solely of work’s delectation – but as the evidence of “the creatural and ordinariness of domestic culture.” Perhaps then, according to this understanding, we should more correctly distinguish between the genres – still life may be better characterized as male, and the interior genre – female.

Indeed, what has strikes one about Moira Clark’s work is that the subjects of her painting and printmaking are never about her or her surrogate viewer alone. Each work affirms the value of interlacing, interdependence and connection. So, for example, an early etching such as the  Staircase with Artichoke Tiles (1979), is a study in asymmetrical symmetry, where the left and right mirror images are almost, but not quite identical. Adjacent doors, parallel staircases and bannisters, and the rendering of the tile pattern are very faithfully described, and yet, as much as the print is an abstract exercise, it is also a metaphor of attachment and identity, where these doors are markers in space for the beginnings of similar, connected, but separate lives. 

In Sunlight Through Glass (1982), a still life arrangement of an empty bowl and three tomatoes sits on a table occupying an almost overlooked place in the near foreground, while two pots of geraniums, sit on a widow ledge in the background. Together these objects define a space that otherwise consists of a tangle of confusing shadows and reflections. The physical, tangible character of the still life objects contrasts with an interior space of shifting phantoms and shadow presences. Domestic space in this image may be considered to consist of objects which reflect the spirits of those who live there and whose long shadows are cast over the hard and soft edges of the room.  

A rare image by the artist featuring the presence of human figures, The Three Sisters (1986) tends to reinforce the sense that human presence is ineffable at best in Clark’s work. Here it is the figures that are pushed to the edges of the frame and which define the common central space of the table top. Rather insubstantially and summarily rendered, the three sisters form a circle of charged space – a space that is defined by their interaction. The table top is a medium, not unlike a Ouija board, which each of the sisters touch, with arms and legs interleaving above and below the table in circle of connection. In contrast, when the figures are absent from the picture plane altogether as in Three Chairs After Dinner (1977) and All Night Café (1982), everything is more substantial. Chairs that look quite capable of sustaining weight, have not been pushed back to the table, and their random arrangement betrays a recent and hasty departure. The repetitive patterns on the table cloth in Three Chairs After Dinner , or carpet patterning and abstracted arrangements of plants in the back ground of All Night Café are more substantial, more regular and more firmly contoured than any of the three sisters.

In the early 1990's Clark left the print shop. She left the layered, methodical and distanced discipline of printmaking to develop her imagery in the more tactile and direct medium of acrylic. In the process, she moved away from the spatial and compositional explorations of the interiors and began to focus on isolated objects. These objects – food and flowers, plates, bowls, glasses and pitchers – rendered weightless in space, began to hover over soft indeterminate grounds, as though they existed as pure ideas, outside the work-a-day world of food service and hospitality. Sometimes, Clark would present these objects lined up on a narrow ledge, like the unique and individual characters in a family portrait. Flowers, at one time subjects of her still life, became decorative motifs that floated in well ordered columns and rows, in front of and behind of Ironstone plates and pitchers, finally, in later work, to come to rest on the china itself, as part of its decorative surface.

The surfaces surrounding and supporting Clark’s still life objects eventually crystallized into tight weaves of coloured bands, reminiscent of cane or wicker – grounds that began to function as optically vibrating planes – flattening the spaces and removing the air that had at one time had flowed around and between her subjects. She superimposed translucent cut glassware over her colourful grids, muting and softening the hard edges, and in the process these still life objects began to dematerialize. The glassware has become a cipher – a thin veil described only by white contour lines and refractions and extremely subtle modulations of the interleaving grid in the background. Those solid objects that had at one time hinted at human presence, seem to be no longer necessary. Clark has moved on now, to describe the trajectories of connection itself, through weaving, interleaving, intersecting and connecting of bands colour.

The Art of Gardening

The Art of Gardening

At some point, just about every gardener feels the urge to place a work of art amongst the annuals and the groundcover, to nestle a sculpture in a budding grove, or to frame it with a wall of ivy. It is curious, this urge, because we tend to associate gardening with a love of nature, and art sometimes seems so “unnatural.” Art is symbolic. Art represents human feeling and thinking, and by its very definition, something made by human hands. But gardening isn’t entirely ‘natural’ either. Gardening is the human cultivation of the natural world – a humanization of the wild. “Select this flower. Plant its seed here. Trim this bush and make a place for people.” Next will come a bench, a small table, and then maybe, some art.

Both gardening and art making are component parts of place making. We make places by projecting ourselves into a space. When we garden, we project our place in the natural world. We prune and shape bushes to create paths and walk ways. We plant grass to grow under our feet, flowers to bloom around us, trees shade us from the sun. When we make art we gather the things around us that we love and admire, things that remind of the past, charms and votive objects that represent our hopes for the future, and our talismans for the things we fear. This now is a place that we can call home.

And so when it came to discussing the little piece of land owned by the city of Cambridge – that lot adjacent to the Ferguson Cottage at 37 Grand Avenue, just the other side of the fish and chip shop – and whether it was to stay as it was or become a parking lot, Heather Franklin, artist and member of the Galt Horticultural Society and Judy Welsh, executive member of the Horticultural Society, proposed to the city in 1999 to establish the Cambridge Sculpture Garden. The Cambridge Sculpture Garden would be a place where contemporary artists would place their work on the banks of the Grand River, on land that would be cultivated and tended by the horticultural society, in the old community of Galt, for the residents of the modern city of Cambridge.

One of the first accomplishments of the Cambridge Sculpture Garden was the relocation of Andreas Gehr’s sculpture, Twilight, in September of 2000, from its location at the Grand River Conservation Authority. Andreas Gehr’s piece was originally built in the nineteen eighties as part of Cambridge Galleries’ Public Art Programme. The once electrified and illuminated piece had since that time languished in benign neglect. Yet, even minus its electrical peripherals, the rust red spiralling tower is still a remarkable sculptural object. Part ‘Tower of Babel,’ part soft ice cream swirl in rust red steel – it is dramatically visible again, thanks to the sculpture garden.

Early commissions by Sculpture Garden were undertaken for short terms and special occasions, and the committee began to experience the challenges of exhibiting art outdoors. To celebrate the opening in the fall of 2000, Graham Todd, Dennis Bolohan, Scott McNichol and Allan Flint were invited to install temporary works. Dennis Bolohan’s Labyrinth,a maze planted in the summer of 2001, suffered from an exceedingly hot and dry summer and never fully realized the artist’s conception. Scott McNichol’s A Question of Who’s in Charge, originally constructed impermanently of painted Styrofoam and installed just for the opening, was recreated in fibreglass for long term installation in the summer of 2001. Unfortunately, the piece has been repeatedly vandalized. The bold rhetorical challenge to authority posed by the artist in the work has been played out in real life, as the Sculpture Garden struggles to assert its right to exhibit art outdoors and to present artistic expression in a public space. 

One of the landmark pieces of the Sculpture Garden has been Allan Flint’s Use, installed in the spring of 2001. Flint was originally invited to participate in the grand opening, but his work arrived later, and in a much more resilient form. A concatenation of large, yellow, three dimensional letters, Useseems like text on a holiday, where language and meaning withdraw from the world of chatter to sink into a primordial garden of sights and sounds and smells.  

Thanks to a project grant from the Ontario Arts Council, a call for entry was circulated in the province and a jury was convened to commission three new works in the Spring of 2002. Ryzsard Litviniuk, Max Streicher and Marguerite Larmand were charged with creating semi-permanent works of art – artworks that would endure the arbitrary temperaments of man and nature for one calendar year. Ryzsard Litviniuk’s hollowed wood sculpture Tension - 14 from 2, was the first of this group to be installed in the summer of 2002. Litviniuk wields a chainsaw like a scalpel, and cuts thick unseasoned tree stumps into delicately telescoping forms. The piece installed at the Sculpture Garden consisted of fourteen sections cut from two triangular shaped stumps and mounted on steel reinforcement rods. There is an elegant machismo to all of Litviniuk’s art. In the grand tradition of male abstract sculpturing, his work expands and rises with strength and virility – a strength which in his case is also tempered by the deftness and delicacy with which he directs his roughly hewn material.

Ironically, the delicate parts of Ryszard Litviniuk’s sculpture proved too delicate for the Cambridge Sculpture Garden. Tensionwas vandalized and the piece was removed. The Sculpture Garden was relandscaped and berms were created to prevent vandals from driving their vehicles on to the property to tow or drag the sculptures from their moorings. Subsequently, the works proposed for the site by Max Streicher and Marguerite Larmand both included design considerations to deter further vandalism.

Max Streicher’s piece, Windsock, was installed in October of 2002. Streicher has become internationally known for his inflatable sculpture and recognized locally for his 1998 exhibition at Cambridge Galleries. Obviously, a thin mechanically inflated membrane, sitting on the ground would be impossible given electrical power limitations and increasing security concerns for the site. Streicher decided that instead of using electrical fans to inflate his work, he would elevate the figures on flag poles, and open them up to collect the prevailing winds like windsocks. The adult male figures that he customarily uses in his inflatables was substituted for an infant toddler proportioned figure. The proportionately larger head and little round pot belly recall the famously animated dancing baby hallucinated by Calista Lockhart on the television show Ally McBeal. But Streicher’s babies, blowing with the winds high above the Grand River, are not biological determinism’s siren song. Rather, they resemble more the spirit of the lullaby “Rock a bye baby” – lazily lolling in the breeze like kites, rising and falling, sleep inducing and hypnotic.  

Similarly, Marguerite Larmand, whose work Afloatwas installed in May of 2003, chose to elevate her wax figures in towers constructed of young maple trees. In contrast to Streicher’s floating figures, Larmand’s sentinels are made of sterner stuff. As is customary for the artist, her figures are created and then wrapped and supported by natural elements, articulating her belief in humanity’s cyclical place in the eco system. Yet this work is not dewy-eyed naturalism either. These sober figures seem to survey the community from fortified watchtowers, as if they might be at once both the city’s guardians and its prisoners. Perhaps Larmand’s sentinels are like an ecological and art settler movement, as they greet the elements and challenge the vandals from their fortified towers: “We are here,” they seem to be saying, “We are strong and multiplying.”

The art of gardening requires that every spring the dead and dying plants and vines are cut back and new life is transplanted and seeded. The life of cities needs replanting too, and the Cambridge Sculpture Garden is one of those new seeds.

Gordon Hatt, 2003