Brent Roe's autodogmatic, anti-transcendent trip

Consciousness, to paraphrase Pascal, differentiates humanity from just so many blades of grass.1 Maybe it fell to the visual arts in the twentieth-century to remind us of this. What better way to illustrate enlightenment than in the single, instantaneously apprehended image?

Beginning in the war ravaged Europe of the 1920's and in the war time America of the 1940's, abstract artists liberated themselves from the responsibility of reproducing images from life and discovered the powerful and liberating possibilities of making art in the existential present. These artists no longer saw the canvas as a window through which to view a metaphorical diorama. They saw it as a flat surface, with which to record the spontaneous, the accidental and the physical properties of painting. The new painting was to be about being alive "to the moment" – to the chaos of unmediated feeling. The artwork did not, nor could not, describe, represent or symbolize this new attitude. It became a record of a lived event or, existed as a self contained, parallel entity.

Brent Roe's paintings are not abstract or non-objective in the commonly understood meaning of the terms. Yet, he is an inheritor of this legacy of abstract art and its influence carries through to the present day. Strongly affected by abstract art in Toronto in the seventies, and its promise of personal freedom, Roe for a time painted energetic, non-objective, abstract canvases. Toward the close of the decade, however, he and many other young artists at the time experienced a profound discontent with the received culture of abstraction.

 "It was getting outside of a mind set, getting into the unconscious, away from the linear way of thinking, once you start to smear paint around you kind of get lost in it. I'd spent a good couple of years painting abstract -- going at it with a bit of a fervour. Then I got into figurative. I started to feel that the abstract just became another academic theory."2

 The younger generation of artists to which Roe belonged was influenced by the convergence of political issues in the early eighties. A renewed cold war and arms build-up, economic recession, environmentalism and feminism brought into relief the degree to which the culture of abstract art had become cloistered, and had drifted away from contemporary life. It had become, quite simply, just another "genre" – an academic style with its own rules and standards -- removed from any direct, experienced connection to the present. The old principals and taboos of the abstractionists started to seem stale and academic. Young artists experiencing the turmoil of these years became less reticent about making direct references in their work to political issues.3

 Brent Roe's initial forays away from abstraction were toward images that had environmental and cold war references. In an early painting entitled Two Ways of Passing an Island (1980),4 Roe contrasted a benign storybook nature, represented by a whale swimming in one direction, to a malevolent humanity, represented by an air plane dropping a bomb, flying in the opposite direction.

 One painting in the Cambridge Galleries exhibition which may trace its roots to this earlier, political period in the artist's work is Dead Poor People (1992). On a swirling white ground a simply painted, thin black line frames an image of the earth, as seen from space. Below the black-line frame the artist inscribed the three words "dead poor people."

Dead Poor People may be about all of the people who have lived without having a monument in their name. Perhaps it is a cartoon of a memorial that questions the role of individuals and those we choose to memorialize. But what is political in this work is not so much an issue of current affairs as it is an issue of perception and the manipulation of symbols in general. The mere fact of being an artist in the 1990's is an implied rejection of mass marketed images of proscribed meanings and values. Every aspect of Dead Poor People is a rejection of the warm embrace of the production values and ideology of the corporate media environment.

Separated by a dozen years, Two Ways of Passing an Island and Dead Poor People describe not so much a political program as an aesthetic. It is a cultivated, naive, style of lazy, enervated lines, and weightless, schematically described, floating forms. In the 1980 painting, Roe renders the bomber a rubber child's toy. In the later painting, he contrasts the thinly painted floating earth with the baldly wooden epigram "dead, poor, people." Aimless painterly gestures are anchored by the goal oriented alliteration Perfectly Purposeful People (1995). An articulated phrase of corporate optimism, Rational Future, floats above a white surface tortured with scumbled black lines and etched with graffiti and tattoo like markings (1997).

Contemporary life is characterized by a universe of expanding emotional and perceptual complexity. If art is a politically redemptive act, it is not because it can instruct people. It is because aesthetics can model the existence of new forms and new perceptions and can validate our most elusive and tangled feelings. In Brent Roe's work we can describe an "aesthetic of ambivalence," where the authority of each statement or gesture is undermined by its opposite. It is an ironic, self-conscious aesthetic. It is informed by a knowledge of art history and an interest in the processes of perception. It is also an expression of the lived sense of the difficulty of making an unequivocally authoritative artistic statement.

 "In painting, make that experience of perception a real one, an honest one."5

With text and imagery constantly in a state of opposition these paintings cannot lead anywhere, or better said, they cannot lead to any other place than the paintings themselves. Titles such as Is (1993), Eternity Is Amongst Us (1995), Where It's At (1995), Less Is More (1996), and Is Often Desiring (1996) are notable in their use of intransitive verb constructions to this end.

The earliest paintings in the exhibition, Hi, Dead Poor People, and Fate (all 1992), Hidden Meaning, Aspirations, Awaken From Your Trance, and Is (all 1993) mark a break with previous, more densely painted work and call upon a simplified, almost minimalist aesthetic. These paintings all have in common a gesturally active, swirling, white painted ground above which hover texts and images. The painting Is shows the artist making reference to his heritage of abstract colour field and expressionist painting. In the middle of the white ground he has painted a cartoon of a colour field painting. It is a circle in a square, bisected diagonally and broken into the complimentary contrasting colours of red-green and blue-orange. In the centre of the cartoon he has painted the word "IS."

In Is Roe consciously combines the elements of gestural expressionist painting, which he associates with the unconscious, and colour field painting, which he associates with a pure retinal experience of colour and form. The text connects Roe to conceptual, text based and interventionist artists who critique the politics of language and mass media. Related in form, the innocent and disarming Hi achieves the same end with understatement and humour. A minimalist painting within a painting – a black outlined, yellow ochre square hovers again over the active white painted ground. Within it a purposefully painted diagonal black line moves from side to side to side. Dangling from the end of the line, contained within the shape of a droplet, is the word "Hi." It is an anti-message  – a minimalist, two letter greeting. Its "moment" is much like a touch on the sleeve. In tying these three historical movements together in these paintings Roe underlines their common goal. Namely, to create a fissure – a short-circuit in our programmed expectations -- to create an experience of the moment.

 The charts Bacon of Hope, Chart #1, and Chart #5 (all 1994) continue to employ the agitated white ground. Employing the pun to great effect in the Bacon of Hope, Roe has rendered a thinly painted slab of bacon surrounded by the words fertilizer, jazz, chips and sex. Like Hi, it is disarmingly banal, mundane. The summary, thin painting and the random references to apparently unconnected commodities like fertilizer and chips suggest the artist may be connected to a dangerously dissolute and entropic state.

 "Went out to buy some bacon one day and did a painting of a strip of bacon. It's about trying to find hope and having these disparate words floating around."6

Seven searching words resisted being a mistake, The world will not end any time soon, and Compost Your Theories (all 1994) make direct reference to the work of the American abstractionist Philip Guston. A Guston-like crosshatch of shaky, pastel brushstrokes again floats above the common swirling white ground. The Guston references are topped with a text icing that seems to struggle against the indeterminacy of the paint. The command "Compost Your Theories" and the affirmative "The World Will Not End Anytime Soon" struggle for authority on a shifting ground. The anti-message – unlike the conventional Cassandra, there is essentially nothing to report here – makes for a wistful painting. It is a post-adolescent, reality without angst.

"No point in behaving like things are going to end, because they won't."7

Where It's At, Perfectly Purposeful People, Expand Your Moment, Eternity Is Amongst Us, Real Meets Real, Decorative Sun (all of 1995), and Is Often Desiring, (1996) mark a stylistic change for the artist. The active white ground is replaced by a transparent polymer sizing over a raw canvas. The thin, hesitatingly transparent applications of paint have been replaced by solid opaque colours. The imagery and text still seem to float in the centre of the canvas. Speaking about the painting Where It's At, Roe relates the text to the act of painting and the viewer's experience of it in the moment, suggesting that "where it's at," is on the canvas, or perhaps in other words, "what you see is what you get." The text is a play on the well-known hipster saying, a kind of campy finger snapping, jive talking satire of academic art criticism.8

Soft on Space, Please Position Your Poetry Within These Parameters, and Less Is More, (all 1996), mark the artist's shift to acrylic paint and with it, a greater opacity and illustration board quality to the imagery. In these paintings the artist may be less involved with the act of painting and more interested in conceptual and perceptual issues. Less Is More is a flesh toned ground covered by scumbled white lines, pink lozenge forms and green dots. It features a central image which appears to be the content of a large blue lava lamp. It is skewered by black lines on the ends of which are supported candles and skulls and flames and red droplets. Floating in white biomorphic balloons is the text "less, is, more."

Beyond the immediate contrast of the functionalist credo with the spontaneous and emblematically kitschy, Less is More signals perhaps a new attitude by the artist toward the canvas. The figures and text in his most recent body of work Autodogmatic Trip (1996), Rational Future, Twin Heads of Yes and No, Together We Can Perfect the Moment, All those seeking meaning line up behind this canvas, Strangely Content, and I Am Dreaming About Time (all 1997) seem etched into, or to exist within an enveloping space. The ground has become an ersatz body, a living organism. It is no longer a hypnotic swirl of paint -- it has become a torturous tangle -- literally a web in I Am Dreaming About Time. Roe's figuration has become less idiosyncratic too, resembling more the schematics of graffiti and the obsessions of adolescents who doodle on their notebooks, running shoes and jean jackets.

 Painting was, and always remained for Roe, about being alive to the chaotic, unmediated "moment", as the title of the painting Together We Can Perfect the Moment (1997) reminds us. Autodogmatic Trip features a tangled, scumbled and tattooed ground with the bare description of a recessional space. An articulated text, "auto-dog-ma-tic," is enclosed in biomorphic balloons. The word "TRIP" is constructed of three-dimensional block letters at various angles, inscribed with paisley, stripes and wavy coloured lines. Like cartoon figures, the letters seem to shake with energy. "Trip," and things "trippy" recall the descriptive slang of the drug culture of the late sixties. Mining our personal and cultural past for material, Roe uncomfortably reminds us of the explosive and introverted mind of both a personal and cultural adolescence. But what is "autodogmatic" about it? Maybe it is a neologism – a conflation of "dogma" and "autoerotic" – about the artist setting his own goals. Or maybe this "trip" is a voyage of solipsistic reverie.

Gordon Hatt

Notes

1."Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. . ."

Blaise Pascal, Selections from the Thoughts, ed. & trans. By Arthur H. Beattie, Northbrook: AHM Publishing, 1965, p. 30.

2. Interview with the artist, November 1997.

3. See "Discussion" and Clark, T. J., "More on the Differences between Comrade Greenberg and Ourselves," in Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, edited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbault and David Solkin, pp. 165-194,Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, 1981.

4. Exhibited in Artventure, The Royal Bank of Canada, Royal Bank Plaza, Toronto, July 10 - August 29, 1980.

5. Telephone interview with the artist, January 1998.

6. Telephone interview with the artist, November 1997.

7. Telephone interview with the artist, November 1997.

8. A parallel could be made with the street scam that goes something like this:

"Five dollars says that I know where you got your shoes."

            "You got your shoes on your feet."

Catalogue of works in the exhibition

1. Hi, 1992, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

2. Dead Poor People, 1992, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

3. Fate, 1992, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

4. Hidden Meaning, 1993, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

5. Aspirations, 1993, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

6. Awaken From Your Trance, 1993, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

7. Is, 1993, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

8. Bacon of Hope, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

9. Chart #5, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

10.          Chart #1, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

11.         Seven searching words resisted being a mistake, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

12.         The world will not end any time soon, 1994, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

13.         Compost Your Theories, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

14.         Where It's At, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

15.         Perfectly Purposeful People, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

16.         Expand Your Moment, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

17.         Eternity Is Amongst Us, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

18.         Real Meets Real, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

19.         Decorative Sun, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

20.         Time to Rhyme, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

21.         Soft on Space, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

22.         Please Position Your Poetry Within These Parameters, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

23.         Less Is More, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

24.         Autodogmatic Trip, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

25.         Is Often Desiring, 1996, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

26.         Rational Future, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

27.         Twin Heads of Yes and No, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

28.         Together We Can Perfect the Moment, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

29.         All those seeking meaning line up behind this canvas, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

30.         Strangely Content, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

31.         I Am Dreaming About Time, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

J. Lynn Campbell: Offering

The following text is an edited transcript of a conversation between J. Lynn Campbell and Gordon Hatt in the artist’s studio on February 21, 1997.

I first conceived of this project in 1991 and have been collecting and wrapping tree branches and roots since that time. Offering was first exhibited as a work-in-progress at Workscene Gallery in Toronto in 1993. While continuing the wrapping, I have considered various options for the finished installation. It was about one year ago that the addition of the table and four chairs fulfilled the intent of the piece for me. The chairs have since changed to benches, each with a word inscribed on the seating surface. I feel it has now culminated fully.

GH: How long have you been using brass wire in your work?

JLC: I started using wire in 1989. It came about from a conscious decision to introduce various materials to realize a more tactile surface. I enjoyed the distinct physical qualities of the materials combined with the different physical demands each makes on the body as well as the mental exercise. It's the combination of the mental faculty and physical activity and what that may evoke on other levels of the psyche.

GH: Why brass wire?

JLC: I like the flexibility it offers as it easily follows the form of most objects. With Offering I am using 24-gauge soft wire which is still very strong. It is the linear quality that intrigues me most. The line suggests time, a continuum. A line is a series of dots joined together. One can imagine those dots as moments joined in a continuance of minutes, hours, days, weeks, years. So, the line of wire comes to symbolize the sequential lifeline.

GH What is the significance of the process of wrapping?

JLC: Much of my work is about process. This particular process of wrapping has the deliberate intent of slowly following the contour of an object, making one aware of every detail and the time it takes to be conscious of such details. The process becomes meditative. I start to think about the surface texture, shape, colour. I experienced the activity of wrapping and what that evokes. The material(s) and activity start to suggest various meanings. Wrapping something can imply an act of preservation. It is also suggestive of women's work and their activities which often embrace the concerns of family life on very fundamental levels: caring, nourishing, protecting.

GH: Is the wrapping of the wood a type of aesthetic appropriation, like claiming an interesting surface?

JLC: For me there is always an aesthetic consideration when conceiving and constructing my work. I am not sure about the word "appropriation", unless it is to mean the assignment of something to a special purpose. Then I would say yes, and extend that consideration to include any abstract component, symbolic experience, and what is the aesthetically real in the work's concrete elements. Offering can be accessed through the association brought about by symbol and metaphor. On a certain level there is a conscious selection or claiming of elements for a particular purpose. But there is always more below the surface. Again, this goes back to the process and what it reveals to me. The chosen elements in combination with the process present a possible starting point to link other levels of understanding. I believe most, if not all

things are connected on some level.

GH: The process of wrapping then relates to the tree branches and roots as connecting elements?

JLC: The limbs and roots have been separated from the original tree and, metaphorically speaking, these separate parts represent a reconstruction of the tree symbol as a totality. The tree is a symbol of the bare processes of life – growing and dying – processes that continue at a deep level. The tree also symbolizes the centre of life, fertility, knowledge and sacrifice. It is the whole manifested. Offering does function in a similar way to the conventional symbols of creation and recreation, death and renewal. The tree is the world in constant renewal and regeneration, the life principle. The continuance of the wrapping, symbolic of the life process, suggests the accumulation through time of our experience and knowledge of ourselves. Time unites the opposites: birth to death, youth to age, night to day, work to rest.

GH: Offering? What is the significance of the title?

JLC: JLC: Traditionally an offering is a thing presented or sacrificed in worship or devotion - something offered for acceptance, a gift. As individuals, our life experiences are a product of our action and effort and we share these experiences with others in many different ways. "Offering" or sharing is a way of giving thanks for what we have received. This sculptural installation and the process involved to complete the work was for me a way to explore how we "receive" and "give" during the course of understanding our conscious existence. The inquiries I put forth in doing my work are initially personally directed. From conscious existence. a connection with the audience? From the starting point and working outward, I hope to gain some objectivity and understanding of reality.

GH: Is there a link between the table and a desire to make a connection with the audience?

JLC: So much happens around the table. It has a rich association historically and symbolically. The table is where individuals friends and family come together to share a meal. It is where we talk and exchange ideas. It is a frame work where we gain nourishment physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. The table presents the opportunity for communication (the round table), where people discuss problems and treaties. The harvest table is traditionally used to lay out the season's yield in a celebratory fashion, to give thanks and share in the bountiful "gathering," The table, by its stability of form and clarity of function, connects and grounds our participation in this process of "receiving" and "giving."

GH: The Last Supper?

JLC: That too – an important event.

GH: Do you regard your objects as beautiful?

JLC: Yes - some of them. The visual aesthetic of the work is often purposeful and thereby important to its meaning.

GH: The branches and roots wrapped in the brass wire have a beautiful surface quality, they reflect the light wonderfully. The piece will look like fire. People will be attracted, and come closer and discover your process of making them.

JLC: The luminosity of the brass and its smooth, richly coloured surface is quite seductive and sensual. Although I am dealing with ideas and concepts, for me, art making involves all the senses. It becomes a bodily experience as well as an intellectual process. At times, the material will start to feed an idea. I think about the idea and try to expand it in different ways. An image starts to develop and with that image come certain sensations. I return to the material(s) and examine, experiment and determine which ones may best support the concept.

One consideration for exhibiting any of my works is the result of the process and what it has brought to light for me. This I want to share and would like to reach people on comparative levels. There are big questions and not so big questions about life. Whether I start with the big questions or the smaller ones, it still all connects. Sometimes I will use a visual technique that will draw the viewer in to disclose a detail or an intimacy about the work. Details are part of something larger. The considered overall form of the work pulls the viewer back to reflect on the larger countenance and meaning. My hope is that other people will be inspired as I have been.

GH: The desire to locate inspiration in the viewer is the same inspiration that you have?

JLC: I don't expect anyone to respond in the same way as I have experienced my own work or the work of others. Every viewer through their own experience will respond correspondingly. I have been inspired by artists whose professional accomplishments are very different from mine. The response I have to their work has changed me in some way. I consider it an advantage and privilege to be able to take away with me something previously unknown, unexplored or unrealized.

GH: Why is it important to make art today?

JLC: At times I ask myself, what would I do if I didn't make art. I don't know. Obviously, I enjoy the creative process and want to be involved. On some other level of being, I know I have to make art. It addresses some purpose and meaning outside what I consider conventional and routine. Life proposes many questions (as I see it) and this is a way for me to grapple with the puzzle.

So much is changing as we near the end of this millennium. The post-modern world is continually changing form, with unstable boundaries. Identity is no longer fixed by social role or tradition but rather made (and frequently remade) out of many cultural sources. Moral and ethical values are forged out of dialogue and choice. All of the world's cultural symbols are up for grabs with endless improvisations. Much has been undermined. There are times I find it painfully challenging and I struggle to understand. For me it is important to regain some sense of solid ground – to reclaim a sense of ownership of views, beliefs and identity. Living ought to inspire and offer hope - two things I would find difficult to live without

GH: Is the work you make an act of faith?

JLC: I think that is what art making or being an artist is. It is not a profession so much as it is an act of faith - something necessary to suspend disbelief.

Carlo Cesta: Romance Language

In his most recent exhibition, "Romance Language" at the Garnet Press in Toronto earlier this year (April 1996), Carlo Cesta unified the disparate influences and investigative paths that have characterized his work in the ‘90s.

Looking at Carlo Cesta's work over the years I have witnessed a consistent critical process at work. His critical method is at base visual and modernist: form is a fluid and elastic material for polymorphic play. He works, however, within the enlarged, post-modern understanding of form -- an associative, metonymical understanding -- where aesthetic qualities are inextricably bound up with symbolic and historical references. Pleasure in the manipulation of a form, in Cesta's work, is therefore also a process of transcending irony where representations are inverted, emptied and reinvested with meaning.

Cesta works in the places where art and utility meet -- where personal and group identities shape, and are shaped by contemporary urban, industrial culture. In the mid-80s with his monochromatic paintings of household appliances, he began an investigation into domestic symbols and the machinery of class. In the late 80s and early 90s, he began to explore the materials of skilled trade labour -- creating a non-objective, serial and bio-mechanical imagery. In a body of work entitled Industrial English (1994), Cesta began to make references to the Toronto Italian community in which he grew up, completing the triangle of class referents: family, occupation and ethnicity.

Romance Language juxtaposes the transcendental language of modernist form with the vernacular of class. The installation Romance Language (version) occupied the ground floor of the Garnet Press, and consisted of forty-one, two and three-dimensional biomorphic, geometric abstract and text-based works. Mounted floor to ceiling and wrapped around three walls, the installation recalled the early Suprematist installations. However, the wrought iron pieces, the sew-on fabric name badges, the texts phonetically transcribed in a fractured Italian-accented English, pointed in another direction. Instead of Suprematist aspirations of purity, infinity and the absolute we are back on earth, in Toronto's working class Junction Triangle to be specific, where there are no absolutes, only histories, contexts and provisional actions.

Cesta's sew-on, fabric name badges initially read as elegantly embroidered oval shapes. With a little bit of work the meaning of the words embroidered on the badges is eventually deciphered. These words and phrases are taken from a phrase book, compiled by former M. P. Charles Caccia in the 1950's, in which English words are approximated via Italian phonetics - i.e. to shovel becomes tu sciavol. The book was designed to assist recent immigrants in adjusting to their new environment; the texts refer to specific jobs, activities, tools and conditions that defined the working life of Italian immigrants to Canada in the 1950's and 60's. These are not abstract shapes, they are functional forms -- wash and wear class signifiers.

Fabric name badges are only one example of the very idiosyncratic media Cesta selects to communicate his ideas. The sheer variety of his materials and applications is staggering: adhesive foil tape, car underbody paint -- stencilled and etched -- mail box letters on sheet metal, polyurethane foam, tinted acrylic glass, melamine, and wrought iron to name only some. The materials are part of a sculptural kit of techniques and materials developed by Cesta requiring precise shaping and finishing.

One important and recurring form in Cesta's work is the gasket, the soft, flat material that acts as an interface where two metal engine parts meet. Cesta's gaskets are at once visual, rhythmic themes and emblems of trade labour. In Romance Language the cellular bio-organic form replicates, mutates, and evolves visually and symbolically. This metamorphic gasket may be a body-double for industrial humanity: a metaphor for the malleable, impressionable flesh of people caught in the gears of modern industry.

Carlo Cesta, Provisional Landscape, mixed media, 1996.

If modern industry was a functional model for the Suprematists through to the Minimalists, their aesthetic model was the laboratory. Sterile, removed of uncontrolled organic activity, the modern working space was the site of intellectual control, and of existential reflection. Provisional Landscape (in the upstairs space at the gallery) is an example of Cesta's method of introducing microbial viruses into the laboratory. The mixed media, wall mounted piece features a wooden disk with bevelled edges and punctured with small metal vents. Below this, a nickel plated horizontal structure looking a lot like a Donald Judd wall piece supports bottles of Mio orange soda pop. The disk is not abstract. It is vented -- it breathes. Hovering over a horizontal shelf it becomes part of a figurative landscape. Placing bottles of pop on the glossy polished shelf, Cesta plays the working class naive who mistakes a work of art for a piece of furniture. Poking fun at geometric abstraction and minimalist aesthetics, Cesta reveals Modernism as human and vulnerable -- a metaphorical construction.

The artist's most comprehensive statement to date, Romance Language is an exuberant gush of twisted, skewed, inverted, disassembled and reconstructed icons. It is also a densely layered meditation on personal, communal and social identity.

Gordon Hatt

from C Magazine, #51, October-December 1996, pp. 17-19.

Italica: "alla maniera italiana"

"Oggi, ch'indi riluce / languido lume é lacrimosa luce"

(Today, that begins to shine / languid flame and tearful light) ¹

A legend richly detailed in Anglo-American and German culture is that of Italy as other. Other than where you come from – a place where streets are named after artists, where life somehow seems more vital, where passion rules reason. The 17th century saw the romanticization of Roman ruins by the townscape painters and the 18th century saw the Germans Goethe and Burckhardt stirred by the Italic. E. M. Forster's Room With A View contrasted the vital character of Italy with puritan and mercantile Victorian England and articulated the aesthetic discontent of generations of young northern aesthetes. Italy as other in the 20th century was the backdrop for a postwar North American coming of age party featuring cheap wine and the loss of virginity.

Italy as the place where you come from is another story of course. To be of Italian heritage and living in North America has been a different experience for each successive generation. To the immigrant first generation, North America was the other, a place of exile and manual labour. To the bicultural second generation, North America was the scene of cultural conflict. To the third generation, Italy may become little more than a cultural memory – a family album.

Italy as a source of myth, Italy as an ancestral home: is there an intersection where these two Italys meet? Is there an intersection for the millions of Italy's of the mind, of individuals, who belong to the Italic family, either through birth or through adoption? This exhibition is the result of my working with a number of artists for whom the Italic has some significance. Sara Angelucci, Carlo Cesta and Dino Bolognone are second generation Italian-Canadians. Jane Buyers and Julie Voyce are Italophiles of British ancestry. As curator, I belong to the latter group. My observations on this theme, the theme of a culturally specific characteristic, are naturally coloured by the lens of my own ethnicity.

Italy has always been a giant theme park for the visual arts and its art history is an obvious answer to the question of why contemporary Canadian artists would find it a source of inspiration. This influence is undeniable for any artist because the very idea of Italian culture retains such a vivid visual character. But historical models and references are really not the concern of this group of artists and none would list the subject of this exhibition among their primary, personal or artistic concerns. In short, this is not a demonstration of ethnic pride and nationalism or cultural shangri-las. Italica exists in a subtler form. Italica becomes an issue as part of an investigation into personal identity, or a reference in the rhetoric of materials, or as the exotic site of experience.

My own associations with the Italic came about rather by accident in my late teens and early twenties. Having grown up in North America I was used to the idea of people of different cultures arriving here to become Canadians or Americans. Different people wanting to live with us, wanting what we want. It was great for national pride and propaganda: Complain? Hey this must be a great place if everybody in the world wants to live here! But where was here? My neighbours didn't speak much English, but for what they could, I admired them. I was never forced to learn a second language. However, not in school, no job prospects, no vehicle -- here in those years was hour long bus and subway rides, vast windswept parking lots and industrial parks on the edge of the city. Here wasn't so hot. A friend told me about Italy: The greatest place in the world, beautiful yes, but more important, there they respected artists. Art, adventure, romance, -- Ciao Canada.

The Italy of my mind is courtly, aristocratic and elegant, well groomed and well mannered. It is also ancient, dark and inscrutable. But the baroque and the antique force themselves upon the concept of the Italic as much as woods and snow are cited as typically Canadian. Therefore, when I think of the Italianate, I can't help but think of the Torquato Tasso's "languido lume e lacrimosa luce" – languid flame and tearful light.

The 16th century Italian poet's "lachrymose" religious verse was the counterpoint "heart" to the Jesuit "mind" in the battle for the hearts and minds of Europe during the Counter-Reformation. The passage above is deluxe - the dark Italian "L's" and the round, more resonant Italian vowels are like loops and swirls carved in cherry wood. The language is rich and ornate and sonoric, almost architectonic in its alliteration, yet, it describes pure liquid: the sticky nostalgic sentiment of the helplessness and dependency we associate with childhood. This contrast of form and content finds its ultimate and uniquely Italic expression in the cherub or "putto" whose soft rounded features are regularly plaster cast and gilded or marbleized or cast in bronze.

This is the Italica we have been taught to scorn. Modernism, rationalist architecture, form and function -- the international style declared war against the artifice of decoration in favour of modularity and practicality. Originally the modernist dream was a futuristic socialist vision of antiseptic cities and modular high-rise workers' housing. Unnecessary decoration was associated with barbarism1 and as modernism became associated with progress in North America, decorative artifice gradually came to signify lack of taste.

As an artistic canon modernism was insufficient because it was irrelevant. It was an academic game that did not address the questions of context and identity: e.g. race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality as determining factors in artistic expression. The relaxation of this modernist hegemony has allowed artists to explore areas of their visual cultural that were previously taboo. New liberties permitted the quotation of styles. The complex of feelings and ideas could be addressed through the juxtaposition of existing representations.

Thus when we look at the work of Carlo Cesta or Sara Angelucci, the form or content may be a quotation, specifically, to the architectural interiors and exteriors of their youth and by extension a reference to family and a complex constructed identity. In Sara Angelucci's triptych In Reverence, the architectural reference is like a fading memory; indirect, distant and blurry. Her hand held, available light photographs are taken on holidays, while travelling -- looking for the familiar in the exotic. Baroque palaces and churches such as Versailles and St. Peter's perversely become containers of intimate, domestic signs. Vaguely felt and complex feelings of "home" are given expression in unfocused, indistinct contours. Chaotic, apparently unintended views mimic the random associative character of stream of consciousness memory.

Carlo Cesta's Strongties rests on multiple references. It is a baroque, family coat of arms created with decorative motifs from the machine shop and the mechanic's garage with materials purchased at the Canadian Tire store. Strongties touches upon the material and formal character of the home and work of Cesta's youth. It is a meditation at once on the complex of abstract concepts and deeply felt identities of family, ethnicity and class.

The baroque reference may be more than just a nationalistic identifier. The amorphousness of the style, its organic model, its apparently irrational character, is like feeling itself – unbounded, incommensurable. The scrolls of Dino Bolognone recall the grand scale of the baroque – a virtual cascade of images and textures, thoughts and feelings. Direct Italic references and quotations are less important, mere backgrounds and facts, than the baroque richness of his diaristic tapestry. Like the oversized marble cherubs in St. Peter's basilica, Bolognone's scrolls are a large-scale intimacy.

Jane Buyers draws on the material culture of Italy to invest her sculptural metaphors with a hyper reality. Bronze and iron are employed to describe and magnify ephemeral and organic subjects. The material is more foreign than familiar, more exotic than domestic. The baroque rhetoric of material and scale Buyers uses in her work transports us from the here, to an ancient and aristocratic Italica.

Julie Voyce travelled to Italy to find hyper reality too, and documents it in a visual diary. I guess that her Italy of the mind may be similar to mine: courtly, aristocratic and elegant at least. Perhaps not dark, but certainly inscrutable. Her light filled images are visual information unbounded, uncontained, uncensored. The images posit the artist as a mirror onto the self and the society around her. Perhaps it takes the foreignness of the other to reflect adequately on the foreignness of the self.

Gordon Hatt, January 1995

Notes

1. Torquato Tasso, Alma inferma e dolente.

2. The modernist Austrian architect Adolf Loos (1870 -1933) criticized ornamentation as primitive, associating it with body piercing and tattooing.

List of Works in the Exhibition

1. Sara Angelucci, In Reverence, 1994, silver print triptych, 52 x 37" each panel (framed).

2. Dino Bolognone, Untitled, 1994, engraver's printing ink and oil pastel on paper, 396" x 53".

3. Jane Buyers, Untitled, 1993, Cast bronze, painted iron, 35" H x 18 D x 21" W.

4. Jane Buyers, Giardino Ideale, 1993, ink on paper, 23 " x 31" (framed).

5. Jane Buyers, La Rosa Nel Giardino, 1993, ink on chine coll paper, 23" x 31" (framed).

6. Carlo Cesta, Strongties, 1991, Foil tape, midget louvers, rubberized undercoat on melamine, 59" x 49".

7. Julie Voyce, Paris, Venice, Rome, Naples, 1992-94, Watercolour on paper, enamel on plexiglass, 3 panels: 30" x 49", 40" x 55", 30" x 49".

Cambridge Galleries, 1995

Guelph: The City that Works

 Guelph "works" the way that people speak of cities as "working." The streets are clean and safe, it has a living downtown core of small business, well-preserved historic neighbourhoods and a variety of social and cultural amenities. The housing stock is moderately and stably priced. It also has a small, active and engaged art community. 

* * *
In the time that I have lived outside the urban core I have never felt that the culture surrounding me was anything else other than natural and logical. I have sometimes struggled to express myself. I have struggled to understand too, by listening carefully to patterns of language, by analysing publicity and by examining codes of dress and manners. I drive on highways, ride escalators, walk through malls. It is a life that I had previously seen only as a child at my parent's side. Now I am back, like a stranger in my home town. I recognize the place, the people, the streets, but I feel that I am anonymous. I really could be anywhere. 

* * *
I once sat in on a town council committee meeting in which a participant strongly insisted that the town "had to have a theme." "A theme," I thought to myself, "how could one theme possibly represent the stories of all the people in the town?" My mind drifts to a reverie, to the feeling of myself, dashing across the town's main street in a drizzling rain. I have a six-pack of beer under my arm. I'll trade it to the owner of the junk shop for a souvenir - a favour for some German tourists. Is this a theme or is it a nightmare? 

* * *
The city or town, large or small, was once simply a place in which to live and do business. It is now common for civic minded people to speak of municipalities as tourist attractions. Towns and cities marketing their communities as such will have to face a choice. They may decide that the cultural life of their community is unique and feature civic life as a consumer spectacle. Fundamental to the marketing of the spectacle will be the idea that there are unique experiences that can only be obtained by travelling to the place itself. It will be an experience unlike anything you can see on TV or buy at a shopping mall. Real people will be seen living authentic lives. Do you like to eat? It is guaranteed that the tourist destination will have absolutely unique eating establishments. Do you like pictures? It has the originals. Sports? The real thing, as seen previously only on TV! 

If it is agreed that there is nothing particularly unique about the community then it may be necessary to import a spectacle: Perhaps mud wrestling at the mall? Or, if that doesn't work, the business people could wear cowboy hats and pretend they live in Dodge City. 

* * *
We know that big cities and artists seem to go together. What other class of people could redeem the modern metropolis's transparent greed? Cities need artists to create the illusion that urbanity is about more than the axes of commerce and the accumulation of capital. The urban art community assures us that contemporary urban life is meaningful and that the manifest social and cultural forms of the city are rich and significant. Artists make their art at great personal sacrifice and their interpreters admonish the craven and the philistine to pay heed: "Think about what you are doing," we say. "Just think about it." 

* * *
The urban environment is dominated by the presence of the commercial, journalistic or popular entertainment references. The information culture now defines the community environment more significantly and has a greater influence on the course of North American life than do the cycles of nature. The view from my window is more likely to reflect the character of my cable feed than the weather. In this sense, the civic environment is no longer defined by physicality. It is virtual. The urbis is now a web of communications that connect our northern-most communities with the same product, information and entertainment culture as the South. One can no longer speak of a rural culture that is substantially different from any small city or from the suburbs of our big cities. Rather, rural culture has become sub-rural, reflecting as much the values and way of life of sub-urbanity. The battle lines of the 21st century already pit the culture of the urban media classes against the sub-urban and sub-rural image consumers for control of the language. 

Artists have traditionally gravitated to the centre of the production of images. Product advertising, news and journalism, popular entertainment - these fields of image making are evolutionary primate cousins to the fine arts and are central industries in the modern metropolis. The creation and exchange of images in the urban centre, the cross fertilization of arts and the intersection of the different fields breed a hardened, antidotal fine art culture highly resistant to commercial trivialization and banality. This culture is at once despised for its lack of enthusiasm for the commodity circus, and desired for the same reasons. Sub-urbanity typically resists the hardened urban culture. It is resisted because image producers play with written, oral and symbolic language - they subvert its authority by shifting contexts and suggesting the infinite plasticity of language and meaning. This formless language mocks earnestness and sincerity with irony. It undermines optimism with scepticism and casts doubt on fundamental beliefs of progress. 

* * *
The Install Art collective, representing a core group of Guelph artists, proposes that 25 artists from Guelph and from Toronto find their "niche" in the city of Guelph. In as much as a title can signify anything common about a diverse group of artists, the title, Niche, betrays a desire by the artists to fit in: "Our intention is to build connections between artists and their communities - whether that be other artists or the larger community..." (Niche statement p.1). These are not Dadaist, or Surrealist or Situationist interventions that challenge the prevailing idealogy or aim to disturb the functional surface of community life. This is post cold war art, stripped of its political ideology and agit-prop roots. This group of artists does not function as an avant-garde for a new society. They retain a strong belief in the self-evident necessity of the work they make: They make art as a strategy for survival in the present, as a way of attaining something real in a virtual world and as a balm to a bruised post-industrial psyche. The work does not intervene to change - it is necessary to survive. It fits in. The question is: Does it fit in Guelph? 

* * *
What and where is Guelph? Is it a city? Well, yes. Is it a town? Well, yes it is that too. We associate art with major cities (great art from great empires?), but historically, major art movements have also had roots in the country. Small villages such as Pont Aven and Collioure and Emma Lake have played specific roles in art history. Small cities like Bielefeld, Birmingham, Dijon and Baltimore, however, have never held much interest for artists. It would probably surprise no one that many successful and important artists were happy to have escaped such places. Can small cities such as these - university towns, mill towns, regional centres - support an art subculture? Do they even need one? 

It is possible that the proliferation of images has accelerated at such a rate in recent years that it is no longer necessary for artists as a group to live in the urban core. It may be that a component of the creative process, that of reflection, has been sacrificed in the recent past to reaction. The regional centre, the mill town or the university town can play a role, perhaps, as a place where images can more slowly coalesce and where ideas can anneal. Perhaps Guelph can support an art subculture, establishing roots for successive generations of artists or perhaps Niche is merely the result of the passage of a few remarkable people at this particular time. If the people who call Guelph home continue to demand more from their language and culture than what is offered to them, if people outside of the media industry and the urban core demand more from their culture and not less, then it is possible that a non-commercial, participatory art culture may yet become a part of the sub-urban fabric.

Gordon Hatt, 1995

Mary Catherine Newcomb: Corpus Delicti

“The stuff that is outside... is also inside.”

The body as a medium and subject of visual expression is as old as the history of art. The ancient Greeks and Romans idealized the body in their visual arts. The artists of the Italian Renaissance aspired to the same classical ideal. Medieval artists, however, lost the interest and perhaps also the ability to represent the body. Nineteenth century landscape painters and 20th century abstractionists denied the body entirely and championed a disembodied spirit and intellect. The body dominates the visual arts -- then it fades from view, only to appear again. Enchanted by progress, we are confident in our ability to transcend physical limitations and we scorn our fragile bodies. Sobered by experience, we meditate on our transient flesh. Are we primarily physical or mental beings? Are human beings, god-like creatures who appear on earth with physical bodies, or mere animals, differentiated from other life forms only by the certain knowledge of our own mortality?

Mary Catherine Newcomb is an artist who tells stories that reflect her interest in esoteric knowledge. The media, subjects and symbols in her work are determined by the stories she wants to tell. The scope of her art production is wide and has included found objects, conceptual and interactive constructions, painting and sculpture in papier mâché, concrete, wax and plasticine. Beginning with her papier mâché works and body castings of the mid-1980s, to the recent plasticine works, Mary Catherine Newcomb has consistently returned to the body as the dramatic site of interaction between thought and feeling. In wax, plaster, concrete and plasticine she has used the body as a symbol of consciousness and as a vehicle to express universal desires and fears. The body in her work is not a classical image of perfectibility to be feared and adored, rather, the body is located at the intellect's base, as the core and character beneath all knowledge. The body is a partner in a dialogue with the mind, providing a wealth of sensory information to the brain and providing abstract thought with an emotional and physical context.

Mary Catherine Newcomb's figurative work has developed and matured over the past ten years and can be roughly classified into three bodies of work. Narrative dominates the earliest work. Figures interact -- they illustrate a dramatic metaphor, or act out a personal passion play. In the late 80's she added gesture to her rhetorical repertory through the pose and repose of body parts cast in plaster, wax and concrete. This work isolates feeling as significant and meaningful in its own right. More recently Newcomb has been exploring the expressive qualities of unmediated, tactile sensation in a series of large-scale plasticine works. These three approaches rise, subside and interleave through the decade.

An early narrative work, such as Untitled ("Boat"), 1987, is almost entirely symbolic in character.¹Stylistically, it is stiff and lacking in formal expressiveness. The use of papier mâché as a medium around this time, however, provided the artist with a sensual counterpoint to the creation of representative narratives. Working with papier mâché was a low-tech process that afforded the opportunity for a material bridge to an elementary, repetitive form of material play, a quality she would seek to re-experience in the later plasticine pieces.

When the artist moved into the more industrial processes of body casting, engineering took over from exploration. Dramatic moments in the stories of godlike, mythological characters are represented in this series of work in an "archaeologically distressed" form. If the papier mâché works retained a stiff, archaic quality, the body castings have a flowing, dynamic Hellenistic character. In an apparent counterpoint to the new materials, the intensity of the artist's rhetoric heats up into more dramatic "events". We feel we have entered a pivotal moment in the course of a drama when looking at these works. The intensity of these images is heightened by bizarre juxtapositions with animals and the highly naturalistic postures and gestures of the human characters.²The figures in these pieces are, for the most part, castings taken from the artist's body. Newcomb is both the artist and the model -- both the director and the actor physically interpreting the script. Works such as Untitled ("Motley Pie"), 1989, and Untitled ("Twin Goddesses II"), 1990, in the exhibition are exemplary of this body of work.³

"Twin Goddesses II" is an image of two female figures, one with a head, one headless. The figure with a head is wearing swimming goggles around her neck and holds a towel to her chest. She appears to be emerging from a pool, perhaps a baptism. Her mouth is open as if to take communion. The headless figure holds a snake towards her. The piece recalls the ancient sculpture Laocoon and its depiction of the scene from Virgil's Aeneid where Laocoon and his sons are strangled by a sea serpent. Whereas the death of Laocoon and his sons was a sign of tragedy in foretelling the immanent fall of Troy, the "Twin Goddesses II" is an image from a personal creation myth. The artist has created an image of the dialogue between the mind and the body -- where the body presents the mind with an incontrovertible awareness. For the artist, it is a statement about truth itself -- the physical, emotional experience of how one perceives something to be true. Truth, the artist insists, is only partly intellectual. It is also something felt.

When the complex narratives, metaphors and parables of feeling became less interesting to the artist, what remained was gesture -- the physical expression of feeling. Untitled ("Worm Man"), 1991, is the last of the concrete body casts.⁴Unlike the interplay of figures of the earlier narrative work, this piece and the body casts that follow it are more likely to embody an undefined physical or emotional feeling rather than illustrate an event within a larger narrative. It is a transitional work marking the end of the dramatic mythological narratives and the beginning of works that are almost purely emotional feeling given form. The "Worm Man" is an image of a man with half a head emerging from a coiled shell. It can also be seen as a possible ironic reference to the image of Venus being born from a scallop shell.⁵Interpreted from a purely physical point of view the piece suggests confinement and embodies the emotional struggle to be free.

The artist's figurative work began around this time to resolve into simpler statements -- a gesture, a reference, a feeling rooted in the body. Untitled ("Foot"), 1990 is a forward-looking piece that takes an unconscious expression, such as how you position your foot, and turns it into a quiet reflection on security and vulnerability; the exposed underside of the foot being a very vulnerable place. In contrast to the heavy languor of the "Foot", Untitled, ("The Ascent of the Virgin I & II"), 1994, express an anxious feeling of detachment and up rootedness. The alternately relaxed and tensed postures of the legs may suggest peace and anxiety, acceptance and denial. Recalling the earlier work, the "Boat", and its cyclical voyages between the living and the dead, the "Ascensions" replay the drama of every artist's split personality; namely, the intense introspective personality and its alter ego, the extrovert. Untitled ("Whisper-ma-phone"), 1995, continues the theme of the artist's ambivalent participation in the world. The crouching position of the figure with its face on the floor and the hands covering the ears is an unambiguous rejection of everything exterior. Yet the playful, wildly curling horn connected to the figure's hip appears to confound the figure's rejection. The world, in its wild and willful unpredictability, comes in the side door.⁶

If the narratives eventually resolved into the gestural statements of bodies and their parts, perhaps the next logical step on the part of the artist was to strip the figures of their dramatic gesture. This move is already hinted at in the matter of fact, oversized rendering of the "Foot", which bears little of the dramatic expression of other pieces made around that time. The scale of the "Foot" is the dramatic rhetorical device that replaces gesture. The plasticine body parts Untitled ("Tongue"), 1995 and Untitled ("Ear"), 1995, retain the same dramatic proportions. These sense organs stand as symbols of stimuli processing, heightened awareness and sensitivity. The gooey, home-made plasticine from which they are made is like a raw flesh which has had its epidermis removed. It is an irresistible primal muck that recalls an infantile, uncensored exploration of the world through the senses.

The profound experience of creating images with her own hands is fundamental to Mary Catherine Newcomb's understanding of her own art. From the early papier mâché works, through the body castings and the large plasticine pieces, the artist has literally immersed herself in her materials. The images she creates represent at once her connection to the larger world and her distance from it. The artist's hands, in the work Untitled ("Blue Hands"), 1995, may be gestural devices, but they are surely symbolic on a deeply personal level as well. The blue wax hands, chewed off at the wrists, are a symbol of a singular struggle. An inversion of the myth of Pygmalion, the artist has not fallen in love with her work, but rather sees in it the devices of her own entrapment. To make art, to be an artist, is a calling and a fate. Mary Catherine Newcomb affirms that the practice of making sculpture is not an endless love song in clay. It is a rage against limitations on the spirit.

Notes

1.    In Untitled ("Boat") a female figure dressed as a warrior lies on a flat-topped boat. At the prow of the boat is a laughing hyena. The "Boat" makes reference to the Hades of Virgil and the barge that carries the dead across the river Styx. The hyena, according to the artist, makes a mockery of the fate of the warrior (the artist?) and anticipates many return trips between the world of the living and the dead.

2.    The artist's use of animals in her work is consistent throughout her career. These animals may be likened to the animals of aboriginal creation myths. Rabbits, as carriers and symbols of occult knowledge, frequently occur in her papier mâché and concrete casting work of the 1980's. Mice, snakes, a hyena, a fish, a sheep, and an alligator make appearances in the narrative work as symbols of esoteric knowledge.

3.    Untitled ("Motley Pie"), concrete, 1989, is a dramatic image of the head of a sheep licking the hip of a woman. The sheep's head is suspended in air, its sole support is a steel bar that connects the tongue to the torso. A propane torch, anchored in the hollow of the cast body, sends a lick of blue flame from the place where the tongue and the hip meet. The sheep was part owned by the artist and kept on the co-owner's farm. The genesis of the piece came with the slaughtering of Motley. For Newcomb, the piece recalls our guilty relationship to the animals we eat as well as making reference to biblical animal sacrifice. The image according to the artist, comes from a dream, generated by the confused emotions related to the animal's slaughter and butchering. In the dream the artist perceived the animal licking her hip and characterized the feeling as a cleansing -- "a cleansing burn."

4.    The "Worm Man" directly precedes the artist's first plasticine piece, the large Untitled ("Shell"), 1992. The shell functions here as a creation symbol. The dramatic narrative (e.g. the depiction of a birth) is displaced by the dramatic scale of the shell and the muddy tactility of the plasticine. Yet, as conceptually monolithic as this piece is, fresh rabbit tracks in the plasticine indicate the artist's reluctance to entirely dispose of the narrative thread.

5.    The ancient myth of Venus has it that she was born from sea foam, but the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli depicted her emerging from a scallop shell in his famous painting, The Birth of Venus.

6.    Then he grunts, "I will call you by Whisper-ma-phone for the secrets I tell are for your ears alone." The Whisper-ma-phone is inspired by the children's book author Dr. Seuss. See Theodore Geisel, The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, Random House, New York: 1971.