Oh Baby!

Pictures are a rhetoric with which we organize and describe our world. The subjects we depict and the manner in which we treat them reflect our deepest beliefs about ourselves and the world in which we live. Oh Baby! is an exhibition that surveys the representation of children by contemporary artists who are painters, photographers, sculptors, graphic artists, and multimedia and installation artists. The children represented in this exhibition range from babies in utero to pre-schoolers. The images range from direct and naturalistic to oblique, abstract and metaphorical. 

If we look at baby pictures the way we look news photographs, science illustration, and fine art, we process information not simply about the subjects represented. Contained within every genre of image making is information about the intentions, the biases and the sophistication of the picture-maker. Often we don't read this information — we don't see anything more than a straight-forward likeness of little Maria or Sam — because we share so intimately the culture of the picture makers. We don't see the conventions of picture making until we view the images of cultures with which we are unfamiliar, or, until we begin to understand the conventions of our own culture.

Representing a child in Western culture is a celebration of fertility, health, lineage and duty. A feature of most contemporary middle class homes in Canada is a shrine-like installation in the living room or "family room" that contains at least one baby photograph of each son and daughter. In the past, these pictures were mostly taken by professional photographers. Today, with auto-focus cameras and affordable film processing, such pictures are often taken by parents and family members. These contemporary folk shrines celebrate modern neo-natal care and the virtual elimination of childhood disease. It is okay to represent children today, because we know, with a greater degree of certainty, that they will survive.

The celebration of fertility is not shared by everyone at all times. Physically, intellectually and emotionally immature, babies can represent the antithesis of human beauty and grace, or, may be simply an unwelcome reminder of our own shortcomings. For those who don't "breed," babies are quite ridiculous — alien, invasive, destructive, quasi-human beings who disrupt the seamless flow of adult culture. Mostly, those who don't celebrate babies, don't represent them, except to describe dislocation and absurdity. 

Some of the artists in this exhibition are parents of the children represented. Others are not. While reflections on aspects of parental bonding may inform some of the images, this exhibition is not about parenthood. Neither is this group of images meant to draw a picture of infancy and childhood as such. Some of the images of children are imagined — signifying the feelings and energies that we associate with childhood. Other images are absurd — images of children in surreal contexts or fashioned from unexpected media — juxtapositions that express adult feelings of dislocation, paradox or fantasy. The images in Oh Baby! may say less about children than they do about the symbolic role that children play in adult lives. In fact, these images may not be about babies at all.

While tidying up some shelves in my home, I come across a thick envelope of colour photographs. I pause from my cleaning to shuffle through the dozens of out -of- focus, poorly framed and red-eyed pictures of my son. There is one that is in focus, and not too badly cropped, where my little boy smiles back at the camera, like I want him to. Life, in this picture, is not chaos. It is proof — needed proof — that our life is in focus, and "framable." It is proof too, that my son is happy. I set that one aside and put the rest of the pictures back in the envelope.

***

Images of childhood have been used as indictments and propaganda of state. Charles Dickens created narrative images of contemporary children in nineteenth-century England to symbolize the moral bankruptcy of the existing social order. A standard feature of Fascist and Communist propaganda during this century has been the image of the charismatic leader surrounded by an adoring brood of children, symbolizing the patriarchal benevolence and superior wisdom of the dictatorship. Today, the image that has the greatest potential to mobilize communities, even entire nations, to political, charitable or military action, is often the image of abused, abandoned and malnourished infants and children.

In the twentieth century, contemporary artists have typically avoided the talismans, totems and traditional subjects of folk culture, seeking instead connections to the text-based, humanist culture of the modern academies. Artists, however, are only slightly less susceptible the forces of fertility celebrated so avidly by the rest of the culture.

When artists do tackle fertility, they can bring a broader spectrum of colours and tones to the subject. Artists such as Sybil Goldstein visualize the internal emotional and physical processes of birth. Goldstein, in her Gestation Studies, conjures the sketchy, impressionistic features of the as yet unborn child — a process of mental imaging not unlike the nesting actions that often occur shortly before the onset of labour. These images are as much about defining hope, fear and the unknown as they are about visualizing birthing. While fear and apprehension appear to have disappeared in the Newborn Studies and Portrait Studies, (both completed shortly after the birth of her child) these images still share the same bubble of subjectivity and maternal focus of the Gestation Studies. 

In contrast, Judy Major-Girardin, who also represents the gestation process, demonstrates less interest in visualizing the character and features of the unborn child than in naming the process itself. Her images outline a process with the vaguest of contours, and suggest this awareness is best described as intensely warm and luminous colour fields. In contrast, birthing is named by Lorène Bourgeois as graphic and cathartic: an exclamation of physical joy and pain in the form of a graphically illustrated breach birth, based on a sixteenth century maquette from Florence's natural history museum, La Specola.

Sheila Butler's expressionist renderings of newborn infants exist within a maternal bubble that is fraught with ambivalence. Butler contrasts powder pinks with the grimmest flat blacks; images of mother and child are layered one on top of the other, bound together, yet apart and antagonistic. These images allude perhaps to that mixture of love, loathing and despair, characteristic of postpartum depression, but may also suggest to us the complexity of the familial bond that lasts long past infancy. Margaret Belisle also investigates the complexity of families as a pull of contradictory forces. She describes the chaos of infant care and responsibility in the family, representing in photographs the stories that are usually communicated as oral histories and dispatches from the "family conflict zone."

Clair Cafaro also identifies the black moments of postpartum depression in her installation Motherlove. Here, an empty crib and an unused diaper form an abstracted representation of a baby. In Cafaro's image, however, the cartoon teddy-bears and clowns on the waist band of the Huggie disposable diaper have metamorphosed into a lament. Cafaro, Butler and Belisle, it seems, have all walked in the underworld, where there are two bubbles instead of one, and where pink and baby blue are sometimes also black.

Julie Voyce, Mary Catherine Newcomb, Cathy Daley, Sally McKay and Aidan Urquhart by contrast explore the themes of infancy in a detached manner. In the work of these artists babies may function as colours, tones, textures and rhythms, or by lending thematic contrast to a narrative space. As a group their similar and uninidivuated appearance seems to suggest a platoon from an absurd army — made even more absurd by their completely random and spontaneous movement. In this spirit, Aidan Urquhart's baby multiples form a humorously rhythmic, repetitive battalion of spawn. 

Julie Voyce and Cathy Daley's work operates with an ironic, dark humour, reminiscent of nightmare images of babies lost in the woods, falling from window ledges and dropping out of our arms. These are babies out of control — mental images more typical of people for whom the care and feeding of infants is a concern. Babies in Julie Voyce's image world are mythological creatures with disproportionately large heads who exist as pudgy icons of wonderment and worship. These are surreal images, at once cute and threatening. Like tiny Buddhas, corpulent and smiling, they seem to be possessors of an esoteric vision, and a malevolent adult knowledge. 

The comical physical ungainliness of babies makes for a buoyant liveliness in Cathy Daley's drawings. The baby has become a formal device — a dynamic movement with consequence — rendering an image as perverse as the unfortunate fall from the tree top in the classic lullaby, Rock-a-Bye Baby. Similarly, Mary Catherine Newcomb's highly naturalistic water-filled, rubber infant effigy bridges the ambiguous territory between play doll and figurative sculpture. Her rubber baby is a sly and humorous confrontation with the maternal fear of literally dropping the baby, and perhaps a figurative acknowledgment of the ability of children to survive the occasional parental fumbling. It is also a darkly ironic meditation on the transient mortality of flesh. 

Perhaps we tend to associate rubber with babies because so much of an infant's life is rubberized. Squeeze toys, teethers and soothers form a large part of a baby's unprotected interface with the world. Sally McKay's Lost Soother Project is a photo documentation of half a dozen soothers found at the road side. Photographed in the studio, the little roughed-up and run-over ciphers of displaced infant emotion seem like baby surrogates — abandoned children — each one representing a trauma in miniature.

A desire to find meaning in the image of the infant is characterized by ambiguous and changing representations. In the photographs of Gordon Laird, Ron Hewson, in the paintings of Rae Johnson, and in the sculpture of Tom Dean, babies are alternatingly absurd and delightful, strange and familiar, malevolent and innocent — barometers perhaps, of changes taking place within the artists themselves. Come funghi della terra, the Italians say — "like mushrooms from the earth" — packed in back packs in two's, or left in a box of groceries, wielding guns or emerging from the earth, we grapple, along with the artists, with the arbitrariness of fertility.

Children refocus our gaze and draw attention to physical and emotional phenomena. In observing the processes of development, we understand more about ourselves. Representing the child may be a way to communicate the experience of wonder. For photographer April Hickox, the deafness of her child Alex became a process of personal dedication and discovery. In the process of learning to communicate with her daughter, Hickox was able to touch a new world of experience — a world of sensation, colour, texture, shapes, and movements, unbounded by conventional language. These images may represent some of the best we can experience if we look, listen, and take the time to learn from our children.

Gordon Hatt, 1999

Works in the Exhibition

Lorène Bourgeois, Toronto, Ont.
Ouvrage, 1999, oil on panel, 23.5" (diameter).

Margaret Belisle, Toronto, Ont.
Keith, 1989, colour photograph, 20 x 30".
Care and Feeding, 1988-91, colour photograph, 20 x 33".

Sheila Butler, London, Ont.
Lullaby, 1998, oil chalk pastel, acrylic, gouache & charcoal), 21 x 30".
Bedtime , 1998, oil chalk pastel, acrylic, & charcoal), 24" x 31".
Morning , 1998, oil chalk pastel, acrylic, gouache & collage), 24" x 31.5".

Clair Cafaro, Toronto, Ont. 
Cicatrix #9 , 1998, oil and plastic toy on wood, 12" x 6" x 3".
Cicatrix: Girl in A Red Dress , 1998, oil on canvas, 3.5' x 2.5'.
Motherlove , 1998, mixed media, 4' x 3.5' x 1.5'.

Cathy Daley, Toronto, Ont. 
Untitled , 1995, pastel on vellum, 30" x 80".
Untitled, 1995, pastel on vellum, 36" x 42".

Sybil Goldstein, Toronto, Ont.
Gestation Studies #1- 8 , 1992, oil on wood, 8" x 6" each.
New Born Studies #1 - 3 , 1993, oil on wood, 8" x 6" each.
Portrait Studies #1 - 4 , 1993, oil on wood, 12" x 8" each.

Ron Hewson, Kitchener, Ont.
Piano Fun , 1998, colour print enlargement from Polaroid SX70, 20x20".
Miriam Sleeping , 1995, colour print enlargement from Polaroid SX70, 20x20".
Paul Sleeping , 1998, silver print enlargement from Polaroid 667 , 9" x 13".
Boy with Gun , 1987, silver print , 9" x 13".
Parent Pretenders , 1985, silver print , 9" x 13".

Tom Dean, Toronto, Ont.
Untitled (baby head), 1992, pigmented plaster, 12" x 8" x 8".
Untitled (baby bum), 1992, pigmented plaster, 12" x 8" x 8".

April Hickox, Toronto, Ont.
When the Mind Hears , Part I, 1993, multimedia installation , 10' x 14'.
When the Mind Hears Part II , 1993, two silver prints, 50.8 x 60.96 each.

Rae Johnson, Flesherton, Ont.
Fire-baby , 1999, oil and ink on paper, 84" x 48".
Baby in the Woods , n.d., oil on plywood, 8' x 4'.
Cain's Seed , 1992, oil on canvas, 78" x 84".

Gordon Laird, Guelph, Ont.
Untitled , 1999, 2 chromogenic prints, 24" x 36" each.
Untitled, (Karen, Kusta and Cezanne), silver print, 5" x 8".
Untitled, (Badlands), 1995, silver print, 5" x 8".
Untitled, (Groceries), 1995, chromogenic print, 6" x 10".

Judy Major-Girardin, Cambridge, Ont.
Nucleus , 1994, acrylic on canvas, 48" x 48".
Birth , 1993, acrylic, ink and chalk on paper, 23" x 30".
Newborn , 1993, acrylic, ink and chalk on paper, 23" x 30".

Sally McKay, Toronto, Ont.
The Lost Soother Project , 1999, laser print, 18 x 24".

Mary Catherine Newcomb, Kitchener, Ont.
Bag of Mostly Water , 1999, water, rubber, human hair, 36" x 18" x 12".

Aidan Urquhart, London, Ont.
Confessions of a Former Toddler , 1999, mixed media installation.

Julie Voyce, Toronto, Ont.
My Diva , 1997, watercolour, 10.5 x 8.5".
The Kidnapping, 1997, watercolour, 8.5 x 10.5".
Really New Baby, 1995, watercolour, 10.5 x 8.5".
A Girl and Her Brother, 1996, watercolour, 10.5 x 8.5" .
The Gown, 1996, watercolour, 10.5 x 8.5".
Baby Landing, 1996, watercolour, 10.5 x 8.5".

Anette Larsson: Pleasure Vision

Is it now possible once again to speak of art and eroticism in the same breath? Erotic content in art has been discredited in the recent past. First, by formalists, who argued that content had no bearing on aesthetic quality, and secondly, by feminists who pointed out that erotic content in art was almost exclusively a male preserve – a product and symbol of the patriarchal relations that permeate Western society. 

Arguments against "pleasure" in art have also divided politically into right and left, at times shifting, from right wing puritanism to left-wing Spartanism, and back again, from right-wing libertarianism to left-wing sexual liberalism. The degree of self-indulgent pleasure considered socially acceptable, and expressible, appears to have a natural ebb and flow.

We have evolved somewhat from those rigid formalist positions of the middle part of this century toward an art that addresses issues other than the phenomenon of the form. Art once again has become a way to talk about the world we live in, how we live in it and the issues that affect our lives. The human body is significant – as it has always been – a potent metaphor for human complexity, the container of culture, the object of desire, the mantle of character, the symbol of nurturing life and gnawing death. The body is also a battlefield where a contest of ideologies is fought out. Questions such as who controls your body, how you use it, how and when it is permissible to represent the body, are issues not only of art, but of the whole of society. 

Anette Larsson 's pleasure vision focuses our attention on these issues. Her series of grainy, back-lit photographic transparencies contain intimate keyhole images of the artist naked before a mirror. The radically cropped photographic representations of her body are almost indecipherable except for the most minimal indications and vaguest contours of torso, limb or hand. Inverted, each panel becomes a puzzle piece; a curving expanse of rolling flesh rising here, the cavity and sharp curve of a joint falling there. Together, these images form an abstract composition of amorphous erotic energy.

A hand, a shoulder, or a muscle twisted in the grip of a hand, may not coincide with our traditional notions of eroticism, yet bathed in the ethereal blue world of pleasure vision, they approach the familiar strangeness of the erotic fetish, where a loved one's hand or neck becomes an object of desire. Perhaps even more than the fetishistic desire of the other, these particular images speak about a personal, autoeroticism – a questioning of this physical container within which we live, how it works and how it feels, and yes even loving it a bit, in a somewhat backhanded and abusive way.

The intimate self-embrace narrated in pleasure vision recalls the iconography of commercial advertising. Where we see a model's self-directed touch and posture of obsessive physical introspection, we know at once that this message is about the fears and uncertainties we have about our own bodies, and the redemptive promises that advertising offers us, of this or that brand of hygiene, fragrance or undergarment. Advertising exploits the complex relationship women have with their bodies to sell products. Fear and insecurity will dissolve into confidence and a feeling of well-being we are promised, with each new purchase. 

Anette Larsson has adopted the techniques of commercial advertising and the glamour industry to communicate a different message. She has detached the significant gesture of touching oneself from the message of personal inadequacy and the objective of consumption. Turning the camera on herself, she has taken back control of her own image. Minimizing references to specific body parts, her images suggest a desire that is at once centred in the body and yet boundless. These images salvage a private (and public) pleasure from the commercial realm. Commercial advertising exploits fear and shame based in ignorance. Pleasure, Larsson may be telling us, is centered in self-knowledge.

Gordon Hatt, 1999

The Nature of the Machine: Jeff Mann, Mike O'Brien, Victoria Scott, and Norman White

"We are surrounded by a society which has become so ingrained in its technology, so steeped in it, that it is almost an inescapable death hold . . . So what we are doing is we are taking technology and using it . . . hoping this will pull us out."1

Jeff Mann, Mike O'Brien, Victoria Scott, and Norman White make artworks that are individual and idiosyncratic the result of personal explorations that are equal parts technological experimentation and philosophical inquiry. These artists are united not by thematic or formal similarities in their work, but rather by their approach to art making. They share a common enthusiasm in solving the problems of engineering their complex work and they share a common faith in the transcendent and revelatory experience of invention. These artists have an intimate relationship with the technologies that they use: they are engaged in all aspects of the problems of design, engineering and fabrication out of curiosity and out of conviction.

"By making the machines, by going through the technological process of working through the technology, learning how to build this thing that you have in your head, it is almost like reverse engineering. And in making it real, the machine starts to make you. You see everything that you have been trying to work through. You have made errors. You see those errors . . . [I think that] if I learn how to make this machine and understand the machine, I'll learn something about myself."2

Process is important to these artists, and making errors of design and engineering is a part of the internal dialogue in which they are involved. In contrast to those who make art conceptually or incorporate advanced computer systems and software, these artists insist on having a more intimate relationship with their technology, on getting their hands dirty, and getting inside it to know how it works. Taking apart an old machine, salvaging its parts, adapting it for other purposes, and just plain misusing the technology results in missteps but also in discoveries - important rites of passage. Moreover, these artists see the cannibalization of obsolete technology and its attendant reincarnation in the form of pathetic machines as a meaningful drama. Victoria Scott sees this as re-imagining technology, "in a way that speaks more to the human."3 Norman White refers to this process as being like the Uroboros, the ancient symbol of time represented by a snake eating its tail, "devouring the engineering, making something that is almost irrelevant to the engineering, [where] utility is no longer the quest."4

Devouring technology today, however, is a tall order. The accelerated pace of development in the field of micro-processing makes it all but impossible for anyone but a specialist to have a deep understanding of contemporary technology. Because these artists insist on having a profound understanding of the machines with which they work, they revert to simpler technologies. Norman White, for example, has adapted and programmed a 15-year-old computer design, the 8086, to create The Helpless Robot (1987-1999). Jeff Mann programmed a seven-year-old Macintosh computer, running Max language and Quick Time, to produce Adult Contemporary, (1999).

Victoria Scott takes the technology challenge in the opposite direction, rejecting baroque complexity and championing a reductionist mechanical aesthetic. She sees meaning and eloquence in stripped down and simplified mechanics, which in their essential functionality may become, in her words, " . . . a visual metaphor for the larger piece." Scott also rejects high gloss or industrial finishes, preferring a rougher, home-built feeling a "technology that looks like somebody has been touching it."5Michael O'Brien prizes simplicity of design as well. He de-emphasizes the mechanical nature of the work, preferring instead that the viewer focus on the content of the work and not the form, ". . . so that the action is the pure centre of interest."6

Motion, it goes without saying, is fundamental to kinetic art, but it has also played a significant role in the development of the more traditional media arts. The power and dynamism of machines influenced early twentieth-century visual artists such as the Italian Futurists, who attempted to communicate kinetic power in their paintings.7 Much of the popular appeal of the comedic actor Charlie Chaplin may have come from his mechanical mannerisms. His movie Modern Times, (1936), expressed Chaplin's pessimistic, dystopic and tragic-comic view of the human consequences of technology.8 As well, popular dance in the last quarter of the twentieth century has been significantly influenced by mechanical rhythms and movement.9

Kinetic artists in turn see the movements they are able to create with their machines as expressive and eloquent. Norman White's Sim-2, 1993, was a device that addressed this parallel directly. Together with dancer Bettel Liota he created a mechanism that both recorded and played back human gestural movement a sort of gramophone for dance. Mechanical movement can also suggest deeper realities. Victoria Scott is interested in motion as a way to create a field of resonant, sympathetic vibration that may recall sexual energy or life-force. The movement in Michael O'Brien's work may suggest deeper cycles in nature such as the shifting of tectonic plates. But it's motion's illusions that enchant, and it is kinetic sculpture's sense of aliveness of being "like life," like technologically inspired Pygmalions, that is a source of fascination for the artist and viewer. "Machines are a lot like people," says Jeff Mann. "They are more like people than anything else."10

As much as the machines may resemble humans, they are resolutely alien, and their alien qualities resonate in us as well. Kinetic art may simply bring into relief the oddness of mechanical behaviour. Victoria Scott likens the function of the artist to that of a counsellor who gives the machine open space, permission as it were, to be what it essentially is: a machine, simultaneously a human reflection and human ersatz, a clue to the physical and emotional world we inhabit, and at the same time, a vibrating question mark.

The result of these artists' engagement with technology is a commentary on our contemporary mechanised environment. Implied in this work is a critique of the modernist ideology of personal, social, and political technological mastery. The construction of these complex and enigmatic objects, proposes a creative, interactive and open alternative to the meccano/technological ideology of control. Searching for a balance, these four artists are inventing alternative technologies: technologies that don't alter the world, but describe it. They are giving physical form to the universe of mechanisms both real and imagined, and reflecting on the nature of the machine.

Gordon Hatt

Endnotes

1. Norman White, Interview with the artist, April 19, 1999.
2. Victoria Scott, Interview with the artist, April 19, 1999.
3. Victoria Scott, idem.
4. Norman White, ibid.
5. Victoria Scott, ibid.
6. Michael O'Brien, Interview with the artist, April 19, 1999.
7. The Futurists saw in modern industrial society a radical break with the tradition-bound past, and hailed a future promising unbridled personal and cultural freedom through technology. Many artists around the turn of the century were concerned with the representation of movement as a reflection of the social psychological impact of the automobile, train, air travel and telecommunication. In addition to the Futurists, artists such as Robert Delaunay, Robert del la Fresnaye, and the early Marcel Duchamp in Paris, in Russia Kasimir Malevich, combined the aspects of Cubism with an interest mechanical dynamics.
8. In Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin plays a factory worker consumed by the machine of modern industry. He plays a victim of automation, who goes from a dehumanizing assembly line to a mental institution, where he ends up much happier.
9. Michael Jackson seems to have popularized the dance called The Robot around 1974, when he performed it on television to the Jackson Five's hit, Dancin' Machine. The Robot is a mechanical dance style that involves moving the limbs at constant speed from one position to the other, ending up with a snap or Tick' of the body, just as a mechanical device would. Usually only one part of the body moves at a time, which makes it look as if the body is under the control of a program, and systematically doing the moves.
10. Jeff Mann, Interview with the artist, April 19, 1999.

List of Works in the Exhibition

1. Norman T. White, Facing Out Laying Low, Version 2, Plexiglas, custom-programmed microcomputer, electronics,servo-motors, 1998-99, 69cm h. x 46cm x 46cm.
   Description: A microcomputer-controlled, interactive robot, Facing Out Laying Low, Version 2 surveys its surroundings from a fixed point, and responds to activity it finds "interesting" with a variety of audio responses (the first version employed coded brownian trills, while later versions used synthesized voice). It has gone through six major hardware/software revisions, and is still to realize its intended perceptual subtlety: educated guesses, etc.
    
2. Norman T. White, The Helpless Robot, plywood, steel, custom-programmed microcomputer, electronics,optical position encoder, 1987-1999, 190cm h. x 100cm x 178cm.
   Description: A free-standing kinetic sculpture, free to rotate upon itsbase. The work is essentially passive, depending on its electronic voice to enlist the muscles of human beings.
    
3. Michael O'Brien, Untitled,
   Description: A box of stones with a series of valves underneath the surface. The lifting of the valves makes the stones appear to lift/displace in random sections at different times.
    
4. Michael O'Brien, Untitled,
   Description: An articulated bronzed tree branch, slowly moved by a housed motor that is attached to it.
    
5. Victoria Scott, Coil Room, 1995, steel coils, electric motors, switches, each coil 4 ft. w x 8 - 10 ft. high, installation 500 - 1500 sq. ft.
   Description: Fifteen vibrating, inverted steel coils, are suspended from the ceiling almost to the floor. They are spaced apart so that viewers may walk among them like an exotic/erotic garden, powered by sexual energy. The spirals movement is controlled by a slowly rotating 3 foot round disk imprinted with a colour image of a vulva, which acts as a switch.
    
6. Jeff Mann, Source Follower, 1996, mixed media.
   Desciption: Source Follower, is a plastic sheet suspended in an updraft produced by a fan. Its undulating movements create changes in electric fields which are detected by several antennae. Small speakers emit sounds that vary in pitch according to the movements.
    
7. Jeff Mann, Adult Contemporary, 1999, mixed media.
   Description: Adult Contemporary is an interactive video installation recently completed as a result of the Tactile Video workshop at InterAccess. The hyper-repetition of short music video segments creates vibrating moments of fluid time. "An intense experience of the minutiae of human expression, the music within the music, the performance within the performance."

Mary Catherine Newcomb: A Surrealist in Kitchener

Ambivalence is a state of contradictory desire: to love and hate the same thing, same person, to feel a sense of belonging and at the same time alienation, to at once agree yet also to disagree. Ambivalence mires us in indecision, drains energy from our convictions and causes emotional stress.                                                              

It is a two-headed deer joined at the mid section. One pair of forelegs is planted firmly on the ground as if attempting to lift itself on all fours. The other pair of legs is splayed in the air, falling, the head turned toward its own back as if to find the cause of its physical incapacitation. As one, this strange animal describes a three-dimensional arabesque. The twisting torso and necks define an elegant s-shape. The contrapuntal action and direction of the legs give it its expressive tension. It is a sculpture that simultaneously rises in space while it sinks back to earth. Janus faced, it looks forward and backward. One can even go as far as to see the first attempt of a new born fawn to stand, while its other half has been felled by a bullet. (Pushmi-Pulyu, 1996.)            

Over the years Mary Catherine Newcomb has used bodies both human and animal as symbols of consciousness and as vehicles to express universal desires and fears. The body, the artist insists, 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.

Newcomb's use of animals has been a consistent refrain throughout her career and may be likened to the animals of aboriginal and classical myths. Rabbits, as carriers and symbols of occult knowledge, frequently occur in her papier mâchéand cast concrete of the nineteen-eighties. Mice, snakes, a hyena, a fish, a sheep, and an alligator make appearances in Newcomb's narrative works as symbols of a knowledge that resides in the body.                           

With this two-headed creature, the artist has fashioned an image that has more in common with the plastic language of classical antiquity and surrealism than the ironic references of postmodern art making. A human figure joined at the waist to the body of a horse was the classical image of the satyr – a symbol of lust. The twisting serpentine form of the deer recalls the Ouroborous – the snake eating its tail – an ancient symbol of time. This pathetic struggle suggests the serpent-entangled figures of the second-century B.C. E. Laocoon, and the hunted deer as a metaphor of human fate can be traced to the myth of Diana and Acteon.             

Newcomb has given physical embodiment to the inner turmoil of ambivalence. Torn between our aspirations and our duties, our need for individuation and our group identity, we are, as the artist suggests, of two minds.

Gordon Hatt, 1995

John Armstrong: Affirmative Paintings

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,

Luxe, calme et volupté.1

I find nothing so pleasurable as the idea of wandering through a picture gallery jammed with easel paintings — landscapes sublime or pastoral, moralizing narratives, still lifes of domestic simplicity or of regal groaning boards, portraits of physical beauty and social power. I am transported by this narrative of desire to another kind of gallery, the picture book, a source of infinite juvenile delight. The picture book was my first door to the known world, the world of facts; the encyclopedic visual detailing of the sciences, geography, illustrated histories and biblical narratives was, and remains for me, electricity to the mind.

Easel painting — the term itself seems to creak — conjures smells of fresh oil paint, turpentine, linseed oil, and images of hirsute male artists, with brushes and palette in hand. Picture books exude their own antique charm; the crack of the glued binding upon opening, the smell of the paper and ink. I am reminded of the sensual theatre of it all, and the surge of satisfaction that accompanied it. The love of paintings and books is a sublimated desire: a redirected frenzy to consume both fantasy and reality in large amounts.

John Armstrong's series of "Affirmative" paintings are about this kind of desire. They recall the charms of traditional easel painting, in their compact size and often oval shape, seeming just the thing to hang in the dining room of that narrow Victorian townhouse. Each painting is an ostentatious display of oil paint, thickly applied, scraped and scored, and gathering at the edges of the raw linen canvas. His media refers back to nineteenth-century academic methods, but his handling is contemporary — paint being a fetish now (since the Abstract Expressionists decided to drip and trowel it on) and no longer simply a medium with which to draw and colour.2

A painting, like a written text, carries within it a history of colours and textures and characteristic patterns. Call it style. A measure of interest that a painting holds for us may be determined by the degree to which the artist is capable of juggling the various lateral references that intersect in the creation of the image field. So we know that oil paint is a product of the Italian Renaissance, pre-mixed colours in tubes a product of nineteenth-century France, the canvas support a Venetian contribution. The appearance of text, the oval shapes of the canvases, and the often regular, hatched application of the paint recalls the early avant-garde works of the Cubists Braque and Picasso in the second decade of the twentieth century. The palette knife technique and the extremely unctuous paint application recall the rebel Quebec abstractionist Paul-Emile Borduas.

Each choice of media and technique signifies a history, and tells another story. Painting has been around, which unfortunately, is sometimes held against it. To paint, like engaging in any of the arts, is really a positive act, the point where human beings rise above the purely animal functions of eating, sleeping and breathing, and — not despairing over "this mortal coil" — give it a sort of romantic caché. Curiously, this act of painting has been anything but affirmative lately. It's been backed into the corners that describe hesitation, ambivalence, and tentativeness — reduced to all of those scratchy, doodly, sketchy parts that signal the uncongealed and immature. Painting as a rule today isn't affirmative, it's insecure and neurotic.

But Armstrong to his credit, pushes back hard. OK, OK, OK, Jim Dandy, YES, and Chill, are anything but indecisive. Centrally composed, (or in the case of Chill forming part of a centrally focused triangular composition) Armstrong's neo-positivism fairly jumps off the canvases. And the words lead us to different places as well — to painting's history as a commercial art, where formerly a dexterous hand lent charm and material desirability to the word, rendering letters clean and efficient or luxurious and languorous, as the case may warrant.

OK, OK, OK . . . it could be an admission, as in "Don't worry, I haven't forgotten, I know I said I'd do it, I just haven't gotten around to it yet." Or it could be breathy, drawn out, and savoured: Ok, Ok, Ok . . . . Meaning better than okay. Meaning yes. Or maybe not. There is something dutiful and less than sanguine about these "Ok's" as they march across the canvas. Jim Dandy and Chill, on the other hand, make reference to colloquial expressions of contentment and satisfaction. The rustic expression "jim dandy" seems to circle above a caricature of an abstract-expressionist painting, making light of the high drama of that genre, similar to the way the Pop artist Jasper Johns poked gentle fun at his gestural and existential colleagues. What is "jim dandy" about Jim Dandy? It returns to us the pleasure that we can still obtain from older media, older techniques, and older genre, without the ideological baggage and the stale cigarette smoke.

YES is so bloody affirmative it hurts. Nothing ambiguous about this. Armstrong has seen fit to dress the word up in the most unremittingly cheerful typeface. And unlike the plodding and regimented OK's, his YES's form an arc of delighted self-satisfaction. But it is worth identifying this YES — to grand gestures and affections, to unabashed appetites for everything in books and in paintings. YES, to art and to a culture of infinite interconnectivity. YES, to fact and fantasy, to taste, to touch and above all YES, to pleasure . . . .

" . . . and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."3

Gordon Hatt

Notes

1.         Charles Baudelaire, "Invitation au Voyage," in Le Fleurs du Mal, Classiques Larousse, Paris: 1973, pp. 40-1.

            
2.         And in case one were to miss this reference in the handling of the materials, Armstrong provides us, in Jim Dandy, with the characteristic Abstract-Expressionist style of American artist Clifford Still.

           
3.         James Joyce, Ulysses, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth: 1975, p. 704.

Sheila Gregory: Flip! A Series of 20 Paintings

Sheila Gregory's Flip! is one work, consisting of 20, 48 x 70-inch panels. The individual panels are like modules that can be assembled in any fashion to create a new composition each time. These oversized biomorphic abstract paintings are at times brushed, sprayed or poured onto canvases. Using acrylic paint, Sheila Gregory creates interleaving layers of texture, shape and line that reveal a complex relationship between the intended gesture and the happy accident. Ten panels of Flip! were first exhibited at the Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto, in 1997. This exhibition will be the first time all 20 panels of the piece will be exhibited together. Bright, energetic, almost efflorescing, these paintings are a mix between the aesthetic of graffiti art and high abstract expressionism. They exude a vitality and optimism that painting remains a life affirming activity.

Flip! may be a virtue made of a necessity. When confronted with her first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery with only a few months advance notice, the artist altered her working method from working on one, to working on several paintings at a time. While her approach to painting remained essentially the same, the paintings in Flip! are not as densely composed and have fewer layers of paint than her previous work. One might say that if Sheila Gregory's large expansive works are epic novels with a large cast of characters and subplots, the 20 paintings in Flip! Are a series of finely wrought short stories. GH

A revolution in how I paint

The following text is an edited transcript of a conversation between Sheila Gregory and Gordon Hatt on October 10, 1998:

GH: How did the short lead-time that you had in preparing for the original showing of Flip! Lead you to a different approach to painting?

SG: Flip! was the first time that I had ever worked on several panels at one time. Normally my working practise is one painting per month, and there is a lot of time spent labouring in and around each and every centimetre of a canvas. With the short lead-time for the exhibition and the challenge of creating an enormous new work, I had to rethink my studio practice: "How can I paint an 80 ft. piece that is almost 6 ft. tall in my 350 sq. ft. studio?" Those challenges are part of the intensity that drives me in the studio. Part of it is also the colour intensity, the mark-making intensity, the bearcat sensibility I like to throw into what I am doing. I really push for, and try to push myself to new edges. The work has influenced all work since then for me. I now work on a "multiple-paintings-at-one-time" approach where works are drying on the floor, stacked up to my waist height almost every other night. I have eight paintings lying on the floor around me as they are drying and in the morning I put them away and a new group of eight will come in and dry on the floor for the next set of challenges. Flip! was really important to teach me a new way of being able to work at a faster rate and in a more challenging way, overall.

GH: I would like to ask you about the influence that your participation in geological and archeological expeditions in the north has had on your work.

SG: In 1989, 1990 and 19941 had the opportunity to go up north for two-month periods of time, working on a geological crew, and the last time with a crew from McGill exploring Tule whaling villages. So, the influence of the last two trips really had the most profound effect on the work I had been doing since 1990: namely, rethinking fragments and how we derive meaning out of many pieces of a scattered, fragmented whole. Also, (I was interested in) the archeological point of view of trying to pull (those fragments) together, to then examine what the whole subject was. We were counting the cumulative number of harpoon heads (in the north) and various other data in order to assemble a sense of the history that had gone on prior to our point in time.

There are some interesting revelations in looking at the world from a scientific point of view. And there are parallels in the visual world and how, especially in the archeological sense, a lot of sight reading is initially done visually through aerial photography – flying in and, from above, choosing the best area for studying for a summer. A lot of that is picked up just through visual land formations. As your eye becomes visually attuned, you walk around and identify areas of occupation that require studying or mapping.

So, in the working process later in the studio the problem is: "How do you then distill that experience and turn it into part of your own working contemporary practise, and what do you really want to deal with there?" Going back to the archeological fragments, Flip! is comprised of 20 similar fragments or modules. They are all the same size canvases, 70 x 48 inches.

The starting point for me is usually composition, and the challenge to create a very interesting composition within one picture plane. In this particular painting, I throw the compositional tool out to the gallery director or the end manipulator of the piece to compose and thereby to derive their own meaning from the elements I have created.

GH: Do you see the marks you make on canvas as being meaningful?

SG: I was asked recently how much devotion I have to the palette that I choose. When starting a work, I let the colour work intuitively. Once I start a new series, I make a conscious decision to begin with a different scale or chroma than the previous one, which in the case of Flip! Tended to be very bright. But generally, it is not a consideration that I deal with. I spend more time thinking compositionally. Once I make that shift, I just go into the art supply store and I buy colours say, more on the earth level and the studio becomes the repository of those colours.

GH: What is the basis of that colour choice?

SG: I think it's intuitive. There was no conscious choice on my part to say it's going to be a series of very bright paintings. It started that way and it just kept going in that direction. There are two panels, however, within Flip!, which are entirely colour restricted – the two blue panels, #I0 and #13. I had restricted the palette to blue, white and black (there is very little black but there are some greys mixed in). I chose blue strictly as a challenge to myself to work on a restricted level within a very unrestricted palette, (which Flip! generally tends to have). I thought over all, that the two blue panels would be effective in stopping the eye – changing your thought process. (preventing it) from locking-in. giving you a breath, before moving on. Again, I didn't know how the whole thing would order itself up when installed (by a gallery director or curator). I made colour restrictions in those two panels but nowhere else.

I think I have been fortunate enough as an artist that I have never felt worried about where the colours start and where they end. I felt very secure intuitively with my choice of colour and how I move that into the picture plane. So, I didn't set it as a starting point, that. for example, it has to have a number of pinks and a number of yellows and so on. It just happened. The sense of having to be aggressive isn't really a thought in my work. My work tends to be rather loud and in your face; uses a lot black. There is a linear element in the work, cartoon-like references, but I think over all the colour adds into that level of impact and aggression that I bring to the work – that exuberance that has become part of my style. It's pretty hard for me to make softer paintings.

GH: What are the steps leading up to the completion of a single panel?

SG: In the case of Flip! there were 20 panels requiring two and half weeks of canvas stretching and priming. There is the anxiety of wanting to start, and in that time. thinking about what you will. Finally, the moment arrives when you have your paint in hand and you christen each panel with a colour. I couldn't put all 20 paintings in the studio at one time. I had a system devised where I could paint nine paintings each day. With Flip I wasn't putting them on the floor to dry. I arranged a house of cards in my studio where at the very beginning I just washed in one panel top to bottom in pink, and other yellow, another green and another blue ... just a flat break up of colour. I had nine of them in the studio resting side to side in a house of cards fashion. The widest wall point that I have in the studio is about ten feet. and the ceiling is about nine feet high. So, those nine paintings are drying and they come out of the studio and the next day the other nine come in, followed by the last two. I worked in cycles and it would alternate between a level of hard bodied acrylic (from a tub) and the next day might be a spray-painting session. There is a tension between what the brush is doing and what the spray paint is doing. And the spay-paint needs one day minimum to cure before it can be repainted. What I do in those beginning months is to blindly build forms, not knowing what is going to happen, what will be kept and what will be buried over. It is an additive process of just pulling out of the mind another form every day. I'll respond to a dot on a canvas and start with a colour, a line, a form, and build the form around it and set up a challenge- not working myself out that challenge that night – and two days later I'll come back and work my way through it.

GH: What is the nature of the challenge?

SG: It is the composition within one painting. Often there are bottlenecks or problems. It may be too centrally focussed. If it's too symmetrical, your mind tells you to offset. or it is too boring. too much the same. no variety. But the speed at which you have to keep working ... I would set myself a problem on each of the canvases and not worry about it because I would have another two days before I would have to get into it. (It allows you) a freshness to come at whatever that panel's problem might have been from two days prior. You can attack it with a completely open view. There is a lot of responding intuitively, quickly, and with the advantage that those two responses have . . . It was normally my process to over-deliberate and continually rethink and sit a lot before moving, whereas in the Flip! process I'm moving a lot more than I'm sitting and reflecting about the work. It was a real challenge to my working process but I thought overall it has been a really positive one since it has influenced everything I have done since Flip! was completed. That is how dramatic a shift it was: a revolution in how I paint.

RE: Work Re: Work

The Install Art Collective at the Library & Gallery in Cambridge

June 18 to July 25, 1998

In the winter of 1997 Lisa Fedak proposed to me the idea that the Install Art Collective might undertake a project of installations, interventions and performances at the Library & Gallery that specifically engaged the library, the gallery as well as the building's common foyer. It was impossible to say no. 

I had worked with the Install Art Collective as a catalogue essayist for their first exhibition, Niche, in the spring of 1995. Niche was a series of 24 installations, performances and interventions throughout downtown Guelph. At that time the Install Art Collective consisted of a core group of artists living in the city of Guelph with the addition of invited artists from outside the city. My earliest memory of the group was of a meeting at the Clinton tavern in Toronto. At least ten tables placed end to end were surrounded by twenty-six artists all talking at once, across tables, over people's heads, and behind each other's backs. The volume of all of the simultaneous conversations was so great that Lisa Fedak, the meeting's chair, couldn't be heard to call the meeting to order. It was left to Corinne Carlson, who while rising, focused her eyes in the distance and emitted a sound, similar to the high pitch of vibrating glass, strong enough and clear enough to gather everyone's attention. I remembered the enthusiasm of that meeting – the "Hey-guys-let's-put-on-a-show" energy of the group. How to say no to getting that energy back in 1998? 

My interest in seeing this new project through was of course more than just the fun and excitement of chaos. Like the artists in the group, I too am sometimes frustrated by the limitations of the public gallery space, climate controlled and self contained, existing for connoisseurs and iconoclasts, but dismissed by the larger society as irrelevant or overly precious, elitist or just downright incomprehensible. Getting out into the public's space and catching people's attention the way commercial publicity seeks out its audience is alluring. For a curator it is, in the end, just another way of drawing attention to the activities of the art gallery and to the possibilities of what art can contribute to public life. In this rests a fundamental belief that at some level, the sublimities of art can be experienced by everyone. 

But Install Art was so formless, so chaotic . . . How would the group deal with a library – an institution defined by its mandate for collecting, classifying and ordering? Moreover, as curator, there was virtually no road map that I could consult in dealing with a collective. Public galleries don't normally do that sort of thing. No one in Guelph had invited the Install Art Collective to undertake Niche in 1995 – they just did it. From where I stand today, it makes all of the difference in the world that there was no curator in Guelph, no one to mediate between the city and the artists. In hindsight, the role of curator seems all the more problematic. So what was my role? What could my role be? Was I going to make this Install Art project better, or worse? 

There was another thing too. There are significant cultural differences between being "in the street" and being "in the library." Interventionist art has an agit-prop history. Being "in the street" is symbolic of a social malaise experienced by the artist – shut out of the academy, as it were, alienated from the institutions of public discourse, finding common cause with the disenfranchised and challenging the existing iconography of authority. Authority is "inside." It resides in public buildings and private wealth. Being "inside" means to be connected to power, to acquiesce in its practise and to share in its rewards. Protest and challenge reside "outside." This could, as our gallery director reminded me on a more than one occasion, cause the library real problems. But I was completely sold by the original Install Art statement from 1995: "Our intention is to create connections between artists and communities – whether that be other artists or the community at large . . ." I didn't see this group taking aim at community institutions. 

My inclination was to find workable models for our relationship. First, I considered it a touring exhibition, meaning that it was not an "in-house production." The Install Art Collective decided who its members were and who would exhibit; each individual member would decide alone what they would exhibit. This effectively absolved me of the necessity of making curatorial decisions. I imagined the Library & Gallery as a small city, like Guelph. Its departments – Information Services, Circulation, Fiction and Children's Services, and the Gallery – were semi-autonomous states. The artists would direct their proposed installations to the managers of the various departments. This would retain the character of the 1995 installations which were independently negotiated between the artists and small business people, property owners and city authorities. Moreover, this was a solution aimed at preventing a flood of proposals arriving at my desk, many of which I would have no power to authorize, while at the same time preventing a flood of proposals arriving at the office of the chief librarian. 

So, it seemed like a plan. It first had to be approved by the gallery director and the management committee of the library. The gallery director, Mary Misner, was nervous about the lack of curatorial control. I assured her that the model that the group had developed in Guelph for negotiating space would adapt itself very well to the departmental system of the library. It was a convincing argument that said, "Let the librarians decide what they can tolerate, and what they can't." 

I then took the proposal to the chief librarian, Greg Hayton. After struggling a bit to explain the concept of "interventionism" to him, I received his full support. I was invited to make a presentation to the management committee where I outlined my idea of the library as a city in miniature, in which artist's proposals would be made to the various department heads. I wanted to make the managers of the various departments comfortable with the role into which they were being thrust. They were in effect becoming programmers and curators of the public spaces they managed. 

When in doubt, managers, unlike owners of business and property owners, are inclined to look up the ladder to the next level of authority. They are trained to work as a team, and they chart carefully the political map of authority, its principalities and semi-autonomous republics. Sitting at the management table, the eyes of all of the various department heads of the library were on me. As I spoke about the history of Install Art, the Niche exhibition and how I envisaged it would play out in the Library & Gallery I sensed a light, buoyant mood in the room. Everyone was glad to go for the ride, and if it went wrong, I, at the head of the table, spouting off god-knows-what to them, would be the one to buy it. "Sounds great Gord. Keep us posted," went the general response. The show was a go. 

Perhaps in my zeal to sell the concept to the management, I had also unwittingly sold myself. Perhaps I believed too much in my own rhetoric, my own clever analogies and the tidy organizational structure that I had conceived and negotiated. The exhibition of course would be nothing like that. I attended meetings of the group to represent the interests of the Cambridge Galleries and to answer any questions the artists might have in dealing with the library. Inevitably I felt the pull of debates and issues which were outside the role I had defined for myself. I was attracted to the debate over the theme and title of the exhibition, and stopped myself when I felt that I had offered more than I should – hardly an easy thing to do for someone full of opinions like me. But I felt this strange pull, and it wasn't just me, straining at my self-imposed leash either. To act like a curator was to impose myself and my vision; to pull back was to invite unmediated conflict. It was as though the Install Art Collective formed a whirlwind of energy, its centre a vortex for those attempting to organize a unified front. At various times any number of us felt sucked into this vacuum, floating in space, gasping for air, waiting for Corinne's siren song. 

The creative process is chaotic by its very nature. It doesn't follow predictable paths, and doesn't conform to conventional assumptions. After the exhibition, I spoke with Install Art Collective member Ian Cauthery about the Work Re: Work experience, about why exhibiting institutions "don't do that sort of thing." I said to Ian that as a curator you must be ready to "embrace the chaos" that is Install Art. Reflecting on this later, I realized that while this chaos is a weakness of the Install Art Collective, it is also its greatest strength. The Install Art Collective organized itself to riff on the theme of work in a public library and art gallery. When so many individuals are given a virtual free reign, ideas are generated, images rendered and situations created, that I, as an individual curator, never could have imagined. The power of a collaborative exhibition such as Work Re: Work is that it is so much more than the vision of one person. 

What was great about Work Re: Work? It was its scope. It involved new media and old, monumental scale and miniature, interactive and static. It was everywhere in the Library & Gallery – in the face of more than a few people – yet it was also discreet. Life went on. Books and videos were checked out, magazines were read, homework was done. People felt the ripples, or they ignored them. And little epiphanies took place. 

Gordon Hatt, 1998