Globe and Mail, May 21, 2007
There are flashes of brilliance in this rambling showcase of contemporary art, thanks to a wild and woolly curator who gave the biennial event a good shaking, Sarah Milroy writes.
MONTREAL -- At the launch of the Montreal Biennale 10 days ago, about an hour into an afternoon symposium, I had an epiphany about the Biennale's curator, Wayne Baerwaldt.
There, in a light and airy former classroom of the abandoned schoolhouse-turned- temporary-museum (the École Bourget on rue de la Montagne), 100 or so artists, curators, writers and art collectors were gathered with the ostensible aim of discussing the topic of borders. Soon, though, the proceedings began to take a less strictly choreographed shape. At Baerwaldt's prompting, the artists were asked to stand and simply talk about the work they were showing. There was a lot of rambling, to be sure, but the rambling was interspersed with occasional flashes of brilliance. An overall sense prevailed of the creative process taking its own meandering time to unfold.
In this regard, the symposium was a microcosm of the Biennale itself. Not for Baerwaldt the finely honed curatorial thesis to which objects are rigorously conscripted. This Biennale is titled Crack the Sky, a phrase he borrowed from the name of a seventies rock band from the Ohio Valley. Back then, Baerwaldt used to listen to this band during his long driving trips, but the title has come to hold other, newer implications for him too. "There is a shifting of consciousness that takes place in a lot of the work here," he says, a kind of hallucinatory rethinking of reality. The title also evokes the itinerant life of so many of the artists in the show. "Over half of them are in and out of the country on a regular basis," he says. They exemplify a new notion of the Canadian artist at home in the world.
Finally, though, it is simply a great title, a title that gets you to your feet. Something big is happening here. Maybe the sky is falling. You'd better pay attention.
Watching Baerwaldt preside over his symposium - a gangly, boyish man of 47 with a slightly sardonic drawl and a pleasantly conspiratorial manner —it struck me that this dramatic flair is at the core of what he does: He catches the spotlight and then he creates a social space in which culture can germinate - often, it must be admitted, at considerable unforeseen economic cost and often in a way that feels wild and woolly and a bit unravelled, conceptually and even administratively. (Three days into the show, a number of works still had no wall labels, and technical support was funky at best.)
But — as the crowds that poured into Montreal for the opening can attest — one thing is clear: You wouldn't want to miss it.
The Montreal Biennale runs through July 8 in nine venues across Montreal, and it brings together artists from across Canada and a few international straggler — such figures as Brazil's Paulo Whitaker and Iran do Espirito Santo, Uruguayan artist Ignacio Iturria, Denmark's Jesper Just and American sculptor Bill Smith. These are people who have crossed paths with Baerwaldt over the years, and most of them have some connection to Canada. (Whitaker, for example, has worked in Winnipeg and at the Banff Centre, and has served as host and unofficial ambassador to many Canadian artists in Brazil.) By and large, though, this is a Canadian show, and full of fresh work, some of it made specifically for the Biennale — like Geoffrey Farmer's Puppet Kit devoted to a tyrannical tweedy owl, presented as a little spotlit effigy in a gallery all to itself at the École Bourget. In the adjacent room, Farmer displays a number of enigmatic objects and accessories, which he couples with delicate little labels handwritten in pencil. ("Don't underestimate the power of the owl," reads one such label, accompanying a crushed puppet with its strings dangling forlornly.) Farmer made all the work in three days from materials that he discovered in the building. The owl, for example, was made from a sack he found in the basement boiler room.
At the opening, rumours circulated that the owl symbolized Claude Gosselin, the director of the Biennale's parent organization Centre International d'art contemporain de Montréal (there were reputedly numerous run-ins between him and various artists in the Biennale), but it can equally stand in for any kind of authority figure to which the artistic temperament is constitutionally allergic. Here, Farmer is at the top of his game, demonstrating his wit and his transformative way with materials to create a work of subtle subversion. It's one of the best works here.
Other new works, though, were less successful. Ottawa photographer Lynne Cohen showed a suite of new images of institutional interiors that seemed to lack her usual editorial edge. Chris Cran, a painter from Calgary, exhibited some kinetic sculptural pieces that came across as transitional efforts. Brian Jungen's totem pole fashioned from golf bags is a handsome but slightly weary extension of his often ingenious works involving repurposed sporting equipment. But biennials always end up being a mixture of hits and misses. The bonus here is that Baerwaldt has made a biennial that does what a biennial is supposed to do: deliver the news.
As well, he is presenting the fruits of some unusual partnerships between artists from different parts of the country, like the pairing of Winnipeg filmmaker Noam Gonick with Toronto's Luis Jacob. Their multimedia installation Wildflowers of Manitoba is a homoerotic riff on Buckminster Fuller's dome (harkening back to the Montreal glory days of Expo 67), a work that combines sculpture (the dome) with film projections (images of an imaginary gay wedding in a lush natural setting), and a live performance of a lithe young man reclining on a mattress, listening to music and burning incense. It's both a sixties flashback and a glimpse of a utopian future of infinite tolerance and sexual bliss.
Toronto artist Michael Awad and Calgary's Evan Penny are also showing a new collaborative work, a bizarre coupling of photography and sculpture titled Panagiota: Conversation. Using his specialized camera modelled on aerial reconnaissance cameras from the Cold War, Awad took a series of motion-capture, time-lapse pictures of the head of a talking woman. The resulting images are grotesque, with the sitter's movements giving rise to gross distortions to her physiognomy as the camera tracks her. Penny then distilled these time-based images into a single static sculptural form — a stretched horizontal 3-D portrait that evokes motion through a static form. Both artists are grappling with the dilemma of portraying flux in stillness, pushing the limits of their respective media.
Baerwaldt, a former director of Toronto's Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, has a highly developed sensitivity to the different regions of the country, and, true to form, he has included a number of artists from centres that are often overlooked in national roundups, like Winnipeg (where he once ran Plug In ICA) and Calgary (where he now serves as director/curator of the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art and Design).
In the process, he has highlighted some regional traditions that were not previously discernible. For example, many of the artists from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta share a predilection for small-scale fantasy spectacle, often using kinetic elements or projection to create their low-budget special effects. Sometimes, this kind of work can come across as folksy and sentimental, as is the case in the work of Graeme Patterson, from Saskatchewan. He builds elaborate replicas of architectural structures in Woodrow, Man., peopling them with moving figures. (In a weather-beaten church, for example, we discover an old woman playing the organ and, in the basement, a group of seniors whooping it up in a bowling alley.) But once we have experienced the illusion, there is not much left to think about.
Other artists are able to bring a sharper psychological dimension to their imaginings, like Calgary artist David Hoffos, who is showing the fifth instalment of his Scenes from the House Dream series: meticulous mini-projection/installations, urban and suburban scenes in which we discover (among other things) a couple flirting under a railway bridge, an abandoned kitchen with snow blowing in through the opened windows, or our own bodies observed from behind and appearing before our eyes through a picture frame on the wall. These vignettes arouse a distinctive air of loneliness and mild uneasiness. Hoffos is a master of the mirage.
Winnipeg's Sarah Anne Johnson brings a deliberately cruder touch to her subjects, and in recent years she has been garnering acclaim for her mini dioramas of man-in-nature, peopled with tiny Sculpey figurines that she hand-builds and then sets in the landscape. Johnson sometimes captures these dioramas in photographs, and these are, I think, her most interesting works. Unfortunately, she is not showing her photographs here, but we do have the chance to see a selection of her most recent scenarios: a night highway unfolding beneath a full moon; two men lost in the forest, consulting their maps; another two guys drinking beer by a flickering campfire, and so on. Johnson's is a flannel-clad Canadiana gone weird, a curious blend of charm and menace.
Calgary artist Ryan Sluggett also makes work with a rough, handmade aesthetic. At the Biennale, he's showing a suite of three DVDs that document, through stop-action photography, his anarchic improvisations in the studio. These fast morphing narrative fragments are elaborated in paint, photography, collage and bricolage, recalling the recent animations of South African artist William Kentridge, as well as the voracious art-historical borrowings of the British painter David Hockney at the peak of his powers. There is tremendous vitality in the way Sluggett runs at the game of representation, and a kind of bravado in how he filches from the past. I was impressed.
The Biennale holds a number of other equally stunning surprises: Montreal collective BGL's all-white sculpture depicting Darth Vader's trademark helmet melting into a puddle (evil transmuting into goodness); the display of recent and past sculptures by David Altmejd, who will be representing Canada at the Venice Biennale in a few weeks (apocalyptic sculptural explorations of the themes of decomposition, crystallization and regeneration); the minimalist wall paintings of Iran do Espirito Santo (dark grey, light grey and white windowpane-like abstractions suggesting the play of light and reflection); Luanne Martineau's gloriously unbridled wool and felt sculpture of the human body disemboweled and decomposing (a textile work work in textiles that seems threaded with the cultural DNA of Willem de Kooning, Woody Allen, Philip Guston and Robert Crumb); and Kent Monkman's tepee-shaped Théâtre de Cristal.
This last work is a sparkly, chandelier-festooned enclosure in which the artist projects silent movies of himself dressed in traditional, aboriginal feathered headdress, as well as somewhat less traditional fake eyelashes and high-heeled silver pumps, riding his horse around the grounds of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., in pursuit of the elusive white man. Monkman's pastiche of the 19th-century European gentleman adventurer reveals a perfect comic pitch.
(On the wall, he inscribes: "And so I have set forth on this arduous and perilous undertaking with the determination of reaching every tribe of White European Males and creating faithful portraits of their handsomest personages, views of their villages, ceremonies and their sports.") With humour, intelligence and dramatic flair, he turns the tables on history, mobilizing the power of art to pillory the powerful.
It's a bit like the show as a whole, a renegade event that brings a welcome dose of havoc in its wake. The Montreal Biennale, now in its fifth incarnation, was in danger of becoming a tame and plodding affair, almost an institution. Baerwaldt has given it a good shaking up, delivering it - at least for now - from that unfortunate fate.
The Montreal Biennale continues at venues across the city until July 8. For more information, see http://www.ciac.ca.