New Level

Hello everyone,

If you haven’t come and seen the Barry Allikas show we’ve got on yet, there’s still a week left to make it by. There’s also a fantastic review on the website of Canadian Art Magazine, written by Cameron Skene, along with stunning photos of the paintings by Richard-Max Tremblay. The work in this show represents a real triumph for Barry; and the commentary and feedback I’ve been getting by the truckload pretty well universally is of the opinion that he’s done it; the pieces are stellar: it’s his best show yet, a new level as well as logic.

Thanks to all and congratulations to Barry

Let Me Real It

I was very happy with the reaction we got to our last show, The Promise of Reality. Having made clear that while both artists taking part were in my opinion clearly of tremendous quality, my idea for the show and the curating I did towards it seemed less certain to me initially. In the end, the thing I heard most often was a variation on “they shouldn’t go together, but somehow they do”, they being Cheryl Sourkes’ photography and Marion Wagschal’s paintings. It’s true that from one angle, Cheryl’s work appears to self-locate squarely within the conceptual camp, the exact opposite of Marion’s, hers being realist painting with a strong observational component, and a naturalistic approach to the figure. Opposites can sometimes of course attract, and gel; but if the show really did work as a unit, I think the main reason was the quiet, but deep consonance between the artists, and not the obvious but interesting differences.

The thing they had in common, simply stated, was the age-old artistic quest to furnish a coherent and reliable way of describing reality to ourselves, in a way we can ultimately make use of. In this their art, like that of certain others such as Jasper Johns, Giorgio Morandi or Cindy Sherman, acts as a branch of philosophical knowledge. Performing a rational inquiry into the matter – we can call this theorizing – such art can be seen as a valid, if initially opaque empiricist treatise in picture form. Although it cannot perform literal experiments, and must be classed apart from the hard sciences, nonetheless work like Cheryl and Marion’s can be capable of at least suggesting truths about reality; that is, the mere reality in which we seem to live, rather than some ideal or imaginary one. Francis Bacon talked about deforming a subject into appearance and likeness: in other words of changing things a bit in order to draw a picture of truth. And he, like Marion and in a way Cheryl as well, drew pictures of truth by adding some untruth to the direct correspondence we make out unconsciously to things. Doing so, he privileged the meant conclusion rather than one or another academic ideology which spells out what reality is according to the “rules”. Marion and Cheryl are very similar to him in that.

Getting technical for a moment, consider that in a “traditional” painting, the surface of the canvas stands in for the eye of the viewer, or the space just in front of a putative eye, one through which we might see. “Realistic” as opposed to “naturalistic” implies a subject with which we might actually come into contact, and not just an approximation of something conforming to the expected rules of eyesight, which obviously can be conjured by technique to create things which do not exist outside of the imagination. Try to paint a full figure naturalistically from too close up, and you run out of support. But get your sitter to move ten feet away and even quite a small canvas will suffice. By the same token, paint the same person in that space twice too big, and achieve a totally different result artistically.

Like in the “squishing your head” joke, which weirdly implies an important truth about creative interpretation of our perception, we are reminded of the way things are by deliberate creative misreading. People across the room aren’t only inches high, even though within our field of vision they can fit within our fingertips’ span. Recognizing this, we realize that we too look a certain way depending on from where we’re seen. Abstract painting in the forties and fifties grafted onto itself the socialist idea of universal equality and applied it to the notion of all-over composition on the picture plane, thereby revolutionizing art (formally, if not economically). Art which destabilizes the viewer’s perspective, and reminds us of our actual, relativistic universe plays into the journalistic side of the artists’ authorial intentions, and offers us something tangible in the search for truth of experience. Thanks, Marion and Cheryl.

 

Two Beer Cans

 

Hello everyone,

 

Just a small post for now. 

Apropos of Vincent Lafrance’s show, something seemingly unrelated, which I think might still be suggestive: Willem De Kooning said of the famous art dealer Leo Castelli that the bastard could sell anything, two beer cans, anything (I’m paraphrasing). So Jasper Johns, whose sense of humor was (and probably still is) something like those theoretical solids with millions of sharp edges that don’t really exist, went to his studio and made a bronze sculpture of two beer cans from scratch, which Castelli immediately sold. 

What De Kooning may arguably not have realized was the synthetically perfect, dialectical situation he had in effect proposed, staged and begun, of the kind that a High Structuralist like Johns couldn’t miss completing. The legendary Abstract Expressionist position of De Kooning (and Rothko and Pollock) apropos money contrasted the axes of existentialism vs. money where success is graphed as trending upwards the fewer sales there are (according to that myth of artistic integrity); which stands in direct contradiction with the artistic movement which followed it of Neo-Dada and Pop, where the foreordained success of artist and work depended to a real degree on sales. In the sixties, if it didn’t sell, (up to a point and somewhat like recently) it wasn’t good. Dialectical juxtaposition being a reflexive habit of art writers in this era, I feel moved to point out the following, given the historical nature of what seems to be occurring all around us economically speaking ; by us I mean the art world (some gallows humor may be involved, as well as the hope that all may still be well).

There are two beer cans in one of Vincent Lafrance’s photos currently showing here at Division Gallery. The artist is coy, in good Johnsian fashion, so I guess it’s up to me to say something about it.  Encoded in the work indeed is the signifier ‘two beer cans’, in the complete postmodern sense; as if to prove the point there is even a Johnsian arm and hand coming from above and ‘questioning’ the ‘reality’ of this image after a fashion, along with an assortment of studio junk, all of which makes for a very well-phrased idea if you know how to listen to the argument. It’s very consistent, wonderful even, since as an analog photograph the work does depict empirical reality, despite the clear fact that the scene is not typically what one tends to encounter, or how one would expect to do so. At the same time, the De Kooning mantra of (again I paraphrase) ‘if we can’t do it that’s why we have to’, feels relevant too, with Lafrance squaring the Johnsian circle, and mocking the mocking. Full stop? A good zinger and then silence?

No, I don’t think so. Both De Kooning’s existentialism and Johns’ structuralism are nodded at in this photo; but rather than just referencing them, Lafrance reconciles them, like tying a Moebius Strip into a bow. Clever I’d say, and possibly touching on the kind of possibilities which need to be explored for the art of the future to flourish.

The photo is sold by the way.

Gathered From Coincidence

 

Hello everyone,

 

The Andy Warhol show at the Musée des beaux arts got me to thinking about lots of things; and I’m going to say something about how it reflected on Eric Simon’s show at Division Gallery for me, but first I’ll make a few more general points. About the idea of uniqueness: Warhol philosophically identified uniqueness in the most existential possible sense with fame and that of particular individuals; but at the same time, much of his art seeks to erase the putative boundary between the real and the fake or duplicate. The more I parse the sense of this idea, the more it uncannily seems to lead to a series of thoughts about the nature of art and it’s impact on us.

It would seem that a painting with three images of Elvis overlapping each other conforms to the Structuralist belief that system, and not phenomenological individuality, is the paramount clue relevant to our understanding of the world; and also to identify with (perhaps to prompt?) the further and related Deconstructionist notion that every point contains it’s counterpoint, every argument (including the one making it?) its disproof. But in the first place, to be able to present this position, which concludes by suggesting that the idea of individuality obliterate itself, the argument must be buttressed against a wall of immovable individual stuff, if it can be said to even be capable of argument, much less of correctness.

Bizarrely, Warhol’s paintings seem to know all this. And another thing. The idea of the artist or the lover as mirror that Pops up everywhere in the show (and Warhol generally) reminds me of Hamlet and his “mirror up to nature”, which seems (to me at least) to draw a helpful analogy between Drella and the Prince of Denmark (hear me out). We never really know whether or not Hamlet is delusional, more or less because he’s too smart to pin down: same with Warhol, he can’t be trapped. It doesn’t matter if he made the Brillo Boxes by hand, and it does, but it doesn’t… so does it? Yes and therefore no and vice versa. Why can’t he act? But he does: it’s just that when he acts nothing happens, or what happens doesn’t definitively change anything. Is he a machine? Hamlet wrote to Ophelia and said of himself “While this machine is to him”, referring to his mind; Warhol, we can say, mirrored this attitude without question. His method in interviews, like Bob Dylan’s, was profoundly Hamletian. How pregnant his empty replies sometimes were. I’ll move on.    

Elvis and Marilyn were presumably gifted in unique ways; to present multiple images of them as the point, the art content, of a painting is both to affirm that uniqueness, and to reverse the point by framing individuality as a thing impossible to perceive through the senses. Which one is real? OK fine, none are… even the real ones! A particular image of them is materially unique though, at least as an object; including the images of them created by themselves, by their actual bodies. Warhol seems to be leading us to the following insight: to make an image is already to duplicate it, if we can presume that something like it exists as an idea in the mind of the artist, before it actually appears in our visible world (which echoes, but reverses the polarities in terms of approval, the Platonic theory of Ideal Forms). There are even more esoteric interpretive possibilities here. 

But, the artist’s mind is an illusion of stability and differentiation in the first place. In ‘reality’ (maybe) it’s a fragment of code. But then, reality really must be stable in the end – we can at least say ‘it’s this’ if ‘that’ is true. But no, we can’t trust our objectivity, even when we’re thrown back onto the last possibility of knowing anything. We can’t trust trust (a poignant notion applied to the collapsing securities market). Which brings me at last to Eric, who I feel is a profoundly Warholian artist. I’ve said that Eric has all his life explored different styles; but his way of doing so, I believe, is his style. The structure of art practice itself, and a given quanta of traits, are the point, the content of Eric’s work, along with the images’ ‘meaning’; this seems like an authentic duplication to me, by Eric of Andy, in performing this operation, this hiding in the open of philosophical questioning. The answer is the question. And since any argument does pragmatically constitute a truth claim after all, so does this. So, to conclude for now, it seems to me that Warhol has had a major influence on us all in the art world and beyond, and in particular, Eric Simon is a true son and protegee of Andy, in the best sense.

Uncommon Variety

Hello everyone,

 

Our current show, the first solo at Division Gallery, presents the work of Eric Simon, who is a mid-career, Montreal-based artist, and an associate professor of fine arts at Concordia University. Last summer he showed at the Musée D’art de Joliette, and has a long history of participating in excellent exhibitions, and other art-world achievements.  He’s married to another quality artist, Sonia Haberstich, who showed here in our very first exhibition, Prismatic Spray, and with whom he has two children. He is, for good reason, a respected and valued member of our community.

He’s also funny, in several ways; but I’m interested in one of those ways in particular, his sense of humor and variety as an artist. It would be easy to convince anyone, myself included, if they didn’t already know the truth, that several if not many different artists were the authors of Eric’s work. His stuff often generates actual laughs, in a generous way, without sacrificing anything in the way of ultimate seriousness and quality. And not only that, but the sheer amount of apparently unlike things he makes can be frankly bewildering to think about at first, although with a little time, patterns emerge across the blanket of his practice that begin to make sense. His technical level being very high is something which he both celebrates and deprecates visibly, sometimes in the same work; but more often by hanging things near one another that seem like contradictions. And then we realize that part of the point is to reveal the diverse ways in which speaking in the discourse of art is something like a unified form of speech.

We all know that artists are ’supposed’ to move towards increasingly unified positions in their style; and it is true that doing so helps most people, by allowing them to focus in the needed way, to improve their level of quality. In truth though, most artists will experiment from time to time, and doing so is usually helpful. Most such experiments aren’t exhibited; but there is no fundamental reason why they can’t be. And sometimes they are, bringing occasional gusts of fresh air into the art world with them.  Then there is the occasional artist whose whole career is dedicated to such an ideal, and such gusts, who challenges us to confront heterodox imagery and ideas, every time. Curating such work is exhilarating, I think. Eric’s show, Au-delà du réel?, is one such case. He’s someone for whom the words ‘experimentation’ and ‘art’ are synonyms, and has put together a large and various, deeply personal world for our consideration. I find it very exciting.

Ghosts of Romantic Imagery

 

Hello everyone,

 

Our current show is called Images of Romantic Distress and Consolation. The ‘Images’ part of the title is what’s most important in describing what the artists in the show have tried to accomplish, I think, because the issue of explicitly addressing the Romantic in an artwork is obviously fraught. Why that even is, is quite hard to say, to begin with. In thinking about it, both the show and the issue more generally, I’ve had some thoughts about how imagery and representations connect to the nature of romance (and Romanticism), which I’ll try to formulate in writing. Here goes.

 

Images both are and are not the ‘real thing’; as representations they point toward an understanding of another thing: but also possibly lie about it, by seeming to represent or incarnate a set of qualities, but actually deceiving with respect to them. Postmodernism for instance, as an intellectual ideology, has sometimes attacked the Existentialist notion of ‘authenticity’, re-defining the idea to construct a new meaning for it: which is, that which exhibits its nature as ‘something which is inauthentic, paradoxical, in contradiction with itself’, becomes what is taken to be authentic. Anything which can be regarded as textual, and which tells us that it’s ipso facto lying, is seen as being authentic, in that it succeeds in telling the truth about untruth. It would therefore seem that all visual images in fact accomplish this admirably. Therefore, any image can be considered a true and perfect one, fulfilling the nature of imagery to be simultaneously true and false; because to be persuasive, representations must employ mimetically forceful rhetoric, be they in any style whatsoever. That said it still appears that real life romantic feelings, possessing their usual notoriety, seem to be difficult to represent in visual art. To see them is to see them change: and so it’s quite difficult, even say to photograph a loving facial expression on a person, for example. Metaphor becomes a necessary and capable tool in creating a still image of feeling that reminds us of our own parallel emotions, because of its ability to compress a message, and simplify problems into forms that can be read and understood.

 

In one of his extraordinary letters to his girlfriend Milena Jesenska, Franz Kafka discusses his longing and frustration by arguing for the impossibility of communicating romantic desire in a letter; implying that artistry is powerless to emote, and deliver the feeling itself. He says of writing letters: “It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts…Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold – all else goes beyond Human strength…Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts…The ghost won’t starve, but we will perish.” The sense of isolation and distress are made perfectly clear; he seems to prove that artistry is capable of telling the truth about what may or may not be ‘lies’, and immerse us in strong emotional sensations. Art can therefore tell us what love is, but not give us the experience; point out its absence, but also make us capable of it.

 

In the case of real, empirically tangible objects whose artistic function is to communicate to the viewer some message or meaning about our human romantic predicament, we run into the problem of what constitutes ‘communication’. We automatically ‘get’ some things, but others, maybe never. It would seem that like in other areas, here too, we have to keep trying to represent what would seem to be very difficult to capture. Artists who try are ambitious people.

Art in Recession

 

 

Hello everyone,

 

I’d like to venture a few thoughts on the subject of the art world and its interaction with commercial markets, seeing as how our current show, Team Studio, is concerned with the careers of emerging artists; and how those careers need to progress professionally, as well as artistically to survive.

 

People in the know, like Ben Bernanke (chairman of the Fed) and Warren Buffet (philanthropist and richest man in the world), are warning that the US economy is experiencing more than just a slow-down; it’s feared that a full-blown recession has already hit, or is on the point of touching down, with potentially devastating consequences. As is clear, this affects the price of things even in the meantime, just as it is affected by them. Skyrocketing oil costs or bottoming-out real estate markets influence the total value of all the money in the world, and all commodities whatsoever stand to be reduced in value if a serious recession takes place that damages the global economy.

 

Scarcity, which is the active ingredient in commerce, is inherent to the visual arts, in that plastic art is by definition object-based and therefore a commodity; and even art which is not plastic in nature but which is putatively within the domain of visual arts is affected by the same market (in both the cultural and economic senses) because it derives its validation and context from that sphere of influence. One way or another, even if we attempt to prevent a financial equation from grafting onto an artwork and consequently defining its worth, we ipso facto know that it will have one as soon as it is wanted by someone, anyone.

 

The begging question therefore is: during a recession can the value of art culturally diminish, as well as monetarily? Does it become not as good somehow? There seems to be a force field that surrounds famous and valuable artwork, and shields it, not from criticism, or even hatred, but from devaluation. Condescension and scorn are heaped upon certain works: in extreme cases, the effect is to raise the price and improve the reputation of that work all the more, but usually during a bull market. Bear markets induce global cultural uncertainty, and art not protected by long-standing reputation can become vulnerable to aesthetic reappraisal as well as failing commercial value. Conversely, art can also provide a safe haven for money during times of market uncertainty, but even then, the risks incurred are too great for art to prefer the bear to the bull. And where new art is concerned, unproven internationally and untested at auction, both falling prices as well as disappearing sales could  well be the upshot, and very much hurt the base of the art world pyramid.

 

How much does our qualification of art depend upon the aura bestowed by the market, in fact? When individuals decide or are persuaded that a certain artist is good, and that they should like that artist, is there a sense in which that is the moment when the artist actually becomes good? Or, if not, at least better than he or she would otherwise be seen to be by neutral observers. And even if the question is facetious, and we can be more or less certain that some work is good for objective and perceptible reasons, couldn’t it still be true that even the artist themselves is very likely to shift his or her stance toward the work in question, having seen it validated in this way?

 

The most recent evening auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s were successes, contemporary art is doing well, and maybe it will weather the storm, even come out on top. But when we come to appreciate the fact that reputations that seem solid can collapse (when just one collector unloads the work of a particular artist in bulk for instance), we may come to appreciate a different form of irony than the kind we are used to in the visual arts: tragic irony, in the classical sense. We all have to hope that art knows what it’s doing. Art needs to be a little bit heroic this next while, and hang on to the edge, because it’s a cliffhanger we’re in, and even if the plot seems familiar, we still may not have seen this particular movie, and for better or worse the ending could come as a surprise.

Art School Perspectives

Hello everyone.

As I’ve said, exhibitions at Division Gallery are, among other things, intended to be essays of a kind, speaking to concerns particular to contemporary art and its world at large. One pressing concern I’d like to address with respect to younger artists – emerging artists I’ll call them – is how to develop the quality of their art, and somehow at the same time make enough of a career at it to justify continuing, while gaining some momentum of the kind that will secure a professional future. The most travelled path leading towards a solution to these problems, at least in our society, is art school. We go there both to improve and to prove ourselves. 

But unlike in most other disciplines, where approved bodies of knowledge and skill are the norm, in the Fine Arts (where no such clear standards exist) a more esoteric kind of knowledge prevails; by what exact kind of understanding we gain it can be unclear, at the same time as being pretty much obvious to everyone. Success in the marketplace can come in baffling and infrequent doses, even for those who find popular admiration for their work. Some version of peer review (called ‘critique’ in art school) is therefore essential to young artists, who vet one another’s work and ideas in ways that come very naturally to artists. Quality control is the immediate purpose; mutual influence though, is often the further result. When this influence yields good results in the studio, exciting things can follow in the art world.

Our second show, called Team Studio, opens tonight, May 30th. It has to do with all these questions and some possible attempts at answers; it speaks humourously and elegantly to the issue at hand. We hope you’ll come take a look.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Klein

Director

Introductory post on the Division blog

Hello and welcome, bonjour et bienvenue, to the Galerie Division blog.

This is my first post, and I’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who helped to make our first show, Prismatic Spray, a success. This post is just for starters: the idea for this blog is to showcase the artistic mandate and intellectual stance Division Gallery proposes to have; a flexible, exploratory and challenging program combined with the strong conviction that Montreal is a great art town, and that everything possible to advance it contributes to something positive and vital. No one show at Division Gallery will be able to represent the whole of our position; rather, each exhibition is intended to function as a complex, examined, and finished thought, well expressed, and bounded on each side with other and different statements.    

A word about blogging in English and French. My French writing is in the process of improving, and I intend to try writing in French at some point, once I’m able to; another possibility to be explored is to translate into French what’s first written in English, and that will be attempted too. In the meantime, for those who prefer to read in French, please accept my apology, and be assured that at the gallery itself, we are all able to speak French and are more than happy to do so.

That’s it for now: more to come very soon. Once again, thank you to everyone. We’re extremely happy with the reception we’ve been getting so far. The future of contemporary art in Montreal looks bright from where we’re standing, and we intend to be a part of that future; so stay tuned, and you’ll hear from us soon.  

Sincerely,

Benjamin Klein

Director

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