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Compelling art all part of the protest

11/28/2014

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The war in the woods is heating up again. Except it's not the people against forestry giants MacMillan-Bloedel or Fletcher Challenge; on this day it's Kinder Morgan. 
PictureYagis Eating an Oil Tanker by Ian Reid Nusi. (Photo by Christopher Glawe)
Oil-pipeline officials are doing their best to try to shape protestors at Burnaby Mountain these past weeks as a small group of environmentalist wackos. Meanwhile, the movement is growing. And so is the art.

Marshall McLuhan said, "Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it." And that's what I think about when I see this work by Ian Reid Nusi. Yup, that would be an oil tanker in that sea monster's mouth, carved in response to the prospect of the Northern Gateway oil pipeline moving tar sands diluted bitumen to the coast and onto tankers. (Artist interview clip below)

Environmental protests have shaped this province, and some important artworks have been a part of that.
PictureWallace's CP IV, 1993-95, 178 x 300 cm (from Canadian Art magazine)
It's in Ian Wallace's large-scale photo collage murals (reconfirmed as important works five years later in Canadian Art magazine).

His plywood patterns interrupt the protest images from the summer of 1993, the height of the fight to save Clayoquot Sound, the largest unlogged temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island. About 800 protestors were arrested and carted away, while Wallace created a whole new way of seeing art, protest and the role and position of the visual artist.

Wallace's artworks endure, and also serve as a reminder to those who view them in galleries that what multinational corporation spin-doctors would like to refer to as a green-y lunatic fringe is actually a large and diverse population of British Columbians who are willing to inconvenience themselves for the sake of protecting the oceans or the last of the great rainforests.
PictureHeadwaters of the Stein, B.C., August 1988 (from tonionley.com)
Toni Onley has been in there too. As part of the large protest to protect the Stein Valley from logging, he organized a plan to fly in well-established artists to the vital watershed area to paint their impressions, with sales going to help the campaign to save it from a plan for the Mitsubishi company to log the old growth for disposable chopsticks. 

Onley, who died in 2004, recalled painting a watercolour in support of a Stein cultural centre while “Chief Perry Redon, the chairman of the Lilloet Tribal Council... beat his drum and sang to the four quarters. I was inspired and soon we had a watercolour for the Stein poster….”

PictureKen Wu photo by T.J. Watt (tjwatt.com)
Many paintings of the beauty of the protested areas of the Stein, the Carmanah Valley, Clayoquot Sound helped fund the continuing protest, and today form important collections and are captured in coffee table books like Carmanah: Artistic Visions of an Ancient Rainforest. 

But there's nothing like a compelling photograph to bring the stark reality of the protest home.

T.J. Watt's photo of Ken Wu, the Ancient Forest Alliance’s executive director, sits atop a massive red cedar stump in the Upper Walbran Valley on Vancouver Island. The photo earns its place as an important visual of the struggle to retain a small portion of the natural environment, but its place is also determined by this image that is forceful in its subject of scale and a unique moment in time.

PictureShawn Hunt's Untitled, 2013
The Kinder Morgan survey crew has to be out of Burnaby Mountain in a few days, but the protests against the transport of a dirty, risky diluted bitumen in lieu of real government investment in clean energy sources has just begun. 

It's there on the faces of the growing protestors, and in the art that's growing along with it. And sometimes, as in this surrealist portrait by Shawn Hunt, it's in the faces in the art.

This is the history of environmental struggle in this corner of the world, and part of the history of art, too.

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The Gallery is not a bank so why does it keep banking hours?

11/21/2014

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Here's a plan: Meet up with a friend after work downtown for a drink, then go check out the latest exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery. That works just fine — if your workday ends at 3 p.m.
Picture
Stupid us, we figured that at least we'd get a quick look at the Emily Carr/Landon Mackenzie show when we arrived at the VAG entrance at 4:55 p.m. Not so much; we were turned away at the door.

"This place is dead," said my artist buddy, looking around the empty Robson plaza.
It was a lovely, crisp late afternoon, but except for a couple of skateboarders riding the ice-less rink, the place looked like it had just been evacuated.

The city's premiere art gallery is open 10 a.m. to just 5 p.m. (Tuesdays it's 'til 9 p.m.). The VAG is not a bank, so why does it keep banker's hours? Heck, even bank hours are longer.

These are hours that suit the retired and field-tripping kids. Those who work and live in the downtown area, or like to head down to dine or socialize after work are pretty much out of luck if they hope to also take in some art.

And herein lies my beef.  

In Paris, you can have your boeuf bourguignon then head for a post-dinner look-see at that contemporary art gallery mecca, the Pompidou, where they won't kick you out until 9 p.m. any night of the week. Even at the stodgy Louvre you won't get the boot until 6,  or, if it's a Wednesday or Friday, you could linger until 10. In Berlin, the top-rated C/O Gallery is open until 8 p.m. every night. Yes, many major galleries in major cities close at the end of the normal working day, but that's no reason to follow suit. 

It's like the dead-mall phenomenon. If you want to attract shoppers you need an anchor tenant, some major destination draw. Then the little guys open up and soon you have yourself a busy little retail centre again.

If the VAG adjusted its viewing times to, say, noon - 8 p.m., the grilled-cheese sandwich truck and the Peruvian toque kiosk might stick around. Soon a couple of buskers would follow, and before long you might actually have a little evening vibe going on in that plaza, different from the usual nine-to-five routine. My little group would rendezvous at a sushi joint, then duck into the VAG, marvel at the exquisite, rarely seen hand-embroidery in The Forbidden City: Inside the Court of China's Emperors, maybe even wander by the gift shop while I'm at it. Ka-ching!

The VAG board is hell-bent on raising funds for a brand new building further east, when it's currently smack dab in the middle of a major plaza which is about to be anchored by a big-name U.S. retailer making its Vancouver debut next door.

Just saying.










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Is Instagram a godsend for artists, a social drug, or worse?

11/14/2014

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I've been giving Instagram a lot of thought. And I've concluded that I'm exhausted.
Picture(Photo by Carlyn Yandle)
I realize that Instagam can turn a small-town lady with a crafty idea into an international business success story, but that's quickly eclipsed by thoughts of more insidious, multinational business antics: top-level consumer marketers who court those Grammars' "Insta-fluence": Nike, Holiday Inn, Burberry. (More at this New York Times article.)

I think about how encouraging it is to have people following you in your creative endeavours, but then I think about the shared similarities among the top social-media savvy "micro-celebrities", our exploding narcissistic culture and the easy-pickins' exploitation for big-brand profit and almost-free fame.

I realize that Instagram can open a door for artists to the big wide sharing world and that by refusing to open that door runs the risk of a lifetime of professional obscurity. Indeed, "Instagram is custom made for the art world," says New York Observer opinion-writer/billionaire financier/art collector Adam Lindemann. But he then adds: "You get a quick flash of an image with virtually no text or explanation. There’s no need to read. It’s perfect for people with zero attention span, zero education and zero interest in learning about anything—perfect, in other words, for the art collectors of today. You could go so far as to say that the successful art of this current generation must be Instagramable to succeed, and if it doesn’t look good on Instagram, it ain’t working in this instant-gratification art world: goldfish have longer attention spans than ‘grammers."

Picture(Photo by Ariel Zambelich/WIRED)
I  realize that it's free and with the help of such apps as Latergram, it's possible to keep the phone-pecking at a daily minimum, but I can't help thinking about these guys: the Instagram and Facebook engineers who recently moved all Instagram photos to Facebook's data centre, without any users the wiser, as reported by Wired. 

I realize that this is a wee worried whisper in the hell-yeah storm of 200 million mostly female, mostly under-35 Instagrammers.  And I realize that I may be overthinking the whole thing. I could be expanding my visual horizons, connecting with artists around the world, but instead I'm fixated on what becomes of the millions of bits of personal information being sucked into that data centre in Forest City, North Carolina (as suggested in the Wired article) every day, and how that data has been used and how it will be, soon enough.

PictureA slideshow still from How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet (wired.com)
Last year the FBI and the National Security Agency were handed over the ability to suck up people's photos, videos, emails and documents, after the largest businesses online allowed the agencies access to their servers. According to a ground-shaking Washington Post article last year, "The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden."

I think about Instagram and I think about what's monitored, what's censored (no pubes!), what's the next app to eclipse Instagram's success (Snapchat or Bolt?).  I think about how all these social media apps contribute to the time-sucking attention to that little gadget that is now as much a part of the restaurant table as the cutlery and that has turned a busload of riders into something resembling group prayer. I think about how Rogers is a dealer, getting rich on its users' increasing dependency on data, more data.

Am I overthinking Instagram and the rest of the global social re-wiring? Yes, but I might not be thinking about it enough either.

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flying that doily flag at upcoming PechaKucha

11/7/2014

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In the next month you're likely going to end up stuck at some fatuous seasonal gathering, wondering how soon you can bolt without appearing rude so you can go home and change into your antisocial cozy pants.

This is why I like PechaKuchas, lectures delivered in 20 slides that each flash by in 20 seconds. (Next!)
PictureData map by Attila Bujdoso, past organizer of a Pecha Kucha night in Budapest. (bujatt.com)
They're fast-paced, a little risky, guaranteed to vibrate the ol' grey matter and bring on some laughs (vital during these dank days).  You don't feel like a knob if you go by yourself or arrive in your day uniform — whatever that is. In short, except for the alcohol and snacks, PechaKuchas are basically the opposite of most social events.

The participatory part isn't for everyone, but when I saw the call to artists to participate at the Terry Fox Theatre in Port Coquitlam on Nov. 21, I decided to take up the challenge.

Picture
I'm bent on facing my fears these days and besides, I had a topic in mind that might answer one frequently asked question I get about my work: What's the deal with the doilies? (Or the more polite: Are you still working with doilies?)

This isn't my first PechaKucha — the onomatopoetic name for Japanese chit-chat — but I'm a serious neophyte, and that's okay.

The beauty of PKNs (PechaKucha nights) is that it's all okay, which likely explains why they've taken off around the world, in coffee houses and auditoriums, plazas and living rooms, with wide-ranging topics from biology to political movements, delivered by everyone from little kids to known political dissidents. 

My little drop in the PKN bucket addresses a crafty little topic with some tangles but it forces me to do a little more than just shrug and mumble something apologetic. 

It could be of particular interest to no one else but me, but my approach is: fly this freak flag; it will all be over in six and a half minutes.

PictureScreen shot of the browse window at pechakucha.org
   

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    Cross-posted at
    carlynyandle.substack.com

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