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Big ideas behind chit-chat format

2/21/2013

As much as I would like to believe I have enough focus to while away an evening at an art or design lecture, my attention span is... this keyboard is filthy. What was I saying?

Our hyper-accelerated culture calls for accelerated information delivery systems. We've reached the PechaKucha period: lectures delivered as 20 slides, 20 seconds each, with breaks that involve a cash bar.

It's not exactly new; this month marks the 10th anniversary of the very first PechaKucha — Japanese for chit-chat." (Here’s a fun way to remember how to pronounce it.)

Networking events and guest lectures never looked so dry and dull since I went to my first PechaKucha event. For the uninitiated, PechaKucha 20x20 is a simple presentation format dreamed up by a couple of architects living in Tokyo. The presenter speaks, the images roll, and before you know it it's all wrapped up. Next! If the content of each presenter isn’t enough to hold you for six minutes and 40 seconds, there’s usually plenty of entertainment watching that presenter getting the bum’s rush from the slides automatically moving forward. The pace and the party atmosphere keeps things rolling along nicely. No wonder PechaKucha has gone global.

Gary Cheng presents his ever-changing micro-apartment in under five minutes, in Tokyo. (from pechakucha.org)

For artists, getting familiar with the format is becoming sort of essential as PechaKucha is likely to continue to take over the graphically banal PowerPoint presentations where most times the presenter just reads what they've typed on the screen and the audience feels like putting a gun to their collective head. Or maybe that’s just me.

Sharing thoughts about the creative process, past projects and future explorations can be tough-going, I've discovered as I try to splice all my tangential thoughts together for an in-class PechaKucha next week. I’ve been scouring the official website for some good examples. One favourite is Gary Cheng’s insight into his incredible transformer Hong Kong apartment. If anything, he reminds me to have a little fun with the format.

Dave Olson at a 2011 PechaKucha event at the Vogue. Photo by Jonathan Hanley

Architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham held their first PechaKucha Night in February, 2003. Their firm still organizes and supports the global PechaKucha Night network as well as the PechaKucha Night Tokyo.

The winning format for these easily distracted times can be seeing locally next week, when Vancouver's Vogue Theatre hosts a special PechaKucha night on Feb. 28, with all presenters speaking to the topic, "Women Transforming Cities."

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Power struggles embedded in newspaper photos

2/15/2013

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Venerable city newspaper reporter John Mackie has an eye for old things Vancouver. He was intrinsic in the broad-daylighting of Fred Herzog’s mid-century images, and more recently he has given deserved public exposure to a visual goldmine of prints by Vancouver Sun and Province photographers, some dead, some still on the job.

Just as Mackie’s passion for historical images of the momentous and the everyday led to a major Vancouver Art Gallery show for Herzog in 2007, it’s also been the impetus for a new exhibit of a 500-image sample of the newspaper photos at Satellite Gallery in the old A&B Sound building on Seymour.

But here it’s not just about the images — although there are some gems here, including a shot of the Duke of Edinburgh having a chin-wag with top Nazi Joseph Goebbels — but the ratty prints themselves. Most are yellowed with age or by hasty hand-developing in the darkroom under deadline duress. Some of the black-and-whites are slashed by red crop marks. Some subjects are halo'd in hand-drawn black felt pen to “knock out” the background, or have sizes scrawled in the margins in standard-issue blue grease pencil.

Anyone who has worked in newspapers before it all went digital knows that these are also the markings of daily power struggles between photographers and page editors or graphic artists, or, in the case of community weeklies where I spent my career, photographers and the reporters who were responsible for laying out their own sections of the paper.

Ian Lindsay's 1976 image of Andy Warhol shows crop marks that instruct the staff photographer's composition be reduced to a head shot. The decision eliminates the original image area that captured the rich visual details of the awkward artist's natty outfit and clasped gnarled hands.

From the behind-the-scenes view of newspapers, the 500 images at the News! show are a history of the heated arguments with staff photographers over creative control and news judgment. They speak of the daily deadline battles, some quietly awkward, others spectacular, that kept a day at the office interesting.

Today that battlefield is all but obscured, as the writers and the shooters are often the same person, or they’re not in the same building. Or country. Or time.

In an age where we’re bombarded by fleeting, non-material images, these little contested objects are mighty weighty indeed.

The Presentation House Gallery-hosted exhibit continues to March 30 at 560 Seymour. John Mackie and Vancouver Sun librarian Kate Bird talk on the topic, “The Accidental Archive” this Saturday at 3 p.m.

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Out of analysis and into the mystic

2/8/2013

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I do so love a shit-disturber, whether it’s fearless Middle-East reporter/author Robert Fisk ripping apart mainstream media last Saturday night downtown or the venerable art critic Jan Verwoert at UBC Wednesday night, talking about “irreconcilable ape-shittedness.”

Robert Fisk

An estimated 1,100 people crowded into St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church to hear Fisk call it as he sees it when it comes to how the West views — and intrudes — on Middle East conflict. Reporting what authority spokesthingies are saying is really no reporting at all, he says. The task at hand is to be witness to the atrocities, whether that’s a busload of Israeli children blown up by a suicide bomber, or Palestinians’ entire communities decimated by Israeli missiles.
Fisk gets plenty of heat for bearing witness, for allowing readers to be witness to the unfathomable, without including the other side of the story, without complying with the required format of including official reaction.

Jan Verwoert

Then on Wednesday night at UBC, at another packed lecture hall, the Berlin art critic/writer Verwoert also argued against prevailing constructs but in the case of visual art it’s the great, grinding academic/analytical machine that surrounds art production.

The rational, scientific view has partially failed us, Verwoert told the audience. The real power is not in representation but in the artist’s success in channeling the essence of the work. The artist is at the existential threshold between spaces, wiring some of those energies together, creating an energy circuit that holds an unquantifiable power.

He gives the example of Gustav Corbet’s The Painter's Studio (1855, above), in which the artist is at work on the threshold between the poor population he relates to, and his privileged patrons who provide his livelihood. The scene raises more questions than answers, with the only conclusion being that the discomfort of those two spaces in one painting creates enduring energy.

“Bearing witness goes beyond making meaning,” he says in his essay, You Make Me Feel Mighty Real. “It’s an avowal of that which may be inexpressible or even impossible to share when what one feels is also felt by the other. Beyond meaning lies feeling. And feeling someone feel what you feel makes all the difference.”

It’s a risky business, thumbing one’s nose at the rational or economic power forces that shape the prevailing structures, or refusing to take a side in a binary view of the world. But assuming the position of witness carries the possibility of new understandings, new discourse, whether the witnessing is expressed in the written word or visually.

This power of the irresolvable, the inconclusive non-statement can be seen in this work (left) by graffiti legend Banksy: Why does the graffiti punk appear to be looking for instruction from a banal global giant? Is Bansky with the anarchist or against him? The power in this work comes from the position of the artist, at the counter between spaces that each contain their own energy, acting as a transference agent, neither healer nor romantic transgressor.

That same irresolvable power is there in this image of a contemporary silkscreen artwork from an unknown Havana artist (right), Cuba PostCastro, circa 2008. The energy lies in the fact that it’s unclear whether the work is an assurance or a warning. The power is in both the formal elements — the geometry, colour and media that composes the image — as well as the history of political art posters, and the artist as witness, at the counter between political and art spaces. It is a powerful art object with no conclusion, no punchline.

At the very least, the irresolvable is awkward. At most, mystical or even magical.

Fisk and Verwoert would probably agree that if everyone’s slightly uncomfortable in the unknowing, you’re probably onto something.

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You can't keep a good maker down

2/1/2013

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My mother might remember this: as a kid, I once declared that I could handle a stint in jail, because I would spend the time dressing up the place by making decorations out of any old bits and pieces.
Not a huge leap, as making something out of nothing was already my preferred activity within my own four walls, for hours at a time.

I scored stuff around the house and started fabricating, often without too much of a game plan. I recall a lot of painted papier-mache figurines made of plastic dishwashing liquid bottles, sock puppets from what may or may not have been orphan socks. This is around the first time I heard 'crepe' refer to fabric, and not just to 'paper', as in, "That was my good black crepe!"

Arntzen's models are a work of art themselves. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

I was — and still am — an opportunistic maker. I am inspired by whatever materials I come across, fabricating a lot of experiments, literally playing with ideas. In my world, that's not unusual. The other day a friend reflexively picked plastic bits from the alley while we walked. Another friend I met for coffee smiled in triumph as she held up a small battered bit of found metal, an inevitable component of a future encaustic painting.

Makers might dream of spacious studios or top-quality materials and tools to develop their concepts through doing, but a lack of all that won't keep the making from happening. In fact, restricted space and resources can lead to innovation, necessity being the mother of invention and all that.

I was reminded of this during the Eastside Culture Crawl back in November, while visiting Arnt Arntzen's steampunky workshop in Strathcona, a must-see stop for any passionate maker. Just a few weeks earlier, Arnt and artist-spouse Valerie Arntzen had just returned from six months in a small pied-a-terre in Amsterdam's city centre, so surely he wouldn't have a lot of new examples of his signature reclaimed-wood and metal furniture to show.

Yet there it was: a collection of what this famously humble industrial designer calls models for future furniture, created out of whatever he found around the city and a Leatherman pocket-sized multi-tool. They may have been modest macquettes to him, but to me they are exquisite, concrete proof that you can't keep a good maker down. Six months away from his workshop may have been hard for this hard-worker but the restriction also pushed him in another new direction, and the writing was on the walls: paintings that combine his passion for industrial design with pattern and abstraction.

Random sample of innovation with scant art materials and no tools but a lot of heart:

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Big ideas behind chit-chat format

Power struggles embedded in newspaper photos

Out of analysis and into the mystic

You can't keep a good maker down

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