writings - carlyn yandle

everyday video footage — with a conceptual twist

7/18/2014

Now that we're all carrying around the equivalent of movie cameras and photo-editing studios in our pockets and purses we are each potential blockbuster or documentary filmmakers, iMovie-ing and uploading all of life's activities that have become performative acts.

YouTube boasts 100 hours of video uploaded every minute but like digital photography devalued the actual, tactile photo album, the bombardment of everyday video footage has reduced the essential beauty of the captured moving image. What was once the miracle of the moving image is now a lot of space-hogging files we fail to manage well.

Shooting video is as easy as a screen swipe, but finding the art in what's being shot has created genres of filmmaking that surely has the Spielbergs, Lucases and Coppolas included in the one billion viewers glued to YouTube every month.

I'm addicted to capturing the cute moments of every kid in my life, but with everyone else filming countless hours of other moments of those same kids, I'm fully aware that my shots of kids at dinner, kids playing catch, kids dressing up, kids watching the World Cup, kids rolling out pizza dough, kids acting in skits, and kids with other kids may carry little value or interest in 20 years. More likely, we'll all be using some new interface model by then and all our .MOV and M4v files will be too obsolete to translate. Or iCloud and Google Cloud and all the other cloud-like storage systems will crash in a great grid-locking e-storm and I'll have nothing left to show for all my years of hunchy running around the perimeters of play.

8 Days, 2013, installation at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite. Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery

What will remain is a new way of seeing, understanding and playing with moving images of the everyday. It's why the plastic-bag-in-the-wind scene from American Beauty still sticks in the head. It's why Mark Lewis' real-time videos of landmarks and laundromats resonated with the public when they were screened over the winter at the Vancouver Art Gallery's Offsite (top).

For me, it's a new kind of sketching (see above) that is not made for public viewing but for my own reference. For what remains to be seen. (YouTube vid, above)

Below, some other inspiring videos of the everyday seen with a fresh and critical eye:

Words are not enough to capture the seduction of distraction

6/6/2014

Distracts #1, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

To me, the easiest part about carving out a place in the visual arts world is writing something about it. Yet most of my artist colleagues don't know how I make myself do it on a weekly basis. Easy. It only took 20 years of deadline writing for newspapers.

'Easiest' isn't quite the right word; it's more like 'reliable.' I can rely on the fact that if I sit down at a blank screen, soon words will link into sentences, inspired and connected by images. It's really just a habit at this point. If I don't get the chance to try to make literal sense of the past week, things start to swirl up into a ball of confusion. But once it's out there, it's done and I can move on.

Distracts #2, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

If only my days at my shared studio were as reliable. I wish I could start the morning with the same confidence as I stare at the freshly gesso'd blank canvas, and have the same conversation I get from writing a column (okay, blog). The two sides of my brain do not dance together at the studio. I do not enjoy the small eureka moments of understanding, or any great leaps forward in concept. And unlike weekly writing, I can't see that I'm creating any history of my process/progress.

Distracts #3, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

Some days I feel like I'm just painting myself into corners, or cycling back to where I started months ago. I often need to call in the reinforcements — artist friends — for a studio visit, when I ask, "Am I flat-lining here?" or "Am I a one-trick pony?"

But words work for me. Letters soon coalesce into strands of ideas and at the moment of this writing I see one taking shape as I type, and drop in these images of my latest paintings.

Distracts #4, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

This much I know is true: This is the most distractive time in human history and I live in a neighbourhood that is arguably the nation's capital of everything yoga. As I ride to the studio, I'm generally pre-occupied with this idea of the swelling dedication to personal, meditative practice juxtaposed with the seduction of our screens and the growing realization that our personal identities can be stolen in a click of a button.

Distracts #5, 2014, acrylic on panel, 14"W x 16"H.

I think about how we crave peace of mind and heart but are captivated by the fantastic and unfathomable, packaged in high-def or in 3-D, with same-day shipping, something to Like, Share, Tweet, and post to Instagram/Tumblr/Pinterest.

Some days at the studio I just need to retreat, retrace past meditative practices, like lace-making. Other days I need to represent the fracturing of that focus.

If painting really is a conversation the painter has with the materials, surface, technique and image, I'm seeing that this is talking about mapping out an understanding of the here and now, where words fail.

Distracts #6, 2014, acrylic on panel, 16"W x 20"H.

It's somewhere in the uneasy spaces between the digital and the handmade, the personal craft expression and the art and decor industry.

Put into words, it's a little terrifying to be in unexplored territory with no obvious path ahead.

I'm just bush-wacking, looking for a clearing.

The pretty and the pretty awful make it into Eastside murals

4/11/2014

Urban Crow (detail), by Richard Tetrault

I have this vague, hippie-era-soaked memory of my brother and I hanging with my father as he painted a wall alongside some other artists. Forty years later I suggested to my brother that he swing by my own mural project last summer, reminding him of those times when we were to come see the art in the making.

There's a humble history of mural-making in East Vancouver, but well-known Strathcona-based artist Richard Tetrault has taken it to new heights. Speaking in Vancouver and Richmond this week, his survey of his large-scale, collaborative, very public paintings emphasizes place and history.

His work is about layers: the often conflicting layers of histories of Vancouver's distinct communities and the layers of translucent colour that identify his painting style.

Iconic hydro poles and back lanes, Urban Crow (detail)

The very-Vancouver images of construction cranes, crows, and hydro wires take on symbolic meaning in his murals. But behind the expansive visuals on the sides of buildings or retaining walls is a whole other skill area: working with Eastside communities to create the content that is often contentious but necessary, he says, in moving forward. So, residential schools and the 'bad' Balmoral hotel sign are depicted, often despite some objections by those who are haunted by them, but in a way that acknowledges their impact without further torment.

Then there is the challenge of the logistics of securing funding and handling swing stages and working while exposed to the elements. These are skills that only develop from a lifetime of experience in public mural-making, and are invisible in his slideshow of works that show, say, collaborating members of the Chinese, First Nations, and Japanese community represented in the Radius mural at the Firehall Theatre in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (below).

The Radius mural in progress at the Firehall Theatre.

Some of that background can be seen in the short film (see YouTube clip, below) about the immense Through the Eye of the Raven collaborative mural on the Orwell Hotel.

Tetrault is heavily influenced by his own early-adult years in Mexico, absorbing the social art murals by the likes of the big three — Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros — whose large-scale public artworks were created to speak to a largely illiterate indigenous population.

Siqueiros' Revolutionaries (detail), 1957-65

What makes a good/important contemporary mural remains the subject of great debate, making this public artform fraught with issues.

Is a mural without a message — such as to remember a history of struggle, to give rights or hope to the wronged, to call to action — mere decoration? Is colour, beauty and skill worthy enough of public funding? What are the parameters for officially sanctioning one kind of expression over another? Should the public have input into what is being funded?

One Terrace local shares his views on the Enbridge campaign. Photo by Josh Massey

Unauthorized murals — also known as graffiti — are fleeting but can also pack a punch, as famously seen in Bansky's surreptitiously created scenes.

It can be seen in the work of my cousin in Terrace BC. (name withheld) for his anti-Enbridge art on the public property of the old Skeena Bridge and possibly painted out by now. For the people, by the people.

***
Richard Tetrault's murals can be seen in the flesh with the help of the interactive maps in this self-guided Eastside Mural Tour.

QR button blanket: Epic fail or a larger reading?

3/21/2014

After three months of sewing one donated button after another into a giant QR code, the big moment arrived this week: time to stand back and scan that baby with a reader app, translating this quilt-thing to read, "The devil is in the details."

Except it didn't read. Don't panic!, I thought, then spent the entire next day working with a photo image of the QR Button Blanket, Photoshopping in more buttons and darker buttons and bigger buttons, trying to add the minimum amount of density for the software program to register the pattern and work its magic to produce the punchline. No luck; even a sliver of white in one button cluster puts a wrench in the wholecloth works. I filed this one under the category of Epic Fail, not worth finishing it as intended, framing it in black bias binding. I do not want to create something that is 'still' good; I want the thing to be good, full stop.

Failure demands confronting the why. Why conceive such a laborious, risky project in the first place? Why endure the painstaking process when half-way through it was becoming abundantly clear that this was not going to 'read'?

But there is another power here, and that's tied to the process beyond the product. The achievement may lie in the endurance (in an increasingly A.D.D. world) that is not necessarily attached to the product after all. It may be in seeing it through, without the promise of a sure result. The power may lie in the humble, everyday materials and the community of women who contributed all those bits of plastic saved from the waste stream. (There should really be a global ban on production of billions of plastic buttons. Plant-based plastic, bone, wood, and leather- or fabric-wrapped tin buttons eventually return to the earth.)

But what's really starting to click in for me is the cultural reference of this button-grid design. A decade ago, it might have been viewed as an oddly arranged colour field or an abstracted grid but we're so acclimatized to codes that the pattern begs to be 'read.' The fact that this is irresolvable might be annoying. And that's interesting.

Wavy Gravy, marker on synthetic velvet, 58" x 43"

The possible multiple references could be more engaging than the one answer provided by a QR reader app. There's something to be learned in the discomfort of the open-endedness.

Moments like these, I seek out the artists who have embraced what New York artist Polly Apfelbaum calls the 'tough beauty' of visually exciting works that incorporate everyday materials in surprising ways. Apfelbaum, who calls herself a bad crafter, articulates the process of hard work in this video.

"I work all the time," she says, without a schedule and in a highly experimental way. "You make the work and then you hope for the best."

"It's very important to get your fuck-you back."

I'm going with that.

Some powerful signs at Sochi

2/14/2014

Alex Livesey/Getty Images

The signs, they are a-changing.

But to see them you have to look past the visual bombardment of dead-eyed-Kardashian-object images, pop-up balloon-boob ads, and the opening scenes of violence against women on CSI: Whatever.

The signs are there, at the current Olympics, on the helmet of Calgary skeleton racer Sarah Reid, the fashion-baggy gear of female snowboarders, the bulk of the women's ice hockey team jerseys.

They read: Fierce, driven, focused, fearless.

For me, the Sochi Olympics has been a perfect study in semiotics (the study of signs). They're captivating in their complete contradiction to the prevailing mass-media image of young women, and they point to an emerging, alternative 'system of signification,' as the academics might call it. Calgary-based Sarah Reid, 26, shows it in the haunting helmet she conceived with artist and goalie Jason Bartziokas (Alberta College of Art and Design grad '04).

Team Canada playing Finland at Sochi (Canadian Press photo)

The ice hockey team displays it in their uniforms and their team effort — so rarely seen in the culture of young adult women.

It took some hard lobbying on their part to get here on the ice or in the half-pipe, and it took a lawsuit win to get them the chance to fly through the ski-jumping competitions. (International Olympics Committee members have a history of excluding women, notably because the sport may injure their reproductive organs.)

Germany's Natalie Geisenberger steels herself in luge training at Sochi. (Reuters/Arnd Wiegmann)

US snowboarder Karly Shorr, risking her reproductive organs in the slopestyle qualifiers. (Reuters)

Although they're still banned from competing in a few Nordic Combined events, the women are alternative models to the Victoria's Secret variety for young girls. But we're not there yet. Not when there are only 24 women in the 110-member International Olympic Committee. (More neat stats here.)

I keep these visual signs at hand, to show whenever one of the young girls in my life is confronted with another misogynist music video. See here? See how they run, ski, jump, spiral, play well together, delight in their own abilities?
Visual signs as new modes of thinking.

The most powerful art might be made of garbage

11/22/2013

Carlyn Yandle photo

The astronomical private art-investor feeding frenzy at prestigious auction houses is light years away from art. It's a greedy need for prestige, worlds apart from the hand of Picasso or Andy Warhol and, most recently, Francis Bacon and the other Important Artists who conceived those coveted works.

Art is outside the billions of dollars sloshing around the world's art investors; it's in the streets, provoking those who hold the purse strings and the power. You can see it in humble objects, like the garbage monster that prowled around the anti-pipeline rally last weekend at the end of False Creek, towering over the thick crowd, snapping its messy maw at excited kids. It's not pretty, and it certainly has no retail value, as it's made of the usual stuff that ends up in the Pacific Gyre, but it functions as art has and always will. It provokes us to think differently, to re-consider, step out of our complacency and see the world for what it is and where it is headed or could be. This is the power of the visual object.

The makers (presumably the two operators) of the garbage monster were compelled to express themselves through their creativity and labour, with no profit or prestige motives in mind. The object serves to contest the ways and means and plans of those in power, in this place, at a time when the news broke that Canada is dead last in climate change policy in the developed world. It may be a small gesture, but when combined with other creative forms of expression, can turn the tide.

Carlyn Yandle photo

The prevailing discourse was there in the form of an image-object of an actual SUV receiving a giant lethal injection, during Car-free Day on Commercial Drive this past June. The only motive behind this gesture was a need to comment. The high visual impact is art in its purest form and the makers are indisputably artists. And those artists are probably not getting rich if they're spending much of their creative effort on an expression outside of the system of capitalism.

That pretty much has been the history of artists. Their work may have no cash value, but their value to society is priceless.

Art that has tongues wagging is working

3/15/2013

A few weeks back, one of the local dailies ran a staff photo of a grumpy-looking woman wearing a hand-drawn sign around her neck that read: “Mount Pleasant needs a pool not a poodle on a pole.”

God, I miss the newsroom sometimes. When that kind of photo lands on your desk (so to speak) you do a little happy dance. This is the money shot, the hook into a hot little story, the art that guarantees the front page of a community paper. And the alliteration in the scrawled sentiment doesn’t hurt either.

It's the kind of story that has the community buzzing, the phones ringing, the (e-)letters pouring in. It has, as they say, legs. It promises follow-up stories with new angles, fresh emotions. It fends off the greatest fear for an understaffed newsroom: crickets. (Watch how a CTV news story adds fuel to the fire.)

Successful public art does the same thing. Love it or hate it, it gets people talking, debating, engaging. As I write this the tweets for #MainStPoodle have neared 1,000 since the pooch made the papers. (My December post on the freshly erected poodle is here.)

It's all grist for the mill for those on the media sidelines but now that I'm out from behind the desk and in the rejection-rich realm of art-making, I wonder how the poodle-producer, Montreal artist Gisele Amantea, feels about people griping over the seven-foot-tall porcelain pooch’s $97K price tag. How does any public-art-maker, for that matter, not feel at least a little wounded by the slings and arrows launched against their own creative expression? An opinion piece in a newspaper is tomorrow's fish-wrap (it sounds archaic even as I write it) but public art endures. It could torment the critics for decades; the criticism could torment the artist for life.

New York City artist Dennis Oppenheim’s 1997 public artwork, Device to Root Out Evil installed in Coal Harbour was never intended to be permanent but plenty of Vancouverites squawked that the piece known as the 'upside-down church' was “sacrilegious” or worse: view-hampering. But does an artist of that international stature have all the steely resilience to chalk up the chatter to 'community engagement'?

(Above: photo by Papalars)

I wonder because I felt that pang of rejection as I was photo-documenting the installation of Crossover, the scramble-style four-way crosswalk in Steveston in 2011. My design was an attempt to weave together the history of the Japanese net-makers and the modern-day marine flavour of this corner of the Lower Mainland using a simple, enduring motif. I was not prepared for the few individuals who showed up while I was snapping photos, griping at anyone within earshot that this was a colosal waste of taxpayers' dollars, not to mention a safety hazard. (I'm not so resilient that I could resist following up on the hazard part and I'm relieved to learn it's a safety improvement.)

The other day an artist friend who had to return to the salaried workplace said she never realized how much rejection she had to deal with as a full-time working artist. I'm starting to see that this business ain't for sissies.

Out of analysis and into the mystic

2/8/2013

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.