Category: Expression

Art trumps ads by just a whisper

11/1/2013

They say if you want someone's attention, whisper. Or maybe that was just a line from a Whisper pantyhose commercial back in the '70s.

Whispering to get attention isn't easy in an image-packed urban landscape where slick marketing messages infiltrate our entire field of vision, from pop-up ads on our screens to the clutter of billboards.

There's so much of it that we subconsciously absorb, dismiss then ignore each image as we move through the visual bombardment. And we wonder why we're mentally exhausted at the end of the day.

That's what makes the experience of public artwork in the city landscape so compelling. No call to buy or to back a product or political organization or private enterprise. With no aspirational words (Believe! Passion! Simplify!) or branded images, logos, phrases or text of any kind to cue our automatic-piloted brain to overlook the visual image, a slight confusion sets in. Whoa. What the hell is that?

First comes the double-take, then out comes the smart-phone camera. The proof of the attention-grabbing power of commercial-free artwork on the city environment can be measured by the number of similar google images. You'd be hard pressed to find that Telus panda ad on a Flicker photo stream, but you'll run across multiple images of a single public artwork, like this giant macrame-esque installation created by Jasminka Miletic-Prelovac, at the only tall building (for now) at Main and Broadway. Or Edward Burtynsky's images on Pattison billboards (spotted along West 4th Avenue, below).

These message-free images that appropriate buildings and billboards are enough to compel viewers to investigate further. Turns out Miletic-Prelovac's work was this year's commission to highlight the livable laneways movement. And Burtynsky's images are from his latest book and new documentary, Watermark.

No logos. No brands. No text. These are whispers that can create a small roar.

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when dress-up becomes an artform

10/18/2013

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Thank god for The Walking Dead. It is the one force that has the power to kill off the overpopulation of pink princesses.

All that Pepto-Bismol-hued froth and glitter kicks in my gag reflex but I'm no censor; I've indulged in the princess fantasy of those little girls (and, shockingly, some grown women) for too many years to mention. But there is hope. Pink fatigue appears to have set in this year, at least for Halloween, due, no doubt, to the craze for the undead.

Next battle: the pink aisle.

Princesses and stupid Sexy costumes (popular YouTube clip at the end of this rant) are a waste of a great fantasy opportunity — and an art opportunity.

American photographer Cindy Sherman's long and rich career dedicated to using her body as a blank canvas on which to apply various female personas, makes her an artist of an ever-changing body-sculpture, earning her an important position in conceptual art, performance art, and gender studies.

There's a lot of concept to be mined when altering one's appearance, whether for art or undercover information. Former New York Times restaurant reviewer Ruth Reichl, who donned disguises to ensure she would be treated as a regular restaurant patron, discovered that her different range of personas garnered different reaction from the wait staff. That body effect became equally as interesting as her reviews, and even more so to many of her readers.

Buenos Aires photographer Irena Werning explores the persona of the past, recreating photos of subjects using their own childhood images. She not only recreates the pose and garments, but goes to great lengths to mimic the backdrops and particular photo quality of the original image. Werning insists she has no arching concept in mind in her two-part series, but the effect is there in black and white or colour: a riveting time-based visual study in changes in body and persona.

Above: Christoph 1990 and 2011, Berlin Wall.

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Power of art is as plain as Putin's drag face

10/4/2013

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Whenever I'm hit with another CBC countdown promo of its exclusive Canadian coverage of the Winter Olympics in Sochi that viral image of Putin in drag makeup pops into my head.

That one cheeky act packs a political wallop and reminds me that while the pen is mightier than the sword, there's the same power in the paintbrush. And Photoshop.

That image (which I'm still searching for in the form of a legal-fundraising T-shirt) has me dreaming of an Olympics that has athletes wearing rainbow scarves on the podium. More likely it will be the very real nightmare of the military dragging away brave individuals in the stands and the streets who are demanding justice in the face of a homophobic president and its national political policy of hate.

A taste of things to come was most recently seen when Russian artist Konstantin Altunin fled to Paris to seek asylum after his painting of Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in lingerie was seized along with three other paintings in his August show. The crime is unclear. It may be promoting homosexuality to minors. Or hooliganism, which sounds funny but landed the members of Pussy Riot with two years' hard time for performing a "punk prayer" in Moscow's main Orthodox cathedral last year after Putin was reinstated as president.

So 'performance', even if it's a sloppy dance in homemade hoods, is mightier than the sword. The heavy hand of Putin's policies may be winning the battle — Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova ended her nine-day hunger strike last week to protest working conditions in the women's prison, to no avail, apparently — but the war for social justice is just beginning.

It's unclear whether these unlikely political terrorists (the three convicted seen here pose with their verdict) see it that way.

Taking on the U.S. President or his policies through art has none of that threat of individual freedom of expression. True, there may be a sort of White House Down going on there at the moment, in the form of a government shutdown over a glacial move toward universal health care, but you don't go to jail for performing or painting or Photoshopping your president in a political artwork.

You can march on Washington, carrying your homemade sign depicting your president's head on a Pez dispenser spouting one Lie after another, or you can even tattoo his face on the sole of your foot so you can stomp on his image with every step (below) but you can't mess with individuals. And in these parts that includes private companies, as we learned in viewing The Corporation (written by Vancouver's own Joel Bakan, UBC law professor).

You want a taste of the kind of trouble you can bring upon yourself via the paintbrush or Photoshop or performance, take on some of those individual-companies. You might not land in the gulag but you may find yourself paying through the pocketbook in legal defence fees for violating their 'individual' rights.

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From a five-year-old's paintbrush to my soul

9/20/2013

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What movie first rocked your world?, someone asked during a recent dinner with friends. Easy: 2001: A Space Odyssey, said one. Looking for Mr. Goodbar, said another, clearly remembering her fear.

Mine was The Wizard of Oz. Never mind the munchkins and the flying monkeys; I was captivated by the black-and-white horror of the dustbowl twister, the gleaming-gold yellow brick road, the brilliant glassy cluster on the horizon that was the first glimpse of Emerald City.

So when my nearly-six nephew, also a bit of an obsessive Wizard of Oz movie fan, showed me his latest paintings, all I could think of is: I feel you.

I look at the thick column of furious grey strokes going in all directions and immediately zone into his own fearful recollections of that part in the movie as he attacked the paper. That ability to connect the intensity of feeling by the maker to the viewer is the basis of successful art. Wow, I said. I can really feel that.

I was thinking how great it would be to feel the twister myself, using ink on hand-pressed paper and maybe actual dust, while he trotted back to the kitchen and retrieved Yellow Brick Road. The field was filled entirely with almost mechanical vertical strokes in different shades of orange, yellow and gold, with intersecting strokes to form a grid that ran off the paper, suggesting an endlessness.

Wow, I said again, thinking already how it might look actual road-size, using rollers on stretched canvas.

Back he went, returning with Emerald City, and by then I knew this kid was really onto something. Unlike his drawings, which are these days more narratives involving figures and recalled landscapes, or — my current favourite: a bird's eye view of a baseball game — this series was expressed feeling-first. Not so much on telling the story but recalling the feeling, through colour and stroke.

Kids have so much to tell us about what not to do when staring at a blank canvas. Maybe not so much with the analysis, the second-guessing, the pre-planning, the systemization.

Just attack. Jump right in. Look at each stroke as it's going down and do not bother yourself with committing to spending more than a few minutes on it. You may not feel the urge to let a puppet take over the paintbrush or let your inner Scurvy Pirate out for a song but it's good to wrap it all up in play. Like another friend, a modest but gifted artist likes to say, "I'm just playing."

My nephew's paintings remind me not to be so precious about the results. It's about the making, not the amassing. Only the adults care about keeping them.

I can see some auntie-nephew collaborations down the yellow brick road.

American illustrator and graphic artist Mica Angela Hendricks writes about the world that opened up for her with she began collaborating with her four-year-old.

Her blog updates her creative process that is challenged by her daughter with her own ideas.

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You can't keep a good artist down

6/21/2013

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You might have heard the hammering this week of the final nail in the coffin of a well-known cartoonist's career with the Province newspaper. After more than 30 years, Bob Krieger joined the legions of other Vancouver Sun and Province reporters who took the buyout. Jumped before they were pushed, basically.

This is all about loss. And the city's two-paid-dailies-in-one-company knows about losses. You can almost hear the flushing sound of the whole print industry swirling out of sight. (More here.)

Krieger earned his full-time union salary by his deft drawing hand, his keen wit and his honed sense of social justice. His signature squat, cross-hatched caricatures that graced the editorial pages four days a week boosted the Province brand since he was first hired on in 1981. The sweetly scorching one-panel works graced many a staffroom fridge and coffeeshop corkboard. Gone viral, old-timey style.

But Krieger's departure is less about company losses and more about what he sees as newspaper politics. He calls 'em as he sees 'em but increasingly his ideas became just... wrong in the judgment of his bosses. While it's understandable that hemorraging newspaper revenues might have a chilling effect on editorial, hacking away at a healthy dose of opinion on the opinion page is a sure-fire way to lose readers. There might be a lot of industry stats that could counter that claim, but anecdotal evidence shows that when Krieger's art was eventually moved from the Editorial page to Sports, those of us who don't speak Sportuguese stopped seeking him out. One less drawer, one less draw to the paper.

There seems to be a major logic gap here. If the publisher really is all about re-focusing toward a web-based 'paper' (read the leaked memo to staff here) then a hot one-shot original cartoon image created by a local artist carries hefty potential for page hits by local readers, whose attention local advertisers are trying to capture. If we are to assume that this is a pretty basic strategy for building readership and advertising for a regional... uh, reading product, then some other agenda is behind showing the door to this editorial artist.

Artistic expression isn't tied to the promise of wealth — this insanely pricey city's strong arts community is proof of that — but the suppression of expression can be a killer. Something died at the Province when Krieger left last week. And it's starting to stink.

Above: Some of Krieger's favourites, used by permission.

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Forward>>

Art trumps ads by just a whisper

when dress-up becomes an artform

Power of art is as plain as Putin's drag face

From a five-year-old's paintbrush to my soul

You can't keep a good artist down

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