TYPOLOGY

Author: Shani K Parsons

  • 100 years ago this week: A great-grandfather is born and Futurism takes Europe by storm


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    We celebrated the 100th birthday of a family member this past weekend, a rare and momentous occasion indeed. What stunning change he has seen, having lived through the past century’s exponential social and technological growth. In the days since, we’ve been wondering about the world into which he was born so long ago. A new century was just hitting its stride, and among many other international developments, the year 1912 proved to be a pivotal moment in the world of art when the first exhibitions of Italian Futurist paintings were held in Paris and London.

    It was then that the painters Balla, Boccioni, Carrá, Russolo, and Severini made their now famous declarations against commercialism, academicism, and traditionalism: “For we are young and our art is violently revolutionary.” Vaunting new pictorial laws which would “deliver painting from the uncertainty in which it lingers” the Futurists boldly equated art with sensation, simultaneity, and discontinuity through a rendering of the invisible rhythms and forces between all things. In employing such “physical transcendentalism”, the painter—and by extension, the viewer—could become a full participant in the chaos and clash of contemporary life at the height of the 20th century Zeitgeist.

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  • Places + Things according to Jaime Hogge


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    It’s a bright and sunny day here in Toronto, but we can’t stop looking at Jaime Hogge’s image of a roiling, seething Lake Ontario. One can almost feel the dramatic sweep of brushstrokes over canvas, except that this is a contemporary photograph, not an 18th century oil painting. Hogge, driving by the lakeshore last spring on his way to a shoot, felt compelled to pull over and capture this image during a massive windstorm which ultimately killed one and left 135,000 without power. It is a side of Lake Ontario rarely seen.

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  • David Shrigley does sculpture, and it’s macabre as hell


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    David Shrigley is best known for his sardonic, absurdist or just plain weird drawings, often compiled into volumes with titles such as Ants Have Sex in Your Beer and Drawings Done on the Phone Whilst Talking to an Idiot. However his new show at the Hayward Gallery in London is making waves for its unsettling sculptures. Bringing together work from as early as 2001, the exhibition features Shrigley’s darkly funny (or disturbingly demented, depending on your appetite for the macabre) take on taxidermy.

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  • Dennis Wojtkiewicz: Even fruit can be mysterious and sublime (no pun intended)


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    Stunning large-scale oil paintings in which fruit assumes a mystical quality. Citrus has never looked better.

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  • “The Tie-Break” pt 2: Tibi Tibi Neuspiel + Geoffrey Pugen at Neubacher Shor Contemporary


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    The Ministry of Artistic Affairs hosted its first event of the season last Wednesday evening at the capacious Neubacher Shor Contemporary. Currently on view in the main gallery is new work by the collaborative duo Tibi Tibi Neuspiel and Geoffrey Pugen, made in the aftermath of their gripping Nuit Blanche performance, The Tie-Break. Conceived as a reenactment of what ESPN once called “the most riveting episode in the sport’s history”, Neuspiel and Pugen set out not only to memorize and execute the legendary fourth set tie-break from the 1980 Wimbledon Finals between Björn Borg and John McEnroe, but to do it over and over again, all night long. As anyone who was there that frigid evening last October can attest, their composure and sheer endurance in the face of blistering winds and a few too many drunken hecklers further electrified the atmosphere of tension and suspense, despite the audience’s assumed knowledge of the match’s outcome.

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  • You might want The Thing right now: Dave Eggers, Shannon Ebner, Mike Mills and David Shrigley


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    By our calculations, The Thing Quarterly launched a full four years ago, with a hand-wringing window shade bearing silkscreened text by Miranda July. Each issue of The Thing, conceived as an object-based periodical, is the brainchild (or red-headed stepchild, depending on your aesthetic inclinations) of a different invited artist, writer, musician, or filmmaker, including the likes of Trisha Donnelly, Jonathan Lethem, Doo.Ri, and James Franco. Charged with the task of marrying a useful object with text, contributors have created, among other things, a bamboo cutting board with text seared into its surface (“Crying Instructions” by Starlee Kline), and a hefty rubber doorstop bearing a letter to Billie Jean King written by the artist’s much younger self (untitled, by Anne Walsh). The editors, Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan, are visual artists themselves, and the most interesting of the things they have produced walk an elegant or provocative line between literature, fine art, and functional object.

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  • IMHO: Are not Hirst’s spots merely Rorschach inkblots made by robots?

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    Perhaps it’s who we follow, but our news feed over much of the past week seems to have been Occupied by all things Damien. (Okay there were some bits on SOPA and the Bushwick gallery scene in there as well, but you get the point.) Aside from the sheer bonanza of articles employing spot-related puns in their titles, Gagosian’s worldwide exhibition of Hirst’s paintings has yielded such a polarized response from artists and critics that each new review seems to be a reaction not only to the paintings themselves, but also to the many reviews that have come before. It has made for some unexpectedly fascinating psychological reading, despite our best efforts at studiously avoiding the whole throwdown.

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  • The medium is the money: Hennessey on Hirst, Occupy George, Mark Wagner, and Gary Taxali


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    In the wake of Hennessey Youngman’s hilarious and pointed YouTube critique of Damien Hirst (linked below) in which Hirst gets skewered for: a) perpretrating “a perfect storm of banality”, b) oozing an unprecedented level of “Iroc-Z Axe Body Spray douchery” and  c) yes, using money as his medium, it seems an opportune moment to take a look at some other recent money-based projects as an interesting counterpoint to the art of excess.

    Just yesterday, Hyperallergic profiled Occupy George, an online initiative in which infographics visualizing aspects of the economic disparity in the US have been made available for anyone to download and print onto dollar bills. The stated intent? To circulate the stamped money as much as possible, passing knowledge to all who come across the bills.

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  • Art and Drinks and Bettina Hoffmann


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    Recently we enjoyed the art and drinks at Art and Drinks, the experimental venue on Dundas West featuring non-narrative video art in a lounge-like setting. Conceived as a hybrid pop-up space by artist John Oswald, Art and Drinks sets itself apart from the usual gallery/café scene by carefully foregrounding the exhibition and visual experience of the art over the comparatively unaesthetic business of eating and drinking. Presented salon style on all four walls (including the plate-glass window fronting on Dundas), video works by a changing roster of artists are displayed in a variety of projected and screen-based formats and sizes. Ambient music serves to modulate the sounds of conversation without detracting from the visual experience, while headphones hanging on the walls invite the viewer into further engagement with individual works. One might expect visual cacophany from such an arrangement, but the effect is surprisingly harmonious and coherent, a testament to the curatorial choices Oswald has made with regard to artworks and placement.

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  • The submerged subway: NYC


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    Making the rounds this morning is a fascinating article on New York City’s ghost subway system, comprising dozens of partially built or fully built but never used tunnels and platforms interwoven among and between the city’s currently bustling tracks and stops. Mainly originating from the 1920s and ’30s, these forgotten subterranean spaces represent the thwarted ambitions of city planners who once envisioned an expansive, interconnected future for every neighborhood in New York—until the fiscal repercussions and socio-political re-prioritizations of the Great Depression and World War II changed everything.

    Reading all this brought to mind Stephen Mallon’s stunning 2010 photographs of the MTA’s ongoing “loadouts” and “drops” of retired subway cars into the Atlantic Ocean for the dual purposes of disposal and reef building. Coming to rest deep in the waters off the Maryland coast, the skeletal remains of obsolete trains circumscribe a virtual space of the sub-marine variety, existing as yet another invisible incarnation of the New York subway system’s many lives.

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