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TORONTO — Feeling fragile? With the financial sky falling in great, crumbling plaster chunks, the U.S. political ship of state threatening to capsize into a sea of idiocy and the constant threat of neo-Katrinas in the Gulf of Mexico, you might well be. If so, you can find lots of company among the world's leading-edge artists, who are increasingly evoking the fragility and tenuousness of our times in a new language of art.
“I was going to call this year's panel discussion The End of the Future,” Richard Rhodes said to me this week in a Toronto coffee shop near his office at Queen and Spadina, where he works as editor of Canadian Art magazine, “but at first blush that seemed a little pessimistic.
“Instead, I went with Delicate: Art and Post-Millennial Culture. It's a little more upbeat. By ‘future,' though, I meant that bright modernist future that we all imagined. That old future, that's dead.”
What comes next is more uncertain. “The morning of 9/11 was living proof of the gap between our expectations and how the world really works. Wasn't it Joseph Conrad who said you have to watch out for the real world or it will come and knock you down when you aren't looking? Well, it did.” The most interesting artists of the post-9/11 era have been metabolizing that fallout.
Rhodes's Saturday-morning think tank, sponsored by the Canadian Art Foundation, will be part of the city-wide Gallery Hop, an annual pow-wow for visual-arts enthusiasts who gather to speak about contemporary art (free gallery talks are scheduled throughout the city today), look at new work and celebrate the commencement of the new season. This year, the panel couldn't be more prescient.
Notwithstanding the histrionics of British artist Damien Hirst and his $200-million garage sale at Sotheby's, the tide is turning from shallow, hyper-inflated glitz to the quieter, more contemplative, more contingent work this panel will consider.
“I mean, what is Damien Hirst really but a British footnote to Andy Warhol [in his manipulation of the art business]? It's ridiculous,” Rhodes says. “You go to Chelsea [art district] now and you'd think you're on the movie set for Cleopatra. The scale has become so vast. But the great thing about the art I've been seeing is that there is a new generation of artists that are taking their practice very seriously, and not a single one of them is keeping an eye on what we call ‘the art world.' ”
Instead, he says, many of these artists are immersing themselves in a very private, very handmade, very materially modest way of working. Often their materials are humble, sometimes recycled detritus, with the artist working his or her way off the grid, as if in response to the big and shiny fabrication of contemporary art (particularly photography), and the staggering production costs it can entail.
“The artists are getting back to basics,” he says. “The artist of calibre is content with a sort of underground status where they can refine their practice and reflect on the world.” The opening show of the New Museum in New York at the beginning of the year, Unmonumental, was a flawed but notable attempt to grapple with the new trend, with many works being the product of slow immersive processes taken to obsessive extremes.
As our conversation unfolds, a number of artists come up for discussion. We talk about Gareth Moore, the young artist from Vancouver who is on this morning's panel, known for his objects and installations made from found materials. Rhodes mentions the work of former Toronto artist Karen Azoulay (she now lives in New York), whom he describes as “one of the very first Styrofoamers.” (We had been talking about the use of garbage materials.) “She took those bags that onions come in and she transformed them into these exquisite installations,” Rhodes says, remembering her earlier work. It's Azoulay's work that graces the Gallery Hop poster this year: a photograph of a woman in a cocktail dress who has been hit in the face with water as if from a fire hose. It's a perfectly timed visual incarnation of the concept “the party's over.”
Rhodes mentions the installations of Canadian artist Scott Lyall, whose show just opened at Toronto's Power Plant. “His work is about being so internalized, so in your own world. He will take an event from the news, like the unfair post-9/11 arrest of a proprietor of a copy shop at the University of Toronto – some small event – and he will respond in depth. He takes tiny filaments of information and materializes them.”
I bring up the Canadian duo of Hendrika Sonnenberg and Chris Hanson (now in New York), artists who painstakingly replicate everyday objects in carved Styrofoam, or Vancouver's Damian Moppett, who has been known to refashion the modernist masterpieces of Carl Andre out of twigs and twine, or the duo Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, who are currently showing their new tinfoil sculptures at Pari Nadimi Gallery in Toronto.
The installation art of Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn comes up – the noted maker of apocalyptic handmade environments fashioned from recycled cardboard, packing tape, photocopied academic texts and pop-cultural flotsam and jetsam. Timely, too, are the morning-after party trays, complete with cigarette butts and dead rodents, handcrafted and cast from resin, and meticulously painted by Vancouver's Liz Magor (now on view in her show at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle).
“I started thinking about this phenomenon a number of years ago, when I was watching a video by Anri Sala at the Berlin Biennial,” says Rhodes. “The image projected was of a cart horse tethered beside a highway. Every time a big truck went by, you could see the horse shiver and cringe. It was this amazing image of this element from the 19th century somehow stranded in the 21st,” a meditation on change and its impact on our vulnerable, soft-tissue humanity.
Jeff Wall's large-scale photographs, Rhodes says, can also be looked at through this lens. “His work since the 1990s has really been about the sobriety of the real world. There's a big picture that he made recently of commuters crossing a bridge under a ragged breaking sky.
“This is a picture of normalcy, but it's normalcy under the shadow of duress. That's the world we live in. Artists are dealing with that in a way that puts Pop art and its progeny in the past.”
The panel discussion Delicate: Art in Post-Millennial Culture takes place at the Ontario College of Art, 100 McCaul St., in Toronto at 11 a.m. today. The event is free and is followed by a series of free gallery talks around town (information: www.canadianart.ca).
