Oh, Canada & Globalization

MassMOCA is featuring an exhibition of new Canadian artists which, while not purporting to define an entire country, does give an idea of current artistic sensibility north of the border. I had a marvelous time and, looking back, was struck by the fact that six of my favorite seven pieces had moving parts. (I didn’t take notes and, except for Rebecca Belmore had heard of none of the artists, so I will perforce be vague in my descriptions.) First was an assemblage of wheels, or gears, turning methodically in a darkened room. The spoke-ends of each wheel were plastic milk(?) bottles, half-filled with a sandy substance that caused the bottles to be illuminated during the upper half of the arc. At least, that’s what I think was happening. The construction was transparent yet mysterious, the feeling hypnotic and engaging.
Somewhat similar, at least in the transparency/mystery sense, was a floor-to-ceiling billowing white curtain, on which were projected, from behind, ghostly images of a female tightrope walker, above, and a male voyeur, below, in a kind of dance. The piece I spent most time on came next: a large construction called ‘Mountain,’ or ‘Hilltop’ (by Graeme Patterson, I think) with an adjoining small house, put together in a kitschy way. Inside the hilltop were three video screens (with another in the house), showing a video of animal characters – i.e., a man with a lion head and paws, a bison and others – dancing, jumping on a trampoline, playing ping-pong, all to a hip-hop score. All the props in the video – e.g., the ping-pong table – could be found in miniature inside the hilltop or house. I watched the video a long time and it never repeated, plus the side videos were going at a different pace, so the permutations of what you saw could have been endless.
Next to that were two full-scale constructions, separated by a log-cabin wall. The second featured a mannequin of Tonto ministering to a dying or dead Lone Ranger, mask removed and in his baby blue suit. The first diorama similarly showed an Indian tending to a buckskinned frontiersman – perhaps another allusion I didn’t get – who had slit his wrist. The floors of both cabins were littered with (modern) beer cans, cigarette packs, etc. On the wall was a sampler, in English for Tonto, in German for the other: “The love that dare not speak its name.” Each diorama had a cut-out in the back wall of the log cabin in which a video looped of the two characters pantomiming a casual conversation in front of an artificial landscape. As hokey as the mannequins were, the acting in the video was, purposely, worse.
In the next gallery was a white tepee with a white sand floor and two birch tree stump seats you were invited to sit on, while a video played. This one was a narrative, with a beginning, end and credits, but again it featured fake animals – mostly bears, but a medley of other northern natives. A pretty young girl was delivered a birthday cake from the lake, which she delivered to a performance of dancing bears who came back to life when they got gold teeth. Or something like that.
The only static piece that made my list was a large statue of a wild boar, whose skin was textured cloth but whose horns and legs resembled blue-and-white porcelain. The artist had two other pieces using this same material, which wasn’t actually porcelain but a convincing facsimile. Then in the next gallery was a straight video, projected lifesize with headphones to hear the dialogue. A young Canadian couple out on a date, standing with drinks at a table in a bar, had a minor misunderstanding which devolved into a screaming match, painfully awkward but fun to watch.
If there was one piece that brought the show together it was a music video starring a nerdy Chinese-Canadian guy and a plain-looking girl. With a lot of simple computer graphics going on behind and with them, they sang a catchy and simple song about being invited to show at MassMOCA and what is Canadian art – “is it post-ironic Mounties?” It captured, precisely, the common feel of the art I had picked out: rough-hewn, clever and, yes, post-ironic. Even the video of the dating couple was shot in a blurry way, with background noise. It was like the lumberjack ethos ran in all the artists’ veins. The other revelation for me was how the videos were used as a part of larger installations. Normally, I’m not a fan of video art – having to sit in a museum for eleven minutes, and thinking I could be at a better movie instead. By combining videos with installations, however, these artists added another dimension to the experience without putting so much weight on the video itself. Interestingly, the only artist I recognized, from her piece at Liz Armstrong’s Until Now show, Rebecca Belmore, was also represented by a video-combine piece: a film of a bald eagle’s head on the head of an oil drum.
A week or so later I was able to revisit the MIA’s first video, Doug Aitken’s . Unlike the Canadian pieces, this is pure video, one that requires you to sit in a darkend room for 20-some minutes while a series of animals snort and mess about in cheesy motel rooms. The label suggests this is a metaphor for our loss of wilderness and the tackiness we have replaced it with, but it’s hard for me to see how white peacocks and a horse represent wilderness. There are cute moments – the fox gliding into the room, the beaver in the sink, the bison horning the pillows – but instead of finding any point to the whole thing, I just saw self-conscious “art.”
The Aitken video is presented as part of a seven-gallery installation called Globalization, in which objects are drawn from different departments according to seven different themes. In ‘Water,’ for instance, we are shown pots from China, Japan, southwest Native America and the Modernism collection along with photographs of people using pots. In ‘Outsourcing’ we are given the U.S. Olympic uniform made in China, a portrait from Tintoretto’s workshop and a Thomas Kinkade. The idea, I suppose, is to make us see artworks in a new context, or in context with works from other cultures. The result, for me at least, is to decontextualize these works and deprive them of their artistic meaning. If I am shown a mizuhashi in our Japanese tea house, or in a collection of Japanese tea implements, I can get a sense of its esthetic purpose, how it relates to the culture that has produced it, and even how it compares to other mizuhashi. How it holds water, or even just the fact that it holds water, is, for an art museum, not so important.