Guest Blog| Jenna Kirouac: The Olio Festival and the Art of Partying

It is my pleasure to welcome Guest Blogger Jenna Kirouac, a Vancouverite who will be regularly featured on Avant-Guardian Musings as a Vancouver Arts Correspondent. Jenna's bio follows with her probing thoughts about Vancouver's Olio Festival below. 

Jenna in Berlin at the Wall

My name is Jenna Kirouac and I am a fourth year English Major at Simon Fraser University. I love art and am particularly interested in new forms of contemporary visual art that intermingles new technology and traditional mediums in a way that expresses ideas and concepts about modern society. Locals often complain that the Vancouver art scene is lacking and are constantly looking outside the city as a means to define their standards around art. I wanted to get involved in this blog as an avenue to introduce the world of art that functions and operates around and on the fringes of Vancouver. Good things are happening here, you just have to know where to look for them!

Interior Shot of 304-days artist-run project space (Jenna's picture)

When I got back to my apartment Thursday night after visiting a few art galleries I reflected on the evening as a whole. Somehow I felt a bit cheated. I couldn’t claim that I had engaged with any art that made me think differently about the world around me. Sure, it had been a fun time but had I been to any art shows or just parties? It was hard to say.

Our first stop was “The Best Ones Last” at JD’s Barbershop, which showcased retro painted commercial signs by an artist named Dan Climan. The venue was pretty on par with Climan’s work, as both the shop and the signs waxed nostalgic of the 1950’s. This event was fun but the art itself was kitschy yet no doubt aesthetically pleasing-- Climan’s signs might be something I would consider hanging in my apartment.

The Shudder Gallery’s exhibit aptly named “Things that change and do not keep,” included works by a variety of artists all centered on an idea of transitional phases, the ephemeral, or expiratory. Images of clouds of smoke, diced meat at an old butchers shop, and a barely visible body wrapped in a sleeping blanket walking across the wet lawn at night. These were a few of the images that hung on the walls. Like the Barbershop most people were hanging out drinking beer and not many people were paying attention to the photographs. Across the street at the artist-run 304-Days Gallery was “Morning Light is the Best Light,” a solo exhibition by Les Ramsey featured abstract acrylic and oil paintings as well as sculpture. Just like the other stops on my East Van art crawl, the patrons were drinking beer and socializing, and unfortunately there was no supplementary reading on the walls or offered at the door. It wasn’t until the next day when I went back online to check out the 304-Days website that I was offered an explanation of the exhibition’s focus.

It is by no means my intent to skewer the Olio but I just wanted to propose that all three art shows had one thing in common: they functioned primarily as a party and secondarily as an actual legitimate art exhibit. Maybe that was the intent. The Olio is a four-day interdisciplinary arts festival that celebrates local and global artists. It does succeed in providing a way for the community to interact with the local art scene and also introduces gallery resources to new up-and-coming artists as a means to showcase their work.

I started to wonder about this interaction of social gatherings and the art itself. In Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Enlightenment as Mass Deception” they argue  that all art exists within the capitalistic commercial sphere and the denial of this blatant truth is what renders art irrelevant. Most contemporary and post-modern art is centered on the discussion of what is and isn’t art. From Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made through to the evolution of performance art, the debate revolves around the performative nature of the object or act itself. So when the masses cry, “That’s not Art!” the fact that it provokes such a reaction means that it has at least succeeded on some level. If we take this idea and push it further, what about partying? Is partying performance art? I am not asserting this as my opinion but merely proposing the question. Think about it. To go out and hit the town we dress up, we perform in a non-rehearsed way. We act outlandish, dance and sing, its reckless abandon. There is an element of chance and the spontaneous and unexpected occur. The night holds with it a certain sense of voyeurism and can be comedic or tragic. It is an escape and it is a conformity that functions within the capitalistic enterprise. We are all in it yet we are all trying to escape. Partying is the pursuit of pleasure and can be destructive, violent, and mindless. So if we are aware of this and we still partake do we elevate ourselves to a higher understanding of society? Maybe. Adorno and Horkheimer believed that these series of contradictions in the real world are everywhere, and art succeeds because it fails. If art tries to show us truth outside of the commercial world, it can’t and so it fails. But they also said that in the struggle for truth we learn something and therefore it succeeds.

So I leave you with this: Going out this weekend? Go ahead and try to escape the drudgery of your scholastic and professional world. You can’t but you might as well try. Put on your costume, act out, be crazy. Be artistic about it. Go check out some events for the Olio!

The Olio Festival is running now (September 23-26) and details for all venues can be located here.

The Global Meets the Local: The Wilderness Downtown Project

When I started my foray into the blogosphere less than a month ago, I was looking forward to sharing many of the amazing and creative projects/ideas/information that my students have pointed me to over the years. Over on the blog’s Facebook page, the wall is beginning to accumulate many of these links, and I wanted to stop, share, and comment on the one Jana posted last night—The Wilderness Downtown.

Screen shot montage of The Wilderness Downtown

In the rapidly expanding and more visually driven cyberspace environment, the potential to move beyond traditional media formats is both inevitable and creatively inspiring. There is also the possibility to critically reflect on the ideas concerning “Intermedia” first introduced with the alternative art movements of the 1960’s, when artists asked questions about what it could mean to work between artistic disciplines and push the boundaries to explore new potentials in both praxis and theory.

This past August, an online collaboration between web giant Google, Montreal-based indie rock band Arcade Fire, and music video director Chris Milk resulted in the difficult-to-categorize project with the provocative title, The Wilderness Downtown. Utilizing Google Chrome (Google’s new web browser) and HTML 5 (the next major revision of the HyperText Markup Language, the predominant language for constructing web pages on the Internet), the film project situates viewers in an individualized filmic experience, utilizing personal location and memory as a vehicle to create a dynamic intersection of the local and global (I don’t want to give the experience away entirely, so go check it out for yourselves here).

The project’s director Chris Milk is a music video director and photographer who has directed videos for Kanye West, U2, Green Day and was even part of Barack Obama’s bio film that helped introduce him to the public at the pivotal Democratic National Convention of 2008. As Milk suggests in an interview with Wired Magazine,“We were excited about breaking out of the traditional 4:3 or 16:9 video box, and thinking about how we could take over the whole browser experience. Further, we wanted to make something that used the power of being connected. In contrast to a traditional experience of downloading a pre-packaged video or playing a DVD, we wanted to make something that was incorporating data feeds on the fly, and tailoring the experience to a specific individual….One of the biggest struggles for a director is to successfully create a sense of empathy with their characters and settings... This effect is a totally different kind of emotional engagement that is both narrative and personally driven."

Screen shot from the film

For their part, Arcade Fire has been able to expand the conceptual potential for the song that inspired the collaboration “We Used to Wait.” With lyrics that refer to the nostalgia of analog letter writing, and the changing nature of intimate connection, the haunting refrain echoes:

Now our lives are changing fast

Now our lives are changing fast

Hope that something pure can last

Hope that something pure can last

Milk hints that there will be more layers added to The Wilderness Downtown project soon: “The second level of social interaction, beyond just the observers and the piece … will unfold over the next few months as people are able to anonymously connect with each other through the postcards created in the film, and output through a number of both digital and physical mediums — one being the traveling ‘Wilderness Machine.’” It will be interesting to critically reflect on how these developments alter our understanding of both Intermedia and the shifting potential of social networking.

For a great Q&A interview with Milk that appeared only two weeks ago on Techland concerning this project, click here.

VIFF Preview| Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child

As the Vancouver International Film Festival draws closer and the VIFF Program Guide drops today (check here for pick up locations), I will be previewing some of the many art related films that will be part of this year’s schedule in the coming weeks. So many films, so little time!

Basquiat posing in front of one of his signature canvases c. 1980's

There are several moments of twentieth century cultural history that I would love to have experienced first hand—Weimar Berlin in the 1920’s, the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930’s, post-war Rome and Paris in the 1940’s, San Francisco in the late 1960’s, and then there is the New York art scene of the 1980’s. This final milieu forms the backdrop of the much awaited new documentary on the life of the enigmatic visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Emerging on the New York art scene as a young graffiti artist in the late 1970’s, Basquiat came of age during the intoxicating moment when a seismic shift in the New York art market, fuelled by new corporate art investors and the influx of Japanese money, resulted in the demand for large painted works to decorate the walls of corporate offices and million dollar New York lofts (think Gordon Gekko and the general vibe of the 1987 Oliver Stone film Wall Street-- which incidentally has a timely sequel opening tomorrow). As auction houses began to sell directly to this new breed of collector, the world of art buying and art producing, together with art promotion and art criticism, underwent profound transformation. Importantly, many artists became caught up and obsessed with the management of their public persona and fortunes at the expense of what many claim was the actual art they created. It is not unlike the cult of personality attached to celebrity artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons that was explored so brilliantly in another great documentary from last year's VIFF, Ben Lewis's The Great Contemporary Art Bubble.

Basquiat and a young Madonna in an intimate snapshot

The Radiant Child is a documentary portrait of Basquiat directed by Tamra Davis and inspired by a set of never-before-seen interviews and footage that the filmmaker made twenty years ago while friends with Basquiat. Basquiat’s identity (born to a Haitian mother and Puerto Rican Father) together with his good looks, interest in street art and close associations with musicians and performers from Manhattan’s Lower East Side (he famously dated the young and yet to be discovered Madonna) lent him the kind of instant mystique and outsider position that many of the new collectors were drawn to. It didn’t hurt that Andy Warhol liked and promoted him a whole lot as well—and so Basquiat became a 1980’s art superstar. As Basquiat biographer Richard Marshall sums up (and is reiterated in the trailer for the film): “Jean-Michel Basquiat first became famous for his art, and then he became famous for being famous, and then he became famous for being infamous.”

Basquiat and Andy Warhol photographed by Michael Halsband

Because of the particular context which lead to Basquiat’s fame and some argue resulted in his very tragic end (he died of a drug overdose in 1988 at the age of 27), the questions surrounding Basquiat’s critical contributions to the history of contemporary art have been complex. As the New York Times review for the film concludes, Davis “places Basquiat’s art in a cultural context with an enthusiasm and zest that make the many pictures shown come blazingly alive. His bitter contemplations of black history, in particular, have an epic, historical dimension, while also reflecting his own insecurity about being treated as an exotic, token black star in a predominantly white art world.” I look forward to seeing this film and thinking about how Basquiat's life story contributes to our understanding of the art superstar phenomena that is still very much part of today's contemporary art world.

The Radiant Child will be running at VIFF on Thursday, September 30th @ 6:15pm (Empire Granville 7) and Sunday, October 3rd @ 11:00am (Vancity Theatre)

Trailer for The Radiant Child

Further Reading:

Buchhart, D et al. Jean-Michel Basquiat Hatje-Cantz, 2010.

Marshall, C. "Jean-Michel Basquiat, Outsider Superstar." International Review of African American Art 16.4 (2000): 32-36.

Focus on Research| Google Scholar

Whether we like it or not, academics are increasingly recognizing the role that Google searches play in scholarly research. For undergraduate students in particular, Google is often the first place consulted when starting the gathering process for research essays, and even libraries (such as Simon Fraser University’s newly launched

Fast Search tool—(a topic for a later post) are working on a Google-like platform. What many students do not know, however, is that Google has an alternative site,

Google Scholar, to help narrow the vast field of search results prompted by a typical non-specific Google search.

I like to think of Google Scholar as a "pre-research" or useful adjunct to the more targeted and dynamic academic research that students should carry out through the library resources at their individual universities. Covering peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research, Google Scholar does provide a good starting point and has the added benefit of identifying full-text sources for articles—this is a terrific feature since these links can often be accessed with a simple click if you are logged into your home university library and that library subscribes to the journal database the article is housed with. Still, many critics of Google scholar are correct to point out the search engine’s deficiencies (see this article for a good example of what to consider), and I agree that Google Scholar should be used as part of a broader arsenal of research tools.

CBC's Tod Maffin has produced a very useful four part series,“Secret Google Tips for Researchers,” on the official blog of the CBC InsideTheCBC.com that I have compiled on a YouTube playlist for your convenience. 

Guggenheim Museum YouTubePlay: Shortlist Announced

The Guggenheim and YouTube, in collaboration with HP and Intel, announced the shortlist for YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video this week. Selected from more than 23,000 submissions from 91 countries, the 125 shortlisted videos can now be seen on the YouTube Play channel at youtube.com/play and also at creative kiosks in the Guggenheim museums of New York City, Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice. The selected videos can be sorted by animation, documentary, experimental, music videos, narrative, and non-narrative.

Guggenheim YouTube kiosk

Open to the global online community, the competition was announced this past June and accepted submissions through July 31st. The 125 shortlisted videos were chosen by the Guggenheim curatorial team and have been presented to the YouTube Play jury for consideration. The jury of eleven includes: musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson; musical artists Animal Collective; visual artists Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter, and Takashi Murakami; artists and filmmakers Darren Aronofsky, Shirin Neshat, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul; and graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, with the Guggenheim’s Nancy Spector serving as jury chairperson.

Of the shortlist, Spector says that it “presents a rich sampling of the best creative video found on YouTube and is representative of the various stylistic and conceptual genres specific to this broad, ever-expanding platform. The selection is diverse in technique, subject matter, geography, and professional status, which reflects the increasing accessibility of new media technologies around the world. We believe the shortlist reveals the abundance of creative energy this project evoked.”

Takashi Murakami, who has recently opened the controversial exhibition at Versailles that I have already blogged about explains, “In both the global art world and beyond, the speed at which information technology is developing is accelerating at an astounding rate. These innovations have brought with them drastic changes in both the form and dissemination of artistic expression. In the past several years, not a day passes without me watching something on YouTube. YouTube is a medium to communicate with the world at large and we artists can no longer call ourselves artists merely by discovering something special and presenting it to the public alone. In that way, YouTube has incited a revolution.”

The jury will now select up to 20 of their top choices to be revealed and presented at a special YouTube Play event at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21. The final videos selected by the jury will be on view to the public from October 22 through 24 in the Tower 2 gallery of the museum, and available to a worldwide audience on the YouTube Play channel at youtube.com/play.

Six Canadians (two Vancouverites!) have been chosen for the shortlist, including:

• Jerry Levitan's Oscar-nominated I Met the Walrus, an animated film based on a 1969 interview with John Lennon, has been selected by the Guggenheim Museum in its YouTubePlay art project.
• Jason Ryan of Toronto with Acornucopia, an animated film about a generous squirrel and a space-age robotic blue jay.
• Jeff Kopas of Toronto with Dogasaur, in which a four-year-old girl tries to help her blind grandfather by reintroducing him to the world of imagination.
• Nicole Duquette of Vancouver with Dreamscape, an anime-inspired video about a girl's watery dream.
• Andrew Nicolas McCann Smith of Toronto and New York with Home, a live drama set an old folks home.
• Sterling Pache of Vancouver with Mars to Jupiter, a short film about the struggles of a Rwandan genocide survivor as she integrates into North American society.

In honour of Peace Day, I have chosen to feature Levitan’s I Met the Walrus for your viewing pleasure. This work also won the 2009 Emmy for "New Approaches" making it, as the YouTubePlay site remarks "the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the Internet"