VIFF Preview| Winds of Heaven: Emily Carr, Carvers, and the Spirits of the Forest

Emily Carr, Indian Church (1929)

Living and working in Vancouver as an art historian, it is difficult to avoid conversations, questions, and debates concerning Emily Carr. Few Canadian artists have had more of a longstanding and direct impact on the guiding art historical discourse of this city and province (some argue all of Canada), and her controversial works have inspired fierce debate and critical conversations about both the aesthetic re-presentation of this part of the world and the engagement modern artists have had both formally and contextually with First Nations culture.  In short, she is quite literally an institution in this town, lending her famous name to Emily Carr University of Art and Design and making her presence permanently felt at the Vancouver Art Gallery where her works are always on display and frequently inspire new exhibitions (see "In Dialogue with Carr: Douglas Coupland, Evan Lee, Liz Magor, Marianne Nicolson" as the most recent example).

Perhaps for this reason alone, I was uncertain at first about previewing the new documentary about Emily Carr screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival.  Do we need to continue and contribute to the conversation about Carr? Can audiences look beyond her seductive images of the West Coast and their spiritual undertones to arrive at a more critical response to their impact on picture-making in British Columbia? Can we move the Emily Carr discourse in a new direction? Michael Ostroff’s Winds of Heaven: Emily Carr, Carvers, and the Spirits of the Forest is described as “a filmic journey into the deep brooding mystery and inner beauty of Emily Carr’s paintings—a lyrical, luminescent and entertaining impression of the life of Carr and her connection to the First Nations people of the Northwest Coast.” To my ear, this sounds like more of the same about Carr that needs questioning. But with the addition of commentary by art historian and critic Marcia Crosby (who has done ground-breaking research into the artistic representation of First Nations-- see further reading for Crosby's work and recent critical discussions of Carr at the end of this post), I am hopeful that this film will have moments that cut through the carefully constructed Carr narrative and open up people's eyes to the complexities and tensions of Carr’s legacy to the art of this city, our province, and the country. Taking the family to see the film over Thanksgiving weekend seems like no more appropriate time.

Winds of Heaven will be playing at VIFF on Saturday, October 9th @ 6:30pm; Sunday, October 10th @ 4:00pm; and Wednesday, October 14th @ 1:00pm

A short introduction into the life of Emily Carr from a local perspective


Further Reading:

Crosby, Marcia. "The Construction of the Imaginary Indian" in Vancouver Anthology,. Stan Douglas, ed. (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991), 267-291.

Dawn, Leslie. "The Enigma of Emily Carr: A Review Essay" BC Studies 152 (2006): 97-103.

Moray, Gerta. Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr. UBC Press, 2007.

Focus on Tech| Google Chrome: Fast, Stable, Flexible (Did I say it was FAST?)

Frederico Fieni, The Story of Google Chrome (2008)

I love Google Chrome. As web browsers go, it is by far the fastest, most effective, and most flexible of all the ones I have tried (even Firefox), and it boasts the best possible feature of being virtually impossible to crash (I am looking at you Internet Explorer 8 and Safari 5). I switched to Chrome only a few weeks ago after finally being convinced to download it to view the The Wilderness Downtown Project. Clearly, Google understood what they were doing putting together that collaboration because I ended up playing around with the browser after thinking the download to watch the video/film was only going to be temporary. It was like my computer was given a turbo charger and my web browsing speed (even with dozens of open tabs) easily doubled-- oh, and it is very pretty to look at, great minimal design, and the addition of artist designed themes to choose from if you wish (I selected the abstract Casey Reas-- see his fascinating bio).

I have since spent some time researching and playing around with options on the browser and have discovered several great features (including the fantastic integration of Google search right in the web address bar). Many of these are usefully summarized not only in the YouTube video I have added below (which also discusses how the Chrome browser inspired the upcoming Chrome open source operating system for computers) and this one here, but also summed up in a series of "how-to" posts found here and here on one of my favourite tech blogs, ProfHacker.

To download Google Chrome (it is free!), view demonstrations, and browse nifty theme packages, visit the download page.

The Anatomy of a Developing Discourse, Part 2: William Powhida and the Art of Insider-ism

William Powhida, The Game (2010) "The goal of the game is relatively simple, get your work in to Met and make history."

Further to the Jerry Saltz and Frieze magazine “talk around art” incident I raised a few posts back, I wanted to extend that discussion and raise the work of William Powhida as one recent example of an artist's attempts to represent and provide critical commentary on the “unspoken” aspects of the contemporary art industry. Living and working in New York as a visual artist (with a specialization in drawing and painting), Powhida’s illustrations focus on exposing the mechanisms of power that influence the world of art criticism, acquisition, production, and circulation. Importantly, what sets Powhida apart from many other artists attempting to do something of the same is his direct engagement with the power of social media and the growing influence of blogging, posting, and tweeting in the circulation of ideas concerning art and the art industry. Much like his drawings suggest and to which they give form, the nature of the discourse is built upon a series of interconnections and pathways of knowledge and influence.

William Powhida, How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality (2009)

For example in 2009, Powhida was commissioned by Brooklyn Rail (a monthly journal covering art and politics in New York and around the world) to produce a cover for the publication and submitted a satirical drawing titled “How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality” which was based on the title of a blog of the same name offering a critique on the New Museum’s show featuring celebrity (and some suggest overexposed and overplayed) artist Jeff Koons. Powhida’s drawing extended the original blog into a carefully detailed drawing that not only named and connected all of the players involved in the exhibition, but also featured caricatures and ironic commentary on the whole affair. The use of individual "Facebook" like pictures and snappy short text in "Twitter-esque" prose also successfully pushed the conceptual reading of the work. But perhaps most ironic in the end (and something Powhida must come to terms with as an artist) was the purchase of one of Powhida's drawings by the very museum trustee at the center of the controversy. Jerry Saltz not surprisingly described the drawing and whole aftermath as “a great big art world stink bomb” (!).

William Powhida, Pressure (2007)

Powhida’s most recent Brooklyn Rail cover features “The Game”—a drawing that traces the dynamics of power based upon the players career choices moving from an MFA program towards celebrated art career. The summary says it all: "The goal of the game is relatively simple, get your work in to Met and make history. You need to follow a path through the art world from an MFA program towards recognition, representation, and museum exhibitions while picking up some supporters along the way who will help propel you into history. Like the real art world, whether your in or out is largely out of your control.We’ll assume you have some modest talent, but making history requires a lot of luck. The only decisions you have to make along the way are which paths to try to get ahead, whether or not to drink, and how you can best use your supporters influence to advance your career, the rest is either luck or chance, depending on your outlook on life. You can also play the ‘Bitter Version’ by following the suggestions for modifying the game play. Also, feel free to make your own supporters and new INS and OUTS. There’s at least 197 other collectors who matter and shit loads of ins and outs. Good luck.”

This work and other projects can be found on Powhida’s entertaining blog and see this interview with William Powhida conducted by James Kalm (art vlogger)

Further Reading:

Leffingwell, Edward. "William Powhida at Shroeder Romero" Art in America 95.9 (2007): 204.

Lindholm, Erin."The Art of the Crowd." Art in America online, February 16, 2010

VIFF Preview| Hunky Blues: The American Dream

A photographic still of immigrants waiting to be processed, used in Hunky Blues: The American Dream

For many North Americans, the story of our individual family’s remembered past includes tales of immigration adventure. Passed down through oral storytelling, the occasional photograph from the “old country,” and the suggestive trace of a name found on an archival document, the stories form and re-present memories through the mediation of personal visual and textual documents. At the same time however, these same stories remain in constant dialogue with the visual and textual documentation of the broader cultural context from which they emerge. For Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács, this dynamic intersection of personal and cultural/national memory forms the basis for his latest experimental film, Hunky Blues: The American Dream, playing at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

The captain from Danube Exodus (2002)

Forgács, who is also a media artist and has represented Hungary at the Venice Biennale and exhibited his art works at the Getty and in multiple galleries and museums around Europe, is best known for his work with found amateur home made films recovered mainly from Hungarian families of the 1920’s through 1960’s. Through these efforts, he established the Private Film and Photo Archives in 1983 that houses a collection of over 300 hours of amateur film. Since 1978, Forgács has made more than thirty films, the most internationally recognized to date being The Danube Exodus (2002) which tells the story of Nándor Andrásovits, a riverboat captain who documented his voyages along the Danube as he transported Eastern European Jewish refugees to safety in Palestine in 1939 within the same year as transporting Bessarabian Germans who had fled back to the Reich from the Soviet invasion to resettle land confiscated in occupied Poland in 1940. Compiled from original 8mm footage taken by the captain, Forgács presents these complicated (and seemingly irreconcilable) stories in purposeful and stark juxtaposition.

Péter Forgács, rendering of video portraits in frames for Col Tempo (2009) courtesy of Art in America

With this found film material, Forgács has thus worked to retrieve competing narratives in an overall understanding of the troubled region of Central Eastern Europe. Born in 1950, only five years after the end of WWII and the beginning of a new communist regime in Hungary, Forgács has spent a good deal of his professional career attempting to understand the complexities of art and history-making in his homeland. Expelled from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts for his involvement with an unsanctioned art movement, he began to explore the avant-garde scene rarely discussed in the art schools of the time—finding the work of pioneering modern artists such as Marcel Duchamp and more contemporary filmmakers such as David Lynch to be both inspiring and mind-opening. As a result, Forgács has worked with a conceptual aim in both his art and film making practice to explore and visually represent those places of slippage where the historical and personal record intersect. In his latest film, Forgács once again tackles the complexities of what would appear at its surface to be a straight-forward documentary account of the large wave of Hungarian migration to the United States between 1890-1921. What he creates instead is a visual fusion of early American cinema sources, archival photographs, found amateur film, and personal diaries, in a carefully composed “picture” of the complexities of immigration. The film's world premiere in New York's Museum of Modern Art attests to its visual focus.

As I close this preview, I want to disclose that my personal family history is also linked to a Hungarian past and a harrowing tale of immigration adventure that my parents took to find their way to Canada. It is a part of who I am and has played a critical role in how I understand the production of history and visual representation. Still, I believe that an experimental film like Forgács’s can resonate with a much broader audience than first presumed. As Forgács has explained about his process: "I am using the ordinary language of photography and film to find in banality, the sacred."

Hunky Blues: The American Dream will be playing at VIFF on Wednesday, October 13th @ 7:00pm (Pacific Cinematheque) and Friday, October 15th @ 1:15pm (Vancity)

Here is an example of the "found footage" technique used by Forgács. More examples can be located at his YouTube Channel

Weekly Twitter Round Up| Click and Muse

October is finally upon us and the semester is beginning to feel more like a routine and less than an exercise in keeping one's head above water! The Twitterverse is buzzing with many great visual art and culture related topics and I have gathered my favourites once again this week (FYI, you can follow all the Vancouver Film Festival related tweets by checking out the #VIFF or #VIFF10 hashtags). Make sure to vote for your favourite films at VIFF in the CULTURE POLL on this blog's home page-- I am starting to get some great selections submitted and will share them with you this week and as VIFF moves forward.

Finally, check out this week's CLICK and MUSE poll concerning the ethics of art criticism. Last week's poll asked the question about whether or not Joaquin Phoenix's recent activities have been more performance art or publicity campaign, and a unanimous 81% of you thought it was all performance art!

Culture war violence breaks out at an art gallery in Istanbul, a 2010 European Cultural Capital

Careers: When should a grad student go on the job market? 

Facebook and Skype are beginning a beautiful friendship

    
Uffizi paintings on web in high resolution

Electronic Arts pulls ability to play as Taliban 

Facts, fiction, Facebook, and appletinis

Frieze magazine responds to Saltz's criticism by eagerly confirming cronyism. Sad, pathetic (this is the tweet that inspired my post about Jerry Saltz and this week's CLICK and MUSE POLL)