Month: October 2013

Art as Experience

Finally saw the Ai Weiwei exhibit at the AGO. It’s small, if I’d had to pay for it separately, instead of with my regular membership, I would have felt cheated. Instead I felt mildly entertained, then slightly nauseated. I shouldn’t have been surprised at how carefully Weiwei was packaged up as Dissident Artist. That should have been clear from the giant posters showing his oversized body, arms crossed, beard defiant. But even so, the psycographic distance between Weiwei’s dangerous effort to uncover the list of kids who died in the Sichuan earthquake, and the giant wall covered with a reproduction of the list of names, situated a couple dozen feet from the gift shop selling colored plastic Chinese symbols and AW inspired pins, was almost enough to make me hurl.

To be clear, I don’t think that art needs to be removed from commerce to remain worthy. But courageous dissent about thousands of dead schoolkids and $3 pins occupy different spaces, in my own mind at least. For art to work as experience – and the impact of AW’s oversized works relies entirely on the experience of being in their presence – this experience has to pull you in to a different reality, something other than a relaxed state of mild stimulation that accompanies a pleasant walk through an exhibit of well crafted bicycle sculptures.

Art as experience works when it takes you outside of yourself, when it pierces the membrane between your perception and the artifact you perceive. If you ever get the chance, go see Picasso’s Celestina, painted before he fragmented his prodigious talents into periods of thematic deconstruction. Stare into the woman’s uneven eyes until you’re afraid you might not be able to pull back, until the woman’s essence floats off the canvas and lodges itself into your brain.

This is Art as Experience, and it bears the same relationship to Art as Commodity as travel does to tourism. The central problem with the Ai Weiwei exhibit is that it thwarts experience at every moment, and fills in the space with co-branding (AW & AGO 2gether 4ever!), video screens (to distract from the dearth of original artwork) and merchandising opportunities.

There is no there there, man.

Nuite Blah

This is a tree with light bulbs. It’s part of Nuite Blanche in Toronto. Perhaps the most damning observation about this city is that the most drab, uninspired art festival draws such a large crowd that it’s nearly un-navigable. Don’t get me wrong, some of the exhibits, including the light bulb tree, are pretty. Or well executed. But they’re all bland. Pointless. Timid beyond even the worst corporate art placed in the lobby of an insurance firm.

How about those bicycles you could pedal to generate electricity? Only a 30 minute wait, and you get to participate in a profound display of our difficult relationship with the earth. Or something. So clever and thoughtful! Imagine the tortured artistic visionary and his long struggle to convince Scotiabank, the festival sponsor, to include his daring creation.

My advice: use your peddling power to shine your bike light in the opposite direction from the Nuite Blanche exhibits.

All that’s left of the farm

There was a time when this field grew crops. Now it grows grass. Lots of grass that has to be mowed unless I want to grow dandelions and ragweed, which I don’t. If I had goats, they could eat the grass, and then I could eat the goats. If the coyotes didn’t eat them first. Apparently the farming on this land wasn’t so great, with a thin layer of soil above rock, so the previous owners retired the farm implements and left them to rust in small clustered islands. Islands I have to work around as I navigate the sea of grass with my riding mower.