nonsite

February 16, 2009 1:01 pm

February 16, 2009: spectacular commodity

I was listening to Glen Branca’s composition The Spectacular Commodity last night and I realized- what a perfect description for a work of art. An artwork is a spectacular commodity. It is unique, limited in production, and has the potential for amazing value, as assigned by the art markets and museums.

This isn’t unique to a work of art obviously. Any commodity with limited production or in scarce supply has that potential, but I think the work of art is singularly unique in that the quantity of product is finite and limited to the artist’s lifetime of production. Artists don’t necessarily think of their work in their work these terms- at least not while starting out or as students, but this concept is consistently reinforced by the subtext of the art objects we are shown in art history and visual culture courses.

How does a society assign value, how does it change over time and implicitly as artists, don’t we want our work to be part of this valuation. What’s interesting is that an artwork may have great personal value yet little commercial market value. I’m thinking now of a particular painting I made in the autumn of 1976 during my last semester as a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. It is a small painting of two similarly articulated towers tentatively painted in a brick coloured, earth red within the crudely drawn black linear forms that float on a light grey ground.

dmacwilliam

The painting is about 18 by 24 inches, on very heavy unstretched canvas. It pins to the wall. Based on a drawing I had made a few weeks earlier, it embodies all the qualities I thought a painting should have at that time. It was abstract, modest, personal, ambiguous in scale, tentative, anxious. These were all of the qualities I thought a painting needed to have at that time to recuperate and ressusitate painting from its earlier macho market excesses.

I have kept it with me over the past thirty years as a talisman for my development as an artist and a reminded of those heady days in Halifax. I donated it to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax in 2007 as part of the NSCAD archives there. As part of a Canadian Cultural Properties donation, it was assessed at a fair market value of $6000. It is interesting that if I was asked to assign a value, I would have said more than ten times that amount.

February 10, 2009 5:07 pm

February 10, 1975: Robin Peck, Robert Eardley

Robin Peck hired nine local carpenters to each build a three foot wooden cube which was then painted grey for his exhibition with Robert Eardley at the Anna Leonowens Gallery. The nine cubes were arranged in a fiarly tight 3x 3 grid in the front of the gallery. We all thought the work was a brilliant: a dry, provincial critique of minimalism.

February 10, 2009 12:49 pm

February 10, 1976: Theodore Wan

Theodore Wan exhibited Two 120 Rolls and Six 35mm Negatives, Photographs not by Theodore Wan, at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, February 10 - 15, 1976. For this project Theodore wrote away to a classified ad in a men’s magazine, I’m not sure which one, to purchase exposed rolls of film negatives of nude women taken by a unnamed photographer who was selling them through an ad placed at the back of the magazine.

Theodore was researching authorship, what was socially acceptable and in this case: what was considered erotica or pornography.

He became increasingly interested in vernacular photography. He did extensive work as a medical photographer and as a performance artist, he used himself as a subject for medical self-portraits. Exhibiting his photographs in hospitals- illustrating draping procedures and bridine scrubs for nurse training. These photographs were understood very differently than when shown in an art gallery context.

bridine11

February 9, 2009 8:47 pm

February 9, 2008: Intellectual Property

We are in the process of finalizing an IP policy for Emily Carr University. We have had ongoing and extensive discussions with faculty and students over the past few years around some of the complexities involved around intellectual property.

In Canada there has been a great deal of debate recently around copyright. Mostly around music- because of Apple’s iPod and our ability to copy our CDs as MP3s and play them on our nanos. But recent technologies have upped the anti as it is now possible to play video as MP4s and now television. Copyright is protected by nation states and differs by the laws in each country, in Canada we have a copyright act written in 1997. It is under review and is currently in the process of being rewritten given the huge changes in digital technologies which weren’t anticipated back int he mid 90’s. For example, since 2003, the Canadian Private Copying Collective, had been trying to convince the Copyright Board of Canada to extend the levy we pay on blank CDs to the memory inside MP3 players.

February 8, 2009 5:17 pm

February 8, 2008: the networked city

Busy week, just now getting down to focusing on my project. Andy recommended William Mitchell’s Me++ which looks like a great book. I have it on order and I’m looking forward to reading it.

Everything seems connected to me lately, I was having coffee with a friend this week and we were talking about how Google maps were changing our sense of the world. My son is in Mexico at the moment and I when I get a note from him saying he was in San Christobal, the first thing I did was to check Google Maps to look up his location.

February 8, 2009 1:04 pm

February 8, 2009: Smithson’s Non-Sites, Augé’s Non-Places

When I was at the AGO in Toronto in December, I saw a Robert Smithson Nonsite from their permanent collection that they had up on exhibition. It had the map with the location noted and a zig-zag box with the earth from the site.

Smithson saw the nonsite as an indoor earthwork, the map was a ‘landmarker’. He chose remote, unpopulated sites and materials from these locations were brought into the gallery. Nonsites relate to Smithson’s research into site, displacement and location.

Smithson writes about these sites: “I began in a very primitive way;..started taking trips in 1965; certain sites would appeal to me more–sites that had been in some way disrupted…pulverized. I was really looking for a denaturalization rather than built up scenic beauty…when you take a trip you need precise data & I would often use quadrangle maps; mapping followed traveling”

smithson

In contast Marc Augé writes about Non-Places: sites of excess- train stations, freeways, supermarkets, airports; places where people are in transit. Non-places are evidence of a supermodern world of acceleration, speed and excess. He writes about the problem of the overabundance of information and events that have overtaken our lives. Augé’s non-places are intermediate, overwhelming sites of information overload.

I’m considering these ideas of Smithson and Augé in relation to websites: in what way are websites nonsites or perhaps more appropriately: non-places?

February 7, 2009 1:06 pm

February 7, 2009: How Soon Is Now

Twenty four years ago, the Smiths released How Soon is Now? That’s now the borrowed title for the latest, large Vancouver Art Gallery group exhibition curated by Kathleen Ritter.

There was a huge opening last night for the exhibition. It was great to see such a huge crowd out to celebrate and congratulate their friends and colleagues. There is lots of good work. The exhibition represents a younger generation of artists, many of whom are in their early 30s and graduated from Emily Carr University in the last ten years and are showing at the VAG for the first time.

Highlights for me were Instant Coffee’s Nooks, Luanne Martineau’s hangings, Sonny Assu’s copper coffee cups and lids,

sonny-assu

Holly Ward’s dirt Island, Damian Moppett’s ceramic pots on top of his white remake of Anthony Caro’s Early One Morning (1962), Samuel Roy-Bois’s Practice Room, Christian Kliegel’s two Elevator Doors, Kathy Slade’s big black Pom Pom, and Brendan Tang’s amazing ceramic objects. One of the highlights was Cedric, Nathan and Jim Bomford’s amazing recycled wood bleachers construction in the two-story North Gallery.

February 2, 2009 10:43 pm

February 2, 2008: the sun is shining

It is always so amazing when spring comes to Vancouver. Today is a beautiful February day- cool but sunny. I’m listening to The Shins latest Wincing the Night Away. Every song on the album is excellent, beautifully considered- I’ve been listening to it for months and every time I put it on, I’m delighted. My favorite songs are Australia, Phantom Limb and A Comet Appears, great songs to listen to while doing research.

February 1, 2009 8:17 am

February 1, 2009: photographs and dates as mnemonics

I’ve been looking at some old photographs and I’m struck by how many memories they trigger. I’m sure it’s the same for everyone- different photographs but similar responses- memories flood back. I don’t have a lot of photographs from when I was younger, but my mother just gave me another pile that she found taken from when I was a child. I’ll scan one and post it shortly.

Dates seems like another interesting trigger for memories. I’m just not sure if the month- March 1984 is enough, or if you need the date for example- March 7, 1984 to really resonate. That was the day my son Kent was born.

Kent will be 25 on March 7, 2009!

January 31, 2009 5:12 pm

January 31, 2009: The 13 Most Beautiful…Songs

Last night we went to see The 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests at the Vogue, as part of the PuSh Festival here. Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips played live while the 13 four minute “screen tests’ showed above them. It was a great concert- not too long with good acoustics.I’ve been a fan of Dean Wareham since is Galaxie 500 and Luna days.

It was great to hear Dean and Britta’s version of Bob Dylan’s I’ll Keep It With Mine- which he wrote for Nico and that she recorded on Chelsea Girl- while watching four minutes of Nico on black & white film looking self-consciously aloof.

January 27, 2009 1:14 pm

January 27, 2008: Mark Soo

It took be a while to make the time to finish my project proposal- I was hoping to have it finished yesterday, but I didn’t quite make it. This week was a busy one we seemed to be out almost every night this week to openings at all the major galleries in the city. Tuesday, I arrived early to see Trust in Me at the CH Scott Gallery, so I missed the main crowds. The big opening of the week was Exponential Future at the Belkin at UBC. The opening was packed and we didn’t really get to see much of the work, but it was fun to see people I hadn’t seen for a long time. Mark Soo made two amazing stereoscopic photographs where he recreated the Sun Recording Studios, the “birthplace of rock and roll” from the 1950s where Elvis Presley recorded his first recordings. You had to wear red and green 3-D glasses to see the piece in 3-D. He’s a really interesting artist and curator who’s also a partner with Matt Cox in a side music project called Quadra. Unfortunately, we never made it to the Anne Collier opening at Presentation House Gallery and the Isabelle Pauwels opening at ArtSpeak last night- we stayed home and had dinner with friends. I’ll have to see those shows over the next few weeks.

I look forward to reading my colleagues proposals and getting feedback from the group on Monday.

January 26, 2009 8:22 am

January 26, 2009: nonsite, non-places and autoethnography

Reading Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, I am still struck by how clearly the contemporary art world fits into ethnographic research and I’m trying to understand the distinction between ethnography and ethnology. As an cultural anthropologist, Augé makes the distinction between the Near and the Elsewhere and articulates how his focus has shifted to the near.

I like his observations about our over investment of meaning: What is new is not that the world lacks meaning, or has little meaning, or less meaning than it used to have; it is that we seem to feel an explicit and intense daily need to give it meaning: to give meaning tot eh world, not just some village or lineage. This need to give meaning to the present if not the past, thi price we pay for overabundance of events corresponding to a situation we could call ’supermodern’ to express its essential quality: excess.

This essay is very useful for me as I consider how deeply my nonsite project relates to the insider aspects of autoethnography.

January 25, 2009 5:04 pm

January 25, 1975: Dan Graham

The first time I met Dan Graham was in a Projects class I was taking up on Coburg Road.

He was at NSCAD to install and perform several pieces at the new downtown Historic Properties campus. He came into the class a little late, disorganized and brilliantly apologietic with two spools of super 8mm film and a splicer. We already had two projectors. He needed to splice some leader onto one of the rolls and repair a break on the other. It was a sunrise film shot with two super 8 cameras.

It was a stereo film projection projected on adjacent walls. I remember being struck by his bumblingly charesmatic personality. We eventually saw the four minute film. I don’t remember much else.

NSCAD AV had these beautiful little fixed focus, wide angle Kodak Super 8 cameras just a little bigger than the film canister. We all wanted to make artist films after seeing Dan’s presentation.

Later that week Dan recorded 2 Pieces in the Audio Visual Studio. The first was a nude male camera operator describing a clothed woman reclining in a chair. The second was a clothed male camera operator describing the same woman nude in the chair.

January 19, 2009 2:25 pm

January 19, 2009: subcultures reader

Perhaps a better way to look at the contemporary art world is as a subculture.

It definitely has some of the defining characteristics- in particular: a systematic opposition to the dominant culture. The art world is social, has shared conventions, values and rituals. Well, perhaps there are a number of subcultures within the contemporary art world- each different, more specific but interrelated.

January 19, 2009 12:34 am

January 19, 2008: RFID chips

I was in Victoria this weekend for my mother’s 82nd birthday- it was a great celebration! Walking in the downtown, I went past a games store that had this beautiful geodesic sphere in the window made out of Zome, a children’s building tool that has been co-opted and used by schools and universities around the world. I was struck by how amazing the system was- when I asked the owner if he sold the parts, he said no, but I could order them online and I could buy the sphere if I wanted. Visiting their website, I see they have a huge amount of information including a Zome Product of the Month. I’d like the white artists series with 1308 pieces.

On Friday, before I was leaving school someone told me about radio frequency ID transponders and RFID chips.

They’re flat and can be put on or into objects that can be tracked. I’m wondering if this might be a possibility for a mapping and drawing project. Giving away an object that acknowledges that it contains an RFID that will be used by tracking where it ends up- and used to generate drawings. I understand that the use of these devices can be contentious and there are movements to resist their use.

I’m continuing to make drawings every day and I love how immediate drawing is. I’m also thinking about the relationship of what I’m doing to digital arts. I’m looking forward to Monday’s chat.

January 17, 2009 7:10 pm

January 17, 2008: Trust in Me and Exponential Future

There’s great anticipation building in Vancouver about two exhibitions opening next week. The Charles H. Scott Gallery opens Trust in Me featuring the work of eight young artists including Janice Kerbel, Tim Lee on Tuesday.

The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery’s Exponential Future exhibition featuring the works of eight young Vancouver artists including Mark Soo, Isabelle Pauwels and Althea Thauberger opens on Thursday, January 24th.

Tim Lee is in both exhibitions, hot on the tails of his solo exhibition Remakes, Variations (1741-2049) at Presentation House Gallery which just closed last weekend, on January 13th. The Pink Panther (2049) photographs- large life size photographs of Tim taking photographs of himself in Dan Graham sculptures- were very beautiful.

If you don’t know the work of ECIAD alumna and London artist Janice Kerbel, be sure to listen to her radio play for insomniacs: Nick Silver Can’t Sleep, an Artangel project for BBC Radio 3. Her 15 Lombard Street project of her masterplan of how to rob a London bank caused a bit of a stir over there, the BookWorks Projects book is an out of print classic. Also if you haven’t seen Janice Kerbel’s amazingly cheeky Bird Island web project from the late 90s it is still worth a visit. I hope she’s showing Deadstar.

January 12, 2009 8:38 pm

January 12, 2008: new year, new reflections

January started with a lot of drawing. I have some pretty clear ideas over the holidays and in general it was a productive time- away from work and with family and friends. I have been making a drawing a day and that’s been a great experience- connecting me to that creative impulse- and that great thing about drawing is that it is so immediate!

I have been working on an acid free 9 x 12″ Drawing Block from Maruman. I’m now ready to work larger- I have some rag paper in my studio so I’ll begin today- I’m also curious about colouring the polygons. I’m scanned a few drawings so I’ll start there. I need to review the essay outlines of my colleagues, and review mine again before Monday’s tutorial.

I’ve also started reading John Maeda’s Design by Numbers a language he wrote to make drawings on a computer. I need to try working with it. It’s hard not to admire someone whose latest book is called the Laws of Simplicity. I wish him all the best as the next President of RISD.

January 12, 2009 8:24 am

January 12, 2009: back in the day

Busy week. I gave a presentation for my Mapping and Marking public art proposal: Kingsway Luminaires to the selection committee on Friday at 9:45. I enjoyed the process- it felt good. I should know by next Wednesday. Preparing for that presentation distracted me from my MA_DA research.

north-viewtrans

Andy had suggested that I look at Marc Augé’s ideas about non-places which he wrote about in his book: Non-Places: introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity. Interesting ideas, and I can see how Augé’s ideas relate to some of the images I was posting in my nonsite project at the end of last year. Over the holidays I’ve pretty much completely revised the site- it sill needs a lot of editing, but I have now moved over pretty much everything that might be useful from this site to reflect upon in nonsite.

My ideas are becomeing clearer. I’m still thinking about Benedict Anderson’s ideas around the construction of imagined communities- and the contemporary artworld in particular, as an imagined comunity. What is it that makes the artworld an imagined community and how is one’s identity as an artist formed in relation to it? I have come to realize that for me this was something that I had a very tangible sense of as a young art student studying in Halifax at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the mid 1970s. Those were seminal years- back in the day (as they say). Over the next few months I am going to try to remember and reconstruct the circumstances that made NSCAD the amazing place that it was in 1975 and 1976 and collapse that time and those memories with the past two years that I have been working on this MA course at Camberwell.

January 6, 2009 12:52 pm

January 2009: Living in Halifax

I lived in Halifax from September 1974 through to December 1976 while I was a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. It was an amazing time of growth- both for me personally (I was 23 when I arrived) and also for NSCAD as an art college.

I took the train from Victoria where I was living, across Canada to Halifax arriving in late August 1974. I arrived to register for my classes in the old Anna Leonowens Gallery on Coburg Road. It was the last semester that NSCAD was still located at the Coburg Road campus. A beautiful brick building on the edge of Dalhousie University on Coburg at LeMarchant. The first person that I remember is Colette Urban. She was working for the school helping students register into their classes. I didn’t know her name, of course, but I remember being struck by how interesting I thought she looks and how at ease she was with how the school worked- she had been there for a while and know how the school worked and seemed to know everybody and had great confidence. I didn’t get to know her for a few years.

I can remember that first registration day and a dance that evening that the students organized in Gallery.

All the people I remember from when I lived in Halifax:

The students: Collette Urban, Madeline Palko, Todd Davis, Johanna Van Waarden, Doug Kirton, Peter Haaren, Rose Zgodzinski, Eva Scopino, Mary Grimes, Carl Affarian, Ann Prim, Tony Duggan-Smith, Charles Lewton-Brain, Julie Duschenes, Gerry McGrath, Kirby Dick, Robert Hamon, Mary Williams, Jeff Balsmeyer, Rick Harder, Gerry Morehead, April Gornik, Robin Peck, Howard Mussells, Will Gorlitz, Brad Brace, Jeff Spalding, Brian McNiven, Ian Murray, Claire Larson, Charlene Reader, Oliver Girling, Susan Britton, Ellen Rumm, Oliver Girling, Sandra Meigs, Wayne Packer, Debbie McCarthy, Harris Edelman, Graham Dubé, Richard Purdy, Alex Salter, Rick Harder, Janet Morgan, Cyne Cobb, Michael Fernandes, Cordell Wynne, Katherine, Knight, Tom Nickson, Minna Zelonka, Jeff Spalding, Alan Barkley, Rick Rofihe, Todd Davis, Christina Richie, Andrea Wexler, Spring Hurlbut Williamson, Heidi Schoemaker, Alex Salter, Jim Schaeufele, Paul Hess, Servie Janssen, Bart Robbett, Gordon Voisey, Joseph Bartscherer, Tony Brown, Nelda Swinton, Howard Edelman, Alan Barkley, Tony Brown.

The staff, faculty and vsiting artists: John Murchie, Tom Klenck, Garry Kennedy, Robbie Zuck, Mary Snider, Martin Barlofsky, Richards Jarden, Eric Fischl, Mira Schor, John Hutcheson, Kasper Koenig, Marion Robertson, Terry Johnson, Stephanie Boyd, Gerald Ferguson, Tim Zuck, Pat Kelly, David Askevold, Alan MacKay, Graham Dubé, Robert Berlind, John Fernie, Dennis Gill, John Greer, Robert Berlind, Elliot Schwartz, Harriet, Ernie, Bruce Ferguson (at Dalhousie Art Gallery), Colin Campbell, Marilyn Lenkowsky, Jack Butler, Pat Steir, Emmett Williams, Donald Kuspit, Michael Snow, Peggy Gale, John Torreano, Martha Wilson, Victor Bergin, Jim Starrett, Joel Fisher, David Rabinowitch, Karl Beveridge, Carole Conde, Paul Brach, Miriam Shapiro, Ron Martin, Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner, Dan Graham, John Knight.

January 5, 2009 9:59 pm

January 5, 2008: Marking Place, Making Networks

I’ve been thinking about how we live in an increasingly networked society. We are now able to stay connected to each other via the telephone and the internet as we move through our daily lives. Recent changes in mobile telephones and wireless computer networks have changed how we communicate with each other along with our sense of community.

I have been making drawings that use simple polygons to connect points and create form. I see these drawings as graphs of a network of connected points which represent a network. Visually these drawings also refer the polygons of wire frame meshes used to create 3D graphics.

I am interested in the idea of how we create a community and how we arrive at our sense of place and I am wondering if I could use the locations of various mobile devices to create drawings?

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