Pigeon Panel at 811 in Toronto

Join me on April 19th at 811 (233 Spadina), where I'm guest-curating an event on animal-human relations in urban contexts.

With Toronto's Chinatown pigeon as a starting point, three panelists will discuss their work in the context of larger issues around everyday ideologies, definitions and classifications of nature and the future of biodiversity in the age of the anthropocene. Listen to the panel while enjoying some traditional Chinese fried squab and dove-themed cocktails.

The food (graciously bred by Richview Farms, and prepared by Chinatown's Pho Hung) and drinks will start at 3:30 pm, the panel go from 4 to 5 pm. The panelists will be Mitch Akiyama, a sound artist and scholar, Chloé Roubert and Mark Peck, ornithologist at the Royal Ontario Museum and curator of "Empty Skies: the Passenger Pigeon Legacy."

The Shanghai Urban Fauna Mapping Project: Walk, Workshop, Talk in Shanghai

My Dirt is Matter Out of Place project presented in Montreal's Articule gallery last year, is about to have Shanghai edition: The Shanghai Urban Fauna Mapping Project is a walk, mapping workshop and artist-talk that focuses on mapping the sparrow, the pigeon and the dog of the Chinese megapolis to uncover some of the city's governing ideologies. The event hopes to be a platform to address Shanghai's everyday and current modernization as well as think about present and past urban policies and social paradigms. From Mao's Four Pest Campaign, to the destruction of Shikumen lanes and the 'modernizing' urban plan each animal has its place in this ideological urbanscape.

The Shanghai Urban Fauna Mapping Project is part of K11's public program "Mapping Shanghai," and will occur on April 13th 2014.

3:30pm we will meet at at K11's entrance dome to start the walk. The walk will be semi-guided and last one hour. Maps will be distributed but participants are invited to bring cameras and pencils to map their own animal landmarks.

5pm artist-talk and workshop will be given on B1 of K11. Drinks and sweets will be served!

More info here for Mandarin speakers here: http://www.douban.com/event/21273718/

Dirt is Matter Out of Place: Thanks all d'être venus!

"Dirt is Matter Out of Place": A walk, installation and panel in Montréal

For those of you who know about my pigeon obsession, the beast has morphed into an installation, a walk and a panel for the anti-curatorial exhibit Springtemps at the gallery Articule in Montreal from March 29th to April 14th.

The difference between a pigeon and a dove is arbitrary because there is none: the dove is simply a white pigeon. So while we can observe these birds under viaducts we can find them as symbols of the holy spirit in churches as well.

Inspired by the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, "Dirt is Matter Out of Place" is an installation in the gallery Articule as well as a walk and a panel. The project explores how these birds, once war heroes, illustrate our ambiguous relation to dirt, prejudice and aesthetics, and hopes to imagine solutions to better share Montreal with its fauna.

Join us on April 7th for a pigeon-walk in the Mile End led by biologist Luc-Alain Giraldeau followed by a panel discussion in the gallery with Luc-Alain Giraldeau, Laurent Lussier, urbanist, François Messier, pigeon-breeder, and myself, Chloé Roubert, anthropologist.

1:30 pm at Parc du Portugal on St Laurent and Marianne to begin the walk.
3 pm release of pigeons at Articule
3:15 pm panel at Articule

Articule
262 Fairmount W.
Montréal Québec
H2V 2G3 Canada
(opened tues to thurs 12h–18h, fri 12h-21h, and sat–sun 12h–17h)

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Pour ceux qui connaissent mon intérêt pour les pigeons, l'obsession s'est transformée en une installation, une marche et une table-ronde pour l'exposition anti-curatoriale Springtemps de la galerie Articule à Montréal du 29 mars au 14 avril.

La différence entre un pigeon et une colombe est arbitraire puisqu’elle n’existe pas: la colombe est simplement un pigeon blanc. Si on peut observer ces oiseaux sous les viaducs, on les retrouve aussi comme symbole du Saint-Esprit dans les églises catholiques.

Inspiré par le travail de l'anthropologue Mary Douglas, "Dirt is Matter Out of Place" est une installation dans la galerie Articule ainsi qu'une marche et une table ronde. Au travers de ces oiseaux, anciens héros de guerre, le projet explore notre relation ambiguë à la saleté, empreinte de préjugés; et propose d'imaginer des solutions pour mieux partager Montreal avec sa faune.

Retrouvez-nous le 7 avril pour une marche-pigeon guidée par le biologiste Luc-Alain Giraldeau suivie d’une table ronde avec Luc-Alain Giraldeau, Laurent Lussier, urbaniste, François Messier, éleveur de pigeon et moi-même, Chloé Roubert, anthropologue.

13h30 Parc du Portugal sur St Laurent et Marianne pour le début de la marche.
15h lâcher de pigeons à Articule (262 Fairmount O.)
15h15 table-ronde à Articule

Articule
262 Fairmount O.
Montréal Québec
H2V 2G3 Canada
(ouvert mardi au jeudi 12h–18h, ven 12h-21h, and sam–dim 12h–17h)

(poster Chris Tucker; photo Layne Gardner, for more on the pigeon go to http://www.npausa.com)

Architecture's Bi-Annual Event

I was in Venice last week and it was great.

Hornaday with Baby Bison at Smithsonian

"William Temple Hornaday, Chief Taxidermist of the United States National Museum from 1882, Curator of the Department of Living Animals, and the first Superintendent of the National Zoological Park, with a baby bison known as Sandy, probably on the grounds adjoining the Smithsonian Castle. This is probably the bison calf that Hornaday brought back from his 1886 summer field trip to Montana. The calf lived only a short time."

From The Smithsonian Archives

What in the World is Art: An Example from the Field

A few days before the 2012 Whitney Biennial opened, a web page with the museum's logo, template, language and a similar url (www.whitney2012.com instead of www.whitney.com) announced the institution's decision to give up on certain "generous corporate donations" by terminating its partnership with the Deutsche Bank and Sotheby's. According to this release by resigning from such benefits the Whitney was acknowledging and, especially displaying its role in upholding "a system that benefits collectors, trustees, and corporations at the expense of art workers" (I would add art lovers). The Whitney was taking a stance against the Deutsche Bank's corporate conduct (the bank just settled a legal dispute of $202 million for reselling knowingly shaky mortgages between 2007 and 2009) and deploring Sotheby's recent internal policies (the lock-out of its art handlers while making record profits and increasing its director's revenue from $2.4million in 2009 to $10.3 million in cash and benefits in 2011).

The world of art is a weird one that exists through the belief that certain "things" have magical-like forces over us. Often these magical qualities are explained by using intellectual concepts, discussing production prowess or expressing notions of aesthetics, while actually most of these "things with agencies" gain their aura through the tricky powers of financial markets. So for a museum to use its own existence to reveal the inner-workings of this weird cosmology - for instance museums may use artists because their sponsors need to sell things that may gain value if the museum uses this artist's work - was impressive, almost as impressive as good art. That excitement, however, lasted only until I learned the website was a hoax and experienced the Whitney biennial's overall blandness.

If that fake virtual press release was the most creative project to come out of the Biennial, I'm also excited to say that their hoax is part of a series of fake press releases and that their latest has just denounced the Whitney’s recent actual request for donations from blue-chip artists of work valued over $500,000.

Two Mediums, One Story: Damien Hirst Does the Art World One Spot at a Time

Damien Hirst's International art world invasion continued on January 12th 2012 with 331 of his spot paintings on display-and-sell missions in every Gagosian gallery world-wide (that's 11 - three in New York, two in London, and one each in Paris, Geneva, Rome, Athens, Hong Kong, and Beverly Hills).

Two fantastic art critics similarly discuss this cruelly banal cultural phenomenon through two different mediums  - Peter Schjeldahl covered it in this week's New Yorker with his article Spot On and Hennesy Youngman propagated his thoughts via YouTube.

(Hennesy the younger art critic will be talking at Concordia U. in Montreal next week thursday 26th. for an event called What Does It Mean, And What Can You Do About It? )

Finally Marina's Presence in a Game!!!

Closed for over a year now, Marina Abramovic's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and the amount of coverage, articles and commentary documenting it seem like a distant past.

At the time I remember being struck by the general uniformity of critical response which matched her audiences attitude: either utmost seriousness or profound awe (and a striking lack of humor). The constraints of the institution - the intense security (transgressors could be banned from the MoMA for life), the difficult acoustics, the bright neons - were probably the principle causes for this monotone outcome, but overall the artist's serious form of self-making in the show - with Abramovic replicating herself through her performance and reperformances - was like turning everyone that participated into her (too grim? too dramatic?) outlook.

Pippin Barr recently came up with "The Artist is Present" game, which embodies quite well the qualms mentioned above as well as the weird steps involved in the Marina art experience (although I feel like the art experience in general to a certain extent too).

Curating Questions and the Multi-Narrations of Health/City

I went to the Power Coorperation Fellows' talk at the CCA last Thursday, where the three young architects presented their collaborative curatorial project entitled Health/City. Since the beginning of the summer they have been conjunctionally working on ways to present their topic without supporting a thesis in relation to health in cities directly but rather advocate a version of urban health history that, like history in general, is however you perceive it.

It is with this in mind that they chose 100 health related images from the CCA's collection: the low-brow magazine cover from last month with the eco-friendly building, air conditioning industry catalogues from the 1950s, 19th century slum maps, passages from novels discussing military asphyxiation... With this initial (mostly visual) base they mapped out the various thematic passageways between items (such as the 17th c. plague doctor can be linked to a slum map through the theme of epidemics, but also to a toilet bowl through smell). The point here is that this cluster of links and images form a multi-narrative understanding history. While the website isn't up yet, the fellows are planning on putting this network of information online by the end of the month - the website would let the visitor/browser create/curate his or her own version of health history by deciding which images to link with one another. 

I enjoyed the talk. I enjoyed the talk because it wasn't a self-congratulatory architect's attempt at philosophy but rather a real try at asking questions about the nature of curating, collecting and knowledge and coming up up with a tangible platform as an answer. Some audience members suggested that the lack of curatorial structure could be disorienting for users or let the project fall flat; others also pleasantly name dropped architects for extra useful images. I think both of these thoughts wouldn't have crossed people's mind if the project hadn't been qualified as a CCA project. Indeed in a way this project's quality and flaw are the same: from the talk it seems that it is more of an exercise in curating and anthropology than an architectural thesis materialized through a curated space. This is obviously totally great by me, and exceptional really because for a discipline - curating - that prides itself for creativity, depth and original-thought, interdisciplinary perspectives and multi-medium exhibitions remain ridiculously too few and avant-gardiste. 

Basically it's very exciting to see the CCA promoting such initiatives, and I'm looking forward to seeing Health/City online to get a better grasp of my version of urban health history. 

The Lack of Subtlety, the Art of Making Things Banal and Provincial Masturbation

I went to the "Denis Gagnon Shows All" exhibition at the Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal yesterday. 

Gagnon is a fashion designer - sorry "couturier" - well known for his thick glasses and recent use of zippers. The exhibition was designed by another of Québec's creative force, "famous architect from Montreal" (quote Nathalie Bondil) Gilles Saucier. Gilles and Denis must have agreed that Denis was a gift to the province - sorry the world (of fashion) - and his talents of universal artistic value and that consequently everything would be done to dramatically aestheticize not only his dresses but also the man - sorry couturier - and his sales. 

The dresses, which seem to have been selected for their geometrical proportions and high contrasts, are presented on plastic white models hanging from the ceiling and lit with led lights to project heavy shadows on the costumes and the floor. Since Denis' talent and the outcome of it is as atemporal as it is universal there are no tags with dates or material used for the objects shown - you just have to look to feel their value. If the shadows don't make you feel enough the dramatic music blasting in the background can help. It accompanies a geometrical three screen projection on the ceiling with Denis and his glasses in slow motion during a fashion show. The film plays on repeat just in case you didn't notice it the first twenty times around. It gave me a head ache and seems to purposefully distract you from the dresses.

Honestly some of the dresses aren't uncreative, but since all selected pieces are from his fall/winter 2010 or Spring/Summer 2011 collections, the curator monitoring the show should have put commercial tags straight up. Besides the moment you are out of the store - sorry museum - you can head to Holt and Renfrew a block away and buy your own. I know a lot of stores like to think of their windows as curated - fine -  I'm more curious as to why a museum would want a fashion window in its institution. 

Fashion is far from being a simple banality. More than art, it is key in how we construct our everyday selves for ourselves as well as for and through others, and because of this, like art, it deserves an essential place in public debate. Some fascinating fashion exhibits have been curated in exhibition spaces: at the Barbican Art Gallery in London with Viktor and Rolf or at the FIT on costume and American nationalism. So instead of just presenting two pretty tacky collections by a local designer with the most unsubtle presentation possible, why not use the collection to analyze the role of nudity in culture (a key aspect in his dresses), think about the influence of local vs. multinational trends, the presence of decay in contemporary high fashion, the evolution and relation of craft and fast fashion - in other words making it interesting and more than a boutique showcase.

The real pompom  was that - while the close up images of his dresses (horse hair and zippers) stuck to the walls looked like advertisementss, the music sounded like an Operette from an all-inclusive in Santo Domingo, the shadows contrived and the dresses overall tacky - the promotion material for the exhibit presented a glass-less Denis nude staring in our eyes. Again very subtle. I think you are suppose to read something along the lines of Denis Gagnon: an icon unveiled. Not only is the photoshop poorly done but not even for their Yves St Laurent retrospective - an icon whose influence is seriously difficult to question - was there no image of the couturier.

and that is called provincial masturbation.

A Good Curator Gets

Drop Legs sent me this. These are all the reasons for why being a curator is a great career choice:

When the MET Gets Insecure - Baldessari's Pure Beauty Take Two

Last week I went to the Metropolitan to see the Baldessari retrospective for a second time (I first saw it at the Tate in London). The Tate had it better. Maybe because the British institution had more room, the MET show felt cluttered. But in their spatial restrictions, I was happy to see the curators presented more of the artist's earlier and less well-known work (such as Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt of 1972) rather than his 80s color dots on black and white footage. 

In their restrictions, however, they also decided on pretty much the pettiest of possible moves they could have done with Brain/Cloud (With Seascape and Palm Tree) from 2009 -  the image illustrates my post "Baldessari's Brain vs Koons's Penis". This installation is composed of a sculptural brain being filmed by a delayed low quality camera, giving the visitors the chance to see both the brain/cloud in reality and in a mediated reality themselves and the cloud/brain. For some reason - I heard rumors of weight - the MET didn't instal this work but still wanted to. Accordingly they went on presenting multiple flat large-scale reproductions of it as well as its illustration on all of the exhibit's published material.

Talk about being missing the point.

To forget how depressing it is when even the world's top museum is insecure about its collection and/or suggests a reproduction is sort of like the real when doing an exhibit on an artist who has perpetually made fun of such conventional ways of seeing:
Here is a little humor with John Baldessari's Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt from 1972: 

Hell No? The New Museum's latest use of 'we'

"Hell No!" was taken in March 2010 in Williamsburg, NYC

The New Museum opened its latest show Free tuesday night. It's hard to judge an exhibition during an art opening, mostly because it's a party and not a time to look at a new hanging (interestingly the after-party is the only part of the night that suggests the true purpose of such gatherings). Anyways, because of that I wouldn't judge the curating but I will judge the curatorial statement.

Inspired by “ Dispersion” (2001–), an essay by artist Seth Price, the show brings together works that tackle "the increased dispersion of culture, by examining how its circulation and reception has changed across mediums from print, to video, and to the web. In light of the way we now experience political events and pop culture, Price offers a new description of public space and questions the viability of public art as we understand it."

So Free is about the increasingly free-flowing circulation of information in 'our' day and age, its implications and how it has affected 'our' relation to and in public space. While this is definitely a theme worth an exhibition (and many more), there's a disconcerting use of all-encompassing words - such as we, culture, pubic space, dispersion, information - that dilute these complicated realities into smooth processes and make the art/show difficult to take seriously.

The most obvious of these vacuous uses is of the term 'we'.

Who is 'we'? Is it the artists' and New Museum staff's class and generation? People born between the Oil Crisis and the fall of the Berlin Wall, with high degrees, a certain creative edge and all living in NYC (12 out of 21 of the artists) or at least a Western metropole (all artists)? If that is the case, then yes that 'we' does have a different way of exchanging information and experiencing the public realm, otherwise the 'we' must be nuanced - put more bluntly exchanged for "the New Museum's target audience." It isn't a question of how the 'we' excludes those who do not own a computer, do not speak English or are living under the level of poverty but rather considering the people who are part of the Western 'popular culture' and 'public space' are not necessarily following youtube trends, responding to Yahoo! answers, staying updated on their urban landscape via Google Maps and socializing on chatroulette.

In a way the use of 'we' illustrates the paradox of the net art community: they make claims and believe they are asking questions on the  popular while dialoguing only with a niche of people who aren't part of the popular.

If this is what defines an avant-garde I think the show would have been better off reconciling the popular this avant-gardism claims to embody with the popular of the 'we' the museum says it wants to explore.

This video accompanies this post just because it's web related, and it sums the both very popular (we've all seen at least one of these) and very exclusiveness (who has seen all of them) of 'web' culture.

Curatorial Project: Within Which All Things Exist and Move - Closing Party and Catalogue Launch

The catalogue is printed and Pop Montreal was very generous - we have beer reserves till spring.

Thanks to everyone who came to the show, the closing vernissage and/or helped with putting all the parts of the exhibit together - the art, catalogue, curating, hanging or party.  

It's been a great success and hopefully was material to challenge the spaces within which all things exist and move!

Curating: Within Which All Things Exist and Move

I curated an exhibit opening at Art45. Although it opens saturday, the closing party is where things will be at: October 3rd with Pop Montreal, the artists and the catalog launch. Here's the press release:

Curated by Chloé Roubert, this exhibition juxtaposes images from Jon Rafman's Google Street View series with photographic urban shots from the 1950s onwards by Gabor Szilasi. By comparing these artistic approaches to past and current public space, the exhibit touches upon ideas of urban visuality, privacy and authorship.

Rafman will be in the forthcoming exhibit Free at the New Museum in NYC, and Szilasi is a recipient of the Governor General award whose retrospective was held at the National Gallery of Canada in 2009.

The Closing Party with catalogue launch and artists present is organized in collaboration with Art Pop of Pop Montreal, on Sunday October 3rd from 3pm to 5pm.

Art45 is open Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 5pm, or on weekdays by appointment.

Art45 - Edifice Belgo Building
372 St Catherine W. #220
Montreal, Québec
art@art45.ca