Allison Hrabluik artist talk at York University

Lois Klassen's version of the PENELOPE! project, from loiszing.blogs.com

I love (and am envious of the recipients of) Calgary-born, Vancouver-based artist Allison Hrabluik's recent PENELOPE! project. On March 17th of this year, Hrabluik mailed out 435 envelopes to various Canadian art world figures. Produced in collaboration with Artspeak as an OFFSITE project, the packages had no return address and each contained a large sheet of white paper that had the addressee's first name written across it in simple but exacting block letters.

While the envelopes were a total mystery to some, and there was quite a bit of online gumshoeing going on to try and find out where they'd come from (on Facebook especially), they seem to have been a welcome surprise for most people. The posters seem sort of like oversized, generous but strangely anonymous "thinking of you" greeting cards. I've really enjoyed finding people's names in such bold, enthusiastic letters above their desks in their offices and other unexpected places.

Anyone want to bet which Greg this might be for? From artspeak.ca

Hrabluik was recently in the Vancouver Art Gallery's "How Soon is Now" survey of West Coast art and is also coming to Toronto next week to do an artist's talk at York University in Dan Adler's "Theoretical Issues in Contemporary Art" grad seminar. The seminar focuses on photoconceptual practices in contemporary art, so I'm assuming her talk will address the use of photographs in her projects at some point.

The talk is free and open to the public (or to those who are willing to make the trek up to North York) and will be happening next Wednesday, May 6th at 11:30 am in Accolade West, Room 003.

Timeline of Museums and the Recession

The website ARTINFO.com (via Art Fag City) has started a timeline of how North American museums have been affected by, or responded to, the recent economic recession. It's a thorough play-by-play of developments at several major institutions, including Toronto's AGO. While it's a not-so-great distinction for the Canadian institution to be included, the timeline is useful in seeing how early this all began and how much the closures and reductions have increased as of late.

"Recession art" at FIAC, Paris, from www.flickr.com/photos/emergencyrooms

Seemingly inspired by the Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum's recent near-closure, The Art Newspaper is also reflecting on the relationship between art and the recession in Tom Shapiro's article "Museums and the recession: there is an alternative to closure or selling off the collections—sharing". In it, Shapiro advocates that museums and galleries facing the possibility of reduced staff, programming and public activities join forces with other local institutions to share staff and collections in order to stay afloat and foster new relationships that can offer resources that are hard to come by on reduced budgets:

Bringing together the best thinking from multiple organisations should result in better processes and practices. Also, as employees talk across organisations, they may develop synergies that have nothing to do with shared resources. For example, an art museum and a natural history museum might start lending works or exhibits to each other; museums might begin to coordinate their exhibition schedules and openings, and there may be opportunities for region-wide collaboration.

While I think Shapiro's idea is a good one, theoretically speaking, I'm not sure how practical it would be to execute; particularly in small town environments, which many university-affiliated galleries like the Rose Museum find themselves in, where neighbouring institutions and potential partners might be a great distance from one another. And while I could see larger institutions like the ROM finding some beneficial partnerships with slightly smaller museums like the Gardiner Museum, for instance, I don't know that the institutions that directly "compete" with one another could put aside their differences and make such collaborations work. I doubt the AGO and the ROM, whose recent renovations have put them into direct competition in many ways, would be able to come to agreeable terms for a partnership, for instance. Still, it's worth contemplating, especially since sharing and collaboration are two strategies artist-run centres have used for decades now in order to thrive on their limited budgets.

And for a slightly more light-hearted take on the creative impact of the recession, check out some of the projects at the Recession-Art blog. It hasn't been updated in a while, but offers some interesting performance pieces on art fairs, banks and the recession.

Cory Arcangel and Hanne Mugaas's "Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet)"

One last piece of Images festival blogging detritus as this year's edition comes to a close:

L.M. and Sally McKay have written an interesting review/critique of one of the last Live events of the festival, a co-presentation with Pleasure Dome of a 'collaborative' (scare quotes to be explained shortly) performance by Cory Arcangel and curator Hanne Mugaas called Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet)

Still from Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet) version 2.0 at Art in General, 2008

I identify with a lot of the points they make, including wishing the presentation followed through on its promise to define the internet, then art on the internet and the relationship between the two, and that it was more structured and concise and less "fly by the seat of your pants and hope you're charming enough to pull it off". But I actually wasn't all that disappointed by the performance. I thought a lot of the clips the artist-curator chose were hilarious (I hadn't seen many of them before, I should admit straight away) and that there were a few phenomena–such as the online exhibition of the bichon frisé in art or the strange way that YouTube seems to produce people who have the same name as famous artists who also share similar characteristics to them, such as a teenage Dan Graham who cynically rambles in stream-of-consciousness sentences–that did manage to comment on the way the internet has changed our relationship to art, even in spite of the sometimes annoying presentation style.

Sally's point that the 'collaboration' was really a one-sided affair, with poor Mugaas stuck in the control booth the whole evening and only occasionally participating by Gmail chat, is definitely well taken, however. One of the interesting things the internet has faciliated is co-creations by artists, curators and all sorts of other folks that may not have been (physically) possible in the past, but the interactions between Arcangel and Mugaas in this performance were sort of like a casual conference call gone horribly wrong.

Andy Paterson also critiqued the performance on his Images blog for similar reasons. His post can be found here.

Update:
Terence Dick has now joined the debate, firmly on the side of "that performance was a waste of time," on Akimblog and I am having the unnerving experience of being in complete agreement with Timothy Comeau after facing off against him quite firmly over the Mammalian Diving Reflex debacle (I believe he called something I wrote "one of the stupidest things [he]'d ever read"). Just goes to show there's no accounting for personal (aesthetic) taste.

Sung Hwan Kim's "In the Room" at Gallery TPW

I sometimes worry that my love of Gallery TPW's programming is verging on boosterism. Either that, or curator Kim Simon and I share a brain or an ESP link or something. But, as I've been doing double-duty this week at the Images Festival as their blogger, I've had a chance to see tons of programming, and the performance and subsequent installation by Korean-born, New York–based artist Sung Hwan Kim has been my favourite set of experiences.

Sung Hwan Kim,Pushing against the air, 2007 [performance documentation]
Photo: Nina Canell

"In the Room," which began as a Live performance including improvised storytelling, live drawing and music, has now been translated into a month-long exhibition in the gallery space. Curator Kim Simon discussed the performance and exhibition with me on the Images blog here.

There is still lots to see in the last two days of the festival, including several curated screenings and a few Live events coorganized with Pleasure Dome and Wavelength. The full program can be found on the Images site.

South-South: Interruptions and Encounters at Justina M Barnicke Gallery

My posts on this blog will be scarcer than usual over the next week as I'll be writing for the Images Festival blog here. Artist and critic Sholem Krishtalka and I will be doing previews of screenings and live performances as well as interviews with artists and curators, while Andrew J Paterson and others will be posting their reviews of events, exhibitions and screenings. There are a lot of fantastic events planned, so if you have any interest in film, video and related image-based performance works, I highly recommend checking out the full program online.

Louise Liliefeldt, Lekker III, 2004, performance still (left). Courtesy of the artist
Marlon Griffith, Runaway Reaction, 2008 (right).
Photography by Akiko Ota. Courtesy of the artist.

But, before the Images madness begins this evening, I highly recommend stopping by the opening of "South-South: Interruptions & Encounters," a group exhibition at the Justina M Barnicke Gallery (co-organized with SAVAC) put together by artist and curator Tejpal S. Ajji and historian Jon Soske. The show brings together "eight artists whose work is situated at an intersection of African and South Asian history, politics, or culture" and includes work by Omar Badsha, Allan deSouza, Brendan Fernandes, Marlon Griffith, Jamelie Hassan, Apache Indian, Louise Liliefeldt, and Hew Locke.

Brendan Fernandes, Future (•••---•••) Perfect, 2008,

installation at Toronto's Nuit Blanche

Not only does the exhibition look fascinating, but as with Ajji's excellent 2007 exhibition, "Rightfully Yours," the public programming promises to be fantastic. It includes a workshop with Toronto/New York–based artist and Nuit Blanche alumni Brendan Fernandes, a scholarly panel discussion on African and Indian nationalisms and a multidisciplinary panel discussion that "brings together artists and writers to further explore the notion of an "aesthetics of the encounter" as represented in the exhibition."

The opening is tonight, Thursday April 2, 2009 from 6 pm - 8 pm at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto and the exhibition runs until May 19.

AGYU releases Waging Culture Report

Yesterday, the AGYU (Art Gallery of York University) released their long-awaited Waging Culture Report, which surveys visual artists living in Canada (who voluntarily took the survey) for demographic and statistical data. The aim of the report was to offer data to governmental bodies and cultural policy planners since a nation-wide survey of this kind has not been completed since 1993.

Also working from statistical data, Komar and Melamid used telemarketer survey
results to create the USA's Most Wanted Painting, 1992,
from diacenter.org

The statistics that have resulted from the survey run the gamut from interesting and idiosyncratic to downright depressing. Some findings of note:

- Day jobs and grants are still getting the average artist by, while their studio practice is often an expense rather than a revenue generator: In fact, the typical artist lost $556 from their studio practice in 2007. The vast majority of an artist’s studio revenue is from sales (54%), with grants (34%) and artist fees (12%) making up the rest. Expenses that exceed an artist’s revenue are covered by other employment income.

- Visual artists have higher levels of education than the general population, but this is often directly disproportionate to their artistically-generated income: Over 84% have at least an undergraduate degree, and almost 45% have graduate degrees (compared to 23% and 7% of the total labour force, respectively). The higher an artist’s education level, the less they earn from their practice after expenses; other income sources, however, do increase proportionately to the levels of education.

- Some sort-of good news: Artists in Quebec earn the largest net income from their studio practices (median: $1,383) and those in Alberta lose the most (median: -$2,000). Ironically, artists in Quebec have the lowest total income (median: $15,089)

- And: The wage gap between male and female artists is significantly lower than in the labour force as a whole, a mere 10% for artists versus 36% for the total labour force. The difference in sales, however, is a full 48%.

While I know the methodology of the report has sometimes been controversial, and I'm a little wary of framing other forms of work and income that are not derived from a studio as "non-art related work,"* I think it's important for the AGYU and Michael Maranda to devote time and effort to try and insert this information into the discourse about art, money and funding in Canada. Sometimes the only way to get your voice in to all the bureaucratic rhetoric is to speak the same language.

* While I firmly believe artists need the financial stability, time and space to be able to make the kind of work they want to make and do the research necessary to continue their practice, I'm not convinced that devoting time and effort to other projects - like desk jobs in the arts or elsewhere, writing gigs and curating - necessarily detracts from their practice or whether it instead informs and can be an extension of their studio practice. This is coming from an admitted workaholic, but I'm interested in the boundaries in the art world between "real work" and "art work" and whether those really hold up when tested.