Art and Cold Cash

Everyone reading this, as well as the one writing it, lives within the horizon of a world-historical event so profound that we hardly have words to describe it.
Specialists speak of it as the disappearance of hunter-gatherer societies, or the final knitting of all humankind into the single market economy of metropolitan capitalism. But this disinterested language cannot express the loss we feel when we ponder the imminent vanishing of the earth’s last Palaeolithic cultures. Critics on both the left and right advise us not to “romanticize” these cultures; and, indeed, those who are victors in this vast scenario of destruction have been all too ready to lapse into easy pathos and self-satisfied nostalgia about the “primitives” whom industrialized civilization is displacing and eradicating. Yet for anyone who has read even a little of the vast library of poetry, narrative and ritual collected from diminishing Palaeolithic people over the last two centuries, the extinction of these universes of human experience, beauty and knowledge of the divine can hardly seem like anything other than catastrophe.
The work of the Art and Cold Cash collective, based in London, Ontario, and Baker Lake, Nunavut, has been made on one frontier of this disaster, as it is now being undergone by one ancient people, the Inuit of Canada’s Arctic. But I do not want to put words in their mouths. The MOCCA exhibition of drawings and videos made by the collective and friends--artists Jack Butler, Sheila Butler, Patrick Mahon, William Noah, Myra Kukiiyaut, writer Ruby Arngna'naaq, and others--takes as its official topic, its “key factor” (according to a wall text), the quite recent transition from barter to market economies among the Inuit of Baker Lake. The approach to this matter, says the collective’s website (http://www.artcoldcash.ca), is “investigative.” And, in fact, the documentary videos, especially, do offer the viewer critical insight into the contemporary Inuit experience of modernization, which the people of Baker Lake appear to be taking in stride, however bemused they may be by its novelty and energetic consumerism.
The drawings in this show are meant to be similarly investigative in character, and, to a degree, they serve as memorials to the disjunctures that civilization has introduced into the north. A monumentally scaled acrylic work on paper by Inuit artist William Noah, for example, juxtaposes a bush plane with an Inuk in traditional garb and goggles for winter hunting--a bold, simple statement, with no commentary needed or wanted, of the contrast between the fast and new, and the old, slow and patient.
But the drawings also take us well beyond the stated agenda of the collective, into the scene of the deeper cultural emergency. The graphite pictographic sketches and the poems of Myra Kukiiyaut are subtle, delicately painful evocations of her daily life among the contradictions and alienations that have been visited upon her. To one drawing, she has attached the following text:
helicopter
this is useful
this is flour
this is baking powder
this is very costly
this is very expensive
this is what is on their minds
this land is far away
Kukiiyaut has become preoccupied with the list of things that are “on their minds,” things that are now on everyone’s mind, whether in the north or south: the cost of newly necessary commodities, the inescapable facts of rational, mechanized civilization bearing down, like attack helicopters, on whatever is personal, secret, mythic within us. And, in the process, she has been distanced from the land that once supported her amply, and supplied her with the food of story, without which everyone withers and perishes. In these lines and in Kikliyaut’s poignant drawings, we sense the passing away of a world, and its replacement by weightless anxiety.
The dread of modernity, though not so finely stated as in Kikiiyaut’s work, also pervades the drawings of the southern Canadian artists in this show. In Sheila Butler’s large, loosely worked pieces on paper, the north’s newfound capitalism is depicted as a version of what southerners presumably experience all the time: a vicious circulation of industrial and consumer products--helicopters, television sets--accompanied by the incessant spectacle of money changing hands. Someone at a drafting table sketches a bag of money at the end of a rainbow: a dispiriting icon of the artist in capitalist culture, whose ultimate subject in both life and art (so it is represented here) is the endless quest for ever-elusive cash. As things are in the south, we are told by these angry works, so are they in the north, with cash exchange dissolving everything into an image of itself.
Three of Jack Butler’s four furiously painted gouaches in red and black--the most involving works in this exhibition--are, like Sheila Butler’s drawings, urgent essays on the self-consumption of art in capitalist culture. “What becomes precious?” one exasperated painting asks, in English and in Inuit syllabics. The answer, at least in sensible societies (or so I gather from this complex, agitated picture) is a tool or a person, not the abstract dollar signs whispering all around us.
But not every work by Jack Butler is so directly polemical. In the provocative gouache entitled this one thing I know--a line from Gavin Bryars’ haunting 1971 musical composition Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet--Butler skips free of all narrative constraint, and delivers up a phantasmal vision of the ancient, myth-making mind at the end of its tether. A snake with an engorged penis and the head of a gasping or screaming man springs from the painterly turmoil of this work, toward a floating foetus. Joined are two primordial emblems of transfiguration and renewal--the serpent, the unborn child--yet the pair here are mere potentialities stuck in permanent unfulfillment: the snake doomed never to mate and reproduce, the child fated never to be born.
In Jack Butler’s drawing, we glimpse the destiny of the brilliant Palaeolithic imagination in our time: to be recalled a little while longer--for one final sunset moment--in the beautiful tales and poems garnered by ethnographers and in carvings and drawings of the kind created for the southern market at Baker Lake, then to vanish from human consciousness, without issue, and without hope of resurrection. Though the collective does not intend it to be so, the work of Art and Cold Cash is a witness made in the dusk, an act of mourning for something infinitely valuable that humankind is losing forever.

Art and Cold Cash, with work by the Art and Cold Cash collective and Myra Kukiiyaut. The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen Street West, 3 February to 11 March 2007.

Jeff Redinger

The Walter Band, which helped kick off Walter Redinger’s current show at MOCCA, is a matter of fathers and sons. There’s Walter (guitar, lead vocals) and his electrically energetic son Jeff (bass guitar, backup vocals), and veteran rocker Brodie Lodge (lead guitar, backing vocals) and his exuberantly talented son Durrie (drums). The night Walter Redinger opened, Amigo Motel talked with Jeff Redinger about music, art, being an artist’s son, and the future. Jeff was dressed, head to toe, in regulation punk black, with some faintly sinister silver accessories: a gleaming crown of thorns around his neck, for example. Jeff’s band, called Redinger, performs frequently around London.

Amigo Motel: How did you get hooked up with the Walter Band?

Jeff Redinger: Four or five members came into the band. I don’t know if there were some issues, but along the way they lost their bass player, so they asked if I’d come in and play bass, so I said, sure. I pick up on instruments fairly well, and bass is basically a guitar less two strings. I have more of a guitar-player’s sense when I’m playing the bass, but, you know, I’m very in tune with rhythm, so I just fit right. The more I played the more I felt comfortable with everybody.
Bass is an interesting instrument, it opened up a lot of avenues for me, because as a musician, for myself, being a guitar player, you kind of put the bass in the background. Everybody kind of forgets about the bass player, and how important and key that role is, so important to a band. Playing for my dad actually helped me out in my musical career as well, just in the fact that as a bass player I realized how much I controlled the sound or the tempo or, you know, how it made the song a little more jumpy, with more character to it. So it was really good for me to join the band. Basically, that’s how I got into it and went with it.

AM: But you didn’t come out of music. I mean, you’re a graphic artist.

JR: It’s a funny story. When you live with an artist, and you live in a small town--well, I’ve always felt different from my peers. In the city, when people find out you live with an artist, it’s kind of great. But when you’re actually in it, it’s different. I‘ve lived through the financial hardship of it. I’ve kept a lot of my peers and friends away from it. I’ve hid it, protected it, just because I didn’t want to have to explain why we live this way. Why there’s paint on our kitchen furniture. And why the table’s got marker all over it. I’ve always known our place to be a functioning studio, and it’s been difficult for me. Everything’s a risk.
The reason why I went into graphic design is, yeah, I have talent as a visual artist. But because I witnessed my dad’s career, and how risky it can be, I always wanted to stay away from the art world. But I always knew I had talent in it, and I wanted to do it a kind of way I would get a paycheque every few weeks. So I thought, OK, there’s graphic design and advertising. I think I took a course in high school once, and the task was to design your own magazine. I really took to it, and I thought it was really cool. So I thought to myself, here’s a way to be an artist and not starve, right?
So I went though high school. I was an honours student. So I thought about going into maths or science, or biology. I really took to the scholastic part of school, but it was always art--some kind of spiritual thing that pulls you back to where you’re supposed to go. You find your way in the course of life, even if you try to rebel against it, or you don’t want to be a part of it because you fear it. I think my higher power, or whatever you want to call it, just kept on bringing me back to art. So I went to school in Toronto, at the Ontario College of Art, and took advertising and design. I did fairly well, graduating at the top of the class.
I had a few creative directors check over my portfolio and, you know, they wanted me to come in for an interview. But I never quite cracked it, and it really frustrated me. I had a lot of depression. I was always meeting barriers. I thought I was never good enough. I was in a relationship with this one lady who worked downtown in Toronto, and she was more of the engineer type, very type-A personality, where I come from a very liberal, free-spirited environment. And I felt that I could never live up to those expectations that she made for me.
So all this frustration was happening, and I was trying to run away from what was natural and what was me. And money was tight in Toronto, and I couldn’t pay for rent, and it just got worse, so I had to finally go back home with my tail between my legs.
I had to start from the first square. I had a lot of depression that I was battling, I had a serious problem with alcohol abuse, and life started to spiral down even more, and finally I met rock bottom. During that time I was playing music while I was going down the spiral. Lots of depression and past things happened to me that really spurred a lot of my creativity in my music. Everybody likes a sad song, you know? And I had a lot of them. So I wrote about six albums in two years from the time that I was at home, and I finally decided to give up and stop fighting who I really was, and said, all right, this is possibly my destiny--music, art in general. This is what I have in me, and I should give in and do it. After I did that, I felt a lot more free, and things began happening for me. I developed a supporting unit behind me in my music, a bass player and a drummer. Now I have my own band, I go under my own name, Jeff Redinger, solo artist with accompanying musicians, and that’s really working out for me. It’s been a weird ride for me. I am still lost, you might say, but I’m not worried about it, and that helps me get through the day.

AM: What kind of music do you listen to?

JR: I like a lot of blues, blues-rock, bass-type music. A lot of sixties rock, early seventies, that type of deal. I can always remember when I was a kid my father always had the blues playing or there was always jazz on. Or classical--CBC was always on in the house. When you’re a kid, you don’t really understand why it’s on, you don’t really like it. When you’re three or four you say, let’s listen to something different. But I think that had a large effect on me, and it really helped me out.

AM: What about contemporary groups?

JR: Like commercial bands? There are some, but I always tend to go back to the roots of music, like Led Zeppelin, like Muddy Waters, or John Lee Hooker, or Bob Dylan, Neil Young. I stick with the classics, I don’t know why, but I’m very particular with my music. With today’s music, it’s got to be something really good to grab me. Maybe something like The White Stripes. I really appreciate their musical style. Jack White [lead vocalist and guitarist with The White Stripes] is a really great musician. But, I don’t know, I really stick with the older stuff.

AM: What kind of stuff do you like playing in the Walter Band?

JR: I like playing all sorts of music. We do country. We’ve gotten into blues, we’ve incorporated a lot of abstract, experimental sound. We’ve harnessed it as much as we possibly can, but it’s fun because I’m like my dad, I like to be free and just try anything, go with the flow, wing stuff off in the moment. I do that a lot when I’m on stage, too, I’ll surprise the guys, switch the set list around, maybe even try a news blues song, something right in the moment, and see what happens. It gets people loose, and gets creative juices flowing.

AM: Where do you want your music to take you?

JR: I really don’t know. I’m really uncertain, but I’ve come to terms with that. I have a lot of faith these days, and that’s really been helping me out a lot.
Do I want to leave London? Possibly, if I wound up staying there, then I will be ready to take it when it happens. I’m not forcing things to happen, because a lot of the depression I had stems from that. I was always trying to get somewhere else, and not face reality where I was, and just let things be.

AM: What is your faith about?

JR: My faith is in Christianity. I believe in God and Jesus Christ, and Romans 8:28 really sticks in my mind all the time. [“We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”] The serenity of prayer is always there for me. Little things make sense, and I get the things I need when I need them the most.
Christianity came to me when I hit rock bottom. I realized that I had done a lot of--I don’t know if you’d want to call them bad things, but things that weren’t advancing me in my life. When you’re in your weakest moment, you cry out for some type of help from whatever higher powers, whether a rock or a twig, or the tree outside. Mine just happened to be Christianity....I was always aware that there was a God, but I never tapped into it. But now I am. That’s what gets me going every day. I don’t call Redinger a Christian rock band or anything like that. I write what I know and what I’ve experienced, or stories from other people that I’ve heard or that have intrigued me.
My music is all over the place. Some times it’s serious, other times it’s a lot of joking around. But people are like that. They can be jokers, they can be serious persons, and be a fool sometimes. I’m just being me, right? An ordinary person.
As far as my sound is concerned, I’m all over the place there, too. I’m blues, I’m blues-rock, I’m straight rock, I’m punk, I’m hard rock, country--I’m all over the board. I don’t like doing one type of music, because you get stale. I like where everything’s going right now. People are very receptive to what I’m doing in the clubs these days. It’s a slow start, but it’s a good start. If I had to look back two years ago, I would never have thought I would get here.

Jeff Redinger's website: http://www.jeffredinger.com

Walter Redinger: Return to the Void: The Ghost Ship and other tales from the ether. Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen Street West, Toronto. 3 February - 11 March 2007.

Redinger on Redinger

Amigo Motel caught up with Walter Redinger just before last Saturday’s opening of the artist’s Return to the Void at MOCCA. He was dressed for the occasion in a black bowler hat and a black, buttoned-up frock coat, an outfit that made him look like an amiable Victorian English archdeacon.

Amigo Motel: Tell me about Ghost Ship, the history of it.

Walter Redinger: I think many artists like to do a boat once or twice in their career. With all the tangling and weaving of life, the ups and downs and sorrows, it takes beauty and skill to skim over the surface of the water. But I never thought I would want to get heavily into boats. When I started to work [around 1990], I got into three or four ships. The first one [1994] was a singular thing with the Christopher Cutts Gallery. Then I put it aside for about a year or so, and began to work on another project--still a kind of ship, but smaller than that one. And from there I moved ahead, working on the boat or ship idea.
Now what happened? I get three or four of them, and I’m having an exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery [in London, Ontario; 1998], and at the same time the Michael Gibson Gallery wanted me to exhibit. Paterson Ewen also said he’d like to do it, but he didn’t want all the pressure, so he wanted to show with someone else. I didn’t know he was a fan of mine. So the fourth boat went in there [1998], and it looked good, but it didn’t look marvellous. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Mind you, I was coming off that four or five year stretch when I was in the desert, searching for God knows what, and I was quite picky. I sensed, when I brought the boats home, that I was not yet happy with what was happening. My way of solving it was to get very hostile, and I chopped them up in pieces, and I used those pieces...
Everybody thought I was nuts. So I said, I don’t tell you how to run your life, let me deal with it. I want to do what I have to do here. And I started to work on this last one, but in my heart I called it my first. I started to go after this bugger. In the summer times I would work outside, where I could see. Then, when fall came, and for three or four winters, I would haul it inside. I had one heavy winter and about three or four heavy summers. So counting the boats I first started, Ghost Ship took close to ten years.
So I’m having more fun, more control. I believed I had to get this bastard right. I wanted that complexity, and I didn’t have it yet. I was very fortunate that I had a friend who apparently didn’t have any more to do than come over and sit by me and criticize the damn thing. We did this many times. I would go all the way around it, and keep circling it in my design. Somebody mentioned that it didn’t look like it grew, it looked like it was.

AM: Was what?

WR: It was what it was. It didn’t grow in stages. I just kept marking, and I wasn’t an expert at the thing, but I had a good idea. You don’t need that much to do a boat, because the damn thing is in pictures. We don’t live in Halifax or somewhere boats are really around the place, but I just knew enough. And I had been coming off those fibreglass years, with those cast things I was doing. I was ready to sculpt in a different way, yet still pursue the organic, the fibre, and all of those things. But what this boat had was thickness--and I didn’t blow it. I somehow didn’t blow it.

AM: What’s at the back of it?

WR, pointing with his cane at the stern: That’s kind of the brain back there, and it has the steering mechanism, and the churning engines. But then it could be something that has nothing to do with a damn ship. It could be a walrus, an airplane, whatever...Two guys were delivering the stuff, and the one says--he was a picture framer--: This thing works with two opposing forces. It’s something very gentle and caring, and it might have led its kind. But it might have thumped other species or kinds on the head. Then somebody else told me something that was pretty neat: that it had led its kind through birth through the whole cycle of life back again, to death. So it saw beginnings, and it saw endings.
[He touches the charcoal grey fibreglass surface of the piece.] The thing is still smooth with all that fric-frac on it.

AM: What’s fric-frac?

WR: I just made that up. Fric-frac is texture. Flip-flop. I told David [Liss]: with the lighting, make it dance.

AM: Will you do any more ships?

WR: I have a feeling I’m not.

AM: No more ships?

WR: No more ships. And I think there might be a big, drastic move in my work again. I’m being pushed, with the health thing. And that’s kind of neat, too, sometimes. I told this to somebody: When you’re young, and you’ve got all that energy, you can screw around a lot. Myself, I just want to see a little more before I go, and, you know, that period I had in the 1980s, it probably helped me be a better person.

AM: A dry period?

WR: It wasn’t dry, I just wasn’t exhibiting. Then I did exhibit in New York [1995-2005], and, curiously, maybe I thought I was safe. I had this bullshit relationship with my own country. It was something I imposed on myself as much as people imposed it on me. I just sensed that I wanted to get some stuff, as Greg Curnoe would say, and I had to earn it. And I wasn’t sure what it was I was searching for.

AM: What have you learned about Ghost Ship, seeing it here at MOCCA?

WR: It’s more total. Let’s walk around.
[Standing by the port side, looking toward the stern]: I have never seen this view. It has a confrontational nature, almost like a wall on this side. The other side allows you to see inside its belly, inside its scoop, to look at the opposing dance of the greys, and the greys nearing black. I told the guys, when they were lighting it, to keep some of those blacks inside.
[Moving down the port side toward the stern]: When I made these parts, I would do them in links, but I knew I would have to get the whole thing swinging. It’s like swing in music. How does swing happen? I was delighted to find this out when I played with my band. Swing is slow-down--shuffle, as it were. And with the angles and the notches, I echo the curve.
[Pointing to the small wedges supporting the ship]: I had to put those buggers in, I just had to. I wasn’t going to put in a metal contraption to hold it up--I just said, Screw it--and it works. The ship kind of lopes over things a bit. As the ship is coming in on its last lung, it says: I’ve been going for seven thousand years, and I need a rest. That’s kind of what I wanted.
I think when you strike on an element of human nature, and you come across something very beautiful and very sad, you’re lucky to have seen it, to have experienced it. For an artist, it’s even more significant, because you’re in there with the dynamism, building the thing. Half the time you don’t even know how it works. It was impossible, in places, to build. I had to turn the thing upside down, get inside, grind it out, then reinforce it.
[At the rear, on the starboard side]: I saw this rear end and the rudder, and I saw it from the road, and I said, it’s not big enough. So I attached a piece to it, to give more chunk to it...The last thing I did with this baby was pull it over a bit. To swing it!

Walter Redinger's website: http://www.walterredinger.com.

Walter Redinger: Return to the Void: The Ghost Ship and other tales from the ether. Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen Street West, Toronto. 3 February - 11 March 2007.