The Graham Smith House

Modern lines made warm and inviting; Architect Graham Smith's contemporary house is full of the relaxing fragrance of wood and the radiance of blonde brick
19 October 2007
The Globe and Mail

The making of a perfect house can take a long time, as nobody needs to remind Toronto designer Graham Smith: He's been at it for almost 10 years.
The story of Mr. Smith's beautiful residence began in 1998, when this partner in Altius Architecture and his wife, Dinah Hampson, bought a vacant lot above Wendigo Creek, on the west side of High Park. Situated on a steep slope of sandy ravine, the 105-foot-wide site had long been considered impossible to build on. Before doing anything else, Mr. Smith had to prepare the spot, first, by scooping out a deep recess in the hillside to hold his building, then nailing down the dirt with long pins and otherwise bracing the excavation with concrete.
Next came the raising of the house's basic structure: a 4,300-square-foot, five-level stack of oblong boxes defined by steel girders and set into the hill, turned so that the building's long axis is parallel to the street. At the bottom is a 1,000-square-foot garage for four cars. On top and off the principal storeys are nearly 1,500 square feet of terrace.
The general aesthetic of the structure, now almost complete, is modernist in feel and style, with the clean lines and simplicity of the best of such design. With a clear span made possible by the steel-frame construction, glassed in on two sides and with a wide deck sweeping around its east and south sides, the principal level offers an uncluttered setting for cooking, dining, relaxing around the fireplace, and the kind of large-scale entertaining the family likes to do.
Below is a spacious family room, and, above, are the ample sleeping quarters for Mr. Smith and Ms. Hampson, and for their two daughters, 5 and 8, who have arrived since construction began.
The interior is notably quiet: Warming and cooling is accomplished by geothermal heat pumps, connected to some 1,600 feet of pipe sunk into the hillside.
But if Mr. Smith has approached his project with a modernist sensibility, he has also brought to it a warmth often missing from such houses.
Much loveliness in the structure comes from the fragrance, texture and warm natural colour of the wooden beams and window surrounds, from the soft darkness of the mahogany panelling used throughout, and the light-yellow radiance of large blonde bricks.
Since my first visit to the house three years ago, Mr. Smith has considerably enhanced the comfort and livability of the interior.
The four bathrooms have been finished, and cabinetry and closets have been installed throughout. (When I dropped by in 2004, Mr. Smith and Ms. Hampson were still hanging their clothes on a wire stretched across the master bedroom.)
The most attractive finishing touch, however, is the 1,200-square-foot deck garden, planted earlier this year by landscape designer Terry McGlade. Perched atop the building, with lovely views of High Park's treetops, this patch of robust nature in the city features the colours of our Ontario autumn, from the blue of asters to the sombre brown of tall grasses.
Because such green roofs are now in vogue, it's probably worthwhile pausing a moment on this garden.
The basic substructure is ordinary wooden decking. On this surface, Mr. Smith poured a liquid tar-like substance to provide waterproofing. Next came a layer of six-inch Styrofoam insulation, and, on top of that, a layer of cloth-meshed plastic and a thick sheet of black plastic to act as a root barrier. The next level was felt fabric, then an expanse of gravel-filled plastic containers shaped like egg cartons, then a layer of filter cloth. Finally, on top of this elaborate sandwich of materials, came the soil – ordinary potting soil – laid down six to eight inches deep.
As Mr. Smith explained to me, it would take a much larger green roof to affect local temperatures. But even at just 1,200 square feet, the garden has a definite impact on its immediate environment. It saves water by storing rain in its multilayered underpinnings: The precipitation that falls on the roof stays on the roof. And the sturdy insulated infrastructure of the garden effectively prevents solar radiation from heating up the interior of the house. From whatever perspective it's viewed – environmental or just aesthetic – this roof-top garden is a successful addition to a superb modern house that, in every sense, works.

Carolee Schneemann

Amigo Motel: Tell me about the MOCCA show, how it came about.

Carolee Schneemann: For many years, David Liss has been following my work and wanting to make an exhibit of it. It’s been a long wish for both of us. I think it was in the eighties when he saw my work in Montreal at Galerie Samuel Lallouz, and then other times, a retrospective in New York City in 1998 at the New Museum. He’s come to my exhibits in New York City at different galleries, and it was amazing that there was the time frame and that we could combine a Toronto show with this big exhibit in Buffalo at the same time. So the two curators have been collaborating. The spaces are very different, and the works are completely different.

AM: What have you brought to Toronto?

CS: I’ve brought major installations, many of which were made, conceived, thought of, dreamt, in Montreal or originally made in Canada.
It goes back to the eighties, when I worked a lot in Winnipeg, through the irresistible auspices of Gilles Hebert. He did a performance art festival in the eighties that somehow convinced artists from different parts of the world to come to Winnipeg in the winter, and do performances. I don’t know why I said yes. There wasn’t much money, but I got to stay in a wonderful railroad hotel with all the brass fittings, and I got the flavour of Canadian ingenuity...It was a splendid festival that, like many wonderful things in Canada, remain locked in the mythology of Winnipeg.
And then Gilles convinced me to prepare work for Plug In when Wayne Baerwaldt was there, and I had begun this very odd work of moulding rocks out of great desperation and an unhappy time. It started at home, in the Hudson valley, and I told myself: If you can make one rock, you’ll feel better today. And then it became two or three, something to think about. And I became so interested in this hand-cast process that, when I went to Winnipeg, I continued hand-casting them with a secret recipe. Soon I had hundreds of these rocks. And actually they had started with a dream, as most of the work does--a dream of circles diminishing in deep perspective, related to Monet’s water lilies, to cow plops, to bread, to Palaeolithic objects...
Snafu is my most immediate media work. It’s based on computer programme which activates four motors that pull vertically these small children’s baptismal coats dipped in plaster. They float up and down, activated by a sensor when people walk into the space. Projected on them is a horse race tipped vertically. The whole work was dreamt in Montreal. I have no idea when it’s about. I found the horse race on a live programme when I was in Nova Scotia for a James Tenney concert two years ago, and that’s what I had been dreaming of, and there it was.

AM: Tell me about Devour, the big video installation in this show. Is that a new work?

CS: Yes--relatively new.

AM: It has so much intimacy, sexuality.

CS: And violence, brutality. Someone being shot in Sarajevo. The endless destruction by my government’s militarism and technology. These endless incursions to destabilize other countries and cultures for the benefit of arms, oil, gold, whatever the underlying, invisible investment structure that drives the democracy of the U.S. Whatever this configuration is, it began to come to me in these video increments that were unexpected. Even before 9/11, I was getting videotapes from friends who worked in Haiti, photographing the brutalities there. I've always been collecting material from the destruction of Palestinian culture, the bombardments of Lebanon--I have a lot of research on that.
And then this horrific videotape from former Yugoslavia, that was a compendium made by a cooperative made by different artists and friends. It’s a mixture of a record of their losing their culture, with a small, floating statement that says: “We want you to understand that we may not have water or food or any more film, and this is the evidence of what’s destroying our society.” It’s an astonishing mix of material, and I wanted to juxtapose that with the fragility of privileged, ordinary domestic life. Images of people walking at a fair, a baby nursing, intercourse, a tree being chopped down, and the bird flying in my driveway, a plane taking off. So Devour is a work about menace, fragility and violence. Every normal image becomes saturated or contaminated by the threat of the other destructive images.

AM: Canadians feel a great deal of unearned aloofness from all that.

CS: Yes--That’s why I also come here, to enjoy a little aloofness.

AM: But it’s unearned for Canadians. They didn’t sacrifice to get it.

CS: But Canadians have not initiated these invasions and bombardments and advanced destructive uranium bombs and such. They may be part of it in some underlying structure, in which they supply materials and invest in our militarism. But they are not the initiators. Perhaps that is part of their innocence, naiveté.

AM: You’ve always been political.

CS: Yes.

AM: For all your career?

CS: Yes. But it’s been ignored because of the emphasis on the imagery of the body. This full body of work is very little known because of the physical actions of two performative works that entered the canon--Meat Joy [1964], Interior Scroll [1975] --which is great, and we’re happy about that. But my little mantra, when telling people about my work, is that the use of the body has displaced the body of work. I’m thrilled because here I’m able to see for myself the fuller body of work, and it’s wonderful to have that opportunity.

AM: Why do you think the political dimensions of your work have been ignored? What’s the edge you bring to your work that makes it difficult for people?

CS: The work is disturbing. And the political work is always very beautiful. They’re gorgeous in how they are realized, but they are also of horrific images, and they are real. The World Trade Centre piece, Terminal Velocity [2001-2005], has become a piece of visual musicality. It’s full of beats and pulses, and it’s very elegant. But its subject is twelve people falling to their deaths, either by jumping or being blown out of the window. So there’s been conflicted reaction to it--but my erotic works produce very conflicted reactions also.

AM: I think I’ll take my jacket off. I guess it’s safe.

CS: It’s very safe in here.

AM: I think it’s the particular juxtaposition between eroticism and delicacy and violence in your work that feels unsafe.

CS: But there is no sado-masochism in the work, and no punishment. And sexually, I don’t even want to be spanked, whatever that means. Punishment and pain are not part of the iconography that I’m driven by. It’s the opposite of pleasure, and what threatens it, that I have to keep looking at. Other cultures are impinged upon or destroyed by the agency of my government. I pay attention to that. I want to know a lot about the countries we’re invading and giving armaments to, just as I want to know about the countries where we are refusing birth control and medical care and maternal information.

AM: I find the intimacy in your work threatening, challenging--some word that I’m not quite getting. It disturbs my male ego. I think I have a vested interest in being non-intimate, not being given to hugs and kisses. The sight of a child nursing at a breast makes me uneasy, even though I’ve seen it many times.

CS: What about the kissing cat?

AM: It bothers me. Cats are carnivores. They are one step removed from wild cats. And there is something very foxy and sexy, and also very menacing, about cats.

CS: Something disturbing about my work could be the transition between what is considered taboo and what I don’t consider to be taboo. Take the amorousness of my cat, and the delicacy with which he insisted on kissing my mouth every morning for a prolonged period of time since he was a tiny kitten. I had to see how it looked. There are perhaps 180 of these self-shot cat kisses, and they’re fascinating. And the communication with the cat has a whole other dimension. He was a talking cat, who could put thoughts into my mind. But that’s a discussion for cat people.
Let’s go back to the discomfort with the intimacy. Most of my curators, with the exception of David Liss and the gallery PPOW, have all been gay men. Now what is that about? Every curator who really made a commitment and stuck his neck out, and my only serious collectors, relate to this intimacy and the materiality around it. But I have never had a woman museum curator interested in the work. Never.
And in this major feminist history of art-making that just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, my work is in dark section of museum. It’s kind of like putting the bad girl in a bad, lonely place. Hannah Wilke is near the bathroom. Now this is an unconscious aspect of curatorial practice, but the rest of exhibit is luminous, shining, splendid.

AM: But they put the bad girls near the bathroom!

CS: They’re not looking at the formal properties of the work. There’s this interference--the resistance to accept the assumption of intimacy. If you can’t accept this assumption, you won’t be able to see what the work is doing formally. That’s what happened with Fuses [1965] for so long. It took people years to see the structure of it because they were pleased, excited, non-plussed, repelled by the explicit sexuality. But I just have to keep making these works. I have never done a work that I thought would shock anyone. To the contrary! I’m always shocked when my work is censored.

AM: You’ve had this happen?

CS: You’re kidding! Censorship? Endless, constant. Because certain cultural people are obsessed with a few of the explicitly erotic works, they’ll never see anything else and they wouldn’t possibly invite me to exhibit.

AM: The thing that I find admirable about this work is that joining of sexuality and violence is a very strong thing to do. Not offensive, but strong. These things are closely bound up--pain, intimacy. A person who’s been shot in Sarajevo, dragging himself away, is enduring a passion, like the Crucifixion. The Passion of Christ is such a powerful theme in art. It brings us into such intimacy with the crucified God. I see an almost sacred intimacy in your work.

CS: Now let me see how many ways I disagree with you. I need to separate tenderness and sensitivity from sexuality, and juxtapose it with what could destroy it--militarism, the hyper-masculine. For me, the sacrifice of Christ is the place where the fracture between psyche and body has embedded itself ferociously, to the extent that joyfulness and spontaneity have to be earned outside of the sacred. It’s a devastating fracture, and the question for me has been why has it persisted so long and to what extent has it shaped the construction of gender. It has certainly worked well for the patriarchy of all the religions I know about, except the pantheists and witches. It also has to do with the displacement of goddess religion, and any religion that might be more equitable and pleasurable. So I definitely work in antagonism to my own inherited religious rituals.

AM: And the sacred?

CS: I am locating it in the feminist realm.


Carolee Schneemann: Breaking Borders. The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen Street West, Toronto. 24 March to 22 April 2007.
Carolee Schneemann: Remains to be Seen. CEPA Gallery, 617 Main Street, Suite 201, Buffalo, New York. 31 March to 26 May 2007.

Ghost Ship

The following text by John Bentley Mays was published in Canadian Art, spring, 2007.



No ideas but in things, wrote the American poet William Carlos Williams in 1944. He did not know Walter Redinger, who came of creative age a couple of decades later in London, Ontario, and in Toronto. But in writing that terse line—a controversial proposition about reality, a summary manifesto about art, a world view in five words—Williams could have been prophesying Redinger’s art, which his words perfectly characterize.
Everything is on the surface in Redinger’s intensely eccentric work in all mediums: no text, no formidable cultural theory, can be invoked to explain or ease the ouch of what the artist does. The intense, crowded drawings that Redinger turns out ceaselessly at his studio deep in the farming country of southwestern Ontario are surely open to interpretation, but, ultimately, they do not satisfy the viewer’s hunger for deeper meaning. They demand to be taken as the strange thing that happens to paper when the artist’s dotting and daubing and delineation flips beyond reason into a self-immolating creativity, extinguishing whatever symbolism or higher significance we may be tempted to wrest from the dense thicket of gestures on the page.
So also the sculptures. To viewers inclined to look for recognizable figures in all art, some of the large cast-plastic pieces—always Redinger’s best-known works—may resemble fleshy bulbs and bulges, earlobes or breasts, glands or sinister growths under the skin. In a 1998 review of Redinger’s work at Mitchell Algus Gallery, which represents him in New York, the Times critic Roberta Smith saw in them “a slightly creepy, corporeal aspect, an interest he shares with many of today’s young artists. Irregular in shape and surface, his red plastic wall reliefs are gleaming melting blobs whose smooth protrusions and folds can suggest a phantasm out of ‘Ghostbusters’ or the body’s interior greatly magnified: perhaps a swath of muscle or the inside wall of an artery.”
Spectators who like to invest abstract sculpture with figurative meaning in this way, I suppose, have their reward. But over the time of observation the sculptures deserve, the identity of these objects gradually becomes less obvious. They shed their allusions and settle into being what they are: enigmatic, inert, logic-jamming apparitions, fantastic and unmeaning things that lodge themselves uncomfortably in the mind, like fragments of dream.
Or take Redinger’s immense and fascinating Ghost Ship, which was shown this past winter (along with drawings and other sculptures) at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto. Begun around 1990 with a series of small studies (since destroyed), this project of imagination was first made visible in what the artist calls simply a “boat”; it was shown at Toronto’s Christopher Cutts Gallery in 1994. Other versions and fragments were exhibited in London, Ontario, in 1998. “After the shows were over,” Redinger told me in an e-mail, “I brought the boats home and started to dismantle them as I was not happy with them. I cut these boats and used their parts as if going through a stage of entropy. I used some of the parts and created new parts that eventually became the Ghost Ship.”
The final act in this sequence of revision, assemblage and construction—the Ghost Ship shown at MOCCA—was completed in late 2005. At first glance, this dark piece in driftwood and twisting wands of sumac sheathed in fibreglass reminds the viewer of a ship listing in heavy seas, with a wind-driven, soaring prow, a notional sail, an elaborate stern and rudder. We can follow this early impression where it quickly leads us: down the rabbit hole into the brilliant wonderland of maritime imagery in Western art, from the soul-rescuing Barque of St. Peter, through Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, to the profoundly allusive ship-sculptures of the contemporary Canadian artist Peter von Tiesenhausen. The title of the work and its sculptural form plausibly prompt us to imagine Ghost Ship in this tradition, so rich in the symbolism of discovery, wandering and catastrophe.
But keep looking, keep considering Redinger’s creative practice in drawing and sculpture over many decades, and the most obvious meaning of Ghost Ship begins to slide. The open network of lines suggests no longer a vessel but the rotting carcass of a beached, fabulous sea creature, its once-powerful sinews and ligaments burnt by the sun. Yet, again, the mind cannot rest here. Such satisfying biomorphic interpretation is unsettled by the faintly repellent, insistently modern sheen of sandpapered plastic, and by the obsessive joining of twig to twig repeated endlessly, in the manner of the drips in a Pollock painting. Like Redinger’s drawing, which rapidly surrenders all pretense to art-historical resonance or philosophical depth, Ghost Ship becomes at last less a depiction of anything in the real world than the abstract expression of a raw state of consciousness and spirit, bruised and extreme, radically uncompromising, quixotic.
This body-based, antitranscendent spirituality is also the theme of recent works by Redinger that were shown last winter by the St. Thomas-Elgin Public Art Centre at the majestic, derelict Canada Southern Railway station in the southwestern Ontario town of St. Thomas. Suspended overhead, these constructions (called Les Formes) are, like the Ghost Ship they precede, large webs of branches and roots encased in fibreglass. Like the piece shown at MOCCA, they superficially recall things out of the visual inventory of Western art and culture: threatening clouds, or nightmarish birds howling down from the clouds, or avenging angels descending from the sky on the Day of Judgment. Yet, here once more, these works are best understood not as images of something in the visible world but as lucid and unmediated embodiments of certain spiritual states that defy our efforts to put them down in clear, unthreatening language—anxiety and vague dread, and the existential ungrounding that comes when we try to imagine our own physical extinction.
The winter exhibitions at MOCCA and St. Thomas gave Toronto gallerygoers a valuable reintroduction to Redinger’s art, which has not been seen in Canada’s largest art centre since 1994. (His work has been displayed frequently over the last decade, however, in London, Ontario, and in New York.) But despite the definite public worth of these recent museum and gallery shows, Redinger’s remarkable new work is certainly best seen in its rural Ontario birthplace, where I first encountered it late last year. The shadowy cinder-block bunker in which Ghost Ship was fabricated, amid the clutter of older sculptures and raw materials, provided a mysterious, dusk-like atmosphere that was peculiarly right for viewing a piece hovering between fact and fiction, dark fantasy and dense materiality. The works later shown at St. Thomas similarly carried their fullest imaginative force in the studio, installed as they were high in the dark over the thick, furious commotion of Redinger’s Room, an experimental undertaking in black and white that combines paintings, sculptures and drawings into a spinning churn.
In whatever context we find it, however, Redinger’s work deserves to be seen and appreciated for what it is: an involving, hectic and (as far as I know) unique project in contemporary Canadian sculpture.
No ideas but in things: absent from this art are the metaphysical complexity and weight so treasured, so keenly sought, in Western painting and sculpture from the Renaissance until the unquiet death of poignant meaningfulness in the time of Warhol and Judd. We live now in an era rife with revivals and recuperations of this lost art-historical and symbolic depth, some deeply engaging. But Redinger’s project is not among them. Behind his current work stand the Minimalists, whose sculpture eloquently embodied the disillusioned, post-metaphysical mood of the 1960s, the decade in which Redinger emerged on the Canadian art scene. Behind it also stands the artist’s own long career as a maker of odd forms that totter on the unsteady, contaminated edge of reason.
If, like William Carlos Williams and the Minimalists, Redinger is a mystic—as I believe him to be—his mysticism is similarly one with no place for God, transcendence, closure. It offers no resolution of the unsatisfied hankerings and essential doubts that constitute the modern condition. Neither does his mystical method ever relax into melancholy for some past attainment snatched away by the engines of modernity. Nowhere more urgently than in the works recently shown in Toronto and St. Thomas, Redinger’s practice painfully exposes the no ideas but in things of our existence, the radical and eternal now of our anxiety.

David Liss in Madrid

In February, for the third year in a row, MOCCA director David Liss curated a special exhibition of Canadian artists at the Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo (ARCO) in Madrid. He was also featured among the speakers invited to the fair. Amigo Motel talked with David Liss shortly after his return from Spain. Here is an edited version of our interview.

Amigo Motel: What did you learn in Madrid?

David Liss: What I’ve been learning in Madrid, and what I’ve been having some fun with, is working with the art fair as a theatre of operations, as another context to present artwork. The role of art fairs has changed quite a bit in the last three to five years, and the art market and art fairs have radically shifted the landscape, if only temporarily.
A lot of people now are getting quite worried about how the market seems to be leading the discourse at this point. It was one of the things that went on at the speakers’ forum at ARCO: Curators telling me they’ve had situations where young artists have not made their best pieces available for a show at P. S. 1 because they’re going to be in one of the art fairs. I really am fascinated and intrigued by the tension that exists between the market and theory. I think that, at this point in time, it’s the edge to be working on, because there are so many contradictions involved in that relationship. Yet both [market and theory] are so necessary.
So what I’ve been learning, in Madrid, in Miami, and in the Toronto art fair, is how to mine some fissure in this particular landscape and open up a frontier for artists to be working in. It’s another form. We’re working in our gallery, a traditional white box. We’ve done performances out on the sidewalk, and over at the Drake Hotel, and now we’re doing them on convention centre floors. So it’s exciting.

AM: Tell me about this fissure. What forms does it take?

DL: With the overheated market situation that we have today, when there’s that much money at stake, it does tend to affect human behaviour, whether we’re in the art world or otherwise. The prominence, the media attention, and the money that is now accompanying the contemporary art industry! Make no mistake: even if that industry isn’t well evolved in Canada, it is in most of the rest of the civilized world, and we will be catching up eventually. Artists in particular, and curators, like to think art is somehow separated from the real world, and the human imagination should not be tainted by some of the harsh realities of the world. On the other hand, how can art not be affected by those things?
So there’s a conundrum embedded there as well. There are artists and art dealers who are doing quite well, and I can’t suggest that’s a bad thing. Of course, there are so many more artists than galleries, dealers, non-profit organizations out there, so the industry has evolved into quite a large and complex form, with opportunities for young artists to sell work, and make a living from their work. That’s been the modest dream of every artists since time began: to simply make a living off their work. Most artists did not get into the art world motivated by financial greed. Obviously, that would be the wrong business to be in!
But I think younger artists in particular see opportunities to get paid for what they do. I think we’re looking at a younger generation of artists who don’t necessarily have the same romantic, bohemian notions of the world that artists of other generations might have had. They are influenced by the material world we live in, and they say: We’re doing what we do, we want respect, and we want to get paid for what we do. And I can’t argue with that.
On the other hand, I’m interested in art that explores the outer limits of the human imagination, because that’s how humans evolve forward: by challenging the imagination, by going where others fear to go. [Art] is not always bound by economic and commercial considerations, so that’s where I think that fissure lies.

AM: What’s special about ARCO?

DL: What I do like about ARCO is that they have, more than any other fair, the experts’ forum. They trimmed that down a little this year, because there were some complaints last year, when their roster of speakers reached 250 over the course of five days. Starting from 10 in the morning until 9 o’clock at night, there was, at any given time, five or six panel discussions taking place--and we’re talking about every leading expert in the world: the director of the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern, independent curators from all over the world, directors from China and the director of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, architectural experts, design people. In my own speaking panel, I was frustrated because there were at least two other panels going on at the same time that I would love to have attended.
ARCO is the one fair out there--one of the oldest ones, 25, 26 years running--that seems to be fostering a dialogue between the market and theory. But even there, the fair is taking place in one section of the building, while the experts’ forum is taking place elsewhere. Physically and ideologically, they seem like two very different worlds. A lot of dealers and the artists are on the floor trying to sell art. The curators and the experts are all mingling with their types, and everybody’s trying to broker deals and explore ideas and create exchanges all over the world. For them to be walking around the convention centre floor--which is an absolutely horrible way to be looking at art in the first place--is not conducive to looking at art.
I find it interesting that, in some discussions, you have these leading academics and theorists, high level PhDs. And if somebody sticks up their hand from the audience and asks them about economics, some of these people are left absolutely speechless. They just don’t know what to say about it. Then you get down on the convention centre floor. I know a lot of the art dealers do not like these academics hanging around their booths, using $50 words, because they are afraid the collectors are going to get all confused.
For the last few years, ARCO has invited ten curators from different parts of the world to present artists, based on a theme. It’s about what’s new, upcoming, edgy and experimental. In 2007, the theme was Projects, so again it was open-ended. There were no age restrictions and I was allowed to select five galleries, with a maximum three artists per gallery. On one hand, I’m invited to participate at the theoretical level, at the level of the discourse. On the other hand, I’m inviting commercial galleries to risk a lot of money by going to Madrid and participating in this fair. It’s a tricky, challenging negotiation for the galleries to present something that I think is exciting, relevant, and needs to be seen in an international forum, versus what they think they can sell.
So far, in Canada in particular, there aren’t galleries out there that are willing to say: Yeah, whatever you want, go ahead and we’ll spend the $40,000 [necessary to take part in the fair]. There aren’t many Canadian galleries in that kind of luxurious position, if there are galleries anywhere in that position.

AM: What is contemporary art about, as you saw it in Madrid? The topics, the concerns?

DL: I think the themes, issues and concerns that are emerging are multifaceted, pluralistic. I suppose we could call them post-Modern, post-post-Modern. Some people call it internationalism, some call it globalism. A trend or direction is completely elusive at this point, which does frustrate the human impulse to have things categorized and defined as simply as possible. I’m quite happy to embrace the fact that art at this moment is pluralistic. That is our human condition, as the world grows smaller through technology.

AM: But can you pinpoint one direction?

DL: Yes. How to say something about one’s cultural or ethnic heritage in a world that is being increasingly flattened out by communications and immigration patterns that are threatening to turn the world into a homogeneous mass.
As I travel to various cultures and places around the world, I find it’s getting extremely difficult to purchase something, even a T-shirt to bring back to my kids, that would say something about the place I was in. They’re selling the same crap on the King Charles Bridge in Prague as they are selling in Taipei, as they are selling in Madrid, as they are selling down at Yonge and Dundas in Toronto. Are we on the verge of realizing the dream of one people, one world? Or are we threatening to eliminate all the rich tapestry of ethnicity and cultural mosaic that is also fascinating about the world we live in? I think a lot of artists are dealing with issues of identity.
Another thing: Twenty years ago, it was fairly easy to say what kind of art Canadians were producing. It always went through the lens of landscape, or weather. Those are things that oddly unite us as Canadians in some ways. I know people who live in Toronto, who have never been to the prairies, or seen the Rockies. But they can very quickly conjure an image in their minds of what those places are and look like. It’s not so easy for people in other countries who do not have that. When a Torontonian is travelling abroad, you always get questions about the mountains or the prairies. We know what we are being asked. This issue of geography, this territory we live in, unites us.
But I think, with populations shifting toward the urban, we get into these issues about identity, with people trying to reconcile their own roles in densely populated cities. That’s a major issue right now. We are experiencing farming crises all over the world. Populations move into the cities and multinational corporations take over the rural areas and the production of the food supply, so we are becoming increasingly estranged from some of those vital aspects of what keeps us alive. Interestingly, that’s one of the major crises in the world, this shift of rural to urban.

AM: How do you understand your own role, as a curator, in the midst of these shifts and slides?

DL: I’m quite ambitious about being as up to date as I possibly can be. These days, it’s a full time job to read all of the art magazines, all the on-line information that’s available, all of the blog sites that carry on the discourse, not to mention getting to the hundreds of artists’ studios that are in Toronto, never mind other cities.
So that’s my personal challenge: to manage the local-to-global engagement which we have built into the MOCCA vision and mandate. I’m excited by that, and by all the contradictions that are embedded in that. I’m fascinated by the fissures, areas of contention--where the shit flies and where all the fun can be, where discourse gets heated and intelligent people are agreeing and disagreeing. I love that kind of stuff. And that’s how ideas evolve, that’s how the human imagination goes forward. I like it when people re-open debates on things we thought we’d already solved. The established canon of contemporary art is of little interest to me. I want to know what the artists are telling us about now.

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.