Last thursday I had my first experience as an event photographer. I found it quite enjoyable, specifically because my favourite kind of photography is spontaneous portraiture and this was an experience where nearly everyone was happy and excited to have their picture taken by a “professional” photographer.
Kaela and I have been going to the AGO every Wednesday night since New Years; it’s free after 6pm, and I think it’s both good to have rhythms in life and to make an effort to fill your visual field with beautiful and stimulating things. This week we took one of the tours which proved to be an excellent idea. Don showed us sculpture throughout the gallery beginning with two Rodin sculptures in the central hall and moving on through the African sculpture exhibit and finally, to the Henry Moore room. I’ve always disliked Moore’s sculpture; I didn’t have a sense of it, it alienated me and I found it physically off-putting. But after Don’s explanations which were grounded in our intuitive sense of the work and the concepts the work brings forth I found myself intensely liking the sculptures, appreciating them and wanting to spend more time with them.
Anyone interested in coming with Kaela and I to the art gallery on a Wednesday should get in contact with me and we can meet outside the AGO at 6pm.
Photo Credit: Kaela Greenstien
It has come to my attention that some people out there in the cyberworld, and also in my life of in-person human contact, find my photos decent. Personally, I like photography. I like taking pictures, I like editing them and I like the emotional responses they invoke in me when I look at them. But, I’ve generally considered these responses to be of a personal nature – they are after all of my friends, travels, my memories. This is probably a reason I have so few of my pictures printed to give as gifts, and I’ve shied away from trying to have my work shown in any gallery (or coffee shop) setting. First off because everyone is a photographer these days, and, in tune with that – I don’t consider my work to be notable within a context of millions of proficient everyday photographers, many of whom take it much more seriously than I do.
If I were going to develop in the direction of taking “better” pictures, in the sense of having greater artistic merit (whatever that is), I feel that I need to train not so much my skills at taking pictures (seeing), but at evaluating my work (although always with an eye back towards taking pictures itself) – the criticizing. The few conversations I’ve had with others about my photos are extremely revealing – it’s illuminating and wonderful to get a sense of how someone else sees a photo.
In that vein, I’ve created a facebook album, viewable to anyone (I think – if it doesn’t work for you let me know, entitled “Photo Set A”. Photo Set A is approximately two hundred of what I think are the best pictures I’ve taken over the past two years (most older than that were lost in a harddrive back up debacle). The idea here is that people could, if they like, comment on individual photos they find compelling, and try to describe why. Or, if there are photos that you think shouldn’t be there – say so. I won’t take it personally, and if you say why it will help me understand what it is in photos that is more general, and what is more specific.
So, if you like my photography and you’d like to help me improve it. Or, if you hate my photography and want to see it improve – consider spending a bit of time going through Photo Set A.
This past weekend I travelled with 20 new friends, mostly from my housemate’s NGO “Operation Groundswell“, to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington DC. You can see my photos here. The trip itself was quite an adventure – friday morning we left, were interrogated at the border, went to a new england bluegrass festival in Maryland on Friday night, and I think I slept a few hours on an easy chair. Saturday we put together our costumes and drove from Betertton to the Suburbs of DC, where we caught the overcrowded metro into downtown. We arrived quite late – about 2pm, and it wasn’t until about 2:30 that we (after almost completely losing each other), found a place where we could both hear the rally and see a screen. The only part of the rally I really cognized was the closing speech, which I highly recommend you watch, or at least read these excerpts from wikipedia. To me, the most moving lines of that speech were these:
This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear–they are, and we do.
But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus, and not be enemies. But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke.
Come and See is a 1985 Soviet film about the Barbarossa campaign’s effects on the villages of Belorussia. While everyone is familiar with the Holocaust, the extent to which operation Barbarossa was a racial extermination, a genocide against the “lesser peoples” of Russia, is significant and deserves knowing about.
The film chronicles a boy’s life during the war, beginning with searching for a gun buried at an old battle sight so that he would be allowed to join the army, and following him through various unbelievable disasters of humanity – which he, and sometimes no one else, survives.
What might be called the climax of the film consists of Nazis rounding up an entire village into a barn, then proceeding to burn the barn with the inabitents inside. Two people are allowed to escape and witness the violence, and in the end the boy survives because laying on the ground he is presumed dead. According to the film, 628 villages in Belorussia suffered a similar fate.
The film is watchable on youtube in 15 parts (there is a playlist which will automatically switch you from one part to the next). Please note, the film is not in an American style – what this means is it is much closer to “Horror” in tone, although not specifically gore, than a conventional American war movie, i.e. Saving Private Ryan, or The Thin Red Line. The poster on youtube loudly instructs the film is “NOT FOR CHILDREN”, and this warning should probably be heeded.
This reservation aside, I highly recommend “Come and See”.
In a recent long drawn out argument with Milan over tensions concerning the oversight of institutions which can not be subject to normal democratic control, i.e. central banks, I had some thoughts concerning not so much what a Government is or could be – but rather concerning the implications of the kinds of answers we give to these questions on how we think about our current situation and how we might change it. To put it simply, I tend to think of Democracy as an ideal which we are not living up to, and that the political duty put on us by our right to live in a rational state puts on us a duty both to make our state rational and to (but not in this order) find out what it would mean to make a state rational. This to me is obvious – what is not obvious is how to go about doing it.
But what I realized in the discussion was that I was making a problematic assumption by separating the ideal (the “rational state”) from the means by which we achieve it. It is good, I think, to hold open how one might make a state rational, and also to hold open what a rational state would be. However, what I was ignoring was how the category “rational state”, even emptied of most of its content, remains a non-neutral ideal towards which we project, and which determines our struggle in various ways.
To explain what I mean, I will employ the example of a statue that stands here in Montreal on the road leading up to McGill. The statue is a luminous yellow of a gathering of people. The ones in front are looking forward, calm, confident. Some silly, some caniving. As you walk backwards along the statue, the people in the crowd are less and less focussed on the focal point out in front, and more on each other, on fighting, on cheating. At the back there are people starving, laying on the ground.
What they are staring at is ideals, values, utopia maybe. The ones in front see, but it is ambiguous to what extent the ideal is drawing them forward. At first, it looks quite clearly that it gathers them, but then you notice some of the faces in the front row are anything but genuine. And besides that, the ones in front shield those behind from the ideal – hence the fighting, caniving, etc.. And at the back, there are the starving, laying on the ground.
The statue is perhaps a bit didactic, and certainly not an “argument” – but it does make me question the “ideal – real” idealist pull, “progress”, the “It will be ok so long as we strive for good values”. Because, striving for values leaves people out. Instantiation is always partial.
In “No Country for Old Men”, Anton Chigurh says to Carson Wells character, when he is sitting with him in his hotel room with a gun trained on him: “If the rule you follow led you to this, what use was the rule?”
The point being – values should be evaluated based on their effects, not their pretensions.
Of course, I already accounted for this by leaving means open, it is our duty to figure out which means will get to the ideals. But – it is rationally required to go farther – to determine “empirically”, or at least by experience, which ideals actually bring us places we want to go. So, even the projected ideal “rational state” must be re-evaluated in the light of what means it inspires us to create, and what the real effects of those means actually is.
Anyway, the point is to not take the ideal as a neutral “utopia, would be nice”, but (at least for the ones in play) as productive agents which make and motivate our world and experience. It is easy for us to see the politically problematic nature of ideals in history, i.e. “Wilderness”, “Civilization”, “Noble Savage” – but it is not similarly easy to see the contingency of the ideals we strive for. We assume they are right, and that the difficulties lie in the way we try to bring these ideals into reality. But the ideals are themselves what bring the world into reality – not the world they purport to beckon, but the one they actually bring.
Are people interested in something like this? Would it be better for it to start soonish (february), or would the summer be better? Do people have suggestions for others films they’d like to have shown?
I went to a talk yesterday in the Fine Arts department about the role of Art in the development of sustainable lifestyles. The talk was given by Benn Todd – the president of the Arcola theatre in East London, and the topic was basically what that theatre does, its history, and its future. Todd is quite an interesting character – trained as an engineer, and worked on a project to turn waste biomass into carbon-neutral electricity. He left the profession when he realized that what we lack are not solutions, but the demand for solutions – what’s the use in perfecting a technology which is already basically working, when what truly makes it un-viable is a lack of demand, not a lack of development.
What really struck me about the talk is that, for an Engineer, he was quite good at not getting caught up with the primary effects of actions. He believes strongly that we can’t deal with climate change with facts and technologies – we need a cultural shift. The example of smoking is enlightening – the facts about smoking have been known for decades, but strong declines in smoking seem to be motivated not by rational knowledge about its ill health effects, but by its becoming un-socially acceptable. Todd quit smoking the day the U.K. banned it in pubs. It’s hard to know what motivates cultural shifts – but Todd figures it isn’t crazy to think the cultural elite have something to do with it. So, taking over Arcola, he didn’t start putting plays about sustainability – rather the emphasis was on putting out first rate theatre productions, run sustainably.
One of Arcola’s big things is fuel cells – they run all the lighting in their cafe/bar on a fuel cell, and they run the lights of their shows on a fuel cell. Todd is very up front that using a fuel cell does not directly lower their carbon footprint – the hydrogen after all is made out of methane, and the whole procedure probably would have produced more power per carbon released if it had been burnt at the power plant. However, since the fuel cells are only 5kw, running on fuel cell forces the lighting in the cafe-bar to be extremely energy efficient, which at least in the summer, reduces overall energy consumption. More importantly, however, the production lighting runs on a fuel cell – this requires the productions to be lit on 5 thousand watts – a paltry amount. To run on such a small amount of power they use LED theatre lighting – they basically pioneered this against a theatre industry that insists on the colour rendition of tungsten light. But they’ve also run shows on fluorescent and tungsten light, still limited to 5k watts. Of course, they could just make a rule that they will be limited to 5 thousand watts and not use a fuel cell – but this would ignore the central secondary benefit of doing things low-energy – it’s a source of excitement for the community, it’s a source of free advertising, and using a fuel cell shows to others what is possible more loudly than facts. They are also involved in community theatre, and they have space for technological development in their building as well. Once a month they host something called “Green Sunday”, which is a kind of monthly conference / seminar / community workshop on sustainability.
It’s a mistake to think that even if Arcola can spur a revolution in theatre lighting, that this would be significant in itself – the total power consumption of Arts in the U.K. is simply not big enough to make a difference. However, it’s a very visible quarter, and making changes here first shows what is possible. This emphasis on the cultural shift as the primary goal, with energy-efficiency and new-technologies as derivative, preliminary goals, is what excites me about Arcola’s approach. It’s impossible to know how to effect a cultural shift – it might be a mistake to think you can “effect” one at all, but it is possible to try to work towards it as a goal.
Emilie Mover is a singer songwriter in Toronto, Ontario. I met her in 2004 when I first moved to Toronto, and was immediately enraptured by her sad, magical songs. I was at the Tranzac for the release of her first record, Good Shake Nice Gloves. Since then she’s released a new album – also entitled Good Shake Nice Gloves. She’s big and famous now – she even has one of her songs in a Sears Commercial! But the real proof that she’s hit the big time – when you search her name on youtube you get clips of young girls covering her songs!
Last night I was lucky enough to see Emilie play the Drake Hotel on Queen Street in Toronto. She played beautifully, but unfortunately it was only a short set. If you become a fan of her on facebook you will hear about her shows.
People in Toronto can catch her at the Tranzac tommorow at 8pm.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal is free. This means you don’t have to pay, (except for some temporary exhibitions). That and the collection is quite astonishing – including the likes of Monet, Picasso, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, etc… There is also a serious ancient Greece exhibit which, unlike the ROM’s, doesn’t pretend that Roman copies of Greek statues are Greek. There is an excellent exhibit on 20th century style and design. There is an expansive collection of European painting between the 15th and 19th centuries.
In other words, there is enough here that one can get a sense of the entire history of painting in a day. As such, welcome to Tristan’s comprehensive theory of European painting. Just kidding of course, but even a cursory look through does reveal some very interesting events. First off, Painting seems to have progressed quite slowly between the 15 and 19th centuries – many pieces from the early 19th century could be confused with things painted hundreds of years earlier. Basically, until Monet, the advances seem to be mostly technical – as far as style is concerned, there are 14th century landscapes and portraits that look like early 19th century works by lesser painters. 
With Monet, however, the codes seem to break down. “Impressionism” means the self-consciously recognized product of painting is emotional. The symbolic codes become the object of play (Picasso), and dismissal (painting black squares). Rejection of symbolic codes for a time is revolutionary (dada), but is later co-opted by the same system it wishes not to reproduce (dada on Starbucks water bottles). 
What is most amazing about this history is how, taking Monet as a fulcrum, we can see such a disparate rate of change of artistic style on either historical side – before, 300 years of relative calm – after, less than a hundred before the codes have completely broken down. Of course, they do not disappear – symbolic painting and representational painting persist, but persist as one code among many options. The old code was not characterized by its properties, its attributes, but by it being the-code, the dominant – not one part of a plurality.
The reason the current age can be said to “have no style” is not that there are no trends in design, not that no one is doing anything new in sculpture or painting or furniture – but rather that no unified code develops amongst people ever inventing the new. Foundings ever repeat, but do not take hold. There are too many choices, freedoms, possibilities. The system embraces it’s own deconstruction. The post-modern self is the one products are marketed towards.
