Simon Starling at the Power Plant (with a side-dish of Sadie)

I’m arriving somewhat late in the game on Simon Starling’s Cuttings (Supplement) at the Power Plant; the show has been open since the beginning of the month, but now that I’ve got a review that needs writing for the good people at MAP Magazine - presently on residency at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, by the way - I was well due for a day trip into Toronto for some Scottish content.

The driving purpose of Cuttings (Supplement) is ostensibly to showcase Starling’s commission for the Power Plant, and Simon Starling being what he is, this entails a highly localized response to his host city, this time in the form of Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore), a steel replica of Henry Moore’s Warrior with Shield that has been submerged in Lake Ontario for 18 months and is now on display, replete with rust and a colony of zebra mussels.

His collage drawing of this proposal (also on display in the exhibition) is like something out of a surrealist wet dream, absolutely caked with massive clumps of mussels. By comparison, the actual sculpture’s surface is far more subtle - my inner Hamiltonian just loves the rust, and the mussels are exquisitely tiny and jewel-like in their trailing clusters across much of the Warrior’s surface.

With the possible exception of Island for Weeds (Prototype) from Scotland’s showing at the 2003 Venice Biennale, Infestation Piece is easily the high point of the exhibition in terms of its visual impact and the visibility of its various narrative threads which can sometimes become quite obscure in Starling’s wonderfully convoluted works. As a work specific to Toronto, one would expect the piece to be a point of curatorial pride, so I was utterly baffled by the decision to place the sculpture in a gallery otherwise given over to Los Angeles, 3rd-5th March 1969 // to indefinite expansion. That work involved wallpapering the space with a magnified CMYK spectacle of photo-experimentation so distracting that one could almost miss the Starling-Moore beauty on its unobtrusive plinth. I don’t consider myself an expert on curatorial strategies, but even I found that move a bit on this side of ridiculous.

At the end of it all, Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore) seemed lamentably lost alongside the space given over to eight other works, one of which (the wonderful video of Autoxylopyrocycloboros) was malfunctioning and therefore not available for viewing today. I’m also harbouring doubts about the stewardship of Bird in Space - a massive slab of steel imported from Romania to the United States in homage to Brancusi’s art-import debacle of 1927 as well as Bush’s recent attempt at protectionist taxation on steel imports. The descriptive panel for the work - and this being Simon Starling, one must read the panels - proudly proclaims, ‘This steel plate floats effortlessly in space,’ but I found the inflatable jacks (read: black rubber cushions) weren’t holding up so well against the weight of that steel plate; they were looking positively defeated, crushed by their burden in a way that, while potentially interesting, was so at odds with the Bird in Space reference that I was a little worried. The appearance of the work, however, was not one of the failures addressed by Derek Sullivan when he presented his Sunday Scene tour of the show this afternoon, though he did elect to point out that by the time Starling executed the process of importing steel as art, the WTO had already overturned Bush’s taxation policy, rendering part of the work’s meaning obsolete.

As an artist, issues like this would make me flinch from re-showing a piece after the original commission was complete; the fact that it’s included in Cuttings (Supplement) therefore leaves a bad taste in my mouth, especially when I’m otherwise a huge fan of what Simon Starling accomplishes as an artist. His work is otherwise the very picture of integrity in practice, and seeing it shown in such a haphazard way diminishes the extraordinary efforts he brings to the table time and again.

By contrast, Sadie Benning’s Play Pause is an easy-to-read dual projection video that gives generously to the viewer looking simply for interesting visual effect with just enough politics and identity crises thrown in to keep the brain active. I generally take my encounters with faux-naïve drawing styles with a grain of salt, and as such don’t find Benning’s line drawings anywhere near as successful as others of her ilk - Mario Doucette’s work at Hamilton Artists Inc. this month comes to mind as a superior iteration of the trend - but she does accomplish some stunning techniques elsewhere in the video’s use of textures, layers and sound that help to carry the drawings through to a more engaging form.

Although it must be said that she can execute one hell of a leer on just about any character’s face. Even the sun leers in her world, and that’s pretty fantastic, really.

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