On Monsters, or art in times of strife

I’m pretty sure summer is meant to be an easier and even sun-shinier time, but lately it seems as though my own view and everyone else’s has been one designed to reinforce how bloody hard it can be to make art happen. And now that the rain’s let up for two whole days in a row, that seems too heavy a view to go unchallenged.

Yes, artists struggle to earn a decent living. And bureaucracy of all sorts can easily usurp their efforts to bring the works they manage to achieve despite it all to a wider audience. This just makes it ever more important to take advantage of sluggish times and make some damn art by whatever means necessary. As I’ve been trying to do all morning when not fretting over databases and committees and political bullshit. Or what to write in this blog today, for that matter.

Allyson Mitchell is a prime example of an artist whose work enacts a startling transformation out of impoverished means. As I discussed when reviewing her show at the McMaster Museum earlier this year, Mitchell uses marginalized and devalued objects - largely outdated textiles of the sixties and seventies - to construct her colossal sasquatches, which achieve a shocking monumentality despite their humble origins. The cost of their creation does remain high - both in the craft and the quest for such a collection of stuff - but it is a practice that defies much of reality’s yoke, and is all the more powerful for it.

If anything made me think again of Mitchell in recent weeks, it was definitely my recent revisiting of the original Star Trek television series in general, and this alien-dog from ‘The Enemy Within’ in particular. For those in doubt: yes, Sulu is holding a lapdog wearing a fur costume complete with spines and horn (it looks like a Shih Tzu but I could be wrong). It’s the sort of cheap trick that’s symptomatic of science fiction for much of the twentieth century, and is part of my ongoing infatuation with the genre. Doctor Who didn’t need to blow its budget on elaborate space ship designs because its alien protagonist’s time-traveling vessel just happens to look exactly like a British police box. There’s an episode of the far less popular British serial Sapphire and Steel in which photography is a means of destroying space-time and paper children are far creepier than their three-dimensional counterparts.

I could go on, but the common bond between all those outdated, somewhat ridiculous but utterly earnest programs remains as a sign of a time when otherworldly terror and imagination (and consequent comedy value) could be had for next to nothing.

This last thought is more a tangent, nor is it mine, but Roberto Calasso does have some artful thoughts on the place of the errant monster in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony that I’d like to borrow to wrap up:

In the beginning the monster was in the center, the center of the earth and the heavens, where the waters rise. When the monster was killed by the hero, his dismembered body migrated to recompose itself at the four corners of the earth. Then it embraced the world in a circle of scales and water. It was the composite margin of all there was. It was the frame. That the frame is the home of the monster, the artisans of the Baroque knew only too well, and the frames they made were far more intricate, far denser, far more archaic than all the idylls they enclosed - and perhaps would one day suffocate. Then came the moment when people didn’t want frames anymore. The museums hung pictures without frames, which looked as though they’d been stripped bare. The frame is not the antiquated, but the remote. With the frame gone, the monster lost his last home. And returns to wander where he will.

FRESH / LATEST POSTS

Archives

Blogroll