I’ve taken to listening to Executive Producer David Eick’s episode commentary podcasts while working in the studio (yes, this will have something to do with art, trust me). Like Ronald D. Moore’s rather more entertaining podcasts for Battlestar Galactica, I find much of the creative problem solving discussed in these commentaries translates well across disciplines, and makes for encouraging listening when my own practice is suffering a creative lull, as it was last week.

Some 19 minutes into the commentary for Episode 102 (’Rebirth’), Eick and Co-Executive Director Jonas Pate reference their Lake Tahoe writer’s retreat in January 2009, where Caprica’s writing staff and producers talked story arcs during the day, played craps at night, and ultimately produced enough plot threads to carry the first nine episodes of the series rather than their goal of the first six. By listening to their profoundly informal discussion of this retreat, it became clear that this excess of creative production was a direct consequence of that setting:

Jonas Pate: “I think the writer’s room is the least effective way to do what it’s designed to do possible. You come into a white-walled, drop-ceiling room with a bunch of couches in the middle of some place that is essentially office park, and you’re expected to be creative. That’s not how to do it! Tahoe is the way to do it!”

Around this point in the podcast, I glanced around my white-walled studio space and wondered - despite the lovely view of suburban backyard and mud-splattered puppy - if this space was ever conducive to creative thinking. Lake Tahoe was starting to sound pretty damn good.

Scene from the pilot of Caprica: Daniel Greystone (Eric Stoltz) and Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) in a decidedly uninspiring virtual space.

And yet my studio space, like countless others I have been assigned as both student and artist-in-residence, is based in the white-walled aesthetic of contemporary art. While I have known artists who were happy to work in clean white rooms - video artists, mostly - I wonder whether the making of things and ideas requires a more liberal setting. A clean expansive space tends to indicate that thinking has occurred somewhere off-site while for others, this space becomes an outward expression of ideas in process in all their cluttered chaos. It ceases to be a white cube altogether.

Much like the writer’s intimidating blank page, the white-walled studio seems an ill-suited starting point for creativity. A creative space needs to be a space where conversation is generated, either between collaborators as in the Lake Tahoe retreat above (or any number of artists’ residencies) or between the individual artist and a space that carries its own conceptual weight. Both the site-specific maker and the nomadic artist seem to operate under those terms, but I’m increasingly convinced that this spatial conversation is crucial to any creative process. Ever since setting up my home studio two years ago, my most significant creative epiphany didn’t happen inside that white room but rather seemed to spring from wandering the rest of the house right down to the old apple tree in the backyard.

The notion of the studio as a refinery rather than a generator for ideas seems strangely self-evident after that meandering train of thought, though it contradicts the creation myths surrounding art-making that privilege the studio as a sort of womb for production. The prevailing wisdom still dictates that any time spent outside the studio is time not being spent in the making of art, but as one of my former classmates at Glasgow liked to reiterate, art does not happen in a vacuum. Art is given form in the studio, but it could - and perhaps, should - come in from somewhere else, like Lake Tahoe.

The point of this ramble being that maybe I shouldn’t have cleaned my studio after all. Or else I really need a vacation.

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Matthew Walker, sketch for aural sculpture, 2009, charcoal on paper (photo: Matthew Walker.)

In addition to reviewing Matthew Walker’s one-night-only-save-for-the-night-I-snuck-in-after-the-fact installation of charcoal drawings at the former Ginza Cafe, my report also covers Clarissa Inglis at You Me Gallery, Fierce: Women’s Hot-Blooded Film/Viedo at the McMaster Museum of Art, and exhibition from Simon Glass, Terence Byrnes and David Merritt at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

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Instead, I’m backtracking to the last time Saltz was having his regular 15 minutes on the blogosphere, back when his demand that MoMA include more women in its permanent collection installations made something in my own girly, delicate ovaries cringe in annoyance. Ultimately, it was the artificiality of the gesture that seemed to grate my nerves - the exclusion of women from modern art discourses is a historical fact against which many women artists have explicitly reacted, and the erasure of that history by the apologist addition of more heretofore underappreciated works by women feels like a consolation prize at best, and a lie at worst.

At the time, I felt Saltz was missing an opportunity to take up his chosen target, MoMA’s Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture Ann Temkin, on her challenge that he reconsider the bias that makes him dismiss the significance of other sections of the MoMA permanent collection dispaly where women are strongly represented - drawing, photography, and printmaking to name a few. Rather than rewriting the history of painting and sculpture (the arts that Saltz value above all others), it would be more honest and productive (and alas, more labour-intensive, but boo-fucking-hoo) to re-envision a modern art discourse that gives equal weight to all creative production, especially in our own increasingly post-discipline era. This is work that Saltz himself can easily pursue within his purported role as art critic - with an audience as vast as his, he is exceptionally well-equipped to bring more attention to women artists of all disciplines through his own choice of subjects for his many published reviews, articles and illiterate Facebook rants.

Installation of Piplotti Rist’s “Pour Your Body Out.” Photo: Frederick Charles/Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Courtesy of the Artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, London. (Source: nymag.com)

I had even presumed that Saltz would naturally include the weapon of his own productive (rather than condemning) voice in his crusade for gender equality, but anaba has been watching more closely and turned up one hell of an interesting statistic, phrased as ever in his delightfully colloquial tone:

“I don’t get how JS keeps up this appearance of being a champion of women. How many reviews dedicated to the solo show of a woman has he written in the past YEAR? One…. and it was Georgia O’Keefe. Talk about shut up or nut up. Even Schjeldahl, who also didn’t review the solo show of a living woman in the past year, beat JS by two dead women.

“The last show of a living female artist JS has dedicated a full review to was Pipilotti Rist at MoMA, published 12/28/08. What year is it now? Oh yeah, 2010.”

Given the wordspace Saltz devoted to the “Swiss miss”’s gender rather than her art in said review, you’d think he’d have taken that crusade with him into 2009. Apparently not.

Anaba wraps his critique of Saltz’s inability to “nut up” by offering up his own blogspace for any reviews Saltz may care to write about living women artists - generous given that Saltz still doesn’t host his own blog, but the fact remains that he doesn’t need that option. I refuse to entertain any belief that New York Magazine is at fault for the lack of coverage - even as an occasional contributor to major art magazines, at the bottom of the pecking order, I enjoy the privilege of choosing my subjects and can’t imagine Saltz doesn’t do the same. His “dickish” choice of exhibitions to review is, frankly, all down to him, patronizing lip service to women artists be damned.

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Renny Pritikin, “Prescription…” reproduced from Proximity Magazine’s layout (source: blog.sfmoma.org)

While a quick look at New Langton’s blog appeal is depressingly void of any positive developments for the struggling artist-run centre, a further look at the SFMOMA article is worthwhile for Renny Pritikin’s Presription [sic] for a Healthy Art Scene, reprinted from its appearance in Proximity Magazine. It’s an ambitious list that gradually made my heart sink further on Hamilton’s behalf the further along I read - the grimness really kicked in after 08: Sophisticated writers to document, discuss and promote new ideas/continuing regional development was chased down with 09: Publications for them to write for. Yet I still find it strangely uplifting to know that of the entire list, Hamilton at least excels at the last point: 23: Events that bring people together scheduled multi-gallery opening nights for example.

My impression of the list is one of priority order first, insofar as I think 01: A large pool of artists comes before all else, but what else does one suppose Hamilton already has? Of our shortcomings, which need to be prioritized?

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Both these new manifestations were strange enough in their own right to make me hesitate at the entrances with a refreshing sense of being a complete outsider - fascinating to myself, but clearly off-putting to the countless other art crawlers I saw shuffle past both these doors after a cautious glance through the windows. In the case of the one-night-only installation/performance happening at the old Ginza Cafe at 133 James North (only discernible as “art” from the outside due to the almost-magical quality of the dangling lighting fixture outside), the unfamiliarity is understandable, but it may prove a detriment to State of the Art, whose clean signage seems to indicate a more permanent interest in being a gallery.

Located closer to Barton Street and away from the busier James-Cannon portion of the crawl, State of the Art took me by surprise at first glance and confused me further when I ventured inside. It could have been the use of candles to ineffectually light the largely illustrative work on display, or the fact that the few people inside all clearly knew each other and were enjoying a lounge moment around the central sofa and coffee table, but I was left with the distinct impression that I had just crashed someone’s too-trendy-for-thou house party - and despite what the movies tell you, that’s not the best vibe for a new gallery.

What I could see of the work was actually highly evocative of the selections that gallerist Dane Pedersen tends to favour at Loose Canon, which struck a disappointing but fun-loving blow to my hopes that this place would represent a new and as-yet-unheard voice in the community. I had even seen quite a few of the Bryce Huffman pieces on the crawl just a few months ago, which also took some of the shine off the newness of the place - case in point, the Bryce Huffman piece pictured above was actually photographed by my barely-adept self at Loose Canon, where the lighting is at least conducive to viewing the work.

Meanwhile, Loose Canon has opted to show the more visually complex work of Matt Pelletier, whose paintings and sculptural works tend to slow down viewing by stint of their unsettling diversity. While united by a conceptual thread that favours the gothic and macabre, Pelletier works across a range of stylistic approaches that reference anything from Renaissance altarpieces to high surrealism. Seeing such striking difference in a single solo presentation isn’t always a convincing experience, but the few truly exceptional works tend to stand on their own strengths. One of the smaller works in the show, The Ballad of the Pepperell Street Flood, is strangely arresting for its Egon Schiele-like renderings of three mysterious figures in a disturbingly flat space where the wood-collaged floor pushes subtly forward: its formal qualities are a direct echo of the disturbing tableau it portrays.

Another derivation from my usual art crawl path was a trip upstairs to the third floor of 175 James Street North, typically home to painters of the portraits-and-flowers variety that will sadly never float my postmodern boat but word of mouth had alerted me to a showing of work by a colleague from my anatomy-lab-drawing days in Jessica Roth’s studio/gallery space. Sean Porter Scott’s formalist experiments in painting and assemblage were an incongruous but not unwelcome surprise in this repurposed gallery, with its generous and airy space highlighted by the miniature scale of most of Scott’s paper constructions. The smallest and most delicate of these evoke an element of child’s play reinforced by the remnants scattered over the floor, perhaps too painstakingly arranged in the spirit of Jessica Stockholder to be truly playful.

Though not to be confused (as I certainly was) with the aforementioned painter, Sean Scott is among the photographers collected together for End of the Century at Mixed Media, an inevitably political visual document of the demolition of the Century Theatre on Mary Street. This collective elegy of bitter loss is only made truly poignant by the redemption of anonymously donated historic photos of the Century in its original glory. The vintage images of the marquee announcing many cinematic classics presents a necessary understanding of the former life of the place before its current destruction which would otherwise ring unfortunately hollow.

The James North Art Collective has continued to adeptly pair its member artists by presenting sculptor Dawn Hackett’s ceramic and wood pieces with the monotypes and oil paintings of Doug Carter - both bodies of work trigger something of a Group of Seven depiction of nature that manages to exceed the drawbacks of that old-school type. For all their uniformity of surface, Carter’s painted images are lively things that reference the leaves conspicuously missing from Hackett’s fragmented birch trunks extended by ceramic prostheses. These totemic trees scattered throughout the gallery especially reinforce the overall impression of a forest exploded into playful possibilities, the darker implications of such an exercise notwithstanding.

The mass flock of sheep waiting the window of You Me Gallery operate on a similar edge between childlike delight and something more sinister. Charming though they are, one doesn’t need to wander far into this installation of work by Clarissa Inglis to realize that this undertaking definitely qualifies for a darker interpretation. The flock of Go Forth and Multiply lends its title to an immersive show deriving from the artist’s travels in Mexico and Central America, in which she examines the aesthetic and dogma of the prevalent Catholicism of those regions.

Inglis’ installations and mixed media drawings are weighted by a gendered critique of Roman Catholicism’s expectations upon women, yet the success of her critique lies in her ability to sublimate those concerns into subtle visual cues that play off the lustre and decadence of the religious aesthetic. Nothing is explicitly given away in these works, though the crawling snakes and collected crucifixes effectively conjure a great deal of Inglis’ uneasiness with her subject matter.

Another understated body of work was presented by Kristian Nesbitt in his solo exhibition at ArtWord ArtBar’s downstairs gallery. While the many monoprints on show employ a repeating vocabulary of markmaking - some of it explicitly attributed to the influence of Jackson Pollock - each work manages to demonstrate something unique unto itself, deftly avoiding the spell of repetition that can plague printmaking and finding new possibilities in various combinations of layers and shapes. I’d certainly recommend a look at his website (linked above), if only to see better quality images that support my praise better than my second-rate stealth photography can demonstrate here.

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This latest oversight appears the most dire to date - I cringe to think of artists outside this narrow slice of the blogosphere who will see no evidence of a project breakdown on Vantage’s site - but I still think a core lesson has been drowned out in the chatter, such that I’m willing to risk prolonging the issue by elaborating here.

Also, it’s Wednesday, so this airing of grievances is becoming traditional now.

While Diana Poulsen cited upwards of eighteen points of contention with the Gatekeepers call, none rankled me more than the $45 submission fee. This unusually high sum was to be paid up front as a condition of even viewing the submissions criteria (that assholery has since been fixed, but is moot given, you know, the resignation of the curator) with no clear justification for the expense.

Excepting grad schools (and that’s a completely different kettle of fish), the highest submission or “processing” fee I’ve deigned to pay was $31 for a residency at the Banff Centre. In this case, the opportunity on offer was, not unlike grad school, the sort of prolonged learning experience worth the expense of applying (not to mention the reams of paperwork in quintuplicate). Even rejection didn’t particularly embitter me to the cost, as I was informed that this payment would be held in kind for any of their plentiful residency programs for the following year. By waiving their claim to further fees for the next twelve months, I came away assured that I wasn’t just another pocket to be picked.

So it’s not that I’m dead set against artists paying fees for consideration, but I do think artists need to be smart about their choices, and recent art graduates in particular need to learn to resist the desperate impulses that make them the primary target of exploitive submissions policies.

Flash Forward 2009, DC FotoWeek (Source: www.magentafoundation.org)

I think a good illustration of this point is a comparison between the Gatekeepers project and the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward as pointed out by photographer Matt Sparling on Diana’s blog. Both are juried art publishing ventures that require comparable submission fees as a condition of entry, and appear similar on the surface. But it doesn’t take much digging to see the differences between the two competitions. Candidates applying to Flash Forward are reviewed by a jury of art professionals from Canada, the US and the UK and selected artists (including at least one prize-winner) are included not only in the hard-bound publication but in exhibitions concurrent with book launches in both Canada and the US (most often Toronto and New York, though past shows have also been held in Boston, Montreal and Washington D.C.). In theory, this amounts to exposure to an international panel of curators and critics at the jurying stage, the prospect of multiple public showings of one’s work in two countries with networking opportunities at the openings, and an even slimmer but enticing chance of winning the big prize. Oh, and publication in the big, shiny book.

Applicants to Vantage Art Projects are juried by a single practicing artist (i.e. someone less likely than a curator or critic to have a professional interest in remembering your work), and if selected are included in a publication that, based on the release for Vantage’s first exhibition-in-print, opens with a survey of the selecting artist’s own practice before getting around to contextualizing your chosen work.

In terms of straight-up cost benefit analysis, the potential returns from Flash Forward clearly outweigh the limited exposure an artist hopes to gain from a Vantage publication wherein a strictly Canadian public can only view their work by purchasing the book at the charming price of $69.98 (as opposed to $40.00 for Flash Forward 2009). With this prohibitive level of public access, the odds of furthering one’s career through this venture are slim to non-existent.

If Flash Forward’s fee is a fair standard (and at $50, I’m not even sure that it is), then a project like Vantage has a ways to go to meet that level of return for investment. Awareness of the prevalent standards is essential to making choices from available calls for submissions - and paying for consideration is always a choice, not something to be taken as given.

For further, wiser reading, Joanne Mattera elaborates on the issues surrounding juried shows in one of her wonderful Marketing Monday posts with reference to Jackie Battenfield’s The Artist’s Guide (an indispensable artist resource if ever there was one). Though pay-for-play options are less than ideal, there may be times when the opportunity is worth the price of admission, and both Mattera and Battenfield are adept at pointing out how best to identify those exceptions to what should be a rule of not gouging fees out of artists just because it’s easy.

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So… how about that not-so-local sports team?

Even though my play-off picks leading up to tomorrow’s Superbowl were ridiculously bad this year, I’ll still be watching the game tomorrow night and can take vicarious interest in one of the more interesting side wagers pinned to the outcome. Thanks to some brilliant goading from MAN’s Tyler Green via Twitter (there we go, I finally conceded that Twitter might be good for something other than ego-wank), the Directors of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art have wagered loans from their permanent collections on the success (or otherwise) of their home teams.

A read of Green’s updates on the bets is well worth the one-upmanship and smackdown between IMA director Max Anderson and E. John Bullard of NOMA - the highlight being Bullard’s refusal to put up Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun’s Portrait of Marie Antoinette on the grounds that the 1788 painting was “too fragile to travel, much like Favre.”

Instead, the Colts and the Saints will be playing not just for the big-ass trophy and fancy new rings, but the three-month loan of significant landscape paintings.

Should the New Orleans Saints prevail, NOMA will receive the loan of J.M.W. Turner’s The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800), a massive and moody canvas characteristic of Turner’s atmospheric and dramatic handling of the landscape.

On the other hand, a victory for Indy means NOMA will loan their Claude Lorrain painting An Ideal View of Tivoli (1644) to IMA, which would prove a great companion to the Turner at either museum given Turner’s indebtedness to Lorrain for having essentially founded landscape painting as a genre during the Italian Baroque.

Supposedly, Anderson at IMA has already decided where to hang this beauty when it arrives from NOMA. Which is just as well because bad play-off bets or not, I did choose Indy to go All The Way, and still stand by that.

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What makes me revisit the theme now was a comment I found awaiting me this morning on my own post discussing the Gatekeepers project from Mia Johnson, the developer of artist-curator Angela Grossmann’s website, requesting the removal an image of Angela’s drawing from that post. Like any semi-responsible blogger engaged in art criticism (and therefore in the presentation of appropriated images), I was already fully aware that my use of the image falls under the Fair Dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act. Fair Dealing allows for “the use or reproduction of a work for private study, research, criticism, review, or news reporting” as an integral part of the Copyright Act, preserving a necessary balance between the rights of the owner and the public interest of the user.

Perhaps most tellingly, this airing of this copyright issue addresses one of the concerns that Diana and many other artists raised in regards to the Gatekeepers call. What Mia herself didn’t seem to understand is that Angela’s work isn’t copyrighted just because she slapped her little note at the bottom of the webpage - its copyright is guaranteed under Canadian law from the moment of its creation. As such, any artist submitting their work to Gatekeepers or any other project retains their copyright by default, unless they choose to formally sign those rights over to another party. And given that Vantage Art Projects isn’t offering any sort of compensation or royalties for the use of their images, the expectation that Vantage would demand such rights is ludicrous. Though not impossible, and I would still maintain that more organizations need to make that expectation clear in the early stages of a call for submissions - frankly, it’s not just Vantage that is guilty of that sort of omission.

Paul Butler, Toronto Now Suite detail, 2008. Because he didn’t object when I used this image in a mini-review of his MKG127 show in 2008.

Although I ultimately substituted the image of Angela’s art with one of the artist herself at Mia’s insistence that the post was not about Angela’s art, I still maintain that Angela Grossmann’s primary occupation as a visual artist is a large part of what went wrong with this call for submissions. Miscommunications and the disputed allocation of responsibility are just some of the possible consequences when an artist is inserted into a curatorial role for the first time. There’s a professional lesson to be had here, insofar as the curator’s responsibilities extend far beyond that of artist-theorist or even juror.

Vantage Art Projects’ previous exhibition-in-print curator was Paul Butler, who ironically is also well-positioned to respond to the notion of gatekeepers in contemporary art - the statement for his 2008 MKG127 show practically reads like a textbook for the Gatekeepers open call without the condescension. His choice of curatorial theme for Vantage’s first publication, however, was ‘Lateral Learning’ - a theme that both spoke directly to the book as format and more importantly did not exacerbate the inevitable tension generated by the submission fee.

In light of the comment thread generated by Diana’s post on this subject, I can’t help but feel that there is an undeniable learning curve in the artist-to-curator transition that cannot be taken lightly. Paul Butler, who has previous curatorial experience and administers The Other Gallery, was far better equipped to take ownership of the issues inherent in this call. Conversely, Angela’s attempts to realize an earnest idea within the terms established by a third party has left her project vulnerable to criticism; perhaps the most reprehensible element of this episode has been the extent to which Angela has engaged in the dialogue at Diana’s blog while Vantage Art Projects has kept silent save for a self-serving attempt to promote their upcoming book launch.

I’ve no doubt that, given their intimate knowledge of the creative process, any number of artists could make brilliant curators of exhibitions and special projects. But it’s a transition that cannot happen without a certain degree of mentorship and support. And just as Vantage appears to be taking advantage of submitting artists, I wonder whether Angela’s name and earnestness has been similarly exploited for the sake of this project.

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Perhaps because of this sometimes-crass accessibility, I found myself surprisingly un-annoyed to discover his commissioned animation to promote Pringle of Scotland’s brand for Milan Fashion Week (and it seems Pringle of Scotland has a thing for artist’s commissions, given that their website opens with a Ryan McGinley film in which a befrocked Tilda Swinton gets all touchy-feely with a pristine Scottish ruin). This is the sort of commercial endeavour that would normally leave me a bit cold, but his simplistic drawing style combined with the hilarious narration manages to undermine the high-fashion intention altogether, creating something that is still an undeniably effective promotional tool.

Count me convinced. And hankering for damp Scottish weather and a nice wooly jumper besides.

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For all the dearth of exhibition opportunities out there, calls for submissions are as plentiful as chicken balls at a Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet, and every bit as dubious in quality. It takes a practiced eye to quickly process all the Akimbo advertisements and Instant Coffee listings for anything useful or relevant, and I’ve become accustomed to discarding entire listings without so much as a bite of interest for any number of reasons. Too many calls for video art when my art is emphatically analogue. Too many calls to show in vanity galleries where artists are both juried and then stuck with the rent for the space. And too many calls where a submission fee is just too high for my severely limited budget.

Angela Grossman, pictured with Confetti, 2008. (Source: www.dianefarrisgallery.com)

I’ll admit that none of these were my chief concern when I first scrolled through the call for Gatekeepers, an exhibition-in-print (i.e. book) curated by Angela Grossmann. In all honesty, it was my fondness of Grossmann’s drawings (they’re really remarkably gritty in person) that kept me reading, but I was ultimately turned off by the curatorial theme for the publication, which courted a reductive vision of wildly successful in-crowd artists and those toiling wastefully on the outside, with an invitation to take on the view of these poor excluded souls.

The costs of failure are legion: shame, huge art school debts, derision and quite often, low or no income. Many artists have become critical and disinterested in the dominant pathways to ‘success’ and the increasing power of institutions, art schools Biennials, art fairs and market driven blockbusters. In this time of shape shifting economy the view from ‘outside the gates’ may be the more interesting one.

I wasn’t convinced, and more importantly felt that attempting to twist my work to present itself as a symptom of disempowered self-pity would do both the work and my professional efforts a huge disservice. I deleted the call, and didn’t think on it again.

As it happens, art historian and fellow blogger Diana Poulsen did a fair bit more digging. And starting from the inflated submissions fee - $40 on the website, $45 by the time you hit PayPal - she sharply vivisects every element of this call that should have any self-respecting artist cringing from participating. I’ll leave you to read the gory details in her own words, but suffice it to say that any call that requires to you pay not only to submit your work, but requires payment before even providing the submissions requirements is not something you should ever consider. It’s simply vile.

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