Vancouver
posted by Clint Burnham - November 29th, 2006.
Luc Tuymans’ recent talk at the Vancouver Art Gallery was a stunning performance – part art history lecture, part self-portrait, all Euro cool and erudition. The standing-room only audience that crushed into the gallery’s lobby had a lot of patience and endurance for what turned out to be almost three hours (with, at Tuymans’ request, a smoke break) by “the Polanski of contemporary art,” as he was introduced by director Kathleen Bartels.
The first hour of Tuymans’ lecture was a tour through European art history; from Van Eyck and Hieronymous Bosch to Giorgio di Chirico and Magritte (despite Tuymans’ claim that surrealism is not Belgian), this was essentially his genealogy. The big payoff came in the second half of the lecture as Tuymans showed images from all thirty-three of his major exhibitions, beginning with his infamous swimming pool show in 1985, to which no one came. Tuymans was frank and self-deprecating as he spun stories about dealers and critics – one of whom, sitting next to him at a dinner, apparently declared that she had “never met a commercial artist” before. He also gave insight to his affection for Edward Hopper, his use of childhood imagery (a goose painting that used to hang in his bedroom), as well as, of course, his Nazi and child abuse paintings. His most recent work, including paintings that deal with the legacy of Belgian colonialism in the Congo and such tragic African figures as Patrice Lumumba, also came under searching exegesis.
Luc Tuymans, Der Diagnostische Blick IV, 1992, oil on canvas
Tuymans was always charming, with that Euro-tourettes affliction of saying “shit” and “fuck” a bit more freely than we are perhaps used to. The climax of the evening came when the Western Front’s Mark Soo, noting that Tuymans had mentioned his wife frequently, asked how the painter thought his wife would rate him as a lover. To his credit, Tuymans went along with the tenor of the question, remarking that his wife was educated by the Jesuits and trained as a biologist, “so I don’t have a chance.”
Home Theatre is a group show of photography and video about domestic spaces now on at the Simon Fraser University Gallery in Burnaby. It includes work by Karin Bubaš, Lynda Gammon, Arni Haraldsson, Oliver Michaels, and Carol Sawyer. The strongest art in the exhibition is that of Bubaš, Haraldsson, and Sawyer. Bubaš’ selection is from a suite of photographs she also showed at Monte Clark Gallery in 2003. They depict the interiors of the Ivy House, a residence in London, England that she was commissioned to shoot after the occupant passed away. Bubaš’ photographs show a space in transition; it looks as if the occupant has just left the room. A magazine sits on a chair, folded back, waiting for its reader to return. A mop and broom stand side by side, perhaps to be used again. In these photographs, we are in mourning not so much for the deceased occupant, who we do not know, but for the objects of her life.
Carol Sawyer, Flux: Blue Bedroom, 2002
Sawyer’s photographs also deal with absence and empty spaces. She documents houses in the Strathcona neighbourhood of Vancouver, the city’s oldest residential neighbourhood and one undergoing transition as it gentrifies. Sawyer is interested in the architecture of the small, century-old cottages and bungalows that line Strathcona’s streets. Her photographs show fading wallpaper and rotting corners. They also give us a sense of the layers of history that encumber such dwellings, a history that, as the title of her series indicates, is always in “flux.”
Haraldsson’s pictures are also concerned with memory and architecture. Those here depict the house of the late Vancouver artist B.C. (Bert) Binning, a house that he designed and built in 1940; it was one of the key early examples of West Coast modernism. Haraldsson’s photographs show the tension in a house that is both a domestic living space and a museum of sorts, maintained by Binning’s widow Jessie. The walls are hung with Binning’s paintings to give them a salon feel and Haraldsson shows well how modernism ages.
Karin Bubaš, Woman in Frost, 2006, C-Print
For someone who told me a couple of years ago that she wasn’t making much work, Karin Bubaš has had a busy fall with, in addition to her participation in Home Theatre, a solo show at her gallery Monte Clark. This new exhibition, Studies in Landscape and Wardrobe, is inspired by Hitchcock’s use of actresses, in particular how he would coordinate their costumes with his over-all set design and location shooting. Each of Bubaš’ six photographs show a woman in a Vancouver location – Stanley Park or Queen Elizabeth Park or with a horse in a field in suburban Langley. There is a great deal of tension in the photographs for we do not see the women’s faces – we are looking at what they are looking at: their surroundings. We also see their dresses – which are often coordinated with the setting's colours. One woman in a pink prom-like dress sits under a blossoming cherry tree, another in a yellow dress is found in field of buttercups. Bubaš is doing something difficult here, I think. She is trying to take feminine fashion seriously, while setting it in a natural landscape that threatens to overwhelm the clothing.
Clint Burnham is a Vancouver writer. His recent article on Weegee can be found at http://doppelgangermagazine.com/.
Vancouver Art Gallery: http://vanartgallery.bc.ca/home.cfm
SFU Gallery: http://www.sfu.ca/gallery/
Home Theatre continues until December 9.
Monte Clark Gallery: http://www.monteclarkgallery.com/Vancouver.html
Karin Bubaš: Studies in Landscape and Wardrobe continues until December 11.
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