CEAC: Radical Experiment or Exercise in Self-Destruction

Tomorrow at 1pm, the Art Gallery of York University hosts a symposium titled CEAC: Radical Experiment or Exercise in Self-Destruction: An Afternoon of Discussion.

The Centre for Experimental Art and Communication was active in Toronto from the fall of 1975 (when it emerged out of the Kensington Arts Association) to mid-1978, when it abruptly ceased operation. The CEAC organized exhibitions, conferences, workshops, screenings and performances. The group presented a wide-range of projects, including works by artists Vera Frenkel, Joseph Kosuth, Dennis Oppenheim, Martha Rosler, Carolee Schneeman, Michael Snow, and Lawrence Weiner, and composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

The CEAC publication Art Communication Edition, later re-named Strike, was a vehicle for promoting the centre’s radical political program. In their May 1978 issue, they featured a lengthy article on the The Red Brigades, an Italian militant organization notorious in the 70's for their violent attempts to destabilize the country through acts of sabotage, bank robberies, and kidnappings. Kneecapping - the crippling of your enemy with a gunshot to the knee - was another favourite tactic, reportedly used as a method to punish at least 75 people by 1978.

Robert MacDonald,  a conservative columnist who helped found The Toronto Sun newspaper in 1971, wrote a series of articles attempting to erode support for the arts councils by highlighting what he deemed the the group's advocation of such violent terrorist acts. A scandal ensued that saw funding cuts to the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, both of whom (alongside Wintario) pulled their funding to the CEAC, costing the group their building, the first owned by an artist-run centre in Toronto.

The AGYU symposium brings together the surviving "original protagonists" of the CEAC experiment—Diane Boadway, Peter Dudar, Lily Eng, Bruce Eves, John Faichney, and Ron Giii. They are joined by curator and AGYU director Philip Monk, Dot Tuer, and artist Mike Hoolboom (whose website provided the above images).

The event is held in conjunction with Monk's exhibition Is Toronto Burning? 1977/1978/1979 Three Years in the Making (and Unmaking) of the Toronto Art Community. The extensively researched exhibition examines three pivotal years in the local art community, and its increasing engagement with politics, punk rock, fashion and advertising. Housed in the show's many vitrines are the original CEAC publications, alongside related newspaper clippings from the Toronto Sun and Globe and Mail. Other publications include Image Nation, FILE megazine and Carole Condé & Karl Beveridge's ...It’s Still Privileged Art. 

Alongside the CEAC, the exhibition includes Susan Britton, David Buchan, Colin Campbell, Elizabeth Chitty, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Judith Doyle, General Idea, Isobel Harry, Ross McLaren, Missing Associates (Peter Dudar & Lily Eng), Clive Robertson, Tom Sherman, and Rodney Werden.

The AGYU is located in the Accolade East Building, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto. CEAC: Radical Experiment or Exercise in Self-Destruction: An Afternoon of Discussion takes place at 1pm on Wednesday November 12th. Is Toronto Burning? continues until the 7th of December, 2014.

Act Up Art Box

[Various Artists]
Act Up Art Box 
New York City, USA: Act Up, 1994
35.56 x 60.96 x 10.16 cm
Edition of 95 (with 10 A.P.s)

A maple, birch, aluminum and chrome box containing seven objects, produced as a fund-raiser for ACT UP, a "diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis".

The contents include untitled works by Ross Bleckner, Kiki Smith, Lorna Simpson and Louise Bourgeois, Hibernating Egg: Postoperative State by Mike Kelley, Approaching by Simon Leung and To The Revolution (the cover image), by Nancy Spero. The colophon is signed by each artist, and the Spero and Smith pieces are additionally signed.

Recent auction prices range from $2250 to $6875.00 US. Printed Matter has a copy for sale for $3500 US, here.



"Finding them all shacked up together, one considers the seven objects in the ACT UP Art Box collectively. Beyond a shared show of support--each artist donated his or her work to benefit ACT UP--what connects these disparate things? The avian imagery (Ross Bleckner, Mike Kelley and Lorna Simpson's works all involve birds), fragile materials (Simpson and Kiki Smith both use glass) and grotesqueries of these ofjects (Louise Bourgeois, Simon Leung, and Smith each detail unidealized aspects of the body, put to dance by Nacy Spero) all add up to the time-honored notion of memento mori. As reminders of the organic ephemeralness of life against the sure passage of time and certainty of death, this motif fittingly commemorates people with AIDS. But given the aegis of their assembly, an organization actively, dramatically, even rudely, committed to ending this health crisis--these objects must contain more than pathos.

Anger is frowned upon in decent society. In the conventional breakdown of mind and body, intellect and emotion, culture and nature, anger falls into the latter, distictly feminine cast of attributes. It thus becomes the property of all disenfranchised persons--the property we are all taught to hide. But anger's indecorousness is also what makes it patently anti-social and potentially radical. Members of the lesbian and gay communites realized this when they "allied in anger" to found ACT UP in March of 1987.

Think of anger, first quietly projected in the picture of a man skating the Rockefeller Center rink during the holiday season carrying a sign protesting homelessness of people with AIDS. Now imagine some outrageous outburst, like the funeral last July for Jon Greenberg, who died of AIDS. His coffin was carried through the streets of the East Village; his own ironic epitah read, "I don't want an angry political funeral. I just want you to burn me in the street and eat my flesh." That it doesn't get much more distasteful is exactly ACT UP's position: AIDS is not acceptable.

Now open the ACT UP Art Box. Begin with the slow rage of frustration that curls up from Leung's post-modern veil of St. Veronica: a silk scarf imprinted after the facial oils left by art pilgrims as they press against the door of Marcel Duchamp's manipulative last work, Étant Donnés (1946-66), to look through a peephole at a diorama of rape. Kelley and Smith also go in for acts of violation. With a cork shoved into a crude gash and putty pushed into a tiny incision, Kelley's wooden egg--the absurd rejoinder to, "Egg, heal thyself"--comes doubly domaged and twice repaired, ready to be hurled, like a grenade. In a photograph of one of her sculptures, Smith protrays flayed anatomy made out of meat and clay. Conversely her delicate glass flower evokes the symbolic shatter anticipated (almost audibly) by Simpson's pair of tenuous glass wishbones. The image of Bleckner's feathered friend dipped in tar is not only poignant but sadistic--a frightening token of the ease with which our culture flies to protect animal--as opposed to human--life. While Bourgeois and Spero both work in idioms of sensuous subversion, Bourgeois's willfully perverse pink rubber testicles and phallic smear (with its faintly industrial odor) joins an entire iconography of psyco-sexual amputees. Equally characteristic is Spero's ruinous frieze, a chorus of women moving to the sound of an omimous incantation, "let the priests tremble, we're going to show them our sexts!"* Having lined the halls of so many artworld Valhallas with these Sapphic alternatives to classical constructs of art and identity, it seems only fitting that Spero's agitprop muses adorn the exterior of each ACT UP Art Box.

Filled up and closed shut, this box is no casket of artistic curios, but a toolbox, beautifully equipped with exquisite implements of anger, fine instruments of change."

- Ingrid Schaffner, March 1994 [inside enclosure]

People of the 21st Century book launch

People of the 21st Century, Hans Eijkelboom's new title from Phaidon Press, is available as of last month, but has it's official launch next week.

Colette in Paris is hosting a launch and talk with Erik Kessels on the 13th of November, from 5 to 6:30pm. The next day at Dirk Bakker Books there will be a book signing from 6 to 8pm.


"The book is fascinating to flick through – in part to see the changing fashions (remember when everyone was wearing lumberjack shirts?) but also in the deeper questions it provokes. Are we all fashion automatons? Do we not have any unique style? When advertising is so often focused on promoting the idea of free expression and individuality, it is somewhat disheartening to see that in actuality, we all end up looking the same."

- Creative Review

"The results, collated in a 500-page book, are simultaneously mundane and compelling. Laid out in a grid, the shots of women wearing pink T-shirts or businessmen carrying briefcases have a hypnotic, repetitious quality, but the longer you look at them, the more nuances become apparent. Eijkelboom used a similar technique in an earlier project, Paris-New York-Shanghai, an exhibition and a trio of books documenting everyday life in those cities that was widely perceived as being a deadpan comment on globalisation’s effect on national identity. The point seemed to be that people increasingly dressed the same all over the world.

People of the Twenty-First Century offers a more positive message. Eijkelboom occasionally documents a fashion trend, or a tribal allegiance, where people are trying to look alike: bikers, Rolling Stones fans wearing the band’s logo. But more often, the similarities between his subjects’ appearances reveal themselves to be superficial. Eijkelboom might have chanced upon a dozen people all wearing yellow T-shirts, but they’re not a uniform and their significance changes with each person: one shirt is pledging allegiance to a football team, another to a band, another to surfing."

- The Guardian

I am A Sender: Multiples by Joseph Beuys

The above brochure (click the images and the text should be large enough to read) comes from Micah Lexier, who recently returned from a trip to Munich. The exhibition I am A Sender: Multiples by Joseph Beuys, is the result of an almost two-year long joint research project between the Pinakothek der Moderne and the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge. Both institutions have substantial multiples holdings, and the project's aim is to make these works more accessible to the broader public.

The exhibition opened in June and continues until the 11th of January, 2015.

OAAG Awards

Congrats to Jimmy Limit and curator Marcie Bronson for winning the best exhibition OAAG award for Jimmy Limit: Recent Advancements at Rodman Hall. And to the Art Gallery of York University for their seven wins, including Art Publication of the year for Will Munro: History, Glamour, Magic. And to all of the other winners and nominees.

For more information, see the Canadian Art story, here:

http://canadianart.ca/news/2014/11/05/oaag-awards-2014/


Or visit the Ontario Association of Art Galleries site, here and the Rodman Hall site, here. The Will Munro monograph can be purchased here.

David Shrigley | Cruet Set

David Shrigley
Cruet set
London, UK: Sketch, 2014
4x4x5.5cm
Edition size unknown

Similar to Shrigley's popular Heroin and Cocaine salt and pepper shakers, this cruet set (typically used to hold olive oil or balsamic vinegar, I've just learned) is designed by Made and made from English fine bone china, manufactured by Caverswall. They are dishwasher friendly.

Currently out-of-stock, with more promised soon. £80.00, here.

Other Shrigley editions currently available, include:

Heroin and Cocaine
Pigs Deck
Swan
Passport Photo
Gold Disk
No Junk Mail

Dean Baldwin | Eel's Wallet

The first half-dozen of Dean Baldwin's Eel's Wallet (see below post) shipped today. Above are some production shots, featuring the numerous tickets sourced from Ebay, Craigslist, and dollar stores.

The work is available from the Nothing Else Press, here. Other titles launching imminently: Jimmy Limit's Rainbows, Karen Azoulay's A/V reading of her Down With Liberty book and two book bags by Cary Leibowitz.