Stories About Art

One of my favourite Frida Kahlo paintings, Without Hope (1945)

Is there potential in the prospect of critics writing short stories about art in the place of art reviews or traditional pieces of art criticism?  Here's a short story that I wrote recently (raw and pretty much unedited) that used Frida Kahlo's paintings as a starting point and ended with mention of Diane Arbus.

Gross

“Frida Kahlo makes explicit the openness, fragility and leakiness of the body-self, as not just object and subject, but also as always potentially ‘abject.’”  Reading this sentence in an art history text, I am reminded of my break from childhood to adulthood.  What things change between these periods that could serves as signposts, you ask?  I promise, it’s not what you think.

I remember when I was about twenty-one, living in my second apartment; I learned I wasn’t afraid of “gross” anymore.  I remember doing the dishes, determined to wash each plate and mug until it was perfectly spotless.  I relished in the steamy scent of green detergent wafting in my nostrils.  By the time I finished this chore and the chortle of the last trace of grimy water circled the drain, there would be chunks of tomato and bloated grains of rice gathered at the bottom of the sink.  Sometimes I would try to jam it all down the drain with my thumb.  Other times I would scoop up the slimy detritus with my hand and throw it in the garbage under the sink unfazed.  The bottom line is it didn’t bother me like it might have a year or two earlier, when I would have just let the dishes slide for another day.

When I was a child, I was afraid of everything gross.  The country was gross.  The way dragonflies skittered across the surface of a lake did not fill me with a wide-eyed sense of wonder, but rather with tiny jabs of fear that bordered on disgust.  The mosquito avenged the contempt I had for nature.  Their bites would swell to the size of fried eggs on my young, fleshy body, resembling breasts I did not yet have.  My swollen self yearned to go back to the city, back to the perfect balance of chaos and control of subway lines and air-conditioned malls on Saturday afternoons.  Garbage water and gutter dirt had nothing on the smell of cabin and the feel of algae on my feet. As I aged, visits to friend’s cottages were politely passed up more and more frequently.

Gross is never in style for teenage girls, and for a while it wasn’t for me either.  But at one point, I realized that gross could be a weapon.  I put egg white and Kool-Aid in my hair; put black tar around my eyes to look like a cross between a movie monster and a mocking caricature of femininity.  While this may be gross to some, this isn’t really the kind of gross I am addressing here.  This is a more topical type of gross.  What I’m really talking about is the gross that gets under your skin and into your intestines.

In her biography, an acquaintance of the photographer Diane Arbus claimed that in the few years before her death, Arbus “would wander around Central Park with a camera strapped around her neck.  She was always wearing the same leather pants, and often had a strong smell about her.”  It is an unwritten rule that one of the more taboo day-to-day transgressions is body odor.  That man on the bus who smells like a cross between salami and scalp, or the mouth-breather in the doctor’s office who has a cheesy funk to him.  But one day, somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, it was like someone had flicked a switch inside of me.  I began to welcome the smell of my own body, and almost revel in it. To some, the smell I’m referring to might be the sort to get under the skin and into the intestines.  But to me, it’s a reminder that I am imperfectly and gloriously alive.

A Cheesecake Story

LECTURE: This month’s edition of Trampoline Hall, the long-running amateur lecture series (“amateur” in the sense that the chosen subjects must be things the lecturers are not professionals in) is curated by Becky Johnson and hosted (as always) by Misha Glouberman. It features artist and author Serena McCarroll on “Invisible Problems,” writer and comic Joel Buxton on “What Makes a Hit,” and conceptual artist Tara Bursey on “Cheesecake.” Very limited at-the-door tickets go on sale at 6:30 p.m. tonight. The Garrison (1197 Dundas Street West), 8 p.m., $5.

Yep, I lectured on the process of making and distributing four cheesecakes over a weekend to a packed house at this week's Trampoline Hall.  The fourth cake (not pictured here) was given to audience members at the show.  Also not pictured is Jim, the foreman of a building site on Givens Street who was the recipient of the blueberry cheesecake. This project was inspired by a short piece of non-fiction I wrote about making cheesecake for my family as a child.

The wheels are turning for future edible food art projects like this one!

Father Knowledge, Mother Tongue

In the thick of work on my thesis project.  This is a first shot at a promotional image for the project, which will eventually emerge as books, a book launch event in late March, and an exhibition-like space where the launch will take place.  More on this soon!

New Zines

Eat to the Beat: A Rock'n'Roll Cookzine

"Food and music are two of the most primal pleasures on earth! It’s a wonder that their paths don’t cross more often than they do-- exceptions being pasta sauce made by ex-Ramones, punk sommeliers and the song titles of bubblegum pop bands, of course…and that guy behind the desk at the record store with the pizza sauce dripping down his chin…

Community recipe collections in the form of cookbooks are not new. I embarked on this project because so many of my friends in “rock”-- whether they be musicians, DJs, record store clerks, recording engineers or record collectors-- are also total foodies. The premise for this zine is simple-- to bring rock and food together in one tasty package, as well as to pay tribute to my community of talented, creative and fun rocker pals and the songs and artists that inspire them."

Eat to the Beat is a collaborative rock'n'roll-themed cookzine featuring contributions by Alycia Wahn, Alexandra Gutnik, Andy "Dictator" Shernoff, Ben Needham, Bev Coneybeare, Casey Johnson, Christina Wozniak, DJ Nico, Elaine Banks, Mark Kingdon, Mary Ann Guiao, Matt Hitch and myself. Zine includes a super special "Food Fight" Risograph pin-up insert illustrated by the fabulous Elaine Banks.

42 pages, 8.5" X 5.25"
Xerography with Risograph insert
2012

Rusty's Dusty:  

A solemn short story in mini-zine form about a man who works in a boatyard in Etobicoke. Inspired by a real-life encounter I had in the early 1990s. Zine comes in a little origami boat.  Recommended for people experiencing post-industrial anxiety.

Zine measures 4.25" X 2.25"

Xerography, origami paper

2012

Buy them here.

A History of Hunger

Here a is new-ish project I completed recently called A History of Hunger consisting of one dozen mini-scroll "books" made of a dozen white eggs.  Admittedly, this was a project for school.  Here's a statement about it...sorry if it comes across as a little clinical sounding.

A History of Hunger
Eggshells, Japanese paper, adhesive, egg carton
Edition of 12 unique objects

A History of Hunger is a series of 12 miniature objects inspired by books.  Using the phrase “break in case of emergency” as a starting point and combining creative writing with research and sculptural processes, I used broken, empty eggs to frame an exploration of hunger and famine across time and space.  Through online research, I learned about both contemporary and historical examples of famine and food insecurity such as the Irish potato famine as well as periods of hunger during communist rule in China, WWII and the Great Depression.  Each of the twelve book-objects represents a year when a famine or food shortage existed somewhere in the world, and contains a short poetic response to a condition or situation that I read about.  A guiding idea in the series is that in opening each egg and finding it empty aside from a short piece of text reflecting an experience of hunger or famine, one might learn not only how widespread hunger is, but how people have coped with food shortages, as well as how they come to exist.

This project is in keeping with the guiding principle of our class publication-- playing with time by imagining the present through the lens of the future, and guessing what aspects of our contemporary cultural/societal condition will carry over to become major issues in subsequent decades.  Food security is an issue worldwide that will likely only get worse with increasing climate change.  The series of multiples resists providing a linear narrative or definitive history of hunger, and the inclusion of a multiple marked with the year 2042 alludes to the fact that hunger will likely be a continuous problem in a rapidly growing and warming world.

Many of the material/formal decisions I made in the execution of A History of Hunger grew out of my initial decision to use a carton of broken eggs as a starting point.  While the content of the multiples is historical, the use of a contemporary carton of eggs marked with nutritional information at a recent date stamp root the work in the present.  The multiples play with the scroll-- a historical format that is echoed in word processing applications, web browsers and film credits.  Typing directly onto the narrow scrolls required the use of short words in my poetic responses to each historical example of hunger, making them resemble Haikus and giving them a quiet quality that softens the tragic imagery contained in some of the text.  The long scrolls made out of Japanese Kozo paper were designed to mimic the look of egg yolks and whites pouring out of their shells.  Finally, the fragility of the eggshells fits with the precariousness of food security across time, as well as the increasing instability of our environment.

Agnes Martin on Art and Solitude

I found the following inspiring Agnes Martin quote on another blog this morning, which was excerpted from her book of prose, Writings:

"We have been very strenuously conditioned against solitude. To be alone is considered to be a grievous and dangerous condition. So I beg you to recall in detail any times when you were alone and discover your exact response at those times. I suggest to artists that you take every opportunity of being alone, that you give up having pets and unnecessary companions. You will find the fear that we have been taught is not just one fear but many fears. When you discover what they are they will be overcome. Most people have never been alone enough to feel these fears. But even without the experience of them they dread them. I suggest that people who like to be alone, who walk alone will perhaps be serious workers in the art field."

More on Agnes Martin and her work here.

Soul Food

Since returning to school, I've had to do a lot more writing than I was used to previously. Though I've had many mixed feelings about returning to school (part-time) and my classes, boning up on writing and remembering how much I used to get into the process of writing has been great. So many people dread writing essays....I'm definitely not a natural (I do dread starting a piece of writing, and am a huge procrastinator..), but once I get started, it's generally an enjoyable challenge. A piece of writing is like a puzzle...finishing is incredibly satisfying.

The following descriptive essay is the first thing I wrote for school this year. The assignment was to write an in-depth description of something. Woodgreen Fish 'n' Chips was one of the most bizarrely beautiful spaces I've ever set foot in in my life. Sometimes I feel like Woodgreen helped shape my current taste in items, objects and interiors. Everything from the fireproof walls to the booths and the signage made going there an amazing and very unusual aesthetic experience.

This essay started out as a relatively simple descriptive exercise. But as I wrote, I realized that the story had a mind of it's own. After I finished and read it over, I realized that it was also a meditation on memory, and clear way children observe visual details and experience space and social dynamics. It is also about the loss of many aspects of my life from that time, specifically my grandmother, who died four years ago.

*****

Soul Food

Woodgreen Fish and Chips used to be on a sleepy strip of Queen Street East until about a year ago. It served up crisp and greasy breaded halibut with thick french fries sprinkled with crystalline flakes of salt to generations of diners, from lanky pre-teen girls on banana seats to burly, bearded blue-collar everymen. My own patronage of the restaurant began in the mid-1980s, at the tender age of four. My earliest recollections from this period involve my family- long-time patrons- piling into my parents’ two-tone, beige and brown Oldsmobile Toronado and driving south on the sizzling August streets towards the diner. Visits like this started the same way for years, but it is the visits from a few years later that remain most vivid in the annals of my childhood psyche.

Most of our mid-day jaunts to Woodgreen were attended by my neurotic mother (who would meticulously dab grease from her fish with no less than three napkins), my vamp-ish aunt with her jet black hair and gravelly drawl, and my portly grandmother, who was always dressed head-to-toe in black, a stiff leather purse clutched tightly between her fleshy, bejeweled fingers. I remember how we used to stand out among the others in the sweaty luncheonette. There was something unmistakably different about our distinctly Mediterranean brand of mealtime fussing, from the armfuls of shopping bags spilling out from under our table to the dollar bill tug-of-war that would always ensue between the parties who simultaneously insisted on paying the bill. What a contrast this was to the usual assortment of diners sharing the space, which invariably included a quiet elderly man cautiously cutting and forking tiny pieces of fish cake into his gummy orifice and a shabby-looking couple slumped across from one another in a booth, one absorbed in a scratch card while the other stares out the window vacantly.

While my family was consumed in what was to me an impenetrable web of Macedonian chatter, I would lose myself in the trove of curious visuals abound. The walls of the restaurant were made of fireproof tin, painted from floor to ceiling in a faded sea foam green enamel, cracked and broken in spots like a boiled egg struck by the back of a spoon. At the front of the space were two bay windows on either side of the door, one adorned with a single potted bonsai tree, and in the other hung a sun-bleached cola advertisement from the late sixties in a dusty gilded frame. The tiny booths we were seated in which lined the walls were at least as old as the advertisement. They were painted fire engine red with black trim, and squealed under the weight of my grandmother’s ample posterior. In each booth, copies of the same pair of decades-old ketchup and mustard bottles sat against the wall, each made unique by the subtle landscapes of layered grease and dust on their surfaces, detectable only by touch. Similarly worse for wear yet obviously enduring were the plates we ate from.

I remember during one particular visit, while sitting at the lunch counter, I slipped a plate off it’s towering stack behind the back of the old lady wrapping a hot bundle of french fries in newspaper for take-away. I stared at the plate’s surface for several minutes. It was grey with age and use, and had a simple tan-coloured pattern around its rim resembling a Greek frieze. Subtle charcoal-toned scratches formed a whirlpool of markings in the centre of the plate, which simultaneously evoked the rings of a tree stump and the idiosyncratic lines of a fingerprint. Though these lines were perfectly visible, I couldn’t feel their light etch under my finger when I tried. The plate felt perfectly smooth. It’s lines were both existent and non-existent, like smoke rings blown from rough lips, or a puff of hot breath in the cold.

Woodgreen Fish and Chips isn’t on Queen Street anymore. It’s creaking booths and lunch counter have been replaced by shiny molded plastic, gleaming stainless steel and conspicuous consumption. Yet still, the residual rings on my plate from forks circling fish around it’s circumference are echoed in cars circling city blocks, and rings circling the fingers of widows day after day, year after year, decade after decade.

Photo above of Woodgreen F&C by you can count on me/Jeannette Ordas.