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Ar(t)chives

M. Gros: investigation games and the art world

Artistic duo Geneviève and Matthieu derive inspiration for their latest performance from investigative TV shows and movies

Artistic duo Geneviève et Matthieu will present their new creation titled M. Gros at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines theater from Oct. 12 to 15. The performers bring the audience into their universe in a non-narrative multidisciplinary creation built around the themes of investigation, identity, and the art world.

Some of the props Geneviève et Matthieu use in their new creation include  fake skin placed on stools, masks with long dark hair attached to clothes hangers, a large piece of fabric piled at the back of the stage, a cotton candy machine, a guitar that plays by itself, a large rope, and a collection of knives.

Their piece is based around the idea of the Mr. Big police investigation technique. This technique aims to solve unsolved crimes through the work of undercover police officers who use infiltration techniques to get to know the suspect. The artists were inspired by investigative TV shows and movies they love. They also thought the name Mr. Big was poetic and could correlate to many ideas, such as the chocolate bar, the body, and the rock band of the same name.

Geneviève et Matthieu have been working on M. Gros for two years now, with it constantly evolving. Improvisation is a crucial part of the performance: the artists have a script that lists the main events of the show, but the way in which they transition from one to the other changes every time.

The artists view the improvisational aspect of their work as a challenge; one that allows them to constantly try new things. “We want the freedom we are giving ourselves to show through because that is all part of playing games, when you start a game of Clue you don’t know how it’s going to end, so it’s the same for us, it’s the idea of how it will end and what shape it will take,” said Geneviève.

The duo is also accompanied on stage by a mad curator who hates contemporary art, and a visual artist who hides behind the different objects on the stage. “It is a roleplay and there are many declensions, but always under the same theme of our identity, who we are, what we hide and what we reveal,” explained Geneviève.

M. Gros is an investigation game Geneviève et Matthieu set for themselves. They are using movement, music and text throughout the performance. As the investigators, their target is specific: they are taking over the art world. The idea came to them after pondering what would be the worst thing that artists could lose. The answer to this question was their ideas. Therefore, the performance also reflects on the contemporary art world.

Geneviève et Matthieu have been working as artists since the 1990s. They also founded an artist centre in their hometown of Rouyn-Noranda called l’Écart.  The Biennale d’Art Performatif de Rouyn-Noranda performance art festival which presented its 9 edition in 2018, is another project they initiated. All the art pieces they’ve encountered influence their practice. Their knowledge enriches the show as they touch on the history of performance art.

Geneviève et Matthieu are both trained in visual arts. They are also musicians who wrote and produced five albums. The performative aspect of their work appeared later in their career, with their pieces La Jamésie and L’opéra d’or. 

Geneviève explained that the creation of their performances was always driven by the props they use. Also, the multidisciplinary aspect of their work is an important part of their creative process. “We always present in different contexts whether it is a theatre, an art gallery, it is really something we are looking for because it gives us the opportunity to work differently and to be influenced by the context,” said Matthieu.

After its run at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines, M. Gros will be presented in another form at the Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain gallery from Nov. 13 to Dec. 18. For them, the exhibition space gives the audience a way of interacting with the props that is different than in a performance space. “When we are in an exhibition space, we have another relationship with the artwork which includes more proximity… in the way we will install it, the work of art will have another life and the objects will interact with each other in a different way,” said Geneviève.

M. Gros is presented in partnership with the Phenomena Festival. Tickets for the M. Gros show are available on the La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines website. 

 

Photograph courtesy of Geneviève et Matthieu

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Ar(t)chives Arts

Existential art: a brief look at Alex Colville’s Pacific

Pacific, one of Colville’s most well known works, challenges viewers to be inquisitive and to derive their own meaning from this complex piece of art

I first encountered Alex Colville’s work in an introductory art history class during my second year at Concordia. Our professor had us observe several works from the Canadian artist, and try to decipher the meaning behind them.

Colville was primarily concerned with realism, deriving inspiration for many of his works from his life in the Maritimes, as well as his experience serving in the Second World War. Although Colville has quite a few noteworthy paintings, there’s one that has stuck with me ever since I first saw it: Pacific (1967).

This work features a man leaning against a wall as he vacantly stares out at a tranquil body of water. However, this won’t be the first thing that viewers notice. Behind the man rests a pistol on a table, its barrel angled towards the observer. Although Colville’s work often explores themes such as the use of power, postwar anxiety, and morality, coupled with his interest in French existentialism, it appears that the artist would prefer that his audience attempt to interpret what Pacific means to them.

In several of his paintings, Colville presents a landscape that is eerily serene, where he then juxtaposes it with a chaotic subject. His pieces, especially Pacific, leave us with questions that are uncomfortable to confront: what is the man in the painting contemplating? Why is the gun angled towards the audience? Will the man end up using it?

His work draws us in, and instead of providing clear-cut answers and satiating our desire for more vibrant, serotonin-boosting pieces, these paintings demand that we be inquisitive. They expect us to dig a bit deeper, and to get into the heads of the subjects that Colville so carefully crafted.

When viewers are unable to decide on a narrative and make sense of a subject’s motives, they may walk away feeling uneasy. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Art that gets us thinking, especially pieces that cause us to ponder existential questions we may try to avoid, might help us view the world a bit differently. Sure, it can be gloomy to try and make sense of a painting like Pacific, but our own interpretations of a piece often say a lot more about how we view our society and ourselves, rather than the direct intentions of the artist.

In a world where many things tend to move at breakneck speed, there’s nothing wrong with taking some time to engage with a complex work that requires careful introspection from its observer. You might even learn something new about yourself in the process.

 

Visuals courtesy of Taylor Reddam

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Uncategorized

This past academic year at The Concordian has been one for the books. Between onboarding a mostly-new staff to changing up our content, we’ve made a lot of adjustments along the way — not to mention adapting to the whole COVID-19 thing. It turns out that publishing in a pandemic isn’t so easy.

The Concordian would like to sincerely thank you, the Concordia community, for your continued support during these past 8 months. This has undoubtedly been one of the most challenging years in our 38 year history — serving Concordia since ‘83, baby — and it wouldn’t have been possible without our readers. Despite the fact that most students haven’t set foot on campus for over a year, knowing that so many of you still took the time to engage with our content means more than words can express. You guys truly are the best.

A big thank you to our contributors for lending us your written words and choosing to share your stories through our platform. Our digital door is always open to new stories, new voices, and new ideas, so if you’re still around next fall, you know where to find us. We love you!

And finally, a big, huge, fat, enormous thank you to our whole staff of managers, editors, assistants, artists, and production professionals. You guys are the heart and soul of this operation. Here’s to (hopefully?) meeting in person someday. For those of you who are sticking around, have an amazing summer, and we’ll see you soon. <3

 

Feature photo by Alex Hutchins

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Student Life Uncategorized

Concordia needs to pay attention to graduate students with families

Graduate students with families struggle with finding suitable, affordable housing in Montreal

The lack of affordable housing near Concordia University’s two campuses disproportionally affects graduate students who have families. Rents increase exponentially each year, particularly as developers renovate and convert apartment complexes into high-end luxury condos and apartments.

An article in CBC News shows that, despite the increase in availability of rental apartments in the central part of Montreal in 2020, the average rent went up to $891, 4.2 per cent higher than in 2019. Graduate student families are affected because they cannot share residences, which help other students cut down on rent and other costs. The rising cost of rent in and near downtown has made it very difficult for student families to live there. They end up having to move farther away, thus adding commute time and other considerations.

In addition, most graduate student families, particularly those that are international students, are single-income households or living on financial aid and scholarships. Most international students’ spouses accompany them on a visitor permit or have to wait for work authorizations. Finding jobs is also a difficult task due to the language barrier and lack of access to employment networks and support that are provided to citizens and permanent residents.

Concordia needs to seriously consider providing options for students with families, particularly graduate students, as they are often here for the long-term. While undergraduate housing is available through Grey Nuns and other on-campus residences, there are no such options for graduate students.

Graduate family housing at universities such as the University of Toronto has been very advantageous. These provide opportunities for socialization; particularly important when arriving from a foreign country, for both students and their families. It helps build a social network wherein these families, who understand each other’s challenges, can share helpful advice to navigate everything from university life to healthcare and education for children.

Many newly-arrived graduate student families also lack the required credit checks to get many apartments and thus find themselves in apartments that may not be suitable. International students with families also often end up spending a large amount of money to rent short-term or live in Airbnbs before finding a suitable apartment, as it’s nearly impossible to rent an apartment before being physically present in the city.

Michelle LaSalle, a Concordia Fine Arts Masters student, struggled finding an apartment with a young child, when her son was just three months old. Most families, like LaSalle’s, have a hard time finding landlords who are willing to rent apartments to families with small children, due to noise and other issues, which is also not legally allowed under Quebec’s housing laws. The process of finding an apartment with children is extremely stressful, a point to which this author can also attest to. The process is not only competitive but also involves so much emotional labor with having to convince potential landlords to rent to a family.

I, myself, was declined from even viewing several potential apartments when I mentioned I had children.

Family housing also helps spouses and children who may be isolated to connect with similar families, and can also help facilitate child-care when needed. As both the Concordia subsidized daycares and the Concordia Student Union daycare are located within the university campuses, it helps parents to be located near the daycares. In addition, schools and daycares have very fixed pick-up schedules and require parents to be able to drop anything they are doing to pick up their child in case of an emergency, which necessitates a short commute.

Lindsay Pereira, a senior undergraduate student at Concordia, set to start her Masters in English this fall, has three children and lives in a rented 5 1/2 in LaSalle. She spoke about how the increasing rents are difficult to manage on a single income, especially after she made the decision to return to school after twenty years to complete her undergraduate studies and pursue a Masters.

Pereira says that even though she lives close to downtown, commuting on public transit used to take up so much of her time. With the pandemic and shift to online learning, it has also been more difficult to find a quiet space to study and take classes from home. She would welcome subsidized housing options, particularly near the Loyola campus, with its green, open spaces that are ideal for a family and  the shuttle service that provides an easy and fast commute to the downtown campus.

Pereira ended by saying, “I am grateful that I have a suitable place, but the truth is my reality as a student with children is very different from those who do not, and it is high-time Concordia starts thinking about students with families and their needs, particularly with the financial and other effects of the pandemic.”

 

Feature photo by Kit Mergaert

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Ar(t)chives Arts

Art for a changing world

How the Harrisons’ multidisciplinary practice tackled environmental issues

Known as “the Harrisons,” Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison were trailblazers in the eco-art movement. Their collection ranged from manifestos to maps, and sculptural installations. If a viewer didn’t know, they might interpret their work as data rather than art.

The couple’s multidisciplinary practice, which ranged a variety of disciplines, explored forestry issues and urban renewal, among others. This led them to collaborate with biologists, urban planners, architects, and more.

What makes their work particularly fascinating is not solely the aesthetic aspect of it, but rather the fact that each piece could be viewed as a solution to ecological issues.

“Our work begins when we perceive an anomaly in the environment that is the result of opposing beliefs or contradictory metaphors,” they said, according to a statement on their studio’s website. “Moments when reality no longer appears seamless and the cost of belief has become outrageous offer the opportunity to create new spaces – first in the mind and thereafter in everyday life.”

In fact, in the 1960s, the couple pledged they would exclusively create art that involved environmental awareness and ecosystems.

The Harrisons offered a unique take on art and its purpose, demonstrating the ways in which society’s inclination towards beautiful things makes them more likely to care about important issues if they are exhibited in a tasteful way.

“All of the sudden people are looking at the environment in one way or another, and they’re looking differently,” said Helen in a video of their sculpture Wilma the Pig. “In other words, it’s bringing their attention in a way that is meaningful.’”

The work was displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles for their 2012 exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, a remake of one of their earlier installations titled Hog Pasture, wherein the creative duo recreated a small live pasture within the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. They had intended on bringing a hog into the space, however, the museum refused.

Among their other large-scale projects is The Force Majeure (2007 to present). The ongoing series is a manifesto for the present and the future and offers proposals to adapt to a changing world.

In fact, the Harrisons started the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a research centre that enables the collaboration between artists and scientists in an effort to design projects that respond to climate change.

Despite art being often deemed unimportant, the Harrisons’ works and legacy demonstrate the ways in which art can serve as an alternative way of discussing important issues.

“Why not artists?” reads a statement on the Centre’s website. “Art is the court of last resort – and our best hope.”

 

Visuals courtesy of Taylor Reddam.

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Ar(t)chives Arts

Land Art: investigating humanity’s relationship to nature

The 1960s movement popularized taking art outside of the museum

Upon first glance, Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967) appears to be a simple monochrome photograph of a grassy field with trees in the distance. The photo, however, only serves as a form of documentation of the artwork itself, which is Long’s interaction with the terrain. This avant-garde form of artmaking is classified as Land Art.

Also known as Earth art, Land Art is created with the surrounding landscape, often taking the form of a performance, sculpture, or installation, and serving just as great of a political purpose as one driven by aesthetic.

The genre gained traction in the 1960s as part of the conceptual art movement, characterized by the notion that the concept behind the work takes precedence over the finalized work itself. In the same respect, Land Art holds its significance due to the idea of the artist’s physical intervention with their environment.

Notable figures who contributed to the movement’s popularity include Richard Long, Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson, all of whom used natural elements as a means of investigating and creating a narrative about humanity’s interactions and relationship with the surrounding environment.

One of the most acclaimed works of Land Art is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970). Situated on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah, the installation uses over six thousand tons of black basalt rocks and earth to form a spiral-shaped sculptural installation along the shore. The otherworldly work resembles a galaxy and, according to Art & Place, published by Phaidon, the nearly 460 metre-long spiral was created by bulldozing material from the shore into the lake.

“Built at the mouth of a terminal basin rich in minerals and nearly devoid of life, ​Spiral Jetty ​is a testament to Smithson’s fascination with entropy,” reads a statement on The Holt/Smithson Foundation website, demonstrating the ways in which Smithson was greatly inspired by geology and the natural sciences.

The site on which the installation is located is owned by Dia, an art foundation dedicated to preserving artists’ visions by commissioning and exhibiting site-specific installations. The foundation welcomes visitors to the site and advises them to “leave no trace” behind. In other words, visitors mustn’t interfere with the environment or the art, leaving it exactly how they found it in an effort to preserve it for future generations of viewers.

Aside from the grandeur of Smithson’s work, what makes his collection particularly fascinating is its volatility; being made entirely of natural resources means that the work can dissipate at any given moment, should it be subject to a slight disruption.

Nancy Holt, on the other hand, explored the genre through a different approach. Holt’s series Trail Markers (1969) consists of photographs that document the artist’s journey through Dartmoor National Park in England.

“Holt resists the panoramic, all-encompassing view, offering instead an experience of the landscape that is at once dynamic and myopic,” states the work’s description on The Holt/Smithson Foundation website.

The photographs, which are all focused on very specific parts of the landscape, neglect the vastness of the mountains, instead giving viewers an encounter that is representative of the artist’s experience within the space.

Whether it be through photographs or an expansive installation, Land Art serves as a reminder of nature’s grandiosity and impermanence.

 

Graphic by Taylor Reddam.

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Ar(t)chives Arts

Helen Frankenthaler’s abstract climates

A deep-dive into the artist’s influential role on the abstract movement

A practicing artist for over 60 years, Helen Frankenthaler’s collection of works spanned many key moments and transformations in abstract art. The American abstract expressionist has actually been recognized for her contributions to postwar abstract painting.

Frankenthaler has been attributed with the influential shift of abstract expressionism to colour field painting, alongside the likes of other notable figures such as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt.

Colour field painting — a genre characterized by compositions containing large, simple fields of colour — emerged in the 1950s and marked a pivotal moment in modern art, marked by the separation of emotion and religion from painterly depictions.

In addition to Frankenthaler’s effect on the transition into a new artistic era, she gained notoriety for further developing the technique of colour-staining. The technique had initially been developed by Jackson Pollock, who earned acclaim for pouring paint and pigments directly onto a canvas.

Opposite Pollock’s bombastic technique, Frankenthaler applied thin washes of paint to unprimed canvases, giving them an almost whimsical appearance. A key example of this technique can be observed in Mountains and Sea (1952), which consists of organic strokes of vibrant blue, green, and pink hues against a pale yellow background.

Contrary to Mountains and Sea, her work Shippan Point: Twilight (1980) features wider, harsher, and darker brushstrokes. The use of black overlayed on turquoise and blue hues gives the viewer the same sense as being by the water at night. And rightly so; a quick Google search about Shippan Points yields hundreds of photos of a Connecticut peninsula featuring a pier, dock, and the deep blues of the Atlantic ocean rising up against the shoreline.

Despite not being a direct rendition of mountains and the sea, or of a dock by the ocean, Frankenthaler’s work somehow manages to elicit the same feeling of looking at a landscape. Vibrant, yet serene and somewhat chaotic, yet dainty, the artist’s canvases capture the calming effects that colour and simplicity can have on the mind, as well as the unpredictability of the elements surrounding us.

“My pictures are full of climates, abstract climates,” said Frankenthaler, in regards to her work. “They’re not nature per se, but a feeling.”

 

Graphic by Taylor Reddam.

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Ar(t)chives Arts

Mathematics and spirituality: decoding Hilma af Klint’s work

A brief overview of the Swedish artist’s esoteric paintings

You may recognize Hilma af Klint’s works from their abstract shapes in bold tones of purple, yellow, orange and blue. Combining distinct floral and geometric elements, the Swedish artist’s paintings were greatly inspired by the stages of life.

Born in Stockholm in 1862, af Klint went on to study at Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Meanwhile, she began to immerse herself in spiritualism and Theosophy, a religious movement established in the late 19th century.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, a key characteristic of Theosophy is the belief that there is a “deeper spiritual reality and that direct contact with that reality can be established through intuition, meditation, revelation, or some other state transcending normal human consciousness.”

Af Klint’s inclination towards this system of beliefs greatly led her to founding “The Five.” The group consisted of women artists who gathered on Fridays for spiritual meetings, wherein they would pray, meditate, and conduct séances, which included the practice of automatic writing and mediumistic drawing exercises.

During one of her meetings with The Five, “an otherworldly ‘guide’ instructed af Klint to design a temple connected by a spiral path, and commissioned her to make paintings for this temple,” according to the Guggenheim. This would subsequently lead af Klint to create 193 works, known collectively today as The Paintings for the Temple. Created between 1906 and 1915, the series of works is recognized today as one of the first examples of western abstract art.

In 1907, af Klint painted a series of 10 works titled The Ten Largest, which demonstrate her interpretations of the messages she believed to have been receiving. The works display connection to the universe through recognizable shapes and patterns such as flowers, cells, eggs, and orbs.

The paintings, which resemble both diagrams and art, draw from science, botany, geometry, and colour theory, offering a glimpse at the way in which everything is connected. Af Klint’s contrasting use of holistic and scientific symbols display the artist’s methodical, yet almost “radical” and abstract approach to artmaking.

Aside from af Klint’s revelatory works, what is remarkable about her practice is how contemporary it feels. The works merge spirituality and science in a way that is seamless, aesthetically pleasing, and that manages to feel relevant today.

As stated by artist R.H. Quaytman in the Hilma af Klint catalogue published by the Guggenheim Museum in New York, “If you . . . didn’t know anything, you’d think these paintings were made ten or twenty years ago. You would not know how old they were. And what’s so thrilling about her work, I find, is how contemporary it feels.”

It is outstanding that works created over a century ago are still pertinent in our age. Perhaps af Klint’s revelations offered her a glimpse into the future.

Graphic by Taylor Reddam-Woo.

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Ar(t)chives Arts

A glimpse at John Kacere’s “body” of work

The artist painted larger-than-life depictions of the female midsection

Upon first glance, John Kacere’s paintings could be mistaken for some NSFW photos. A quick search of his name in the Google search bar yields dozens of photos of bare women’s midriffs and bottoms.

The American artist originally began his career as an abstract expressionist in the 1950s and ‘60s. Works such as Homage to Stuart Davis (1952) feature the same bold geometric shapes painted in primary colors that many artists of the same era, like Joan Miró, are recognized for. These pieces contrast many of his series from the same period, such as three works (1959-1963), which feature a collection of very minimal strokes and shapes on paper.

Kacere experimented with a variety of media, including pencil, graphite and collage, until the late 1960s, when he settled on the oil-on-canvas photorealistic style that he is known for today. One of his first works, Untitled (bikini) (1970), depicts a close-up of a woman’s bikini line. She wears white lingerie, and the shading is so detailed that it appears as though the painting is an enlarged photograph. The painting is nearly 50 inches wide and 40 inches tall — that is over three times “life size.”

The artist maintained this style for the rest of his career, assembling a collection of roughly 130 works, according to the Louis K. Meisel Gallery. Over the years, the New York City gallerist, Louis Meisel, has worked to collect them in order to offer a retrospective of Kacere’s career. Meisel is said to have discovered Kacere’s work via his wife, Susan Pear Meisel, who met Kacere in 1966 when she was a student at Parsons School of Design, where Kacere taught.

In a statement on his gallery website, Meisel writes: “I might point out that Kacere’s work CAN be seen as all three parts of realist painting, portrait, still life AND landscape.”

This quote encompasses many of the aspects present in Kacere’s paintings. Some, like Meisel, have compared the works to landscapes, describing the curve of the womens’ hips as “[building] a terrain across each canvas.” Others, like Melt, have observed the classical resemblance and quality of his work which “could be attributed to the luxurious materials and skin on display.”

While his focus on the beauty of the nude body was recognizably influenced by classical sculptures, it is also interesting to note his displays of female fashions, which make the paintings resemble still lifes. In each work, the depicted woman is clad in a new, intricate and luxurious set of lingerie, and sprawled against luscious patterned silks and satins. The fabrics are shown in a similar manner to the way most still lifes depict ceramic vases or ripe fruit.

His work has, unsurprisingly, been described as erotic and provocative. There is no doubt Kacere was fascinated with the female figure, which, of course, has raised questions regarding objectification. According to Fad, Kacere once stated that “Woman is the source of all life, the source of regeneration. My work praises that aspect of womanhood,” in reply to criticism about his chosen subject matter.

The verdict is still out among art writers and critics on whether Kacere’s work is, in fact, problematic or not. However, his “body” of work makes it clear that he redefined the way we perceive the modern female nude.

 

Graphic by Taylor Reddam.

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Ar(t)chives Arts

My Wife’s (unlikely) Lovers

The amusing history of an 1891 painting of 42 cats

If you have not yet seen Carl Kahler’s My Wife’s Lovers, I urge you to do so.

Commissioned in 1891 by millionaire and philanthropist Kate Birdsall Johnson, the work features her 42 Persian and Angora cats. A mix of kittens and cats stand poised on Rococo furniture while others are sprawled against a lavish velvet curtain.

Painted by Austrian artist Carl Kahler, the work took three years to complete. According to the Portland Art Museum, this is supposedly because he spent months studying them in preparatory sketches and paintings.

The oil painting, which is 6 by 8.5 feet in size, and weighs roughly 227 pounds, depicts the cats to be larger-than-life. And yes, each and every one of the 42 cats, meticulously painted, belonged to Birdssall Johnson. Despite the Portland Art Museum claiming it to be a falsity, many sources such as Architectural Digest and Sotheby’s declare that the work depicts only 42 of the woman’s 350 cats.

According to an article in the New York Post, the elegant and collected cat that stands at the centre of the painting was a US $3,000 cat named Sultan which she bought during a trip to Paris.

According to many sources, such as the New York Post, it is rumoured that the painting was a gift from her husband, Robert C. Johnson, and that he chose the title My Wife’s Lovers. However, Dawson Carr, curator at the Portland Art Museum states that her husband, in fact, died two years prior but adds that it is a possibility he had used the phrase to refer to her collection of cats in the past and that Birdsall Johsnon simply deemed it fitting as a title for the monumental painting.

Birdsall Johnson reportedly paid approximately US $5,000 in 1891 for the work, which is equivalent to around US $143,000 in 2021.

The work was estimated at a value of $200,000 to US $300,000  by Sotheby’s in 2015 and sold at auction for nearly three times its estimate, at US $826,000  by an anonymous buyer in California.

If you didn’t think it was crazy enough that a lady paid over $140,000 for a painting of her cats, just think that someone paid over half a million for cats that didn’t even belong to them. Another rumour even states that she left her cats over US $500,000 in her will.

My Wife’s Lovers has ignited many rumours. Whether false or not, Birdsall Johnson has proven to be the ultimate crazy cat lady.

 

Graphic by Taylor Reddam.

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Ar(t)chives Arts

What is art?

Discussing aesthetics, Dadaism, and intention

Art has long been a disputed form of self-expression. The topic has garnered debate among philosophers, art historians, and artists, and even has an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to its controversiality.

Many jokes and memes have been made around the notion of art’s subjectivity. Books, such as Leo Tolstoy’s What is art? have attempted to answer the question, while Instagram accounts such as freeze_magazine poke fun at and ridicule how absurd the art industry can often be. And you’ve definitely seen the prank where a group of friends placed eyeglasses on the floor of the museum to observe viewers’ reactions and point out how almost anything can be considered art.

This dispute has veered towards problematic for the reason that it ultimately validates an artist’s career. What one might deem to be worth thousands of dollars can be viewed as a piece of old junk to another. We’ve all heard of the stories of someone selling a famous painting for close to nothing in a garage sale, merely because they did not know its “worth.”

So, let’s look at this etymologically. “Art” is derived from the Latin “ars” meaning “acquired skill” or “craft.” In this sense, it is commonly understood that art requires a certain level of skill in order to achieve a desired aesthetic result. Herein lies the problem. “Aesthetic,” like the notion of “beauty,” is inherently subjective.

Dadaism is an ideal example because it, at its core, rejected standard notions of aestheticism and poked fun at art in society. Let’s take, for example, Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades. The acclaimed artist began using and presenting everyday objects as pieces of art. This absurd approach to art-making helped redefine what could be considered art and challenged the idea that art had to be something beautiful and visually appealing. Instead, demonstrating that art could be intellectually appealing.

Constantin Brâncuși’s infamous 1923 work Bird in Space (L’Oiseau dans l’espace) is another prime example of the challenges in defining an object as art. The sculpture faced a number of legal controversies when the artist tried to have it shipped to the United States. Customs officers did not believe that the work was art — art, at the time, was not subject to import taxes — and instead were charged with a 40 per cent tax for “manufactured metal objects.”

According to an article titled Is it Art? published by Harvard Law, after a number of years of legal debate, Brâncuși’s Bird in Space was part of the first court decision stating that “non-representational sculpture could be considered art.” In part, on the basis that the artist intended for the sculpture to resemble the movement of a bird.

Intention brings us back to the eyeglasses meme mentioned earlier. Had the glasses been placed on a coffee table in your home, you wouldn’t have thought much of them. Having been placed on the floor of the gallery, viewers automatically begin to search for a meaning and begin to decipher what they believe the artist’s intention was.

For this reason, art is and will remain subjective. While there may never be one true answer as to what constitutes art, one thing is certain: it is personal, self-informed, and different for everyone. So, what do you consider a work of art?

 

Graphic by Taylor Reddam

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Student Life Uncategorized

What first-years can teach us about surviving online school

Freshman students seem to be some of the best-equipped to handle university life

To put it frankly, the Fall 2020 semester is a hollow shell of what it could be. The pandemic, self-isolation, online classes, and stagnant tuition are all contributing to a rightfully pessimistic outlook on the academic year. And, naturally, the mood among most students reflects little hope and optimism. But there is one group of students that seem to be showing some much-needed enthusiasm: first-years.

One would think that incoming students to Concordia, who’ve never gone through university life, would be the most disgruntled with a greatly diminished freshman year. From what I’ve seen, this just isn’t true.

I’ve worked extensively with first years in my time at Concordia. In 2019-20, I worked in the dorms as a Resident Assistant, supporting students with their first-year experience.

Now in the current coronavirus-online-Zoom year, I’ve been working as a Student Facilitator on a new program Concordia is trying out called “Homeroom.” Delivered entirely on Zoom, Homeroom is a series of weekly sessions where first years can come together and hang out, learn about the university, and enrich their freshman experience, if only for an hour a week. This project has been extremely successful, with hundreds of first years logging in every week.

With those credentials, I can say with confidence that I have a decent insight into the attitudes of first-year students. With this, I believe there are three quintessential elements of a first year student: curiosity, energy, and above all, enthusiasm. Has this pandemic halted these virtues in students new to Concordia? I would say absolutely not.

For one, the first-years are still fascinated with Concordia. Most are coming from high schools or smaller CEGEPs, so the thrill of seeing such a monumental and happening institution (flaws and all) for the first time still has them asking me countless questions about clubs, events, opportunities, and everything else the school has to offer. I’m sure we can all remember our first month at Concordia, feeling an identical sentiment.

Energy is in abundance during these Zoom sessions. Students, always eager and on time, get much of their weekly socializing during this short hour. I’ll often run short presentations, either on university life, or skills development, which students happily participate in and engage with. I can’t help but smile hearing of all the connections and benefits everyone gets from these meetings.

Finally, there’s enthusiasm. While you could argue that this goes hand-in-hand with energy, I’d say enthusiasm encompasses a much broader and more abstract feeling. It’s the anxious yet exciting knowledge that this is the start of the crazy journey of going to Concordia. One that could last two years, five years, or 30 years (if you end up becoming a tenured professor). There’s an insatiable curiosity with what’s to come.

Granted, the sample size of my subjective observation is small; 50 or so students is not representative of the thousands of first-year students in 2020. But when I chat with some of my coworkers, the stories I hear are the same, and I’d wager these truths hold up for thousands more.

Mind you, this is all happening entirely online. No campus tours, no orientation or frosh week, no awe at the massive lecture halls or student-run bar crawls. This is excitement that you see with each passing year, and this one is no different.

Perhaps it’s due time to emulate some of this. Through the drudgery and tragedy of this online year, I feel many of us have lost sight of our deeply rooted hopes and goals. We’re monotonously going through the motions of being university students, with more apathy than ever before. Maybe one solution lies in the spirit of 2020’s freshman class.

 

Feature photo by Ben Mulchinock

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