¡Give me some images!

My visit to ¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art was overwhelming. The show contains not only 400+ objects, but a vast amount of didactic text which pinned each section of the show to its historical moment, and only a small number of benches. *

My assumption was that when I got back to NZ and wanted to talk about the show, I'd be able to go to the website and refresh my memory. Sadly, the exhibition website - and this is for the largest outing ever of Cuban art, showing only in Montreal - has exactly 6 images from the show. And the text is hardly designed to evoke the experience; here's the introductory paragraph:

Organized and presented by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from January 31 to June 8, 2008, ¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today, which brings together some 400 works of art, is the most important exhibition ever presented to showcase the art of this Caribbean island, which Christopher Columbus described as “the most beautiful land eyes have ever seen.” Thanks to the collaboration of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Fototeca de Cuba, and of many collectors and museums in the United States, including the MoMA, this exhibition draws a broad panorama of Cuban art and history. This lively and well-conceived multidisciplinary exhibition brings together about one hundred paintings, including a huge collective mural produced in 1967 by many artists, two hundred photographs and documents, approximately one hundred works on paper (in particular two collections of pre- and post-1959-Revolution posters), installations and videos, in addition to music and film excerpts.

Excited? No? That's a shame. I spent two hours in the show, and would love to have been able to reflect on it without shelling out CA$70 and carting the catalogue home (more about my penny-pinching ways shortly). Over the net have previously posted about the paucity of images on gallery websites, and I have to agree - y'all can give us text til the cows come home, but we're coming to you to look, not read ....

* There was also the fact that each work had three labels; French, English and Spanish. I never managed to train my eyes to read just one, not all three.

Simon Starling @ The PowerPlant

One of the things I looked forward to most on my trip was the Simon Starling show at The PowerPlant in Toronto (headed by ex-GBAG director Greg Burke).

The show didn't disappoint. As a whole, it had quite a stern, elegant feel - large works spaciously displayed. Even works that weren't big felt like they were - especially Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore), the show's central focus: weighty, tactile, affecting whether you knew the art historical and social backstory or not.


Starling's work in the flesh reminds me a lot of Michael Stevenson - the intently researched, deeply idiosyncratic, beautifully produced aspects of Stevenson's way of working. I'm never sure about the humour in Stevenson's work though (is it there? is it there for us, or for him? should I find any of this funny? it is funny though, isn't it? isn't it?) but I like the absurdist tinge of Starling's earnestness, best exemplified in this show by Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006, the slide show that records Starling and a helper slowly destroying the small boat they are floating in by feeding it piece by piece into a woodburner.


The only disappointment was the resounding quietness of the galleries - admittedly, it was mid afternoon on a weekday, but I did wonder if the locals feel the love for this GBAG in the big smoke.

Images from the PowerPlant website
Above: Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore) 2007
Below: Autoxylopyrocycloboros 2006

The beauty machine

So. What you want to do is time your visit to the Canadian Centre for Architecture right at the end of the day. Leave the CCA, and head down to the port. Dawdle so that the sun starts to set and the sky turns that ridiculously romantic, Cindarella shade of pinky-lilacy-blue. Stand and watch as people start to turn on the lights in their homes in Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67. Take in the way this utopian complex manages to look modernist and ancient and brutal and sad, all at the same time. Consider the fact it's now a privately-owned condomininum complex. Walk on slowly.



Images:
top - reference view of Habitat 67
bottom - Habitat 67 at twilight in early spring.

Something to write home aboot

Struggling with jet lag, I wasn't able to properly take in the extraordinarily detailed show 'Sorry, out of gas' at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. So instead, I settled for appreciating their elegant exhibition design...





I've never seen such poetic display cases. Architecture shows are tricky - what could be harder to evoke than another building inside a gallery space - but this one was beautiful to be in. If you're going to Montreal, I'd make the CCA the must-do gallery stop: from what I saw, the shows are intelligent, the collection extensive, the building an interesting merger of 19th-century and contemporary, and the bookshop's nothing to sneeze at either.

In the meantime, check out the very Flash Sorry, out of gas online exhibition.

Apologies for the badly-exposed photos, and thanks to the nice man at the CCA who let me take them.

Homage to Peter Peryer

Detail of Douglas Coupland's Brick Wall, at the Candian Centre for Architecture. Proper, insightful & stimulating posts on their way soon ...