Aleksandra Mir at Mercer Union Until Aug. 6, 1286 Bloor St. W., Toronto; mercerunion.org
Aleksandra Mir's video and collage exhibition at Mercer Union, The Seduction of Galileo Galilei, left me with two distinct and contradictory impressions – a fitting result for a work that, according to Mercer Union's own didactic brochure, "indulges the delight of failure."
Mir's set-up is simple enough. In a tribute to Galileo's world-changing experiments, and in an act of reclamation of the pivotal roles played by Galileo's daughters, Mir stages a dicey experiment with gravity – one that allows for limitless play between accident, timing, and the unpredictable.
How the New York-based artist does this is the most fun: Assembling a team of helpers, including two crane operators, Mir attempts to build a wobbly tower out of dozens of spent tires (thus making a ridiculous version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, itself a ridiculous building, and the tower from which Galileo, as the story goes, dropped his feathers and rocks, to measure gravity's pull). So far, so harmless goofiness.
But other elements are mixed into Mir's video recounting of her performance pile-up, elements that made me a bit uncomfortable, even cranky.
Now, I am the first to admit that I am overly sensitive to class issues. Coming from nothing does that to you. So, when I see a group of well-educated, privileged and world-travelled artists employing, arguably for parodic reasons, elements of working class culture, I get antsy.
And in Mir's video we watch a team of classic, straight-from-the-kit artist types (of which, yes, I am one too, nowadays), put on hard hats (uncomfortably and uncertainly), don new construction yard gloves, and proceed to get dirty. But, to them, it is all performance, a game, hardly work.
The setting is the back lot of a kiddy go-kart track, located in a poor part of rural Ontario, which acts as another trigger – what could be more down-market, more outré?
Some local children are interviewed, filmed as if they were Emperor Penguins in Antarctica – look, real live locals! And, after watching the video twice, I am not certain the voices of the two crane operators, the only professional labourers in the video, are ever fully heard, a misstep that negates their very real contribution to the project.
Perhaps Mir has a set of intentions I have misread, or can't gain access to (the accompanying information contains nothing about her background, other than the usual art/education résumé), but how the work appears to the visitor, informed or not, is what matters – and, from this end, it looks like an act of class tourism.
Other little snide-nesses creep in to the production. Boxes of Tim Hortons doughnuts (the fave snack of the art-hating Conservative party) are shown, and one clever sort tries to pile them into a tower. The landscape around the race track is filmed as a desolate, unlovely spot. And to announce her project, Mir uses one of those ubiquitous roadside arrows, the kind with replaceable letters, signs beloved by fruit stands and adult video stores all over the countryside.
Oh, it's all so ironic, so not-rural-but-about-the-rural, slumming for simulacra. One of the participants even sports a jacket with the name Barthes (as in Roland) on her back. Maybe that's her last name, but I doubt it. Whatever her goals, Mir's video smells of smarminess, of a kind of informed idiocy whose ironies only the clinically art-theory-fed can process.
I feel very strongly that when artists invade spaces outside their comfort zone, they need to be cautious about how they later present these spaces – be those spaces developing world slums, or rusting Ontario small towns. It's just common courtesy.
With that off my shoulders, I will say that, overall, Mir's foolhardy project is amusing to watch unfold. Of course, the tires can't be stacked more than 10 or so high, and thus there are tumbles a-plenty. Like any fan of Jackass knows, watching stuff fall over is funny. I won't give away the ending, but simply say that the "how to" element of the project is eventually, ridiculously resolved.
As a video work, however, Mir's narrative could use a lot of tightening, and drop some of its stop-motion, halting edits, which only look pretentious given the project's innate clownishness. And, the less said about Mir's collages the better. She inserts spaceships and astronomical imagery into mass-produced Catholic liturgical art, beating the Galileo vs. the Church bit to a weary shrug. The results are more Mel Brooks hammy than Monty Python witty.
But the true irony of The Seduction of Galileo Galilei is how much the artists involved, by play-acting labour culture and nudge-wink mocking easy-target, working-class tropes, are behaving exactly like the all-knowing, smarter-than-thou bishops who put Galileo in prison in the first place.
Inez at Fran Hill Gallery Until July 24, 285 Rushton Rd., Toronto,416- 363-1333
For a completely different sort of art experience, visit the new suite of paintings by the singularly named Inez, on display at Fran Hill Gallery. You might need sunglasses.
Toronto is notoriously chromophobic when it comes to art – we like our art severe and grey. Apparently, nobody sent that memo to Inez. Her landscapes, mostly of birch stands, explode with hot, cherry red, basil-leaf green, urine yellow and metallic cobalt. She doesn't paint so much as scrape and re-scrape her surfaces, revealing more supporting understructures than Pamela Anderson's dressing room.
Inez is also very fond of the pointy ends of her brushes, perhaps even the stubs, as the paintings pulse with thin but deep animation lines, sudden strikes and merciless gashes. Which leads me to conclude that despite their overt prettiness, these paintings are far more aggressive, stormy and inconclusive, than they are fixed captures – more about the life forms teeming (and eating each other) all around the still copses than any sort of Druidic harmony.
This is your local forest on steroids.