It’s almost party time! We’re rushing around this afternoon making sure that everything is set: art on the walls, programs printed, decor sparkling, bars stocked. It’s going to be a blast.
Although advance tickets are no longer available, we’ll have more at the door for $15. We’ll be ready at 8:00 tonight—will you?
It’s late January, and Amy Goodman is in a small bookstore in Utah, glowing with enthusiasm over the digitally-assisted revolt in Egypt. One of the resident cats chooses this moment to start churn-barfing on the floor in front of the journalist: Hrf. Hrf. Hrf. “Maybe he’s a Mubarek ally,” she jokes. “No, not my cat!” sings his owner sadly.
Everyone here to meet the woman at the centre of Democracy Now! is humbled by and concerned about the events unfolding in Egypt (and other elder lands). But at the same time we’re also impressed with our fortune that Goodman’s visiting during Sundance to discuss the implications of these global events. I’m not meaning to slight the sprawling film festival saying this, but at that moment Egypt wasn’t the first people were talking about on the streets of Park City, dressed for the slopes. Goodman, in front of a small crowd and two cats, one barfing, was like an island of simple, delicious consciousness. And consciousness and communication are everything when it comes to helping each other make the world better.
“The corporations working with (Mubarek) in this,” she begins, “the British company Vodaphone, shut down all the communication systems in Egypt. They say they had to do that because of the Egyptian government. Thank God not everyone says, ‘Only following orders.’
“You never know when the magic moment will come. But if you’re involved with social change you are building a foundation for when that moment comes. You all help to determine history. And that’s what’s happening with the people of Egypt. That’s what happened with the people of Tunisia. In one sense you could call Tunisia’s uprising that led to the uprising of Ben Ali – who’d been there for 23 years – the first WikiLeaks Revolution. Before the documents, the cables released by WikiLeaks, certainly there was great unrest. But people were afraid to speak out. This broke the dam when they read the internal U.S. Government cables that talked about tremendous corruption, with all the information to prove it.
“And you think about what that launched. What transparency launches, because that’s what WikiLeaks is all about – getting this information out.”
Even today, a month later, as the resilient Col. Gadhaffi appeals to a crowd to dance in the streets and defend Libya from its own democratic will, the revolutionary changes in Africa and the Middle East have the potential to be (a few already are) some of the most important events in modern history. What Gadhaffi cannot undo is the fact he fired on and killed hundreds of protestors. His own people know it. I believe this information will destroy him where American assassination attempts failed.
Goodman: “I was talking to Noam Chomsky as Julian Assange was getting assailed and worse here in the U.S. I mean, he’s being dealt with very differently in other countries. People are just looking at the documents. I don’t think the story is Assange. If he had written the documents, he would be the story. You’d have to say, ‘Is this man someone you can believe?’ But he didn’t. These are U.S. government documents, first the Iraq war logs, then the Afghan war logs. These are written by the military themselves. It’s fascinating to read them because often they are what grassroots activists say about a country. What these documents show us is what is the U.S. Government’s real view of what’s going on around the world.”
Goodman pauses now and then to collect her thoughts, speaking expressively, using her hands a lot. Her voice is more soothing than the intellect and stories behind them. When she speaks at the U of A tomorrow night I’m sure we can expect the same. “What Chomsky said, interviewing him, he said what it shows is the disdain the U.S. government has for democracy. Because it’s the way they intervene in governments, not to represent the people.”
Goodman, whose mind terrifies me with the number of details she can keep straight, asks, “How has Mubarek remained in power for so long – 30 years? The second-largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel, something like $2 billion – more like $4 billion if you counted everything? Tunisia, Ben Ali? Hillary Clinton was, to say the least, severely criticised when she said they support the Egyptian government for its ‘stability.’ What does stability mean?
“Stabilty for business. From ATT to the spice companies like McCormick to Nike to Reebok. Stability for business. Because the same guns that gunned down the Timorese in this occupied country until they were able to vote for their own independence, making them the newest nation in the world, those same guns were pointed at the workers in the plants that provide the stability for these multinational corporations so the people don’t rise up and they don’t unionize.”
Goodman defines a less aggressive policy of stopping terrorism. “We have to really analyse what stability is. Because I do think we should be concerned about national security. We should be concerned about how we are viewed in the world. There’s a very straightforward way to be. And it’s to support democracy.”
Then, this. Goodman reminds us of one of the most horrifying things we’ve ever seen. “In Iraq, there was this attack on a group of people on July 12, 2007. There was a videotape released by WikiLeaks. A group of men are walking around, showing around two Reuters employees, Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, up-and-coming videographer, and Saeed Chmagh – he was the driver for the Reuters crew. He had four kids. And the videotape is so chilling of what took place. The Apache military gunship overhead, they see these men and you hear them cursing, laughing: the callousness. They are constantly calling back to base, asking for permission to open fire. They are not doing this on their own. And they blast this group of men. The videotape is taken by the military, not peace activists you could accuse of editing it to make it look worse than it was. You can’t make something look worse when 12 people are gunned down.
“And they are laughing and cursing as they kill them. I think it was Saeed, who wasn’t yet dead, who’s dragging himself away from the bodies. A van pulls up - and this is an international war crime - when people come to help those who have been injured – and they get out to help the survivor. And the helicopter gunship explodes the van. Amazingly, two children survived. Saeed Chmagh was just disintegrated. Reuters demanded the videotape and they could not get it for years.
“A little while later, we interviewed a young man, a U.S. soldier who had come home from Iraq. He was engaged in a protest. He was demanding of President Obama that he stop sending soldiers with PTSD back to Iraq and Afghanistan. I asked him about his experiences and he clearly was suffering terribly. And he said there was this attack on a group of people on July 12, 2007. He was on the ground with the military group that came up on the van that had been exploded. And he ran and he saved the two children. And he said, I’m holding these kids, their intestines are all cut up and he went back to the base and told his commanding officer. ‘I need help.’ He could not get their faces out of his head. His commanding officer told him to suck it up.”
“We talked to another soldier. He wasn’t in the gunship, but only by chance, he had a cold. But when all the guys came back he was there and they were laughing and cursing and he knew what had happened. We played him the videotape and he said, ‘I don’t get why you are making such a big deal of this.’ And I said, you don’t think it’s a big deal when you blow up a group of people? ‘No, it’s not that.
“’It’s just that we do this every day.’”
o<
See Magazine spoke to our Vicky Wong about 53 Ways to Leave Your Lover—and their preview is out today:
But as anyone who’s attended past instalments will tell you, 53 Ways is much more than your average fundraiser; it’s a wild dance party, which this year will incorporate video projections from local artists, fine food from local favourites Elm Cafe, the Sugar Bowl, and Viphalay Laos and Thai Restaurant, and abundant cocktails of all sorts.
Vicky Wong, Development Coordinator for the gallery, happily defends those without plans on what has become known as V-Day.
“The events have been going on since we first moved into our new space, in 2003,” Wong says. “The event originally was to help cover the cost of the move. We wanted to create an event that runs counter to the commercialism of Valentine’s Day, and all these expectations that people have about it: that they should be with somebody, that they should spend it with a partner, but that leads to people acting desperately and making poor choices. This event is long enough away from Valentine’s that you can reflect on your decisions.”
Most of all, though, people want people to drop their inhibitions and dance.
The article isn’t all fun and games: it also talks about why 53 Ways is important, and why artists Josh Holinaty and Shane Golby donated work to support Latitude 53 at the event. The story they tell has a bitter undertone, which our writer-in-residence Fish explored in yesterday’s post. But See’s Alistair Henning doesn’t lose sight of what it all comes down to on Saturday:
On a similar note, Bob Prodor, who has participated in a few shows at Latitude over the years, is especially excited about this event because “Latitude 53 puts the Fun in Fundraiser! You get to feel good about getting decked out in your finest turtlenecks and scarves, looking at art and feeling intellectual while getting smashed on red wine!”
By the time you read this post, Premier Ed Stelmach’s farewell budget may have already impacted the surface; the words “hopeful” and “fearful” replaced in headlines by “angry” and “AAAAAAAAA!” Whether this meant another round of cuts to the arts – five to ten per cent being the common rumour - was still an unknown I wanted to freeze and examine in the last seconds before anything else happened. The still before the storm.
As you know, last year’s 16% “haircut” went deep into the scalp of arts organizations like Film and Video Arts Society Alberta, here at Latitude 53 and over at the Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists, just to name a few local spaces.
“SNAP was hit by the usual 16%,” executive director Anna Szul explained. “We didn’t cut any one particular program but trimmed expenses everywhere. Although in retrospect, for public perception, it would have been more effective to cut all from one area to show what a drastic effect such extreme financial cuts have on the arts.”
Objective note: we are at the point of talking about strategically placing cuts so people notice.
Rather than SNAP’s even approach, this was how Latitude handled the cuts – dropping one major show and a catalogue, both interrupted possibilities in the middle of the gallery’s financial year. Executive director Todd Janes and I sat down for some time talking about last year’s cuts, which he described as useless and mean-spirited, especially as Alberta allocates only .1% of its budget to the arts. Point one per cent. He compared it to your household trying to balance its finances and pretending not going to a movie is going to save the children.
Janes, who should write a book on the subject, thinks there are bigger issues to talk about than how much the Tories fund farming, big oil and horseracing. “There’s been 40 years of Tory rule and, let’s be generous, the past 25 years of Tory rule haven’t managed anything. One of the main reasons they survived is because a bunch of prehistoric life died in one area and for the past four decades they’ve had a large horseshoe made of petrochemicals up their ass.
“It’s not because they have a vision, or a plan.” This last item is increasingly felt in the province, regardless of your political stripe. “What has Lindsay Blackett done?” Janes asked. “Great, we have a Department of Culture and Community Spirit. But the bigger story is Minister Blackett has mismanaged his portfolio beyond belief. Arts and culture are clearly not even on the radar for this government … or they’re just malicious. It’s probably a mix.
“There’s a few points that need to be conveyed here. One, the arts are still not funded in Alberta from taxpayer money, but lotteries money. The allocation is very clear. The second thing is, under the leadership or the vision or the impetus of Lindsay Blackett, I would argue almost everything he’s done has eroded professional artists and arts organizations in this province. And while the AFA budget has been going down almost every year since he’s been minister, his personal departmental expenses have gone up over 22%. His ministerial budget has inflated in a opposite direction. I find that really interesting.”
Janes cited the government’s partial matching of private donations to non-profits as positive, “but at the same time Blackett totally got rid of Wild Rose funding and decimated and consolidated a lot of the non-profits that just as a general citizen I’m curious about. And what does the Premier’s Council on Arts and Culture do again? It’s a panel of people from all over the province that meets and advises the minister, but there’s no accountability - no one really knows what they do. And the AFA went for over a year without a chair. Finally we have Mark Phipps, and we’re eager to see what happens under his governance …”
Alberta, believes Janes, has an odd psychology when it comes to advocacy and funding. “There’s a large ribbon of fear. We don’t want to rock the boat for fear of repercussion. I find that scary. It’s a fallacy, too. In this province a squeaky wheel gets oil.
“I don’t know where (the fear) comes from.”
I brought up a beholden’s attitude of not wanting to snap at the hand that feeds it, but he believes that doesn’t apply. Organizations work for their supper, after all. “If we look at arts and culture relative to social services - with a larger portion of the budget - what’s happened over the last ten years is it’s moved from, ‘We (the Tories) are going to help (social services) do work,’ to where they’ve removed the middleman and most social service agencies and non-profits do a bunch of fee-for-services. So they actually provide the day-to-day operations services the government doesn’t provide any more, at a much reduced cost. So it’s not about biting the hand that feeds you, it’s about a hand helping the government do what it should be doing.
“Now look at arts organizations. Arts organizers have to be really good managers. We can take a loaf of bread and some water and feed the multitudes. I fear we’re our own downfall because we’ve done so well for so long with so little that maybe it looks easy. Arts organizations provide facilities and services and common gathering places … a lot of what arts organizations and to some degree artists do is a fee-for-service in terms of this devolved government. ”
This “service” aspect is especially true when it comes to bragging time at elections, when cultural patriotism flies at its peak as politicians boast about the borders they hope to keep working within. But Janes notes: “Why shouldn’t we be calling governments to task? We elect them. We pay their salaries. If they’re not doing what we want shouldn’t we be able to have a mechanism for saying, hey, what’s with this?
“Everyone is affected by the arts whether they agree it should be funded or not. The statistics show 98% of people think the arts are important and 92% think they should be supported. Those a pretty strong numbers. Harper would love to have those numbers, I’m sure. For every dollar that’s invested by governments into artistic activities in Canada, it generates about $8.
“For governments that are concerned with financially conservative policies, the arts work. They are a success story. And the majority of Albertans do not see art as an add-on frivolity, they engage in it.”
All this, we knew before the budget dropped. So, uh, how did it turn out incidentally?
Of course we’re all very excited about 53 Ways to Leave Your Lover which is coming up next weekend on the 26th, but we’re also looking ahead to two exciting shows which open the first week of March. In the Main Space, Montreal artist Mathieu Valade is installing a new work titled Cubic Units. We haven’t seen it yet, but Victoria Stanton talked to Valade about the project:
What does Mathieu Valade’s sculpture have to do with performance?
In 2000, Los Angeles-based sculptor Evan Holloway made a piece called “Wildly Painted Warped Lumber (#2).” In 2009 I read about it in the keenly insightful book, Perform, by Jens Hoffman and Joan Jonas. The piece is described in the second section of this set of short essays, titled “Performing the Object.” According to the authors, the particularity of this piece, as related to the ensemble of the artist’s practice, is its relationship to the viewer: “The works often turn out to be triggers for actions executed by the viewers who come into contact with them.” This, in turn, results in the spectator “(per)forming a second stage of sculpture.”
You can read her monograph on our website, but to make the most of her “Humble Suggestions For Viewing Cubic Units” you’ll want to pick up a copy in the gallery when the show opens March 4th.
At the same time, Edmonton’s own Lisa Rezansoff will have a show of New Prints in our ProjEx room. We’ll be bringing you more on these two shows in the next two weeks
As promised, I’ve written a story about Glasgow for you all. It’s just getting good, but it’s getting long so you’ll have to be patient for part two. —Adam
Transmission Gallery is something like the Latitude 53 of Glasgow. The city’s longest-running artist-run space, its current programming is built on two familiar themes: to show the best of new Glasgow art to the world, often supporting artists emerging onto the national scene, and to bring exciting contemporary art from elsewhere into the city.
It’s not quite as old as Latitude 53—Transmission was founded in 1983 by a group of young painters who were fed up with having nowhere to show, and has transitioned from a do-it-yourself venue advertised with photocopied posters in a way familiar in the Canadian tradition of artist-run centres. The home it moved into in 1989 has recently been incorporated as part of a huge city-funded arts block, Trongate 103, but Transmission is still run by a voluntary committee, six young members of the local scene who serve for two years each. I sat down with two of them, Tom Varley and Amelia Bywater, on the weekend and talked about the similarities and differences between their almost-thirty-year project and Canada’s artist-run network.
When we explored Sundance a couple weeks back, a welcome distraction from the positioning and peacocking was their multispace art installation, New Frontier. Although the entire festival affair is intended to be independent, nuances such as $6500 for a place to stay being considered on the cheap side tells its own story. One can certainly argue if you can’t pull together the kind of resources to attend you have no chance in hell of making an actual film (where it takes several minutes at the end to credit the presumably-paid cast and crew). But let’s leave the discussion of what “indie” means for now and talk about some of the art that made me excited about structural boundaries being pushed beyond what you might imagine in such a context.
All That is Solid Melts Into Air has more kinds of tension than I can easily count. Filmed by Mark Boulos of sometimes-London, sometimes-Amsterdam, opposite walls of a boxy room are both projected on, the volume cranked. On the left, a wide, continuous shot of Chicago stock market traders screaming and waving their arms about imaginary money. Each of them bears a number and most have some sort of future-now communication apparatus attached to his head, giving impression of a tireless mechanical organism affecting the lives of the rest of us without concern.
On the facing wall, meanwhile, flicker closeup interviews of Nigerian guerrillas talking about how America is colonizing their land for petroleum. And how they – or at least their children – might escape being killed in the incumbent struggle. There is frank and shocking talk of murder amid energized dancing in the dust with automatic weapons. The simultaneous noise of these men on both walls fighting for their goals is a simple enough idea, but beautifully unnerving. You can’t help walking away thinking, “Welp, we’re all screwed.” For while you can argue a certain segment of society is benefiting from capitalism, including the relative Western “us,” any deep analysis on the subject shows us that no one is actually in control. I wonder how many people felt more unconscious empathy for the focused Nigerians, despite the fact their started aim to kill the chubbier fellows opposite them?
Updated: the location has been changed to Churchill Square. See the Facebook event for details.
As part of their advocacy campaign in protest of the recent 16% cut to the arts—and rumours of future continuing cuts—PACE is organizing a flashmob media event this Monday:
“This media event will be colourful, dramatic and fun, but it will also send a very serious message to the Alberta government that further cuts on top of last year’s 16% funding cut will stop many important arts projects in their tracks,” says Daniel Cournoyer, Chairperson of the Professional Arts Coalition of Edmonton. “We know that most Albertans will be happy to show their love of Alberta art, we just hope that same love will be in the air when the provincial budget is delivered on February 24th.”
The media event will take place at 12:30 PM on February 14th in Sir Winston Churchill Square. The flash mob will only last 5 minutes followed by a media availability with representatives from various professional arts organizations.
Click through to the Facebook event to see more information and express your support.
Latitude 53 is excited to announce a Call for Works for the exhibition Spaces&Places:VisioningMcLuhan@100. A part of the University of Alberta’s Herbert Marshall McLuhan Edmonton Centenary 2011 event to mark McLuhan’s 100th birthday and the Media Ecology Association’s annual convention.
Here’s a little bit of what we’re looking for:
Marshall McLuhan is considered one of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th-century. His ideas and theories resonate across a myriad of practices, subjects and disciplines. He presciently foretold the considerable role that media would come to play in our everyday lives, coining the term “global village” to represent how different forms of media would interconnect the world.
2011 marks the centenary of McLuhan’s birth. The Spaces&Places:VisioningMcLuhan@100 exhibition will bring together art, design and media practice that explore all that is McLuhan. Media, practice and style are all open but at their core should deal with concepts and ideas that relate to or explore manifestations of McLuhan’s ideas. Possible submissions could explore issues relating to the collapse of geographic space, the loss of one focal point in immersive media-rich environments, ideas relating to speed/inertia, excitement/ennui. Pieces might take a variety of forms, including 2D works, 3D installations and online explorations. They could play out over time in videos and online environments. Proposals could draw on a range of media, including the Internet, radio, television, magazines, etc. to represent McLuhan’s ideas and issues. The works could also be designed for an on-line exhibition, which would be accessible to viewers on-line, or in one of the galleries.
The full Call for Works is posted on our website.
Today SEE Magazine published an interview feature with Adrian Louden.
“That’s part of why my showings at TU Gallery and Latitude 53 are so exciting,” Louden says. “They’re both happening almost simultaneously and it’s the first time I’ve ever had my work featured in a gallery context. It’s an opportunity to show people that walls aren’t just for protection.”
His work, part of Hip Hop on the Wall is up in our Community Gallery until tomorrow—come down and have a look.
