Megan Morman: Cooler

Megan Morman has packed up her cooler and left the building. I am bereft. I have become very attached to seeing her raise her eyebrows as she jots in her secret little notepad. I miss her sweet, mischievous giggle. After all, creating mischief is what Megan came to the Visualeyez festival to do. I'm also totally addicted to her blog. Like candy, gossip can be addictive and we know it's not always good for us even though it's so much fun.

The artist installed a water cooler in the front foyer of Latitude 53 among the comfy couches and crocheted pillows. She left out bowls of candy to lure in her subjects. (It worked.) Megan's spot-on sense of parody nailed the tone of the celebrity tabloids, web sites, and tv shows she mined for this project. She has an amazing work ethic, literally working 12 hour days during the festival to create her slick, web-savvy blog.

Megan and I both came from small, midwestern towns where it's easier to gossip than it is to do just about anything else. The essential topics in small towns are birth, deaths, marriages, affairs, and divorces (as opposed to the nasty details of celebrity gossip which include cellulite, sexual peccadillos and sartorial slobbery). Life in a small town becomes blatantly transparent, which is why many of us leave for the comparative anonymity and freedom of life in an urban center. (The irony is that we kind of miss the connections between people. I do, anyway.) Once Megan entered the realm of the art world she was surprised at how vicious artists, art writers, curators and administrators could be. In fact, one time Megan got into trouble herself for a disgruntled posting she made on one of her blogs. It all ended in tears, as these things sometimes do.

Having Megan and the festival made us all hyper aware of what we said about other people who weren't in the room at the time. "Will Megan write about that," we wonder? "Was that just a mean thing to say?" In the end we trusted her judgement and sometimes she was asked to change things to protect people's anonymity, which she did without hesitation. It was not her intention to hurt people.

In my conversations with the artist she talked about her interest in how artists raise their profile in the community. How does one go from being off-radar or even "box office poison" to being the sexy hot performer on the circuit--the "it" boy or girl? Is it achieved bad boy (or girl) style by doing something so outrageous it sends tongues wagging across the nation, or is it when one just does a bad performance? (We all have nightmares about the latter.) Do we become the object of someone's jealousy, fetishistic desire, or ire? After all, much of contemporary art is about fetishizing something.



By raising the participants of this festival to pseudo-super star level, Morman parodies the voyeuristic gaze that performers crave and fear at the same time. The wonderful thing about her piece is that we all had fun playing the game ourselves, making up imaginary scenarios and trying to convince Megan to post them. One day a set of word magnets mysteriously appeared on the bathroom stalls. Custom-made my Megan Morman, they contained our names and racy words that enabled anyone in the bathroom to construct rumors. This reminds us that yes, gossip is intentionally constructed, crafted from fantasies and oral stories passed from person to person. They are dynamic, unpredictable, and generally erode over time.

Morman's piece made us even more aware of the social nature of our art, especially within the context of this particular festival where performers are encouraged to stay for the entire time to engage in social and critical dialogue. Remember the French immersion exchanges from the Trudeau era? Like that, only the language is performance art. It's a truly elucidating and humbling experience to see the work of your peers at this festival, especially the senior artists who maintain a lively engaged practice in the era of a conservative government. Furthermore, the conversations among the artists and curator help to create solidarity, critical feedback, and evolve the practice. It's the talk around the water cooler and the table at Boston Pizza that keeps us grounded and builds trust so we can give critical feedback to each other.

Do check out Cooler. It's a hoot! I hope it never ends.

Renato Vitic Walks on Water

Yesterday Renato Vitic lead us on an art walk through the city center streets. Walking on Water was presented at Visualeyez as part of a show at the Art Gallery of Alberta called The New Flaneurs curated by Marcus Miller. We gathered at the entrance to the gallery and discovered the artist wearing a distinctive red and white checkerboard suit. He was a walking traffic sign. To introduce the piece, Vitic emphasized that the audience helps to create an art walk, that the participants become performers.

The artist had mapped out the journey ahead of time and gave us various facts about water in Edmonton and beyond. He peppered his talks with profound quotes about water carefully chosen for each site and set activities for the audience along the way.

"Sanitation is more important than independence."
--Ghandi

The first stop on Vitic's tour is a storm sewer. Apparently there are 60,000 storm sewers in Edmonton, none of them adorned with art, as they often are in other cities. The artist wryly pointed out there is potential here for some creativity--(Vancouver has a lot of sewer art, in fact they add more every year.) Speaking about the importance of treating sewage, Vitic stated that one out of six people in the world doesn't have clean drinking water.


The audience was asked to put one arm on the shoulder of the person in front of them. Thirty people snaked in a conga line, exploring the concept of "flow" lead by a man in a checkerboard suit in and around the pillars of the buildings. We created quite a spectacle. Spectators laughed and some even tried to join in the fun.



The second stop on the journey was the pool at city hall, which had recently been turned off and drained. Vitic knows his statistics: apparently every year the city of Edmonton disposes of two million litres of water from its public pools and fountains. Wowza. The good news is that since 2005 they have started to de-chlorinate the water and used it to irrigate city parks and green spaces. Next, Vitic had the crowd form a big circle in the pool, the circle changes, mutates, until it becomes the symbol of infinity.



"Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you pour water into a cup it becomes a cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend."
--Bruce Lee


The next feature we headed for was the Epcor fountain. The festivities for Edmonton's AIDS walk were in full swing, so we pinned on red ribbons as we listened to the artist talk about the issue of the corporate management of water and the history of water in its use in monuments. He told the story of the doomed emperor Nero who created an artificial lake in the center of Rome as a symbol of his power. The artist told people to get into groups of three and he used velcro to strap their legs together. Vitic instructed the teams to be like water and move to the other side of the square together. Hilarity ensued.





Always leave something to wish for; otherwise you will be miserable from your very happiness."
--Baltsan Graciau

Now we headed for a fountain inside the Citadel Theatre. The artist talked about the mythology of fountains and gave us each a Icelandic Kronar to throw into the pond to make a wish. He wanted to use a coin that was under five cents that featured aquatic imagery and this cod-adorned coin fit the bill.




Sometimes if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known."
--Winnie the Pooh

Now we crossed Jasper Avenue and stood facing the North Saskatchewan River which the artist tells us originates from the Saskatchewan Glacier on the Columbia Icefields and flows across the Prairies into Lake Winnipeg. It used to be a major fur-trading route until the railway supplanted that role. Vitic asked us to write positive quotes about water on pieces of bristol board to carry on our journey. He helped us staple them to sign boards along the way. As soon as we started walking with the signs, an occasional person in a car would start yelling at the group. Fear of those who want to go against the flow?

This is where I ran out of space on my camera. Mea Culpa.

Water needed to produce the following food items:

potatoes: 103 litres/kg
wheat: 185 l/kg
corn: 289 l/kg
rice: 393 l/kg
soybeans: 412 l/kg
beef: 20, 663 l/kg


We headed up to the Sobey's grocery stored where Vitic talked about the role of water in the production of food. He asked us to explore the concept of flow once again by having us walk a half a block in fifteen minutes. This got the attention of the Sobey's employees who started snapping photos with their cell phones. Curious bystanders asked me what was going on. One man who was going to ride his bike of the sidewalk had to stop and take another route. The surreal slowness of movement suggested evaporation. There was a race at the finish line to see who could come in last.

Our final stop was another dry fountain, this time at Beaver Hills House Park, a fountain somewhat hidden and integrated into the landscape, meant to honour the local Aboriginal community. Ironically there was a sign saying the water was not suitable for swimming or bathing in. "Hey," called a woman on the grass, Can I play checkers?" "Maybe," say Renato, and then he let out a hearty laugh.

Finally we ended to tour by having a chat on the patio of Latitude 53, where we were served fine mineral water. "There aren't many professional walkers," Vitic said to me. "It's an activity for amateurs." I asked what he meant and he told me about a kind of Buddhist religion where the monks walk constantly, with a goal to walk virtually circumnavigate the circumference of the earth. He says that there are people who walk behind them to prop them up when they are sleeping. Vitic also said that its an activity that goes across class structures. I liked the accessibility of his walk. It's something that drew in an interesting cross-section of people and the structure was loose enough that you could converse and meet new people so it became a real social event. Also, it was something you could opt in or out of at any time.

To be a tourist in your own town is something I love to play at, and art walks are a great vehicle for seeing the everyday in a new way. The Ministry of Walking in Calgary, of whom Vitic is a member, is interested in making people aware of pedestrian culture, and maybe even luring them out of their cars to walk more often and appreciate their environment in a more human way. The implications of art walks are sometimes subtle: the effects trickle down into our bodies and brains and alter the flow of information and attention in ways we might not be conscious of. Some of its poetry percolates into the groundwater of our minds for many weeks later.

IdeaAssassins

IdeaAssassins Project: Courtney Lohnes and Kimberly McLeod
No. 66--In a Pool

It was ten o'clock at night and they had turned off the lights inside the room that housed the aging Scona indoor pool. We entered the back door and took off our shoes, enjoying the warmth of the floor on the bottoms of our feet. I was itching with curiosity to see the performers setting up to do their sound check, but we were told to stay away until they were ready. I loved the quality of light coming from the back of the screen in the distance projected onto the water. The quality of light reminded me of a Peter Greenaway movie. Some of the publicity for this piece had hinted that the crowd could enter the pool during the performance, so a couple of performance artists in the festival were really keen to join in. Naufus changed into his bathing trunks and did a little happy dance. There was much talk about whether or not we could swim and the rumor was that there was room for 13 people only because there was only one lifeguard on duty.


Once we were lead in we saw one performer laying face down in the water playing dead with a transparent breathing tube, and the other performer told us that we could choose to see the performance however we wanted, as long as we didn't block the video projector facing the screen hung above the water. Naufus slipped into the water and stayed there for the entire show. We were given permission to use a hand-held light so I pointed it at the performers when I wanted to take a photo. (Still, I apologize for my documentation--it was a very challenging lighting situation.) A projection of a nude man swimming on a beautiful pastoral outdoor pool played on the screen.

There was a looseness to the structure of this piece that was playful and nonsensical. The artists performed tongue-in-cheek baptisms on one another, they played with breathing into opposite ends of the transparent tube, and played an interactive game of matching a quote with a celebrity face. The quotes were written on papers that floated in the water on flutter boards and the faces looked like they'd been taped to flutter boards. Foam noodles and other pool toys floated in the water around the performers. A chaotic mish-mash of pop culture images from television edited with original images created by the artists played on the white screen; home-made DIY pop culture was mixed with snippets of found mainstream pop culture.

Volunteers were conscripted to join in the fun: Cindy Baker put on a white sandwich board which acted as a screen for a silent video of talking head shots. Three men volunteered to read the same short narrative about a personal experience in a swimming pool in Spain. The performers headed back to the ropes at the far end of the pool and used them to jump into the water while an audience member read a review of Water World, the notorious Kevin Costner movie flop. Arcane statistics were presented on a film that's apparently not really worth recommending.

Knowing that this particular pool is doomed to be shut down for good lends a melancholy tinge to this piece. However, the performers seemed to have a lot of fun. They each have a strong presence on the screen, as you can see in their Youtube videos. The anarchy of web surfing and channel surfing entered the performance paradigm. There is a work-in-progress interactive web component to the piece that contains Youtube videos with each of the artists reciting the same pool story from Spain. In No.66-- In a Pool the IdeaAssasins have created a collage of images that the viewer is left to sort and untangle or just let float and drift through one's mind like autumn detritus on a dark and murky pool.

What effect does a life mired in the banal trivia of pop television and pop web culture have on the evolution of identity and consciousness? That old gem the "opiate of the masses" comes to a cynical mind. Every time a new form of technology emerges, it is criticized for the negative effects it will have on corrupting the youth of its age. The positive features of current web culture include the ease at which the audience can also become a generator of culture on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Furthermore, virtual water coolers in the form of online forums make intelligent critique on the work possible among people a great geological distance apart. What could happen is a slow erosion of national identity itself, breaking down barriers between provinces and countries. What could happen is an erosion between mainstream and domestic culture. What could happen is an erosion between product--sponsored (Proctor and Gamble et al) culture and DIY "vanity" culture. The possibilities are intriguing and IdeaAssassins are part of the movement of young artists who will be exploring them.

welcome

Hello!

It is just a few days less than a month and Visualeyez will hit Edmonton and I am both nervous and excited about this year.


Please keep checking back to this site to find out more information and details about the exciting artists scheduled for 2009.


This year Visualeyez… Canada's Annual Performance Art Festival will feature over ten artists with a strong Alberta and Edmonton component, a diversity of Canadian performance artists with solid performance art histories and dynamic international artist with strong Canadian ties.


I am also excited to announce that Lori Weidenhammer will be the festival animator for 2009. Lori Weidenhammer is a Vancouver performance based interdisciplinary artist originally from Saskatchewan. For the past three years she has been appearing as the persona Madame Beespeaker on a regular basis, at the Regina Folkfest (Neutral Ground), Visualeyez (Latitude 53), Van Dusen Botanical Gardens (Second Site), and UBC Farm. Her collaborative media works with Peter Courtemanche have been shown in Canada and abroad, including Divining for Lost Sound (Bregenz, Austria), Brain Dress (Grunt Gallery, Vancouver) The Haunted Crinoline (The Dunlop Gallery, Regina), and The Laughing Dress (Video Pool, Winnipeg). She is one of members of a group of Vancouver community artists in The Means of Production Artists’ Raw Resource Collective (MOPARRC), a food security volunteer and activist Weidenhammer works with students of all ages on identifying native plants, eating locally, gardening for pollinators (i.e. honeybees), and guerilla gardening. She is passionate about art that that transforms the relationship between the artist and the viewer and creates community bonds.

Hold on and hang tight as Visualeyez floods the streets of Edmonton as we explore this year's theme of water.

Todd