BLOG # 21…May 2013
A couple of things I’ve seen lately have reminded me how lucky we are here in Canada to be able to speak our minds openly and fairly safely.
Steven Harper Hates Me is the title of a show by Gabrielle de Montmollin that’s up until May 18 at the red head gallery, a cooperative artists’ space at 401 Richmond St. in Toronto . De Montmollin takes a number of images of our Prime Minister and renders them as Clown or Satan, using humour as a sharp tool to make her point… my favourite is Ignorant Man Despising What He Doesn’t Know Standing in My Studio. Writer Susan Swan has composed an essay to accompany the show in which she calls Gabrielle’s world “fantastic, fearless and furious” and defines the work as “the artist’s longing to stage a conversation with Harper.” It’s a one sided conversation though, rather like the one Yann Martell tried to initiate in 2007 on the 50th anniversary of the Canada Council by sending our Prime Minister a book every other week…so far no answer.
At the other end of the spectrum of expressive freedom is Pussy Riots, a film that played at HotDocs earlier this month. Pussy Riots, a Russian feminist punk rock collective, shows the young performance artists protesting Vladimir Putin’s third term as president which puts him in charge until 2024. They chose the recently rebuilt Church of our Saviour to protest both the erosion of the democracy which seemed so promising with the fall of the Soviet Union and the conflating of church and state. It aroused immensely strong feelings resulting in arrests, trials and prison sentences for two of the young women. The choice of venue was hugely inflammatory, Russians who’ve been deprived of religious expression for over 70 years, reacted emotionally to an extent that somewhat obscured the purpose and the result, alienating many liberal thinkers. I was enormously moved by these young women, their passion and their courage…when was revolution ever easy - or unemotional?
And, anybody else see the irony in our Prime Minister referring to the attack ads directed at Justin Trudeau as “part of the democratic debate” Last time I checked democracy didn’t include bullying.
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