Blog # 92… April 2019

China has been much on our minds lately and not in a particularly good way – Huawei, political prisoners caught in the middle of trade wars, canola - seemed a good time for seeing an Ai WeiWei show and tuning in to his sense and sensibility.

The Gardiner Museum continues its creative programming with Unbroken, running until June 9, a small and delicious sample of artist/activist Ai’s work using ceramics as his medium.

Ai flashed across the art world a few years ago when he purposely dropped a Han dynasty vase, (there’s a photo of him doing this) smashing it as a symbol of how he wanted to smash conventions and up-end cultural conventions and materials in his native China. It also references the destruction of many art works during the Cultural Revolution. Obviously, this, along with other acts of rebellion against tradition angered many people, in China particularly.  Ai was imprisoned and now lives in exile in Berlin.

The centerpiece of the show is a tall pillar composed of six large blue and white vases. On first glance, they look like conventional designs, but closer up, the images emerge as scenes of lines of refugees marching across desolate landscapes or camps of tents and children playing in the dust. Using the familiar colours and shape leads us to expect one thing and be shocked by what we see, more effective than columns of print.  

The famous sunflower seeds, each created individually by a pair of hands, appear again (they were in the Tate modern a few years ago and at the AGO too).  This time, they form a pyramid against a background of a series of large Lego panels featuring digitized images of the animals of the Chinese zodiac.

Most of the objets in the show speak in ways both whimsical and serious to boundaries, both real and symbolic, social justice abuses, freedom of speech, and repression of dissent. Two delicately crafted pairs of handcuffs, one in rosewood, the other jade remind us that Ai has direct experience with repression.  He’s paid the price for expressing his ideas, both with time in prison and being forced to live away from his homeland. 

I enjoyed this show with Marian Kenny, a dear friend who died a few days later. This is for her.

Blog # 91…March 2019

As our world becomes more multi-everything, less uniform, less predictable, less safe, more edgy, we’re struggling with how to react, how to place ourselves. Do I always seem to be saying that art is the answer to just about everything?  Well I don’t see anything else stepping up, so I’ll just carry on.

Here are some things that have helped contain and explain my world lately.  February was Black History Month and I was lucky enough to catch Trey Anthony (Da Kink in my Hair) in her one night stand trying out Oh no!  I’m Becoming my Mother. Again, she captures the unique experiences and reactions of black women in Canada.

Cecil Foster’s new book, They Call Me George, recalls the world and the role of sleeping car porters, almost always black men, on Canada’s cross country railway trains. A particularly moving passage involves the war brides who arrived in the late 40’s and early 50’s - young women, some with babies or small children. They arrived in Halifax after a sea crossing, ready to make the long journey into a strange country to begin new lives with husbands they may have barely known. The sleeping car porters were their first contact. “George” as all the porters were known (diminishing their identity) welcomed them, introduced them to the country as they travelled, often holding babies and warming their bottles.

And Jordan Peele’s If Beale Street Could Talk, adapted from a story by James Baldwin is a companion piece to Moonlight, giving us a look at an ordinary black family, their hopes and dreams, loves and lives.

A play, a book and a movie to think about.

Kate Harris just won the Charles Taylor non-fiction prize for Land of Lost Borders.  When I was in about grade three, we devoured a series about explorers. They were fabulous books, written from the point of view of a child travelling along on the voyage. My favourite was I Went With Marco Polo (closely followed by I Went With Vasco de Gama). Kate Harris also has a fascination with explorers, a longing to know about what lies outside our personal world. She took her fascination on a bicycle to travel the Silk Road…she went with Marco Polo!  Her trip was exotic and challenging, but her message is that anyone can explore anywhere …”if you’re willing to pay the world a certain intensity of attention”.

I haven’t mentioned our Iraqi family for a while, but our annual International Women’s Day dinner this year included Hiyam (the mum) who helped us welcome two recently arrived Syrian women. Warm feelings and wonderful food, from both east and west.

Blog # 90…February 2019

Trumpty Dumpty wanted a wall
But Trumpty Dumpty's starting to fall
While Nancy and the Blues are standing up firm
Trumpty's starting to wiggle and squirm.

Good fences are meant to make good neighbours – keeping the livestock from wandering, encouraging people to mind their own business and respect others. 

What about walls though? There were walls made of men between Athens and Sparta and the walls of Jericho were tumbled by Joshua and his followers blowing their rams’ horns (or maybe it was an earthquake) before burning the city. A happier scene greeted the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.

Talk of walls is loud these days; they’re somehow seen as a simple solution to the very complicated issue of people wanting to move from a place that’s dangerous or unsustainable for living to a place that isn’t. At the end of WWII there were 7 walls around the world, 15 in 1989.  At last count there were 77 – 65 countries hoping to protect their territory and increase security by barricading their borders with walls.

In Mexico, it’s stimulated a flurry of creative responses, sometimes to get through to the other side, holes through, tunnels under, ramps over. 

Artists are beginning  to claim and tame the walls, rendering them less powerful.  Mexican artists have had their way with various parts of their wall, making art great again, trumping Trump.

My favourite treatment is the Mexican section painted blue to blend with the sky, making it almost invisible and part of the landscape.

I know it's not February yet, but this seemed to want to be up there today.

Blog # 89…January 2019

Impression Sunrise
Claude Monet 1872

It’s good to find something comforting at this time of year and in this sort of world.  I love the Impressionists; it always seems to comfort me to look at people enjoying picnics by the river, harbours bathed in light at different times of day, even lovers sitting glumly at a café table. 

But sometimes, I also like to mix it up a bit and look at art that upsets my equilibrium, makes me wonder or think or just be uncomfortable. 

It seemed to start with William Hogarth, the first artist I know about who used his lively perceptions of the world around him to paint the vitality and despair of ordinary people on the streets of London in the early 18^th century. Berthe Morisot, a century later observed the personal world of women, tending babies, hanging out laundry. And our own Mary Pratt took us into the ordinary, sometimes lonely world of women. Maybe it reflects the more egalitarian lives of the cave dwellers that their artists portrayed mostly animals and abstract designs…simpler times.

I met John Waters on the walls of the Baltimore Museum of Art last year. His work is a cheeky, in your face series of comments on our society as it’s unfolded over the past half century. And although it speaks to Baltimore, where he was born and lives, it applies widely…kind of like The Wire. I enjoyed the show and might have thought he was just an amusing iconoclast if I hadn’t seen Kiddie Flamingo, a table reading of his best known film Pink Flamingo by a group of young child actors  with Waters providing direction off stage. It combined two things kids love – dressing up and swearing and was handled with great sensitivity so, although the kids were obviously enjoying it, there was nothing that could frighten or harm them. 

Kent Monkman

Kent Monkman jiggles our sensibilities too with his paintings of Canadian historical events and people, poking gentle fun at the Daddies of Confederation and bringing tears to our eyes with the children being captured in the Sixties Scoop.

Curious to think that the Impressionists were considered wicked and disruptive in their day, wonder if today’s disrupters will turn into providers of comfort in the future???

A very happy and healthy New Year to you all.

Blog # 88…December 2018

Christmas is coming with its usual cocktail of sentiments and behaviour: bittersweet memories of times and people long gone and sadness about the obvious gap between haves and haven’ts...over eating and drinking, forced conviviality and obligations. And yet, and yet, it’s also the season of office parties, family dinners, and other celebrations to brighten the darkness.  And it’s a reminder to communicate with people even if only an annual phone call or Christmas card.

I’ve been struck lately by how a number of features of our human condition are being explored in books, movies and on stages - addictions, depression, cancer, loneliness and alienation, all with their attendant difficulties in communication.  

Autism has had its fair share of attention with some sensitive looks at people who inhabit that world (usually on the end of the spectrum that used to be called Asbergers) hoping to promote some understanding of how they perceive and relate to the world and communicate with it and us.

Oliver Sacks introduced us to Temple Grandin in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat…if you haven’t ever read this book, rush out immediately and get it.  Temple is a scientist, famous for developing humane ways of handling livestock.  She manages her life in an unorthodox but very effective way and was played by Claire Danes in a prize winning biopic.

I haven’t seen The Rain Man, but I did read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon (then saw the play) and was highly amused by The Rosie Project by Australian writer Graeme Simsion. Both books successfully placed the reader in the position of a person with difficulties interpreting and responding to their surroundings and were executed with great humour, affection and respect.

People with autism may seem as if they’re not interested in connecting with others, but some of their apparently unsociable behavior may be when they’re trying hardest to engage. They may look as if they’re not paying attention because it’s difficult to concentrate on what someone’s saying while also making eye contact. 

Not expecting the usual social conventions and accepting behavior that may seem a bit bizarre and difficult to read can open us to the possibility that people may be trying in their own way to connect.  And that’s not only people on the autism spectrum…how about trying to meet people half way? Words I’m trying to live by in this season of good cheer.

A very happy holiday season  to you and yours dear readers, see you in 2019.

Blog # 87…November 2018

Our hands are fascinating... what they represent and what they can do.  The Current had a piece a while ago on the function of hands and how robotics are being developed to replace that function…hmmmm, not so fast.

Will they be able to fashion something with the grace of Rodin?
Will they be able to replicate a mother's touch on a child's brow?
Or know the right pressure to lift a feather or a bowling ball?

Our hands are our most personal interface with the world and with our bodies. We caress our children and our lovers, pat our animals, bathe and scratch ourselves. We sew, paint, cook, drive, hold a tennis racquet, a hand of bridge or raise a bottle of beer to our lips. Walking has always been a huge priority in rehabilitation after illness or injuries, but for me, getting hands to work is the big thing and an incredible work of art.

Think of how often we say hands…hands up, or down, hand held, give me a hand, hand it over, hand made, tip your hand, hand over hand , put your hands together,  hand to mouth, hands across the ocean - next time conversation flags at a dinner party, suggest finding expressions containing hands.

Poet Robert Priest devotes a 1998 collection called The Mad Hand to “plaster the propaganda together into mad tirades of affection…reactivate old hopes…sending out these bleeps with love…hoping for the best.”  Thirty years later, these words resonate on many levels. I remember meeting Robert playing the guitar with a bandaged hand from an industrial accident - there are two poems about this in the collection. Attacks on people in the press who use language to keep us informed, the confusing proliferation of language online and a general loss of interest in precise and beautiful language in the public sphere makes me hugely grateful to people like Robert, guardians of our tongues.

I also  have memories of my colleague therapists in the Hand Program at Toronto Western who performed miracles instilling function into reconstructed hands, and helped people accept the new hand that did the work but seemed a foreign part of their body. One of them told me patients often came in holding the reconstucted hand out in front as if it were an object on a platter. 

Modern medicine with all its technical wizardry poses some large questions about altering the human body…where’s the point in the process where we lose our essence of humanity?  Words help us explore and make sense of our world, let's not lose them either.

Blog # 86…October 2018

I just returned from Washington where I saw a t-shirt that read Make America Kind Again. I’m sure I'm not the only one finding the world a more turbulent and meaner place than usual.  The social stability in the US seems seriously damaged and, as well as sharing the continent, we suffer some overflow through the insistence of CNN.   So much to catch our attention and raise our anxiety level.

I was particularly attracted to a couple of recent newspaper headlines (I still prefer to digest material that way) Maybe Girls Will Save Us, and Two Cheers for Feminism.  I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about boys lately and intending to explore their world. Now it seems more interesting to look at both girls and boys and how the stories children read and hear give them hints, maybe even rules, about who they are and will be and how they’ll make their way in the world and change ours.

Although, up to a certain point, both boys and girls seem to express themselves pretty equally (allowing for personalities and situations) at some point most girls are encouraged to express their emotions - and focus on their appearance - by stories and what they see in the world around them. Rage Becomes Her, and Good and Mad have both appeared in the past few weeks, giving us a picture of women’s anger, how difficult it is to express, how it’s interpreted and the conflicted reception it receives. Girls (and women) face pressure to be popular, pretty and successful, in a system that still discriminates against their ambitions - lots to be angry about.

A couple of months ago, a piece by Rachel Giese in the Globe and Mail read Fears for Tears, referring to her book Boys: What it means to Become a Man.   The pressure for males not to show emotion in public is crushing and the roles they're assigned limiting.  As they grow up, boys get stories of action and the value of physical strength, not much about the consequence of their actions or encouragement to look at the future... I sometimes wonder if re-introducing some of the primitive rituals of entering manhood might be healthier than the drinking games that have taken their place with many teenagers.

Snakes and snails and puppy dogs tails … sugar and spice and everything nice - time we left those images behind; neither captures the complexity of kids’ identity or equips them for the world they’re entering. We’re all being confronted with shifting images of gender identity – our own and others. I’ve been in many discussions, you probably have too, about the relative influence of genetics and environment, as if either nature or nurture were more important...not that simple is it?  Roles are shifting too, women are working at all kinds of jobs, men are taking care of households and children.  But, in general, we’re still stuck in some old notions of what males and females should look, act and sound like. An uneasiness with change pervades us at the same time as we welcome it. Some people handle it better than others...in general we prefer predictability, uncertainty can make us mad as well as uncomfortable.

So, what’s my point here?  Stories are important. People are different. Listen to each other and be open to differences. Don't just think binary in any realm. Take a deep breath rather than leaning on the horn. Take a screen holiday.  Don’t be afraid of your anger if you’re a woman, or to be tender if you’re a man.  Keep calm and carry on.

I wish I’d bought that t-shirt