ARTS
VANCOUVER SPECIAL OPENS DECEMBER 3 Derya Akay
Colleen Heslin
Ryan Peter
Maya Beaudry
Julian Hou
Sylvain Sailly
Raymond Boisjoly
Allison Hrabluik
Rachelle Sawatsky
Eli Bornowsky
Gareth James
Walter Scott
Rebecca Brewer
Garry Neill Kennedy
Krista Belle Stewart
Colleen Brown
Tiziana La Melia
Angela Teng
Matt Browning
Khan Lee
Mina Totino
Mark Delong
Arvo Leo
Ron Tran
Kim Dorland
Lyse Lemieux
Tristan Unrau
Barry Doupé
Glenn Lewis
Charlene Vickers
Michael Drebert
Anne Low
Brent Wadden
Julia Feyrer
Elizabeth McIntosh
Alison Yip
Jeneen Frei Njootli
Jordan Milner
Tamara Henderson
Antoni Oko
Generously supported by:
Supporting Sponsor:
Artworkers Retirement Society Chan Family Foundation Phil Lind Michael O’Brian Family Foundation
Simon Starling’s Three White Desks is a copy of a writing desk designed by Francis Bacon for Australian writer Patrick White. Blaine Campbell photo.
Artist reveals creative process of artworks Each of Simon Starling’s works has an in-depth history that involves extensive research and examination V IS U AL AR TS SIMON STARLING: COLLECTED WORKS At the Rennie Museum until March 25
In a recent artist’s talk, Simon
2 Starling spoke initially about,
well, artists’ talks. The Turner Prize– winning, Copenhagen-based British artist characterized the illustrated lecture—a mainstay of art-world education—as a medium unto itself. It is, he said, a way of reconciling exhibited images and objects with “the realities that have driven their making”. His art practice could be described in similar terms. Much of what he does is interpret—or reinterpret—works of modern art and design by a long and probing journey through the social, political, economic, and material conditions of their creation and display. Given the complexity of Starling’s art and the depth of research and learning behind each piece, viewers are grateful for—even needful of—access to his process. For those who missed his low-key but fascinating description of the works in his exhibition at the Rennie Museum, there are tours by docents and explanatory labels to more fully open the art to our appreciation. Each work has an elaborate back story, involving, again, deep and prolonged research, whether Starling is exploring the acquisition of a Henry Moore sculpture by a Canadian art gallery, remaking a desk Francis Bacon designed for the Australian writer Patrick White, or restaging a groundbreaking performance by Pilar Pellicer at an interdisciplinary art centre in Mexico City. Starling’s media and materials vary from project to project, ranging across photography, film, sculpture, theatre, furniture, and even mollusks. (For Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore), he immersed a copy of Moore’s Warrior With Shield in the zebra-mussel-infested waters of Lake Ontario.) Although he creates new images and objects as he reveals a series of curious histories, it’s the uncovering of these histories that becomes the true artwork here. Starling’s Self Portrait (As Henry Moore), mounted on the wall opposite the entrance to the exhibition, sets us up for the most complex and dramatic work in the show, Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima), installed in a darkened gallery on the 30 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT DECEMBER 1 – 8 / 2016
second floor. The small self-portrait is a brownish-toned photograph, a chryso-uranotype print of Starling wearing a wooden mask that depicts the renowned British sculptor. The mask was created by the Japanese master Yasuo Miichi, whom Starling names as a collaborator in the Masquerade project. Starling also speaks of Moore as a creative collaborator, albeit a dead one. The work has many aspects, including a dramatically lit installation of eight masks and a top hat, mounted on tall, thin, humanheight tripods in front of a mirrored wall. The masks represent real-life and fictional characters, including Moore, art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, financier and art collector Joseph Hirshhorn, and James Bond, whom Starling has folded into a story of Atomic Age intrigue. Masquerade also includes a gorgeous film that shows Miichi carving and painting masks while a narrator recites a drama in which the characters of an ancient Noh play are conflated with the 20thcentury characters depicted by the masks. The starting point for this complicated and intriguing work was Moore’s 1965 sculpture Nuclear Energy, installed at the University of Chicago, and a smaller version of it, Atom Piece, in the collection of the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. The film and the installation, supplemented by drawings and photographs (more chryso-uranotype prints, made using uranium oxide), are richly layered, revealing unexpected connections and conflations. Not all Starling’s artworks are equally effective. In Pictures for an Exhibition, he employs digital collage techniques to photographically re-create an exhibition of Constantin Brancusi sculptures, curated by Marcel Duchamp for the Arts Club of Chicago in 1927. Despite what this work reveals about the collections in which the original Brancusi sculptures now reside, despite, too, what Starling observes about the absorbing of avant-garde art into mainstream economies, Pictures is just not that interesting to look at. It’s one of those widely researched and painstakingly reconstructed projects that seem to fascinate the artist more than the viewer. Still, delight far outweighs tedium in this important exhibition. > ROBIN LAURENCE