Join us for another enlightening #GGArts conversation between 2020 Governor General’s award recipient Ken Lum and art historian and critic William Wood. They will address Lum’s studio work as well as his teaching, his public art projects and his recently published book of writings, Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991–2018.
#AGAlive is presented with the support of the EPCOR Heart + Soul Fund.
This conversation was a live event and the AGA supports the artists’ freedom of imagination and expression as well as our audience’s right to form their own opinions and reactions. We aim to spark respectful conversation and dialogue.Join us for another enlightening #GGArts conversation between 2020 Governor General’s award recipient Ken Lum and art historian and critic William Wood. They will address Lum’s studio work as well as his teaching, his public art projects and his recently published book of writings, Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991–2018. …
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Introduction
Introduction
0:00
Introduction
0:00
The Governor Generals Award
The Governor Generals Award
5:00
The Governor Generals Award
5:00
Identity
Identity
10:20
Identity
10:20
Furniture
Furniture
15:40
Furniture
15:40
Phone
Phone
28:12
Phone
28:12
Building
Building
31:28
Building
31:28
East Fan Monument
East Fan Monument
40:38
East Fan Monument
40:38
The Lower Mainland
The Lower Mainland
43:52
The Lower Mainland
43:52
Use CTRL+F to find key words if it is a longer transcript.
Introduction
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good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us for the fifth artist conversation organized as part of the programming to
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complement the exhibition of the 2020 governor general awards and visual and media arts
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currently installed at the art gallery of alberta my name is catherine croston and i’m the executive director and chief
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curator of the aga i would like to begin by acknowledging that we are hosting the exhibition and this webinar from 3d6 territory
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and region 4 of the metis nation of alberta we acknowledge this as the traditional ancestral home of the
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nihiwak kri anishnabe soto nisitappi blackfoot nakota sioux dene and metis
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peoples and we also acknowledge the many indigenous first nations and inuit people who make alberta their home today
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we recognize that this acknowledgement is just one small recognition of the work we need to do to address and reverse the ongoing
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impacts of colonization the governor general’s award in visual and media arts is a lifetime achievement
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award that recognizes an artist’s career body of work and contribution to the visual arts media arts and fine
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craft in canada in 2020 eight honor artists were honored for their exceptional careers and
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lifetime achievements the 2020 winners are deanna bowen dana claxton ruth cut hand
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michael fernandez jorge lozano lorsa ken lom anatorma and zainab virgi this afternoon
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we are very pleased to welcome ken lum ken lum is an internationally recognized artist having participated in numerous
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important exhibitions such as documenta the venice finale the sao paulo biennial
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binal and the whitney biennial a long-time professor he is currently the chair of fine arts at the university of
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pennsylvania’s weizmann school of design in philadelphia ken lam is co-founder and founding
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editor of the yishu journal of contemporary chinese art he is a prolific writer and has given
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keynote addresses at the 2020 markham public art conference in marcom ontario the 2020 stick team ddsm worth
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conference in amsterdam the 2010 world museum conference in shanghai the 2006 biennale of sydney in sydney
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australia and the university’s university’s art association of canada in 1997.
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since the mid-1990s lum has worked on numerous major permanent public art commissions including for the cities of vienna
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rotterdam st louis lydon utrecht toronto and vancouver a book of his writings titled everything
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is relevant writings on art and life 1991-2018 was published in 2020 by concordia
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university press more recently he has completed a feature-length movie screenplay dealing with chinese contract laborers
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in the immediate post-civil war era lum also has a curatorial record including co-curating
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shanghai modern 1919-1945 the shanghai biennale is beyond biennial
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number seven in the sharjah biennale seven in sharjah united arab emirates and monument lab creative speculations
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for philadelphia he was project manager for the oakwe and mazor curated exhibition
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the short century independence and liberation movements in africa 1945-1994 london is also the co-founder
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and chief curatorial advisor to monument lab a public art and history collective founded in philadelphia
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this afternoon ken lum is in conversation with william wood william wood is an art historian and
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critic he holds a doctorate from the university of sussex and has taught at universities and colleges in england british columbia
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ontario and alberta his research has focused on contemporary art and its display the history of conceptual and minimal
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art of the 1960s and 1970s aesthetics and cultural criticism since
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1984 what has published on recent art in journals anthologies and exhibition catalogs
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as well as holding editorial positions with c magazine public vanguard parachute and magazine
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woods research and writing has been supported by grants from the canada council the ontario arts council the henry moore foundation the social
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sciences and humanities research council of canada and the ubc hampton research fund wood
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was a research fellow at the national gallery of canada in ottawa in both 1993 and 2007
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and in 2002 he was awarded the inco award for curatorial writing from the ontario association of art
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galleries before i turn things over to our speakers just a few notes ken and bill will speak for about 60
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minutes following which we will answer questions please enter any questions that you have using the chat function
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i would also like to take this opportunity to thank epcor who support aga online programming through their
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heart and soul fund and also the canada council for the arts for their support of the governor general awards and the exhibition at the
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aga please join me now in welcoming ken lum and william wood
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thank you catherine it’s great to see you ken hey good to see you bill long time yeah
The Governor Generals Award
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um i want to start with the talking about the prize itself i mean you’ve received several
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recognitions in terms of prizes from the netitian foundation the gershon iscovitz
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foundation and things like that but this comes directly from the federal government
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i mean i know you’re already a member of the order of canada but what does this mean for you
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well it me it’s it’s an honor to be uh recognized as a as a
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an artist worthy of the governor general’s uh award um it’s as simple as i mean it doesn’t it
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doesn’t change me in any way um and it doesn’t um but you know it’s it’s nice to have uh you know no i
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think that’s great i also think i mean don’t you think it’s uh a sign of changing times that
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of the cohort that you have with several black indigenous people color
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immigrants well i mean possibly but then i i’ve
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been working like as an artist now 40 years and uh if you look at my cv it’s got a lot
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of entries in it so you know i’ve i uh no it’s not that i just mean do you think that it’s a sign
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of as i say of changing attitudes towards the type of recognition uh well i i hope so but i mean i i know
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not answer that because i’m i am an artist of color and and um but was that one of the factors
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in it i have no idea oh i don’t i’m not trying to i’m not trying to integrate that i just meant that
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um i’m very interested in that question right i wouldn’t have co-founded monument lab if i hadn’t
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and obviously uh well maybe not so obviously to people who aren’t familiar with my work i’ve been interested in the
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question of uh identity formation uh you know subject positions uh how
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uh how you know negotiations of the self from another perspective into
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communities and other groups and so on that’s been uh almost a light motif of my work since
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the very beginning yeah and we’ll get around to that i also i was in reading your book
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i was uh which is very good i was uh struck by you talking about
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um art being an aspect of self-definition that seemed
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very interesting and and kind of counter-intuitive given some of the uh non-subjective aspects of your life
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well i i mean it in terms i guess i meant it in a very philosophical sense because
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you know you as an artist you can’t always control the path you’re on you know you can’t control whether a
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gallery drops you in all the kind of prosaic aspects of of being in the art system right and also the art system itself can
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is not something and i’ve i wrote about this extensively in my book where many moments where i really had
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serious doubts whether i could continue on as an artist precisely because it was so
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uh linked identified with the art system so that i had to uh try to find uh you know uh the
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peripheries of the art system you might say and and to re reinvigorate my my my love
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of art in the first place and so i went i guess i uh what i meant by
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uh that was a philosophical uh path as an artist i of course you try to
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make good work you know i try to make good work all the time but some some works i have to go
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through maybe not so good works in the opinion of others to get to better works and um i like to think of uh my work
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as an earth as something as a kind of totality as opposed to you know what what was the last hit i
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did in terms of um in terms of an exhibition you know and which is which i would say is probably
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a little bit counterintuitive to the what to the kind of business side of um of how art is directed
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and so on so but it’s kind of um but by taking this kind of philosophical
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position i’ve i’ve uh i’ve found a new purpose for art and that’s why i’ve kind of
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not so much deviated but kind of extended myself and all kinds of other roles was still within the larger realm of art
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think that’s interesting also i mean you’re talking about the business side of art um in the sense that it’s something that
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art and language spoke about is that people artists don’t make works anymore they make exhibitions
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and i think that and as you say i mean that’s one of the ways that and you’ve very much worked in serial
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fashion right um yeah then well well they do both right but
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because you can also make you know spectacular iconic works which
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is which also has its negative aspects the pursuit of something iconic the pursuit of something spectacular
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which more often than not requires uh a lot of monetization in terms of its production
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so like that can also be a another good thing as well that’s true so do you want to look at
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some slides sure okay uh helen so i thought we’d bring in this early
Identity
10:21
work right she’s a gg winner by the way i know that’s exactly why i brought her in this is zainab zergy and it’s
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and it’s backwards by the way this is what came off the slide with us off the site so i apologize for that i
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haven’t seen it for a long time but um it’s very i mean this is
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a work about identity in a strange way right because it’s a corporate type logo
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it looks i think sort of like what canada trust uses it was it was down the trust logo yeah and this
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doesn’t exist anymore yeah it’s td canada trust now but um
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but the idea of combining this very flattering um studio portrait
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well very uh conforming i would say i don’t know it’s firing but it’s very
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yeah that’s right um and this sort of corporate identity and the individual identity
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sort of being i’m not sure if you’d say they’re matched up against each other or well i think they’re brutally
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abundant up to each other sure okay because some of the other ones like the one of
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ed gibson that was kind of friendly you know even though it was based on the cp i believe logo at the time
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um you know demko uh temco capitals okay company but also i mean the
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media i mean and i think this is interesting is that um in our one of our previous
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conversations you said uh of your student work which i don’t really want to go into but you
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said i was working out the sort of typical minimal conceptualist framework
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of the immediate past because i mean conceptual art was maybe dying when you came into art
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school um in many ways i’m still working it out i mean i think i think those lessons
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an artist can draw from the avant-garde movement of america and also europe are still not totally
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resolved and and but also they provide a kind of fecundity of um possible procedures for for making art
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right it it it has become in its kind of neo-conceptual form a kind of linger function for that
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permits a kind of globalized language of art and and thus uh there’s a there’s a kind
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of uh you know transmissibility in terms of uh artists from all all corners of the
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world make art and and be legible no and i also i mean
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i know we didn’t teach together but we did studio crits together at ubc and we saw
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our students doing exactly that right so running through the motions yeah but in my case in an interesting
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way that’s not a negative thing no no but in my case i was you know i
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i didn’t i i didn’t i didn’t go into art until my last year
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undergraduate right and so i didn’t know anything about art and and i was so excited that
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i felt i had to know as much as possible i was first of all shocked by the uh by the claims of art right
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performance art male art all this kind of these forms of art which i
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i couldn’t believe uh i thought it was a bit of a ruse or something right because i always had some ability to draw and
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because i was a florian illustrator for the bc government and um and then i meet met all these colleagues
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and i thought well you can’t draw why are you even trying to be a mother it doesn’t make any sense
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i can draw a horse but then i realized there was a there’s a logic to to the kind of uh what i
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thought was the kind of irrationality i think it’s also interesting that um out of that period
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and in many ways for a long aspects of your career you followed
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i guess robert smithson talked about as a post studio practice um and i know that people like smithson
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and dan graham and joseph kasooth are all very important to you as models i guess um
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well i mean i wouldn’t say i was totally post studio i did i did have long periods of studio and where i actually
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made work i always made drawings you know i i made a lot of drawings one day i’m going to show them
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like smithsonian he also did yeah he was he was like jimmy hendrix he never yeah
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huge after he passed away right and so on so i have a lot of drawings um so i never it was never entirely like without
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the hand somewhere in there um but i often but also you know i to be
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honest i never had money for a long time so even having a studio was like just
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you know i was always working part-time time you know burger chef uh i forget uh computer
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something as the uh you know this summer name job and i had all kinds of jobs like that so and
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i had that from very young on so you know and and then um yeah it was just it was just
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uh not possible for me for long stretches to have a studio i get it
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but i mean also but i was thinking on the other hand um works like this or i’ll go to the
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next slide this are
Furniture
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maybe expensive to make in terms of the uh no i say logo and then and then this is
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uh a take on the ready-made the french sculpture and the idea that you’re you depend very
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much on standard two to three-dimensional uh
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media yeah i was extending the logic of how furnitures arranged within the kind of
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rational spaces of the domestic of of homes right but um you know i rented the furniture here
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from some company called grand tree ferns to rental and uh it took me about you know i was
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working part-time and saving up i think it was only i mean only but you know because the dollars changed obviously but
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for me it was expensive just to make this piece just to rent yeah just to wrap this up
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and no one liked it everyone hated it well i remember uh the first show i think i saw of yours was the yyzet in
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toronto where if i remember correctly you had andy patton order the furniture over
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the phone yeah it was kind of a take on um the telephone paintings by maholinage
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right and then i have a very nasty review i won’t mention the name in uh c magazine or one of them i know i published that
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and um okay well no i didn’t rick rhodes you were right he was a publisher
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i mean people just uh i actually and you know i mean i actually thought that elka town did
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i kind of well i was referring to something else oh another one yeah no no we don’t want
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to talk about that no i just made about the first about that piece about between affirmation and
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contempt or something like that she called it and i or we called it right and i thought that was yeah
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let me tell you a quick anecdote about this uh i you know i presented a a talk this is maybe 10 years ago now
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at a certain uh museum and the uh curator there is very quite
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well known i won’t mention his name i i should because i’ll just hint that there’s a scandal around him a few years ago
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and but um and uh afterwards at dinner he he he was staring at me and i and i looked
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over and he said i don’t believe you right and i said what don’t you believe well you know
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during your talk when you showed uh this work here he said you know you said that you you
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picked the furniture because uh your mother would have really loved to have this
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i i i can’t believe that because it’s clearly so ugly this is what this guy said oh god right
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and uh and i remember thinking it was like that was like one more uh you know microaggression but one more
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moment where i went okay this is a lesson in terms of being being an artisan in the art world
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with its demographics and you know taste and so which which is often under spoken about well that’s what’s
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funny about i mean just thinking about the work with zainab and this work um
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how class is an important aspect of your work and continues to be in many ways
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class and region yeah um probably more authentically than before before me perhaps i betrayed
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my class by becoming bourgeois petty bourgeoisie like i said it was a
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function of how much or how little money i had as well right yeah like somebody said well why
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didn’t you make those the cena pieces bigger why didn’t you make more of them because i couldn’t afford it you know
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but it is true that after i’m not sure of the date of this piece but um this is a 1980.
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wow okay so it’s that early i was thinking that uh later in the mid 80s um you moved into
19:35
hi making furniture sculptures out of pretty high-end rosh wool and things like that right
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yeah and those and i mean and those had a totally different you know i don’t want to agree with that
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curator but there is something kitschy about this type of arrangement
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uh and that may be class based too yeah i think it’s class based right because
20:00
if you i was more interested in the inventory of variation you might say
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according to class and taste which is endless well that’s what i’m more interested in than
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the idea of um you know uh uh you know kitsch or you know that’s that’s you know heinz steinbeck’s friend mine but
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you know it was always kind of kitschy you know like you had this you’re you know you go into a gallery and you’re actually swimming in terms of
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you know the the tide box on top of this lava lamp yeah and so on but i was never i was
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really interested in uh something that was authentically effective at least effective in my own life which i which
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inspired uh this work and that’s why i think i or i i just i hope that it it it uh fomented some
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degree of um of unease among the among viewers
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yeah i think as as one of them and also of course um your the arrangement here
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and this is kind of a standard type of arrangement i mean you did other things too but it’s totally closed off i mean it’s
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uh and you’ve taken i think elements particularly from robert morris’s minimal work
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and and use that with the combining with the ready-made and again it’s kind of mash
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up of yeah i was drawing i was drawing lessons from minimal art right but obvio but in a way
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kind of um um you know making it more explicit it
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kind of contained you know psychological language of that work which was always about closure and hermeticism and so on but in a way
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and then making that hermeticism explicit all right because you know the private home the private space is also hermetic
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in its own way as a unit of consumption as a unit of all kinds of private um compartment and so on so i was
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interested in all those questions i was also interested in the kind you know the kind of transitioning of space uh you know that works of art um
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uh uh uh you know uh moves through right the exhibition space the home
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space the collector’s space and so on sure and also i mean i was thinking in
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many ways that’s taking off from themes that were raised by dan graham in homes for america
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and um not and at the time not a well-known piece
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of writing compared to what it is now um yeah maybe but i was deeply influenced
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by at the time well no no that’s what i’m getting at is it i mean it was very very forward-looking in that sense
22:30
and and in advancing your critique yeah i mean it’s funny now because i get you know i i’ve probably shown
22:36
variations of furniture sculptures uh eight or nine times last year right
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because oh this is terrific i love it can you do a furniture work right now are you still following them um
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the rental model when you do that um no uh there i mean for example i did one
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that’s the swisses to new york last year and uh they just bought it on wayfair
23:02
you know but it’s also kind of interesting because it means the labor that went into it was
23:08
is is so little in terms of what you know our competitor received to make
23:14
these these works you know yeah and i i think it’s i mean also this is a very much the post studio
23:20
in the sense of a danvaven or a carl andre mode if you put together in the gallery if it
23:27
doesn’t sell it goes back to the hardware store or the furniture store or something okay let’s move on let me see um
23:36
is this next so i was thinking about these works that
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sort of come out of the portrait logos um but
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i mean are more declarative in some ways um and about people identifying with
23:55
different figures like this little girl tracy bond meeting a mascot
24:01
on on the street i’m pretty sure that’s granville street in vancouver i think it is yeah um
24:08
and these seem like well how do you think about these are these in terms of kinds of moments of everyday
24:13
life well yeah i guess because i was interested in the quotient and the
24:19
prosaic as well um but uh you know they were obviously uh misonsen
24:24
uh pictures but i was also interested in um uh you know the relationship between uh
24:31
textuality and pictorialism right like the text itself as you know like when
24:37
you have a caption to it to uh to an image that caption is is is only associative because of
24:43
proximity but that caption doesn’t contain the image and neither does the image contain
24:49
the text because it’s you can substitute the text a multitude of of captions for this image just as you
24:56
can substitute a multitude of images for this text right so there’s a kind of uh oscillation in
25:03
terms of the opening uh uh you know the kind of multivalent uh interpretive threads that it can be uh
25:11
produced by by each side so i was interested in in that as well as as well but i was
25:16
also interested in this kind of slightly um i don’t know it’s kind of slightly deadpan
25:22
uh you know um psycho or maybe deadening uh kind of quality quality to to urban
25:30
spaces and so i mean the ideal viewing position of this work is right at the right at the fissure between the two
25:36
halves right and so on but the work itself specifically i drew from um drew from an experience
25:43
uh you know i was just having a coffee at starbucks or somewhere on denman street and the a w wood bear waldo down the street
25:50
all right and i was handing out coupons like free fries or free root beer i’m not sure and a little girl looked like goldilocks
25:57
ran out and grabbed the uh root bear by the leg and said i love you a
26:02
w root bear right that’s amazing yeah it was amazing and i went oh my god right
26:08
because you know there and i remember thinking okay this is weird and why was it weird because of the kind
26:13
of usurping of the enchanted you know a spree of the of the little
26:19
girl towards the animal the bear she made light root beer but i don’t think she’s
26:25
enchanted by root beer right so but and yet it became appropriated by for commercial ends and so that inspired
26:31
this work and then you also i mean the the typeface typefaces
26:37
um that you use are well how would you where did you find these and how did you
26:44
what do you think of them um well i i actually more recently i have invented my own typeface later on
26:51
uh um i may have done one here like pepe pig but the um tracy bond those ones are you know
26:57
there’s a gazillion uh typefaces and uh i don’t know it’s just partly like oh that i think that works
27:04
you know that doesn’t work and not move the meats over or the meats is bigger or the and so on well i guess also i mean they
27:11
the same like the the portrait logos you’re getting kind of advertisement aspect into it these look
27:18
like kind of typefaces you might find in the back pages of the newspapers yeah and i but i also was thinking of
27:25
like the variations of uh fonts and um as cadences in speech you know like somehow with the
27:32
color you know the chromatic key shifting somehow it’s like speech and uh it slows
27:37
you down or speeds you up in terms of in terms of the duration you spend uh
27:43
even reading five five words yeah and it’s either i mean it’s very clear here where the
27:50
the two nouns between proper nouns um linked by the verb but the verb is the
27:55
smallest sort of least you know kind of compressed in a way
28:00
and anyway by the way i designed a pig costume too that’s especially made so that’s great
28:09
okay let’s um so out of those somewhat later
Phone
28:16
this is the mid 90s uh no uh 93 or
28:21
93 okay 93 um what is that thing that she’s standing
28:27
at i don’t recognize it it says telephone but it’s very weird
28:33
it’s too big to be a phone yeah it’s really big yeah i’ll just carry it with her i don’t get it but okay
28:39
that’s good too i like that but you made these these are um
28:45
on canvas laminate photograph and canvas we’re not on canvas they’re on uh powder
28:50
coated aluminum oh really okay um
29:01
maybe that advertising mode into a kind of confessional or
29:08
recording of a subject in this case in crisis they’re not old yeah i mean they’re monologic in this
29:13
case right many of them are more monologic and so it became um i was interested in um uh you know uh
29:20
you know limits of speech because you know like the lacanian rule is that you know we’re made by
29:26
language right we’re produced by language and that’s the tragedy of uh of uh identity right and subjectivity is
29:33
like can’t escape language and so on but but and yet you know the real which
29:38
is out there beyond language is always there and so i was kind of interested in that in that uh that that space
29:45
as well right and so because she’s losing her uh capacity to try to convince her
29:52
i suppose her bull from um you know coming back to her um she she’s
29:59
she’s losing her sense of selfhood so i was kind of interested in all these types of questions but i was
30:05
also interested in you know you know these kind of matrix lines where you know there’s variations
30:11
in terms of the text but you know you you you know there’s quite a number of words but it’s
30:16
not but as soon as you see it you can apprehend that there aren’t a lot of different words right and so
30:22
certain things get reinforced and because the kind of matrix quality of the text um you
30:29
end up in a kind of circular moment or movement back between image and text and so on and uh one
30:36
undergirds the other constantly so i was and as a way and i was also at the time
30:41
i remember reading anne hollander of the governor it was a kind of interesting figure because she was the kind of amateur
30:48
uh art historian she never actually you know has a phd or any i’m not even sure she
30:53
had a graduate degree and she wrote this great book on what she called duration in dutch
30:59
landscape painting and dutch uh paintings of little towns at night and the lighting and and so on was to
31:06
enhance the sense of duration in front in front of painting and so i i kind of like i took that and was inspired by
31:12
that and i thought well if this text keeps kind of repeating itself in variation then you always return back to her stuck
31:20
in the phone booth and back in the phone booth yeah no that’s good i want to show another
31:26
one of these just to make it clear that you’re not just dealing with crisis um and this is you know very
Building
31:33
in some ways one could say sentimental but um um bringing your dignity to the sort of
31:42
every day yeah i mean she’s i mean she’s a little girl and she’s smoking
31:48
so yeah which is probably not for not proper
31:54
and so on and and it’s a kind of what is it an institutional building it’s vaguely institutional and
32:00
and you know i was kind of interested in neoclassical space which is somewhat shallow like a proscenium and
32:06
then the heavy heaviness of the granite and the heaviness of the brick the masonry and
32:12
and even the slightly discomfortable way of sitting on steps all of that right while
32:18
she’s biting her time weighs down on her as a kind of you know allegory through the material through
32:25
the quotation of the materials in the building right and so she’s just wowing her time
32:32
yeah and it’s well it’s also interesting as you say about uh she’s smoking because there’s a book
32:39
called cigarettes are sublime by a guy called uh robert richard klein and it’s about
32:46
smoking and what it says is that smoking is the time to is a time to be out of it you know like you do it um
32:53
it’s just sort of a break from everything else one of my favorite rock bands is cigarettes after sex
33:03
now i want to turn to these works which again have this miroric aspect that you’ve actually
33:10
been quite fascinated by um
33:17
i do remember this picture being critiqued because it was an attractive gallery assistant that was looking at
33:22
the work um but that was in the battle days of the 80s now the photographs here are i i have
33:30
one of a man another gallery assistant as well nobody ever mentions that when i show people
33:37
no it just seemed i mean you know i knew i just meant it she was a friendly way she was like sean
33:42
landry’s wife so the artist john lander’s wife so yeah no i just meant it i just was raising it to
33:48
to raise say the stakes of some of the pettiness that particular time
33:53
and the photographs here i mean they’re stuck in a mirror the way that you might
33:58
do it in your home or school or something as a kind of memento they’re both anonymous and
34:08
poignant i’d put it that way right yeah and and they don’t necessarily come from one
34:13
source by the way you know right they in fact these pictures they all come from multiple sources
34:18
but as soon as you put them within the frame you read them as okay they are linked
34:24
within some cosmology of one person right one one family one individual whatever
34:31
and so on so i was interested in that but i was also but then and the images that the pictures are are clipped
34:37
permanently uh uh this in a special way underneath and they’re always at a 90 degrees they never
34:43
they’re never sloppy they never you know just kind got haphazardly placed there
34:49
believe it or not i was kind of interested in like uh referencing in my own way
34:55
some uh works by jose litzki and even michael snow these kind of monochromatic paintings with little you
35:01
know that it’s lots of of different color along the edge right so you know as a kind of just as a kind of
35:08
procedural lesson but not not you know having anything to do with it
35:13
it’s content of those artists and so on but i was also obviously i was interested in the camera
35:20
but uh but not um but making a kind of work that because the camera is nothing
35:26
but mirror chambers anyway right i’m talking about home camera and so
35:31
i was interested in um in doing that without um without actually taking a picture
35:38
right and when in in the exhibition you would see many of these works with uh portrait size uh
35:44
mirrors with a single image uh photograph and um and of course you see yourself uh you know it’s
35:51
recursive right you see yourself in the act of looking you see other people in the act of looking and it’s
35:57
like recursivity after recursivity yes and then they also i mean
36:02
this is photographed in a certain way so that it doesn’t catch the other ones but other the installation photographs you can see mirrors within mirrors
36:09
exactly which is quite quite a nice effect for an installation but this also i mean this takes you a
36:14
bit back to minimal art certainly dan graham’s used to mirrors yeah
36:22
he’s okay but he’s more outdoors and you know in in in relationship to glass
36:28
and yeah yeah yeah i’m just thinking about that idea but also of uh what so yeah capturing explorer
36:36
michelangelo
36:42
so from that i wanted to move on to one of my favorite pieces um which is this is the outside
36:49
which is the mirror maze signs of depression with 12 sides of
36:56
depression and this is in a documentary in 2002
37:01
yeah yeah and so inside there you get the maze effect
37:08
of mizona beam of being disoriented or running into things and here you can’t read the text but i
37:16
did bring on one of the features so here we have i have no friends
37:21
right and this is quite i mean i find this a remarkably effective piece um maybe it was because i suffered from
37:27
depression for a long time and also i was alone in castle which is not a fun thing to do
37:33
um but i think that this uh this is one of the first i guess even though it was
37:39
temporary public pieces that you did per se um
37:45
but it also referenced i mean after those sorts of monologic pieces then this references
37:51
aspects of mental health and also creates both uh as they say the kind of confusion of
37:57
being in a maze with these yeah feeling depressed or yeah alluding to them it was quite a
38:05
trying piece in some ways yeah i was well i’ve as i said i’ve gone through my own periods uh maybe i don’t
38:11
know it was depression i never went to one to a a specialist would say but
38:16
well you know periods of uh profound uh despair and and whatever for sustained periods and
38:23
so but also but i wasn’t i wasn’t even so specifically interested and i was kind
38:28
of interested in that kind of a symptom a despairs on a societal level or you
38:34
see it i mean i’m in america that’s like basically the you know the the mother roost of of of all that stuff
38:40
right so many people are just you know uh it
38:46
acting out in strange ways because there’s they have no avenue to properly express it except
38:53
maybe through you know killing people or something like that or or drugs or drugs and and so on
39:00
and so i was kind of really interested in kind of this kind of psychological
39:06
damage and psychological affliction that you know the system of social economy
39:11
political economy you know bestows on on people on a very massive level right you know if you’re if you’re
39:18
poor you know you you may not even be clinically depressed because you would because you would never have time to be
39:23
depressed you’re just worried about you know to work dunkin donuts for shift
39:30
right so i was kind of interested in all these types of questions and and it is a kind of sub theme within
39:36
within my work i i did i don’t know showing them but i did like necrology series more recent works uh where i just
39:43
basically wrote uh kind of very uh florid uh obituaries of fictional figures and so on which i’m
39:50
showing uh soon at the philadelphia museum of art and so on so um yeah i mean
39:56
and even you know if you go back to that earlier uh one of the uh young woman in the uh phone booth it’s it’s a kind of
40:03
desperation right it’s a kind of you know if if you leave me i’m finished and so and so i guess and then death
40:10
have to say you know finality founder thought the echological
40:16
has always been um a subset uh sub theme yeah yeah that i’ve treated my
40:21
work on a very uh on off on many levels someone said how many works on death would be that i said one or two and i i counted it it
40:29
was like close to ten no well if you count these necrologies just close this even more yeah
40:36
um now i mean here’s one of your
East Fan Monument
40:42
permanent or mostly permanent unless they’re are they still talking about moving it
40:47
i have no idea no one’s communicated with me i know that they’re building a building in front of it but
40:54
yeah but this is the east fan monumentees fan um east vancouver yeah east vancouver
41:01
and someone said actually said uh what is evan street
41:08
that’s pretty good but this was i’m i grew up on the west side uh near
41:14
denmark park it shows it shows the riley park boys would come
41:20
and put this all over the community center in the park right and when there were basketball games at point grey
41:26
high where i went then do you see it the next day right stuff like that so really what’s the mark and i mean although
41:31
people say it’s a gang symbol which is kind of erroneous i think no i think some gangs probably did did adopt
41:37
definitely the gang and it was larger than the gang it was it wasn’t because of the gang
41:42
either yeah i think it i think it had something to do with the kind of catholic uh immigrant populations
41:48
in east vancouver at that time with the cross definitely yeah and and also and as he’s also wrote
41:56
about this you know it’s often followed with these fan rules right right right kind of a real strong assertion well
42:03
it’s uh it’s a it’s also ironic because they don’t rule oh yeah and yeah it’s the dublin tone
42:11
right like rules you you you you’re now you’re an east fan you live by our rules and it’s also a
42:18
matter of its faces west i’m correct yes it does so i mean it’s a it’s a kind of a it’s a property it’s a
42:25
dividing line on clark drive yeah between east and west yeah and and you know i’m pleased to say
42:32
that as soon as it went out it was embraced right yeah i was going to say it’s a very popular piece even though it’s
42:39
it um is unlikely let’s say is public art it doesn’t seem
42:45
to address things but then it’s become very popular and yeah as we say at least historically it really has
42:50
right because i think it taps into a sense of um beleaguered i won’t necessarily say
42:57
grievance but believer men uh on the part of a lot of working people
43:02
right or mostly uh you know residents on the east side more so than
43:07
the west side yeah and also i think um you know when this was going up was
43:14
a certain amount of gentrification of east van was happening and it’s only accelerated now so having
43:20
this kind of marker of that old yeah i mean people people kept saying to
43:26
me oh you’re it’s really about pride in that you’re just proud of uh growing up in these family and i’d say
43:33
i’d always say to them i would have rather have grown up in the west side
43:40
it would have been a lot easier you know well i like this as well because i mean
43:45
as i say it’s sophisticated but it’s also popular it’s not like uh off-putting yeah um
The Lower Mainland
43:53
now this is a temporary piece you did uh do you want to talk about this and
44:00
wow and this this has to deal with other another history of the lower mainland yeah it was it was
44:07
well it was during the uh mud flat uh days uh in the 60s and 70s and um it was it was during
44:15
the kind of uh tidal uh uh zone uh in north vancouver where a lot of people
44:21
uh including uh david strang of one of the founders of um of greenpeace
44:27
and tom burrell’s and uh lowry malcolm lowry right all three of
44:34
them their homes are were reproduced here to scale and um
44:40
along georgia street as part of that uh bag i’ve got what space is called insight i think off-site offsite outside and so inside
44:48
outside insight is uh is a show and uh but anyway so
44:53
i was kind of i was interested in um in recalling that moment not because it was
44:59
um i’m nostalgic for it because i was you know just a kid then but i was interested in in this possibility
45:06
of living otherwise right which was and the reason why they couldn’t get rid of
45:12
these mudflat homes for a long time was because it was unclear what was proper
45:20
uh borders proper to north vancouver right it was never formalized it was
45:25
never in terms of like it was up and so because you know it was intertidal the water came in the water went out and it
45:32
was kind of marshy right there was never no one actually said okay this is uh civic territory right and because of
45:40
that you had alternatives that eluded that kind of zoning because that zoning
45:46
didn’t exist and then the only reason why it eventually became raised
45:51
burnt down in fact was because um the municipality of north vancouver
45:58
including with deep cove and other municipalities formalized um language that said
46:04
water that extends out beyond the tidal area belongs to the city once that became
46:10
formalized it was like a put in terms of living otherwise but this uh the title is
46:18
shangri-la frank yeah from shangri-la right now because of the location in downtown
46:25
vancouver right next to the hotel yeah hotel and stuff like that so you were bringing the kind of as you
46:32
say the title the peripheral areas somehow uh memento of that
46:38
into the center also to right yeah right but as you well know bill i mean
46:44
people are giddy in terms of uh you know real estate rise and the kind of monetization is kind of
46:49
crystal city made out of money right crystal glass city and yeah i wanted to call up this moment
46:56
of you know where people didn’t seek that people were going okay we’re going to recycle we’re going to
47:02
uh you know live within our means where we’re going to salvage things and and so
47:07
on and also i mean very much bohemian lifestyle i mean yeah you know and
47:12
on anti-work sort of anti-cult corporate and so on yeah well you’re bringing that work
47:17
because they worked hard to build this right but it wasn’t it was a kind of anti-capitalist way
47:24
of defining uh and temporalizing work and especially about claiming a space
47:29
without it being property per se um no i think it’s very interesting because i mean it is
47:35
as you say very much about that specific real estate uh situation that’s still going on
47:42
there i mean and maybe oh well it must be changing now in the united states in some ways
47:47
people talking about um people moving out of the big cities because of covet
47:54
yeah i mean uh the hottest uh one of the hottest markets for uh homes is actually new northern new
48:01
jersey because so many new yorkers are just leaving right yeah more affordable than you know
48:06
hudson valley so and even philadelphia is is booming real estate the periphery of philadelphia
48:13
because you know you can take an amtrak train ten minutes from where i live i live in the suburbs and get off at
48:19
penn station within an hour and 10 minutes no that’s i mean i think that’s that’s
Walterdale Bridge
48:25
very interesting the idea both of the overheated market that this piece helped to represent and also um
48:34
it’s possible at least aggravation let’s put it that way something like that
48:40
um why i was also something mnemonic right because you know vancouver
48:46
especially uh you know don’t doesn’t believe in mnemonic aids you know they’d rather just forget or just kind
48:54
of bury it under money and and we’ll deal with it you know that’s very true um now i want to return
49:02
turn to edmonton now this is the walter dale bridge and you’re involved in a pretty
49:09
interesting unique as far as i know type of public art project where you
49:15
were part of the design team yeah yeah it was my idea to add to passerell
49:22
it’s a very i mean i i drive over a lot and it’s very very nice and certainly replaces
49:27
something that was pretty dreadful um but of course there’s
49:32
the part of that that is not completed this is a bridge in downtown edmonton over the north
49:37
saskatchewan river heading between one of the three or four connections between the south side of
49:43
the city and the north just for for people who may not know it but there’s also this which
49:51
you designed cast had a model made it had cast and
49:59
was too much you need the plaster the original plasterers for it uh i’m very small and then some other guy enlarged it and enlarged
50:06
it but i mean and this is was to be installed on either side of the bridge right
50:11
it was it was meant to be meant to be yeah intended it’s been it’s been
50:16
sitting in a uh in this kind of uh chain-link uh lot for
50:22
uh i think owned by the admitted arts council for many years yes i know and i mean i remember i asked
50:28
you about this a few years ago um where is it where is it because i know um
50:34
catherine croston who um was on the call earlier was on the public art board when it was
50:40
approved um now you that is a contentious piece of land right
50:49
contentious piece of land what do you mean where around the walterdale bridge um no no no the the
50:56
you know i i went through um you know vetting i went through community input uh including with uh
51:01
several uh first nations uh communities and that was um that was directed that i should meet
51:09
by the edmonton arts council that was part of the procedure and so on and um for whatever and then i didn’t
51:16
hear from them for a long time because partly because the bridge was delayed like three or four years yeah yeah and then um i get
51:22
this um email that said um you know after a long time saying uh you know uh you know
51:29
maybe uh maybe this is not the right time for this to be interpreted
51:35
uh wrongly as as colonial and so on and i said what is about coloniality
51:41
right it is it’s about it it’s called the last buffalo in the last buffalo hunt no no um the the buffalo and the buffalo
51:49
fur trader oh for trader okay yeah he’s he’s it’s actually the the fur traders actually
51:55
he’s sitting on uh buffalo pellets yeah it’s a famous picture right really at the apogee of um the
52:02
demise of the buffalo the near demise of the buffalo and um and i wanted to have
52:08
one side of the river and and the and the other one on the other side of the river and they’re very tall they’re like you
52:14
know 11 half feet to 13 feet tall and um and they’re looking at each other as you uh cross the passerallis as a
52:21
pedestrian and i wanted to speak about this dialectic can i still use that term or
52:26
that people could do well no no no no we’re not post marxist yet
52:32
okay i want to speak uh about this dialectic um about um you know
52:39
um one way of uh you know little of wisdom about how we should live
52:47
you know epitomized by the buffalo and so on and then the kind of rapacious you know business person
52:54
on the other side you know which is still the relationship we have colonizer and colonize
53:01
nature nature itself is also colonized and so what i thought that’s right yeah so i was interested in
53:06
that that question right and uh and that but you know in the judgment of the edmonton arts
53:13
council they say that they’ve talked to all kinds of groups and so on including first nations and
53:19
and uh it may be read as as uh as a kind of affirmation of
53:26
colonialism which i want i don’t know well what’s interesting is uh that
53:33
in the old uh royal alberta museum you would go in and there were huge bronze
53:38
statues and celebrating colonization spirit which is still really active here
53:45
and um i can’t i guess i just can’t imagine it’s pretty brutal
53:52
anyone ever done a kind of brutal depiction of of someone that was a buffalo killer on
53:57
mass for money right so is it about like i said earlier is it about
54:04
coloniality yeah it’s about that condition sure well being the real condition
54:10
that’s what it’s about right but i also found it interesting that with this and with this piece and there you are
54:17
charmingly um you know you’ve gone from i mean by the way i’m in the blue coat well
Retired Draft Force
54:25
yeah you’re not the horse um how you’ve gone from
54:30
as you say a kind of reliance on strategies from the neo
54:36
avant-garde of the 60s and 70s and with these two pieces you’ve returned you’ve turned two and in other
54:42
pieces you’ve turned to one of the most classic and conventional modes of monument
54:50
right yeah and and and if you look at kenny wiley and all these kind of american artists they’re all doing bronzes too
54:57
yeah i know i think right mark quinn and so on and so i i no i was uh but but you know
55:04
to be uh you know clear i’m working in the public realm which is which has different demands i’m
55:10
not working at you know uh you know some uh sculpture park you know i’m working in a context which
55:18
is very widely public right and so i it requires different registrations of accessibility
55:24
and legibility yeah i was going to say to make it intelligible and this too i
55:30
mean like the buffalo piece this is a kind of piece about colonialism yeah well it’s
55:37
about the kind of uh yeah it’s called the retired draft force and the last pull log what you don’t see is
55:43
maybe about the 10 meters behind is a is the is a log with a big chain that’s being
55:48
snapped off the yoke presumably uh somehow broke and and the horse is kind of in this improbable position of
55:55
sitting like a sentinel taking in the passing traffic which is uh king’s way in burnaby so i was
56:02
interested in this moment of um you know when kingsway was a very important uh agrarian uh you know
56:10
by a conduit for transporting of goods right and of course before that it was just it
56:16
was forced it was first nations and and so on so i was kind of interested in that transitional moment
56:22
yeah and this is also i mean i know something about horses from my partner and our daughter riding
56:29
horses don’t like to sit like this no they in fact they don’t sit like that and um you may see pictures of horses
56:36
sitting on on the internet but that’s only because the camera captured the horse on the way
56:41
from up yeah one way upward one all the way down way down yeah so i mean i think i think it’s quite an
56:47
interesting piece in that stasis as you say that legibility um
56:53
which not all public art addresses at all um
57:01
maybe this is time to talk a bit about monument lab sure um it’s a very interesting project
57:07
you want to describe what it is yeah monument lab started when i first moved to philadelphia in 2012 it’s
57:12
almost a decade there now it’s interesting monumental uh inventory that dotted the city there’s
57:20
over a thousand statues in philadelphia you know because philadelphia was founded in 1640s
57:26
or 47 something like that and what’s the most powerful city in the in the united states until
57:32
the early 19th century uh it was one of the most powerful new york already you know uh more powerful at
57:40
some point right in the 19th century but it was certainly very important right if you look at the philadelphia
57:46
story spencer tracy and kate hepburn you know it’s it’s basically that in new
57:51
york right and um and so uh but i was kind of interested in the
57:57
unevenness i guess uh in the system of representation i was interested in the questions of
58:03
well who gets represented who doesn’t get represented i happened when i first moved uh uh there with my family i i live very
58:10
near the uh uh home of uh billie holiday you know the great jazz singer really yeah
58:15
this beautiful voice and so i saw his little marker right oh this is billy holliday’s home
58:21
was born here and it’s kind of stuff philadelphia and so i went oh wow okay great right and then i
58:27
uh walked up to city hall not not that far away and i see this big statue of john wanamaker whom no one
58:34
would know but you know he was a department store uh business person who of the name of the
58:40
eponymous lawmakers department store and of course you know i’m not saying he didn’t deserve recognition i suppose i’m
58:47
saying billy holladay certainly did you know and it was that unevenness i was kind of interested in
58:53
that that sparked um a dialogue i had with a a professor i met
58:58
in urban studies at penn and uh he was teaching about this and and then
59:04
i said you know you know what i’ve always been interested in is doing a kind of exhibition uh called the negative history
59:10
exhibition and just about the negative history history that’s you know that should be should be better
59:16
known should be acknowledged should be voices that should be heated and has never been heated
59:22
and so on and um well it it it’s a long story but it the result
59:27
was monument lab and it’s uh and it’s become incredibly um gratifying
59:33
right because we’ve uh you know received a four million dollar uh melon foundation uh that’s great
59:39
right we are uh probably going to get uh i can’t i’m not supposed to say but it’s a million a quarter from another foundation and so
59:46
on and uh we’ve grown to uh maybe about 25 to 30 people it’s a collective and
59:52
and we’re doing all kinds of projects including in uh antwerp munich uh you know amsterdam
59:58
so across the pond it’s also incredibly prescient yeah we’ve been seeing the the
1:00:05
protests monuments and yeah and also i mean i don’t i’ve only been in philadelphia twice
1:00:12
but i was kind of struck by it and washington dc too as being quite southern in a way
1:00:21
yeah well the accents and the the accents and the some of the layouts of the streets and
1:00:27
things like that well philadelphia was just north of the mason-dixon line which was basically the
1:00:32
historical line uh dividing north and south and in fact if you cross the delaware river
1:00:37
into south jersey which is parallel with philadelphia they were they were on the side of confederates
1:00:43
right so it’s uh right and um yeah so you know like since october i’ve done 42
1:00:50
uh webinars right and probably about over 30 of them work was on around monuments and
1:00:57
including uh just you know disposing of confederate monuments and renaming projects and and so on
1:01:05
no i think it’s it’s a very interesting and um
1:01:11
nicely public revisionism you know it’s not just like oh no i’m always interested let’s change
1:01:17
the institution the museum yeah i’m always interested in reinventing myself you know i mean i think that’s all i’m
1:01:24
also interested in in personal reinvention right because you know like like the uh like the buddha says if you
1:01:30
do not change direction you may end up where you are heading right yes well talking about that
1:01:38
i mean i this was this only slide i could find from the early or gallery and it just happens to be your
1:01:44
work that you did you curate this yourself yeah of course did you think about it
1:01:52
i was running the space yeah yeah and so someone who writes a face like i thought
1:01:57
hey i got a right to show my people i was living in the back and upstairs yes and this was
1:02:03
in the ore gallery on franklin street before it received government funding it was
1:02:08
self-funded no funding in fact the canada council actually wrote to me uh thinking the
1:02:15
gracious of them i guess it was well we know so you’ve had this gallery now and and uh you know we’re really
1:02:21
interested and you know you can uh get funding for this and i said no thanks and they said what they said you can
1:02:28
apply for a grant you and i said i’m not interested you just have to that’s right they were confounded by that i was not interested
1:02:34
in any funding i funded it myself i i made the i mean there was it was a
1:02:40
for a short time a gallery uh for uh la juan and uh sarah laden had called the
1:02:45
courage of lassie’s band but i was the one that put in lights i made the space much more perfect
1:02:51
gallery-like the gray floor i was the person that did all that and then also had a real program
1:02:58
yeah and of course it did get started getting funding a few years later after it went
1:03:03
down historic yeah story of my life uh you know it’s like i’m not like manuel i i i told my
1:03:10
partner there paul farber said i can’t get my keep get i don’t have enough time and energy to
1:03:16
be so involved now i’m so successful they’ve received so much funding right
1:03:22
yeah but sure there’s a lot of administration you need to pay me and stuff
1:03:27
anyway i thought i’d bring this in because of your history in curating and also i believe
1:03:34
maybe i don’t remember you did a show in a shopping mall poco rococo in um
1:03:41
port coquitlam where you took youngest young school students students and to show
1:03:49
their work yeah from poco high school oh okay we already know high school and you showed other
1:03:55
professional artists working with artists from you know like uh what’s the name jim cummings and
1:04:00
remember bro brain eater leader yeah all the kind of artists i thought um not necessarily i liked the work i
1:04:06
liked him but that i thought had some relationship to to suburbia to high school kids no i
1:04:13
thought that is again a terribly prescient project now from that
1:04:21
i think uh we’re probably close to limit just just in case i think yeah we’ve just got a couple slides left but um
1:04:27
maybe just talk a bit about um not just the charger you know in 2005 where you were
1:04:34
the a co-curator and you write a beautiful diary about the
1:04:39
situation of being a curator and it reminded me of quatermark medina saying that curation is the um art of
1:04:47
compromise and i thought that’s a good thing and also um but you were
1:04:53
very involved well maybe it’s a compromise of art
1:05:00
in um you taught in places like in martinique
1:05:06
you travel to africa you worked with oakwood on an african show you did this to be an
1:05:12
owl and stuff like that so you’re part of that global i did a i organized a conference for the uh
1:05:18
havana biannual um and uh yeah i taught in china and hangzhou
1:05:24
and uh you know i lived i spent a lot of time in in um in sharjah for uh you know close to two
1:05:30
years um yeah i mean one of those one of the kind of cosmopolitan
1:05:38
art people of the arts i don’t know i don’t want to be and i
1:05:44
don’t mean that in that i grew up in strathcorner to you know i don’t know if i’m cosmopolitan right
1:05:50
but i meant in terms of this travel and uh collaboration and
1:05:57
um yeah you know the sort of and mostly on i would say on the good
1:06:02
side of exhibitions as opposed to the art fairs being the other side yeah um where you often decry the art world
1:06:10
in your book in the earth system as you say which you see is financial as opposed to call it
1:06:17
commercial um i hope it was more these places
1:06:23
places like the emirates and china are now very contentious
1:06:28
politically they were contentious at the time i mean the uh exploitation of especially you know uh dark skinned
1:06:36
people in in the uae is really terrible and you said i think in your diary you said that many
1:06:42
of the workers were from india is that right yeah from kerala which is in the south of india
1:06:47
oh yeah yeah yeah okay and i’m not a very and they have they have health care yeah no rights right but they were there
1:06:53
of course because uh you know the money they get there which is a fraction of what emiratis got
1:06:59
is still way more than they would get if they were in south india but their spouses could not be there
1:07:05
their children could not be there so they’re there for the duration of the multi-year contract
1:07:11
okay i just want to touch on that maybe someone else asks questions but i want these two publishing projects
1:07:19
you were the founding editor of issue the journal of contemporary chinese art
1:07:26
and you’ve just published this book everything is relevant writings on art and life now i
1:07:32
was looking at that subtitle and of course what did it come into my mind but someone i wouldn’t associate you with
1:07:39
which is only cap realm the blurring between art and life in his
1:07:44
his collected writings um i thought you’re going to say peter berger or something
1:07:50
oh the sublation of art life no i wasn’t thinking of that but anyway
1:07:55
um it’s i mean it’s interesting you did turn to writing mostly in the 90s
1:08:01
um i remember the first thing i read of yours was in the 1989 catalog from winnipeg with those
1:08:07
three sort of autobiographical pieces that really sort of reset certainly my ideas
1:08:13
about what you’re up to um and then you’re continuing on with this some uh
1:08:19
a quite good uh art or historical article on the raft of the
1:08:24
medusa by jericho um appreciations of
1:08:30
fellow artists um and then some a lot of uh discussion about
1:08:36
globalization and nationalism including quite a good essay on canadian nationalism
1:08:44
and uh cultural nationalism um
1:08:50
yeah it’s a big yes and i see also i mean you you talked at the beginning about the path
1:08:56
and so we can see here a path of sorts yeah it’s it’s a path in
1:09:02
paralysis cemetery in paris i thought
1:09:09
and the idea about with issue about going to in the 2000s turning towards writing uh
1:09:15
having a journal explicitly given over to in english to contemporary chinese art
1:09:24
but which you also write about and their education system and so on in a very interesting way um
1:09:31
now these are i kind of kind of parallel
1:09:37
your position but also as you say you record uh some moments of dissolution
1:09:44
um i remember actually being you being with you in paris in 1996 when you were teaching your day
1:09:51
call and um you were having i remember you were confessing saying you were having a rough time yeah
1:09:58
um and this is also when you started turning more to international projects i mean that would
1:10:04
be in paris for a year i mean that must have been great but i mean going to farther afield i’m actually in
1:10:09
paris two years but really okay but the yeah i mean
1:10:15
i wanted this i i was still interested in art at least the ideals of art right and um
1:10:21
and i was not in a good mental state at that time and uh
1:10:28
i wanted to recuperate something of uh what was it about art i liked and uh and so i
1:10:35
started asking myself uh questions about where else is there art is this all there is to art and um i
1:10:43
remember meeting oakley and wesler at that time in paris and uh he was like i had to buy him a
1:10:48
meal because he had no money his new guy and no one went to his talk right uh and uh i went to it was a lunch
1:10:56
hour talk and i want this guy’s amazing right and i remember
1:11:01
i wanted i said i i said to myself i need to know this guy and i need to be uh you know i need to work with this guy
1:11:09
you know as a it was more like a kind of lifesaver i saw something in him that made things
1:11:14
possible for me that’s great i think katherine’s going to come in with some questions but i
1:11:20
just want to finish with this which is kind of congratulations on this right the renaming of the vit of it uh
1:11:27
as the constitute melee yeah based on this piece yeah that’s a whole other story that’s a real honor i think
1:11:35
thanks as an anti-colonialist project as well so it keeps on themes that you’re
1:11:40
interested in hi catherine hi thank you both um
1:11:46
actually there are no questions in the chat so um okay
1:11:51
if you want to talk ken about the name the new naming of the wit bit with this that would be i think people
1:11:58
would be interested in that and bill you need to sit close to the camera because you’re in the dark now
1:12:03
i told you it’s going to get dark this happened only a few days ago the formalization of the name change because
1:12:09
the it was the formerly known as the victovit center for contemporary art uh was named
1:12:17
after not named after with david who is like uh which by the way means whiter than white
1:12:24
that was a colonial officer with the east uh dutch east india company and which was a
1:12:30
proponent of um you know transactions of bodies right slaves and so on and so a problematic figure but the
1:12:37
reason why uh it was named with david at that time was um
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in 1990 was uh it was situated on with strat or
1:12:49
street and at that time this building uh was in a very somewhat
1:12:57
sketchy part of town quite isolated from downtown and now
1:13:02
it’s virtually the center of hipsterville there and and so on so you know because of the
1:13:08
kind of uh social reckoning uh that’s taking place worldwide
1:13:14
right uh blm and uh by park and and me too and so on um
1:13:20
you know they they had they did a search for a new name uh starting a process
1:13:26
started about three years ago and uh and then in the end they they said they called me and said we’d
1:13:31
like to call it the art muse or the kunst institute or the art institute nelly
1:13:37
right i said great and it’s because you know this work has been on the side of the museum since
1:13:44
the inaugural exhibition that was the inaugural exhibitor for the formerly known as with the center for contemporary art
1:13:50
and it was a billboard there was a there was a billboard frame there and they had this idea to um they had
1:13:56
this idea to uh you know advertise the show right and for whatever reasons i have no idea
1:14:01
i’m glad i did make that decision um they they said well we’d like to show like uh an image belly shaman you’ll
1:14:08
have your names and mom and dates of the show and so on and now accompany every show and i said
1:14:14
um how about just the work without my name without any other extraneous information and they said
1:14:21
sure so they put it up and then when my show came down two and a half months later they the billboard came down and then when
1:14:27
the billboard came down uh the width of it received a lot of
1:14:32
phone calls and even letters demanding it be put back
1:14:37
obviously i didn’t anticipate and then i received a phone call in vancouver and from one of the
1:14:44
officials not the curator one of the officials there and and and uh i said after a conversation i said why what’s going on
1:14:50
right i remember being stunned by and he said well the best uh reason uh
1:14:56
for the demand to put it back up is came from one woman who said every city needs a monument to people who hate
1:15:02
their jobs [Laughter] you know so it’s been up since and since
1:15:09
then it’s been hundreds and hundreds of images on flickr facebook page and
1:15:14
um you know it’s uh there’s a conference in terms of job dissatisfaction at harvard university a few years ago
1:15:20
and they they use this money they asked the rights for the image to as part of the poster and
1:15:26
it it’s taking on a life of its own so it’s great it’s now the melee art institute
1:15:32
that’s great so any questions yeah there is a question that just came in um the question is hi
1:15:39
ken i wonder your work is a straightforward response to racism and stereotypes of all races
1:15:47
for example your artist book speculations there is no place like home 2010
1:15:52
and coming soon and also some of the works in the portrait text series um
1:16:01
it’s a it’s a response to the uh to the fact that humanity is comprised of
1:16:06
many many different shades of color and and many differences in terms of gender and many other differences in
1:16:13
terms of whatever and so it’s a response to to that right but i but i am also also very
1:16:20
interested in the way in which uh you know certain imaginings of race
1:16:26
takes place and they become internalized become naturalized and they become even uh tropes so i’m interested in that
1:16:33
but i’m also but i’m not just interested in replaying that i’m interested in
1:16:39
challenging it upsetting it right so the way to upset that is to dislodge the fixity of those
1:16:47
tropes is to um is to you know throw doubt into uh your stereotypic forms
1:16:56
thank you uh there is no other there are a number of thanks but no other questions
1:17:05
so should we wrap it up yeah well with that i would just thank you very much ken yeah thank you
1:17:11
bill enjoyable thank you family yeah come to
1:17:16
philadelphia where it’s uh cold and uh two degrees celsius here
1:17:23
anyway on behalf of um the art gallery of alberta and all of our audience members thank you both
1:17:30
uh for being here today i want to give a shout out to serge gobold i can’t see his name there if he’s still there hi
1:17:35
sarish how are you and michael turner as well yeah michael
1:17:41
turner actually had a question that maybe i’ll convey to you
1:17:47
through the chat um yeah anyway again thank you both thank you very much
1:17:52
ken and thank you for um all that you are doing for artists for in canada and abroad and
1:18:00
it’s wonderful to have this opportunity to have you here uh speaking with us thank you so again thank you very much and congratulations
1:18:06
on the constitute mellie and also on the governor general’s award thank you cheers goodnight everybody
1:18:14
see you later
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