Culture - Q: What Is Art?

Some people understand particle physics, others claim a grasp of middle eastern politics, but does anyone comprehend contemporary art? The question is particularly apt in Vancouver, which has recently arrived as a truly global centre for art’s contemporary variation. Dozens of artists from the city now travel a circuit that takes them through galleries in New York, London and Berlin and back home again. Three of the many are Stan Douglas, Brian Jungen and Myfanwy Macleod, each of whom showed in Vancouver during 2006 and may still be viewed at galleries around town. (most galleries specializing in contemporary art can be found on or near Granville Street between Sixth and 14th avenues.)

Art capitals don’t arise from nothing, and Vancouver’s current status is generally traced to the artists of the Vancouver School, photoconceptualists who first began to make their names in the 1970s. It comes as a shock to many that, globally speaking, Stan Douglas is the second-best-known Canadian artist ever — right after fellow Vancouver Schooler Jeff Wall, whom they may not have heard of either. Shocking but true. Wall’s photographs hang in the world’s most important galleries alongside Warhols and Picassos. The intensely cerebral douglas attracts a similar degree of critical awe even if he has yet to get a one-man show at London’s Tate, as Wall did in 2005.

In general terms contemporary art need not be primarily concerned with artists’ ancient roles as documenters of reality or creators of beautiful objects, especially paintings and sculptures. Rather it’s more about using any and all media in a thoughtful and thought-provoking way. That said, the photographs in Douglas’s recent Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery show, Inconsolable Memories, both capture the realities of today’s Cuba and radiate an intense beauty. Like many of his Vancouver colleagues, Douglas uses a large-format camera to create great depth of field so that distant details are much sharper than can be seen with the human eye. The effect is furthered by the photographs’ large size and luminous reproduction (here on a medium known as honeycomb aluminum), leaving the viewer transfixed without quite knowing why.

At one time beautifully crafted photographs of an exotic place would have been more than enough for a show. But the contemporary world wants more. Douglas works in film as much as photography, and for this show he made one of those as well. It had plot, characters and a historical context as well as production values comparable to anything you’d see at a film festival, but if it were just a film it would be slightly suspect inside an art gallery; the showing looped together films of different length to confront the viewer with “existential questions about time.” Further distancing Douglas from traditional artistic concerns were the themes that underlie the work. As is the case with most of what he does, Inconsolable Memories had less to do with aesthetics than with history, politics and, yes and especially, with economics. These pictures are worth a thousand big words.

The works of Brian Jungen also say a lot, though oddly they seem to require no explanation at all. In his best-known series — northwest coast masks fashioned from Air Jordans and lifelike whale skeletons made from plastic patio chairs — the ideas are conveyed so instantly and well that talking about them is almost belabouring the point. Fortunately it turns out that Jungen has been up to other things as well, if for no other reason than that he has been showered with shows and he makes a point of producing a new and appropriate piece for each one.

Just 35, Jungen has already received a career retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a touring show that opened in New York and later went back east to other cities. With a reputation to uphold, Jungen says he felt the pressure to come up with something good for a star turn in his adopted hometown. (Born into a mixed aboriginal and European family, he grew up near Fort St. John, in B.C.’s northeast.) In New York he carved baseball bats; for an earlier stop in Montreal he produced a cat habitat modelled after Moshe Safdie’s human version. During the show the SPCA housed its strays there, and gallery goers who adopted a cat got to cart it home in boxes Jungen made for the purpose. Having previously debuted both his masks and whales at smaller Vancouver shows, he knew he had a hard act to follow.

In the days before the show’s opening, and still without his big idea, Jungen found himself inside a chain store specializing in inexpensive furniture, where he found himself staring at the rows of lumpy leather sofas and marvelling at how much they looked like the herds of cattle he remembered from his childhood on the farm.

Another early memory was of the teepees, covered in cowhide, that functioned as both symbolic and practical meeting places at native gatherings the family regularly attended. Jungen purchased 11 sofas, disassembled them and, using nothing but the leather and wood from the furniture, constructed a giant teepee which became the centrepiece of the show. The teepee is simply called Furniture Sculpture; the medium is described as “11 leather sofas.” What more need be said?

And then there is Myfanwy Macleod, who produces objects, installations and even the odd performance that are certainly unforgettable if not so instantly understandable. Her 2006 show at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Where I Lived and What I Lived For, took its name from a chapter in Thoreau’s Walden. This was no romantic reverie, though there was a sense that Macleod shares Thoreau’s discomfort with the interplay of humans and the natural world. Among the components were drawings inspired by photographs of marijuana grow-ops she found on a website, a world of rot, mould and other things that suggest a backward trend in the course of human affairs. Also on display were photographs taken during an artist’s residency in Scotland, where Myfanwy found herself transfixed by depopulating rural areas and abandoned houses. Already committed to the CAG show with its grow-op theme, she started making photographs of dusty corners, stained bathtubs and rotting woodwork.

Photographs and drawings are well enough, but contemporary art demands something more. In this case it was to be a functional mushroom-growing operation erected on site. The fungi would emerge from their culture, reaching maturity by the time the show closed. For practical reasons the grow-op gave way to a large panel smeared with ground vegetables and allowed to mould. But had Macleod’s mushroom operation been built, she would have hired someone to do it, as she has with other works constructed of wood, an enormous outhouse being one of the best-known.

All these artists treat their work as industrial enterprises requiring a certain degree of division of labour. Jeff Wall is famous for taking months and employing dozens in the production of a single photograph. Jungen maintains a studio of four to five people to produce his creations, and one of the photographs in Douglas’s show was a view of the elaborate set used for interior scenes in the film, producing in viewers a flash of recognition about the scope of the production. Artists are increasingly understood to be academically trained practitioners who conceive ideas and marshall the resources to produce them rather than wielders of chisel or brush. In this they are not so different from the Renaissance masters, who employed teams of painters to do their work.

Of course, there is another similarity between the most successful contemporary artists and people like Rembrandt. Much of their work is not produced for an easily defined art market, as was the case for 20th century painters and sculptors, but rather takes the form of site-specific installations created for a specific client — a patron by any other name. For all its confusion and cussedness, contemporary art flows quite naturally from art of the past.