One More Istvan Kantor Article
Mar. 12th, 2004 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ltmurnauOK, I found this much better and more balanced opinion piece in the Globe and Mail yesterday. I'll stop now:
By RUSSELL SMITH
Thursday, March 11, 2004 - Page R1
It is refreshing that artists can still shock, even when they're doing something as established, indeed as familiar, as body-oriented performance art. It is encouraging to see that new art still has the power to catch someone's attention outside the world of art schools and galleries. It's a remarkable achievement in a world of public discourse that has almost dismissed visual art as exclusive and impenetrable.
A lot of media have suddenly taken notice of an artist who has been well-known in Canada since the 1970s. They have taken notice because he was recently awarded the Governor-General's Award for visual art. Now that they have taken notice, they have decided they don't like him, that he is a charlatan and an outrage and a waste of taxpayers' money.
The artist is Istvan Kantor, who makes videos and performances and sound and automated machinery. The attacks have been in The Ottawa Citizen, The Calgary Herald, across the Web in raging blogs, even here in The Globe in a mild but bemused editorial.
Of course, very little of his work is being discussed by the outraged columnists; they are peculiarly preoccupied with one series of acts that he did in the early 1990s that involved using his own blood in various performances.
The act that repeatedly comes up in coverage of his prize is an "intervention" that Kantor did, in the grand Dadaist/Situationist tradition, in the National Gallery in Ottawa (and again at the MoMA in New York) that involved throwing his own blood at the walls. For this he was expelled from the gallery and banned for life.
This rather juvenile act of rebellion, part of a tradition of body-art that has many august antecedents now in reference books, is not representative, on its own, of the large body of work that Kantor has built.
Although the gallery violence is typical of Kantor's aggressive anti-authoritarian stance, and his fearlessness about transgression of all kinds, there is a lot more to him than this standard Dadaist act. His work distills rage and noise into terrifying and exciting performances, usually concentrating on a body struggling to be human in a world of technological repression.
He founded the Machine Sex Action Group, a performance group whose members get naked, then get strapped up with wires and prostheses so that they look like fleshy robots; they then writhe together in a concert of rhythmic industrial sound and simulated agony. (You can get a brief glimpse of one of his videos at http://www.machinesexactiongroup.com.) Kantor's bodies are machines and his machines bodies; it is never clear which one controls the other.
One of his favourite visual motifs is the filing cabinet, an image of office banality, of utter blandness -- and also of information storage, which is important to his view of the world as a massive surveillance system. The filing cabinet becomes a kind of monster in his robot installations. Kantor has made an incredible metal machine, which opens and slams shut the drawers of a filing cabinet. It looks sort of insectoid, and its violent (and incredibly noisy) actions are unmistakably sexual; its frenetic thrusting is a kind of nonsensical rape.
Kantor's visual world is both frightening and humorously parodic, just like violent Hollywood movies. Indeed, his work is so accessible it crosses the line between high art and fun.
For example, his sample-heavy, pounding soundtracks for these intensely edited videos are just a loop away from the world of industrial dance music. He is a craftsman, too, who could easily make a mint in the commercial world: The editing of sound and video that he accomplishes makes the work intriguing.
In this he differs, interestingly, from several of the other laureates for this year's G-G prize. Four of the seven winners (Garry Neill Kennedy, Ian Wallace, Iain Baxter and Eric Cameron) are old-fashioned conceptualists. Most of them made their names in the seventies doing things that are interesting as ideas and not necessary to see. They certainly don't do anything shocking; their work is not about the themes that preoccupy Istvan Kantor -- sex, compulsion, technology, aggression, repression -- but about far more abstract and arcane concerns, such as the history of art and the nature of representation. This is the stuff that still obsesses contemporary galleries, such as Toronto's Power Plant, the stuff that fills such places with, say, static video in which there is no blood or sex or violence, but rather, say, two actors standing still and a voice-over reading a Marxist philosopher, or German phrases spelled out with mirrors -- and, usually, pages and pages of theoretical explanatory text.
This is precisely the cold and non-visceral stuff that has turned the public off art. Giving Istvan Kantor's bloody work a prize is important precisely because our other famous artists are so bloodless.
Of course, the objectors to Kantor's work would probably object to all the others' as well, if they paid any attention to it. One writer who did dismiss it as representative of all the worst excesses of contemporary art was that Calgary Herald writer, one Don Martin, who is still upset about the purchase of Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire. He mocks abstraction and conceptualism alike. Kantor's work was particularly upsetting to Martin because, during a blood-throwing incident in New York, Kantor got a spot of blood on a Picasso. Martin called this "unforgivable."
He likes Picasso? What does he like about Picasso? Picasso's rebellious stance? The way his paintings combine the abstract and the figurative? The way they are not easily interpretable? That fact that he was derided by the mainstream media at the time of Cubism for being a fraud and a non-artist? I wonder if Don Martin would have been one of Picasso's defenders at that time.
I somehow doubt it. I don't even think that he can see that the shock artists of today often make it into the museums of tomorrow.
You can see an animation of the drawer-slamming machine, and other documentation of Kantor's upsetting and stimulating work, at http://www.interlog.com{tilde}amen.
By RUSSELL SMITH
Thursday, March 11, 2004 - Page R1
It is refreshing that artists can still shock, even when they're doing something as established, indeed as familiar, as body-oriented performance art. It is encouraging to see that new art still has the power to catch someone's attention outside the world of art schools and galleries. It's a remarkable achievement in a world of public discourse that has almost dismissed visual art as exclusive and impenetrable.
A lot of media have suddenly taken notice of an artist who has been well-known in Canada since the 1970s. They have taken notice because he was recently awarded the Governor-General's Award for visual art. Now that they have taken notice, they have decided they don't like him, that he is a charlatan and an outrage and a waste of taxpayers' money.
The artist is Istvan Kantor, who makes videos and performances and sound and automated machinery. The attacks have been in The Ottawa Citizen, The Calgary Herald, across the Web in raging blogs, even here in The Globe in a mild but bemused editorial.
Of course, very little of his work is being discussed by the outraged columnists; they are peculiarly preoccupied with one series of acts that he did in the early 1990s that involved using his own blood in various performances.
The act that repeatedly comes up in coverage of his prize is an "intervention" that Kantor did, in the grand Dadaist/Situationist tradition, in the National Gallery in Ottawa (and again at the MoMA in New York) that involved throwing his own blood at the walls. For this he was expelled from the gallery and banned for life.
This rather juvenile act of rebellion, part of a tradition of body-art that has many august antecedents now in reference books, is not representative, on its own, of the large body of work that Kantor has built.
Although the gallery violence is typical of Kantor's aggressive anti-authoritarian stance, and his fearlessness about transgression of all kinds, there is a lot more to him than this standard Dadaist act. His work distills rage and noise into terrifying and exciting performances, usually concentrating on a body struggling to be human in a world of technological repression.
He founded the Machine Sex Action Group, a performance group whose members get naked, then get strapped up with wires and prostheses so that they look like fleshy robots; they then writhe together in a concert of rhythmic industrial sound and simulated agony. (You can get a brief glimpse of one of his videos at http://www.machinesexactiongroup.com.) Kantor's bodies are machines and his machines bodies; it is never clear which one controls the other.
One of his favourite visual motifs is the filing cabinet, an image of office banality, of utter blandness -- and also of information storage, which is important to his view of the world as a massive surveillance system. The filing cabinet becomes a kind of monster in his robot installations. Kantor has made an incredible metal machine, which opens and slams shut the drawers of a filing cabinet. It looks sort of insectoid, and its violent (and incredibly noisy) actions are unmistakably sexual; its frenetic thrusting is a kind of nonsensical rape.
Kantor's visual world is both frightening and humorously parodic, just like violent Hollywood movies. Indeed, his work is so accessible it crosses the line between high art and fun.
For example, his sample-heavy, pounding soundtracks for these intensely edited videos are just a loop away from the world of industrial dance music. He is a craftsman, too, who could easily make a mint in the commercial world: The editing of sound and video that he accomplishes makes the work intriguing.
In this he differs, interestingly, from several of the other laureates for this year's G-G prize. Four of the seven winners (Garry Neill Kennedy, Ian Wallace, Iain Baxter and Eric Cameron) are old-fashioned conceptualists. Most of them made their names in the seventies doing things that are interesting as ideas and not necessary to see. They certainly don't do anything shocking; their work is not about the themes that preoccupy Istvan Kantor -- sex, compulsion, technology, aggression, repression -- but about far more abstract and arcane concerns, such as the history of art and the nature of representation. This is the stuff that still obsesses contemporary galleries, such as Toronto's Power Plant, the stuff that fills such places with, say, static video in which there is no blood or sex or violence, but rather, say, two actors standing still and a voice-over reading a Marxist philosopher, or German phrases spelled out with mirrors -- and, usually, pages and pages of theoretical explanatory text.
This is precisely the cold and non-visceral stuff that has turned the public off art. Giving Istvan Kantor's bloody work a prize is important precisely because our other famous artists are so bloodless.
Of course, the objectors to Kantor's work would probably object to all the others' as well, if they paid any attention to it. One writer who did dismiss it as representative of all the worst excesses of contemporary art was that Calgary Herald writer, one Don Martin, who is still upset about the purchase of Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire. He mocks abstraction and conceptualism alike. Kantor's work was particularly upsetting to Martin because, during a blood-throwing incident in New York, Kantor got a spot of blood on a Picasso. Martin called this "unforgivable."
He likes Picasso? What does he like about Picasso? Picasso's rebellious stance? The way his paintings combine the abstract and the figurative? The way they are not easily interpretable? That fact that he was derided by the mainstream media at the time of Cubism for being a fraud and a non-artist? I wonder if Don Martin would have been one of Picasso's defenders at that time.
I somehow doubt it. I don't even think that he can see that the shock artists of today often make it into the museums of tomorrow.
You can see an animation of the drawer-slamming machine, and other documentation of Kantor's upsetting and stimulating work, at http://www.interlog.com{tilde}amen.
