Two Rivers at Matanzas, 2013, 61 x 64 cms

Ottawa City Centre c.1997, collection, Canada Council Art Bank, 2003

The City Center is a mixed office industrial complex in west end Ottawa. It was described in the Ottawa Citizen as the ugliest building in the city. As a structure it is pretty brutal with loading docks and a railway spur line, but in c.1997 I used it as the local for a large work in my Government Building series. My intention was to make a broadly metaphorical picture on the conflict between capital and social consciousness as mediated by governance and architecture. 

The building is clear in parts showing three Ottawa landscapes behind it, a starry sky over the river, Place du Portage from the Parkway and Parliament Hill. Beginning with the super fast elevator the composition rises through orders of rational scientific, religious moralistic and idealized images of capital to a final conflagration of conflicted interests on the top floor, all set against a calm nighttime sky.      

This is a transitional work and is more connected to my late 80’s Nova Scotia Landscapes, like Ice on the Northwest Arm and Saint Anne’s Bay from Englishtown, than to the later Government Building works like The Pearson Building (all that is high will come down low) or The Kingston Penitentiary. The work is a favourite of mine, because its so loaded. I’ve not attempted such a broadly metaphorical work since. The work is in the collection of the Canada Council Art Bank.

The Winnipeg Airport in 2006 (2007) 122 x 83 cms, purchased 2013, Department of Foreign Affaires and International Trade, Ottawa

At work on a new overhead view 27/01/13

Pointe St Charles, 2012 , 69 x 122 cm

64 Points on The Railway Between Halifax and Montreal, 2012, in Stages

The first overhead view picture is called Terre des hommes. It was constructed at 9 Villeneuve O. in Montreal c. 1990. It is metaphorical view of Montreal and the Expo islands from 1967 to 1970, but it not a true overhead view as the perspective shifts in the picture from the islands to a horizontal view of the Montreal skyline stretching east and west, with a blazing sunset.

The second overhead view was also made in Montreal, probably in 1991. The work is titled Sur Montreal une nuite d’hivere and like Terre des hommes, has two vanishing points. This picture depicts the center of the island from Longueuil to Laval and traces Boulivard St. Laurent as I saw it flying into Dorval on a winter night.

The first proper overhead view was constructed in 1992 at 142 Forward Avenue, an Ottawa rooming house and is titled Grey Halifax. Like Sure Montreal une Nuite d’hivere, Grey Halifax was made with a map and rendered metaphorically correct, as all maps despite their claim to authority are absurd approximations and in the end lies.

From 1993 to 1998 while absorbed with my Disaster Ship and Ottawa Government Building works, I let the subject stream drop. Almost as an afterthought I made The Way the Canal Worked in 1990, a view of the Rideau Canal from Dows Lake to the Ottawa River as an add-on to the Ottawa Government Buildings works. It was followed in 2001 by The Ottawa Airport from a Satellite in Space, which included Ottawa South rail lines.

As I moved into Railway Lands, the overhead views became a constant

element in the ongoing exhibition series in shows from Sackville, to Tokyo. Halifax Elevators and South End Rail Yards, 2003 followed the Ottawa airport picture, then Halifax Peninsula and Railway Lands, 2004. In 2005 I completed The Halifax Airport in 2004, for Agnes Pothier.

In 2006 I returned to a Montreal image, with Dans le Coeur de Montreal and in 2007 I made both, The Colour of London is Red and The Winnipeg Airport, though there must have been ten or eleven months between their completions. I made New York, River to Bank in 2008 and Blue Tokyo in 2010. Most of the pictures are scattered around the blog.

Its become my practice with overhead views to start the next picture soon after completing the last, then let it sit for some months to work on other things before picking it up again. So toward the end of 2010 I started 64 Points on the Railway between Halifax and Montreal. It was commissioned by my good friend Glenn McInnes and is in the collection of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton. The work is meant to describe as a visual metaphor, the train journey from Halifax to Montreal. The work is based on map and satellite views and set on a grid division of 64 squares. It’s constructed similar to the other overhead views and this description will give a good idea of how they’re all made.

Stage 1, begins with a blackened piece of floor vinyl stapled to plywood. As an actual grid is integrated into the work I started by laying out a box grid composed of 5mm aluminum strips. Normally a grid would be drawn on and streets and features would be sketched into the drawn grid. In this case I did the drawings into the aluminum grid.

Stage 2, the drawing complete, I cut out the rivers and water bodies and apply gesso in the spaces for repainting in this case in Yves Klein Blue. With the waterways complete, I lay down the road, street and railway grid in brushed aluminum strips. The sketch is worked up on a sub grid. You can see each square is numbered and gridded to correspond with a reference image. In this case satellite images from Google Maps

Stage 3, the grid is complete and I infill the large open spaces, with ochre brownish oxidized .50 mm sheet steel to represent field, forest, park and grassy areas.

Stage 4 is the most labourious, what I call the nail-bang. The populated places are represented with street rows of alternating 5mm   grey, white and black squares cut from primed and painted .50 mm aluminum sheets. Once the nail-bang is done the work is more or less complete.

I study the picture as I go along to be sure the composition is working. With 64 Points, I didn’t realize until the work was virtually complete, that the horizontal grid lines were not true, despite careful measuring at the start, so much of the left hand top line had to be adjusted.

A Senseless Assemblage

                                           Monument to Inequality, John Murchie, 1989

A Senseless Assemblage

1

In art as in philosophy there is a conflict between objective and subjective meaning in phenomena. Art works like all things in existence are supposed to either convey information objectively, be concrete, knowable and significant, or on the other hand be entirely subjective and beyond interpretation. The same holds true for perceivable groups of art objects, like in a web exhibition. Depending on your point of view, artist, enthusiast, or curator, the context for perceiving a body of work assembled from the output of one artist, or works pulled together from a multiplicity of individual artists to illustrate a theme, is fluid and no consensus as to the ultimate “meaning” of the work can be achieved, none the less, we still try to make objective sense out of groups of things. The purpose of this web exhibition is to create a condition in which we can contemplate art works, both objectively and subjectively and attempt in the process, given the logical constraint of meaning versus non-meaning, to create a synthesis.

To put this in perspective, John Murchie’s Monument to Inequality (1989), for example, is a stack of small cedar shims glued together in layers with yellow acrylic paint and is, in one objective reading, a small sculptural object apparently hand manufactured displaying a repeated process, not unlike making a multilayered birthday cake, which, to a percipient without a history of conceptual art practice in the 1970’s must appear as an example of pointless utility or perhaps a senseless assemblage. Another subjective reading, equally appropriate to the object posits it as a piece of conceptual art in which cedar shingles and paint, traditional easel painting materials, are recombined by the action of the artist’s intellect and hand to create a new kind of painting who’s content and meaning is of one order, the object itself, as Kant says, in it self. What I am suggesting is both objective and subjective readings tend toward meaninglessness either in the form of passive objectification or active subjectification. This dichotomy lies at the heart of all contemporary art practice.

 

                                Eric Tormented by a Nymph, Eliza Griffiths, undated, c.1995


2

Our understanding of art phenomena is situated, to use a computing metaphor, in binary bits of (object {1}) and (subject {0}) -tification. One strand follows the other in theory, in a quasi-metaphysical code of significance. Signification alone in a semiotic sense depends upon linguistics to create meaning and is for our reading, of a second order. The first string in the code is conscious perception followed by phenomena. For our purpose the phenomena is a piece of art. Art however is a philosophical proposition devoid of any practical significance outside of itself, so we will use an Eliza Griffiths painting as an example of synthetic art phenomena, The painting, Eric Tormented By a Nymph, undated (c. 1995) is apparently the work of one or more hands, in that the stretched canvas may have been constructed to the order of the artist. The significant part of the painting, the canvas itself is a shallow rectiline cube bearing a smooth painted surface, which has been modified with pigments. The pigments are worked together to create an illusionistic, representational image, which participates with many formal rules including colour theory and linear perspective. Starting with consciousness, objective or subjective strings link art phenomena to significant inherent modifiers that create meaning: canvas, pigment, drawing, frame etc. Each string makes the phenomenal coding more solid, but inevitably random associations; stray projections from the percipient, weaken the strings that influence meaning. For example John may own a bright red car. Subconsciously John is partial to primary colours. John views Eliza Griffiths’ paintings at the art gallery. He notes the artist’s pastel colour schemes tend to lack bright colours and therefore concludes Eliza Griffiths’ paintings do not appeal to him and may possibly not be art, despite linguistic prompts in the form of a curatorial essay, wall texts and word of mouth testimonials.


3

As a dialectical structure, meaning versus non-meaning is only an entry point into the evaluation of synthetic art phenomena. It is interesting that linear perspective and colour theory function as significant modifiers in our logical strings and suggest art phenomena is rational, ideal, reducible to mathematical structure, and is, in as much as we can understand it, like geometry, governed by axioms. Axiomatic thinking influences our reading of art phenomena most profoundly when we are not aware the axioms we habitually use are in operation. Like universals in philosophy axioms are transmitted subconsciously and are held by all collectively. Those with the ability to apply axioms to art phenomena, art historians, curator and artists, influence meaning as long as the concepts they advance are timely and generally agreed to by the percipients. The concept of post modernity for example, is built upon the axiom: everything old is new again. This axiom seems simple enough on its face, not much more than a linguistic cliché, but without the root idea, both modernity and post modernity as perceptual frameworks for art phenomena are impossible.

                                    For the Glory of the Wind and Water, Robert Frank, 1975,


 4

According to Plato Heraciltus said “Nothing ever is. Everything is in the process of becoming.” And so it is with art phenomena. Rudimentary wall markings become sophisticated illusionistic oil painting. Blocks of stone become idealized, representational sculpture, modern architecture becomes post-modern and photography is becoming art. It is crucial to the understanding of art phenomena in a modern sense to appreciate the impact of photography, by which I mean all manifestations of the photographic process including moving images, on modes of art understanding. Before 1827 photography did not exist and therefore could not be considered a form of art phenomena. After the process was demonstrated by Nicéphore Niépce in France photography rapidly found champions among axiomatic thinkers and within a decade was being conceived objectively as art phenomena. Today when we view a photographic image such as Robert Frank’s For the Glory of Wind and Water (1976), we apply our objective and subjective tests through strings of significant inherent modifiers to arrive at artistic meaning. If we follow the strings {1 + 0 + 0 + 1} to their logical conclusion, we arrive ultimately at the art manifestation as the object itself, in it self. While this synthesis is obviously an abstraction. It is crucial to point out that such an outcome was not possible before photography made actual depictions of observable reality conceivable as art phenomena. Conceptual art manifestations, particularly documentary, performative works like Dennis Oppenheim’s, Stage 1 and 2, Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn (1970) could not exist without this condition.

Stage 1 and 2, Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn, Dennis Oppenheim, 1970, Art Institute of Chicago

5

There is a theory in axiology, the study of value, which influences both ethics and aesthetics, called ideal observer theory which transcends the objective and locates subjective choice in the zone of relativity. The ideal observer is very much like the person who is reading this now. In that he or she is above average intelligence (it is a proven fact, web art gallery visitors are more intelligent than their non attending peers,) interested, in an intellectual sense, disinterested, in an ethical sense and dialectical in logic. To the ideal observer striving to create meaning for synthetic art phenomena either singularly or in groups, through strings of objective and subjective meaning referenced through significant inherent modifiers influenced by random associations, the logical outcome of such a synthesis must surely be in some sense relative to the individual consciousness in the act of contemplation. To that end I would suggest as a final thought to take away from the exhibition, that given this condition, logically there can be no such thing as it’s usually conceived as good or bad or meaningful or non meaningful art. Only interesting and non-interesting art phenomena and that judgment must be purely subjective.