Greetings, Distinguished Art Critics and Art Lovers,

Just a heads-up that we will be making some changes to the guts of the website over the next little while. We’re going to try and make this as quick and painless as possible, but my apologies in advance if you encounter any technical glitches or poor layout, or just plain don’t see the site, on one of your upcoming visits!

The background changes to the NESW / studiosavant website are now complete. For those of you who are interested, a WordPress backend has been installed in order to make it easier to update and maintain the site. If you have any comments or questions in this regard, or find any problems with the site, please feel free to contact me at winston [at] blackriders [dot] com

For the rest of you, we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks!

Winston

An art exhibit is a regular contest for our attentions – art’s attractions versus its distractions. It is contemporary fashion to design exhibitions with enough layers of rationalization that serious examinations of the art’s excellence or importance are pre-emptively deflected; and oddly, art we could expect to deliver the most punch commonly peers out at us through the highest stacks of defensive information. Extended labels, wall panels, reading cards, audio guides and docents crowd out the very art that they should be there to assist.

It is by now pretty much common knowledge that the Edgar Degas sculptures currently on exhibit in the AGA’s Poole Gallery are posthumously-cast editions of mostly non-extant, mostly wax originals, and that only one of the pieces was ever exhibited in its original non-bronze constitution during Degas’ lifetime. This information surely is germane to various academic –ologies, and students of art history should be concerned with scouring even the tiniest details of provenance for high accuracy, but I contend that delving into either tidbit diverts attention away from an appreciation of the things as they so stand. Fortunately, presuming one can avoid the pounce of an interpreter, the 40 or so bronzes in the show are beautiful enough, and carefully enough installed, that their allure is not much diminished by debates about authenticity or allegations of artistic intent.

The only impedance to clear viewing of the sculptures comes from a mundane source: plastic vitrines cause significant reflective and refractive interference. Within their encasements, many of the sculptures also find themselves situated among a gridlock of shadows that spotlights angle in through the pane joints. But the use of jewel cases is an unavoidable concession to critical museological functions. Bronze sculptures are durable objects, relatively speaking, but their patinas are sufficiently susceptible to the oils in a finger’s touch that putting 100 year old treasures under glass is a warranted concession: no less than when guarding against thieving or sneezing patrons.

The sculptures don’t suffer too badly for the ¼” plastic buffer though, as Degas’ human figures are generally most in focus between knee and collar-bone – there’s little need to look too closely for finer features. Despite extending from toepoint to fingertip, almost every sculpture is really more a concentrated study of the female torso. The appendages have been left relatively unworked, certainly not finished to the descriptive degree that the haunches have been fleshed out to; the extremities seem at times to have been grudgingly included as a mere suggestion of hands and feet and even heads. In most of the pieces this works out just fine. Subduing the intricate lineaments of an arabesque-ing dancer’s hands is an effective way to counter the dramatic outward gesticulation of her position – the eye is not caught and held at overly-fine details out on the periphery of the sculpture. Feet, when planted upon the ground, are as necessarily indistinct as a tree’s roots. Imperfectly formed heads tilt in approximate agreement with the pose but carry only faint facial expressions. All visual cues support the center of gravity, none distract from the bodily gesture.

“Little Dancer; Aged 14″ is an obvious exception to all these particularities: no leotard wrinkle too insignificant to be rendered. This, the biggest sculpture in the exhibit, is adorned with a real tutu, a hair ribbon, and polychromed bodice and shoes. Although she cannot not qualify as the definitive Impressionist sculpture, she is nevertheless iconographic – a literal poster girl for Degas’ Impressionism. It may be hard to dislike her since “Little Dancer’s” disposition is that of ‘beguiling sweetie’. But the crux of the sculpture lies in how inert the metal feels mated to the ribbon and tutu (which looks to be rotting away before your very eyes). Overly detailed, long-fingered, large-palmed hands, laced together behind her back, are just more evidence of a disparity of parts in this sculpture. Cute as she may be, as a sculpture she is less than – a fraction of – the sum of her parts; she is the odd one out and late to the party.

Otherwise, the exhibition may be dually faulted in its selection and arrangement of dancers standing on one leg: too many, and all in rows. Chorus lines of arabesques and positioning dancers appear rather more like a flailing studio rehearsal than stage-ready choreography. Including even half as many dancers in the show would have magnified their poise. And poise, not motion, is the dominant theme of the 40 bronzes.

There is another sense in which the title of the exhibit, Figures in Motion, is a flawed premise: Degas’ intention may very well have been to capture in wax or plaster the flicker of a dancing ballerina or prancing horse (art historians love such tidy surmises) but no matter how they’re lit the bronze casts we have here stand oh so very stock still. Darkly patinaed sculptures provide high-contrast surfaces that cause an apparent gain in mass, such that guesses to heft might figure as greater than hollow bronze and maybe as much as solid lead. Viewers are from most available angles reduced to searching out silhouettes for accurate clues to each thing’s specific gravity and balance – its poise.

Moving back to the essence of any visual art exhibit, what about the sculptures that look just too good to simply read about, walk away from and forget. Which ones are the good ones? What’s good about them? I could select easily half of what’s in this exhibit to approve: “Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot”, “Woman Taken Unawares”, “Spanish Dance”, “Woman Seated in an Armchair Wiping Her Neck”, “The Tub”, “Picking Apples”, “Pregnant Woman”, all four riderless horses.

One sculpture stands out from the rest as it actually is a figural fragment. “Woman: Rubbing Her Back with a Sponge” is a thick, truncated torso with certain brazing seams left visible (as is a regular feature of Rodin bronzes). It has a single skinny arm, which does not from most viewing angles wholly belong with the modeled logic in the rest of the body. The arm might reasonably have been shortened to a stub, but because its cocked elbow acts as a starboard jib, loss of the arm would likely diminish the sculpture’s expressive twist and intriguing contours. The relationship between this lone de-limbed piece and the rest of the be-limbed dancers lies in a taut bit of balance. The torso appears to be quite over-weighted to the rear, almost as if, should the lower portion be restored, the figure would be kneeling.

“The Tub” is another unique piece; its configuration landing it in some grey zone between the ranks of ‘sculpture in the round’ and ‘sculptural high relief’. The girl reclining in an half-empty/half-full bath seems the greater part of a whole figure, but upon inspection is made almost entirely of limbs. This may be the only sculpture in the show in which the figure’s limbs are up for consideration, but not its torso. The tub’s rim is a natural framing device that reinforces the tub water’s flattening force resulting in a 3d sculpture that emerges from, somewhat at odds with, its 2d ground – a tension that is only exacerbated by the decorative (art deco?) bronze slab that the whole thing rests upon. In a sense, its worth as an artwork lies in its embodiment of contradiction and exploration of semantical space.

Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot

There are sculptures in Degas: Figures In Motion that do not depict poise so much as describe an instant of inertia: the pent up energy of potential motion. “Picking Apples” is a gleeful, off balance dance of life that only remotely depicts its titular subject matter. Perhaps recalling the days when she was the agile “Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot”, the “Pregnant Woman” cannot now lean forward far enough to see even the tops of her toes. The “Woman Taken Unawares” is wildly indecisive and caught, psychologically as much as physically, between demureness and demurring.

Woman Taken Unawares

It is of course the equestrian sculptures that are most suggestive of motion. Each of the riderless horses has one or two special sculptural traits that set it off from the others. One, with a wonderful muzzle modeled by only a couple pinches in the wax, rears upon wire armatures unadorned with hooves. Another has an exaggerated neck and narrowness of shoulders that emphasise its side view: serving as a portrait of a remarkable, memorable horse friend. The one with no neck at all (only its twisted-wire armature holds a down-turned head in place) seems to carry a cumbrously affective yoke upon its shoulders. Smeared daubs of wax that evince surefooted horse hooves equate directly to Degas’ treatment of the dancers’ light feet, but at so much smaller a scale the effect draws rather more attention to itself, to the light canter of the animal, and away from any of the top-heaviness apparent in an unmoving horse.

It is art historians’ place to know by whose hand(s) these things were made, to whom attributions should refer, and in what regard. A handsome hardcover catalogue raisonné accompanies Degas: Figures in Motion; its scholarship regarding the serialization of Degas’ works seems comprehensive. What may never be agreed upon is whether displaying artworks that were never intended by the artist to be exhibited constitutes a moral dilemma. In any event, not only is a deceased artist’s mind unknowable, those responsible for casting the things have passed away by now as well – unless our great museums are to be implicated in illicit duplication of the things, there can be no one left to prosecute.

Given the quality of even this remnant of Degas-derived sculpture, surely no one will disagree that it is a special thing that his originals were salvaged for sharing with the world. Dubious of origin or not, they are very fine things worthy of conservation and exhibition. The breadth of Degas’ sculptural explorations, a mode of art-making for which he is not best known, is instructive – I find that it sets the bar for a committed sculptor very high indeed. Inspirational stuff. My congratulations and thanks to the AGA for bringing this show to town and displaying it to benefit.

Culturally sensitive eyes in my little province of the world were, this past weekend, turned expectantly towards the opening of its greatest-to-date monument to the visual arts. The every aspiration of Edmontonian culturati found glorious expression in the grand reopening of the Art Gallery of Alberta on January 29th, January 30th, or January 31th (depending on whether you dropped $500 on a gala dinner plate; cut the proverbial ribbons with upsized chrome scissors; or settled to be one of 350 people/hour getting in for the low, low price of printing out a digital form). Relentlessly branding the place for months on end, AGA marketers have been stocking shelves, delivering press copy, and selling every square inch of the new building’s plaque-able surface to civic boosters – entities regional, national and corporation-al.

In any event, self-styled supporters of the arts have largely embraced not just the new building but the schtick that accompanies it as well. I spoke with one longtime participant in the gallery’s endeavours who believes wholeheartedly that the AGA’s new building exemplifies charter donor John Poole’s exhortation to “build it right and cut no corners.” Although I would not wish to dampen such sincere enthusiasm (I recognize the benefits of having a new and improved regional gallery), for myself I cannot so heartily affirm Randall Stout’s scrawling building as a sign that Edmonton has finally arrived among the world’s most refined and cosmopolitan cities. Because I’m paying close attention to it, and because sustained attention begets appreciation, and because practiced appreciation develops taste, I recognize significant flaws in the new building.

There has been enough muckraking of dissenters that I feel I must first state the obvious: criticality does not a hater make. I for one always try to put honest words to my thoughts and to pay as little mind to popular opinion or political tactic as possible. I understand that my opinion is contrary to many of those most closely involved in this city’s culture scene, but who in principle would disagree that diverse opinions only have a chance at becoming dialogue (and who doesn’t value dialogue?) when they are allowed to butt one against another?

Mere contrariness becomes no one; even so, I really can’t get behind calling the loopy parts of the structure “the Borealis”, as Stout and Co. are said to do. I’ve been privy to all sorts of trash talk about the place and I’ve heard it referred to by tradesmen as “the Borealis” exactly once and sarcastically, at that. It is little wonder that such a high-minded tag hasn’t caught on, not least since the stainless steel loop-de-loop doesn’t look remotely like the northern lights. “Plane Crash”, a regular-joe reference that I’ve heard numerous times already, could stick but even I hope it doesn’t. I’m looking for a more endearing term that is attentive to the primary visual quality (the gestalt) of Alberta’s premier visual arts centre: incongruity. For lack of the perfect moniker, I’ll just refer to the New Building hereon in as the “Newb”.

I grant that upon first approach the New Building is impressive, albeit in the same value-free way that we might understand when someone says a painting is ‘interesting’, and inasmuch as whatever impression it does leave is indelible. In daylight, obdurate-cast facets of glass repel rather than attract, but under a night sky the glassy façade glows in a pleasantly inviting manner. Inside or out, night time is when the Newb is at its best – disjointed silver cockles soften into aqueous moieties and awkwardly canting steel erectors recede when interior illuminations overtake the sun’s. Stout’s lighting designer earns a respectable grade by redeeming the exterior from 24-hour frigidity.

And yet, as I feared in the months leading up to this opening weekend when all that was possible was to peek into the construction over its street-side hoarding, the place is disorientingly scale-less. Walking up to the Newb yields unreliable information about how many stories tall it may be, or about what it might feel like on the inside. With the visible entrances made of tall, all-glass gates; perplexing aperatures into a patio in the upper reaches; and little to no indication of how the Newb’s loops structurally grip the ground, the human-scale information that we generally take for granted when navigating through our urban architecture is almost entirely absent.

There is one consistency to be found in the New Building: disorienting perspectival cues. Enter the atrium and even those most reliable of all human scale indicators, other people, appear diminished and at a distance – as though seen through a convex lens. Beside the PULL sign on the doors there should be an additional warning: “Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear”. The polished natural concrete floor is the only immediate proof that one has not stepped into some sort of veneered vortex. The lowest ceiling available to hook your visual pitons into is about 30 feet up. At a glance silver and white metals rake across the upper reaches, not wisping ephemerally as cirrus clouds but looming heavily like the bottom of an airliner at that fraught instant before it touches down. Of all the dramatic effects that it would be possible to achieve when designing an experimental building, I’d be willing to bet that vertigo is not any architect’s most desirable. (Except for a rollercoaster architect.)

Even the primary light feature that beckons one in from the cold turns out upon inspection to induce a dizziness of its own. A Plexiglas column of frosted blue light juts from the concrete like some retro-futuristic spatial distortion weapon. It shares a quality specific to black light in that it doesn’t stop wavering long enough to for the eye to settle comfortably upon it. Think of how blue Christmas lights seem to be simultaneously right in front of you and impossibly distant, then imagine a 30 foot tall electric blue bulb and you may be able to appreciate the dimensional shifts it causes. Never even mind how difficult it is to focus on the names of the New Building’s donors printed in black vinyl on the surface.

I’ve already written elsewhere of unconvincing surface treatments throughout. The zinc cladding looks believable until you’re within 6 feet, the lobes of stainless sheet steel only appear seamless and smooth from six hundred feet distant. Obviously, inside the Newb you are brought within those parameters, and compounding the sense that every visible surface is only a membrane are unconvincing junctions between disparate materials. Patches of fir lath do not nicely complement rolled and burnished steel; tempered glass does not join with concrete in any easy way. It is my experience that solid, discrete, believable junctures are crucial, imperative really, to achieving unity with disparate materials. Weakly designed, or weakly constructed? I suspect some combination of each. A bit of scuttlebutt from the Artist/Industry event: winging stainless swoops as well finished as on one of Gehry’s buildings would’ve required another $20,000,000.

That there are customized views from the second and third floors onto Sir Winston Churchill Square, and of City Hall in particular, is one of Randall Stout’s most leaned-upon justifications for a 60 foot high glass atrium. In order to catch a cohesive glimpse of the city beyond a viewer must either accept a composite fly’s-eye view by willfully ignoring the geometric oddity of the broad steel window casings, or shuffle forward and back and all around then tilt his head just-so. Other than in the vestibule, there may not be a single pane of atrium glass that stands square and plumb. I have heard dozens of people resort to defending the incongruities of the AGA’s New Building by saying, “at least it’s not square”. But it is so far out of square that I don’t think the Newb catalyzes its architectural environment effectively, not within city limits. To lay it on a bit thicker: it is a colossal cubist head so emphatically narcissistic that the rest of the Square is rendered moot in its presence.

Fortunately, excellent gallery spaces easily compensate for their shell, which is adequate in the way that the hermit crab’s chosen home is so long as it is big enough to retreat into. (Interestingly, after writing this I saw the Globe and Mail quote the AGA’s chief curator likening the relationship of the building’s interior and exterior to those of a conch shell.) The gallery spaces are generally voluminous but of a decent variety to accommodate the various arrangements specific to the needs of nearly any imaginable exhibit: intimate or blockbuster, classical or contemporary. Truly excellent lighting and environmental systems enhance the possibility of presenting truly world-class exhibitions. As a museum for exhibiting art the Newb is a notable improvement over the slowly-failing Brutalist building that preceded it; as a space for human occupancy, the first shell was the more homey.

But note that art is not among the first things to confront a visitor to the Art Gallery of Alberta in its New Building. Whatever art one might find is a long ways in, past the blue-lit spire, ZINC the restaurant, Ernest C. Manning Hall, Shop AGA, the white hottub sculpture that is the front desk, and art is not visible from any site line even 40 steps in. Except for the possibility of showing art made of impervious materials (steel sculpture, say) there is no remedy as the vast atrium is an environment insufficiently controlled to protect the more fragile arts from mould and degradation.

It is not only the AGA’s facade and surrounds that have changed. The easily intuited www.artgalleryalberta.ca has now been recast as www.youraga.ca and “Your AGA” adverts have cropped up as far afield as Medicine Hat, AB. A dubious five-colour acronym logo that reads ASIA as naturally as it does AGA replaces the much classier black and red full-name version. To his staff, Executive Director Gilles Hebert recently described The Art Gallery of Alberta as “a new organization”; and certainly, any institution that throws so many resources into re-branding itself twice in three years (its staff having grown at least 150% in the same period and primarily in marketing/development) cannot simultaneously retain a clear sense of its longer history. Traces of what the Edmonton Art Gallery (EAG) had been good at/good for over the years has been regrettably displaced, and all but forgotten.

My cynicism is admittedly tempered by certain statistics – by various measures the Newb is a popularly acclaimed hit. It has been solidly sold out. The gala VIP event filled up long in advance of its privileged first night; the Artist/Industry party was over capacity; somewhere in the range of 10,000 timed tickets for the two or three days following the ribbon-cutting ceremony were claimed online in about 24 hours; membership sales are at an all-time high; and wedding receptions are booked solid through 2011. It was immensely encouraging to see so many people milling around an art gallery over the weekend, and even the first day of paid admissions seemed significantly busier than I was anticipating.

Glorious details not unlike these have been released to the press on a weekly basis for months on end prior to Saturday the 30th, and for its part the press has been glad to report as fact anything AGA spokespeople declared as such. In a TV interview the mayor quixotically spoke to hypothetical complaints by people who might say the Newb is only more urban blight and by perturbed hockey fans who might feel that their true culture has been co-opted and tax dollars funnelled into the Newb instead of a New Arena: he said they could dislike the New Building if they wished but that they could not, must not, deny it its place as a necessary symbol of Edmonton’s pre-eminence. The press agrees, it would seem, for there has been hardly a whit of journalistic pressure applied since the moment Randall Stout was acclaimed.

This is surely the most propitious opportunity we’ll ever have have to critically consider the Art Gallery of Alberta’s contribution to architecture in Edmonton. At least until another 50 years have passed and more moneyed civic champions of the arts bequeath the AGA sums for its New New Building. Like it or not, the Newb is what we’ll be stuck with, for the remainder of my lifetime anyhow. What we ‘must’ do is get critiques of its architecture-ality out of the way now so we can start considering the art that it will house.

[Via BoingBoing, Courtesy Devil Devil]