Peep Show: The Death of Amy Winehouse

You’ll never get my mind right

Like two ships passing in the night

Want the same thing when we lay

Otherwise, mine’s a different way.

Amy Winehouse “In My Bed.”

A week ago Saturday, I was preparing my film clips for my lecture series Forbidden Desires: The Films of Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma at the Revue Cinema when the breaking news on television announced that singer Amy Winehouse had been found dead in her apartment. While the news could hardly seem surprising given her continuous struggle with substance and personal abuse, not to mention her disastrous recent concert tour (which seemed to invoke any number of Hollywood melodramas you cared to call up), it still seemed unreal. As the day wore on and my work was finished, I turned to more television coverage only to see that many others seemed to share my unsettled reaction to the news. While some writers trotted out the usual clichés about “the good dying young” and the eerie coincidence of her joining “The 27 Club” (which contains other dead 27-year-old performers like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain) others grappled with words to describe their grief. While I searched for my own, I realized that some of the answers were right within the lecture series I was doing.

Devastating: Asif Kapadia’s Amy

Amy Winehouse at age 14, from Asif Kapadia’s Amy.

Watching Asif Kapadia's powerful and devastating documentary Amy, which encompasses the trajectory of the late Amy Winehouse’s career, I was struck anew by how the best documentaries go beyond expectations to deliver something that often becomes seminal and relevant in a way more ordinary documentaries do not. In other words, if you are a halfway talented filmmaker and tackle decent subject matter, your doc will be worthwhile. It’s the ones that display more ambition and are helmed by master talents that ultimately make a deeper mark. Amy is one such documentary, a tragic screen portrait that will have you in tears by its end.

By the time the talented jazz chanteuse died in July 2011, at the age of 27, directly from alcoholism but more accurately from years of drug abuse, we had seen her rise and fall on TV and in newspaper headlines, almost incessantly documented by tabloid journalists and rapacious paparazzi. And while she was hardly the first pop/rock star to die from an excessive lifestyle, she likely was the most studied and displayed before us, like a deer trapped in the headlights before being hit by the car. There was almost an inevitability to her passing and I suspect it was heightened, even caused in significant ways, by how pervasive was the coverage of her every wrong move and reckless action. And if there is one thing we know about social media and its often parasitic hangers on, it’s that if you’re a public figure, you can’t get away forever with abusing yourself and not expect to, unsympathetically, be pilloried for doing that. Amy Winehouse, too often, appeared negatively in the public eye, even when she should have known better than to display herself, warts and all. It didn’t help, of course, that her biggest supporters and truest friends, were jettisoned by her in her ascension up the pop charts. The other major difference between her and previous musical talents who had the same fate, is that we could catch her out doing it, when nearly thirty five years earlier, an Elvis Presley would destroy himself largely out of sight of his fans and the media.

Ten Years After: Back to Winehouse

Amy Winehouse's second, and final, studio album Back to Black was released on October 27, 2006.

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.” – John Updike

Before long, the brilliant album Amy Winehouse released ten years ago this past October will have lived longer that she herself did. Back to Black (Island Records, 2006) was then and still is now a singular achievement with few sonic peers in the realm of pop music. This is especially ironic because it was never intended to be a pop record at all and instead merged jazz, blues, R&B, funk, ska, soul, hip hop, "Wall of Sound" 60’s girl groups and something else without a name into an amazing witch’s brew with many imitators but few equals.

Having just completed a book on this album, its historical roots, brilliant producers and back-up band, I am amazed by the record now as I was when I first heard it a decade ago. Almost as strange is the fact that she passed away nearly a half a decade ago this year, and took with her one of the most oddly gifted and mesmerizing torch song talents to come along since Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Anita O’Day and Sharon Jones.

The Saddest Singer on Earth: Amy Winehouse and The Blues

Introduction:  Welcome to My World

“When I’m singing, I’m happy. I’m doing what I can do, and this is my contribution to life . . .”
– Anita O’Day (an early incarnation of Amy)

Incredibly enough, Amy Winehouse passed away ten years ago this summer. But this is a story about her sad music and the sad music that inspired it, not a story about her problems or the flaws that caused them. Born September 14, 1983 and died July 23, 2011. That’s her biography, plain and simple. Her own autobiography, however, is mostly embedded in her two releases while still vibrantly alive and brazenly sashaying, her debutante surprise Frank in 2003 and her surprisingly mature masterpiece Back to Black in 2006, and that autobiography is considerably more complicated than her actual personal history. They are the light and the dark sides of both her real character and her chosen edgy persona, as well as of her deeply impressive musical artistry, the first one inspired by her love of Sinatra (or rather his ring a ding-ding Rat Pack spirit), the second one inspired by her love of oblivion (or rather by its lack of awareness).

Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings

Sharon Jones (centre) and the Dap-Kings. (Photo: Jacob Blickenstaff)

Here is an excerpt from Donald Brackett’s upcoming book, Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, which is being published by Backbeat Books in Fall 2018.

“The heart of youth is reached through the senses; the senses of age are reached through the heart.” – Nicholas-Edme Retif 

“Too short, too fat, too black and too old . . . ” – perennial refrain from record producers responding to Sharon Jones in the early days of her music career.

Following their traditional performance pattern, when The Dap-Kings started a concert by playing a few instrumentals to get the crowd warmed up to a fever pitch and ready for their main attraction, they would introduce her by having the bass player boom out: “Ladies and gentlemen, 110 pounds of soul excitement, Miss Sharon Jones!” She was all of that and more, with not an ounce of falsehood in her.

This is a tale of triumph over adversity and the lifelong commitment to a pure and positive spirit. This is the saga of Sharon Lafaye Jones, May 4, 1956 – November 18, 2016, and her 60 years of raw, untutored, ramshackle, rambunctious and infectious energy. Performing at a concert in 2014, the year she was valiantly fighting off the pancreatic cancer that would eventually claim her only two busy years later, and going onstage to perform one of her typically boisterous and sensual sets, she was asked how it felt to be suddenly performing with a totally bald head. Not for Jones the feeble world of either wigs or hiding from reality. As reported somewhat jubilantly by Max Blau of Spin Magazine, she declared, “It’s going to be different. I’m just going to go with it. That’s what soul music is all about!” Sharon Jones was definitely different, and she was definitely what soul music was all about. She went with it, all right, all the way.

The Sound(s) of Silence: Comparing Notes

Author, professor, and musicologist Adam Ockelford. (Photo: Getty)

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." – Elvis Costello

Guilty as charged. Yep, I guess I’m definitely one of those Declan grumbled about who attempts to dance about architecture. The same quote has often been attributed to the artist/comedian Martin Mull, but since the subject is using language to try and define or describe sounds, let’s leave it in Costello’s sarcastic hands for now. It somehow just feels right coming from him.

In Comparing Notes: How We Make Sense of Music, a captivating new book by Adam Ockelford, newly published by WW Norton and distributed by Penguin/Random House, a noted musicologist asks some thought-provoking questions. How does music work? Indeed, what is (or isn’t) music? We are all instinctively musical (not so sure about that one) but how and why? There would seem to be two kinds of books about music -- maybe more but at least two: those that try to describe music in a certain context and those that try to define music in all contexts. I suppose I’m even more guilty of Costello’s criticism, since often I not only write about music itself (as in my recent Amy Winehouse or Sharon Jones books) but I go so far as to write about people who write about music. Thus, writing about writing about sounds: a double offense as far as Costello’s credo goes.

Betwixt and Between: The Polarity of Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift

“I think there are different kinds of fame. There’s a fame which is plastic and about money and then there’s a fame when no one knows who you are but everyone wants to know who you are.” – Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga)

“Nothing is permanent. So I’m very grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level. My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making art.” – Taylor Swift

Unlike the deeply distressing confessional songwriting mode and music of such classic heart-on-their-sleeve singers as Marianne Faithfull and Joni Mitchell, or even the ultra-suffering effigy of the late, lamentable Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift are self-curated performance artists whose homeopathic medicine doses are dolloped out to us in artfully crafted personas always on the verge of revealing their wounds but never quite arriving at divulging it all the way. They are practically tantric in this regard. Their massively popular primal therapy sessions, conducted in ritualized public spaces and thus akin to ancient Roman colosseum spectacles, and delivered in real-time diary entries of the most flamboyant sort since Madonna, have become a kind of cultish conceptual living theatre designed to permanently suspend gratification for worshipping audiences whose fervor almost approaches the stunned crowds gathered to writhe before the early Beatles.

You Can Never Go Home: Duran Duran and R.E.M.

Duran Duran

There was a time in the world of pop music when two bands, Duran Duran from Birmingham, England and R.E.M. from Athens, Georgia, became the reliable supply to radio stations interested in being hip, yet still accessible with their formats. Both groups started in the late 70s just as punk and new wave music were emerging on commercial radio. These groups basically came to represent what we now call “alternative.”

Duran Duran, who were named after the villain in the 1968 film, Barbarella, directed by Roger Vadim, charted their own course by shaping their music and their appearance in what was called the “New Romantic” movement of British bands such as Spandau Ballet. I simply considered them now a British dance band with good hooks and high production values. To their credit, Duran Duran was one of the first acts to issue 12-inch extended re-mixes to club DJs.

R.E.M.

R.E.M. was the genuine, original, college radio rock band. They launched themselves in 1980 with one of their great hits, “Radio Free Europe,” a song that garnered them a lot of attention from the get-go. They, too, had a string of great singles all peddled by the new video channels around the world. The kicker was the fact that R.E.M. made the slow, steady climb to pop stardom, while Duran Duran had immediate success following the release of the soft-porn video, “Girls on Film.” It featured topless women mud wrestling, fighting with pillows among other suggestive sexual depictions. It was released originally as a closed-circuit video for dance clubs, but the newly launched MTV was desperate for content before the video directed by Godley & Crème was released. It was a smash hit leading to a string of singles by the group that brought them international attention.

Get Back: Paul McCartney's New

Considering all that he's accomplished in his long career, Paul McCartney's only competitor is himself. On New [Hear Music], his 16th solo album, Macca proves that he can still write the perfect pop song with lyrics and hooks that are irresistible. His volume of work can now be classified as a style, "McCartney" if you like, with compositions that are just sophisticated enough to keep our ears engaged while accessible enough to appeal to listeners of all ages. His style has proven strongly influential, too, as heard on the recent Mojo magazine CD release, Songs in the Key of Paul, that comes with the November 2013 issue. It is a really good mix of old and new songs featuring a variety of old and new artists. The CD features a collection of songs that best represents the "McCartney Sound", rich in vocal harmonies, interesting chord changes and song structures not far removed from Tin Pan Alley or Motown.

Happily Disrespectful: Jamie Cullum at Massey Hall (March 9/10)

You have to have either supreme confidence in your abilities or sport quite a large set to let somebody as amazing as Imelda May and her tight, tight band open for you. Jamie Cullum, the young British jazz pianist and singer did that just this past Tuesday at Massey Hall in one of those concerts that will always be in my memory bank.

Imelda May is an Irish rockabilly singer who's relatively unknown over here, but after her high-energy opening act, she made 2000 new fans. With a voice that is a mix of Dusty Springfield, Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse and a bit of Loretta Lynn, May got Massey Hall humming and did what any opening act should do, warm us up and leave us wanting more. As my wife said after May's brilliant 40-minute set "what the hell was that?" And she meant it as the highest compliment. We were here to see Cullum and we were given an amazing gift for showing up on time. At the mid-point of her set, May told us that the up-coming Cullum would "blow your minds". She was right. He had little choice after her performance.

Podcast: Musical Chairs (A Radio Pilot, 1990)

In March 1990, Donald Brackett and I were growing concerned that music programming on the radio was becoming more niche driven. Since both of us grew up in an era when radio often turned you on to a vast palette of diverse genres, we wondered if we could create a show that – given these limiting programming changes – might accommodate more broad selections of music. We came up with an idea called Musical Chairs where we would create an identifiable theme of interest to a larger audience and then use that as our laundry line in which to hang a vast assortment of musical styles. The first show, which John Corcelli produced in the studios at CJRT-FM, was an examination of music that characterized the city as a homeless and hostile environment rather than the romantic vision heard in songs like "Chicago" and "New York, New York."

The selections included Charles Ives' "Central Park in the Dark," Ornette Coleman's "Skies Over America," Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City," Bernard Herrmann's score for Taxi Driver, Bruce Cockburn's "Inner City Front" and concluded with Aaron Copland's "Quiet City." We also added the prospect of interviews on the show by including one with writer Timothy Findley talking about Toronto while in town promoting his book of short stories, Stones. Since I was just beginning work as one of the producers at CBC Radio Prime Time, I didn't have the time to promote the pilot, but Donald sought out interest both in Canada and the States. No one nibbled enough to take it on. So despite coming up with ten other episode ideas, we only got this far in what you might describe as a map of what we might have accomplished.

– Kevin Courrier

The full radio pilot of Musical Chairs can be heard here.

Radio Daze: Fond Memories of an Aggravating Angel

Photo by John Marsonet.

“To deal with the history of cultures means to abandon oneself to potential chaos and yet to retain a deep belief in the basic ordination and meaning of things. It is a very serious task. One requiring a great lightness of spirit.” – Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi

I definitely miss being on a weekly radio program. From about 1988 until the end of the 20th century, I was the visual art critic for CJRT-FM in Toronto, a wonderful community-based station with an eclectic mix of programming and hosts covering every aspect of popular culture, from classical music, folk and jazz, to BBC-imported Goon Shows and compelling ideas-based documentaries. The program on which I appeared every Wednesday to review an exhibition, interview an artist, curator or museum official, discuss an architectural design site and occasionally assess art books of mainstream interest, was appropriately called On the Arts, and that’s exactly what it was, with a day each week exclusively devoted to music, films, theatre, art, design, books and art politics.  It just now seems so perfectly 20th-century, in fact, that kind of diversity of interests, since independent public radio (and television for that matter) has become such a rare thing to behold or behear. (Critics At Large has been sharing excerpts of the program as podcasts.)

One of the other joys of my radio days was the fact that it was through this medium that I was able to cross paths with a delightful friend of over thirty years, the late, great Kevin Courrier, who passed away (or went to spirit, as he would have called it) in mid-October of this year. The path to Kevin, however, first led me to encounter the irascible, sardonic, sarcastic, infuriating and brilliant Tom Fulton, Kevin’s co-host at CJRT-FM and his mentor of many years: the man who Kevin said helped him “find his voice.” Kevin in turn helped me find my own voice, guiding me through the odd vagaries and quirks of the radio broadcast medium of expression.

Being and Somethingness: Barnett Newman: Here

Princeton University Press.

“Here. A place in the world. Proof that one exists. Barnett Newman spent a lifetime searching for confirmation of a simple idea.”

Amy Newman

For many decades as an art historian I have often remarked to those who would listen that what matters most about visual art and art history is not exactly what you’re looking at in front of you. Puzzled expressions often ensue. I frequently share the observation that there’s more to fine art than meets the eye, and that what matters is what’s behind your eyes, not what’s in front of them. In other words, how much you know about what you’re seeing, in the sense not of privileged knowledge but rather of the kind of basic information that can be accessed by anyone who is curious about what’s going on in the world of contemporary art, that quantum which can alter your perception forever. By anyone who can, that is, suspend immediate snap value judgments and pursue any credible art text in any reasonable library. And if my audience were still listening, I would proceed to further clarify this perspective: the image is in front of us but the imagination is in our minds, lurking behind our visual apparatus, just waiting to be fully engaged in a deeply personal and, for lack of a better term, existential revelation.

So Long, Marianne (1946-2025): What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

Marianne Faithfull. (Photo: Peter Seeger.)

“The men and women who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or culture the most extensive, but rather those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their own personality into a sort of mirror.”

Marcel Proust

If there is a sadder singer-songwriter on earth, I’m not sure who it might be. The late Marianne Faithfull was sadder than Neil Young, sadder than Leonard Cohen, sadder than sad. She even exceeds the sorrow and bleakness quotient of one of the great lamenters of all time, Nico, the chanteuse of pain who originally performed with The Velvet Underground but who left them, probably because they were too happy for her. She might be sadder that Amy Winehouse, although she was fortunate enough to live a full half-century longer than the poor lamentable Amy. Marianne Faithfull was the dark side of Joni Mitchell: while it’s true that Mitchell had her own dark side, Faithfull was the dark side of Joni’s dark side. She was an exile who lived in a dream world for so long that her reports from its frontier took on the status of legend. She was also, apart from being a consummate risk-taker, an empath of the highest order, with a remarkable ability for turning sheer survival practically into an authentic religion.

Primal Pop: Whispering in a Loud Voice

Ol' Blue Eyes. (Photo: Getty Images)

Wait . . . some wag is claiming that both Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra were exemplars of primal pop music? How can that be? Two of the most mellow crooners in musical history? But what about John Lennon or Jim Morrison? Oh, them, too, of course. But two of the very first pop stars, astronomical and international singers of pop songs to everyone everywhere – that would be Frank with his 150 million records sold, and Bing with his 100 million – also both touched a deep and hidden place in the soul of their listeners, as diverse as their audiences were, and that is the essence of a primal pop star. They were not only minstrels and troubadours of the highest degree, each with a sense of timing and finesse that captured the tempo of the human heart as never before, but also they both never once complained about being so popular and wished they could have been taken more seriously as artists.

Coal into Diamond: The Inspiring Story of Gospel Funk

The incredible Sister Rosetta Tharpe, consummate gospel singer and secret inventor of rock 'n roll, soul and visionary funk music, circa 1940.

“I feel like there is an angel inside of me that I am constantly shocking.” – Jean Cocteau

“When I’m on stage, I’m trying to do one thing: bring people joy. Just like church does. People don’t go to church to find trouble, they go there to lose it.”– James Brown

The word "gospel," of course, literally means good news. But the really good news is that gospel music morphed into the blues, blues morphed into soul, soul morphed into funk, and funk eventually morphed into both rap and hip hop. There will inevitably be another mutation in this wild musical evolutionary chain, but who knows what exotic shape it might take, especially considering the weird fact that hip hop has already become part of mainstream white pop music?

When blues music went on a blind date with gospel music and had too much rhythm and blues to think, that unlikely marriage of heaven and hell gave birth to something called soul. In some ways the parents of both these sacred and profane styles didn’t want their kids going out together, let alone settling down and starting a dance-mad family that would shake up the musical world forever. Thus we entered the fray that would become the saga of gospel funk, and saw its incredible climb to the stellar soul heights after its humble beginnings in the hot holy Southern church pews of America where fervent worship was the only spiritual dish on the community menu.

S O L A C E: The Art of Intimate Absence – Theme for an Imaginary Exhibition

Dreamwalk, Mimi Gellman, Edward Day Gallery, Giclee print, 2002. (Image courtesy of the artists)

Note: All images are courtesy of the artists.

“In dreams begin responsibilities . . . ”– Delmore Schwartz

In the museum of dreams, anything is possible. Perhaps prompted by viral circumstances, I imagined an installation of images, objects, films, videos and performances addressing social issues of import which impact everyone in today’s world: anyone who wonders how we maintain our mutual bond as people and cultures during a challenging time of collective isolation. The three well-known artists contemplated, Mimi Gellman, Vessna Perunovich and Nayra Martin Reyes, have a unique but shared interest in exploring isolation and identity politics, gender issues, exile and refuge, persona and displacement, and travel, in what I am designating as a post-proximity world. They express through their artifacts a transnational and humanist domain which is essential for us if we are all to survive the challenges facing our global cultures at this precarious moment in our common history. They each approach a new vista verging on the merger of safe place and secure shelter with vulnerable empathy and alienated exclusion.

Uncanny Kingdom: The Enigmatic Art of Mowry Baden

Marsupial, 2013, by Mowry Baden. (Steel aluminum fabric rubber. Image: VAG)

Mowry Baden, curated by Grant Arnold, Vancouver Art Gallery: March 9-June 9, 2019

Ever since the French invented a mechanical device called the camera in about 1840, visual artists have been liberated from the tyranny of mere pictorial representation. Likewise, sculptors, who are best described as making three-dimensional drawings in space, have been offered the authority to leave behind the pedestal in favour of incorporating everyday life into their tableaux. And no one has taken that liberty of expression to heart with as much consistent passion and creative commitment as Mowry Baden, originally from Los Angeles but since 1971 a resident of Victoria, British Columbia, from where a steady stream of emotionally compelling and intellectually rigorous works have issued.

Having decided that by the end of the '60s “painting seemed all used up,” Baden's self-stated strategy was as simple as it was ambitious: provoking a perceptual crisis in the viewer through the manifestation of constructed environments, or “envelope spaces,” which invite us to experience kinesthesia, the sensory awareness of position and movement most often contained in task-oriented and body-centred physical settings. This serious form of play is encapsulated in its earliest stages in the 1970 floor-mounted piece called Untitled (Seatbelt), which is just what it says: an excessively long looped seatbelt bolted in three places to the floor and permitting interactive but non-utilitarian use.

The result is a kind of physical calligraphy whose poetry is hard to describe, with an ever-shifting graphic placement depending on each visitor’s chance re-arrangement and resulting in a palpable haptic haiku written on the museum floor. Basically the entire architectural ground has become his conceptual pedestal. The rest of this career-length retrospective of the Governor Award-winning mixed-media artist is just as cheeky and engaging, a living demonstration of how the basic definition of what an art object is and what it’s supposed to do underwent a drastic upheaval in the post- photography era, culminating in the ascent and supremacy of abstraction in all forms.

The Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition of fifteen sculptural pieces, as well as journal drawings and an archive of public art projects, was a masterful crash course in the efficacy of Jules Michelet’s nearly mystical observation that each epoch dreams the one to follow and creates it in dreams. It showed just how far a liberated artist can go once technology sets him or her free, and in Baden’s case it also celebrated his legitimate allegiance to major international art movements such as Fluxus, assemblage, and art povera, through the elevation of quotidian objects far above their usual thing status.

A perfectly curated coss-section of Baden’s often whimsical and sardonic sculptural assemblages, the eponymous Mowry Baden, was an ideal but not idealistic show perfectly suited to our own epoch. Basically, the trajectory from the strictures of vertiginous modernity to the open-ended ambiguities of the postmodern realm are charted almost cartographically in the creative arc of Baden’s work from the mid-'60s up to the present. Art history itself, in many ways, arrives after its feverish marathon of shifting meanings into the waiting arms of this West Coast tactician of irony.

Cheap Sleeps Columbine,1994. (Mattress boxspring, pillow fabric, wood, mirror. Image: VAG)

His many oneiric sculptural objects, often splendidly tongue-in-cheek re-configurations of engineering poetry and mechanical theatre, almost always relate to or involve collisions of everyday things with a surreal narrative which is usually perceptible to the sense of touch. Pieces such as the superbly chilling Cheap Sleeps Columbine (1994), with its mandala of mattresses, box springs and mirrors, as well as one of my favourites from the survey show, Marsupial (2013), with its spooky wheelbarrow and cage-like enclosure for a human bearer, are definitely canny testaments to the uncanny kingdom we all occupy in this disturbing century.

Cézanne, who practically invented pictorial modernism, once remarked, referring to his own late visionary evocations of nature in oil, “The landscape thinks itself in me, I am its consciousness.” And while strolling like a psychic flâneur through the calm splendour of Baden’s post-industrial mystery-objects, I was struck by the potential to characterize them in a way that echoed but far outdid Cézanne: “The machine thinks itself in us, we are its consciousness.” If art history is a relay race (which it must be) with individual artists passing the baton from one to the next, then Baden has grabbed Cézanne’s baton and run right off the racetrack with it.

Baden’s charming and confounding works, especially a trio of rubber and stainless-steel sculptures such as Braille (2016), Punched and Grilled (2015) and Tachycardia (2016), quite literally embody and personify the character of what Walter Benjamin called the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, as well as the vivid personality of a dynamic which that press agent for the future, Siegfried Gideon, accurately declared as mechanization takes command. They are engineered dream objects come to life: emblems of an industrial domain suddenly rendered mute of customary meaning.

Tachyardia, 2016. (Rubber and steel. Image: VAG)

But he is not all about just puns or bemusement; his work is also about suspended satisfaction, anxious anticipation, delayed gratification, and most especially unfulfilled expectations. He often addresses important aesthetic issues such the physical embodiment of spirit through sculpture and its discomforts through thought. Such a piece is his Rubber Thistle (2013), with three interlocked warehouse pushcarts which can be moved in circles but not utilized practically.

Baden explores polarities of life and death, as well as the dualities of waking and dreaming, through the strange affinity that inherently exists between his uncanny engineering effigies in a museum and his clever disruptions of aesthetic representation embedded in certain radical art traditions. Indeed, his pieces can be seen both as a source of macabre spectacle and educational entertainment, via the image of a site which copies life, but also as a territory which negotiates the development of unsettling new genres of representation.

As this gifted senior artist so ably illustrates, the sculptural image itself is deeply wedded to the living human body in motion and at rest, but it is also a passage haunted by stillness and absence, as exemplified clearly by the obscure objects of desire so effectively examined in this retrospective installation. Economy of means, complexity of meaning: few artists employ dislocation as a strategic tool to elicit both empathy and jamais vu quite as powerfully as Mowry Baden.

This article also appeared in the magazine Vie des Arts. 

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films.He is the author of the book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, and is a frequent curator of film programs for Pacific Cinematheque. His latest book is Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, published in November 2018. His new book, Tumult! The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, is forthcoming from Backbeat Books in 2020.

Frozen Music: John Ballantyne’s Persistent Reality

John Ballantyne's Tower Stairs.

“Music is constant. Listening is intermittent.”– John Cage.
 

Paintings such as John Ballantyne’s are invitations to a ritual of looking that engages our imaginations far above and below the apparently straightforward substance of the images represented. They are what they appear to be: placid architectural spaces, portraits of both interiors and exteriors, still life’s with rooms and buildings instead of fruits or flowers, designed and built landscapes at once tightly contained and yet fully open to conjecture. As such they also aspire to be accurate diagrams of something impossible to behold, something which the poet Goethe once offered as an ideal definition of what architecture is and what it does: frozen music. In Ballantyne’s work we witness a certain kind of mathematical precision which is not strictly realistic per se but in fact actually arrives at quite a different destination: a metaphysical dwelling place for the frozen music of form and content. Another primary and recurring focus of his work is the frequent element of illuminated objects which remind of us of the original meaning of the word photo-graphis: drawing with light.

Fiat Lux! some of these images seem to whisper, let there be light, and the purity of Tower Stairs is a good place to begin contemplating the precious qualities not only of painting with light but also paintings of light itself as a subject, and of its palpable yet often invisible personality in our lives. The artist has observed that he sees painting as a tentative step towards realizing “the self”, and to express that process he uses “simple exteriors or interiors of buildings accentuated with light, light as a metaphor, a means of illuminating the subject and, at the same time, symbolizing enlightenment”. But just as enlightenment is not actually as complicated as it first appears to be, these lux meditations are definitely not quite as simple as they first appear to be. He investigates what lies beneath the surface of things and arrives at what the philosophically inclined might call things-in-themselves. This artist is building a staircase to heaven without ever leaving the earth. While Ballantyne’s kind of themes and these accurate depictions of the recognizable world around us are often called photorealism or pictorial realism, I find it more accurate and rewarding to perceive them as magic realism. Either way, the artist’s persistent commitment to capturing the essence of appearances and the mysteries below the surface is laudable in an age still avidly absorbed by both the abstract and the conceptual. As for their visual references or aesthetic geneology, while some viewers may tend to identify a resonance with the Canadian realists Colville or Pratt, or the Americans Wyeth or Hopper, I tend to veer toward their affinity with other more magic realists such as Fransoli, Guglielmi or Helder. They are similarly crisp and tidy, presented in bold outlines, with forms defined by soft but stark lights and gentle but profound shadows.

People Among the People: The Public Art of Susan Point

Artist Susan Point. (Photo:: MonteCristo)

It’s all a question of scale. Recently on the West Coast we had the great opportunity to experience two sides of the widely accomplished and acclaimed Coast Salish (Musqueam) artist Susan Point. Her intimately scaled gallery works were showcased at the first solo show featuring her in the Okanagan Spindle Whorl, at the Kelowna Gallery, while her large-scale public artworks were celebrated in a remarkable new book, People Among the People, released by Vancouver-based Figure 1 Publishing, with insightful texts by Robert D. Watt and Michael Kew.

Both the interior gallery drawings, paintings and sculptures and the large exterior public space commissions by this gifted artist share an attention to indigenous motifs and an interactive spirituality for which she has been rightly recognized over the last thirty years or so. Ironically, the gallery exhibit has a bigness of heart while the public works featured in Watt’s book have a gripping intimacy which often belies their grander size.