Review: Who Means What / Brent Roe / Paintings / 1992-2001

Agnes Etheringon Art Centre, 5 January - 28 April 2002 Since the early 1980's Toronto painter Brent Roe has been exhibiting his work in parallel spaces, artist collective exhibitions and in small annual and biannual shows at Wynick Tuck Gallery. He first gained attention for a narrative cartoon-style of painting that commented ironically on cold war politics. By the mid-eighties he had replaced the caricature style and political references with a looser, schematic figurative rendering accompanied by captions and texts describing conundrums, solipsisms and random streams of consciousness. The essential components of Brent Roe's mature style have changed little since that time, but in spite of that his work has evolved markedly. Figure ground relationships, paint handling, colour, surface texture, canvas sizes and proportions have constantly changed in relationship to each other in a concentrated on-going activity reminiscent of a chemist's careful measuring and testing of the volatility of his compounds. Through the waxing and waning of stylistic and ideological enthusiasms in the 1980's and 1990's it became apparent that Brent Roe had been focused on a specific and unshakable mission. Just what this mission is, however, remains a slippery subject. In the quest to understand Brent Roe's mission I organized a five-year, 31 piece survey at Cambridge Galleries in 1997. John Massier tackled an ambitious 10 year, 93 work survey of Roe's work at the Koffler Gallery in 1998. The third and current survey, organized by John Armstrong and Michelle Jacques for the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, falls somewhere in the middle of the previous two. In the quantity of work and in its 1992 starting date, it is closer to the Cambridge survey. But like the Koffler exhibition, this show also contains a selection of sketchbooks and the baroque touch of the artist's idiosyncratic miniature graffiti on the walls between the paintings. Also in a manner similar to the Koffler survey, the conventional horizontal alignment of paintings at eye level is supplemented by the additional hanging of works high above – salon style. An added feature of the Agnes Etherington exhibition is the existence of a ping-pong table in the middle of the gallery. Demonstrating perhaps a newfound tongue-in-cheek interest in the decorative arts, the surface of the ping pong table and its paddles have been painted by Roe in his characteristic manner. Roe's characteristic manner is typically a combination of a painterly abstraction with ironic, deflating texts. Often, the texts seem to mock not only the pretensions of painting, but of all redeeming notions of art. The belief that some larger meaning can be divined from studying art, for example, is derided by texts like "truth and meaning can be found within 5 metres of this spot" or "All those seeking meaning line up behind this canvas," configured either as the visual voice balloons of declaiming cartoon figures or slogans painted on an abstract and expressionist ground. Expression, essence, truth and genius, and other popular notions associated with art receive similar treatment at the hands of Roe. Of course irony and sarcasm can quickly wear thin, and thinness is the most common criticism leveled against Roe's work. This perception is not diminished by the institutional and logistical imperatives of both commercial and public galleries to emphasize solo exhibitions. I don't think I have ever left a Brent Roe exhibition wanting more, and in fact the artist has a history of crowded solo exhibitions, which have included just too many works. It is my experience that these paintings work best not in solo exhibitions where they can begin to seem like a string of one-liners (and where one begins to suspect that he's got more than a million of 'em), but in-group shows. There, surrounded by extroverted expressions of earnestness and virtuosity, the negative ions thrown off by Roe's paintings create deep rich spaces of calm and existential awareness – a cold steely clarifying of the moment – not unlike the way a great wit can at once celebrate and expose the pretensions of the guests at a party. Never-the-less, a solo survey exhibition gives us the opportunity to examine constant thematic and stylistic devices and the conscious changes that the artist engages over a period of time. On the occasion of the Agnes Etherington exhibition, the organizers provided interpretative assists in the form of a colour-illustrated catalogue with an essay by curator John Armstrong and an interview with the artist by Michelle Jacques. A panel discussion focusing on Roe's use of language in his paintings was held toward the end of the exhibition. An added bonus was the recorded audio guide conducted by the artist. Armstrong's essay introduces the focus and the scope of Roe's art-about-art commentary and Jacque's interview reveals the artist's playful, evasive, reflective and iconoclastic character. On the audio guide Roe offers up startling details about the iconology of the paintings in the exhibition. It is worth listening just to be able to experience the depth of his engagement with the ideas he presents. The symposium was less successful, focusing perhaps too much on the history of texts and voice balloons in art and not enough on what makes these devices effective in Roe's paintings. Two comparisons made by Armstrong at the symposium, however, were illuminating. Beyond the common use of text, the proximity of Roe's work to that of the senior American artist Ed Ruscha had not previously presented itself to me so forcefully. However, their similar preoccupation with the tensions between image and words and abstraction and representation contribute to a shared ascetic mysticism and a riveting evocation of the existential present. This is an aesthetic which has roots in the early modernism of Picasso and Braque and which had its most theatrical presentation in the work of Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists. It is no accident that these are among the artists cited as influences by Roe in the catalogue interview. But why text? Why use language in a painting, in a picture, which, as the saying goes, is worth at least a thousand words? It seems to me that question is partially addressed by another image cited in the panel discussion. An Annunciation by Simone Martini showing the Virgin Mary being informed by the angel Gabriel of the immaculate conception and the impending birth of Jesus. In an attempt to mimic the way words are directed from one person to another, Martini has laid text on the surface of the painting in a straight line beginning at the angel's mouth on the left and heading toward of the head of Mary. Language and text in the biblical sense are traditionally associated with the divine revelation of God's laws and interventions. Applied to the painting's surface, text makes the image revelatory. Brent Roe's text balloons function as gem-like personal revelations, and for the viewer they work like a cleverly pointed reality check. I suspect however, that the issue for the artist is not his use of language in painting, rather, it is what painting and language can uniquely achieve when combined, for Roe is first and foremost a painter. Every one of his paintings foregrounds the act of painting, with references to painterly abstraction and other historical styles, or in his decorative doodles, flourishes and graffiti inspired markings. T. J. Clark, in his fascinating study of Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat, draws attention to the two letters in the painting and contrasts them with the great expanse of scumbled, burnt umber that occupies the canvas's upper half. Clark sees this large area of dark ground as the objective reality of paint, the “endless, meaningless objectivity produced by paint not quite finding its object.” He contrasts that with the deception of the Charlotte Corday letter in Marat's hand, and the trompe d'oeil illusionism of the letter on the plinth that appears to project into the viewer's space. In the visual telling of this revolutionary tragedy, illusion and deception are in a struggle against truth. It is text that clarifies the activity of painting, and brings us in someway closer to its uncanniness. But it is also painting that makes language present, frames it – makes it more real. And making both painting and language more real, may just be Brent Roe's mission. Gordon Hatt

Dan Kennedy: Shack of Deals

Because infants perceive only movement and contrast, adults open their eyes wide, arch their brows, and raise the pitch of their voice in an attempt to bond. This is how we learn that we are not alone in the world - a revelation that must seat itself profoundly in that part of the brain that records emotions. Is it any wonder, when our very first existential crisis is met with a toothy smile, big eyes and singing happy talk, that as adults we thrust Mickey and Minnie on our children for comfort, or find ourselves seeking solace in pop stars with cartoon smiles? The traveller notices it first - the billboards, the magazine covers, the TV screens featuring unfamiliar yet attractive, wide-eyed, smiling characters with indecipherable foreign texts. You think, "Why are all these people smiling at me, and what are they trying to say?" It seems like the world has begun to feel like a giant crib, with dozens of strange relatives looking in and talking baby talk. Westerners travelling from the old West Berlin to the communist East Berlin used to experience another kind of shock. It was a shock of withdrawal - the total and complete cessation of visual happy talk - no billboards, no backlit signs, no glamour magazines at the newsstand. It was like the aural equivalent of turning the television and the radio off. Clearly, being accustomed to its sensuous embrace, we become confused when commercial publicity is absent. The promise of contemporary urban life is the satiation of desire, where you can get anything you want, where no anxiety need go unaddressed, where no impulse lacks an expression. The world of commercial imagery that surrounds us is a fantasy of glamour and affection, providing meaning and security in a community of economic values. Publicity and advertising assure us that even if we can't afford it, even if we aren't good enough or glamorous enough, comfort exists. *** Dan Kennedy's paintings in the exhibition "Shack of Deals" have all been created since 1999 and comprise aspects of two bodies of work. The painting Trick #6 comes from a series of work of the same name and takes as its compositional format the conventional advertising poster or signboard, where texts at the bottom and the top frame a central illustration. Kennedy makes reference to these recognizable formats in his Trick series paintings, seeking to create a layered, visual representation of the voice of the huckster, combining the illusions of the sales pitch, with the pictorial illusions of age in the apparently yellowing varnish and fading enamels. Illusionism, the artist seems to be saying, is the property of both the artist and the huckster. A separate body of work is illustrated by the title piece of the exhibition Shack of Deals, in which the conventional graphic format of the posters is replaced by dense layers of images and text that seem to float in weightless spaces. These painted collages conjure a world filled with cartoon characters, comic pastorals and fragments of words in commercial typefaces. No text is complete. No phrase resolves into a statement. Instead, the words begin to resemble the aural detritus of a garbled salesman's shill. All that remain are the superlatives and the false imperatives. These are airless paintings, whose cartoon figures are incomplete, fragmented, inverted, colliding and jostling in a soupy, viscous space. Pastel bubbles appear to leak and hiss from the recesses and cavities of this claustrophobic world. Pictorial spaces shift, from illusionistic depths, to flat dripping areas of colour. Moments of innocent charm - popular cartoon characters for example - seem overwhelmed and oppressed by the crowded space in which they seem doomed to exist, like some Disney version of Dante's Inferno. *** Looking up from our cribs at our mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers and extended family can be a both a comforting and terrifying experience. As hard as they try, not all of those high voices and exaggerated smiles manage to bridge the gulf between knowledge and innocence. Aged faces scare babies, and why not? They provide a little bit too much information about things to come. It is hard not to feel that Kennedy's vision is not dissimilar to the infant's view from the crib. Cartoons of wide-eyed innocence exist side by side with caricatures of the wizened and sinister. These images mirror the same emotional mixture of comfort and threat, and beg the question: is this an isolated world view, or is this vision an insight into a larger social pathology? Much current speculation on the effects of globalization and the penetration of corporate cultural values suggest that social infantilization is the inevitable and even desired outcome. Benjamin R. Barber has described contemporary marketing's targeting of children as ideal consumers: The result is a new consumer who is neither a kid nor an adult, but a "kidult" with grown-up buying power and childish, uniform tastes that can be catered to by fast food, athletic shoes, T-shirts, cola drinks, Gap-style coed clothes based loosely on sports apparel, and - the merchandising and branding engine behind it all - the global pop culture of homogenized MTV music and Hollywood's cartoonish blockbuster films and videos.(1) The defining aspect of multinational global consumerism at the turn of the millennium is the pursuit of economic self interest and personal self gratification, to the detriment of all other values. We are encouraged and enabled to pursue our most immature desires, to demand from the world endless comfort and gratification, to consume out of our most irrational fears and to forego the basic responsibilities of citizenship. Dan Kennedy's work is not the product of an isolated individual, but rather that of an observer of contemporary life. He uses the tools of pop culture familiarity and character recognition to connect with viewers and bring people into his work. At the same time, we may be troubled and discomfited by his ambiguous, mysterious and toxic spaces, by the shrill bleating of his advertising graphics and by the ominous signs of aging and mortality that he builds into these paintings. These works mirror what growing numbers of people feel - the simultaneous experience of desire and disgust, of charm and alienation, of satiation and of emptiness, in the new global market place - in this great shack of deals. Gordon Hatt End Notes 1. Benjamin R. Barber, "The Global Infantilization: How We Became Kidults without Noting the Loss of Freedom In Society," Tagespiegel Online, Tagespiegel Online Dienste Verlag: 2001, <http://www2.tagespiegel.de/archiv/2001/09/08/ak-so-am-558006.html>.

Tom Bendtsen: Argument #6 (b)

Interview on January 10 & March 12, 2002

with Cambridge Galleries’ curator Gordon Hatt

GH. I'm interested in how the book works started. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

TB. It was in Montreal, when I was part of a show called “Systems of Exchange” in 1994. It was a cultural exchange between cities - a way of bringing together these two cultural centres of Canada. What ended up happening was that people started to parade and canvas around an issue of censorship – and this idea of community started to break down. We started to fight with each other and then within our city groups we started to fight amongst each other about titles and contents and it just all broke down.

After that I started thinking about this work. We're all influenced by and we all have access to the same information, and yet we're able to construct vastly different ideas and arguments. So I was thinking of the arbitrary nature of ‘conclusion making,’ or having opinions, or making arguments. It's not entirely arbitrary, but can seem to be. Whatever your emotional state at the moment, you can find a way of justifying it through common knowledge or academic texts. I started thinking about collecting a large group of books that represented knowledge – my knowledge, knowledge I had access to – and then just started compiling them into different structures that represented ideas, monuments to ideas. You can take knowledge and construct any argument you want based on what you want. And I also like the idea that when they're done they're fixed. They're heavy and they're immovable. They're made up of little parts, but they're immovable once they're completed. They're also fragile.

So that was of the genesis of the work, and that's why I built the wall, the first piece I did. It was a house – a wall blocking off part of my studio limiting ‘potential’ for myself (Argument #2, 1997). On the outside of the house were academic texts (more presentable) and on the inside there were Readers Digest condensed novels, Hardy Boys, “how-to” books more ‘home’ and ‘comfort’ books maybe the types of books you wouldn't want anyone to see, or know what you read in private. At Mercer Union (Argument #3,1997) I built a column, mainly of art and culture texts, and the idea of that was that a specific kind of history was keeping the ceiling from falling in. In the exhibition “Canadian Shield,” (Argument #4, 1998) I built a cave, which was a little more ambiguous, but I think one of my more successful book works. You walked inside and it went up about 14 feet all around you and you felt like you had walked into a cave, or maybe even a cathedral. The power of the physical space – that was the main thing. The content wasn't as specific. It was more architectural.

The piece at Southern Alberta Art Gallery was monolithic (Argument #5, 2000). It represented art in all its majesty. If you went around the to back there was a little staircase. My thinking was that it was like the ‘Wizard of Oz’ – pomp and circumstance, showmanship, and then if you knew how to get in the back, there's this little staircase . . . And finally this piece in Cambridge, which is the idea of ascension through knowledge, but contrasted by the content of the books, which become more superficial as you climb up. It appears as ascension through knowledge, but I'm contrasting that very utopian ideal with contents that reflect the contrary.

I was also thinking at this stage about cultural entropy, the fact that culturally we're casting out subtlety all the time. I’ll use a flu virus as an analogy – the genetic makeup of the flu bug has, say 100 parts to it and as it divides it loses some of those parts – maybe 5% as it grows and expands out into the human population. As it loses some of its genetic material it reproduces quicker and spreads faster. It learns that it doesn't need all its genetic material. It speeds up as it is able to transmit into the population until it reaches the point where it doesn't have enough genetic material left to reproduce because it's cast off so much. The same thing exists in nature, where certain trees flourish in a forest. They're able to kill off other trees and plant life and they grab more sunlight and more of the water. But then at a certain point that tree is isolated and it doesn't have the other plant life and other bug life to sustain it. Then it will also die. It is a condition in nature of speeding up and casting out the unnecessary or the subtle detail.

I'm thinking about this pattern as it relates to world culture. Things are speeding up at an incredible rate – jettisoning extra languages and traditions and habits and cultural patterns. In this piece I'm including the idea of ascension, but the texts are becoming more and more simple.

GH. I think people tend to believe that more information makes you smarter, and the more information you have, the better the decision you will be able to make. Well informed combatants or debaters can at some point shed their prejudices and come to a rational solution. In a similar way, there's a general feeling that there's more and more information all the time – we live in a more and more complex world. But what you're telling me is almost the opposite of those two very things: The volume of information we have makes no difference.

TB. I agree that knowledge and education is a good thing tolerance and understanding of other cultures is good for us, but if you look at the Internet, which is supposedly the way that everyone has access to knowledge, access to all the libraries, it seems to me that it has become just another television now for the advertisers. I don't think it necessarily follows that because there is more information, or access to it, that we become better educated. Maybe the only information is Corporate America's version – the diversity of opinion being essentially lost.

GH. What do you think of the books as ‘objects.’ You're working with books, it's the material you use, the building blocks signifiers in a way, but there seems to be a fetish for the books themselves.

TB. I like the idea that I can't reach them when they're in one of these things, it may seem juvenile my resistance to knowledge, but it's also a caution. I've got this cigarette rolling machine and every time I read a book I take the cover off and I shred the book (I had to have read it all) and I roll it into cigarettes.

GH. They're just paperbacks?

TB. Well, yeah, I could take a hard cover off as well and just be left with the pages, so that at the end of my two years (at the State University of New York in Buffalo) I'm going to have a series of shelves displaying the cigarettes with the book covers and however many cigarettes the content rolled into will be displayed along side. I guess there's addiction consumption in the form of a cigarette, and it's also a way of not taking it all too seriously. I want the knowledge. I want to understand, but at the same time to make sure, I add a bit of caution to the process.

GH. Do you ever encounter people who find what you do with books offensive?

TB. Absolutely. Not many people have seen the cigarette work yet, but some have said even the stacking of the books is disrespectful.

GH. . . . you should donate them to a library?

TB. Actually, someone said exactly that a couple of years ago.

GH. Even since the time since I first saw one of your book works, my attitude toward books has changed. Because of the Internet, the way we very often get information now is digital as opposed to printed text.

TB. There's a nostalgic quality to books. Where they used to carry information now they're old fashioned and you cuddle up by a fire with them.

GH. Book publishers are spending more time to make the book an interesting object – more of an attractive object to buy, so that the cover art and the actual handling of the book is more appealing. The book becomes an art object.

TB. There's a nostalgic quality to the dying medium – film is similar to books in that there's this bit of information that's readable – it's right there in front of you. It's not abstract (like digital text). It doesn't appear to you all of a sudden on a screen. There's something about that hard technology that's appealing to me. Film is sculptural to me – it's a physical thing.

GH. As opposed to video?

TB. Exactly. Video is just a series of electronic data. I was recently asked if I would consider myself a Luddite.

GH. A Luddite?

TB. Yeah, because of this nostalgic approach to technology. I had never thought of it that way. But I don't think I am.

GH. Where does your interest in science come from? You are able to talk very animatedly about science and find metaphors and parallels in it.

TB. I guess it's similar to art in that it involves abstract thought. Like people sitting around their rooms or studios and coming up with crazy ideas and then trying to illustrate them. I see it as quite similar.

GH. Okay, let's just start from the beginning – just the program of Argument #6(B).

TB. This is the sixth in the Argument series and the basic idea was that there is a limited amount of knowledge that I have access to and these books represent that knowledge – a sort of a Western Canadian's history. It's about me trying to make sense and organize all that history and all the information that is accessible to me. So this is an attempt, as the other configurations are, to make ideas physical – like the idea of ascension. Others pieces I have done have dealt with the history of contemporary art, personal reading histories as opposed to public versus private reading histories. This one is about ascension, or the illusion of ascension through progress and knowledge. There is a general historical gradation in all of them. The foundation of our knowledge is often in the legal system and religious beliefs very loosely associated. That's the base. As we climb up we get into more academic texts and more science, (again) our legal and scientific belief systems. It starts to dissipate into psychology as we come out of the academic texts into the humanities. Over on this side it is more literature based and around here we have more art and contemporary ideas of art. On the other side maybe we have a Canada rising out of a British tradition. Here it's not exactly linear, but we have a lot of British legal texts (supporting) Canadian legal texts and then these books here are journals of consumer products and marketing strategies and then we come up into Canadian business, Anne of Green Gables, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement, Norman Bethune, In Flanders Fields, The Klondike by Pierre Berton, W.O. Mitchell . . .

GH. So this is the Can-Lit section?

TB. Yes, and it has a historical gradation up into Carol Shields, John Ralston Saul near the top before we get into this layer here which is the Readers Digest Condensed novels. That is for me the cut off point where all the stuff below it has become homogenized into a pop culture framework or has become regurgitated. So above we have the Readers Digest, then we have the Hardy Boys which again is colour. A lot of it has do with colour as well. The legal texts and the Bible are heavier so it makes sense for them also to go on the bottom just for practical building purposes. But then similar to the base, the Readers Digest novels reflect a new beginning – the homogenization of these more critical texts or texts we take more seriously. Above the Readers Digest we get into autobiographies, (Shelly Winters), popular fictions (Jurassic Park) different sports figures, biographies, and we move up into more pulp fiction. As we ascend we get into trashier novels, fantasy novels and romance novels. We have heavier, denser content moving up into a lighter content. There is an idea of ascension built by this piece that seems to be swirling upward but it is actually contrasted by the content of the books, where they become lighter in their content as they ascend. There is a euphoric, progressive feeling you may get from this piece originally, but if you look at it closer, as it ascends it dies out.

GH. So when you are constructing this, obviously you have an idea that this section for example is Canadiana, and then this is literature, and then this is art, chemistry, statistics etc.

TB. The more I build these things, the more organized the books become. The categories weave into each other a little bit sometimes. I'm not following a specific content structure from bottom to top. But it does still reflect that legal text into academic text, into that acceptable older respected literature, more modern philosophy up into Camille Paglia, How to be a Good Secretary and What About Men. There is a little feminist thing right there so there are little pockets of other things as well that are outside of the larger areas of focus.

GH. There is something terribly Hegelian about this whole thing. The end of history starting with religion and law, moving through art and then ending in philosophy.

TB. There you go. And my ending is pop culture.

GH. And here along the steps . . .

TB. Well here we have a Bible, then we have British legal history, then we have Canadian legal history.

GH. So this is a reiteration of the overall . . .

TB. Yeah. We move up step by step. Here, all the encyclopaedias are in one spot. There is a colour choice made as well – you know the red looks nice beside the green of the consumer charter and the blue of the “Protect Yourself.” It's a futile effort to actually try and make sense of all the available history, so at times I'm just trying to place them aesthetically – to order all of these texts specifically as they relate to each other and myself would be virtually an impossible feat. Here's a bit of rock history – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Elvis & Me, No One Gets Out of Here Alive, His Way: An Autobiography of Frank Sinatra . . .

GH. I'm interested in the fact that as you're building it, you're going around in a circle so you keep coming back to sections that you're working on.

TB. Maybe they connect as much this way (laterally) as up and down.

GH. The more I talk to you about it, the more fascinating I find your engagement with the books, your feeling from the books and also the personal way you approach it in terms of Western Canadian history.

TB. My bias is included in it right? To construct some utopian, fair world view would be wrong. This is my bias. It's about my history and that's the only place I can speak from.■