Proximity to Power (Part 1)
On moving away
I moved away from NYC over two years ago, a reality that was almost completely obfuscated by the sweeping global pandemic that arrived mere months after I landed in Vancouver, where I’d graduated from art school nearly a decade and a half previously. Aside from being one of the bigger cities in Canada, Vancouver holds, or at some point held, the status of “third most important art scene in North America.” As Scott Watson, art historian and director/curator of the University of British Columbia’s Belkin Art Gallery, describes it in the 2017 documentary Is There a Picture (directed by Harry Killas):
“Recently I was in Los Angeles, and an important curator, a director of an art school, said to me, Well, I guess Vancouver is the third most important art scene in North America. The first two would be New York and Los Angeles. And I said, well, I guess that’s the case, but in fact it’s really more the 13th most important, it’s just the positions from three to twelve are vacant. I mean, it’s ludicrous to compare Vancouver to Los Angeles or New York. It’s absolutely ludicrous. But on the other hand, it makes you wonder why Vancouver’s art world is probably weightier than the art world of, say, Chicago. Why is that?”
The importance of Vancouver on the international (art) stage was a familiar refrain during my years at the local art school. It was what kept me from transferring to university in Montreal to pursue textile art halfway through my undergrad degree. I was accepted to the school, and went to Montreal to visit that summer and decide whether or not to transfer. I partied my 19-year-old ass off: drank Don du Dieu, Fin du Monde, and Maudite from the dépanneur until I passed out on a couch; crowd-surfed and made out at an after-hours; ate bagels at dawn.
And then I boarded a bus to NYC for a few days. It was 2005, and cell phones weren’t much use, so I made a list of galleries from the back pages of Artforum and toured Chelsea and Soho with the help of subway maps and Time Out New York. After a few years of art school in Vancouver, where my teachers – many of them former students of arch-photo-conceptualist patriarch Jeff Wall – had preached the imperative of deeply-researched criticality and icy, airtight conceptual logic, I was astonished by what I saw in New York galleries.
The art was colourful, fun, and glamorous – trendy, even. It had the slickness and seduction of the images in the overpriced fashion magazines that I spent hours reading in bookstores. I didn’t know that art could be that cool and expensive at the same time.
That was it. I was going to stay in Vancouver, finish my degree, and move to New York, somehow. Of course, there was something deeper to the art I saw than just being cool and expensive. It was good, too: to my late-teenage brain, Banks Violette’s burned-out church cast in salt and enveloped in an ambient black metal soundtrack seemed like pretty much the pinnacle of what art could be. While my tastes have expanded a bit since then, I still really like the piece, and am currently kicking myself for (inexplicably) not having kept the catalog I bought.
And now that I’m back in Vancouver (again), I’ll have to make do with Steven Shearer, the earlier, but much less glamorous, heavy metal conceptualist.
I probably shouldn’t do this, but I can’t help but read into Shearer’s work from the perspective of cultural differences between America and Canada. Both him and Violette, though a generation apart, operate in a sort of conceptual mannerist mode that harks back to the photo-conceptualist and Pictures Generation practices of the 70s and 80s, but with a counter-cultural twist. Shearer, who emerged in the 90s with work that looked like it came out of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy-era Cal Arts, didn’t actually go to grad school, while Violette’s origin story is famously that of a high school drop-out and recovered addict who graduated from Columbia’s MFA program during its peak in the 2000s.
Both artists incorporate references to heavy metal, ritual and fantasy in their work: Shearer with his image collections and renderings of long-haired androgynous basement dwellers, suburban echoes of pagan rituals, and “poems” made of grotesque song lyrics; Violette with drum kits dripping resin stalactites and renderings of album art motifs in graphite and (in one case) fresh flowers. But while Shearer’s work seems suffused with repressed (queer) desire (and ambient gender non-conformity), Violette’s is steeped in unbridled sentimentality and melancholy longing, which, as a self-professed dark romantic, I can’t help but love.
It takes me back to that first trip from Vancouver to NYC. While Violette is far from an underdog, his posture is anathema to the over-analytical “rigor” of (post-) Vancouver School aesthetics. It’s work that aspires unapologetically to beauty, in spite of its costs.
Moving away from NYC all these years later, once the shock wore off, sparked a reclamation of things I’d taken for granted, that I’d forgotten or thought I’d lost: embracing the things that I like, rather than what is of the moment or “smart.” My years spent “in the art world” – inadequate shorthand for an environment, a way of thinking, an echelon – both weigh on me, in terms of the loss of meaning and moral injury they inflicted, and also seem to hold the key to who I am outside of it. Which is something that I am just beginning to uncover.