Western Canada's art magazine since 2002
8 September 2020 Vol 5 No 18 ISSN 2561-3316 © 2020
From the Editor
Portia Priegert
During the pandemic, social media sites have been awash with homebound remakes of famous paintings, with encouragement from galleries like the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
At one point, after I had shared some images on Facebook, Sarah Swan, who writes for Galleries West from Yellowknife, sent me a link to a Momus article by Toronto writer Mark Mann.
“I think most art people feel good about these recreations, with so many galleries issuing similar calls and challenges,” Swan wrote. “I was wondering if any negative articles might emerge and this is the only one I've seen thus far.”
Personally, I find the challenges interesting because they display ingenuity, often to humorous effect. Some of the images veer into broad parody, particularly when they involve stockpiles of toilet paper. But, of course, such remakes are generally shorn of the original work's deeper content – its meanings and themes – leaving an ersatz image at the level of surface, something that seems to matter more with some artworks than others.
This is essentially Mann’s point. While acknowledging that he enjoys scrolling through the images, Mann decries the kitschy echoes of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Own Son. “Originally painted on the walls of the country home the artist occupied in his last years of life, the works are terrifying and surreal because they are honest about harm and hate,” Mann writes. “No one is more wide-eyed than old Goya in his shadows; no one has flinched less.”
In pondering Sarah’s note, I also thought about why these remakes – at least the ones I've seen – are largely enacted by white people, and how even this playful activity seems to reinscribe the exclusionary reality of much Western art history.
So it was interesting to open a newsletter from the Art Gallery of Ontario last week to find an item about British baritone Peter Braithwaite, who responded to the Getty's challenge and then kept going, portraying more than 80 Black characters from art history – including the Mali Empire’s golden king, Mansa Musa and the leader of the Haitian Revolution, François-Dominque Toussaint Louverture.
“I hadn’t seen many recreations of pieces of art with Black people before I started to do it myself,” Braithwaite is quoted as saying. “And it’s an acknowledgment of what a great challenge it is in the way it’s opened up a whole new world of creativity and culture for me.”
Meanwhile, in this issue of Galleries West, Sarah has turned her critical eye to "comics journalism," more specifically American Joe Sacco's graphic book about the Dene peoples.
She raises the problem of drive-by writing, and says the book could have used more counterbalance to the harrowing stories of colonization. "The Dene are more than their experiences of trauma," she writes. "They have so much to offer through the beauty and strength of their cultures."
We also look at work by an Edmonton-based artist from El Salvador, Michelle Campos Castillo, who explores her childhood survival of a 1986 earthquake with murals that recall comics art. Writer Adam Whitford calls the show “a reminder that art continues to be a conduit for connection and empathy.”
We are pleased to welcome a new-to-us writer, Ian M. Thom, a former curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery. His incisive review, which considers a show of social paintings by Maxwell Bates at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, cites the artist's "enormous skills with colour and pattern."
Rounding out this issue, Vancouver’s John Thomson reviews Currency, a fascinating show by eight international artists who reflect on money, markets and the financial world. We also have two stories from Victoria, a preview of Luke Ramsey’s upcoming exhibition at the Madrona Gallery, and another about art that probes the intersection between poetry and visual art.
Looking ahead, we are putting together stories about a pandemic-flavoured show of beaded masks at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, and a show we didn't get to before the pandemic lockdown, Ontario artist Bridget Moser's solo show at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon.
Until next time,
CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE: Sarah Swan, Ian M. Thom, John Thomson, Adam Whitford