Table of Contents
Fillip 2 (Winter 2006)
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Catastrophic Narratives /
Fred Douglas’s large-scale, multidisciplinary practice reveals an uneasy truce between the nature of improvisational methods and the after-thought. Although Douglas would move conceptually away from the romanticized notion of improvisation to a more philosophically-based interrogation of the very possibility of the spontaneous act itself.
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To Live Real Boredom, One Must Have Style /
Boredom develops from the French word ennui, which is a differently attenuated mood. Ennui has grander and more passionate associations compared to its tedious, flat-footed English cousin.
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Now We Collect Situations /
Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation is not the useful survey text of “post-studio,” situated contemporary art it might have been. It has too many of the earmarks of a rush to jump on the relational aesthetics bandwagon, leaving shreds of low-grade binding glue everywhere behind it.
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By All Means Listen By All Means: Reading Aural Cultures /
As Jim Drobnick’s introduction to Aural Cultures indicates, part of what makes this field of inquiry so appealing (and perhaps timely) is that it must be fundamentally amenable to other, often sectarian disciplines, from history, to physics, to music, to philosophy, and so on, and thus must be more of an open, ongoing composition than itself a set discipline.
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The Long March Project /
Used Mao Zedong’s tactic of sending urban intellectuals to the countryside, the Long March Project engaged with the socialist memory of the historical march, working with the mass media and the general public over a series of twelve sites throughout China. The initial stage of the project, completed in 2004, culminated in the Yanchuan paper-cutting survey.
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The Number One Galleries in the Number One City /
Now that the British Columbia premier has boosted the economy by ensuring that the stupidly wealthy are richer, the galleries may have the opportunity to reap a harvest. Yes, the “best people in the world” are buying art. But do they know what they’re buying?
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The Bondo Between Word and Image /
While Simon Morley’s Writing on the Wall is in many ways impressively well-researched, and, up to a point, quite original in its cross-disciplinary perspective, it is mired by its uncertain sense of purpose.
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Derrida's Garden /
Derrida and Eisenman choose chora as a theme for thier garden at the Parc de la Villette project in Paris. Used by Plato to symbolize the space in which the ideal becomes visualized, chora is outside description and language. The problem thus becomes: how to represent the unrepresentable?
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Farm Arugula with Figs: Bay Area Bazaar, The RED and the GREEN, and Ripe Family Supper /
In Bay Area Bazaar, Laurie Reid asked one artist to participate in the show and then asked that same artist to invite two other artists. In this way she was no longer responsible for the exhibition in its totality. Reid herself admitted she disliked some of the work, but was willing to respect her friend’s choices. That the exhibition space was a commercial gallery only heightened the exhibition’s failure.
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Termini /
The pleasure of Charles Rea’s Crystal Lab’s is its hermeneutical playfulness, problematized by its abstruse epistemology. This is evident in its ambiguity, and emblematized by its kaleidoscopic layering of diagrams and charts superimposed through translucent intersecting planes, erupting with errant detail, colours bleeding and receding to diffusion.
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Remain in Life /
We are so accustomed to mediation that immediacy has become invisible. You can see it on the faces of the visitors ambling through the Richard Tuttle retrospective at the SFMoMA. They gaze vacantly at the oblong sheets of white paper affixed to white walls, at the pages of ruled notebook paper touched with dabs of watercolour, at the slats of wood hanging mutely and undecorated just above the floor.
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Departures From Death /
Judy Radul’s route to experiment is virtually free of the prevailing nostalgia for too hastily consumed artistic vanguards or some coming notions of community because it primarily interrogates presence. Even when she stages her experiments in the most romantic of settings, her work is not grounded in the fond, disarming recognition that so often links subjectivities.
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Colophon
- Editorial Board: Jordan Strom, Jeff Khonsary, Jonathan Middleton, and Paloma Campbell
- Editor: Jordan Strom
- Managing Editor: Jeff Khonsary
- Art Direction: Jeff Khonsary and Jonathan Middleton
- Copy Editing: Paloma Campbell
- Edition: 1500 copies
- Printing: Western Printers
- Distribution: Emma Marion (British Columbia), Speedimpex (Canada)
Acknowledgements
This project would not have been possible without the generous support of Courtenay Webber, Julie Flett, Amiel Flett-Brown, Kristina Podesva, Cheryl Meszaros, Matthew Stadler, Greg Gibson, and Christoph Keller.