Lower Unit
Or, Observations on "LoVe/HaTe: New Crowned Glory In The G.T.A" displaying at MOCCA
By Wintifer Osprey
Posted July 23rd, 2007.
Painted orange asphalt littered the floor, suggesting the caution required of me on the threshold of this constructed urban landscape. And rightly so, for as I stepped on in — bedlam! Installations spattered dizzily about in hideous dripping colour and vibrancy. The sounds of flashing cameras and plaintive confessions beat about the air, while the low eddies of indistinct pounding bass coiled my insides.
Until August 19th, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art has gathered over thirty artists from around the GTA in the hopes of creating a summer blockbuster of bold, blustering, borsht. It boasts "some of Toronto's most loved and despised artistic icons, including those we see and hear far too much from and others who deserve to be seen more often". This appeal to the personality pituitary, gussied up under the banner of "LoVe/HaTe: New Crowned Glory In The G.T.A." has no doubt had a polemic effect on its audiences thus far. It has pitted a wide array of talent one against the other in what will no doubt be a veritable Thunderdome of visual carnage.
At my feet lay a manipulated geometric death. A figure so alike my own time spent modifying primitives in 3D studio: a faceted extreme of shape, on which was layered the bright gloss of some overzealous computer nerd, texture mapping the dead. I was missing playing doom in the 90's right there and then, while I meditated over this reconstructed discorporate by Susy Oliveira which is among my favourites on display here.
In another exhibit, a screen confronts me beside a stack of posters, which read "this has been printed on poison ivy." I witness a figure making an impassioned oration on the severe consequences of handling the "free" copy I now hold in my hands. Dyan Marie responds to accusations of her involvement in an eco-terrorism cell and speaks about the horrors facing her, resulting from her fugitive status in the eyes of authority. Her environment distills the escalating hyperbole of marketing fear. She invites me to ask myself what reality I choose to accept. A part of me wants to know how many people have broken out in psychosomatic poison ivy as a result of their choices.
The show has drawn its work from icons who are making waves in the local art scene and whose reputations alone will draw out legions of enthusiastic followers. Indeed, that seems to be their only criteria for this exhibit. People will go to see the latest Bruce La Bruce and the Scandelles, the kitschy ink work of Fiona Smyth, and the raw atrocity of performance extremist Istvan Kantor, each one contributing the very thing people know, love and expect them to produce. But the relationships between the artists and between the pieces themselves are left somewhat untouched, arranged pell-mell within the same space. Much like warring states, little common ground can be found between them, however much the uniqueness of each can be appreciated.
Curators Camilla Singh and David Liss have apparently taken a wide spectrum of artistic profundity and mooshed it together in an attempt to incite carnal fervor: "Love it, hate it, hate to love it, love to hate it." Perhaps it is their hope that patrons gather in quarrelsome nodes, marching under the banner of their selected artist. Still, it leaves the audience with the task of sorting through these bodies of work strewn amongst college dorm accoutrements (a pool table, foosball game, and some exercise equipment inhabit the area), to intuit their associations. Underlying such orchestration there may be great ruminations to be had, such as "antidisestablishmentarianism," or there may not.