Wong & Huisman Inject New Steam Into Vancouver Art
Saturday, February 15, 2014
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| Paul Wong & his neon plus sign hash tag |
Two of my favourite pieces of art were painted in the 19th century by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes and by J.M.W. Turner. The former’s is his wonderful portrait of the Duke of Wellington which for me evokes a real man of flesh in blood as opposed to the wooden hero of history. The latter is his The Fighting Temeraire.
I wrote of the significance of Turner’s
painting and how well it was used as a prop in the James bond film Skyfall. Read it here.
At my age of 70 I feel like that tired old wooden ship being towed to its breaking up by the latest gadget of the time, a steam driven tug boat.
At my age of 70 I feel like that tired old wooden ship being towed to its breaking up by the latest gadget of the time, a steam driven tug boat.
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| The Winsor Gallery |
For most of my years in Vancouver I have been a
magazine photographer but I did “dabble” as an artist until framing, matting
and un-brisk sales of my “so called” art convinced me finally that fame and
fortune will first be preceded by my death.
There may be a whiff of a bitterness reminiscent
of a little speech I heard Fred Herzog make at the opening of his first show at
the Vancouver Art Gallery.
He thanked the gallery and all those concerned but interjected that it would
all have been better if they had discovered him when he was younger and in
better health.
But I am happy to report that thanks to an
artist talk today by Paul Wong (the show is called #PaulWong14) at the newly located Winsor Gallery I am much more excited about art and of my own photography.
When I first went to Wong’s opening I liked
his stuff on the wall but had no concept of what it was all about. As a product (that’s me) of the age
of wooden ships (not quite but you get the idea) I have been unable to
understand the purpose, or the art, of conceptual art. I remember going to a show
on what used to be a tiny gallery row on Cordova near the now gone
Classical Joint that featured a row of old shoes on a floor corner which had
tubes on the wall dripping water into the shoes. I felt, I remember, like going
to the gallery representatives and telling that I wanted one of those for my
living room.
I read in my NY Times the difficulty that
the big art dealers have in selling works by Jeff Koons that are sculptures
made of balloons. I always thought that art had to have an important element of
permanence.
In short I did not get the message from art
that had a message to convey.
But when I heard Wong explain his complex
art (complex, particularly in the size of the digital files involved) in which
he mostly uses iPhones I began to see the light. Wong told us how his art (and
when he says “my art” there is not an ounce of pretension!) it has all to do
with making us (helping us) aware on how the ever more quick and frightening
interjection of new media (with their gadgets) intrudes into our life.
Any of Wong’s works in my living room might
induce an epileptic fit and in my bedroom it would cause insomnia fringing
towards insanity. But seen in the large and clean space that is the new Winsor
it all made sense. I left feeling I had read a good novel or seen a fine film -
good novels, and films reveal, inspire, trouble, affect, challenge and certainly
not bore. And Paul Wong’s video art is all that. And what helped me realize this was Wong's intimate, intelligent and personal explanation of his facts.
Enlightened somewhat (in what was a gray
and dullish rainy day) my friend Ian Bateson (a recently self-avowed artist,
who was just that, most of his life, while being distracted by being a good
graphic designer) and I decided to see Katie Huisman’s show, Physical Attraction
at the Initial Gallery (where the Monty Clark Gallery used to be).
I must clarify that this was my second time
at Huisman’s show. I had attended the opening on Thursday. The show features
the portraits of 50 couples in which through skillful use of Photoshop Huisman
combines the face of one with the other to form a composite portrait that
dramatically reveals that many of us seek in a partner someone that looks like
us.
I hears a few of my somewhat retired
colleagues of the "Fighting Temeraire type" talking in a “so what” sort of mode. I
heard one even ask,” How was life before Photoshop?”
And yet photographers have always been the
first to break rules and use the latest equipment they can find. My own primitive use of Photoshop's tool called layers tells me that Huisman spent many hours working on her exhibition. Curiously whatever varnish she used on her portraits made a few stand out as if they were in 3-D!
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| Physical Attraction at the Initial Gallery |
The original use of electronic flash
(perfected by Harold Eugene Edgerton) was to mount it on a reconnaissance
version of the B-24 Liberator bomber an fly it at night over the French coast
so as to find a suitable landing spot for the allied invading armies in WW-II. Obviously
photographers found plenty of other used for this device.
And these old timer colleagues of mine
might just not remember that Huisman’s technique was anticipated by Philippe
Halsman (curious how close Halsman is to Huisman!) in 1967 in his Marilyn Being
Mao. Halsman was a good friend of Salvador Dalí who asked him if he could think of a way to make Marilyn look like Chairman
Mao. Halsman was stimulated by the challenge, and he carefully scaled one of
his famous portraits of Marilyn with a close-up of the Chinese leader.
I also heard a few
people at the show comment that the pictures looked like driver’s license mug
shots.
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| Mao Marilyn - Philippe Halsman 1967 |
That is certainly not
true. The pictures are sharp and detailed. Huisman used two lights on either
side of her subjects so as to purposely remove and kind of drama or depth to
the portraits.
It is my feeling that
it may be just as difficult to dislodge an emotion from a sitter as it is to
keep that sitter free of all emotion. I believe that Huisman most skilfully, either
by instinct or by a clear purpose, took the portraits as they are.
I went home happy that
as I am being towed away to break up, Wong soldiers on (after all he is only
60) and Huisman will inject new steam into what I thought was a moribund art,
the art of photography.
