ISSUE 11Summer 2011 Contents HIGHLIGHTS: Steven Shearer by Dieter Roelstraete; Slavs & Tatars by Carson Chan; Kaari Upson by Quinn Latimer; Alina Szapocznikow by Chris Sharp; Greg Parma-Smith interview by Nicolas Guagnini. web features topPOST-WHAROLIAN MOURNERS STEVEN SHEARER, the representative of Canada at this year’s Venice Biennale, practices a dazzling pictorial experimentation engaged with a dense array of historical styles, from Impressionism to Expressionism, Fauvism, and Symbolism, while exploring the codes of suburban American pop culture. Window, 2005 Through no fault or design of my own, a chance visit to Minneapolis provided just the right inspirational occasion for jotting down a few thoughts on the new and not-so-new work of Vancouver-based artist Steven Shearer (b. 1968), whose drawings, paintings, and sculptures will occupy the Canadian Pavilion during this summer’s Venice Biennale. The occasion in question was an exhibition titled “The Mourners,” which I was fortunate enough to see at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The exhibition’s titular grievers are a group of thirty-eight small alabaster sculptures, made in the fifteenth century by some of Europe’s finest stone carvers to adorn the graves of the Dukes of Burgundy: a procession of mournful, dejected looking monks, many with their hoods pulled over their contorted faces, languorously shuffling in and out of the labyrinthine structure (meant to evoke the entrails of a medieval Carthusian cloister) that forms the pedestal on which the life-size sculpted effigies of the ducal deceased lie enshrined. topPOP RIGHT NOW As we witness the unprecedented destruction of public space through digital media, the embrace of art and popular culture has grown increasingly complicated—demanding that its core contradictions be explored to unveil Pop’s enigmatic and ambivalent nature, and to discover how its legacy plays out in contemporary practices. topART STIGMERGY In an increasingly dispersed world, MARK LECKEY rejects the self-referentiality of the art world in favor of being immersed in things through the benefits of technology— thus allowing an expanded field of sculpture to take shape between material and immaterial realms.
Drunken Bakers, video still, 2005
MAYBE WE COULD START OFF BY TALKING ABOUT THE ROLE OF POPULAR CULTURE IN YOUR WORK. WHY DO YOU FOCUS ON POPULAR CULTURE? Popular culture is just things that are immediate to me. When I was in college in the ’80s, I found everything too detached or ironic, and I didn’t want to make work like that; I couldn’t make work with a critical disinterestedness. I decided that I should use as material my own history and background. “Fiorucci” was a way of digesting things that had happened to me personally, but also a history of where I had come from. I was a casual and a raver, so those are things I can speak of. My show at the Serpentine features a big fridge because that’s what is now in my local environment: domestic appliances. That’s what I have a relationship with now. Read more |
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