Canadian Conceptual Art
Four Artists: Tom Burrows, Duane Lunden, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace
Exhibition
February 3, 1970 - February 18, 1970
Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC
"The Limits of the Defeated Language: A Review of Four Artists"
Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, February 1970
Review by Dennis Wheeler"The Free Media Bulletin, edited by Duane Lunden, Jeff Wall, and Ian Wallace appeared on the scene in early fall 1969; it was the precursor to this show and went almost unnoticed, partly through a lack of adequate sponsorship. The attempt was to establish a ground on which to build an education in an envelope filled with socio-aesthetic documents vital to each of the three artists. The contents ranged all the way from W. S. Burroughs and Duchamp to original works of art by Duane Lunden and Jeff Wall. Ian Wallace did an essay, 'A Literature of Images', where he describes what he feels to be the 'determinant' of our new landscape, the urban, suburban and industrial environment (perhaps some day we will recognize the wilderness of the metropolitan grid).
This show, Four Artists, is an interesting focus on some energies recognizing this urban-industrial wilderness which Free Media Bulletin brought together formally for the first time."The notion of 'limits' is taken up most clearly by Jeff Wall in his magazine, Landscape Manual, which sells at the gallery for a quarter. He says, 'If you claim that you want to look at the facts, remember that the facts always exist in interdependence with your thinking'. The regionalism which is a proposition of these works suggests specificity of place, understood as a necessary and positive source of energy. The Landscape Manual is not an objective description of the environment we live in. It is a construction, a revealing of, and discovery of events and object situations. There is no attempt to be objective in the sense of producing some sort of record. Value or 'quality' is not irrelevant in this process but rather it is absorbed on the occasion of the perception which created the art we subsequently experience. Wall's interest is not in the invisible aspects of the urban environment but in the visible.
"There is nothing less engaging than the notion that artists have to isolate the limits of their activity and then spend the rest of their time struggling within these barriers.
One's obvious initial reaction to the show is that there is a new sense of landscape, a sudden heat for the mundane suburban city stretching horizontally across the map of America. The featureless-ness of this map is what becomes energy, and there is no attempt to turn the banal into a monumental popularism. Whether it is a wrought iron fence surrounding someone's house or pages from Look magazine, you are thrown back into the vernacular of a very real and unavoidable place. This place is Vancouver, but it could as well be Chicago, Edmonton, Toronto, or anywhere. There is always a micro-identity which is possibly singular; but it is currently overridden by the conclusive and reductive urban communication networks. This is not, however, turned into sentimentality, as is the apparent danger. Instead there is a terrific focus upon the very procedures and quality of this new environment. Images caught in car mirrors and windows in the Landscape Manual are fractured by the normal movement of sight. arresting the path of vision as it scans material."The reading of the book is only one level of activity in which the artist engages you. The messages are an abstracting instrument, but at the same time they are filled with an abrupt reference to a physicality that is available everywhere. This is 'the ground', the artist making an imprint to register the direction of a future growth rather than attempting to leave 'the masterpiece'.
"Intersections in time and space of objects and even our own imaginations as they are thrust outward from the Landscape Manual, are determinations more powerful than any reductive formalist statement. The material becomes the 'must' of where you are, each moment you are conscious of revealing it. The record of this movement toward consciousness is the coherence, the art itself.
"Tracks left, whether by civilization as in Wallace's taped Look pages, or by Wall's tire tracks in loose gravel and soil, are strong indicators out of the constraint implicit in the gallery context. Wallace's magazines, stapled and then taped to the wall, are reminiscent in part to Burrough's technique of cut-up. Both in his book of collages and in those which are fastened to the wall under plastic sheet. Much is made of the intersection and revelations of freshly juxtaposed images. The only artist in the show who includes film as a part of his work, Wallace is interested in avenues of communication both in the literal sense of city streets and in the fracture of real information that occurs there. Film is not used as an isolated medium but taken up as an expressionistic device to reveal the breakdown and synthesis of events as they happen in his travels about Vancouver. It relives the cultural present and past as if from several points of view at once. The artist as individual disappears into the mass of the cultural material surrounding him. He is the eye under a collapsing conception, the flood of letters, signs and materials, a catalyst unleashing the torrent behind the concrete, always removing more walls than he builds.
"Tom Burrows has two of his recent fibreglass paintings here as well as some newer foam rubber, concrete, and tension elastic strap sculpture. Most vital in these pieces is the dialogue between the reflective and translucent properties of the fiberglass as a structural material and the illusory qualities of the painted surfaces. Under the severe lighting, the reality of that which is built interferes with and complicates the illusion of the painted surface. The elastic suspended configuration of the thick speckled foam rubber is variable and sits directly in front of the painting which it seems to reflect and structure three-dimensionally. Burrows's newer work has a gravitational defiance about it--concrete suspended and holding down tense parts, ropes connecting a seizure about to occur. This compares peculiarly to Duane Lunden's world without gravity where images float in vague and random space ...
"This exhibition demonstrates more problems than it proposes to solve. Indeed solutions are hardly the motivation. The formal and more painterly concerns of Burrows are almost antagonistic to the departures of Wallace and Wall but in as much provide a genuine and provoking argument around which the show generates. The focus here is more intense thus it avoids the vague quality which permeated 955,000.
"Those things of interest in a landscape seen as self effacing with the corresponding loss of urban monumentality and an almost defeated inner-city scale, become located at the periphery. As centres lose their vitality, the scattered, crumbling edges take on a new and commensurate intensity. The centre is everywhere at once."
Reference: Dennis Wheeler, "The Limits of the Defeated Landscape: a review of Four Artists," artscanada, June 1970, 50-51.
Related people
Tom Burrows - Artist
Duane Lunden - Artist
Jeff Wall - Artist
Ian Wallace - Artist
Ann Pollock - Curator
http://ccca.concordia.ca/resources/searches/event_detail.html?languagePref=en&vk=7178
