Obsessed d'art
When curating Indemnity Noel Bégin focused on concept and content
EXHIBIT PREVIEW
INDEMNITY
Curated by Noel Begin
Artcity
September 20 to 29
Uptown
Between his duties as technical co-ordinator for EMmedia, working artist, and curator of Artcity's Indemnity group show, Noel Bégin has had a busy week. Tuesday night at sunset he's sprawled on a couch, but instead of taking a nap, he's carefully holding a pose and answering questions while Allyson Glenn paints his portrait for the cover of Fast Forward. He's slightly bewildered by all the attention.
"It's weird that I'm having my portrait done, when what I wanted to do was to highlight the other artists' characters. I guess it's vain to have an art show, but it's the best way to access the public dialogue."
The show in question, Indemnity: Intimate Efforts Made Dear, promises to be one of Artcity's most interesting and potentially baffling exhibitions. It features eight artists who, apart from their presence in this show, are about as different as artists can be. They are photographers, painters, videographers, musicians and performance artists – some are novices, some are established and they are wildly diverse in age and education. Their methods aren't particularly similar either. Don Kottman purchases the Calgary Sun each day, pulls the pages apart and paints on them. Diane Colwell produces massive photographs of mountainscapes. Chad Van Gaalen makes drawings while riding his bike. The relationship between the pieces they've produced is not immediately evident – as Bégin puts it: "They're not related in the sense that they all have cars in them or something."
Instead, Bégin hopes to showcase the conceptual connection between the artists, which has more to do with the effort, interest and commitment they give to their work than with the works themselves. All of the artists use media, subject matter or process techniques that are arguably undeserving of the intense attention they are given. It is the investment of the artists in their labour that interests Bégin, their determination to take ostensibly disposable or worthless objects and painstakingly convert them into art objects.
"These artists are always in their work. Their walls are covered with old stuff and new stuff, and they look at it and think about it all the time. Like Don Kottmann's Sunspot paintings – the fact that he does it and thinks about it every day. In his studio he has a wall of newspaper paintings that he looks at and sits in front of and stares at and contemplates every day."
While the main fascination of the Indemnity show is its exhibition of atypical artistic material, it does not simply ask the old question: "Is It Art?" The works are not simply confrontational, nor do they pointedly resist the gallery setting – their cumulative effect is more complex.
"It's not that the works are weak, and it's not that the works are repellent – they're all gorgeous and strong works," Bégin says. "But it's this quality that they share that I thought I could build the show around, that kind of tension where there's something about a piece that does almost undermine it. And, at the same time, the thing's so laboured, so well done, so attended to, there's a sense of the commitment and involvement of the artist."
Bégin describes this nebulous sense as the "aura" of a piece, and the thing which a viewer must strive to perceive. The artist's investment imbues the piece with a degree of value, and the value is transferred back to the artist. It is the give-and-take dynamic between the worker and his or her work that inspired Bégin to call the show Indemnity. The expense of time and effort that an artist gives is ultimately its own repayment, and this applies to the viewer of the work as well.
"The aura is that tension between wanting to walk away, and recognizing that the art is on display for some reason," says Bégin, who admits that it's a challenging exhibit. "Somebody makes it, someone else displays it and somebody looks at it. It has that disposable quality which is going to cause some people to walk right by, but people are just going to have to be good viewers and try."
The give-take construct is as central to civilization as it is to art, Bégin suggests, and Indemnity approaches the concept at a basic, almost ideal level. Elsewhere, the dynamic is subject to abuses and misinterpretations, particularly in the North American culture of excessive insurance and compensation.
"This is where the litigious culture comes from," Bégin says. "It's a symptom, like those accident-injury lawyer ads on Channel 2. They're potent ads, and it's a potent concept."
When he isn't raiding artists' studios, Bégin is finding time to work on his own projects. He's currently exploring the potential of art DVDs, and attempting to organize his basement.
"In the last few years, I've been taking works I made years ago and trying to build them into new relationships with other materials, even by keeping old documentation about the objects and using them in the artwork. I'm building relationships between documentation and the history of making stuff, and what happens to old stuff."
Bégin's head has moved and he has to realign himself. If he is uncomfortable, he doesn't mention it. Despite his packed schedule, Bégin has nothing but enthusiasm for his upcoming show. He admires his colleagues at Artcity, he learns more every day and he gets to meet with artists in their own studios, something he finds fascinating, generative and motivating. You might say Noel Bégin has been indemnified. |
