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The Good, The Bad & The Ugly by John Will, Richard Smolinski & Kris Lindskoog
Truck
Friday, November 14 - Saturday, December 13

More in: Visual Arts

Finally, a masculinist art show. It’s not that there are too many feminist art shows around, but a show focusing on masculinity is warmly welcomed by this writer. It is often overlooked that men as well as women have difficulty coping with imposed gender roles and stereotypes. More than ever, the media pressures men to attain a certain body type. As well, the current concept and expectation of masculinity — power, success, rationality, physical and emotional strength, and sexual prowess — are as narrow and confining as ever.

Never fear. In The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, the current show at Truck, three male artists working in the cutthroat, competitive, cowboy-speckled milieu of Calgary have a standoff — their works facing off in separate quadrants of the gallery. Without discussing it ahead of time, the artists instinctively staked out their own territory in the gallery. It effectively allows three diverse positions on the matter of the male gender to emerge.

The cowboy, polar explorer, ramblin’ man, wanderer, family provider, anti-feminist, ape, artist and power tripper all take turns expressing their wants and needs through these primarily text-based works. The entanglement of gender norms and verbal or written language is explored in one-liner phrases, lengthy statements, abrasive slurs and bluegrass or old-timey song lyrics.

“And still I go a roamin’” appears in bold capital letters, painted with murky green-black ink on a humble piece of mylar hung simply on the wall. The artist Kris Lindskoog cites influences such as the iconic wandering vagrant, a recurring figure in American popular culture, in his reproductions of lyrical phrases into painted texts. “One aspect of putting these simple phrases on a page is that you have to let it sit there and be sedentary until it dries. Then it may sit in someone else’s mind while they mull over it even if it is just a word. A word can be that powerful,” says Lindskoog. Drawn to the unusual, emotive language of sung transcriptions on a page, Lindskoog appreciates the sad wailing of bluegrass singers and the feelings of inadequacy or insecurity facing men in the ’20s and ’30s who left home looking for work. Lindskoog’s “Dig a little deeper in the well,” another painted song lyric, is an appropriate phrase to remind us of the perpetual pressures battering the male psyche.

Then there is the question of how these pressures set in, or just who is creating them in the first place. RICHard SMOLinski, in particular, has much to say (or depict) about the interpersonal power dynamics of men. “Unfortunately, I tend to focus on the more negative aspects of masculinity, as opposed to instances where I have seen a much more mature, sensitive and aware type of masculinity,” he says. However, SMOLinski thinks there is more than one Calgarian who feels that the “bacchanalia of shirtless cowboys walking around and pounding on each other” is indicative of more problematic male behaviours. SMOLinski’s colourful tableaux-like installation of 80 or so paintings, shows the shifting “hierarchy of manliness” through painted characters and text. Throughout the works, clear words accompanying the characters corrupt into scrawled marks and smears of paint that indicate verbal emphasis. Mimicking the simplistic retorts of men in groups, the artist doesn’t mind the added effect of using one-liners. “They stick in people’s minds more than sophisticated phrases. They hit you over the head, and can be useful in small doses, because the shock induces [you] to assess the merit and look more deeply at the issues,” says SMOLinski.

Providing the show with the wisdom of age is John Will, or “Johnny Wonderful,” his character in a classy video portrait taken by Milo Dlouhy. If Will is being sarcastic when he says "Late into many a night, I would slave lovingly over images of healthy, throbbing thoroughbred stallions and buxom nubile cow girls..." he never breaks character. Asked if he considered himself a feminist, he replied "No! Get rid of them!" In his work, declarations like “I draw the line with heifers” and “It’s turbo chaaarged” are made of gloopy, plastic, pastel or beachy-coloured puff letters popping out from the canvases like Will’s own exclamatory eyeballs. The bold statements are lovingly caressed by hours and hours of hand-painted layers forming the protruding letters. “My favourite is the letter I,” he says. An inside joke unto himself, Will delights whenever he can slip in references to his all-pervasive egocentrism. Never the “soft man,” pussyfied by militant feminism, Will asserts his self in this show as a virile man loved by women, and represents the men who feel that the proper definition of “men’s liberation” implies freedom to embrace traditional male gender roles — not simply freedom from them.