Going Abroad
I did a day trip to Montreal today, and I must say that I am clearly living in the wrong city. Talk about a closed-fist salute to the teeth. Anyway, it was a beautiful day spent in a beautiful city, occasionally peppered by a shitstorm of crappy pop tunes. I went to the Musée D'Art Contemporain De Montréal which featured some pretty fascinating shit. Here's my synopsis of the day's events:
At the Gallery:
I checked my bag at the coat-check stall, only to be cheerfully greeted by some brassy dame who had all the joie de vivre of a Soviet border guard. Due to my lack of foresight, I had forgotten to change from shades to my regular script and had to have the poor woman retrieve my bag from the far-most depths of coat-check depository. Yes, a massive intergalactic gap of 30 cm away from her person, believe it or not. Of course, all with the expressed purpose of being able to, you know, fucking see a foot ahead of me and somehow make my visit not seem all for goddamn NOUGHT. Good God, did she fucking suddenly hate me. However, I should be sympathetic to her. It must be tough to get laid-off as an internment camp administrator.
At any rate, the set-up for the fall exhibit was indeed the shit. There was this cool installation -whose name escapes me because I couldn't be arsed to keep the pamphlet - where a series of projectors with their corresponding cameras were installed facing all four walls. I think there was a total of 8 projectors. I don't remember cos I couldn't be bothered to count. Damn, I wish I cared more. Each projecting a distorted image of the viewer, which was totally wild.
YET!
(cue the other shoe to drop)
I realize that I am too much of a Philistine to be an art critic, so I'll be a total dick instead. There were a few pieces that made me think: Paint and a Protractor. Are they fucking kidding me? Believe me, I'm all for modern art and the re-interpretation of its scope. More power to it. However, when I see art manifest itself in a way that makes me to slap the Director and challenge the bitch to a pistol duel at dawn, then I've got to question public ambivalence towards art purchases in general. Bear in mind, not ALL pieces done in either the traditional Arbitrarily Slopped Paint or the lauded Armed With Glue-gun While High On Coke method, respectively, are bad; it's just that not a whole hell of alot of 'em are good. Swear on a stack of dead grandmothers. Some of it makes the crap Ikea flog come off like an off-shoot from the goddamn MOMA.
Run-down on the rest:
Good multi-media: Blackboard montage, wherein a projector suspended from the ceiling flashes on said blackboard an animation made to look like chalk drawings coming to life.
Bad multi-media: What appears to be a dance studio (this was intentional) leading to a hidden alcove with a projection of some yob blowing on a wind-keyboard blow toy (similar to the one I had when I was in JK). Yeah. Fun stuff.
Also: Saw a video montage by Paul McCarthy called Girls Wild Gone, involving underwear clad chicks hacking some fat dude's leg off. Decided to break for a meal at that point.
Overall, a brief but healthy shot of culture. Now I don't feel so much of a plebian.
I headed out on St. Catherine street in search of food. Nothing like zipping through art that's hard to understand make you want to cram food down your gullet at warp speed and fucking pronto. I was hunting down an eatery, trying to find an outlet that would appeal to my taste buds/common sense, so I walked down the whole length of the street, passing a procession of stores that sorta followed this permutation:
cafe
peep show
pub
high-end boutique
peep show
dodgy convenience store
cafe
sleezy boutique
church
sex shop
peep show
metal bar
By the time I had reached the end of the street, utterly bereft of hope, I thought: "Fuck it. I'll go look at some titties instead." However, my defeat had subsided when an outdoor menu caught my attention. It was a chain joint that served Italian food and I was seated by this gorgeous dame. I sat down, ordered the Penne di Tutti Cholesterol and a Strawberry Daiquiri. The penne was a'ight. Why the fucking daiquiri? I don't know. Because I am an idiot? I never got into daiquiris because they were cloyingly sweet and frankly, extremely pussifying. However, I decided to have one for shits and giggles. Sadly, there were no giggles to be had. Can't say the same thing for the shits part, but I digress. I hate daiquiris. Like I despise milkshakes, and just about any drink that test my lung capacity. Naturally, they serve the goddamn thing with a straw so narrow that it rivals a horsefly's urethra. After dinner, I hit a pub for a couple of double espressos and staggered off to the bus depot a couple of hours later to be accosted by an attention-craving panhandler and a surly ticket jockey.
My arrival into O-town: Wrist-slashingly joyful.
At the Gallery:
I checked my bag at the coat-check stall, only to be cheerfully greeted by some brassy dame who had all the joie de vivre of a Soviet border guard. Due to my lack of foresight, I had forgotten to change from shades to my regular script and had to have the poor woman retrieve my bag from the far-most depths of coat-check depository. Yes, a massive intergalactic gap of 30 cm away from her person, believe it or not. Of course, all with the expressed purpose of being able to, you know, fucking see a foot ahead of me and somehow make my visit not seem all for goddamn NOUGHT. Good God, did she fucking suddenly hate me. However, I should be sympathetic to her. It must be tough to get laid-off as an internment camp administrator.
At any rate, the set-up for the fall exhibit was indeed the shit. There was this cool installation -whose name escapes me because I couldn't be arsed to keep the pamphlet - where a series of projectors with their corresponding cameras were installed facing all four walls. I think there was a total of 8 projectors. I don't remember cos I couldn't be bothered to count. Damn, I wish I cared more. Each projecting a distorted image of the viewer, which was totally wild.
YET!
(cue the other shoe to drop)
I realize that I am too much of a Philistine to be an art critic, so I'll be a total dick instead. There were a few pieces that made me think: Paint and a Protractor. Are they fucking kidding me? Believe me, I'm all for modern art and the re-interpretation of its scope. More power to it. However, when I see art manifest itself in a way that makes me to slap the Director and challenge the bitch to a pistol duel at dawn, then I've got to question public ambivalence towards art purchases in general. Bear in mind, not ALL pieces done in either the traditional Arbitrarily Slopped Paint or the lauded Armed With Glue-gun While High On Coke method, respectively, are bad; it's just that not a whole hell of alot of 'em are good. Swear on a stack of dead grandmothers. Some of it makes the crap Ikea flog come off like an off-shoot from the goddamn MOMA.
Run-down on the rest:
Good multi-media: Blackboard montage, wherein a projector suspended from the ceiling flashes on said blackboard an animation made to look like chalk drawings coming to life.
Bad multi-media: What appears to be a dance studio (this was intentional) leading to a hidden alcove with a projection of some yob blowing on a wind-keyboard blow toy (similar to the one I had when I was in JK). Yeah. Fun stuff.
Also: Saw a video montage by Paul McCarthy called Girls Wild Gone, involving underwear clad chicks hacking some fat dude's leg off. Decided to break for a meal at that point.
Overall, a brief but healthy shot of culture. Now I don't feel so much of a plebian.
I headed out on St. Catherine street in search of food. Nothing like zipping through art that's hard to understand make you want to cram food down your gullet at warp speed and fucking pronto. I was hunting down an eatery, trying to find an outlet that would appeal to my taste buds/common sense, so I walked down the whole length of the street, passing a procession of stores that sorta followed this permutation:
cafe
peep show
pub
high-end boutique
peep show
dodgy convenience store
cafe
sleezy boutique
church
sex shop
peep show
metal bar
By the time I had reached the end of the street, utterly bereft of hope, I thought: "Fuck it. I'll go look at some titties instead." However, my defeat had subsided when an outdoor menu caught my attention. It was a chain joint that served Italian food and I was seated by this gorgeous dame. I sat down, ordered the Penne di Tutti Cholesterol and a Strawberry Daiquiri. The penne was a'ight. Why the fucking daiquiri? I don't know. Because I am an idiot? I never got into daiquiris because they were cloyingly sweet and frankly, extremely pussifying. However, I decided to have one for shits and giggles. Sadly, there were no giggles to be had. Can't say the same thing for the shits part, but I digress. I hate daiquiris. Like I despise milkshakes, and just about any drink that test my lung capacity. Naturally, they serve the goddamn thing with a straw so narrow that it rivals a horsefly's urethra. After dinner, I hit a pub for a couple of double espressos and staggered off to the bus depot a couple of hours later to be accosted by an attention-craving panhandler and a surly ticket jockey.
My arrival into O-town: Wrist-slashingly joyful.
posted by maz at
11:01 PM
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