In Paradise, Kutlug Ataman’s new video installation at the
Vancouver Art Gallery, 24 residents of Southern California narrate
their personal stories on camera. Included among his subjects are the
founder of the Laguna Beach Laughter Club, televangelist Robert H.
Schuller, a 12-year-old girl who dreams of fame, and the world’s oldest
clown.
Paradise was cocommissioned by the VAG. The museum has
paired it with Ataman’s similarly structured 2004 work
Küba, which won the Carnegie Prize, and is made from
interviews with residents of a left-wing district outside Istanbul.
Along with a rich lineup of gallery shows this season—especially
a primer on young Vancouver artists called Exponential
Future—the compelling and worldly VAG exhibition is a
reminder that, however often you travel to Vancouver to see art, it
isn’t often enough.
Kutlug Ataman: Paradise and Küba is part of
Vancouver’s 2008 Cultural Olympiad, a seven-week-long event (ending
March 21) held in anticipation of the 2010 Winter Olympics. In addition
to the shows held during the Cultural Olympiad, the provincial
government took the opportunity to announce a pledge of $50 million
toward the building of a new VAG, one with dedicated space for the
museum’s permanent collections. As yet, there is no specific budget,
architect, or location for the new building, but the museum’s director,
Kathleen Bartels, told the Globe and Mail that she’s
determined to see it open by 2014. (At her side was international
power-house artist Jeff Wall.) Among the shows coming up at the VAG’s
current location are WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution and
KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games +
Art, cocurated by industry innovators Art Spiegelman, Seth, Tim
Johnson, Will Wright, and Toshiya Ueno and Kiyoshi Kusumi.
Vancouver boasts strength at the institutional, global level and at
the local level of individual artists, as Paradise and
Küba and Exponential Future demonstrate.
The Turkish district of Küba, like Southern California, has a
certain mythology attached to it. It is at once a safe haven to those
who resist state control and an impoverished community plagued by
violence. Ataman spent more than a year there, collecting the stories
of 40 of its residents and creating a cumulative portrait that
ranges from personal tragedy to love
for Enrique
Iglesias.
Both Küba and Paradise use separate
television sets for each story. For the Californians in
Paradise, Ataman has chosen the newest flat-screen models and
noise-canceling headphones, creating a quiet and intimate experience
for the viewer. Küba is infinitely messier. Here, the
subjects are less flatteringly framed in old clunky sets, and 40
cacophonous voices compete for attention. Strangely, both works
captivate in the same way, prompting contemplation on the construction
of self and place that has taken place in front of the camera.
For Ataman, Paradise and Küba are not about
geographic locales as much as the experience of knowing. There is an
openness in the structure of these installations, with no prescribed
guidelines to lead us through them. Moreover, we inevitably enter most
of the narratives after they have begun and, not knowing whether they
will last 5 more minutes or 45 (Küba, in fact, is 28
hours in all), we are forced to decide if and when to stop
listening.
In Exponential Future, eight Vancouver-based artists come
together: Tim Lee, Alex Morrison, Isabelle Pauwels, Kevin Schmidt, Mark
Soo, Corin Sworn, Althea Thauberger, and Elizabeth Zvonar. These
artists may be young, but they’re well-established.
Lee, for example, is everywhere right now. He makes witty
photographs and objects that combine art-historical and pop-culture
references (e.g., Dan Graham plus Peter Sellers plus Steve Martin,
and Alexander Rodchenko plus Public Enemy), and he had a solo
exhibition at Vancouver’s Presentation House in 2007, was included in
Charles H. Scott Gallery’s recent group exhibition Trust in
Me, and is currently showing in the Chelsea
gallery Cohan and
Leslie.
Like Lee, a number of the artists humorously resurrect the past for
their subject matter. Soo’s retro photographs (requiring 3-D glasses)
of a Memphis recording studio recall where Elvis purportedly invented
rock ‘n’ roll. Morrison’s photographic diptychs, meanwhile, more
conceptually consider the specificity of place, documenting the filmic
dramatization of the Battle in Seattle (which recently unfolded in the
streets of Vancouver).
But the video works are the most compelling. Thauberger’s
black-and-white video projection Zivildienst ≠ Kunstprojekt (Social Service ≠ Art Project) is one example, beautifully
weaving a story through text and tableaux vivants. The work
grew out of the artist’s extended collaboration with
Germany’s
Social Service (an alternative to mandatory military duty), and the
group of young men that she recruited helped her to develop the story’s
primary themes: isolation, self-definition, and community
formation.
On a more upbeat, though ambiguous, note, Schmidt’s Wild
Signals is the artist’s
re-creation of a concert-style light
show. Placed in a remote landscape, the colored lights and the fog
machine begin, accompanied by the artist’s own cover of John Williams’s
theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In Schmidt’s
work, however, there is no climactic moment; after several minutes, the
music, fog, and lights simply end. 
Also recommended in Vancouver:
Process as Work: Roy Kiyooka, Damian Moppett, Jerry Pethick, Ian
Wallace (Catriona Jeffries Gallery, through March 29); Lisette
Model and Her Successors (Presentation House Gallery, through
April 20); The Lecture: Rachelle Sawatsky and Dan Starling (Western Front, through April 19); Brad Phillips: New Works (Monte Clark Gallery, through April 12); and Robert Morris: The Birthday Boy
(Simon Fraser University Gallery, March
29–May 3).