Are we still talking about “the male gaze” in paintings? The latest exhibition at the Olga Korper Gallery features an artist who takes the term seriously and builds her own approach specifically against what she understands this male gaze to be. Vickie Vainionpää observed the paintings by the Masters likes Rubens, Tintoretto and Bronzino through a device tracking her eye movement. The paths of this recorded eye movement were then digitally visualized as lines and patterns, which the painter in turn painted back onto the canvass in a very traditional and slow way. She most often chose soft, tubular, twirling forms, with some bits of the original paintings hidden inside.
There is a sofa in the gallery in the same form, but I’m afraid that all this reminded me of Jeff Koons’ balloon animals. What have I learned about the male gaze in the process? Where do our eyes usually go to? Vickie Vainionpää doesn’t share that information, but we know from psychoanalysis and evolutionary biology and our baby past that protrusions and recesses and entrance/exit points will always be of interest, whatever our sex. The artist does use the word ‘cyborgian’ to further add to the confusion. How are we one with the eye tracking device? Not clear. And how likely is it to be joining, say, the electroencephalography or the Neuralink’s latest “Brain chip patient plays chess with his thoughts” efforts? But the attempt to digitize, measure, bottle up how visual pleasure works will likely return.
The term male gaze has an eventful history dating back at least to the 1970s, probably starting with the legendary John Berger series Ways of Seeing.
The male gaze as an instrument of feminist critique, however, fully came into being in cinema studies, and as such is a different field of inquiry from the history of western painting. But we tend to forget this and lump everything, and today’s 24/7 easy access to porn, into one and the same male gaziness. Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” did a lot to popularize the term, but few have actually read this dense, psychoanalytically-informed piece which, like a lot of early feminist film criticism, really likes (dissecting) Hitchcock.
Just as I was pondering all this the other day, a friend sent me the link to the page for the upcoming exhibition at Bau-Xi Gallery. Vicki Smith’s series depicts women frolicking in water. The water—greenish and murky, likely a river or a lake—is masterfully rendered. The free, frolicking women, however, all wear one-piece swim suits. Many in floral prints.
Wait, is this Marimekko flower design, you find yourself wondering. And: these ladies came prepared! This was no furtive wild swim of a hot day, say, halfway on your bike trip between Niagara Falls and NOTL. (I will neither confirm nor deny) These ladies have responsibly packed their swimwear and other necessities ahead of time. Nor is this in any way allegorical or referring to any myths involving water, water gods, nymphs or whatever. It’s about those who face a body of water (and the viewer of the painting) prepared.
The painter clearly did not want to depict naked female bodies of various shapes and sizes being free, on their own, in a river. Where does this resistance come from? I expect the male gaziness discourse. As if painting a female body au naturel, by a woman painter too, is always already corrupted by the male gaze and for the male gaze (let’s take this to mean, simply, for the male buyer and/or critic). To which I say, let’s not.
Franz Kaka
The Toronto art world’s obsession with identity continues as before (see, or not, the Gallery TPW exhibit on artist’s Indian parents; Sarindar Dhaliwal at the AGO on her Indian childhood; “Black being across themes” at Daniel Faria Gallery; Stephen Bulger Gallery for “insights into [Shelley] Niro’s Indigenous heritage”; A Space in 401 Richmond where “[Julius] Manapul brazenly reconfigures church architecture, cultural symbols, and religious iconography to assert their queer diasporic Filipinx subjectivity” and then hop over to the U of Toronto Art Museum where “Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts gesture at and supplement histories of queer and trans people that are insufficient, compromised, colonial, or simply absent”). However, all that is punctured, though not frequently enough, by the popping up of places that show zero interest in hustling intergenerational trauma, mnemonic silences, DEI careerism, and any kind of overt politics altogether. Commercial galleries tend to be more like that (see the two that I wrote about early this month, or Muse Gallery in Summerhill, the Red Cardinal in DuDa, or James Rottman on St Clair W) but here I mean the non-commercial spaces which are beginnings of something that may or may not last. They are often small and weird; run by artists and arts workers who have jobs and can only keep the space open three days a week; and they appear just about never in what’s left of Toronto’s arts media. Best of all, they employ very little if any art speak to explain what they’re doing.
They are not on any radars. But they exist and update their Instagram pages and have openings and press on as if art matters as an activity in itself, even if no newspaper or funding body ever pays attention to it.
One such place is Franz Kaka - which, yes, is a high-low riff on the name of Franz Kafka. “Kaka” is a small space on the second floor of the post-industrial building on Campbell and Dupont which rents most of its ground floor out to a large Hale Coffee. Rents are not as bad this far out, Aryen Hoekstra who runs the place told me when he opened the gallery for me on a snowy Tuesday. The east end rents are comparable, he’d discovered, the east end across the Don that is, the Eastern Avenue-Logan, Carlaw area, but no one is yet moving there.
As part of their next to last exhibit, Stephanie Ligeti’s “P is for Painting”, the gallery showed some of Gilles Deleuze from A to Z, an 8-hour TV series released after Deleuze’s death, in which Claire Parnet asks Deleuze to talk, in alphabetical order, about the various concepts she throws at him. The series is available on YouTube, but for gallery screenings you’d still need to secure the rights, which the Kaka gang did - due to costs, for one segment only, “S is for Style”.
This sounded like something a gallery from the before-world of Toronto gallery going and art making would do; as if I walked through the time portal into the West Queen West and the Power Plant of 2005. If you look at the ‘gram stories of the artists that “Kaka” showcased—Katie Lyle, Azadeh Elmizadeh, Lotus Laurie Kang, Haeahn Woo Kwon, Anne Low, Bea Parsons, Michelle Bui, Elvis Saydam—that is some (allow me this highly technical term) weird shit. In the best possible sense. In the whispers of the avant garde sense.
Hoekstra told me of a couple of other artist-run places that pitched their tents and open them for the public three days a week, e.g. Hunt Gallery on St Clair west of Dufferin, and (talk about the weird shit) the plumb on St Clair and Dufferin.
Can you imagine starting out as an artist in 2020s in Canada? I know I can’t. The kids are leaving art schools to face the double whammy: identitarianism and Zhdanovism from the left, contempt and philistinism from the right. With these rents (never mind renting a studio) and these costs of living. And no arts media. And techno-feudalism with five tech companies running the culture. Post-COVID pandemic.
The aforementioned Stephanie Ligeti (now in Vienna) graduated OCAD in 2021. 2021! The Gen-Z kids come out of the thoroughly DEI’d, more expensive then ever art & humanities schools. What do they want from art? What do they intend to do? And most importantly, how will they rebel? Respect to them for staying in the field. For choosing it! What madness.
I’ll be hoping they surprise us with more weird shit. And I’ll take this as the sign of pulse. Not life yet, but pulse definitely.