Lung, Adrianne Munden-Dixon, Lung (Self-released / Bandcamp)
My 16th birthday was spent unlike most kids’ 16th birthdays. That is, I hope it was, anyway.
I hope to God that most people on their sweet sixteenth don’t take massive doses of LSD and devote the night with friends to watching David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, listening to Cabaret Voltaire 45’s on 33RPM, and laughing uncontrollably at pretty much everything.
It was a more innocent time back then — 1993, to be exact — and there was much less in the world to be truly worried about. The Soviet Union had recently dissolved; Ukraine was an independent nation again. There was no real internet to speak of. There were no cell phones, no social media.
U.S. President Bill Clinton hadn’t yet stained any blue dresses. O.J. Simpson was still a former running back and a second-rate actor. Donald Trump was just an embittered blowhard billionaire. Ok, maybe some things don’t change.
Nonetheless, in 1993, we were merely a bunch of wacky suburban youths experimenting with our own brain chemistry. No big deal.
Among the things that had us in stitches that night was one of Matt Groening’s pre-Simpsons-era Life in Hell comic books, which we leafed through at the peak of our collective trip. The drawing in question was a rendering of a phony magazine cover with outrageously absurd headlines — flatly stupid articles that Groening must have considered that no one would write, much less want to read.
I remember the headline that floored us that particular night was, “Thinking about string.” I recall that we laughed so hard that our faces hurt, and our sides were sore. We were literally bursting. I had never before found anything as funny as the idea of thinking about string. The ridiculousness, the preposterousness of it. What about string was there to really think about, we thought?
But then, we really thought about string. And the more we thought about it, the more we realized that there was actually lots about string to think about. Rather deeply, in fact. String contained multitudes of fascination and mystery and enigmatic attraction.
We held no notions in 1993 of theoretical physics, or Schrödinger’s cat, or probability — probably. And yet, in that moment, we did. String suddenly pulled into sharp focus the alpha and the omega, the be-all and the end-all of the entire universe.
The acid wore off long ago, thankfully. But I’m not sure if I have ever completely stopped thinking about string. To this day, my mind unravels like a ball of yarn at its mere mention.
Jeremy Shaw, Phase Shifting Index, Fonderie Darling
Was the entirety of the Darling Foundry carpeted for Jeremy Shaw’s stunning video installation just so that audiences, if necessary, could cut a rug?
Rafael Payare and Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 29 February 2024
The Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri’s In the half-light, which serves as the opening act for the OSM, is apropos for the moment. We are only half-awake. We are only half-aware. Half of us are always sleeping, and half of us don’t even know it.
It seems as if the world is split in half. As many advancements as we have made, we have also lost ground, spinning our wheels, making no progress. The last thing the world wanted was another war, and now we have two.
We could stay in the half-light forever. Or we could break through this wall of darkness. In God, there is no darkness at all.
Adrian Norvid, Best Friends For Never, with Marcela Szwarc, McBride Contemporain
On the surface, it might seem difficult to draw any link between the works of Adrian Norvid and his partner, the painter Janet Werner. Werner’s art renders solemn depictions of juxtaposed fashion photography, whereas Norvid’s is more pedestrian, cartoonish, and jokey. Werner’s paintings are exclusively visual, whereas Norvid frequently incorporates text, puns, and plays on words. Werner’s art is collected in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, whereas Norvid’s is more at home in edgier collections like the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art.
But dive a little deeper and we see that the two intersect at Al Jaffee, the American illustrator who for over half a decade skewered pop culture in Mad Magazine. Norvid’s technique unmistakably echoes Jaffee’s own — sitting somewhere amongst Heavy Metal and Robert Crumb, with a wry gothic wit. And Werner’s works, to me, have always recalled the magazine’s back pages, the iconic Jaffee-innovated fold-in that reveals another message when the page is creased in on itself.
Here we go with another ridiculous theory.
Shary Boyle, Vesselling, Patel Brown, until 20 April 2024
“Put all your love into everything you do,” instructs Shary Boyle at her artist’s talk on March 2nd at Patel Brown in the Belgo Building.
A large group is assembled to listen to Boyle speak about a collection of new and, even though they appear highly accomplished, apparently experimental works that encompass multimedia paintings, drawing on paper, and fired ceramics — works that are at once tactile and untouchable, fantastical and real, beautiful and terrifying.
Boyle says a number of insightful things during her lecture. She doesn’t believe in evil or purity, but she does believe in fury and insistence. To be sure, there is much right now to be furious about, and even more upon which to insist.
I worry in the future that certain cultures — what we call “delicate ecosystems” — will simply die out. Ukrainian, and Palestinian, and perhaps even Quebecois culture in 100 years will be subsumed by their bigger, louder, and more violent neighbours. When generations to come look back to piece together what happened, they will look to these culture’s artworks to make sense of our hopes and fears, morals and values, and ultimately, what went wrong.
Unlike Boyle, I do believe in both evil and purity — the purity of stupidity. As Margaret Atwood once said, “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”◼︎
Cover image: Shary Boyle‘s Grafters series.
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