Category Archives: How Do You Spell Holiday?

NicheMTL’s travel and events guide, featuring new shows, exhibitions, festivals, and interviews.

How Do You Spell Holiday?

Questions In a World of Blue: in conversation with WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. —William S. Burroughs, “Soul Killer”

Turning power against itself has always been a useful form of resistance.

Donning the enemy’s flag and uniform has historically been deployed as a consistently successful strategy to confuse and infiltrate any opposing army. American Delta blues artists like Skip James and Robert Johnson confronted the misery of the Great Depression by singing sad songs. The legendary Montreal post-rock record label Constellation in the early days of the corporate internet posted to its website a manifesto proclaiming, “THE WORLD HAS NOT CHANGED. THE WORLD REMAINS THE SAME. THE END OF THE WORLD WILL NEVER COME. WE ARE ALL GUILTY.”

It is befitting, then, that more than two decades later, Patch One, the Portland, Maine-based artist and musician, the experimental guitarist and synth player Jonathan Downs, Efrim Manuel Menuck, a founder member of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and numerous offshoot bands, and I meet via Zoom, the technology platform that came to fame most notably during the coronavirus crisis, to discuss their latest collaboration, a battle-weary go-screw-yourself forthcoming on Constellation Records, squarely aimed at state power, entitled NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER.

“Fuck this app,” Menuck ceremoniously exclaims from behind a mountain of beard and hair as he flickers onscreen.

The four of us are gathered virtually on the day that the last remaining North American university campus protest against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, at McGill, is bulldozed. It’s a stark local coincidence that underscores the simultaneous urgency and ambience of apocalyptic global events, as well as the necessity for artists to continue making art in the face of it all.

“I think ‘contribution’ is a key word,” says Patch in response to the question of how music can stimulate social change. “I can pretty quickly talk myself into a corner and think that this is nothing, this is fucking stupid that I’m doing this right now. But I don’t actually believe that. That’s what the powers that be are telling me to think. There is a lot to be said for putting things out into the world.”

WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN sleeve drawing. Patch One.

“For me, making stuff is a compulsion,” Menuck insists. “As far as I can tell, the responsibility of an artist is to address whatever reality they’re living in in the moment in a way that’s truthful. And there are a bunch of different truths. I think the four of us in the band share certain types of truth that lead to the record that we made.”

NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER clearly originates from a post-punk infused worldview, and a post-rock inspired aesthetic: shimmering, lurching, distorted dirges that harken to Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s catalogue, as well as that of Big|Brave guitarist and collaborator Mathieu Ball, with whom I caught up a few weeks later at a gig at Ateliers Belleville.

“I don’t know how this album came together,” Ball admits. “It just did.”

Although Patch and Downs are American, Montreal’s zeitgeist comes to the fore with WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN.

“Like every bigger city in the world,” observes Ball, “with the cost of living continuously increasing, I do find it slightly harder to continue pursuing creative endeavours. It’s becoming more difficult to find a studio and workspace. But the creative community in this city will not anytime soon cease to exist.”

The album was recorded over an intense week with the foursome hunkered down at Hotel2Tango, the studio which incubated some of Montreal’s most enduring recordings, including Fly Pan Am’s N’écoutez pas, Arcade Fire’s Funeral, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s debut, F♯ A♯ ∞.

“Patch and I drove up to Montreal at the end of last August,” Downs recalls. “Efrim knew how we played and asked us to be a part of it. He thought we’d fit in. He and Mathieu had worked out some jams beforehand, and Efrim had sent us all some skeletal structures — some ‘songs,’ you might say. It was all kind of loose and we listened to the songs over the PA speakers and just put more into them and built them up.”

That layered approach produced an encrusted and profoundly moving LP that primarily invokes the despair of observing savagery from a safe distance whilst being unable to intervene. This theme is ever-present, even metaphorically, for instance, on the song entitled “Dangling Blanket from A Balcony (White Phosphorous)” which grapples with the shock of watching Michael Jackson suspend his son out of a hotel window for the apparent bemusement of the paparazzi.

“I think that sometimes people make the mistake of thinking that having empathy or feeling pain watching something happen is a productive human value,” says Menuck. “It’s a reflex, and it’s a good reflex. But the reality is that it doesn’t do anything on its own.”

“Not that there’s not always horror and war in the news,” Patch chimes in, “but since we recorded this, I’ve thought a lot about how people use social media and post things on the internet. Everyone that I look at on the internet is just showing me all this shit and it’s like, what does this mean for the people? Are you trying to do this just to show me something about what’s happening, or to show me something about yourself? I don’t blame people because it is a thing, and I’ve been that person, too. You want to feel like you’re fucking doing something while you’re just sitting there at home or whatever.”

“The big problem,” adds Menuck, “is that the way to disseminate these images is all owned by huge sketchy companies that are really just data-scraping endeavours. Who owns these companies? I feel like there has been stuff on social media that’s made a change. But what that change leads to, I don’t know. What people do with that horrible feeling of being stuck just witnessing is what matters. Just the witnessing doesn’t matter.”

WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN back cover photo. Efrim Manuel Menuck.

“I wonder,” muses Downs “what other moments in history would have been like with everyone having a smartphone, or a camera, and being able to connect information from those devices to a lot of people? I think it has made more people aware with a lot more people looking at it. The more people tear away from the mainline story of what’s happening, the better.”

The media landscape within which WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN emerged, however, is unique, even in a world that seems to interminably reiterate atrocity. There are now multiple wars raging, with no end in sight, and a panoply of viewpoints on every aspect of daily life. There is no question that art contributes to producing more positive conditions, if even to offer a soothing tune in troubled times. But how that occurs is difficult to describe.

“I think a melody with words attached that have some sort of meaning does get into people’s heads” Menuck explains. “But at the same time, we’re not making popular music. So, it’s just a few people at a time.”

Now Menuck starts second-guessing himself.

“If one song changes…” he pauses mid-thought. “No, if one song opens someone’s mind… No, that’s way too heavy. If one song gets a certain idea… No, that’s heavy, too.

He exhales a plume of smoke and reorients himself in front of the camera eye.

“Mostly the world is going to change based on small things like the conversation we’re having with each other. That stuff does ripple out. It’s not enough. It’s really not enough. But it does play a part. We live in an organic system, and all these small things interweave with each other. And all these tiny little accidents are what make change at the end of the day. It’s not a glorious thing or a heroic thing. It’s just trying to contribute to something that’s better than this.”◼︎

NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER is released via Constellation Records 13 September 2024.

Standard
How Do You Spell Holiday?

All In The Family: in conversation with Kiva Stimac

Pre-Christian festivals traditionally marked the turning of the seasons, celebrating solstices, equinoxes, the planting and harvesting of crops, and other sundry natural cycles.

Festivals nowadays are largely symbolic of such seasonal celebrations, centering more upon common interests and activities like film, theatre, dance, and music.

The festivalization of cultural industries in the 21st century has meant that patrons more often than not expect a curated round-up of events rather than any stand-alone experience. There are such things today as “festival circuits,” a secondary calendar upon which cultural products and producers travel and tour year-round.

Without doubt, one of Montreal’s most interesting springtime festivals is Suoni per il Popolo, currently entering its 24th iteration.

Founded in 2000 by the artist, printmaker, and chef, Kiva Stimac, Suoni, for short, has become a much anticipated and lovingly lauded launch pad for those with big ears for experimental sounds.

“Montreal is at its most beautiful right now,” Stimac observes as we chat over the phone on a sunny late May morning. “And the festival this year — I’m very proud of. We made it so we’re going to have challenging, revolutionary, good times.”

“Montreal audiences are very enthusiastic.” Kiva Stimac for Popolo Press.

Stimac and Godspeed You! Black Emperor bassist Mauro Pezzente have collaborated since the festival’s inception on booking bands at Casa del Pololo and La Sala Rossa, twin venues that they started nearly a quarter century ago, which have become go-to stages for local and international musicians, and venerable institutions for Montreal’s music aficionados.

“We had a very deep love for music of all kinds,” Stimac says of the impetus behind Suoni’s founding. “But we noticed that bands were skipping Montreal. People would play Boston, Toronto, but they would skip Montreal. For instance, Arab Strap wasn’t playing Montreal. So, we booked them a show at Casa, and it sold out in 10 minutes.”

Originally called Artichaut, the venue that now houses Casa del Popolo in 2000 was “more like a hippie space,” Stimac remembers.

“At that time, this part of St. Laurent was very desolate, uninhabited,” recalls Stimac. “The rent was affordable enough that we signed a lease. And everybody started coming in while we were trying to renovate, trying to get our permits and stuff, saying, ‘hey, I was supposed to play a show here next week, or ‘I was supposed to do something here in a month from now.’ So, we just started saying ‘okay’ to people.”

Quickly, demand for these live happenings coalesced and Stimac realized that she could invite artists of her own choosing, renting the Spanish Cultural Center across the street soon afterward and transforming its upper level into La Sala Rossa.

“Montreal audiences are very enthusiastic,” Stimac notes. “From the first year of the festival, everybody that we called and asked to play said ‘yes.’ And to come and play an artist-run, small venue, not necessarily knowing us, once they showed up and it was a family vibe, and we cooked them food, and gave them advice on the sound, even though these were small spaces, with the vibe of the audiences, everybody was really enthusiastic.”

A singular aesthetic is Suoni’s hallmark, but the festival is recognized for curating artists from diverse genres — from punk to funk, classical to jazz — and across various demographics, too. It is not a youth-oriented or fashion-specific affair.

Some of this year’s highlights include No Hay Banda on June 13th performing a commissioned piece that Sarah Davachi composed; the Swedish vocalist and electronic composer Erika Angell on June 17th, and industrial-rap superstar Backxwash, aka Ashanti Mutinta, on June 21st.

“Having our final show be Anthony Braxton and Wolf Eyes is a pretty big deal,” Stimac remarks. “That’s the elder free-jazz experimenter hero, and then the noise-making trickster Detroiters, also heroes, coming together and making a sound that is really special.”

For the first time, day passes will also be sold this year for $45, allowing patrons to attend every event on any given day.

“Sometimes, it’s challenging,” Stimac admits, regarding programming Montreal’s premiere avant-garde festival. “A lot of times, it’s problematic. It’s not like, oh my God, we’ll play Kumbaya and everybody’s going to come together. Oftentimes it forces people apart or sets people into scenes, like ‘oh, I can’t interact with this or that scene.’ So, having multiple intergenerational interracial scenes here, that is very important to me.”

While the city’s bigger festivals like Osheaga, Pop Montreal, or the Jazz Fest court corporate sponsorship and attempt to attract higher-profile star power, Suoni deliberately remains committed to showcasing the best underground artists from Montreal and internationally. Stimac believes that a strong sense of community and solidarity through struggle is at the heart of Suoni’s ethos.

“We want to sell these shows, but also be true to who we are as people.” Kiva Stimac for Popolo Press.

“I didn’t create this thing as a business,” says Stimac, “or even as a festival. I created this as a family situation. Family isn’t just blood, either. It’s chosen family, too. The outsiders, the misfits, the queers, the punks — we’re all an international family. How do we exist in a world that’s so tragic and horrific?”

Stimac answers her own question: “I think making music and art of all kinds — dance, theatre, visual art — is an important connecting point to get to the next step of, hopefully, creating something different in this world.”

Montreal and music’s independent scenes have changed significantly since Stimac conceived of the festival. Covid and its restrictions were particularly difficult on the arts and one of Stimac’s performance venues, La Vitrola, was forced to close its doors.

The cost of mounting major events like Suoni increased three and four-fold as artists and their surrounding industries attempted to make up for lost revenues. Even though her festival has thrived for more than two decades, Stimac seems acutely aware of wanting to share the wealth as ethically as possible.

“When you’ve been around for 24 years, and you have some funding, a lot of times you’re also seen as ‘the man.’ We want to sell these shows, but also be true to who we are as people. That’s the hustle,” Stimac explains.

At twelve days, this edition of Suoni is leaner and more focussed than previous years, with fewer shows programmed against each other, leaving more room for audiences to discover the depth and diversity of Stimac’s vision. Still, she is generous to give credit where it’s due. From ancient fairs and feasts to modern festivals, the central theme of any seasonal celebration has always been a spirit of communion.

“I’m not looking to be the curator of the entire festival anymore,” says Stimac. “I’m doing this with over 25 different co-presenters from all different backgrounds. I just do what I can do with my own hands. So, I make the posters, I make the food, DIY. But hopefully we’re figuring out more how to DIT — do it together.”◼︎

The 24th edition of Suoni per il Popolo runs 12-23 June 2024.

Standard
How Do You Spell Holiday?

Home Grown: in conversation with Rose Naggar-Tremblay

“I am a very, very local-based artist,” says the Contralto Rose Naggar-Tremblay one recent Wednesday. “I did all my studies at UQAM, at CEGEP Saint Laurent, at McGill. I was grown here.”

It is one of the charms of the rhapsody in two languages that is everyday life in this city: little traductions infidèles like this one. Naggar-Tremblay likely meant something like “born and raised,” but being neither above nor below a pun, “grown” seems apt enough to me — for a woman named Rose.

Verily, this Rose was grown in Montreal.

Although wandering is the theme of Naggar-Tremblay’s forthcoming recital at Bourgie Hall, entitled The Women Who Leave, a performance inspired in part by the artist Marisol, whose retrospective is currently on exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Particularly, Marisol’s world travels — at a time when the romantic notion of artist-as-wanderer was reserved mainly for men — resonated with Naggar-Tremblay.

“In the year before, I had been thinking a lot about moving, or wandering, or travelling women,” she says. “Just the ability of woman to be free in her movement. Marisol went travelling and came back with a completely different style of sculpting and painting that really embodied the notion of movement. I was a little bit stuck home during the pandemic, like everyone else. Actually, being stuck at home was for me the motivation to say, ‘no, I can’t spend my whole life missing opportunities.’”

Over the past two years, Naggar-Tremblay has been doing nothing but wandering, with stints working in Europe, singing the lead role in Bizet’s Carmen at the Edmonton Opera this past October, and returning home to perform with the OSM after winning top honours in their 2021 Concours competition. “It was extremely inspiring to work with Rafael Payare,” she says. “It was something very special. It was also evocative of travel.”

Naggar-Tremblay’s parents both immigrated to Quebec, her mother originally from Egypt, and her father born in Germany, the son of a military man. “I was raised with stories of abroad and of travel. Adventures. That was part of my imagination. Being drawn to travel, to the sea — those are things that I strongly identify with.”

In her preparatory explorations for writing The Women Who Leave song cycle, Naggar-Tremblay participated at the Museum in controlled mediation activities with groups of elderly women.

“We didn’t just appreciate Marisol visually;” she explains, “we also tried to use the same media that Marisol used to create our own little sculptures and paintings. And after these experiences, we would have a circle of discussion to evoke what she brought up inside of us. How we received her body of work and her tools of artistic expression. After these conversations, the poetry really wrote itself.”

“The biggest danger is to stop listening to your little voice.” Rose Naggar-Tremblay, photographed by Tam Lan Truong.

At only 31, Naggar-Tremblay has already achieved admirable accolades. And she has done it her way. In addition to successes at the OSM, Naggar-Tremblay won the prestigious Georges Enesco Competition in Paris, came in second place at the Prix d’Europe, and was named Radio-Canada’s Breakthrough artist of 2022.

“Wherever I work, I always get rehired,” she beams, “and that’s a very special thing. I can make myself valuable to a house. But that is based on who I always was. I’m not trying to please anybody. For the couple of years that I did try to please, I was extremely unhappy, and I was unsuccessful.”

Naggar-Tremblay grew up dreaming of becoming an artist of some sort. But it took time to land on opera. “When I was a kid, I was doing everything,” she recalls. “Dance lessons, and singing, and piano lessons, and choir. As soon as I could, I joined theatre in school. I feared free time. I wanted to be busy, and I wanted to be doing things. Then I channeled that into opera because it’s an all-encompassing artform, where all of my skills could be used.”

The Classical repertoire was a large part of Naggar-Tremblay’s early musical influence. But more recently, she has embraced a Pop sensibility that manifests in her singer-songwriter side, on a recording called Je me souviens à toi.

“It’s a completely different use of my voice,” she explains. “I’ve always had this duel between being a Classical musician and wanting to be a singer-songwriter. I discovered Pop as an adult and I fell in love with it. Now I listen to Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift, like everyone else. But when you’re a young Classical musician, you grow up in an obsessive bubble and there isn’t space for anything else. You train so hard. And then you open yourself up to everything else in the world and you think, ‘oh, I was so naïve.’”

I ask Naggar-Tremblay what advice she might give to her fifteen-year-old self. “I would say find your five-year-old,” she laughs. “The biggest danger is to stop listening to your little voice. To me, as a five-year-old, I was extremely creative, and I loved a lot of different things. That is what gave me the career I have now. I was very positive and curious. What makes you unique,” she states, “is also what’s going to make you find your niche.”

Undoubtedly, Naggar-Tremblay has found hers in spreading joy throughout the world with her voice. Naturally, she will be travelling again after her performance at Bourgie Hall, spending five months in Europe, doing a Strauss production in Toulouse and Wagner’s Das Rheingold in Germany, before returning to Canada to sing Verdi’s Requiem in Toronto. “It’s the longest stretch that I will be away from home,” she says.

Right now, though, Naggar-Tremblay is excited to present The Women Who Leave in Montreal.

“Marisol gives us the inspiration to create movement in our lives, maybe in smaller ways,” she tells me.

“It doesn’t have to be living on the other side of the world. It can just be, ‘maybe I’m going to do one thing for myself today, and that’s going to be my escape.’”◼︎

Rose Naggar-Tremblay performs The Women Who Leave December 13th 2023 at Bourgie Hall, 1339 Sherbrooke St West.

Cover image: Brent Calis

Standard
How Do You Spell Holiday?

Resolving Power: in conversation with Claude-Philippe Benoit

Abstraction resonates so deeply in modern art because it illustrates our everyday incongruity: capital is incommensurate with value.

Time is not money, to contradict an old adage. Time and money are like the frames of an image that arbitrarily circumscribe certain realities, and zoom in or out as would a camera lens, depending upon interfering and vibrant impulses. Markets. Labour. Fashion. Nature. These variables give the abstract shape, rendering the air solid, freezing time.

The Montreal artist Claude-Philippe Benoit intuitively grasps abstraction — as a concept, and historically, as a tradition.

“Artists have the responsibility to be knowledgeable, to be informed,” Benoit tells me from across a table in the back room of a pop-up gallery set up in the Insurance Exchange Building on Saint-Jacques Street, strictly to showcase his newest work. “It’s a duty for me.”

For nearly four decades, Benoit has been recognized primarily as a photographer. His sequences of melancholy images — of disused movie theatres and depopulated urban landscapes — have exhibited internationally, across Europe and in America. But the publication of his life’s work as a monograph in 2016 spurred a return for Benoit to painting, the subject of this latest show.

“I felt a kinship with the Düsseldorf School of Photography,” Benoit explains. “But all along, I always kept an eye on what was happening in Abstract painting. And when I visited galleries, like in Chelsea and SoHo, I was always most attracted to exhibitions of Abstract painting. That’s where I had the most pleasure as a viewer. And it also became research material, keeping me updated with what was being done.”

After Kazimir Malevitch, the 20th century Ukrainian Avant-Garde artist, Benoit refers to his current oeuvre as “Les carrés noirs.” Extreme movements characterize these paintings, with deliberate and often repeated brush strokes producing chunky and textural images that Benoit squares, quite literally, on paper and canvas.

Left: st8488 (2022). Right: st8448 (2021). Les Carrés Noirs.

The resulting work is a maximal exercise in minimalism — or vice versa — extending each minute physical gesture into monumental proportion, and wringing out extreme meaning from the abstract.

“It was Expressionism 2.0,” Benoit quips. “I was working in a gestural kind of painting. It takes your whole body. In any kind of art media, you have to invest yourself.”

Growing up in the Gatineau region and settling in Montreal in 1990 to pursue a career as an artist, Benoit has dedicated his entire life to creative practice. “I took classes of painting outside of school with a friend of mine,” Benoit recalls, “doing still-life paintings for my mom. And I forget how, but at a young age, I came across a book about Surrealism. And I read that book, and I was like, ‘oh my God.’ I was really astounded. I realized how extensive art could be.”

Benoit later attended Algonquin College, in Cinema, but was constantly drawn to the persistence of the still image. “I realized that the kind of life, being a contributor in film, was not for me. Sixteen-hour days. Plus also realizing that the creative input in a film was not noticeable enough for me. So I started working more in photography. And I was very conscious at that time that I wanted something to be a starting point. I didn’t know what was going to come next. So cinema theatres was that.”

Left: Réf. 44. Right: Réf. 3. L’envers de l’écran, Un Tourment Photographique, (1982-1985)

Benoit’s most famous series, entitled “L’envers de l’écran,” produced between 1982 and 1985, focusses upon the other side of cinema: behind the screen; the emptied-out theatre; the projection booth — those spaces normally occluded from film’s audiences. Benoit’s camera captured cinema’s eerie essence of ideology and myth with these images, and eventually granted him access to seats of power on another order.

“I was showing in New York,” Benoit recalls, “and while I was there, I somehow got permission to visit the U.N. Today, you understand, you would never get access. I was accompanied at the beginning by a security agent who was following me through. And I wanted to photograph these rooms empty of people, because I wanted it to be about these rooms, which for me were very coded, because we saw these rooms on the news. After half an hour or so, he went off and I was by myself. I could roam around, go from one room to another, open a door, ‘Oh, there’s a meeting here, sorry!’ Close the door. And I quickly realized that these places were about power.”

Those photographs formed the second chapter, “Ô-NU,” in his cycle, “Les Lieux Maîtres,” and led to another epiphany for Benoit about how to choose the subjects of his images. “If you want to photograph interiors, or landscapes, and there are people there,” notes Benoit, “there’s some kind of phenomenon that happens where, very quickly, it’s not about that interior, or that landscape. It could be one tiny person in the whole picture. But the viewer is drawn by that person.”

For his next series, “Société de Ville,” Benoit burrowed his lens into his favourite urban muse: Montreal.

“I used Montreal to photograph the urban landscape,” reveals Benoit, “but I didn’t want to photograph the iconic places, like Old Montreal, or the Olympic stadium. I only wanted to photograph as if it was discovered by someone, say, living in the woods all his life, and all of a sudden he comes out of the woods and discovers there’s a city. I wasn’t born in Montreal, but Montreal is certainly my home. It’s my home in my mind since I was a young boy. My parents brought me to Expo ’67, and I was amazed by the cityscape, and the autoroutes, and the Metro. I fell in love. And at that point, secretly, in my mind, I thought this is where I want to live. This is where I wanted to be.”

“I wasn’t born in Montreal, but Montreal is certainly my home. It’s my home in my mind since I was a young boy.” Claude-Philippe Benoit photographed for NicheMTL.

From runs of black-and-white photographs to enormous diptychs painted in cadenced waves, a curious theme emerges throughout Benoit’s works: capital, power, time, labour, leisure, language — these abstract concepts, like the image, elicit no intrinsic interpretation.

“I don’t think a lot about the meaning more than I want my work to have meaning,” Benoit emphasizes. “Because I can see a meaning in any of these photographs, but is that meaning going to come through for the viewer? That’s a pretty difficult task that mostly fails anyway. But to have meaning, that’s possible.”

The abstract vacuum of human form paradoxically unites Benoit’s photography and painting. Yet, he has no intention of choosing one practice over the other. “When my book was being produced, I got into painting to keep me busy, creatively. But then I liked what I saw. And voilà!”

Benoit motions to walls of framed canvases. “People started asking me, ‘Does this mean you’re not going to work in photography?’ No. Just because you start something doesn’t mean you have to abandon something. This show is a witness to that. The two of them can live together.”◼︎

Claude-Philippe Benoit Photographies et peintures continues at 276 rue Saint-Jacques through 28 October 2023.

Standard
How Do You Spell Holiday?

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

The air conditioning broke. So Casa’s doors stood wide open to the smoky night.

Montreal is known as the ashtray of North America. It’s a fuming city. People mill about outside of drinking establishments and music venues huddled around cigarettes. There’s a way people stand when they’re smoking, as if searching for something to do while performing a perfectly acceptable task: smoking.

Cigarettes, much like the people who smoke them, are on a spectrum of pleasantness. Sometimes, cigarettes smell like the backseat ashtray in a taxicab, or of a 1976 department store cafeteria. Other times, cigarettes possess a luxurious warmth, deeper and unplaceable across history, a mossy autumn evening’s air spiced with Portuguese chicken and passersby’s musk. A smell you want to take your time with, get lost in, a smell that wraps its tendrils around you.

It depends on who’s smoking the cigarettes, though. You’ll have better memories than others of some smoking people, of the people as well as their cigarette smell. Bad cigarettes can have a way of grabbing you by the nostrils as would some ephemeral Three Stooges routine. The punch of hot smoke pumping through an air conditioner. Pleasant cigarettes, au contraire, gently caress the olfactory sense, an inviting scent. Addictive, even.

Nicotine is a stimulant, as long as it’s administered regularly. You can stay up all night smoking a pack of cigarettes. Or you can get that second-hand thrill and stay up all night watching someone else smoke their pack of cigarettes. In the olden days, when cigarettes were still allowed indoors as entertainment, we’d return home after a night out stinking of cigarettes and high as kites, not able to think of sleep until the new dawn’s first rays, whether we’d been smoking or not.

Live music is like audible smoke, wisping through the atmosphere, clearly discernible but ungraspable. Music, like smoke, is always moving, energetic when it appears (sounds) like it’s still. Layers of soundwaves accumulate like strata of smoke in a dusty old pool room. Recording is to music as film is to smoke, capturing but also subdividing the indivisible, preserving the beauty of fluid movement and losing something in its preservation.

Smoke is particularly cinematic as music is uniquely suited to audible reproduction in time. Music is a cigarette burning steadily in an ashtray, throwing off plumes and flares that always delight yet never entirely surprise, a comfortable unpredictability.

There is an undeniably sexy quality to smoke and smokers. They know something that others don’t. They can breathe fire. Smokers blow non-smokers away — literally — with the tough black leather air of hip rebellion, sneaking a puff behind the barn, or after a busy late shift. I love a smoking woman, like a Hitchcock glamour shot, glimpsed through gauze. It’s nothing if not romantic to watch a beautiful woman bring a cigarette tip to her lips.

We venerate smoking artists. There’s a rugged authenticity to copping wholeheartedly to addiction, to leaning in when logic and science say recoil. Leonard Cohen famously smoked, then gave it up, then rekindled his affection for cigarettes after age 80. George Orwell wrote a considered essay on his epic struggle between buying books and consuming cigarettes. The work was intended to defend reading as one of the cheapest and most rewarding forms of recreation. But today, George Orwell is just a number, and Leonard Cohen is a mailbox, transubstantiated in form as smoke — and capital — is: into the air, thick or thin.

A melancholy mood pervades the end of September, the gradual understanding that summer is as far away as it can be, with three full seasons between. As nights stretch out, cigarettes underscore the passage of time, and the inability to regain what is soon to be lost, spent, smoked. When the weather turns brisk, women tend to bend at the knees slightly and hurry through their cigarettes to rush back inside, to get elsewhere.

Because cigarettes aren’t the destination, they’re the journey, transient — what life’s about.

We can see the stub coming up ahead but can do nothing to slow its inevitable approach. There is no medium that faithfully recaptures sound and music and smoke.

Cigarette smoke is like the past haunting the present. There’s a reason that ghosts in the movies are always shrouded in clouds of billowing smoke.

I don’t believe in ghosts. But we are entering into the most haunted season, since smoke reveals the contours of what once was but can be no more. I do believe that smoke revives the dead, breathing life, if only briefly, into burning carbon and particulate matter. Our loved ones might return in spirit, marrying breath and body, reconstituting only to dissipate once more as clouds form and in an instant vanish above a fjord. It may be possible to conjure a memory sculpted in smoke.

Saint-Laurent Boulevard on any summer’s night late in the season is a choking vapour factory populated by scantily clad and curvaceous bodies that obstruct the sidewalk and divert the flow of pedestrian traffic out and into the street. The sidewalk smokers’ lives unfold as more lives glide by in cars with windows rolled down, trailing smoke behind them like a Cheech and Chong movie. Since marijuana was legalized, there is now the distinctive ubiquitous and pungent skunk aroma of weed that pervades the city’s moist and cool air, mixing with dead leaves and the burnt and earthy dust smell of baseboard heaters clicking on again for the first time of the year.

The smoke of a late summer’s night reminds us that we are simultaneously alive and dying, nudging us closer to home, closer to that biggest of sleeps.

And when we arrive, our sweaters will smell lightly of tobacco and vanilla, and maybe a hint of bourbon, and our memories as golden-age cinema and the wind-up recordings of yesteryear both preserve indelibly and sully our collective experience.

The Bible says from ash we’re born and to ash one day we shall return. In between, we smolder.◼︎

Cover image: Ky Brooks and Jessica Moss perform at Casa del popolo, 15 September 2023.

Standard
How Do You Spell Holiday?

Le Temps Qui Passe: notes on The Pop of Life!

In February of 1969, then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau reached out to the People’s Republic of China’s leadership in hopes of forging formal diplomatic relations.

There was a general forbidden sense about the East at that time. Aside from the Soviet Union, China’s was the world’s most opaque Communist national government, shrouded in mythology and mystery. The United States, our closest neighbour and ideological ally, was still operating under the Formosan policy formulated during the mid-1950s by the Eisenhower Administration to protect independent Taiwan’s sovereignty against Red Chinese encroachment.

Taiwan had continued to function under the aegis of the American-allied Republic of China after the Chinese Communist Party triumphed in 1949, putting an end to the Chinese Civil War. Communist China’s price for friendship was the condition that Canada endorse its intention to imminently take Taiwan back — by force, if necessary. On October 10th, 1970, Ottawa issued a statement reaffirming the PRC’s Taiwan position, and diplomacy with Beijing was established that very day.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Mao, 1972. MMFA purchase, William Gillman Cheney Bequest. ©️ The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / ARS/ CARCC 2023. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Trudeau Sr.’s cavalier approach to countries the West viewed as potentially perilous rankled conservatives who questioned the Canadian leader’s allegiances. The Prime Minister was a noted friend of the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, too, and would entertain the rock-and-roll stars/anti-war activists John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Parliament Hill that December.

During the 1960s, Trudeau’s home province was undergoing its most total shift in generations. Jean Lesage’s Liberal Party upset the 1960 provincial election and initiated the overarching societal changes associated with the Quiet Revolution, in which Quebec moved further away from the Roman Catholic Church’s influence and towards a more secular, Americanized model.

Just as Castro was kicking out the Yanks, Quebec was flirting simultaneously with a form of economic socialism borrowed from the Pinkos, and an increasingly consumerist capitalism taken from America’s playbook. In Havana, Coca-Cola was on its way out. In Quebec, Coke was it.

Consumer products’ arbitrary placement in media — a barrage of ads sitting right next to the day’s news on TV and in print — reflected Pop culture’s ambivalence as both low culture and high art. In a proto-culture-jamming gesture, American contemporary artists like Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann in the 1960s and ‘70s incorporated these apparently absurd industrial-age incongruities directly into their works. Reproducing images that were themselves mass-produced seemed to serve as an ironic and radically post-modern artistic critique of mass-reproduction. Capitalist touchstones like Coca-Cola suddenly became iconic and iconoclastic in equal measure.

Michel Leclair (born in 1948), Fries with Gravy, and a Coke! 1974. MMFA purchase, Saidye and Samuel Bronfman Collection of Canadian Art. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Quebec artist Edmund Alleyn rose to prominence in the mid-1950s, receiving a grant from The Royal Society and Quebec’s prestigious Grand Prix aux Concours artistiques for his early Abstract Expressionist paintings. Alleyn relocated to France in 1955, representing Canada’s art scene from abroad, and came home to Quebec in 1970 to experience the cacophonous transformations abruptly wrought by the so-called Quiet Revolution. Those experiences shocked Alleyn into producing some of his most profound and popular works.

Immediately, Alleyn altered his style and media and created a striking cycle of photorealistic installations on Plexiglass that depict a culture foreign to its own land, bewildered tourists, as if returning home after a war. These monumental works in retrospect revealed the artist himself as a tourist, remastering his command of genre and artistic form while acquainting himself with a new Quebecois culture that had rapidly turned more American. If there was one thing France in the ‘60s was not, it was American.

Pop Art produced by the kaleidoscopic Quebec lens refracts American capitalist realism through the residual shards of traditional French-Canadian culture. Artists like Alleyn — and Pierre Ayot, whose prints and sculptures of the 1970s indicated capitalism’s sly colonization of the quotidian — were also showing their audiences the broken promise of consumerism as an organizing social force. Objects, regardless of their symbolic value, are void of any spiritual essence and ultimately leave their owners bereft of meaning. These artists adeptly anticipated today’s ennui.

Edmund Alleyn (1931-2004), Étude photographique pour Iceberg Blues, MMFA Collection, gift of Jennifer Alleyn, inv. 2016.399.

Quebec in the 21st century continues to cling to some of the cruellest aspects of our patriarchal French Catholic history while having embraced enthusiastically and unconditionally a specifically American brand of hyper-capitalism. Quebec, for instance, seeks culturally to shore up the mother tongue in part by remaking bad American reality TV in French. We enjoy the dual pleasure of conformist homogeneity and the smug superiority of singularity — a distinctly mimetic culture.

Pop Art works on the subconscious, whereas memes work on affect. So the Quebec of the new millennium offers a whole nother order of Pop sardonicism, more Jung than Freud.

It’s cliché to say that history repeats itself. Nevertheless, Taiwan is once again among the sovereign nations under threat of armed invasion by old foes; we have another Trudeau in Ottawa who appears to conservatives to be soft on Chinese capital; we have advanced secularism, and linguistic nationalism; and we have an art world awash in copies of copies of copies of artworks that were never intended to convey originality.

Pierre Ayot (1943-1995), Madame Blancheville Rides Again, 1974. MMFA Collection, gift of Madeline Forcier. ©️ Estate of Pierre Ayot / CARCC 2023. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts possesses a curatorial team capable of conjuring the complexity and also the unique curiosity of a Pop Art chez nous, recreating in fine detail the historical period in which Quebec was not-so-quietly redefining itself in wonderful and horrible ways, a revolution reverberating for decades.

The Pop of Life! reactivates a collection of artworks by unexpectedly juxtaposing them against each other, as well as opposite this moment in time. Warhol’s Mao portrait means so much more today than it did in 1972.

Another sort of patina has accumulated upon these alternately groovy, vulgar, plastic, and timeless masterpieces of Pop Art: a patina of meaning, laid on thick like layers of forever chemicals. We may see the works for what they are, or we might step further back and see ourselves seeing them.

Like Edmund Alleyn, we can journey to another place in time with a touristic fascination of discovery, tasting something familiar yet strange, Coca-Cola from another country, or Moscow’s McDonalds, a franchise still pulsing with semiotic vitality.◼︎

The Pop of Life!: Pop Art in the Collection of the MMFA continues through 24 March 2024 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Cover image: Edmund Alleyn (1931-2004), Iceberg Blues, 1973-1975, MMFA Collection, photographed for NicheMTL.

Standard
How Do You Spell Holiday?

Sweet Emotion: in conversation with Erin Gee

Erin Gee is overflowing with enthusiasm.

The artist, electroacoustic musician, and academic has invited me around on a swelteringly steamy summer afternoon to her relatively shaded backyard to tell me over a cool beverage about her work, particularly a forthcoming performance, entitled Affect Flow, which Gee and collaborators — both real and robotic — will present at this year’s Mutek festival in August.

“I’m so full of things to talk about right now,” Gee exclaims, before quickly doubling back. “I’ll have to turn off the academia and turn up the passion.”

Immediately, Gee third-guesses herself: “Maybe they’re married sometimes.”

Gee speaks in a characteristically deliberate scholarly pitch, punctuated incongruously with folksy snort-laughs that betray her quirky intelligence and wit. Gee is currently finishing a doctorate in composition et création sonore at Université de Montréal’s Music department, having relocated from Saskatchewan years ago to complete an MFA at Concordia and steep herself in this city’s cultural scenes.

“I’ve been productive artistically, but in the meantime, I’m getting a doctorate,” Gee chuckles. “It’s something that has really spurred my creativity and got me going. I’m not much of a big city girl; I was just passionate about learning to work with robotics.”

Gee’s robotic passions were rewarded after a fortuitous meeting in Sydney, Australia, with the neurophysiologist Vaughan Macefield, a researcher who creates robotic biofeedback sensors that measure human factors like heart rate, respiration, skin conductance, blood pressure, and neural activity.

Gee recalls that Macefield “just kind of said, ‘I don’t know, I think my work is fascinating, and it would be cool to see what an artist could do with it.’” She then had “a flash, imagining a piano that you could play with these things,” and embarked upon a multiyear research creation project to design biosensing robots that behaved something like a distributed wind chime.

“It was in a diatonic scale,” Gee explains of that work, “and basically, little hammers would strike little bells, and the parameters from an emotional person would control musical parameters like speed, timbre, the mode that the sound was playing in, the density of the notes. So you would end up with this abstract interior portrait of people.”

Though the musical product was not as simple as, say, hearing saccharine strings coming from a sad subject, or mouth harps and slide whistles emitting from someone more cheerful.

“When I first started making this work,” Gee divulges, “I really thought I could have some Holy Grail of interior musical emotional being. What I instead learned was that everyone’s interior world is really different. Even if, to a certain degree, Hollywood has already imprinted upon us what happiness and sadness sound like, what it feels like is totally different inside all of us. Anger, fear, surprise — these manifest physiologically very differently in us depending on how we were raised. This plays into gender, class, trauma — all kinds of things. So I was a bit bummed out because it’s really common for us to expect technology to reveal nature’s secrets. And you open up the Black Box and discover it’s Black Boxes all the way down.”

Gee later transferred her robotic technology into portable synthesizers, called Biosynths, and began working with a choir of young kids to make music. “I told myself, you just made a fleet of robots, you can work with children,” she laughs.

Gee soon discovered that the aesthetics of the technology were equally important to functionality in shaping its user’s attitudes. “You almost have to think of it as a collaboration when you’re working with robotics as much as with humans,” Gee says. “It’s a very different game than just making the device and making it work. And so the kids, unfortunately, were probably my toughest critics, but also my first customers. I learned a lot from them and hopefully they learned a lot from me.”

Affect Flow, Gee’s forthcoming Mutek performance, combines her user-friendly biosensing robotic technologies with the more avant-garde, and adult, practice of autonomous sensory meridian response — commonly abbreviated as ASMR — into something Gee calls ‘ASMRtronica.’

ASMR consists primarily of exceedingly sensuous and lushly recorded sounds like whispering, clicking, crunching, pouring liquids, and the like. Its objective is to produce the tingling sensation associated with pleasurable affective experience — if not pleasurable, then sensorially authentic.

And herein lies the paradoxical rub: its effects may decidedly be real, but ASMR is entirely synthetic: “ASMR is this hyper intimate, hyper personal, but really artificial practice of doing these gestures,” Gee explains.

“It’s closely related to hypnosis, but faux hypnosis. It combines hypnosis with social media feeds. It’s using these emotional hacks to push your body’s buttons. And I realized that this was the opposite of what I was trying to do: Instead of using emotions to push the mechanical buttons, now we are using emotions and gestures to push our physiological buttons. For me, ASMR became like this hinge. I had to get into it and understand it more, to inhabit this space in a way I knew I could as an artist.”

Under Gee’s direction, Affect Flow features an ensemble wearing biofeedback sensors corresponding to hardware synthesizers. “I’ll have ten people that make this ambient wash of sound,” she describes, “or there might be these brief moments when everybody is physiologically synced. So the audience can tune in or tune out of that perception of their bodies. People will experience at first a very polished ASMRtronica roleplay. And then,” Gee snorts, “it’s going to get a bit weird.”

“I’ll be leading everyone in emotional meditations that will mess with you a little. If you want. What I like about this is, you can choose. It’s all about consent. You can go on a journey with me, or just watch it. No one’s even going to know. The people in the biosensors — I call them ‘surrogates’ — because it’s through their bodies that you’ll get an overall portrait of the mood in the room.”

Again, Gee guffaws: “Our bodies are talking, you know?”◼︎

Erin Gee, photographed for NicheMTL with Pastel and Camélia, performs 24 August 2023 as part of Mutek’s Play 1 programme.

Standard