Collage Party!

ART Toronto

by Vanessa Nicholas

This past week between Sunday March 9 and Wednesday March 12 Paul Butler hosted one of his famous collage parties at Toronto’s Justina M. Barnicke Gallery as part of the University of Toronto’s annual Festival of the Arts. How I wish I could have been there!

Buter’s collage parties are modest events that usually takes place in gallery or studio spaces. Chairs, tables, tape, and magazines are provided and all are welcome to participate. The parties can last from a few hours to a few days and all resulting works are exhibited afterwards. Butler, who is from Winnipeg and graduated from The Alberta Collage of Art and Design in 1997, began hosting collage parties in 2002 after he began missing the concentrated and communal atmosphere of creativity that characterizes the art school experience. Though they began as casual events between friends, Butler’s concept quickly gained international popularity. Butler has hosted collage parties in London, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Oslo, and Dundee.

I imagine these events to be like group meditations. Canadian artist Cliff Eyland describes the parties as “many hands slapping, folding, creasing, and tearing…the prevailing mood is contemplative…[it is] a set of long, dreamy interludes of looking.”

Butler’s collages themselves reveal an interest in meditation and equate the collage process itself to a kind of redemption. They are often combinations of text and empty space or landscape scenes that give the viewer physical room to breathe. The untitled and undated work that is pictured above, for example, features a forest scene with the text “decisions, decisions, decisions” set against it. This combination of found natural imagery and provoking text embodies the type of refuge that the collage process can offer. “Decisions, decisions, decisions” describes a state of stressful sensory overload as well as the restorative act of making a collage. Magazines, newspapers, advertisements, junk mail, and pamphlets in many ways represent the clutter and stress of urban life that can make us feel claustrophobic and over stimulated. Collage prompts us to slow down and purposefully consider the minutia of everyday life. The challenge of selecting and compose images in a meaningful way encourages us to seek out beauty in a pro-active way.

Make sure to keep your eyes and ears open for Butler’s collage parties. In the meantime, serve your soul and start cutting and pasting!

John Latham at Delaye/Saltoun, London

ART London

John Latham: The Spray Gun and the Cosmos

Delaye/Saltoun
11 Savile Row London W1S 3PG
Until April 11th 2008

by Vanessa Nicholas

Delaye/Saltoun is a commercial gallery focusing on post-war British art that opened in London’s Saville Row on February 29. Their first show is “John Latham: The Spray Gun and the Cosmos”.

John Latham was an important British artist of the postwar period and is remembered particularly for his work entitled Spit and Chew (1966), which involved him and his students at Saint Martin’s School of Art chewing the school library’s copy of Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture. The book’s pages were turned to a pulp and left to ferment in a jar. After a series of overdue notices from the library, Latham returned the book in its new form. Needless to say, his teaching contract was not renewed.

Delaye/Saltoun’s show focuses on Latham’s interest in science. As a young man Latham began to question his devout Christian upbringing and sought to find a more satisfying theory of reality. This period of doubt and exploration coincided with his meeting and befriending two scientists, Clive Gregory and Anita Kohse. Latham adopted their belief that an alternate and more inclusive cosmological theory that broke down barriers between science and culture could end human conflict. The spray gun paintings attempt to visually represent ‘least-event’ theory that Latham developed with Gregory and Kohse, and which basically reduces reality to events instead of particles. The burst of paint from the spray gun is a literal representation of what Latham believed to be the essence of cosmological structure. In addition their integration of science and art realizes Gregory and Kohse’s interdisciplinary aims.

The works are explosive, chaotic and vibrating compositions on unprimed canvas. Neutral tones like brown, black, and grey dominate, though are activated by bursts of bright colors including, purple, pink and blue. That these works are removed from the artist’s hand by the spray-gun positions them against the works being made at the same time by the abstract expressionists, which celebrate human gesture. These works have not been exhibited together since they were made in the 1950s.

What I find most endearing and inspiring about Latham’s spray-gun works is his romantic intentions. That he believed his spray-gun full of paint could potentially dissolve barriers between people and establish a peaceful world compels the viewer sympathize with Latham and inspires affection and admiration for these works. I attended a lecture on astrophysics last year and learned that we are all made of stars, literally. Our bodies are composed of matter left over from expired stars. Though idealistic, Latham’s interest in the connection between the universe and human behavior thus appeals to our essence, strips us bare and exposes truth.