Ladies and gentlemen, bienvenue. We are the Artfag.

To loosely paraphrase “It’s a Wonderful Life,” every time a dolphin makes a pass at his attending research scientist, a fag-baiting Republican gets a coronary. Gay animals are absurdly, yet understandably, a high-stakes affair in this hysterical little culture of ours; despite the cries of the happily married homos that we’ve come a long way, baby, our people still count on the rutting of two male penguins in a zoo to make our “lifestyle” palatable to any Texas blowhard who swings his jowls us-ward. Faunae of the same sex cavort, and all of a sudden, some hysterical queen starts the chorus of “See?! It’s NATURAL!”

Let us oversimplify: a great deal of investment goes into the homo diddlings of the animal kingdom, and this investment inevitably says a great deal more about us than it does about the beasts of the wild. Enter Rebecca Anweiler, charming dyke painter extraordinaire, and her new show at the Katharine Mulherin gallery. Ms Anweiler has spent much of her career thus far exploring the cultural assumptions about so-called ‘natural’ dispositions, and so her weighing in on this amusing little minefield seems a logical step. Thus, her weight is thrown into “Nature Lover,” an encyclopedic series, at turns ribald and ruminant, that attempts to address our curious relationship with our collective bestial natures and cultures.

Ms Anweiler’s game is one of juxtaposition; her oeuvres are presented as suites, some settling themselves into austere rows of threes, others fanning out like expansive organisms, clusters of square (or thereabouts) paintings spread in irregular blockish blobs across the pristine walls. The suites themselves are comprised of three main elements: a black and white film still, blazingly coloured images of flora or fauna, and deep-amber monochrome extreme close-crops of busy hands and sundry anonymous anatomies enthusiastically pursuing flagrante delicto à la homosexual (these naughty bits are prurient enough to have prompted Ms Mulherin, in an act of good neighbourliness, to block out her street-facing gallery windows, and post a sign warning that the show is not for the easily corrupted or Republican of heart – everybody but heaven knows what A Space will do to safeguard sensibilities and prevent litigiousness). The film stills are all iconic, and eminently recognizable to anyone who has spent any time watching classic Hollywood movies. Even (or perhaps especially) in the denser compositions, it is worth noting that there is ever only one film still, contrasted with the numerous flora/fauna and sex images. In effect, the film stills provide the conceptual anchor around which swirls this associative maëlstrom of lush, provocative imagery.

Good news or bad news first? The good news: Ms Anweiler is a dab hand with pencil, brush and paint. Her images possess a figurative ease, skating with equal fluency amidst the folds of Rock Hudson’s dinner jacket or the labial protrudings of an orchid petal. Her sense of colour is unflagging, both within the picture frame and without; the honeyed reds and oranges of the pornographic images convey a lush, tumescent heaviness, and the searing technicolour of the animal works are put down with a confident zeal. The black and white film stills carry a loving sense of nostalgia; the images seem excerpted from faded issues of Photoplay (or the like), the monotone tinted with warm shades of ochre. And all three elements orbit each other easily and playfully.
The bad news: Ms Anweiler can’t help but swerve into the derivative. This is the imminent danger of working with this kind of material; between Georgia O’Keefe and Robert Mapplethorpe, the teeming sexuality of flowers has, by now, long since been played out. Their place amidst these juxtapositions seems merely instrumental; think of them as the punctuation in a joke, rather than the punchline; helpful, but, between the perverse animals, the iconic humans and the beaver shots, hardly necessary. Some of the less abstruse pairings also veer dangerously close to the edge of glib; representing female sexuality as a screeching tigress is an old ploy, and the old tricks are not always the best ones.

Nevertheless, this does not cheapen the joy of Ms Anweiler’s work, nor what it aims to say about the processing of our lusts – their sublimation, their shame-inducing perversity, their animal necessity. And some of Ms Anweiler’s juxtapositions produce some marvelous camp thrills: the harmonious echo of a spread eagled flamingo, its wings and tails a labial red, the outstretched arms of Cyd Charisse in Singin’ In the Rain, an impressively protuberant vulva dead centre in the canvas, nested between a set of splayed legs. Consider the smaller triptych, in which Liz Taylor entwines herself around an unimpressed Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; beside Liz is a roaring tigress (beware old tricks!), beside Paul is a towering cock being (ahem) tended to. And let us not forget the show’s centrepiece, a swirl of sexed anatomies and rutting fauna anchored around the image of Maureen O’Sullivan’s Jane draped against Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan. Jane’s arm curls behind her and disappears in the deep shadows of Tarzan’s thighs...but alas, his mind seems elsewhere, as his gaze is calmly fixed somewhere in the far distance. If the show can be boiled down to any kind of polemic, it’s that the only thing that’s natural about the vagaries of human desire is that they exist at all, no matter the object choice – nature is sexual, full stop, and our frenzied interpretations are byproducts of our heated and shamefaced imaginations. To dip into another iconic Hollywood cliché, Que Sera, Sera; you can take the man away from his apes, but you can’t ask him to like it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

We have been attending Pleasure Dome’s New Toronto Works show for a number of years now with clockwork regularity for the simple reason that, aside from the schmoozing orgy of Roman decadence and proportion, it tends to offer, year after year, the most bipolar programme to be had in this charming little burgh of ours. What’s more, owing to the ever-dwindling running time (we were shocked – shocked! – to arrive chez nous at a mere 10:30 this year!), this quality contrast only gets harsher and harsher. The highs are soaring and remarkable, the lows are utterly fecal (in point of fact, we have yet to exorcize the nauseating images left behind by last year’s bafflingly-curated Star-Trek-‘n’-coprophilia offering), and the middles are generally nowhere to be found. Suffice it to say that New Toronto Works is usually an all-you-can-eat buffet of schädenfreude, from which we generally leave dined and sated. So we are uncertain of what to report regarding this year’s crop. The buffet was decidedly slim this year; mostly good New Toronto Work! Is our hunger for schädenfreude selfish enough that we would bemoan the quality of the programme?

Decidedly not. When there is praising to be done, we are first in line, and the first thing to be praised is the running time. What with New Toronto Works having the punctuality of a drag queen on quaaludes, an hour-long show is a mercy verging on beatific. The longest entry was 15 minutes, and not only was that particular video a good 10 minutes longer than most of its confrères, it was far and away the most atrocious. But more on that later; this paragraph, after all, is devoted to praise.

The highlights, then: certainly the show was off to a rollicking start with delightful assays by Andy J. Patterson and Istvan Kantor (of all people). Ms Patterson’s entry, entitled “D.O.A./Remake/Remodel” is all film noir grit and grain, twinned with a machine-gun-paced voice-over, delivered in his inimitable meandering, more-smart-ass-than-thou bellow. Istvan Kantor’s “Revolutionary Song,” an essay on his father’s militaristic designs on sixteen-year-old Istvan’s hair, spun an electrically virtuosic, heartfelt and hilarious web, enmeshing adolescence, authority, and the potential confluence of resistance both public and private. It is delightful by virtue of its simultaneous display of vulnerability, humanity, and grandiose posturing, and is almost enough to make up for his art’s thus-far relentless display of radical pretensions slathered in oily “neoist” machismo. Cameron Groves’s “Flamingo” is a charming juxtaposition of the humble tragedies of a casino waitress’s life narrated over the retina-searing images of glitz and glamour of her Las Vegas home. Jamie Phelan and Adrienne Recknagel’s “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” is worth a laugh or two, queering that old chestnut with some expert manipulation of Ken dolls and Saran Wrap. Jeremy Bailey’s “Video Paint 2.0” starts off with a delightful send-up of the techno-instructional video, and then takes a bizarre tonal left-turn towards the Iraq- hostage-beheading final third that we are entirely unsure what to make of; but ambiguity and incongruity are in and of themselves interesting, especially given the generally cold, gee-whiz-look-what-I-can-do digital show-offery of Bailey videos past, and so the jury will let this one slide. John Forget’s “Monaco or Bust” is an endearing portrait of some local eccentric (we do believe we heard the word “Sudbury” dropped in once or twice), who moonlights as Prince Rainier of Monaco of all people, and has the wardrobe to match, epaulets and all. He also, as it turns out, can crank out one hell of an advertisement for Labatt’s Blue. In the face of his majesty’s flaccid version of a royal wave, all we can do is titter with delight, and quote Rex Reed’s review of John Waters’ Female Trouble: “Where do these people come from? Where do they go when the sun goes down? Isn't there a law or something?” Speaking of which, John Caffery’s and Lex Vaughn’s dance-a-thon rounded out the show, and is the usual potion of disco beats, bombast, flair and gymnastics, although it is a tad over-edited; after all, we all like to watch Ms Caffery dance, and the continuous jump-cuts and fade-ins are an unwelcome intrusion. Hats off to Ms Vaughn for her prize winning costume consisting of a lamé jumpsuit complete with sparkly red gash.

And the rest? Middling to dreadful, in grand ol’ NTW tradition. Caroline Ross provides further support for our argument that nothing is so detrimental to art as cute titles. “Skin Flicker” seems an awful lot of effort for a fairly bad pun (Get it? Porn clips in a pseudo-flicker film! Get it?!), although it was only a minute long, and we enjoy male nudity in any context, so we shouldn’t complain too strenuously. Barb Taylor’s animated “The Sheelagh” is a queasy blend of Celtic myth and muesli-loving womyn-on-womyn empowerment; cue Dar Williams and our gag reflex. Geoffrey Pugen’s “Utopics Video Guide” is a bland exercise in paranoid post-modern theory; it’s all frigid millennial techno-angst, the most entertaining part of which is Ms Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay’s cameo appearance, which is a scant few seconds long. And “Hannah,” the aforementioned longest entry of the pile, is eye-rollingly painful. The video is a narrative arc structured as a palindrome; the narrative plays out backwards, and then forwards. Samuel Kiehoon Lee almost pulls a muscle trying to be artsy. All we care to say on the matter is that the acting is better in reverse, and walking into the fridge does not a drama make.

Another year, another New Toronto Works show, and things seem to be trending on the up and up. Shorter running times, programmes where the good outweighs the bad...who knows, there might come a day where we saunter into the Latvian House aglow with great expectations, as opposed to merely bracing ourselves for the onslaught of the laughably awful, which, as we are at pains to demonstrate, has its own particular joys. Could the day dawn when NTW becomes the Toronto experimental film and video scene’s best-of teaser? We don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

One may have noticed by now our fondness for sweeping generalities, so let the following come as no surprise: this city’s art shows, with very few exceptions, have become boring. Not merely boring, but bo-ring. We are entirely unsure as to the origins of this particular phenomenon – the cosmos? perhaps something causally related to the unseasonably warm January weather? – but the fact remains as we have stated it; the digestive system of Toronto’s galleries has become unduly sluggish. Every upcoming show tantalizes us with the promise of reprieve – perhaps some enterprising gallerist will deliver a turd of magnificent heft and subtle interest to signal an end to this constipatory trend – but alas, all that results is an offensive stream of hot air. We had expected the new show at InterAccess to deliver us from stagnancy; after all, it is a fair assumption to equate video games with fun, and it might naturally follow that prankish artists tampering with video games would be even more amusant. Alas and alack, we are let down once again, but a show that takes bo-ring to even further fathoms that we are considering extending the word by a further syllable (bo-ah-ring?).

To begin with, the gallery is starkly empty. Some battered arcade game casings by the door, a set of TV’s in one corner, some monitors in the middle of the room, a TV in another corner, and a projection in an alcove; tiny islets of cables and screens amid the vast ocean of dimly lit concrete that is the gallery’s relatively new space. One might think that a show structured around games and mischievous hacking would inspire some curatorial flair, and one would apparently be wrong. And of the works themselves? Can one at least settle in for some adolescent gaming interactivity; seeing as this is a show about gaming (we feel the need to reiterate, as the curators seem to have lost sight of this) might we be able to actually play?

Apparently not. Only two of the five works are interactive in any loose sense of the term, and only one of the works is actually playable. In the interest of full disclosure, three of the five works should be interactive, although Prize Budget For Boys’s pieces (the aforementioned arcade cabinets) weren’t plugged in, or at least working in any other way, when we arrived (we pressed buttons and hammered joysticks, to no avail). Myfanwy Ashmore’s hacked versions of a Mario Bros. game strips the game of all but the most basic architecture, so all that one can do is walk and jump and watch the time run out, and then die. Alright in and of itself, although the novelty (both practical and conceptual) wears out fairly quickly. The TV screens in the corner all display some hacked version of a virtual skateboarding game (we could never see the point of those to begin with...why not just go out at skateboard?) where the character is caught in a series of infinite loops: doing a 360-degree swivel around a banister in perpetuity, for example. As we’re sure most of can attest, watching someone else play a game is about as exciting as watching paint dry; watching no one in particular play a broken game demands more patience and forgiveness than we are willing to muster. Apparently, it took a collective to figure this one out, one of whom is apparently a University professor. Well, we can all rest assured that behind this staggering yawn of a work is enough theory to choke a horse. Nevertheless, we remain unconvinced as we ask ourselves the same question yet again: how can a piece about games be this bo-oh-ah-ring? Anita Fontaine + Yumi-Co’s contribution, entitled “CuteXDoom” is the only one that can rustle up the appropriate enthusiasm, as this seems to be the only effort to engage the curatorial theme to any kind of fuller potential; we can actually play the game, for a start. We are some kind of fairy-warrior-princess (anything that allows us to pretend to be a fairy warrior princess is already earning points), and we find ourselves at the foot of a castle comprised entirely of detritus from Japanese youth culture: walls are comprised of Sailor Moon screen-captures, JPEGs from the Engrish.com website, etc. etc.. Our mission, as regaled to us by a jumping pink bear, is to venture forth into the dank forest of doom and collect 10 plush toys; only then will we be allowed access to the palace. And off we go, running after toys in an environment comprised of clashing juxtapositions: generally, the lightheartedness of the game’s object is offset by a soundtrack suggesting that we are about to meet our maker in a particularly hellish way (alas, we ended up falling into a ravine, which, considering our alternatives, isn’t all that nasty a way to go). “CuteXDoom” seems most interesting, in large part because it feasts on the mutual fascination that Western and Japanese youth culture have for each other, and their respective and mutual incomprehensibility, and the consequent unquestioning satisfaction with each other’s simplest cultural output. This is made all the more bizarre by the fact that free-market capitalism doesn’t seem to regard this as an impediment: witness the influx of Manga and Anime culture on this end of the Pacific, and the rabid consumption of western fashion as the signifier of youthful rebelliousness instigated on a mob scale on the other end. Our respective cultures might not have a handle on each other, but money is a fabulous social lubricant.

Tasman Richardson rounds things out with yet more blah: projections of the pretty colours and shapes made by glitches in an Atari console flicker across the wall, which might be interesting provided one has the attention span of a fish, prompting our question yet again: how is it that a show based on gaming can be this remote, this alienating, this bo-oh-ah-ri-hing? Perhaps one can find an answer in the form of some accompanying literature? A curatorial statement indicating the desire to illustrate the vacuity of a culture obsessed with living in the virtual (a tired concept, but we’re grasping at straws here, ladies and gentlemen)? Disappointed, yet again; no statement available, nothing to satiate the thirst of an inquisitive viewer (and quite frankly, if they’re still interested enough to ask questions at this point, this should be the final nail in the coffin of their enthusiasm).

And so, exiting InterAccess, head bowed and shoulders slumped, we sent out a prayer to the Art Gods, knowing full well that it isn’t unheard of for those who listen to prayers to answer with a resounding “no.” Gazing at the frigid February sky, we pleaded desperately for a sign: something, anything, to relieve this city’s galleries of this dreadful, dreary, stultifying turgidity.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------