Ladies and gentlemen, bienvenue.   We are the Artfag.

And, as one might surmise, we are not amused by the weather. And quite frankly, we have begun to seriously question whether or not the presence of air conditioning should be the determining factor in our gallery-going. Keeping up with the latest and greatest is hard enough without the added misery of standing in a puddle of one's own (and others' - we shudder at the very thought) sweat.

What we like: central air conditioning, linen suits, the frigid waters of the Atlantic, summer thunderstorms, and the cool breezes that flow thereafter.

How we are: doing our best to maintain our inimitable froideur. Everybody but heaven knows that, come July, honey, it ain't easy.

What we don't like: the summer. It's not a season, darlings, it's a punishment.

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

It has always struck us that, for a certain cross-section of the great unwashed (a cross-section that ends up including our dainty selves), a taste for Bruce LaBruce seems to be compulsory. Certainly, on paper, what's not to like?   Let us recall the great subcultural heights to which Ms BlaB has ascended (descended?): J.D.s - a home-run, first time at the plate. A veritable bible for the cranky punky nelly, a safe haven for one Kristy McNichol, a document that has barely aged (even if the band-names it checks have), a collection which we hold dear to our cranky punky nelly hearts. Let us not forget the essays in various and sundry periodicals, which are, if nothing else, eminently readable (except for those bits where she embraces anti-gay-gayness with a little too much reactionary gusto). And of course, there are the films. Hustler White is tenderly charming, if a little liberal in how much it steals from Billy Wilder, and Super 8 ½ remains our fave, and, for our money, a serious contender for funniest Canadian film of all time. Some of the features are lost on us, however, as we could never quite hop on the Neo-Nazi-fetishizing bandwagon, no matter how much irony the bandwagon waded through. But this is not a talent in decline: Raspberry Reich was a delightful romp, and anyone who attempts to marry Godard and butt-sex has our undivided attention. Nevertheless, there has always been, to our mind, a surprising shallowness to her output, as if underneath the parade of chic uniforms donned over the years - nelly punk, anti-gay fag, sexually demure porn-slinger, Che-chic revolutionary - lies the encroaching sense of boredom of someone who's all of a sudden realized not that they're the smartest person in the room, but rather that the room they're in is getting stupider by the minute.

It is this sense of boredom that pervades her show of Polaroids at Gallery 1313. Now, before continuing, we feel it necessary to iterate a series of obvious conclusions, if for no other reason then to dispel any hint of our naïveté: Gallery 1313 is a small artist-run gallery in a small city (sorry kids, but it's true). So there's no reason to break out the big artistic guns; save that for Peres Projects or Gavin Brown's Enterprise. Any expectations in that direction were scuppered long before we crossed the gallery threshold; Toronto + non-commercial gallery = minor work, amusing distraction at best. And there's no reason to expect that an amusing distraction wouldn't suffice. Amusing distractions have pleasures all their own, and besides which, we have always privately maintained that Ms BlaB makes better production stills than she does movies. So, while not expecting to be blown clear across the continent by concepts with heft to rival the cocks of his porn-stars, we were expecting a Good Time.

Oh well.   The title of show - "Polaroid Rage" - suggests a certain manic excitement that the 'Roids fail to deliver. Obviously, we are not dealing with anything rigorously formal; photographic acumen is not the name of the game by any stretch of the imagination. So, in lieu of Uri Geller-esque theoretics and formal athletics, what we are left with are the performances that Ms BlaB purports to document. And surely, we have at least come to expect of Ms BlaB, given her coterie of lurid and extravagant pals, a good performance or two. Surely, if nothing else, we can count on her to deliver in the freak department?

Oh well. There are some performers here that we, and others of our subcultural cross-section, might recognize. On the local end, we have Ms Sasha van BonBon, ecdysiast extraordinaire, and Justus, a fellow who can do remarkable things with a 40 oz bottle of beer, both of whom make early appearances. Ms van BonBon is simply incapable of taking a bad picture, and Justus and his 40 oz-er seem to live for the camera. Most unfortunately, their respective salacious exuberances are largely drowned out by the other inhabitants of the Polaroid frame. These others resemble nothing so much as refugees from a condo commercial trying desperately to look naughty, to use their proximity to the demimondaine in order to graft edges onto their drably rounded corners. Most of them, putting on their bravest kooky smiles, simply look like they don't know what to do, and if you don't know what to do when someone pushes their gorgeous ass up against you, then you don't need help, you need a telethon.

The Polaroids are hung in a long line, the scene shifting every so often, and we move, conveyor belt-style, to a group of fatigue-bedecked thugs holding a parade of people hostage, most of whom are probably, like Ms BlaB herself, terribly famous to the same tiny subcultural cross-section, and all of whom can't hold the camera's attention. That the fake blood splattered behind them has more magnetic vim than any of the models should tell you something. We are shuttled on to a nudie group shower scene, probably the best of the bunch, given Ms BlaB's porno proclivities. The collection yields a few juicy boners, but not enough prurient raunch to make it look like something other than towel-snapping jocks having a good chuckle and the occasional hormonal mishap, let alone have it live up to the "18-and-over" caveat plastered on the gallery door. Next on the menu is snaps of the opening of the show itself (the corn-syrup-and-food-colouring remnants of which stuck to the soles of our shoes as we made our way around the show), where Lola, a trannie drag queen with an impressively buoyant rack and an American flag fashioned into a hijab, gets comfortable with some willing victims. Once again, most of the victims simply can't compete with the queen; girlfriend gives good face.

Like everything else in the show, all these set-ups and get-ups sound neat-o on paper, we realize. And while they're hardly exemplary, they are certainly characteristic of Ms BlaB's modus operandi: mining the zeitgeist for the latest sacred cows - hostage taking? American flags? Islam? - and turning them on their ears by some pat juxtaposition. This trick is turned to best effect in porn; but quite frankly, ladies and gentlemen, if she's going to leave us with her sloppy seconds, and she's not going to distract us with rutting, elephantine-membered hunks, there's only so much facile appropriation, glib topical scandal and nose-picking juvenilia we're willing to tolerate.

Oh well.

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

Initially, we welcomed the news that the AGO would be hosting an Andy Warhol show. And, even though he might not be the first person to leap into our heads to curate, we welcomed the participation of David Cronenberg, as everybody but heaven knows our misgivings about curators past. Until, that is, we saw the ads: "Sex symbols. Car crashes. Electric Chairs. We'd expect this from Cronenberg, but from Warhol?" Far from being clever and savvy, these ads actually raise the not-entirely-unrealistic prospect that the AGO had never ever heard of Warhol, nor had they any clue what he had ever done. Furthermore, what the general public knows of Warhol (aside from that dreary quote about fame that everyone invariably gets wrong) is that, over and above all else, he was a fey, pale, remote weirdo, and thus a prime candidate to create remote weirdo work.

In point of fact, Warhol has become more famous than perhaps even he realized was possible. All one has to do to find evidence of this is take a walk down Queen street, or any street in any major cosmopolitan city; his imitators and adulators are everywhere. He has become the (if not merely an) archetype of the contemporary artist; the flâneur, whose bizarre ideas are forever walled up behind a barrier of terse, mystifying speech; the ur-scenester who waltzes just as easily with the demimonde as with the world of high culture, all without missing a step. Whatever one may think of him, he is part of the art pantheon; we do not think it amiss to declare that he is to our end of the last century as Picasso was to its first half. Editorializing aside, his perplexing centrality must be recognized, and, to paraphrase Mr. David Moos' slightly condescending monologue on the show's audio-guide, wrestled with.

And so the AGO does, with a great degree of success, thanks to the nimble hand of Mr. Cronenberg. The wisdom of their ad campaign aside, the show is excellently handled, and generally free from the undergraduate amateurishness that blights most of their blockbuster efforts.

Weighing in at a scant two and a half rooms long, it's certainly an oddly attenuated blockbuster, yet it manages to make the best out of the meagre means forced upon it by renovation follies. Of epochal interest, however, is that this is the first museum exhibition where we voluntarily perpetrated an abrupt violation of one of our sacred precepts: we indulged in an audio-guide, although 'voluntarily' might be stretching it a bit. We are warned from the get-go that we are bereft of Informative Wall Plaques (thank Heaven, at long, long last!) and, lest we lose our interpretive way, Mr. Cronenberg's disembodied voice is there to usher us safely through (we knew there might be a catch). Now, we know a marketing gimmick when we see one; all this urgent, plaintive filibustering on behalf of the necessity of the audio-guide serves merely to underscore Mr. Cronenberg's involvement (his narration is even available at the gift shop as a consumer-priced CD). Nonetheless, this strikes us as perfectly kosher. As we said before, he is an odd choice of curator, and thus, we were more than curious to hear what he has made of Warhol, and so more than happy to press that clammy receiver to our waiting ear.

And what of Mr. Cronenberg's involvement? This is, after all, a double feature: the curation of the show proper, and, because the AGO insists on stressing the singularity of his interpretive vision, his narration. As a curator, at least, and perhaps at best, he escapes unscathed. A remarkable aspect of the presentation is that films and paintings hang side by side. Not only does this make the most of the two and a half rooms, it simultaneously allows for a greater variety of work (instead of having scheduled single channel screenings) and makes a gracefully quick job of introducing the fluid promiscuity of Warhol's output. Through Mr. Cronenberg's expert arrangements, interpretive associations and thematic connections are suggested rather than belaboured, and so the show hangs together like a well constructed essay; an idiosyncratic argument, rather than heavy-handed institutional didacticism. Witness the easy fraternity of Liz-as-Cleopatra with the Red Disasters (Mr. Cronenberg accurately points out that Liz herself was a Hollywood disaster of the grandest sort), or the moribund threesome of films Kiss and Blow-Job sandwiching the "Silver Disaster #6" painting.

His narrative interpretations, while generally astute, are a little spottier. Certainly, the presence of "guest stars" on the soundtrack is mostly frivolous, as they add little beyond bland gossip (did we really need a whole monologue delivered by Warhol's wig stylist?). Cronenberg himself fares better than his guests; in proper schoolmarm fashion, he consistently hammers all the right Warhol-101 nails, both professional - he wanted to be a machine, his silkscreen technique was deliberately smudgy, most of his work was done by assistants - and personal - shy, remote, vaguely asexual, and celebrity-obsessed. Celebrity obsession is the axis around which the show rotates, Mr. Cronenberg making grand opera out of the relationship between celebrity and death, and Warhol's (and our) eager appetite for the two. The idea is certainly there for the interpreting, although that's the curious thing about Warhol's oeuvre; it's so accommodating to interpretation that its oft-described (by Warhol, anyway) blankness is almost overpowering. At any rate, Mr. Cronenberg insists on his celebrity/death hook with a dogged fixation, which makes for some odd moments. Consider his discussion of "Elvis I and II": the image is taken from a publicity still from the film Flaming Star, which Cronenberg takes to be the Flaming Star of fame, the very same celestial body which would engulf his musical majesty in a whirling torrent of drugs and weight-gain and eventually death. Thus, Warhol was giving us prescient warning of the transience of beauty and the perils of notoriety. That's all fine and dandy, although we hope that Mr. Cronenberg didn't pull any muscles reaching for that tenuously retrospective conclusion.

Allow us to offer a more direct reading, and in so doing, draw attention to the major (and startling) shortcoming of this persistently single-minded musing: Elvis was a sweet piece of ass, especially in the '50's and '60's. That the title of the image's source film is "Flaming Star" is indeed of great significance, not as a black harbinger of Gotterdammerung, but as a queer double entendre: Elvis is a flaming star. Funny yes, but this is not a one-liner; Andy is suggesting that the homoerotic gaze is infectious. At the level of icon (where stars operate, after all), queer lust for the macho stud is enough to turn him into a flamer. An interesting assertion now, and certainly a dangerous assertion in pre-Stonewall America, let alone pre-Stonewall Nashville.

And this is where Cronenberg fails, and fails terribly. As far as identity goes, Warhol was never particularly moored to anything, or at least not for a very long time. Early on, the New York critics called him a Painter, and lumped him in with the Abstract Expressionists. He confounded that designation by cheerfully asserting that his assistants rather than he did his paintings, that he envied the inhuman ease of the machine-made, that he and his work were equally shallow (consider the revolutionary aspect of that statement, amidst the heavy critical breathing of Artist as singular genius, cultural übermensch). The Marxists and Leftists claimed him as one of their own, citing every Campbell's soup can as a blow against commodity fetishism, a shriek piercing the vacuous surface of Western capitalism. He betrayed them as well, especially later in his career, jet-setting to Iran at the behest of the Shah, cozying up to the Reagans in an attempt to get an official portrait commission.

The one thing that Andy was, resolutely, inarguably, until the end of his days, was queer. He created an enduring oeuvre around his own perversities, and therein lies the great catch of his work: in order to get comfy with it in any meaningful way, you have to assume his desires; you have to want to see Jackie O or Liz or Troy Donahue 16 times over; you have to want to watch a grotesque closeup of people kissing for god knows how many hours; you have to want to watch people play out their drugged-up hysterias and insecurities and cruelties; you have to want to watch, unblinkingly, someone sleep for 5 hours. You have to submit your will to his perversity. In short, like no other artist, Warhol colonizes your desires, and his cipher-like blankness is a devilishly good conduit for that particular brand of hegemony. Granted, his work seems blank enough that one can affix anything - Marxism or Cronenberg-ism - to it, and it will stick, for the most part; but that misses the point. If his work is political in any way, it is in its insistence on queerness as an extravagant problem (not coincidentally, that was his own euphemism for homosexuality - he was constantly querying whether so-and-so had a "problem"). And, in ignoring his queerness as if it was a child with a temper tantrum, the show misses some excellent points and, more often than not, veers towards the ridiculous: viz., a roomful of deeply polite, patient and slightly incredulous museum-goers watching an absurdly high Ondine fucking an especially toothsome bit of trade in "Couch," while Amy Taubin whispers genteelly in our ears on the kooky comings-and-goings of the Factory. In discussing Jackie or Liz, the word "gay" is tossed off casually, as if to couch Warhol's manic collection of their respective images in an easy psychological shorthand. But this is to Cronenberg's great detriment, as queerness is the missing numeral in his celebrity/death equation. That is why his discussion of the "Most Wanted Men" feels flaccid and sketchy; how can one speak of the allure of the criminal element and leave out sexual desire? Certainly, these men were most wanted by the FBI, but they were also wanted, lusted after, by Warhol himself, and it remains a matter of conjecture as to whose desire (J. Edgar's or Andy's) caused Most Wanted Men's censure at the New York World's Fair. It is precisely the addition of desire to Mr. Cronenberg's particular constellation that makes Warhol's achievement so utterly perplexing: how is it that a man this odd, this remote, this fey, should exercise such a fierce and lasting hold on the larger public imagination? Warhol single-handedly waged a culture war from a relatively marginal trench, and, from where we are sitting, it very much looks like he won.

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