Ladies and gentlemen, bienvenue. We are the Artfag.

And we are 20 issues old. Quite frankly, when we began our little endeavour, we had no idea that this would be the result. Granted, we were hoping that the result might be a little grander than this (to date, we have yet to control the media), but we aren’t complaining. A cult following is a pretty little following indeed, and we are blessed to be both liked and loathed by all the right people.

We have been at this for quite a while, at least in the ‘zine stakes, and we were wondering how best to mark this anniversary. What could we possibly do? We know what you’re thinking, and no, we have utterly no interest in doing that (although we will address that, below). For our 20th anniversary, we have decided to commit physical suicide. We are abandoning our stake in the material world, and from here on in, our presence will be purely virtual, like a fog of pink ones and zeros, hanging like a mist above Toronto. Those who are on our email list will continue to receive emailed versions of our little cahier, to have and to hold in the comfort of their in-boxes. Should one wish to join their ranks, one has merely to contact us via email.

Perhaps, one day down the road, hubris permitting, we might publish a best-of edition of our little cahier, and that indeed will be physical (and, be forewarned, that indeed will not be gratis). But for now, the paper-and-ink version of our cahier is done for. No more trips to the copy shop; as we glance outside our window, the paralyzing cascades of snow applaud our decision.

And as we are 20 years old, we thought we might like to address some recurring questions, listed in order of persistence:

1 – Who are we? Ladies and gentlemen, we say it at the beginning of every missive: we are the Artfag. Isn’t that enough? Clearly not; but almost nothing could induce us to unmask ourselves. We are quite content with rumours and false guesses and the aura of the unsolved. Should someone approach us with an offer of substantial cash, we might consider dropping our pseudonym. But in the meantime, we have merely to quote Saccheverel Sitwell: it is the mystery that lingers, and not the explanation.

2 – The sporadic nature of our endeavour. There are two reasons for this. The first is that we are a volunteer enterprise. We are not financially remunerated, thus we have no responsibility to punctuality. The more noble reason is that we simply can’t be arsed. Granted, we used to be a little more attentive to a self-imposed deadline of every two months. But the majority of the shows we see in this city bore us, and we have nothing to say about them; lacklustre work by juvenile artists, displayed by self-deluded gallerists or curators desperate to fill space. We were never one to make excuses, neither for others, nor for ourselves, but darlings, have a tiny amount of pity in your hearts for those poor souls who are paid to produce: they are faced with the bland monotony of art in this city, and they are financially bound to produce copy.

So. In celebration of our 20th issue, we decided to let ourselves in for a little treat, and one that involved walking scarcely two blocks. We decided that we would make things easy on ourselves (little did we realize), and devote this issue to our two favorite galleries in this city, one of whom seems slightly imperiled at the moment. We trust it will become obvious exactly whom we mean.

What we like: the gentle slopes of undisturbed snowbanks, burying ourselves underneath pounds and pounds of duvet covers.

How we are: well darlings, we’re getting older, don’t you know, and thus increasingly infused with l’esprit d’escalier.

What we don’t like: the furiously blowing, inclement torrents of the freezing white stuff that cause the aforementioned gentle slopes of undisturbed snowbanks.

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We wonder, ladies and gentlemen, if art folk will start talking about the Royal Art Lodge they way the rest of the world talks about boy-bands. Certainly, this metaphor occurred to us after we had taken a leisurely perambulation around Drue Langlois’s and Hollie Dzama’s new shows at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects. Langlois seems to be Lance Bass to Marcel Dzama’s Justin Timberlake: still in the public eye, but fading fast, as opposed to his compatriot’s still stellar career arc. We’re not sure where this little metaphor of ours leaves Ms Dzama – as Jamie Lynn Spears, perhaps?

First, a brief foray into Ms Dzama’s showing, “Scary Pretty.” Let us be blunt: it is of staggering ugliness and gorge-rising puerility; certainly among the worst things we have ever seen in our tenure in this city. In point of fact, the only thing that separates Ms Dzama’s work from the work currently adorning the walls of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health is that the CAMH inmates aren’t showing in Katharine Mulherin’s gallery (although most, if not any of them would make a marked improvement over Ms Dzama).

Now that we’ve raised the issue, let us indulge in a brief tangent, in all seriousness: consider, ladies and gentlemen, the monumental injustice of what difference these two exhibition venues make in the reading of the artworks contained therein; in the audience attracted to both; in the attention paid to both. And Ms Dzama, so this context fails to have us believe, is an Artist, whereas the CAMH folks are merely indulging in therapy. We have nothing further to say regarding Ms Dzama. We have registered our shock and loathing, and we are moving on.

While Mr. Langlois fares slightly better, the only thing we can think of to say about his latest attempt to keep our attention is that there is simply no excuse for it. We have seen this work before, over and over again, not simply from him, but from scores of other people. This particular song – this mock-naïve, and thus heavily ironic take on teen-boy kitsch – is overplayed; in fact, it is played out. We remember castigating someone for overindulgence in this aesthetic mode as recently as our last little cahier.

But we are dissecting Mr. Langlois here, and the fact remains that he has been spinning this record for far too long, and it grates. His particular turf seems to sprout from a fondness of the golden age of comic books – the superhuman and extraterrestrial affairs of the creations of artists like Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and their various descendants – and thus we have a gallery devoted to a series of women of superheroic proportions (mainly in the bust-line) going about their superheroic business. Of course, we are all meant to share in the same amused and distanced (always distanced) fondness for the effluvia of low culture, so Mr. Langlois’s glance is always askew, his juxtapositions to be read with a knowing smirk: a city engulfed in nothing so dangerous as chocolate, a fencing heroine decapitating a Cherry Cordial-headed villain, a Raquel Welch-circa-One Million Years B.C. look-a-like triumphantly holding an Easter egg aloft, and so on and so forth. The paintings all partake of the same formula: just enough innocence to be charming, just enough oddity to dispel all notions that we’re dealing with anything less than Art.

And when we say all the paintings partake of a formula, we don’t merely mean the collection assembled at 1086 Queen Street West; we mean his entire oeuvre, from first to latest. The aura of déjà-vu that permeates the show dulls it terribly, and there isn’t much in the way of sharpness there to begin with. Far from earning a sense of consistency, what emerges from this show is the notion that Mr. Langlois simply lacks the imaginative faculties to do anything other than these penny-dreadful illustrations and stuffed-felt dolls. Just by the by, the dolls fare the best in the show, as their handcrafted homeliness is briefly winning. Still, even those we have seen too many times before to be engaged in any serious way, for any length of time. At best, the whole affair comes off as crass, as if Mr. Langlois was doing his level best to manufacture some easily sellable art-world niche for himself. At worst, it comes off as twee, and silly, an assembly that can barely hold a wall on its own aesthetic merits.

Mr. Langlois has titled his show “Oily Paintings,” presumably after the materials he used to construct his images. This title is a half-truth. In fact, the title should have been “Oleaginous Paintings,” for that is what they truly are: perfunctory, smug, glib. The illustrators to whom we earlier appealed as antecedents are possessed of a far greater visual panache and graphic verve than Mr. Langlois is capable of conjuring. Everything here is tepid: the drawing, the compositions, the colour, all blended over with the buttery sheen of oil paint, as if the medium itself could compensate for the catalogue of Mr. Langlois’s artistic lackings. It cannot.

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We knew, as soon as we saw the Shiva on the exterior southern-facing wall of the Cameron house transmute all of a sudden into Brigitte Bardot, that John Abrams was up to something. And lo: concurrent shows at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton and at Paul Petro’s two spaces along Queen Street.

Abrams has been doing this for a fair while by now – mining ‘60’s New Wave cinema stills for his paintings – and while the show at Paul Petro Contemporary Art doesn’t demonstrate or forebode any great tectonic shifts in Abrams’ practice, there have been some subtle shifts of concern along the way, and there is much to enjoy.

Gone are the days of the lurid blue-orange-red x-ray colour schema of the Betty Blue and Breathless series; the new work, consisting of paintings lifted from Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away and Godard’s Contempt, is in glorious and realistic technicolour. The Mediterranean sun glares through the Swept Away paintings, registered in the baked yellows of sand and sun, the saturated blues of skies and surf, and the bleached lighting. Similarly, Godard’s famous primary colour palette is paid its due reverence in the Contempt paintings. A shift in scale has occurred, at least at the paintings up in PPCA: the smallest of the work is roughly 12” x 24,” while the largest spreads its girth across singular walls. But the most significant shift in the handling of this motif is the paint itself. Where before Abrams was as tight as a drum, he has gone on to discover freer, more jazzy uses for his brushes and his paint. And this, above all else, is essential.

The one major criticism that can be leveled at Abrams is that he’s made his job so easy that it renders one a tad suspicious. Not only is he dealing with images that have been pre-composed, they’ve been pre-composed by none other than Raoul Coutard, certainly the greatest cinematographer of the French New Wave, quite possibly the greatest cinematographer of this past century. Now, one might counter-argue that a composition is simply an armature, a skeleton. To which we might respond, well yes, but this is the equivalent of having your skeleton custom designed by Givenchy. Similarly the colour choices have been made for him, by none other than Wertmuller and Jean-Luc Godard. So of course they are beautiful images; they were beautiful images before Abrams hit puberty. It would take a total oaf to ruin these images, which Abrams is not; so where does he fit into all this? Where does he earn his own kudos, as opposed to plucking kudos from atop the cameras of giants?

As long as Abrams looks to the movies for his subject matter, he will always need to answer that question; before, in Betty Blue and Breathless, he tackled it largely cosmetically, through colour swapping. And while the colour choices here are not in the least bit abstract, that knotty issue of what Abrams’ particular job is in all this painted cinephilia is far more resolved, for here, the translation job goes deeper than mere colour choices, and speaks to the very bedrock of the métier of painting: touch and gesture. The paint is put through a rigorous exercise program: great sweeping swipes, rapid-fire scumbling, whips and drips (the bravest painting in the show is tucked into Petro’s back room, where, in a display of startling confidence and cojones, Abrams has dropped a single, great splash all over an otherwise perfectly polished work). Abrams’ looser painting suggests a much deeper thought process: of how to take that photographed image, and find its corollary physical description in pigment. In this latest body of work, he has transcended the pitfalls of his chosen niche; he is no longer a glorified copyist, making polished, merely clever paintings that rely on other people’s visuals. Just as his inspirations (well, at least Godard) were making films about filmmaking, he is now making paintings about painting, about the translation of light into matter.

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There was a moment during Vtape’s Queer Here, Queer Now 2: Sex Is So Abstract screening when we thought to ourselves, “Selves: some day very very soon, the rest of the art world is going to get very very tired of us gay men, and O how the heads will roll.” And then we remembered that there are far far too many constituent fags in the art world for such an event to take place. And that, in a nutshell, is what went horribly horribly wrong with Queer Here, Queer Now 2: Sex Is So Abstract; too many fags.

We are duty-bound to pause for exposition and full disclosure. Queer Here, Queer Now is the tripartite project of John Paul Ricco, Vtape’s current curatorial intern. It unfolded as two curated video screenings and a symposium. We attended merely and only its second installment, and thus can speak solely to its particular skull-fucking awfulness.

The program itself consisted solely and entirely of cocks, in various ways and means of spurting: piss and jizz, although more heavily concerned with piss. Parenthetically, we would like to remark that this seems to be the de rigeur pastime of the fashionably alternative queer; we’re sure there’s an entire PhD thesis in the works about why exactly this might be (“Yellow Submarine: Urinary Re-Presentations of Post-Queer Sexual Dynamics”), but we are content merely to diagnose, and move on. The entire program, which had the not-entirely unique power to make 36 minutes seem a lifetime, consisted of penises evacuating on others; entirely men, with the sole exception of Emelie Chhangur, who ends up on the receiving end of a 6 minute slow-motion arc (more on this later). By the end of the affair, we felt as if we had trying to watch a movie with someone’s dick jammed in our eye socket, and thus felt perfectly happy never to partake in anything gay-art related for the rest of our existence.

And that’s certainly what these videos were: Gay Art of the most annoying sort (we’ve expounded on this horrid little subgenre elsewhere). The worst offender by far is one Fernando Arias, who is represented here by three videos, all premised on the notion that everyone is meant to care about his sex life. The first, “Fluido,” consists entirely of microscopically close-up shots of spouting schlongs (sometimes in reverse), and recalled nothing so much as John Waters’ stated aversion to porn: sometimes, it bears an eerie resemblance to open-heart surgery. Let us truncate any It’s-All-About-The-Abject told ya so’s and call a spade a spade, ladies and gentlemen: as is made perfectly clear by his other videos, Mr. Arias is painfully short of ideas, and thus, this reeks of his trying to pass off cock-worship as artistically significant. His second video, “Quickie,” consists of our intrepid artist having anonymous outdoor quickie sex, on fast forward (get it? Quickie? Fast-forwarding? O, the mental exertions Mr. Arias must have put himself through in conceiving of this little gem). The third, “Public Incovenience 2,” lingers among a row of public toilet wankers. There was much ado during the Q & A over the abstract qualities of the men’s room’s pipes and tiles, as if they were positively weighty with signification, but we refused to buy it: the entire video was weighty with nothing more than solipsistic bullshit. We refuse to accept someone’s (literal) wankery as a Grand Statement.

This drek was interspersed with the second-worst offender, Slava Mogutin. His mere existence as an art star speaks to nothing more than how comfers-cozers the North American art world is, given that much of the attention paid to him comes courtesy of his filthy pervert rabble-rouser cred, bestowed on him by his having offended the cultural and political gatekeepers of the ex-Soviet Union. In reality, his works (and certainly the videos on display here) are nothing you can’t find on any amateur porn website. His oeuvre consists exclusively in cute fags doing semi-pervy things to other cute fags; viva la revoluçion. His work looks scandalous without actually being so, and thus is eagerly consumed and paid for by other cute fags (the ones we mentioned in our opening paragraph) who want in on the controversy bandwagon, and thus is a reputation begotten.

The strangest presences here are Emelie Chhangur and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay. Ms Chhangur carries the unfortunate burden of having to represent women in this program. We don’t care to psychoanalyze Mr. Ricco, but the fact that the sole female presence here involves a woman on her knees being peed on does not bode well for Mr. Ricco’s relationship to the fairer sex. The video in and of itself is interesting enough, but is brutally hamstrung by its presence in this program.

The same could be said of Mr. Ramsay. Ordinarily, we are fond of his oeuvre: of its prosaicness, its delicacy, its arch dandyism and gentle wit. His “UROPOP” rounded out the screening. The video consists of Mr. Ramsay at a party finding his wardrobe lacking, and, in what can only be described as MacGyver-esque resourcefulness, has a pee-party in order to turn his plain white undershirt into a disco-tastic sequined number. While it’s certainly not the most rigorous thing Mr. Ramsay has assayed, in and of itself it is brief, unpretentiously simple, and lightly charming. At the tail end of this homo-priapic festival, however, its simplicity makes it all too easily complicit with its programmed colleagues, and thus raises the uncomfortable idea that Mr. Ramsay is doing little more than making Cute Fag Art.

Over and above our distaste for most of the programmed works, Queer Here, Queer Now 2: Sex Is So Abstract is undone by two massive problems. First: anyone who, in 2008, conceives of Queer Here, Queer Now as being the sole province of young men has very many issues, the least of which being that they have not been paying attention to the entire history of late 20th century feminism. Second: anyone who thinks that, in 2008, penises and their effluvia are (a) queer here, (b) queer now, (c) queer at all, and (d) abstract, has not been paying attention to anything whatsoever. Mr. Ricco: there is a wide, wide world outside of the gay club from which you seem to be doing your curating. We suggest you poke your head out once in a while.

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While we are never plagued by the insecurity that no one pays attention to our little missives, it’s always lovely to see people following our advice. While the curators certainly deserve their fair share of praise, we would like to take at least partial credit for the fact that this year’s installment of Pleasure Dome’s New Toronto Works was the best one yet. It was brief without being curt, punctual without being anti-social, and generally hummed along like a purring sports car.

And the work was quite lovely, too. The worst that could be said of the worst of them was that they were a tad boring, and this can hardly rank as a serious complaint with the average running time barely grazing the 7 minute mark. There were some noteworthy diversions from the norm, this year: more film than usual – in fact, almost the entire first half of the program was on film.

John Price fired the starting gun with his film of Niagara Falls. The footage of the falls themselves, which faded in and out of focus, was pleasant, although perhaps we are a little too technologically blasé to marvel at the moving image of rushing water. No, the most interesting part of the film for us was seeing the images of the tourists, taking quickie snapshots with their digital cameras. This seemed to us a meeting of opposites across the chasm of a century: the cumbersome aged medium capturing, in stark clarity and sumptuously saturated colour, the new medium on the block, tiny and portable and instantaneous, designed for the most literal definition of the masses.

Things cruised along nicely from there, with films that neither revolted nor engrossed us. This edition of New Toronto Works even held a surprise: we somewhat enjoyed something by Jubal Brown! His video, “Party Tape #52,” is a re-edited version of some disco scene from some ‘80s movie or other (although it seems achingly familiar, we are unable to place it). The footage is broken down into vibrating gels of red and blue, like a 3D movie on too much coffee. The effect is jarring, retina-searing, and seems an entirely appropriate marriage of form and content.

The first half ended with recent York University graduate David Frankovich’s “Exquisite Corpse.” It is slick and high-gloss, and churns through various B-movie tropes at a breakneck 17 minutes, finding time to interject some self-deconstructing musical numbers, at a 120 sly-wink-per-minute irony rate. It is much more winning than we’re letting on, but nevertheless, it is a project so clever, only a film student could have thought it up.

After a performance by grande doyenne Johanna Householder, the program resumed with one of our favorite numbers: Kids On TV’s video for their song “Breakdance Hunx,” which is surely as close as Toronto’s ever going to get to Paris Is Burning. A high-octane ode to bicycles, fag gangs, dance-offs, throw-downs, driven and assembled by megawatts of enthusiasm (and, to quote the credits’ sly reversal of the usual provincial arts council thank-yous, paid for by John Caffery working at a gay bar), it is surely the best time ever hosted by the playground at Trinity Bellwoods Park.

It’s also a total showstopper, and while we understand the curator’s desire to open the second half with a bang, it is a height that was never again reached in the ensuing half-hour. Still and all, with no stinkers to report, we say of a certainty that this was the best New Toronto Works yet, and, amidst a year marred by gruesome institutional attempts at municipal self-promotion and self-definition, a marvelous augury of the video talent nurtured and percolating in this fair city of ours.

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