Ladies and gentlemen, bienvenue. We are the Artfag.

And we are discovering that there have been certain perforations in the otherwise air-tight issue of our nom de plume. Quite frankly, ladies and gentlemen, we are perfectly content should the issue of our identity become, like the traffic direction of Tom Cruise’s anus, an open secret. Besides which, Open secrets have a certain je ne sais quoi. And we are all about je ne sais quoi.

We have also come to the realization that we have been gauche in our manners; thanks are due, and we have not announced them. A swift correction: ladies and gentlemen, a round of limp-wristed applause (for those of you who, alas and alack, are not blessed with limp wrists, a firm golf clap will do nicely, thank you) for the Artfag Hag (her chosen title) and her lovely Beau, who distribute our little cahier of witticism and criticism. They, in their fashion, like we in our fashion, deliver with diligence and style. Une grande merçi, darlings.

What we like: air conditioners, a good pair of sandals, shpants (capri pants, for the unenlightened) and cold soups, of either the Spanish or French variety.

How we are: Comme ci, comme ça, really. Quite frankly, ladies and gentlemen, it’s summer, and we don’t do heat, although we do enjoy a sunny day. And lo and behold, Gay Pride is upon is, and everybody but heaven knows what a mixed bag that is.

What we don’t like: humidity (as in “it’s not the heat, it’s the...”).

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Matthew Barney, we have unilaterally decided, is the artfag’s wet dream poster boy: the body of an athlete, the libido of a goat, and a brain that can go head to head (so to speak) with obscure Lacanian metaphor any day of the week. And he even manages to look dreamy while sporting that ridiculous Hemingway beard he insists on dragging about these days. We won’t even bother commenting on his connubial tryst with la Björk (if one insists on being straight, she’s the one to do it with, we suppose). Any ex-football hunk who spends 8 years contemplating his balls, and who’s willing to use his anus for his art, is okay by us. So it is with great relish that we attended the screenings of Cremasters 1 through 5 at the Cinematheque Ontario.

To be perfectly frank, we can’t really be bothered going into each of these movies, picking them apart one by one. It seems a waste when, first of all, there are scores and scores of essays which do precisely that (although, we must admit, none even approach our level of panache, except for that one critic from Harper’s who called him Onan the barbarian - we have to admit, we tittered endlessly when we read that). Second of all, they are a cycle, operatic in nature, with leitmotifs and recurrent visual themes, and lend themselves (strangely enough, considering the abstruseness of the metaphoric system Barney employs) to summation. Specifics, in Barney-land, are to be lost in. We shan’t indulge.

As a whole, the Cremaster cycle has a sensual Baroque grandeur that easily overwhelms. Even the earliest-made film (#4) with the least budget, teems with over-the-top gorgeousness. The last one to be made, #3 in the series, is almost orgiastic in its polished glamour. This surfeit of prettiness is absolutely to Barney’s credit. Taken as a set of one-to-one biological metaphors, the films are absurdly narcissistic, remote and alienating. The orgy of rich colours, wide shots, exquisitely detailed sets, and ornate costumes carry a great deal of the weight in coaxing the viewer into this bizarre surrealist world of subjective similes.

That having been said, there are a great deal of metaphors in the films which are apparent enough to lead the viewer in a certain interpretive direction. Even without prior knowledge of how exactly the Cremaster muscle is involved in sexual differentiation, and what exactly it has to do with testicles, the issue of masculinity in the cycle in unmistakable. The thing is replete with phallic symbols, male obsessions, and deeply masculine personalities: football (#1); heavy metal, serial killers (Gary Gilmore, to be precise), Harry Houdini, rodeos, horror movies, westerns, Norman Mailer (#2); the Chrysler building, the masons, big cars, more heavy metal bands, video games, gangster movies, Richard Serra (#3); race car driving, the Isle of Man (get it?) (#4); grand opera, Bond girls (Ursula Andress), more Harry Houdini (#5). As if all that weren’t enough, the image of losing one’s teeth, Freud’s stand-in for castration anxiety, runs rampant throughout.

All this bulbous, weighty metaphor, however, does not guarantee Great Art. Indeed, that’s not really where Barney succeeds in all this; it’s all very impressive, this internal world of balls and anxiety of his, but the only thing it does is provide a framework. Orgiastic prettiness and slick presentation aren’t blue chip indicators, either, for that matter. Beauty is nothing without depth. The success of Barney’s Wagnerian opus lies in the balancing act he pulls off between the two. His metaphors are gorgeously, sensually anthropomorphized, making them much easier to digest; his visuals carry enough messy biology, and ooze enough prosthetic goop, to disrupt the anaesthetizing tendency of the clean, alluring surfaces, to remind us that there’s more to all this than a great sense of design. Most important, however, is that each of these elements - tight, intelligent and consistent as they are - are in perfect symbiosis. It is this overall-ness, this sense of total control, this sense of a meticulously conducted expansive vision, that makes the Cremaster series some form of benchmark. Whether or not one subscribes to its greatness, one has to recognize that Barney’s cycle, all hype and theoretical heavy breathing aside, is, at the very least, an achievement.

We feel compelled to point out, however, that the lack of Matthew Barney’s full frontal nudity, although metaphorically accounted for, was a tad disappointing.

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We realize, having put in our time in the slave galleys of Art Historical academia, that the “compare & contrast” essay, scarred as it is by overuse in exams, is a somewhat tired form. However, it has its applications, and we do not hesitate to re-invigorate it by employing it now, in the case of Matt Bahen versus Scott Waters. Both of these gentlemen are figurative painters, both have shows up dealing with the military, although only one of them has produced something of real depth and significance.

Trying to find meaning in Matt Bahen’s “Fatal Surveillance” series by looking through the curator’s comments is an unmitigated disaster, largely because Ulysses Castellanos’ curatorial essay is an undifferentiated mess of contradictions, non-sequiturs, and obvious falsehoods. In the very first sentence, he manages to get the title of Damien Hirst’s notorious shark installation, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” wrong by truncating it halfway through, thus sabotaging his thesis statement (and this is the least of his errors). To catalogue the missteps would require a whole other essay. To make very long, garbled story very short, according to Mr. Castellanos, Mr. Bahen’s paintings simultaneously make reference to the following: the fear of death, consumer census-taking, the dangers of online purchasing, the irresponsibility of the news media, the gap between the rich and the poor, the exploitation of third world countries by the first world, the greed of capitalism, the evils of industry, and the perils of war. That’s a lot to hang on one set of paintings.

The work, sadly, does not (cannot?) live up to all this interpretive advertisement. Each painting is a variation on the same image: camouflaged soldiers cradling rifles in a non-specific jungle setting, juxtaposed with thermographic scans of human anatomy. The soldiers are painted in heavy impastos, great stalactites of paint hanging off the canvas, in a largely earth-toned colour scheme. The thermographs are likewise heavily painted, although the direction of the brush-strokes is more controlled and deliberate, and in a rainbow-bright palette. The two sections of the canvas have nothing to do with each other in any formal way. So wherefore this division? Suffice it to say that all this textural bombast and jarring juxtaposition is quite obviously in the service of Making A Statement.

We suspect this all has to do with surveillance, and the usual paranoia about just what a militaristic society we’ve become. No one disagrees with these warnings and concerns (at least no one who’d be seeing the show), and therein lies the problem. Mr. Bahen, by trading in well-meaning generalities and distanced (and therefore somewhat smug) critiques, is preaching to the converted. This point has been made so often to the same crowd of people that it has by now become trite (war is bad? Really?). By abandoning any personal perspective, his polemic becomes hollow and precious. These paintings are decidedly not the cry heard ‘round the world that Mr. Castellanos would have us believe.

Scott Waters’ “Hero Book” series follows the same approach - a critique of the military - but succeeds where Mr. Bahen fails, in conjuring the all-too real dangers of a militaristic society. Mr. Waters’ show is a profoundly moving and awfully eerie (to a civilian, anyway) evocation of army ethos and army ritual. His success lies largely in two things - the humility of Mr. Waters’ presentation, and the deeply personal nature of his approach.

The artist’s book that accompanies Mr. Waters’ show is likewise entitled “The Hero Book,” and consists of personal photographs, reproductions of his paintings, and reminiscences. Both the show and the small book narrate, somewhat obliquely, Mr. Waters’ experience as a cadet in the army reserve: the world of strange bonding rituals, grueling training, seemingly absurd exercises, the general violent misanthropy into which the cadet is inducted, and forced to live through. There are no theoretical justifications in the book, no swollen claims to urgent relevance. What is there is a poignant, painful question: how does one make an account of a period in one’s life that one has left behind, and still own that as a valuable experience?

That, of course, is a rhetorical question, and the show does not claim to answer it. Instead, Mr. Waters’ paintings offer humble eyewitness. His painting is graphic and simple; there is no bombast, no roiling swaths of paint, just the movement of brush over wood. Nothing here is generalized - the detail with which the guns are painted betrays a familiarity that can only be the result of having had to use one. The subjects themselves are, we assume, re-stagings of events in the life of a cadet, some gruesome, some darkly funny. In most paintings, entire figurative elements are left blank; the book tells of an initiation ritual in which inductees must bite the head off a grouse. This scene is dutifully rendered, the inductee looking at the creature held in his hands, eyes wide and mouth open in preparation. Only the grouse has been left unpainted. The inductee holds the empty silhouette of a bird. These are the tricks and aids of memory - for one’s own benefit more than anyone else’s, perhaps, one erases the object of one’s shame. The complicating twist is that Mr. Waters openly declares that despite his shame, there remains a lingering nostalgia toward his army days. The combination of detailed figuration and its periodic absence is the show’s main motif, a direct means of hinting at Waters’ almost bipolar ambivalence.

All this is to say that Mr. Waters is the clear superior of this comparison. He is far and away a better draftsman; his forms are fluid and precise, whereas Mr. Bahen betrays a clumsiness when it comes to rendering gesture, anatomy, and perspective. Mr. Waters is also the more accomplished painter: Mr. Bahen still labors under the rudimentary misapprehension that shadows should be painted in black, rendering his already earthen palette chalky and flat, whereas Mr. Waters displays an ease with both local and invented colour. As far as thematic execution is concerned, the climate is ripe for critical discussions of a culture fraught with militaristic jingoism. Mr. Bahen’s alarmism is perfectly valid in the abstract, and therein lies its shortcoming; by remaining abstract, it comes off as a trite, one-dimensional polemic. Mr. Waters’ deadpan confession is fraught with emotional complexity, and results in a harrowing portrait of an institution terrifying in its necessity.

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We must admit, we have thus far not taken Jeremy Blake very seriously. We can’t really come up with a good reason why this is; the one that most readily springs to mind is the seeming glut of fashion magazine exposés that emerged after his collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson (Mr. Blake did the title sequences for Punch Drunk Love), the tones of which were almost masturbatory in their unqualified praise. Unqualified praise makes us suspicious, to say the least. However, we grant that trusting the editorial powers of Vogue is an oversight; nostra culpa. All of this to say that the strength of his show, “The Winchester Trilogy” at the Art Gallery of York University, has shown us the error of our ways.

The explanation for the two-room video installation is as follows: apparently, a Mrs. Sarah Winchester, widow to and inheritor of the Winchester rifle fortune, upon the loss of her husband and infant daughter, visited a psychic, who informed her that this mortal loss was the result of a curse placed upon her by the victims of gun violence (Winchester brand gun violence, if we want to be picky about it). The antidote to this curse was to move west, find a new home for herself, build up that home and never stop (the psychic told her that if she stopped building, she would die). This she did, building a sprawling mansion in San Jose over the course of 38 continuous years, featuring staircases that go into ceilings, doors that open onto walls, chimney flues that never find their way outdoors, all in the service of warding off and confusing evil spirits. Only in California, ladies and gentlemen, only in California.

The two videos on display at the AGYU (the third is shown at Trinity Square Video) consist of much the same thing: images of the house which blur into what Mr. Blake calls “time-based paintings”: essentially, amorphous, kaleidoscopic compositions of blobs and lines and dots which amble about the screen, casually transforming into other abstract compositions before eventually transforming themselves into either another view of the house, or one of its many bizarre architectural features. The “paintings” are not entirely abstract; often, an image will morph into a decorative pattern, where one can discern figurative elements: the silhouette of a man with a rifle, the silhouette of a horse, a turn-of-the-century lady. All of this painterly metamorphosis is underscored by a soundtrack that sounds straight out of Vertigo.

Needless to say, an almost hallucinatory mood is established. The hazy, surprisingly rich colours folding in and out of one another, combined with the ominous soundtrack, are instantly hypnotic, and we have been trained by the movies to glean mood from music. Thus, the back-story, rich as it is, is certainly not a prerequisite to enjoying the videos. Between the images of the house and the Hitchcockian score, we are given ample cues which suggest tragedy, otherworldly weirdness, and impending doom.

The videos are eminently watchable, for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that they are cyclical, and the narrative is pre-established. Therefore, one isn’t forced to wait until a beginning to start watching, and one doesn’t have to sit through the full 20-odd minutes to get Mr. Blake’s gist. This permissive ease aside, one tends to want to sit and watch. The sinuous animations are lushly coloured (Mr. Blake has expertly exploited his digital media in this regard), and well-composed, the house and its architectural features are likewise candy for the eye. If there is a criticism to be leveled, it is that Mr. Blake’s vaporous colour compositions do not suggest avenging spirits from beyond the grave so much as they evoke really fetching interior design schemes. Nevertheless, the videos are a decisive success, and have quite certainly shown us, at least in this case, the error of our dismissive ways. And to get the Artfag to admit a faulty judgement is no mean feat.