Ladies and gentlemen, bienvenue. We are the Artfag.

And, as it is the season, we find ourselves assaulted on all sides by the constant blaring of revolting Christmas ditties sung by lugubriously voiced pop singers. This is the kind of music they forced Nikolai Ceaucescu to listen to as an interrogation technique.

A little trivia for the holiday season: we offer you, as tidings of good cheer, or some such business, the story of St. Nicholas, who was not a jolly fat white man. No, he was a spindly 4th century Turkish priest who made anonymous gifts of cash to those in need. A particularly riveting story is how he saved three dowry-deprived girls from being sold into slavery by lobbing bags of gold into their rooms while they were sleeping. Finding themselves with the requisite cash to land a husband, they all promptly went out and did so. Consider our heart’s cockles duly warmed.

What we like: Hanukah. The jews have superior holiday ditties, it must be said. And Kiki and Herb’s Christmas album, “Do You Hear What We Hear?”

How we are: well, darlings, if you hadn’t guessed already, a tad humbuggy. Although we will say that we enjoy how creative Christians get with their alcohol around the holidays.

What we don’t like: if it wasn’t obvious before, the constant blaring of revolting Christmas ditties sung by lugubriously voiced pop singers. Christmas-themed sweaters.

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This might seem like a strange statement for us to make, ladies and gentlemen, but we find Gay Art to be problematic, to say the least (or perfectly dreadful, to say the most). Don’t misunderstand; there are Artists who are Gay, and there’s Gay Art as a category, and there are miles and miles of difference between the two. Our problem with Gay Art is the same as our problem with any art that is tokenistic, single-issue, didactic and therefore, excruciatingly literal. Feminists have their tampon-in-a-teacup art, Men have that whole Ab-Ex raging phallus thing to get over, and the Gays have Gay Art, which manages somehow to make representations of desire completely unappealing.

By way of explaining all this, we offer the “Gay Body” show as an example. We may mince in every other way, darlings, but we never mince words: this show is one grand, steaming mound of awful. There are some exceptions, some thorny roses sprouting amid of the pile of dung, but, we are sad to say, far too few to obscure the smell. In a nutshell, our problem with the “Gay Body” show is our problem with Gay Art. The terrible work partakes of all the aforementioned tokenism, literalness and didacticism, while the singularly uninspired curatorship attempts to bleach out the complexities of the good work. To make bad matters worse, the “Gay Body” is far too small in scope to accomplish its ambitions of being some form of survey. One can’t possibly have a show about representations of Gay Desire with artists only from Quebec and Ontario. So, in addition to all its aforementioned troubles, the show is painfully...well, provincial.

All the work tends to run along similar rails: soft-focus black and white images of muscular (waxed, natch) male torsos, the inevitable references to Greek statuary, the inevitable juxtaposition of Greek statuary and porn, the inevitable juxtaposition of porn with postmodern theory. Which inevitably leads us to the major Gay Art problem: quite frankly, the ubiquity of these so-called “visual strategies” is such that they become formulaic. Making things all the more trite is the fact that the tired old queen who curated this organizes everything into these formulaic categories: the leather-daddy/cowboy, the muscle queen, etcetera. Surely desire is more subjective than that. But alas, as far as Gay Art goes, and as far as the “Gay Body” goes, it isn’t: all torsos are Greek torsos, all chests are waxed chests, and even the least smattering of body hair must be accompanied by either aviator sunglasses or assless chaps. In a bizarre twist of curatorship, intentional or not, the only deviations from all this Herculean heavy breathing, the depictions of gay male domesticity in the show, are made by women.

And so ‘provincial,’ unfortunate as it may seem, is the best way to describe this sorry state of affairs. Most of these works are outdated in every sense of the word; obsessed with tired concepts (does anyone seriously pay attention to the phrase “ideal beauty” anymore? Does anyone still fret about pornography’s lack of subtlety? How many more hackneyed homages to Mapplethorpe must we endure?), woefully limited in both time and place (there isn’t much work here that dates after the mid-to-late eighties, and if one is going to attempt a quasi-historical survey of depictions of gay desire, Quebec and Ontario might be a fine place to start, but makes a pitiful place to stop). Not all the blame should be laid on the frail shoulders of the curator, however; the exhibition space has to carry its share of the blame as well. The Barnicke gallery has to rank among the worst gallery spaces in Toronto: low ceilings, tired yellow lighting, and walls that look like a cross between cubicle partitions and rubber-room padding do not make the best showcase for anything, let alone anything this poor.

The survivors of the show are Evergon, despite the fact that he’s criminally mistreated here, Andy Fabo and Attila Richard Lukacs. Mr. Lukacs is here as the Big Ticket Draw; he’s certainly the most famous among the artists present, and his trademark Neo-Nazi rough trade is by now almost canonical, and thus, in the midst of all this pap, a welcome familiar diversion. Mr. Fabo escapes unharmed largely because his work is a delightful combination of the plain and the abstruse. So, just as the presence of vintage Physique Pictorial cut-outs in his collages can blend in easily with the rest of the show, the bizarre abstract pictograms that are printed atop them resist the kind of easy reading that the curator wants to try to force. Evergon has two pieces present: “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” - a ring of cowboy boots with underwear straddling their ankles, surrounding a slice of white bread - and his impish farm boy piece, “Chad.” The curating of these pieces in this show might as well be a slap in the face to Evergon. They are placed in the leather-daddy/cowboy section, thus flattening out their wry, humorous complexity in an effort to make them conform to someone’s feeble curatorial project. To put it baldly, just because a piece has cowboy boots in it, doesn’t make it about cowboys. “Gunfight...” is a simultaneous critique of, and elegy to, the homoerotics of straight male machismo. To imply that its main thrust (so to speak) is about how dreamy cowboys are is demonstrative of the baffling simple-mindedness that infects this show.

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Silenus, according to Greek myth, was the tutor to, and precursor of, the god Dionysus (god of wine and vine, instigator of frenzied drunken rampages and, thanks to Nietzsche, scourge of philosophy students and literary critics everywhere). In classical depictions, Silenus gets the short end of the canonical beauty stick; perpetually drunk, he is always portrayed as rotund and bald, whereas Dionysus gets the athletic, youthful treatment: graceful and supple of limb, curly of hair, perky of nipple and pert of buttock. We might think of Silenus as the daddy bear to Dionysus’ eternal twink. So Patrick DeCoste would have us believe, at any rate, in his new show at SPIN, coyly titled “Silenus in Furs” (which sounds like it could be a Velvet Underground b-side). Silenus lustily romps through Mr. DeCoste’s paintings, occasionally being carried by two burly men, and occasionally passed out, stretched along the ground like a beer-gutted odalisque.

The show itself is neither here nor there, which is a pity, as Mr. DeCoste ranks among the more reliable local artists as far as quality goes. The idea that Silenus represents some kind of classical archetype for our buried scatological lusts that we’ve sublimated in the form of the cleaner, leaner Dionysus is novel enough, although we can’t really say that it sustains our interest throughout the entire show. It all sounds like a bawdy call to arms, but ends up looking like some kind of neoclassical brochure for a nudist bear resort. Moreover, Mr. DeCoste’s thick, sepia-coloured glazing technique, which might as well be a trademark by now, is stretched mightily thin, here.

The best of the pieces are the smallest. The small square canvasses are intimate enough to compensate for the thin flatness of the paint, and the scale provides a successful vehicle through which the deep honey coloured glaze can do its pictorial work. At this size, the paintings come across as small jewels, as images from some kind of lost treasure trove of antiquity suspended in amber. Furthermore, the colour of the glaze is somehow fuller and richer in these intimate works. The larger works, done on a monumental scale, are not nearly as successful. The worst of these is, quite unfortunately, the intended centrepiece of the show: a larger-than-life-size image of His Rotundity being carted about by his bear cub attendants, the lyrics of The Hidden Cameras’ “That’s When the Ceremony Starts” written in a column on the right-hand side. The thinned-out paint looks wan and sketchy. The jewel-like intimacy is gone, and the full-bodied richness of the glaze fades to an overstretched acrid yellow, as if Silenus himself might have lost control of his bladder amidst all this drunken grandeur, and let fly all over the canvas. The text of the song, whose lyrics become wincingly didactic when juxtaposed with the pictorial element, is poorly integrated with the rest of the image; it is huddled all by itself on one side of the canvas, and no attention seems to have been paid to its actual writing, and so consequently looks as if Mr. DeCoste, in a hurry to get this one out of the studio, brusquely scrawled the lyrics freehand. It doesn’t help that the script doesn’t follow a straight line, and thus teeters off the picture plane. All of this is compounded by the fact that this rushed, handwritten sloppiness is in stark contrast to the clean, crisp and precise drawing which characterizes Mr. DeCoste’s style, and which is clearly on display here. And so poor Silenus is let down once more; as far as bawdy drunken rampages go, this tribute ranks a little closer to sloppy tipsiness than anything else.

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We, in our infinite cleverness, like to think of drawing as the underground indie-music of the art world; a few practitioners here and there, making weird, oddball-looking art, appreciated by small groups of loyal devotees. The above-ground legitimacy (so to speak) of drawing is growing, however, along with its fan base. Thanks to the explosion of the art (and consequently, careers) of people like Marcel Dzama and the Royal Art Lodge (ah, we remember the glory days of Marcel, playing small venues like the sidebar illustrations in Saturday Night Magazine) and Massimo Guerrera, drawing is enjoying something of a cross-over appeal (at least we think that’s the indie marketing term for such things). Massimo Guerrera (who is, at present, the Flaming Lips of the art world, and slowly becoming its REM) is a particular example of this kind of burgeoning popularity, with frequent shows in all sorts of places. Like the Clint Roenisch Gallery, for instance.

DARBORAL (so the show is titled, in all its uppercase glory) is not merely a show of drawings. The floor of the Roenisch gallery is covered in a collage of carpets, on top of which bizarre sculptures, folios of drawings and plates of snacks (olives, nuts, dried fruit) are strewn about. A few 2-D wall pieces are there to stand guard over everything. This particular show is, according to the artist’s statement, merely the latest pit stop in the thus-far 5 year unfolding of the DARBORAL project, which, according to said statement, has something to do with social interaction and the construction of identity.

Whatever theoretical justifications may be brought to bear on the show, the fact remains that it is a staggeringly, strangely beautiful collection of objects. Everything generally has the same aesthetic, which partakes of a surrealist approach to biology. The sculptures, plaster casts, are mostly outlandish versions of heads; strange, hydrocephalically swollen things with grotesque protrusions from various and sundry orifices. The other sculptures are almost entirely unrecognizable, save for some vague associations with biological anatomy; some of them look like negative casts of chamber pots, some look like rather extravagant butt-plugs. The stars of the show, for our money, are the two dimensional works – the stand-alone drawings and the folios of drawings. They all partake of Mr. Guerrera’s now-recognizable stable of marks – the stipple dots, the short needle-y dashes, the sinuous exploratory contour lines. They are scenes, tableaux, absurdist in their distortions and conflations of the human figure. Most of the drawings consist of couplings or groupings: mother and child, lovers, masses of people. And there is an animalistic eroticism that pervades the drawings, that is equal parts Freud, de Sade and Kinsey.

That DARBORAL has to do with the ins and outs of societal living is not all that hard to glean, and the theme is a well-established one. What makes this exploration so fascinating is how Mr. Guerrera’s form bears out his theme. His drawing vocabulary has always reminded us of textbooks and manuals. One comes across the stippled shading, the precisely descriptive uniform line in anatomy and biology textbooks, and their like. Yet, Mr. Guerrera takes this banally familiar form, and turns it on its head by representing these surreal circus freak-show distortions: lovers fused at the hip, caught in an eternal rutting penetration; a child’s head anatomically indistinguishable from the breast on which it feeds; people conjoined with furniture, with machinery, with each other. DARBORAL, therefore, does indeed speak of social interaction; it ends up looking like some nightmarish anthropology textbook in which humans are the subjects, as if, somehow, some alien species handed us a guidebook to our own collective unconscious, and this was the result. In a peculiar, precise drawing language, he has shown us not only the ins and outs of social interaction, but our disturbed and disturbing fantasies that are implicit therein. Mr. Guerrera, has put on (to complete our smarmy little metaphor), with indie means, a show of arena-sized breadth and scope.

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The Versus show, a blockbuster blowout offered by the Pleasure Dome and curated (although that’s a bit of a faulty word, here) by the 640 480 collective, poses a particular problem: how might one criticize a collection of works whose foundational premise is completely faulty?

Let us elaborate: the aforementioned premise of the Versus show is that two artists – a performer and an editor – are paired together. The former documents their body in performance, then hands over the tape to the latter to edit, or “post-produce,” to use the current lingo. That seems to be it; no caveats, no controls, no checks or balances. To be fair, 640 480 did have a set of rules, which is posted for all to see on their website; the trouble is, none of them were followed in practice. We can only assume that the oh-so clever 640 480 heads thought that this project would produce some kind of pure form of collaboration; that this playing field of limitless possibility was even, and thus, we would all be able to judge for ourselves whose contribution was the most significant: the performer’s or the editor’s? Think of it as the video art scene’s version of a Pay-Per-View wrestling match in one of those imposing death-cages, only with skinnier people and better haircuts.

Ah, and if only that was the case. As is the case with most good ideas, the reality of the situation intervened, and the one thing that emerged from the screening was the one great flaw of the project, which leads us to the crux our aforementioned question; the playing field, alas, is not even. The centre does not hold, and everything falls apart.

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: the performers can do what they want, up to a point, and that point is when they hand over their raw footage to the editors. The performers can be as banal as they want, they can be as obtuse as they want, they can be as scatological as they want. Because the editors end up having final say, all control (and thus, all balance) is lost as soon as that raw footage changes hands. The editors, in having no limitations (save for a vague “certain amount of respect,” to quote 640 480’s rules), have all the power; they can add, re-arrange and tinker to their heart’s content, unanswerable to anyone. So, there is no “Versus.” There is only the power of editing, with all its attendant digital tomfoolery. This says more about the collective’s view of performance than they would probably like to admit.

This was apparent in the first video, the “trailer,” which was Free Dance Lessons versus 640 480 themselves. The piece was a mishmash of non-sequiturs and blandly sensational associations; the misses Paige Graitland and Day Milman (of Free Dance Lessons) romped about in bright costumes, their performance re-arranged to look like a static-y terrorist tape aired on Al-Jazeerah, if the terrorists were space aliens from a disco-era B movie. Somehow, we can’t imagine that this was what Free Dance Lessons had in mind when they volunteered. So much for respect.

It was mostly downhill from there. Daniel Borins ignored every single rule laid out by the collective, and did his usual glib hack job on an admittedly uninspired-seeming performance by Volrath. The Jubal Brown/Steve Reinke effort was all Jubal Brown and precious little Steve Reinke. It’s telling that the best parts of that video were when Mr. Brown left Mr. Reinke alone enough to deliver slices of what must have been a very entertaining monologue. The rest of the video had all the pacing of a garburetor; it was a relentless goulash of neon colours and MTV edits. Jeremy Drummond’s treatment of Alissa Firth-Eagland’s quietly elegiac domestic performance was enough to send anyone with a decent set of ethics into paroxysms of rage; in a bizarrely obscure series of connections, Mr. Drummond subtitled the performance with text from a book on torture techniques for men.

The good pieces were only good by comparison; Cooper Battersby’s edit of Benny Nemerofsky-Ramsay was pleasantly inoffensive, but ended up looking like a colourful screen saver. Kika Thorne’s touch on Steve Kado’s performance was light, although Mr. Kado’s performance was self-indulgent enough to make us wish she had been more heavy-handed.

On reflection, it seems that we have successfully surmounted our proposed problem: one can indeed criticize a show whose foundational premise is faulty. We only wish that 640 480 could have surmounted the problems in their proposal with as much ease.