Ladies and gentlemen, bienvenue. We are the Artfag.

Surely, ladies and gentlemen, it must be the most pedestrian of homilies to state that teenagers are hot property; everybody but heaven knows they’ve been so ever since Plato sang his paeans to the joys of pervy pedagogy. Their wanton sexual mystique has been a cultural scene-stealer for quite some time, and will remain so for some time to come; there’s a litany of things that make adolescence sopping wet with interest and intrigue. Theory aside, let us merely consent to the stated fact: all that self-absorption and nascent hormonal melodrama starts everyone’s pulses racing, and as such, is bankable entertainment. It is curious, then, that the Monte Clark gallery, in their “My So-Called Life” show, manages to construct a show around adolescence that, for the most part, is about as dramatically energetic as a retirement home.

The premise is simple enough: proceeding from the titular TV show, the exhibition aims to cull together artists whose work encompasses the trials and tribulations of that confused, protean process otherwise known as Becoming an Adult. Fair enough: brevity and transition are part of what makes adolescence so alluring; we enjoy Claire Danes as much as the next artfag trying to relive his frittered adolescence; everything looks good on paper. So what goes wrong?

Well, the art, for a start. Most of it is, well, for lack of a more florid adjective, boring. Derek Root’s monochrome images are flourishes of technical prowess, and are possessed of a cold, muted surreality. While this is generally a strength, especially in the wall-sized “Clearing,” the coldness seems ill-fitted to the curatorial intent.

Justine Kirkland’s work is apparently about girl-ness: “celebrating the state of girl-ness,” to quote the gallery statement. Ms Kirkland creates vast tableaux, expansive vistas with characters grouped in such a way as to suggest a narrative. The best of them manage to convey a skewed sense of the trials and tribulations of femininity with a sly, sardonic edge; the worst seem like picturesque landscapes with people in the way. The real trouble is, Ms Kirkland’s is the only female gaze in the bunch, and so the inclusion of her images, surrounded as they are by a bevy of boys, become anomalous, and therefore somewhat tokenist. More importantly, however, the work that’s here is far too similar in look to Anthony Goicolea’s (more on him later) to properly assert itself.

The inclusion of Larry Clark is a commonsensical curatorial choice; everybody but heaven knows his obsession with teenage rough trade sexuality has gone on for so long as to become more than slightly unnerving. We have never been a fan per se; we find Mr. Clark to be more of an ethnographer than an artist, and there is a blunt gracelessness in his work that we could never find it in ourselves to appreciate. Nevertheless, when Mr. Clark’s photography succeeds, it does so by virtue of precisely these aforementioned qualities. The perverse performances of scantily-clad, wanton working-class teenage hoodlums are jarring because there is no cushion of grace or artifice; Mr. Clark forces us to see through the unadorned lens of his prurient and arguably exploitative gaze. However, when his subjects aren’t doing anything decidedly salacious, the hook of his modus operandi loses its barbs. There is nothing particularly cringe-inducing about boys lounging on the hood of a Chevy, and so his subjects look like cast-offs from an open-call audition for Rebel Without a Cause. Danny Lyon’s photographs of the down-and-out youth of Chicago are virtually indistinguishable from Mr. Clark’s. All in all, it ends up looking like a limp parade of the Weegee fan club.

The undisputed saviours of the show are Douglas Coupland and Anthony Goicolea. Mr. Coupland’s tomb-like charcoal gray-on-black photo portraits of dead high-school graduates have the hushed grandeur of a mausoleum. They are more than simple evocations of loss and the tragedy of curtailed ambitions and potentiality; the barely visible faces, dimly emergent from their abysmal black backgrounds, are Gregorian chants to the fragility of memory and identity, and the cruelties of life’s random circumstances.

But it is Mr. Goicolea who is the real scene stealer, despite the fact that what’s on display isn’t necessarily his best work (although it is a fair indication of his larger practice). Through some expert manipulation of digital tomfoolery, Mr. Goicolea creates enormous freeze-frame tableaux of hordes of boys, almost always dressed in private school uniforms, engaged in various kinds of carefully staged (and often licentious) adolescent hijinks. The complicating twist is that all of these boys are clones of Mr. Goicolea himself. It’s a marvelous evocation of an adolescent world, albeit processed through the Brothers Grimm via Balthus. His endless parade of clones playfully evokes the anxious narcissism of adolescence, while his ramped-up colours pay honest homage to the heightened melodrama of a teenage ego. The best of the bunch is Mr. Goicolea’s video, “Nailbiter,” in which a disturbed schoolboy, filmed in the phantasm-greens of a night-vision filter, sits upright in bed, furiously chewing at his digits, which sounds like a woodpecker hammering away at a treetrunk. His porcelain features are in sharp contrast with his glowing bestial eyes and, as the camera pulls slowly away from a tight close-up of his face, it reveals the boy covered in a thick jelly of his own drool mixed with a carpet of nail fragments. It is precisely this juxtaposition between the innocent and the monstrously nightmarish which gives Mr. Goicolea’s work its punch, and allows him to run away with this show.

This is all for the best, really; otherwise, “My So-Called Life” would remain a strong curatorial effort terminally hampered by inferior work. Messrs. Goicolea and Coupland do more than their fair share of carrying the show. As far as the other artists are concerned, we wouldn’t be surprised if it were the case that the curator couldn’t procure exactly what he wanted and had to settle for what he could get. And even that circumstance is a fitting metaphor for the essential tragedy of the melodrama of adolescence: a great deal of heightened expectation met with a payoff whose rewards are stunted by that sobering killjoy otherwise known as “the real world.”
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Ladies and gentlemen, we have a confession to make: we have never liked the work of Harmony Korine. We neglected to see Gummo as a direct result of having seen Kids, whose combination of blasé anarchy and sexual alarmism we failed to find particularly winning. We were somehow roped into seeing Julien Donkey-Boy (thank you, Mrs. Artfag, for that indignity) which confirmed a suspicion that had nagged at us for quite a while: that Mr. Korine was a formula writer. True, when he isn’t counting on the improvisational skills of his actors to carry him along, he scripts excellent dialogue for a specific sort of person, the type of person liable to walk through the frame of one of his films: lumpenprole thugs. Otherwise, his writing consists of a series of carnivalesque vignettes, in which we gawk at one lurid and inhumane situation before pausing briefly to head on to another. He has yet to make a film that demonstrates any kind of range, or indeed, any kind of sympathy beyond a limited sympathy for the freakish, which, when it isn’t clinically matter-of-fact, is usually played for laughs anyway. So the legitimate question must be asked: why on Earth would we choose to attend Mr. Korine’s evening at the Kodak Lecture Series at Ryerson given this raging bias of ours?

Morbid curiousity, perhaps? A desire to be proven wrong, or, even better, proven right? All of the above, ladies and gentlemen, all of the above. And, we should also confess, we are a fan of Bruce LaBruce’s. Super 8½ remains a delightful romp, Raspberry Reich was all good fun, and if one is willing to endure the occasional bit of grandstanding, his writing remains the most entertaining thing about him (although we almost lost our lunch several times over when he was nominating himself for World-Class Enlightened Fag of the Year by announcing to anyone within earshot that he was dating a Muslim). At any rate, we enjoy any opportunity to watch Ms LaBruce hold court. And so we found ourselves chez Ryerson, amid a teeming throng of disaffected youth chomping at the bit to hear words of wisdom pour forth straight from the horse’s mouth. After all, to most of the audience, Mr. Korine was proof that one could make it straight out of the egg, no waiting: fresh out of high school and already a hit film, now barely in his early thirties and a canonical darling of the indie film scene.

Alas, darlings, from the minute the culture hero ambled onto the stage, looking for all the world like he’d just woken up from a three week blackout, we knew we were about to be proven right. All the more unfortunate for us, as we had to watch ourselves be proven right for about two and a quarter hours. After the obligatory introduction in which Our Humble Host waxed on about Our Controversial Much-Maligned Enfant Terrible du Jour (in which Ms LaBruce propped up his aging street-cred by declaring that he and Mr. Korine met while getting drunk on Tequila at the Sundance Festival), we were off to the races, and oh! what slow, plodding races they were. Ms LaBruce was, in point of fact, in top form, being entirely engaging and witty, equal parts James Lipton (his admission) and Joan Rivers. His banter was quick and dishy, and his questions were direct if not particularly deep, and lobbed at Mr. Korine much like a doting softball coach might unto a young batter. Mr. Korine was another matter entirely.

Perhaps it was jet lag, perhaps it was a pressing need to pee (which he did in the middle of the talk), or perhaps it was his well-beloved quaaludes, but Mr. Korine sounded like one of those anthropomorphic Disney cars when they’re about to run out of gas: a stammering, stuttering, halting mess of hot air (in short, he sounded just like he looked). Any question, no matter how simple or plainly phrased was answered with an endless stream of obfuscatory “ers,” “uhs,” “likes,” “I means,” and so forth. And this is when he actually remembered what the question – or the answer – was; we knew we were in for trouble when Mr. Korine forgot the very first question asked before even attempting an answer. But time slides irrevocably into the past, and so the evening wore on: doltish, inarticulate responses to valid questions. There were occasional moments of genuine interest: Mr. Korine is quite obviously a cinephile of encyclopedic proportions, a passion that obviously (and admirably) drives his own practice, and listening to him extol the virtues of his favourite films was instructive.

Nevertheless, moments like these were few and far between, and, just when we thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, it was time for the audience segment of the Q & A. Actually, this mercifully short section of the evening was unintentionally hilarious, as the interrogators and the interrogated were possessed of equally impoverished communication skills; close your eyes, and you couldn’t tell who was asking the question and who was answering. Moreover, there was no interest in having Mr. Korine defend his movies, of having him answer to the charges of exploitation and voyeuristic cruelty; the only insider information that was in demand was whether that guy actually ate that chocolate bar that fell in the dirty bathtub water, how much he vomited afterwards, what music Mr. Korine listened to, and whether he would accept audience gifts (he did).

The intellectual tenor of the evening was perfectly summed up by Mr. Korine himself, in fact, at the end of the evening, in one of his more articulate moments: “I’m, uh, um, not really big on introspection. I mean, I don’t really care to know why I do things.” It’s moments like this, ladies and gentlemen, that critics kill for, where everything they suspect is proven true in an instant, with such perfect grace and ease. If he doesn’t care, well then, why should the rest of us? Mr. Korine might have waxed indignant about Janet Maslin’s butchering of Gummo in the New York Times, but in that instant, he justified her every word. Why should any benefit of any doubt be given to someone who has a careless disregard for the mechanics, and thus the consequences, of his own artistic process? One might think that the patronizing belief in the simple wisdom of the urban naïf has been disposed of by now. Alas, not where the accrual of instant fame is concerned; and one look around the crowded-to-capacity auditorium – let alone the second room where the unlucky simultaneously watched the proceedings on a live feed – told us just how many eager believers there actually are.
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There is something to be said for getting in on the ground floor; at the very least, it saves you from climbing all those stairs in order to catch up with the elevator. The career of G.B. Jones is instructive in this particular case. She (along with junior partner Bruce LaBruce) sauntered into the Toronto art scene elevator just as it was taking off. It’s not quite that she never looked back; she never even paused to look around and say “hello.” Surely every other art scene debutante must be teeming with jealousy - she gets all the salivating attention of the fagerati without having to leave her apartment. Catching a glimpse of that unkempt mop of reddish brown hair at an opening makes us feel like we’re all of a sudden in an episode of Hinterland Who’s Who. So imagine our shock and awe when we learned of her new show at Paul Petro gallery.

The rarity of her currency as an art-dyke socialite aside, G.B. Jones’ work is always a treat (although its lack of ubiquity doesn’t hurt, either). As the underlying theme of Allyson Mitchell’s perspicacious, although somewhat meandering essay suggests, Ms Jones’ work is so successful because its thematic architecture is so perfectly structured. The entry-way is wide and roomy, and charmingly seductive in and of itself; one could not go amiss admiring Ms Jones’ cheeky appropriations of Tom of Finland’s iconography, or the salacious bad-girl romping of her trim dykes. Although her line quality is leaden and neuter, and she displays a bit of clumsiness with the finer mechanics of foreshortening and the subtleties of hands and features, there remains a great deal of joy to be had at least on the conceptual surface of Ms Jones’ pencil drawings. The inadvertent greatest hits catalogue of dyke hairdos alone is worth its weight in gold, from the Carole Pope-meets-Joan Jett shag of the early ‘80s (the New Wave pompadour makes an impressive appearance) through to the baby dyke Olympia punk Chelsea-do of the mid-‘90s. How can one nay-say a world where teams of roving dykes go about beating neanderthalish straight boys about the head with broken beer bottles, where every nipple stands at attention like the cone of an ICBM, where every item of clothing clings to the skin like sodden silk, and where saucy prison-guards and curvaceous nuns get their comeuppances from their delinquent Sapphic charges?

The answer is that one simply can’t. Even Ms Jones’ shortcomings as a drawer work in her favour. There is a sense, in all the drawings, of the perverse, giggling imagination of a horny schoolgirl given free reign to doodle as she pleases, casting her crushes in all sorts of lascivious situations; Ms Mitchell’s catalogue essay beat us to the punch, but the point bears repeating: the feeling that we are looking at dirty class-notebook marginalia is pervasive here, and is certainly a strength. And, like most highschool mash notes, the drawings are loaded with sly winks, in-jokes and minutiae of the most specific sort. Among our favourites: a “Girly-Show”-era Madonna dominatrix browsing the gossip rags; a sly “J.D.s” tattoo adorning the smooth, muscled shoulder of a tattoo artist; and topping the list, a bit of bathroom graffiti that reads “Bruce abuses women.” This kind of soft-core fantasizing is made all the more interesting when one notices that all of the scenes involve various permutations of authority and punishment. Once we amble beyond the entry-way, so to speak, we find ourselves in the pornographic dialectics of private school rebel-girl hijinks, where authority exists to be mischievously undermined, and where that mischief is rewarded by the unhooking of a bra and the hiking of a kilt, followed by a light spanking and some heavy petting.

But this Foucauldian dithering smacks of grasping at interpretive straws. One shouldn’t go about mistaking Ms Jones’ drawings for a Women’s Studies thesis, and that lack of conceptual heft is perfectly alright; someone, after all, has to keep up the lighter end of things. We defer to Ms Mitchell: to academicize these drawings is to miss the point by a country mile. The drawings are too wonderfully, impishly light to be bogged down with tired, furrowed-browed ruminations on authority. To be titillated by them, or to have them inspire a quiet snigger (depending, we suppose, on one’s taste for missile tits) is success enough. Let’s call a spade a spade, ladies and gentlemen: these drawings are pornographic, albeit of the soft-core ilk, and pornography needs no outside justification (or, as himbo Tony Ward said in his only intelligent moment to date, “the only thing that separates art and pornography is the lighting”). As a catalogue (or, at the very least, an echo) of our most basic bodily desires, pornography remains its own treasure trove of interpretation, and provides a rewarding cornucopia of interest for the artist willing to treat it on its own terms. Ms Jones’ drawings are perfectly content to occupy that dirty little seat without getting worked up by tired highbrow theoretics, and therein lies their charm; they are entirely free of sloganeering angst, and any version of politics that finds its way in is merely a vehicle for driving us through a bouncy-bosomed romp in the hay (or prison cell, tattoo parlor, or school chapel, as the case may be). After all, ladies and gentlemen, to paraphrase Julie Andrews, there’s something to be said for the simple joys of maidenhood.
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