Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports
Curated by Christopher Bedford
Art Gallery of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
April 30, 2010 - September 4, 2010

Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports has come to Calgary, and it has brought no mixed signals: it is an unambiguous failure.

Currently at the AGC -an institution that has come to be loathed by many artists and cultural-workers in the area- it is a poorly mounted canned exhibition initiated by Wexner curator and former university footballer Christopher Bedford for iCI (Independent Curators International).

The institution has managed to sidestep the multiple coups and attempts to inject some criticality into the corporate agenda that the gallery (and the city) has become emblematic of. Regrettably, the travelling exhibition currently housed there offers no exception.

Ostensibly an attempt to contest a clichéd macho image of the virile, strong, straight sportsman, the exhibit in reality promotes an essentialist, uncritical and ultimately backwards ideology. The critical rigour was as flaccid as Mark Bradford's sack of (collaged soccer) balls, which hung in the corner on the main floor.

Individually, the artworks weren't all bad. In the context, however, the rich body of work that is Catherine Opie's Football Landscapes was flattened into well-lit promo-shots for beer-league tryouts. They are vivid, dark images of sportsmen in play that attempt to map a terrain of masculine aggression.

Catherine Opie Football Landscape #5, (Juneau vs. Douglas, Juneau, Alaska), 2007 Chromogenic print 48 x 64 in. (121.9 x 162.6 cm) Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

With the exception of instances of heroic failure, no alternate to masculine stereotypes is presented in the show.

In Marco Rios' performance video (Moving Equilibrium, 2006), wherein the artist-cum-weightlifter just barely benches a giant spirit level above his head, we are given no interchange of the typical typecast male. This is also the case in Joe Sola's St. Henry Composition from 2001, where the artist displays his own lack of prowess, agility, strength and speed though a series of futile football drills.

Marco Rios Moving Equilibrium, 2006 Single-channel video with sound 5 mins., 3 secs. Collection of Eileen Harris Norton, Santa Monica	Joe Sola Saint Henry Composition, 2001 Single-channel video with sound 5 mins., 7 secs. Courtesy of Bespoke Gallery, New York, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH

Is the most profound curatorial insight a mere reversal of our most common stereotype of the male sex? No simple diametric portrait of masculine superiority can unravel the patriarchal ideologies that Bedford affirms the exhibition interrogates.

Indeed, the show did little to offer an alternative to the "typically aggressive, hyper-competitive and emotionally undemonstrative" man (as the didactic handout declares).

Brian Jungen's now-familiar sports-equipment-cum-aboriginal-artifacts could offer a departure from this homogeneity - an insight, perchance, into the links between athletic aggression, commerce and colonialism - but is left decidedly flat without contextualization, and through its proximity to the vapidly ironic non-advertisement advertisements of Hank Willis Thomas.

Brian Jungen Prototype for New Understanding #12, 2002 Nike Air Jordans 23 x 11 x 12 in. (58.4 x 27.9 x 30.5 cm) Collection of Ruth and William True, Seattle	Hank Willis Thomas Something to Stand on: The Third Leg, 2007 Polyurethane coating on MDF 49 x 41 x ¾ in. (124.5 x 104.1 x 1.9 cm) Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

As I leave the building, truly let down, a bridal party lumbers in as the attendant evacuates people from the gallery booked for the photo shoot. "It's one of our most successful services - we'll even take the work off the walls", I'm told.


GenderBlender
the Sugar Shack Art Salon
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Sunday, 13 June 2010

Full disclosure:
I had artwork in this show. My enthusiasm about the place is bolstered only in part through my participation with it: I'll keep the following unbiased, as lauding as it sounds.

Opened within the last year on the site of an old homesteaders' shanty in Mount Pleasant, the Sugar Shack is part vanity-gallery, part shop of horrors, and part monthly exhibition space where touch-and-go programming lends an experimental flavour to the rustic gallery.

It's one of several artist-run spaces that have cropped up in recent months, alongside the CAM, Local Library , Comrade Sound and Pith. As such, it faces funding issues, legal constraints and an antagonistic (even hostile) conservative public, while eagerly promoting alternative artistic activity in a city that's begging for it.

On a budget a miniscule fraction to that of the AGC (my artist fee was a rubber nipple. Really.), GenderBlender was able to outperform Mixed Signals immensely.

Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan's 2002 video, Lesbian National Parks and Services: A Force of Nature, mines the lesbian ecosystem through fieldwork, public outreach and a hilarity that thinly masks a vehement critique of sexism and homophobia.

Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Lesbian Park Rangers, 2008.
Photo: Don Lee, Banff Centre

Wednesday Lupypciw's emotionally variegated video work practices a type of Queer vernacular, or perverse nostalgia.
An edit of a seemingly constant documentation of her quotidian (if deranged) life, it is a private world we're given only calculatedly voyeuristic glimpses into.

Still from Wednesday Lupypciw's ICKKFAXX 2010, courtesy of the Artist

Detail of M.N. Hutchinson's Fuck Gender: I'm an Autosexual, courtesy of the Artist

Lisa Brawn's & Michal Lavi's I Liked You Better Before -a short film starring the dashing Allison Sears- is a superb narrative about a travelling plastic surgeon who, in the manner of a carnival sideshow, beautifies paying customers in the notorious Bambi Media Machine (reformatted for the film as the Mobile Surgical Beautification Unit).
Calgarians will be familiar with Brawn's meticulous woodcut portraits: here she extends her scrupulous craft into this hilarious video.

Production shot from I Liked You Better Before
Directed by Michal Lavi
Photo: Frank Lee

GenderBlender was truly Queer in its representation of wildly diverse modes of art-making, and through the creation of a carnivalesque experience.
Smalique's endurance psychedelic-storytelling -a perverted fairytale tableau-vivant that was as anything but straight- was told from atop a crescent moon hung low in the front yard. Baroness Von Wienerstrudel and Baron Von Beaverhausen (aka Keith Murray and Jamie
Tea) hosted a tranny croquet tournament replete, even, with mini cucumber-sandwiches in a mad-hatterish spectacle.

Smalique, Photo: Linda M. Cunningham	Baroness Von Wienerstrudel and Baron Von Beaverhausen, Photo: Angela Inglis

In the face of a dominant corporatist Calgarian culture that is indifferent, at best, GenderBlender proves that local artists and thinkers are invested in a rich discourse of gender, sex and sexuality, and are paving new roads and exhibition models to have their voices heard. Of this, there are no mixed signals.

Mikhel Proulx

*update
Comrade Sound may soon be stricken from the list of active cultural venues:
read Peter Hemminger's report for FFWD