Schneemann comes up in conversation, part of a lineage of sixties and seventies video and performance artists who investigated the body and its relation to technology that informs Chevalier’s practice (see his half-homage, half-remake GIF GPOY As Fountain [After Bruce Nauman]). He’s suspicious of any sort of ecstasy they might have found in collective, exuberant works like Schneemann’s Meat Joy, a canonical performance of naked participants writhing and smearing themselves with materials from raw chicken and fish to wet paint and transparent plastic. “There was a utopian impulse behind those,” he says, “‘If we all get naked in a room, and roll around in fish guts,’ like [Schneemann], ‘we’ll create a new world.’” If bodies in a room was the medium for a social world in the sixties, for Chevalier it might now be Tumblr: “Hyper Flesh Markup Language (Holy Fuck My Life!)” rings his own site/art project, and it’s this swirl of reality-TV aphorisms, fucking, and new media, all under the influence of a 21st century queerness, that marks his artistic output.

But that’s not to collapse his work into an expanding genre of post-medium, technological practice. Chevalier reminds me: “I don’t like work [where] you walk into a gallery and all you see is the technology, and the question is ‘what is that technology, how do they use it?’ It becomes less about technology being a support for an idea than technology being the object.” Last year, Chevalier graduated with a degree from Concordia’s Intermedia/Cyberarts studio program, in the midst of exhibiting and performing his work in venues from San Francisco to Finland. But the geography of Montreal and environs of his upbringing haunt his ongoing “little black blog” PWIF’d (Places Where I’ve Fucked), an archive of the approximately 100 parks, apartments, and parking lot hook-up backdrops, crystallized in the unassuming form of the Google Maps screenshot and annotated with place, age, and sex acts in the mystifying phraseology of queer sex websites. “#montreal #qc #24 y/o #bttm #pnp #w/s #scat” reads one caption, under the unimpressed gaze of a generic high-rise.

The approach by which we might understand, evaluate, or judge the sort of person we might imagine Chevalier to be, in PWIF’d’s case via the cryptic shorthand of queer culture, forms the core of Chevalier’s artistic concerns. But how to account for our uneasy and simultaneous reliance on and dismissal of our most prevalent means of communication – glamourless internet text – to transfer every matter of information? How to translate things as urgent or vacuous as sex? Chevalier explores this brand of Web 2.0-uneasiness with w. mun :-(, a transcript of a conversation between Chevalier and a friend following the 2010 death of Will Munro, a Toronto-based artist and “huge luminary for Canadian queer culture,” installed on the windows of Concordia’s Fine Arts Reading Room last year. Pale grey vinyl lettering, effectively invisible on the room’s glass surfaces, the chat (“will munro = too fagulous for shitty planet earth,” Chevalier writes) questions how we might attach ourselves to the most banal of media forms. “I don’t want to make these hard and unjust differentiations between our lives spent online and our lives spent offline,” Chevalier tells me. “It’s impossible to take those apart, and it’s really the opposite of techno-fetishism, where it’s this weird Luddite slash ‘well back in my day we did real things with real people…’ These are real things with real people, they’re just different; we need to look at them just as hard as we looked at public space in the past.”

The ways we might talk about sex, sexuality, or dying – out loud or on screen – function not only in Chevalier’s disarmingly poignant So when did you figure out…?, a video of a 13 year-old Chevalier dramatizing the disclosure and then instantaneous death of a person with AIDS on a talk show, but also in his Hospital Documents (2004 – 2011) installation. The piece is a grid of Chevalier’s blown-up medical files from a Montreal-area hospital, which contrasts a Modernist linear cut-and-dry presentation with seemingly the most personal content, yet it’s spun from the interpretations and judgments of medical staff. Considering Hospital Documents’s interest in the public/private presentation of his self, Chevalier notes, “Who is this person who has an HIV diagnosis and goes to the addictions treatment centre and who is described as an ‘awkward-looking young man, casual dress. Not good hygiene today, very friendly.’ I think [at one point] they were writing what I was saying about Foucault but in their analytic psychologist way: ‘thinks of the hospital as an institution blah blah blah.’”

If Chevalier is interested in the ways text and official discourse might make sense of us, he also wants to consider the ways identities might be established and repeated through and against established tropes. In his 2009 performance The Red Carpet Treatment, Chevalier walked from his now former apartment in Verdun to the Belgo Building downtown, but only moving via the repetitive action of laying a two-metre red carpet down, walking its length, picking it back up, and repeating. If speech for Chevalier could stand for erotic preference, medial diagnosis, or mourning, the red carpet is his shorthand for both privilege and the politicized glamour of a past and present queer culture. “Taking up space becomes a political gesture and that can be in crossing gender boundaries, in protesting, [or] in speaking up and being loud. I’m marking this territory as mine. But I was disgusting. I was covered in dirt, sweaty, in pain.” The labourious treatment of a symbol for a positive identity expression seems to wear it out, in ways that suggest the contradictory need to both preserve and revitalize symbols of resistance – a neutralization of queer glamour. Chevalier states his reservations of contemporary queer identity politics, when identity might overly rely on cultural shorthand “as if they’re the full monty instead of a marker.”  But, his work seems to ask: could the rehearsed ways in which we might express ourselves be necessary or essential?

These are questions that Chevalier has developed and honed in a distinct queer artist scene of Montreal, one that he’s hoping to integrate into his new job at ARTSPACE; together, we tentatively title this career objective “faggots across Canada.” It’s this kind of humour, tinged with a sociopolitical conviction, that is visualized in Chevalier’s work but also recognizable in the daily dangers and pratfalls of hoping one could be capable of transmitting and offering the sincere, the fake, the worthless, the attached, and the deeply serious. But could such transparency in talking, fucking, or grieving, in fact  be possible? When I ask Chevalier if his work might be cynical, he answers, “I think there’s always a little bit of hope. I try to work with a little bit of humour, not really explicitly. My work is earnest, not honest, earnest.”

—

Chevalier’s work can be seen at vincentchevalier.ca.

The post What you see is what you might get appeared first on The McGill Daily.

I also believe protests must be organized intelligently.

For all we know, these people arrived crazy

on day one.

The police did what police do.

Thanks for having the clarity that so many university students today lack:

The police did what police do.

Hello? Try storming the office of any CEO in Canada and see what happens.

We have allowed our universities to be run by left wing professors

and we should not expect our young people to be brain-washed by them?

Give me a break!

Riot police are not traffic cops, their job is more fast paced,

and therefore more prone to innocent mistakes.

McGill’s liberal majority: “Okay, well then get on your knees”

The police did what police do.

There should be a sense of gratitude that McGill students belong to a school that’s consistently top 20 in the world,

while paying half of what their Ivy competitors pay (Adam’s 21 Birthday IPA KEg party !!!!!!1!!1)

In the famous words of the entitled everywhere: “I want to know and I want it now!” (

Either way, it isn’t something McGill administrators have any power over).

You throw shit (including a stick) at a cop and chances are they are going to: a) smack you around and arrest you or b) call for reinforcements if they crowd is too big.

Bingo.

Guess what happened kiddies?

HMB’s persistent negligence and cowardice

The police did what police do.

There is space at McGill for every voice in civil debate (the devil lies in the details of their mandates and independence)

while Canadian students waste their own money and the taxpayer’s money on degrees in “gender studies”

Either way, it isn’t something McGill administrators have any power over.

Tomlison Professor of Political Theory, McGill University; blogs at:

The police did what police do.

(a very small fraction of students outside the core activist community where there. Does anyone have strong and even mildly informed views about which Canadian cell phone carrier is overall best?)

Thanks for presenting an insightful and educated point of view as opposed to one which was simply crazy, out of proportion,

which is what I’ve been hearing a lot of lately.

MD: How does it feel to be arrested on your own campus?

“Okay, well then get on your knees.”

You speak of McGill not worthy of its reputation.

I think its more that these student occupiers are not worthy of attending McGill (There is space at McGill for every voice in civil debate).

If you don’t like, leave and go anywhere else in North America,

but

I doubt you will since we have the cheapest education and still do after these 300$ a year hikes.

The police did what police do.

“The University did not call the riot squad. I can tell you that, unequivocally,” Mendelson said in an interview Friday afternoon.

“I know that the police who were here called in [the riot squad]”  (Riot police are not traffic cops, their job is more fast paced, and therefore more prone to innocent mistakes.)

A refreshing viewpoint on McGill’s current madness (would totally rather be back with my faves than writing my French compositions #suckynight)

Today is November 10, 2011 16:35 EST.

Campus Announcements:

The police did what police do.

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The institute conceptually arose from both Manderson’s connections to academics in other faculties upon arriving at McGill and, in 2003, the creation of the Shakespeare Moot Project and an accompanying course with Paul Yachnin, a Shakespeare scholar and current Chair of the English Department.

“[This] interdisciplinary project [brought] together Law Students and Graduate Students in English around a Moot [or, simulated court proceedings], which was built around contemporary legal problems but in which the works of Shakespeare were treated as the law, as the constitution,” Manderson stated.

The Moot Project proved to be a success, with pairs of English and Law students arguing cases before scholars flown-in for the occasion; audiences sometimes reached several hundred people, according to Manderson. Intellectually, the event fostered what he sees as the most beneficial type of interdisciplinarity, one “in which we both learned from each other, rather than simply informing the other about what we knew… In other words, the way in which it created within us rather than between us a sense of interdisciplinary knowledge and understanding was very exciting and satisfying.”

In 2007, after four years of the Moot Project, Provost Anthony Masi announced a new initiative that would provide particular funding for the humanities in an interdisciplinary sense. Masi asked Yachnin to create a working group on “Languages, Literatures and Cultures” (the current name for the administratively unrelated area studies department merged this year). After over several months of planning with a committee composed of professors from seven different faculties and six proposals sent to Masi and faculty deans, the IPLAI was finally created in the fall of 2009.

The IPLAI incorporated the intellectual models of both the Shakespeare Moot Project and Yachnin’s own interdisciplinary project called Making Publics, which focused on the creation of the public sphere in the early modern period. It aimed to function as an institution that “had this broad mission of interdisciplinarity in the humanities, but also had this more specific and public focus, looking at how ideas and the humanities effect the world, and how the world effects ideas and the humanities,” according to Manderson. Interdisciplinarity and the impact of humanities became the twin foundations of IPLAI, from which the institute would aim to create bridges within McGill’s academic, intellectual, and artistic communities and to imagine versions of these in the community at large.

It seems that interdisciplinarity as such is not a novel concept, both in intellectual production and pedagogy.
“If you go back a fair way, earlier than the 19th century, you find that almost everybody is interdisciplinary,” Manderson explained. “They’re interested in all sorts of different objects, sites, or projects rather than particular disciplinary logics.”

“I think the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are seen as the ‘rise of disciplines,’ the idea that we can have specific bodies of knowledge and we need to be specialists,” he continued. “And I think certainly since the 1960s, there’s been [a move] against that sort of [approach], that sort of disciplinary isolation.”
And though Manderson maintained IPLAI’s interdisciplinarity is not necessarily unique within McGill, some students have seen it as a new pedagogical approach. Ted Ledford, a U3 Cultural Studies student who took the PLAI course “Studying Place and Reinterpreting Choreography” taught by Architecture professor Ricardo Castro, stated his frustration over stringent disciplinary lines in other courses: “I’ve taken lots of seminars in other departments outside of my major and I found the conversation very narrowing and closed off to divergent thinking.” His PLAI course featured weekly guest speakers and a variety of experimental and sometimes personal assignments.

Manderson emphasized IPLAI’s emphasis on a kind of active pedagogical environment, to perform interdisciplinarity.

“It’s important in our courses [to] have more than one teacher in the class at the same time for there to be a dialogue amongst the teachers so that students themselves can see how different disciplinary frameworks engage with the same material,” he said.

His Shakespeare course with Yachnin often featured the two instructors debating each other in front of the course. This performative aspect to teaching is one tenet of the IPLAI’s approach to pedagogy, along with the development of new collaborations. IPLAI selects resident faculty fellows to both teach courses and conduct research on a particular theme (“Memory and Echo” was last year’s), pairing them together in productive combinations after choosing the best applicants.

In general, Manderson sees teaching as integral to the research undergone at IPLAI: “It had been the experience of many of us that it was through teaching that we became exposed to new ideas, that we got on top of new literatures, and we could try out our ideas with intelligent audiences like students.”

In addition to advances in the classroom, the IPLAI has strained to move outside certain typical university spheres. In addition to traditional conferences and guest speakers, the institute has held a series of “Great Trial” public lectures at Westmount Library, wherein professors discussed notable cases and trials relevant to their research. The series is now being held at Atwater branch, and IPLAI is hosting a “Theater and Danger” lecture series at the Segal Center for Performing Arts. Reading groups hosted by the institute have drawn in undergraduates, graduates, professors from four of the city’s universities and people from the community, including local artists.

“We’re developing collaborations with The Walrus, we have internships with the McCord Museum and with art galleries,” Manderson added. “We’re trying to build those links in a whole lot of different ways, because it matters, in the end to, as how the humanities are funded, as to whether they’re visible in the rest of the world.”

Yet the IPLAI is still fairly new, and is still facing certain structural challenges, such as funding and finding a more efficient implementation of their pedagogical strategy.

“It’s very hard for us to get funding from generally grant institutions or even more specifically from the university,” Manderson elucidated. “[McGill] was very generous when it set up [the institute’s funding], but in order for it to keep going in the future we need to sort of secure commitments from other parts of the university, and, because of the funding situation now, it’s been very hard to do that.”

Furthermore, Manderson commented on the difficulty of acting on the IPLAI’s founding intellectual principles: “Finding the ways in which we can work together, finding collaborations that actually work rather than just saying that this is a good idea is still something which we’re working on and trying to develop.” In his PLAI course for example, Ledford mentioned certain visiting professors “weren’t familiar with how the class was conducted, or the general vibe.”

But despite growing pains, the IPLAI may be able to fill a niche in the McGill academic experience. Ledford noted, “the interdisciplinary institute has provided a great way for people to explore things that disciplines would otherwise not investigate.”

The post Encouraging collaboration appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The new focus on a possible merger breaks a long-running attitude of “benign neglect” on the part of the administration, as Morton put it.

“What’s happened over the past few years is departments lost positions,” offered German Studies chair Karin Bauer. “[People retired], left, and they were not replaced. So now we have some very small departments.” The department of Russian and Slavic Studies presently has two permanent faculty members, Italian Studies three, German Studies four, and Hispanic Studies six. According to the chair of Italian Studies Lucienne Kroha, the current situation is one “the administration has helped to create.”

Yet according to Morton, “[It] doesn’t make sense to have a department of three. Is that really serving students’ interests? Are there ways in which [we] can actually think about doing things differently or cooperatively? I think it’s an attempt to bring vitality and an opportunity to add resources.”

Differing perspectives
Some voices are optimistic toward potential benefits. “German Studies was the department that from the start really felt positive about the possibilities that merger might offer,” Bauer said. “The exciting part of a merger is to think of new programs for students, to develop new opportunities, new ways of teaching, new ways of research.”

Menemsha MacBain, an undergraduate representative to Morton’s working group, noted that a possibility “in which [she’s] particularly interested” is the opportunity for “interdepartmental” team-taught courses.

However, not everyone shares similar outlooks. The Hispanic Studies department in particular has presented the most unified departmental opposition to the merger, citing budgetary failures and an incompatibility between the other departments and research in Latin American culture studies – a popular area of study in the department.

As Hispanic Studies graduate Sophie Bégin described, amalgamation would constitute a regressive move. The department serves as a reference point for hispanic studies in Canada, Bégin explained. “Bringing down this department for [pragmatic] issues would bring down hispanic studies in Canada.”

Cuts to funding have also contributed to Hispanic Studies’ decision to refuse the amalgamation plan. “The proposal was too underfunded to accept in its form,” explained Amanda Holmes, the department’s chair.

Students across departments have also noticed the risks of such consolidation. “If it leads to a department that is productive in its active criticism of studying countries based on nationalism, that would be cool,” offered German and East Asian Studies undergraduate student Carol Fraser. “However, if it leads to a diminishing of specialty and a dilution of language-learning, that would be a huge loss for McGill.”

Alessandro Giardino, the graduate representative to the working group and Italian Studies language instructor, echoed a similar sentiment: “We are afraid that the merger might be an attempt to cut out a certain specificity that comes with the language and the culture.”

Common ground
Despite their different attitudes, all four departments are concerned about ramifications the proposed merger could have on language instruction funding, a problem already aggravated in previous years.

“The cuts to our language teaching had a significant impact on our ability to respond to student demand,” Bauer said. Kroha identified “a significant reduction in language instruction” within the administration’s proposal for amalgamation. Holmes noted that with the plan’s cuts, “we wouldn’t have the same language teaching capacity.”

The effects of decreased language instruction seem to create their own cyclical consequences. Kroha noted that a reduction in language instruction leads to a reduction in potential program students, and thus smaller departments in general. A number of spots in language courses must then be reserved for Arts students who could potentially become majors.

Also, as Bauer noted, some Management and Music programs require German language instruction. “They will not be able to graduate if they can’t take German courses,” she said.

Some have also found the administration’s lack of sufficient support for language antithetical to McGill’s concern with its international reputation. “For a university that wants to be international, that wants to be research-intensive, that wants to [do] cutting-edge research, it’s somehow unthinkable [that] you can’t study the language you need to fulfill your program requirements, or to do your research,” explained Bauer.

Graduate students
Decreases in language instruction would also mean fewer graduate students teaching among the four departments, a demographic perhaps most at odds with the merger.

According to Kroha, less teaching opportunities (and the wages that go along with them) would mean a lack of competitive edge in an institution that already gives graduate students low funding opportunities. In a drafted statement, German graduate student Nina Gerschack wrote “compromising our ability to teach seriously affects our ability to effectively secure teaching positions once we finish our degrees.”

Morton again located the lack of graduate support in a wider context: “We would all like more resources to get the very best graduate students. So I don’t think in any way that’s unique to language.”

But the current proposal would also add four new tenure-track positions for the combined department and potentially faculty lecturers for language instruction. Bauer noted that the interdisciplinary possibilities of new tenure-track faculty “can help make this unit more coherent in the sense that you can hire people who already maybe cross some boundaries.”

“We haven’t decided,” Morton said, “but the belief [is] that perhaps that is a way to actually improve the quality of language teaching,” suggesting an improvement over graduate student instruction.

Speaking about German Studies, MacBain said that, “We love our grad students dearly, but I’ve asked around about this, and the phrases I most often hear used to describe their teaching skills are ‘mixed bag’ and ‘hit or miss.’”

In contrast, Gerschack cited the “demand for additional sections” and “feedback from undergraduates” as evidence to the contrary. Similarly, Holmes mentioned the positive feedback from course evaluations in Spanish graduate instruction.

Local issue, global pattern
The merging or abolition of small departments has become widespread among institutions around the world. “We are not being terribly innovative in this; we are really following the pattern,” Morton said.

Middlesex University in London intends to close their philosophy department, as part of the United Kingdom’s enormous cuts in teaching expenses. Similarly, several language, theatre, and classics programs at the State University of New York (SUNY) Albany may be cancelled.

Closer to McGill, over the course of the summer, the University of Toronto Faculty of Arts And Science aimed to conglomerate East Asian Studies, Germanic Languages and Literatures, Italian Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Spanish and Portuguese, and the Centre for Comparative Literature into a new “School of Languages and Literatures.” Thomas Keirstead, chair of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, identified a global trend towards viewing such departmental amalgamations into such “economies of scale.”

The faculty’s plan was met with a rapidly mobilized academic response from professors and students, including the creation of town hall meetings, a website archiving all information related to the merger, and a plan for outreach across the university. Ultimately, the faculty reversed its decision and retained the departments.

In comparison, McGill’s move toward amalgamation has been unadvertised, save in emails on certain listservs to find student representatives for the working group. As Fraser wrote in a petition to Dean of Arts Christopher P. Manfredi she circulated in German classes, “…to my current knowledge there has been no explicit notification to students in my department, either by emails, announcements, or postering.”

However, there is still ample time for discussion. According to Morton, a report will be sent to the Dean by November 30. The Arts chair meeting will happen after, “at which point it will eventually be brought to Faculty. At that point there’s some public discussion,” Morton said.

As Keirstad said, “There’s something to be said that elite institutions devote themselves to fields whether they’re popular fields of inquiry or not. …Part of being a world-class institutions is supporting minority fields of inquiry.”

The post The cultural conglomerate appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Born in 1891 and growing up into World War I, Dix found himself swept in the nationalistic Nietzschean fervor entering the war that stressed a test of the self best conducted in warfare. And like most other German soldiers, had that fantasy quickly shattered in trench warfare. He fought actively throughout the war, and drew all the while, but wouldn’t publish a definitive representation of his war years until 1924.

The series of prints titled Der Krieg (German for “War”) must justify admission on their own. They successfully present the atrocities of war within Dix’ spectrum of pitch-black humor. Each piece in the portfolio covers a different aspect of the war in a different manner, leading to more gruesome kaleidoscopic rendering of war than Der Krieg’s most compared war print series, Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra from 1820. Goya’s tortures and slayings appear scientific next to Dix’ work: caricaturish soldiers trudge through mud and flesh under the watch of jeering skeletons. “Lens Being Bombed” depicts what happen if Ernst Kirchner’s detached Dresden street denizens were about to be blown to pieces. Typical of Dix and the show itself, Dix uses Der Krieg to encompass a variety of German art historical visualizations. Trench images draw on the illustrative immediacy codified in the pre-war Die Brücke movement. The vaguely disturbing “Sailors in Antwerp” turns the sexual promiscuous hinted at in early modern genre scenes into desperate and realized sexuality.

Dix’ bizarrely detached self-aware presentation of horrific content creates the propelling rhythm in the exhibition’s first-half. The stunning Wounded Solider from 1922 shows a fairly standard frontal watercolour portrait, albeit with the titular soldier’s exposed bleeding war wound. This combination demonstrates certain German expressionist aspects’ appeal to pop culture today (see the entire career of Tim Burton), a seemingly inevitable willingness to tap into a mildly neutralized ghastliness. As guest curator Olaf Peters said in an interview, Dix “may be the only artist who talks about lasting while killing someone.” Self-Portrait, Grinning Head Resting on Hand shows Dix as a smiling fanged monster – survivor’s guilt as gothic caricature.

In 1925, Dix settled in Berlin and began a steadier career as a portrait painter, both as a commissioned artist and unofficial street observer. But whereas earlier expressionist movements presented the artist as a flaneur recording a mechanized, disconnected citizenry, this post-war populace is now mutilated and broke. The War Cripples focuses on the gruesome exposed anatomies of card-playing veterans, in a somewhat geometric quality that testifies to Dix’ breadth of artistic versatility and affinity for the work of Georg Grosz, a leading light of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. Fittingly, Dix’ more official portraits combine a rigid formality with self-expression. Dr. Heinrich Stadleman depicts the trappings of a successful bourgeois doctor’s office with a ghoulish, sunken green-tinted version of the doctor himself.

Dix’ portraits of prostitutes, one of the more-advertised areas of the show, combine depictions of Mary Wigman-esque prowling women and more interestingly, a sensitivity towards de-sexualized female nudes such as pregnant and older women rarely seen in early German modernism. Sex and prostitution are given the same dark humor as in the war images. Still Life with Widow’s Veil satirizes both early modern vanitas still-lifes’ and Berlin brothel society with a human spine and mask, mocking vanitas’ emphasis on subtle reminders of death and showing the connected nature of sex, death, and social performance in a shocked post-war society.

But Dix’ sardonic and grotesque treatment of the everyday did not change from its comfortable place in Weimar brothels to Nazi Germany. In 1933, Dix was fired from his teaching position and forced out of the Prussian Academy of Arts. Dix was featured prominently in Entarte Kunst (Degenerate Art), the famous traveling exhibition used by the Nazi Party to showcase base, obscene art.

In the weaker end of the exhibit, Dix’ work mellows into landscapes based on his new home in Lake Constance. Works like Saint Christophorus IV almost have a Biedermeier sensibility in their light tones and classical forms. But as Nathalie Bondil, Director and Chief Curator of the museum, stated in a press conference, Dix’ work moves from the critical to the allegorical, such as implementing iconography from Renaissance battle paintings. And in this way, Dix is the anomaly “trapped in Germany due to his art,” as Peters said. Der Krieg uses a monographic pallet from the prints of Albrecht Dürer, the most famous Northern Renaissance artist and one highly valorized by the Nazi Party. Dix’ still-life with a human spine and widow’s veil is egg tempera on wood panel covered by oil graze, a technique distinctly from the early modern era. Dix tapped into a modernist aesthetic but in the context of a highly classical sense of German art history, to the extent that he could, according to Peters, sell paintings to Nazi officials even as he work was branded “degenerate.”

In the advent of CIA-exported Abstract Expressionism after World War II, Dix fell of the artistic map, resurrected as a proletarian example by the GDR and archetype for an enormous German cultural self-consciousness that emerged around 1968 in sync with historically self-reflective events such as Auschwitz trials. Dix poses the contradiction of positing himself in “the line of the old great German masters,” as Peters stated, but with a highly subjective style that avoids the classification art history loves to canonize. Indeed, it seems more natural to have taken so long to present a Dix exhibition, for an artist who willingly reveled in the margins.

The post Dark world appeared first on The McGill Daily.

While cervical cancer may not be an issue for men, there are numerous reasons to receive the vaccination. HPV infections can lead to rare penile and anal cancers. This makes the vaccine especially important for men with same-sex partners, who according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, are 17 times more likely to develop anal cancer than those with opposite-sex partners. The vaccinations immunize a patient against 90 per cent of genital warts, a more common but less threatening symptom of the disease which can be difficult to treat. Men immunized against HPV have a lower of risk of spreading the viruses.

As Pierre-Paul Tellier, director of the McGill Health Centre stated, the University had even pre-empted Canada’s approval of Gardasil: “The clinic made the vaccine available for men even before Health Canada accepted it. We had scientific evidence that it was effective so we chose to go ahead.” Not only is the vaccine approved but immediately accessible. “It is easily available, all a man has to do is book an appointment with a nurse and they will give it. Now that it is accepted by Health Canada, students can also be reimbursed in part through the SSMU health plan.” Yet even with the reimbursement, the cost may be high. Currently, the three vaccinations are $140 each and the test for HPV itself is $110.

The post Viruses in Guyville appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The gallery also prominently features Holzer’s “Redactions Paintings”: enlarged silk-screens displaying the titular blacking-out of classified information in Army dossiers released per the U.S.’s Freedom of Information Act. Torture becomes a matter of semantics in these presentations, as two army officials communicate regarding the status of an Iraqi prisoner as a “lawful” or “unlawful” combatant, and hence the type of detention he will receive. Language (or explicitly, in the case of “Redactions,” the lack thereof) begins to neutralize violence into a matter of classified jargon or even the trappings of an email conversation, complete with appropriate headings and obligatory psalm as a signature. Water Board black white redacts everything from a military document except the words “water board,” a clever if ghastly flipside to the decidedly apolitical text-based conceptualism of American artists like Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari. An interrogation transcript calmly relates that “the decedent was shackled to the top of a doorframe with a gag in his mouth at the time he lost consciousness and become pulseless,” in the standard letterhead format. To print is to distance.

In other pieces, Holzer returns to her most famous kind of work – scrolling LED messages in the style of those ubiquitous in the metro and above airport customs desks. Rib depicts a soldier’s account of his accidental shooting of an Iraqi civilian in a manner typically used to announce stock prices on Wall Street. Public language seems most problematic to Holzer, who gained renown predominantly from public pieces, like the words “sex differences are here to stay” emblazoned on a Hollywood marquee. Rib confronts the viewer with a barrage of incongruous ambiguities: the text presents private visceral horror as disembodied and formalised army protocol (arguably, a reality of any military system) in the guise of a public announcement. Rib is a presentation of trauma in an inappropriate context, something Holzer herself can’t avoid. Despite her eagerness to convey her conviction that the way we use language isn’t suited to documenting trauma, Holzer herself cannot transcend this very problem. Her show-and-tell technique in “Redactions” stumbles in Rib, especially when coupled with the blatant arrangement of human bones in the nearby Lustmord Tables.

Holzer (and DHC’s) penchant for theatricality is ramped up with For Chicago, an enormous panel of vertical slats with the same LED letters scrolling downwards. A yellow glow permeates the columned room and the result is an aesthetically impressive confusion. Holzer again focusses on the gruesome with her text (“her head explodes in the fire”) but the writing is difficult to read vertically and at times moves too fast. Language is certainly a poor choice for representing horror, but unlike the sobering effects of the “Redaction” pieces, For Chicago overwhelms. The glaring mustard tint combined with the threatening yet meaningless sets of dizzying words quickly alienate any viewer trying to decipher who precisely is saying what.

In an interview with Art21 on PBS, Holzer stated, “I hope the installations are atmospheric. I want colour to suffuse the space and pulse and do all kinds of tricks.” The texts she presents become visual elements both insistent on and devoid of meaning. Any instinctual reaction to the scope of the project is soon displaced by the result of Holzer’s indecision between presentation and content.

Check out Holzer’s work at the DHC Gallery (451 St. Jean) until Nov 14.

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The McGill Daily: Could you talk about “The Betweeners”?
Ian Wojtowicz: I wrote a piece of software, which…connects to MySpace [and] downloads all the data about people in Montreal who are on the [city’s] network, and records the friendships between them into a network graph. It highlights particular individuals who have particular characteristics on the network…[and] records their user IDs and their friendships. Then, I ran an algorithm…called “Betweenness Centrality.” It measures how central someone is to the network. Say there’s two clusters, two cliques of friendships, and one person has friends in both – that person is highly central to the whole. They connect these two disparate groups on the network. So it’s a measure not of someone’s popularity but how diversely they’re connected.

From that point on the process was very analog and traditional, contacting these people and setting up appointments and going to photograph them…. When I met them, we worked collaboratively to select some of their photos from MySpace to re-enact. [There’s a meaning to] photography on MySpace, which you can extend to online photography in general, where people are representing themselves in particular ways online to create a persona, to feed into this notion that…on the Internet, everyone’s a celebrity. There’s a whole question about friendship…. What it boils down to is people have connections online that are called friends, but what they’re really doing is a kind of microcelebrity culture.

MD: How much artistic authority did you take with these subjects? Was it totally their self-representations or did you determine how they would look?
IW: It was a back-and-forth. We picked out a couple of photos to re-enact together. I made sure that it was similar enough to the original photo, but I might have added some changes to the clothing they were wearing, or fixed their hair a little bit differently.  
MD: Can you talk about why you chose MySpace as a medium?
IW: Well it started off with me wanting to use Facebook, but Facebook recently changed their system so that they didn’t have city networks anymore. It turned out to be a very productive switch because it turns out MySpace is still very much a dominant network for anyone interested in live music. Once you have a look at the people that I actually found through this software, it’ll [become evident] there are a lot of artists. I sort of got two performance artists, one graphic designer, a jewelry designer, a fashion designer, and a writer. That’s what the software found. In that sense, it all worked out for the best. 
MD: I’ve never considered MySpace as an artistic space.

IW: Totally. There are other networks that are more focused on visual art. I don’t know any visual artist that doesn’t love music. It’s a logical connection I think. A lot [of MySpace] pages are really chaotic and ugly, but there’s a really customized look to [some of the pages]…. [Whereas Facebook] is very much focused on usability, MySpace is much more focused on personality and expression – to its detriment to some degree. There’s definitely a lot more personality that comes through on people’s [MySpace] pages. 
MD: I’m really curious about the thematic role of the individual within your work.

IW: The final work is going to be a group portrait; I’m hoping not to focus too much on the individual, [although] each person will have a bio for [visitors] who are interested in learning about them. [The show] is both interested in who these people are as well as the group as a whole. I’m really interested in this idea of synecdoche…where a group of Montrealers can stand in for the city as a whole. The photo montage that I’m in the process of creating…will depict all of them in one room together, despite the fact that I took all of the photos separately in different locations. So, it’s about a group – a virtual group.

MD: What do you think is the role of the artist within the society of hyper-connected social networks?
IW: I don’t think the role of the artist changes all that much, they still do the same thing they’ve been doing for hundreds of years, which is producing meaning in society. They’re very often involved in critiquing society and re-constructing it through visual representation. The artistic process is very interested in comment, critique, and satire to [challenge] society when one sees certain problems affecting it. Artists are very quick to identify these and create their own solutions. To a certain extent everything that we see and experience that’s built by people is mediated through an artistic process.  
MD: Going along those lines, can you agree that these networks are artistic?
IW: All of these networks ask individuals to represent themselves in certain ways. I think creativity certainly enters into it. These networks kind of blend the artist and the gallery together. I think artistic expression and artistic production is very core to how these networks work.

 —compiled by Joseph Henry
“The Betweeners” runs from April 16 to May 22 at the Centres des arts actuels Skol (372 Ste. Catherine O.)
Correction: 26/04/2010 In the original version of this article, “Betweenness Centrality” was incorrectly referred to as “Between the Centrality.”

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Armed with a green jelly sleeping mask-cum-fetish outfit, I went to the “ANONYMOUS” party at Katacombes with an open mind and a fake name. My preconceptions were probably not much different from those of the general populace — fetishism is centered around a marginalized sexual community, a group of mysterious outsiders engaging in sordid “perversion.” But to me, there was a winking knowledge of their marginality and an admittedly romantic idea of sexual rebellion.

Like many first encounters, some of my assumptions were validated and others refuted. ANONYMOUS could have been a Halloween party in January, albeit with a standardized uniform of black leather. In jeans and the aforementioned Creature from the Black Lagoon mask, I probably stood out more than the guy with the enormous anglerfish costume or the couple in skin-tight plastic masks. Fittingly, I felt a lot more at home at the party in disguise – there’s not much at stake when everyone is costumed and attending for the same reason. The night’s MC articulated the mood: “hello you perverts!”

That kind of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness of the scene’s own strangeness contributed to it’s surprising approachability. Sexual perversion, made manifest in clichés like sadism, submissiveness, and fetishism, among others, may alienate non-subscribers, but anyone could have gone to this “fetish” party. A high-school science teacher I spoke to had come looking for a master so much as wanting to dress up and drink – theoretically why I showed up too.

A performance that evening embodied the mix of social accessibility and alternative sexualities. Four androgynous dancers in various shades of leather (gender, if not kept anonymous, is often irrelevant) proceeded to act out sex and physical punishment on stage, ultimately stripping each other down to the same black outfit.

Anonymity plays a large role in the sense of ease that is near universal in fetishism, usually for participants’ professional sake outside of events. At Kabaret Kink, an event I attended later, a dancer called Nebula X identified businessmen and doctors amidst the dancing throngs. While waiting in line, I saw a calm group of Quebeckers on a double date, none of them younger than fifty and all clad in black leather outfits that covered only the face, crotch, and feet.

Fetishism’s anonymity extends to the Internet, where most events are organized. Personalities gain prominence through their blogs, like Head Mistress Madame Jade Dragon. A self-described Fem(me)Dom(inante) who runs Club Sin, a monthly party at Café Cleopatra, Madame Jade’s website lists sexual practices, apparels, orientations, preferred locations, and restaurants for those in the know.

I quickly realized that whatever definition of fetishism I had was too limited. BDSM, which often overlaps with fetishism, is a flexible acronym. The “D” and “S,” represent “discipline,” “dominance,” “submission,” or “sadism”, respectively, and are paired with “bondage” and “masochism”. Trying to define fetishism at either ANONYMOUS or Club Sin was at first frustrating, but ultimately needless. From what I could tell, fetishism depended on exactly who was taking part.

At the cabaret show at Café Cleopatra, the BDSM bastion in Montreal’s crumbling red-light district, Nebula X valourized fetishism as a venerable occult practice, “a religion…stimulated by magic,” that could be traced back to the 1700’s. Her characterization of fetishism as “alternative fashion” articulated the highly performative nature of fetish events, from the leather show at Katacombes to the cabaret act that night. Membership into the community is expressed through clothing and public actions, such as a topless woman in the cage beating her hunched over partner at Café . Nebula X stressed that fetishism was “a feeling a human can feel,” something internal and distinctly personal.

A particular preconception I had about fetishism was its degree of specificity. Didn’t everyone have some very particular turn-on – hearing a certain word five times or wearing children’s sports uniforms? Presuming one needed an individual fetish, a friend and I assumed the role of South American twins. But those who come to Club Sin don’t bring their menageries and toolboxes of individual fetishes.

More so than Nebula X, Mistress Irony, a Club Sin performer, represented the liberating experience of fake identity as well as the pitfalls in profiling a community meant to remain anonymous. For a celebrity, Mistress Irony returned no results on any fetish websites, leading me to believe her name was assumed only for one particular night. Her name, she said, was chosen for its decidedly intangible properties. “It can only exist in literature,” she explained. Fetishism was about more than sex for her: “The guys with the gas mask, that could be a political thing.”

Mistress Irony also represented the duality of a fetish persona. She earns forty percent of her income from promoting fetish events, the rest from her job at a church, another potential reason for her name. In my quest to nail down fetishism, Mistress Irony confirmed Nebula X’s assertion and my frustration. To her fetishism was simply, and elementally, “magic.”

Her companion, a faithful Club Sin attendee, travels from Quebec City once a month – a commute demonstrative of Montreal’s position as a Mecca for Quebec BDSM. After World War II, Montreal became a red-light capital in comparison to more prudish American cities, partly for Quebec’s fairly relaxed social policies. Yet there remains an important distinction between strip clubs and sex clubs here.

BDSM events, part of a more unorthodox, if welcoming, subculture, are not generally organized at large clubs, but rather at small venues like Café Cleopatra, and even private houses. Yes, this makes them approachable and available, but certainly also less publicized. The overwhelming majority of club goers I spoke to were Francophone and the median age seemed about 30. The disconcerting image of half-naked old men in chains was mirrored by a large congregation of lone dancing older women, like a chorus of leather-clad Miss Havishams. Suffice it to say, anglophone McGill first-years were not marching into the established fetish scene.

Though fetishism may have liberating aspects, I have to admit some measure of trepidation towards scenes like public flagellation or anonymous hypnotists’ offers of “massages between the legs,”

Among alternative sex practices, fetishism seemed to be a micro-zeitgeist, an attitude of personal preference and expression in a community bonded by the same objectives (and outfits). It was multi-faceted, not necessarily a curiosity cabinet of perversity and not just an occasion for dress up either. Indeed, one’s avoidance of fetishism is understandable, but the undeniable truth remains in the palpable feeling of acceptance available for those who seek it.

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Like Wolf Parade, with whom they share a studio, Intensive Care relies on streamlined guitar lines and rock-hard rhythmic patterns, but the band’s vocals roughen the edges, making their sound oddly familiar and comforting – until, that is, some good old-fashioned dissonance enters the equation.

The Kelp Center, on the other hand, is a brand new quartet of first-years who manage to cover numerous facets of the term “alternative.” “The Trek” features sophisticated interchanges between guitar and vocals, and “P.O.W.” combines leering sing-song melodies and samples from the abyss of 1950s commercial advertising. The band also promises a variety of covers in their live show to further inhabit the complete spectrum of independent music.

The Pop Winds use distanced, reverb-treated vocals over a background of electronic trickery and hushed rhythms, à la college-band-institution Animal Collective and the recent “chillwave” sensation. Yet The Pop Winds carry enough melodic prowess to lift their music out of soundscapes and into songs. The (A)live performance follows the release of their EP, Understory and a bevy of shows at local Montreal venues.

With such a formidable line-up scheduled, one hopes CKUT will be able to sustain the standards set by tonight’s inaugural show. Though that remains to be seen, you can bet that this week’s concert will be a whale of a time.

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Delilabros, a sailor from Athens, died in 2000, leaving his numerological formula for the Bible, as well as his visual art, and seemingly all of reality, behind. But it hasn’t ended there. Delilabros’ son Panayiotis has reconstructed one of his father’s most extensive experiments into the installation When You Go Back, Nothing is Real. The work, which is centred around a musical composition based on Delilabros’ calculations extracted from the Bible called Automatic Reproduction of Constantine Delilabros’ Music Scores,” is up at articule through December 13.

As an installation, the presentation is stark. The younger Delilabros’ hand-written transcriptions of his father’s code serve as the visual component: framed sheets of tiny numbers that, because of their pseudo-Pointillist aesthetic, seem like masses of black geometry from far away. In the centre of the gallery, Panayiotis has encased a Bible, a calculator, and a relay box in a glass container. The numbers depicted on the wall are entered into the calculator, and then processed into the gallery’s speaker system. The resulting aural tones, random kazoo-like pitches, are then played into the gallery space in direct mimicry of his father’s work.

Though this may seem like a formal dialogue on minimalist sound interactions, the presentation actually belies a deeply personal motivation. Panayiotis has recreated his father’s experiment to reconnect with an often-missing paternal figure and to compensate for an unsubstantiated father-son relationship.       
The two had what Panayiotis calls a “difficult” connection, exacerbated by Constantine’s absence from the household due to his work. “He believed everything was numbers,” Panayiotis said of his father, whose personal numerological perspective informed not only his stratification of Biblical figures (angels had different numbers based on number of wings), but also the paper sculptures he created while at home. According to Panayiotis, Constantine kept his sculptures, musical compositions, and numerical formula to himself, and never attempted to publish his work. To Constantine, the art making and numerological theorizing were escapist indulgences out of touch with the overtly masculine Greek society in which he lived. To his son, Constantine’s formula was “borderline between madness and genius. Probably madness.”

Panayiotis has gone through the motions of attempting to artistically recreate his father’s actions: painstakingly learning his father’s handwriting and legitimizing it as an actual font, writing approximately 100 numbers for each of the sheets, and even creating an Internet connection to constantly stream the music into his kitchen, where Constantine first played his compositions. The processes behind the work seem to carry more personal weight for Panayiotis than the actual product, the music he has acknowledged as “random.” In the same way children act out their parents’ mannerisms, Panayiotis is replicating an experience that he was excluded from as a child.

“You, Me, and Him in Trocadero,” one of the three videos Panayiotis is showing alongside “Automatic Reproduction of Constantine Delilabros’ Music Scores,” shows Panayiotis and his boyfriend – who wears a paper mask printed with Constantine’s face – entering a photo booth. At one point, Panayiotis chooses to have the photo booth program “draw” the two men’s faces. The rather drawn-out computer sketching mirrors Panayiotis’s own processes of discovering his father and discovering himself in that context. Yet the final product in “Trocadero” is a kitsch representation of the artist and a caricature of his father together, demonstrating the partial and insufficient identity constructed in the end. As the title states, when you go back, nothing is real.

Panayiotis refuses to provide his father’s mathematical formula, enabling Constantine’s genius, or madness, to retain its elusive and incomprehensible (or unfounded) properties. He has also opened up his father’s hidden art the public sphere, legitimizing what was once considered shameful. As the artist says: “[The] most important thing for [me is] exhibiting his work in a gallery.” What remains is an act of respectful recognition, regardless of a relationship that never was. 

When You Go Back, Nothing is Real is up at articule (262 Fairmount O.) through December 13. To hear the musical section of the work, go to whenyougobacknothingisreal.info.

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Dirty Projectors (the band once had, but has since removed “The” from their name) began as Longstreth’s tape-recorded experiments. His rather inaccessible musical exercises eventually built enough momentum to support full-fledged albums like The Getty Address – an opera about Don Henley, ancient Mexico, oil, and post-9/11 America. It sounds like Wagner, it sounds like R. Kelly – it sounds like the future.

But it was only this year that they broke through with Bitte Orca, an album that tempers Longstreth’s more difficult musical tendencies with genuine pop sensibilities. “Stillness Is the Move” combines West African guitar work with Projector Amber Coffman’s R&B vocal delivery, creating one of the strangest party jams of this summer. “No Intention” effortlessly switches between girl-group coos and dissonant noise blasts, with enough time to throw in a percussion-heavy rap verse. “Two Doves” appropriates Nico’s “These Days,” and the result is a moving showcase of Angel Deradoorian’s formidable vocal talents.

In terms of their live show, Dirty Projectors features some good old-fashioned technical prowess. Look out for overwhelming vocal counterpoint between the band’s three female singers in “Remade Horizon.” Meanwhile, Longstreth plays through difficult guitar runs like he washes his hands. The band played last Sunday at Le National for their impressive John Cage-as-MC rock show. They visit Montreal regularly, so make sure to catch them next time they’re in town.

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