Canadian Art World Haterz: A Reflection

@canadianartworldhaterz

“One doesn’t just eat carrots, one styles oneself as a carrot eater.”

(Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 111)

i. I am always frustrated.

I can’t say this is a healthy way to be. It’s not. It means I wake up and check my phone in the middle of the night: someone has been shot. Trudeau has reneged on a promise. I flip to Instagram: I see endless pictures of paintings ripping off Memphis Design with a polished painted fern in the centre. There are taped airbrush lines slicing the air. I can’t remember which artist is which. I watch the slow rippling successes of New York artists from a distance and forget someone was shot.

It is easy to be frustrated, but it is hard to wield that frustration into something interesting, vivid and memorable.  To create something out of information and images in the digital realm is like sculpting dense clay that melts when you touch it and squirms through the crevices of your fingers. It’s very easily a hit or miss.

For those who are reading this and unaware of who I am, I am an artist who started an Instagram meme account. This account criticizes the microcosm of the world I live in. And, if you’re reading this, chances are you probably also belong to this same microcosm in some sort of way. I think you would agree that the Canadian art world is like a small tidal pool in the dips of coastal rocks, with its own tiny thriving ecosystem. It’s easy to get wind of gossip when there are only about five thousand people operating in this world.

Until I started the meme account, I had never felt so far away from five thousand people even though I have a fifth of this community as Facebook friends. I wondered, “What is an artist?” if she was not at least surrounded by other artists, all interested in similar things?   

I’ll be honest: my intentions in starting this account, which seems to have rattled and affected so many, were not altruistic. The closest I felt to the art world at that time was when I was with friends in bars, bemoaning the fact that people were not looking at our work, that the work being made in Canada is hopelessly tame, and discussing the salacious rumours permeating our scene about the misogynist and racist things that seemingly noble people had done. Why were these stories and known facts, which in many cases could be corroborated by several different people, not shouted from a rooftop? Why were there still people going to openings at these galleries when the gallerists perpetuated the status quo of showing work that was the caboose attached to the train of the 20th century?

ii. I am a painter.

Being a painter in Canada will get you everywhere and nowhere.

I paint scenes inspired by the realm of science fiction and science fantasy. I used to make abstract paintings, but I felt—and still feel—that this is a realm that men have dominated and tarnished. I thought the times when I did show my work went by mostly unnoticed. It was around February-March when I had just finished a solo show with Katharine Mulherin, and began filling a black notebook with ideas of what I thought would be funny memes criticizing Canada. Admittedly, my knowledge of the art world was Toronto-centric, but that didn’t weigh too heavily. I was waiting to hear back from grad schools and was already more or less rejected from almost all of those I had applied to. It was a transitional year.

iii. I am a typical wannabe rebel.

Nepotism, moral licensing, erasure of bodies from places, capitalism—all of these things enrage me, and yet I have benefitted from them. I had time on my hands, and I felt if that I could try and poke the beast and change the way we valued art and people, maybe that would somehow help me—and many others—show and move their work.

But running a meme account that criticizes the reflexive consumerist world we live in is not easy, especially when you are trying to also negotiate your own well-being, while also being someone else. I’ll elaborate: I had decided that I couldn’t be myself if I was to start a meme account that could involve as many people as possible. I knew the moment that I revealed I was a young white woman, that no one would take me seriously. More importantly, I didn’t want my identity to be a barrier for those who wanted to promote the truisms that are the flaws in our system. The Internet and Instagram specifically is the perfect medium for satire in a world obsessed with images.

I changed the way I wrote, kept it a (sort of) well-kept secret from even my closest friends. I tagged gallerists, curators, and other artists in various memes to have them confront the art world we all have a hand in creating.  

What it comes down to, however, is the meme itself. Making a good meme is about picturing catharsis. You have to see yourself with other people in the room looking at the same thing on a screen and realizing that you all find it funny. You have a shared story, but it also says something personal to you. It is a micro-zeitgeist in the digital realm that fades as soon as it is born.

iv. I am a new media/digital/social practice artist (but I’m still a painter).

For all intents and purposes, memes are art. I’m willing to argue with you over that if you’re buying the beer. I frame @Canadianartworldhaterz and my current project (a podcast) as a form of social practice because I am trying to bring people together to participate as a community to push for change. I think talking about the ways in which we are similar and are different is powerful, and translating our lives, our stories, and our beliefs into images is art. Indeed, as Michel Foucault elegantly states, “…couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or house be an object, but not our life?”¹

Here, the medium becomes part of the message. Instagram has become a digital agora for a collective identity of people to say: we (the artists) are tired that mostly white men still get the bulk of gallery shows in private and public institutions in Canada. It’s time to change.

Of course, many shows are beginning to go to white women, but not to people of colour, as shown in studies conducted by Canadian Art magazine and others. I believe that this needs to change. And perhaps what frustrates me most is that the changes required to solve many of our problems happen so gradually that it’s like watching the world pass by with tunnel vision.

I have also been struggling for awhile in reconciling the nature of what I am interested in; saving the environment, science fiction, and futurism in painting; and developing the foundation for what is also a social practice critiquing the here and now. How do these two connect? Does it even matter?

I have heard many denigrate the resurgence of identity politics; some of them used to be my intellectual idols. There is a belief that we need to unite together and leave our identities at the door in order to save the planet and, ultimately, leave it. I don’t disagree that we must unite.

And yet.   

Solving the systemic problems that put our identities in flux needs to be solved in tandem with saving the environment from ecological disaster, is what I’ve come to believe. Our identities are tied to our environment, digital and physical; I have a need for both practices, whether they coalesce or not.

That being said, I am going to do it as myself, not as a new identity. As much as I want to be liked, I’ve found that I’m going to be okay without it, which is my privilege and burden.

Claire Scherzinger is a visual artist and writer with a BFA in drawing and painting and creative writing from OCAD University. She has shown her work across Canada as well as New York, Seattle and the UK. She was also a winner of the Royal Bank of Canada funded National Painting Prize in 2015. Scherzinger currently lives and works in Victoria, BC, where she is finishing a Master’s of Fine Arts.

1. Zachary Simpson, “Life as Art from Nietzsche to Foucault: Life, Aesthetics and the Task of Thinking,” (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2009).

This article is published in issue 35.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue