One plus One

This evening I went to Neutral Ground and saw a short performance piece by Michele Sereda and Elwood Jimmy called "One Plus One", a response to Jean-Luc Godard. I'm looking at the images on the back of the camera and am amazed at how lurid they seem. It was a very verbal piece really, with Elwood acting as the interviewer asking a long string of questions about politics, morality, ethics, etc, to which Michele would respond to each with the same answer, "Yes". Then she lay down on the desk and was covered with multiple family size bottles of ketchup. Then there was washing and guns and so on. However, with the crowd of people and the closeness of the space, I felt overwhelmed by the smell of the ketchup and didn't see the sight as I see it now in my photos. Curious how this happens. I guess that's cinema for you.

Art discussions ramp up for fall

Today classes started for me. I taught experimental film and reorganized it to introduce formalism on day one. I also showed them the Pixelvision 2000 camera but I didn't let them used it because it is best used outside and it was raining the whole time I had them shooting surrealist-style video. As per tradition, my watch broke. After class I caught the tail end of our faculty retreat. This evening we went to a Neutral Ground show curated by John Hampton. One piece was a lawn with automated light, cutting and water created by Robert Hengeveld. They served cupcakes that look like hamburgers and cookies that look like french fries.

257

Today I bought William the giant Harry Potter Hogwarts Lego set that was on half price at Toys-R-Us and Paul came over and we built it. This evening we went to the Dunlop and to the Neutral Ground art openings, both good shows. The Dunlop show is on contemporary independent Canadian comic books. The gallery is filled with pillars with alcoves in them in which stacks of comics are stored. There are lots of comfortable places to sit and read them. There is no original artwork up, the curator claimed that this fetishizes the process, and instead presents only the comics as they were published.