Art off the wall: Books and surfing the Web great way to beat summer heat

By Peter Goddard, Toronto Star, pgoddard@thestar.ca

Smaller galleries tend not to be air-conditioned, so you might want an alternative kind of art fix if you don't want to face this Havana-like summer.

Here's art that stays home to chill with you.

ITEM 1: The Group Of Seven In Western Canada, Catharine M. Mastine, general editor (Key Porter, 208 pages, $60).

Next to the Maple Leafs and the Guess Who, no Anglo-Canadian collective gets more heart-swelling, pride-of-the-nation press than the Group of Seven.

To generations of art teachers, A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris and co. have been like the Mounties — trustworthy, forthright chaps keeping Canada Canadian, just the way we like it.

But the whiff of revisionism is in the air. Some of it's coming from the new book, The Group Of Seven In Western Canada — tied to an exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

(After stops in Halifax, Winnipeg and Victoria, the show arrives at Ottawa's National Gallery from Oct. 10, 2003 to Jan. 2, 2004.)

What looks wonderful on a wall doesn't necessarily work on a page, and this thin coffee-table book feels cramped, particularly when you consider the size of its subject.

You can get a sense of the greatness of the best work — like Jackson's great Radium Mine — even in miniature. But these aren't the wide-open spaces you might otherwise be looking for.

A bit of western rebelliousness has seeped into the text, though.

Marcia Crosby, an art historian of Tsimshian and Haida ancestry, tears a strip off of these easterners and criticises Jackson's "explicit racist comments about Indians."

The Group of Seven sold its audience on the great romance of Canada, and that audience in turn made the Group part of that romance.

But what The Group Of Seven In Western Canada shows us, besides a lot of western scenes, is that the Group members weren't always what they painted.

ITEM 2: Kiss Machine magazine.

Each new generation of magazines has had its art star.

The writer was the soul of Esquire's world in the '50s and '60s. For Rolling Stone in the '70s, it was the musician.

The star of the near future is the visual artist.

Toronto has at least two home-brewed publications, Lola and Kiss Machine, where the art stars, and the artist is star.

Lola is moving closer to the mainstream (it really wants to bump off Toronto Life).

But Kiss Machine, a product of "do-it-yourself publishing," as it likes to brag, is a zine with the heart of a rebel Web site, which happens to be http://www.kissmachine.org.

To its publishers, Emily Pohl-Weary and Paola Poletto, "Kiss Machine is an attempt to create a new kind of independent publication that exists in the gray area between artist's book and zine."

In other words, Kiss Machine is more image-intense than most zines.

It really takes off into its own wild blue yonder in the way it loves to bang disparate ideas together to generate a kind of surrealist energy.

The fifth edition of the mag, launching Sept. 5, is a "cars and religion" issue, in honour of the 1980s Toronto world-premiere of the popemobile.

The fourth edition, "Hospitals And Aliens" is still available, as are some copies of "Sex and Condiments," the third issue.

Even neater, http://www.kissmachine.org leads you to:

ITEM 3: The Inflatable Museum, http://www.kissmachine.org/inflated.html.

This may well be the ultimate cyber-art space.

This "gathering place for objects, performances and environments that are resigned to instability" offers such neat finds as Sherwin Tjia's Condom Corsage, where charm and practicality meet, and to a pair of spacey, electro-performances by the Vancouver-based art troupe Human Faux Pas.

And while you're surfing the Web, you can next dive into:

ITEM 4: mobydickonline.org.

Yep, Moby Dick, the Hermann Melville novel — spread across 135 chapters — can be found on-line.

But this uncut rendering of all 220,323 words is meant to be experienced as an art event (funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Arts Council of England) where each successive word appears every half-second in a continuous feed.

Each word thus becomes an object swimming across the vastness of cyberspace like a big white whale in the deep-blue sea.

Click on the Web site to find how you can register. The project ends June 15 next year.

ITEM 5: Old Man Goya, by Julia Blackburn (Pantheon, 239 pages, $35).

Francisco Goya is coming back in fashion, no doubt because his vivid depictions of madness, rage and national horror have resonance these days.

But what motivates Blackburn's history with a fictional twist is the pathos of the Spanish painter's final years after he'd fled to France in the 1820s.

With his homeland seemingly bent on self-destruction, Goya settled in for a long and lonely exile in Bordeaux.

Loneliness clearly is a place where Blackburn feels at home (Daisy Bates In The Desert is a previous effort). Like a ghost from the future, she follows old Goya around his melancholy streets, putting herself in the picture as it were and making sure we understand her feelings as much as she understands his.

Maybe this is the start of a new genre: art history as the author's confession — or vice versa.