#kh rainer

[wasntadandelion]

So, I've been writing and animated (Not posted yet) a fun little Union X side story series, Following what I call "The Cross Ties Trio" and the rest of the Trio calls "The B Team"

Why are they the B Team? Because that's the team you call in when there's no one else to call in.

Now the three of us (We voice the characters we made for this) ended up watching Wish together.

The ONLY Thing that got us through that film is thinking of how the B team would react to this gosh darn story and how we Kingdom hearts-ed it.

I kinda wanna do an audio book of it or something, but this is the basic plot. (If you want to read it, you can, if not, HAVE FUN SCROLLING!) (Also, should I just write a fan fic and post it on AO3? I really like this story)

First things first, the Cross Ties Trio-

Left to Right - Bumble, Phas and Rainer

Bumble is a very shy and energetic bunny - Keyblade: Devine Rose (Lvl 2) (She uses more Magic abilities and she is speedy)

Phas is Quiet and Collected (Very much vengeful under it all though (Good at hiding it)) - Keyblade: Sleeping Lion (Lvl 2) (He only uses Speed)

Rainer is a Grumpy Grease Monkey with a heart of gold - Keyblade: Fenrir (Lvl 2) (Rainer is slower than the other two in battle, but DOES HE HIT HARD- Mainly an attack user)

One last note about the Trio, this takes place before the Keyblade War! Rainer is the only Dandelion in the group, Phas is Blind (Not 100% he can see better in brighter areas and he can also see hearts (Because they are pure white or for heartless pure black)) Bumble is literally a Bunny in Human form, she can talk to animals.

NOW THAT YOU KNOW WHO THEY ARE- TIME FOR THE BASIC WISH PLOT BUT WITH THESE KEY KIDS!

-Wish-

SO- Story wise, in Daybreak Town when the parties in a Union get missions, we imagine they go into like a head office to get them, then they head out. The party is in Leopardus (Rainer used to be in Unicornus, but after a run in with Bumble and Phas, he decided to switch Unions to keep hanging out with them)

Now, they had been getting reports of other wielders going missing in this new world. People would be sent in, only for them to not report back. The office decides to send The B Team, because... Well they normally SOMEHOW survive these kind of missions, WHY NOT!?

The Mission is Simple- Find out what happened to the Missing Wielders and stop it.

The Trio head out to the Kingdom of Rosas. And they end up hopping off the boat with the new arrivals and IMMEDIETLY get sweep up in the opening musical number.

Rainer is grumpy and doesn't like the culty vibes, Bumble is also getting the "Why are they doing this? This seems like they are trying to convince us nothing is wrong here" and isn't Vibing, and Phas is having a fun little panic because- "Why are there CHUNKS of people's hearts missing!? WHAT IS GOING ON HERE!?"

(Some Wish Lore and I think a LOT of people missed, UM- The wishes are apart of their hearts, so when they give up their wish, they give up a part of their heart- Phas can see hearts, and he can see the pieces missing)

They do end up meeting Asha for a bit before she runs off, and Phas notices the pieces of heart (Wishes) in Magnifico's Tower, as well as they learn about the Wishing Ceremony that will be happening later that day.

After they end up sneaking into the tower during Asha's interview, and seeing the Wish Horde.

During the Ceremony they try to stop it, but get attacked by some guards- Wait- Were those the missing Keyblade Wielders? Pieces of their hearts were missing...

The Trio end up out in the Woods that night, and Asha has her I want song, gets Star and has the "Your a Star" Song happen before she Runs into the Trio. (Bumble has also befriended the Local wild life at this point) They kind of don't think it's a great idea to leave all those wishes there and Phas informs Asha, those Wishes aren't just their Wish, but also a Piece of their Heart. (Asha gets mad and runs off to get her Grandfather's wish)

Following Asha when she tries to get her Grandfather's piece of heart, (Wish) the Trio go with her. But while Asha escapes easily, Magnifico drags the Trio out of their spots and attacks them (Like "WHO IS IN MY TOWER!? Ah. More Wielders They seem to get into places they shouldn't be..." (Understandable)) He does offer the Trio their most deepest desires, or... well... what he thinks is their deepest desires- (He guesses Bumble and Rainers correctly, but Phas' wrong, which makes them realize Magnifico is a fraud) They end up escaping by the skin of their teeth (Bumble down, Rainer next, Phas realizing what's happening, grabs them and escapes.)

The Trio end up hanging out in the woods, trying to figure out the best way to take out Magnifico, but soon find Asha sending her family off on the boat. And decide to team on once more with her, They enter the Kingdom and see the Wishing Ceremony, and again, we get to see the piece of heart (Wish) get given back, but corrupted. (Phas isn't happy)

After that they join for the "Rally the Troops" song- AND THEY SPLIT THE PARTY.

Phas is borderline defenseless in the dark, so he stays with the friends, while Rainer and Bumble go off with Asha in the woods. (Phas can also make sure they get all the Wishes and Bumble has befriended all the animals, (They can help) Rainer goes with Bumble because they think leaving Bumble (A Caster) and Asha (ANOTHER CASTER) alone with Magnifico is a bad idea, so Rainer goes with!)

When Phas realizes that Magnifico is there its kind of too late, and Phas fends off Magnifico so the Friends can escape.

It goes bad.

Then the ending happens, and we have a fun boss fight instead of... SINGING. (Bumble like, heals Phas up, and they fight him (Also the reason Phas didn't notice him originally is because Magnifico was eating wishes left and right, and it confused him, he thought they were just a cluster of wishes, NOT AN ENTIRE DUDE) We also give Asha her wand back, so she can join)

Anyways, the Missing Wielders didn't want to leave because they wanted their wishes granted, then after their piece of heart was taken, they thought they could help the Kingdom, and a lot of them joined the royal guard to help Magnifico.

Rosas becomes like a little resort town for the wielders after, it's very chill there, there's like magic there that fends off Heartless (Thaaaanks Magnifico for protecting you citizens! It does get weaker now that he's gone, SO. Heartless appear and Wielders help)

ANYWAYS- That's another 0% survival rate mission under the B Team's belt! >:D

So, ah- Thoughts? Should I actually write this?

[strangefellows]

Day 3 of @khoc-week !! Friends and lovers...well, here they are~

(Bonus! @missingmywing used Jas and Cherry in their entry for today too!)

Cherry is my friend @redbud-tree's keykid -- she's from the Black Cauldron world and was like, nine when Jas ran into this spitfire small child from Ursus trying to solo a raid boss; he took her under his wing mostly to keep her from getting killed, and they became basically siblings. She was with him when he fell into the Realm of Darkness, and they continue traveling together. He calls her Cherrybomb, because he nicknames people too. Rainer (Prince Rainer) is an old KH OC of mine that was Jasper's friend ages back, and I figured now's a good time to revive him! He's the son of Ansem the Wise, though it was kind of a strained relationship and Rainer didn't spend a lot of time in the castle -- he's older than Ienzo by a bit, too, so they didn't spend much time together. He ended up getting world-yeeted when the Garden fell and met Jas and Cherry, and they travel together. He...somehow hasn't put together that Jas is the son of the weirdo royal guard who turned up in RG at some point. He's a bit eccentric just like his dad, after all. Jas calls him Nerd or Specs or Princey depending.

And lovers-- yep, yep, I ship him with Lauriam, though mostly KH3 era since they didn't actually meet in Daybreak Town. Two local idiots prone to making stupid batshit life choices when it comes to protecting or finding their family? Yep. Sassy assholes? Yep. Is this also slightly to spite Braig? Probably, both of them think it's funny. Jas likes to call him flower names in Gaelic to be cute.

[radiantresplendence]

100% Genuine Descriptions of KH Characters

Destiny Islanders

Kairi: Damsel in distress

Sora: Hapless hero

Riku: Audibly sighing as he bails the other two out for the 900th time this week

Nobody Trio

Xion: Fanfiction character

Roxas: Boy with so much baggage that he stole protagonist rights for a bit Ten years later, still no one has told him that he’s a supporting character

Axel: Older brother/surrogate non-deadbeat dad desperately trying to keep his family together while breaking the 4th wall

Wayfinder Gang

Terra: Anakin Skywalker if he never got laid

Ventus: Kairi with more agency, also an amnesiac primordial human from before the creation of the multiverse, also also conspiracy fodder

Aqua: “But it’s not the Jedi way.” Sad for literally a decade straight

Foretellers

Ira: Loner with big brony energy

Invi: Is into it though

Gula: Cat kid just wants to read, please leave him alone

Ava: Suppressed screaming as all the keybladers kill each other

Aced: Has no friends

Org 13

Xehanort’s Nobody: Mansex

<REDACTED>: Spoilers

Xaldin: 2 many spears x3

Vexen: Double Double Double Double Double Double agent

Lexaeus: Silent earth boy

Zexion: Former shota turned bishie

Saix: Deadbeat dad to nobody trio

Demyx: The Master of Masters

Luxord: A Final Fantasy character

Larxene: After millennia, still just wants to smash Lauriam

Union Leaders

Strelitzia: Got fridged like one of Kyle Rainer’s girlfriends

Brain: Big Fedora Energy

Skuld: Theoretical mom to nobody trio

Lauriam: Rumblin’ Rose

True Org XIII

Old Nort: Bizarro Spock

Young Nort: Back to the future

Repliku: WHO’S STRONGER

Vanitas: TOO SLOW

Ansem Seeker of Darkness: “Those who know nothing can understand nothing.”

Misc

Darkness: Dankness

Ansem the Wise: Racist old man

Namine: Reality-induced depression

Yozora: Dylan Sprouse

[beatyroseflower]

Mừng sinh nhật lần thứ 200 của bản Thánh ca bất hủ được yêu thích nhất mùa Giáng Sinh

Năm 2011, bản Thánh ca này được UNESCO công nhận là kiệt tác truyền khẩu và di sản văn hóa phi vật thể của nhân loại. Năm 2013, tạp chí Time sau một cuộc khảo sát đã tuyên bố đây là ca khúc Giáng sinh được yêu thích nhất trên thế giới với 733 lần được thu âm, tính riêng từ 1978 đến thời điểm đó.

Giáng Sinh ngày nay đã là ngày lễ không chỉ của riêng người Công Giáo mà là của cả nhân loại. Điều gì làm nên một đêm Giáng Sinh đầy ý nghĩa? Chúng ta nghĩ tới Ông già Tuyết, quà Giáng Sinh, ánh sáng lung linh, đêm đông lạnh, tuyết trắng, món ngỗng quay, cây thông Noel, không khí ấm cúng trong các gia đình Ki Tô hữu hay hình ảnh náo nức ngoài phố của người ngoại đạo, v.v. nhưng nhất thiết không thể thiếu nhà Thờ Công Giáo và các bản Thánh Ca.

Có một bản Thánh ca đặc biệt năm nay tròn 200 tuổi đã thể hiện sức sống trường tồn của nó bất chấp thời gian và những đổi thay của loài người. Bản Thánh ca này có lời ca được dịch ra ít nhất 140 thứ tiếng, chưa kể các loại thổ ngữ khác. Nó được thể hiện bởi vô số các giọng ca lẫy lừng, các dàn đồng ca danh tiếng trên thế giới. Không chỉ trong hoàn cảnh thanh bình, nó còn được hát ở hai bờ chiến tuyến và là lý do ngừng bắn của binh sĩ hai bên Anh – Đức trong thế chiến 2. Năm 2011, bản Thánh ca này được UNESCO công nhận là kiệt tác truyền khẩu và di sản văn hóa phi vật thể của nhân loại. Năm 2013, tạp chí Time sau một cuộc khảo sát đã tuyên bố đây là ca khúc Giáng sinh được yêu thích nhất trên thế giới với 733 lần được thu âm, tính riêng từ 1978 đến thời điểm đó. 

[caption id=“attachment_1062871” align=“alignnone” width=“734”] Qua 200 năm, bản Thánh ca Silent Night đã thể hiện sức sống trường tồn của nó bất chấp thời gian và những đổi thay của loài người. (Ảnh từ youtube)[/caption]

Chúng ta đang nói đến bản Silent Night huyền thoại.

Hoàn cảnh ra đời của bài hát

Ngày 24/12/1818, tại làng Oberndorf gần Salzburg nước Áo, có một vị cố đạo trẻ 25 tuổi tên là Joseph Mohr đang loay hoay chuẩn bị cho phần âm nhạc của buổi đêm Giáng Sinh. Ông phát hiện cây đàn Organ trong nhà thờ bị chuột gặm hỏng, do vậy dàn đồng ca sẽ không thể trình diễn được như thường lệ. Trong hoàn cảnh này chỉ có thể sử dụng tiết mục đơn ca và đệm bằng đàn guitar mà thôi. Nhưng với nhạc phẩm nào đây? Joseph Mohr chợt nhớ đến một bài thơ ông làm hai năm trước ngợi ca cảnh Chúa Jesus giáng sinh. Có lẽ phải phổ nhạc cho bài thơ này để sử dụng cho buổi lễ tối hôm đó. Ông nhớ đến người bạn của mình là Franz Gruber, một thầy giáo dạy nhạc ở trường làng và đem bài thơ đến nhờ Gruber phổ nhạc. Gruber nhận lời và rất nhanh chóng phổ nhạc cho bài thơ để hai người có thể bắt tay vào tập luyện.

Và buổi đêm Giáng Sinh đó, dân làng Oberndorf hết sức ngạc nhiên và thích thú với tiết mục biểu diễn của hai nhạc công không chuyên. Một bài hát lạ lẫm được trình bày bởi giọng bass của Gruber và giọng tenor của Mohr, được đệm bằng đàn guitar… đã thành công rực rỡ và mang lại một không khí hết sức khác lạ, hết sức thiêng liêng.

Từ đó, bản nhạc bắt đầu được Gruber lan truyền quanh khu vực Oberndorf và ngày càng đi xa hơn. Đặc biệt, ban nhạc Rainer Family đã trình diễn nó ở cung điện của Sa Hoàng Nga và Hoàng đế nước Áo vào năm 1822. Năm 1832, Silent Night được trình bày trước công chúng ở Leipzig. Vua Phổ Friedrich Wilhelm năm nào cũng mời dàn đồng ca nhà thờ tới lâu đài trình bày ca khúc này. Năm 1839, nó được chơi ở NewYork và rồi đi khắp thế giới theo chân các nhà truyền giáo. Chỉ có điều, người ta đã quên bẵng hai người cha đẻ của nó là Mohr và Gruber ở một ngôi làng bình dị nước Áo. Ca khúc hay được hiểu nhầm là dân ca Tylorean (vùng đất trong khu vực núi Alps ở Châu Âu) hoặc thậm chí được cho là tác phẩm của những nhà soạn nhạc lừng danh như Haydn, Mozart hay Beethoven. Mãi cho đến năm 1995, người ta mới tìm thấy bản chép tay của bản nhạc và khẳng định được chủ nhân đích thực của nó là Mohr và Gruber sau gần 200 năm bị rơi vào quên lãng.

[caption id=“attachment_1062873” align=“alignnone” width=“713”] Hình vẽ Josef Mohr và Nhạc sĩ Franz Gruber đều là người Áo, đồng tác giả của bài Silent Night. (Ảnh: dkn)[/caption]

Tại Việt Nam, bản Silent Night được chuyển lời Việt thành bản “Đêm Thánh vô cùng” khoảng hơn nửa thế kỷ trước bởi nhạc sĩ Hùng Lân.

Nội dung của bản Silent Night - Đêm yên lặng

Silent Night mô tả sự việc vào đêm huyền thoại khi Chúa Jesus giáng sinh với phần ca từ như sau (bản gốc tiếng Áo gồm 6 khổ thơ, bản tiếng Anh sau đây rút gọn còn 3 khổ thơ)

Silent night, holy night! All is calm, all is bright. Round yon Virgin Mother and Child. Holy infant so tender and mild, Sleep in heavenly peace, Sleep in heavenly peace

Silent night, holy night! Shepherds quake at the sight. Glories stream from heaven afar Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia, Christ the Savior is born! Christ the Savior is born

Silent night, holy night! Son of God, love’s pure light. Radiant beams from Thy holy face With dawn of redeeming grace, Jesus Lord, at Thy birth Jesus Lord, at Thy birth.

Tạm dịch:

Đêm tĩnh mịch, đêm thiêng liêng! Mọi vật thật bình yên và rạng rỡ Xung quanh Đức Mẹ đồng trinh và con của bà Đức Chúa hài đồng thật hiền hậu và bé bỏng Yên ngủ trong cảnh thái bình thiên giới Yên ngủ trong cảnh thái bình thiên giới

Đêm tĩnh mịch, đêm thiêng liêng! Những mục tử chấn động trước thần tích triển hiện Những luồng sáng mỹ diệu từ thiên đường phía xa Những thiên sứ hát vang bài “ngợi ca Thiên Chúa” Đấng Ki Tô Cứu Thế đã ra đời Đấng Ki Tô Cứu Thế đã ra đời

Đêm tĩnh mịch, đêm thiêng liêng! Người con của Thiên Chúa, ánh sáng thánh khiết của tình yêu thương Những tia sáng lộng lẫy từ dung nhan của Thiên Chúa Với bình minh của ơn cứu rỗi Chúa Jesus giáng thế Chúa Jesus giáng thế.

Độc giả có thể đối chiếu nội dung bài hát mô tả trung thực cảnh Chúa Jesus ra đời trong bài viết này:

Sự ra đời của Chúa Jesus và truyền thống tặng quà Giáng Sinh

Chút cảm nghĩ về bản Silent Night - Đêm yên lặng

Bản Silent Night hát về một thời điểm thiêng liêng nhất của loài người từ 2.000 năm trước, đó là đêm giáng sinh của Chúa Jesus, vị Cứu Thế của nhân loại. Nhưng Ngài ra đời trong một khung cảnh thật bình dị - trong một chuồng gia súc, trên máng cỏ cho lừa. Ngài sinh thành trong một gia đình lao động bình dị. Và những tác giả của bài hát ca ngợi vị Thánh giả bình dị mà vĩ đại ấy cũng là hai con người bình dị của làng quê nước Áo, không phải là những tên tuổi lừng lẫy trong giới âm nhạc như Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart… như nhiều người lầm tưởng.

Thậm chí, tên tuổi của họ suýt chút nữa đã vĩnh viễn rơi vào quên lãng, trái ngược hẳn với danh tiếng ngày càng lên cao của bài hát.

Thật khó tưởng tượng rằng một bài hát bất hủ như vậy đã ra đời bởi một nguyên nhân kỳ quặc: một sự cố về nhạc cụ của một dàn đồng ca địa phương trong ngày Giáng Sinh 24/12/1818. Thế rồi, nó được sáng tác và tập luyện trong một thời gian nhanh kỷ lục chỉ vài tiếng đồng hồ trước buổi lễ. Điều này khiến chúng ta liên tưởng đến việc bản nhạc này đã được sáng tác bởi ý Chúa thông qua hai người thường. Đó là thần tích triển hiện.

Cứ mỗi mùa Giáng Sinh về, bản Silent Night lại vang lên trong khắp các ngôi nhà, phố phường và nhà thờ. Nó mang lại một cảm giác đặc biệt khi được nghe trong Nhà Thờ Thiên Chúa. Dù có là giáo dân hay không, dù có hiểu nội dung bài hát hay không, hầu như bất cứ ai nghe nó cũng nảy nở một cảm giác an bình, để rồi hồn ta lặng đi trong giây lát và trôi vào một khung cảnh thiêng liêng cổ xưa mà ta không thể diễn tả được bằng lời. Hình như trong tâm khảm của mỗi chúng ta trỗi dậy một điều gì đó linh thiêng, một ơn cứu rỗi mà ta đã đón đợi từ lâu lắm trong vô thức.

Hay đơn giản đó là những phút bình lặng, tĩnh tâm hiếm hoi khiến trí ta sáng suốt hơn, lòng ta cao thượng hơn… những phút bình lặng thực sự mà bài hát mang lại cho loài người, cho một thế giới mà từ lâu đã trở nên không còn nhiều bình lặng.

Xin kính mời quý độc giả thưởng thức bản Silent Night với phần thể hiện của hai danh ca Hayley Westenra và Aled Jones.

[embed]https://youtu.be/E4vXGEBGQp8[/embed]

Bình Nguyên

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[flauntpage]

Thinks: John Murchie

On, In, and Around the Line: An Interview with John Murchie

  Keeley Haftner: Over the years you’ve inhabited the role of an artist, a critic, a teacher, a librarian, and a civic activist. Let’s begin in the early part of your art career back in the 1970s. That was when you began your twenty-year stint at the then internationally renowned Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which was also when the school was very much in its stride. At that time, Garry Neill Kennedy was at the helm and engaging a pretty impressive roster of visiting artists through The Press and the lithography workshop. Can you talk about your experience there?

John Murchie: I was there from 1972 until 1990 when my partner Gemey Kelly and I moved here to Sackville, New Brunswick for her directorship with the Owens Art Gallery. I came in the midst of NSCAD’s heyday, but also as it was beginning to fade. As you say, the lithography workshop and the visiting artist program were well established by then, but The Press was only in its infancy.

KH: It was a bit of a conceptualist paradise at that time, and it seems to me that The Press was especially exciting then. As I recall it published books for and around artists like Michael Snow, Steve Reich, Gerhard Richter, and Yvonne Rainer, among others. And of course the lithography workshop was responsible for incredible original prints by artists like Lawrence Weiner, Joyce Wieland, John Baldessari, Dan Graham, Claus Oldenberg and Eric Fischl, to name a few…

John Baldessari, “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art”, Lithograph, composition. 1971. Image ©MoMA.

JM: I think The Press was more self consciously trying to be of the time than the lithography workshop was. Garry had begun to replace staff with faculty for whom it became known about five years prior to my arrival, but of course he continued to bring in artists in all through the ‘70s and ‘80s while I was there. But as the Director of the Library, I was always on the periphery. I had specific skills that came out of my background in English literature and philosophy, which I applied to my work as both an artist and a librarian. But the school was quite hierarchical during the NSCAD heydays. Probably the only person they’d have paid attention to less than a librarian like myself in that era was a woman!! And of course when it became clear that this problematic attitude had to change, [snaps fingers] it changed.

KH: It strikes me that the ideas you are thinking through in your art practice have been deeply influenced by the kind of conceptualism practiced by Kennedy and those of the avant-garde who engaged with NSCAD while you were there.

JM: “Thinking through” might be too strong of a term. [Laughs] But yes, that’s true. I grew up outside of New York City in the 1940s and 50s when Abstract Expressionism was the be-all-end-all. It never made any sense to me, particularly, and to this day I haven’t felt capable of responding to it. My sister was formally trained at art school, but as I mentioned my background was not in visual art but in philosophy and literature. Still, when I got to NSCAD in 1972, I had been making things for some time. Mostly sculptures. And then I encountered Gerald Ferguson, who was Garry Kennedy’s behind-the-scenes guy. At that stage Jerry’s work was very conceptually driven, and he had been in the famous Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art around ’71. That show included pretty well-known artists like David Askevold, John Baldessari and Sol LeWitt, who of course all had ties to NSCAD as well, though Jerry was the only painter in that show. I responded to his work quite a lot, and it was the first time that making artwork ever really made sense to me. So to this day it’s still kind of the backbone of my work in lots of ways.

KH: Yes, and I would say I also see that backbone in your performance work, which also often engaged your background in literature. They seem to have “recipes” in their descriptions like much of Sol LeWitt’s work, as do many of your paintings. Can you describe some of those works?

JM: I will if I can remember them! [Laughs]

John Murchie, “see what you think”, Performance (attempted shredding of the estimated weight of the Dalhousie Art Gallery’s archives in surplus material), Dalhousie Art Gallery, 2012. Later iteration (shredding of the estimated weight of the entire history of Art in America magazine in street and junk mail) performed at AC Institute, NYC, 2015. Photo courtesy of Dalhousie Art Gallery.

It was always important to me that performance work exist in the moment, so only a few have ever been documented, like a piece I did for the Nickel Art Museum in Calgary as part of the M:ST Mountain Standard Time Performative Arts Festival which was recorded simply because they recorded all of the work that was performed. As for “conceptual recipes,” I tended always to have titles that were self-descriptive, after having gone the short historic period where everything was Untitled. So, whatever title is pretty much tells you in some way whatever you are about to engage with – if it’s called Four-Sided Blue Box then it’s probably a four-sided blue box. [Laughs] When I did a performance called Opening.Open.Closed at Eye Level gallery in Halifax in 1980 the gallery was on the second floor of a building on Barrington Street. They always used napkins and a paper cups for the openings. So I covered the entire floor of one room with paper napkins and the other room with paper cups. There was a glass door so you could see into one room without opening the door, but not the other. For the opening I managed to get the cups right up to the door, and when you looked in it was quite beautiful. I mean it was stupid, and I’ve always been interested in that – stupid throwaway materials that in repetition can be quite beautiful. But the crux was that to go inside the room and experience it, you had to destroy it, because as soon as you opened the door there was a nuclear-bomb-esque chain reaction kind of thing. They just went pluuuum. And then followed the traces where people would walk because it would continue to get disturbed as they did so. But the pleasing perfection of it all was destroyed as soon as you opened the door. It was actually Ron Shuebrook who went on to be the president of the Ontario College of Art and Design who first opened the door – much to his chagrin, because he knew what would happen. Anyway, there were photographs of the rooms at the end of the evening which were developed into this little document, but the original negatives that were my proposal to Eye Level have been destroyed. So all that is left is the publication, two prints from those negatives, and that’s it. Gone. Garbage. Hopefully by now, forty years later, those cups and napkins have biodegraded into the world somewhere, or been recycled into something else.

KH: Yes, they are probably long since soil, or perhaps in a landfill somewhere, since it was 1980! But certainly not in a museum or archive, at any rate.

JM: Exactly. At the time I was interested in the question of where the art was. That’s the whole issue, if you’re a naïf like myself. I mean artistically naïve, in the sense of not being academically trained in art and so on. Another good example of that line of questioning is a piece that I did for the Khyber Centre for the Arts when they invited me to produce a work. They had this little closet in their space that I lined with tinfoil, put in an incredibly bright light, and closed the door. If you wanted to see the work you would have to open the door, at which point you would be blinded so you couldn’t see anything. And people would immediately shut the door because it was annoying… not annoying so much as actually blinding, really. So once again, you were kept from the work by the work.

KH: It seems to me that a lot of this work was connected by withholding – like a desire to suspend a certain beautiful moment or a direct experience of a thing. There is some sort of mediation there.

JM: I’d never thought of it in that way, but I suppose there’s truth in that. I guess for me I’m interested in how your sense of one thing is changed in proximity to something else. For me this mostly comes out in painting. For example, if I put a coat of paint down on top of a white thing then the white thing becomes a green thing, and then if I put another coat on top of the green thing it becomes a red thing, but it’s still a green thing and a white thing and a red thing. It’s just that you can’t see it. That’s one of paint’s principle features – its ability to disguise itself.

John Murchie, untitled studio experiment, 2017.

KH: Certainly this kind of optical deception and chromatic depth is present in the work of op artists like Bridget Riley, or even the black monochromes of Ad Reinhardt, but your work tends to merge these cool but expressive experiential elements with your own subjectivity in a way that I find quite visceral, sometimes cheeky, but also moving. I’m thinking about your relationship to lines, in particular. Can you talk about your tattoos?

JM: They’re still there!

KH: [Laughs] Yes, well, in some ways they are only slightly less ephemeral than your paper cups and napkins, in the sense that you yourself are rather ephemeral in reference to geological or cosmic time…

JM: True. I honestly don’t remember how I began working with lines exactly, except that it began soon after I started working at NSCAD. My use of straight lines is probably another reflection of the fact that I was interested in making works in visual art but had no particular skills or training, and I also had no interest in gaining those skills. That compounded with my background literature and my interest in science and mathematics. As for the tattoos, they are artworks that I’ve had for twenty-two years now. Most of my life I’ve worked in some sort of job where I’m dressed with sleeves covering the majority of the work, so the question most people will wonder is how far up my body they go. There is an implication that they continue.

KH: I’m looking at them now – they are on the center of your forearms, beginning at the wrist and ending at the elbow. I remember you saying once that one was black and the other blue, though of course now the black one is blueing, and the blue one is blueing further, which is also interesting in terms of tracking time. Lines are of course related to a human sense of time as a linear concept, and certainly your continued use of the line connects much of your work through time.

John Murchie, “Black and Blue”, 1996. Photos courtesy of Gemey Kelly.

JM: When I got them done in the mid-‘90s, there weren’t that many people around with tattoos. Those from my father’s generation who had been to war certainly had some, but aside from that they weren’t that prevalent, but were starting to be. I’ve always been interested in how a sculpture can be a painting and vice versa. I still see them as my drawings, basically. On the other hand, I’m obviously a three-dimensional thing, so its sculptural, and also I see it as an ongoing performance, until my last breath. It’s the only way I can give my body real value. I have offered this artwork to the National Gallery of Canada. I told them they couldn’t have it until I passed away. And then, they would have to make a decision as to whether they preferred to see it as a drawing, and skin me, or see it as a sculpture.

KH: And embalm you?

JM: [Laughs] Yes. It’s their choice. I see both possibilities as perfectly adequate and true, but obviously you have to make a choice. Curatorially speaking, I think they would make the better choice than I would. From my perspective, it’s one of my most successful works.

KH: I’m led to think of Santiago Sierra’s 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People from 2000, which of course was done much later and garnered a lot of negative attention for the obvious problematics – paying prostitutes the price of their choice substance to be tattooed across their backs as some sort of unit. Obviously your work is exceedingly different, but I can’t help but bring Sierra to mind. Both works, regardless of their extreme difference, involve an attempt at geometry against the fleshiness of the human body, and demand that the living body be seen as an art object.

JM: Yes well even in my case not everyone has been empathetic with the work either, like my mother, for example. [Laughs] She thought it was the most stupid thing she’d heard in her life. Conversations around their utility come up most often in hospitals when my sleeves are rolled up to do blood work and the like. I guess they look suspiciously like the surgical marks doctors draw when they’re getting ready to cut you open.

KH: And then some uninformed surgeon comes in and gives you a new laceration you weren’t expecting! [Laughs] So after NSCAD, you were the Coordinator of Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre Sackville, New Brunswick for ten years, but have since retired. It seems to me that these days you’ve mostly turned your focus toward painting.

John Murchie, “Crossword Painting, The Globe and Mail (December 27, 2014)”, acrylic on newsprint, third panel of a triptych, 2014-Present.

JM: Yes, well, that’s probably just my age and lack of energy! I have been doing crossword paintings for about 20-years now. For these works I take the full-page crossword from the Globe and Mail and use it as the basis for a painting. Number one will be blue, number two is green, and so on. The colours are assigned arbitrarily, but every once in a while you’ll have to make decisions because, for example, in the case of the number twelve, it is both one and two. They become grids of colour where the crossword would be, and once they’re full I move on to the next.

KH: So they’re almost like visual permutations?

JM: Yes, permutations. And then my other paintings have been getting progressively smaller. I work on small birch board supports that feel like objects, so if I want the work to stand like a sculpture or go on the wall like a painting, it can do either. Francesca Valente, a curator from Toronto, asked me to contribute to the project IMAGO, Luciano Benetton Collection. I was given a very small – 10 x 12 cm! – stretched canvas. I decided to explore my fascination with the negative line that emerges between two painted forms. This stupid little thing has always fascinated me. The work had four sides and four colours on top of one another in various sequences to produce six straight lines, which is Any Way You Look At It: Six Straight Lines. No matter which way you rotate it, it’s still the same damn thing. And since, like you said, the work is in some way a series of permutations, I have also been making work that explores this directly by using a grid and a number generator that will tell me however many colours I am using in a specific sequence.

KH: In addition to treating paintings as sculptures, some of your pieces also work sculpturally with paint. In these works paint is used as layering device that reminds me a bit of the work of Eric Cameron, though rather than coating the object to abstract it, you layer the interior or edges of an object and keep the external nature of the thing itself exposed. An acting of filling or framing rather than obscuring. Are you still producing work of that nature?

JM: Yes, Struts used to give out small, brown boxes for their fundraising auction Sweetest Little Thing. It’s fundraiser event that commissions artists – both locals like Graeme Patterson and Leah Garnett, and past exhibitors like Micah Lexier and Amalie Atkins – to produce works for Valentine’s Day. I have three of those boxes, and I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it but for a number of years I’ve just been going around and around the interior of each with acrylic, very intuitively with no predetermined colours or planning. The logical finish for the work is when the box is full of paint. They are pretty extraordinary.

KH: And are they nearing full yet?

John Murchie, “Untitled”, 2010-Present.

JM: I think there’s a fair ways left to go. But they’re very heavy now. I have a feeling that all of a sudden I’ll probably know that’s as far as I want to take it. Because the boxes are made of cardboard they’ve begun to bend inward from the sides against the tension of the paint. More recently I’ve begun working with two wooden boxes of the same scale and I’ll be curious to see what that’s like, because the surface on the inside is kind of rough and that of course effects the texture of the paint as it’s layered on. At the top edge there is kind of a little lip, so even from the time I put the first stroke down it began catching there, just a tiny bit, but it only takes a tiny bit before the effect starts multiplying. I’m interested in how I’ve got these identical objects and I’ve been doing the same thing to them but the outcomes are extremely different. You’re more of the scientist than I am, you might have some ideas as to how this might happen.

KH: It’s hard to make things identical in this world, even when DNA is replicating itself!

JM: Yes, everything one does is somehow related to those kinds of physical and scientific facts about the world that we live in.

KH: You’ve had the honour of being one of the few or only art critics in a small artistic community – not just Sackville, but Atlantic Canada for that matter, and even the whole of Canada tends to have very few. Coming from Chicago I know this can be difficult even in larger communities, which in reality are never as large as they seem. Can you talk about what it’s like to be a critic in a very small artistic context?

JM: It’s hard. I stopped doing the reviews. I was writing criticism between the late ‘70s and ‘90s, primarily for Arts Atlantic and Visual Art News in Halifax, but also for Canadian Art magazine and Parachute. Being critical was difficult but necessary, because quite often I had to write about work that really wasn’t any good. Too often it took me right to the edge of the role, which I did not like. These are still works that someone has put a fair bit of blood sweat and tears into, so it’s hard not to feel a little icky about it. But it has to be done. Many of the people I was writing about were people I knew very directly – you know, it’s not like I was writing about Jeff Koons or some superstar artist whom I’d never see, so I wouldn’t have to worry if I said “this sucks” because he’s probably not going to come over here and whack me on the head or something. But once for example I wrote a fairly critical review of the work of Thaddeus Holownia, who I see fairly regularly, which was not an easy thing to do. I still stand behind what I wrote, even twenty years later, but still. It’s different to be invited to write for a catalogue or in a similar context, because in that case if I’ve agreed to do it than I’ve probably got some sympathy for the work I’m writing about.

KH: Right, but aside from having to look the person you’ve reviewed in the eye, wouldn’t you say that an art community benefits from criticism, regardless of the scale? And if not you, someone who I think of as a sort of thick-skinned and frank person, then who?

JM: Oh yes, I think it benefits. I got enough of a reputation that at some point I was at an event and an artist who I’d written about (who was quite drunk at the time) came up to me and said, “You know everyone here hates you?” Luckily, I had a thick enough skin and quick enough wit to reply, “Everybody?” [Laughs] But, it is both necessary and difficult. I wrote a bad review of the work of a friend of mine for a show he had at the Owens Gallery, and I felt kind of bad about doing it, but the show had problems. The review got published and low and behold within a few months I got not one, but several letters from people saying that they appreciated what I’d written. Those letters took me a long distance toward making me comfortable in my own skin moving forward. I don’t see much in the way of criticism being written in the North Atlantic today; there’s a kind of tact that people take these days in which they cling to the theoretical so they don’t have to say anything, really. Not anything meaningful. Mostly we get a fair bit of, “it’s just really great, so wonderful, the colours are really bright, it’s great…”

KH: But of course as the director of the only artist-run in a coastal community and as someone who spent a good deal of time engaging in local town council, community is obvious really important to you, which could be harder to balance as the local critic. You ran for mayor in 2012 – can you talk about that?

JM: That wasn’t the first time I’ve went for public office. You’re right to say that I’ve been fairly active in my community and I think that more artists and artist-run centres should be, honestly. There is totally no question that there is more consciousness amongst the non-artist community in Sackville about what goes on in the arts community because of our participation with that wider community. There just is. And of course through that participation I gain more consciousness about some other kinds of concerns that I generally don’t pay attention to, or take for granted. Anyway I had been urged to run for town council before, and in 2012 it turned out that the day before the nominations closed there was only one person out there running, someone who was not a very interesting person, I thought. A pretty shameful democracy, if you ask me. I didn’t think I could beat him, but I didn’t want him to see him win just because no one else cared enough to run.

KH: That’s great!

JM: Yes well, by the next morning when nominations closed, there were four people running! In another election in Halifax, I became fairly active in my campaign, going door to door and speaking with people about issues and concerns. I was totally destroyed by the woman who was the incumbent, who even left town during the campaign. I went around and knocked on virtually every one of the 30,000 applicable voter doors, while she relaxed in Barbados or something. [Laughs] I didn’t really have much of a platform so much as the feeling that there must be other ways of doing some things. There must be other ways of paying more homage to some issues that are generally speaking important, like the environment and so on. I’m usually able to stir things up to some extent. But that’s not much to run on.

KH: But in this case you would have wanted to be mayor, it wasn’t just about forming an opposition?

JM: No, absolutely. I wouldn’t have gone through all that if I hadn’t wanted to be mayor.

KH: Do you think you’d run again, or was 2012 “Murchie for Mayor” the last time?

JM: No, by the time it was all done I would be seventy-eight years old, and there are a lot of other things that I want to do with my life other than whatever would be entailed there. Like paint, for example!

KH: And time is precious, so thank you for giving some of yours up to speak with me, John!

JM: So much fun! Any time.

  John Murchie is a Canadian artist. You can find him where he lives, in Sackville, New Brunswick.

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Episode 585: John Opera and Aron Gent

Episode 579 Carris Adams

Thinks: John Murchie published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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FARBE.LICHT.RAUM im Künstlerhaus

Bei der Ausstellung im Künstlerhaus zu sehen: float von Sybille Hassinger, 2015, Öl und Lack auf Leinwand, 170 x 130 cm, Foto: Jürgen Spiler FARBE.LICHT.RAUM erscheint wie eine untrennbare Trinität. Zumindest, wenn wir uns bezüglich der fünf Sinne, die uns zur Wahrnehmung der Welt zur Verfügung stehen, auf das Sehen konzentrieren. Die Ausstellung mit diesem Titel im Künstlerhaus am Sunderweg 1 - Eröffnung ist am 25. Januar um 20 Uhr - vereint Malerei nicht nur in Form des klassischen Tafelbildes. Sie tritt auch in strengem schwarz-weiß auf, und Farbe ist auch auf anderen Trägermaterialien zu finden. Flach, und auf den ersten Blick an das Tafelbild angelehnt, zeigt sich zum Beispiel eine besondere Materialität in der Verbindung des Trägers mit der Farbe. Auch installativ wird Farbe erlebbar sein. Im Raum schwebend, auf papierenem Träger oder als hoch glänzende, architekturbezogene Intervention. Das Licht, das uns diese sinnlichen Seherfahrungen ermöglicht, ist bildgebender Bestandteil raumbezogener Arbeiten. In diesen wiederum kann das Licht selbst auch zur Farbe werden. So vereint die Ausstellung künstlerische Positionen der Malerei, Skulptur und Installation, um visuelle und gedankliche Räume in und mit den Kunstwerken zu eröffnen. Beteiligte KünstlerInnen im Künstlerhaus Sybille Hassinger Farbe und Licht zählen bei Sybille Hassinger zu den wichtigen Katalysatoren der Bildfindung. Ihre Arbeiten zeigen ein subtiles Wechselspiel von opaker und luzider Malerei, die mit Farbe und Form, Farbe und Linie, Form und Antiform ihre Bildzeichen setzt. Im Dialog mit den pastellartigen Farben und kräftigen Farbflächen gehören skriptuale Liniengerüste ebenso wie filigrane Gitterfelder oder Kreisformen mit zellartigen Verbindungslinien zu den wesentlichen gestalterischen Formelementen ihrer All-over-Malerei. Manche ihrer zwischen transparenten, zart farbigen Lasurschichtungen und verdichteten, opaken Farbflächen oszillierenden Bilder imaginieren geradezu einen Schwebezustand. Die Werke faszinieren durch ein virtuoses Perspektiv-Spiel von Bildvorder- und Hintergrund, durch den stetigen Dialog von Farbe und linearer und organischer Form. Die Künstlerin selbst beschreibt die suggestive Raumwirkung ihrer großformatigen Bilder und sagt: „Den Bildern ist ein Atmen nach innen eigen“ – „es ist wie ein körperliches Eintauchen in das Bild“. (Marina Schuster, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf) www.sybillehassinger.de     Nicole Jana Die Serie der Uneconomic Drawings - Zeichnungen auf Aluminiumfolie - sind sowohl Bindeglied zwischen Malerei und Plastik, als auch eigenständige Objekte. Den Anspruch, die Materialität dieses fragilen Metalls zu bewahren und zugleich dessen Verletzbarkeit zu nutzen, erfüllen diese lyrisch aufgeladenen Blätter auf ihre eigene Art. Die reliefartig angelegten, teils arg zerschrundenen Strukturen und Zeichnungen umkreisen fragend die Suche nach An- und Abwesenheit, nach Reflexion und Visualisierung gedachten Raumes. Durch seine Spiegelung wird der Betrachter Teil dieses Reflexionsraumes. www.nicolejana.de   Arjan Janssen www.arjanjanssen.nl   Paul Schwer Seit fast 20 Jahren arbeitet Paul Schwer im erweiterten Feld der zu Unrecht immer wieder totgesagten Königsdisziplin der Kunst: der Malerei. (...) Denn es geht bei Schwer in seinen malereibezogenen Konzepten stets um retinale Momente der Wahrnehmung. Und um Umwandlung dieser Wahrnehmungsmomente in bildnerische Konstellationen, in denen sich die Flüchtigkeit dieser Wahrnehmung manifestiert. Man könnte auch sagen: Paul Schwers malerischer Ansatz will festhalten, dass nichts festgehalten werden kann, dass alles vorbeifließt, alles einer momenthaften Flüchtigkeit und Zerbrechlichkeit unterworfen ist. (...) Weitgehend stammen die Materialien aus einem technischen, industriellen Zusammenhang (Stellagen, Leuchtstoffröhren, Plexiglas, Polystyrol-Hartschaum), dessen Inszenierung aber eine fast poetische Beschwingtheit und Weichheit atmet, und sich zudem immer zwischen den Polen konstruktiver Statik und rasanter Dynamik bewegt. Nur an wenigen Stellen spielt reale Malerei noch die Hauptrolle, und doch ist alles in diesem Universum in hohem Maße malerisch angelegt. Was sich uns zeigt, ist sozusagen die Erzeugung der Malerei aus dem Nichtgemalten. ... (Aus: Ruppige Schönheit von Stephan Berg) www.Paulschwer.de   Elisabeth Sonneck Mit materialbedingter Spannkraft bzw. Schwerkraft und dem Eigenverhalten von Papier beschäftigt sich Elisabeth Sonneck, wenn sie ihre einseitig mit Ölfarbe bemalten Bahnen spiralförmig ineinander verschlungen, säulenartig aufeinanderschichtet, als Schlaufe von der Wand herabhängend oder einem Mobile ähnlich inszeniert (unfix., Galerie Parterre Berlin, 2014). (…) das Kunstwerk ist f��r Sonneck kein zum Stillstand gebrachtes, kristallines, sondern ein von Prozesshaftigkeit geprägtes Gefüge – das Material schreibt die Form. (...) Diese dem Werkprozess inhärente Arbeitsweise und dynamisch-bewegte Aneignung des Materials, die einmalige Farbgebung, der lineare, gleichmäßig-repetitive Akt, dagegen das mehrfache Umformen in fragil ausbalancierte, variable Objekte formulieren eine rhythmische Kraft – den Worten Henri Maldineys entsprechend: „Der Rhythmus durchwebt den Raum (und die Zeit) mit einer existenziellen Bedeutung, das heißt mit einer bedeutsamen Gegenwart.“ Als latent vorhandene, raum-zeitliche Kategorie betont er das Jetztsein, die unwiderrufliche Präsenz des einzelnen Augenblicks, in dem Dauer und Moment identisch sind (...) www.elisabeth-sonneck.de   Rainer Splitt www.rainersplitt.de   Claudia Vogel Die Künstlerin arbeitet parallel an verschiedenen Bildlösungen, von denen sie Stichproben in der Ausstellung zeigt. Innerhalb einer Werkgruppe bespannt die Künstlerin hölzerne Rahmen mit feinmaschigen Textilien oder Netzen, die eine rasterartige Struktur als Bildgrund vorgeben. Durch diese feinmaschigen Gewebe reibt Claudia Vogel die Farbe von der Bildrückseite, welche an der Oberfläche die Bildstruktur hervorbringt. Sie benutzt in dieser Technik Ölfarben oder flüssige Kunstharze, welche während des zeitintensiven Gestaltungsprozesses aushärten. Der Ausstellungstitel „Stichproben“ lässt sich im eigentlichen Wortsinn auf die Entstehung dieser Arbeiten beziehen, denn der Begriff der Stichprobe bezeichnet eine beim Aufließen flüssigen Materials entnommene Probe. So sind die Werkstücke dieser Gruppe von Arbeiten charakterisiert durch die Verschiedenartigkeit der verwendeten Bildmittel: Abhängig von den Materialien, dem Grundraster des Trägermaterials und der stofflichen Konsistenz der Farben bzw. Kunstharze ergibt sich eine stark strukturierte Bildoberfläche. (Sandra Kraemer M.A.) www.institut-aktuelle-kunst.de/kuenstlerlexikon/vogel-claudia   Ulrich Vogl www.ulrich-vogl.de     Konzept und Organisation Anett Frontzek Freundlich unterstützt von Kulturbüro Dortmund, Sparkasse Dortmund, DEW 21   _____________________________________________ INFORMATION Künstlerhaus Dortmund Sunderweg 1, 44147 Dortmund Bürozeiten Mo + Fr 10-14 Uhr, Di-Do 10-16 Uhr Fon +49 (0)231 82 03 04 | Fax +49 (0)231 82 68 47 Geschäftsführung: buero@kh-do.de Pressekontakt: press@kh-do.de www.kh-do.de ÖFFNUNGSZEITEN DER AUSSTELLUNGEN IM KÜNSTERHAUS Do-So 16-19 Uhr Bei Interesse an Führungen für Gruppen oder Schulklassen wenden Sie sich bitte ans Büro. EINTRITT frei, wenn nicht anders angegeben ÖFFENTLICHE VERKEHRSMITTEL Bus 453, 460 und 475 zur Haltestelle Treibstrasse Fußweg vom HBF Nordausgang, 15 Minuten Fußweg vom Dortmunder U, 15 Minuten FREUNDLICH UNTERSTÜTZT VON Kulturbüro Dortmund, Sparkasse Dortmund, DEW 21 siehe auch hier und hier und hier Read the full article

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Thinks: John Murchie

On, In, and Around the Line: An Interview with John Murchie

  Keeley Haftner: Over the years you’ve inhabited the role of an artist, a critic, a teacher, a librarian, and a civic activist. Let’s begin in the early part of your art career back in the 1970s. That was when you began your twenty-year stint at the then internationally renowned Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which was also when the school was very much in its stride. At that time, Garry Neill Kennedy was at the helm and engaging a pretty impressive roster of visiting artists through The Press and the lithography workshop. Can you talk about your experience there?

John Murchie: I was there from 1972 until 1990 when my partner Gemey Kelly and I moved here to Sackville, New Brunswick for her directorship with the Owens Art Gallery. I came in the midst of NSCAD’s heyday, but also as it was beginning to fade. As you say, the lithography workshop and the visiting artist program were well established by then, but The Press was only in its infancy.

KH: It was a bit of a conceptualist paradise at that time, and it seems to me that The Press was especially exciting then. As I recall it published books for and around artists like Michael Snow, Steve Reich, Gerhard Richter, and Yvonne Rainer, among others. And of course the lithography workshop was responsible for incredible original prints by artists like Lawrence Weiner, Joyce Wieland, John Baldessari, Dan Graham, Claus Oldenberg and Eric Fischl, to name a few…

John Baldessari, “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art”, Lithograph, composition. 1971. Image ©MoMA.

JM: I think The Press was more self consciously trying to be of the time than the lithography workshop was. Garry had begun to replace staff with faculty for whom it became known about five years prior to my arrival, but of course he continued to bring in artists in all through the ‘70s and ‘80s while I was there. But as the Director of the Library, I was always on the periphery. I had specific skills that came out of my background in English literature and philosophy, which I applied to my work as both an artist and a librarian. But the school was quite hierarchical during the NSCAD heydays. Probably the only person they’d have paid attention to less than a librarian like myself in that era was a woman!! And of course when it became clear that this problematic attitude had to change, [snaps fingers] it changed.

KH: It strikes me that the ideas you are thinking through in your art practice have been deeply influenced by the kind of conceptualism practiced by Kennedy and those of the avant-garde who engaged with NSCAD while you were there.

JM: “Thinking through” might be too strong of a term. [Laughs] But yes, that’s true. I grew up outside of New York City in the 1940s and 50s when Abstract Expressionism was the be-all-end-all. It never made any sense to me, particularly, and to this day I haven’t felt capable of responding to it. My sister was formally trained at art school, but as I mentioned my background was not in visual art but in philosophy and literature. Still, when I got to NSCAD in 1972, I had been making things for some time. Mostly sculptures. And then I encountered Gerald Ferguson, who was Garry Kennedy’s behind-the-scenes guy. At that stage Jerry’s work was very conceptually driven, and he had been in the famous Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art around ’71. That show included pretty well-known artists like David Askevold, John Baldessari and Sol LeWitt, who of course all had ties to NSCAD as well, though Jerry was the only painter in that show. I responded to his work quite a lot, and it was the first time that making artwork ever really made sense to me. So to this day it’s still kind of the backbone of my work in lots of ways.

KH: Yes, and I would say I also see that backbone in your performance work, which also often engaged your background in literature. They seem to have “recipes” in their descriptions like much of Sol LeWitt’s work, as do many of your paintings. Can you describe some of those works?

JM: I will if I can remember them! [Laughs]

John Murchie, “see what you think”, Performance (attempted shredding of the estimated weight of the Dalhousie Art Gallery’s archives in surplus material), Dalhousie Art Gallery, 2012. Later iteration (shredding of the estimated weight of the entire history of Art in America magazine in street and junk mail) performed at AC Institute, NYC, 2015. Photo courtesy of Dalhousie Art Gallery.

It was always important to me that performance work exist in the moment, so only a few have ever been documented, like a piece I did for the Nickel Art Museum in Calgary as part of the M:ST Mountain Standard Time Performative Arts Festival which was recorded simply because they recorded all of the work that was performed. As for “conceptual recipes,” I tended always to have titles that were self-descriptive, after having gone the short historic period where everything was Untitled. So, whatever title is pretty much tells you in some way whatever you are about to engage with – if it’s called Four-Sided Blue Box then it’s probably a four-sided blue box. [Laughs] When I did a performance called Opening.Open.Closed at Eye Level gallery in Halifax in 1980 the gallery was on the second floor of a building on Barrington Street. They always used napkins and a paper cups for the openings. So I covered the entire floor of one room with paper napkins and the other room with paper cups. There was a glass door so you could see into one room without opening the door, but not the other. For the opening I managed to get the cups right up to the door, and when you looked in it was quite beautiful. I mean it was stupid, and I’ve always been interested in that – stupid throwaway materials that in repetition can be quite beautiful. But the crux was that to go inside the room and experience it, you had to destroy it, because as soon as you opened the door there was a nuclear-bomb-esque chain reaction kind of thing. They just went pluuuum. And then followed the traces where people would walk because it would continue to get disturbed as they did so. But the pleasing perfection of it all was destroyed as soon as you opened the door. It was actually Ron Shuebrook who went on to be the president of the Ontario College of Art and Design who first opened the door – much to his chagrin, because he knew what would happen. Anyway, there were photographs of the rooms at the end of the evening which were developed into this little document, but the original negatives that were my proposal to Eye Level have been destroyed. So all that is left is the publication, two prints from those negatives, and that’s it. Gone. Garbage. Hopefully by now, forty years later, those cups and napkins have biodegraded into the world somewhere, or been recycled into something else.

KH: Yes, they are probably long since soil, or perhaps in a landfill somewhere, since it was 1980! But certainly not in a museum or archive, at any rate.

JM: Exactly. At the time I was interested in the question of where the art was. That’s the whole issue, if you’re a naïf like myself. I mean artistically naïve, in the sense of not being academically trained in art and so on. Another good example of that line of questioning is a piece that I did for the Khyber Centre for the Arts when they invited me to produce a work. They had this little closet in their space that I lined with tinfoil, put in an incredibly bright light, and closed the door. If you wanted to see the work you would have to open the door, at which point you would be blinded so you couldn’t see anything. And people would immediately shut the door because it was annoying… not annoying so much as actually blinding, really. So once again, you were kept from the work by the work.

KH: It seems to me that a lot of this work was connected by withholding – like a desire to suspend a certain beautiful moment or a direct experience of a thing. There is some sort of mediation there.

JM: I’d never thought of it in that way, but I suppose there’s truth in that. I guess for me I’m interested in how your sense of one thing is changed in proximity to something else. For me this mostly comes out in painting. For example, if I put a coat of paint down on top of a white thing then the white thing becomes a green thing, and then if I put another coat on top of the green thing it becomes a red thing, but it’s still a green thing and a white thing and a red thing. It’s just that you can’t see it. That’s one of paint’s principle features – its ability to disguise itself.

John Murchie, untitled studio experiment, 2017.

KH: Certainly this kind of optical deception and chromatic depth is present in the work of op artists like Bridget Riley, or even the black monochromes of Ad Reinhardt, but your work tends to merge these cool but expressive experiential elements with your own subjectivity in a way that I find quite visceral, sometimes cheeky, but also moving. I’m thinking about your relationship to lines, in particular. Can you talk about your tattoos?

JM: They’re still there!

KH: [Laughs] Yes, well, in some ways they are only slightly less ephemeral than your paper cups and napkins, in the sense that you yourself are rather ephemeral in reference to geological or cosmic time…

JM: True. I honestly don’t remember how I began working with lines exactly, except that it began soon after I started working at NSCAD. My use of straight lines is probably another reflection of the fact that I was interested in making works in visual art but had no particular skills or training, and I also had no interest in gaining those skills. That compounded with my background literature and my interest in science and mathematics. As for the tattoos, they are artworks that I’ve had for twenty-two years now. Most of my life I’ve worked in some sort of job where I’m dressed with sleeves covering the majority of the work, so the question most people will wonder is how far up my body they go. There is an implication that they continue.

KH: I’m looking at them now – they are on the center of your forearms, beginning at the wrist and ending at the elbow. I remember you saying once that one was black and the other blue, though of course now the black one is blueing, and the blue one is blueing further, which is also interesting in terms of tracking time. Lines are of course related to a human sense of time as a linear concept, and certainly your continued use of the line connects much of your work through time.

John Murchie, “Black and Blue”, 1996. Photos courtesy of Gemey Kelly.

JM: When I got them done in the mid-‘90s, there weren’t that many people around with tattoos. Those from my father’s generation who had been to war certainly had some, but aside from that they weren’t that prevalent, but were starting to be. I’ve always been interested in how a sculpture can be a painting and vice versa. I still see them as my drawings, basically. On the other hand, I’m obviously a three-dimensional thing, so its sculptural, and also I see it as an ongoing performance, until my last breath. It’s the only way I can give my body real value. I have offered this artwork to the National Gallery of Canada. I told them they couldn’t have it until I passed away. And then, they would have to make a decision as to whether they preferred to see it as a drawing, and skin me, or see it as a sculpture.

KH: And embalm you?

JM: [Laughs] Yes. It’s their choice. I see both possibilities as perfectly adequate and true, but obviously you have to make a choice. Curatorially speaking, I think they would make the better choice than I would. From my perspective, it’s one of my most successful works.

KH: I’m led to think of Santiago Sierra’s 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People from 2000, which of course was done much later and garnered a lot of negative attention for the obvious problematics – paying prostitutes the price of their choice substance to be tattooed across their backs as some sort of unit. Obviously your work is exceedingly different, but I can’t help but bring Sierra to mind. Both works, regardless of their extreme difference, involve an attempt at geometry against the fleshiness of the human body, and demand that the living body be seen as an art object.

JM: Yes well even in my case not everyone has been empathetic with the work either, like my mother, for example. [Laughs] She thought it was the most stupid thing she’d heard in her life. Conversations around their utility come up most often in hospitals when my sleeves are rolled up to do blood work and the like. I guess they look suspiciously like the surgical marks doctors draw when they’re getting ready to cut you open.

KH: And then some uninformed surgeon comes in and gives you a new laceration you weren’t expecting! [Laughs] So after NSCAD, you were the Coordinator of Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre Sackville, New Brunswick for ten years, but have since retired. It seems to me that these days you’ve mostly turned your focus toward painting.

John Murchie, “Crossword Painting, The Globe and Mail (December 27, 2014)”, acrylic on newsprint, third panel of a triptych, 2014-Present.

JM: Yes, well, that’s probably just my age and lack of energy! I have been doing crossword paintings for about 20-years now. For these works I take the full-page crossword from the Globe and Mail and use it as the basis for a painting. Number one will be blue, number two is green, and so on. The colours are assigned arbitrarily, but every once in a while you’ll have to make decisions because, for example, in the case of the number twelve, it is both one and two. They become grids of colour where the crossword would be, and once they’re full I move on to the next.

KH: So they’re almost like visual permutations?

JM: Yes, permutations. And then my other paintings have been getting progressively smaller. I work on small birch board supports that feel like objects, so if I want the work to stand like a sculpture or go on the wall like a painting, it can do either. Francesca Valente, a curator from Toronto, asked me to contribute to the project IMAGO, Luciano Benetton Collection. I was given a very small – 10 x 12 cm! – stretched canvas. I decided to explore my fascination with the negative line that emerges between two painted forms. This stupid little thing has always fascinated me. The work had four sides and four colours on top of one another in various sequences to produce six straight lines, which is Any Way You Look At It: Six Straight Lines. No matter which way you rotate it, it’s still the same damn thing. And since, like you said, the work is in some way a series of permutations, I have also been making work that explores this directly by using a grid and a number generator that will tell me however many colours I am using in a specific sequence.

KH: In addition to treating paintings as sculptures, some of your pieces also work sculpturally with paint. In these works paint is used as layering device that reminds me a bit of the work of Eric Cameron, though rather than coating the object to abstract it, you layer the interior or edges of an object and keep the external nature of the thing itself exposed. An acting of filling or framing rather than obscuring. Are you still producing work of that nature?

JM: Yes, Struts used to give out small, brown boxes for their fundraising auction Sweetest Little Thing. It’s fundraiser event that commissions artists – both locals like Graeme Patterson and Leah Garnett, and past exhibitors like Micah Lexier and Amalie Atkins – to produce works for Valentine’s Day. I have three of those boxes, and I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it but for a number of years I’ve just been going around and around the interior of each with acrylic, very intuitively with no predetermined colours or planning. The logical finish for the work is when the box is full of paint. They are pretty extraordinary.

KH: And are they nearing full yet?

John Murchie, “Untitled”, 2010-Present.

JM: I think there’s a fair ways left to go. But they’re very heavy now. I have a feeling that all of a sudden I’ll probably know that’s as far as I want to take it. Because the boxes are made of cardboard they’ve begun to bend inward from the sides against the tension of the paint. More recently I’ve begun working with two wooden boxes of the same scale and I’ll be curious to see what that’s like, because the surface on the inside is kind of rough and that of course effects the texture of the paint as it’s layered on. At the top edge there is kind of a little lip, so even from the time I put the first stroke down it began catching there, just a tiny bit, but it only takes a tiny bit before the effect starts multiplying. I’m interested in how I’ve got these identical objects and I’ve been doing the same thing to them but the outcomes are extremely different. You’re more of the scientist than I am, you might have some ideas as to how this might happen.

KH: It’s hard to make things identical in this world, even when DNA is replicating itself!

JM: Yes, everything one does is somehow related to those kinds of physical and scientific facts about the world that we live in.

KH: You’ve had the honour of being one of the few or only art critics in a small artistic community – not just Sackville, but Atlantic Canada for that matter, and even the whole of Canada tends to have very few. Coming from Chicago I know this can be difficult even in larger communities, which in reality are never as large as they seem. Can you talk about what it’s like to be a critic in a very small artistic context?

JM: It’s hard. I stopped doing the reviews. I was writing criticism between the late ‘70s and ‘90s, primarily for Arts Atlantic and Visual Art News in Halifax, but also for Canadian Art magazine and Parachute. Being critical was difficult but necessary, because quite often I had to write about work that really wasn’t any good. Too often it took me right to the edge of the role, which I did not like. These are still works that someone has put a fair bit of blood sweat and tears into, so it’s hard not to feel a little icky about it. But it has to be done. Many of the people I was writing about were people I knew very directly – you know, it’s not like I was writing about Jeff Koons or some superstar artist whom I’d never see, so I wouldn’t have to worry if I said “this sucks” because he’s probably not going to come over here and whack me on the head or something. But once for example I wrote a fairly critical review of the work of Thaddeus Holownia, who I see fairly regularly, which was not an easy thing to do. I still stand behind what I wrote, even twenty years later, but still. It’s different to be invited to write for a catalogue or in a similar context, because in that case if I’ve agreed to do it than I’ve probably got some sympathy for the work I’m writing about.

KH: Right, but aside from having to look the person you’ve reviewed in the eye, wouldn’t you say that an art community benefits from criticism, regardless of the scale? And if not you, someone who I think of as a sort of thick-skinned and frank person, then who?

JM: Oh yes, I think it benefits. I got enough of a reputation that at some point I was at an event and an artist who I’d written about (who was quite drunk at the time) came up to me and said, “You know everyone here hates you?” Luckily, I had a thick enough skin and quick enough wit to reply, “Everybody?” [Laughs] But, it is both necessary and difficult. I wrote a bad review of the work of a friend of mine for a show he had at the Owens Gallery, and I felt kind of bad about doing it, but the show had problems. The review got published and low and behold within a few months I got not one, but several letters from people saying that they appreciated what I’d written. Those letters took me a long distance toward making me comfortable in my own skin moving forward. I don’t see much in the way of criticism being written in the North Atlantic today; there’s a kind of tact that people take these days in which they cling to the theoretical so they don’t have to say anything, really. Not anything meaningful. Mostly we get a fair bit of, “it’s just really great, so wonderful, the colours are really bright, it’s great…”

KH: But of course as the director of the only artist-run in a coastal community and as someone who spent a good deal of time engaging in local town council, community is obvious really important to you, which could be harder to balance as the local critic. You ran for mayor in 2012 – can you talk about that?

JM: That wasn’t the first time I’ve went for public office. You’re right to say that I’ve been fairly active in my community and I think that more artists and artist-run centres should be, honestly. There is totally no question that there is more consciousness amongst the non-artist community in Sackville about what goes on in the arts community because of our participation with that wider community. There just is. And of course through that participation I gain more consciousness about some other kinds of concerns that I generally don’t pay attention to, or take for granted. Anyway I had been urged to run for town council before, and in 2012 it turned out that the day before the nominations closed there was only one person out there running, someone who was not a very interesting person, I thought. A pretty shameful democracy, if you ask me. I didn’t think I could beat him, but I didn’t want him to see him win just because no one else cared enough to run.

KH: That’s great!

JM: Yes well, by the next morning when nominations closed, there were four people running! In another election in Halifax, I became fairly active in my campaign, going door to door and speaking with people about issues and concerns. I was totally destroyed by the woman who was the incumbent, who even left town during the campaign. I went around and knocked on virtually every one of the 30,000 applicable voter doors, while she relaxed in Barbados or something. [Laughs] I didn’t really have much of a platform so much as the feeling that there must be other ways of doing some things. There must be other ways of paying more homage to some issues that are generally speaking important, like the environment and so on. I’m usually able to stir things up to some extent. But that’s not much to run on.

KH: But in this case you would have wanted to be mayor, it wasn’t just about forming an opposition?

JM: No, absolutely. I wouldn’t have gone through all that if I hadn’t wanted to be mayor.

KH: Do you think you’d run again, or was 2012 “Murchie for Mayor” the last time?

JM: No, by the time it was all done I would be seventy-eight years old, and there are a lot of other things that I want to do with my life other than whatever would be entailed there. Like paint, for example!

KH: And time is precious, so thank you for giving some of yours up to speak with me, John!

JM: So much fun! Any time.

  John Murchie is a Canadian artist. You can find him where he lives, in Sackville, New Brunswick.

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Thinks: John Murchie published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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Thinks: John Murchie

On, In, and Around the Line: An Interview with John Murchie

  Keeley Haftner: Over the years you’ve inhabited the role of an artist, a critic, a teacher, a librarian, and a civic activist. Let’s begin in the early part of your art career back in the 1970s. That was when you began your twenty-year stint at the then internationally renowned Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which was also when the school was very much in its stride. At that time, Garry Neill Kennedy was at the helm and engaging a pretty impressive roster of visiting artists through The Press and the lithography workshop. Can you talk about your experience there?

John Murchie: I was there from 1972 until 1990 when my partner Gemey Kelly and I moved here to Sackville, New Brunswick for her directorship with the Owens Art Gallery. I came in the midst of NSCAD’s heyday, but also as it was beginning to fade. As you say, the lithography workshop and the visiting artist program were well established by then, but The Press was only in its infancy.

KH: It was a bit of a conceptualist paradise at that time, and it seems to me that The Press was especially exciting then. As I recall it published books for and around artists like Michael Snow, Steve Reich, Gerhard Richter, and Yvonne Rainer, among others. And of course the lithography workshop was responsible for incredible original prints by artists like Lawrence Weiner, Joyce Wieland, John Baldessari, Dan Graham, Claus Oldenberg and Eric Fischl, to name a few…

John Baldessari, “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art”, Lithograph, composition. 1971. Image ©MoMA.

JM: I think The Press was more self consciously trying to be of the time than the lithography workshop was. Garry had begun to replace staff with faculty for whom it became known about five years prior to my arrival, but of course he continued to bring in artists in all through the ‘70s and ‘80s while I was there. But as the Director of the Library, I was always on the periphery. I had specific skills that came out of my background in English literature and philosophy, which I applied to my work as both an artist and a librarian. But the school was quite hierarchical during the NSCAD heydays. Probably the only person they’d have paid attention to less than a librarian like myself in that era was a woman!! And of course when it became clear that this problematic attitude had to change, [snaps fingers] it changed.

KH: It strikes me that the ideas you are thinking through in your art practice have been deeply influenced by the kind of conceptualism practiced by Kennedy and those of the avant-garde who engaged with NSCAD while you were there.

JM: “Thinking through” might be too strong of a term. [Laughs] But yes, that’s true. I grew up outside of New York City in the 1940s and 50s when Abstract Expressionism was the be-all-end-all. It never made any sense to me, particularly, and to this day I haven’t felt capable of responding to it. My sister was formally trained at art school, but as I mentioned my background was not in visual art but in philosophy and literature. Still, when I got to NSCAD in 1972, I had been making things for some time. Mostly sculptures. And then I encountered Gerald Ferguson, who was Garry Kennedy’s behind-the-scenes guy. At that stage Jerry’s work was very conceptually driven, and he had been in the famous Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art around ’71. That show included pretty well-known artists like David Askevold, John Baldessari and Sol LeWitt, who of course all had ties to NSCAD as well, though Jerry was the only painter in that show. I responded to his work quite a lot, and it was the first time that making artwork ever really made sense to me. So to this day it’s still kind of the backbone of my work in lots of ways.

KH: Yes, and I would say I also see that backbone in your performance work, which also often engaged your background in literature. They seem to have “recipes” in their descriptions like much of Sol LeWitt’s work, as do many of your paintings. Can you describe some of those works?

JM: I will if I can remember them! [Laughs]

John Murchie, “see what you think”, Performance (attempted shredding of the estimated weight of the Dalhousie Art Gallery’s archives in surplus material), Dalhousie Art Gallery, 2012. Later iteration (shredding of the estimated weight of the entire history of Art in America magazine in street and junk mail) performed at AC Institute, NYC, 2015. Photo courtesy of Dalhousie Art Gallery.

It was always important to me that performance work exist in the moment, so only a few have ever been documented, like a piece I did for the Nickel Art Museum in Calgary as part of the M:ST Mountain Standard Time Performative Arts Festival which was recorded simply because they recorded all of the work that was performed. As for “conceptual recipes,” I tended always to have titles that were self-descriptive, after having gone the short historic period where everything was Untitled. So, whatever title is pretty much tells you in some way whatever you are about to engage with – if it’s called Four-Sided Blue Box then it’s probably a four-sided blue box. [Laughs] When I did a performance called Opening.Open.Closed at Eye Level gallery in Halifax in 1980 the gallery was on the second floor of a building on Barrington Street. They always used napkins and a paper cups for the openings. So I covered the entire floor of one room with paper napkins and the other room with paper cups. There was a glass door so you could see into one room without opening the door, but not the other. For the opening I managed to get the cups right up to the door, and when you looked in it was quite beautiful. I mean it was stupid, and I’ve always been interested in that – stupid throwaway materials that in repetition can be quite beautiful. But the crux was that to go inside the room and experience it, you had to destroy it, because as soon as you opened the door there was a nuclear-bomb-esque chain reaction kind of thing. They just went pluuuum. And then followed the traces where people would walk because it would continue to get disturbed as they did so. But the pleasing perfection of it all was destroyed as soon as you opened the door. It was actually Ron Shuebrook who went on to be the president of the Ontario College of Art and Design who first opened the door – much to his chagrin, because he knew what would happen. Anyway, there were photographs of the rooms at the end of the evening which were developed into this little document, but the original negatives that were my proposal to Eye Level have been destroyed. So all that is left is the publication, two prints from those negatives, and that’s it. Gone. Garbage. Hopefully by now, forty years later, those cups and napkins have biodegraded into the world somewhere, or been recycled into something else.

KH: Yes, they are probably long since soil, or perhaps in a landfill somewhere, since it was 1980! But certainly not in a museum or archive, at any rate.

JM: Exactly. At the time I was interested in the question of where the art was. That’s the whole issue, if you’re a naïf like myself. I mean artistically naïve, in the sense of not being academically trained in art and so on. Another good example of that line of questioning is a piece that I did for the Khyber Centre for the Arts when they invited me to produce a work. They had this little closet in their space that I lined with tinfoil, put in an incredibly bright light, and closed the door. If you wanted to see the work you would have to open the door, at which point you would be blinded so you couldn’t see anything. And people would immediately shut the door because it was annoying… not annoying so much as actually blinding, really. So once again, you were kept from the work by the work.

KH: It seems to me that a lot of this work was connected by withholding – like a desire to suspend a certain beautiful moment or a direct experience of a thing. There is some sort of mediation there.

JM: I’d never thought of it in that way, but I suppose there’s truth in that. I guess for me I’m interested in how your sense of one thing is changed in proximity to something else. For me this mostly comes out in painting. For example, if I put a coat of paint down on top of a white thing then the white thing becomes a green thing, and then if I put another coat on top of the green thing it becomes a red thing, but it’s still a green thing and a white thing and a red thing. It’s just that you can’t see it. That’s one of paint’s principle features – its ability to disguise itself.

John Murchie, untitled studio experiment, 2017.

KH: Certainly this kind of optical deception and chromatic depth is present in the work of op artists like Bridget Riley, or even the black monochromes of Ad Reinhardt, but your work tends to merge these cool but expressive experiential elements with your own subjectivity in a way that I find quite visceral, sometimes cheeky, but also moving. I’m thinking about your relationship to lines, in particular. Can you talk about your tattoos?

JM: They’re still there!

KH: [Laughs] Yes, well, in some ways they are only slightly less ephemeral than your paper cups and napkins, in the sense that you yourself are rather ephemeral in reference to geological or cosmic time…

JM: True. I honestly don’t remember how I began working with lines exactly, except that it began soon after I started working at NSCAD. My use of straight lines is probably another reflection of the fact that I was interested in making works in visual art but had no particular skills or training, and I also had no interest in gaining those skills. That compounded with my background literature and my interest in science and mathematics. As for the tattoos, they are artworks that I’ve had for twenty-two years now. Most of my life I’ve worked in some sort of job where I’m dressed with sleeves covering the majority of the work, so the question most people will wonder is how far up my body they go. There is an implication that they continue.

KH: I’m looking at them now – they are on the center of your forearms, beginning at the wrist and ending at the elbow. I remember you saying once that one was black and the other blue, though of course now the black one is blueing, and the blue one is blueing further, which is also interesting in terms of tracking time. Lines are of course related to a human sense of time as a linear concept, and certainly your continued use of the line connects much of your work through time.

John Murchie, “Black and Blue”, 1996. Photos courtesy of Gemey Kelly.

JM: When I got them done in the mid-‘90s, there weren’t that many people around with tattoos. Those from my father’s generation who had been to war certainly had some, but aside from that they weren’t that prevalent, but were starting to be. I’ve always been interested in how a sculpture can be a painting and vice versa. I still see them as my drawings, basically. On the other hand, I’m obviously a three-dimensional thing, so its sculptural, and also I see it as an ongoing performance, until my last breath. It’s the only way I can give my body real value. I have offered this artwork to the National Gallery of Canada. I told them they couldn’t have it until I passed away. And then, they would have to make a decision as to whether they preferred to see it as a drawing, and skin me, or see it as a sculpture.

KH: And embalm you?

JM: [Laughs] Yes. It’s their choice. I see both possibilities as perfectly adequate and true, but obviously you have to make a choice. Curatorially speaking, I think they would make the better choice than I would. From my perspective, it’s one of my most successful works.

KH: I’m led to think of Santiago Sierra’s 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People from 2000, which of course was done much later and garnered a lot of negative attention for the obvious problematics – paying prostitutes the price of their choice substance to be tattooed across their backs as some sort of unit. Obviously your work is exceedingly different, but I can’t help but bring Sierra to mind. Both works, regardless of their extreme difference, involve an attempt at geometry against the fleshiness of the human body, and demand that the living body be seen as an art object.

JM: Yes well even in my case not everyone has been empathetic with the work either, like my mother, for example. [Laughs] She thought it was the most stupid thing she’d heard in her life. Conversations around their utility come up most often in hospitals when my sleeves are rolled up to do blood work and the like. I guess they look suspiciously like the surgical marks doctors draw when they’re getting ready to cut you open.

KH: And then some uninformed surgeon comes in and gives you a new laceration you weren’t expecting! [Laughs] So after NSCAD, you were the Coordinator of Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre Sackville, New Brunswick for ten years, but have since retired. It seems to me that these days you’ve mostly turned your focus toward painting.

John Murchie, “Crossword Painting, The Globe and Mail (December 27, 2014)”, acrylic on newsprint, third panel of a triptych, 2014-Present.

JM: Yes, well, that’s probably just my age and lack of energy! I have been doing crossword paintings for about 20-years now. For these works I take the full-page crossword from the Globe and Mail and use it as the basis for a painting. Number one will be blue, number two is green, and so on. The colours are assigned arbitrarily, but every once in a while you’ll have to make decisions because, for example, in the case of the number twelve, it is both one and two. They become grids of colour where the crossword would be, and once they’re full I move on to the next.

KH: So they’re almost like visual permutations?

JM: Yes, permutations. And then my other paintings have been getting progressively smaller. I work on small birch board supports that feel like objects, so if I want the work to stand like a sculpture or go on the wall like a painting, it can do either. Francesca Valente, a curator from Toronto, asked me to contribute to the project IMAGO, Luciano Benetton Collection. I was given a very small – 10 x 12 cm! – stretched canvas. I decided to explore my fascination with the negative line that emerges between two painted forms. This stupid little thing has always fascinated me. The work had four sides and four colours on top of one another in various sequences to produce six straight lines, which is Any Way You Look At It: Six Straight Lines. No matter which way you rotate it, it’s still the same damn thing. And since, like you said, the work is in some way a series of permutations, I have also been making work that explores this directly by using a grid and a number generator that will tell me however many colours I am using in a specific sequence.

KH: In addition to treating paintings as sculptures, some of your pieces also work sculpturally with paint. In these works paint is used as layering device that reminds me a bit of the work of Eric Cameron, though rather than coating the object to abstract it, you layer the interior or edges of an object and keep the external nature of the thing itself exposed. An acting of filling or framing rather than obscuring. Are you still producing work of that nature?

JM: Yes, Struts used to give out small, brown boxes for their fundraising auction Sweetest Little Thing. It’s fundraiser event that commissions artists – both locals like Graeme Patterson and Leah Garnett, and past exhibitors like Micah Lexier and Amalie Atkins – to produce works for Valentine’s Day. I have three of those boxes, and I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it but for a number of years I’ve just been going around and around the interior of each with acrylic, very intuitively with no predetermined colours or planning. The logical finish for the work is when the box is full of paint. They are pretty extraordinary.

KH: And are they nearing full yet?

John Murchie, “Untitled”, 2010-Present.

JM: I think there’s a fair ways left to go. But they’re very heavy now. I have a feeling that all of a sudden I’ll probably know that’s as far as I want to take it. Because the boxes are made of cardboard they’ve begun to bend inward from the sides against the tension of the paint. More recently I’ve begun working with two wooden boxes of the same scale and I’ll be curious to see what that’s like, because the surface on the inside is kind of rough and that of course effects the texture of the paint as it’s layered on. At the top edge there is kind of a little lip, so even from the time I put the first stroke down it began catching there, just a tiny bit, but it only takes a tiny bit before the effect starts multiplying. I’m interested in how I’ve got these identical objects and I’ve been doing the same thing to them but the outcomes are extremely different. You’re more of the scientist than I am, you might have some ideas as to how this might happen.

KH: It’s hard to make things identical in this world, even when DNA is replicating itself!

JM: Yes, everything one does is somehow related to those kinds of physical and scientific facts about the world that we live in.

KH: You’ve had the honour of being one of the few or only art critics in a small artistic community – not just Sackville, but Atlantic Canada for that matter, and even the whole of Canada tends to have very few. Coming from Chicago I know this can be difficult even in larger communities, which in reality are never as large as they seem. Can you talk about what it’s like to be a critic in a very small artistic context?

JM: It’s hard. I stopped doing the reviews. I was writing criticism between the late ‘70s and ‘90s, primarily for Arts Atlantic and Visual Art News in Halifax, but also for Canadian Art magazine and Parachute. Being critical was difficult but necessary, because quite often I had to write about work that really wasn’t any good. Too often it took me right to the edge of the role, which I did not like. These are still works that someone has put a fair bit of blood sweat and tears into, so it’s hard not to feel a little icky about it. But it has to be done. Many of the people I was writing about were people I knew very directly – you know, it’s not like I was writing about Jeff Koons or some superstar artist whom I’d never see, so I wouldn’t have to worry if I said “this sucks” because he’s probably not going to come over here and whack me on the head or something. But once for example I wrote a fairly critical review of the work of Thaddeus Holownia, who I see fairly regularly, which was not an easy thing to do. I still stand behind what I wrote, even twenty years later, but still. It’s different to be invited to write for a catalogue or in a similar context, because in that case if I’ve agreed to do it than I’ve probably got some sympathy for the work I’m writing about.

KH: Right, but aside from having to look the person you’ve reviewed in the eye, wouldn’t you say that an art community benefits from criticism, regardless of the scale? And if not you, someone who I think of as a sort of thick-skinned and frank person, then who?

JM: Oh yes, I think it benefits. I got enough of a reputation that at some point I was at an event and an artist who I’d written about (who was quite drunk at the time) came up to me and said, “You know everyone here hates you?” Luckily, I had a thick enough skin and quick enough wit to reply, “Everybody?” [Laughs] But, it is both necessary and difficult. I wrote a bad review of the work of a friend of mine for a show he had at the Owens Gallery, and I felt kind of bad about doing it, but the show had problems. The review got published and low and behold within a few months I got not one, but several letters from people saying that they appreciated what I’d written. Those letters took me a long distance toward making me comfortable in my own skin moving forward. I don’t see much in the way of criticism being written in the North Atlantic today; there’s a kind of tact that people take these days in which they cling to the theoretical so they don’t have to say anything, really. Not anything meaningful. Mostly we get a fair bit of, “it’s just really great, so wonderful, the colours are really bright, it’s great…”

KH: But of course as the director of the only artist-run in a coastal community and as someone who spent a good deal of time engaging in local town council, community is obvious really important to you, which could be harder to balance as the local critic. You ran for mayor in 2012 – can you talk about that?

JM: That wasn’t the first time I’ve went for public office. You’re right to say that I’ve been fairly active in my community and I think that more artists and artist-run centres should be, honestly. There is totally no question that there is more consciousness amongst the non-artist community in Sackville about what goes on in the arts community because of our participation with that wider community. There just is. And of course through that participation I gain more consciousness about some other kinds of concerns that I generally don’t pay attention to, or take for granted. Anyway I had been urged to run for town council before, and in 2012 it turned out that the day before the nominations closed there was only one person out there running, someone who was not a very interesting person, I thought. A pretty shameful democracy, if you ask me. I didn’t think I could beat him, but I didn’t want him to see him win just because no one else cared enough to run.

KH: That’s great!

JM: Yes well, by the next morning when nominations closed, there were four people running! In another election in Halifax, I became fairly active in my campaign, going door to door and speaking with people about issues and concerns. I was totally destroyed by the woman who was the incumbent, who even left town during the campaign. I went around and knocked on virtually every one of the 30,000 applicable voter doors, while she relaxed in Barbados or something. [Laughs] I didn’t really have much of a platform so much as the feeling that there must be other ways of doing some things. There must be other ways of paying more homage to some issues that are generally speaking important, like the environment and so on. I’m usually able to stir things up to some extent. But that’s not much to run on.

KH: But in this case you would have wanted to be mayor, it wasn’t just about forming an opposition?

JM: No, absolutely. I wouldn’t have gone through all that if I hadn’t wanted to be mayor.

KH: Do you think you’d run again, or was 2012 “Murchie for Mayor” the last time?

JM: No, by the time it was all done I would be seventy-eight years old, and there are a lot of other things that I want to do with my life other than whatever would be entailed there. Like paint, for example!

KH: And time is precious, so thank you for giving some of yours up to speak with me, John!

JM: So much fun! Any time.

  John Murchie is a Canadian artist. You can find him where he lives, in Sackville, New Brunswick.

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Thinks: John Murchie published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv