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The Way Greg Curnoe Was -- Perhaps

8/29/2017

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The Way It Is: The Life of Greg Curnoe, by James King. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2017. 392 pp. $45.00.

(This review lightly revised Nov. 2018)

The Way It Is: The Life of Greg Curnoe is a beautifully produced book, printed on heavy high-gloss paper to accommodate more than 70 colour photos of Curnoe’s art – worth its price for those more than for James King's commentary. The images create a parallel biography to the one which King attempts in his text, and to a large extent renders his pedestrian by contrast to its own richness and complexity. King doesn’t discover anything really new or unknown about Curnoe, or attempt to do much original research, but he does assemble much known information that has not previously been together in the same place. As well as a beautiful book, it’s a handy compilation of facts and opinions together with a bibliography of commentary about Curnoe in which the only items missing appear to be two articles of mine from 1995 and 2003 about his lettered work.   
                         
     King gives the impression that he was fairly thorough in interviewing Curnoe’s family and friends and in researching Curnoe’s critical reception and the notes and journals he left for his archive, held by the Art Gallery of Ontario, but he seldom questions or reflects for long on what he encounters. He tends to accept at face value most of what his interviewees tell him, despite being aware that many speak from backgrounds utterly alien to the assumptions about art and art history that preoccupied Curnoe. Even about non-art matters he can be recklessly presumptuous in his generalizations. For  example, he declares early in the book about the noise band in which Curnoe was co-founder and drummer (the Nihilist Spasm Band) that “all the members were men who felt strongly that a woman’s place was to be a helpmate to her spouse or partner” (136). How he or a possible informant – he does not identify a source – could claim to “know” such a thing about eight men – right to the strength of the feelings – is baffling. (In chapter 10 he quotes band member Art Pratten as saying of the group that “Playing in the only thing we have in common. [....] We couldn’t agree on anything, not one damn thing” [216].)

      King is presumptuous also about Curnoe, buttressing otherwise unsupported claims about him with the phrase “Greg would have known” (139), or “Greg would have immediately realized,” “Greg would have been
aware” (142), Greg would have seen” (151), “Greg would have known


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Iconic Words: When Text is Visual Art

11/21/2014

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This is the text and accompanying images of a presentation I gave last night at the RSC meetings in Quebec City. -- FD
PicturebpNichol, “Letter to a Loved One,” 1967.
1. In my recent biography of Canadian poet and lay psychotherapist bpNichol I outlined the arguments he developed around 1964 for writing visual poems. Unaware of the international concrete poem movement, he was calling his proposed new poems “ideopomes.”

PicturebpNichol, “Blues,” 1967.
2. These “ideopomes” would help him, he believed, avoid didacticism and self-pitying emotional expression, which he saw as the main weaknesses of his conventional poetry. He also believed that self-pity and narcissism were serious limits on the Freudian psychotherapy he was undergoing, and limits to the success of any psychoanalysis.

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3. He would later call his visual poetry a means of resisting “arrogance.” In these arguments one can perceive the shadow of high modernist arguments against Victorian moralism and sentimentality, and in favor of imagism and impersonality; collage and “objective correlative” in early Eliot, and of Pound’s “ideogrammic method.”
(sections 4-20 via "Read More" below)


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 Greg Curnoe '61-65 -- at the Dawn of Contemporary Installation Art

2/9/2014

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This show at the downtown London (ON) Michael Gibson Gallery of large, possibly unfinished Curnoe works from the 1961-1965 period accompanied by numerous smaller sculptural pieces will be one of the most important Canadian art show in Ontario this year – but also likely, alas, to be little known outside of London. The show includes the last large works from the early 60s period remaining in his studio and the last remaining constructions from incidental materials similar to his celebrated Drawer Full of Stuff of 1961.

The central piece of the exhibition, an 18-foot tryptich presenting the outline of a female nude in three poses, in fluorescent orange, red, green and blue, and on its verso coordinated portraits of Louis Riel and the Rolling Stones in similar areas of unvariegated colour, is remarkable in numerous ways. Not the least is that it shows Curnoe working at large-scale installation art in the early 1960s,  before the term was coined and long before it entered the Oxford in 1969, and before his Kamikaze painting/sculpture of 1967. As well, this stunning  triptych has

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all the elements that one is familiar with in Curnoe’s mature work – the fluorescent areas of plain colour, the extraordinary rendering of spatial proportions, the combinations of text, collage, carpentry and paint, the use of text to comment on the process of creating the work, and the use of templated fonts. It’s thus a major piece in the history both of Curnoe’s development and of world art. Curnoe may have abandoned it because of the difficulty of combining and erecting its three parts – the legs he had made for it were insufficient and have been replaced for this exhibition. He had attached metals eyes to the top, possibly in hopes of suspending the pieces from a ceiling.  He also appears to have had misgivings about some of the visual elements. The text on the left panel appears to be on its way to being erased. On the centre panel there is an uncharacteristically blurred area beside the chin of the blue-and-


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Greg Curnoe: Unforgettable, Too Little Remembered

11/14/2013

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Today marks 21 years since the extraordinary Canadian artist Greg Curnoe was killed, in a cycling accident near London that was as puzzling as his sculptures, installations and paintings were remarkable. It was a death reminiscent of Tom Thomson’s – both unlikely and yet tightly linked to his ways of living and creating. I still say hello to Greg nearly every time I drive across the Highway 402 / Longwoods Road overpass that overlooks that Delaware hill on which he died. Beyond are 1812 battlefields which he had often visited and referenced in his art; nearby live some of the First Nations men and women who were assisting him with the books and painting series that he would leave unfinished.
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Despite the 2001 Art Gallery of Ontario Curnoe retrospective Greg Curnoe: Life & Stuff and Dennis Reid and Matthew Teitelbaum’s generous catalogue (right), the Canadian art world does not seem to have yet taken stock of the prodigious figure that he was. There has yet been no Curnoe biography, no catalogue raisonné. In today’s art market Curnoe seems viewed more as an outlier than as the “singularly significant Canadian artist” that the 2001 catalogue proclaimed. Amusingly the Heffel Gallery’s “Top 100 Canadian Artists” and “Top 100 Canadian Painters” lists currently include the likes of Herbert Palmer, Ann Savage, Franz Johnson, Henry Masson and Doris McCarthy – but no Curnoe. One reason for this may be that Curnoe’s work is still too recent for there to be much on the art market; another that his work has little resemblance to the realism and abstractionism that dominate the lists; but a third is surely that his work has received little of the public attention that those of contemporaries such as Milne, Lemieux, Colville or Kurelek have received.

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Canadian artists have usually found it difficult to be simultaneously regional, national and international. Not Curnoe, with his reworkings of Dadaism, his bicycle motifs that drew on the racing traditions of Europe, his technically daring and intensely local rubber-stamp works and his highly original contributions to the self-portrait genre – as both above and left, on the cover of his book Deeds Nations. (In that genre I suspect he belongs with Rembrandt and Schiele.) In the same year he could paint a Lake Erie beach, an homage to Van Dongen, a Canadian-made racing bicycle, and create a three-dimensional work of super-realism.

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, Joni’s “Big Yellow Taxi” lamented. In Curnoe’s case, even that proverb hasn’t held.

FD


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    Author

    FRANK DAVEY: Poet, former Coach House Press editor, co-founder of TISH newsletter in 1961, co-founder of e-mag Swift Current in 1984, editor of poetics journal Open Letter, 'author' of Bardy Google in 2010 (Talonbooks), author of the tell-much biography of bpNichol, aka bpNichol in 2012 (ECW), and author of the recently published poetry collection Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions (Mansfield). He has two other websites: a personal one at FrankDavey.net and one (co-managed with David Rosenberg) focused on poet bpNichol at  akabpNichol.net -- have a look!

    Postal Address: Books for review or other mail may be sent to FD at OPEN LETTER, 102 Oak Street, Strathroy, ON N7G 3K3, Canada

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