There’s a new art exhibit up at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Hart House, titled Love and Scandal, and it’s been garnering quite a bit of attention from the likes of CBC Radio, the National Post, and Toronto.com. All this is a bit surprising.
For one, it’s only a selection of works from Hart House’s permanent collection. Also, frankly, not many people look to U of T for interesting art. And finally, the show really doesn’t accomplish anything monumental, despite the eager claims of the curator’s statement.
The show (which runs until Jan. 30) contains only 25 pieces, mostly paintings, each of which was selected by curator Milena Placentile for very specific reasons. The concept is this: if we are forced to view art through a very specific lens, one that divides everything we see into rigid, oppositional categories, we may be able to learn more about our own ways of seeing, and how our own ways of seeing influence our perceptions. This is where the exhibit’s title comes in: “love” and “scandal” are loaded terms that resist easy definition.
Placentile calls the show “part exhibition, part experiment,” and the experiment segment of it comes into play with pencils and strips of paper provided at the entrance. The name of each piece is listed next to a blank space where it can be checked off as belonging to either the “love” or “scandal” category. Participants are encouraged to loosely define what each term means to them and view the show while placing each piece in column A or column B.
Afterwards, they tack the finished exercises to the wall provided and compare responses. Or they can read the curator’s statement, which includes Placentile’s own responses to her questions. The idea is that other people’s opinions may shed light on our own subjectivity or the significance of context, and the whole exercise may teach us something about the process of viewing and understanding art.
This is all fine in theory, but it doesn’t necessarily work as planned. First of all, the process of classifying each piece into the strict categories of either “love” or “scandal” left me frustrated and irritated. I found the categories limiting at best, and absolutely ridiculous at worst. After a halfhearted attempt at genuinely partaking in the exercise, I finished the rest by random selection.
There are some interesting pieces in the show, surprisingly, as I’d have expected the Hart House purchasing committee to be headed by conservative types with a penchant for Group of Seven landscapes.
A few notable works caught my eye: the bright, pink-hued watercolour Sheila by Greg Curnoe, two fantastically coloured nudes by Robert Markle, a painter famous for his brushes with censorship law in the 1960s, and Joel, a beautifully rendered pastel by George Hawken, a senior lecturer in U of T’s visual studies department. These gems lose some dazzle among the rest of the show, however, works with which they sometimes share little, either visually or conceptually.
The curator’s lofty intentions may fall a bit flat in the real-life situation of viewing art, but the show shouldn’t be ignored altogether.
Just don’t expect any epiphanies; new ways of seeing and understanding art may not be waiting within those quiet white rooms.
