At the Photo Gallery of the National Film Board,
Ottawa November 1970 to January 1971
by Barry Lord
artscanada February to March 1971 p.p.’42-45

At least since impressionism photography has been mid-wife at the birth of most of the new art forms that matter most; yet photographers themselves have usually been paradoxically anxious to be accepted on traditional terms into the very temple of the fine arts they have been helping to undermine. Now at least come indications — the Gar Smith slide show last season and the B.C. Almanac process this one— that young artists are willing to use photography to help create a mass-production art of public distribution in which the image is everything and the precious object for exploitation and possession doesn’t exist at all.

Almanac process is the execution by 15 photographers of an exhibition-Cum-set-of-books of photographs collectively and bilingually entitled B C Almanac(H) -CB. Originally produced for the National Film Board stills gallery in Ottawa, where it opened in November, it will also be presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery in April. The book-set, available loose in a box or bound in a single volume, is being circulated by the N.F.B. as the eight in its series of Image photo-books; the Museum of Modern Art is also selling it. Signally each of the books cost 50c, the set sells for $6.95 for all 15 books. The comparatively, low cost was achieved by printing the hundreds of photographs (often nine or 12 to a page) on perishable newsprint. On the gallery walls, instead of the glossy originals to which the book would be secondary, are only photographs of the book pages; looking at this “exhibition” produces, if anything, a desire to see the books themselves. Thus the true nature of the camera art is recognized: the reproduction for mass distribution comes first, and the “photograph as object” is only a record of it.

This kind of fidelity to process provided a rational for ill aspects of production. The gallery walls in Ottawa were painted in the series of greys of the photographer’s grey scale, and the spine of the bound volume had the same motif. A picture of the requisite semen tons of newsprint stacked in the printer;s shop graces the cover of the bound set; and the invitation to the ottawa showing as well as the title page of the bound book offer a glorious photo of the B.C. forest from which the pulp for that newsprint came. The artists also wanted to use the grinning face of their printer as the photo for the shows poster, but Film Board director Sydney Newman who allowed plenty of pubic hair and nipples and pregnant nudes in the show and the book, censored this head-and-shoulders shot of the grinning Rob Brown, on the grounds that it would harm the Board’s public image . “Liberal” values and “good taste,” in art as in government remain the enemy.

In many ways the Almanac process was yet another product of the Intermedia group. Dennis Vance supplied responsive electronic sound for the Ottawa exhibition, and Gerry Gilbert closed the extended-almanac cir cute by taking videotape of the opening. Much of his tape showed the playback TV unit itself, sometimes while it was telecasting one of the tapes that the artists had made in Vancouver. Many of them have been at one time or another associated with Intermedia, and while the organizers Jack Dale and Michael de Courcy are recognized as photographers, a good number of the others — Roy Kiyooka, Michael Morris, Ian Baxter’s N.E. Thing Co., Glen Lewis and Gerry Gilbert– are primarily known for their work in other art forms.

Jack Dale”s Totems and Judith Egglington’s I am a living creature both look comparatively conventional, with their expressive inter-relation of images. Vincent Trasov’s dead-pan pix of his own and his friend’s favourite clothes on a hanger (an unacknowledged homage to Jim Dine) and Robertson Wood’s Snap Shots with eight or nine or a dozen pix to a page in family album fashion, suggest much more clearly the tone of Almanac (h) as a whole.

The approach to subject-matter, needless to say, is documentary. Ian Baxter simply records some of the N.E.Thing Co.’s photographic projects. Michael Morris gives us a series of shots of two male nudes seated among rocks, one with his back to us reflecting the light from the sun onto the other’s body; they could well be stills from a film. Roy Kiyooka photographs rock formations on Hornby Island that look like his sculpture, adds some nude and clothed figures that happened to be there with him, and is careful to include a few shots with polaroid prints scattered over the landscape.

Allowing artists to do the layout led to an intriguing multiplicity of ways of relating to such images. Timothy Porter contents himself with one-to-a-page presentations of his matter-of-fact shots of bus interiors and hotel corridors. Glenn Lewis in-sets a littered bedroom interior shot in the corner of a series of pictures of “posed” seashells in forest settings. Jone Pane puts her “projection” images into a comic-strip “thought” bubble, inside the “projecting” picture. And Gerry Gilbert allows his personal sensibility to control every connection of subject and form in his three tiered collage pages.

Curiously, the most consistent applications of the philosophy seemed to me the best and the worst books in the set. Christos Dikeakos’ documents of a drive through Vancouver streets, displayed four to a page, were consistent enough but absolutely vapid. Michael de Courcy’s nine-to-a-page document of the birth of a daughter, of the other hand, is the most moving and completely satisfying book in the set. Entitled Season Cycle, it includes many individually beautiful photos on its way from early pregnancy through the delivery room to the bonneted, crawling infant and beyond to the mother back in the sea. Over it all de Courcy maintains an open as-it-comes vigilance that re-enforces the real-life narrative and allows the telling images as if naturally into his lens.

In all, Almanac(h) is undoubtably the most advanced show of the current season, conceptually. It confirms once more that it is through photography today that significant art forms can be created. But it also, inevitably, points to a problem: birth cycles and beach parties are groovy, but for artists arrived at this point of formal consciousness must there not also be an equal attention to content? This kind of public-document form demands a public-document to match – and something a bit less banal than a drive through Vancouver. The assignment to match public art forms with adequate public content seems to me to be at the top of the artists agenda for the early 1970s.

 

Forest image used for invitation to opening of B.C. Almanac(h) C-B
Photographs by Tamio Wakayama
"Gerry Gilbert & Glen Lewis"
"B.C. Almanac(h) C-B collected ephemera"