Barbara Astman
Untitled (I Was Thinking of You) , 1979
manipulated Polaroid photograph
From the collection of McMillan LLP
AUGUST 5TH - SEPTEMBER 12TH, 2010
ART AT WORK
Corporate Collecting Practices Today
PART 2
Opening Reception, Part 2: Thursday, August 5th 6pm
A free shuttle bus will depart from the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen Street W., Toronto) at 7 pm to the reception. There will be an informal talk by the curator at 8 pm. The shuttle bus will return by 9 pm.
Curated by Geraldine Davis
Exhibition continues until September 12th
In corporate art collecting, connoisseurship meets branding in its most elegant form. Post-capitalistic discourse hasn’t completely penetrated the quiet halls of commerce where private art treasures convey status from some of our cities’ most expensive walls. By the act of possession and proud display, their owners transfer a new aspect to their acquisitions. “Collectors’ items” become tools of wealth and power because of, or in spite of, their sometimes critical content. Does ownership diminish their capacity to transform us? Seeing these pieces “at work” in large bank lobbies, private banking’s hushed halls or poised above Lake Ontario in a major law firm’s reception, corporate art reveals an awkward and interesting symbiosis. Is this art still working when it’s “at work”? Who is it working for? Are these works able to perform their cultural critique even in their reluctant function as “office décor”? This ambiguity of functions pervades even the most provocative of corporate collecting practices.
What happens when collecting evolves into corporate responsibility? In discussing the merits and foibles of collecting practices, Art at Work unpacks a few secrets in the marriage of art and business. Our society’s privatization of culture reflects similar histories elsewhere in Western banks and corporate arts competitions with their prizes and publicity. Curator Geraldine Davis unveils some of this tangled background while peeking inside some of Canada’s major banks, whose thousands of works of art once represented the majority of transactions in our art market. Is corporate art collecting really just astute investing disguised as self-reflection or critical thought? A clever confusion emerges amid aesthetic splendour in these highlights plucked from magnificent collections and re-shuffled for this exhibition.
A First Nations’ youth defiantly returns our gaze in a haunting portrait of society’s least privileged. In its short “collected” life at McMillan LLP, a Toronto law firm, Greg Staats’ memorable 1994 silver print, Wesley Rheaume, rose from partially-despised acquisition to venerated icon. The process of art’s acceptance by its owners and their clients oddly echoes the work’s content as a now-marginalized outsider whose people were once the only insiders is welcomed within. Art’s capacity to transform its audience and our perception is arguably the most subtle and powerful force in contemporary human existence. Especially potent in a society drowning in data, theory and text, visual art often transcends the motivations of owners or the potent influences of corporate settings. In the twinned context of wealth and power, art’s transformative potential ironically invests this unusual form of wealth with greater value. In corporate collections, art vacillates between monetary and social functions even while delivering aesthetic riches.
Photography, portraits and images of people dominate in many contemporary corporate collections. Davis examines the current popularity of photographic media and prevalence of human subjects in contemporary artists’ photo-based practices. The famously unpeopled wilderness landscape once symbolized Canadian ideas of visual beauty. Still powerfully present in Alex Cameron’s environmentally-threatened Georgian Bay Aurora, 1988, from Oslers LLP’s collection, vacant natural scenes have been triumphantly displaced by pictures of ourselves. Along with photographic images by Barbara Astman, Rebecca Belmore, Luis Jacobs, Kelly Wood and others in corporate collections, The Royal Bank of Canada’s recent acquisition of Geoffrey Farmer’s figurative installation for its new building demonstrates the strong corporate appetite for images of people. Davis explores corporate collectors’ fascination with photography and human images in light of contemporary art’s “branding” function in notable collecting practices of Canadian businesses today
Catch Art at Work at the Art Gallery of Mississauga to see artwork not usually available for public viewing.