Simon Denny in huge Canadian art exhibition

MashUp, The Birth of Modern Culture
Vancouver Art Gallery
Until June 12 

The Vancouver Art Gallery’s “MashUp. The Birth of Modern Culture” is a monumental exhibition tracing the development of art over the past 100 years.

But this is not a usual chronological history of art as there are almost no paintings in the show. The exhibition is really about how, over the last 100 years starting with the development of collage and the readymade, there has been the development of art forms that make use of the mechanical techniques of production and reproduction and allied to that the increasing notion of appropriation.

The idea of a mash-up of cultural forms is presented in the show with 371 works by 156 artists and includes visual artists, musicians, composers, writers designers, architects, filmmakers, video and digital. What has been achieved is a remarkable insight into the way in which art and artist respond to ideas reworking concepts and modes of working to create new ideas.

The exhibition is presented over four floors of the gallery with each of the floors devoted to both a period of modern art as well as providing a context for the works. The four floors are entitled; The Early 20th Century – Cut, Collage, Montage and Readymade at the Birth of Modern Culture, Post-War – Cut, Copy and Quotation in the Age of the Mass Media, Late Twentieth Century –  Splicing, Sampling and the Street in the Age of Appropriation and The Digital Age – Hacking, Remix and the Archive in the Age of Post-Production. The exhibition starts with examples of the composite photographs of the Canadian photographer William Notman as well as Victorian photocollages.

These initial collage works are seen as leading to the collages of Picasso, Braque, Gris and Schwitters where the artists used scraps of material, newspaper, photos and other found material.

Also influenced by the photographic medium’s possibilities were many of the Dada and Surrealist artists with the production of photomontage by photographers such as Hannah Höch and John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld) Also among the early users of the collage techniques was Joseph Cornell with his sculptural assemblages. 

He was also an early experimenter of collaged film and the exhibition is running his first film “Rose Hobart" which uses clips from the film East of Borneo and a documentary on an eclipse. The exhibition includes several of Marcel Duchamp works including the readymades “Fountain,” “Bicycle Wheel” and “L.H.O.O.Q” featuring an image of the Mona Lisa with Duchamp’s addition of a moustache.

There is also a group of music boxes by the Italian sound artist Luigi Russolo who wanted orchestras to use a range of man-made noises which could be assembled and created in his music making boxes.

The use of found materials in drawings and development of paper constructions, created an entirely new mode of representation as artists broke down barriers between disciplines, redefining what constituted “fine” art

The contextualisation of the everyday manifested in the use of found objects, images, sounds and words would prove to be one of the principal themes of artistic practice over the ensuing century and the three other floors show how the initial ideas of appropriation and reuse developed over the century.

One of the key artists presented in the post-war section is Andy Warhol with several of his series being exhibited – “Electric Chair,” “Marilyn” and “Mao” as well as his series on President John F Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. These works bring together ideas about mass production, the use of existing images as well as their use for political and social commentary.

In one area there was John Cage's musical score along with a recording of the work as well an elaborate interactive set of five circular Plexiglas sheets by Robert Rauschenberg. There was also a film of a dance work choreographed by Merce Cunningham with music by John Cage and designs by Rauschenberg. Other artists who are used to draw out the connections include Frank Gehry with a partial reconstruction of his Santa Monica House, works by Nam June Paik including an interview with Marshall McLuhan and the two films by Jean-Luc Goddard.

This period showed the spawning of ideas around the development of popular music with a number of experimental artists such as Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby.

On another of the floors, there were further connections with D J Spooky and Adam Ant The Splicing and Sampling galleries dealt with examples of contemporary appropriation with a sculpture by Jeff Koons of Jane Mansfield and Pink Panther as well; as Sherrie Levine’s “Fountain, After Marcel Duchamp” a bronze version of his readymade.

Other examples of appropriation included a series of Sherrie Levine’s reworking of some Walker Evans’ photographs, Richard Prince’s take on the Marlboro Man advertisements and Vicky Alexander's blow-ups of Christine Brinkley magazine images.

The ground floor staircase featured a huge installation by Barbara Kruger as part of the Digital Age section of the show which had a major emphasis on video and sound work. There was also a linking of disparate elements across, time, media, content and emotional connection in several of the works. A work by New Zealander Simon Denny was included. His “Startup Case Mod Meerkat vs Periscope” was an exploration of technological obsolescence and corporate culture constructions of national identity. A major inclusion was the video “The Woolworths Chronicle of 1979” by 2012 Turner prizewinner Elisabeth Price.

The work links notions of the afterlife moving from an educational style work about the carvings in a 17th-century church into a more dramatic sequence using material from a disastrous fire in a Manchester department store in 1979. Overall, it is a confronting and challenging exhibition abounding with surprising, subtle and not-so-subtle connections. It provides new ways of thinking about contemporary art and the way that art and artists have changed over the past 100 years

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