Navigating Without a Compass

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Douglas Ord composed the four essays in this book between 1991 and 1996
as a grant recipient of the Ontario Art Council’s Arts Writing
Program, a program intended to promote informed writing about the arts.
The essays contribute significantly to our appreciation and
understanding of several modern art exhibitions at the National Art
Gallery, the Musée d’art contemporain, the Art Gallery of Ontario,
and the Ottawa School of Art. In each essay, the author reviews and
analyzes the artifacts, discusses the literature related to them,
describes their creation and exhibition, and provides a narrative
context of historical/biographical incidents for the artists.

The first essay discusses the controversies around various exhibitions
(e.g., Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire and Jana Sterbak’s Flesh
Dress), details the autobiographical events that stimulated Ord’s
interest in the arts, and outlines the evolution of artistic revolts,
from the avant-garde movement through to a modern flow/fracture paradigm
“of mediated images in film, television and the Internet.”

In explaining why public controversy engulfs art exhibitions, Ord
focuses first on The Favela, Tadashi Kawamata’s 35-shed installation
at the National Gallery He then compares and contrasts two simultaneous
exhibitions at Montreal’s Musée, one by several AIDS activists and
the other by various Hungarian artists.

The third essay concerns Chaim Soutine and his not-so-beneficent
benefactor, Dr. Albert Barnes, while the concluding essay deals with the
exhibition of the work of the Toronto-based computer artist, David
Rokeby, at the Ottawa School of Art.

Anyone with an interest in art should enjoy this entertaining and
educational collection on art and writing about art.