When photography dealer Howard Greenberg celebrated his 25th anniversary in the business last year, he mounted an exhibition at his midtown Manhattan gallery. Amid 25 seductive highlights from his collection – including an abstract pear by Steichen, a pointillist streetscape by Karl Struss, two pieces of Americana by Walker Evans, and a print of Ruth Orkin’s An American Girl in Italy – he’d constructed a shrine to a book.

The installation made a strong case for the book’s place of honour among the dealer’s rare and expensive artifacts, with a video showing its creation, from typesetting to printing to binding, in an old-fashioned process that even Gutenberg might recognize.

The star of the 10-minute video was Michael Torosian, a Canadian little-known outside the small world of rare-book collectors. Since founding Lumiere Press in a garage at the foot of his yard in the west end of Toronto in 1986, Torosian has published 18 handmade books on photography. Printed on his vintage letter press, they are themselves works of art, limited editions in which the editorial content, design and printing is executed with an aesthete’s eye, an artisan’s hand and a perfectionist’s oversight.

Torosian’s 19th book, An American Gallery, was produced by special order for the Greenberg anniversary and includes stunning high-tech reproductions of the 25 photographs from the exhibit accompanied by the dealer’s commentaries. The book took almost 12 months to produce, slowed down only slightly by the fact that the photos had to be printed separately and then placed by hand into each copy.

Lumiere editions include three volumes on Dave Heath and one each on Lewis Hine, Edward Burtynsky, Paul Strand, Gordon Parks and others. Torosian also has published three books of his own photography work.

The title page of An American Gallery went through 53 different designs before Torosian was satisfied. The typesetting ate up half a year. He took months to figure out how to insert the photographs, which are a different thickness than a normal paper page, to ensure they didn’t cause the book to spring open awkwardly.

“You have to be focused: every day, every week, every month. You can’t just sort of go through the motions, because it’s very unforgiving,” he explains. “I guess it’s like someone who makes violins or something: There might be monetary incentive to turn out 100 violins a year, but if you can only really do 18 credibly, then you’d better stick to the 18.”

“No matter how well a conventional mass-market trade book is produced, in their nature as a physical object, they all look the same: this sort of blockish object. They’re interchangeable. But when someone picks up one of my books, it has the same pedigree as other books, and yet it’s a different species. And that’s what they’re responding to. It’s familiar but it’s outside the ordinary.” A number of Lumiere Press books are in the collections of rare-book libraries.

The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York currently has a remount of the Greenberg anniversary exhibition, including the Lumiere video installation, which will stay up until June 22.

Excerpted from Simon Houpt, Globe and Mail, May 17, 2008

Lumiere Press

“And now I come to the araucaria. I must tell you that on the first floor of this house the stairs pass by a little vestibule at the entrance to a flat which, I am convinced, is even more spotlessly swept and garnished than the others; for this little vestibule shines with a superhuman housewifery. It is a little temple of order. On the parquet floor, where it seems desecration to tread, are two elegant stands and on each a large pot. In the one grows an azalea. In the other a stately araucaria, a thriving, straight-grown baby tree, a perfect specimen, which to the last needle of the topmost twig reflects the pride of frequent ablutions.

Sometimes, when I know that I am unobserved, I use this place as a temple. I take my seat on a step of the stairs above the araucaria and, resting awhile with folded hands, I contemplate this little garden of order and let the touching air it has and its somewhat ridiculous loneliness move me to the depths of my soul. I imagine behind this vestibule, in the sacred shadow, one may say, of the araucaria, a home full of shining mahogany, and a life full of sound respectability - early rising, attention to duty, restrained but cheerful family gatherings, Sunday churchgoing, early to bed.”

Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf is the story of Harry Haller, an author and intellectual in post-World War I Germany, torn between two selves: a man who desires the respectability and comforts of bourgeois existence, and a wolf who scoffs that these vain, absurd desires. The perpetual antagonism of Harry’s two halves prevent him from finding happiness or meaning in life. Hesse’s novel is about selfhood.

Is Harry man or wolf? He has lived with that conflict all his life until, one rainy night, a stranger hands him a small tract outside a Magic Theatre that he cannot enter.

“…So that’s it, thought I. They’ve disfigured this good old wall with an electric sign. Meanwhile I deciphered one or two of the letters as they appeared again for an instant; but they were hard to read even by guess work, for they came with very irregular spaces between them and very faintly, and then abruptly vanished. Whoever hoped for any result from a display like that was not very smart. He was a Steppenwolf, poor fellow. Why have his letters playing on this old wall in the darkest alley of the Old Town on a wet night with not a soul passing by, and why were they so fleeting, so fitful and illegible? But wait, at last I succeeded in catching several words on end. They were:

MAGIC THEATER

ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY

I tried to open the door, but the heavy old latch would not stir. The display too was over. It had suddenly ceased, sadly convinced of its uselessness. I took a few steps back, landing deep into the mud, but no more letters came. The display was over. For a long time I stood waiting in the mud, but in vain.

Then, when I had given up and gone back to the alley, a few colored letters were dropped here and there, reflected on the asphalt in front of me. I read:

FOR MADMEN ONLY!”

The booklet is A Treatise on the Steppenwolf – an analysis of Harry Haller that is Nietzchean, Jungian and Buddhist at the same time.

Bourgeois life demands that one lead a balanced life at the cost of intensity. Before meeting Hermine there is no intensity in Haller’s sad life; he is preoccupied with his books and his pains, although his wolf-half occasionally expresses its derision for this path, leaving him to flee social situations in disgrace. Haller is chained to the bourgeois life by childhood experiences. He is fascinated with the washed leaves of the araucaria, by meticulous neatness, by devotion shown in little things. He is disgusted when his wolf-half laughs at the bourgeois life, until he meets a young woman, Hermine, who tells him to do precisely that.

This bond to the bourgeoisie can only be broken through humour, and looking deeply into the chaos of his own soul. In a dream sequence, the Magic Theatre mirror reflects all the thousands of facets of his soul. Behind one of the doors in the Magic Theatre, Haller learns that his numerous selves can be reconfigured like chess pieces.

“I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being.

One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh…”

Image: Jaroslav Bradac, from A Treatise on the Steppenwolf.

Jasper is still sleeping when I wake up. He sleeps a lot these days. He’s sprawled out, taking up half the bed like he always does. I nudge him gently with my foot, but he keeps dozing. That’s okay. He can sleep in. Today is his day.

Today we are celebrating Jasper’s Day. It was my idea. Mom and Dad are staying home from work. I’m staying home from school. Everything we do will be in honour of Jasper - sort of like a birthday. But it isn’t Jasper’s birthday, and I tell myself not to think about what day it really is.

Riley’s family celebrates Jasper’s last day. In the morning, their beloved Golden Retriever gets his very own serving of his favourite breakfast - scrambled eggs with cheese, and bacon. Riley remembers to bring the camera as he and his family take Jasper out for a ride in the van.

The family drives to Jasper’s favourite stream where he used to swim and fetch sticks when he was more agile. Jasper’s sight and hearing are also failing, and his arthritis makes it difficult for him to move about. After the stream, Riley and his parents stop at The Big Scoop for a treat. Riley’s father orders the “usual” for Jasper and himself - butterscotch ripple. Riley’s father tells the ice-cream shop owner about Jasper, and the man comes out to the van to say good-bye to one of his loyal customers. After the ice cream, the family stops at Riley’s Grandma’s house, and she and her dog, Nikki, bid farewell to Jasper. Along the journey, Riley has taken several photographs of Jasper.

The family returns home, but only Riley and his mother get out of the van. It is time to say goodbye. Riley whispers in Jasper’s ear, “You’re the best dog in the whole world.” Jasper licks Riley’s cheek, and then he and Riley’s father depart. Even though Riley knows that the veterinarian will give Jasper a shot and death will be quick and gentle for Jasper, it is terribly difficult to say goodbye to his beloved dog.

Riley’s father returns home with Jasper’s body wrapped in an arrowhead blanket, and the family buries him in the backyard. They gently place Jasper’s old chew toy, a stick, his water dish and a picture of the family in his grave. The family laughs and cries as they remember Jasper and say their final goodbyes.

That night, the house is empty without Jasper. Riley’s chest aches as he tries to fall asleep. Mom and Dad got Jasper before he was even born; Jasper had always been in his life. Tomorrow will be Riley’s first day without Jasper.

Riley looks at the photograph of himself and Jasper on his nightstand and thinks of all the photographs he took today, he gets the idea to make a memory book of Jasper’s life. He will never forget his friend.

Marjorie Blain Parker’s tender and unsentimental treatment of a child’s dealing with the death of a pet resonates with readers of all ages. The gentle and honest story speaks of lessons about love, acceptance, and remembrance. Janet Wilson’s soft and expressive illustrations are rendered in chalk pastels on coloured paper.

Jasper’s Day won the ASPCA Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award.

A Memory Book for Harry

Recently, a friend in our online community lost her Golden Retriever to an aggressive cancer. The story of Harry and the beautiful memory book that was created for him and his surviving sister Lucy appears on our sister site, Red Star Café. The story includes a YouTube version of the memory book, with a haunting rendition of Into the West by Annie Lennox (from Lord of the Rings). Read the story here.

Manga Shakespeare is a series of graphic novel adaptations of William Shakespeare’s plays. A fusion of classic Shakespeare with manga visuals, these are cutting-edge adaptations that will intrigue and grip readers. Drawing inspiration from trend-setting Japan and using Shakespeare’s original texts, this series brings to life the bard’s words for students, Shakespeare enthusiasts and manga fans.

Manga is a dynamic, emotional and cinematic medium easily absorbed by the eye. Its attractive art and simple storytelling methods enthuse readers to approach Shakespeare’s work in the way he intended – as entertainment.

The first Manga Shakespeare books – Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet – were published in March, to great critical acclaim in the UK. With Romeo and Juliet set in modern-day Tokyo, and Hamlet in a cyberworld, these backdrops make Shakespeare more accessible to today’s reader. Richard III and The Tempest were then released in September 2007 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream was published in February 2008. There are more titles in the series to follow including Macbeth and Julius Caesar in June and As You Like It and Othello due in November.

Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s most famous love story, unfurls in a dramatic manga setting, in which Verona becomes a street in the highly fashionable Shibuya district of Tokyo. The star-crossed lovers, touching in their youth and innocence, are caught up in a bitter feud between two Yakuza families (Japan’s ‘mafia’) whose rivalry erupts into violence and killing on the streets. Romeo, a rock star, is a Montague who falls in love with Juliet, a Capulet. They defy their parents and consummate their passion in secret. This is a story of love, revenge, violence and tragedy.

Hamlet is set in a dramatic futuristic world. The year is 2017. Global climate change has devastated the Earth. This is now a cyberworld in constant dread of war. The state of Denmark has grown prosperous and defended itself successfully against neighbouring states. But could it be that its greatest threat comes not from without, but from within the state itself?

It is in this cyberworld that we find the young Hamlet. His grief over his father’s recent death turns to something far darker when the ghost of his father appears to him. Hamlet is very soon to discover that something is rotten in the state of Denmark…

SelfMadeHero, winner of the UK Young Publisher of the Year award for 2008, is an imprint of Metro Media Ltd, a UK-based book publisher specializing in manga and graphic novels.

Self Made Hero

In related news, the publisher introduced the Eye Classics series in October 2007, transforming classic literature into another art form. The books feature acknowledged leaders in the world of graphic novels and bandes dessinées. Titles include The Trial, Nevermore, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Master and Margarita, and Crime and Punishment.

Eye Classics

While you’re surfing, check out another UK publisher of illustrated classics: Classical Comics.

 An inventor who goes by the name Datamancer has modified his laptop so that its popular qualities — light, thin, resistant to falls — are lost. But something even more wondrous has emerged. Datamancer’s laptop is completely encased in mahogany-stained pine, like a Victorian music box, resting on clawed brass feet. Leather patches set with handmade brass tacks serve as wrist wrests, and the keyboard consists of typewriter keys. To boot it up, you must wind a key.

If you ask Datamancer why he would bother to do such a thing, he would give you a simple answer. It’s all for the love of steampunk.

Steampunk has its roots in science fiction literature, where it describes a corner of the genre obsessed with Victoriana and the idea that the computer age evolved alongside the industrial. Steampunk stories, which started appearing with regularity in the 1980s, eschew clean and orderly visions of the future in favor of gas-lighted streets, steam engines belching toxic smoke, and dastardly villains inventing strange technologies. Dirigibles rule the air, and the upper classes employ clockwork servants to serve their meals.

In the past two years, though, steampunk has emerged in the real world, as Datamancer and a growing number of enthusiasts build steampunk objects and then share photos of them on the Internet. One of the first was the appearance last summer of a group of robots designed by the San Francisco Bay Area artist I-Wei Huang: They look like 19th-century locomotives with legs and are literally steam powered. This year alone has produced steampunk watches from Japan (bizarre assemblages of rusted brass, cracked leather, and antique watch faces) and a steampunk tree house (a steaming metal tree that houses a main room with all manner of secret compartments and drawers) at the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. There is even steampunk fashion, such as a combination dress/overalls adorned with gears and belt loops for every lady’s steampunk tools.

In their embrace of the toothy cog and the sooty pipe, this guild of steampunk hackers represents a rebellion of sorts against our iPhone moment. In all of our new technology there is nothing lasting to appreciate: Each new version is obsolescent the moment it appears. We have museums dedicated to preserving steam engines and mechanical watches. It’s hard to imagine a future museum preserving every example of Blackberry. What we want to preserve about technology also becomes a reflection of what is human about it, the spirit of invention and craftsmanship. No one would suggest that the iPhone isn’t a marvel, but there’s something vaguely alienating about a device that doesn’t allow users to replace their own batteries. And why bother? You’ll toss it with the rest when the new model appears.

“The iPhone might be sleek and well-designed within its mode, but there’s no way it can compete in luxe qualities with some Victorian equivalent,” said author Paul Di Filippo, the first to use the term “steampunk” in a title of a book, The Steampunk Trilogy. Steampunk “embodies both handicraft and mass-production elements in a rich visual vocabulary totally lacking in today’s plastic, cheap-jack gadgets.”

The term “steampunk” is a play on cyberpunk, a type of near-future science fiction where rebellious hackers use handmade tech to wage virtual warfare with corporations and governments.

These steampunk engineers are also part of a broader surge in the do-it-yourself mind-set, fueled by the sharing spirit of the Web. There is a punk ethos to the social communities of today’s Web, in which users are trying to wrest content away from the marketers and commercial media.

There is here a deep historical connection to the spirit of Victorian invention, Di Filippo says. During the Victorian era, the amateur could still compete with the professional in a number of crafts. It was a time when naturalists and other nonprofessional scientists were responsible for amassing important collections of biological specimens and for naming a number of asteroids and stars.

“The entirety of knowledge could be almost apprehended by a single individual,” says Di Filippo. “There were still frontiers. There were fewer laws and governing bodies. Who wouldn’t want all of those things back?”

The influence on steampunk literature goes as far back as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, but those authors can’t really be considered steampunk because they were writing about their own era. Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air, Lord Kelvin’s Machine by James P. Blaylock, The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and Di Filippo’s Steampunk Trilogy are often cited as the central steampunk novels. In The Difference Engine, the visionary artist William Blake gives Powerpoint presentations using a kind of magnetic tile device. In a novel released this year, Jay Lake’s Mainspring, the sun revolves around the earth along a system of celestial gears.

Yet steampunk has also evolved as an aesthetic unto itself, drawing on a number of diverse references. Goth, which has its own anachronistic sensibility, borrowing heavily from Victorian styles such as corsets, offers an early glimpse of steampunk. Punk lent elements of leather and metal, as well as the DIY attitude. The film Brazil is of particular inspiration, where technology looks like junk, and the rebel fights against a technocratic authority. But one of the most important influences has to be Japanese animation, or anime, which is replete with images of mechanical robots, neo-Zeppelin starships, goggle-wearing hackers, and the melding of the techno with the organic.

Steampunk is a backlash to the sameness of design. In Victorian times, decoration was integrated with the form and the function. Individual components were beautiful.

Excerpted from Boston Globe

Datamancer

Steampunk Workshop website

At the turn of the century, Parisian magazine subscribers were treated to colourful advertising posters which were included in the monthly issues. Each magazine contained four small 11 x 15 inch posters. For 60 months, subscribers also received a monthly original lithograph by one of 90 French or foreign artists, numbered and imprinted with the mark of Atelier Chaix, the magazine publisher.

Subscribers paid nothing for these prints, other than the price of the magazine. Today, though, if you want to purchase one of these posters, you are looking at a price of several hundred dollars apiece – more for the works of the more famous artists.

An important catalogue of 256 of these prints, Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, offers a representative selection of art of la Belle Epoque.

Published in Paris, this collection reflects the well-deserved pride of the French at having invented the artistic commercial poster. Jules Chéret, the artist-director of the printing house, was the father of this artistic genre. For his role in launching the golden age of the poster, he was awarded Légion d’Honneur.

He believed that advertising design at the time was vulgar and lacked redeeming artistic features. Chéret was the first to associate a woman with a product; for example, beverages such as Dubonnet, various pastilles and soaps, music halls such as les Folies Bergère.

His salon artists covered the buildings and walls of Paris with images of beautiful women, turning the city into a plein-air museum.

It was not only the French who collected these posters; it is estimated that 6,000 American subscribers also had a collection. Major museums such as the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, also acquired these works for their permanent collections.

One of the best-known Maîtres de l’Affiche was Alphonse Mucha. His images were appropriated during the 1960s for theatre posters, and they often featured actress Sarah Bernhardt. Another well-known contributor was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose art celebrated the Parisian cabaret and the bohemian life in Montmartre.

The complete set of 256 prints illustrated in Les Maîtres de l’Affiche or its English-language counterpart, Masters of the Poster, provide an enticing glimpse into the bohemian life of la Belle Epoque.

Roo Borson, Ten Thousand
Image: Van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhone

In celebration of Earth Hour, 2008.

Visit Red Star Café for Earth Hour blogging.

Mary Oliver, The Swan

An intense and joyful observer of the natural world, Mary Oliver is often compared to Whitman and Thoreau. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon and humpback whales. Oliver has been called “a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms” and “an indefatigable guide to the natural world.”

Image: Mikhail Vrubel, Swan Princess, 1900. Oil on canvas.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Begun in the autumn of 1957 and published posthumously in 1964, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast captures what it meant to be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920s. A Moveable Feast is considered by many to contain some of his best writing.

A correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921 with his young wife, Hadley, and baby son, Bumby (John), and the ambition to be a great writer. In that small tranquil world there was no need for a formal introduction. Everybody frequented the same cafés and ate in the same restaurants. Acquaintances were easily made and in a very short time Hemingway knew everyone who was someone÷or destined to be.

This was three years after the trauma of the Great War and at the beginning of the transformation of Europe’s cultural landscape: Braque and Picasso were experimenting with cubist forms; James Joyce, long living in self-imposed exile from his native Dublin, had just completed Ulysses; Gertrude Stein held court at 27 rue de Fleurus, and deemed young Ernest a member of une génération perdue; and T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk in London.

According to Hemingway, there was nothing lost about his generation. There was no movement, nor any tight bands of pot-smoking nihilists wandering around looking for a cause. There were a lot of people of the same age who had been through the war, and they came to Paris to write or compose or do whatever they had in mind. Paris gave them the freedom they needed.

His territory ran the length of the Boulevard Montparnasse from the Closerie des Lilas at the Observatoire to the Restaurant du Petit Trianon opposite the railway station, and by one route or another down to Saint Germain-des-Prés and the Seine.

Among these small, reflective sketches are unforgettable encounters with the members of Hemingway’s rag-tag circle of artists and writers, some also fated to achieve fame and glory, others to fall into obscurity. Some of the prominent people to make an appearance in the book include Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Hilaire Belloc, John Dos Passos, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.

Hemingway spends a great deal of time in the cafes, drinking and eating rather well for a pittance. His kindest comments are about Sylvia Beach, the American who ran an English bookstore called Shakespeare and Company — it was a hangout for English-speaking authors and others, and was an oasis for individuals seeking English-language books.

He depicts his genteel poverty and his obsession with gambling on horse races. He is deeply in love for most of the book with Hadley, who loses all of his manuscripts at a train station. He courts influential people such as Ford Madox Ford, who is described very unfavourably, and has great admiration for war veterans. His artist friend Pascin invites him to share his models, but he declines.

His friend Ezra Pound is trying to get up a collection for T. S. Eliot to rescue him from mundane bank work. He teaches Pound boxing. He cuts off his friendship with Gertrude Stein, repulsed by her lesbian relationship with Alice B. Toklas. He debates the merits of Dostoevsky with poet Evan Shipman. Ezra Pound charges him with delivering opium to the addicted poet Ralph Dunning, but Dunning rejects the help. Hemingway devotes three chapters to the very annoying F. Scott Fitzgerald and his hawkish and manipulative wife Zelda.

In the bittersweet final chapter, he describes an idyllic time spent in the Austrian Alps with Hadley. Pauline Pfeiffer arrives and an affair develops which eventually destroys his marriage.

It was during these years that the as-of-yet unpublished young writer gathered the material for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and the subsequent masterpieces that followed.

“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

This is the Paris that Hemingway knew as a young man - a map drawn in his distinct prose of the streets and cafés and bookshops that made up the city where he, as a young writer, sometimes struggling against the cold and hunger of near poverty, honed the skills of his craft.

Environmental art is a catch phrase that includes land art, earth-sensitive art and artists working with natural materials. Land art is a phenomenon of the ’60s and ’70s, with artists like Robert Smithson who made his Spiral Jetty in Great Salt Lake, Utah, one of those grandiose environmentally insensitive works that transformed the landscape.

Earth-sensitive art is smaller in scale, integrating an assemblage or sculpture in a natural setting, and there is art made with natural materials, which is usually exposed indoors.

~~ John Grande

Art critic John Grande writes about environmental art in his book, Balance: Art and Nature

Believing that artistic expression can and does play an important role in changing the way we perceive our relation to the world we live in, art critic John Grande takes an in-depth look at the work of some very unusual environmental artists in the United States, Canada, and -Europe.

Grande contends that the egocentricity of modern western society and its infatuation with technology and consumerism have increasingly separated us from the natural world. That separation has an impact on the way our art is conceived, formed, marketed and even displayed. Grande proposes that art return to being more “ecocentric,” reminding us that we are derivative and essentially dependent on natural processes. “In developing a nature-specific dialogue that is interactive, rooted in actual experience in a given place and time, and giving these elements an equal voice in the creative process,” he writes, “we are ultimately respecting our integral connectedness to the environment.” Holding such a vision, we will come to see that “nature is the art of which we are a part.”

To develop a dialogue more in touch with nature, Grande argues that artists should favour their specific culture and the diversity of the ecological communities in which they live rather than the homogenizing pressures of internationalism. He asserts that contemporary artists’ preoccupation with international “market recognition,” often reinforced by museums and funders, promotes a “product standardization” that takes precedence over any desire to represent one’s own culture and bioregion. In such a horizontal milieu, artists and their works consequently become easily interchangeable. The attendant appropriation of Third World, tribal and extranational art styles not only mirrors acts of economic expropriation but also often ensures the commercial success of the collusive artists. Such appropriation barely pauses to appreciate the source culture’s context and meaning.

As an alternative, Grande proposes that we celebrate the cultural diversity naturally intrinsic to each ecological community or bioregion. Such a preference would nourish the artistic expression of the cultural symbolism and spiritual values unique to that region. It would enhance an intuitive dialogue with nature in the creation of art, encouraging a healthier relationship with the local environment.

John Grande website

I think, a lot of art has as much to do with fashion and the look of things as it has to do with a kind of search for breakthroughs or a higher meaning. In a way we almost have an over-production situation where art is fine and society is in bad shape. It is one of my main concerns right now, The programs are working. Artists are producing. But the actual society is breaking down in many ways as a collectivity and becoming sort of digitalized. We have become digitalized producers and consumers.

Nature is the house that supports us all. We sometimes forget that. The same thing can be said for the world of art. What really nourishes art, more than ideas, is the physical world, and it is the main sustaining feature of any kind of aesthetic, even so-called immaterial ones.

Interview with Mike MacDonald

Interview with John Grande at Green Museum

EcoArt Network

Art critic, writer, lecturer and interviewer, John Grande’s reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in Artforum, Vice Versa, Sculpture, Art Papers, British Journal of Photo-graphy, Espace Sculpture, Public Art Review, Vie des Arts, Art On Paper, Circa & Canadian Forum. He is also the author of Balance: Art and Nature (a newly expanded edition by Black Rose Books in, 2004), Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books, 1998), Jouer avec le feu: Armand Vaillancourt: Sculpteur engagé (Lanctot, 2001), and his most recent book, Dialogues in Diversity: Marginal to Mainstream published in Italy in 2007 by Pari Publishing.