Q & A: RICHARD RHODES, Curator of "Timeland: 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art"

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"Salt Beard"

Jason de Haan, "Salt Beard," found bust, salt, steel, 2010.

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"Wilderment"

Rita McKeough, "Wilderment," 2010, mixed media installation.

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"Anything and Everything"

John Will, "Anything and Everything," mixed media on 200 canvases, 1989 - 91. Collection of the Art Gallery of Alberta.

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"Communication Breakdown"

Paul Bernhardt, "Communication Breakdown," oil on canvas, 2009, 62" x 74".

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"Salt Beard"

Jason de Haan, "Salt Beard," found bust, salt, steel, 2010.

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Q & A: RICHARD RHODES, Curator of Timeland: 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art

By Amy Fung

Amy Fung: From the Timeland catalogue, the voice you assume is very much about being an outsider coming in, traveling to this land, and really decentering the center of the art world, which is basically Toronto in Canada. 

Richard Rhodes: I don’t believe in centres anymore. I believe technology decenters everything. There are still centres that have everything and that people still aspire to, like the Toronto art scene for instance, it aspires to New York, London, or Berlin, but that’s pathetically self-colonized. When you go to art scenes further afield, there is this wonderful kind of independence. It’s what has put the strength in the Vancouver art scene over the past couple of decades, this sense of being in a place where you know you’re not the centre, but at the same time have access to all the technologies to know absolutely what’s happening anywhere and everywhere. I wish the National Gallery would do what they originally planned to do in the 1980s starting with Pluralities, that in essence was a launching pad for the Vancouver art scene. Without mechanisms for launching things, nothing gets launched.

AF: The model of the biennial then is about identity-forming for the art world? 

RR: I think so. In the last couple of years in Canadian Art we’ve been pretty attentive to biennials. Rather than follow the debate in ArtForum or Frieze about how tired and horrible biennials are — which, if you’re talking about the Whitney or Venice or sundry other art fairs and biennials, are truly exhausted and dull, but in this country, biennials have a really constructive role to play, because they help affirm an art culture — in fact there are artists alive and at work even if they don’t figure in any major public way.

AF: What do you think of the notion that art fairs are becoming more curated while biennials are becoming more commercialized? 

RR: Those conceptions in the international art world are a sign of its tiredness and insularity, because in fact, this is just business-page news. They have nothing to do with content, those observations, and the minute you can see any art enterprise proceeding without some notion of content, it’s time to move on and it’s time to look elsewhere.

AF: With that frame of mind coming in to curate this biennial, how did you negotiate what is inclusive and what is just your selection process? 

RR: Well to some extent, I think the selection process is a given. I wanted to work with the system that the gallery had set up. Only, I’ve come to find all of this amazing work! (laughs) I don’t mean to sound surprised by it . . . My surprise was not at the art, but my own lack of knowledge of it. I don’t ever want to suggest that if there was an artist in Alberta who isn’t in this biennial, that it means their work doesn’t count — that kind of thinking is anathema to me. You just realize there’s this whole group of mid-level artists who would never bother to apply anyway because they would feel if they weren’t chosen that it’s a kind of affront to their dignity. Well, okay, but the fact of the matter is, a structure like a biennial is an information-sharing system.

AF: Do you think this lack of knowledge about regional art scenes is more common than one would think across Canada? 

RR: I think it’s generic across Canada that we don’t know who our artists are. We know a handful of people who get into institutions that have marketing budgets to let other people know they count. If only everywhere showed their own artists.

AF: Isn’t Canada just too big? In Europe, you can see local artists, take the train for an hour, and see another set of local artists, but here, you can drive for five hours within the same province just to see local art. There is definitely a very different consciousness of what local and regional identity means within Canada. 

RR: To me these are the issues at the moment, these are the defining issues for the art world and for culture in general, as we have the technology to speed up time and place to make it synchronous. I think the most important thing for us to do in this country is to construct an art culture that takes its place alongside the established recognition that the performing arts has in this country. So for me, to do a biennial, it’s a way of insisting on this art practice that happens without the Canada Council, and indicates the need for more recognition and for more support for the production of art that tells us about where we live.