The Strange Catalog Text That Will Keep Us Together

I've posted Jacqueline Mabey's fantastic essay on my work from my exhibition she curated at the Belkin Satellite in March.
This is easily my favourite piece of writing about my work. Jacqueline spent nearly a year traveling to my studio and exhibitions researching and listening while I told tall drunken tales about burning studios and late nights with one-legged bikers.

" Since it is superfluous to the ends-means rationality of capitalism at its most base form, art’s very existence – its continued existence – proves the insufficiency of dominant ordering narratives. As the excesses of auction week attest, art can be a part of reproducing said ordering narratives. Nonetheless, it undercuts the fiction that there is only one way that the world can be organized. In its polysemic generosity, the painting of Wil Murray does not foreclose on the viewer’s possible interpretations, possible emancipations, that moment of disassociation with a socially constructed subjective position. Its everyday associations and the bodily confrontations it stages with the viewer propound that the emancipatory moment is not something out there at a cerebral remove, but possible within us in the most quotidian moments and spaces"

From: Jacqueline Mabey, "the strange space that will keep us together: Painting and the Possibility of Postmodern Utopias" Vancouver: Belkin Satellite, 2008.
Available as PDF or .doc file.

*A note on the photo, it is Fred Herzog. I saw his exhibition while in Vancouver for my Belkin Show. Virtually everyone I know who has lived in East Vancouver now owns his book and uses as memory.

Interview Posted

Nearly a year old, the interview done with Jacqueline Mabey in May of 2007 is now posted at wilmurray.com, or download the PDF here.
This is the interview that appears in the artist binder at the current show in Vancouver.

Which New Painting?

To chase the new, to value the contemporary is as intentional as deciding to be an ancient Egyptian. Don’t put it past me, bouffant black hair, eyes ringed in black, holding a staff or a can of beer, maybe.
Historical movements, constructed in the workshop of art history, are encapsulated, started and finished without us. We are positioned after their occurrence. Our claims to contemporary practices are made by our proximity to their inception, how soon we knew them, how early we believed them. In historical movements, we are given the relief of a death never felt in person, in new work, the hope of a birth without a life we’re responsible to. Unless we really like the baby.
I’ve not really not been a fan of new painting. By the same token, I am not a fan. In fact, I’ve always loved new painting as much I needed to in order to paint, and show my work, and feel less alone. I've loved new painting to capacity while I wondered which "New Painting" the internal imaginary interviewer was asking about.
I understand most easily new painting when I can see it within miles of my home. I can imagine how the work got there after the last show on the same walls, and can ask questions that ground the work near my own. “Where is his studio?” “Where are they from? Here? Where I'm from?”
I have to figure out less about the how when I see new paintings nearby. Old men don’t travel to other cities to watch construction sites, the most interesting ones are found nearest to your house because you can remember last week when the street wasn’t a gaping pit and you crossed it where you liked as long as the cars weren’t trying to kill you.
Maybe old men would travel if they could. Maybe old men who watch construction sites have been broke so long that travel doesn't even enter the equation. Maybe they keep their minds of travel down at the construction site, watching with the other old men. Now I'm just being cute like Calvino, or the lyrics to all that new adult contemporary music coming from Canada.

I like painting.
No much of it, though.
They hit hardest near to home.
It is hard to tell with paintings, when they all hang on the wall kind of the same, when they are from. The smell can give it away.
Sometimes the smell gives away that they were painted last week.

I go to galleries a lot. More than I go to movies, less than I imagine art historians go. Mostly I go on sunny days when I am in another city, or on Tuesdays when I am in Montreal.
I keep trying to walk into a gallery and have this all change. To be knocked on my ass and care more about what did it than my ass pain. Or my embarrassment. That's like feeling self-concious when you're drunk, and trying to drink it away because you heard that booze lowers your inhibitions
Maybe this is why I don't collect painting.


* The top photo is from the opening of "the strange space that keeps us together" at the Belkin Satellite. In the photo is Colin, Me , and Jacqueline Mabey. I don't know who took it. The show is still up and you should all go see it before April 6th.

Upcoming Solo Exhibition: "The Strange Space That Will Keep Us Together" Vancouver, BC

the strange space that will keep us together

Wil Murray

8 March to 6 April 2008

Opening reception Friday March 7, 8 to 10 pm

the strange space that will keep us together is a survey exhibition of emerging, Montreal-based painter Wil Murray. The exhibition consists of a selection of works made after the July 2003 destruction by fire of his West Pender Street studio space, the historic Pender Auditorium, to the present day. In his work, Murray picks up the dropped threads of abstract modern painting, playfully subverting its dogma, while seriously re-engaging its central themes.

Murray’s work explores the horrors of banal choices. In every choice, there is an element of madness. The most reasoned decision is still a leap of faith into an unknowable future- a leap which is never made alone, as its consequences ripple out. Paint is poured onto a support, slowly built up layer by layer, sections are cut out and tacked onto other works. Marks are made and effaced, at some points visible, at others concealed. A story is told, but the tale is not straightforward. Against mastery, against autonomy, Murray’s process is suggestive of the tension between the terror of the contingency of identity and the spaces caused by incommensurable differences.

Wil Murray was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta. He attended the Alberta College of Art + Design for two years before moving to Vancouver to open a studio. Murray was short-listed for the RBC Painting Competition (2005) and was included in the Magenta Foundation’s Carte Blanche Vol. 2: Painting (2007). Represented by the Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Murray’s work is included in collections in Canada and the United States.

This exhibition is curated by Jacqueline Mabey, a candidate to the Masters Degree in Critical and Curatorial Studies at The University of British Columbia.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Alvin Balkind Fund for Student Curatorial Initiatives, the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, and the Faculty of Arts at The University of British Columbia, STRESSLIMITDESIGN, the Program in Canadian Studies at The University of British Columbia, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Lotus Hotel Limited, and the UBC Alma Mater Society.

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For further information please contact: Julie Bevan at julie.bevan@ubc.ca,
tel: (604) 822-3640, or fax: (604) 822-6689

Belkin Satellite Gallery Website

Phainting Poenix

The constant re-emergence of painting as a viable practice in contemporary art, that is, the phoenix-like death and re-birth every two years or so, forces a renewed but consistently narrow assessment of painting's value relative to whatever fresh practices provided the contrast to make its re-birth remarkable.
More often than not it seems what is chosen as the representative work of a painting resurgence is that which is a relief from forms with shorter histories that have become too laboured conceptually, too ephemeral, or rely too heavily on dick and shit jokes. Painting can be the emancipated heroic formal relief, the permanent and hopeful stalwart release, or the hard-working under-appreciated and intelligent relief.
I’ve been thinking about this phoenix cycle since reading a proposal for an upcoming exhibition, written by the curator, Jacqueline Mabey. She discusses the current resurgence of interest in painting, and tracks the disinterest back to the 60s or 70s with the rise of more conceptual mediums.
I think I have lived through at least two resurgences in the years since starting art school. The first was triumphant, the second frustrating. I hope the third will be funny.
Maybe painting is the garage rock of the art world. Garage rock never stops, sometimes a band or two will have a little trip into the hearts and CD players of millions, their faces on the cover of magazines that proclaim Rock, recently deceased, is actually alive and well in a third-tier American or British city.
If painters didn’t work all the time, and garage rock bands didn’t keep rocking all the time, there wouldn’t be anything to find when the web-art and the acid-folk gets a little dusty.
While the cycle never really gets at what painting does, or has time to address the slightly different relief painting provides. In making such a narrow criteria in such a limited time-frame, painting is not allowed enough dick jokes, or shit jokes, or to labor its own concepts. Maybe its because painting's required time is so long, and its autographic qualities so undeniable that it suggests refinement and elegance. Just on the cusp of anything revelatory about why we keep on coming back each time and what is different about this time and the last, some faster medium karate-chops painting back to the grave.

I have a desire to refine my own practice that does not reside in soliciting this cycle's start or end, or in a reaction to the cycle itself.
I wonder what black motives live in the absence of my usual ones.

Toronto Show Opening At Loop Gallery

"Strawberry Alarmist Talk Radio" opened on Saturday at Loop Gallery in Toronto. I am suitably exhausted from a week of drink, installation, visiting and transport.
Some good introductions were had to the Toronto art world. A review will be forthcoming in the Globe & Mail by Gary Michael Dault on Saturday July 29th.
Some tentative steps toward working with a dealer there were made.

Thanks to Dayna and Elliott for the place to stay and the help with installation and all the with divining the meaning in the words and actions of Toronto art folks.
Thanks to Jackie and Jesse for the roses.

Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete)

Stopping in on a friend(the same one who passed me Jackson Mac Low) at work the other day, we were discussing an interview I did with Jacqueline Mabey for a show in Vancouver next year. In the middle of all the marveling at my surprising lack of childhood dreams of a painter's life(I can remember wanting to be a rock star, an elephant and a fighter pilot), and my non-phenomenal relationship to art-making, he jumped up excited to show me this great bit of writing on his computer:

"Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have, I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."
That’s for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you’re in love and someone’s mistreating (mal aimé) you, you don’t say, "Hey, you can’t hurt me this way, I care!" you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do ‘flay after a few months. But that’s not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.
I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? they’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.
But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? for death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too. And all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Unless of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what You’re experiencing is "yearning."
Abstraction in poetry, which Allen recently commented on in It is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particu1ars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between "the nostalgia of the infinite" and "the nostalgia for the infinite" defines an attitude toward degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé). Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody yet knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poésie pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That’s part of personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blonde). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages."

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Frank O’Hara "Personism: A Manifesto" from Yugen #7, copyright © 1961.

Hobos. Diet Ppsi. Calaway Park.

I just finished watching Emperor Of The North Pole. A bit like a Sunday afternoon film for kids, but with Ernest Borgnine hitting hobos in the head with hammers.
It has Lee Marvin in it.
Along with diet cola and greasy pizza, Lee Marvin is comforting to me. Weekends spent at my Dad's house as an adolescent eating, drinking, and watching Lee prance around berating someone to do something like kill Nazis or....kill Nazis.
My inbox contained an email about Gowan. Now, I had to second guess my memory, but I think I saw Gowan at Calaway Park when i was a kid, or my sister and cousin did and I stole their memory.
But the Volkswagen Beetle with the stickers all over the windscreen and the periscope out the top, that's mine and no else's.

Some more details about a curated solo show of mine in Montreal in October should be forthcoming soon.

Jacqueline Mabey wrote the text for a catalog of mine that never got published

Now she's working on her curating chops out in Vancouver:

Oh, What a Blow That
Phantom Gave Me!
20 January-
18 February 2007


Belkin Satellite
555 Hamilton Vancouver, BC

Opening reception:
Friday 19 January 8-10 p.m.


Raymond Boisjoly, Melanie Bond, Natalie Doonan, Jesse Gray, Joshua Hite, Paul Kajander, Marilou Lemmens & Richard Ibghy, Elizabeth Milton, Colin Miner, Ryan Peter, Kristina Lee Podesva, Sarah Turner

More Info Here