Program
CONNEXIONS
Greg Curnoe | 1970 | Canada | 15 minutes
In the artist's own words, a frenetic whirlwind introduction to the people and places that comprise his community.
In Connexions (1970), Greg Curnoe describes on the soundtrack, in a fluent series of observations, his relationships and the connection of his experience to the places he, his friends and his family have lived. The image is dominated by London, Ontario street photography that Curnoe took while traveling through the city by car to document the significant landmarks of his life. This footage is bridged with other digressions, to events, parties, family gatherings, and portraits of his friends, for instance, of Jack Chambers in his studio.
Curnoe’s narration shows his character, a stream-of-consciousness that is humble, sweet natured, amused by memories, pleased by the recitation of names and streets, further pleased by the accumulation of his observations, where one anecdote leads to another. The start-stop mechanism of the tape recorder betrays shifts in tone and speed of voice, with abrasive interruptions to clarify statements, dubbed later by Curnoe to correct facts he had misspoken on the first pass.
At times the overdubbed narration causes the original narration to truncate, fragments of earlier sentences sounding at the end of his clarifying statements. The narration is not composed, but emerges from the immediacy of observation, and it is not careless so much as it is willfully unrehearsed and unpolished. The image skips hurriedly from one composition to another, the shots gathered spontaneously, loosely composed or uncomposed (as in shots taken out of the window of a car). Curnoe laughs and observes “it’s too fast now,” as he tries to match the speed of his description to the images. This, taken with Curnoe’s technical explanation at the film’s outset of the differing speeds of his camera and recorder, make the film a technological experiment in the truest sense, the maker’s speed as a narrator competing with the speed of his camera.
The final moments of the film focus on London’s Victoria Hospital, a subject of paintings that both Curnoe and Chambers were making at the time, and Westminster Hospital, the name of which is lettered on its lawn to Curnoe’s great pleasure. As he looks at the Westminster Hospital grounds, with its declarative lettering, Curnoe says, ”There are so many connections in this film, I’ve only talked about a few of them.” He goes on to say a few more names, with quick digressions to clarify his relationship to them, the spare facts that he recalls in the moment that define their roles in his life.
Connexions assumes the form that memory takes, not merely in its autobiographical content but in the palimpsest of Curnoe’s narration, correcting, revising, to get the record down accurately. It recalls a statement Curnoe made to Chambers in the latter’s portrait of Curnoe, R34 (1967): “I’m putting the whole thing together.” In this sense, what Curnoe does in filmmaking is much like his work in assemblage and painting, the act of assembling mirrored to the mental processes of forming ideas, statements, actions, or specifically in the case of Connexions, recollections. The undisguised act of his interrupting voice, correcting his statements of names and places, has this quality, of laying down one account and then revising it, refining it, making a whole from component parts. Connexions, more than any of Curnoe’s other films, embraces the particular subject—marking this face, this street, this home, as a citation that is personal and individual.
Text excerpted from Strange Codes: Notes for the Preservation of the Canadian Underground Film by Stephen Broome
R34
Jack Chambers | 1967 | Canada | 26 minutes
A free form and expressionistic study of Curnoe's artistry shot at his studio with accompanying sounds by the Nihilist Spasm Band.
R34 (1967) is a study of the London painter and collagist Greg Curnoe during the period in which Curnoe painted The Camouflaged Piano or French Roundels (1965-1966), a large mixed media canvas in which the British dirigible R34 appears prominently amidst figures, bright bands of colour and text naming musicians and labelling instruments. [...]
Curnoe identified with Dada, evident in his collages, paintings, and his co-founding of London’s noise ensemble, the Nihilist Spasm Band, who performed on homemade instruments. Where Chambers’ paintings and drawings were rigorously traditional in their technique and materials, Curnoe’s were crude and spontaneous, teeming with a liveliness that Chambers’ work resisted in its isolation of the photographic moment and its entrenchment in memory. But both men were primarily invested in themes of history, memory, community and family.
Chambers described R34 as “a kind of self-expressive documentary about someone else.” He was drawn to Curnoe as a subject for Curnoe’s devotion to art-making. As Chambers later recalled, “Greg was one of the three or four artists in London who had a studio in 1967 and devoted all his time to painting and other related things. When I left London in the fifties no one was painting full-time. Greg was apparently the first one to do so in London and when I returned in 1961 he was the only artist with a studio of his own.”
Text excerpted from Codes For North: Foundations of the Canadian Avant-Garde Film by Stephen Broomer
GREG CURNOE
Nancy Johnson & Mark McCurdy | 1981 | Canada | 23 minutes
A documentary by celebrated London-based production company, Lockwood Films, interviews Curnoe about his ideas, passions and approaches to his practice.
The programme will conclude with rare 16mm footage shot by Greg Curnoe of family, friends and unfinished projects.
Artist Bio
Greg Curnoe (1936-1992) was an artist-activist who was central to the development of the 1960s London art scene into an important artistic centre. Rejecting the notion that an artist could thrive only in the big cities of Toronto or New York, he instead founded the Regionalism movement which celebrated everyday life and experience.
He was involved in organizing many firsts in the community: the first art “happening” in 1962; Region Magazine (1961-1990); Region Gallery (1962-1963); and Canada's first artist cooperative, the Forest City Gallery in 1973, still in operation today. He was also a founding musician in the Nihilist Spasm Band which specialized in improvisational music on homemade instruments. He was very supportive of fellow London artists Jack Chambers, Tony Urquhart and Kim Ondaatje who founded the Canadian Artists Representation/Le Front des Artistes Canadiens (CARFAC) to demand recognition of artist copyright.
Curnoe exhibited extensively including representing Canada at the Sao Paulo Bienal (1969) and the Venice Biennale (1976) and in major exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada (1968), the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (1981), and at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2001). His work is held in numerous major public and private collections.