Cold shoulders

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/07/2016 (3667 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I was distracted and upset when I finally made it to the Karel Funk show at the WAG, which seems unfair. Unfair because the Winnipeg painter lavishes attention on overlooked encounters, and his work demands that kind of focus in return, rewarding our patience with impeccable craft and exacting detail.

Unfair also because it wasn’t anything Funk has done or said about his work, but what he doesn’t attempt and what others have taken his work as licence to say themselves. It’s a good show, and I recommend you see it.

The banner overlooking Memorial Boulevard tells you what to expect. A painting (yes, it’s a painting) shows a man in profile against a white backdrop. The hood of his blue parka is drawn up, obscuring most of his features. That’s it.

Funk has been painting variations on this scene consistently, near-perfectly and to broad acclaim for 15 years. The acrylic paintings on panel are exquisitely made and even more impressive in person. The best have the presence and composure of early Renaissance religious portraits, while feeling unself-consciously contemporary. The work’s consistency emphasizes gradual shifts in composition and subject matter, fixing our attention on the impervious sheen of crumpled nylon and occasional patches of bare skin, all meticulously rendered in layers of translucent paint.

Instead of enjoying the surprise of each eyelash and plastic toggle, though, I was distracted, thinking about a Plug In group show from 2012-13, which debuted in France the year before.

Likening Funk’s layered painting process to getting dressed, in his essay for My Winnipeg: Winter Kept Us Warm, curator Noam Gonick wrote: “On cold winter nights, light-duty hoodies satisfy the warming needs of ‘Peg City gangsters. Thug bodies burn at higher temperatures — fuelled by teenaged pregnancy and pellets of crack cocaine for trade, the modern day wampum.”

“Other Winnipeggers,” he continues, “layer their wardrobes protectively — like brushstrokes on canvas.”

Why bring up a sneering aside (ahistorical, for that matter, since wampum was never routinely traded this far west) from a better-off-forgotten text? It only distracts from the merits of Funk’s work now. Why not “focus on the art,” as I did when I reviewed My Winnipeg back in 2012?

Well, I haven’t forgotten the essay, unfortunately, and I can’t seem to focus on the art now. It’s not fair, but here we are.

Looking around, it does seem to be Gonick’s “others Winnipeggers,” who populate the current survey, the largest at any institution to date. The jackets are all immaculate. When Funk does show skin, it appears to be white skin exclusively. According to a gallery text, he made the choice to begin painting women in 2008.

To my knowledge, Funk never set out to “represent Winnipeg,” and he doesn’t, but his work has been made to, here at the WAG and elsewhere, and it’s not up to the task. (Unfair, I know.) Any Winnipeg winter I’d recognize includes black women shoving tuques over headscarves and Sikh men tucking turbans into jacket hoods. It includes First Nations kids who deserve to be seen as more than “thug bodies” in hooded sweatshirts. The Winnipeg of Karel Funk, the exhibition — if not Karel Funk, the artist —conspicuously does not.

Newer paintings in the show forego human figures entirely. I read one balled-up jacket first as a detached hood and was distracted, thinking about a 1993 work by the African-American artist David Hammons. In the Hood is just the hood of a forest-green sweatshirt, roughly cut off at the neck and hung on the wall like a limp trophy. With its overtones of lynching and summary execution, that work took on renewed urgency after the murder of Trayvon Martin, whose own bloodstained “light-duty hoodie” was mounted for display and presented as evidence in the trial that ultimately acquitted his killer. Branded a “thug,” Martin’s only offence was his hoodie and the skin it covered. A hooded jacket is not a “neutral” signifier.

Foregrounding the anonymity of their subjects, Funk’s paintings of weather-ready white folks offer little beyond their laboured surfaces — it seems unfair to ask for more — so we populate them with our own perceptions, past experiences and prejudices. Hopefully we sit with them awhile, get to know them better.

Paintings hold our gaze in ways that snapshots and snap encounters on the street cannot. They leave time and space for us to consider not just what we see but what we bring to them — judgments and associations that can have deadly consequences outside the gallery.

After a while, under Funk’s careful attention and steady hand, anonymity gives way to strained intimacy and limited understanding. If a lack of diversity in the work points to anything, it’s that this kind of attention could be paid more broadly, and should be.

 

 

Steven Leyden Cochrane is a Winnipeg-based artist, writer and educator.