Navigating Without a Compass

by Douglas Ord

This book consists of five narrative analyses to do with contemporary art and art museums, that were written in the 1990s. They are outside the mainstream of art criticism, based as they are on the experience of physically entering art-space and encountering the encompassing environment of an exhibition or -- in one case -- two exhibitions coincidentally juxtaposed.The chapters "Narrating Art," which develops a paradigm for art writing that involves narration."Kawamata's Sheds," which explores the controversy that arose when the Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata installed 35 sheds roughly built from scrap lumber on an "art garden" designed by another artist, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, outside the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa."Coincidence," which as the longest piece in the book recounts the author's experience when he inadvertently encountered, at the Musée d'art contemporain in Montréal, two juxtaposed "Art About AIDS" and "Free Metaphors and Realities in Contemporary Hungarian Art". The experience was deeply jarring, and the essay became a conceptual trialogue involving, in particular, the conceptual universe of Gilles Deleuze, the legacy of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the paintings of the Hungarian artist László Fehér."Barnes'Eden and Soutine's Revenge," which recounts, with some degree of comedy, the author's experience of being prevented from taking notes at a major exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, including two by Chaim Soutine."Watch/ed and Measure/d," which describes the experience of a computerized installation by the Canadian artist David Rokeby.

175 pages, Paperback