The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2004, Síða 11

Vol. 59 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
53
deemed unacceptable, is where the real
action is.” (Eyland 2001)
Eyland came to Winnipeg in 1994,
when his wife was hired to teach at the
University of Manitoba, and has been
quoted as saying that he will never leave.
(Enright 2000) He sees the city as a pro-
gressive place for art. Because space is
affordable, he has a studio, which he says is
“a new idea for him.” He is, however, in
the enviable position of being able to teach
at the Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design during the summer months. The
Winnipeg Free Press has called him “dash-
ing” (Walker 2003), partially in reference to
his performance art with fellow artists
Dominique Rey, Tannis Van Horne and
Curtis Collins, former Winnipeg Art
Gallery curator of contemporary art and
photography. Rey, Van Horne and Eyland
also perform as a musical group called the
Absurbs. They play only in art venues,
where the patrons are ‘tolerant’.
Performance art, which tends to be sedate,
is anything but when it involves Eyland,
who prefers it to be adventurous rather
than dull.
One wonders if Eyland is attempting
in some way to depict ‘everything’ in his
art, the way that Borges imagined every
book ever written. He has compartmental-
ized his work into twenty-eight elastic
groupings. These groupings contain every-
thing from file card gifts from others,
drawings, charts, calligraphy, abstracts, ID
portraits and collages of real and imaginary
folks, glyphs, nudes and sexual works, real
and imaginary landscapes, an homage to
Paul Emile Borduas using “passport”
stamps from Expo ’67, sculptural works,
Belfast pictures, work relating to Raoul
Wallenberg, a collection of Rolodex
addresses, work used as labels or captions
for exhibitions, framed paintings, figure
paintings, pre-1981 works cut into file
card-sized bits or reproduced to make new
works, military illustrations, photographs
used in a variety of ways, architectural
drawings, retouched reproductions or pho-
tocopies used as a basis for new paintings,
paintings of wildlife, trees, animals, mon-
sters, robots, Eyland’s imaginings about
Saskatoon, works referencing paintings by
Giotto or based on St. Francis, works relat-
ed to Cambridge, England, recorded and
unrecorded music, film and video, and, of
course, works he inserts secretly into
libraries. In the future, he proposes to
include playing cards, trading cards and his
essays/reviews edited into file card-sized
books. (Enright 2000) Eric Cameron has
commented that this body of 3 x 5” images
“enable(s) him to test empirically his nurs-
ings on the organization of the particular
kinds of knowledge we identify as works of
art.” (Cameron 1998)
When I spoke with him, I teased Cliff
Eyland that his problem was obvious -
thinking too much. His response was sim-
ply, “you just have to get over it.” To pro-
vide further food for thought, then, I sug-
gest some further categories for explo-
ration found in information preserved in
commonplace books of old: “quotations,
anecdotes, maxims, jokes, verses, magical
spells, astrological predictions, medicinal
and culinary recipes, devotional texts and
mathematical tables, mottos, anagrams...
reading lists...” (Havens 2001) A silva
rerum, a forest of things.
References
Eric Cameron. Cliff Eyland: System
and Sensibility. The Manitoba Studio Series
1998, Winnipeg Art Gallery
Robert Enright. Postcards From The
Edge. The Globe and Mail 8 Jan 2000, R9.
Cliff Eyland. “Officialdumbing”,
Border Crossings, 2001, 122-123.
Blake Gopnik. “A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Obsessive”, The Globe
and Mail, 15 August 1998, C4.
Earle Havens. “Commonplace Books
On View in Beinecke Show”. Yale Bulletin
and Calendar, Volume 29 No. 34, July
2001.
Robert McGee.’’Visual Art- Big Apple
Bibliolatry”, Border Crossings, 1998, 60.
www.umanitoba.ca/schools/art/con-
tent/galleryoneoneone/selfp.html
For more information search “Cliff
Eyland” at www.google.com