The 2010 Vancouver Olympics opens tonight with, as the Web site claims, “glowing hearts.” Torch relay runners have made their way around the city, culminating in the lighting the Olympic torch.
Michael Drebert beat them to it. Last month he lit a cigarette in Vancouver and drove south to Seattle, firing one cigarette from the butt of the previous until he reached Western Bridge, where he offered to light others’ cigarettes from his. Hanging in a gallery was his hand-drawn poster of the plan, which he calls Ember.
Drebert was the first artist invited by Western Bridge to participate in its new seires titled New Year. He’s one of 13 commissioned to do whatever they want in the upstairs gallery, within the limitations of the space, time and budget. Western Bridge isn’t kidding about the limitations of time. Each show is two weeks, open Thursdays to Saturdays. That’s a 6-day run.
Jen Graves called Drebert’s performance and drawing “boundless, funny and sweet.” Sweet? Really? How many dead smokers does she know? How many with emphysema, trying to breathe through the wet tissue that used to be their lungs?
Yes, this down-at-the-heels version of the Vancouver Olympic Torch is wry commentary on a winter show that lacks snow. It’s wry commentary on the Olympics themselves, and how sponsoring it affects (erases) a city’s down and out. And yes, it’s chummy, especially for those who ignore the chill buried inside it. I know at least one former smoker who relapsed in order to participate. (Talk about hunger for community.) For those who aren’t even trying to quit, Drebert offered a moment of solidarity with a bad choice, if it is a choice for the hardcore addicted. Show them a film of people smoking through a hole in their throats after cancer surgery. With trembling fingers, the addicts in the audience will light their next one.
Art has no obligation to be good for you. No doubt Drebert aced his own assignment, but calling that assignment “boundless, funny and sweet” is at the very least insufficient. Drebert provided thin ice. To pretend all was well was to fall through it.
Currently on view is Matt Sheridan Smith’s Flotsam/Jetsam, through Feb. 20.
Jen’s right. Very funny, very sweet. You’re being moralistic. The point was the light and passing the light, not the tobacco.
Yes, it is cute. A kind of torch relay.
And, after all, who doesn’t like the Olympics?
http://no2010.com/