Best Art Gallery
Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby
VanArtGallery.bc.ca
You don’t need to look much farther than the Vancouver Art Gallery’s latest exhibition to see that it doesn’t do anything halfway.
The first thing to note about MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture is the scale of it: 371 works by 156 artists on loan from 75 private and public collections from eight countries around the globe.
Three years of planning went into MashUp, as well as the expertise of 30 local and international curators. The show takes up all four floors of the VAG, as well as Robson Plaza and the offsite space at 1100 West Georgia Street. It’s the most ambitious exhibition in the history of the VAG.
The works span nearly a century and a half, and the featured artists read like a who’s who of contemporary art history: Andy Warhol, DJ Shadow, Robert Rauschenberg, Nam June Paik, Jean-Luc Godard, Quentin Tarantino, Stan Douglas, Hito Steyerl, and many (MANY) others.
If there was ever a topic that required this level of exploration, it’s mash-up, says Bruce Grenville, senior curator of the VAG.
“We’re at a stage in art where mash-up is the dominant mode of creativity,” says Grenville. “There isn’t anything in a sense that isn’t touched by mash-up methodology.”
And in order to properly examine it, “we realized we really needed to look back at its history,” says Grenville. “It emerged in ways that had to do with a history that went back, and as we began to trace that, we saw an arc of a story that we could begin to tell.”
Thus, each floor of the exhibition tells part of that story. The first floor covers The Digital Age: Hacking, Remix, and the Archive in the Age of Post-Production; the second explores Late 20th Century: Splicing, Sampling, and the Street in the Age of Appropriation.
On the third floor, Andy Warhol’s era is examined via The Post War: Cut, Copy, and Quotation in the Age of Mass Media.
And the top floor brings visitors back to the very beginning of the last century, via Collage, Montage, and Readymade at the Birth of Modern Culture.
This is where you’ll find groundbreaking works of assemblage by Marcel Duchamp (including Bicycle Wheel and 1917’s signed porcelain urinal, Fountain), Hannah Hoch, and Pablo Picasso.
Picasso, along with Georges Braque, is credited with inventing collage during a period of intense experimentation that ran from 1912 to 1914.
One seminal Picasso collage – 1913’s Nature morte, bouteille et verre – is included in the exhibition.
Grenville knows that MashUp is a lot for attendees to take in during a single visit. Ideally, he’d love for visitors to come back and explore the exhibition a couple of times, although he says he knows that’s just not realistic for everyone.
And so he recommends “starting on the ground floor and winding your way back in time through to the moment in the same path that we took which is really to say, ‘This is the contemporary moment, and this contemporary moment was formed in a continuum that started a hundred years ago.’”
Speaking of continuums: the VAG is gearing up for a historic moment that was formed in a continuum a few years ago. In 2017, it will break ground on its new location at the intersection of West Georgia and Cambie. The concept design and timeline can be viewed at VanArtGallery.bc.ca/future.html.
• MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture is on view at the VAG until June 12, 2016. Details at VanArtGallery.bc.ca.
