On Weakness, or, “You will become a friend of mud”

Text by Anthony Kiendl

As a child growing up in suburban Winnipeg, I lived in a neighbourhood with brand new bungalows, duplexes, and Donwood Elementary up the street. Childhood, among other things, meant regular checkups at the doctor and dentist. These visits involved travelling from the suburbs to the doctor downtown, or even farther –– the west of Winnipeg –– for the dentist. When I think about these drives, I recall blistering summer heat, with my little legs sticking to vinyl car seats and the tune of Hot Butter’s catchy pre-techno hit “Popcorn” on the radio. (Around 2011 I was intrigued to receive a vinyl album of Popcorn re-mixes by contemporary artists, from Dennis Tyfus in Antwerp.)

Going to the doctor or dentist caused me less trepidation then than now. Sitting in the waiting rooms was eventful. Those visits were a crucible of cultural experience that I can trace in my curatorial practice today.

Ian Lawrence Goldberg was our family doctor. His office was in the Boyd Building on Portage Avenue, across from where a big mall was eventually built. I remember when Dr. Goldberg passed away. His death from cancer was unexpected to me –– he was young. Mom was upset; it was like losing a close friend. He took care of all us kids, including my younger sister Lynn who had cerebral palsy.

Mom clipped out Dr. Goldberg’s obituary. It read:

On July 5, 1981 at the St. Boniface Hospital, after a lengthy illness, Dr. Ian Goldberg, aged 44 years. Dr. Goldberg was born in Winnipeg and attended Luxton School, St. John’s Tech and the University of Manitoba graduating from the Faculty of Medicine in 1959...

Dr. Goldberg held a Fellowship in Pediatrics and was the Chief Pediatrician of Misericordia Hospital. He was a staff physician at the Children’s Hospital, a staff Physician at Victoria General Hospital and an Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Manitoba ... Dr. Goldberg’s many involvements included Directorships in the Jewish National Fund, United Jewish Appeal and ANAV ...

Private shiva.

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I remember the hectic pace of the waiting room at Dr. Goldberg’s office. The waits were often long. I also remember the pictures on the wall. I spent a lot of time exploring their intricacies. The pictures depicted big-eyed children. I recall one of a boy, apparently down on his luck and penniless, scrounging on what I imagined were the streets of Paris. There was another picture of a girl in the same setting. I remember some with tears in their eyes. Many will remember those big-eyed children paintings, invented by American artist Margaret Keane, as a popular-culture phenomenon of the late fifties to early seventies.[i]

They were caricatures, conforming to the textbook definition of cuteness. (Yes, cuteness has been defined in textbooks, particularly in those concerned with evolution theory, as part of the study of neoteny. This term refers to the progressive juvenilization, or retention of juvenile features, of a creature as a strategy of species survival. I explored this research for my exhibition Fluffy on the aesthetics of cuteness.) The children had big foreheads, with big eyes set widely apart. They had comparatively small mouths and relatively short, stubby limbs. Cute. The teary-eyed kids were dreary, but I imagine they were chosen to reassure young patients waiting to be poked and prodded. I will never forget those big eyes. 

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Allan Erwin Diner was our family dentist. In his office the artwork was different. In his last few years, he painted and drew. Though I did not see these works, I vividly remember another painting in his office by his daughter, Janis. It consisted of four horizontal lines about nine inches across, each monochromatic. The lines touched one another, except the bottom one, which was detached and floating about an inch below the rest. The three on top were stacked like pancakes. The painting was a study in colour and control. Although the colours kissed each other, they didn’t mix. Each line was straight and of equal length, with both ends rounded like pills. This painting captured my attention. It was a riddle. I had never seen anything like it. Why did someone make it like that? Why was it hanging there? What could it possibly mean? And as I waited there for my appointment, my mind struggled to come to terms with it. It was so different from the big-eyed kids on the walls of Dr. Goldberg’s office.

On Sunday morning, February 8, 1998 at St. Boniface Hospital, Dr. Allan Erwin Diner, 78, passed away peacefully with his family at his side ...

Allan attended St. John’s High School, the University of Manitoba, and graduated from the University of Toronto Faculty of Dentistry. He served as a Captain in the Canadian Dental Corps. Overseas during the Second World War. Upon his return he practiced Dentistry in Winnipeg for over 45 years. He taught at the University of Manitoba Faculty of Dentistry from 1967 to 1987 …

Donations in Allan’s memory may be made to St. Boniface Hospital Research Foundation Age of Discovery Fund or Studio Programs at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Daddy, we love you and miss you! Don’t take any wooden nickels!!

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These first two memorable experiences with public art are effectively conceptual bookends in my imagination. What two more completely divergent representational strategies could I have happened upon? The epitome of the kitsch experience, Keane’s big-eyed children countered by a slab of high-modern, minimal, colour-field abstraction. I am speculating that Dr. Diner’s waiting-room painting was an evocation of formalist aspirations that appeared in the twentieth century, culminating in art critic Clement Greenberg’s writings. I can do little more to explain the thoughts I project on this painting than art theorist Wilhelm Worringer, who in 1910 proposed:

“The simple line and its development in purely geometrical regularity was bound to offer the greatest possibility of happiness to the man disquieted by the obscurity and entanglement of phenomena. For here the last trace of connection with, and dependence on, life has been effaced, here the highest absolute form, the purest abstraction has been achieved; here is law, here is necessity, while everywhere else the caprice of the organic prevails. But such abstraction does not make use of any natural object as a model.”[ii]

Worringer’s statement puts forward a desire for transcendence of an imperfect world. The entanglement of phenomena, the lack of order and clarity in the fragmentary and contingent, and the entropy of the organic body are thought undesirable compared to the objective, noncapricious order of abstract law. Worringer’s flight from the body aims at “overcoming,” escaping into an ordered, nonorganic universe.

In a world of abscessed teeth, flesh-eating bacteria, AIDS, and brain damage, I can understand this desire. It’s a utopian gesture, a flight from weakness.

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Clement Greenberg’s reason for seeking transcendence is the most compelling aspect of his writing. Greenberg sought in the formal anonymity of the non-representational an escape from the holocausts of the twentieth century. Writing in 1939, he was prescient. Greenberg’s writing on kitsch sprang from his fear of its “virulence.” He feared that this “inferior,” mass-produced material was available to the fascists for manipulation of the masses, and that “the main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too ‘innocent.’” He claims, “It is too difficult to inject effective propaganda into [art and literature], that kitsch is more pliable to this end.”[iii]

Greenberg sought out the peace and certitude of the non-representational for solace in an uncertain and unassimilable world, calling on the “innocence” –– a childlike attribution –– of high art. That Greenberg sought transcendence from suffering through “innocent” high art resonates with the comparable disavowal of suffering in Keane’s depictions of “innocent” children.

The big-eyed children, despite their vulnerability, demand our attention. Psychoanalyst Judith Vida states:

“These [Keane’s] paintings can be construed both as giving witness to an encrypted layer of universal suffering and at the same time contributing to a universal disavowal of that suffering. For that flicker of an instant we can glimpse the uneasy relation between presence and absence, between the living and the dead, between the smallness of the person in the present and the pressure of a vast unfathomable past. “Kitsch” is what we call it when we belittle with contempt that which frightens us, that which unnerves us for our utter inability to contain its contradictions. There is a gap between the larger social purpose for which World War II was fought and the millions of individual lives sacrificed or deformed to attain that purpose. “Those eyes” of Margaret Keane looked into that gap, and then they, too, became as frightened as the rest of us to go on looking.”[iv]

I have no preference for either of these subjects of Greenbergian analysis, the high modern or kitsch. For Greenberg, abstraction was thought to be universal and transcendent. Yet countless cultural theorists of the late twentieth century have shown how these claims to universality and transcendence tend to erase cultural difference, or that the so-called universal means the white European male. Mass culture, conversely, can be the embodiment of complex cultural meaning (for example, The Simpsons). Today, arguments of high versus low art have largely lost coherent meaning, with culture becoming an ooze of nebulous references and significances.

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The medical establishments of my childhood were unintended classrooms for contemporary art theory and history. My formative art experiences were also experiences in healing. The term curator is derived from the Greek “to care for” those objects and documents in a collection. This medical derivation of curating echoes the curative setting of my personal initiation into art. 

Adding strength to my association of empathy and caring with curating is a passage I stumbled across, a description that strikingly summarizes the parameters of my curatorial practice: “a complicated weave of sociology (tradition, rites), psychology (hand-to-mouth behaviour), politics (poverty), and biologism (manifestation of deficiency). We are in the space where culture and disease overlap.”[v] But this description is no passage from a curatorial handbook. Rather, it is a description of the origins of geophagia: the act of eating mud.

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I began my curatorial practice as programme coordinator at the AKA Artist-Run Centre in Saskatoon. Flower Theory by Joanne Bristol was among the first exhibitions scheduled when I got there. That’s where I met Bristol and began a thirty-year conversation through art, life, and love about empathy, loss, weakness, and failure.

In a performance at the Western Front in 1995 called Centre of the Universe, Joanne showed a video projection of her mom, Marie, as a meteorologist-fortune-teller-Wizard-of-Oz character. Marie’s monologue included quotes by Patti Smith (“I don’t fuck much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future”) and the Clash (“The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in”). These words, delivered with the matter-of-factness of a weather reporter, suited the meteorological nature of the Clash’s apocalyptic lyric, as a swirling satellite view of the world behind Marie’s head morphed the weather report into a crystal ball. She was talking beyond science, and like Patti Smith was getting metaphysical. Marie –– with hypnotic suggestion –– then delivered the incantation: “You will become a friend of mud.” Bristol was talking about how to be in this world. Partly ecological imperative, partly an embrace of the abject, her statement is a touchstone of feminist reinterpretation of nature and desire.

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My curatorial work is based on the immanence of the weak: philosophically, this phrase means a “witnessing” or remembrance of weakness. Socially or economically, the phrase means an acknowledgement of the weak. (Heterogeneous capitalist society attempts to make poverty “disappear.”) Biologically, the phrase means a responsibility to the weak, the provision of empathy and curative assistance. Psychologically, the phrase recognizes art as a recuperative act.

Becoming a friend of mud implies the development of an intimate relationship with that associated with filth, disease, and disorder. Analogically, it implies more than wallowing in muck. I am too optimistic to revel in abjection as the least compelling of the nineties pathetic aesthetic seemed to do. Rather than embracing an aesthetic shock tactic aimed at abjection, I am interested in art that finds its meaning outside dominance.

Consider that pathos means a suffering feeling: the quality in representation that excites a feeling of pity or sadness, stirring tender or melancholy emotion. The prefix patho from the Greek means a form of suffering or disease. It is transient or emotional as opposed to permanent or ideal. These qualities are what I love in art. Transience and emotion are counter to everything art has valorized in modernity. Pathos carries within it, immediately, associations of the sick, the diseased, and the unwanted.

So does geophagia: Soil eating is poverty and hunger’s most extreme outpost. It is an activity that is charged with a strangely archaic quality where a lack is miraculously turned into a surplus. In his febrile state of hunger, the soil eater transforms the bed of the river into filling food. He is set within a hallucinogenic landscape where the very ground he walks on is transformed into nourishment. For science, geophagia is a hard nut to crack. The phenomenon is located at the intersection of sociology, medicine, and religion, and studies of soil eating need a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach.[vi]

This act, by turns abject, pathetic, and circumscribed by weakness, is also utopian, inspired, and profoundly creative.

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My curatorial work thus far is not a culturally restorative pursuit, but perhaps it is curative as a practice of associative or investigative research. I have theorized weakness, empathy, pathos, and associated sentiments such as nostalgia as responses to modernity. This meta-narrative can be traced through the diverse forms of various curatorial projects. They include Little Worlds (1998), an exploration of diminutive environments; Fluffy (1999), a laboratory of cuteness; Beautiful Losers (1999), a meditation on loss and failure; and Space Camp 2000: Uncertainty, Speculative Fictions, and Art, a cocktail of space-related thought that proposed science-fiction narratives as agents of alterity and disruptions of rationalism, that is, as emotional, contingent, suspect.

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The work of London, Ontario-based artist Luanne Martineau has engaged questions of naturalism and abstraction by denying the assumption that non-representation has removed a stable referent or indexical source. I curated an exhibition of Martineau’s work in 2000, in which she presented a world of decomposition and decay. Her quiet works carry an emotional and conceptual weight belied by their slight material forms: slender doodles on transparent paper, transferred to cotton; almost invisible embroidery. Old Gestetner photomechanical reproductions fade almost before the viewer’s eyes. Her sculptures, made from a common craft-clay compound, suggest disposable material, waste, soil, and excrement.

(As psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva points out, abjection is not caused by a lack of cleanliness or by ill health, but by that which disturbs identity, system, and order. These phenomena do not respect borders, positions, rules; the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.)

Martineau’s illustrations consist of consumptive prairie landscapes; tenements and ghettos in decay; abstract representations of alien forms sliding into disarray. Piles of organic matter are displayed in museum-like fashion, safely shrowded in covered pedestals. By contrast, the Gestetners are not even presented as finished works, but rather as hypothetical sculptures, unrealized, flaccid, lacking, and tenuous.

More significant than the formal representations of abjection in Martineau’s work, are the related observations of breakdown in systems of order and understanding. Martineau’s work creates disrupted visual narratives that suggest narrative omission. Her practice is preoccupied with the absence of functional master narratives, and this absence collapses all but momentary coherence.

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Winnipeg artist Daniel Barrow creates thoughtful evocations of the emotional. His “live illustration” or “manual animation” Looking for Love in the Hall of Mirrors is a narrative performance of drawings on acetate presented on an overhead projector. It relates the musings of a foppish old man who moved from the farm to the city to begin a committed and confused analysis of love and artistic success. The form of Barrow’s work –– using old-fashioned mechanical appurtenances –– represents a disruption in the supposed superiority of technological progress. In other works, Barrow depict scenes of nostalgic romance in prairie settings. Landscape paintings found in second-hand stores are detourned with Barrow’s embellishments, including scenes of rubbish amid nature.

∞

Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of Will to Power, suffered most of his adult life from illness: headaches, insomnia, and near blindness that sometimes drove him to suicidal despair. For Nietzsche, the only truth about the world and about us is the irrepressible will to power, or our need to control. Humans therefore only create “truths” for themselves that are useful and help them survive as a species.

The legacy of Nietzsche, along with Darwin and Freud, has been to create a world of domination: the will to power, the survival of the fittest, the Oedipal complex. I do not propose to celebrate weakness simply as the antithesis of domination. My challenge is to present a diversity of artists, artworks, expressive modes, and preoccupations with a meaningful philosophical grounding and curatorial desire based on the question of: how to be in this world?

In philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s depiction of the postmodern age, we are left with weak thinking aimed at a weak and vanishing being. To Vattimo, a world in which there is no ultimate reality, and only multiple interpretations, domination might be less likely to occur. Rather than basing all our hopes on a single utopia, he suggests that we accept a being that repeatedly dissolves. Accordingly, being can no longer be seen as an eternal structure. Rather than those destructive nihilists who believe that being ultimately dissolves into nothingness, Vattimo holds out the possibility of a weak subject. The modern experiment has come to an end, and with it, a faith in progress and emancipation. However, if we accept a reality that is continually dissolving –– while less reassuring than the age of myth or the age of reason –– we may still hold out hope for an emancipation of a limited kind. In the aftermath of the erosion of faith in a fixed reality, a plurality of world pictures that emerges could lead to the liberation of difference.[vii]

I do not want to wallow in the muck of nihilistic despair. I seek a means not of transcending ­­–– climbing out of the mud –– but rather of practising empathy, moving with care along this field. I want to become a friend of mud.

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This text first commissioned by editor Catherine Thomas for the Banff Centre Press and Banff International Curatorial Institute collection The Edge of Everything: Reflections on Curatorial Practice around 2000, before I was Director of the program. Published in 2002, the book can still be found online. In 2025, I slightly revised the text as presented here. Along with Jon Tupper, Melanie Townsend was instrumental in the collection and my involvement, and sadly she passed away in 2018. She is deeply missed. © the author, and artists, all rights reserved.

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[i] Keane’s ex-husband Walter claimed their authorship, a story that there is no space to relate here. Margaret inspired many imitators with fantastic names –– Gig, Eve, Lee, Goji, and Franca –– one or another of whom may have actually produced the reproductions in Dr. Goldberg’s office. For more information on Keane, see Tyler Stallings, ed. Margaret Keane and Keanabilia (Laguna Beach: Laguna Art Museum, 2000).

[ii] Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1967; 1910), 20.

[iii] Clement Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume I: Perceptions and Judgements 1939–44, ed. by John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 20.

[iv] Judith E. Vida, “‘So –– What Is It About Those Eyes?’ (How Pain Becomes Kitsch),” in Margaret Keane and Keanabilia, ed. by Tyler Stallings (Laguna Beach: Laguna Art Museum, 2000), 14–15.

[v] Magnus Bärtås and Fredrik Ekman, “The Soil Eaters,” in Cabinet 3 (New York: Immaterial Incorporated, 2001), 42–43.

[vi] Magnus Bärtås and Fredrik Ekman. “The Soil Eaters,” in Cabinet 3 (New York: Immaterial Incorporated, 2001), 42-43.

[vii] Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. by Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

Image above: Luanne Martineau, Parasite Buttress (1995) (detail). Curated and commissioned by Anthony Kiendl as part of the Informal Architectures project. Courtesy Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre. Collection of National Gallery of Canada.