Gary Michael Dault: "World's Greatest Satirist of Tourist Dreck" The Globe & Mail. December 27, 2003

World's greatest satirist of tourist dreck

GALLERY GOING

Toronto artist Mitch Robertson is a wag. As such, he makes funny, charming, highly entertaining art works. He is also a coruscating satirist, who so carefully conceals the critical corrosiveness of his work beneath an ever-present sense of visual delight that it's sometimes hard to decide where he stands.

His new exhibition, Some Days are Better than Others , at Toronto's Robert Birch Gallery, offers all the multifarious Mitches rolled into one. And the job of work here is probably to separate them into categories bearing in mind, of course, that (to paraphrase a line from Seinfeld) a Mitch divided against itself, cannot stand.

Here's an example of Mitch waggery: There's a coffee mug in the exhibition with the words "world's greatest" custom-printed on its side. The idea is that you can grab a grease crayon and proceed to scrawl anything you like under the words: World's Greatest Lover, maybe, or World's Greatest Art Critic. The cup costs 20 bucks and might make d good belated gift for somebody you forgot on Thursday. World's Greatest Neglector.

Is the mug art? Well, maybe not. How does it differ from something in a souvenir shop? Not by much. Except for the fact that in being wickedly like the dreck in souvenir shops, it ridicules and deconstructs the desperate pseudo-assertiveness that apparently motivates the buyers of such trivially self-aggrandizing artifacts ("I'm With Stupid").

Also redolent with smarmy, gift-shop novelty-shock is Robertson's Pepsi Jesus (Six Pack) , small painted porcelain statuettes of Jesus, obviously harvested from a religious kitsch store, now painted in Pepsi red, white and blue, and sold as a case of six - a genuine piece of pop art if there ever was one.

If you want to get serious about Mitch at this point, you can start into a discourse about the commercialization of belief, the selling of religion, the diminution of the icon into the plaything. And that will work, because all that kind of thinking is built into even the most lighthearted, most iconoclastic moments within his production.

But the best part of Mitch Robertson lies in his uncanny ability to generate big meaning from effortless (or apparently effortless) gestures. As with his Loch Ness Landscapes , for example. Robertson says his exhibition is about "regional tourism, the nationalism that results from it, and the international audience that supports it," and these initially disarming and even downright pretty pastel landscapes of the infamous loch presumably pander to the tourist's desire to carry home a "unique" (although, in fact, formulaic) view of the haunted vista.

For what is being offered here are views downloaded from the webcams that constantly sweep the loch (and that can be accessed via the Internet), which are then rendered muzzy and "sensitive" by running them through the watercolour filter in the computer's Photoshop program.

The results of this amusingly shameless manipulation are produced as giclee prints, which, when they are matted and mounted in dignified walnut frames, look as respectable as anything. Tourists beware! Look to the meaning of your tastes!

Just as gregariously lethal are Robertson's brilliant little Rope Holders pictures, a series of authentic postcards from the 1950s through the 1970s (he buys them both from used bookstores and online), which have been cunningly hand-altered. Having decided that the smiling, fulfilled people in these lambent postcards more or less had to be professional actors (they stare delighted at monuments and cavort without conviction on beaches), Robertson has linked them together with rope-like lines of ink, sort of the way children are tethered together to go on daycare outings.

The ink "rope," according to Robertson, now "unites the tourists as an identifiable group of sightseers, highlighting the staged atmosphere in postcards of the era, mocking the postwar vacation image of the 'perfect getaway'..." The rope-lines also unite the privileged viewers of the works - all of us - in the deliciously self-righteous feeling that none of us could ever be so ignominiously identified and herded together! Or could we?

-Gary Michael Dault