Catherine Osborne: "Mitch's 16th Minute" National Post. January 3, 2004

MITCH'S 16TH MINUTE:

An artist's quest for fame became an examination of fame itself

I am one of what I suspect is a growing number of converts who think Mitch Robertson is a pretty good artist. He annoyed me five years ago when he showed up on the scene.

I think he rubbed me the wrong way because he had an art-school-lad overblown confidence about him and his art seemed aimed solely at making himself famous through overzealous self-promotion. I thought that if he was going to use Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" cliché he'd better have something more to say. And, really, he didn't have much art to show for all his hype. Even self-promoters of the 1980s like Jeff Koons and Mark Kostabi made art, big art, and lots of it. Mitch made little things, such as gold spray-painted plaster casts of his wallet, so you could buy replicas of one of his personal belongings. In 1998 he made a series of Art Star Trading Cards that mimicked bubble-gum hockey cards kids buy and trade only he used local artists as the featured players. The cards weren't printed that well, and the slipshod quality ruined the mass-market effect they were supposed to be imitating.

A year later he outfitted a motor home as a Mitch Robertson hall of fame and souvenir shop. He decorated it with memorabilia from his own (recent) childhood - class pictures, wisdom teeth, ribbons and so on. Then he drove the caravan across the country and parked it in front of local museums.

This is fine as concept-lite art, but no better or different from any other smart-ass 20-something artist trying to break into the gallery circuit. Mitch was too much talk, not enough content, and he seemed to believe that if he kept repeating he was going to be famous by 30, he would be.

He's 28 now, and famous in the sense that he is represented by two of Canada's leading galleries, Robert Birch Gallery in Toronto and Trepanier Baer Gallery in Calgary. Household-name stardom has not yet arrived.

But that appears to be a good thing because for his past few exhibitions it has become clear he is finally getting over himself. He's still on the fame track, but his art has shifted to fame itself, rather than fame for Mitch.

Some Days Are Better Than Others , the show now on at Robert Birch Gallery, deals with related topics, including holiday destinations that are blatant tourist traps, like Sudbury's giant nickel and Prospect Point's totem poles.

In particular, Mitch has zeroed in on Loch Ness in picturesque Scotland. There are companies, he discovered, that have set up online Webcams that give scenic viewpoints of the mystery-laden lake. He has downloaded screen grabs from some of the vistas, then run the images through the Adobe Photoshop "watercolour" filter to produce a series of cheesy Sunday painter-style landscape prints that have a feathery brush-like effect. You can hardly tell they are computer-manufactured.

It would be impossible to spot a monster through any of these low-res cameras, even if, as Mitch says, the creature popped its head up and waved. Yet your eye does scan the calm lake in each of the eight convincing-but-faux watercolour prints for a sighting, a testament to Loch Ness's fame.

What interests Mitch about Loch Ness, and other destinations that are built around a man-made fabrication, is that they are entirely driven by the souvenir industry. You can see why he would be attracted to this type of hollow fame; he is an artist who thinks fame is bigger, maybe better, than whatever is being made or sold.

Mitch used to be an artist who wanted to be famous without making much art. He is now an artist who has found his equal in Nessie, one of the most ridiculous tourist traps ever, built entirely on hype, rumour and fable. This is a conceptual artist's wet dream - boxes inside ironic boxes.

To add more layers, Mitch has made each of the prints in the suite "originals." By not making editions, these completely computer-generated prints are as unique as any Sunday painter sketches that are found at souvenir shops the world over.

Mitch (I'm calling him Mitch, not Robertson, because single-name usage in print is such an endorsement of fame) is taking a longer and possibly higher road to fame and fortune. It is hard to tell if he's still interested in pursuing his own fame for the sake of it, or if he's still determined to break us out of our tragic Canadian disdain for hyperbolic hype. But I like his new direction. He's hit on a whole new stream of possibilities on a pretty worn-out topic, like fame.

- Catherine Osborne