Glenn Lewis has been an influential force in the cross-disciplinary art practices on Canada’s west coast, especially the remarkable period of vitality and experimentation of the sixties and seventies. He developed a highly performative practice that reflects a spirit of inventiveness and belief in the transformative power of art. The ideal of bringing art and everyday life together through experiential and communal activities fueled his expansive practice. Already evident in the early works documented in this catalogue, he has continually tested ideas about the potential of art.
Lewis began making “standard ware” in the tradition of studio pottery as an anonymous craftsman. In the early 1960s, he studied in England with Bernard Leach who imparted a deep appreciation for the cultural value of ceramics, especially in Asia. Lewis honed the subtle skills involved in crafting functional pots, taking away from his rigorous training an enduring respect for utilitarian and mundane things, and their making. Once returning to Vancouver in the mid sixties, Lewis found himself in the middle of a lively experimental art scene. Having taken to heart the art of mundane activities, he gravitated towards social energies. Lewis’ ceramics practice which until then had focused largely on pottery expanded into more sculptural forms like porcelain tableaux of domestic tableware (teacups, salt shakers, eggcups) that were usually arranged on trays. Full of imperfections, these ceramic pieces reveal the many chance processes of working with clay, and following old ceramic traditions placed high value on material “truth” to the degree of highlighting accidental transformations. Usually deformed with folds and waves, they appeared to have been formed by wind, and forces of gravity, emphasizing the malleability of clay. These ceramic sculptures were often housed in tinted acrylic containers and on mirrored plinths, calling for a self-conscious encounter with the enclosed objects. When installed together, as in his late sixties Douglas Gallery exhibition, the works floated in a multi-coloured and sensory reflective environment.
In 1970, Lewis produced Artifact, a ceramic mural commissioned for the Canada Pavilion of the Osaka World’s Fair. The 176 one-foot square tiles, glazed and fired in a local toilet factory, are gridded in a 22-day calendar that records the production of eight tiles a day. On twenty days, Lewis crafted salt shakers on each tile, and on the two days he “took off” he carved poetic texts about his activities those day on the tiles: “Dennis Gerry and I Drove over to Micks to pick up my table had lunch with Lynne there went to old Intermedia building…had liver and bacon for supper at the arbutus café.” This chronicle of mundane activities reduced to concrete poetry refers to ancient Sumerian writing on small clay tablets. Artifact’s ordered grid of ritualized procedures is interrupted by a chaotic field of white ceramic salt shakers in various states of erection and breakage. The mural is a type of diaristic archive that reveals the contingencies of everyday life amplified by the alchemical interactions of glazing and firing clay. The somewhat lunar, glistening landscape suggests a topography–a spatial map as well as a record of marking time. Lewis set up a rigourous system of production, amplified by the industrial unit of the tiles in a grid format that functioned as a container for the contingencies of clay and human action.
Lewis moved away from the physicality of ceramics towards performance with his body. His early performances ranged from elaborate theatrical and scripted events to actions on the street and in private settings. Shot at the New Era Social Club with a Portapak video camera, Japanese Cabbage shows the artist, disguised in a Mickey Mouse mask, earnestly demonstrating a cabbage recipe in a spoof on television cooking shows, complete with an impersonation of Julia Child’s frantic voice. In his performance of making the Korean condiment, kimchee, he demonstrates the recipe with a formal array of bowls and knives as a ceremonial ritual. Lewis often assumed the role of chef, whether for dinner parties or art events, and also wrote about food. He worked with the relational dynamics of social interactions as various personas including administrator and curator that blurred distinctions between reality and fiction. The potential fluidity of personal identity was tested as a strategy for creating social energies and discursive situations. Lewis’ ongoing performances as Adolf Hitler, who he uncannily resembles, enacted in various costumes through casual and adhoc appearances speaking in a German accent, and through more elaborately planned and casted dramas, as in Hitler at Wreck Beach of 1972. This soap opera involving buried money was purposefully staged as a photographic sequence was also a political action with Lewis giving a speech against a proposed freeway from a gun turret on the beach. His irreverent and provocative disguise as Hitler was a social intervention intended to disturb normative rituals, such as art openings.
In the early seventies, Glenn Lewis adopted a persona, Flakey Rrose Hip, that characterizes the festive and playful spirit of his socially engaged activities. With a nod to Marcel Duchamp’s pseudonym Rrose Selavy, this alter ego underscores the fluidity of artistic identities at a time and place when authorship was often subsumed in collective activities. Indeed Lewis wore many hats during the era, from object maker to performer, writer, curator and producer of elaborate multimedia events. He was part of a cultural ecology intent on generating alternative systems of communication and creative enterprises. The New York Sponge Dance School of Vancouver, which Lewis initiated in 1970, was one such informal group of mostly artists, although membership was open, that involved performance, correspondence and synchronized swimming events. The swimmers met once a week at the old Crystal Pool in Vancouver and performed formations wearing shark-fin bathing caps made of tire inner tubes by artist Kate Craig.
Like many performances during that period, actions were often private and not intended as a spectacle for an audience. Lewis’ actions in different environments often involved drawing geometric shapes in the landscape by recording patterns of walking. As an integral part of his performances, these actions led to working with still and film cameras. His performance film loops document simple actions in real time, with the artist literally going in circles, transforming indeterminate spaces into temporary containers that fuse a sense of time and space. In the 1969 Forest Industry, a camera follows Lewis arduously trekking through the forest on the Sunshine Coast demarcating a square kilometer of land with surveyor’s tape. Blue Tape Around City Block charts the metropolitan grid through a depiction of Lewis, dressed in overalls, running tape around a downtown Vancouver block. Camouflaged as a labourer involved in a purposeful task, the artist articulates space through his action of seemingly unwinding film while at the same time producing one. His absurdist gesture and Chaplinesque movements heighten both the gravity and humour of these endurance performances, with their ironic references to colonial explorers, urban planning, and property ownership. Lewis’ fascination with mapping urban geographies was also articulated through photographs—made processually and sequentially very much like film sequences–of close-ups of sidewalks, gutter debris and storefronts. The slide work Greenwood Hill, New York produced in 1970, similarly exploits the temporal and perceptual capabilities of the camera. Here Lewis tracked changes in weather and light in a landscape over the course of a year through a static camera which he used to take one image a day.
Significantly, Lewis brought his films into gallery setting as a type of performance that went well beyond a screening as such. Forest Industry was performed at the Vancouver Art Gallery as a film that moved across the walls. Four Intersections, a film about four corners, was presented as a film installation projected into the four corners of a room.
Lewis’ camera works and performances evoke the explorations of artists involved in procedural and land art at the time, particularly those who emerged from minimalist and early conceptualist practices who were crafting ephemeral, abstract forms. Lewis’ interest in the imposition of geometries on the environment as a form of drawing is particularly evident in photographs that document Four Hundred Yards of Burned Paper in a Square from 1970. These show a group action where volunteers at the University of Calgary assisted Lewis in making, igniting and then collecting the residue of a huge paper square, the result of which, a pile of ashes, was put under mirrored glass. The work is an example of Lewis’ growing interest in exploiting the poetics of entropy through subtle gestures that cut through space, and in how the temporal cartographies of the diaristic already evident in the Artifact mural were to be amplified in geographic and time-based works that followed. In Room Divided, he transformed a gallery room into a contemplative space that alludes to Zen gardens, by simply dividing a room into two parts demarcated by blue tape on the floor with one side covered in white stucco and the other side bare.
While certainly informed by and an influence in his locale, Lewis participated in a wide network that surpassed place. His prescient experiments in mapping everyday life and urban geographies reflected the ideals of early interactive art, and the centrality of a philosophy that sought to bring art and life into an unceasing and intricate conversation.