I just discovered Lou Beach via a “classified ad” in the print version of the humour magazine The American Bystander. His work has a Surrealist flavour, but that's all right because I like it anyway.
A lot of Surrealist work seems weak due to a naïve understanding of the friction between the literary and the visual. But some of Beach’s pieces manage to walk that very fine line between the illustrative-literary on the one hand, and the pure visuality of visual art on the other. I think he achieves that difficult balance with his Life Magazine series. And as a Toronto boy, there is also the home-team appeal of Life Magazine versus File Magazine from General Idea.
Amazing, that’s what TO looked like when I was 21 (That’s a view from the island)
There is an issue that bothers me though: disposable print media, such as newspapers and magazines are becoming obsolete. And on account of that, topical, political paper collage is losing its edge, or at the very least, a lot of its raw materials are starting to look historical and decorative. As Marshall McLuhan said somewhere, obsolete tools are hung on the wall and admired as decor. Paper collage may soon join plein air landscape painting in art’s ongoing battles with nostalgia.
These things need to be carefully thought through because our vision is easily impaired by new technologies. It’s difficult to see new things for what they are because we’re dazzled by their newness, and besides that, the old ways are so easy.
Figuring these things out is the preliminary work of artists and poets. Location is the foundation, and once that is determined, art becomes possible.