Over the past few years, there have been several exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario which excitingly provided close-ups of a plunge into a massive, disturbing and thrilling change in orientation from that of a longstanding mainstream rationality. Efforts ranging from Picasso to David Bowie have staged for us a perhaps very puzzling eschewal of embracing the ambitions of discrete figures joining with other such bounded players in order to cannily foster understanding and well-being. There we saw, by contrast, a cadre of those outsiders engaged by uncanny possibilities which seem to have little chance of meaningfully connecting to generally understood respectable ways and means.Another show, called “Surreal Things,” sought to indicate how the worlds of fashion and industrial and graphic design had become noticeably infiltrated by such initiatives. But the tenor was such as to allow for an easy assumption that only well-heeled neurotics were taking that path. However, with the current show, “The Great Upheaval,” put together by the Guggenheim Museum in New York, from out of a bravado spate of acquisitions by industrialist, Solomon R. Guggenheim, in the early years of the twentieth century, the focus has been very much sharpened in order to, as it were, give us an X-ray of processes generally eclipsed by everyday chores and pleasures.In the work above, “The Smokers” (1911-1912), by Fernand Leger, the mundane pastime becomes engulfed by the neighborhood’s own drift.   Continue reading →