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GUESTS AND PERFORMANCES
FanTasia 2005 was back yet again with another strong over-all program, but what set it ahead from last year was the inclusion of several wonderful and varied guests, performances, and presentations, most notably the appearances of Joe Coleman, Steven Bissette, and Ray Harryhausen. The appearance of painter, filmmaker and performance artist Joe Coleman, his first in Montreal, was entitled “Retinal Stigmatics: An Evening with Joe Coleman.” Described in the festival catalogue as “A Live Multimedia Midnight Mass,” the evening was principally a slide show of magnified details of his paintings, accompanied by dirge-like music and Coleman’s own partly autobiographical, partly analytical running commentary. To make these slides Coleman must have panned over his paintings with a camera (digital I would think), highlighting portions of his colorful, finely detailed works. To see Coleman’s art, which are small in their original size –most about 20 by 22 inches– projected on a huge screen rendered an operatic flavor to his highly “iconographic” art (You can see some of Colemen’s art on his official website.) In fact, the “representations” of his original artworks were so powerful, and spoke so clearly to the senses, that his running philosophical-religious commentary usually hindered rather than aided the overall performance. Less intrusive was Coleman’s autobiographical commentary, where we learn that he was born and raised Irish Catholic and has endured a lifelong love-hate relationship with God and religion. Again, this is evident from the art itself, but at least the autobiographical commentary did not attempt to pigeonhole the meaning of the art as did the analytical interjections. We also learn that his favorite artists are mainly pre-Renaissance, naming Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel, as well as post-Renaissance painters Otto Dix, and William Blake (I also saw elements of William Hogarth in his art). In Coleman’s view, art died with Michelangelo, because he valued the aesthetic over the subject (a debatable point which would require, well, a lot of debate). In Coleman’s approach to art, he paints not for aesthetic reasons but to depict the inner pains of his subjects; not to change or make the world a better place, but to exorcise his inner demons. As such, Coleman’s style stands as a strange combination of Renaissance classicism and early 20th...