tim Jocelyn

Tim Jocelyn combined the rigour of fine craft traditions with streetwise, cutting-edge visual art in the many fashionable garments, pieces of decorated furniture, textile banners, paper cutouts, and sculptural constructions he produced during his frenzied career. One might describe the energy running through his hold, colourful compositions as ecstatic. The word “ecstatic” comes from the Greek root ekstasis, which means, literally, to stand outside ones self. And indeed, this concept of transcending the physical self, of acting on impulses outside the individual’s concerns, is in keeping with many aspects of Jocelyn’s life and work.

Again and again, a study of Jocelyn’s imagery reveals the archetypal story of Icarus, the fallen boy who, with manmade wings, flew too close to the sun. In Jocelyn’s brightly coloured four-panel screen called Re-Signing Icarus (1985, silk and leather, 65” x 64”, Collection of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph), images of ascent are mingled both with tribal images of nature and geometric patterning that hints at the technological world. On the panel titled Next Icarus, an image of an astronaut’s suit hovers in the blue sky adjacent to the grid of a satellite arm, reminding us that a present-day human, as a modern Icarus, can cheat the laws of nature and soar ever higher. Icarus appears as a winged figure, a hybrid incarnation that gives him dominion over the land and the air. Jocelyn incorporates images of newt-like amphibious creatures on the bottom third of the panel called Beatification of Icarus. These graphic shapes, cut and appliquéd from blue and black fabric represent still other creatures that can move between worlds, in this case the land and the sea.

Jocelyn’s Re-Signing Icarus screen unfolds in panels, inviting a narrative reading. As we read across, we see the central figure emerge from the sea to construct a tower on the land, then to climb into the air, and eventually to hover in outer space. The folding screen is an open-ended story that leaves room for other panels — unwritten prologues and further chapters to come.

It is inspiring to examine Jocelyn’s short but productive career (he died in 1986 at the age of thirty-four). He was a prolific visionary, who deliberately transgressed any boundary set around him. He ignored, for instance, the traditional hierarchy governing the divisions between fine art, fashion, and craft. In his own work, and in his entrepreneurial activities as an organizer and promoter, no project was too big to be tackled and no attitude too entrenched to be challenged. Jocelyn lived on the stylish cusp of the art scene, constantly experimental in his work, maintaining close ties with his own creativity, defiant against attempts to categorize his production. He lived a joyful, transformative existence — like Icarus he moved effortlessly from one world to the next.

Jocelyn’s dynamic surface decoration relied heavily on the technique of collage, the drawing together of bits of fabrics or colours that come from many sources. I- developed an appreciation for material as a young man when he spent time in the Stratford Festival costume department — his father was head of the Festival orchestra. But it was after a trip to Turkey and Nepal in 1971 that Jocelyn became intrigued by the sophisticated textile arts he found there and began gathering pieces. He was particularly impressed by the thankas, Buddhist prayer banners that incorporated strips of brocades and other fabrics. Perhaps it was the coupling of beauty and meaning in the fabric of the thankas that was to inspire Jocelyn in his own work.

Jocelyn selected pieces of fabric for their colour and texture. They were then cut into shapes and composed into a design on a ground fabric, usually silk. The shapes were basted into place, then appliquéd. These panels, now much like paintings, were cut according to a garment pattern, and finally sewn into clothing. Jocelyn was able to create energy in his textile creations by contrasting shapes and colours on the charged, coloured grounds. The works brought disparate fragments of the artist’s personal history into a new whole.

The artist began by making small “disco” purses, before quickly moving on to vests and, eventually, elaborately decorated jackets. Jocelyn was a painter before he taught himself the textile arts. In his early designs, he was influenced by Russian constructivist work from the twenties and the creations of Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), a Russian expatriate who designed fabrics for the Italian fabric house of Bianchini Ferier. There are also references in his earlier designs to Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Henri Matisse (1869-1954), among others. The cutouts done by Matisse in the fifties reveal a fluid freedom and exuberant use of colour, harnessing purity by honing an evocative shape from solid colour, an impulse Jocelyn shared.

After a trip to New York City to see an exhibit of Mariano Fortuny’s work at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Jocelyn became enamoured of the subdued colour schemes and symmetry implicit in Fortuny’s garments. Jocelyn said, “With me the Fortuny influence is definitely important. I’m working with a very limited colour range — pewter, bronze, and greens. I’m looking at the influences of the classics, the Greek and medieval period. I’ve really begun to understand how something new can draw from the past.”[i] It was after his exposure to the Fortuny tradition that Jocelyn’s designs lost their linear quality and became softer, more flowing.

Other garments allude to historical eras in their formal appearance. Jocelyn’s intricate imagery often encrypts messages and secrets in the garment. His Florentine Dress (1983, silk and leather, Collection of Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph), for example, endows the wearer with the power that accompanies the knowledge of its mysteries. A long red chasuble (a loose, sleeveless, usually ornate outer vestment worn by the celebrant of Mass or Eucharist in the Christian Church) is appliquéd with a stack of symbols that read like a modern hieroglyphic. An airplane, an amphora, a gryphon, a lion, a jumping dolphin, a cog from a wheel, two empty chairs, and a naked man rising in front of the sun — all are visible on the bib that hangs over a shimmering golden-green frock. The garment alludes to ceremony and plays ironically with the austerity of a religious give the dress a spiritual iridescence. Jocelyn was very conscious of the tactile quality of his fabrics. He said, “I just cut and build and try to be improvisational. I’m always aware of the light-reflective quality of fabrics. That’s why I love the metallics. I’ve always worked with silk and increasingly, now, with leather. I love combining colour and textures.”[2]

The combination of fabrics and scraps on the silk ground symbolized the cultural fusion at work in the art community that surrounded Jocelyn in Toronto in the eighties. Toronto (and Canada, for that matter) was increasingly fascinated by imagery from other cultures, at a time before the dialogue around cultural appropriation frowned on such exoticizing by a dominant culture. Jocelyn’s textile works casually embodied antithetical aesthetics: his tribal motifs and stylized figures, for example, were reminiscent of African art, yet they also alluded strongly to the refinement of Henri Matisse’s elegant paper cuts. Consider the term “sampling,” which we now apply to the aural appropriations of recording artists: Jocelyn sampled other cultures, tried on different attitudes from various periods in art history, and created a new groove with an energy of its own.

Jocelyn was aware of and influenced by his New York—based contemporaries, Keith Haring (1958-1990) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), who drew their raw energy from the street and eventually brought the graffiti scrawl into the shrine of the contemporary museum. Like Haring and Basquiat, Jocelyn did not create his pieces for muse um display. The work came from a calling in the immediate community, an appreciation for the energy that rippled through the urban youth movement

Tim Jocelyn had the ability to step away from his own interests and, altruistically, involve the broader community of artists in events that he conceived. These important events, exhibitions, and happenings provided a nexus for a new energy and attitude in Toronto’s visual-arts community. Jocelyn transgressed existing boundaries between working artists and the commercial and public gallery sys tem by conceiving of an alternative forum that skirted the rules, attitudes, and pretences of those institutions. Jocelyn belongs, as one of an important group of instigators, in any art historian’s recounting of the maturation of the visual-arts scene in Toronto. It was a time when fashion fused the elements of life and art, art returned to the people and the streets. In his essay “The Snakes in the Garden,” Globe and Mail art critic John Bentley Mays describes the limits faced by young artists in Toronto in the early eighties:

There was also a new art scene, and the artists originally faced the same obstacles as their colleagues in other disciplines. Young artists tumbling out of the counterculture had virtually nowhere to go, if Avrom Isaacs, Carmen Lamanna, Dorothy Cameron and a few other perceptive and risk-taking dealers would not take them. And unlike the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario (except during the tenure there of Alvin Balkind) remained by and large aloof from the new developments in Toronto art, and willing to give only token acknowledgement to the changes overtaking art elsewhere in the world. So it happened that artists did what the dancers, writers and musicians also did, with equal and often surpassing success: they took matters into their own hands.[3]

This impulse again fuelled the proliferation of collectives and exhibitions in alternative spaces that defined the scene in the Toronto art world of the nineties.

Tim Jocelyn was associated and worked closely with the members of the ChromaZone collective, formed in 1981, in theory to reassert the importance of the art object amidst the rising interest in performance, video, and other time-oriented media. In 1981, he and Andy Fabo organized Jaywalking the Intersection of Fashion and Art, held at the Theatre Centre in Toronto. In conjunction with Chroma Jocelyn was one of three organizers of Chromaliving, which was mounted in the former Harridges department store at the Colonnade at 131 Bloor Street West in Toronto from October19 to November 12, 1983. Jocelyn, along with Andy Fabo and Carla Garnet, brought together objects, furniture, sculpture, and painting in installations that engaged art with every day life and resulted in a watershed exhibition. Art was “not elevated and separate,” Jocelyn said to John Bentley Mays[4]. Mays went on to say in his review of the show that “Chromaliving is proof positive that Toronto’s post-war high art traditions are dead.”

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Jocelyn organized the art and fashion event called Dressing Up for Harbourfront in 1984; it brought together a hundred artists and models to celebrate wearable art and the cult of fashion. An encapsulation in Canadian Art magazine described the event as “an evening designed to make high fashion look highly facile, to topple haute couture into low culture. An evening, altogether, of lunatic dionysiatrics…”[5] while the premise was to give artists an opportunity to walk the runway in their creations, Jocelyn’s efforts once again subversively turned notions of the sanctity of fine art on their ear.

Although Jocelyn was an impresario, he would not be comfortable given sole credit for such happenings. In fact, his energy and vision created forums for many artists and makers to come together in new ways. Lucy Lippard, in her description of similar forces at work in the New York art scene, writes: “In the early 80’s, collaboration itself became a political statement, an effective way of attacking the conventional notion of rugged individual genius and of breaking down barriers between ‘downtown’ and ‘uptown’ artists.”[6] Jocelyn recognized a surge of activity in the community that demanded an outlet, despite the aloof stance of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the private dealers in the city.

Jocelyn was also aware of the difficulties that his own work conjured when demanding classification by the Toronto art establishment. As a “fashion artist,” he was vexed by the double standard evident in the gallery world’s handling of craft. Jocelyn was conscious of the age-old schism between the fine-art and craft camps. He said, “There have always been great craftsmen involved in fashion — the lace makers and the bead makers. I’m quite happy to sell to the fashion market. Equally I think people in galleries can carry my work. I like to think of myself as walking a fine line. I don’t like to polarize myself.”[7] He did not consider his work outside the realm of fine art, yet it was difficult for him to fit in. “1 want people to approach my clothes fairly seriously because, to me, they’re an art medium on the same level as sculpture or painting.”[8]

Jocelyn straddled the two camps. He participated in many exhibitions at the Ontario Crafts Council, Harbourfront, at the ChromaZone venues, and even had a retrospective exhibition at the venerable Olga Korper Gallery in 1983. Visual/ Rhythms, an outdoor exhibition at the Toronto Sculpture Garden in 1984 that incorporated three huge banners by Jocelyn, furthered public familiarity with his work. He was also included in a show of Canadian design at 49th Parallel Gallery in New York in 1985. It was not until after his death, how ever, that the larger players — museums and public galleries — began to take notice of this important body of work. A posthumous retrospective of his work, Fictions + Realities, was mounted at the Power Plant in Toronto in 1990. Shows organized in conjunction with the Tim Jocelyn Art Foundation have followed at the Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto (1996), the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa (1997), and the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre in Guelph (2000).

Sexuality was a factor in defining Tim Jocelyn’s work. As a young gay male artist in the carefree heyday of pre-AIDS Toronto, he reveled in the newfound acceptance of a gay lifestyle. There is a joyous celebration of homosexuality in Jocelyn’s work, a defiant, lusty playfulness that belies an assurance and confidence that were reflected in the man. It is helpful to consider his chosen medium as “queer” - breaking with tradition, alternative, undefinable. Fashion and sewing have traditionally been characterized as “women’s work,” but Jocelyn and other gay male Canadian artists such as Robert Windrum and Neil Mac have defiantly claimed the needle. Mac has written, “The complex link that associates the homosexual in popular consciousness with the textile practitioner may appear to be a superficial sexual stereotype. There is, however, a verifiable history of homosexual textile practice as there are certain professions popularly associated with figures known to be homosexual.”[9] In an interview, Mac said, ‘Both the domain of textiles and sexuality are informed by the conditions of habituated practice. Cultural artifacts and social interaction facilitate a meaningful history of use through sensory experience located first in the body rather than in the mind.”[10]

Jocelyn explores the relationship of the garment to the body and its associated sensual, intimate qualities in his Wild Boys Boxer Shorts (1982, silk and leather, Collection of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph). The shorts are appliquéd with colourful silhouettes of burly boxers: their bodies are cut out of silk, their gloves of coloured leather. The words “WILD” and “BOYS” are writ large on the waistband of the shorts. The fetishization of the sports garment is common in gay male iconography that investigates the locker room as queer space. In another work, Jocelyn tattooed a regular grey double-breasted business jacket with black, silver, and gold decorations reassembling machine parts, a television set, and even a heart on the sleeve (Grey Jacket, 1984, silk and leather, Collection of Gordon Jocelyn). This uniform of conformity, normally worn in the performance of everyday tasks, suddenly becomes gloriously unique, emblematic of a queer identity - ready for monkey business

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Perhaps it was in his banners that Jocelyn’s textile work came closest to painting. The flat format of a banner lends a formalism that encourages the reader to view the work as a piece of art. Of several ornate silk and leather banners produced in the mid-eighties, Cities of the Red Night (1984, silk and leather, 38” x 60”, Collection of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph) is most complex. The banner takes its name from a book by William S. Burroughs (1911-1997) published in 1981. When an excerpt taken from the new book was publisher in FILE magazine in 1981, the editorial described “William Burroughs excerpts his new novel Cities of the Red Night and puts sex where it belongs: in public — in the bars and at hangings.”[11] Jocelyn banner brings sex into public as well. The whole banner is cut in warm to hot shades. A sinister hand holds a demonic mask on the far left, and naked men wrestle, pose, and engage with javelins and bows against a backdrop of mosques and minarets. A mysterious trio of masked figures runs arm in arm from far right through this gay nirvana. There are also sinister silver fighter jets in the sky over the city. Could these masked rogues and portents of violence signal the arrival of the AIDS plague into the gay man’s playground in the eighties? The centre of the banner is dominated by a large silhouette of a muscular male figure in fiery red briefs, reminiscent of the first Calvin Klein underwear ad, which appeared in the eighties and featured model Jeff Aquilon, mostly naked against a whitewashed Grecian wall. The top and bottom are bordered by a decorative band that juxtaposes curling phalluses against a bold geometric pattern. The banner is provocative and sensual in imagery and material. It is a rigorous composition that rivals any painting in its complexity, depth of meaning, and concept.

In 1985, one year before his death, Jocelyn was commissioned to create a piece for the Canada Pavilion at Expo 86 in Vancouver. This was to be the last major project in his short career. He began exploring imagery for the project on paper, working with vinyl cutouts in the same way he had used fabric in his textile applications. What emerged was the Net Dimensions Astrolabe (1986, vinyl cutouts, mixed media; 7.3 m X 4.9 m, Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto), and it reigned over the Great Hall of the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 86.

The Astrolabe was based on the ancient instrument of navigation used by the explorers who “discovered” Canada. The instrument calculated direction based on the altitude of stars. Jocelyn’s Astrolabe was made up of multifaceted concentric rings, comprising twenty-four different parts that turned slowly, programmed by a computer. Jocelyn used cool blues on one side and hot reds and yellows on the other side of the rings. The imagery incorporates motifs that are distinctly Canadian and closely tied to the natural environment: thunderbolts, a Haida mask on the visor of an astronaut’s suit, snow geese, beaver, moose, a rendering of Tom Thomson’s The West Wind painting, a deep-sea diver, and maps of an ocean floor. All of these images throb in vivid primary colours. Conceptually the work embodies the ongoing search for a national identity that has preoccupied Canadian culture for most of the past century. Jocelyn seems to have synchronistically merged images of the natural world, cultural production from aboriginal peoples to modern artists, and images of new technologies related to space travel and communication. All of these elements blend into a rich, funky lexicon that celebrates that complex identity and reassures us of its development and longevity.

Any summary examination of the work produced by Tim Jocelyn must conclude that indeed this Icarus’ ascent was quick, colourful, and brilliant. He was a magnetic artist, an inspiration, who carried many along with him on his vision quests. He forged ahead despite the inability of others to define him. And, thankfully, he left behind a wonderful body of work that is ample evidence of his unique vision, his humour, his irreverence, his pride in who he was. The Icarus myth is particularly poignant when applied to Tim Jocelyn because he fell far too soon.

It is tragic to dwell on the work that was never to he made and all that creative energy lost to Toronto’s artistic community. It is better to focus on the ecstatic vitality of the objects that remain. It is better to be inspired to mark our own lives with emblems and decoration that set us apart from the everyday, using art as our wings to carry us above the predictable, the restricted, and the repressed

“The Ascent of Icarus: On the Art of Tim Jocelyn” by Stuart Reid from The Art of Tim Jocelyn edited by Sybil Goldstein. Used by permission of McClelland & Stewart Ltd return

Photo Credits

*1 Re-Signing Icarus, © Tim Jocelyn, 1985, materials: silk, leather, dimensions: 41 x 165 x 10 cm, 16 x 65 x 4 in. collection of: MacDonald Stewart Art Centre, University of Guelph

*2 Tim Jocelyn in front of Cities of the Red Night, 1984 photo: Tony Wilson, courtesy of the Artist Foundation

*3 Florentine Dress © Tim Jocelyn, 1983 materials: silk and leather, photo: Michael Rafelson, collection of: MacDonald Stewart Art Centre, University of Guelph

*4 Chromaliving Poster, offset, 18 X 12in., 1983. design: Andy Fabo, photo: Tony Wilson, courtesy of ChromaZone, Toronto

*5 Dressing Up, Finale, 1984, photo, Tony Wilson, courtesy of The Artist Foundation

*6 Cities of the Red Night © Tim Jocelyn, 1984, materials: silk and leather, dimensions: 97 x 152 cm, 38 x 60 in. collection of: MacDonald Stewart Art Centre, University of Guelph, photo: Michael Rafelson

*7 Tim Jocelyn in Front of Astrolabe, 1986, photo: Tony Wilson, courtesy of The Artist Foundation

*8 Governor General Awards Poster © Tim Jocelyn, 1986, materials: offset, dimensions: 61 x 46 cm, 24 x 18 in. published: Summerhill Press, photo: Michael Rafelson, courtesy of The Artist Foundation

NOTES

1. Beverly Bowen, ‘craft Council Gallery Displaying Fashion Art,” Globe and Mail, August 6, 1981.

2. Quoted in “Those Magnificent Men with Their Sewing Machines,” Toronto Life Fashion, Winter 1981.

3. John Bentley Mays, “The Snakes in the Garden,” in Robert Bringhurst etal. eds), Visions: Contemporary Art in Canada, Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1983), 1 74.

4. John Bentley Mays, “Chronialiving Proves Traditions Are Dead,” Globe and Mail, October 22, 1983.

5, “Tim Jocelyn’s Dressing Up,” Canadian Art, Fall 1984,90.

6. Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessings: Art in a Multicultural America, ‘New York: The New Press, 1990), 168.

7. Quoted in Beverly Bowen, “Getting There. . .Tim Jocelyn,” Globe and Mail, June17, 1980.

8.. Noah James, “Fashion Doubles as Art Form,” Globe and Mail, June 30, 1981.

9. Neil Maclnnis, “Crimes Against Nature,” in Ingrid Bachmann and Ruth Scheuing eds), Material Matters: The Art and Culture of Contemporary Textiles (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1998), 226-27.

10. Neil McInnis quoted in an interview with Margo Messing, cited in Janis Jefferies, “Autobiographical Patterns,” Material Matters, 116.

11. FILE vol.5 no. 1, March 1981, 13.

-sr-

about the author: Born in Dundee, Scotland, Stuart Reid immigrated to Canada in 1967. He studied art and art history at York University in Toronto (BFA 1986.) From 1990 to 1992, Reid was an Associate Curator at The Craft Gallery of the Ontario Crafts Council in Toronto. From 1992 to 2001, Reid was Curator at the Art Gallery of Mississauga. In 1997, he was a guest of the British Council on a study tour of contemporary art in Northern Ireland. Since 2001, he has been Director and Curator of the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery in Owen Sound. Reid is an alumnus of the J. Paul Getty Trust’s Museum Leadership Institute (2002) at the University of California at Berkeley. Reid is an active curator, critic and writer – recent exhibitions include Kevin Yates: My ex-girlfriend is a slut, Lorna Mills: Reality Show and The Limestone Barrens Project: A creative residency exchange between Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Ireland.

About the artist: To find out more about Tim Jocelyn, and see more of his work go to Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art or his specific page

In 2004, The Tim Jocelyn Art Foundation changed it’s name to The Artists Foundation.The Artists Foundation [TAF] is dedicated to promoting the status and welfare of Canadian visual artists. TAF provides charitable and tangible support to both individuals and organizations as directed within the visual arts community through three programs: the Arthur Gelgoot Fund, the Community Access Program and the Publications Program

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the Art Of Tim Jocelyn

THE ASCENT OF ICARUS: On the Art of Tim Jocelyn by Stuart Reid