When my London first gazed upon the marvellous Greg Curnoe exhibition of collages, it was somewhere just after the beginning.
Now, it’s almost the end.
This should be your cue to stop reading this — and race down to Museum London, seek out CUTOUT: Greg Curnoe, Shaped Collages 1965-68 and prepare to be uplifted. And up laughed. And up turned to the remarkable London art scene of the 1960s.
If by some chance you have kept reading, do visit Museum London before Sunday afternoon at 5 p.m., when CUTOUT closes.
Toronto-based curator Robert Fones, a former London artist, worked with Curnoe when the late London artist was creating the shaped collages in the 1960s.
Fones’s insights and identifications are definitive. There are dozens of 50 shaped object-collage works, in series of repeated “face” elements and one-of-a-kind objects.
Fones tracked down almost all of them.
When Fones discussed the exhibition for a My London column last May, its title was tentatively Anatomy of a Collage: The Cut-Out Collages of Greg Curnoe 1965-1968. The title may have changed a bit. As Fones said at the time it tends to be dominated by the moustache-shaped collages, because of their sheer number — and because, for those of us who remember Curnoe, the man and the moustache are forever tied in memory.
“They were reflective of Greg. He had a moustache,” Fones said then.
So what’s inside those shapes, moustaches or otherwise? Colours. Words. Boxers. Babes. Witty juxtapositions. Parking tickets. Gum wrappers. Material from the comic strips such as Terry and The Pirates and Moon Mullins Curnoe enjoyed so much. Part of a political pamphlet urging voters to support Brickenden — likely the late George Brickenden — a good Liberal.
Fones points to many phallic images — thermometers and zeppelins among — and a considerable interest in the naked or Betty Page-ish female form.
Curnoe also came up with Dink as the perfect collage title for a work where the phallic image is no thermometer. The use of a telephone dial as part of that “dink” suggests, Fones said during an exhibition tour, an allusion to a primitive phone sex/dating line back in the day.
My London would welcome more details about that line, which has achieved urban myth proportions over the decades.
CUTOUT is almost gone — and because the collages are held in many separate collections, it will not be easily gathered again.
A visitor to CUTOUT Wednesday talked with London artist Wyn Geleynse, a London artist and part-time installer at Museum London.
“I’m just measuring up the Curnoe moustaches because I’m designing special boxes for (transporting) them,” Geleynse said.
There’s your cue. Get down to Museum London. Now. Don’t miss out on CUTOUT.
James Reaney is a London Free Press arts & entertainment columnist and reporter.
E-mail james.reaney@sunmedia.ca, read James's blog or follow Jamesatlfpress on Twitter.
IF YOU GO
What: Museum London exhibition CUTOUT: Greg Curnoe, Shaped Collages 1965-68. Curated by Robert Fones. Ends Sunday.
When: Thursday, noon to 9 p.m., Friday to Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.
Where: Museum London, 421 Ridout St. N.
Details: Admission by donation. Visit museumlondon.ca or call 519-661-3767.