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Border Crossings 104
Whenever I go to Europe I make a point of picking up a copy of The Economist at the airport and reading it from cover-to-cover on the plane. I have to if I want to keep up with my European brethren; they are more politically attuned than I am. The Economist helps level the field. I feel more intelligent after reading it, ready for engagement.
Border Crossings does something similar for the arts. It is a comprehensive, informative, very well-written quarterly magazine that, while focusing on the visual, does so in the context of many genres of art, literature, and film prevalent in today’s world. Issue 104, for example, features poetry, painting, photography, zines, graphic novels, films, exhibitions, doodles, cartoons, and books. All are fed, at least in this issue, into an editorial artery of ‘words and pictures,’ which winds its way through 124 pages of interviews, columns, reviews, profiles, and portfolios. The front cover, cut from nice, thick stock, is filled in this case with a suit top and tie, sketched in what looks like charcoal, and emblazoned with bright orange titles.
Editor Meeka Walsh, and Robert Enright, the founding editor and now editor-at-large, contribute much to this award-winning magazine, now in its twenty-seventh year. Walsh writes with the comfort and confidence of someone who thoroughly understands both her craft and her readership, much as Lewis Lapham knew Harper’s. Her words shine with a limpid distinction that is particularly impressive given how susceptible her subject matter is to the opposite. Walsh’s writing is informative without being pedantic, personal without being banal.
In issue 104, Walsh paints the plain Manitoba landscape as backdrop to a discussion of Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art, a book that, with multiple voices of “quiet courage,” addresses the singular central English white male paradigm, within which the Group of Seven’s paintings were exhibited at the National Gallery in Ottawa and subsequently across Canada in 1995.
I quickly realize while reading that I don’t want Walsh’s essay to end; it’s that affecting. Not just because of the way she pulls ready quotes from the likes of Simon Shama, Thoreau, Rene Magritte, and John Berger, but because of lyrical descriptions like this one of her home province:
Aeons ago, glaciers slid over the ground, raking and scouring it. They left behind, as they melted, endless flat fields covered in a thick layer of stubborn, unyielding soil, peppered throughout by small boulders and rocks that rise to the surface, heaved each spring by the annual thaw.
Threaded as it is with insightful commentary and enlightening quotation, Walsh’s writing alone makes this magazine worth reading.
Robert Enright is renowned for his Border Crossings interviews. He engages significant and interesting artists with a disarming combination of erudition and directness. For instance, with Leonard Cohen he carries the interview from, “A.J.M. Smith had a notion he called ‘eclectic detachment’ through which Canadian poets could choose the tradition they wanted,” in one question to, “You mean you couldn’t even get laid writing a poem?” in the next.
In addition to the Cohen interview, which is accompanied by a selection of Leonard’s “deadly serious” doodles, there is another with Dutch-born artist Marcel van Eeden, who since 1993 has been creating a drawing a day of events that occurred before November 22, 1965—his date of birth. There is also a piece on using collage as inspiration for film making, poetry that intersects with science by a “remarkably gifted young poet” named Michael Lista, crisp, bountifully illustrated profiles of Guelph Ontario born cartoonist Seth, small prop/figurine artist Diana Thorneycroft, poet/artist John Havelda; and a slew of reviews at the back end, mostly of Canadian and international exhibitions.
Other than the perhaps occasional overuse of the word “compelling” and the odd overwritten flourish, such as, “the instantaneity of limited hope and certain disappointment,” this final section exhibits the same winning formula characterizing the rest of this excellent magazine: crystalline, informative prose, charged with excitement from the art it so capably describes.
For the way it writes about and covers today’s artistic spectrum, Border Crossings deserves your attention. And next time I travel abroad, The Economist will not be the only magazine I pick up.