PUCK, THE NAVEL
Lee Henderson

There’s a relatively unacknowledged folk art tradition in Canada of people painting on hockey pucks. Everyone from grandparents to children like to do it; it’s our less ubiquitous version of the ex-voto paintings you see on Mexican satellite dishes: personal tributes to our national religion. As I write this essay we are in the thick of it, the Playoffs are on, everywhere you go you see people in the agonizing throes of late-hockey season. Most important for the artist Jason McLean though, his (as well as my own) home team, the Vancouver Canucks, are still alive. I can hear the ecstatic hollering punctuated by car horns even as I write this. It is a rare thing, the Canucks on a winning streak. Vancouver is well-known to be flush with successful artists; not so much with our boys on the ice. All over Canada, the NHL can drive us into a state of turbid, booze-spoiled collective ecstasy. Springtime is riot time. During the Playoffs especially, the urge to do something to prove ones devotion to the game is unavoidable. If you don’t like to shouldercheck windows, you at least need a flag or two on your car. We are all diplomats of the game. The flags prove whose side we’re on: Our side. Public transit in Vancouver now rotates their digital readout of the route number with the words “Go ‘Nucks.” And the fan is drawn to identify the puck as the source of all this newfound energy, like a great black vulcanized navel. The rubber puck comes to represent hope and faith in oneself to surmount insurmountable odds. The jersey, the puck, the stick, the net. You paint the puck because you want to coin every season, to celebrate, and then have something personalized to remember the celebrations by. The year Vancouver made it to the Finals (and rioted when we lost): 1994. The year we won the Stanley Cup: TBA.

McLean has painted on hockey gloves and other sporting goods for many years, but with his team in the Finals, the hockey is invariably going to play a greater role in his recent work, and thus the puck. And the goalie helmet. Hockey is as much McLean’s subject as it is the city’s, Canada’s. McLean’s drawings combine his unmistakable line handling and vivid colours with a diverse interplay of subject matter drawn from the world around him. I often think of his work as entries in a visual diary. The drawings have that private and obscure feeling you get from a diary, almost too intimate to understand, but still somehow very familiar in the details, and often witty and gregarious in the observations. As a subject, hockey’s everywhere this time of year, like the cherry blossoms, so it’s no wonder it has shown up in McLean’s work.

Looking at McLean’s drawings and considering the athletics that keeps popping up in his work, I’m reminded of two things. The first is Jeff Koons; the second is Walter Gretzky, the strict and focused father of The Great One number 99. First of all, I can see that hockey is to McLean as the dog is to Jeff Koons; both are, in the most strangely sincere sense, examples of a sublime middle-class: This is the way we live. In Koons’s work, it’s the scale and tactility of the material that arrest our gaze (appropriate for puppies), where in McLean’s it is colour, movement, and perspective that keeps us rapt (good for sport). There’s a lot of blue in McLean’s work, blue the colour of water, blue the colour of the Canucks jerseys, blue the colour of Vancouver. In both cases Koons and McLean adorn and embellish the vernacular, whether it’s a poodle or a puck, to draw our attention to the complex social significance of what is, by Koons’s definition “banal.” McLean has painted on hockey gloves and pads, one tennis racket, plenty of leather baseballs, a basketball, and countless other unconventional surfaces. Each of these objects carries with it to the plinth all of our previous memories attached to their likeness. Like Koons, there’s an unmistakable recursiveness to McLean’s work, in that Koons’s dogs refer not as much to living animals as they do to this “banal,” classless vernacular imagery, because this is Koons’s real subject. From Saks jewelry department to dollar store calendars, the dog is such a transcendently trite icon that it won’t and can’t go out of style. McLean has his eye out for this kind of timeless material as well. Demotic design, amateur iconography, and the quotability of street-corner conversations, he appropriates and manipulates these for his compositions, no added commentary, just showing his appreciation. McLean’s drawings are not as smooth-going to swallow as a Koons sculpture, which slip down as fast as a lozenge, because his artwork is more influenced by language, and language is a tangled cacophany that more often than not gets caught in your throat. To enjoy the pleasures of language is sometimes like being into autoasphyxiation. We can discuss something simple about language like whether it’s true that what we mean and what we say are two entirely different things and already we’re confused. Yet I can’t help thinking of how every spring, Canada’s concentration is tuned so steadily to NHL, and Vancouver this year especially, that as with the rare sight of an unclouded view of the sun, the rarity of the Canucks in the Playoffs is enough to send Vancouverites out our doors screaming madly into the streets, conquest and celebration reducing all language to a stream of howling vowels, throwing our minds and bodies into a frenzy of Canucks blue and white—a combination that incidentally occupies a lot of real estate in Jason McLean’s drawings—, and for this brief period of rabid, uninhibited inchoate goodwill, so short-lived and so so rare, the city comes to life, enjoying the hell out of ourselves in this our brief life as an unruly mob. In other cities with more successful sports franchises, there are more opportunities to let loose, more steam valves to release the societal tension that regularly builds up and needs a place to blow up. Vancouver has very few of these valves (as previoulsy mentioned, our favorite colour is dark blue) and our population is steadily ballooning to a certain capacity where if we don’t blow off some steam soon, the whole town is set to pop. Whether it’s politics or sports, it is our competitive self-serving nature as an animal that causes us to riot. Vancouver is about due.

Vancouver’s riot in 1994 when the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup in game seven was instructive. There I was with a couple of friends behind the SWAT team as they pummelled the corner of Robson and Thurlow, the epicenter of the downtown riot, with teargas. Not part of the action, behind the action, and then ducking for cover in a nearby Denny’s until 4am when the clouds of pepper spray finally drifted away. It’s said that Wally—as the elder Gretzky was called—used to watch every game his son played in the minor leagues with a pen and pad on his lap. Not part of the action, but recording it. What he would do was he would follow the puck with his eyes and at the same time trace as accurately as he could onto the page its every movement along the ice. He and his son would study the drawings afterwards, and as his cache of tracings grew, so did their understanding of the game. By being able to establish a pattern of puck movement, they could exploit the pattern to his son’s advantage. Did the drawings help Wayne play a better game? Did they help him play better because the drawings were, unbeknownst to father or son, art? Having never seen any reproductions of Wally’s puck-following line-drawings, my thoughts instantly replace that gap with drawings by McLean. I can easily follow McLean’s line as it skates across the page, getting thick and worked in at the centreline and along the corners. There is this swift assurance that you can see in all his lines, how they seem to appear on the page just as if McLean was concentrating on the moment, and like Wally, his hand is merely following a source of movement he already sees.