[syndicate] Monty Cantsin [Istvan Kantor] recevies gg award

[George Lessard]

Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts: Announcement of 
laureates

http://www.canadacouncil.ca/news/pressreleases/co0406-e.asp
Downloadable images of the artists and selected works are available on 
the Canada Council web site: www.canadacouncil.ca/prizes/ggvma
http://www.canadacouncil.ca/prizes/ggvma/2004/default.asp

Istvan Kantor
http://www.canadacouncil.ca/prizes/ggvma/2004/kantor-e.asp

Istvan Kantor (also known previously as Monty Cantsin) is a media 
artist/producer active in performance art, robotics, installation, 
sound, music, video and new media. Kantor’s interactive robotic 
performance work has been featured at Ars Electronica 2000. He has 
received the Telefilm Canada Award for Best Canadian Video (1998) and 
the Transmediale 2001 video award in Berlin. His avant-garde work has 
been described by the media as rebellious and anti-authoritarian, as 
well as technically innovative and highly experimental. Istvan Kantor 
has lived in Budapest, Paris, Montreal and New York. He currently lives 
in Toronto.

Jury citation: “Istvan Kantor’s work in video and performance art is on 
the cutting and critical edge of contemporary art. His is an aggressive 
and unapologetic aesthetic of excess. Kantor’s interdisciplinary, 
no-holds-barred, neo-Dada art has earned him a large international 
following and a unique reputation. He embraces technology in order to 
confront, and revolt against, the mind-numbing and oppressive nature of 
technology and the power structures it supports.”

"... From the time of his immigration to Canada from Hungary in 1977, 
Istvan Kantor has created a body of work remarkable for its demonic 
energy, its subversive vision, and its encompassing range. He has 
explored mail art, music, kinetic sculpture, multi-media installation 
and, most prominently, performance art and video. He founded an 
indefinable and conspiratorial movement he called neoism. The intent of 
Kantor's work has always been to disrupt closed systems of power, 
political and aesthetic, to lay bare the ways in which technology 
transforms human bodies and minds into elements of a vast robotic 
machine, and to confront today's deadening systems of technological 
control. The concept that most broadly governs Kantor's vision is 
“accumulation.” “In the land of accumulation all activity remains 
activated, causing continuous interventions, overlapping structures, 
sudden changes, global explosions, turmoil, tumult, turbulence, 
everything happens at once and simultaneously,” Kantor writes. “It's 
accumulation that makes the earth shake at six o'clock and demolishes 
the difference between art and life, labour and leisure.”..."
{Daniel Baird is art editor of The Brooklyn Rail, a New York-based 
magazine about the arts, politics and culture. }

In addition to a $15,000 prize, each laureate will be presented with an 
original artwork created by Nova Scotia ceramic artist Walter Ostrom, 
winner of the 2003 Saidye Bronfman Award.