Archive for April 2006

Toronto isn’t the best place to live right now. With the two centerpieces of this city’s culture currently undergoing renovations, and with the Power Plant gallery continuing to highlight just how irrelevant and uninteresting most contemporary art is, I find myself bored more often that I’d like to be. But the talk is of a cultural renaissance and the city is looking for some kind of vision for itself. One problem: this is the corporate centre of Canada, and corporations are lousy at vision. Look at advertising – it has become the dominant cultural and visual expression of our society. Pompeii was frozen in time and its frescoes were preserved. Such a disaster in Toronto would only preserve a galaxy of images of vacant expressions and languid poses.And the graffiti. God bless the graffiti. A recent book suggests the ancient cave painting of Europe had more in common to graffiti than they do to religious iconography, which personally makes sense. (However, since we fundamentally know nothing about the cave paintings, they will always be susceptible to fashionable interpretation: a century ago when religion was taken more seriously, they had religious meaning. Now that religion has faded in importance, they’re graffiti. A century from now, a new reading perhaps based on whatever reality is present at that time).

Christopher Hutsul, in today’s Toronto Star, interviewed some people about Toronto’s cultural vision. He spoke to Fiona Smyth, Matthew Teitelbaum (of the AGO) and Sarah Diamond (the new president of OCAD). Why Smyth was chosen to be the voice of Toronto’s artists, I don’t know. I guess he could have picked worse … there are plenty worse. Smyth hasn’t been relevant to the Toronto scene for a decade (at least that’s my understanding). When asked about her vision, Hutsul wrote:

“For painter Fiona Smyth, graffiti should be flat-out decriminalized. ‘Billboards are taking over,’ she says. ‘Every available space is being grabbed by corporations, and graffiti can be a counterpoint to that …. ‘ The art form could extend to our rooftops, which Smyth believes are an untapped resource for gallery space. She imagines a city where rooftops are connected by a network of catwalks and feature sculptures, art pieces and gardens.”

I have some idea of what she’s smoking, but I’d like to point out that artists really need to get off the anti-billboard bandwagon. Only because, we get it. Imagine you want to suggest a new strategy, argue a point, or hell, even get laid. There’s a progression that occurs in proposition, argument and in seduction. You do not belabor the first step. You move forward. Yes billboards suck. Next…..

There’s a self-consciousness at the moment in the Left of what has gone wrong … and this failure to evolve the message is surely one of the problems. Our city is over-corporatized, billboards are part of that, but graffiti is not an antidote to them. Graffiti can be as much of an eyesore … one person’s masterpiece is another’s whack job, and so we need to keep this in mind. I for one like how graffiti throws down some colour on the otherwise gray landscape, shows some imagination.

We shouldn’t even try to understand architects who think raw concrete is lovely, let’s not waste the energy. But let’s think of how there are paint factories in the world capable of producing enough paint to cover the CN Tower if we so chose.

The tower for one is nice enough as it is, but we’re also used to it that way. We are also used to thinking that ancient Greco-Roman architecture was purely white. But it wasn’t – the Greeks and Romans painted their buildings – they seemed to enjoy colour. They seemed to have suffered from the fear of empty spaces known as horror vacui. Yet, in our day and age, the pure white walled room is the temple of contemporary art and culture. The overall message is that colour is bad, somehow not pure, because of the puritan pollution of neo-classicism which still lingers in the mind of the cultural. Rooftops of gardens and sculptures is something they might have done 2000 years ago, but I don’t really think sculpture has much relevance and I further imagine the sculpture would be like the shit atop the poles on Spadina … pure eyesores.

Calling for catwalks and sculpture gardens is just asking for more space to put up advertising kiosks like Derek Sulivan did. Was his project a critique of capitalism, or the suggestion that billboards are ok, as long as they imitate what was done in Europe a century ago?

Teitelbaum suggests expanding the AGO’s exhibitions to outside the space … put stuff up at Union Stn and similar. I suppose he hasn’t walked through BCE place at any time in the past few years, or through that office building on Yonge that had a space Paul Petro used to run. The BCE exhibitions are usually interesting, but ignored by the business people going to and fro. Union Stn wouldn’t work either – the space is too shitty (the Go Train space that is) and that would be your primary audience. People arriving on VIA would be too distracted by their trip to check out art, and no one from downstairs waiting for a Go Train would go upstairs, probably because the show would have stupid hours or be otherwise inaccessible.

The waterfront idea has some merit, but they’d be encroaching on the Power Plant’s territory, and then there’d be a turf war. Power Plant people bitching about the AGO, I can see it now, and it depresses me. But let’s move on to Sarah Diamond, who, it appears, is full of the vigour of naivte. ‘Look at me, I’m the president of an art school! Let’s have a Happening’. Jesus H Christ.

Yes, to reinvigorate our city’s cultural life, let’s go back 40 years, to a time when Henry Moore fell in love with Toronto out of spite. Happenings with scientists. I imagine Power Point presentations on quantum mechanics and relativity theory and oooh, dark matter. A real happening now involves nudity, cocaine, endless kegs, and music that hurts your ears. That’s not something likely to be sanctioned by corporate Canada and its funders.

Diamond goes on to say that arts need to be at the centre and not at the periphery – but they are at the periphery just as much as plumbing is to many of us – because the arts have become a little industry. I mean, if I needed a plumber, I wouldn’t know where to start to find one. It’s hard enough trying to find somebody to fix your computer, let alone your pipes. The arts are the same way. I happen to know lots of artists because I am an artist as well, because that’s my scene. I don’t know any plumbers or computer fix-it people. For Diamond to suggest moving the arts to the centre is the same as the president of plumbing college saying people need to pay more attention to their pipes. Ain’t going to happen darling.

Nor should we have a crowd of artists at Pearson to welcome passengers. Lame lame lame …. I’m not that surprised she got hired on with these splendid ideas. OCAD doesn’t cease to underwelm me (although I was impressed they’d moved their library catalogue to a self-designed Linux system the last time I was there). Artists at Pearson would send a strangely parochial message, suggesting we’re so desperate for other people’s attention that we’re going to do a song and dance and paint them pretty pictures as soon as they get off the plane.

As opposed to a place like New York. You know what New York’s philosophy is don’t you? It’s Fuck You. That’s why people want to go there. Because their amazing, they know it, and because this gives them the self-confidence to be brash and rude and bold. So they can afford to say Fuck You. Toronto: please come see our hobbits on stage! Look at our shiny artists, aren’t we special? When Toronto has the balls to kiss off the rest of the world as we do the rest of Canada (not for nothing we’re so despised) then the world will take notice, find us interesting, and you won’t need artists at the airports. A healthy culture is not a self-conscious culture. Nor is a healthy culture one that looks to Yorkville celebrities as a source of identity, as happens every September.

The article ends with two poets. “Molly Peacock, poetry editor at the Literary Review of Canada, suggests we stamp poetry into every new sidewalk square. Peacock, who helped bring ‘Poetry in Motion’ to the New York transit system, says if this were to happen, we’d be ‘the most marvellously literary city in the world.'”

This would probably make me hate poetry. I like it on the subway, but on sidewalks like this I’d find it oppressive, overwhelming, and a gross validation of text over speech, which isn’t a balance we should be persuaded to topple. If we get all offended by the stupid adverts everywhere, wouldn’t text everywhere underfoot be a similar violation of public space?

The second poet highlights the idea that poets are useless twits who merely have a way with words. “Sonnet L’Abbé believes the key to a more artful city is for people to ‘ease up on the gas’ in the pursuit of economic prosperity and make a ‘personal commitment to loving art. And when I say loving, I mean paying attention to it, getting to know, not just throwing money at it. It’s like a person growing their own artistic flower … If you have enough flowers, then the whole city becomes a garden of people who love and consume and make art.'”

We shouldn’t be asking people who failed chemistry in highschool to suddenly become chemists. ‘Get to know chemistry …’ they’d say, ‘fall in love with the test tube’. Ridiculous. You can’t ask this of people.

But you can try to create an environment where culture is an ambient reality, so that whenever the interests is sparked, they’ll know how to follow it. Recently I’ve been reading the plays of Aristophanes. A couple of weeks ago, on my way to meet a friend and with time to spare, I dropped into the ROM to check out the Greek artifacts and to familiarize myself with the world of those stories. This is what living in the city means to me – the availability of material for the pursuit of my interests. Libraries, galleries, museums … these are there so that we can grow as individuals, so that we can learn something about the world and what it means to be human.

Gardens and sculptures are lame because they are window dressing, imitations of a style that meant something thousands of years ago, when the statues were of gods or heroes. Exhibitions in transit areas are stupid because those are spaces designed to be moved through… and artists at air ports are foolish because only cultures who are trying to impress the bigger more powerful ones are prone to do something like that.

Toronto is not New York because we don’t have the cultural wealth. Build up the wealth by supporting the artists who work here, and by collecting masterpieces from around the world (and not just from the Anglo-American Empire), and then the city could facilitate cultural individuals. As it is, the city’s best libraries are the university ones, which are limited to the public, and the institutions are more interested in their face lifts.

Canada is a great country and I’m of the opinion that a whole generation of artists and the like are currently working in the city, a generation that will be read about in tomorrow’s history books. Forget Andy Warhol, and Happenings, and all that shit New York did in the 1960s. Toronto’s 1960s moment is right now, and let’s pay attention to those artists if you want to feel like you’re living in a culturally vibrant, exciting, and relevant place.