What Toronto Can Learn from Montreal’s Approach to Public Art (original) (raw)
Public art interacts with its location and passerby, including pedestrians and motorists, in a manner that differs from the viewing experience in a gallery or museum. Public art engages with its location by referencing the topography and geography of a specific site or by referencing the history and culture of a specific place. Its physical occupation of public space also forces passerby to engage with it, whether through appreciation, contemplation, resentment or active avoidance. However, public art derives only part of its "publicness" from its location because the concept of "public" encompasses more than a physical or environmental existence. The public dimension is partly a psychological construct, which includes the public sphere, a conceptual space in which ideas, values and opinions are transmitted and exchanged. Thus public art occupies two overlapping public spaces: the physical and the abstract.
Is Toronto Burning? Three Years in the Making (and Unmaking) of the Toronto Art Scene
Is Toronto Burning?: 1977, 1978, 1979—Three Years in the Making (and Unmaking) of the Toronto Art Scene, 2016
Toronto in the late 1970s was one of the last avant-gardes. In the internet era and age of social media, the conditions for the underground seem no longer possible. Instant availability and constant communication of cultural products, uploaded and downloaded by the democratic mob, are not receptive to singular events that need be sustained in settings of quasisecrecy in small rooms on side streets. Truly, it is no analogous coincidence how well Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, published in 1980, marks the division between the "that has been" of the analogue print and our digital age. The turn of the decade, 1980, that's really the end of my story. From the perspective of here and now, this "that has been" is no lament for a lost art scene that formed in a few short years in Toronto in the 1970s, then dissolved. But in a sense, you had to be there to recognise how analogue our experience of it was. You had to walk the mean streets of Toronto's abandoned warehouse district on nights of its heat-blasted summers and dread winters on your way to a performance or video screening to feel how real it was, how material the feel of the buildings and streets. Looking back on archival photographs of downtown Toronto streetscapes then (in a bleak economic period, moreover), you realise how dour and grey it was. And so too was the art, shades of grey and black-all those video and photographs that render this scene, not to be contradictory, vivid for us today, definitely not dour. They were, place and product, a dialogue. The art scene was a precinct, a place you had to enter, but not be policed. But an underground would not be a scene unless it disseminated itself through these very images of itself. Disseminated itself and was received from afar. And drew people to it. This is also the story of the Toronto art community. In a sense, what follows is a story, a story with a cast of characters. These characters are pictured in video, photography, and print-not necessarily as portraits but rather as performers. The cast repeats, almost as if in a soap opera, with name and identity changes. Artists reappear performing in Is Toronto Burning? Strike 2, May 1978, back cover their own work and acting in others. This is a thing that makes Toronto distinctive, not just this cooperative production or staging (that also existed behind the scenes in artists shooting friends' works, for instance), but also the fictional image artists sustained of an art scene before it was recognised as one-and that helped usher it in. To be more exact, the reason it came into being, performatively. In this 'fiction' we discover a collective portrait of an art scene and also an image of its making. Some would contend that it is not the performances of this fiction but the places of primary production that Toronto artists collectively constructed-the so-called artist-run system-that is the real story. Construction not construal. Certainly, artists would say this. "We, the producers, are the ones to write this history, not those, secondary to the scene, who call themselves writers." This ethos of primary production, unfortunately, has not issued in a history-and this is a problem that writers have to take up. As important as the artist-run system was, my aim is not to document it. If at times I err on the side of ironic ambiguity over political earnestness, by which you could sometimes identify these opposing sides-fictional performance and primary production, respectively-I would only be intervening historically in the conflicted real-time 'soap opera' of that past scene. For given Toronto's resistance to history, to the writing of its history, it is necessary to first mythologise a scene before you can write a history of it. We need to make a moment iconic as much as its individuals. So Is Toronto Burning? deals with this collective moment when the Toronto art scene imagined and created itself. There would be no invention without contention. Here the title resonates. For in these three short years-1977, 1978, 1979-Toronto would make, then unmake, and remake itself again. A penchant for posing was countered by a fashion for politics, the posturing of which was at times volatile and factional. Performativity and politics, in their mutual conviviality and contestation, together the two would fashion an art scene. 14 Is Toronto Burning? Was Toronto Burning? 15 Snow had been championed by New Yorkers Annette Michelson and P Adams Sitney for his structural films, but his multi-media work in sculpture and photography was just as influential in Toronto. Sculpture, actually, was the liberating form for a number of young Toronto artists as it served as "an instrument for investigating and clarifying certain specific aspects of their own existence and experience in the contemporary world", wrote Walter Klepac. 5 Not that this meant their work was subjective; it was rigorous in its own ways. Almost all the artists mentioned by Klepac-in particular, David Rabinowitch, Royden Rabinowitch, Ian Carr-Harris, Robin Collyer, Robin MacKenzie, Colette Whiten, and Murray Favro-showed at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery. There was no question that sculpture trumped painting in Toronto, just as the Lamanna Gallery-which had been invited to the Third International Pioneer Galleries exhibition in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1970-trumped the Sable-Castelli Gallery. Nasgaard was catholic, or prescient enough, to include writers who addressed not only diversity of media beyond painting and sculpture (though, significantly, not photography) but also the established uptown scene and incipient downtown community where the actual experimentation was happening. David Buchan (an artist in General Idea's circle, who also worked at the collective's artist-run centre Art Metropole) wrote on what is now a lost history of women's performance art of the mid-1970s. These ironic, fashion-oriented performances by second wave feminist artists were usually collective in creation and took the "preformed cultural phenomena of fashion shows, ice follies, wedding ceremonies, cabaret entertainments or dime-store-novel plots" for their camp critiques of gender construction. 6 Peggy Gale (Art Metropole's Video/Film Director) wrote of the relatively new form of video art, merely a half-decade old-an art form that would go on to garner prestige for Canadian art as a cultural export. According to her, Toronto's contribution was "best known in international video circles for the artists' use of the medium" to explore artists' "interior realities". 7 Lisa Steele and Colin Campbell were prime examples, but Rodney Werden was singled out, too, for his frank fascination with sexuality. Video's rudimentary editing capability dictated the form of these early works, which made them seemingly naturalistic and intimately confessional; but General Idea were acknowledged for their mimicry of broadcast television formats that was both a disguised media analysis and a "structural investigation of the phenomenon of culture". By the decade's end Toronto video artists would be looking to place their work on broadcast or cablecast television. It was only natural in Marshall McLuhan's hometown that adventurous artists would embrace new technologies and seek to address a mass audience. Another contemporary report published in 1977 in the Milan art magazine TRA was more partisan in outlook and had no need for any disclaimer: The beginning of a new Canadian avant-garde and/or radical consciousness dates from about 1970. Although sporadic attempts were made by some groups and galleries in the sixties (such as the artists' circle around Michael Snow, who left Toronto in the midsixties for a decade in New York), the arrival of Carmen Lamanna in Toronto was essential for the realization and growth of innovation within the artistic milieu. Lamanna was the one art dealer to encourage the first experiments in the new forms of land art, post minimalism and later some attempts in narrative art. Throughout the sixties, neither a strong consciousness, nor a rethinking of the art structure were cultivated. Only at the turn of the decade did the new socializing movements begin to take shape through the cafes, new theatre groups, collectives of political, feminist and most importantly the gay liberation movement. Parallel, though seldom connected to these collective movements, artists groups worked around the new art functions of conceptual and post-Warhol extractions. 8 Although supposedly reporting on all Canada in these opening paragraphs, Amerigo Marras really was describing Toronto, where he himself resided. Moreover, he was implicitly implicating himself in the 1970s "rethinking of the art structure" as he was the mastermind and instigator of ceac's polemics, being the centre's founding director. Significantly, the "and/or" of his opening sentence elided what in reality would be divisive and contentious amongst the city's artistsbut that would come later. Nonetheless, he was unapologetic, despite the important nod to Carmen Lamanna, that the new forces were collective: not determined by the commercial interests of uptown galleries but by Toronto's "new socializing movements". If politics defined the period, downtown artists were also shaping themselves into a scene. Its contours would be shaped, and shattered at times, by the problematic parallelism of its "post-Warhol extractions" with the "new socializing movements", on the one hand, and of its marginal social scene with the civil society surrounding it, on the other. Yet, at that point, the downtown art scene operated not in a vacuum but, let's say, in a vacancy. Part of that vacancy was the open territory of the downtown Toronto landscape where it would situate itself-a sketchy neighbourhood right on the edge of the financial district, with its dive hotels, drinking taverns, greasy spoons, and empty turn-of-the-century warehouses surrounded by vast parking Downtown Toronto, circa 1970 Is...
RACAR, 44 (1), Spring, 2019
This article maps and critically examines controversies surrounding permanent works of public art with a commemorative purpose, whether publicly or privately owned or funded, that have been put up across the city of Toronto to embody local and extra-national narratives connected with ethno-cultural groups. Through analysis of several case studies, I demonstrate how and why Canada’s growing and rapidly diversifying immigrant population has affected this country’s commemorative public art management. To conclude, I posit contemporary public art practices and strategies as alternative ways of remembering, and of achieving and maintaining social cohesion in a multicultural and diasporic city such as Toronto. //////////Cet article explore les controverses sévissant autour de quelques œuvres permanentes d’art public commémoratif, commandées ou financées par le public ou le privé, qui ont été érigées à Toronto afin de représenter des récits nationaux et extranationaux associés à des communautés ethnoculturelles. À travers l’analyse de plusieurs études de cas, nous démontrons comment et pourquoi la population immigrante au Canada, en pleine augmentation et diversification, a une incidence sur la gestion de l’art public commémoratif dans ce pays. En conclusion, nous recommandons l’adoption de pratiques contemporaines en art public comme un moyen de commémorer autrement et de maintenir la cohésion sociale dans une ville multiculturelle et diasporique comme Toronto.
Blog August 2017 - Cultural Philanthropy in Montreal: Place-des-Arts or Art Standoff ?
The richness and distribution of art and culture are never as evident as during the summer months in Montreal, even more so with the city's 375 th anniversary. The agenda couldn't be more complete: from the Francofolies to Pop Montreal, passing through the Jazz Festival, the temporary exposition " Revolution " , which retraces the ideals and aspirations of the late 1960s, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal Symphonique or the Avudo show, retracing the history of the city starting with the Saint-Lawrence River, making it hard not to find happiness here. Montreal, " City of Festivals " , does not hide its ambition of becoming a cultural metropolis of international influence...