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Gentrification look-back

Less crime, busy streets are bad things?

Yes, people hate the class-war implications of gentrification, but sometimes it's better than the alternative. Murray Whyte wrestles with one of the most polarizing words in Toronto's vocabulary

Murray Whyte
Toronto Star
2675 words
4 December 2005
The Toronto Star

The Gladstone Hotel is Christina Zeidler's baby. For three years, Zeidler has stewarded the building from near ruin to pristine, historically precise restoration, pouring money, determination and, on more than one occasion, tears into it. The century-old building was dead when her family bought it in 2000, she says. Now it's alive again.

This weekend, its rebirth was marked with three days of celebrations that finally wind down today. But here on Queen St. W., the Gladstone is just the last to arrive at a long-running party. And what a party it's been.

Since the opening of the Gladstone's neighbour, the Drake Hotel, not quite two years ago, the strip has gone from a gritty extension of Parkdale to an urban playground for moneyed arrivistes. Rhetoric in the neighbourhood is fractured, to say the least. Pre-Drake, the curious melding of the working and artist classes that populate these neighbourhoods "in transition," as the term has evolved, could sense them: Barbarians at the gate, leaning a little harder, day by day.

Today, the barbarians are no longer at the gate. They've broken through, reno'd a semi, and are sipping organic fruit juice-infused cocktails at any one of the posh new locals. The last straw, a pervasive symbol of The End in neighbourhoods like this, arrived last month: A Starbucks, that harbinger of mono-cultural doom, took up residence at the corner of Queen and Dovercourt. Almost immediately, its sign was accompanied by another, scrawled in black spray paint: "DRAKE, YOU HO, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT."

For some, this is war. If the Drake was the beachhead - a slapdash protest was staged there recently, to minimal effect - then the multicoloured condo model suite across the street is its Vichy government: an indelible symbol of real, rapid, irreversible change.

The rhetoric of invasion is not overstated. There is a word used to describe it: gentrification. Zeidler, for one, doesn't like it.

"The Gladstone is not gentrification," she tells me decisively. "That means something that's not animated by an authentic force. Gentrification is Disneyland, a place where you calcify the culture to the point where it has no salience. That is not what we're doing here."

Truth to tell, the new Gladstone is much like the old Gladstone, only better, with its divergent mix of old regulars and new adventurers. Its hallmark, Zeidler says, quite rightly, is fitting into the community, not creating a new one from scratch.

But her loathing of the G word is telling. It is so much more than a word: It is a divisive economic, social, political and intellectual force that polarizes even within itself. Depending on whom you talk to, it is either a harbinger of salvation or a fifth horseman of the apocalypse, arriving late to the world-razing party but having a damn fine time in his Prada suit, gulping single-malt scotch once he gets there.

It's a word with growing resonance as the city tackles the renewal of neighbourhoods with renewed interest and energies. And its resonance reverberates in the Gladstone/Drake area, perhaps, more than anywhere. As the forces of change trickle inevitably west, into Parkdale - perhaps the most gentrification-resistant zone in the city, and therefore, its most sensitive - the creep westward is welcomed with that same polarity: twin surges of alarm and relief.

Gentrification is a word we love in the media, perhaps for just this reason. It has dramatic tension. It engenders extreme reactions. It gives us a story that writes itself: a neighbourhood is changing. Catalogue the reactions, which are so abundant as to be endless. Vividly describe the ubiquitous images of acute discord - lovingly restored Victorian homes next to crumbling rooming houses; prostitutes on one side of a street, Banana Republic-clad young mothers with baby strollers on the other. Starbucks next to greasy spoons.

Stir into a thick, unresolvable stew, and serve lukewarm. Repeat as needed.
I have been as guilty as any of this practice. It's a pattern, especially in young reporters. We are experts at the cautionary tale of neighbourhood change. Maybe it's the idealistic teachings of journalism school still ringing in our ears - H.L. Mencken's credo to "afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted" comes to mind - but it's a story we repeat generationally.

What we learn from these retreads may be a simple fact - change is constant - but the cautionary tone is revealing of something else, something implicit in the word itself.

Gentry-fication. We have Ruth Glass, a British sociologist, to thank for it. From the beginning, the word described something far from benign, let alone beneficial. This was, after all, about the gentry - the idle rich, in decidedly British terms - transforming places they coveted as they saw fit. Glass's coinage, in 1964, was exclusive, aggressive, and damning.

Its use as a weapon in inner-city class warfare should be no surprise. "Gentrification is indeed a dirty word, and should stay a dirty word," Tom Slater, an urban geographer in the U.K., says via email. Slater spent several years in Toronto studying what he called "municipally managed gentrification" in Parkdale.

"It was a hard-fought political victory for those opposed to the process, so that now, people are squeamish about using the term," he writes. "Very, very rarely do you hear politicians use 'gentrification' - more positive terms like 'revitalization,' 'regeneration' and 'renaissance' (the three R's, I call them) are preferred, and for a reason: to legitimize and gloss over a middle-class invasion."

Slater's observation bears weight on the City of Toronto website. A search for the term among all the city's voluminous archives yields but three hits: one, a footnote to the Parkdale study penned by Slater himself; another reference to Slater's study, this time in a much-prettified, graphically rendered form; and a brief, near-apologetic reference on a page called Your Home, Our City that gives a nod to the city's housing issues for the 21st century and allows that "debates have arisen" around "the gentrification of neighbourhoods."

No kidding. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty offers this definition of the (slightly altered) term: "Gent-de-fecation: 1. The upper classes shitting on the lower classes by forcing them from their neighbourhoods through a system of increased property value. 2. The bleaching of a racially and ethnically diverse community 3. Someone else's reality."

OCAP was part of a riotous anti-gentrification protest in Parkdale in 1998, when the city proposed de-zoning rooming houses in the neighbourhood. Tensions were running high; a run-down illegal rooming house, many of whose residents were poor or mentally disabled, had just burned down, killing two people. A group calling itself the Parkdale Common Front had called the proposed re-zoning tantamount to "social cleansing."

"From the beginning it had a connotation that was, itself, for 'better people' - not those that were already there," says Larry Bourne, a social geographer at the University of Toronto. He doesn't like the word much, but a research project he's involved with - nothing less than a managed plan to help Parkdale's transition through gentrification be an equitable one - has it in its title, "so I have to live with it," he shrugs. (Tom Slater is also involved in the project.)

Another urban intellectual in the U.K., Neil Smith, takes the class-warfare notion further, terming a gentrifying centre the "revanchist" city. The word is nearly as loaded as gentrification itself: The revanchists were a middle-class force that opposed the working-class uprising of the Paris Commune in the 19th century, whose goal was to take revenge - la revanche - on those that had "stolen" the city from them.

This is stern stuff, so when I speak to Lawrence Solomon at The Urban Renaissance Institute - an advocate for, among other things, increased immigration and a lower tax burden for the inner cities - I'm a little surprised. Solomon is flummoxed that gentrification could ever be seen as anything other than constructive.

"It is now, and always has been, a very positive process," Solomon says. "The fact that a neighbourhood is improving should not be a cause for despair."

I had started to think that, too - and, of course, immediately felt guilty for it. This is the thing about gentrification, and not just the word itself: "Improvement" is a relative term. Improvement for whom?
Valuable building stock is reconditioned and preserved; that stock, now of higher value, spells eviction for the long-time low-income residents. Rotting streetscapes resurge with a diversity of businesses and services that help bring it to life; those same streetscapes feature businesses out of financial reach for the neighbourhood's previous residents. Diversity of residents and building types helps de-concentrate poverty; new middle-class residents force poverty to concentrate in even denser pockets.

One study suggested that a seemingly bulletproof effect of gentrification - lower crime rates, based on more stable residents moving into an area - produced just the opposite: higher crime rates, because the new wealth provided a target.

A British researcher, Rowland Atkinson, did a study in 2002 with the sole purpose of parsing this very polemic on the subject in academia.

"Gentrification has regularly divided the opinions of policy-makers, researchers and commentators," he says in his introduction.

Surveying 114 studies on the subject, Atkinson came up with a handful of conclusions that show how fractious a realm it can be. Each point has a counterpoint; no argument escapes without being beaten down by another.

A little beaten himself, perhaps - "the move away from a black and white portrayal of the process as simply good or bad will inevitably be an improvement," he says in his conclusion - Atkinson nonetheless states that the "positive ramifications have been under-explored" by serious research, and that the "overwhelming" amount of negative impact studies he reviewed may have to do with academics being "drawn to the subject because of its relationship to social justice."

Atkinson stops short of suggesting a bias - the same one, perhaps, that spawns the cautionary tales of gentrification in the media - but only just.

Indeed, challenging convention on gentrification is a dangerous practice. My colleague at the Star, Christopher Hutsul, did just that, in a column of 2003. After living in the neighbourhood for a few months and becoming frustrated with the crime and disorder, he wrote with conviction that Parkdale "was a place in need of as much gentrification as it could get. And quickly."

The response was rapid, massive and not altogether unexpected.

"It's easier to just be 'against gentrification' as a rule," he tells me. "Some people were really upset and confronted me. But there were a lot of people who were just quietly indignant. Those people, I believe, realized that I was on to something."

I couldn't help but think he was on to something, too.

City centres all over North America were hollowed out in the postwar era of mass-suburbanization. Inner cities, bereft of tax bases and community services, were left to rot. Toronto's fate was altered in the 1970s when a return from the suburbs kick-started the early regeneration of the vibrant city core we have today. It's hard to see how that mix is the black heart of evil that gentrification seems so often to describe: less crime, populated streets and preserved housing stock. These are bad things?

Jon Caulfield, a renowned urban theorist at York University, was one who didn't shy away from some of the positives. In a 1989 paper that evolved into his 1994 book City Form and Everyday Life: Toronto's Gentrification and Critical Social Practice, he described the Toronto experience as hopeful, even ebullient. Caulfield's term "emancipatory gentrification" suggested that the return to the city freed the new arrivals of the bland homogeneity of the suburbs from which they'd come.

To many scholars, Caulfield's view suggests an idealism where gentrification is the city's saviour, a rising tide that lifts all boats, from the poorest to the arrivistes.

"Old city places offer difference and freedom, privacy and fantasy, possibilities for carnival," Caulfield wrote in his 1989 essay, quoting modern philosopher Walter Benjamin: "The city is 'the place of our meeting with the other.'"

Caulfield's notion is one of diversity and integration, not invasion and displacement. Sounds good, but not to everyone. (This, perhaps, is part of the reason Caulfield no longer speaks to the media. I asked; he graciously declined.)

Slater is one of the critics. In his study of last year, Municipally Managed Gentrification in South Parkdale, his interpretation of Caulfield's thesis is damning.

"It is anything but emancipatory for those already in the neighbourhood," he writes. The activity itself is, in fact, sinister, offering freedom not from the suburbs but the very people who precede the gentrifiers themselves. Because of this, Slater writes, "gentrification is not an instigator of social action" - the "meeting with the other" that Caulfield describes - "but of social tension."

In other words, it all depends on your point of view. Which is the maddening, fractious, divisive, double-edged world of gentrification - and a duality that the word itself, with its deep undertone of classist aggression, seems completely to ignore. If we could stop arguing about what it means, engage it as a process and help shape its outcome, I can't help but think we'd be better off.

Frustrated with the lack of resolution, I go for a drive to clear my head. It's Wednesday, around 10 p.m., and a tangle of contradictory thoughts clot my brain.

I drift west along Queen St., where I live, past the Gladstone, which had just removed the wooden battens from its facade, and down under the railroad bridge at Dufferin that serves as the final barricade to the barbarians, some of whom have slipped under and through, trickling westward as far as Brock St.

That's where it stops - for now - as Brock shudders and submits to Parkdale as it has always been: empty storefronts and cheap, all-night eateries, dollar stores and half-lit cafes.

Outside a pizza joint, two greying men in scruffy workwear grapple half-heartedly before submitting simultaneously, stumbling, and crumple to the sidewalk together in a weary heap. They lie for a moment, exhausted, before gathering themselves up and trudging onward in the darkness.

It is a very Parkdale moment: bottled frustration spurting out, finding no real target or purpose, then dissipating; negative energy without place or focus. It's a metaphor for the gentrifiers as well as, in the eyes of someone like Slater, their victims. Parkdale is changing. Into what, everyone seems to care, but no one really knows.

Gentrification is no miracle cure, but nor is it a disease. As Larry Bourne tells me, in diplomatic fashion, "it certainly seems better than the alternative" of constant, pervasive, apocalyptic decay.
As a process and an end result, it's the best we've got. But it's the G-word - as a label and a stigma - that remains the most daunting barricade of all.

477029-332642.jpg | murray whyte photo Backlash: This grafitto was splashed last Monday on a soon-to-be-opening Starbuck's on Queen St. near Davenport, just down the street from the Drake Hotel. It was cleaned off almost immediately. | ;

Newsflash!

... almost a year and a half later, I feel the need to inform my devoted fanbase of 2 or 3 that I can now be found at thestar.blogs.com/untitled, where I blog with significantly more (like, daily!) frequency. See you there ...

Daily bread

Among the most confounding things about the work of Marcel Van Eeden is the odd compulsion to own a dozen or so. Tall order for most of us, given the $2600-plus price tag, but the compulsion is a pretty compelling natural extension of the work itself: Van Eeden's project is tied to producing a new work every single day. 365 days a year. Do the math. Or don't bother: That's $949,000 a year -- in accounts receivable, anyway.

As an art project, it's absolute commercial genius. Granted, given the pace, some are better than others. And it's safe to assume not ALL of them sell (though at his opening at the Clint Roenisch Gallery on Friday night, no less than 20 were already spoken for). Thankfully, Van Eeden's genius is far from merely commercial. Put the pace aside a moment and consider the work: Dark, repressed humour pervades. Oblique glances, stolen moments unfurl confounding mystery narratives without resolution.

Through it all, the tonal element is grippingly consistent, thanks almost entirely to Van Eeden's central gift, which is the rendering of light. From afar, the pieces have an almost photographic precision; a few steps closer and the roughness emerges, confounding your intuitive expectation that they'll sharpen as you approach. I don't know how long Van Eeden can keep up the pace (or how long his growing legion of collectors would want him to) but for the moment, at least, his daily adventures on paper are worth savouring.

The last frontier?

A few days ago, I went to the Edward Day Gallery on Queen for the launch of a, er, Volvo-themed art opening called "Local 416." It was weird, to say the least, an incongruous non-art crowd, and -- oh, yes -- a Volco hatchback parked in the middle of the gallery.

It was pretty bald-faced corporate promotion and co-option of the even remotely 'cool,' which is nothing new in the marketing world; but being in a respecatble contemporary art gallery was. Camel hired Damien Hirst and Nan Goldin to design cigarette packs a few years back, but beyond that, I'm not aware of any other co-option of art in the service of product sales -- at the very least, in a sincere, straight-forward way.

I'm still not sure what to make of it, but here's what I wrote for the Star (what appeared in the paper is chopped down; this is the full text, from my computer to your screen).

--

Toronto Star, Sunday, June 10

The scene was, well, a scene: Free-flowing cocktails and delicate canapés distributed in a constant rhythm by a cadre of black-clad waiters, and eagerly consumed by the attending throng.

Not an uncommon phenomenon for an opening here, perhaps, at the Edward Day Gallery, which is among the bigger and bolder of the gamut of contemporary art galleries that smatter this stretch of Queen Street, west of Strachan Avenue.

But there was one element of the evening that was not so typical: A shiny new car parked in the middle of the gallery. No less off-kilter was its purpose: Neither a cheeky installation nor a conceptual piece unto itself, the car, a new Volvo C30, was there, simply, to sell Volvos.

Sometimes a car is just a car – even in an art gallery, and especially in an art gallery brimming with auto and ad executives, hired out specifically to surround said car with the trappings of an art scene.

“‘Corporate sell-out’ – that’s the first thing you think of, right?” said Kelly McCray, one of the gallery’s two co-directors (the other is Mary Sue Rankin). “We knew we were taking a risk,” McCray said. “But we’re interested in the response.”

McCray was no less sensitive to the accusation than anyone else. Volvo’s ad agency came calling almost a year ago, asking the gallery if they could commission some of their younger artists to do “Volvo-themed” work for a possible event.

“When they first approached us and asked if we were interested, we said ‘Ummmm, not really,” McCray laughed. “We were really skeptical at first. But now, we feel it’s a real partnership. One of our goals is to always, always looking for a new audience, and this was an audience we would never, ever get into the gallery by any other means. So we just decided to jump into it.”

The event, which took place on Thursday, offers a curious perspective of an ongoing phenomenon along the Queen West corridor. Big companies, and especially those with lifestyle associations – liquor, fashion, and of course, cars – have long sought to borrow some of the sheen that various cultural scenes engender. Indie bands provide soundtracks for car and beer commercials; big-name filmmakers have shot commercials and even series of short films for such automakers as BMW.

But the art world, perhaps owing to its rarefied audience and less-mainstream friendly presence, has been mostly left out. Until here, and now, on Queen Street, which is perhaps the perfect capsule example of how art and the rhetoric of marketing collide, often with rancorous results.

All along this stretch of street, where independent galleries blossomed organically in the late 90s, art is now a helpful – if unwilling – sales pitch for the glut of condominium developers bulling their way into the neighbourhood. From the Bohemian Embassy to the West Side Lofts, the local art community has chafed mightily with the co-option, and in some cases, have pushed back against being part of a sales pitch for a product they themselves can’t afford.

Like, say, a Volvo C30. “I think they’re hoping my mailing list is their target market, but maybe they don’t realize that most of my friends are artists and don’t have any money,” laughed Andrew Morrow, who was one of four artists and Edward Day commissioned to create a piece for the event, dubbed “Local 416.” The others are Jesse Boles, Michael Toke, and Matt Durant. It runs through to the end of the month.

Implicit in this, of course, is the simple fact that art doesn’t exist unless somebody’s willing to pay for it. Morrow received the offer with an open mind. “Whenever an opportunity presents itself, you get excited, because they can be hard come by,” he says. “But then I realized certain aspects of this needed to be carefully considered.”

Established artists can indulge in corporate commissions with little worry it might taint their body of work. But for Morrow, still very early in a painting career that focuses on epic tableaux of classical battle scenes infused with contemporary and fantasy imagery, “there’s no separation,” he says. “You don’t want to confuse your brand.”

A curious conundrum, given the clear branding exercise being practiced by Volvo. “We looked into areas we thought were relevant to 25 to 35 year olds,” said Ron Tite, the Creative Director at Sharpe Blackmore, Volvo’s ad agency. “We were thinking interior design, or cooking, maybe, because people that age are big into cooking. And then this came up.”

Tite surveyed the neighbourhood and found its mix of elements conducive to an urban hipster car launch. “It’s that great mix of grittiness and condos going up, full of young professionals,” he said. “When you started seeing all the Starbucks go in, you knew the time was right.”

They started negotiations last year, and initially planned the event for May. But an exhibition for the Contact Festival at MOCCA next door featured a destroyed bus in their shared driveway, complete with accident imagery inside. “Not the vibe we were going for,” Tite said.

He told all four artists that their work had to be engaged in some way with the car, but the treatment was up to them. “We told them straight out there wouldn’t be a Volvo logo on their pieces,” he said. “If they wanted to do a piece that said cars were environmentally bad, then go for it.”

Morrow wrestled with the issue, before settling on an earthy whorl of brown tornado, the colour achieved by mixing Volvo oil into his paint. “It’s part of a series I was doing anyway,” Morrow shrugged. “It was a sticky situation. I thought, if I have a Volvo in my piece, that’s explicitly an ad. And I wasn’t comfortable with that.”

Tite was fine with it, too. “We didn’t want to go to them and say, ‘hey, we want to use your art to sell cars,’” he said. “We wanted to be sincere with it.” (At the opening, a small blurb accompanying Morrow’s piece, said the tornado theme was because the C30 “has taken the world by storm.” Morrow, who didn’t write it, objected; Tite, who did, agreed to remove it. “Hey, my bad,” he said).

McCray proclaimed the event a success. “Some of the suits were completely attracted to Andrew’s paintings,” many of which – non-Volvo related – hung throughout the gallery’s cavernous space. On one wall, Volvo invited the audience to share their impressions in black marker. Amid the obvious plants – “Definitely not your dad’s Volvo!” or “Luv it!” – were scribbles of the essential dilemma. “Using art to sell cars – Not good,” wrote one, and just below it, “No, using cars to sell Canadian art – VERY GOOD!”

Morrow sidestepped the debate. “For me to have the opportunity to hang my work and have people come see it – why not?” Morrow said. “I’m still not convinced they’ll sell any cars, but whatever.”

Wow

We've already touched on the Serra retrospective at Moma, but this image, by Fred Conrad in today's New York Times is worth another look, as is the great review by Michael Kimmelman, who calls Serra "one of the last great modernists in an age of minor talents, mad money and so much meaningless art." No argument there, Michael. Modernism, for all its foibles and false utopias, is still closest to my heart -- in art, at least. Form, material, space, light -- art's big dogs, in my opinion , the basis of emotional and visceral conveyance -- are all too often obscured or ignored by artists who think their idea or intent is more important than the representation of it they create. Wrong. Serra is indelible proof.

Fancy Action Now!

Team Macho opened their latest show, Fancy Action Now!, at Magic Pony on Queen Street this week, and as is always the case with this gang of dorkily charming uber hipsters, it was a packed affair with wall-to-wall irony fashion -- big sunglasses, tapered jeans, neck kerchiefs flouncy skirts, vintage everything -- and its oh-so-self-conscious wearers spilling out onto Queen Street.

The Team can't help it if their acolytes are all refugee clowns from an 80s theme park. So don't blame them. And don't let it obscure the art, either. I have to admit, I was a little dubious about the boys, until I met them in their subterrean lair with their six-toed cat -- no, I am not making this up -- about a year ago, on the occasion of their last really big show, Team Macho is a Tough Man. What I found was as far from art pretense as one can get (and rightly so, frankly), and beneath the (admittedly thickly applied) layer of smart-alecky goofiness was a gang of guys who were really, truly committed to making work their way, together.

And I mean really together: the piece you see above, from Fancy Action Now!, which closes June 17, is typical: The whole gang, five of them, lay out sheets of drawing paper. Someone starts. Everyone finishes, adding doodles, etchings, scribbles, colour. Maybe it's back and forth from drawng board to the bathroom. Maybe it's a scrawl inserted after a hard night of drinking (not you, Bucky), or a similar remorseful doodle hatched the morning after. Not all of the pieces work, in my opinion, but they all contain such spirit and humour they're hard not to love. And when they do work, well, they're in a whole new genre. I have no idea what it is, but let's call it the ridiculous sublime. The Team takes not taking their art seriously very seriously, and God bless them for that.

By the way, Wikipedia says this about them. It's pretty much a team Macho piece in and of itself. Print and save, before it's gone!

Nerves of Steel

Much is being made in New York this week of the pending 40-year retrospective of Richard Serra’s sculptural works, which opens at MoMA on June 3. It’s not so much the work itself as the installation that’s garnering all the attention. Granted, hoisting 30-ton slabs of gently-curled steel from a crane just off 5th Avenue isn’t something one can do surreptitiously. Witness a handful of images taken by Sah Surattanont for the Trolpolism site in New York:

Or even better, a video on YouTube of the monumental steel forms being hoisted up and over the wall of MoMA’s sculpture garden on 54th St. It is, to be fair, a spectacular circumstance that does in fact lay bare the scale at which some of Serra’s work exists. If you ever wondered what a performative work involving several hundred tons of steel might look like, then this would be it.

But it’s also an important part of the process. Serra, an affably crusty elder statesman of the late modern aesthetic, has only missed one installation of his increasingly popular torqued ellipses – that’s what they’re called – and only because he was recovering from knee surgery. This is no mean feat, given the fact the pieces exist in such opposite corners of the earth as Dubai, Seattle, and Spain. Toronto even has its own Serra, called Tilted Spheres, in the airport – which, alas, the rubes seem intent on defacing with juvenile scribblings.

Therein lies a real shame. All the hubbub of the heavy lifting is interesting, to me at least, in that it is the perfect counterpoint of what the ellipses beget, once put in place. I saw a large grouping of them at the Geffen annex of MoCA, in LA, several years ago. Massively imposing, they are at the same time serenely beautiful, the cool of their steel surface almost preternatural as you wander along the paths their curves form inside themselves. These pieces are meant to be experienced from within, not gawked at from behind ropes. Couple in your mind the wild, impossible-seeming – and actually quite dangerous – feat of putting 550 tons of steel in place via crane, and the soothing coolness of the pieces themselves, and you have a very interesting intellectual tension to reconcile amid a very real physical experience – which is what  the torqued ellipses are all about, in my opinion.

In Toronto, they’ve talked of roping off Tilted Spheres, to protect it from scribbly fingers. They may as well remove the thing all together. I’m sure Serra would feel the same.

Power Up: The Welfare Show and Shary Boyle

Spring has finally sprung here in icy old T.O., and with it, the perennial event that is the Power Plant's spring show. Typically a more subdued affair than, say, the summer launch -- one of the best art parties of the year, cocktails and canapes in a lakeside tent, and open to all comers -- this spring's offerings are among the best I've seen in years.

Let's start with The Welfare Show, a series of installations by Scandinavian artist duo Michael Elmgreen (Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (Norway). There's an elegance to the pieces, and a chilliness. With good reason, too. The Welfare Show, as the name might suggest, is an exploration of disenfranchisement -- the experience of powerlessness at the foot of power, the state.

You enter through a set of swinging hospital doors, and find yourself in a sterile, white-walled hallway, where patients -- alarmingly life-like dummies, actually -- lie in mute in their hospital gurnies. Next, you enter a room with hard institutional seating. Number tags denoting places in line are scattered on the floor. A red light, indicating who is next to be served, flashes double zeroes. Then, onward to the gallery's large southwestern room, where a doorway marked 'administration' is sits a good 12 feet above the ground. Its access? A crumbling, un-ascendable staircase. Starting to get the point?

There is a certain obviousness to the show, it's true. But I, for one, was grateful for it. These gents have a point to make about the forces that shape and control our contemporary reality. With no small degree of grim humour, they incapsulate the frustration we've all felt trying to navigate the arcane mechanization of institutional phone systems, bureaucratic agencies, or simply trying to negotiate the structurs that define -- and confine -- the necessary activities of our everyday lives. It's a wonderful revelation that the show is as amusing as it us profound: The Welfare Show sets up an obvious dialectic of 'us and them', but, with humour, gives 'us' the pleasure of release: Rallying around our shared experience of helplessness at the hands of our in-built bureacratic power structures and sharing a laugh that, in all its absurdities, we are not alone. For all its chilly presentation, at its centre is a very humane warmth. And that, above all, defines the show's worth. A final gag? The brick smokestack that serves as signage for The Power Plant -- its name is inscribed on in big block white letters stacked vertically -- has been changed to 'The Powerless.' What might commuters whizzing by on the Gardiner Expressway think? Something, hopefully, as they indulge in our tax dollars, wearing away another layer of tarmac on the daily drive, like good little lemmings skirting the edge of the cliff.

Now, on to the next. Past the very good, and very big Welfare Show is a very small and even better exhibition of the works of Shary Boyle. Yes, that Shary Boyle -- the one that should have been chosen as Ontario's representative for the Sobey Prize. Once again -- and as if she needed to -- she proves why. Lace Figures, a display of 15 hand-made porcelain figurines that Boyle has created using the wonderfully anachronistic technique of 'lace draping,' is a triumph - a macabre romp through the well-groomed field of repressed Victorian decorative convention. Think Royal Doulton meets Tim Burton meets schlock-horror producer Roger Corman: the figures, all untitled, feature every manner of whimsical perversion: Multiple arms and eyes; a severed head held the figure holds serenely in its own hands, complete with gristly neck stump; flowers growing --- and unwelcomely so, judging from the expression -- out of an arm.

 

Like The Welfare Show, there's nothing hidden here. Boyle simply takes the traditions of a quaint, repressed decorative form and turns it loose, infused with all the visceral indulgences it sought to keep under wraps. There is a palpable delight in this liberation. The exhibition is cleverly designed, with the 15 kept under glass on display tables that sit at almost eye-level; the effect is something of a rogues' gallery, a collection of rebels who refused to let the conventions of a form restrain them. They're contained now not by their forms, but a glassed-in prison, to be gawked at in all their disturbingly primal splendour. They're the centre of a scandolous spectacle, not a bauble in a cutesy parlour. And they couldn't be happier.

A final note: As this site is fast-becoming a Shary Boyle newsletter, it woudl not be complete without a mention of her show at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects. Called Fantasia, it features Boyle's drawings and sculptures alongside the work of Daniel Barrow, Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke. It closes April 29.

Justine Kurland at Monte Clark

It was one of those all-too-rare moments of discovery: the mailer arrived from the Monte Clark Gallery for the first-ever Justine Kurland show in Canada. I'd heard of Kurland, and knew she was a New York-based Yalie who was widely praised for her photo-based conceptual work. But I had to admit I'd never actually seen any of it. Then I flipped the card over, and there it was (and is, at right): A procession of young girls making their way across a scrubby dune in the most perfect light and haze you, as a photographer, could ever hope for. In the foreground, the sun is liquid gold, coating the wisps of beach grass, as the girls, almost cast in silhouette, make their way into a glowing, indistinct haze.

It was, and is, mesmerizingly beautiful, and enough to get me through the door. At the show, about a dozen of Kurland's works hang in the large interior gallery. Their presentation is austere: Plain maple frames -- no matting, no glass -- border Kurland's images, which, at about 3' by 5', are neither imposing nor particularly noticeable. In fact, they're a little flat; Kurland's composition is deliberate and, like an obvious forbear in Vancouver artist Jeff Wall, very static. Her colours are often brilliant and hyper-real, and the scenes, while not digitally manipulated, have a strange, unnatural quality to them that both unsettles and, to a lesser degree, confounds.

Kurland takes some pains to make references to history painting in her work -- another Wall technique -- and that's all well and good. But what it isn't particularly, is engaging. There's an obvious dialogue about innocence and nascent sexuality in the images -- the one image set apart from the otherwise nymphs-in-Eden tone of the show is of a couple having rough sex in a burnt-out vehicle under a freeway off-ramp -- but it fails, generally, to compel. Kurland has mastered light, and harnessed it to create tone, both beauty and despair -- a worthy task that precious few photographers ever fully achieve; now she needs to truyl decide what she wants to do with it.

Forward and Back: Peter Doig at the AGO

The AGO's Peter Doig show opened this past weekend, and I dutifully went along to have a look. I'm never quite sure how to feel about Doig; on the one hand, he seems almost like a painter unstuck in time, a bygone-era formalist who, in contemporary terms, seems a little too familiar to be truly engaging. On the other hand, the 'haven't-we-seen-this-before?" quality can offer surprises, largely in how that technique -- a curious cobbling of indistinct, awe-of-nature Romantic landscape and figure painting,  the colour studies of Impressionism, and raw etching -- is set against his subject matter.

Take one of my personal favourites from the show, "3 Bears," an oblique, largely greyscale rendering with just a few dull sparks of red. As the title might suggest, it depicts 3 bears -- cheap lawn ornaments, actually -- heralding the location of a roadside motel. This, clearly, is not the stuff of Friedrich, say, or even the Group of 7, who Doig, a Brit who grew up in Canada, constantly cites as a reference. Indeed, the heroicization of nature was the primary concern of the Romantics and their direct forbears; Doig's, certainly, is not this -- like so many relevant contemporary artists, he's well-aware of post-industrial realities -- but the aesthetic is not far off.  It's that internal conflict in such works is what I find most compelling.

Other paintings, like "Concrete Cabin" (left), offer a view of a brutalist modern concrete building, as seen through a veil of forest.  "The Architect's Home in the Ravine," a modern home all but obscured by deep undergrowth, has the same tone. Another personal favourite, "Ski Slopes at Dusk" (below) is a perfect summation of this concern: Almost cutesy, a crudely-sketched ski lift totters up a gently-sloping mountainside; but the colour -- deep grey-blues and bleak, icy, dirty white -- lend the scene an ominous tone. Humans at play seem here to be the interloper -- a violation of a scene, if painted by, say, Tom Thomson 100 years before, woudl have been idyllic.

The AGO draws a parallel between Doig and celebrated Canadian impressionist David Milne, whose show is also on at the museum right now. It's not so much a stretch: Like Milne, Doig's compositions are strong spacial studies, and his use of colour is often provocative and surprising ("Girl in a Tree," for example, features an oblique, ghost-white figure knarled in hot fuschia branches against a jet-black sky; nonetheless, it seems an altogether classic painting). Sometimes, perhaps, in our thirst for something new, we can be dismissive of the old, or see it as duty -- a little book-learning that informs, but also dulls the visceral reaction we crave when viewing new work for the first time.

Doig is unabashed in paying homage to the past, but it's hardly nostalgic: the world he shows us is his, and ours. We all know art's never-ending dialectic process, constantly churning, replacing and recycling; while Doig embraces that in obvious ways, he's also making a more subtle, significant point: While art, conceptually and stylistically, may come, go and come again, the world is only moving in one direction: forward. Doig's lens offers a pause to consider where that headlong hurtle might be taking us.