Toronto went fine, more or less.
The streetcar lightboxes where The New Sins piece were installed look good — they’re positioned along a groovy up and coming section of Queen Street running from my hotel past the mental hospital down to an area of bars, restaurants and galleries. Unknown to me, a young woman named Natalie was apparently assigned to be my minder. After my initial series of press interviews I had a drink with her at the hotel bar. I thought she was either just charming and friendly or was attracted to me, but I guess she was on salary.
The Drake Hotel is a music venue (I saw Negativland do a live radio show last night), a gourmet restaurant, a coffee shop, an art gallery and a weekend cruising spot — how they juggle all these is a wonder, but they do, and the staff were consistently cheerful. There are constant “events” — parties for the opening of a web site, a magazine launch (with hostesses all dressed in white) and stuff you wouldn’t know about unless you got an invitation. The renovation of the hotel building was funded by a youngish dot-com millionaire, and there was not much in this district like it at the time — so his decision to fix up this old building in this area puzzled some folks. More than one person commented to me how this hotel had completely changed the whole neighborhood. It opened a year or so ago and acted, so they claim, as a kind of magnet, attracting other restaurants, art galleries, boutiques and the renovation of dingy apartments into hip living spaces. If true, it’s amazing that one enterprise could do so much to change a whole district. Jane Jacobs, author of the The Death and Life of Great American Cites, pointed out how this happened in various NYC neighborhoods. I hope the 'hood doesn’t succeed too wildly, as the mix of funky delis, roti shops, diners, hardware stores and locally-owned businesses in with the galleries and trendy cafes makes it what it is — somewhat real.
After my tech check for my lecture, while the audience was filtering in, eating and drinking, I cycled on a borrowed bike to the Bruce Mau show at the Art Gallery of Ontario called Massive Change. (The museum is next to the College of Art and Design, an extraordinary building:)
I know Bruce a little, and am slightly familiar with this project, as it opened previously at a museum in Vancouver and there was press. Everyone’s got opinions on it, so I should see it before passing judgment.
It comes across as a sort of gee whiz science museum exposition, one that proposes that the solutions to many of the world's problems are not only within our grasp, but that their solution is inevitable. And Design, with a capitol D, has the answers. If only we would listen to the designers. Every room begins with an affirmative statement in huge type — We WILL do this, we will do that. That in itself might be a little off-putting to many people, as if Mau knows our destiny and is simply telling the rest of us what will happen. I also found it disturbing, the whole project, for its optimism, and especially what I took to be its utopianism. My suspicions don’t necessarily mean, I don’t think, that I am a doom-monger or cynical pessimist, but utopian thinking hasn’t led to very happy ends in the past, and don’t we all know that by now? In that sense, parts of this show seem downright dangerous — not because of the information they impart, some of which is fascinating and beautifully displayed, but because of the implied editorial tone. There are leaps of logic that are frightening — similar in ways to the kinds of proselytizing that went on during the dot-com boom — that IT technologies and the World Wide Web would revolutionize, and the implication was, liberate and free, everything from economic behavior to democracy. But this isn’t just focused on IT technologies.
More than one person has written that this presentation belongs in a science museum, not in the art gallery, and despite the wonderful design elements — Mau is an innovative graphic designer after all — I agree.
Although I wasn’t there, I was somewhat reminded of the famous General Motors pavilion at the 1964 NY World's Fair called Futurama. This ride through a giant warehouse-sized diorama on car seats and the intricate animated miniature townscapes painted a rosy view of the future, partly inspired by Corbusier’s radiant city concepts — but in this case facilitated by the automobile, not by public transport. It was The Jetsons, but proposed as possible, and like Massive Change, probable, even inevitable. (GM did 2 Furturamas — one at the '39 fair and one in '64.)
It was a vision of the future that was heavily promoted — GM was the biggest industrial company in the world at that point — and given the visceral visual impact of the models it was taken to heart by the public, politicians and town planners. And we have ended up with the urban disasters that cover America today. (When the gas price rises to 10 dollars a gallon the situation will get really scary.)
Anyway, it can’t all be blamed on GM and 2 World's Fair pavilions. But just as the Drake Hotel in Toronto galvanized forces waiting for an outlet, so these shows, when they strike a nerve, make visible the hopes and dreams of a generation — dreams or a possible future partly inserted into our heads by GM, in the case of Futurama.
The future is partly limited by what we can imagine it to be. Granted, events sometimes intrude unpleasantly on our imagination, but John and Yoko might not have been too far off the mark — urging that if we could but imagine a new and better world, then, and only then, could it come into existence. They didn’t claim its inevitability, merely its possibility. That’s where Mau’s we WILL diverges with their more gentle utopianism.
To give the show more credit, and the benefit of the doubt, he and his associates do in fact imagine a solution to the world's housing problems, water shortages, transportation and a host of other looming disasters. Their bravery in the face of a lot of the pessimism prevalent today, especially on the left, is maybe naïve, but maybe also hopeful. Maybe like GM if they present a more hopeful version of the future albeit less ruthless with land and resources than GM's (Mau’s team prioritizes ecological concerns, for example) they might allow a tiny bit of optimism to leak in, an antidote to the bleak scenario of global warming coupled with willfully ignorant U.S. politicians and agencies. (Not that global warming isn’t inevitable.)
[Link to DB/Mau interview in Contemporary magazine]
Later, I did a talk to the swells who were sponsors of the Contact Photo Festival. Not the PowerPoint talk, this one is about the man-made visual environment, specifically, both improvised and designed stuff that is intentionally placed in our field of vision for us to absorb, react to, deal with — weird constructions by lunatics, massive advertising campaigns and public art — some of the latter are my own. Sounds like a big topic, and it is. I don’t provide many answers. I don’t have any. But sometimes the answer begins to emerge only once the question has been formulated. A question, by its nature, implies an answer. Not that the answer is immediately available, but often the question is way of focusing, of defining a subject, an idea, a region, and then sometimes the pieces start to fall into place, little by little. At least that’s my justification for not giving answers.
Quite a lot of my talk focused on advertising, specifically whether or not we are being sold something, and how. Imbedded ads, product placement, ads that use irony to appeal to those too sophisticated to be marketed to.
Other than a few guffaws, the audience, having just finished a rich brunch and some mimosas, sat in polite but pretty stony silence. Only a few walkouts, but I really wondered how I was doing — the PowerPoint talks I did recently got lots of laughs most of the time.
Maybe it was the Canadians — they’re a notoriously restrained audience — some say polite, others give other justifications.
But in talking to folks later, on the street or at the hotel, they seemed to enjoy it and find it stimulating.
