This morning I attended the Dora Mavor Moore Awards press conference, where the nominees for that award for the 2007/2008 season were announced. This season, which is now coming to a close, is the first season that I have been a figure – albeit a small and inconsequential one - in the arts scene in Toronto. But here I am, in this room, at this event, part of it all. What a great feeling. How lucky I feel today. I don’t know everyone in the room, but I know quite a few, even if they wouldn’t recognize me I know them and their contributions, I respect them, admire them and feel a camaraderie with them. I have seen many of the shows that were nominated for awards, and more excitingly have worked with quite a few of the people who put them on, since they were performed on our stages here at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.
What an amazing thing to be part of this community. To be in a room with the actors, dancers, opera singers, producers, directors, playwrights and administrators who make the Toronto performing arts scene hum. Who work together and collaborate and support one another. Who create and perform and support productions that electrify and provoke people, who evoke tears and laughter, fear and anger in their audiences. To see people honoured, like Fiona Reid, the late Richard Bradshaw and Bluma Appel, who have worked in this field for years to not just add to the aesthetic of the city – although that aim also holds its place in this city of concrete and steel – but who are political. They are dreamers, but they are active dreamers, who take it past the questioning to actively challenge the way things are and put forth ideas of how things might be. Who give their life and their personal finances to stage performances that provide this platform for questioning and change because to them it is what must be done. These are artists! Not flakes, not irrational idealists, but pillars of society, no less than lawyers and doctors, who are dedicated against some phenomenal odds to this career choice – no, this life choice, which is important, essential, and very, very difficult for so many reasons. As Ken Gass, Artistic Director of the Factory Theatre, put it, these are people who work to put bread on the table and raise families but who do so with a conscience of what is happening in the rest of the world. Above all, I think, they are free, and that is what the artist in me envies and admires the most. They have done what they wanted to do, and the results are beautiful.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Public Art - An Ode
I was riding up the Yonge subway line to meet my sister at Yonge and Bloor after work today. The car stopped at Wellesley Station and as we waited for the doors to close I looked out onto the platform and noticed that one of the gigantic subway ads was not an ad at all but a work of art. I barged my way through the crowded car, excusing myself as best I could, and ran out the open doors just as the last ding sounded and they closed behind me.
The car pulled away. I stood more or less alone on the platform, looking at a giant photograph. The picture was of a souvenir “Indian Brave” perched in the foreground, the same size as the CN tower way in the background behind it. It was a trick of perspective. The other three photographs were the same. Kitsch souvenirs placed in the foreground of the frame with well-known Torontoscapes in the background, placed in such a way that the former dumbed down the latter. A toy the same size as the lauded CN tower. Familiar landscapes, our urban spaces, made to feel unfamiliar, comedic, insignificant. The writeup nearby had a quote from the artist, Jeff Thomas, about his work: “As a transportation hub the subway station is a perfect example of how urban spaces simultaneously belong to everyone and to no-one. Here is a place where any cultural division –‘us’ versus ‘them’ – is blurred.”
I don’t know how I immediately recognized these images as art over advertisement. Maybe there was an earnestness in them that I couldn’t miss. I do know why seeing these photographs caused me to run frantically out of a subway car onto the platform. I have a thing for public art. I was touched beyond words to see these images here. They mean so much more in a public place than anywhere else. Hundreds, thousands of people mill by these photographs every day. They’re not much different than the advertisements that fill the other poster cases. They’re just images, after all; images that are there to take the viewer out of their present scene and make them think about something else. Only these images are not there to make you buy something, or want something, or feel you lack something. They are there to invoke feeling. The artist feels alone in the city. He is a Native man, caught between the Reserve and the city, caught between the past and the present, caught between racism and acceptance, between wanting to blend in and wanting to be unique, between wanting to have his culture be relevant and celebrated and wanting to not be judged or stereotyped. He is a specific story but his images – these photographs - are everyone. They are every person in the subway station. They are everyone in Toronto. They are isolation amongst the masses. They are the individual subverted by the congregation. They are loss of identity, the feeling of un-belonging, the eerie feeling that in this setting everyone is replaceable. And if this is the case what makes us so sure we really exist at all? We are all overlooked. We all overlook one another.
As Thomas said, the subway station is a perfect place for these images. In these types of spaces, nothing belongs to anyone. In a public urban space, no one individual is responsible; no one individual is accountable. A piece of garbage, a homeless person, a woman crying on the subway, an injured pigeon in a public square. No one has to stop. No one individual needs to stop and help, or care, or even look and notice. The city gives us glorious freedom: freedom from responsibility. It absolves us of our personal accountability to others.
Whenever I think about this societal phenomenon, it reminds me of learning how to use “soft focus” in professor Trisha Lamie’s theatre class. Soft focus was part of the Viewpoints technique. It was incorporated into our movement classes, one of my favourite performance classes of my undergrad. You stand in a group of performers and together you focus on nothing specific until your awareness slackens and you acknowledge your surroundings in a peripheral way only. If any one person begins a movement, the entire group must copy and follow through with it. A group in soft focus moves in flawless unison. A society in soft focus acts in glorious collective irresponsibility. These are natural to humans acting and living in shared spaces. Collective action or collective inaction. Mass movements or mass stillness. The subway cars fill with discarded newspapers and rolling bottles. We are all just kitsch; symbols of people placed beside the CN tower to see which one comes into focus. Which is the background, which is the fore.
The car pulled away. I stood more or less alone on the platform, looking at a giant photograph. The picture was of a souvenir “Indian Brave” perched in the foreground, the same size as the CN tower way in the background behind it. It was a trick of perspective. The other three photographs were the same. Kitsch souvenirs placed in the foreground of the frame with well-known Torontoscapes in the background, placed in such a way that the former dumbed down the latter. A toy the same size as the lauded CN tower. Familiar landscapes, our urban spaces, made to feel unfamiliar, comedic, insignificant. The writeup nearby had a quote from the artist, Jeff Thomas, about his work: “As a transportation hub the subway station is a perfect example of how urban spaces simultaneously belong to everyone and to no-one. Here is a place where any cultural division –‘us’ versus ‘them’ – is blurred.”
I don’t know how I immediately recognized these images as art over advertisement. Maybe there was an earnestness in them that I couldn’t miss. I do know why seeing these photographs caused me to run frantically out of a subway car onto the platform. I have a thing for public art. I was touched beyond words to see these images here. They mean so much more in a public place than anywhere else. Hundreds, thousands of people mill by these photographs every day. They’re not much different than the advertisements that fill the other poster cases. They’re just images, after all; images that are there to take the viewer out of their present scene and make them think about something else. Only these images are not there to make you buy something, or want something, or feel you lack something. They are there to invoke feeling. The artist feels alone in the city. He is a Native man, caught between the Reserve and the city, caught between the past and the present, caught between racism and acceptance, between wanting to blend in and wanting to be unique, between wanting to have his culture be relevant and celebrated and wanting to not be judged or stereotyped. He is a specific story but his images – these photographs - are everyone. They are every person in the subway station. They are everyone in Toronto. They are isolation amongst the masses. They are the individual subverted by the congregation. They are loss of identity, the feeling of un-belonging, the eerie feeling that in this setting everyone is replaceable. And if this is the case what makes us so sure we really exist at all? We are all overlooked. We all overlook one another.
As Thomas said, the subway station is a perfect place for these images. In these types of spaces, nothing belongs to anyone. In a public urban space, no one individual is responsible; no one individual is accountable. A piece of garbage, a homeless person, a woman crying on the subway, an injured pigeon in a public square. No one has to stop. No one individual needs to stop and help, or care, or even look and notice. The city gives us glorious freedom: freedom from responsibility. It absolves us of our personal accountability to others.
Whenever I think about this societal phenomenon, it reminds me of learning how to use “soft focus” in professor Trisha Lamie’s theatre class. Soft focus was part of the Viewpoints technique. It was incorporated into our movement classes, one of my favourite performance classes of my undergrad. You stand in a group of performers and together you focus on nothing specific until your awareness slackens and you acknowledge your surroundings in a peripheral way only. If any one person begins a movement, the entire group must copy and follow through with it. A group in soft focus moves in flawless unison. A society in soft focus acts in glorious collective irresponsibility. These are natural to humans acting and living in shared spaces. Collective action or collective inaction. Mass movements or mass stillness. The subway cars fill with discarded newspapers and rolling bottles. We are all just kitsch; symbols of people placed beside the CN tower to see which one comes into focus. Which is the background, which is the fore.
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