Vancouver Art Gallery

Much dismay that the Vancouver Art Gallery is going to move out of its present location, the classical Rattenbury court house on Georgia Street, and into a new building on the site of the old bus depot on Cambie.  The streets don't mean much to those who don't know Vancouver well, but the bus depot site is at the end of Georgia that is accumulating large cultural edifices: the CBC building, Vancouver Public Library, the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, and now the art gallery.  

The QE Theatre — an opera and ballet hall – is in its original 1959 Affleck building, the library moved from its 1957 Burrard Street location and building into the 1995 Safdie coliseum-referenced library on Georgia: Library Square with huge public spaces in and out, often used by the CBC as performance space.  The CBC is in a 1975 Merrick building on Georgia, expanded in 2009 (Dialog and Bakker) to include a 4000 square-foot performance studio and a glassy public face on the street.  The 1958 McCarter Nairne Post Office building, also on Georgia, its future very much in danger, has been discussed as a possible home for the Vancouver Art Gallery: right location, large industrial spaces, although its massive structure would make changes almost prohibitively expensive, plus it was sold in March for $159 million to a developer.

The Vancouver Art Gallery's first building was built in 1931 on a 66'-wide lot (the original CPR survey grid based on chains for residential plots) a couple of blocks away on Georgia from the Hotel Vancouver.  It looked like a bank vault, which says something about the way art was perceived, as a precious commodity meant to be safeguarded.
Vancouver Art Gallery under construction, 1931. Art Deco single storey gallery on a 66' lot in a residential area - 1145 W. Georgia Street. CIty of Vancouver Archives AM54-S4-: Bu P401.1McCarter Naire Architects, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1931The building was given an International Style renovation and expansion in 1950 by Ross Lort: a part plate glass front wall, part slab, all offset planes and classic white gallery space behind.  It had become a small, exceptionally accommodating gallery that under the direction of Doris Shadbolt and Tony Emery, was at the centre of the explosion of art and performance, from N.E. Thing Co to Gathie Falk, in Vancouver in the 1960s and early 1970s. 

Ross Lort, architect. Vancouver Art Gallery, 1950.

Then, in 1983, the Vancouver Art Gallery moved to the Erickson-renovated 1911 court house building, made redundant by the 1980 Erickson-designed Law Courts complex and Robson Square which filled the two blocks to the west behind the court house.  It seemed appropriate in the ghastly post-modern 1980s when protests on the Court House steps were over, and museums, opera companies and symphonies turned to block-buster shows for survival, that the VAG be housed in the pomposity of a building shouting out its authority.

Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983-present.

Art goes on no matter what the official gallery is, artists challenge and change; where they do it and where you see it is worthy of attention.  In the 1980s artists were like the punk scene occupying marginal and arcane spaces, they certainly weren't in the main spaces of the new Vancouver Art Gallery in the way that they had fluidly slipped in and out of the old modernist unpretentious gallery down the street.  The more we pull access to art out of the everyday, the more inexplicable it becomes to the everyday.  Much like the original 1931 vault-like gallery, the court house gallery demanded, simply by the architecture itself, reverence for the exceptionalism of art.

I'm not unhappy to see the Vancouver Art Gallery leave the court house building, but one does worry about the current civic support, all over the country, for Bilbao-effect galleries and museums.  By their very spectacularity they become objects rather than fabric, appropriate one would think perhaps for programs such as justice, or health, or governance.  Historically, art is deemed to be one of these important conditions requiring separation in a significant architecture.

Might we have something more wabi-sabi: a necessary anchor for history, retrospectives, biennials and curation, plus the infiltration of the rest of the city, starting from that block, with a rootless, opportunistic, transient architecture that reflects the kind of programming most major galleries are engaged with today.  There must be some place for a gallery architecture to constantly renew and reconstruct itself if it is to be an embedded part of the processes of cultural renewal and reconstruction, and not just the place where, after the fact, such changes are displayed.

Christopher Adams: natural selection

Christopher Adams. Natural Selection. Installation view, 2011

CHRISTOPHER ADAMS
Natural Selection
Hosfelt Gallery, New York
23 June - 29 July
 
from the blurb —

Adams' art considers the concept in biological speciation called adaptive radiation, in which a pioneering organism enters a relatively untapped environment, reproducing profusely while differentiating rapidly and extensively.  At the same time, the organism never departs too dramatically from the original form.
 
Each of Adams' pieces starts with a common structure and evolves into an ornate form.  Some are broad and brightly-colored, others are mottled and shrunken or morphologically reduced.  Some appear floral, others cephalopodal, and others have no identifiable counterpart in nature.
 
Christopher Adams has a degree in organismic and evolutionary biology.

face hand camera | rock paper scissors

Richard Hamilton Swingeing London. 1968-9 Acrylic, collage and aluminium on canvas. 848 x 1030 x 100 mm. Tate Collection T01144

things of beauty

Pistoxenos painter. Aphrodite on a swan, 460 BC. Found in a tomb in Kameiros on Rhodes.

Didier Faustino: don't trust architects

Didier Faustino. Flatland. Fundaçào Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon. In Flatland, a spectator becomes an actor by projecting himself into the backside of a movie screen using a swing. The other spectators seated in the theater can see the surface of the screen frontside distorted by the swing of the body, as an empirical three-dimensional effect. Flatland questions what is reality and what is fiction, offering the possibility to a spectator to become the main character of his imaginary.Didier Faustino, such an architect despite the title of his exhibition: lots of brilliant talk while other little bods run around making the piece.  Click on the image above to take you to a short video of the setting up of this project. 

From the press release: '"Don't Trust Architects" by Didier Faustino at the Calouste Gulbekian Foundation.  Didier Faustino is presenting a series of new pieces at the Calouste Gulbekian Foundation (Lisbon) from 14th January to 3rd April 2011. Five new installations produced for the exhibition will immerse visitors in the permanent confrontation of the body with architecture and architecture with movement, via visual and sound tools implemented by Faustino.'

artists in small towns

Hill Strategies Research sends reports every so often on the status of the arts and artists in Canada: how many are there, where do they live, how much do they make.  Always the results are surprising and seem to confound general expectations. 

The study that came out today is about how many of our artists live in small and rural towns: as many as in Toronto and Montréal combined.  Vancouver, with the highest concentration of artists (2.35%) of the large cities, would rank only 21st among small municipalities.  Previous Hill Strategies studies have pointed out the sub-poverty income levels of Canadian artists, so this might have something to do with where they live.
47% of all Canada's artisans and craftspersons live in small towns, 35% of our visual artists do.  Cape Dorset is the centre of Inuit carving and printmaking.  West Bolton is in the Eastern Townships with 10% of its labour force in arts occupations.  Denman and Hornby Islands off the east coast of Vancouver Island have been intense centres of island crafts, arts and music since the 1960s.

Lou Lynn, of Monday's post, lives in Winlaw, BC in the quite remote Slocan Valley.  The work isn't all rural wood carving and fiddle music, it is as sophisticated as the work seen in urban centres.

Since the Massey Report of 1949-51, the arts have been seen as the way to confirm and support the development of an independent Canadian identity. It is surprising that so much of that identity is still investigated, and developed, in rural Canada.