The Antlerheads Come to Montreal

Earlier this week, while walking to a friend’s place on Coloniale Street on the Plateau, I came across an unusual piece of street art. Pasted on an abandoned mattress that was leaning against the side of a building, it depicted the body of a skinny-jeaned, cardiganed hipster topped by the head of a motorized scooter. Its position on the mattress created an interesting optical illusion that gave the scooter-man an extra sense of depth; looking at it head-on, it seemed to be standing up straight in front of me. Later that day, heading home on the 80 bus, I saw a few slightly different versions of the same paste-up on the papered-over windows of a vacant storefront on Park Avenue.

It turns out that the scooter-men, dubbed Antlerheads, are a guerilla marketing campaign for Vespa, which commissioned a well-known street artist, Fauxreel, to promote its new Vespa S scooter in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary. His work has already made a big splash in Toronto, where they appeared last month. “Guerilla marketing gone horribly right?” asked blogTO, which admired the fact that they are at once an advertisement and a parody of consumer culture — “the idea that we can exchange our faces and minds with a product.” Strategy Magazine reports that the posters are part of a much larger campaign that will include print advertisements, street teams distributing scooter-head buttons and a giant 40-foot projection.

As advertising in conventional media becomes less and less effective, marketers are turning to guerilla advertising to get the word out about new products. At its worst, guerilla marketing cynically co-opts street art and public space to sell us more crap we don’t really need. But, somehow, the Antlerheads seem different. They are a very oblique form of promotion, since they contain no obvious signs of being sponsored by Vespa. No logos, no web addresses; only someone who is already familiar with the company’s scooters would recognize them as advertising. Artistically speaking, they certainly hold their own against most of the graffiti, stencils and paste-ups found in our streets, and their cultural commentary gives them an added dimension.

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Lisboa: Up, Down, Around

The geography of Lisbon bends pespectives - up, down, and around its seven hills. Beyond the occasional slow-swooping streetcar, the dramatic undulations of the city’s streets are broken only by its graffiti, which boldly explodes against pastel-painted houses, or grafts messages - somehow both timely and timeless - deep into centuries-solid walls.

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“Pieces of Resistance”

Montreal’s marginal spaces seem to hold particular appeal for its artists. Last year, Karen Spencer decorated fences, laneways and parking lots with her oblique trilingual dreams; Julie Favreau and Caroline Dubois occupied a vacant storefront on Beaubien Street, turning an empty space into one of constant reinvention; and the artists of Dare-Dare took a forlorn corner of Mile End and made it into the centre of gravity for the city’s most interesting and innovative art. Now, the wayward Heather Utah has found herself in the area around the Falaise St. Jacques, where she has marked an entire corner the city with her “flags for a vengeance”: colourful quilts that mark an outpost of ambiguity, spontaneity and humanity in the rigidly-marked space of this drably suburban landscape.

Photos by Heather Utah; click here for the full set.

Hydro Pole Art

Hydro pole street art on 4th Street SW in the Mission

Paris: Beyond the End of History

Quai d’Orsay: From Commuters to Connoisseurs

French culture is dead, Time magazine’s Don Morrison recently proclaimed. Complacently subsisting off plentiful government subsidies, it has failed to keep up and compete with any of the noise issuing forth from the anglophone world. If France’s capital city is any reflection of the country’s cultural decline, one might be inclined to agree with him — superficially, at least.

The museum-like quality of Paris, which remains a sort of improbable continuation of its late 19th century self, has long been lamented. The City of Light is bathing, perhaps, in too much of a stage-set’s glow, and one could be forgiven for feeling like one was traipsing through a theme park when strolling through the Tuileries in the evening - especially since half the park literally serves as a sort of fairground. It’s telling that the two most controversial building projects in central Paris - the reconstruction of Les Halles, a former marketplace turned mall and train station, and the potential rebuilding of the Tuileries palace, are, respectively, an attempt to snuff out one of the few 20th century intrusions into central Paris, and the attempt to restore a building lost to fire in 1871. The recent installation of a bike-rental system has only added further to Paris’ 19th century flair: never since then have there been so many pedal warriors on the city’s boulevards. All in all, Paris is not only ossifying, but taking active steps to turn back the clock.

Place Vendôme: Sepulchral City

Morrison claims that that hope for French culture lies in the twin engine of neoliberalism and the immigrant ghettoes of French cities’ banlieux: the latter providing new twists on what “French” means, the former allowing France to competitively export itself to the rest of the world. It’s true that these two forces have brought considerable change to Paris, though not, perhaps, in the positive ways Morrison expects. The offices of American law firms have quintupled along the Avenue Georges V, and St-Germain has steeply declined from Bohemian Rhapsody to Banana Republic. This sort of sterility, more than the mere preservation of belle époque facades, has paralyzed Paris.

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Taking it to the Streets

“The Nest,” an early October installation by Chih Chien Wang

It glowed amid its sombre surroundings, a giant Lego-brick lantern underneath the Van Horne Viaduct. For three weeks this fall, Chih-Chien Wang’s installation The Nest was hosted by the artist-run centre Dare-Dare in a space at the corner of St. Laurent Blvd. and Van Horne Ave. that has been dubbed The Park With No Name.

Wang assembled his nest using cardboard boxes, painted white on one side and stacked in the shape of a cube. Inside, amid the glare of white fluorescent lights, visitors could hear and feel the sounds of the viaduct overhead.

“(It is) a way to connect people and the city through an organic experience. This is a place where people and city come together,” proclaimed Dare-Dare’s written on-site introduction to the installation.

Ultimately, though, the way people interacted with his art was a surprise to Wang.

“Kids actually came here to smoke. They were very careful and didn’t throw their cigarettes away inside,” said Wang one afternoon as he swept the ground outside the nest. “People also like to drink inside at night. The sound wasn’t too bad.”

One overnight visitor even left behind a drink, a paper bag and, bizarrely, two perfectly assembled hairballs.

Wang’s installation is part of a new wave of public art that reflects - and draws inspiration from - the city’s urban landscape. It is ephemeral, designed to last only temporarily, and it draws heavily from the aesthetic and philosophy of street art.

This past summer, also in collaboration with Dare-Dare - an organization that helps artists develop their projects and bring art out of galleries and into public space - the Dutch artist Franck Bragigand painted the manhole covers along Bernard and St. Viateur Sts.

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Is Civility Just a Mask?

Every so often there is a reminder that Montreal, for all its history as a capital of Jewish culture in North America, still has a problem with anti-Semitism. In the past year alone, a molotov cocktail was thrown at a Jewish school on Van Horne and a bomb exploded outside of a Jewish community centre on Victoria Avenue. It wasn’t so long ago that a Jewish school’s library was destroyed in a vicious firebombing.

Just the other day, a friend told me about this piece of graffiti on Clark Street, between St. Viateur and Fairmount. Someone has scribbled the likeness of a Hasidic Jew with the inscription “Parásit.” It might seem harmless in and of itself, but these thoughtless displays of racism are usually symptoms of a much larger and more insidious problem. If we accept the legitimacy of messages such as this, aren’t we tacitly accepting their message?

Montreal is home to one of the world’s largest communities of Hasidic Jews. Numbering about 15,000, they live mostly within one kilometre of Van Horne Street between Mile End in the east and Côte St. Luc in the west. Historically, since the Hasidic population started growing in the 1980s, there have been some tense moments in the relationship between Outremont’s Hasidim and their mostly French-Canadian neighbours. Some Outremonters have fought against every one of the Hasidic community’s attempts to make a home for themselves by building new schools, synagogues and businesses.

For the most part, though, day-to-day relations between the Hasidim and non-Hasidim are civil. (I wrote about this last winter in “My Heimishe Bakery.”) That’s what makes it so disheartening to see this kind of graffiti. It makes me wonder: is that civility just a mask?

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Laneway Decor

Ghost sign behind East Hastings near Gore

Posters behind Pender near Seymour

Graffiti behind West Hastings near Richards

The Mystery is Solved

Back in July I asked if anyone knew who was painting the manhole covers of Mile End. Slowly but surely, readers started offering some leads. One mentioned that she had heard the artist being interviewed on CBC Radio, but couldn’t remember which show; another suggested that it might have to do with an arts collective that has recently established itself in the neighbourhood. Sure enough, this week brought with it confirmation that a Dutch artist named Franck Bragigand was responsible for the manhole covers, in a project realized by DARE-DARE, the Consulate-General of the Netherlands in Montreal and Montreal’s municipal electrical commission.

DARE-DARE, it turns out, is responsible for a slough of innovative public art in Montreal. I’ve noticed many of them before, but simply assumed they were unsanctioned street art, not art created with the blessing of the city’s authorities. One project, funded by the provincial government, had the artist Karen Spencer describe her dreams on cardboard, in English, French and Spanish, for an entire year. She then mounted the cryptic cardboard passages on walls around the city. I came across one last winter that read: “I dreamed I criticized J.J. for falling improperly.” Another sign began with the inscription, “Soñé que mis dientes estaban wen mi boca” — “I dreamed my teeth were falling out of my mouth.”

DARE-DARE is headquartered in what has come to be called the Park With No Name, an vacant patch of greenery next to the Van Horne Viaduct at the corner of Clark and Arcade. In true Montreal fashion, the group is not just bilingual, but trilingual — it seems that, for many organizations, Spanish has become Montreal’s de facto third language, perhaps to ease the tension between French and English — and it has hosted some pretty swell get-togethers at its Mile End home, including two big outdoor dance parties in June. A wood-fired pizza oven has even been built in the Park With No Name, ostensibly for community use, but a conflict with the city has restricted its use and might even see the oven demolished altogether.

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Fine Art Street Art

This summer the National Gallery in London has brought the fine art to the public, by lining the streets of West End with reproductions of some of its paintings. The campaign is clearly a comment on street art culture — and of course a way to draw people to the gallery. It also raises interesting questions about the importance of authenticity and context.

The King is Dead; Long Live the King

One of the King of Kowloon’s last remaining pieces.
Photo by Dustin Shum of the South China Morning Post

Tsang Tsou Choi, the King of Kowloon, died two weeks ago at the age of 86. I wrote about Tsang in March, outlining my first encounter with his graffiti and the strange and sometimes nonsensical messages it contains.

Hong Kongers will remember his denunciations of Queen Elizabeth II and his outlandish claim to be the rightful proprietor of most of Kowloon. But Tsang’s impact was less trivial than it might seem: in a society that for decades stressed material gain and social mobility above all else, the King of Kowloon was an oddball and an outsider. His unique visual style influenced a generation of creative young Hong Kongers and, in 2003, his work was featured in the Venice Biennial.

For most of his life, however, Tsang was not viewed with such high regard by the Hong Kong authorities, who doggedly erased his work as soon as he put it up. Only a few of his murals remain, the most prominent being located on a pillar at the Star Ferry terminal in Tsim Sha Tsui. Now, pressure is mounting on Hong Kong’s leaders to preserve what is left of the King’s legacy. “Friends, exhibitors, members of the Antiquities Advisory Board and a legislator said Tsang’s work, some of which remains on walls in Kowloon, was part of the city’s collective memory and must be preserved,” reports the South China Morning Post.

Ever since its handover to China in 1997 and the economic recession that followed, the question of Hong Kong’s identity has weighed heavily on its citizens. Last year, the decision to destroy the Queen’s Pier and an historic Star Ferry terminal sparked widespread outrage, as did the eviction of hundreds of residents and businesses for “Wedding Card Street” to make way for a new real estate development. Issues of heritage and “collective memory” have become standard fodder for discussion.

For many Hong Kongers, then, the King of Kowloon represented a part of the territory’s local identity, a small part of the unique culture that sets it apart from the overbearing mainland. So far, government officials appear to be listening. The SCMP reports that they promised yesterday not to remove any of the King’s remaining work. “I don’t see any reason why they should be removed,” said Bernard Chan, a member of Hong Kong’s executive council.

The King might be dead, but his spirit lives on.

Who is Painting the Manhole Covers?

I’m not just asking — I really want to know. Over the past month, somebody has painted dozens of manhole covers around Mile End, on Park Avenue, Bernard Street and St. Viateur Street. It’s quite a lovely endeavour, adding a bit of colour to the sidewalk while drawing attention to an overlooked but essential piece of civic infrastructure.

Quartier Ephemère

Caution: Satan at Work