March 2nd, 2010
In 2008, Carmine Starnino, poet and now editor of Maisonneuve magazine, asked me to write an essay on the future of Canadian cities for an issue of Canadian Notes and Queries he was guest-editing. Here’s what I came up with.
Some days, on the corner of Clark and de la Gauchetière in Montreal, you’ll find a fortune teller who can read your fate in English, French, Mandarin and Cantonese. It’s a very non-specific kind of fate, which is usually the case with fortune tellers, but I sometimes wonder what he would have to say about larger subjects—like the city that surrounds him, for instance. What will it, and others like it across the country, look like in a generation? I’m no fortune teller, but here are three trends I think might influence the shape of our cities in the near future.
1. Edible cities
I never thought much about my family’s backyard when growing up in Calgary. Wide and shallow, its grassy expanse was eventually surrendered to our two dogs, who used it as their toilet. We were far from exceptional, and what still strikes me when I drive through Canadian suburbs is the sheer amount of empty grass. It’s always seemed like an egregious waste of space.
But things are starting to change. Small efforts are being made to introduce small-scale agriculture and locally-grown food into Canadian cities. Green roofs and backyard gardens have emerged in Vancouver; food co-ops in Toronto. In Montreal, the Minimum-Cost Housing Group has been busy finding ways to marry food production with urban life.
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August 28th, 2009
Maguire Meadow. Photo from imagine (le) mile-end
I found myself in Kennedy Town yesterday evening, my hair still dripping from swimming at a nearby pool as I walked towards the waterfront, beer in hand. At the small promenade built next to a bus loop, the smell of diesel fumes in the air, I stopped to admire the violet hues of the sunset. But I didn’t stay there — I pressed on to a far nicer part of the waterfront.
By day, the shipping yard that stretches from Kennedy Town to the wholesale food market at Shek Tong Tsui, on the western end of Hong Kong Island, whirs with industrial purpose, as forklifts dart about and shipping containers are unloaded by boat. By night, it becomes a playground for people who live nearby. As I walked along the water last night, I saw kids riding their bikes, old men fishing, middle-aged women stretching and power walking. As the evening wore on, couples emerged, strolling hand in hand. Nobody seemed to mind the signs warned against unauthorized entry.
It reminded me of the Maguire Meadow, a large open field in the old garment district of Mile End, Montreal, which is slated for redevelopment in the coming years. Lately, people have been gardening on the field and using it for neighbourhood gatherings; over the years, it has acquired an impressive collection of flora and fauna, including walnut trees and the squirrels they feed. At the moment, redevelopment plans call for a new road to be built through the meadow, which has elicited quite a bit of protest.
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January 11th, 2009
Photo by Jean-Pierre Caissie
“It’s a phenomenon unique to public art: the possibility of response,” wrote Jean-Pierre Caissie, the artistic director of Dare-Dare, on his blog last month. “Artistic expression is usually a one-way street. The artist expresses himself and the museum presents his work. A few attempts at responding to the artist have ended up in a court date. But street art, or ephemeral public art, offers the opportunity for passers-by to comment.”
Roaming from site to site around Montreal—first Viger Square, then the Park With No Name, and now Cabot Square—Dare-Dare specializes in ephemeral public art. I’ve been lucky enough to chat with Caissie about the various projects that Dare-Dare has helped curate and a common theme that keeps emerging is the opportunity for public interaction and response, something that isn’t normally possible in a gallery or a museum. Dare-Dare takes art from the gallery to the street and opens it up to the public.
What happens then is entirely unpredictable. In 2007, Chih-Chien Wang built a “nest” of cardboard boxes, illuminated from within, underneath the Van Horne Viaduct. People would come at night and drink nearby, but every so often, somebody would knock down all of the boxes, either deliberately or by accident. Each time, he rebuilt the nest in a slightly different way. Not long after, Caroline Dubois and Julie Favreau turned a long-vacant storefront into a space of perpetual construction and reconstruction. Many neighbours, surprised to see the shop doors open, stopped by to chat.
It’s not uncommon to pass by street art—stencils, graffiti, paste-ups and so on—that has been commented on. Caissie has a few examples, including one—a “raton voleur” that spills out from one of Franck Bragigand’s painted manhole covers on St. Viateur St.—that adds so much to the original work that I had always assumed it was painted by Bragigand himself. Two years ago, somebody pasted a long-form poem onto a laneway wall; “Too bad it’s not that good,” somebody scrawled underneath. Last spring, Fauxreel’s controversial Antlerheads were literally defaced by Zato, another street artist, who transformed their Vespa scooter heads into morbidly grinning moster faces.
Compare that to galleries, where any attempt to comment on art is considered vandalism rather than dialogue. Caissie points the way to a handful of news stories about people attacking, defacing and otherwise leaving a mark on various pieces of art.
June 5th, 2008
Rooftop sleepovers aside, Mile-End isn’t normally known as a camping destination. That will soon change, at least for four days, with “Camping aux bons plaisirs fugaces,” a camping-themed arts event, hosted by the artist-run centre Dare-Dare, which will take place this weekend.
From tonight, Thursday, June 5 until Sunday, June 8, 13 artists will sleep under the stars at the Parc sans nom, the vacant-lot-cum-arts-space at the corner of St-Laurent and Van Horne. In a sense, the event will be a last hurrah for the park, which will be converted into a storage space for the Plateau Mont-Royal borough’s public works equipment when Dare-Dare leaves at the end of the month.
“We wanted to do something with the Parc sans nom and it came up that we could do some camping there,” says Marjolaine Samson, one of the event’s organizers. “The park will become a really dynamic place and we want all the neighbours to come participate. It’s going to be an artistic and community space—a lived-in space…. With what the city is doing there won’t be much left. It’s too bad. So this will really be an ephemeral event.”
The 13 artists participating will use their tents, the park and the neighbourhood around it as their artistic point of departure. The projects include an instruction video on urban survival, an experiment in underground camping and a sound-based walking tour from Rosemont metro to the Parc sans nom. One artist will recreate a night sky; another will serve a meal each night made entirely from food scavenged from Mile-End’s dumpsters.
Originally, the plan was for the public to be able to access the campground around the clock, but the organizers were forced to scale back when the borough refused them permission, allowing them only to open the site from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.
“We thought we could really push the limits of what we can do in the theme of camping, because a campground here is not legal. We wanted to see if it was possible to create a real campground, but the borough said it wasn’t possible,” said Jean-Pierre Caissie, Dare-Dare’s creative director. “It could have been fun having people come to camp in their neighbourhood park.”
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November 29th, 2007
“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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