|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
SCULPTURE IN THE GARDEN: SANCTUARY OR EXILE? - Barbara Fischer ADVANCING THE PUBLIC DOMAIN- Ihor Holubizky
However,
by the end of that century sculpture was displaced from its once formidable
participation as a tool of persuasion. If its secession was due, in
part, to its usurpation by the more modern and literal means of mass
communication (film, radio, television; billboards, roadside advertising,
and LED pixels),2 it was
also due to the artists' own critical undoing. Traditional and commonly
understood figural allegories failed when artists confronted the problem
of the unrepresentable and cataclysmic forces of modernity (i.e. steam
power and electricity, modern warfare, and not least of all, the encounter
with the colonized Other through territorial violence and expansion).3
Yet, by removing illustrative reference to memory, history, events and
location, and by incorporating industrial forms toward an abstract representation
of eternity, sacrifice and duration, sculpture's response to the experience
of modernity illustrated the problem of disseminating a new language,
or of convincing a broader constituency, including those in power, of
the need.4 This, combined
with the fact that architects themselves increasingly conceived of the
construction of urban space and buildings as integral, fully realized
works of art, rendered sculpture, like ornament, a crime. If tolerated
at all, it was reduced to mere organic accent in front of order, the
tilted arc in a squared setting, the human bend in the administrative
web of a bureaucratic grid. [fig. Mies van der Rohe] Like the urban
park's running water and blades of grass, the shrub and the schrebergarten,
the potted planter and the tree in concrete tiles, sculpture performed
the "boogie-woogie" of the body,5
the escapades of the wandering circus, the gesticulating aberrations
in the panoptically transparent city. Like the body in Eadweard Muybridge's
locomotion studies, it was fodder for motion-measuring, architectural
Taylorist grids. [figs Richard Deacon] Entering a state of limbo, a
type of homelessness, and an essentially nomadic condition, the formal
institution of a special court or garden seemed to be among the only
ways out.6 Such a space
consecrated the endeavour of modern sculpture, its self- and imposed
exile, by giving it a place in the city and yet guaranteeing the special
privileges that museums accord to art, such as protection from vandalism,
weathering, and other perilous open air conditions.7
By
the time that The Toronto Sculpture Garden opened its gates in 1981,
however, the condition of contemporary and public art had changed again.
In fact, the appearance of the T.S.G. came on the heels of nearly twenty
years of a vigorous re-investment in public art or art in the city,
and the critical dismantling of the premises of modernism, at once.
Since the 1960s, North American cities including Toronto began to demonstrate
a new civic attitude. The surging sense of modernity and prosperity
had to be marked by permanent emblems of modernist art.8
Coupled with the nearing centennial of the country, the province of
Ontario, embarked on a 1% in public (government) spaces program of sculpture
which, in 1966, resulted in the first major commissioning of modern
sculpture (at the Macdonald Block at Queen's Park). Signalling the government's
desire to take a more active role in constructing and humanizing the
urban landscape, these initiatives also included the construction of
Toronto City Hall itself (a giant space-ship with benevolent embrace)
and the placement of Henry Moore's pastoral modernist Archer.9
Yet,
just as the emblematic form of modern sculpture came to be recognized
as communicative form by the official channels of governments and commissioning
agencies, contemporary artists were radically renegotiating the relation
between the spaces of art and the practices of everyday life. No longer
interested in enacting the anthropomorphic armwrestle with modern materials,10
sculpture broke with the tradition of the autonomous object to enter,
what Rosalind Krauss, in 1979, theorized as the expanded field of postmodernism.
Situated along the various axes between (not-) landscape and (not-)
architecture, the new sculpture (re)claimed the role of constructing
and shaping the experience of space through site markers, axiomatic
structures, and site constructions.11
Often described by the short-hand notion of site-specificity,12
a form of rapprochement was taking place which represented not merely
a re-negotiation of the relation between sculptural practices and geographic
location, but also, eventually, of the relation between art and specific
social, cultural and historical contexts. Opening up the complexity
of urban space to (phenomenological, then increasingly critical and
social) interventions, some of the concerns of the new work eventually,
by the late 1980s and early 90s, would be redefined as new genre public
art. Distinct from, and in fact opposed to so-called public or corporote
commissions, the latter is an activist art serving the issues and concerns
of particular communities or constituencies.13
In Toronto, the history of this re-engagement began in the late 1970s,
in the activities and array of projects initiated by individual artists
and the artist-run centres (culminating in the activities and interventions
of the Public Access collective in the mid 1980s),14
but also in a series of outdoor projects at Harbourfront, and at the
most official level, The Art Gallery of Ontario's "Structures of
Behaviour" exhibition (with Richard Serra, George Trakas, David
Rabinovitch, and Robert Morris) in 1978. In
light of this history, the timing of The Toronto Sculpture Garden as
an institution for art appears positively idiosyncratic. With its urbanized
waterfall and viewing terrace, its graded steps and manicured landscaping,
its decorative brickwork and gates that could be locked, this place
seemed ready to welcome sculptural objects of the modernist kind. In
fact, some of the TSG's early exhibitions did revisit the modernist
tradition. Perhaps to lay a bridge between esoteric, abstract languages
and common symbols and/or experiences, John Noestheden presented ambiguously
linguistic symbols in his "Opus Fifteen" (1983); and Marshall
Webb's curatorial debut in 1984, titled "Visual Rhythms,"
made reference to music to legitimate (as universally accessible) the
tonality, harmony, and dissonance of modern sculpture, and works by
Patrick Thibert, Dieter Hastenteufel, Svitlana Muchin, Andre Fauteux,
Reinhard Reitzenstein, and Tim Jocelyn, in particular. However, by 1992,
that language had clearly become subject to ironic quotation. In proto-postmodern
fashion, Claude Mongrain's "Two monuments to a falling star"
re-invoked the part-to-part relation of high-modernist sculpture, but
replaced its forms and conventions with surrogates (piles of marble
chips, found mini-monoliths, flower pots, and a column of alternating
studio stools). Stacked up in reference to such monuments as Brancusi's
"Endless Column" and his dissolution of the pedestal as a
separate entity in sculpture, Claude Mongrain's work imbued these forms
with the pedestrian meanings of found objects, as well as with humorous
self-reference and self-deprecation. From
the very beginning, however, the inclusion of abstract sculpture --
totemic in its ambitions, elliptical in its references, and therefore
approximating closest the conditions of modern art in exile -- was an
exception. Indeed, against the expectations set up by the traditional
nature of the site, the Toronto Sculpture Garden programme quickly established
itself in support of more immediate concerns in contemporary sculptural
practices -- namely, the return to reference and the significance of
context and location. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, the
newly recuperated narrative agenda of sculpture revolved around the
fate of nature, and all that had been expelled by the city's dominatrix,
modernist, urban architecture. For instance, John McEwen's flame-cut
steel horses "One and One" (1979) toyed with the industrial
abstraction of the minimalist object (i.e. the use of raw steel slabs
in Richard Serra's work); but, the miniature cut-outs and their organic
array-like placement (as opposed to the strictly serial logic of minimalism),
transformed the garden into a miniature farmyard and rural pasture,
confirming, as numerous others from then on did, that the significance
of the garden was its role as sanctuary, as protected enclave separated
from urbanity and modern life. Whether in the form of more traditional
statuary (such as Elisabeth Frink's bronze "Hose and Rider"
of 1975), or abstract constructions [Sorel Etrog's corten steel "Ploughspace"
(1981), John McKinnon's abstract, welded steel resembling the shape
a deer in "Topography of a Deer" (1982), and the fluted, bolted
wood slats of "Sacred Trees" by Louis Stokes (1982)], for
these works the garden served as a backdrop, a reminder of the pre-modern,
paved over, and buried past. As late as 1994, artists paid such tribute.
Stephen Cruise's "G''R A Winter Piece," for instance, presented
farm-yard animals as statuary around the fencing columns of the garden
(like the lions, eagles and sphinxes of imperial projects and schemes),
thereby commemorating a general history of the city in the form of a
rural past. Whether
or not the references to animals or settler-life (now a very established
tradition of public art in Toronto)15
were nourished by lingering anxieties of a specifically Canadian kind,
the suggested sense of urban alienation provided an immediate source
of images for the long displaced forms of sculptural narrative, including
figurative art. Yvonne Singer's "Back to Back" (1984) with
its fifty body cast, draped backs, shared its evocation of loneliness
and lack of human relationships with Susan Beniston's "Into Limbo"
(1989), Gilbert Boyer's "I looked for Sarah everywhere" (1992),
and Cynthia Short's "Pilgrim's Planting" (1987). The latter
featured a solitary figure planting a garden by hedging herself in,
thereby expressing the desire for belonging amidst the bewildering uprootedness
and displacement of modern life. Arguably
set against the pastoral attitude, whereby the garden was made into
the foil for a state of longing and mourning, some artists related to
the space of the garden in a more present tense manner, and in terms
of an experience of natural phenomenon or geographic location. Hugh
Leroy's "The Arc and the Chord" (1987) consisted of a flat
row of 33 wood blocks each of which collected rain water in a specially
carved groove. As the water was absorbed, the expanding wood forced
the blocks upward, changing the flat path into a subtly curving arch.
Emphasizing the experience of the present moment, in view of continuous
change and transformation, was also the subject of Panya Clark's 1996
installation "At this Point". Researching the history of the
immediate area, her work consisted of a miniature reconstruction of
the lighthouse from Gilbraltar Point of Toronto Island to commemorate
the changes in Toronto's topography over one century. With its seductive,
jewel-like reconstruction, the greatest strength of the work was its
ability to evoke a sense of geological time experienced in the present;
it caused a diminution of human history and worked as reminder of a
more precarious or temporal sense of the city's existence in nature. Throughout most of its history, however, the majority of projects at the Sculpture Garden can best be understood as attempts to reconfigure the relation between landscape and architecture, and between nature and the built environment, through the medium of sculpture and installation. Cautious steps in this direction were works which made reference to or suggested a functional utilization of space through furniture. They included Ted Rettig's suspended chairs, Susan Schelle's garden furniture complete with faux fountain, and Dmitri Kaminker's funky suburban-rural wood constructions (i.e. a dog-house, out-house, fencing, folk-art and mythical creatures). Lee Paquette's "Recess" (1984) went furthest by transforming the Sculpture Garden into a richly overdone, colourful Kindergarten (complete with toys, teeter-totters, and other kids' amusements) as if to point the finger at the jail-like play spaces of public housing projects. From
the very beginning, however, the references of much contemporary sculpture
revolved around more literal architectural forms (such as windows and
wall constructions). Already Robert Bowers' "Sand-castle"
and Mark Gomes' untitled enclosure (both selected for the inaugural
exhibition), and Judith Schwarz' "House within a House" in
"Venture down the Garden Path" (1982), had used common, garden-shed
variety materials in structures that referred to enclosed gardens or
urban sites. Later, Herb Parker's "Transient Earth Structures"
(1986) incorporated the entire garden by digging up slabs of sod to
construct a temple-like "garden house". The idea that sculpture
could, in fact, be a means by which to shape space and its experience
-- a function which for so long had been the specialized domain of architecture
-- was also, clearly, the intent of Wendy Habenicht's oddly angled,
topsy-turvy wooden towers in "Dream Retreat (1989), and especially
An Whitlock's dark, but diaphanous enclosure entitled "shadowline"
(1989). Highly interactive and encouraging physical involvement, both
works made a strong argument for architectural construction as a sculptural
concern, not unlike Brian Groombridge's conceptual work, "Within
one action there are many gestures" (1990). A minimal piece, consisting
of nothing but an upright, 20ft I-beam with a cylindrical hook at half
way holding an empty frame (made of two carpenter angles), it represented
anticipation, the realm of the possible rather than the already actualized
gesture. If Groombridge's work was an exercise in understatement, it
nevertheless shared the concerns of larger, architectural installations
by suggesting art could be considered as an architectural project. For
instance, Andreas Gehr's monumental wooden structure, titled "Found
Foundation" (1985), physically echoed, and thereby linked the experience
of sculpture to that of the imposing neo-gothic church across the street,
sharing its spiritual references with Stacey Spiegel's "Sculpture
Heaven" (1986), a subtly swaying glazed and pointed polygon. If Andrea's Gehr's work was "site-specific" through architectural quotation (it was anchored to its surrounding, physical site by literally repeating or restating an existing element), in the late 1980s and early 90s artists departed from the emphasis on perceptual experience and the potential formalism of this type of reference, foregrounding instead that various forms of art and architecture were elements of an existing language that could be used at will and toward a number of different ends. Renee van Halm's 1988 sculptural installation "Display (Temptation to Follow)" for instance, consisted of a montage of various types of architectural surfaces, inset windows and store-front structures. Evoking the general picture of an urban shopping street, the work invited reflection on the urban experience of looking, gazing, mirroring, and window-shopping. Exceedingly,
however, the quotation of elements gave way to the open, and limitless
possibilities of altered combinations, such as Pierre Granche's "Thales
au pied de la spirale" (1988), which used statuary and building
types retrieved from the ancients to show architectural history in a
vertiginous tail spin. If Granche's work collapsed all notions of evolution
and progress, Carlo Cesta employed quotation as a strategy of affirming
cultural hybridization. Included in the 1993 exhibition "Artes
Moriendi," Cesta's ironic, mausoleum-like bird-feeding station
inter-married Italian vernacular fencing with the monochrome panels
of the Schroeder House and subsequent International style -- a gesture
not unlike Robert Venturi's seminally postmodern architectural treatise,
"Learning from Las Vegas." The most ambitious, and only direct
quotation of an industrial type of architecture, however, was Kim Adams'
1994 "Crab Legs (A Studio)." Modelled off a a gravel tipple
the work belonged into an industrialized landscape, such as mining fields
or other types of modern "waste-lands," rather than into an
urban garden. Displaced twice over by its skewed, oversize model and
undersize architectural scale, this real structure in proposal form
hovered somewhere between the realization and projection of an ideal
artist's studio. As a vehicle type -- on track and wheels -- the work
was a layered visual analysis of the placeless/displaced condition of
modern sculpture, its relation to manufacture and small-scale industry
in post-industrial culture, and, ultimately, of its own resolve to belong
nomadically -- up and running, always already here and somewhere else.
As
important as the subject of architecture had become in the history of
the garden's exhibitions, the idea of nature remained a persistent theme
throughout. Especially in the last few years, the TSG had become the
site of a rush of projects concerned with the industrial transformation
of nature, its displacement by culture, and general anxieties concerning
the environment. Shared by artists who no longer were concerned with
upholding a pastoral ideal, it had already been a central focus in Doug
Buis' "Chaotic Encounters" (1990). A technological simulation
of natural phenomena, he presented a ground-hugging, glazed wind tunnel
in which large fans would blow sand back and forth, thereby revealing
and concealing found industrial objects and non-identifiable residue
-- the archaeological traces of ravaged nature. Fastwurms' 1994 contribution
to "Artes Moriendi" (an exhibition which also included Carlo
Cesta and Lisa Neighbour's exuberant memorials), shared these concerns
albeit in more ironic form. Consisting of a greenhouse with burial mound,
weeping birch and bell rope, the installation doubled the enclosed nature
of the garden as "nature on life support" or memory in a mausoleum.
Coupling the fear of being buried alive (through reference to the convention
of placing a bell rope in the hands of a deceased) with the fear of
the disappearance of nature, this beautiful, luscious, and colourful
work poignantly raised the fear of "being alive on a dead planet,"
as Dai Skuse put it in his catalogue statement. Similar anxieties seemed
to underlay Reinhard Reitzenstein's and Carl Skelton's work in their
join exhibition "Blur" (1997). Reitzenstein's "Arbour
Vitae" (1995) warned of the fate of humans in the death of nature
with a dead-looking, uprooted bronze tree that had its trunk modelled
in the form of a human spine, while Skelton's skinned "begging
bear" with its mock bronze patina was a satirical take on the representation
of captured animals as an enjoyment of nature (1995-96). If theirs was
a surrealist diorama, Bernie Miller's "Cornucopia"(1995) employed
the language of productivist utilitarianism to undo the latter's industrial
utopia of overcoming nature. A precariously tilted billboard-sized image
of colourful vegetables is accompanied by heaps of equally colourful
storage boxes, shopping containers, and toxic waste barrels. Yawning
empty in front of an image of visual desserts, promise of abundance,
and ample supplies (so common to advertising), the work put a seemingly
insurmountable distance between harvest and shopping, but suggesting
a circular relation between labourers, reapers, the mass of consumers,
and waste. Not
surprisingly, commentary on the contemporary condition of nature was
frequently levelled at the most obviously artificial element of the
sculpture garden, the electronically pumped water fall. While the subject
of water had already come up in the works by Hugh Leroy and Panya Clark,
more recently Pierre Bourgeault installed architecturally-scaled fragments
of an industrial-type ship to look as if it had been docked or run aground,
thereby transforming the landscape into the grave of an industrial,
albeit restored ruin. This was preceded by Brian Scott's 1991 trompe
l'oeil installation which emphasized the cultural artifice of the garden
by describing nature as disturbed by culture. Using an actual boat,
Scott re-shaped the grounds with earth and sod to make the boat appear
as if plowing through the green waters of an imaginary lake. Later projects
more directly related to the waterfall similarly circulated on issues
of mediation, reproduction, and the world of the simulacral. In Jerry
Pethick's (1996) installation, a super-scaled dog, made from stacked
up, large industrial-scale steel tubes (used perhaps to transport water
or other fluid), sat by a photographic reproduction of a wild waterfall
seen through a veil of fresnel lenses. While the large steel tubes were
perhaps a reminder of the industrial harnessing of nature, the lenses
transformed the array of repeated images into an integrated, three-dimensional
virtual form, spectacular simulation and rendered nature as expendable
surplus. James Carl's "Fountain" (1996), consisting of vending
machines with a split-screen backlit image of Niagara Falls, followed
up with a quick, clever unravelling of nature as managed, modern spectacle
and consumer product. The managed water supply of the Sculpture Garden's
waterfall was revisited in the image of the modern sublime of Niagara
Falls, managed to allow for power-supply and continued use as tourist
attraction, and, finally, in the bottled water available for cash from
the vending machines, all set up to serve the convenience-oriented urban
consumer of nature. The
disappearance of the real, and specifically the disappearance of nature
in mediated spectacle, had already been the subject of an exhibition
curated by Bernie Miller at the Toronto Sculpture Garden in 1986. Presenting
works by Robin Collyer, Spring Hurlbut, and Robert Wiens, this exhibition
was in fact one of the first to critically analyze the setting, and
the idea of the garden, as a possibly utopian projection of a kind of
Paradise or Garden of Eden. Rather than maintaining the modern (utopian)
separation and opposition between culture and nature, all the works
short-circuited the imaginary distance between both. Spring Hurlbut,
for instance, used real tree trunks (with bark) as columns complete
with lathed wooden capitals and bases; Robert Wiens mounted a backlit
transparency beneath the gushing "rains" of the waterfall;
and in the most sophisticated statement, Robin Collyer's empty replica
of a backlit advertising kiosk (standing on a pedestal overgrown by
ivy) signified the transmutation of the old sculptural monument into
a new type of message-bearing, urban spectacle, which, in Roland Barthes'
famous formulation of the advertising photograph, continuously transformed
culture into nature, into a nurtured nature, so to speak. However,
the work that most powerfully tracked the demise of the pastoral ideal
was Liz Magor's 1997 installation entitled "Messenger." Not
unlike Adams' "Crab Legs (A Studio)" Magor's work effected
a series of displacements. A perfectly re-constructed old pioneer log
cabin, complete with newly planted trees, immediately transformed the
garden into a remote, picture-perfect forest clearing and urban get-away.
Stocked with cans of food, weapons, armour, and other defensive paraphernalia,
however, the work immediately changed the connotations of the cottage,
suggesting its use by a loner, an outsider, perhaps even the so-called
Unabomber. Against the idealization of a withdrawal from culture, perhaps,
Magor's work closed in on the myth of the individual who, in search
for comfort and for a way to ward off the shocks of urban life, set
him/her self up against the forces of modernity -- and was now seen
as possibly a threat for the city. (Just recently, in fact, images of
the cottage of the Una-bomber were beamed around the world on television
news. Transported as a "wide-load" by truck into the U.S.
city where his trial was being held, the undertaking had been initiated
by the man's lawyers to demonstrate his insanity, thereby increasing
urbanists' suspicions concerning the outside, the fringe, and no-man's
land beyond the city.) Rather than exiling as insane the desire for
a (re)turn to nature, the arrival of the cottage in the city, its placement
near the city centre, suggested not only the very collapse of boundaries
between the country and the city, and between nature and culture, but
also of the very possibility of the ideal of that separation. For the
practices of sculpture and installation in the context of the Toronto
Sculpture Garden this work posted, perhaps, a point of no return. It
somehow seemed to ask, or run head on into the question, what of the
outside(r) in the city? What place is there for a flight from the city?
What is exiled from its cleansed streets, urban parks, plazas, and public
spaces? Where do all those, where does all that, return? Throughout
its history, the Toronto Sculpture Garden has provided sanctuary for
sculpture in exile, and both the conditions of sanctuary and exile have,
inevitably, been the site-specific subject of art. Equally inevitably,
the Garden provided (and remains) a place for artists to examine the
condition of the modern city as a place that found (or is founded on)
precisely the construction and enforcement of exiles and outcasts, and
museums and sanctuaries. Contemporary art and the other exiled outsider(s),
in that situation, are reminders of the two torn halves of freedom to
which they do not, however, add up.16
In this place of sanctuary art puts exile as an open question to the
city. ENDNOTES 1 For an interesting discussion on the perspectival construction of space, and the participation of sculpture in that construction, see Dan Graham's "Theatre, Cinema, Power," in Parachute 31 (June/July/August 1983), pp. 11-19 2 As Walter Grasskamp points out, the prevailance of the graphic over sculptural form in the city as narrative space can be traced back to the invention of book printing. It made architectural narrative redundant in that the book would come to claim all narrative traditions, both oral and sculpture, of setting and of ritual, and would dominate them from that time on. Greenberg's stress on deliberately expunging literature to purify modernist art may be seen as relevant here. Walter Grasskamp, "Art and the City," Contemporary Sculpture. Projects in Munster 1997 , eds. Klaus Bussmann, Kasper Konig, Florian Matzner (Germany: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997) p. 8 3 One might just cite Barrias' monument to "Electricity" as an example of the way in which sculptors sometimes resorted to old-styled seduction to lead the spectator into a suspension of disbelief, or at least, a distraction from the impossible theme. 4 The beginnings of this chasm between means of communication and means of understanding can be traced back to at least the late 19th century, and Auguste Rodin's deliberate destruction of narrative space in the Gates of Hell, which remained incomplete, literally in pieces; his portrait of Balzac, commissioned only to be refused, humiliated, as shapeless and unrecognizeable mass; and, in another sign of the ensuing crisis of modern sculpture, to the complications around the placing of the Burghers of Calais, literally teeter-tottering on the absence of a pedestal, and seen as an upfrontery to the civic demand for elevation, the idealist separation of art from the everyday, and the status of the represented men. The Burghers were to be placed in a level playing field, evoking empathy for solitary choice and sacrifice instead of demanding of the spectator to kiss (or rub) their feet. 5 Brian O-Doherty, in his essay "The White Cube," wrote about imagining Mondrian doing the Boogie-woogie in the Salon he designed for Madame B. (an interior space painted divided into squared and rectangular colour fields).Brian O'Doherty, "The White Cube," in Museums in Crisis ed. by Brian O'Doherty (New York: Brazillier, 1972) 6 See Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," in The Anti-Aesthetic ed. by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. 35 7 The defenders of abstract (modernist) public sculpture were eventually found reduced to exasperated arrogance, such as British sculptor William Turnbull's declaration that "the problem of public sculpture [was] largely with the public -- not with sculpture." Quoted in Lawrence Alloway, "The Public Sculpture Problem," Topics in American Art since 1945 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1975), p. 247 8 For a discussion of this period and the beginning of institutional public art in the U.S. see also Suzanne Lacy (ed.), Mapping the Terrain (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995) 9 One may also include in this list Dorothy Cameron's "Sculpture 67" (in tandem with Expo 67), which advanced the cause of the avant-garde, its claims perhaps, to be a participant in future visions of the city. 10 This is John Tucker's metaphor describing some of the sculpture along University Avenue. At the beginning of the 1980s, New York artist Robert Hamon, was making tiny tinsel sculptures satirizing the "heavy-metal" school of sculpture. 11 Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," op. cit., p. 38 12 Robert Irwin distinguished the various forms of site-relatedness as site dominant, site adjusted, site specific, and site-conditioned and/or determined. Robert Irwin, "Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Confidential Art," in Theories and Documents of Contoemporary Art eds. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 572 13 Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, op. cit. 14 A Space, Mercer Union, and others collaborated on several ventures, utilizing billboards, but also the medium of performance, and other types of activities, leading up to several outdoor projects (across the nation) in the early 1980s. For a more detailed history of these events see my essay "YYZ -- An Anniversary," in Decalog (Toronto: YYZ Publications, 1996). 15 One could cite Michael Snow's geese in the glazed vault of the Eaton's Centre; Joe Fafard's slightly larger-than-life cows parked on a small patch of grass below the towering buildings of the business district in the downtown core; and more recently, Fastwurms' giant woodpeckers, mounted on a hollow industrial-scale steel tube at the newly built Metro Convention Centre, illuminated from the inside out like a giant, irregular pixel board and tilted against the backdrop of office-buildings as if from a black swamp in an urban forest. 16
Adopted from Theodor Adorno, who wrote this concerning the relation
between high art and mass culture. ADVANCING THE PUBLIC DOMAIN The current and widely-held definition of public art may be equivalent to the role of sculpture at the turn of the century -- a civic virtue and reminder of ethical conduct for the common good. This is not a new thought for a topic fraught with inexhaustible positions and perspectives. Janet Kardon wrote: "Public art is not a style or a movement, but a compound social service based on the premise that public well-being is enhanced by good art, and that good art means work by advanced artists thrust into the public domain."1 Kardon dates the beginning of public art as a "codified genre" in the United States with the installation of the enlarged Picasso sculpture for the Chicago Civic Centre in 1967. But the public domain "thrust" can be moved back to 1964 when work by nine "young" American artists was emblazoned on the exterior of the World's Fair New York State Exhibit building and new art was commissioned and purchased for New York's Lincoln Center.2 The convergence of new art and public space in Toronto can be fixed with the dedication of Viljo Revell's New City Hall and Plaza in September 1965.3 The Council Chambers spaceship had landed and its future shock holds to this day (even if it is the only such landmark), because it also sits in a fixed and stark contrast to the Old City Hall -- architect E. J. Lennox's solid Victorian edifice which was barely 66 at the time of its retirement. A year later, Henry Moore's Three Way Piece No.2 (The Archer) made its debut on Nathan Phillips Square, although Revell had selected it as early as 1961.4 City Council did not approve purchase funds for the work from the public coffers and the money was raised by private donation. The controversy may have contributed to the defeat of its supporter Mayor Phil Givens, in the November 1966 election: the winner of the mayoralty race, William Dennison, made it clear that he was exploiting distaste for the Moore.5 Nonetheless, ten thousand people turned out for the unveiling on the evening of Thursday October 27, 1966 -- an event of alien proportions, not unlike the robot Klaatu emerging from a flying saucer in the sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). If not the earth, Toronto certainly stood still that day, and by the weekend it was estimated that 100,000 had visited. Public comments were hardly a surprise: "like a pair of ears"; "it's horrid"; "like something doctors study"; and "a terrible insult to Canadian artists and culture." A Toronto Daily Star reporter described it as "Canada's most controversial work of art." Robert Fulford wrote, "Just possibly, Henry Moore can persuade us that sculpture ... can have a place in the public lives of all of us ..."6 Newlyweds Louisa and Victor Sciarra stopped by to admire it on the way to their reception. On the same site eight months later, New would joust with Old in Dorothy Cameron's Sculpture '67 exhibition.7 The new Canadian sculpture -- works by Les Levine, Michael Snow, N.E. Thing Co. (Ingrid and Iain Baxter), Intersystems (the multi-discipline collaboration of Michael Hayden, Dik Zander, Blake Parker and John Mills-Cockell) and Zbigniew Blazeje -- was vastly outnumbered, but in turning its back on modelling and carving there was no going back. In comparison to the embrace of industry and materials and the invitation for the viewer to participate in a critical playfulness, Moore's sculpture began to represent all that was wrong with sculpture in public space: the morphed bauble did not respond to or address the environs.8 Such criticism is unfair but commonplace in the revolving door of Modernist revisionism -- which also demands a distance from the past. Inherited forms must be renounced as a symptom of malaise. Whether The Archer represented the old or the new (as is the case of the Chicago Picasso, a monumental appearance from the near past), until that moment Toronto had not been blessed by an abundance of public art nor by any distinctive public art-as-monument.9 Murals and statues identified colonial-Empire connections and the entrepreneurs of the new nation. Contemporary sculpture made public inroads starting in the late 1950s, but was placed off in the wings of suburban development or within protected spaces. Graham Coughtry designed cast relief panels for the exterior of B'Nai Israel Beth David Synagogue in Downsview (1958); Walter Yarwood and Gerald Gladstone received commissions for University of Toronto sites in the early 1960s; and Kazuo Nakamura for the Toronto International Airport (now Pearson International) in 1964. York University initiated an art in architecture programme in the early 1960s: Zbigniew Blazeje -- then 23 years old -- received a commission for the Library in 1965, and in 1971 Michael Hayden (post-Intersystems), completed a landmark electro-kinetic artwork which was integrated into an escalator. The first major public art undertaking for Canadian art in Toronto was at the Macdonald Block at Queen's Park (completed in 1968); exterior sites included a fountain by Gladstone and a large Yarwood bronze.10 Yet, for decades one of the best known city sculptures was an artifact from the past -- that of Timothy Eaton the benevolent shop-keeper as father figure. Eaton's employees started a Toronto "tradition" of touching the left foot of the seated gent for good luck (and after, both feet). Not only did it keepa perpetual polish on his bronze shoes, but indicates our connection to public statues, even those mounted on the protective cultural space defined by pedestals.11 An instructive comparison can be made with Henry Moore's Large Two Forms installed at the corner of Dundas and McCaul in 1974. It has "wandered" away from the Art Gallery of Ontario paddock and developed its own public domain, where the museum caveat of Do Not Touch does not apply and cannot be effectively monitored. Hugging the ground and rising above the pedestrians' heads, it is the most touched piece of public art in Toronto -- a seat, shelter and frame for endless snapshots. Touching is akin to the laying on of hands, a confirmation and affirmation (of what doesn't matter, it happens). "I LIKE IT. I want to bang my head against it." While permanence may be argued as the critical factor -- the Sculpture '67 exhibition being temporary, and Timothy Eaton and the Moores forever -- being fit or fixed to a site is no guarantee of public awareness. Lawrence Alloway proposed that "all art" in the 20th century is "produced privately (initiated solely by the artist himself) and becomes public information later ... but the term public sculpture means something more specific. It refers to art that is intentionally public from the outset, designed to occupy an unregulated site."12 If the terms for new public art demands responsiveness to the site and cultural and physical conditions, there is also an assumption that the urban environment is static.13 Everything can change as populations move elsewhere and as the economy of redevelopment keeps the built environment in a state of flux. Within a short generation or living memory, the subject of a memorial may be forgotten and a work of art once relevant or site responsive, can become isolated or irrelevant.14 How then can a vital enterprise emerge out of terms of reference (the fuzzy terms of endearment), which preempts the private? Another private-to-public approach is "maybe ... doing nothing at all," as proposed by American artist Robert Irwin.15 If Alloway's proposition holds true (and "nothing" becomes something), the first site appears in the artist's vision and the opportunities presented by the unexpected. A brief moment of temporary public art activity took place at Harbourfront from 1977 to 1981 -- the Art Gallery at Harbourfront's programming initiative -- on the unregulated site of the decaying and ignored industrial waterfront.16 The artworks ran the gamut of private interests on a public site to engaging the public in temporary performance events and often played to the extremes -- the old and the suburban, the pastoral and the chaotic, the resolute and the irreverent. As redevelopment closed off waterfront opportunities in the early 1980s, the Toronto Sculpture Garden appeared. However, the historical relationship and reverence for gardens and sculpture cannot be readily transposed, let alone assumed to take root. The Old World garden re-created nature in a pre-determined space and the activity of cultivation is implicit. Sculpture in such a setting could be seen as part of a unification -- the presence of the monument in harmony with nature against the background of cultural history.17 Likewise, the historical European piazza or Ancient World square cannot be recreated at will or by some enthrallment with the picturesque. It is part of a vital traffic flow (or historical flow), the station between here and there and at the same time a destination. The New World plaza is a different creature -- an open space which is neither contemplative nor ceremonial. It sits in front of a set back building, or as the suburban house was set back from the (underused) expanse of lawn. The separation of landscape from the urbanscape may be a consequence of modernist secularism, but by the 1990s Toronto urban spaces such as the Bay/Adelaide Park on Temperance Street, where the Aikenhead's hardware store once stood, were re-inflected with the notion of garden. Designed by Baird/Sampson Architects, the park is a topographical and cultural fabulation of vegetation and water elements, and where the past and present is memorialized through art in an unconventional manner. Margaret Priest's construction technique frame modules, The Monument to Construction Workers, dominates the east side of the park with the city and opened urban scar as the backdrop.18 The activity at the Toronto Sculpture Garden is without question a consequence of artists responding to the site conditions -- a protected space and a programmed activity centre (piazzas are never exhibition centres), situated between two mid-19th century "City Buildings" built in the Georgian style. The site had been cleared in 1938 for use as a parking lot and redesigned as a city park in 1981. In place of a historical continuum and permanent artworks, another cultural activity (and identity?) began to form. This was an opportunity for artists to engage in a dialogue as oral history, as their private concerns were made public. In this sense, the TSG is a room as well as a garden, the window into the artist's private space. The east side shows the urban scar, an interior wall revealed to the exterior and a backdrop to the inner court. On the west, a restaurant patio spills into the space and reinforcing a frontal view. The garden is anything but neutral, but in the absence of a governing programme, artists control the readings and act in an unencumbered manner. What better place for the artist-as-monologist to "work the room" (in stand-up comedy parlance): the situationalist as humourist and satirist, the fly in the ointment of Toronto the Good. The TSG is across from the historic St. James' Cathedral, a quick walk to the venerable King Edward Hotel, and shouting distance to the axis (mundi) of the Toronto financial universe at Bay and King. The TSG has had its share of alien sightings (sitings?), almost unavoidable in the heavy traffic of contemporary expressions -- Pierre Bougault's bisected and glowing metal craft, John Noestheden's elegiac signals, Opus Fifteen, and Reinhard Reitzenstein's anthropomorphic electronic-schematic totems, A Pair of Satyrs -- but other narrative threads appear in the rewinding of 15 years. An innocent phrase jumps out of Andreas Gehr's brochure, for his 1985 site work The Found Foundation: "The sculpture's shape... is enhanced by placing the sculpture on an uneven footing ..." Artists have paid attention to footing at the TSG: a practical consideration in dealing with the sloped grade away from the axial pathway and finding ways to throw the viewer off balance. The inaugural TSG exhibition included John McEwen's many feet of 16 flamecut horses. The horse was already out of the burning barn and the formalized arrangement of sculpture in the garden was never to be. The corollary is between the stand-up routine in an intimate setting and how acts are "polished" for network television (the large public forum always requires a broader stroke when the real audience is not at hand; stick with what works). The object as plinth -- the foot play and being footloose -- appeared in Mark Gomes' stacked tables, Margaret's Tables ... Remembering Margaret Laurence; Wenda Habenicht's towers akimbo of Dream Retreat; Claude Mongrain's potter's stools stacked in a vernacular homage to Constantin Brancusi's "endless" columns of 1918 to 1937; and Stacey Spiegel's precariously balanced and rotating lexan cone steeple-as-container, Sculpture Heaven. In Jerry Pethick's Remembered Room, steel pipes were stacked in defiance of gravity, but for practical reasons were welded in place. Yet the vestige of pedestal -- the foot of "old" sculpture -- did not completely disappear. Stephen Cruise used the TSG brick gate portals as a found plinth for his reconstituted agrarian monuments. Brian Groombridge installed a support column on which a measuring device as object was hung. The plinth and column became the object in works by Spring Hurlbut and Robin Collyer. Other moments of disregard for decorum were inevitable; sculpture-as-Quasimodo hanging from the parapets and suffering the crowd's jeers around Notre Dame. Yvonne Singer mounted plaster body fragments (a fragment and drapery borrowed from antiquity) on the east wall, their backs turned to the crowd. Tim Jocelyn's irreverent Ooga Booga Suite banners were mounted on the same wall, figures engaged in uninhibited ritual dance. Susan Beniston installed body fragments there and suspended them from tethered cables and in the trees. Artists plunged into the TSG waterfall-fountain element on the east wall as if daring the audience to partake in the baptism, as in Robert Wiens' City of Glass and Susan Schelle's Literalists of the Imagination. Pethick used the water element as a backdrop and visual reference: the construction of optical lens structure mounted with (natural) waterfall photographs. James Carl's self-proclaimed fountain was an arc of vending machines depicting a sectional panorama of Niagara Falls upstaged the TSG waterfall while dispensing a version of pure bottled nature. The reverence for The Falls invoked daredevil acts as this artist walked his own tightrope of reverence and tongue-in-cheek wit. Carl's work also reflects a recurring "theme" of urban chaos and nature tamed, cultivated and culture-ated -- the premise for sculptor Bernie Miller's selection of works by Hurlbut, Wiens and Collyer for the Paradise Then and Now installation, and in his own Cornucopia installation. Miller transformed the billboard fragment into the omnivorous beast with the all-too-familiar glamourized produce image caught in its grip. He surrounded it with the spilled cornucopia contents -- brightly coloured plastic containers (some designed for storing toxic wastes), as if plastic fruit jeering at the image of abundance. The ominous side of this cautionary tale was Doug Buis' Chaotic Encounters, a greenhouse or eco-pod turned into an archaeological industrial reliquary. RenŽe Van Halm's Display (Temptation to Follow) proposed another contemporary reliquary scenario. Her cleaved house brought the domestic interior into public view and outside again through a picture window view. This cultural landscape reached out to the Canadian creation myth of painterly backwoods modernity. As proof that the lure was more than local flavour, Russian artist Dmitri Kaminker created an Eastern version of the radical regionalist myth with hewn and assembled wooden monuments, while Pierre Granche looked to Old and Ancient World monuments in his sheet metal miniatures. Taste is held up as gaudy spectacle -- the evergreen in-law joke. Artists delved into the urban-pastoral mythology -- the sly game of the backwoods philosopher, Stephen Leacock and Will Rodgers commenting on the absurdity of modern behaviour. The Ôword from the woodsÕ was delivered by a variety of structures rooted in the proto-cabana; the Seed Room in Lee Paquette's childhood memory playground and Herb Parker's Transient Earth Structure, the sod structure-as-temple giving spiritual shelter. Andreas Gehr's The Found Foundation -- the first full-scale occupation of the garden -- was a blind alley shed, as if a Calvinist retort to the Neo-Gothic steeple of St. James' Cathedral. An Whitlock's apparition was that of the single room house as shadow in sunlight while the transparent mausoleums of Carlos Cesta and FastwŸrms were marked by Lisa Neighbour's illuminated mystic-Christian sign. The vernacular structure was also transformed into the extraordinary. Panya Clark's scaled-down lighthouse contained a hidden view of a stream which once flowed through the TSG site c.1815. Kim Adams' Crab-Legs (Studio) -- a vertical accumulation of garden sheds -- evolved from his vision of the "ideal" needs for an artist's living and working space, but also suggested a northern mining town phantasmagoria which was equally plausible as the outpost on a distant planet (artist-as-alien). The play on garden figures of speech appeared in Cynthia Short's Eden planting, Warren Quigley's "meandering" trees and path, the arboreal-fantastic of a silver glow in Louis Stokes' sacred woods, and Charles Courville forest twigs assembled into a shape-shifting trickster. Hugh LeRoy elevated a symbol-carved wooden path over the garden, while Gilbert Boyer's granite tablets formed an irregular garden footpath inscribed with personal and intimate notations, the letters dropped en route. It is generally agreed that our culture feeds on contradictions but as the American artist Barbara Kruger noted, "sometimes you could just choke on all the irony around."19 She also observed that people have short attention spans, "so I shoot for the window of opportunity."20 Brian Scott's Stray Plow landed directly in such a "window." The agrarian work ethic -- the dignity of labour and tilling the soil -- is mixed with the hunter-adventurer myth, as the plow is transformed into a speeding boat. The boat on this site was a fish out of water but convincing in its illusion -- real and perplexing as it churned up the recreational "spirit" of the urban populace. The installation of Liz Magor's Messenger on the TSG's 15th anniversary was fitting. Her vintage cabin was the true and authentic object transported from another place and time, sending a message to the here and now, even as its authenticity was adulterated by the vestiges of contemporary life. Home-spun truths and myths (the disembodied soul room of Tom Thomson's painting shack) were given a satirical edge and debunked on a neutral ground. Many other cross-references can be uncovered, but it is too soon or presumptuous to describe this as a movement -- the collective sigh of relief as a sign. It is clear however that idiosyncratic and unruly ideas have been played out -- a tonic for commissioned public art which flattens ideas into paving patterns -- and allowing for a quirky eccentricity would lose its flavour in the solemn white box of the gallery and museum environment. Toronto has received permanent and monumental figures of speech even as the TSG works are relegated to memory.21 FastwŸrms' giant woodpeckers sit atop a 100 foot steel column accompanied by a black patina bronze snowman -- a vision that is forever summer and forever winter. It is installed at the expanded Metro Convention Centre, just north of the Harbourfront site and within sight of Toronto's signature monument the CN Tower. Further west is Micah Lexier's Hall of Names -- 1,000 laser cut names dangling from the concourse of the new National Trade Centre at the CNE, taking its architectural cues from the period Automotive Building across the street. Lexier's work plays off the ubiquitous trade show name tag and invites those who pass underneath to identify themselves. Less than 10 years old, the grandfather of the public art barb is Michael Snow's The Audience, attached to the spectacle of the SkyDome, a plinth with the world's largest retractable roof. The Medieval grotesquery of Snow's vulgar and frozen gestures is not necessarily the reversal of Quasimodo's predicament, but beckons the crowds to do the same, to join in. The TSG programme is not necessarily art history-in-the-making but one act following another. The legacy, if it can ever be memorialized, is that of the work room. 1 Janet Kardon "Street Wise/Street Foolish" Urban Encounters (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1980) p.8
|
 |
 |
