We love this event but we had fear we may have to miss it this year. Saturday was terrible, every time I took out the dogs it poured. When I had them at the off leash in the afternoon a cloud rolled over us that was so dark and rainy and lighting-filled, I expected Toto to come tumbling down to visit us. But by the time Collette and I got downtown after sunset, it had turned into a dry, slightly cool, very lovely autumn evening.
We tended to stick mostly to the outdoor installations, partly because the weather was indeed so good and it was cool to see "art" in the closed off streets but also because the line ups were usually massive for these interior events. Judging what to see is always a dilemma. There were over 130 exhibits, scattered all around the downtown core and slightly to the east of it. It's a cool thing to wander along and spot one of the tall white Nuit Blanche flags and say "Hey, here's something, let's see what it is" They also provide you with a booklet but sometimes interpreting what an installation may be from these vague descriptions can be a dicey affair.
I don't know if a lot of the exhibits we saw this year were art. I think the more appropriate term may be "spectacle" In the sense of something big and unusual and designed to engage the public. The first installation we saw was entitled Ice Queen, Glacial Retreat Dress Tent.
The book described it as "a towering ice berg dress animated by Butoh-inspired dance and glacial imagery ... global warming ... as well as the dress explores desire, body and land from a female-centered perspective"
But basically, you know, it was a chick in a big white tent.
The next installation definitely qualified as spectacle. A giant, sliver rabbit balloon hanging inside the Eaton Centre may not be art, but spectacle it certainly is
The booklet talks about the giant balloon as being able, through its size and its reflective qualities, to transport us through the looking glass. Sure. Maybe it's not a carrot that the rabbit is holding but something that requires a flame
From the giant bunny we went on to an installation that really does define spectacle. It was called Battle Royal and it took place at the downtown bus terminal. Again, referring to the book, "Occupying a space between literary representation, wrestling spectacle and art performance, Battle Royal is an unscripted event ... manifesting the artist's own personal fear of societal invisibility"
When we got there, the giant cage they had built in the middle of the bus depot was not filled with gladiators. It was filled with volunteers, blind folded, stumbling around, bumping into each other and tossing each other to the ground as a narrator proclaimed "There is no contact during this round"
Art? Spectacle? Audience participation, certainly. Did it meet the aspirations of the book's eloquent description? Not hardly. But we learned that the "real wrestlers" would fight later, so we decided to come back. The nice thing about Nuit Blanche, it runs all night, we had plenty of time.
Back into the crowd, into the night, large stretches of Bay Street closed off, people milling about, searching for the tall white flags and wondering what they would lead us to. Cool. Cool. We passed by a couple of other installations. Pwn the Wall was a kind of electronic graffiti, where people stood in a little tent and used a digital "spray can" to create images on a screen that were projected, in real time, on the giant wall of the Canadian Tire store across the street.
Over at Nathan Phillip square, these giant LED's had been hung between the two towers that make up City Hall. Words were being created by the lights, all of them only four letters in length. And no, we didn't stay long enough to find out if "that" four letter word was among them.
As I state, it's fun to wander around, seeking the flags and seeing what you've stumbled upon. At the old Court House, we spotted the Nuit Blanche flag and a huge crowd milling about. Up on the steps, was a bearded guy with this word balloon sign over his head:
This was something pretty cool. It was something very simple. It was a guy called Dave, and his friends, who wanted to connect with people the old fashioned organic way. So while many of the installations employed technology to deliver their message, there would be no cell phones or texting here. You want to talk to Dave, you walk on up and say Hey. Nope, this wasn't art and I'm not sure it was spectacle, but it made me smile and struck a sympathetic nerve. Now, the line up was huge so I didn't actually get to say Hey to Dave, but brother I loved this idea.
From the City Hall area we wandered down Bay St into Toronto's financial district. This was the first time for Nuit Blanche that they blocked this street off. At night, even on the weekend, Bay St is like a ghost town. So it was very cool to see it crowded with people, walking, talking, laughing ... for me, this was spectacle in itself, and maybe even art.
The normally quiet street got even more raucous the further south we went. We stumbled upon a little carnival; rides, cotton candy, hot dogs, all down the middle of the street. But this is Nuit Blanche, and of course it wasn't just a carnival. This was an installation, called Wild Ride.
The rides and concession stands were all manned by financial sector workers who had lost their jobs. The idea seemed to be it's all just a game, played for fun, except the stuffed bunnies are real people and the game represents people's lives.
Just the idea of the carnival on Bay St was enough for me to like it. Isn't Bay St a kind of carnival already? So spectacle, with cotton candy. That's my favorite kind.
At that point we went back up to Yonge & Dundas for dinner and from there, decided to slide back over to the bus station to see what was happening with the Battle Royal. Oh, a spectacle of roman (please note the small "r") proportions. The pro wrestlers were in. A battle royal is an event where they load the cage with wrestlers and they begin to throw each other out. Last man standing, wins.
Well, no blindfolded wrestler was throwing another blindfolded wrestler out of this huge cage. There were ref's but they were your typical pro wrestling refs, apparently as blindfolded as the wrestlers and drunk but I'm assuming they were acknowledging tap outs and tossing out fighters.
This round of the Battle Royal may have come closer to the concept of Roman spectacle. Not so much for the wrestlers themselves, though they were going at it hammer and tong, but more for the audience. Collette found herself surrounded by some die hard wrestling fans. Diehard, because they knew all these guys and trust me, this is the very shallow end of the pro wrestling pool, if you know these guys you are diehard indeed.
I still don't really know what the artist intended here, but this was spectacle, especially as the crowd got into it, chanting and gesticulating, as you'll see in the video. There is no way on earth that you could have thought this was real, but the guys were selling with all their hearts and I don't think the fans cared; they wanted this involvement, they needed this connection. Perhaps there is an art in that.
From the bus station we wandered back down Bay St to Larry Sefton Park to view an installation called Ghost Chorus, Dirge for Dead Slang. The book describes it as: "ghostly apparitions raise their voices to the driving melancholic baseline from the beyond to revifify outmoded slang of the long and recent past"
But what it was, was a bunch of people in sheets reading stuff in voices so low that you couldn't understand what were they were saying even when right next to them. Art? I don't know, but a fail on the spectacle.
From the park we went up to BCE place to see The Witches Cradles. Apparently back in the witch trial days, they would hoist women up in these shrouds to torture them and they were later "reclaimed" by witches. In this exhibit, you could have yourself put in the cradle, blindfolded, ears plugged, like a sensory deprivation chamber. People were hoisted up in these pods and slowly swayed. I'm a bit too claustrophobic for this experience but it's an interesting idea. Not much artistry here, everything was contemporary and functional and from an audience stand point, not much in the way of spectacle.
Down the street, in the Royal Bank Plaza, we found a brightly coloured mini van with furniture on top of it and an animal skull stuck to the hood. It was part of Gone Indian 2009. The performance featured a male dancer in fairly traditional fancy dance and a woman in dungarees who added some kind of dramatic commentary.
The woman had bags of pennies, which she sliced open, dumping on the ground. At one point in his dance, the man kicked the coins, scattering them about. In front of the gigantic Royal Bank building, with its windows that contain real gold, the significance of this act by these First Nations people were not lost on me.
From the plaza we went down to Union Station for the final installation of the evening. It was called Imminent Departure and it became one of our favorite exhibits of the evening.
The Great Hall in Union Station had been transformed. Wreathed in smoke and miss, dark, the big clock seeming to float in limbo. Sounds skirled through the cavernous space. Voices, bits of conversation, the sound of trains, footsteps echoing on the marble. Ghosts. Travellers, their spirits still travelling, as if their bodies had long departed this space but their voices still lingered, forever caught in transit.
At one point one of the ghost trains came into the station, the sound of the wheels rumbling, actually shaking the floor, great gouts of steam spewing across the huge room
We really really liked this piece. It was just filled with emotion and feeling and portent. We could have lingered there for an hour but at this point it was almost 4 a.m. and definitely time to make our way home. We had dogs to walk in a few hours.
All in all a very successful night. Great weather, great crowds and some pretty cool stuff to see. So, was it art? I don't know, Art is probably just some guy. But a lot of it was certainly spectacle: Something unique that attracts audience attention. And ephemeral. Hard to think that in a few hours after we left Union Station the mist and the ghosts would be gone. The carnival would have disappeared from Bay Street. The cage full of sweating men would no longer be in the bus station. The city would return to normal. With only the memory of the ghosts and the spirits and the singing lingering, if only for a while.
So here's the video. It features the exhibits we visited. Music by Sarah Brightman and Enigma. Forgive the grain on the ghostly reading exhibit, it was damn dark in there, but I wanted to give you a sense of the audio, or lack of it. Other than that, I love some of these images, especially the city at night, and all the people wandering through it. Can't wait till next year.
Nuit Blanche 2009 from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.
1 comment:
I really would have liked to have been there to see 'Ghost Train' as they transform the station - that would have been very cool to see!
I also like how, the idea of simply talking to Dave is so attractive that there is a huge line. I think we don't have enough interaction, if around all the fancy descriptions of this and that a guy who says, "I will talk to you" has a long line waiting to do that.
I liked the electronic graffiti, but I find that Canadians can be some of the greatest hyperbole artists in the world. Since the fall of the wall and the east bloc, no where else are there more words and meaning attached to usually someone doing not much at all or as you put it, a chick in a tent. One of the things I noticed moving back was that instead of discussing something, people used language to create the language which they determined to possibly discuss something. Confused? So was I. So I went from; "There are only 5 women in 120+ universities at the level of full professor or above; how do we change hiring and short list practices?" to "The nature of the patriarchy enables the historic roots of anti-feminist thought to create a subtext of unspoken dialogue within the body spaces of our stated but not yet claimed 'places of learning'" - AHHHHHH!
Imminent Departure - a piece should be MORE interesting than the title, like this one. Still sounds like quite the night, thanks for the pictures and the narration.
Post a Comment