Large crowds wandering aimlessly in the streets, giant clown heads peeking out of narrow alley ways, strange shadows walking over the walls of buildings, people standing in line to wait for nothing ...
No, aging near sighted rebel hippies did not finally figure out how to drop LSD into Toronto's water supply. This past weekend saw the return of Nuit Blanche to Toronto. This all night art and performance festival is one of our favorite annual rituals. It's also become the ritual for an awful lot of people, this year saw crowds of around 1 million people, which in Toronto makes something almost a victim of its own success. Judging by the huge amount of drunken teenagers staggering up and down Yonge Street, I don't think everyone was out all night for the art. The two gentlemen in hockey jersies who were pummeling each other outside the restaurant in which we had our dinner were not, I suspect, having a disagreement over surrealism versus impressionists.
So, on to the exhibits. The beauty of Nuit Blanche is that you are bound to encounter the unexpected, and you'll walk a few blocks to see something you may never have considered .. Usually what you have to go by is the provided guide book and its descriptions of the exhibits. Sometimes I think the authors of this book have a very keen and twisted sense of humour. Allegory for a Rock Opera, for instance was described thusly: "Historical and popular ephemera fuse in a satirical hodge-podge of visual and aural samples, all of which pose contradictions to our popular understanding of the working class" I think you need to be leery anytime someone uses the term "ephemera" What the allegorical rock opera consisted of, was a small enclosure in which a woman threw rocks into a bucket ...
Rock opera .. rocks .. throwing ... Um, ok, I get it. Now mind you: We watched only a few minutes of a performance piece that was scheduled to run for several more hours. So perhaps there was more to it. That is the thing about performance pieces at Nuit Blanche, they change over the eight hours but I'm not likely to stand around that long to watch them.
From the market (no, we didn't take the opportunity to shop though I was curious if they had any dogs playing poker or Elvis on black velvet ... now that my friends, is art!) we went over to Ryerson University which, like the Ontario College of Art and The Distillery, was a kind of art locus of and to itself. Multi media exhibits are very popular at this festival and this year there were a number of exhibits with interactive photo electric properties.
Ning Ning was one such piece. It was a window filled with motion sensitive LED lights that winked on and off as people passed by. Tucked down an alley, people enjoyed this display but perhaps because it was quiet, free of revelling teens and provided a bench ... a perfect exhibit for us old folks.
Now, I've had a couple of days to think about this. Perhaps this was just a badly conceived and/or badly promoted piece or it was an intentional bit of Pirandello ... The space that the artist created is not an actual tangible 3D space, not an actual construct, but just the idea of a construct, impressed upon a real landscape, awaiting our interpretation .. sorry, but I interpreted it as him being too lazy to build the damn thing
But like the Rock Opera, the hinge to performance pieces at Nuit Blanche is that are designed to run all night long. Watching a piece for several minutes may not give you the the proper perspective on the piece. But having said that, we don't go out to this event to spend hours watching one event, we want to experience as many exhibits as we can. Old I may be, but I guess still want my instant gratification.
... a trio of giant balloon clown heads wedged between two old style office buildings ..
... and a simulated blue fog bank that spread across the street and although simple, was quite effective in creating a completely unique mood on this normally busy street
We made our way over towards St Lawrence Market and found, quite by accident, one of our favorite installations of the evening. In the little parkette behind the Flatiron building, a large tent was erected. Except it wasn't just any ordinary tent. It was a church. Church Intent to be specific.
It wasn't just a church in a tent. It was a church where all the recognizable holy objects were fashioned out of common camping supplies
You admired the craftsmanship right away, the carving in the paddles, fashioning the canoes together to make the Holy Cross, the work done on these old propane gas cylinders ...
But it was more than just the impressive artistry. Perhaps it was the thought of worship as something organic, something commonplace and every day, using these mundane practical objects to mystify religion and its all its grandiose, affected ceremonies
Just think of all those millions, or more likely billions, of dollars wasted on Holy gold and silver when they could have built their houses of worship from canvas and cedar and flotation devices
I don't really have a house of worship but the Royal Ontario Museum may come close, so over we went. As much as I love the ROM, I am not at all a fan of the Crystal, the huge architectural feature recently stuck onside the ROM's lovely over facade, much like a turd dropped on top of a Tiffany egg. But Nuit Blanche gave me a whole new appreciation of the Crystal.
They used the surfaces of the crystal to project the computer animated images of pedestrians who had earlier passed by the museum. This is always something I love about Nuit Blanche, when artists transform public spaces and buildings into something different, like a canvas or a projection screen.
Next door, The Royal Conservatory of Music had also undergone a transformation. Inside the new atrium hung Aurora, a kind of new age forest, from a distance a huge living mass of waving fronds and fairy lights that stretched a good 60 feet to the ceiling.
It was, in fact, a forest of microprocessor lights and textiles that reacted to the air flowing through the big space, to the people moving below, and to a soundtrack of wordless pants and exhalations. The thing's size impressed you at first, then its complexity, the way the lights were interwoven with the material and the material itself, comprised of thousands of delicate filaments that all waved independently. It really did seem organic and it was quite lovely.
Nuit Blanche Toronto 2010 from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.
2 comments:
One fantastic interactive piece was way out in Liberty. It kept us warm by lighting up the night sky with fire. Everyone cheered and got into the art piece because the art was what it said it would be and it was fun.
Basically there is a stage in the middle with a ring of sensors, and the stage is surrounded by a ring of flame throwers. Participants can put their hands over the sensors to make the corresponding flame throwers spew out fire. Very interactive project and one of my favourites. Too bad it should've been located at a much more popular place.
The upside is you did not have to wait in a long lineup because only people who happened to come out to Liberty or came just for that piece were there. Less drunken crowds.
http://www.hobgobeclectronics.com/blorg/archives/631
Thank you to everyone who supported the art piece Flux and Fire and voted for us as the Scotiabank Niut Blanche 2010 People's Choice for Independent Projects. Interactive art is such an enjoyable art form be it media of fire.
Post a Comment