NUIT BLANCHE 2014: VISION OBSTRUCTED

To make any kind of art, be it a painting or a piece of music or a video, you have to have a vision. In your mind you have an idea of the art which you want to create. It can be something fully realized, every brush stroke on the painting, the range of colours, the direction of the light across the canvas. Or the vision can be "soft", incorporeal, loosely defined. An idea, an emotion, a soft shape existing at the corner of your eye.

This part is actually easy. The difficult part is realizing these visions. That's where technique comes in.

nuit blanche is an yearly event in Toronto, an all night (mostly) outdoor art festival. There are nuit blanche events in other cities but this is the one that I attend. Duh. I live here.

I have made many nuit blanche videos. The event lends itself to the visual. Duh. It's art. Sort of.

This year I wanted to try something different. Instead of just a document of the festival I wanted to do something a bit more impressionistic. Even before I saw what the night had to offer, I had a vision in my mind. But each nuit blanche is different, which makes it worth attending but also makes it difficult to plan for.

For me, people wandering through the city all night long has become as compelling at the art itself. The intangible of nuit blanche is that the entire city becomes an art piece, and with the addition of us the people, a performance piece. And that's what I wanted to capture.

I'm not sure if the video is entirely successful. It is not my fully realized vision but it satisfies the idea very well. Technically, I'm not entirely happy with it. I decided to shoot at 24 fps (frames per second). It is not a setting which I normally use but I used it to film the exterior of the CNE video below on that setting and I was very pleased with the result, I thought the frame rate added an attractive depth and contrast range to the video

C.N.E. 2014 Day One from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

But the midway at the CNE has a tremendous amount of ambient light, the streets of Toronto not so much. Also, slow down 24 fps is not as clear and clean as slowing down 60 fps on which I normally shoot.

I did not spend near as much time at the event as I should have. The layout was very different this year and there was a lot of space between the "zones" where the art was distributed. So, I probably did not give myself the best opportunity to duplicate the vision in my mind.

Still, I was able to do something different. And at my age, something different is always a triumph.

The Dreaming City: nuit blanche Toronto 2014 from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

NUIT BLANCHE TORONTO: ART CRAWL VS BEER CRAWL

Some further musings about this year's Nuit Blanche

As I mentioned in my last post, the art festival may be becoming a victim of its own success. It happens here. Nuit Blanche started out five years ago as the Canadian version of an event hosted in cities like Paris and New York. It attracted thousands of people. mostly die hard arts lovers of which there are many in Toronto

Time goes on, word spreads then the event starts attracting people like Collette and myself; we are not gallery lurkers, up on every new artist who has a show in town but we do enjoy art and we do enjoy street festivals. So the art fest becomes more street fest with food vendors popping up and commercial institutes jumping in to take advantage

It was actually amusing some times as you wandered around, watching people trying to figure out if that light display about the deep emotional benefits of drinking Red Bull was a satirical comment on our reliance on advertising or an actual advert for Red Bull ...

What happens, when something becomes increasingly popular, is that it threatens to become less about the original intent (in this case the opportunity for artists to use public and open spaces) and more about people gathering to be an an event, any event

All summer long Toronto is a city of street festivals. Close off a street to traffic and you will attract people, lots of people. So Nuit Blanche has grown from thousands of people to, last year, hundreds of thousands of people

This year the estimated attendance was around one million. I have no doubt about that. Younge Street in particular was difficult to move about in. Last year we noted that a lot of young people were using this all night festival, with its extended public transut hours, as a party opportunity. I saw it as the normal evolution of the thing, that is what happens in Toronto

But something happened this year to give that natural evolution an artificial boost. No, there were no giant robots wandering around smearing us all with latex paint .. but how cool would that have been? Robots, not that's art!

Ahem

What really happened this year was that the city decided to extend serving hours in the bars. So people could drink themselves senseless until past 4 am. Now, isn't that how you want to appreciate art? Staggering half blind down a street with 100,000 other drunks?

I'm not being hypochritcal. Yes, I enjoy my beers (gosh, really Vic, should we make the news flash now??) and during the evening I enjoyed a pint with our dinner. But I don't go to Nuit Blanche to drink. If they didn't want to serve me a beer with my dinner I would not have cared. Collette and I go to look at the art, to see things we normally wouldn't see and to experience the excitement of being out on the city streets all night with a million of our closest friends ...

Drunken ass holes detract from the experience. I enjoyed some of the exhibits on lower Yonge St but it really became a huge party zone. Daniel Lanois was performing over at Nathan Phillips square and because there was music (well, barely music) it became a huge outdoor rave.

I enjoy the crowds. I love seeing people out on the streets so late at night, when normally our downtown core would be quiet as a grave. But I don't come down for a big drunken party or a rave. I was told that the Drake Hotel, which had several exhibits going on, had hallways filled with vomit

Mmmm art

It's one thing when people redefine an event. As Nuit Blanche has become more popular, the audience has certainly changed the environment somewhat. I think it's great that so many people are coming out to see this kind of art and performances and I absolutely love it when public or private spaces are used in this way.

But let the people decide. The gov't deciding that what we really need is more hours to get wasted is injecting an element right away, in one year, that may have take another three years to develop.

It's commerce over art I suppose. I have no problem with the food vendors setting up all night. I didn't even mind all the promo companies coming down. One of the more popular exhibits was Nuit Market, which brought the tacky old Weston Flea Market downtown in the middle of an art festival ... I loved that juxtaposition of Elvis on Velvet competing with art school grads

But let it all happen. How can this city say they want to promote art well at the same time making it far too easy for the party monsters to take the whole thing over.

I hope this trend doesn't become accelerated. We love Nuit Blanche. We'll continue to go. Perhaps it means avoiding areas like Yonge Stree or city hall which would be a shame, because there are often great exhibits there. People have the right to do what they like and enjoy an event as they like ... perhaps the city should understand that and let things evolve

Now, I think I'll go look at my new art book of images of dogs playing poker while I open a cold beer ...

NUIT BLANCHE TORONTO 2010

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.

Still, the amount of art is almost daunting, something like 130 exhibits spread all over the city. Almost too spread out. Although the TTC did a great job of running all night, there is just literally too much to see. We never seem to make it down to the art zone that spreads out along Queen Street West and by the time we thought of going over to the Distillery District is was too late to catch a bus back in time. Not that that left us with nothing to see. There was tons to see and we were out from about 8 pm till 5 in the morning. And judging by our aching bones the next day, damnit, we may be getting too old for this .. not that it will stop us, mind you.

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.

Right across from our ardent rock music deconstructer was the exhibit called Nuit Market. It was, in its entirety, a local flea market transplanted to the downtown core. I guess you could make the points of flea market kitch becoming contemporary art, and of the connection of art to commerce, a particularly relevant discussion here in my money-obsessed city.

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.

Down another alley we found Swan's Lake, which featured a bunch of mechanical swans dancing to Tchhaikovsky's music.

Cutting edge, certainly not, but it had a certain charm. A couple even older than us (yes, they exist and no, they weren't using walkers) commented "So far, it's the only thing I like" But they were fans of "real" opera I feel and not, I suppose, "rock" opera.

We went further into the depths of Ryerson hunting for an exhibit called Meeting Point. It was one of several "structures" constructed by the artist as a way of examining our city's relationship between the human and the mechanical. Only it was not a structure. It was big photograph of a structure, one that doesn't really exist.

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

From Ryerson we went over to Atrium on the Bay that hosted a couple of exhibits. As we made our through the mall, we saw what looked like a huge instructional dancercise class; a fellow with a mic leading a bunch of people through some dance moves. Turns out this was an exhibit called Dances With Strangers. Again, the description waxed poetically about the social interaction of dance that reflects the immigrant experience of our cultural gestalt ... but it was a bunch of people dancing. Art? Well, not when I'm on the floor, that's for sure

Outside the mall on Bay Street, was False Kratwerk. I was a kind of fan of this 80's "industrial" band from Germany and their music pulsed across the street, but the point of the two people and their similarly dressed mannequin? Well, Kraftwerk wore ties, that much I remember.

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.

Nathan Phillip Square at City Hall has always been one of our favorite places to visit during Nuit Blanche, usually something pretty spectacular occupies this big space. This year there was certainly star power in the square. Later That Night At The Drive-In was an exhibit featuring Canadian music superstar Daniel Lanois. The idea being that Lanois had set himself up with with a full portable recording studio, mixing electronic music to accompany various video projections viewed on screens around the square.

I had difficulty connecting to all this because the square is damn big and the screens were scattered about and removed by quite a physical distance from Lanois himself. Yes, I could hear the sounds everywhere but I really couldn't connect the music to the video. The bit of video I saw was a clip from David Cronenberg's Videodrome with a horrible Photoshop like filter applied. I found the music a tad self indulgent and spacey and really, it just left me cold. Perhaps if I had lingered, I would have found something more to my liking, but I didn't find the inspiration to do so.

On the street just beyond City Hall, we found a bus shelter entirely covered with graffiti ... which is not something you normally find in Toronto. You also don't find curtains in the entrance way and inside a couch, stereo, lamps .. this was part of the Bus House Collective, where a series of bus shelters had been transformed into habitation. Something denied to my city's homeless population.

We made our way down Yonge Street, past an old van made into a rotating light fixture ...

... 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.

We go to Nuit Blanche every year to experience several things: Streets closed off to traffic and opened to humans, public spaces transformed and to just see and experience things we never normally would ... And once again, all those requisites were satisfied.

I still don't what art is I still don't know what some of this stuff meant. I just know that it was an experience, and I shall remember it.

Here's the video, with more of Collette's photo's mixed in, and a sound track provided by Rachelle Van Zanten

Nuit Blanche Toronto 2010 from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

NUIT BLANCHE 2009: HAVE YOUR SPECTACLE(S) READY

There is nothing better to make you question your definitions of art than Nuit Blanche. This was our second time attending Toronto's all night downtown arts festival and it has quickly become one of our favorite events.

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.

A BIG STEAMING BOWL OF ART

In Lily Tomlin's one woman show Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe aliens come to Earth searching for .. well .. signs of intelligence. Judy the bag lady argues to the aliens that humanity's ability to create art designates us as having true intelligence. "What is this art?" they ask her. She reaches into her shopping cart and pulls out a can of Campbell's tomato soup "This is soup" she says. Then she pulls out a copy of Andy Warhol's print of a can of Campbell's tomato soup and says "This is art" She pushes her two hands back and forth "Soup, art, soup, art .."

Collette and I recently sojourned through the streets of Toronto in search of art; it was Nuit Blanche, which I posted about earlier. This "festival of art" was one of those events that stretched the definition thereof. We are not talking just paintings and sculpture here. We are talking huge "installations" some of which invited interactivity. One of these installations was a lighted drop ceiling draped over an existing alley way

So what they ended up with was ... a really bright alley way. The artists had staged garbage around but our nephew Jeff told us he wandered into this work of art and didn't realize that it was art till he came out the other side and saw the sign.

Was it art? I suppose some sort of aesthetic was involved, things had been staged but from a purely visual sense, it really did little for me. I found myself on my usual high ground and stood up there with my camcorder, taking in the scence. I liked the reactions it envoked, I liked watching people walk through it and discuss the experience ... is shared experience art? Is it art when a bunch of people gather, take in the experience and say "This is art"?

Several years ago the Ontario College of Art exhibited the work of one of their graduates. A young woman had purchased a 40 pound cube of chocolate and a 40 pound cube of lard, took a bite out of each, and placed them in a gallery space. Was it art? The young woman contended that the pieces themselves were not art but the fact that she literally "put herself into them" made it art. So, the chocolate and lard was not the art, the teeth marks were not the art, but the biting was the art, or was it the woman's need to make art .. made it art.

Another Nuit Blanche "installation" was called Sketching Beauty, also hosted by the Ontario College of Art.

This was a project where anybody who wandered in was given drawing materials then all the artwork was assembled both inside and outside of the college; art created out of art. So you had all these individual works of art, all created entirely independently, to the taste of the individual artist then assembled by seperate artists in a seperate space ... was the art created by all those folks sketching? By the assemblers? Or by the people who came up with the concept in the first place. Was the art the final product, or the act of creation itself.

I once saw a piece of "video art" where a guy stood in front of the camera and bounced a tennis ball off the palm of his hand ... for an hour. One long unbroken, unedited shot. Where is the art in this project? The skill of the guy to bounce a tennis ball for that long, the fact he thought to record it, the fact that it was presented in a gallery ...

One of my favorite Nuit Blanche installations was the Cocoon Garden erected in this tiny little public square behind a market off of Queen St West.

The artist created their cocoons by wrapping sheets of plastic around chicken wire forms. They hung lights inside, some flickering, some static. So the cocoons themselves were art, pieces of sculpture fairly easily related to. The cocoons were mostly hung in the trees but there was also one mostly hidden under a park bench.

The cocoons were obviously carefully placed in the trees, I'm sure that it was not random. So there was art in that, grouping and placing all those individual cocoons so that they became one piece. Inside every cocoon were little boom boxes, and at certain intervals, they would activate and play snippets of jingles and radio commercials. I will straight up admit I didn't really get the message here ... what was the point of the commercials coming out of the cocoons? I liked the way the jingles were cut together but I wasn't able to grasp the big picture (now that is an unintentional pun when discussing art ... "the big picture") But I wondered about it .. and perhaps that is the art.

Out on College Street an artist had created this enormous installation called Waterfall, created entirely out of recycled plastic water bottles.

There was an obvious environmental message here, using man made materials to approximate a natural situation. For me, the message, so obvious, did not make it art. The enigmatic message of the cocoons seems more artful to me; perhaps that is my own ego saying "If I can't figure it out, it must be really really creative" But then, I couldn't figure out the message of the partially eaten lard and honestly, that didn't seem artful to me at all. There was something there, in the cocoons; the rest of the installation had a kind of integrity so I just made the assumption that the inclusion of the sound bites had integrity as well.

I have seen lots of things called "art" that I didn't understand and just thought it was bullshit. I have also seen art I "didn't get" but felt there was something there. I think that word "integrity" has something to do with it, another word would be conviction. I don't have to get it, I just need to feel that there is something to get ... how that comes about I don't know if I can totally explain.

I can pull out two examples from the film world: Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

The Oliver Stone movie is certainly "arty" Different frame rates, back projections, colour schemes, flashback, flash forwards, radical camera angles and camera movement, off kilter art direction .... and I just think it's a piece of crap. Why? Because it was just arty for the sake of art. Like many Oliver Stone movies he had a point to make .. in fact, he had about 500 points to make and he wanted to shoe horn them all into this movie. There are so many techniques used here I really sense a lack of conviction. John Ford or Akira Kurosawa didn't need back projections and cartoons to make their points, they used the beautiful, simple, powerful langague of a perfectly framed shot, a good actor and an understated score. All of Stone's furious activity was not art; it was more like camoflauge, disguising the fact that he really had very little to talk about at all.

The Life Aquatic is one of those movies that I really like but find it difficult to reccomend to people; it's weird. On the surface it is a parady of Jaques Cousteau but there is more going on here; what that is I am not exactly sure. There is family stuff, relationship stuff, stuff about knowing your role, stuff about the importance of art over science, a lot of stuff about the artifice ... I don't get all of it. But I accept that something is there. Why? Because there is an integrity to the movie, the creators had a plan and they followed it even if it left behind.

In the Leonard Cohen song Take this Waltz he has a line that says "take this with the clamp on its jaws" I have no idea what the hell that means but I know it means something. Largely because it's from Leonard Cohen and I can't think of better example of artistic integrity.

Nuit Blanche had an installation at Dundas Square that, at first blush, did very little for me at all.

The artist was up in this watchtower with a big search light that he would focus on people in the square below. The installation had the title of Fifteen Seconds, a reference to Any Warhol's concept that in our modern age, everyone would have their fifteen seconds of fame (interesting how many Warhol references there are in this post) I scoffed at this at first, but as I think about it now, I am wondering about the concept of art being what people make of it. Was the guy in the tower art or were the people upon whom he shone his light?

You can watch Natural Born Killers and think it is the greatest piece of cinematic art ever, you could listen to that Leonard Cohen song and think it is dreck. Art is interpretive. Art has no existance without us, the audience. We experience the art, we access it with our minds, our hearts, our emotions, we make some kind of value judgement, we in that moment just for ourselves, decide whether or not it is art.

At the end of Lily Tomlin's play, Judy the bag lady comes back out on stage. She takes out the can of soup, she take out the Warhol print, looks at them for a moment, then puts them back in her cart. Then she looks straight out at the audience. She puts her hand to her breast "Soup" she says, then points out to the audience "Art"