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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
With so many exhibits we had to find some reasonable way of establishing criteria. The night turned out to be surprisingly lovely, quite mild for October and ... a rarity this year .. dry. So we decided to stick to the outdoor venues; turned out to be a great idea, they estimated a million people were milling around downtown and the sidewalks were crowded enough, I can't imagine what a gallery would have been like.
The next criteria was to avoid installations that featured video ... I do video all day long and while I can appreciate it as an art form, I don't need to see it on my night off. We had a vague idea of what some of the exhibits were but mostly we were going in blind. We stared off at Dundas Square, right down at Yonge and Dundas, an area that has become nicely revitalized lately. Tons of people out, which became a theme of the evening. It was quite exhilarating to see so many people .. so many you couldn't get on the sidewalk .. out in the city at night. Even later, at three in the morning, there were literally thousands of people roaming around; even downtown that is extremely rare. It gave the night this great energy so that us old folks didn't feel tired at all ... much.
The installation in the square was called 15 Seconds. The artist built this wooden tower (doesn't that remind you of the guard towers in The Great Escape?) He was up there with this spot light and the idea was that he would randomly shine it down on individuals in the crowd, giving them their Andy Warhol 15 seconds of fame. An interesting idea I guess but unfortunately most of the people there did not seem to be aware of the script. Perhaps if people understood the concept better, there were would have been more interaction; they should have put the tower on Church Street ... then we may have seen some audience participation.
From this angle it was interesting, the thing was just huge. But it became truly interesting when you got under it and shot upwards.
The thing took on a whole different dimension from the angle ... in the video (at the bottom of the post) you will see that it was turning and you got this real sense of motion, like a vortex, strong enough to induce some mild vertigo. 
At first this "installation" did nothing for me but as we hung out for a bit, seeing this normally dark, unused (but not dirty, this is Toronto after all) alley way transformed by the white ceiling and fluorescent lighting, the colours of the "trash" jumping out at you ... and just the fact that so many people were moving through it, the video will give you a good sense of the number. As I said, the sheer number of people moving through these art pieces was something I found very compelling. People interacting with art .. almost regardless of what that art is ... is pretty sexy and people using their city in any new kind of way definitely has an appeal to it.
Here, Collette captured one of the images, a human silhouette that moved from one tower to the other, its shadow following it. Again, check out the video. From City Hall we moved west along Queen Street. It was great to see the street so busy; this time of year, around midnight, even a street like Queen W is normally sparsely populated. We made our way to St Patrick's Market Square and found that some very strange fruit was growing in the trees.
This was the Cocoon Garden, created by some local artists. Translucent plastic wrapped around chicken wire forms, illuminate from within by different colours.
Some of the cocoons had speakers inside them and they played snippets from commercials and jingles; some of the recordings were on a loop, others were activated when someone pushed the cocoon. That was one of the things I liked about this installation, many of the cocoons were at eye level and you could physically interact with them. 
Sketching Beauty was another interactive installation. Hundreds of people were given paper and pencils and made their own sketches, messages etc and everything was posted up all over the square.
Another installation at the OCA was A Dream of Pastures, a big shadow projection where people participated in the illusion that they were riding horses through a flickering woodscape.
Another big installation ... that wall is huge, about half a block long .. and one that invited participation. You can get a sense of the crowd here, and this is probably after 1 am.
From Queen's Park we made our way up to Yonge and College to the College Park shopping/condo building. Here we found zombies ... well, Zombies in Condo Land to be exactly.
The idea here was having people off the street get dressed and made up as zombies and then participate in an ultra low budget movie. So it was really a movie shoot and as anyone who has ever watched a film being made ... about as exciting as watching hair grow (even my hair, which we all know is fabulous) Still, the idea of making a movie on the spot, with random actors is interesting and I wait to see the final
