Notes, Quotes, and Marginalia from Art and Artists in Toronto Panel Discussion Feb 24, 2016 with Barbara Fischer, Luis Jacob and Sarah Robayo Sheridan.
Was it wombs or was it wounds which become style? Interiority is implied either way, but the direction feels important to clarify.
An early mistake I made was to try and walk towards the water. On Spadina, I strolled south alongside the multi-lanes of traffic. The walk is down hill, until it’s not. Following a sidewalk that turned into a gravel lot that turned into a curb, I walked along bends of shrubs until I was walking on the expressway of Lakeshore Blvd. My first right turn led me across Dunn Avenue bridge, whose demolition is now underway.
This is not a rhetoric of absence so much as a tracing towards absence. I have repeatedly written that you can never truly know a place until you walk it, because you have to walk through a place in order to see it. With each and every city, the aesthetics of cognitive mapping depend on the authors and cartographers who trace it. As the city changes, so do routes, sight lines, and the associative memories of paths and viewpoints.
Do I sense a tone of ambivalence towards the infusion if not total industrialization and commercialization of art in our contemporary neoliberal society? Excitement begets the excited. Cultural capital fuels only the cultural capitalists. The problem of two is the problem of one. A mobius strip of vantage points encircling, deepening the rut with each turn.
The city as a vast plain of parking lots. I didn’t live that reality here, but I have lived that reality elsewhere. Funny how I used to write about the elsewhere over there and now that I am here I am only reminded of there. I remember walking through the downtown core on early mornings, across vast empty parking lots foregrounding glass towers beyond the horizon. I projected an idealist nostalgia for that coming day when this emptiness would be filled. Longing for an absence in the present moment. Wishing for the potential of a place to be realized, but unable to wait it through. Is Toronto the elsewhere I have been projecting all these years?
Is Toronto the skyline of elsewhere?
How can a city that is so good at branding and marketing itself be so utterly void of identity? Les Levine’s press kit as work reminds me of the recent essay I read on Kenneth Anger by Erika Balsom, whose search for rare and limited edition film prints were based solely on their advertised existence in press releases. Self-mythology is the first art form.
Moody through Atwood is one too many dichotomies. Where is Treaty 1? Lower Fort Garry in Manitoba. Edmonton was in Treaty 6. Vancouver is on unceded land. The Toronto Purchase is sketchy as hell, and registered as Treaty 13. The sequential order of Canada’s Treaties is a history I have never learned. De-patterning thought ruts is to learn new ways of seeing.
Back to the nugget, splendid adjectives are reserved for the landscapes we approve of. To the question of “What is History?” the answer could be: splendid adjectives, collected from urgency.
