Final Frontier: Heritage Villages, Collective Memory, and Urban Futures

Being on Time

A shift in our approach occurred in 2000 when we received a Canada Council for the Arts Millennium Arts Fund grant. Up until that point, PAC did not take its audiences or its public to heart when projects were being devised. We were concerned with commissioning works and displaying them through previously inaccessible spaces. The public was simply the anonymous public on the street, in the mall or the train station but we had no refined way of discovering who they were or what they thought. With the Millennium Art Fund, the Canada Council asked artists and curators to help develop new approaches to fostering audiences for art. While we were interested in new spaces for art, the question of the audience had been largely overlooked. The shift in our curatorial approach, no doubt shaped by the demands of the grant, reflected a change in how artist communities around the globe were rethinking audience interaction. Not least through the world’s most important art exhibition, documenta 11 (1998–2002).¹ The artistic director of documenta 11 was Igbo Nigerian-born American curator Okwui Enwezor, who conceived a major intervention into the art world—bringing a new, postcolonial politics to bear on the exhibition by expanding its locations, art events, debates, and publications around the world to include artists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Briefly, documenta 11 was:

Comprised of a constellation of five platforms, realized on four continents over the span of eighteen months between March 2001 and September 2002, documenta 11 extends in substantive, spatial and temporal terms beyond the traditional 100 days format of past documenta exhibitions. The first four platforms were devised as committed, discursive, public interventions, and enacted within distinct communities around themes conceived to probe the contemporary problematics and possibilities of art, politics, and society. Creating a network of partners, collaborators, and interlocutors, many institutions and foundations were instrumental in realizing, together with documenta 11, the platforms, among them the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna/Institute for Contemporary Art, the House of World Cultures and the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD, Berlin, the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, the Hague, the India Habitat Center, New Delhi, CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa), Dakar, and the Goethe Institute Inter Nationes, Munich and Lagos.²

documenta 11 not only shifted the terrain of the art event by introducing new artists and audiences to the exhibition context, it also completely redefined the landscape upon which documenta opened out to stakeholders, effectively expanding the reach of the event into a broader scope of communities, elevating the relationship between art and knowledge, and the role of the artist as a mediator of intercultural understanding.

PAC began to move away from inhabitation and appropriation toward collaborative, relational, and dialogical strategies. In 2000, we received the Millennium Arts Fund grant to curate a site-specific exhibition to bring ten artists into Central Technical High School. The goal was to create a multigenerational conversation around art, time and the state of education. The editors of the exhibition catalog would recall:

With the intention of provoking a timely discussion around the themes of technology, time, art and education, ten installations were devised exclusively for the school’s Art Centre building. Conceived as additions to the existing architecture, the installations lived unobtrusively among the student works which permanently adorn the walls, seamlessly occupying washrooms, hallways, lockers and even creeping into the sacrosanct domain of the teachers’ lounge. As is the nature of site-specific installations, many of the works presented were ephemeral in nature and so particular to the time of the exhibition that it would be difficult to imagine a life for them outside the context of the school.³

The reason that this exhibition represented a shift in our curatorial practice was that it was locally based and truly site-specific. Site-specific projects emphasize the local situation, creating forms of audience participation that redefine the art object. The site literally is an integral part of the art work, which does not exist without it. For example, Canadian artist Kelly Mark, who is now well known for her durational performances, choreographed Hiccup, a series of small gestures performed daily for seven days between 8:45 am and 9:00 am at Central Tech High School in downtown Toronto, conceived as an orchestrated “ballet of the ordinary.” She tells us:

Every day for one month I arrived at the front of the school at the exact same time, wearing the same clothes and sitting on the same step. Then as the students began to arrive, I began my performance of a pre-set routine of simple everyday actions. I smoked a cigarette, took sips from my coffee, looked to the left, stretched my leg, adjusted my hat, read the same 5 pages from a book and underlined the same passage etc. … Although appearing to be moving and acting in a completely natural and spontaneous way, I was in fact, with the aid of a pre-recorded and timed audio track on headphones, completing the exact same actions and gestures every day at exactly the same time. For one month I entered into the normal daily routine of the people around me as a background element… a small anonymous déjà vu experience.⁴

This performance was recorded each day and formed the basis of a seven-channel video installation in the school for the remaining weeks. The performance itself created a surreal durational repetition set against the incessant change of the school environment.

Canada’s most celebrated artist, Michael Snow, devised a completely different meditation on time when he installed an electronic ticket dispenser in the teachers’ lounge. Students were instructed to take a ticket, sit down, and wait for their number to appear on an LED screen, and to leave the room once it did. Working with a computer programmer, Snow created an algorithm in which some numbers appeared immediately, while others never appeared at all—leaving students waiting anxiously. The point was to communicate, in a playful manner, the fact that time is not always equitable.

These are two examples, but the eight other installations throughout the school were equally engaging: from an audio recording of students recounting their nightmares (all having to do with the color blue) installed in a set of lockers (Kim Tomszak/Lisa Steele); a funhouse mirror installed in the girls’ washroom (Lorri Millan/Shawna Dempsey); a visual study of the neighborhood’s color scheme and surrounding duplexes in the computer room (James Carl); the discovery of homophobic graffiti hidden throughout the school (John Greyson). All of the projects were collaborative to some extent and relied upon the responses of both students in the school and visitors to the exhibition. In McLuhan-esque fashion, the projects drew attention to the architecture of the school and its formal alignment with a curriculum in which subjects (math, geography, history, etc.) have been strictly regimented and scheduled. The exhibition also addressed the importance of teaching art and music in high schools, in support of an integrated curriculum that was being severely cut by Ontario’s provincial government at that time. Being on Time engaged students in a conversation through artworks that were collaborative and relational.

The development of “relational aesthetics” as a growing tendency among contemporary artists was underscored by the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud in his 1998 book Esthétique relationnelle (Relational aesthetics). Bourriaud defined relational art as a new method in the production of art, “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.”⁵ For Bourriaud, the role of the artist was changing, from being the central source of the artwork to being a catalyst or collaborator in the process of making an artwork that comes into being through the exchange of ideas.

Such collaborative strategies had already emerged through experimental approaches to art making taking place in North America since the 1960s. Before Bourriaud coined the term “relational art,” feminist performance artist Suzanne Lacy had described a “new genre” in her 1995 book Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art:

For the past three or so decades visual artists of varying backgrounds and perspectives have been working in a manner that resembles political and social activity but is distinguished by its aesthetic sensibility. Dealing with some of the most profound issues of our time—toxic waste, race relations, homelessness, aging, gang warfare, and cultural identity—a group of visual artists has developed distinct models for an art whose public strategies of engagement are an important part of its aesthetic language. The source of these artworks’ structure is not exclusively visual or political information, but rather an internal necessity perceived by the artist in collaboration with his or her audience.⁶

Of central importance to this new genre was site specificity: the location of the artwork and its relationship to an audience or community. While in the US and Canada site-specific works had a history dating back to the 1960s and ’70s minimalist and land art critiques of art institutions, Lacy directed our attention to emerging models of public art that sought to give community a role in the production of art.⁷ Around the same time that Lacy was describing this “terrain,” architect and curator Miwon Kwon’s 1997 essay “One Place after Another,” and later her book of the same title, offered a historically grounded vocabulary for discerning different models of public art and community engagement.⁸ Kwon’s readings of different site-specific projects in the early 1990s take as a central focus community engagement and develop a political framework for situating and evaluating their contributions.⁹ How are communities addressed, formed, strengthened, or expanded through relational, site-specific art exhibitions? What is the role of the artist in these situations? How are collaborations acknowledged and how do they continue after the exhibition closes? These are important questions for curators and artists who take the multifaceted relationship between location and identity as central components in the creation of place-based exhibitions. Moreover, Kwon notes that in the era of late capitalism, and with the growth of diasporic cultures around the world, such relationships are increasingly complex and uneven:

… the deterritorialization of the site has produced liberatory effects, displacing the strictures of fixed place-bound identities with the fluidity of a migratory model, introducing the possibilities for the production of multiple identities, allegiances, and meanings, based not on normative conformities but on the nonrational convergences forged by chance encounters and circumstances.¹⁰

Yet despite this complexification, place continues to exert a strong force on the creation of identities, either “as a compensatory fantasy in response to the intensification of fragmentation and alienation wrought by a mobilized market economy” or some deeper phenomenological attachment.¹¹ In the end, contemporary spatial experiences may well be defined by the tensions (differentiated around the world) between mobility and site specificity.

The Leona Drive Project

It was exactly such tensions between mobility and specificity that were explored in The Leona Drive Project (2009), a site-specific public art exhibition that explored a dwelling in transition, organized by a group of graduate students, many of them practicing artists from York University, the Public Access Collective, and several other urban researchers.¹² Together we devised The Leona Drive Project, which was staged in six vacant 1940s bungalows owned by a local developer and awaiting their fate, to be transformed into monster homes.

The project took place in the inner suburbs of Toronto, in Willowdale, Ontario. All of the bungalows were vacant, and except for one, boarded up, some for over seven years as the developer awaited zoning application approvals—the first proposal for a retirement home had been turned back. The exhibition was organized during the global economic crisis, and this timing might well have encouraged the developer to support a public art exhibition. A number of us, including a York University graduate student who had grown up in Willowdale, approached municipal councilor John Filion to help build a relationship with the developer. We had also contacted teachers from the local arts high school, Claude Watson School of the Arts, who agreed to have their grade ten and eleven students participate in the exhibition, working alongside the commissioned artists.

We invited twenty-three artists to imagine the past and the future of these houses, which had been built in the late ’40s by the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). The land was owned by different developers over the years, and one of the aims of the exhibition was to tell the story of the city through the history of its developments. We traced this development back to the Wright family in 1915, and while all the other streets in the area were named after the developer’s children, Leona was the only name we could not place (though one of the researchers found a reference to a maid named Leona in the Wright family archive). For us, this project was first and foremost a history of the city—a dwelling archive belonging to an urban vernacular of “forgotten” suburban spaces and lives within the contemporary metropolis. The exhibition aimed to foreground the fact that development so often happens without any overall plan. This is a particular affliction in Toronto (as you can see by our waterfront); there has been very little reflection when it comes to planning, and the inner and outer suburbs are no different. While the exhibition could not drive a wedge into the real-estate development of the area, we wanted to create a momentary pause by focusing on what Sigfried Giedion called “anonymous history,” a history of anonymous things. Giedion’s notion of anonymous history was first developed in his book Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete (1928), where he describes architectural form as “anonym” and “kollektiv.”¹³ This history of industrial architecture rests upon the unnamed engineers and builders who shaped the nineteenth century, and for us, it is those builders, architects, designers, and developers who shaped the postwar Canadian suburb.

The source of Giedion’s insights comes from the practices of the French surrealists and of the Bauhaus School of Design, for whom objects and things were embedded in and with the energies of historical forces. Giedion maintains that through these objects, through the networks that enable an object to appear (there are hundreds of networks stored in any object—from the extraction of natural resources to the labor that produced the object, from ways of storing things to ways of moving them), one has access to life itself. He tells us that “the meaning of history arises in the uncovering of relationships. These relations will vary with the shifting point of view, for like constellations of stars, they are ceaselessly in change… History regarded as insight into the moving process of life, draws closer to biological phenomenon.”¹⁴ Giedion’s concept of anonymous history is conceived as a dynamic cultural ecology—history and its archive are living things.

Taking Giedion’s biological analogy to heart, our starting point for Leona Drive was the ground, or underground. We began our research in the basement of one of the houses, number 9, which had recently been inhabited and was not boarded up. In the basement, we discovered some things that had belonged to Ruth Gillespie, a figure who became central to the exhibition. Her things had been left behind after she had passed away: a high-school yearbook from the 1930s, domestic objects, wall hangings, photographs, an unfinished tax return, a recipe book. We later learned that she had died suddenly on the dance floor at 80 years of age and that her brother had quickly sold the house to the developer, who had rented it to a Russian immigrant named Dimitry—a filmmaker whose films on immigration had also been left in the basement when he was evicted by the developer the year before. A great deal of research was undertaken to find out more about these two characters, which gave the exhibition a novelistic feel. This project discovered hidden relationships and strange coincidences. Dimitry, who was a mystery to us, since he seemed to drop off the face of the earth after his eviction from number 9, read about the exhibition in the newspaper and came to the opening. Upon seeing him, I immediately remembered that he had been one of my students from Ryerson University years earlier. Such reunions were frequent throughout the two-week run of the exhibition: families returned to the site of these houses after many years; old childhood friends and neighbors greeted each other after a thirty-year absence; strangers recognized each other from their former addresses on the street.

Artists and researchers provided a great deal of background on the houses and their inhabitants. Toronto artist Richard Fung interviewed many of the “Originals,” as they called themselves, from the area. These were mostly women who had raised children in the houses and who now lived in the nearby condos and met regularly for coffee. An extended interview with Betty, one of the first residents on the street, was the subject of Fung’s installation in the living room of number 9. Two other artists, Angela Joosse and Shana MacDonald, created an installation in the kitchen from some of Ruth Gillespie’s dishes, creating a cabinet of curiosities that mixed projections into all the nooks and crannies of the kitchen with found objects. They even cooked one of her tuna casserole recipes: a projection in the sink, the virtual meal was continuously being made and remade.

The exhibition had a novelistic sensibility because the anonymity of the place invited the imaginative projection of fictive lives. In Borgesian fashion, the past of this place could only be grasped through imaginary projection onto found objects, the small rooms and windows of the houses, or out into their lush overgrown gardens. The artists Steven Logan and Bojana Videkanik, who had painstakingly researched the early cartographies and photographs of the area, decided to employ another historical methodology besides that of the archive, and they called upon the services of a spiritual medium, who spent an afternoon in number 9. She found the “sensitive spots” in the house, and in the end channeled Ruth Gillespie, which was recorded and ended up as an installation in the back garage. Others imagined ghostly children playing in rooms upstairs (Patricio Davila), or the sounds of radio stations across fifty years (Anna Fritz). David Han created a car installation out of a 1970s station wagon, which, through multiple rear projections of Willowdale streets, brought an episode of the early television program Father Knows Best (1954 to 1960) into the present by translating the program into the four dominant languages of Willowdale: Korean, Mandarin, Farsi, and Russian. Han’s project, in a beautifully eloquent form, highlighted the demographic changes that have transformed suburbs from white middle-class enclaves to the most culturally diverse areas of the city. John Greyson staged a narrative of two famous gay penguins, Roy and Silo, escaping to set up house in Willowdale encouraged by Richard Florida’s creative city research.

Landscape architect An Te Liu transformed one of the houses into a landmark feature of the exhibition with the discovery that the design of CMHC houses resembled in their structure the little plastic houses used in the board game Monopoly. Originally, the game was invented in the US by Elizabeth Phillips as The Landlord’s Game to teach about the dangers of concentrated land ownership in private monopolies.¹⁵ Liu painted one of the houses green to highlight the resemblance, and this became a much photographed icon.

If Giedion proposed a history of anonymous things, Leona Drive was such a history and an imagining (the two are not separate) of anonymous people, houses, and gardens. The archival components of the project (photographs, maps, diaries, objects, etc.) connected us to people who lived and still live in the area; we excavated the smaller vernacular histories of the postwar city. Although we believed the houses to be quite lifeless, the exhibition opened them up as a living archive and uncovered all kinds of social relations embedded in the environment of the street. Many of the artists we worked with had some relation to the area; we worked closely with municipal councilor John Filion, with the North York historical society, with the residents of the area, with the local arts high school (a group of 30 students from the school produced an installation for the exhibition), with York University student volunteers, and, finally, with the developers. The neighbors and nearby residents were very much a part of the exhibition, which they came to claim as their own, offering several tours per day. The exhibition was widely covered in the media and was attended by over 3,000 visitors from across Toronto. In the excavation of this anonymous history, these modest houses and the lives lived in them were attached to other lives, those who came to see the show, and this multiplied throughout the two weeks. This helped to create what curators Carlos Basualdo (who worked with Enwezor on documenta 11) and Reinaldo Laddaga have called an “experimental community.” These are temporary communities that come together through transitory domains where gatherings can take place, where processes of translation can develop. Indeed, Basualdo and Laddaga see such communities, which we find being created out of contemporary art exhibitions, to be a product of globalization in which diverse groups—ethnicities, ages, and social classes—come together in one place. Thus, they argue, “artists are inventing new forms of being in common and representing that commonality, in circumstances in which the social forms that emerged in the context of the social capitalism that prevailed in the second part of the twentieth century are progressively dissolved.”¹⁶ It is precisely that which cannot be commodified—human memory and relationships, attachments to place (either temporary or lasting)—that is the fundamental achievement of the exhibition. While ephemeral, the exhibition did manage to produce a pause in the momentum of real-estate development in Toronto. The houses came to an unceremonious end a few months after the exhibition closed. They were replaced by the million dollar ‘monster’ homes by Spring 2010.

It is difficult to identify the long-term impact of the exhibition. I received a phone call from Betty (one of Leona Drive’s “Originals”) in 2011, requesting more copies of the exhibition catalog, which she wanted to sell at an annual neighborhood party in Willowdale; according to her, people in the neighborhood “are still talking about it.” Also in 2011, Municipal Councilor John Filion helped to initiate the formation of North York Arts (nyA), designed to address the needs and interests of artists, arts organizations, and residents, and to foster arts programming and engagement. The Leona Drive Project inspired a very successful site-specific public art exhibition in Willowdale called Oh Dear, curated by Paola Poletto in 2013 and also supported by Councilor John Filion.¹⁷ I believe that Leona Drive prepared the ground for future place-based artistic undertakings and fostered the recognition that art and collective cultural practices are integral aspects of the public and political life of a community.

1. In existence since 1955, the 100-day exhibition occurs every five years and was created after World War II by art professor Arnold Bode in Kassel, Germany, as a means to take stock of contemporary art practices around the world, though in the early days the focus was primarily European. [↩]
2. documenta 11 Press Release. [↩]
3. Chloë Brushwood Rose, “Introduction,” Public: Art | Culture| Ideas 24, “Being on Time” (Spring 2002): 1–2. [↩]
4. Kelly Mark. Hiccup #1. 30 day public performance/intervention, 7-channel video installation: 15 minutes each, silent. Commissioned by Public for the exhibition Being on Time at Central Tech, Toronto, 2000. [↩]
5. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les Presses du Reel, 2002), 113. [↩]
6. Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 19. [↩]
7. Sculptors like Robert Smithson, Christo and Jeanne-Claude were at the forefront of this emphasis on “site” in the 1970s. [↩]
8. Miwon Kwon’s essay was first published as “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity” in October 80 (1997): 85–110; later she published the book One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). [↩]
9. Kwon compares Mary Jane Jacob’s landmark Chicago exhibition “Culture in Action,” which included seven projects installed throughout the city in the summer of 1993, and “In Public: Seattle 1991,” organized by Diane Shamash, the manager of the Public Arts Program of the Seattle Arts Commission, which included eighteen installations displayed throughout the city. [↩]
10. Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” 109. [↩]
11. Ibid. [↩]
12. For more information on the exhibition, see www.leonadrive.ca and LOT: Experiments in Urban Research, www.l-o-t.ca. [↩]
13. Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, trans. J. Duncan Berry
    (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995). [↩]
14. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969). [↩]
15. Philip E. Orbanes, Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game and How it Got that Way (New York: Da Capo Press, 2006), 22. [↩]
16. Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga, “Experimental Communities.” Public Journal, Spring 2009. [↩]
17. Oh Dear, curated by Paola Poletto, paired 7 historic locations with 7 artists. The exhibition is described as “public art that unhinges North York’s sense of modesty: July 2 – August 26, 2013.” [↩]