Toronto Star, 26 May 2005
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Mar. 26, 2005. 09:45 AM |
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Random
acts of weirdness
And then it happens. A
beat rises, obliterating the white noise of the train's rumble. Music spills
from a boom box, and instantly, a small troupe of dancers transforms the
vacuum of morning rush hour into a makeshift, downscale version of Electric
Circus, tailored for the bleary-eyed public transit set. "We've called
ourselves guerrilla dancers, dance terrorists, all those things," laughs
Paige Gratland, who organized the events every Monday in February of last
year. "But really, it's a kind of gift-giving. We just want people to go
about their day with the feeling that something different happened today....
How often do you see people having fun on the subway?" It was a riff on an idea
that Gratland and her collaborator, Day Milman, had for Free Dance Lessons,
where the pair would stage an impromptu dance party on the street, inviting
anyone nearby to join in. The intention, Gratland
says, is obvious. "People on the street don't even want to look at each
other, much less talk to each other," she says. "And that's not how
I want to live my life. We're trying to create a public space where people
can engage in a positive, meaningful way." Gratland and Milman are
not alone. You may have stumbled recently across neatly wallpapered bus
shelters, perhaps being attended by a primly dressed man in a crinoline
skirt, or a brightly coloured concrete pillar or bicycle standard. Trees, at
times, have worn sweaters. Fire hydrants have been garlanded in cake icing.
There have been knitted cosies for bike locks and public phone receivers,
dress-up parties in Trinity Bellwoods Park, and a well-tended garden of ferns
growing from the toilets and urinals of Metro Hall. Tiny gold trophies have
been affixed around town, engraved with the slogan "Good For You.'' And that's just Toronto.
In New York recently, visitors to a McDonald's washroom were greeted by a
tuxedo-clad attendant. Last year, a life-sized game of Pac-Man occupied
city streets there. In London, Scottish artist David Shrigley posted
hand-scrawled signs, one on an expanse of lawn ("Imagine the green is
red"), and in front of the Millennium Dome ("Ignore this
building.") And the list goes on. They are unannounced,
unpredictable and ephemeral, occupying time and space in the public eye only
for a brief moment before they disappear. Names have been put to them, from
public intervention to performance art to installation to street theatre to
happening. Some would consider them one and the same. Others would say labels
don't matter. What does matter is that it's a creative act in The World Out
There: The work doesn't find the audience, the audience finds it. "I've done some of
these kinds of projects in sanctified art spaces, like galleries, and it's
always less successful," says Jillian McDonald, a Canadian performance
artist in Brooklyn. "People who come to those kinds of spaces know what
to expect. And I really love the delight that is possible for myself, as well
as the audience when you're outside of that, in public, because anything can
happen." McDonald has tested her
theory in public space many times. In her Candy for Strangers project,
she handed out 500 sweets to subway passengers in New York ("They were
gone in about 40 minutes; I thought people would be more suspicious,"
she said). Recently, McDonald, dressed in an evening gown, strolled through a
society soirée with a tray of chocolates. When guests reached for one, she
pulled away. "Sorry," she told them. "I'm not sharing." In the prescribed routines
of social space, it was a mental snag: Reactions ranged from the annoyed to
the amused, but no one could be indifferent, and that was exactly the point. "So many of our
interactions in public are so mundane, from getting change to pushing past
people on the subway," McDonald says. "It's when something becomes
more than mundane that things get really interesting." Tyler Clark Burke once
paraded a troupe of papier-mâché zebras through the west end to an art
opening for the Borden Street collective. "People's
interactions with them on the street was amazing," she said last year.
"It made the opening an event." Was it performance art?
Who knows? But it was far from mundane. And maybe that's enough. "I'm in favour of a
really broad definition of performance art," says Dave Dyment,
co-director of the Mercer Union art centre and board member of Toronto's
7a*11d, an annual performance art festival. "It can be something as
simple as a little disruption, a bump in the everyday." It is a wise strategy. As
a form, it has ever been vaguely defined. Its informal beginnings are rooted
in the Futurists and Dadaists, early 20th century art movements. The notion
took root in North America in the 1930s with the composer John Cage, who was
teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina alongside such artists
as Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg. By the 1950s, the notion
of art had spilled out of gallery settings, morphing into vast, chaotic
events called "happenings," orchestrated by artists including Claes
Oldenburg and Alan Kaprow. Around the same time, artists such as Yves Klein
were incorporating performance in their work — which for Klein meant smearing
naked women with blue paint and dragging them across a canvas, accompanied by
music he composed. The happenings, which
coincided nicely with the hippie generation, became a pop phenomenon, with
decadent images of creative abandon the stuff of magazine features and
coffee-table books. But by the 1970s, around
the time "performance art" was coined, the spirit of discovery had
been replaced by the intense, and the shocking. In 1971, Chris Burden had
himself shot in the arm with a .22 rifle in a gallery space. Later, he
crucified himself against the hood of a Volkswagen. Vito Acconci would trail
strangers for days at a time through the city, documenting their every move.
By the 80s, the form had become notorious, capped off, perhaps, by Karen
Finley, who gained notoriety in the alongside Robert Mapplethorpe for
allegedly becoming intimate with yams in her performances.
The stigma persisted.
"Even five years ago, most people would hear the term `performance art,'
roll their eyes, and say, `Give me a break,'" Dyment says. This may not
have been a bad thing. Dyment allows it left room for something new to grow..
"There are a
generation of people now that don't have this reverence for the term,"
Dyment says. "Now, there's a huge element of crossover between
performance art and prank, and I admire that, because artists and activists
are the kind of people who can elevate prank beyond a juvenile gag." Among them are
interventionists like the Urban Beautification Brigade — the purveyors of
bus-shelter décor — and the Civic Beautification Ensemble, who pretty up the
bland bike standards and concrete pilings with brightly coloured paint. The
CBE also convened the recent "Wintervention," which spawned the
icing-laden fire hydrant, the tree sweaters and the cosies. Performance art, activism,
call it what you will — the blurred lines can be liberating, says Duncan
Walker of the CBE. "It's seen as
something that crosses those boundaries, and I've always been interested in
that," he says. Calling the work "colour therapy," the CBE
traipsed wilfully across those boundaries, making a definition all the more
unclear. "We started out by
spinning it as a way to promote civic involvement, but in a tongue-in-cheek
way," says Walker, who, along with fellow CBE founders Redmond
Wiesenberger and Jason Van Horne, offer Power Point presentations in their
performances, . "But we wanted to
give the impression that something's at work here. Is it official or not? Are
my tax dollars going to this? It starts a chain of unanswerable questions,
and that's really interesting." As performance art has
shifted its focus outward, its intentions have shifted too. In 1999, Kym
Pruesse, a professor at OCAD, published a slim volume called Accidental
Audience, a catalogue of artist interventions for
"off\site@toronto," a citywide project that included the trophies
and the ferns in the toilet. "There is something
about its surprise and anonymity that I respond to," she wrote,
"the feeling that the work is an unexpected gift." Germaine Koh might not see
her own public work as a gift, though humour is an element. Koh, an
accomplished artist working in various media, is drawn increasingly to the
public realm for her work. "It's strange,"
she says. "I find myself being in the funny position of being an artist
who shows in galleries but, in the name of directness, also losing interest
in that, because it is so precious." Last May, Koh and Jade
Rude, another artist, met on a traffic island, ringed with chains, near Union
Station. Slipping off their outerwear to reveal full boxing gear, including
helmets and gloves, the pair sparred for three rounds as traffic snarled
around them, before simply dressing and riding off on their bikes at the
bell. The piece was called High Noon. In Watch, Koh
installed herself in a slender window gallery, less than a metre wide, on
Queen St. W., impassively watching passers-by. Some tried to engage her.
Others seemed embarrassed or shocked. Some laughed, some were outraged.
Throughout, Koh sat quietly behind glass, not responding. In both cases, Koh gave no
indication that she was mounting an art project, nor had it been announced. "I think I freaked
some people out," she says. "But I'm not interested in somebody
coming to the work with the question `is this art?' The more interesting
question is simply, `What's going on here? Why is this person in the
storefront, and do I need to call the cops?' They jump to the issues right
away, rather than being able to push it aside into a definition that's more
comfortable." Others take it a step
further. "We didn't start this thing saying we wanted to do a new kind
of performance art," says Gratland. "It was born out of
frustration: `I'm tired of being on the street and not being able to engage
with people.' I wanted to bring energy and vitality to my daily life on the
street. That's what it's about, not being performance artists." It was also rooted in
activism. "It's a democracy of choosing how you want to live your life,
and how you want to interact with people. If you're not happy with something,
put something forth to change it." It's a choice that's still
too rare, said Toronto Public Space Committee coordinator Dave Meslin. "Any time you do anything
in public space that goes beyond this monotonous habit of non-engagement is
an intervention," he says. "It's a culture jam just to smile at
someone, or make eye contact." Over the past several
years, Meslin has helped organize subway parties, where activists board a car
during rush hour and decorate it with streamers and balloons, blaring music
and engaging riders in social chit chat. He's also been involved with Reclaim
the Streets, where a activists occupy a block of the city in much the same
way, completely unannounced — until the police remove them, at least — and
Critical Mass, a hundreds-strong monthly bike ride that clots traffic all
over the city. So is it art? "Anyone
who chooses public space as a canvas is making an artistic statement as well
as a political one," Meslin says. But the category matters
less than the libertation from routine they represent. "It should be an
everyday, natural occurrence that we see performance on the street," he
says. "It should be as common as the grass and the trees, that people
feel free to turn the streets into an art gallery." |