Toronto and the dilemma that is public art

Murray Whyte asks what, if any, rules art should follow when shared with the public.

Thestar.com
June 17, 2017
By Murray Whyte

You don’t need to have been to see the brand-new public fountain at Berczy Park. Instagram - and Facebook, and Twitter - have all been there for you, countless times. From its outer circle of big dogs (retrievers, Labs, a St. Bernard) to its inner rings of pugs, terriers and puppies all spouting water in apparent supplication to a golden bone held aloft the fountain’s peak, each and every canine - there are 27, and one cat - is well enough represented online to have its own profile on Facebook.

What you’re less likely to see in such a way is its immediate neighbour, Indigenous artist Jeff Thomas’s Imposition of Order, an enormous, billboard-sized work of images exhuming the area’s not-terribly-playful history: A steely portrait of Thayendanegea, also known as Joseph Brant, the Mohawk chief who in the 18th century threw his people in with the British against both French and American forces in wars spanning more than 20 years.

Thomas, who shows alongside the portrait maps of lands promised to Brant’s people for his service, now lost, makes a critical gesture in this moment of Truth and Reconciliation: How to make visible a true, and ugly, history of a city where newness is often privileged at the expense of the past.

Public art is subject to few rules, though certain truisms hold: Everyone has an opinion, and they’re as broad as the works themselves. If the fountain, which opened last week, and Imposition of Order, which appeared for the Luminato Festival at exactly the same time, belong in the same family - and, with their public esthetic statements, they do - they’re quite clearly distant relations: One an unblinking challenge to a complex history rooted in the ground beneath the concrete; the other, a reference to nowhere in particular and not very much at all

They seem to have nothing to do with each other, which of course is the point: In a landscape more littered with public art by the day, what standard applies?

Not enough of one, Brandon Vickerd says. “At this point, the culture of public art in Canada is healthy enough to turn its intentions towards establishing a critical eye,” he said. “Right now, it’s a fair question: What are we hoping to achieve, as a culture, when we take on public art?”

Vickerd, a professor of sculpture in the fine arts department at York University, hosted a national symposium on campus last month on that very subject. “Public Art: New Ways of Thinking and Working” took place over the May long weekend. With private development generating vast amounts of public art as a byproduct of most cities’ urban planning regulations, the notion of standards was very much in mind.

“There’s such a proliferation of public art taking place, but there’s a real lack of critical discourse around it,” Vickerd said. “And the truth is, it’s a really difficult field: There’s so much priority on consensus - this idea that you’re making a work that has to be everything to everyone, all the time - that you end up with works that are insignificant to everyone.”
While encouraging signs abound here - James Turrell’sStraight Flush and Micah Lexier’sTwo Circles enrich downtown office towers - the field remains confoundingly broad.

Hence, perhaps, the stretch from a dog fountain to Imposition of Order, and everything in between. That polarity is what Vickerd means to address. “It really is a big question: Can you make a work of art that is commissioned by the city, or a developer, that is critical and has a critical presence in the cityscape?”

Another question: does it have to? Cameron Cartiere, a professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver who specializes in public art, also came to the symposium, but with a very different point of view. “What public art is asked to do is so much more than a work in a museum or gallery,” said Cartiere, a co-editor of The Practice of Public Art, a prominent journal in the field. “In the public realm, the stakes are higher - you’ve only got one shot. Our expectations are much too high - and heaven forbid we indulge in a little whimsy.”

Public art that free-floats out of context isn’t new, but it was driven to new heights of infamy recently when it was revealed the provincial government had granted more than $121,000 to the Redpath Waterfront Festival to bring a giant rubber duck from Ohio to the province for Canada 150 (“The good thing is that it’s temporary,” said Cartiere, diplomatically. “People get to see what they like, and what they don’t.”)

What’s seen as a worthy public art investment remains broad, indeed. A less high-profile project - and certainly one less “fun,” as culture minister Eleanor McMahon described the duck to be – from the Toronto Fire Native Cultural Centre is currently walking the slow path of approval and funding: The work, a 12-foot long turtle climbing a boulder inscribed with the names of Ontario’s 13 residential schools, is intended by Ojibway artist Solomon King as a “Restoration of Identity” gesture to the many Indigenous people abused within the system. The city’s Aborginal Affairs Committee recommended the proposal go forward in May, though many hurdles are yet to be cleared before it comes to be.

The idea of putting art in public is age-old - think of monuments to the various caesars in ancient Rome, or bronze sculptures glorifying everything from generals to politicians since the Renaissance at least. But the shift in thinking, from heroic memorials and monuments to meditations on site, place and culture, is relatively new and Toronto, generally, has not been swift to its embrace.

As recently as 1968, the province installed a cast-off statue of King Edward VII in Queen’s Park, acquired from India as it purged the remnants of British colonial rule. Its arrival served as a quiet reminder of the city’s staunch conservatism, proclaimed much more loudly a couple of years prior as perhaps the city’s best-known public artwork, Henry Moore’s The Archer, an amorphous, high-Modern sculpture, was installed at Nathan Phillips Square in 1966.

The Archer’s initial renown came not from its merits: “It looks like a sick mushroom,” one bystander told the Star that year, and the sentiment wasn’t unique. After a cool public reception to its initial proposal in 1964, city council refused to pay for it, leaving then-Mayor Philip Givens to lead a private fundraising campaign to acquire it from Moore on his own.

Givens, vilified for pushing the work on a largely-indifferent public, would pay a political price: He was voted out six weeks after The Archer was installed, with its arrival a favourite campaign target of his rivals.

Then, of course, is not now, and The Archer, along with Moore’s Two Forms, recently relocated by the Art Gallery of Ontario to Grange Park, are among the most-loved public artworks in the city’s history. “I always say: Don’t judge too quickly,” Cartiere says. “Things need to settle into the landscape and become part of people’s experience, and that takes time.”

Cartiere says public art can play several roles, from engaging with deep histories specific to the site and community to simple amusements. “There are layers to these things,” she said. “It depends on what you value in a city. We ask our cities to not just house us, but to have others come and visit. Why should they? What makes us interesting and unique?”

Indeed, among public art’s many chores is to help establish a civic tourism brand. Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, a giant chromium bean in Chicago, quickly became an emblem of the city worldwide, not to mention the victim of knock-offs.

The more organically such a symbol evolves, the better, Cartiere said - a credo not adhered to in 2015 by the city when it installed a giant TORONTO sign at Nathan Phillips Square for the Pan Am Games. Nonetheless, it’s an Instagram hit - so much so that other cities, like Ottawa, have adopted the same strategy.

Don’t laugh off the social media considerations of public art projects, Vickerd says. “I’ve been on juries where jurors will say, ‘This would be a great selfie sculpture,’ ” he says. “I realize that it’s the way we see the world - it’s the way we socialize, it’s the way we document our lives now. But I don’t think there’s a reasonable argument to be made for making a work that’s a good backdrop for Instagram.”

Nonetheless, high-minded cultural ideals are in tough against crowdsourced validation. For Canada 150, the anniversary of Canadian confederation on July 1, the city has made a slight tweak to its TORONTO sign, adorning the giant letters with raccoons and maple leaves.

For a site as significant to the city’s history - for the square to be built, the Ward, the city’s foundational melting pot of cultural difference, was razed, and all its diverse residents scattered to the wind - the gesture seems blithely thin. We may sometimes expect public art to do too much, but is there a danger that we expect too little?

“That’s a real problem,” Vickerd says. “Not every work has to be critical. There’s room for multiple ways of thinking. But I think there have to be some gatekeepers.”

But Cartiere says quality remains in the eye of the beholder, and the field should remain broad. “Think of how many buildings in your city really make you say, ‘Wow,’” she said. “Not that many. We need to be realistic in our expectations - and a lot more patient.”