Queen Elizabeth Park, July 16th, 1994.
Ephemeral works form passing public fancy
by Robin Laurence - Vancouver SunGone are the days when "public art" connoted a bronze statue in a plaza or a stone monument in a park. Not only are permanent public art projects shifting their form and focus, but a whole new spectrum of temporary art activity is occurring in the public sphere.
In the past few years, temporary public art projects in Vancouver have appeared in, on or around derelict department stores, SkyTrain stations, billboards, pixel boards, bus shelters, bank windows, front yards, back alleys, vacant lots, beaches, bridges and sidewalks.
Forms and mediums have included posters, performance,soundworks, banners, brochures, graffiti, photographic installations, television broadcasts, telephone recordings, and slide projections. The transient, displaced and unsalable nature of such art is concertedly political.
As artist Susan Schuppli has written,"the artist takes the artwork out of the commodity exchange system of the museum and allows the work to exist within a larger system of no fixed exchange value."
On July 23, two temporary public art projects occurred in Vancouver -- well outside the commodity exchange system. Tom Thomas, a local poet and graphic artist, installed 13 metres of poetry on a sunny band of lawn in the main quarry of Queen Elizabeth Park.
And the Public Dreams Society produced its annual lantern festival, Illuminares, in the sultry darkness of Trout Lake Park. Although completely different in size, scope and concept, each project developed ways in which artists can engage their communities and stimulate public imagination.
Thomas'Lawn Ornamental' had both literary and performance aspects, and was as much about process as content.Since 1991, the artist-poet has been installing his work on buildings and sidewalksas a way of countering the obscurity and "cliqueishness" of the system within which poetry is produced and delivered.
Thomas playfully poses serious questions about the ability of poetry to communicate to more than the converted few. How accessible are small edition chapbooks? How "public" is a poetry reading attended by only 12 people?
Over the course of two hours, Thomas and his colleague, Glen Andersen, carefully measured, marked out and laid down 28 lines of verse in black-trimmed, white letters, big enough to be legible from the lookouts and bridges high above the quarry floor.
Thomas's poem, an erotic one with a heterosexual rhythm and a resounding climax, had special resonance in a park crowded with wedding parties. The tourists and children who swarmed by were amused and briefly intrigued: they read what was there, then passed by. But the wedding groups stood looking at it for longer periods while waiting to have their photos taken.
Dripping sweat, fatigue and anxiety, trailing trains, veils, ties and cummerbunds, swathed in magisterial black, virginal white, blood red and vaginal pink, they watched as the poem took shape beside them. Their reception of the installation was curious but not entirely sympathetic. In one party, the groom's mother made a sour face and rolled her eyes, while the bride's mother stomped through the work-in-progress, demolishing the wooden markers.
A groomsman made a snide comment about the likelihood that the artist had received a large grant to execute this project.("I wish" said Thomas, who funded it himself.)
Although Lawn Ornamental appealed to me, it seemed to strike a dissonant chord with some viewers, tweaking some deep suspicion that poetry-- however public you make it -- is an elitist activity.
Perhaps, though, in retrospect, a few of the attendants to Thomas' installation will reflect upon the juxtapostion of individual creation and group ritual that took place at the park. Long after the wedding photos have been tucked into albums, they may remember a moment of intersection between private musing and public declaration on the subject of love, divinity and desire.
Excerpted with permission: Saturday Review, The Weekend Sun, July 30/94
