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"No economic force compels this vice of amiability. It springs from a faintness of the spirit, from a convention of pleasantness, which when attacked for the monstrous things it permits to enter the mind of the world, excuses itself by protesting that it is a pity to waste fierceness on things that do not matter."
— Rebecca West, November 1914
For me, weekends spent in Vancouver after a long absence are more than usually liable to fall into one of the two narrative patterns that define my relationship with the city. In the first I arrive, eager, desperate to escape the bucolic tedium of my daily life, only to find that tedium re-inscribed on the city in terms that make it clear that it’s source is the failure of my own ambition and imagination: the city’s charms in effect wasted, it’s lessons ignored. In the other, I leave Nanaimo full of a dread and misgiving that the city immediately repudiates by pulling me helplessly into its social and physical swirl, overthrowing for hours at a time the tyranny of habitual assumption. In either version I return home on the ferry moderately grateful, hung over, slightly chastened but unreformed, eagerly re-embracing the rural idiocy that had so recently seemed unbearable. Recent events have, if nothing else, revealed to us the fragility of such solipsisms. As in: my recent trip had seemed to fall very firmly into the latter category.
I am probably not alone in having an almost certainly distorted golden recollection of the weekend that began on the seventh of September, but truly no Vancouver jaunt within memory had begun and proceeded so auspiciously, so effortlessly. The late summer Friday—clear with a hint of pinkish brown haze presaging autumn—found me zipping in a fast car, Turkish disco booming over the Ironworker’s Memorial, past the grain elevators and into Strathcona with an ease that it would demean to read as prophetic. Recently I had published an article that spent most of its brief length enumerating—with the bitter logic of self-exile—Vancouver’s numerous faults, and the city seemed to respond with a charm offensive of peculiar and precise acuity. From the Hopperesque shadows of the riverside fish plants to the intense mandarin concentration of my ice cream paper cup the city seemed determined to etch itself as voluptuous memory, as recoverably lush historic data. As quickly as it took to write this sentence I was similarly whisked to the first stop on my intended tour of the multiple-gallery opening Swarm 2, the Catriona Jeffries Gallery. The evening had somehow already fallen.
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Evan Lee, untitled, 2002, C-print.
Collection of the artist.
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There is probably some term from the vocabulary of physics that describes the particular ways in which the recollection of small events that occur in the proximity of exponentially much larger events are refracted and transformed by them. As if bending towards those events, marginal details rush toward the centre; nuance crowds out thesis. But if it is unfair to the innocent ephemerality of most of the work in Swarm 2 to judge it in the harsh light cast by the atrocities of September 11, so be it—history does not choose favourites. And just as it swept away the cozy certainties of Edwardian pre-modernism history has already begun to sweep away the casual cynicism of the institutionalised post-modernism that Swarm represents. For in as much as its conception was directed toward the shared desire for an event, a salve for our collective ennui, for anything to revalidate the experience of art and the social, it is a culpable aspect of a deeply culpable culture.
But though it would be wrong to say that on the night in question hesitations about Swarm 2’s faux communitarianism were absent from my mind, the city’s deeply welcoming embrace had nonetheless put me in a receptive and cheerful mood. My early evening spell at Catriona Jeffries, waiting for the friend who would chaperone and drive me around, was a long one, and alternated between quick plunges into the gallery to look at Myfanwy MacLeod’s drawings and slow leans on the back porch rail for Jim Beam, Craven M’s and—the evening’s recurring and ultimately redemptive highlight—interesting conversations with strangers. In yet another narrative twist MacLeod’s work bracketed my night at Swarm 2. And if, hours later, in the Or Gallery, amid the throng of police and spilled beer at the foot of her menacingly Tardis-like outhouse construction, the memory of her drawings made them seem eerily if unspecifically prophetic, earlier on I was more often bemused by them. Artfully and quickly executed, the drawings have a ghostly, automatic-writing quality, seeming to channel aspects of a peculiar but recognisable cultural subconscious. Little distinction is made between levels of experience or temporal logic: Freud, Tinkerbell, Hollywood and the artist’s youthful other seem to signify equally. Such witty but apparently affectless work seems to challenge the viewer to construct a narrative purpose while denying him or her sufficient means to do so. Do, for instance, the references to John Boorman’s Deliverance indict cultural cliche about rural life or merely reiterate it? The three grey watercolour X’s that comprise one of the drawings offer a kind of clue, and seem to record an exasperation with the processes of experiential exploitation required for the maintenance of the all-knowing but blasé postmodern aesthetic. Both MacLeod’s apparent discomfort with her own facility and her hesitation before the abyss of empty competence are interesting in themselves, and added to the solemnly hilarious cultural reclamations of her sculpture at the Or Gallery are more than interesting. But many of the tensions her work seethes with have yet to break through as clearly as they might; the Vancouver art world’s tendency to domesticate its authentically subversive spirits seems at least partially successful in her case. Though not, I sense, for long.
Because it was my first and longest stop, my time at Catriona Jeffries felt the most like a real—if quiet because early—opening. By the time my escort arrived to spirit me away in his pickup the crowds that would keep expanding throughout the night at every venue had begun to gather even in upper Granville. In fact, if I have little to say about most of the work I tried to see it is because it became clear early on that it was the crowd itself that was the evening’s primary content. As crowds go, it had much in its favour. For one thing it lacked the sullen aggression of almost any large Vancouver gathering—an aura of friendliness towards strangers prevailed without any exception known to me. It was an overwhelmingly young, well dressed and good looking crowd that was yet not too young, well dressed or good looking so as to cause discomfort in an unprepossessing critic. But it was a crowd nonetheless, loud and hot in an enclosed space, getting in the way, exhaling, overemphatic, impatient. But if the crowd was the content its medium was movement—everyone I met had just come from or was going to the place I had been, and despite my friend’s pickup we never felt that were moving fast enough. People disappeared before your eyes like the hallucinatory germ-ghosts coming out of the walls in Jeanne Randolph and Elizabeth Mackenzie’s oddly disturbing Underside of Shadows at Artspeak. As the night drew on this to and fro-ing became increasingly frenzied—art that earlier in the evening might have been courteously glanced at faded into a generalized blur. The model for such an evening was clearly the night-club crawl—a sense Video In’s white limousine installation (whose faintly impatient lineups I regret to say I was not willing to bum-rush for the sake of this review) re-enforced. Stranded in galleries which on a weekday are lucky to have half-a-dozen visitors it is no surprise that the unconscious collective curatorial fantasy which Swarm 2 represents is the white stretch and the velvet rope, the sharp-eyed bouncer sussing up the desperate punters, satiated crowds stumbling onto the pavement. Thus to the collective desire for an event is added the darker wish for arbitrary social stratification, an aura of exclusivity without the chore of its enforcement, buzz without context.
The question of how art transcends such a "context" is now moot—such a context no longer exists. Work consumed in such a fashion already risked being seen as either too subtle or not subtle enough; the harsh retrospective glare cast by recent events illuminates as randomly as it obscures. A show like Pop Song Covers at the Western Front, which featured artists Shannon Oksanen, Scott Livingstone, Holly Ward and Ki Wight exploring the intersection of landscape, music and language, seemed on the night of Swarm utterly lost in the crush of the crowd. The music could barely be heard, and there was another lineup, this time for sweaty headphones. But from the point of view of the last day of September their painfully delicate aestheticism seems utterly transparent and heartbreaking, like a belle-epoque picnic with a soundtrack by Debussy. The tenuousness of this work now seems like a kind of strength.
The clear artistic highlight of the night for me—that is, the work that has kept its shape and clarity in my mind most vividly—were the photographs of Evan Lee at Centre A. Deceptively casual at first glance (he even calls them—with some disingenuousness—"snapshots") it quickly becomes clear that Lee’s photographs are the products of a well-formed and coherent aesthetic, derived less from Vancouver’s conceptual heritage (though that is present) than from the humanist legacy of Frank and Friedlander. Lee’s small photographs record moments of such ephemeral lucidity that one can hardly imagine the camera ever being very far from his hands. Snapshots' unburdened celebration of (and belief in) the problematized "decisive moment" feels at this juncture appropriate and sure-footed. By avoiding coy ironies and laboured historicism with such stringency, Lee has positioned himself for the unknowable future with a palpable sense of aesthetic mission, one that should prove durable and highly productive.
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Myfanwy MacLeod
the little kingdom, 2001. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
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After what had seemed like a short detour around Stanley Park, my chaperone and I realised that it was now twenty to two, so we gunned it over to the one gallery where we knew things would still be hopping, where anyone else who was still up would be: the Or. Whether from the flamboyantly ambitious personal style of its long-time curator Reid Shier, its long-time previous location on the worst (and hence most permissive) block in Vancouver or its long term (if vague) literary connections, the Or has long been the party fraternity of Vancouver artist-run centres, and we parked nearby in confident expectation of finding a few dozen die-hards with whom to wind down and discuss. As we walked up to the Smithe Street entrance we noticed a couple of police officers getting out of a car, and as we walked down the building’s hallway to the Or entrance we realised that they were following us into the gallery. When we walked in the cops walked past us, indifferently and efficiently, to join a throng of police and official looking (clipboards, tweed sports jackets) types gathered at the base of Myfanwy MacLeod’s sculpture. The work—which I take to be a outward manifestation of that to which her drawings are content to allude—is basically a humble outhouse around which is constructed a faux-Victorian monument. Already ominous in its conflation of the class and body phobias that are the nominally "transgressive" art world’s unspoken other, it loomed over the Or’s bust for routine liquor violations like an arrogant Ozymandias with an Easter Island sneer. Even on the night in question it felt like the end of an era—not only was this show the last of Shier’s tenure but the feeling that the relocation from East Hastings to the comparatively genteel corner of Homer and Smithe was in some sense utterly final was confirmed by this unsubtle but timely reminder from the state. In collaborating so enthusiastically and uncritically with the powers of publicity, in amping up the crowds by any means necessary, the organisers—as much a wing of the state, it must be said, as the police—attracted what would have seemed an impossibility—unwanted attention.
Stepping over the spilled beer and overturned bottles with a sense of utter devaluation that then seemed quite profound, my chaperone and I began the long drive back. Moving through the brightly-lit suburbs into the darker Fraser Delta farmlands the night cooled considerably. I kept returning in my mind to Rob Kozinuk’s Diffraction at Access (these gallery names—Access, Or, Artspeak—drawn so unselfconsciously from the vocabularies of repressive tolerance!) the only work I had seen that had seemed to take the measure of the night’s fluidity. Projected onto the old hexagonal floor tiles of the gallery, its images—both computer generated and natural—made of the enclosed space a perceptual field at once vertiginous and intimate. People standing over it when I came in were still there when I left much later. Neither shouting to be heard or numbed into silence, people spoke over it in conversational tones, moved onto the floor and off, followed the patterns with what I can only describe as childlike glee. The creation of this absurd but benign community within the larger and deeply conflicted community of Swarm seems altogether too slight for the resonance it now has, but these refractive anomalies are just one of the things we’re going to have to get used to.
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