I could only imagine the protestors coming in to use the facilities is only part of thier concern. They probably wouldn’t want any protestors to come in and damage any peices of art to send the man a message.

The city has a chance to do something interesting with this block, and I’m not sure an art gallery is the best use. There are a couple issues with the art gallery on the Larwill block.

I suspect the art gallery would prefer a monumental starchitect-designed building on a site all its own. But this part of downtown already has too many block-sized institutional-use buildings: the post office, the library, Vancouver Community College. The concentration of a similar uses leaves the area dead for much of the day, especially in the middle of weekdays and at night. The art gallery will not generate enough traffic to keep the area busy at these times of day.

A wider mix of uses, especially residential, would generate more mid-day and nighttime pedestrians, but the art gallery will likely not see these uses as compatible with the standalone building it wants.

There is an opportunity for a shortcut path through the block to connect with the steps by Stadium station that lead down to Chinatown, reinforcing a connection between Robson and the library to Chinatown. This would only work well with some attractions (especially shops) along the way, which also likely wouldn’t work with a monumental art gallery.

There may be a lot of so-called job space with an institutional building, but there are relatively few jobs.

Art galleries can be bunkers. Direct sunlight is bad, and this site gets a lot of it. Can it go underground?

While I love the direction the VAG has taken lately, i’m amused that while they can only show 3% of their permanent collection at any time, whenever they have shows from the collection they always seem to dig up the same pieces of art 🙂 I’m thinking of the Lawrence Paul dayglo first nations paintings and the cement block by Liz Magor in particular.

I like the idea of a stand-alone art museum / gallery in the Georgia x Cambie location, especially if it was in an iconic building with a great public square and crashing fountain facing Georgia.

I am uncomfortable with such an important cultural institution having to share with the private sector. Does the BC Museum share? Does NYC’s MOMA share? Yet these facilites draw visitors by the millions.

Give the art gallery all the space it needs to display its various collections, add new art, a great restaurant, lecture hall and performance space (not all visual art is static), and encase it in a beautiful building grounded in BC references (please, no more Roman coliseums!) and it will generate a huge centre of gravity and privide a bump to the city’s economy.

My main worry is the level of commitment (current) senior governments have toward the arts. Cultural institutions are what draws people to the great cities of the world, and in Vancouver that would be complemented by our beautiful natural setting.

False Creek real estate is too valuable to be used for a public institution in a city where the noblest cause of all is land speculation (rather than artistic achievement, or the pursuit of knowledge.)

Vancouver is a hollow shell of a place, with a very attractive facade.

The VAG should move to the Sears building.
The MOV should move to the VAG building.
Sears should move out of the downtown.
Done.

We’re well into the 21 century.
The desire to build a new “stand alone, iconic building” is dated.

A renovation to the Sears building by a ‘world class architect’ could be entirely appropriate and fabulous. A Tate Modern rather than a Bilboa.

Hear, hear Hoarse Whisperer! Sometimes, I find Glissando very hard to decipher. But after you do that, he turns out to be such a treat! If we could only transplant a few of his/her brain cells into those clowns at City Hall…what a lovely city we’d have. Way to go GR!

I think the VAG should lease the Storyeum building in Gastown and use it to show another 10% to 15% of their collection before they launch a campaign to raise $350 million. See what the response is like and program that space to appeal to people who don’t go to the main VAG.

I just can’t get my head around the VAG’s desire to move from their site, which, as others have mentioned, is at the absolute heart of downtown.

Hail Glissando:

“Shut up!”

Yessir.

“Really?”

No, I’m still writing. *heh*

To clarify my previous post: I had no problem with the demonstrators, and like you have never seen demonstrators blocking the entrances – although neither have I paid that close attention most days when just passing by. It was the staff who seemed freaked out by them. I say, definitely keep the location for demonstrations, but put something else nifty in the building. I agree with those who have raised the question: if the VAG goes somewhere else (and the location they have identified makes sense to me; it would be ultra cool if they could magically resurrect the murals that were recently painted over, on the East wall), what other wonderful things could be put in its place? Another museum as previously discussed? Or something even more interesting? This could be a gain gain situation all around, including for the city.

“What do you make of that, huh?”

Lemonade?

Spend a $100 and buy the WAG (Winnipeg Art Gallery plans. That’s a nice bunker on an odd-sized lot and I thought that it was a good gallery with good spaces.

Other than that, Miss Bartels, via L.A. Museum of Modern Art (Wha’ Dat?), has done little other than the schmoozing that comes with the VAG.

Make the VAG admission free, few will pay to see the stuff as you have seen with the free Olympic and Paraolympic admissions, move it to Surrey to supplement the SAG collections. Have BAG administer it instead, they are more in touch with the general public who move to Burnaby.

@ Bill Lee: “Make the VAG admission free, few will pay to see the stuff as you have seen with the free Olympic and Paraolympic admissions, move it to Surrey to supplement the SAG collections. Have BAG administer it instead, they are more in touch with the general public who move to Burnaby.”

This project will end up being what we define it to be, which is an interpretation of how we define ourselves i.e. our own culture at this moment in time. Isn’t this what artists do on a daily basis?

Perhaps we can attempt to look beyond the moment at the oncoming century in our evaluation, and test whether this will be a neighbourhood, city, regional or Western Canadian facility. I believe VAG is a currently regional facility that could unwittingly become a major Canadian institution (local artists have historically been very unique but unrecognized), but it receives infinitesimal suppport outside of Vancouver.

The decisions on VAG could very well relate to a diminished view of our culture and identity, which would be very disappointing.

@MB . . . “But it is truly a cram job.” No it isn’t!

Of course you’ve seen Mona Lisa! Who hasn’t?

Yes she is stand alone on the end wall . . . but the walls leading up are cram chock full cheek-by-jowl old stuff stuffed in: as in most decent art galleries.

Actually VAG just doesn’t have enough to make a decent gallery: wasted wall space all over. And that’s a trade secret!

You don’t look at one isolated paint job: its the ambience stupid!

Kathleen B hasn’t a clue how to make an art gallery work.

Her current gambit is a C$350m boondoggle making out with El premier intent upon distracting us from the merry fuck-up he’s got us into with “THU GAMES”!

“Moving into the Eaton’s / Sears building isn’t a bad idea . . .” God help us, it is a hell of a bad idea.

Sears (Eaton’s) is a forty year old toilet seat created by yet another star-chitectural pompous ass-hole, Caesar Pelli, who declared, “retail continuity is not appropriated on Granville, thus killing the street for the past fifty years.

Leave VAG alone and chop the bloody toilet . . pronto . . .

@ Urbbie: Jezzus. If we were in a Nanaimo pub I probably would’ve sloshed an ale into your lap after you called me stupid.

Regarding Eaton’s / Sears / Pelli building. I agree that in its current form it’s a pig. But one can always strip it to the sticks and bare floorplates and start again, and add a few floors in future. But my point is that it may be more difficult to change the current commercial zoning.

The Mona Lisa is exhibited in one of the largest art museums in the world. Paris being what it is, one of the world’s great cities, they ran out of space so they went underground with Pei’s pyramid. Yes, the Louvre has wall after wall, room after room crammed to the gills with art, but they had the cojones to invest in art and the room to expand into. THAT is part of why Paris became so great to begin with. We are still at Square One — debating spending public money on an art gallery and its collections with those who don’t value such things and prefer freeway ramps over Mona Lisa’s.

We mock art, diminish the structures it is housed in it to a line item on a beancounter’s ledger, and drown out any call to expand with a stunningly parochial level of cynism. To me , that is a self portrait of a certain portion of our society, the part that still thinks we live in a small village by the sea.

Urbbie, condescension so defines you.

Yes, I know Kahlo’s work (two exhibits) and her history (from books). No, I haven’t seen her house. Maybe I’ll get around to it after the other 39 places to visit in the world have been crossed off my list.

@MB : It is well know that the VAG has minor-league collection. I would say bush league. Emily Carr’s paintings are depressing and are pathetic for the most part. Only a brain-washed “Artie” would class those as great works. Keep a handful for posterity sake. The rest of the Collection can be weeded down. Sell it off even. And no I am not anti-art. I know great art and it ain’t to be found at the VAG. And MB, try and keep your knickers from getting twisted into a knot, eh!

Do we have to keep pretending that all those art history degrees mean something? Art is whatever you can get away with. Look at the hideous and meaningless “installations” so often displayed or what results when a committee commissions public sculpture (the so-called “turd in the plaza” ).
Why does it always have to be a choice between something some old or dead white guy did and the latest pointless fad from a coterie at the Canada Council?
Making art is a great hobby. Selling art is a con. Selling tickets to look at art is a guaranteed money-loser. Ask any symphony orchestra or ballet company.
There are so many better uses for $400 million that it’s hard to know where to start. A shrine for antique status symbols is the last thing we need.

I would agree with Urbanismo– and quite a number of other art-loving locals with long memories– that Tony Emery was the best director the VAG ever had, if only because, during his tenure back in the 70s (for all you youngsters and newbies,that was when the VAG was in their old location– of which I was quite fond– on the north side of Georgia between Thurlow and Bute), he made more of an effort to reach out to the community as a whole than any director before or since. He didn’t do this by booking touring mega-shows; there weren’t many around at the time, and they would havebeen unaffordable anyway). Emery brought crowds in purely by emphasizing its role as our civic art gallery and one of our primary local cultural institutions. There were a tremendous number of public events during Emery’s tenure, almost all of them free– performance artists, dance performances, film screenings and retrospectives, multimedia, tons of live music of every description, some of it quite challenging– Al Neil, for instance, staged one of his extraordinary music/sculpture/dance/shamanistic performances seemingly every few months during that period, many of them in the evening, and they were a delight. The Anna Wyman Dancers, the city’s preeminent modern-dance troupe at the time, practically took out a residency in the early 70s, before the began touring internationally. Those of us with an interest in avant-garde and experimental film fondly remember the massive, extraordinary month-long retrospective of same assembled and presented by then-Pacific Cinematheque programmer Tony Reif in 1974, with the filmmakers themselves often in attendance for lecture presentations, brought in from North America and Europe. Hundreds of films were screened. This was hardly an elitist event; at a lunchtime screening of Stan Brakhage films, for instance, you would have brownbaggers turning out en masse (now, I suppose, they just hit the malls). I bemusedly remember being astonished when a rather conservative woman friend of mine, who worked a block from the VAG, turned up at a lunchtime screening of Brakhage’s excruciating autopsy film, “The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes”, having been brought there by her current beau, a film nut. I tried to warn her away, but she was determined to keep her date. Never has there been a more inappropriate film to watch while eating lunch. They left in a hurry and, sad to say, broke up not long afterwards.

One of the ways the Wyman troupe was able to build such a local following was thanks to those early, free VAG performances. A couple of years later they were packing crowds into local theatres. There were so many of these public events on offer at the VAG in those days that during some weeks one could go almost daily and see something different every day. The VAG was booming during that period, thanks almost entirely to the vision and dedicated people skills of Tony Emery.

After Emery’s tenure the VAG became a more insular, elitist institution. There have been a succession of administrators of varying quality, some better at reaching out than others. Certainly Kathleen Bartels has demonstrated excellent merchandising, marketing and PR skills. But none have succeeded at turning the VAG into a populist institution as did Tony Emery. Most haven’t even tried. Bartels’ idea of populism is to hang Vermeer or bring in a DaVinci show, and that’s fine; as one who has toured many of the great (and some of the not-so-great) galleries and museums of Europe (excluding the Prado, unfortunately–never been to Spain), I can tell you that being able to sit and contemplate a real live Vermeer– even a secondary Vermeer, as was the one recently on display– is to be able to experience great art and great culture in a way seldom possible here in Bimboville. But big touring shows are not the heart and soul of a community art gallery. And that’s something the VAG hasn’t been for a long time, no matter how many Emily Carrs they may keep rotating onto the walls.

Perhaps obviously, I think the big shows can be quite worthwhile, even fascinating, and are certainly an aid to getting people in the door; some, of course, have done much better than others, when they have prominently featured familiar names– a Van Gogh retro, for instance, would probably break all records. But I also think, and have for a long time, that the VAG could befit mightily by reaching out to the community as a whole in ways that even Landlord and his ilk couldn’t find fault with. A littel populism goes a long ways If that means brownbagger shows, so be it, but there are many other ways this could be accomplished. Nowadays it sometimes seems that the only special events that take place at the VAG are $250-a-ticket fundraisers for the cognoscenti. Brings in the bucks, but does little to reach out to the huddled masses and only reinforces perceptions of elitism. I can’t attach much significance to the crowds that jammed the VAG during the Olympics. First, admission was free; secondly, there were huge crowds just outside, some of whose members finally tired of watching the Zipline; third, even the average knuckledragging partier has probably heard of Leonardo (though I wonder how many flocked in expecting to see the Mona Lisa?). As with the Olympic streetcar line, I think the VAG benefited temporarily from an extraordinary civic circumstance and mindset which even now is vanishing, as ephemeral as Brigadoon.

I think the Larwill Park location is definitely worth looking at (though I would also hate to see the courthouse building demolished as a result of the VAG’s moving– sooner or later, I fear, someone is going to suggest that the revenues from the redevelopment of the current site with, perhaps, Vancouver’s first 80-storey building, would be a big boost to the construction costs for a new home for the VAG, a proposal too potentially lucrative to ignore), and I am in full agreement with VAG management that it should be a stand-alone building, not a half-assed adjunct to yet another bloody office/luxury-condo tower. In this proposal is the possibility, for the first time in Vancouver, of not only creating a (can’t believe I’m using this hackneyed phrase) world-class art institution (it won’t be able to acquire a world-class collection, but there are ways to compensate for that), but also acquiring our first world-class piece of architecture (sorry, Erickson fans). Reportedly the VAG is talking to a number of world-renowned architects, which probably means Frank Gehry, since he’s Canadian and they’re probably hoping he figures he still owes something to this country after doing the AGO expansion. There’s two strikes against that, however; first, Gehry’s pushing 90 and has enough viable offers for work that he couldn’t get them all done if he lived to 200; and secondly, I’m really not sure the world, or even architecturally deprived Snafuver, needs any more of Gehry’s stainless-steel-reflector-oven specialties. The Bilbao represented something wildly new, and the Disney concert hall in LA is stunning to behold; but really, Frank, it’s time to think of some different building materials. If Gehry was to crap out, I just hope to god that the VAG wouldn’t go with Richard Henriquez or, worse, Moshe Safdie, creator of one of the most banal pieces of archi-kitsch ever seen in this country, just up the street from the Larwill site.

As for cost, if you made me God for a day and allowed me to decree whether Vancouver should spend $458 million on a new sports stadium roof or something in the same ballpark (no pun intended) for a new art gallery, I’m not sure the fraction of time it would take me to make the choice is measurable by any known scientific means. I guess I’m just one of those smug, elitist, non-productive, worthless artsy-fartsies that profit-and-loss Neandertals like Landlord love to bitch about. And (as is probably obvious) I don’t even have an art history degree…
gmgw

That’s why I kept it short, LL.
gmgw

@gmgw // Mar 6, 2010 at 1:23 pm comment 34
“I can’t attach much significance to the crowds that jammed the VAG during the Olympics. First, admission was free; secondly, there were huge crowds just outside, some of whose members finally tired of watching the Zipline; third…”

I wonder if they just entered looking the washroom, which must must be straight ahead.
Ah the usual sign disasters of the VAG and the city in general. Up? Down? How to get out etc.

The Canadian Encyclopedia’s potted entry for the VAG
(Tony Emery was appointed in 1967 after Doris Shadbolt’s “acting director” tenure, and was director for 7 years)
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0008305
—–
The Vancouver Art Gallery, founded in 1931, has a collection of about 7000 paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, drawings and objects, largely of contemporary Canadian art. One of the collection’s strongest elements is the Emily CARR bequest, and a gallery is devoted to an ongoing display of her work.

The original gallery was a small art deco building on West Georgia St. It housed a modest collection of British works purchased for the Vancouver Art Gallery by Sir Charles Holmes, and featured an exhibition schedule devoted largely to British art trends. In 1938 the gallery was occupied by unemployed men protesting government policy, but no paintings were damaged.

After the war, Vancouver’s modernists, Lawren HARRIS among them, set the gallery on a new course. A renovation and expansion in 1950 gave the building the look of the international style, and in the 1960s the gallery became well known for its open and innovative programs under Doris Shadbolt and Tony Emery.

In 1983 the gallery moved into larger quarters in the old courthouse which had been renovated by Arthur ERICKSON. Only recently has the gallery had an acquisitions budget, which is now one of the largest in Canada, and besides having an active exhibition program, the gallery also maintains a library, a slide library and education programs. Between 1976 and 1984, the gallery published Vanguard, a magazine of Canadian art criticism. The gallery also played a role in the early 1970s in establishing the Pacific Cinémathèque and Video Inn.

PHOTO Vancouver Art Gallery
The Vancouver Art Gallery in Robson Square. This neo-classical building, which now houses Vancouver’s art gallery, served as the city’s Court House or seventy years and has retained its grandeur (courtesy Colour Library Books Ltd.).

Author SCOTT WATSON and W. HOLMES
=====
And it was definitely British, like heavy mahogany furniture. UBC’s gallery was worse. VSA knew better but had to teach local stuff.

Tony Emery was a breath of fresh air, and while it was the ebullient 1960s with lots of ideas, he brought in video, poets, shows and even Sunday painters for a week each, to enliven the old Art Deco building. He resisted fees.

At the same time, Alvin Balkind was sweeping the UBC art gallery as a scene to be noticed even in the low-ceiling basement of UBC Old Library.

The move to the Courthouse in 1983 brought up a Salon des Refuses (Paris impressionist reference 1863, 1874 [ and be amused by the amazingly strong Archibald Prize disputes in Sydney if you google Salon des Refuses])in an empty warehouse in industrial Yaletown, called “The October Show” it was the most innovative mass showing for decades and compared favourably to “Vancouver: Land- and Culture- Scape: From Vancouver Art and Artists: 1931-1983, An inaugural exhibition in celebration of the opening of the new Vancouver Art Gallery at Robson Square, October 15-December 31 1983”, the Rombout show of what the VAG and the Vancouver scene was.

Luke Rombout eventually went on to ruin the federal Art Bank.
Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker was the director that Mr. Kemble (Urbanismo) is remembering. A sample of her 1983 reportage at ( http://www.ccca.ca/c/writing/d/danzker/danzker001t.html )

gmgw: including “shamanistic” in your description of an Al Neil performance at the old VAG on Georgia is insightful and a useful contribution to the discussion. Separate from should the gallery be moved (it shouldn’t) is the discussion of where does this art stuff fit in to anything meaningful anyway. It’s come under attack in some of these posts so I leap to its defence: Brian Jungen. We miss the more intimate gallery that was part of a Vancouver long gone, but under this director’s watch Jungen and a group of modern aboriginal warriors hunted down and dragged to the VAG several Natuzzi leather couches to be skinned; the hides and frames to be used to erect a six metre high teepee. Hilarious, transcendent even a little dangerous. Art will out!

Urbanismo:
When the wildly oscillating muzzle of your verbal submachine gun begins spitting out bullets from time to time and you merrily mow down (perceived) friend and foe alike, I generally just get the hell out of the way until you’ve finished. Since I’ve somehow managed to plough through just enough of your tortured syntax to realize that I am actually in agreement with you more often than not, I do take some bemused exception to your sporadic and inexplicable ad hominem attacks on me. Apparently I’ve now veered back on to your Nixonian enemies list once again (that “Jericho” exchange, the content of which I can’t even remember, really got to you, huh?). So be it . However…

First: How many people who are reading this, do you suppose, apart from a few geezers like you and me and a few others, can actually remember first-hand the previous VAG, which sat three blocks west on Georgia until 1983? Sometimes the establishment of context just has to take precedence.

Second: Just because I acknowledge K. Bartel’s marketing skills does not necessarily mean that I admire everything she does with them. Far from it. But there’s no denying that she is the most politically skilled administrator the VAG has had in many a day– unless you long for the days of the terminally disdainful Willard Holmes, perpetually glowering over his bowtie in elitist detachment?

Third: “What will happen to the Rattenbury?” you plaintively ask. The simple answer is: Ultimately, whatever the cabal of mega-developers who really run this town (and who have long acted as puppeteers to civic planners, Council members, and Mayors alike) wish to see happen to it. There is not a single “heritage” structure in Vancouver that is completely safe from the right combination of huge offers of money and political pressure (the same kind, for instance, that is increasingly being brought to bear to persuade City Hall to facilitate massive densification of the 70s-scale South Shore of False Creek). If the cost of a new VAG is the demolition of the Rattenbury, than it will happen, whether it’s done at the pleasure of Ned Bosa, Peter Wall, or any of the others. Certainly, I would prefer to see both a new, architecturally distinctive VAG– (at Larwill Park, if it can be made to work, although I would prefer to see that block’s long-forgotten, pre-Bus Depot designation as public space returned– diehard idealist that I am) *and* the retention of the Rattenbury courthouse, whether as a VAG facility or for some other purpose (perhaps the Belkin Gallery could be moved downtown from its currently isolated UBC location, and its operation expanded). I just don’t see any way of persuading any of the powers that be in this city, business, financial, or political, that it would be viable– or even desirable– to achieve both aims. And that saddens me more than you are evidently capable of understanding.

Lastly: As for your concerns about the authenticity of the Vermeer “Love Letter” canvas, you may rest assured that its history and authenticity have been well documented by the Rijksmuseum, the world’s greatest repository of seventeenth-century Dutch art (a claim I can attest to firsthand), and while the painting in question is undoubtedly a “lesser” Vermeer (which is one reason why we got it), the presence in this classic-art-deprived city of any work from the greatest Old Masters, especially Vermeer, whose surviving works number only 30 and none of whose work has been exhibited in this country for half a century, is cause for some celebration. I would hope that on that point, at least, we can agree.
gmgw

Touché gmgw . . . next time I’m in town I’ll treat you to lunch . . .

Regarding the collections, there’s been lots of criticism above about the VAG collections, and its obviously a subjective issue.

I don’t pretend to have a PhD in art, and I certainly am critical of certain exhibits, both past and present, which to me is indicative of curator’s and management’s diverse tastes in usually a very confined budget. But I will never say that VAG shouldn’t be given a chance to improve their collections, and manage them from the persective of both a GALLERY and a MUSEUM (there’s a difference — museums are a lot larger). This requires more space and resources.

If, as part of a public funding package, the impetus will be to focus a higher percentage of effort, funding and space to local and regional art, then so be it. But, as GMGW eloquently expounded, the international exhibits of Dutch Masters and others have real value not only monetarily (higher admissions, which helps with upkeep), but in increasing the public appreciation of art. There were hordes of school kids actually looking hard at the early Rembrants and the Vermeer when I was there, and they were actively engaged in a discussion with a teacher on life during the 1600s in Amsterdam. Try to assign a monetary value to that.

I believe there is great potential for 21st Century aboriginal art. Jungen was mentioned, and he is an excellent example. But people like Thomas Cannell are upcoming … wait for his Stone Family to appear at the Shadbolt Centre in Burnaby soon.

People have alluded to Gehry’s titanium roof structures. It IS a versatile medium that will outlast many other materials, so I think writing it off is premature, especially if it is used in new ways on a new art museum. However, I would like to see new innovations unique only to the West Coast, like imagery from aboriginal art used on / in the building. ‘Raven Steals The Sun’ rendered in a large sheet stainless steel frieze on a new building entry facade would be very powerful indeed, and would make the building a canvas to support the art, not the other way around. You can’t get any more regionally grounded than that. Provided scale, proportion, interior + outdoor space programming, materials palette and public open space amenities are addressed with due care and attention, then I’ll bet we’ll get something to be proud of and that will help pay its own way with new income.

Just goes to show how much the French and Dutch value their culture. Of course, they have twice the population of Canada to spread the subsidy ‘pain’ around on.

What do we value? As alluded to earlier, roads & cars get top billing. I’ll bet a loonie that the entire operating cost and a phased program of purchases at a new VAG building would be completely covered if even 1% of the annual road and car subsidy in Metro Vancouver was diverted to this cause.

Priorities.

MB = Media Baron …. no, that’s not it.