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While council prepares to give Vancouver Art Gallery a shot at empty block, potshots exchange

February 1st, 2011 · 56 Comments

There’s almost zero chance council won’t endorse staff’s long-awaited report suggesting the Vancouver Art Gallery should get two years to develop a financial plan to build a new facility on the empty block next to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

But the back and forth between VAG board member David Aisenstat, union president Paul Faoro, and councillor Geoff Meggs in Jeff Lee’s story makes for fun reading. (Spoiler alert: Someone uses the F-word. Who is it?)

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  • mezzanine

    ^I’d call it boorishness, rather than cultural elitism.. 🙂

  • Roger Kemble

    MB @ 31

    Your friend . . . She is never without many sketchbooks, and pencils and inks and watercolour kits. But she doesn’t do just landscapes.

    Ummmmm, how every interesting: I too have spent my life, “. . . never without many sketch books . . . ”

    Indeed I have fifty years of piled up histories, in sketchbook water colours, crayons, ink: portraits, street scenes, buildings and my own irreverent, and some time censorable commentary on personal interchange with friends, foe and casual encounters.

    Perhaps your friend is not so . . . errrrr . . . well you know what I mean . . . to censor for PG entertainment would miss the point entirely.

    Mine started 1961 +/- as a job diary recording on-site weather, working decisions and change orders. Gradually it transmogrified into personal soliloquy: I am anything but a prurient voyager.

    I have no idea if your friend’s work is anything like mine.

    I do know the hallowed halls of VAG do not lend them selves for such interrogative insight.

    Soon after its move, 1983 +/- an exhibition of encased used tampons seemed to me to be a bit of a let down: to a jaded audience it was not controversial and aesthetically it was an absolute turn off.

    But in its limited way it was an attempt to test the boundaries, provided it did not challenge the funding. And that is the problem with the move.

    VAG will be far too pussy to offend potential donors and that will definitely affect the shows: such gargantuan sums exacerbate self censorship.

    I once submitted a piece lampooning the local development scene that scared the pants off the curatorial staff. I doubt much has changed at VAG.

    Anyway, I cannot see my work in such a sterile context: indeed given my experience with the well-laundered officials, I would be very surprised if used tampons would cut it today.

    And a Larwill starchitect thing-umm-eee-giggle will only make matters more up tight.

    The soviet type gallery atmosphere at VAG is amenable only to sit up beg obedience. I would not want my stuff relegated next to Jeff Wall’s self-consciously, staged wooden tableaus when the circuits blow . . .

  • MB

    Roger, Elizabeth’s work will likely not be like yours. She’s not curmudgeonly enough, and I say that affectionately.

    You’d also have had to bike all over Western Canada for 30+ summers, deinsulate your self from the roaring traffic, the weather, the topography, and the drunken pissing immature grads and other wildlife.

    “Mine started 1961 +/- as a job diary recording on-site weather, working decisions and change orders. Gradually it transmogrified into personal soliloquy: I am anything but a prurient voyager.”

    Perhaps we can see it all lined up at an independent exhibition one day. Most people over 14 — and a surprising number under — can take a few well-placed C-words, S-words, F-words, Q-words, M-words, X-words, Y-words and Z-words, not to mention slanderous pictorials of competitor’s nether regions.

    My old boss, a control freak extraordinaire, who was very satisfactorily laid off a few years back, once described a large luxury yacht he saw in the San Juans while on vacation. It was named ‘Change Orders’, and it was notably owned by a contractor, not an architect.

    An art gallery does’t have to be a starchitect’s wet dream, nor does it have to be a Soviet bunker. Is there no place between these extremes for VAG?

    I would couch having the wisdom to listen to the conservators and artists first and foremost before the managers and the politicos, the latter of whom prefer to denigrate their discourse to the equivalent of a wet towel fight in a claustrophobic, stinky locker room.

    Unfortunately, we all know who gets the press.

  • MB

    I can’t think of a more entertaining person to be imprisoned with when the circuits blow, than Roger.

    But who will be the one to snap a finely-crafted Robert Davidson yellow cedar talking stick for kindling when it get’s cold?

    My point is, our culture and its artistic expression is aleady mature, powerful and highly original. I have no problem with a multi-level public expenditure of $300M to help house, preserve, promote and nuture it for the next century.

    Nor do I see moving VAG eastward as anything more than expanding the city’s heart, which is not as fragile as some critics make it out to be. The Rattenbury courthouse will always be there, and will likely always house a cultural institution and occupy the centre of the centre. That should never mean that the centre should be confined in perpetuity to a very limited periphery as it is now. The city’s heart must be allowed to grow.

  • Roger Kemble

    MB @ 53

    “. . . once described a large luxury yacht he saw in the San Juans while on vacation. It was named ‘Change Orders’ . . .

    Ah ha . . . waddaja tell ya, contractors make big bucks on no bid change orders . . . at that stage they’ve got us by the . . . errrr . . . shorts . . .

  • MB

    … and curlies.

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