Akimblog
Toronto
posted by Terence Dick - September 7th, 2006.
My neighbourhood has been overtaken by Studebakers and bobby soxers. Abandoned buildings have turned into unfamiliar shops and storefront chapels overnight. Ads for “wiglets,” hefty fashions and rock’n’roll 45s abound. Soon, I hear, John Travolta will land. It’s all very disconcerting – not the least because this is a movie version of the musical version of the movie Hairspray by John Waters, a man I grew up associating with dog shit and Divine. I begin to question my hold on reality when I can’t tell which stores are fake and which have always been there. That tells you as much about my neighbourhood as it does my powers of observation.
The Hairspray set, Dundas Street West just east of Roncesvalles Avenue.
In an attempt to reassert my knowledge of our fair city, I visited a couple exhibitions that concentrate on Toronto’s history. Consider it my way of fighting off the amnesia that comes with always searching out the new.
Mike Constable, Peace on Earth, 1981
Over at the Toronto Reference Library's TD Gallery, there’s a small but rewarding exhibition called Culture from the Ground Up on alternative culture in Toronto since the 60s. It’s assembled from the library’s own holdings and is, not surprisingly, paper heavy. Apart from the examples of small press publishing (like the accept-all-submissions Rochdale College newspaper, Coach House Books’ early publications and a selection of the hundreds of zines donated to the library by writer Hal Niedzviecki), the show is mostly posters and flyers. Everything from anti-war protests to cruise missile protests to disarmament protests are promoted and memorialized in silkscreen. Rallies against apartheid and for arts funding (among many other causes) gave a generation of grassroots designers the opportunity to sum up complex issues in unequivocal images, but artists such as Michael Snow and Harold Town also contributed in their own oblique way. Their work is included in a series of posters commissioned by Av Isaacs as a fundraising effort to fight the Spadina Expressway. Having grown up in Toronto, this exhibition is a nice little trip down memory lane, but it leaves me with a bitter taste as I realize that the same battles being fought today (peace, human rights, the survival of artists, etc.) have been going on for decades.
It’s enough to make me depressed so I make my way to the City of Toronto Archives to catch A Collected View: Ten Years of Photography Acquisitions 1995-2005. There I find a number of familiar names and likely suspects: photographers who straddle the disciplines of art and archive like Peter MacCallum, Vid Ingelevics, Robin Collyer and Geoffrey James. It’s great to see their work in this context, but I’m even more delighted to discover striking older images like Michel Lambeth’s documents of Toronto in the 50s and Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s portraits of Italian immigrants. Knowing that the city is including work by artists and not just photographers (don’t ask me to explain the difference) in their collection lifts my spirits. And then a visit to the viewing window of the Archive’s holdings vault (dubbed the “miles of files”) puts me in my place. There’s nothing like three stories of documents, as far as you can see, to make you feel mortal.
Speaking of mortality, I also found out that the Municipal Archives is conducting an on-site assessment at 105 Robinson Street (north of Queen, east of Trinity Bellwoods Park) that they’ve opened to the public most days between 3 and 7 pm. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re in the neighbourhood.
Robert Harris, Her Joy has Turned into Mourning, 1881, linocut on blue paper
My archive-fever is not yet sated so I visit Andrew Hunter’s To a Watery Grave at the University of Toronto Art Centre. He’s credited as the curator but really, there’s so much more going on here. Bringing together historical paintings, artefacts, contemporary art works and found objects that, in a variety of ways, address the malevolence of water, Hunter makes a visual essay about drowning. The topic seems to arise from personal fears and obsessions but, with his storyteller’s manner and theatrical exhibition strategies, Hunter exudes the persona of a yarn spinner.
I spent the afternoon piecing together the tragic tales of lives lost at sea. It is a sad exhibition (this is admitted in the curator’s statement), but one with an ambitious historical overview and an inclusive aesthetic sense. Hunter endears himself to me even more by attributing certain works to The Hunter Family, distancing himself from the role of creator while playing on the semantic value of his surname. By the time I leave, I don’t know who to trust anymore, but I comfort myself with the words of fellow mythmaker William S. Burroughs (quoting an even earlier source), “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, and The Globe and Mail. He is the media columnist for This Magazine, music editor at Broken Pencil and editor of Akimblog.
Toronto Reference Library/TD Gallery: http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/pro_trl_exhibits.jsp
Culture from the Ground Up continues until October 1.
City of Toronto Archives: http://www.toronto.ca/archives/index.htm
A Collected View: Ten Years of Photography Acquisitions 1995-2005 continues until September 16.
University of Toronto Art Centre: http://www.utoronto.ca/artcentre
To a Watery Grave continues until September 30.