Author: MK

Over at the excellent blog run by Zeke’s Gallery, there’s a link to an article about Toronto art collector and philanthropist, Ydessa Hendeles.

Hendeles’ collection is truly spectacular, and the shows at her exhibition space in Toronto are always essential viewing. She recently accepted an award for curatorial excellence, and delivered a speech to accept it that championed responsible art patronage and collecting that will have some longevity.

“The fickle art system has all the manipulative push and pull of immature lovers jockeying for position,” Hendeles declared in her speech. “It is a game of temporary winners and losers, but the gains and losses of today are momentary. What ultimately counts is the body of work over a lifetime, deposited into world memory – for the future.”

Spin the bottle. Grade Nine dances. Truth, Dare, Double Dare, Promise to Repeat. Questioning your judgement while the fellow you had \\such\\ a crush on last week grabs your bum during Stairway to Heaven is not a bad analogy to the awkwardness and desperate cool-hunting that sometimes goes on in the art world. Next to nothing is new and cool is highly subjective. I wish I could say artists weren’t guilty of fueling this fire, but unfortunately, it takes two to shuffle along to Led Zeppelin.

Hats off to all of you, wherever you are: collectors who seek things that mean something to them and don’t look purely for “hot names” or a return on investment; curators who believe in the shows they put together and would rather curate an unpopular/difficult/controversial work than plug in a safe choice; artists who stay true to their dialogue, work hard to figure out what their dialogue is, and for whom an MA or MFA is a renewal of vows rather than a bid for credibility.

I am getting a new passport. It’s a lot of work now, presumably because of 9/11, and the new Canadian passports have intricate new security features (holograms, invisible digital printing, ghosted photos, the works.) I have to submit nearly every piece of government-issued ID I have.

It seems I cannot do a simple errand without getting interested in the hows and whys of doing it, and so I started researching the history of passports. It raises an interesting point: passports were initially letters from a King, requesting safe passage for the bearer of the letter. This Canadian website states that the first known “passport” was a letter issued in ancient Persia in 450 B.C., while this British website claims the origins are unknown and cites one of the earliest existing passports (in the form that we know today) as being marked with the signature of King Charles I in 1641. The current Canadian passports still bear something of this heritage, and reflect our monarchistic tendencies: a letter from the Queen requests safe passage and protection for the owner of the passport.

Where did this idea of safe passage get lost? A passport seems to guarantee very little these days. I think we all know stories of friends who are hassled because they have been determined to look “suspicious” for some illogical reason, despite their valid passports.

Perhaps some clues lie in the important differentiation between holding a passport and holding citizenship that is made on the Canadian Passport Office website. On the site, the passport is stated to be simply a travel document that identifies the bearer.

It is easy to subconsciously equate a passport with citizenship, since it seems to imply citizenship. Of course, citizenship is a bigger issue that extends into personal histories and emotional ties. Canada’s borders have been much more stable than those of other countries, making citizenship for those born here relatively cut and dried. Poland, the place where my family comes from, has been wiped off the map and had several border revisions due to invading armies from both Russia and Germany. In fact, some of my relatives were born in what was technically considered Germany at the time, but of course consider themselves Polish. By moving to Canada as children, they hold Canadian passports and nothing else. How arbitrary is birthplace?

And how arbitrary are the disputes between nations for the people caught in the middle? The most interesting case of citizenship \\vis ˆ vis\\ passports has to be the situation of the “lost Russians” of Latvia. Russians who emigrated to Latvia during the Russian occupation, and that remain there ten years after Latvia obtained independence, are holders of so-called “alien passports”, that identify them simply as not citizens of Latvia. It is a move that is widely read to be a broad, discriminatory stroke, seeing as these individual Russians likely had very little to do with the machinations behind the occupation of Latvia. It becomes additionally disturbing when one notes that children born in Latvia to those holding “alien passports” are also not considered citizens of Latvia. However, emotions and citizenship are very tied up – with independence a scant decade ago, perhaps those holding the reins of power in Latvia are unwilling to admit that these Russians have now effectively become Latvians, or at least integrated into Latvian life. The fear of an old foe is great indeed.

What then, constitutes citizenship, and therefore the right to safe passage to other friendly countries under the name of your monarch or ruler?

My Dad is an airline pilot and is currently studying to become the pilot of a different airplane. He flew the Lockheed L-1011 for years, but is now moving to the Airbus 310.

The 310, he notes, is a radical departure from the L-1011. “There’s two sets of all the controls – the computerized version and the manual version.” This makes for a pretty packed cockpit. Why two versions of everything? The 310 was a transitional aircraft, later Airbus aircraft are more fully computerized. In this version, because safety is paramount, manual controls are able to override anything that the computer does, perhaps because the thinking was that a human is always smarter than a computer, and a pilot will be able to correct things that the computer does that are uneconomical or unwise.

I remember my Dad coming home from trips and proudly describing how he saved the company thousands of dollars in fuel by doing a little simple trignometry and understanding how to use the wind and weather to his advantage. He’s been flying for almost 40 years, and performing his job in a clever way is an endless puzzle that never ceases to interest him.

So I asked him, do all these new computerized airplanes take some of the art out of your job? Can you still do those kinds of creative things, you and your machine? With your knowledge of geography and math and physics are you still able to shave minutes off flight times, or save a few thousand pounds of jet fuel?

He said that he can, but as autopilot systems become more and more dominant, it becomes less likely that you would do so. I thought this was interesting – much like the difference between creating a dish with your knowledge of ingredients and culinary skill, and simply following a provided recipe.

This aircraft interests me because it is a transitional step between analog and digital. In a way, further automation appears to make the pilot’s job easier, but it also reduces creativity and ingenuity. The concrete-spewing robot I decribed in “Just Add Water” must be commanded by a human to create an object. If, for example, the builder robot was programmed with a few pre-fab templates for structures, it could function with just a little direction from a human, just as a computerized airplane can fly with just a little direction from a qualified pilot. But the real art lies in understanding your machine – either by asking the robot to create new and innovative structures, or commanding the airplane to take a different course for a shorter, more pleasant, or more efficient flight.

I think that virtuosity in commanding a machine is an art, and enabling defaults present in the machine is a craft.

The recent election of David Miller as Toronto’s mayor produced a bubble of hope and pride for the city, the likes of which I hadn’t witnessed in my seven years living there. Those who may usually be defined as politically apathetic (mostly due to lack of options on the ballot) became excited by the possibility of Miller in the Mayoral office, and all seemed genuinely inspired by Miller’s victory.

And where there’s a bubble, there’s people eager to prick it. So along comes John Sewell (a former mayor of Toronto), who recently wrote a scathing indictment of Toronto’s tentative plans to prepare a bid to host the World’s Fair in 2015.

At this point in the tale, I will note for those who do not know: I love Toronto and consider Toronto my home, but I currently reside in Montréal, a city that has many charms and that I am growing quite fond of. To ever compare the two is rather unfair, since the two are so different: and preferring one over the other can be akin to saying you love your son more than your daughter, but I digress.

And so, despite, or perhaps because of their intimate relationship as (I will dare to say it) the two most culturally and economically important places in Canada, and both “world class” cities in their own right (Torontonians will get the joke), I will indeed attempt to compare situations in the case of the hotly-disputed potential World’s Fair bid.

Sewell launches his attack by directly asserting that Miller is walking into a trap with the World’s Fair bid. He suggests that the bid, should it go through, will divert funds and attention from other important matters in Toronto, such as the state of the port lands, the homeless, children, affordable housing, public transportation, and other causes that David Miller appeared sensitve to upon election.

Sewell’s points are well-taken, however, I find that perhaps he is too keen to raise his pin to Miller’s bubble of hope for Toronto. To summarize my counter-argument, I have a two-word response: Expo 67.

Jean Drapeau, who was mayor of Montréal during the Expo years, was seen as both heroic and daft. Heroic, for overseeing the introduction of Montréal’s Métro (a four-line subway system), Place Des Arts, the 1976 Olympics, and Expo 67. Daft, for the price tag attached to these items.

But make no mistake, these things changed the face of Montréal for the better, and certainly put it on the world map. Expo 67, in particular, raised Montréal’s proflle globally and remains a source of pride here. No one would deny that Expo was more than just an event, it was a massive undertaking. To go into the many virtues of Expo 67 here would also be a massive undertaking – instead, I suggest you indulge in a bit of Expo nostalgia at this excellent website.

The Métro was extended to go to the fair grounds, and the fair grounds themselves are still being actively used today. The grounds currently host the Biodome, La Ronde (an amusement park) and, a little further away but on the same man-made island, Montréal’s Casino.

There’s little doubt that Drapeau was a visionary. These events did spawn “colossal infrastructure binge”, as Sewell might describe it, and you can insert your own cheap shot at the Olympic Stadium here, but the fact remains that these events drew scores of first-time visitors to the city, raised civic pride, and proved that, when planned correctly, large-scale events can leave behind infrastructure than enhances rather than detracts from a city.

Perhaps Sewell doesn’t trust Miller and the current Council to plan correctly. He does, however, worry that this will unjustly tax the minds of the elites in Toronto, distracting them from other issues. Might I suggest that an undertaking of this size \\should\\ occupy the minds of Toronto’s elite – to ensure that the project is a success and leaves a legacy that adds to city life.

So for the first time, and I hope it may be the last time, I suggest that Toronto (and perhaps English Canada in general) take a page from Montréal’s book. You don’t need to sacrifice social services and other essential things that make a city liveable because you have a World’s Fair. Perhaps the climate in Toronto is not right to support all of this at once – it it true that Québécers pay higher taxes. But I have heard no grumbling about the taxes here, because quality of life is paramount. Culture and large-scale events do not need to come at the cost of essential social services. To suggest that it must is a bogus argument, as I’m currently residing in the centre of living proof that it needn’t be so.

To achieve an undertaking such as Expo, while simultaneously paying due attention to more quotidian but pressing issues, would truly affirm Toronto’s world class status. If anyone is up to the task, is it not Miller and his team?