Wow. I can’t believe how fast October is flying by. Fall has been just perfect this year and there are so many great things happening that are worth doing and sharing. But first I’m going to follow in the footsteps of my predecessor and introduce both myself as well as my good intentions for the next six months….
My name is Megan Bertagnolli and the short biography about me on the Writer in Residence page states that I am a writer, but I consider myself to be much more of an educator. What I enjoy is connecting people to new ideas in ways that are both engaging and meaningful to them. I strive to do this by creating a space for dialogue in the talks I give, the programming develop, and the curatorial projects in which I am involved. Having recently graduated with a Masters in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture, my approach to these different roles is informed by my art historical background, rather than being rooted in art education or practice. As such, one of my principal endeavours during this residency is to engage with readings about critical museum pedagogy and practice, and to investigate how different people use and make sense of visual culture. I’m also curious about the perceptions or beliefs that circulate about what art is or what art has the capacity to be or do.
One of the reasons I’ve been so busy this month comes as a result of Alberta Eugenics Awareness Week and my participation in the Collective Memory Project: Responses to Eugenics in Alberta. Spearheaded by former Writer in Residence Anne Pasek, the entire project consisted of a series of public discussions about the history of eugenics in Canada and open studio where people had the opportunity to make art work responding to that history. This project will be punctuated by an exhibition of both historical documents and artworks that attempts to make eugenic “histories and ideologies visible.” Furthermore, it gives agency to communities and voices not often seen or heard.
The term “eugenics” comes from the Greek for “well-born.” Broadly speaking, however, eugenics encompasses the policies, practices and attitudes that both promote and discourage certain characteristics or socio-cultural groups. Examples include everything from the classification, segregation and sterilization of the “unfit” (those with disabilities, mental health issues, labeled sexually deviant, or from particular racial groups) as well as modern genetic testing, prenatal screening and the rise of designer babies. Often associated with the extreme example of Nazi Germany, Canada’s own involvement includes Residential Schools and Provincial Training Schools which sought to address “the Indian problem” and “the feeble-minded threat” respectively.
This week (October 15-23) is Alberta Eugenics Awareness Week talks, films and performances relating to this history of eugenics in Alberta. Opening on the 23rd in the Extension Gallery at Enterprise Square (10230 Jasper Ave) will be the exhibition component of the Collective Memory Project, which includes an interactive component that invites visitors to actively engage with the themes and ideas being presented by contributing their own stories and reflections to the eugenics tree. While the reception will be this Sunday from 2-4 pm, the exhibition runs until the 23rd of November.
It’s a dirty little secret that we’ve been trying to cover up for hundreds of years now, but maybe it’s not to our benefit to keep in this one closet any longer.
The question of immaterial labour has haunted the identity of the artist ever since Velázquez campaigned to elevate art above craft. The production of illusory or conceptual work seems at odds with any embodied toil in the processes of its creation. There are rarely invoices, timesheets or job tickets for artists to quantify or account for their work. Rather, they are assumed to create, but not to labour.
The gains of this deception are of questionable worth. Freed from an association with labour, artists presumably enjoy greater social standing and mystique. And yet, what once was an asset in aristocratic society has become an impairment in today’s capitalist economy. Distanced from toil and material work, artists stand uncomfortably in contrast to the premium on productivity levied at other vocations.
This seems to be a point made again and again by Kelly Mark, an artist that continually positions herself as an art worker rather than what we might imagine an artist to be.
In & Out (1997 ongoing until 2032) consists of the continuing accumulation and display of punch cards documenting all the hours spent by the artist in her studio. It is owned by a private collector, who pays a yearly stipend for the continuation of Mark’s work (and, in a way, Mark’s own studio practice), thereby becoming her “shitty boss”. The multitude of cards, which measure and visualize the time spent in labour, forefront the activity of art making as a form of toil, sustained and extracted hour by hour.
Likewise, Working Hardly Working (2009) teases out this play of expectations, pitting the difficulty of maintaining a practice of work against the presumed sloth of artists such as Bruce Nauman, whose pieces present more mystique than product and are far distanced from manual craft undertaken by the artist’s own hand.
It is interesting to consider what could be at stake in conceiving of art as labour, whether material or otherwise. Different forms of valuing are won and lost in this paradigm shift. Instead of status, the artist gains legitimacy; instead of heroization, the artist is awarded wages (Mark, for instance, has successfully renegotiated artist fees to work for the minimum wage rather than the CARFAC standard, and come out ahead). Arguably, in turn, this new understanding of art work stands to dignify the profession, albeit on the terms of productive economy rather than through the value of art in and of itself.
And yet, this does not precisely address the nature of the kind of work artists engage in. While Mark’s studio time is on the clock, this measure of her labour does not explain the character of her time spent at work. Rather than the alienated toil of a factory worker, the labour of an artist is more strongly immaterial and relational than industrial work. Despite hinging around a material object, the purpose of much of art today lies in its emotional and conceptual affects.
This opens up an entirely different understanding of work and of toil, one that might be aligned with Michael Hardt’s idea of immaterial labour. Reworking Marxism for the 21st century, Hardt sketches out a working class based out of offices and institutions rather than factories, engaged in the exchange of services and information instead of material commodities. This post-industrial work not only contains the potential to be very exploitative (imagine the emotional wear on the call centre worker or health care provider), it also has become an increasingly invasive organizational system as the work day creeps outwards from 9-5 into a cascading string of second jobs, weekend projects and evening events.
Art making, understood in this context, can also appear quite exploitative. The lack of boundaries between work and life, the incredibly low rate of pay per hours worked and the unequal relation between the artist and the public are all challenges that can weigh particularly heavily on art makers. It can be a thankless, oppressive job when things are going poorly.
This is not to say, however, that artists and other immaterial workers are purely exploited. Hardt makes the case that those who we might see as victims are also powerful agents in many respects, endowed with unique capabilities that emerge out of their skills as post-industrial labourers. Much of this kind of work, be it the creation of affects or the organization of systems, essentially outfits these workers with the tools to create new social relations and political arrangements. Between artists, teachers, nurses and clerks lies the ability to form new societies, if creatively and collectively applied. In this space of possibilities, perhaps there is even the potential to form more truly democratic relations.
We might therefore say that art is work- work with the dual potential to empower or oppress its maker. Still, that definition excludes the attraction towards art making that many experience which seems to extend beyond a rational calculation of capital.
To fully account for the pleasure of art making, one can turn to Peter Kropotkin’s notion of the need for luxury.
Kropotkin, “The Prince of Anarchism”, makes an important intervention into the usual Marxist rhetoric on labour. His anarchistic vision for work does not glorify toil, but instead seeks to completely minimize drudgery through the intelligent application of engineering technologies and a radical rethinking of consumer waste. Living on little means sacrificing less in labour, freeing time for individually driven pursuits and desires. Moreover, rather than abolishing luxury goods as bourgeois vices, Kropotkin claims that they still constitute vital human desires for ornament, beauty and leisure. For Kropotkin, this may have included his beard, which we must confess is quite luxurious and pleasing.
Art seems easy enough to situate in this context. As a common luxury good, or as affective leisure, artworks are not to be reduced to ideological tools or status objects. What’s more, the drive to make art is theorized on the level of the individual, presenting art as a vocation more than another job. Art making, like all immaterial labour in Kropotkin’s social arrangements, is a calling and an individual passion. The manual drudgery and affective demands that comes with the job are costs paid gladly for the pleasure that comes from the creation and community of art work- and perhaps the power of agency that comes in turn with its immaterial labour.
Seeing art as work, then, is to conceive of an artistic practice with conscious consideration to the nature and cost of its labour. Forefronting art as work may form the first step towards improving the conditions of this labour and exploring the potential that it offers as a common luxury and political resource.
However, as is the seeming nature of all labour today, my work here is hardly done. I’d like to open up the conversation about work and art to Latitude’s online and tangible communities. How are art and work divided in your experiences, and what may be at stake in recognizing art as labour? Please feel free to leave your comments below, or, alternatively, come by the gallery next Wednesday night for October 5th’s Theory for Dinner. We’ll be looking at a short chapter by Kropotkin and a talk by Hardt, which I promise will be more leisure than toil.
Confession Time: For many years I thought performance art was kind of silly.
I know I wasn’t alone in thinking that. Of all the art forms out there, performance seems to be consistently taken the least seriously. Trying to account for why this is the case invites several explanations.
Maybe it’s because performance art is not contextualized or taught in school and many galleries. There’s very little frame of reference to grab onto; it’s not quite theatre, not quite dance, not quite visual art. Either way, performance often seems quite inaccessible and baffling to outsiders. Failing to fit into any categorical or contextual nook, it seems easy enough to laugh it off. This is one obstacle of many, to be sure, but the antidote to this particular problem is easily enough found in an appeal to time and greater exposure.
Another challenge might be the relational dynamics of performance. As a spectator, performance art forces you to be uncomfortably present. The distant contemplation we normally enjoy with art objects is denied and the performer has the startling agency to address and provoke their audience directly. Very little else prepares us for such conditions, and yet, I think this relational aspect is easy enough to overcome, particularly in the hands of a skilled performer attentive to the mood of their audience. Eventually this dynamic becomes something you crave as a spectator; surrendering your control and complacency reaps unexpected rewards.
A larger block in many people’s minds seems to be the very authority by which artists perform. Actors and painters have laboured at length to win this societal trust, and it seems to be predicated on the guarantee that an artist will assume the role of an expressive truth-teller. Something very interesting seems to shift in this pact when the artist takes on the role of performer. Several unanswered questions beg resolution. What contrivances legitimate the performer, and what kinds of guises do they have the legitimacy to assume? What is so aberrant about the idea of performing in our incredibly self-conscious culture?
Of course, I wasn’t quite phrasing it like that at the age of seventeen. I was a little more sceptical and a little less scholarly.
My first exposure to performance art was Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. It’s a simple enough idea: Ono sit passively on stage while her audience is directed to approach the performer and cut pieces of clothing off her body. It continues until she is vulnerably exposed.
Inviting the audience to slowly and collectively disrobe her, Ono seemed to be making a point about gendered and racialized power. I, however, immediately thought that it was ridiculous. I couldn’t reconcile this point with her methods. There seemed to be a disconnect between Ono’s performative identity and the identity I assumed she normally inhabited.
Performance, I figured, was anything but passive. It takes a huge amount of audacity to place oneself in the mercy of a crowd, and Ono didn’t seem to lack that bravado. Therefore it appeared that her performance as passive was entirely inauthentic to her character, robbing her performance of the legitimacy that comes from showcasing one’s experiences and self. Suggesting that women were disempowered was one thing, but contriving to theatrically adopt that posture in an experimental space seemed to me to be bad science. She looked to be performing something that she wasn’t, something falsified, as if speaking for another person. This was, of course, a dangerous and ignorant assumption on my part, but it presented a problem that haunted my attitude towards performance art for many years.
It’s a pretty common reaction that when faced with abnormal or inexplicable acts (particularly embodied ones) to try and dismiss these actions as contrived (not authentically reflecting the self) or deviant (reflecting a twisted self). So much of our outlook towards art relies upon this invocation of ‘the authentic self’ that it’s no surprise that performance can tangle these expectations into an uncomfortable knot. It’s difficult to unravel the performer’s off-stage presentation from the many valences of identity that they bring into their work; from the assumption of an atypical character, to the unusual and disruptive actions performed, to the confrontational presence of the body and its naked physicality. Performance disturbs the self as an essentialist object that is brought into visibility through art. Performance rather seems to suggest the self as hidden under layers of different guises, or perhaps most scandalously, alluding to the fact that there’s never been an authentic self after all.
It is at this interesting juncture that performance art seems to suggest the performativity of identities- a notion that can be traced back to the theories of Judith Butler. Written in the heyday of identity politics, when oppressed groups were looking to the proclamation of their own essential and shared identity, Butler’s theory of performativity threatened this quest for solidarity based on a common interior sense of being a woman, being black, or being a sexual minority.
Butler spins the idea of authenticity on its head by claiming that gender is not something that we are, but rather something that we do. Her big thesis is the idea of gender performativity, which suggests that there is no authentic interior experience of gender, but rather a series of affectations produced and regulated through how gender is performed. My identity and understanding of femininity, she would argue, stems from the gendered presentations and acts I have seen and enacted- internalized from the exterior rather that stemming from the interior. What is means to be a woman, therefore, is ultimately shaped by acts in a disciplinary matrix rather than some instinct buried in my second X chromosome. Gender also becomes a space for performative resistance, sexual agency, and creative experimentation in this understanding.
But I don’t think it necessarily ends with gender. Maybe all our gestures, relations and actions- in short ‘being’ itself- can best be described as performative, making the question of authenticity a moot point altogether. If all of our actions are performed, rather than authentically expressed, then performance artists are merely modifying the usual script rather than failing to actualize ‘true expression.’
Extrapolated back to Yoko Ono, it seems clear that I’ve done her a disservice in my initial reading of Cut Piece. Attempting to fix her identity as an artist and as a performer in categories of authenticity seems to be an action that I not only lack authority to do, but is also predicated on a model and demand for an expressive self that is increasingly called into question. If Ono performs her gender, race, or any other myriad of intersectional identities in a different way during performance than in other contexts it would still be immensely problematic to privilege the ontology of one performance over another. One may seem like a contrivance, but so are all the others when you get down to it. To reappropriate some Shakespeare, “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
So that’s the sordid tale of my ongoing relationship with performance art. Loosing my belief in authenticity seemed to be the key to letting performance into my heart, and I have to say that I’m much better off for having done so. I look forward to Visualeyez’s launch tomorrow with great anticipation. I hope that you’ll join me in the all too rare experience of witnessing performance first hand, and maybe even rethinking the meaning of performance altogether.
Theory for Dinner with writer-in-residence Anne Pasek: September 7th at 7:00 PM
Discuss Marxist scholar Guy Debord’s The Society of Spectacle and its series of statements about contemporary life is the textual focus of the series’ upcoming chapter. Pot luck dinner.
“ 1. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived is now merely represented in the distance.
…
4. The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”
As some of you may know, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle was selected as the reading for Wednesday’s Theory for Dinner- a monthly exchange of food and ideas hosted at Latitude 53. Revisiting this text in preparation for this gathering has brought a few questions forward when considering what, precisely, we are to make of Guy Debord today.
While The Society of the Spectacle is a little longer than the ideal Theory for Dinner text, it’s easy enough to break it down into bite-sized pieces. Debord writes in point form, pumping out pithy statements, each of which can be chewed-over in their own right. Don’t worry if you can’t get all the way through Debord’s short book for Wednesday- just find a few ideas that make your head spin. The first chapter is particularly good in this regard.
Garage sales are always a peculiar form of display. Public and private spaces mingle, collections are unwittingly catalogued and assembled, and precious keepsakes made negotiable. Consumer goods are brought back full circle to a storefront of sorts, though they are devalued, worn, and unwanted. Garage sales offer liberation from accumulation to the vendor, and almost free consumption to the buyer. It is little wonder, then, that this format should provide so fruitful a space for artists and curators to build narratives about memory and value. For this realization we have to thank the fast & dirty Collective, the organizers and artists behind last weekend’s Garage Show.
Garage Show combined the works of Adriean Koleric, Robert Harpin and Emily Soder-Duncan in-between two garages. Rob and Adrien’s work seemed to happily interbreed in the first space, while Emily enter into a dialogue moreso with her garage a few doors down. As per fast & dirty’s ethos, this arrangement was temporary, rough around the edges, and far outside the hygienic habitus of the white cube gallery. The show was up for two days, during which hotdogs were tailgated, prices were haggled over, and strangers mingled in art critiques. There was an invigorating kind of excitement in the air; risks were taken and rewarded.
Diving back into our (un)biased comparative analysis of Washington DC and Ottawa, I present to you the second and final chapter. Whose self-presentation reveals a mightier political identity and more progressive national values? Answering such a question requires that we first look at….
4) Representation of Leadership
I’m reminded of something Naomi Klein recently suggested, that, “we aren’t taught the history of social movements- we’re taught the history of great men.” This is very much the case on the National Mall, where Lincoln, Jefferson and FDR are all encapsulated in their separate, walled enclosures where they alone are credited with turning the course of history. Depressingly, the only memorials for collective action are those of war.
Canada at first seems to follow this model. Most of the statues placed around Parliament Hill are of dead white politicians, elevated and stern in expression. However, I think this reading is subverted somewhat by the circumambulatory positioning of all the statues facing the back of the Hill. Rather than presiding over their own mausoleum to history, Canada’s statues of great men seem to be moving collectively towards the central block of Parliament, entering into a larger structure of democratic government. I like that the statues stand together rather than apart and seem to invite acknowledgement instead of idealization.
Points: A half point to Canada, since I’m not entirely sure this alignment was intentional.
USA 0 Canada 2
5) Civic Design
Washington D.C. is and always has been a bureaucrat’s town. It was built from the ground up with the express purpose of serving as the nation’s capital and as such it bears the hygienic traces of being a planned city. Ordered into quadrants in relation to the Capital Building and neatly labelled alphanumerically, the streets of DC would seem to create a rational space equal to the mathematical elegance of the city’s Neoclassical style. Instead, this veneer of order disguises deep-seated inequalities and wilful blindness toward the elements that resist the ideal. A banal example is the absence of a J street, presumably because the civic designer couldn’t come up with a namesake for that letter.
A more serious issue is the disenfranchisement of DC’s citizens. Officially belonging to no state, residents of DC cannot vote equally in elections and have limited civic funding resources for municipal projects. Compound these issues with high poverty rates in the inner city that are largely divided across racial lines and you can find a lot of frustration brewing in the seat of the nation. Many DC license plates come with the slogan “No Taxation Without Representation” and the city is full of advocacy groups fiercely trying to enact change. However, this doesn’t seem to be a high priority to the government workers who commute from suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. It’s certainly not a side of DC that’s made immediately visible to tourists.
At the same time, these pockets of resistance to the outward order of the city provide a space for unique cultures to grow and dissenting perspectives to be expressed. The city’s non-profit organizations are fully engaged in their communities and I found living on the cusp of the inner city to be a rewarding and enjoyable experience. They also have a vegan bakery there. That counts for a lot.
Ottawa, in contrast, grew organically around the trade highway of the Ottawa river. Originally a timber town, it was designated by the Queen as the capital of the Province of Canada in 1857 due to its proximity to both English and French Canada (and its distance from the American border). Today it’s the top city in Canada in terms of quality of life, it’s fully 1/3 bilingual, and increasingly bike friendly. The winding path of the canals makes for excellent park space, niche cafes, and promenades. It’s not the most straightforward city to navigate, but its surprises are generally good ones.
Points: A point to America for making the best out of a bad situation. A point to Canada for being generally pleasant.
USA 1 Canada 3
6) Care of Wayward Kitties
I don’t recall seeing a single animal out on the National Mall, not even a leashed dog. At Parliament Hill, however, I could catch glimpses of cats darting in and out of the bushes by the river, looking generally devious and resting at the feet of monuments. This is because there’s a Parliament-shaped cat sanctuary where strays can find food and shelter. Not only is this both awesome and novel, I think it’s just as effective as monumental architecture and commemorative statues in presenting our values as a nation. I see, in our regard for the welfare of lost kittens, a comparable commitment to supporting immigration and providing a social safety net for all Canadians. Canada, we are those wayward kitties and I think that’s pretty swell.
Points: Kitties!
USA 1 Canada 4
Conclusions
Holding the experience of Ottawa and DC up in contrast with one another illuminates two distinct attitudes and self-presentations. Neither is entirely coherent, but it would seem that the United States generally has a more idealistic vision of history and its actors, and has a certain agenda to impress its visitors through scale and polish. Canada, conversely, makes space for multiple narratives of history while holding our identity as negotiable rather than enshrined. We could do more in our actions and self-representations to achieve a more equitable and democratic society, but at least we take the perpetual comfort that we aren’t quite American yet.
At this point I’ve realized that all this patriotic chest thumping runs contrary to the paradoxical Canadian ideal of being proudly humble. And yet, I must confess, I am secretly very smug.
One of the oldest methodological strategies in art history has been comparative analysis. You probably remember being in a dark stuffy classroom at one point in your life, under the auspices of a professor armed with a lectern and two duelling slide projectors. Chances are this fed into the exams you had to take. “Compare and contrast slide A vs. slide B” or something like that. It can be a very powerful tool for teasing out contextual, formal and symbolic difference that might otherwise be occluded by looking solely at a singular image. What I have in mind for this piece, however, is a little more irreverent.
You see, sometimes these contrasts are presented to us skillfully by curators and scholars attempting to make you think. Other times we stumble into illuminating parallels by chance, perhaps when free associating by Google image search, or maybe even the chance configuration of a newspaper. In my case I can’t claim to be so dispassionate. I spent last summer working in Washington D.C., which begs comparison with our own capital Ottawa in an antagonistically-minded trilingual “mano-a-main-a-fisticuff” showdown. I’m interested in testing how the visual and cultural landscapes of these respective capitals might illuminate our distinct values and histories. Oh, and there are certainly bragging rights to be earned.
Points will be tallied, barbs will be exchanged, and feelings may possibly be hurt in this two-part competition of capital cities. Whose national architecture, visual culture and iconography will rein supreme? I have developed six (un)highly calibrated and (non)objective tests to determine the victor.
You know what this Wednesday night is? Theory for Dinner Time. Any last minute cramers can find our processional hymn, Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces”, here.
Unlike the seminar room, drinking is somewhat encouraged. Bring tasty snacks, libations, and an appetite for discussion. It’s far better to come with questions rather than answers, so please don’t be discouraged by any linguistic trickery on Foucault’s part. He’s a pretty likeable guy once you get to know him, I promise.
Merriment starts at 7pm and the philosophizing begins more so around 7:30, so the court finds your lateness quite tolerable.
I hope to see your faces and get to know you better!
The past week I’ve been talking with Edmontonians about their willingness to visit and participate in what we might call the city’s major cultural institutions such as the Winspear Centre, the Art Gallery of Alberta, and the Citadel Theatre. The quotes above are a few of the answers I’ve received. They seem somewhat innocuous in a point of time where visitor numbers are high. It’s clear, however, that while attendance may be up, inclusivity and broad community access remain elusive.
To a certain extent, this is the same old song and dance. Institutional critiques have long been a motivating factor for changing curatorial strategies, museum stewardship, and the ethical commitments of arts organizations to the communities around them. Fred Wilson suggested that the histories and narratives of oppressed peoples were problematically excluded from the presentation of high art and cultural artifacts when he juxtaposed slave chains with plantation silverware. The Situationist International suggested that institutions were problematically removed from their communities by proposing to blast a holes in museum walls and build labyrinths inside. HansHaacke suggested that galleries were not the neutral custodians of art that they presumed to be by exposing the politics and business interests of the immensely influential but often invisible board of directors as the subject of his art.
All these points are well taken, and should be taken further. However, even if we manage to get the content of cultural institutional right, there remains a larger problem, which is simply getting everyone through the door. Patronage to these places is overwhelmingly correlated with membership to middle to upper economic, educational and social status groups. Why is this the case?
There are many answers, and many responses. Firstly, the monetary cost of admission is certainly a factor, though there are now ways to get around this barrier. You can get tickets to the symphony for $20, the Citadel does rush seating, and the AGA has free access nights. Secondly, the content of these institutions might be seen as being abstruse, but this is also changing. Despite the complaints of cultural purists, the orchestra’s playing Disney, the art gallery’s exhibited Warner Brothers cartoons, and the theatre’s showing The Sound of Music. It’s hard to find a program without something that might be seen as a populist gesture. Thirdly, and supposedly, it’s not even the architecture anymore. The classical temples, opaque and poised upon stone pedestals apart from the bustle of the street, have been replaced with glass walls, public atriums, and assorted shops and cafes in an attempt to serve the public as purveyors of both high culture and low consumption. As sociologist Nick Prior suggests, you can have one’s Tate and eat (in) it too.
And yet, if my conversations on the street are anything to go by, something is left out of this account- something less easily quantifiable and more in the realm of subconscious impressions. Something, I think, that might be better explained by an appeal to the aesthetic experience of cultural capital.
By this, I don’t mean cultural capital in the same sense that Edmonton was Canada’s Cultural Capital of 2007, though that vague designation was pleasing. This kind of capital, as developed by Pierre Bordieu, is a kind of personal commodity just like economic capital. We ‘buy’ our admission into cultural institutions and the comfort we experience therein through the capital we inherit from our parents and nurture in our education. We can trade this capital for social prestige and economic advancement (which gives a whole other spin on philanthropy and wage-work in the arts sector). It’s the subtle ownership we experience or lack in our dealings with culture, and it varies between institutions and people. It’s the difference between ignoring a security guard and feeling scrutinized by his gaze. It’s the facility to which you feel involved in a community instead of nervously visiting. Cultural capital, I would suggest, is what needs to be audited in our institutions if we are to account for the failure of inclusivity.
So how are our institutions doing? To pick on the shiniest elephant in the room, the AGA has some real problems. Rather than conveying a sense of openness and inspiring futurity as promised, Randal Stout’s architecture seems to suggest most predominantly an aesthetic of hygiene. The steel and glass of the building seem hostile to the bodies of its visitors, showcasing the smudges of fingers and the clamour of footsteps somewhat accusingly. Ever present security and a lack of seating discourages visitors from lingering too long, while the absence of participatory art displays breed passivity and disengagement in those without the educational foundations in visual literacy. The comfortable dinginess of the Enterprise Square location is sorely missed.
More problematically, I would suggest, is the management of event spaces in the gallery. I am incredibly annoyed when I interrupt wedding photos by simply I climbing the public staircase, and I feel like an intruder when I open the doors to the building and am immediately greeted by a roped-off corporate function. The fracture of public and private space makes the AGA an exclusive rather than inclusive venue and raises the cultural capital requirements immensely. It would seem that the gallery’s contract with Compass Group has effectively stifled the promise of the New Vision campaign to transform the AGA into a public meeting place. You can meet there, but only for a very premium fee.
But the AGA isn’t the only culprit here. The Winspear Centre locks up during the day, stopping countless curious pedestrians at doors they can peer through but not enter. Even Latitude 53, ostensibly a community-centric organization, can be off-putting when it hosts fashion events and stylish fundraisers for its ever-trendy hipster audience. Almost everywhere, the graffiti of the philanthropic class is widespread phenomena. It seems somewhat at odds to think of it as My Winspear when Enmax, Telus and many affluent individuals have their names on the wall or on my seat. Likewise, it’s youraga but it’s Ledcor’s theatre and Ernest J. Poole’s gallery. Finally, rigid dress codes, disengaged staff, and the absence of queer, immigrant and aboriginal voices on administrative teams are pervasive and surefire ways to make an unwelcoming experience at any institution. All these factors raise the cultural capital required to enter these spaces comfortably. They present very real barriers to institutional accessibility that need to be addressed in tandem with economic and programming concerns.
At the same time, I don’t want to naively declare that these problems are easily or completely fixable. Many of the factors that contribute to cultural capital come from funding demands, which are only likely to intensify in the coming years. You can’t ask for something out of nothing, least of all in the arts, and it’s a fine line of balancing different capital requirements to satisfy as many people from as diverse backgrounds as possible.
One space where I see some encouragement- one institution where cultural capital requirements are remarkably low- is the public library. The EPL does a fabulous job providing content and programs for hugely varied groups of people in an environment that is both welcoming and inclusive. The interiors are warm and homey instead of cold and sanitized, and patrons have an opportunity to effectively curate the content they interact with. I think some interesting things might happen if we began to think of our institutions as cultural libraries rather than museums.
At the very least, we should endeavour to bring the wider community into our cultural spaces, rather than forming communities out of the few that make it through the door.
