Capital Culture- Part I
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.
