Public Art Inspiration from LA: Billboards-for-Art Project

Everyone seems to be swooning over a current public art project in Los Angeles that turns billboards over to various artists. And you know what? I'm going to join right in. Given the billboard-tax-for-art and illegal-signs debates ongoing in Toronto, this has some special resonance for Hogtown. The project is coordinated by the Mak Centre for Art and Architecture and features art by Brandon Lattu, Martha Rosler, Kori Newkirk and others. It looks like the project will continue through March.

Tip of the hat to Stanzie Tooth for the suggestion.

Image of Jennifer Bornstein's billboard from the Mak Center

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Beautiful City builds Billboard-tax-for-Art Momentum

Over the past few years, there's been a growing anti-billboard movement in Toronto. And one of the more interesting subgroups to come out of this is an initiative to use a new tax on billboards to fund public art and art education. The initiative comes up for City Hall approval very soon, November 30 and December 1, and the site BeautifulCity.ca is asking folks to sign a related petition, as well as call their councillors before the vote.

While I'm actually a fan of good, creative advertising and the work it gives creative people (what was the Sistine Chapel, after all, but one massive ad for the church?) the fact is that a lot of billboard ads are crappy, and that we need more money for art, especially art education and underserved communities. (Beautiful City also says that it could generate a 50%/$11 million increase in funding for city artists and arts institutions.) So I urge you to give the petition a look, as well as the related video below.

Beautifulcity.ca Town Hall - 1st Cut from BeautifulCity.ca on Vimeo.

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Tony Oursler dishes on art changes old and new

Toronto’s Luminato festival, launched in 2007, has often been met with skepticism in the contemporary art community. But this year the fest has tried to up its aesthetic credibility with the participation of prominent New York artist Tony Oursler. While the artist was setting up his public installations near Grange Park this week, I got to chat with him about last-minute and long-term changes in his projects. Here's an excerpt from the full chat published today at Canadianart.ca:

LS: A lot of your past work can be read as making private traumas semi-public in a gallery setting. Is moving into full-fledged public art an expansion of that practice?

TO: Well this is a voyeuristic situation so in a way it’s highlighted. It will become obvious at a certain point that this is an installation, but it’s also a private space that has a memory, and goes out into the public space. I like the idea that people have a kind of membrane that they have to choose to pierce in one way or another. That voyeuristic dynamic is important; to look in the window is to join into the piece. We’ll see how it works. It’s a new thing for me.

LS: What part is new to you?

TO: Well, there’s a lot. First of all, this house has a mosaic of flatscreens inside. So it’s not projected. It’s also completely three-dimensional too, where a lot of my previous stuff is more frontal or 180-degrees or whatever.

When I had a flatscreen TV around the studio I was thinking of how amazing they are, because they become almost architectural. Whereas TVs are more like furniture, flatscreens to me are almost like tile or bricks or something. They’re also about redesigning and redefining interior space.

So I kind of wanted to play with that. You look into the space and it becomes like a memory palace of things that have happened or that are happening in the space. We edit the characters from screen to screen so they can move around from side to side, and occasionally the whole house becomes one character. Then it breaks back up into other characters.

Image of Tony Oursler with his in-progress installation near Toronto's Grange Park from canadianart.ca

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Vicariously Enjoyed: The Greater NYC Smudge Cleanse

So I went to the Power Plant's symposium "We, Ourselves and Us" on Saturday. Generally the day of talks was meant to address ideas of collaboration and community in artmaking, with the Nina Montmann-curated exhibition "If We Can't Get it Together" serving as a jumping-off point.

There was lots to digest during the day, and I may do a mini-report for Canadian Art Online later this week. But the main highlight for me was Emily Roysdon's talk. It focused a lot on her own personal artwork as well as her longer-term collaborative publication LTTR, which stands for "Lesbians Tend to Read," among other things. But one of the works she highlighted that I really enjoyed was from artist Jeanine Oleson, who spent 4 days in Fall 2008 performing "The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse" meant to wipe out "classism, heterosexism, imperialism, election anxiety, gentrification, eco-destruction and greed" around the city.

For those who don't know, a smudge is a Native American ritual that uses smoke from a bound stick of sage to cleanse bodies, spirits and spaces. It's a ritual that's long since been appropriated by new agey types and other non-natives for use in healing ceremonies. So Oleson and her helpers basically made the world's largest smudge stick--it looks about 10 feet long--and carried it to four locations--the site of an oil spill in Greenpoint, say, or of the Stonewall riots, or Wall Street financial meltdown.

The images of this massive smudge stick and its tie-dyed purveyors are priceless--just the right mix of sincerity and absurdity. It really resonates for me because of my own past participation in smudges from native to new-agey contexts (thank you Ghost River Rediscovery), and how this optimistic, fruity--and actually much-needed act of symbolic cleansing--constrasts with the typical mindset of urban environments.

Also, the pics are 200% awesome examples of sexing the city in a queer feminist way--including a "Tarot for Tomorrow" booth! Yes!


All images from http://www.nycsmudge.com/ongoing/photos/ Credits: Marina Ancona, Khaela Maricich

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