04.23.09 kulturnatib

Culture and chance

Many governments who find that taxes are not a popular thing, especially governments with leaders who treat the tax coffers as if it were their personal piggy banks, find other ways to pry money from the hands of passively unwilling or actively resistant citizens.

The most trod avenue is the highway to the casino, or some form of either state managed or state sanctioned game of chance.

Even the church, normally the most vocal against this most addictive of sins, is not above dipping its holy hands into gambling revenues or not being too particular about the provenance of such money when some is thrown its way.

It's for some good, they say; government, church and, naturally, the gamblers themselves.

What that good is varies widely though they usually reflect the socio-economic priorities or realities of a particular government or country.

Thus, in our country, most of the money from legal gambling goes to disaster relief or emergency aid, health support and, not very prominently acknowledged, political projects of the President although even disaster relief and health support is often positioned to become political 'pogi' points for the administration in power.

Here, the most prominent positive face of gambling is cultural support, through Loto-Québec's various cultural support programs.

Ten years after its establishment in 1969 – 178 years after legalized gambling was established in the Philippines – Loto-Québec, after much deliberation and determination by the directors, decided to adopt the vision of supporting contemporary Québec art as part of its mission, importantly earmarking 1/100th of 1% of gross sales for art acquisitions.

Thirty years later, this collection has blossomed into over 4,000 works by more than 1,000 artists from all over Québec, representing one of the biggest and most diverse corporate art collections in Canada. 50 of these are currently being toured all over the province.

We caught this exhibit entitled, 'Nomade,' at its first stop here at the Galerie Montcalm of the city hall of Gatineau City.

As expected, the works were uniformly excellent in a variety of media and genres. Expectedly, too, for a traveling exhibit, they were mostly wall works of easily transportable sizes.

Of these what caught my attention was a figurative abstract in acrylic on shaped canvas by Kittie Bruneau. It wasn't the work itself, although this was mostly in eye-riveting bright reds, yellows and oranges, but the title.

Here is one of art's deep mysteries; the titling of a work, “Untitled.” Yet, in this case, the artist wasn't content to simply leave it at that, appending, though parenthetically, the name of a place that as far as I know can only be in the Philippines: Tondo.

The accompanying text to the work did not throw light into why this work was titled such. I was left with searching, though reluctantly yet unavoidably, into visual clues that could tie the work with the title suspecting at the same time that this could not, in all likelihood, be the intention of the artist.

Still, it got me thinking about the strange serendipities or coincidences of chance that a work probably inspired by what is certainly not the most picturesque of places in the Philippines ends up in the art collection of a corporation that traffics in chance thousands of kilometers away with a mandate that is a world of difference in how the smile of lady luck gets to be appreciated.