10.15.09 kulturnatib

Art watched

My column last week ended with this paragraph, “In any case, they announce a switch: Art no longer the passive, pretty picture on the protected wall but the active pedestrian presence watching, measuring, judging the best and worst that we are or can be with the best or worst that we have or will produce, art and otherwise.”

So, the switch happened. Over the weekend, “ArtWatching,” more than a hundred paper cups with eyes from art works printed on paper and glued across their mouths and installed on traffic sign, traffic light posts and other public infrastructure like surveillance cameras, happened.

They watched, surveilled, listened, measured, judged. For the most part they were satisfied. They found they were, to some, like proper surveillance devices, invisible, they found interested strangers, but most satisfying of all, they found some friends; Hey, that's a Lichtenstein! That's gotta be the Mona Lisa! Warhol's Marilyn Monroe! Those eyebrows can only be Frida Kahlo! Goya? “Saturn Devouring His Son”? And so on.

For the most part what they saw was the normal run of things in a stretch of urban road in the capital, no less, of a major western country, Ottawa, Canada. It being a festival weekend, at least at this part of town, leading up to Thanksgiving Day on the Monday – not entirely the same celebration nor the same date as that of her southern neighbor though the historic impulse might be shared – and with the weather turning out to be a most agreeable in the closing days of Fall before yet another cold Winter, it was fun and merry.

People were out in droves, with children in backpacks, slings, prams, bicycles or otherwise trampling on foot. They sampled the sights, sounds, activity and, most of all though certainly not true for all, the merchandise. After all, this was the one day Giant Sidewalk Sale of shops that on regular days you would never catch a whiff of cheap from.

Yet, the GSS is simply the topping, of this extravagant annual Fall event called, as a whole, Cornucopia. If the picture of the harvest, the horn of plenty, is intentional and could be taken for shopping bags of goods to be loaded for or hoarded at home, the picture of a more insubstantial though every bit as substantive art that pervades the event is just as present though maybe not so immediately obvious.

This was especially true of the day's closing and main art event: Natural Disaster. A performance art event that promptly sold out to a packed audience of the art cognoscenti and those who could not tell spaghetti from panini artwise. Still, for both, there was the usual confounding or even confusing moments that performance art always brings on.

While way out of the range of “ArtWatching,” they knew about the event and were familiar with the history of performance art and the debates or discourses that accompanied the emergence of this art form or practice that continue to this date and to the foreseeable future. They would have been keen on it.

Still there was another part they also witnessed; mutilation, destruction, disrespect.

When we came around the following day to take down the cups some of them were gone – even some from a height that would have required a ladder or a Shaquille O'neal to get to --, some were missing the eyes, some had been crushed, ripped, discarded willynilly and not even given the decency of proper disposal in a nearby garbage bin.

Sad. But that's the life of art. Or, just life in general. You get all kinds. Even among the kind you think would know or do better.