PLACE

I live in and work in Toronto, a medium size, medium wealthy, medium security city that is home to several million people spread out over a few hundred square miles on the coast of Lake Ontario. The pressures of increasing population have driven the price of real estate so high that development has sprawled out onto the lake itself. Long fingers of lakefill, busted up chunks of earlier incarnations of the city, now allow for new buildings where there was once only fish and water. Sound familiar?

Toronto and its shoreline are near to being in the middle of North America (in all senses of the word) and whereas I have been known to kick about Toronto and the sticks around it, I have to admit that it's my home only by circumstance and not particularly by choice.

What I want to say is that I live in a regional town, one of many, could be better, could be worse.

I have not traveled as much as I would have liked. Things interfere -- money's scarce these days. I can't comment on other places but I'll bet it's the same where ever you go -- just people living in places they one morning find themselves in. It's not as if we particularly know where we are, I mean you can't claim to know a place just because it's familiar, because you can find your way around, not really. Really knowing a place takes on a kind of horrid objectivity -- I digress. The reason I'm going on about sense of place is that it is becoming such a pervasive idea. The sense of place in general seems to have changed in my lifetime -- forty-one years -- from being general to being specific. When I say 'in general' I mean that there used to be this universal notion of place: I live in Canada as opposed to something more specific. They say now that more and more people define themselves more precisely: I live in Toronto for example -- even the notion of being an Ontarian is too much for me -- I'm not the same as people up north. They are different, and proud of it, and this difference is a compound of practices. The aggregate of things that people do in the place that they do them is called culture and while for most people this is an unusual use of the term, it's time we recognize that the old, familiar idea of culture is distorted.

Somewhere along the imaginary line of history culture became something special as opposed to something ordinary. It became something that select and talented individuals were called away to practice someplace else. The majority of us, even if we hated it, worked to support the rarefied pursuits of the chosen few. You know the routine: art almost has to be bewildering to be of any good and if it is any good it must absolutely be useless. If it's useful, it's something other-than-art, arguments about craft aside. It seems ridiculous to me but some other people still think that art can be dislocated from its place, its culture. There used to be a kind of cultural hierarchy starting at the centre and radiating out to the hinterlands, or the provinces, or whatever and if you lived in the centre it was deemed the best and if you didn't it was, and you were, deemed parochial, or worse, charming -- inconsequential. This specific sense of place I mentioned is a new sense of regional -- a sense of the regional as distinct, and distinct with its own culture and culture practices, and this includes a sense of there being no centre, or at least of there being centres all over the place, and you know where that leads because once the sense of radiant authority is known to be relative it is really dead in the water because relative authority can, and will, be supplanted as opportunity or the need of the moment requires.

There used to be just a handful of centres, London, Rome, Paris, you get it -- all the old capitals from the days when colonialism meant going out there into the world for stuff when you intended to bring it back again for the good of the empire. New York City was a New World centre but for all I know the notion of economic colonialism had already changed by the then and it might not belong in the same list. Unless you're an artist of course and then you would interject quickly, well, what about cultural colonialism?

What has all this to do with being an artist in Toronto?

Everything. I would hazard a guess that monolithic cultural colonialism fell victim to the increase in information. It's not that what's going on in New York isn't exciting anymore, it's just that it isn't as exciting as what's everywhere else. I mean, think about it. Art in New York isn't New York art anyway -- it just ends up there because there's heaps of money there. Most of the art I've seen in New York came from every place but New York. New York is about as exciting culturally as a department store. If it ever was a cultural centre we should admit those days are over.

Culture no longer disseminates from any place in particular. Turn on the TV, go to the museum, attend an art opening, read a magazine, etc., information comes pouring in from all over the place. It's not so much that we have to look for it now as that we have to look out for it or it will bowl us over -- overload. If we tend to see the same old stuff from the same old places it's probably more a case of cowardice, exhaustion, withdrawal to the comfortable and known.

The decline of the notion of the centre puts a lot of weight on the artist that did not have to be there previously. Previously, there were guidelines -- there was authority. There were trends, debates, issues and commercial cues that were centrally established and centrally disseminated. There were claims of 'Zeitgeist' and everybody would get excited and act accordingly and if you didn't you were out of it and if you did you were mannered because I don't believe for a second that there can be a general sense of Zeitgeist unless it's manufactured and made to appear as substantial in the same way automotive manufacturers produce new models and hawk them on the market as the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is a difficult thing to get a hold but anything can and will be marketed if it suits enough people with enough money and people like you and I will buy it because we're told we want to. You can do the same with art, plain and simple, and if it behooves a centrally controlled art market to do it so it is well within their means to succeed. But with the dissolution of the centre all of those commercial cues become particular to the individual, particular to where ever that individual exists. I mentioned earlier that money is scarce these days. (I can remember when things were different). Economic change occurs as a centre dissolves. This is not to say that the change is a bad thing or even that the relocation of funds is necessarily bad -- it can cut both ways depending on your point of view, micro or macro. As an artist it can cut either way. It used to be that all the money went to white males in urban centres or to the agents of white males but now, as they have been deposed, or pushed aside, or as they have been integrated into the general condition, more and more people -- women, people of colour, rural people, people subscribing to religious beliefs not commonly held -- are finding it possible to get a hold of what is turning out to be a limited pot of money available for art. The only reason I bring up art and money at the same time is by way of the idea of the dissolution of centres of power -- artists are not politically neutral, and there are a great many of them that will, the moment they get their hands on some of that limited pot of money, spend it making art that will tear everything down.

It stands to reason that if a lot of money is passing through your hands it will sooner or later dawn on you that some of it might stick. In a capitalist economy where this sort of behaviour is all right and proper there is a rush of people striving to insert themselves into the sphincters through which things flow. Really clever people actually create these openings around themselves and struggle to maintain their position. In the area north of Toronto there is a sweet water marine organism that has evolved to be its own sphincter: it makes itself into a kind of windsock or sea anchor -- funnel shaped -- at the head of a waterfall, which, when you think of it is another kind of sphincter -- a landmass that constricts around a flow of water that causes a cold fluid extrusion -- and the micro-organisms in this extrusion get nabbed up by the little funnel shaped animal and eaten. You have to understand that there isn't an animal inside the funnel but that the funnel itself is the animal.

Well the parallels to art are clear enough. In a major centre there are many of these funnel shaped people that accumulate wealth and some invest in art. If you destroy the habit that these creatures thrive in they go elsewhere and your art market goes with them. Some artists are clever enough to become funnel shaped themselves but it is an unrealistic to demand all artists to do so because, I suspect, mutability is a gift similar to that received by painters or choreographers, and as such can never be learned. Another thing is that this funnel shaped animal can be collective in nature such that we all work together to be a membranous sphincter that works to draw things in so that they become consumed for the comment good -- you could say that Smith's free flowing trade works to increase wealth generally by providing a flow of goods through a number of such societies -- but when the collective fails or when, for example, the aggregate funnel shape of Toronto fails, the artists within it will go mighty hungry. We do not need to worry about rich people here because when things tough, they get going. Borders for the rich are no obstacle. It's different for artists however, borders are a very real problem and besides, there is always, for some, a positive sense of place or commitment to people in that place.

Our funnel failed at the time of economic restructuring. It might fail later anyway when our resources finish running out but they haven't to date and all we've done is sign them over to the good of the few as opposed to the good of the many. Maybe artists shouldn't care about economic restructuring, or the decline of our centres, or the decline of the west as centre, because the onus of culture has been dropped back into the laps of the people. And anyway, artists wouldn't mind the rich getting richer (another aspect of this current bout of economic restructuring) if they would only exercise their noblesse oblige to a greater extent but they aren't doing so and artists can't bum off the poor and the shrinking middle class that never cared about art anyway (unless it can be proven to be of value).

Art is a funny thing. People mostly only care about old art. Old art tends to be valuable. All the people that were around when that art was made are dead. Long dead. They took with them any clear idea of what that art meant. We don't know what all these valuable old things mean -- not really. We can speculate, but really, who does? We look at them for reasons particular to the instant, and if it's the instant that wins the day why not look at new art? Probably because it hasn't yet been threshed and winnowed. Possibly because its got nothing to do with culture.

Now that the notion of the centre has lost credibility it won't help us to sort through the eternal problems of the qualitative in art. Artists are great innovators -- it is fundamental to the business of making art, of creating, that new things will be tried. Not all new things are positive or exciting or even very interesting. This is not meant as an attack on any individual artist. It's not as if dumb people make dumb art and smart people make smart art. It often works the other way around and art has even been known to make itself despite how occult that might sound. At any rate, who's to judge? Up until recently that was always done for us but we now know, or should, that it's up to us. If we don't know what we're doing we should at least clue into the suspicion that no-one else does either. This is no surprise to artists but it's not good news for the paying collectors of art for whom resale value is a constant concern. This is where central authority is sorely missed.

Anxiety is something few people care to admit to, and if you're in a position to exercise power over people's lives, (and we all are) you'd best be dam cool about it -- nobody wants some flake calling the shots when the winds of change are blowing. Well, they're blowing now, and, to stretch the metaphor, people have battened down the hatches. As an artist, I feel distinctly outside. I feel anxious. The art market has closed its doors and the public funding agencies are 'under review'. I feel more anxious already. But I refuse to become desperate.

Nobody knows what's going on -- nobody knows what good art is or at least there are so many divergent opinions as to make debate ridiculous. Even fewer people have any notion about where art should be, or where it should be going. (I fervently hope that the last 'ism' is spinning in its goddamn grave.) Nobody knows about how to deal with the artists themselves: are they entrepreneurs, employees of the rich (patrons), workers, welfare leaches, or a criminal class unto themselves?

My childhood had two parts:
a) growing up in a small, southwestern Ontario town in a working class neighbourhood.
b) moving from that place to the rural-agricultural countryside with my parents commuting to town to work while some of the parents of my schoolmates ran the (now generically extinct) family farm.

It would be difficult to convey the distance between those two lives even though they were geographically within walking distance.

When I lived out in the country, the local town, Woodstock, was the county centre. For Woodstock, the city of Toronto was the centre. Not surprisingly, there was always animosity. When I grew up and moved to Toronto, New York was the centre. When I went to New York on work assignments I couldn't see what the fuss was all about. It could be that by the time I finally got to New York the whole notion of centre had finally had its day, or at least had its day in North America. Maybe things just moved on.

I've always insisted that there are two kinds of dogs: city dogs and country dogs. Chances are you've only met city dogs. The latter type are different. The family dog when I grew up was a killer. He'd kill anything and was known to move against men two and three times his size. My father typified that dog as a brute and I'd have to agree except for one extremely significant fact: that dog had an uncanny capacity to learn. He was still learning, I'm certain, when the lights flickered out in his brain at the time of his death. He was not a smart puppy but he built daily on what he did know and by the time he was old he exhibited a strange cognizance, shrewd and often perverse.

Old dogs learn new tricks.

My point is obvious but the bit about the dog's killer nature may be an important supplement: the animal didn't have a passive bone in his body. He was your standard pro-active, motivated, learning and living (and virile) old dog that learned new tricks.

It's no different for artists.

Just outside of Albany N.Y. there is some graffiti spray bombed on the back wall of some building that you can clearly read from the wrong side of the tracks and it tells you to " GO NOWHERE DO NOTHING ". I'd bet fifty bucks that it was an admonishment against insufficient ambition but there's a slim outside chance that it was intended by the author as a recommendation that there is no better place to go and nothing better to do than be where you are and enjoy the nuts and berries at hand.