Dirt is Matter Out of Place: Thanks all d'être venus!

Montreal: Pigeons Everywhere

Phillips Square, Montreal, 1960s

Dominion Square, Montreal, Québec, Canada, ca. 1950. From CSTMC/CN Collection.  

"Take The Kids Off The Streets": Jane Jacobs vs. The Modern Urban Aspiration

Bad Urban Design and Public Art Installation: the MMFA's Homogeneous Plastic Yellow Poles and Night Guard Protect Their Failed Sidewalk

Last month the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts opened a new building, a new curatorial plan for its Canadian collection and a new sidewalk/sculpture garden (which, as the press release happily stresses makes it "one of the largest collection of public art in Montreal" - Montreal being really well known for its public art this is really thrilling).

Hence to enlarge its sculpture garden and create spaces to reflect and observe it, the Museum commissioned marble steps, platforms, columns and benches for its main sidewalks - on avenue du Musée and rue Sherbrooke. As the images show, today these designs are angular, of different hight and slanted (not totally unlike the ideal skatepark) and are meant to "create a high-quality urban environment for the Museum complex that is both distinctive and homogeneous, [as well as] improve the comfort and aesthetics of the outdoor spaces, integrate public artworks, [and] improve pedestrian safety in the vicinity of the Museum."

Well it seems like the Museum has been caught off guard by how much Montrealers have found these new urban props comfortable and safe. Skatboarders, in particular. But sadly these types of pedestrians are deemed unwelcome by the Museum and so the institution has hired a night guard to make sure only their ideal art lovers come enjoy their sculptures (with their eyes only). But this wasn't enough to deter the normal human pedestrian from touching and interacting with these public installations so the MMFA has added extra yellow plastic sticks to most marble corners making sure no one ever goes near their "high-quality urban environment". (I'm guessing this yellow plastic repetition is to maintain the aesthetic homogeneity mentioned in the press release.)

It seems obvious that the Museum and its favoring of what they wish their backyard looked like rather than what the reality of urban space is, are the only ones to blame for the sidewalks' current absurdity. And as a pedestrian it's hard not be saddened about 33 million dollars that were put into what the field of yellow poles is trying to protect, in particular while budgets in the arts throughout the country are being cut.

Update of 26/11/11: After the night-guard and the plastic yellow polls, the MMFA has now invested in the panoptican power of the surveillance camera to insure the peacefulness they intended for their newly developed sculpture park. Brilliant. 

Published: Dirt and Pigeons

I'm happy to say my passion for pigeons has finally seen its first material manifestation in this multi-faceted, pleasantly deep and particularly clean issue of On-Site dedicated to dirt.

Curating Questions and the Multi-Narrations of Health/City

I went to the Power Coorperation Fellows' talk at the CCA last Thursday, where the three young architects presented their collaborative curatorial project entitled Health/City. Since the beginning of the summer they have been conjunctionally working on ways to present their topic without supporting a thesis in relation to health in cities directly but rather advocate a version of urban health history that, like history in general, is however you perceive it.

It is with this in mind that they chose 100 health related images from the CCA's collection: the low-brow magazine cover from last month with the eco-friendly building, air conditioning industry catalogues from the 1950s, 19th century slum maps, passages from novels discussing military asphyxiation... With this initial (mostly visual) base they mapped out the various thematic passageways between items (such as the 17th c. plague doctor can be linked to a slum map through the theme of epidemics, but also to a toilet bowl through smell). The point here is that this cluster of links and images form a multi-narrative understanding history. While the website isn't up yet, the fellows are planning on putting this network of information online by the end of the month - the website would let the visitor/browser create/curate his or her own version of health history by deciding which images to link with one another. 

I enjoyed the talk. I enjoyed the talk because it wasn't a self-congratulatory architect's attempt at philosophy but rather a real try at asking questions about the nature of curating, collecting and knowledge and coming up up with a tangible platform as an answer. Some audience members suggested that the lack of curatorial structure could be disorienting for users or let the project fall flat; others also pleasantly name dropped architects for extra useful images. I think both of these thoughts wouldn't have crossed people's mind if the project hadn't been qualified as a CCA project. Indeed in a way this project's quality and flaw are the same: from the talk it seems that it is more of an exercise in curating and anthropology than an architectural thesis materialized through a curated space. This is obviously totally great by me, and exceptional really because for a discipline - curating - that prides itself for creativity, depth and original-thought, interdisciplinary perspectives and multi-medium exhibitions remain ridiculously too few and avant-gardiste. 

Basically it's very exciting to see the CCA promoting such initiatives, and I'm looking forward to seeing Health/City online to get a better grasp of my version of urban health history. 

Modern Matters: the Parking Meter vs. the Human

I've been in Brazil's Bahia region for the past week or so now, and in addition to enjoying the beaches and indulging in caipirinhas I think I've come closer to understanding what 'Modernity' stands for - very roughly it goes something like this:

Here, in Bahia's regional capital Salvador, in dense areas a man will always rush to you as you are in the process of parking or while you are attempting to find a spot. As you park he will help (with hand gestures "a little to the left, the right, back, stop") and while you are away he will 'watch' your vehicle. But really nothing is required or set as to what his functions exactly entail. Sometimes you'll find him sitting next to your car, other times napping, chatting with friends or even washing your car after a rain. In exchange for this service he will ask for change. He can ask for 10 and you can easily bargain to 2.

In Montreal in dense areas when you park you are required to pay with your credit card a parking meter with a fix hourly price set by the city (an abstract concept embodied by elected humans that are hopefully clean). The parking meter does nothing that comes close to watching your car and you can't ease the pain of paying through bargaining with it, you can just grumble to yourself as you are paying a machine. But the rate is fixed and the money goes to the community's greater good.

Both are means of making money by taking ownership of the conveted public space. And both have questionable legitimacy and different pros and cons. In Brazil it's an annoying human that gives directions, a chance to practice your Portuguese and a smile, and in Canada it's a horribly annoying machine that hopefully feeds a fair bureaucracy that than feeds a human in need...

Salvador de Bahia, Brazil

The Smartest Thing - People Watching

This is an amazing 1979 ethnography (by William H. Whyte) with (pre-cellular phone) footage of urban spaces, aka it's a team that spent months people-watching and deconstructing social behavior to think of ways to build 'better' cities. It includes a bird lady, the art of chair ownership, girl watchers, people mimicking people and the power-dynamics of food.

Koyaanisqati - The Existence of a Past Everyday

On the premise that facebook hinders honourable graduation, during my MA I refused to get an internet connection. Consequently most of my free home time was animated by a UCL library video collection binge. An eclectic - very francophile, Scandinavian savvy and sound oriented - but nonetheless impressive collection.

Among the Bergmans, Vilgot Sjöman and Éric Rohmer, I rented all of the Qatsi trilogy after a Post-Colonial Visual Culture class during which the last film, Naqoyqatsi (2002), was torn apart for its condescending universalism. Still I got really obsessed with Koyaanisqati (1982) - the first in the trilogy - and watched it twenty times over a weekend (London can be very rainy). Sometimes as background (a Philip Glass soundtrack) music, sometimes as a whole, sometimes as extracts, sometimes as loops, sometimes to observe what the 1980s everyday looked like: what were the colours of billboards or on planes? What forms were cars and trucks taking? What were lighting systems like? What was makeup like? Technology like? Outfits like? Hairstyles? Glasses? Traffic systems? Smoking habits?

While aspects this 'experimental' documentary are sometimes condescending (the title of the film does translate as Life Out of Balance) and underneath its 'objective' looking images has a clunky and at times desperately unsubtle social comment, my curiosity for the everyday overruled all of it....

Yesterday I was in nyc's midtown eating soap in a front window - it felt like television. And watching people on their cellphones bustling around reminded of my obsession for this 'experimental' documentary by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass:

How did people look when they lived without cellphones?

Why New York can sing it's the center of world openly, and how other cities do the same thing differently

Praising New York, "a concrete jungle where dreams come true," Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind is a hit beyond the Big Apple. Yesterday in the tight department of Les Galeries Lafayette in Paris, hesitating between white woolen tights and apple green cotton ones, I listened attentively to the lyrics. The structure is catchy - an emotional chorus, concise and pleasing beats and builds that are hard to stay cold to. In addition to this steady recipe for success, Mr.J sings about the endless golden possibilities nyc offer whoever you started out to be (himself included) through a variety analogies including the Virgin Mary, Eve and Jesus, sports teams, neighborhoods, the World Trade Center, diversity in music, Robert De Niro and Bob Marley. A glorified rehashing of the american dream.

As I paid attention to the video and words, I wondered how other cities had been sung about by its own. I looked into the cities I've lived in - Paris, London and Montreal - and this is the palmares I came up with: 

For Paris, Teki Latex who embodies the Parisians' love to hate themselves and hence inability to sing about Paris in any other way than by using ambiguous irony; the Montrealers, Malajube, who with a DIY creative approach dilute their love for a provincial town into an endearing glass roof effect situation seen from within a fridge; and Blur for London - because even without a video - their sounds captures the terrible wit with which Londonders talk about the grayness of a city most would never want to leave because it's the only place where museums are free, beers are cheeper than water and Indian food better than in India.

Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys for Empire State of Mind (2010):

Teki Latex feat. Lio for Les Matins de Paris (2007):


Malajube for Montréal -40 (2006):


Blur for London Love (1994):

The Buildings of Spring