But I can’t because I’m in love and it makes me cry that I have to look at Telus ads and the same Tim Horton’s litter that makes Todd Babiak upset. Our city, which I will love forever, needs to find a theme that’s actually not shitty and run with it. It’s our duty as the living to make it more beautiful, to add to it so that someday down the road people will flock there for reasons other than a mall that looks like it was bought at a garage sale. Over here, thanks to history, people gladly make civic sacrifices to embolden their public spaces further. Ralph bucks, anyone? Though I don’t like its gift shop Gehry-of-the-glacier look, I’m glad we’re getting a new art gallery. Baby steps.
Leaving aside the fact that Barcelona is highly overrated as a city (it's redolent of damp armpit, it's expensive and, worst of all, full of tourists like, well, Fish) and the general dinkness (that’s a new word: like it?) of Fish's writing (like how he peppers his column with Speedy Gonzales Spanish to show what a man of the world he is), Grikowsky is operating with the same flawed logic of ex-Mayor Bill Smith and countless other nabobs whose fumbling attempts to turn a geographically isolated backwater into a "world-class" city have actually turned us into something of a civic inside joke.
Basically, these well-intentioned idiots think that civic identity (or “theme,” as Fish puts it) can be slapped on a city like a fresh coat of paint on a park bench or rammed into place with no consideration of history, geography, culture, whatever. The end result of such thinking is initiatives like the new Alberta Art Gallery Grikowsky mentions. It’s a shameless ripoff of the famed Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, the construction of which helped spark a renaissance in architecture and tourism in a crumbling post-industrial city. The logic behind the choice of a derivative design for the new AAG is thus: if a fancy Gehry designed art gallery can do such wonders for Bilbao, then Edmonton should be able to tap into some of that hoodoo by building a lil’ Guggenheim of its very own. The flaws are pretty obvious. For starters: Bilbao is in Spain. There, they have beaches there where people can bask (Basque?) in the sunshine. It’s in Europe and thus easily accessible to millions of potential visitors. Edmonton, on the other hand, is cold. It’s in Canada; northern Canada, to be precise, and the only way you can access it is via an airport several dozen kilometers away across a frozen steppe broken up by cancerous housing developments and big box retail complexes (all of this after you catch a connecting flight from Calgary because Edmonton’s airport has very few international flights coming in or going out.)
Other examples of Edmonton’s starry-eyed, never-think-things-through, “If you build it, they will come” mentality are depressingly numerous. The hated Mall is one. The redesign of Churchill Square, carried out to try and lure Edmonton residents downtown to breathe life into a moribund core, is another. In this case, the city fathers decreed that the old square (a tree-and-grass filled area popular mainly with summer festival goers and hobos) was in need of a facelift, ostensibly to mark the city’s centenary, but also because the costs of replacing the grass after its annual trampling were getting prohibitive (Paris, home of some of the world’s largest and meticulously maintained urban greenspaces, addresses the problem of grass abuse with a byzantine system of tiny fences and signs reading “Please keep off the grass.”) Edmonton’s vision/solution was to pave the fucking thing with slate-grey concrete (giving the square the appearance of a Stalinist military parade ground or-and this is the more likely aesthetic inspiration-a parking lot), throw up a few picnic tables and some second rate public art pieces (all prominently featuring the names of the corporate sponsors: who doesn’t like whiling away a sunny summer afternoon beside the sparkling waters of the EPCOR waterfall?), and put up a café, presumably to give people somewhere to go to escape the oppressive, empty feelings the new square invokes. Of course, the café in question is only open until 6 p.m., so if you fancy popping in for a coffee after a show at the Winspear or a trip to the gallery, you’re pretty much fucked. That’s what Second Cup is for, I guess. There’s other examples, like our propensity for bulldozing/burning down historical landmarks and putting up condos and Starbucks (a problem everywhere, to be sure, but in a city with such little history to begin with, a much more acute one), but the point is this: you can’t import an identity. What works in one location won't necesarily work in another. Aping another city's successful projects is like the jock meathead who digs the Killers and buys his ironic tees at Urban Outfitters: unoriginal and kinda douchey. Cities are living things. A city’s identity, its heart, its soul, won’t spring forth from the mind of a city planner, architect, politician, Chamber of Commerce-type or “edgy” “Gen X” “visual artist” like Athena bursting from Zeus’ forehead.
It has to grow.
I reject the idea that this can be done through consensus and careful planning (again: the “theme” of which the Fishman speaks). To return to the original example of Barcelona, Gaudí never set out to make art that would bring tourism bucks to his city: like so many other greats, his work was reviled in his time and he died penniless, his work finding popularity only after he got run over by a tram. Some of his best loved works, notably Park Güell and La Sagrada Familia, are accidental icons: the former was designed as a housing project that was never finished because they ran out of money, the latter is a church that has never hosted a Mass. Other examples of this phenomenon are easy to find. The wide, tree-lined boulevards of Paris were designed, not for strolling lovers, but to facilitate the movement of large masses of troops and cannon. Berlin’s cutting-edge modern architecture was made possible by the city’s almost total destruction in the crucible of the Second World War and its subsequent division. On the other hand, attempts to build greatness (the local examples above, any planned community anywhere and, uh, Nazi Germany) tend to fail miserably in their purpose or otherwise come to grief in the end. Civic greatness, then, is an unintended consequence, an accident of circumstances requiring a quicksilver-slick mix of history, vision and timing. Together, these factors can coalesce and shape a city’s identity, which is about so much more than concrete and stone, blueprints and paint. It’s a feeling you can’t fake.
Which brings me to my final point: Edmonton already has an identity. It’s in the brutalist angles of the buildings of the last boom, the sad, dirty parks, the decaying infrastructure, cheap condos, crap transportation system, and the downtown street corners where the snow and trash fly by horizontally borne by the Arctic air that whips through the concrete and glass windtunnels of the government offices. The things we hate are as much a part of this city as its river valley, festivals and whatever the hell else we like about this place (cheap rents?)
(I’d like to think this makes Edmonton like Manchester or Detroit, but they are decrepit drunks warming themselves on the fading embers of their former glory, while Edmonton is a baby born with its brain on the outside of its skull.) To do away with the flaws, then, would be to destroy part of this city’s soul, or at least whatever passes for it.
Not that I wouldn’t love to see some improvements. We’re a city that, unconsciously or not, embraces all the worst aspects of North American urban culture while neglecting or deliberately attacking those things that could make life bearable. What can you say about a city that holds endless focus groups on downtown revitalization while approving endless new subdivisions on the distant fringes of the city to be served by billion dollar freeway projects? Or that brags about the passion of its hometown sports fans, but sends black-clad thugs to thrash drunken teenagers for stepping off a sidewalk during an impromptu victory celebration? But I suppose that’s to be expected from a city (even a allegedly “liberal” one like this) in the heart Conservative Bizzaro World where public money is earmarked for private gain and where the Powers That Be clench their ass cheeks around the public purse so tight that no amount of probing or lube can pry a few coins free for faggotty shit like “art” and “culture”. But I digress.
In the end, I can agree with Fish’s rather fatuous point that people in this town need to work at making this city better: the city, as the saying goes, is not going to improve itself. A sudden and wholesale shift in out cultural attitudes so that we approach life more like, say, the French, is unlikely at best. And since we can’t count on The Man to help us out (at least not unless we want our ideas bludgeoned to death with a focus group), I guess this is the part where I put forward my great plan for making Edmonton better. But I’ll be goddamned if I have one. I’d kinda like to see a little less breast-beating about how crap this place is and a little more art that is about this place and its people, not shit designed to propel the creator out of Edmonton and to Vancouver or Toronto as fast as humanly possible. By the same token, I’d like to see a helluva lot less fawning over every dink who puts paint to canvas or who picks up a guitar: let’s have a little quality control, people. That old bus ticket stuck to a canvas with random splashes of paint isn’t great art just because you saw the guy who did it down at the Black Dog. Your band really does suck. And the people who snicker at your knock off Warhols aren’t jealous haters cutting you down to make themselves feel good; they’re genuinely concerned with the proliferation of lousy art made by pretentious assholes. Nothing personal and thanks for trying. Just do better next time. For my part, I‘ll try to be a little more open minded and do more to sample the fruits of others’ labours, while doing my meager part to keep the wheels turning. Not to make a statement, or to cram my “vision” of Edmonton down anybody’s gullet and certainly not because some dickwad hack writing for a no-bit weekly told me to, but because of the hope that something good might grow out of it so that when I’m dead a little piece of me might live on. And hopefully that little piece will one day rise up and destroy you all.
What?
(This post was inspired by Devon and Gauloises Blondes)
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