designs for The Terminal City

andesite & after: Interview with Annabel Vaughan + Rob Brownie by Gordon Brent Ingram

Monday, January 18, 2010

andesite cladding, south side of the Vancouver Art Gallery photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram

Annabel Vaughan and Rob Brownie authored one of the more intriguing essays in the 2008 anthology on local sites, materials, cultures, and designs, Vancouver Matters.[i] Andesite is a hard volcanic rock that on Canada’s West Coast is quarried on Haddington Island,[ii] near Alert Bay, between Malcolm and Vancouver Islands. In the first four decades of the Twentieth Century, andesite was often the preferred material for the exterior of the larger buildings constructed in Vancouver, especially for the centres of wealth and power. Colder and more durable than sandstone, andesite was nearly always placed on a granite base.

Architect Francis Mawson Rattenbury (1867-1935) institutionalized the use of andesite in south-western British Columbia, after rejecting a load of sandstone, during the 1898 construction of the Provincial Legislature Buildings in Victoria. In slowly decolonizing British Columbia with its extreme economic fluctuations and its geopolitical marginality, andesite was used to symbolize the new durability of both the state and corporate capital — national, imperial, and transnational.

Francis Mawson Rattenbury (1867-1935) in 1924 a

quarter century after choosing andesite over sandstone

for the British Columbia Legislature

Curiously, andesite’s loss of desirability coincided with mounting challenges to those same institutions during The Great Depression. Preoccupied with making lighter, less constrained structures as cheaper construction materials were becoming more available after World War II, Vancouver’s modernists had little use for andesite’s texture, colour, and weight. For example, concrete was lighter under the weight of Vancouver’s winter skies. Curiously, the Haddington Quarry was recently reactivated after almost seven decades of far less durable cladding being the norm and as the most extensive era of construction (of repetitive designs) in Vancouver’s history has been coming to a close. If we can understand more about the emergence of the original use of andesite, perhaps we have an entre into the dynamics that formed the texture of Twentieth Century Vancouver with implications for what becomes of the urban space of The Terminal City in the Twenty-First Century.

andesite cladding with carving (not from andesite), west side of

Vancouver Art Gallery photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram

GBI: How did you both become interested in, could I say passionate about, andesite?

AV+RB: When faculty and students from the UBC School of Architecture put a call out for submissions for the Vancouver Matters book we decided to choose a material that was unique to the built environment of Vancouver and unfamiliar to a conventional reading of the city. As we researched the stone it was clear that there was a good story to be told and with further exploration an interesting pattern in its use emerged.

GBI: How did you first hear about early Twentieth Century Vancouver’s short romance with andesite?

AV+RB: One of the more useful texts we came across was Geology Tours of Vancouver’s Buildings and Monuments. In this guide we were able to track most of the buildings we refer to and map in the article. Annabel also knew a bit of the andesite story because of the work Birmingham and Wood Architects was doing on the Mountain View Cemetery buildings.

GBI: Your chapter on andesite in Vancouver Matters is the only major discussion in the anthology on a building material. Paradoxically, this discussion has been for a city where obtaining cladding that can resist and seal a structure from our high rainfall has often been difficult and expensive. In a city such as Vancouver, better known for tacky rather than permanent facades, why is understanding the historical use of andesite important – as well as its potentials for future architectural movements and waves of construction?

AV+RB: If we take a moment to consider those materials that make up the majority of Vancouver’s modern building inventory we are typically left with the same palette that you find in any other North American city – concrete, glass and steel. One set of elements that distinguish one city from another are the colours and textures of materials that clad the buildings we are naturally drawn to for their unique historical value. These structures are with us today for a good reason. They were well constructed and made of materials that resisted weathering, floods and fire. They were built to last. In an era that is increasingly faced with genuine moral questions regarding waste production and resource depletion, the construction of buildings that are well designed and use appropriate materials intelligently is becoming a real concern.

GBI: What other building stone has been important in the building of The Terminal City and what have been andesite’s particular attractions and limitations?

AV+RB: Throughout Vancouver you can find basalt from the Little Mountain Quarry and Squamish and granite that is used for building foundations and sidewalk curbing. Varieties of sandstone from the interior and the Gulf Islands are also very common. There are also three beautiful marbles from north of Duncan on the island [white, black and blue-gray] some of which you can see in the main lobby of the Marine Building.

GBI: Is correct to say that andesite has been the most durable material, chosen so far, for cladding of buildings in Vancouver? I can run through a list of ’softer’ materials with which the city was built, from wood, bricks, and metal to sandstone, tile, and concrete. And granite, that is so heavy, has often been used for the bases of monumental buildings. But were there any harder materials ever chosen for buildings in Vancouver?

AV+RB: The main types of dimension stone in Vancouver include sandstone, granite, andesite, marble and fieldstone. Terracotta is another cladding material for building exteriors, most notably on the Hudson Bay Building downtown. All of these materials, including the ‘softer’ ones that you list are in fact durable if sound building principles are accounted for in the design, i.e. substantial overhangs and proper rain-screening.

GBI: In reconstructing the thinking behind Rattenbury’s pioneering use of andesite in Victoria, why do you think that he made the choice to reject sandstone for andesite? Was it just that the sandstone that was previously delivered too weak and would have required more maintenance? Or was the hardness of andesite, and the sense of resilience that it invoked, more aesthetically attractive, and potentially iconic, as British Columbia attempted to become a more legitimate government (as First Nations were subdued and their Nineteenth Century court challenges made illegal in those same decades)?

AV+RB: The Koksilah sandstone that arrived on site at the Parliament Buildings was rejected. Who knows what Rattenbury was making this judgement on – colour, brittleness, unexpected striations? It was really serendipity that allowed andesite to be used. The contractor on site had a financial interest in the quarry and ‘sold’ it to Rattenbury – the luminosity [feldspar] and the crisp carving surface were added benefits that most likely made it a popular stone with local builders and masons.

GBI: How different does andesite look from when it is dry and the weather is clear with shadows and when it is wet and the skies are grey and with reduced contrast?

AV+RB: Depending on the cut of the stone, dry andesite is greyish-blue as in the bossage blocks on the legislature buildings in Victoria, or yellowish in tone when honed or saw-cut. When wet andesite darkens in shades of grey.

GBI: What were the first buildings in Vancouver where andesite was extensively used?

AV+RB: Financial institutions [banks, insurance agents].

GBI: What were the buildings in Vancouver where you believe that the use of andesite was the most powerful, evocative, and symbolic?

AV+RB: [You could make an argument for the Dominion Building – the tallest in the Dominion at the time it was built…] The Royal Bank building [1931] at Granville and Hastings is the most symbolic andesite building in Vancouver. Built in the tradition of early skyscrapers the building rises into the sky like a mountain, echoing the formidable natural landscape that surrounds the city. The strength and solidity of the bank is certainly evident in the building as it towers over the rest of the city.

GBI: Just yesterday, on a rainy January day, I marvelled at the Royal Bank Building on the north-east corner of West Hastings and Granville. Eight decades on, that building is far more striking and cleaner that many of the more recent steel and concrete buildings streaked with mould and mildew. How are andesite surfaces maintained? Or do they need to be maintained?

AV+RB: Concrete and stone are completely different materials. Concrete is purely fabricated, is porous and tends to fault with years of exposure- just think of the maintenance required on Arthur Erikson’s Law Courts or the SFU campus on Burnaby Mountain. Stone can and will suffer when exposed to pollutants such as sulphur dioxide, particularly limestone and marble which contain calcium carbonate.

GBI: What use of andesite on a building in Vancouver do you think was most about promising prosperity?

AV+RB: If the promise of prosperity has any relation to the size and volume of a structure the Royal Bank building at Granville and Hastings is without question the most inspiring building in Vancouver that is clad with andesite.

GBI: What is the most sensual use of andesite on a building in Vancouver? Or were these buildings even supposed to be sensual in the early Twentieth Century?

AV+RB: Keeping in mind the relative softness of the stone one is easily drawn to the gargoyles, sculpted friezes and decorative elements that can be seen on both the Hotel Vancouver and the Sun Tower.

GBI: Did you find an examples of andesite used for housing and smaller buildings?

AV+RB: We accidently discovered a small church at Fraser and 15th that has an andesite wall – we did not really seek out smaller buildings in the city.

GBI: In the first three decades of the Twentieth Century, could many builders of smaller structures afford andesite? Was it an expensive building material back then?

AV+RB: This is a good question that we might follow up on if we extend our research.

GBI: There was something of an anti-andesite subtext to Vancouver’s early Twentieth Century architectural narratives. There was some use of sandstone as with the old Vancouver Public Library building, now the Carnegie Centre, at Main and East Hastings. A kilometre west on West Hastings, the 1930 Marine Building, one of the few major Art Deco buildings in the city, is clad in a warm tile and quite a departure from the three decades of dark buildings with wet andesite – as is the old CPR Building, today’s Waterfront Centre. So as more building materials were available in Vancouver, what was the aesthetic or any other basis for the avoidance (and choice) of andesite?

AV+RB: The Carnegie Library at Main and Hastings would have used US architects and building materials [I am not even sure if the sandstone is local] [The sandstone quarried on south-eastern Saturna Island. GBI] The influence of art deco moderne [from the US Southwest] which migrated north [most likely with prospectors] pops up all over the province – I suspect the history of the Marine Building would tie into that. I am not sure that andesite was avoided per se… it was simply displaced by other materials.

GBI: After the current Hotel Vancouver was finally completed in 1940 (over a decade late because of The Great Depression) and with the selection of andesite being in the late 1920s and roughly contemporary with the design of the Marine Building, were there any more large buildings constructed with andesite?

AV+RB: The final two contemporary buildings that used andesite were Vancouver City Hall [1935] and the Royal BC Museum [1968] in Victoria.

GBI: Have there been any uses of andesite in hard-surfaced, public open space in Vancouver? There have been lots of critiques of asphalt, concrete and even granite as paving material. But do you know if andesite was ever used on historic or contemporary landscape designs?

AV+RB: Andesite has been used in the landscape at Mountain View Cemetery – it is a very smooth stone that appears to attract moss – its suitability in the landscape is hard to assess.

GBI: In your essay in Vancouver Matters, you began a map of andesite construction that roughly followed the westward expansion of downtown Vancouver. Or is it that simple? Were there outlying uses of andesite outside of contemporary Downtown?

AV+RB: Andesite was used outside of the financial district – [Heritage Hall, the Left Bank [BMO] condo ‘heritage’ component, banks in Kitsilano also used it [there is a Koolhaus or Club Monaco in one on 4th]. That would seem to indicate that andesite did migrate to the early ‘suburbs’ or rather “street car communities” in the city – but these buildings are not as noticeable as a district as the ones in the financial areas of the city.

GBI: Are there any buildings with andesite in Vancouver, from the early-mid Twentieth Century, that are under threat of demolition? Could the only limited use of andesite be used as one criterion for maintaining at least the facades of those buildings?

AV+RB: Not that we know of.

andesite cladding, Hornby Street side of Hotel Vancouverphotograph by Gordon Brent Ingram

GBI: But you had some strong feelings about superficial preservation of heritage buildings to which you referred as “facadism.”[iii] Could you restate your concerns and reservations about maintaining the andesite cladding of a building, with limited heritage elements aside from its façade, while gutting its interior?

AV+RB: Facadism is a concern if the integrity of the building interior is diminished. Gudrun Will has described horrendous examples of this practice in his essay in The Vancouver Review.[iv] In other cases however, successful renovations of building interiors have provided us with valuable cultural spaces in Vancouver such as the Wosk Centre for Dialogue and the Scotia Dance Centre. The real question is what is gained from altering or saving a façade and what is lost. Retaining the exterior of a building is important to the streetscape but not if the renovation gives little or nothing back to the community or if that space is taken out of the public realm.

GBI: Now that the Haddington Island quarry is back in operation, what have been the largest projects in Vancouver that have used andesite in recent years? And what are the most exciting ways that andesite is being used in contemporary architecture?

AV+RB: The redevelopment of Mountain View Cemetery is the first contemporary project to use andesite as cladding. The Customer Service Building, the Celebration Hall and elements in the landscape, such as columbaria and memorial walls, all use significant amounts of the stone – a nod to the historic importance of the stone in the civic culture of the city. We have also heard that a contemporary house in Point Grey has used andesite cladding.

GBI: Over the last decade, architecture in Vancouver has been increasingly dominated by social commitments to sustainability and to the attaining LEED certification for larger building projects in particular. As LEED certification increasingly focuses on finding ways to lessen the ecological footprint of construction activities,[v] excessive carbon from trucking from transporting building materials is becoming a growing concern. I am wondering whether a material such as andesite, which is quarried near sea level within a kilometre of a dock and then barged to ports such as Vancouver, does not involve a more modest carbon footprint per building surface are over the long-term? These days, half of the projects in the city are seeing architects scrambling for every last possible LEED point to the extent of working more closely with construction decision-makers around the use and disposal of material. Do you recall any discussions of a return to construction with andesite as part of sustainability transitions?

AV+RB: Although andesite would qualify as a local building product for most of the lower mainland in the LEED scorecard – the cost of quarrying local stone is prohibitive. Most projects end up using stone from China that is cheaper to secure. The ‘insanity’ of the global market - where cheap labour trumps almost all aspects of sustainability is a whole other discussion.

GBI: Are there particular architecture office and any municipalities in the region where there is interest in andesite cladding for new buildings and where you think that it could be appropriate?

AV+RB: Not that we know of.

GBI: Annabel, as a professional architect and university teacher, when would you recommend using andesite in a project of yours and when would you recommend its use to your students?

AV+RB: Andesite tends to consistently work well on smaller projects and as a detailing material. What is important is to ensure that designers are aware of the vast range of local materials that are available and to emphasize material choice within a Vancouver context.

GBI: How would you like to see andesite more widely used in contemporary architecture? Could it be a viable export to other parts of the West Coast?

AV+RB: We have to keep in mind that the Haddington Island quarry is relatively small. There is a finite amount of material we have access to. Without question it would be in our favour to see more buildings faced with this material but what is really exciting is the prospect of having all of the local quarries mined for restoration work and some new construction as well. Andesite has unique properties and has historically worked well on public buildings and so if this tradition is carried on we could see an interesting link between historic and modern views of the city.

GBI: Would a revival in the use of andesite in Vancouver have to be just as a cladding or could you see it used for other, more specific functions and aesthetic statements in the designs of concrete and steel buildings?

AV+RB: Stone is a premium building material – it is budget driven. Projects that use stone tend to have larger budgets and specific design agendas. It is a beautiful material but it really comes down to an aesthetic choice of the client.

GBI: But haven’t you also begun to engage in an argument about andesite’s long-term advantages related to durability and maintenance? As Vancouver accumulates more wealth, don’t you think that there could be a loss of interest in the tackier cladding and a movement back to more durable stone surfaces? Don’t architects have ethical obligations to promote more durable materials especially if the use of cladding such as andesite lessens ecological footprints? And how could this beautiful material, that shaped a city so briefly, be better promoted to both with designers and clients? And what about municipal approaches to promoting the use of andesite? Andesite is beautiful, it has a historical resonance for downtown Vancouver, and its quarrying and shipping footprint is lower than for many contemporary materials that are far less durable. So how could municipal politicians and planners contribute to encouraging a renewed use of andesite in Vancouver?

AV+RB: Andesite is one of many types of dimension stone that contribute to the overall texture and colour of built Vancouver. In time, as the cost of transporting imported building materials increases there could be a shift in thinking as we find ourselves forced into thinking more about sustainability. If it is possible to promote the use of indigenous stone into our structures we need to look no further than Heritage Vancouver and people like Bruce McDonald for the work they have done to help preserve historic buildings and educate the public. In 2009 we led a tour of andesite buildings as part of the Jane’s Walks series that was fully attended. Our walk terminated at the Vancouver Art Gallery and one of the participants asked if a film had been made about andesite. To the best of our knowledge nothing has been done yet, but what is obvious is that writers, artists and historians are ready to pick up on questions regarding materials and urban culture and developers are not. We can only hope that a larger discussion has begun and that some energetic and committed citizens will take these types of questions to community planning meetings and talk openly with planners and architects.

andesite cladding, Royal Bank Building, West Hastings Street & Granville Street , Vancouver

photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram

Notes

[i] Annabel Vaughan + Rob Brownie. 2008. andesite. in Vancouver Matters. James Eidse, Mari Fujita, Joey Giaimo, Lori Kiessling, and Christa Min (editors). Vancouver: Blueimprint. pages 7 to 17.

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddington_Island_%28British_Columbia%29

[iii] Vaughan + Brownie. 2008. andesite. page 14.

[iv] Gudrun Will. 2004. Façadism: Gudrun Will sees past a heritage false front. Vancouver Review 2. http://www.vancouverreview.com/past_articles/facadism.htm

[v] http://www.cagbc.org/leed/systems/new_construction/index.php

a PDF copy of this interview is available: vaughanbrownie-interviewed-by-ingram-2010-andesite-after-designs-for-the-terminal-city

Filed in The Terminal City, heritage and history, sustainability, urban designs | | Comments (0)

Bad things in the biosphere: Environmental crises as narrative [Re-casting The Terminal City (part 1)] * Reviews of H2Oil, Home, Island of Dreams, The Age of Stupid, and The Beekeepers

Saturday, November 21, 2009

PDF copy available: ingram-11-2009-bad-things-in-the-biosphere1

There have been bad things threatening human communities since people have tried to get along. The line between natural menaces and human hubris is the stuff of culture and stories in particular. There are human threats, sins such as avarice, and then natural threats such as from hungry beasts. Lately the pantheon of these bad things have recombined and globalized. Environmental crises have become culture. Sorting out where human responsibility, murky synergies, and what is left of nature increasingly involves simplifying complicated knowledge into stories that are transmitted by film and video.

Moving pictures are never just about the places they purport to describe or even document. Instead, moving pictures are narratives, sometimes spun as documentaries and at other times as mythologies, for the places where we live or would like to enjoy. Vancouver’s 2010 Olympics moment, now upon us, is comprised of a tight set of carefully pre-determined and well-manufactured, marketing presentations that will soon be rendered either stale or fraudulent. Sometime in the spring of 2010, as the hype of the Olympics turns into a hangover and then a headache, new ways to make sense of Vancouver, as The Terminal City [1] for the sprawl that is south-western British Columbia, will become necessary. Vancouver’s Mayor, Gregor Robertson, is busy marketing Vancouver as a ‘green city’ [2] like the leaders of half of the cities on the planet. The inference is part rhetorical but also real: cities that are not ‘green’ will not survive and prosper so well over this century.

As the Canadian dollar garners strength and Hollywood North risks dissipating, Vancouver may soon have to import new mythologies again as we often have in much of modern times. A number of recent films can tell us about possibilities for re-casting the characters and locations for Vancouver The Major Motion Picture. These films can tell us about the new mythologies being spun in this part of the world especially after David Suzuki’s Legacy Lecture (and $1,500 rap party) [3] and as doubts are expressed about the supposed sustainability of the Vancouver(ism) Brand Name. [4]

Environmental problems, and crises of community survival, became part of the modern cultural fabric in the late twentieth century. But disasters, which might have been averted with more forethought and political will, have shaped many of the most central stories in many cultures. The Book of Daniel linked attention to dreams and angelic advice to surviving a series of disasters that befell Babylon. And there are many stories of transformation, even mutation, where indifferent nature becomes malevolent through human folly. And there has been an apocalyptic, survivalist streak [5] in North American settler culture, often linked back to that book of the New Testament, as well as some indigenous narratives. But the scale of potential self-destruction changed after World War II and heightened the centrality of stories of worry, foresight and the heeding of what amounts to communion with divine forces.

The ambiguity of the contemporary environmental narrative, especially around the naming of the bearer of responsibility, was first inscribed in modernism through such work as Brecht’s Gallileo. It was after the horrors of World War II that the old stories linking threat, insight, and survival were reworked. The formation of the modern environmental narrative, the inherently vagueness of the responsibility, can be illustrated through the shifts in the three versions of Brecht’s Gallileo. The first Gallileo was written in German, completed in Denmark in 1938, and performed in Zurich in 1943. [6] In that original Gallileo, survival for humanity was rooted in empirical investigations (science) linked to class struggle and collective challenges to (papal) domination. But something happened to Bertolt Brecht in his short exile in California. In the American version of Gallileo, completed in the months after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and performed in Los Angeles in 1947, [7] the central role of the individual, as with Daniel’s foresight, became central again. The nuclear age was so scary that somehow the prospects of collective solutions were almost too daunting with survival stripped down again to primarily an individual responsibility.[8] A third version of Gallileo, the so-called “German Version,” was completed just before Brecht’s death and performed months later in 1955 in Cologne[9] and codified the ambiguity of the survival story (for both Gallileo and humanity) as a mash-up of individual and collective responsibility. And thus the modern environmental narrative became famously contradictory and increasingly substantiated, as a surrogate for angelic interpretation, through film and video. Today both environmental crises and solutions are primarily framed and described, effectively spawned as stories, through film, video, television, and internet clips.

The origins of the narratives of The Terminal City are Musqueam, Squamish and StóLô stories jumbled with mythologies of British maritime imperialism and Canadian rail-based settlement more recently fused with an increasingly wide array of migration accounts from refugees to business ventures. Few stories, other than those of indigenous communities along with the scant mentions of the Spanish influenza pandemic and the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge, perceive Vancouver as a place of possible disaster, of disregard of signs of natural constraints and human folly, let alone a space where survival might become precarious. Even most of the narratives of the personal disasters in Downtown Eastside work to distance the isthmus from the rest of the city. Disasters, most notably the collapse of the salmon fishery, have been quietly paved over in the ‘World-Class’ narrative. There has been little room for foreboding. Even the short, often made-for-television narratives of David Suzuki have avoided direct suggestions that places like The Terminal City are potentially part and parcel of new environmental crises. So what can some recent films about crises and solutions tell us about the new stories that could be or are already emerging in Vancouver as the Olympic PR begins to wear thin and is apt to fly off in the next, exceptionally violent storm? Five films from the 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival give us clues to how cultural production in Vancouver will respond to and provide stories to help us adapt to life where there are poorly understood threats to our often placid part of the biosphere.

Tsuta Tetsuichiro’s Island of Dreams, Yume no Shima,[10] is a homage to the black-and-white queasiness of post-war Japanese cinema combining elements of the noir genre with a whiff of horror. There is no giant, radioactive octopus this time. Rather the real monster is indifference as air pollution weakens and garbage accumulates. The underlying question in this tale of a immigrant garbage worker (another ‘the other’), working on one of Tokyo’s artificial islands called Island of Dream, and who by night bombs illegally polluting factories, is who, exactly, is the terrorist? A police detective tries to find out. Consistent with the DIY edge is the loving revival of the black-and-white film technology, from the 1950s and early 1960s, where the director had to wash the film footage himself as part of minimizing his own ecological footprint. Island of Dreams reminds us that whatever ethical decisions we may want to make about big problems are grounded in the murkiness of whatever aspects of our origins with which we care to become preoccupied. In this case, the noir thriller, the malevolent city of Tokyo’s post-war reconstruction, is revisited as a toxic wasteland where the whodunit becomes a question of responsibility.

It would be easy to recast Island of Dreams in the Vancouver area with the dump site at even a more dubious location at Burns Bog and the bombing and sleuthing in the more toxic corners of the industrial corridor along the Fraser. But the naiveté of the Tokyo detective would be difficult to come by in the Lower Mainland. The hint of a suggestion that the landfill at Burns Bog, still used in 2009 by supposedly ‘green’ municipalities, was an act of terrorism could engender all sorts of reprisals. And, of course, in Vancouver, youth contemplating lives overshadowed by progressive environmental crises believing that an effective alternative to violence is standing on streets asking for donations says as more about our dreams and innocence, and complacency, than about any sort of West Coast sophistication. Our own noir island of paralysis and complacency may be closer than many of us think – but let’s forget about that until after the Olympics are over.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home[11] is an adaptation of his celebrated coffee-table book of a decade back. Home combines enchanting views of the Earth from helicopters to illustrate how extensively life support on the planet has been damaged in little more than a century. The consolation is the dreamy imagery that at first tells the story of life’s origins and the formation of the biosphere, through plants transforming the atmosphere through fixing carbon and producing oxygen. Halfway through Home, the focus shift to relentless destruction. The use of distance is used aptly in Home with the overviews at great distance giving way to uncomfortably close portrayals of ecological devastation. The final minutes of Home are a bit jumbled shifting, uncomfortably, from a voice-over, that becomes more urgent, to a great deal of text flashed quickly on the screen. Disconcerting, the finale of Home can be likened to oral texts being crammed into a rushed PowerPoint presentation.

Home could be used as a powerful beginning to an introductory course in environmental science. But there is no whodunit here. In Home, all human beings are guilty, well almost. At times preoccupied with still growing human numbers, Home does tell us that people do not impair the biosphere by our populations alone but rather by the unsustainable consumption patterns of a minority. But the specifics, and the route to get home as in a finding a new balance with the biosphere, are all up in the air. The most powerful moment in Home is flying above the shoreline of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) with narrator Glenn Close ruminating on why the people of the island were not able to recognize and reverse the ecological degradation that lead to their impoverishment and near extinction. Could this reckoning one day be repeated for The Terminal City’s Hornby or Galiano Islands after a prolonged drought? But the disasters portrayed in Home have not yet been obvious in Vancouver. Most of our excessive garbage, including much e-waste, is stuff into green spots such as Burns Bog where the extent of the long-term damage is effectively hidden. The exhaustion of marine ecosystems is not obvious except in prices in fish markets. The rising sea levels have not surged into the streets but so far just seeped into the basements of the low-lying parts of Gastown. Forest fires have yet to scar large areas that are visible from the city. And the inevitable environmental refugees have yet to flood into the city. So Home The Terminal City version might still allow the city to live up to the 2010 marketing, from the distance of aerial views – for a while.

If the bottom-line of Home is to enchant adolescent sensibilities, UK filmmaker Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid[12] blends angst and remorse in more intricate ways to mess with any remaining innocence. The pathos, the ’stupid’ in ‘the age of’, is not just about poor decisions about lands, seas and natural resources but also the clinging to denial in the face of overwhelming evidence (such as what is still witnessing in Australia). In The Age of Stupid the characters are compelling and the arguments powerful while being illustrated through quirky cartoons. Unfortunately, the emphasis, on preparation for the December 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen, dates the film now that there are no plans for completing or signing a global treaty (which does confirm the film’s argument that we are, in deed, living in The Age of Stupid).

The Age of Stupid is a milestone in films on climate change and environmental crises more generally. A sort of Unconvenient Truth [13] on Red Bull, The Age of Stupid breaks with the Thoreauvian (as in the 1854, Walden; or, Life in the Woods) preoccupation with personal conscience in solving environmental problems and moves to a more interesting set of characters (than Al Gore) trying to survive, get and stay affluent, and, sometimes, to do right. In moving from individual to collective stories in The Age of Stupid, there are lots of interesting contradictions such as windfarm developer Piers Guy whose other car is biodiesel but who drives a newish BMW station wagon, a decidedly gas-guzzling artefact of peak oil, as he fights the forces of ’stupid’ blocking development of a windfarm in Deptford in rural England. The coverage of Guy’s struggles is at the core of the most important but most debatable logic of The Age of Stupid. Some of the (’stupid’ author’s useage) individuals fighting Guy’s projects go as far as to admit that it is necessary to take action to counter climate change as where anti-windfarm campaigner, Victoria Reeves, states, “Of course we’re worried about global warming. That’s got to be something that we’re all concerned about. I mean we’re all doing our bit to conserve and looking at renewable energy, absolutely.” Reeves argues that a windfarm on the site would be another kind of environmental disaster but makes no specific commitments to support development of other forms of renewable energy generation in the area. Perhaps she was cut-off by the filmmakers. More likely, she was thinking there is still time to find and support a carbon neutral alternative to windfarms for southern England. Guys, the windfarm advocate, reflects that, “It’s an emotional campaign, it’s about fear and mostly based on complete bollocks frankly, but never mind, facts are not a problem.” and later asks, “How the heck are we meant to persuade people in India and China to develop in a more sustainable way when we’re not even prepared to accept the odd windfarm in the landscape?” The Age of Stupid wisely understates that the following year saw extraordinary flooding in that same area (exacerbated, at lease somewhat, by stronger storms from higher temperatures).

The questionable level of sincerity of the commitment expressed by anti-windfarm campaigner, Reeves to ‘conserve’ is the core to the story of our current age of stupidity. Thus the beauty, the core narrative of The Age of Stupid is to show the monstrosity of the lapse in responsibility without turning the anti-windfarm campaigner, Reeves, into a monster. She is an every woman, rather than a bad thing for the biosphere, who still thinks that she has time to complete her sentence. The problem, and it is a minor flaw that can be easily fixed in the sequel, The Age of Stupid II: Death and Mayhem, is that Victoria Reeves could be putting her resource in other kinds of conservation, traded her luxury vehicle for a bicycle perhaps, and just might have been cut-off mid-sentence. So the deeper stupidity of the age is that neither Guy, the nice developer and capitalist, and Reeves the horsey, gentry speculating on land are sufficiently competent (at least from what we saw on screen) to have the primary ’say’ on which conservation and renewable energy projects go where and to become true heroes or villains. Instead, this battle of old and new money in rural Britain, in responding to the biggest crisis humankind has ever faced, becomes distracting and unsatisfying. Thankfully The Age of Stupid is compensated by characters such as an elderly mountain guide reflecting on retreating glaciers and increasing traffic in the Alps, a man who rescued 100 people after Hurricane Katrina and still believes in his gas-guzzling employer, Shell, and a young woman surviving horrific pollution and repression of activists in Nigeria’s oil region.

Perhaps the deepest flaw, in this important film, is that these symbolic individuals are portrayed within communities that are already under stress and disintegrating in the face of peak oil. The Age of Stupid does not show us how to build resilient communities that can quickly build carbon neutral alternatives but rather how distressed individuals are making difficult decisions, grounded in their personalized ethics, to the solving of problems that are so huge as to require far more collectivist responses. As for directions in environmental politics in The Terminal City, The Age of Stupid says a great deal. I can re-imagine the windfarm - rural Deptford - NIMBY debates in the horse zone of Vancouver’s Southlands in this the last decade before rise level will start to threaten some properties. And the self-righteousness of the windfarm advocates, though largely correct, can be used in our region by far more dubious enterprises such as those hoping to dam rivers for ’small’ hydro-electric projects that effectively privatize entire watersheds.

Of the major films on environmental crisis over the last few years, Shannon Walsh’s H2Oil [14] is one of the most powerful in the sense of providing a cogent story that both illuminates and motivates. Whereas The Age of Stupid weaves narratives of denial, coping and activism through a preoccupation with individuals and networks, H2Oil is a more cogent set of tales about communities struggling as two massive watersheds are drained and poisoned. The tar sands are devastating both the Peace- Athabasca watershed, which flows through two huge lakes to the Mackenzie and the Arctic Oceanm and the North Saskatchewan that flows into Lake Winnipeg and then on to Hudson Bay. Where The Age of Stupid ably describes global climate change as a crisis of a thousand forms of reliance and waste of fossil fuel, along with a myriad of denial and repression, H2Oil better links three major disasters: the devastation of the excavation and processing of the tar sands; the pollution poisoning communities downstream; and the subsequent warming which is melting glaciers that in turn reduces the amount of water available for human communities as well as the huge amounts of input necessary to process the bitumen into fuel. While there are many ‘Age of Stupid’ narratives, the story of the Tar Sands is perhaps the most wasteful, perilous (for two entire regions of Canada as well as for the planet), and ’stupid’ as in Pure Canadian Hubris. But H2Oil is too lean to have time for vague judgements. There is a meta-ethic afoot that makes for a powerful discomfort.

The strongest portrayals in H2Oil are of the aboriginal communities of Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca who have been organizing around extraordinary rates of cancer increasingly linked to heavy metals, arsenic and naphthalenic acids seeping from the upriver processing of the tar sands by Suncor Corporation. But the troubles of a bottled water business in the eastern foothills of the Rockies, from oil exploration and declines in the water table, are not so compelling and an Iraqi brother and sister displaced in Amman are collateral damage to the extent that their inclusion in the film is almost gratuitous. H2Oil is most powerful in its careful linking of the tar sands development with three global conundrums: the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq (that inflated oil prices); NAFTA’s Proportionality Clause that puts ever increasing pressure on Canadian energy reserves; and the survival of the Cree and Métis communities of northern Alberta. Especially powerful was the portrayal of the Athabasca Chipewyan and Mikisew Cree First Nations confronting Suncor about its pollution and subsequent intervening in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2008 to highlight the growing threat of the tar sands projects.

H2Oil has implications for re-casting Vancouver after 2010. Much of H2Oil is the story of Edmonton as the regional centre that offsets the costs of its own affluence on to less powerful frontier communities up and down river. And like Edmonton, Victoria (and Vancouver) control sizable pockets of remaining fossil fuels in the Peace-Athabasca watershed – the further development of which would unleash disasters both in those isolated communities and through contributing to rise in global temperature. Like Edmonton and the river systems of Alberta, the future of the greater Vancouver region is linked to how well communities acknowledge and solve the crisis of the Fraser – and the extent to which the damage can be reversed. Like the toxic seepage that is killing Fort Chipewyan, there are many towns and neighbourhoods in our region being poisoned – often with native communities who may well be forced to seek help at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

As new kinds of bad things in the biosphere seep into the lexicon of contemporary culture, Richard Knox Robinson’s The Beekeepers [15] is a 28 minute descent into the unknowns of Colony Collapse Disorder. Entire hives are dying, agricultural production is being increasingly impaired especially for certain fruit and nut crops, and the price of honey continues to climb. And The Beekeepers is as much about unknowns and the limits to scientific certainties in fathoming environmental synergies as it is about the disappearance of honeybees. There are a myriad of theories and possible synergies at work in Colony Collapse Disorder but ‘understanding’ what has been killing a large portion of the world’s honeybees is a relative thing. The Beekeepers also illustrates how environmental catastrophes threaten human cultures with long lines of ancient knowledge such as apiculture.

The cinematography The Beekeepers employs a neo-psychedelic visual style that, while a bit maddening in being chaotic and disorienting, reflects the lack of scientific consensus on the roots of and solutions for the devastation of bee hives. Perhaps the most disturbing thing described surrealistically in The Beekeepers is ecological absence: sudden death and the unexplainable loss of something small, lovely and beneficial that has been taken for granted. In this way, The Beekeepers encrypts a new and brooding cultural relationship with science where acknowledging the full implications of the ecological losses becomes more important than logical understandings of the factors behind the disappearances that are quite possibly permanent. The loss, the death, is so overwhelming, and in some cases complete, that fully acknowledging the extent of the absence becomes more important than the explanation. In other words, the damage is already done.

These five films illuminate some of the archetypes and ’sites’ that will shape much of the culture, in deed the stories, of the twenty-first century both in Vancouver and throughout the world. There are few new monsters and demons – perhaps because there are enough already. There is an absence of heroes and more of the heroism is about surviving combined vaguely with making a few altruistic choices. The nice advocate of windfarms in The Age of Stupid, Piers Guy, is, at best, an enlightened capitalist. His political opponent, who may one day soon be demonized, comes off as just narcissistic – like a lot of people. So these new characters, less champions or fiends than wisely self-interested or fuck-ups will come to populate the pantheon of loss, of what could-have-should-have-but-didn’t-happen. And much of the new cast of The Terminal City will be shell-shocked, poorly informed migrants and refugees such as the Iraqi brother and sister trying to survive in Amman (and probably not able to afford to apply to live in Canada). The bad things in the biosphere can be linked, only in part, to ethical failures: the Suncor official expressing personal hurt at not being trusted about pollution levels when the cancer levels of ‘Fort Chip’ are already horrendous; the anti-windfarm campaigner who could have been organizing for diversification of renewable energy projects but most probably did not; the Tokyo police officer focused on apprehending a supposed terrorist while ignoring the clues leading to the illegal emissions (with perhaps his lapse a kind of terrorism). And the stage is no longer the world of individual actions in isolated spots such as Waldon Pond, that marked the comparatively ineffective responses to environmental crisis in the twentieth century, but ethical choices that are often uncomfortably collective.

Is Vancouver a good backdrop for a generic version of The Terminal City for what may well be a century of mayhem? Our mountains, too, are losing glacier and water. Local estuaries are increasingly paved and contaminated with little pause in sight. Frontier communities are threatened with survival and the overly quiet places are seeing more and more absences of things that we once took for granted. And there are the detectives struggling to identify the perpetrators lost in increasingly toxic nether worlds that bear resemblance to parts of and the suburbs swirling around Vancouver.

Gordon Brent Ingram is a Vancouver-based environmental planner and designer, well-educated in landscape ecology, who often writes and teaches about ecological knowledge and contemporary culture.

Notes
[1] The origin of the label, “The Terminal City,” for the cluster of towns that today constitutes the metropolitan region that includes Vancouver, goes back to the time of the city’s incorporation in 1886. A rather dubious poem using the “The Terminal City,” as a label for the Greater Vancouver region, was published in 1887. (Patricia E. Roy. 1976. The preservation of peace in Vancouver: The aftermath of the anti-Chinese riots of 1887. BC Studies 31: 44 - 59. See page 44.)

[2] Wendy Stueck. 2009. Mayor rolls out Vancouver’s new green strategy. Globe and Mail (October 1, 2009).

[3] http://beta.davidsuzuki.org/david-suzuki-the-legacy-lecture/

[4] Trevor Boddy. 2009. Vancouver, Vancouverize, Vancouverism: Building An Idea. http://www.vancouverism.ca/

[5] For one review of the recent surge in the cultural preoccupation with Apocalypse, see Charles Foran. 2009. The slow apocalypse: The arts show how global warming makes us feel more helpless than nuclear weapons ever did. Globe and Mail (November 7, 2009). http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-slow-apocalypse/article1354720/

[6] Ehrhard Bahr. 2007. Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. See page 106.

[7] Ehrhard Bahr. 2007. Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. See pages 106 and 107.

[8] “Brecht’s Galileo of 1947 was one of the earliest and most thought-provoking literary protests against the nuclear age…Although Galileo raises many arguments in favor of class warfare against the autocratic society of the seventeenth century that smack of a Marxism before its time, this emphasis shifts toward the end of the play. The play’s final indictment and conclusion address the welfare of all mankind, not that of a particular class…Most remarkable is his [Brecht's] valorization of individual decision making…Because of its appeal to the ethics of the individual scientist, Brecht’s Galileo of 1947 must be characterized as belonging to the ‘modernism of social responsibility’…” (Ehrhard Bahr. 2007. Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. See page 126.)

[9] Ehrhard Bahr. 2007. Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. See page 107.

[10] Island of Dreams, Yume no Shima
(Japan, 2009, 83 mins, DVCAM (NTSC))
In Japanese with English subtitles
Directed By: Tsuta Tetsuichiro
distribution: 2525films, Tokyo http://2525film.web.fc2.com/

[11] Home
The Way of Nature
(France, 2009, 120 mins, 35mm)
In English with partial English subtitles
Directed By: Yann-Arthus Bertrand
The movie was released simultaneously on June 5, 2009 in cinemas across the globe, on DVD, Blu-ray, television, and on YouTube.
web-based distribution: http://www.youtube.com/homeproject

[12] The Age of Stupid
(UK, 2009, 89 mins, DigiBeta)
In English
Directed By: Franny Armstrong

[13]Inconvenient Truth, 2006, in English, USA, directed by Davis Guggenheim, Produced by Lawrence Bender, Scott Z. Burns, and Laurie David, written by Al Gore (teleplay), starring Al Gore, budget: US$+1,000,000, gross revenue: US$49,047,567. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth 16 November, 2009 )

[14] H2Oil
(Canada, 2009, 81 mins, HDCAM)
In English
Directed By: Shannon Walsh
distribution: Loaded Pictures http://h2oildoc.com/home/contact

[15] The Beekeepers
(USA, 2008, 28 mins, HDCAM)
In English
Directed By: Richard Knox Robinson
distribution: Ekphratic Productions http://www.robinsonphoto.com/film.html

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False Creek: Public Art and / versus Real Estate Marketing | Collective Memory and / versus historical editing | Cultural production and / versus heritage markers

Monday, November 9, 2009

Since the first cities, public space has been a mash-up of art and advertising, fun and high culture, and remembering and forgetting. Many of the cultural (and political) stories and messages of communities, especially their elites, are transmitted through how public art and memorial works fits into and transforms adjacent urban space. So the environmental, designed and cultural textures of public sites tell us a great deal about unresolved social contests in particular neighbourhoods: between community versus private and corporate interests; between different kinds of and strategies for multiculturalism; and between a host of agendas for remembering (and forgetting) various episodes of local history and bits of heritage.

The network of outdoor spaces around False Creek constitutes a kind a matrix of public life into which the entire western side of the city connects and, while often lovely, embodies a set of ongoing debates and dilemmas around the roles of politicians, developers, artists, historians, planners, and designers in neighbourhood life. So the public art and space along the inlet tells us a great deal about Vancouver’s ambiguous and contradictory relationships to public space, collective memory, and contemporary culture.

The north side of False Creek has the densest set of permanent outdoor art works, constituting a sort of linear sculpture park, both within Vancouver and in the entire country. But the south side of False Creek does not have very much outdoor (or indoor) art, at all. And few people enjoying these spaces have noticed the disparity. Unlike Seattle, with its celebrated Olympic Sculpture Park, the closest Vancouver has to a dedicated space for outdoor art is along False Creek. So what happens on both sides of the inlet in the coming years should be of concern for activists and professionals of both for contemporary art and democratic urban space.

Ever since I was a young boy and my father took me on a walk on the east side of the Burrard Street Bridge to show me the industrial operations being dismantled around Granville Island telling me how ‘clean’ it would eventually all be, the False Creeks has invoked scepticism for me. Even back then, I had a feeling that the clean-up process would be too thorough and get rid of a lot of people and memories. Of course, a lot had already been destroyed and forgotten around False Creek especially the Musqueam and Squamish village of Snaaq, any signs of which were carefully obliterated in the creation of the berms at Vanier Park. And Expo 86 was the excuse to destroy a neighbourhood of workers living in residential hotels now occupied by Yaletown towers. Yet after all of the processes of community obliteration, the last two decades have seen the funding and construction of public art (along with apartment units) dealing with themes of local history, on the northern side of False Creek, at rates and densities never before seen in Vancouver and rarely in other parts of world.

A decade ago, an arc of very uneven public memory emerged in the public art on the north side of False Creek from the AIDS Memorial in the west to the Marker for Change, the only large-scale memorial to the victims of the 1989 massacre at Montréal’s École Polytechnique, to the east. In 1999 while I was one of the urban designers working in the City of Vancouver public art advisory group, I wrote a paper on this space or ‘trail’ of historical memory and presented a discussion at the University of Barcelona.* A few years later, Irwin Ostindie, at the time working at the Gallery Gauchet and who today is involved with development of the W2 media site at the Woodward’s Building, explored the implications of my work on the almost spontaneous emergence of this arc of public memory for the future of Vancouver.

The public art along the north side of False Creek is quite an achievement in Canadian cultural life. At times, a relatively effective but poorly funded municipal public art programme has been remarkably successful at supporting both the careers of contemporary artists and coordinating the installation of public art works as beautiful and thought-provoking points of neighbourhood engagement. But nearby, formulaic and now dated public art has been used by developers, sometimes cynically, to market otherwise bland condos. Some of the public art and memorials (with the lines between the two categories of public ‘interventions’ increasingly blurred) along False Creek celebrate aspects of history and heritage that has almost been forgotten in much of the rest of the city. Yet nearby, other markers effectively sanitize or obliterate controversial and unresolved of pasts communities, events, and experiences. There are the beginnings of conversations, etched in public space, around both the importance of individualistic artistic production and works, on one hand, and marking more collective and historical experiences, on the other hand.

All this dissonance in public space, even if historical memory is used and scrambled a bit, can be fun and is often a pleasant backdrop for a walk or bicycle ride. For me, there are spots along False Creek that make me feel at home but there other stretches that make me queasy, a bit anxious. Like the enigma of so much public art on the north side and so little across the inlet, public art in False Creek embodies a series of over-lapping tensions and dialectics: sites for truly public art and versus contemporary-looking decorum for marketing real estate; sites of collective remembering versus historical editing that contributes to forgetting; and installations the result of individualized artistic production versus markers of history and heritage that have typically been the results of complicated, collective projects. My central argument about the outdoor art around False Creek is that rather than a resolvable set of tensions, this landscape of doubt embodying questions of a cultural “and / versus ” is what makes the assortment of predictable, already boring architecture interesting and for those unlucky enough to have over-invested in those neighbourhoods, liveable.

What makes the art and markers from the 90s and 00s around False Creek so important to any new policies for public space and art in Vancouver is that they run counter to a century of obliterating public memory. But a string of interesting, site-based art works, no matter how fun, well-researched, and even historically engaged cannot make up for those community deeper losses. While public art is increasingly useful for marketing the so-called ‘World-Class City’ it can never be used, at least not for more than a decade or two, as a substitute for a deeper acknowledgement of obliteration of communities and cultural spaces. And as the mould darkens the lustre of so-called ‘Vancouverism’ any uniqueness of and achievements about the communities along False Creek will be much more about how we develop local dialogues for truth and reconciliation that are played out in public spaces, rather than about repetitive and already dated towers.

While enjoying the new art work around False Creek, I have been exploring some larger questions about how public art can contribute to community memory, on one hand, and edit, re-invent and even obliterate the historical knowledge and experience of ‘public-ness’ of a neighbourhood on the other hand. I have been working with a second set of questions of how outdoor art can contribute to both the public-ness and democratization of some sites, on one hand, and conversely can be part of the effective privatization of formerly public places. Two other sets of questions begin to emerge in a broader examination of the spaces of outdoor art around the inlet. What obligations, if any, should artists, who produce site-based outdoor works, have for acknowledging and engaging with local history – especially of the actual sites they are effectively transforming? A fourth question is around the ethics of the effective use of public art for marketing real estate – especially when few artists can afford high real estate prices the inflation of which the creators of the pieces along False Creek have effectively contributed (while often having effectively subsidized the installation of works in order to get their work seen and acknowledged for the sake of continuing their careers).

Two of the more subtle works of public art along False Creek move me the most. Welcome to the Land of Light, Henry Tsang’s 1997 sculpture is the only piece of public text in the city in Chinook. A century ago when my father was growing up in Kitsilano, he lived in a bilingual world where speaking Chinook was necessary for interacting with both native and settler cultures. When I was very young, my father tried to teach me Chinook but I refused. Now I take great pleasure in visiting Tsang’s work and showing it to friends. A five-minute walk to the east, is Lookout completed in 2000 by Christos Dikeakos and Noel Best. For photo-based Dikeakos, Lookout is his only sculptural work. The work occupies a strip just above the walk and bikeway and provides reminders of the First Nations and early industrial communities that were on False Creek. Dikeakos relates how it was almost a fluke that the piece was constructed and that their historical focus was respected, “Our project was selected after a popular American public art sculptor dropped out. He had a generic maritime theme without any specific historical or heritage angle…Some city officials were adamant about providing ‘Rain Shelters’ and using the entire site. The idea of pure sculpture was compromised by their demand so we made the most basic shelter two walls and a glass roof that makes a response to the style of high rise architecture within the vicinity.”

The art we see today along the inlet is already a relic of the political, economic and cultural dynamics of the (pre-Olympic) 1990s and 00s. The entirety of that public space of conversations about collective remembering and forgetting will soon be another artefact. The coming months will see the installation of a few more outdoor art works along False Creek around the Olympic Village partially guided by a 2007 strategy developed by Seattle-based public artist Buster Simpson**, who more than a decade ago had a work of his own installed on the north side of the inlet. Because of Vancouver’s high level of indebtedness in paying for so much of the 2010 Winter Olympics, along with the ongoing provincial and federal cuts to the arts, and a slowing in condo construction, that for more than any other city has been Vancouver’s major strategy for funding outdoor works, it may be another generation before we see much new public art along False Creek – especially on the south side. And as much of the built environments along False Creek prove to be far less sustainable and resilient than they could have been for the times when they were designed, as stronger storms and higher sea levels require costly retrofits, and as pressures mount for inserting affordable housing, advocating for more social resources for public space and art will be more challenging. Any more art along False Creek will require new, more engaged and passionate public conversations about art, memory and place.

Gordon Brent Ingram is an environmental planner and designer based in a studio on Vancouver Harbour. Most of his projects and teaching appointments are overseas.

This essay is intended for publication in the Vancouver Public Space Network’s second issue of their journal, PubliCity.

Notes

* Gordon Brent Ingram 2000. Contests over social memory in waterfront Vancouver: Historical editing & obfuscation through public art. on the w@terfront – art for social facilitation (University of Barcelona) 2 (January 2000). www.gordonbrentingram.ca/scholarship

** See Simpson’s ‘Southeast False Creek 2007′ ‘Masterplan’ is downloadable at http://www.bustersimpson.net/artmasterplans/

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John Greyson returns to the scene of the crime (one more time)

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

John Greyson’s contribution to the celebrated 2008 film Rex vs. Singh [1] centred on re-imagining the proceedings that took place historic Court House in downtown Vancouver. Today, the building where those repressive trials [2] took place houses the Vancouver Art Gallery.

John met me on a warm summer afternoon and we reflected on how this region centre for contemporary art, and relative tolerance and multiculturalism, had been, not so long ago, a site of state terror with two of the numerous groups victimized were Indo-Canadian males and other males, from a range of backgrounds, who supposedly had sex with them.

notes

[1] REX VS. SINGH. 2008. Directed by Ali Kazimi, Richard Fung and John Greyson /Canada /2008 /video / 39 minutes. Produced under the auspices of the Out on Screen Queer History Project of Vancouver. One of the most important reviews and discussions of the film was Mattew Hays’ 2008, Unearthing the ignored and forgotten: Retelling the entrapment case of Rex vs Singh. Xtra! West (14 August, 2008): 25 (plus cover of issue) with a copy available here. matthew-hays-2008-unearthing-the-ignored-and-forgotten-xtra-west-n-391-14-august-2008-p-251

[2] Ingram, G. B. 2003. Returning to the scene of the crime: Uses of trial narratives of consensual male homosexuality for urban research, with examples from Twentieth-Century British Columbia. GLQ (Gay and Lesbian Quarterly) (New York) 10(1): 77 - 110. A PDF copy is available here. ingram-2003-glq-101-77-1101

Filed in The Terminal City, heritage and history, queer space | | Comments (0)

Retheorizing the So-called ‘Gay Ghetto’ of Vancouver’s West End

Saturday, April 25, 2009

Fragments, Edges & Matrices:
Re-theorizing the Formation of a
So-called ‘Gay Ghetto’
through Queering Landscape Ecology*

Vancouver’s West End in the upper left of this image from Google Earth**

Can interdisciplinary sciences such as landscape ecology, fields of inquiry that fully engage natural and social sciences, be adapted for better understanding the dynamics of networks of sexual minorities, and more broadly the patterns across space and time of participants of various kinds of sex that does not specifically lead to reproduction? If most scientific inquiry in recent centuries in the West has had a “heteronormative” (Warner 1991) bias, of what could queered forms of landscape ecology studies consist? In this essay, I revisit some early discussions on neighbourhoods of visible sexual minorities sometimes labelled “ghettos” along with literature from past decades on the formation of landscape ecology in order to shed light on these questions. This essay re-examines the environmental context of the formation of one so-called “gay ghetto,” Vancouver’s West End, and explores more nuanced, spatial, and materialist means of describing social processes involving sexual minorities across metropolitan areas. Through revisiting primarily materialist frameworks, such as landscape ecology’s notions of fragments, edges and matrices, I hope to build a theoretical bridge to better blend biophysical and empirical descriptors in investigations of social networks and physical sites of sexual minorities with critical forms of cultural theory.

The afterlife of the queer theory of the 1990s is shifting to fuller recognition of and engagement with material conditions (Shapiro 2004) that can be termed “queer ecologies.” Broadening the theories and practices that underlay how marginalized groups come to perceive, assess and claim sites, neighbourhoods and social resources has become a project in contemporary sexual cultures and politics (Ingram 1997a). But what do we need to know about our communities and associated physical environments to better defend and expand new-found gains? This essay explores some opportunities provided by and limits to adapting the field of landscape ecology for providing and organizing information on neighbourhoods that in turn can be used in local activism. My focus is on gay male community formation processes that took place in Vancouver’s West End until the onslaught of AIDS in the 1980s, when the neighbourhood’s white gay male demographic began to peak. The West End has been a strategic and mythic locale in Canada’s homosexual male, gay, lesbian, and queer cultures and politics but was particularly important to the formation of notions of gay rights in the 1960s and 1970s. The historical moments that saw the urban changes that created a self-defined gay ghetto (even as long-term resident lesbians were moving away) comprise the focus of this essay.

Until recently, most of the Earth’s ecosystems have been transformed by human cultures that have coupled heterosexuality with reproduction, socialisation, and survival. While exceptions have existed, notions and spaces of sex for pleasure outside of heterosexual reproductive units often remained decidedly marginalized. Well into the 20th century, studies of biological exuberance (Bagemihl 1999), of pleasure in general, were often considered “unscientific,” especially any explorations of the implications of certain human cultures and pursuits of erotic pleasure on ecosystems. Over the last 40 years, the combined movements for women’s reproductive freedom, gay liberation, lesbian feminism, transgendered activism, and queer theory have transformed the formerly heteronormative notions of the biosphere. In the more affluent parts of the world, urban life is being restructured by pursuits for satisfaction, diversifying practices of biological reproduction and modes of families and socialization. The implications of these queer human ecologies on an urbanizing world already degraded by globalization, consumerism, contamination, destruction of habitat, loss of species, and climate change have barely been explored.

In these uncertain times, any utopian anticipation of a planetary lustgarten would be premature and naive. Instead, we are in an era where any space and associated ecosystems and landscapes capable of supporting consensual intimacy are increasingly vulnerable to violence or privatisation or both, and thus becomes a site for contestation. So while there may be a queering of ecological investigations, through at least a tolerance of notions of biological exuberance that includes sexual intimacy between two or more members of the same gender and/or sex, the totality of the habitat (indeed the biosphere) of human sexual expression remains conflicted and “uncomfortable” within the broader contexts of the now lurching globalisation of capital and environmental deterioration.

In this contribution to the debates around Queer Ecologies, I explore an expanded paradigm for understanding the biophysical and cultural environments of networks of public and private sites. In so doing, I hope to contribute to erotic expression, there and elsewhere, that is defined by erotic desire rather than procreation, and that is “queer” at least in the sense of dismantling of the poisonous blend of racism and heteronormativity that was consolidated in the late Victorian period. In particular, I want to queer the vocabulary of landscape ecology in order to better describe and understand the shifting relationships between those physical spaces increasingly influenced by urban design, ecosystem management, and aspects of sites marked in some ways by the rich combination of homoerotic social networks, forms of private and perhaps public erotic expression, and resistances to homophobia.

The central argument of this essay is that landscape ecology holds some theoretical and methodological tools that can be adapted to understanding material aspects of processes of queer urbanization, but that in order to do so it will be necessary to rethink ways to combine the natural and social sciences with a kind of eroticised cultural studies. In particular, it will be necessary to build theoretical bridges linking research methods on cognitive maps to better the defining of erotic subcultures, on one side, and to inventorying uses of particular sites and landscapes by specific groups along with notions of agency, on the other side. Landscape ecology as a field of inquiry consists of interdisciplinary approaches for studying the interplay of biophysical ecosystems and human communities – including culture. Some European schools of landscape ecology have focused on cultural transformations of ecosystems and physical space. Some associated research methods, that map shifting culture landscapes at various scales over time, can be applied for more nuanced understandings of sexual subcultures (which of course have a material basis), and also for the “queering” of neighbourhoods and even for identifying contemporary policy and design agendas. But queering landscape ecology, as with contesting the cultural biases in any science, will not be easy.

A second argument emerges from applying landscape ecology to understanding community formation for sexual minorities in Vancouver’s West End: in describing material aspects of queer social relationships, there is a basis for identifying important dynamics between the physical environment and economic relations, on one hand, and culture and popular political ideas on the other. Some of these relationships can be dialectical, yet they are only partially mediated by political economy. In other words, environmental contexts and city forms have impacts on sexual cultures while sensibilities and ideas directly influence urban policy, design processes, neighbourhood landscapes, and metropolitan ecosystems. These dynamics between and among physical contexts, political economy, and culture–including erotic cultures–are not symmetrical across space or time. Ideas, including ones that are key ingredients for sexual cultures, lead to the transformation of urban spaces just as biophysical environments can foster certain experiences and ideologies. A kind of queered landscape ecology, as a mode of investigation, could be pillar of a renewed and more empirically based body of activist theory and associated research methods, especially useful for better understanding persistent social inequities that extend to sexual expression.

The remainder of this essay is available in the PDF file that has been posted here. ingram-2009-retheorizing-the-so-called-gay-ghetto-of-vancouvers-west-end

Notes

* This paper was originally presented in May 2007 at the Queer Ecologies Colloquium organized through the Faculty of Environmental Studies of York University and held at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. A version of this manuscript has been proposed as a essay of an anthology of those discussions.

** This is a modified, 2007 composite satellite image of the Vancouver Peninsula. The eastern edge of Stanley Park, including the important past and present, public sex sites, is in the upper left. The West End is adjacent to Stanley Park and extends to the middle of the image where the neighbourhood meets Vancouver’s Downtown business district.

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The re-emergence of Vancouver’s wooden streets

Friday, April 24, 2009

After long, wet winters, such as this year’s, Vancouver’s old wooden streets that were built little more than a century ago and that have been barely covered in asphalt, begin to re-emerge. These artifacts of the area’s old growth forests, that are primarily scraps of Douglas fir, were found on Railway Street, just west of North Dunlevy Street in what is now considered the east end of Gastown. When these streets were built more than a century ago, this was the confluence of the Indian Rancherie, that became Skid Road, and Nihonmachi, Vancouver’s Japantown. And down the block at Railway and Gore Streets was Vancouver’s last brothel district that was dismantled in 1917.

Just below the surface of these street are more designs for The Terminal City.

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Returning to the scene of the crime — Again and again

Thursday, August 21, 2008

A copy of this posting is available in a PDF file: returning-to-the-scene-of-the-crime-again-again-designs-for-the-terminal-city-21-august-2008

The following is compilation of my notes for and contributions to the 39 minute video made in 2008, Rex vs. Singh[1] that was first screened this week in Vancouver as part of the Out on Screen, Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

The convergence of the early Vancouver neighbourhoods of Chinatown, Gastown, and Japantown (Nihonmachi) once referred to as ‘Celestialland’.

21 August, 2008, Celestialland, The Terminal City

Last night’s screening of the 39 minute film, Rex vs. Singh[2], was a landmark in contemporary conversations racism on the West Coast – revisiting Vancouver’s 1907 – 1928 anti-Sikh Gross Indecency trials where the City of Vancouver Police were exceptionally active in entrapping adult males for consensual sex with other men. It was gratifying to contribute to Rex vs. Singh and to see the three directors use some of the research and further explore the implications of my 2003 essay, “Returning to the scene of the crime: Uses of trial narratives of consensual male homosexuality for urban research, with examples from Twentieth-Century British Columbia.”[3]

At the screening, I half-enjoyed seeing the five minutes of their interviews with me but I also felt sad that few local others scholars (and activists) had taken the time to delve into the archived dossiers of those exceptionally racist and vicious trials. In the panel after the screening, I did not have time to thank Indiana Matters who, while working in the British Columbia Archives in the early 1980s, first explored one of the dossiers in terms of British Columbia’s ‘Lavender history’[4]. Over a decade ago and already a decade after her 1985 essay, I visited Matters in her office at the British Columbia Gaming Commission in Victoria to ask about her reference to that trial dossier and we discussed the possibility that there might have been more than one trial and perhaps even an organized campaign against Indo-Canadian males. And in that panel after the screening of Rex vs. Singh, I did not have time to talk about, and perhaps it does not matter now, the shock that I experienced in the BC Archives to realize the extraordinary extent to which both the City of Vancouver Police and the local courts hounded these men through scores of trials over two decades.

The screening left me a bit exhausted. With only 39 minutes, and alluding to as much rich cultural history and sexual politics as such detailed portrayals from the Twentieth Century as Brideshead Revisited, Rex vs. Singh barely had time to construct a space for viewers to glimpse the despair and terror that these young men jailed as sex criminals, and so recently in Canada and away from their communities in India, must have experienced. The party after the screening said it all to me: the local Indo-Canadian men and the mixed group of ‘queer historians’ barely mixed. On one level the racist social project embodied in those prosecutions was a failure. But barriers remain that are exacerbated today by so little historical understanding of the damage wrought by homophobic Canada state in the first three quarters of the Twentieth Century.

This little film could best be used to attract the funding for a ten hour historical drama spanning those two decades and that number of trials (or more) but the current Conservative federal government has been specifically cutting contentious explorations such as this. The follow-up questions posed by Matthew Hays for his discussion of Rex vs. Singh[5] are also important for more careful and comprehensive chronicles of resistance to the further institutionalization of the colonial inequities of race, culture and sexuality that for over a century stained and effectively impoverished this neighbourhood of Downtown Vancouver.

***********

Ali Kazimi at Mainland Transfer Company’s Stables, 112 East Pender Street, Vancouver, 6 April 2008, photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram

Returning to the Scene of the Crime (Again)

7 April, 2008 Nihonmachi, Vancouver

Oh the April rains! I have spent the last two afternoons with Toronto-based filmmaker Ali Kazimi returning to the scene of the crime again and again[6]. Ali recently directed a video that was an important contribution to the history of the 1914 Komagata Maru incident. In one of the first operations of the Canadian Navy, hundreds of Punjabi immigrants, many of whom were British subjects, were denied the right to come ashore in Vancouver – with their ship languishing horribly over a tense summer. Ali’s 2004 Continuous Journey[7] cast new light on the terrible affair and situated it more clearly in terms of the broader Indian freedom struggle.

Now Ali is back in Vancouver to investigate the anti-Sikh sodomy arrests that took place in the years immediately before and after the Komagata Maru incident. We walked the streets of what today is often called the Downtown Eastside. But a century ago this was the central precinct of Vancouver that saw racialized contests over urban space with overlapping neighbourhood names such as Chinatown, Gastown to the west(primarily north-western European), and Celestialland (entertainment establishments that included, saloons, opium deans, heterosexual brothels until 1917 and various forms of spontaneous, situational and more purposeful homosexuality).

In the wake of the Oscar Wilde trials (which influenced law in British Columbia) and the codification of the federal Canadian laws against ‘gross indecency’, many of the first arrests for consensual sex between adult males in British Columbia involved one or more individuals who were Sikh and South Asian and to whom Vancouver courts often referred as `Hindoos’. These arrests for consensual homosexuality were nearly always in urban areas of Victoria and Vancouver and by municipal police. In contrast, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were often focused on rural areas and were involved in few arrests for consensual homosexuality between adults. In terms of arrests for gross indecency, the RCMP were more concerned about sex with animals (along with rape) to the extent of organizing complicated barnyard stake-outs.

So in British Columbia, the first legal battles and initial case law around arrests for consensual homosexuality between adult males were in so-called ‘oriental cases’ where Sikh males were followed, hounded, and often entrapped in particularly ‘hands-on’ ways. And along with the legacy of the racism was another of a kind of perverse state interest in South Asian, and in particular Punjabi, male bodies. In addition was the legacy of particularly aggressive entrapment of gay males by City of Vancouver Police that continued well into the nineteen seventies.

On these rainy spring days in a very different era, Ali and I walked the streets of Celestialland beginning to reconstruct of the urban space of two dossiers (with all of their competing fictions). One of the earliest arrests for consensual homosexuality between adult males, and one of the earliest police entrapments of gay men(perhaps for all of Canada), was in Rex versus Nar Singh in 1909.[8] Ali and I ruminated on some the supposed details of Nar Singh’s ill-fated passage in December 1908 in search of a place for sex – as described in the dossier for his arraignment.

“At the said City of Vancouver, on the 12th day of December A.D. 1908, Nar Singh did unlawfully in private attempt to procure the commission by a male person of an act of gross indecency with another male person.”

“Q. You are a detective in the city of Vancouver? - A. I am…

Q. Do you recognise the accused? - A. I do.

Q. Did you see him on or about the 12th December last.

A. Yes on the morning of the 12th.

Q. What time?- A. On or about 2 O’clock.

Q. Where?- A. At the corner of Pender Street East and Columbia Avenue…

A. I was in company of Detective Scott. We were standing on the North West Corner of Pender St. and Columbia Ave. and he was right opposite to us on the other side of the street.

Q. Mr. Kennedy: - I want you to relate to the Court what occurred

In the first place where you?- A. I was in the company of Detective Scott. We were standing on the North West Corner of Pender St. and Columbia Ave. and he was right opposite to us on the other side of the street.

Q. COURT:- That is he was on the South East Corner?-

A. Yes Your Worship. We had seen him there three or four nights previous to that. That is what drew our attention to him this night in particular. I went over across the street to where he was…I asked him what he was doing. He made a motion with his hand and told me to come along with him.”

“Q. Court:- Does he speak English?- A. Yes.”

“I hesitated for a little while. He says come on and caught my by the sleeve of the coat. I followed him. We waded across a vacant lot, a building that has been torn down. He went in behind the Chinese Hospital down a stair way and into a little alley way between two buildings. He took me over to the back of the hospital and across the alley way between False Creek and Pender Street…The Chinese Hospital is back of the Mainland Transfer Company’s Stables…He took me in the stoop of the stables where the Transfer Company keep their horses. He took me in behind a dray. Took off his coat and west and put it on the back of the dray.”

“Then he started to open my clothes. I kind of stopped him a little from opening my clothes. He took down his braces and his pants and went down on his knees on the floor…I was right behind him. We went on his knwees in front of me. Then he tried to reach back with his hands to catch hold of my pants.

Q COURT:- You say he went down on this hands and knees?-

A. Yes. Then he turned around got up off his hands and knees got up on his feet again.”

“He asked me what was the matter. Then he started to try and open my pants again, then he went down on his hand and knees again facing me and he had hold of the edge of my pants, right here.”

“Q. MR. KENNEDY:- That would be the top of the fly?-

A Yes in fact he had two buttons open. I put my hand on his and then he motioned to his mouth. Then I pushed him away made him get and put on his coat. He followed me out of this Chinese Hospital. He had a room there.

Q. Court:- You say he has a room there?- A. Yes five or six of them had a room together.”

“Q. Did he say anything?- A. He started to open my pants up.”

“Q. Was Detective Scott with you when you first saw the accused that night. A. He was right across the street.

Q. He did not did not follow you?- A. He followed us.

Q. When this attempted act of gross indecency took place was he there?-

A. He saw the Hindu pull me away.

Q. But he does not know anything about this attempted act of gross indecency?- A. I do not suppose he would.”

“MR. MCTAGGART:-

Q. Did you go inside the house w[h]ere the Hindus were?-

A. I did.

Q. Were there others there?- A. Yes.

Q. Do you remember where those others were? A. All lying in bed.”

“DETECTIVE SCOTT

Q..When we came along to the corner of Pender and Columbia we saw the accused walking up and down the street. The first we saw of him there was a man apparently to me under the influence of liquor came out of the Great Northern Hotel and went east on Pender St.

Q. A white man? A. Yes a white man.

The accused went a few doors up and stopped him and spoke to him. After speaking to him a few minutes he crossed the street.

Q. Who crossed? A. The accused.

It was then that Detective McDonald went across and met him.”

A. I saw them come up from this stable and they came up and met me together then I went up stairs with the accused to his room in the rear of 112 Pender St. East. He took off his shoes when he went into the room which was very dark. He said nothing.”

“Q. I am going to ask you to go over, very carefully, all the movements that occurred after accused took you to his room that would justify a charge of attempted gross indecency.

A. Everything was very qui[e]t[]. There was no light. The lamp was burned down until the wick was just red. After the accused had taken his boots off and laid them on the floor very quietly. He took his coat off. He came up to me and put his hand on my face and down over my chin and his other on my fly.”

“A. I had hold of him and when he jumped in the bunk I flashed the light on him.

There was a window at this back and there was a dim light coming in.

Q. Electric light? A. A very dim light from the outside. The window was very dirty.”

“COURT:- Having heard the evidence do you wish to say anything in answer to this charge? You are not obliged to say anything unless you desire to do so; but whatever you may say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence against you at your trial. You must clearly understand that you have nothing to hope from any promise of favour and nothing to fear from any threat which may have been held out to you to induce you to make adminission or confession of guilt, but whatever you now say may be given in evidence against you upon your trial, notwithstanding such promise or threat”.

COURT:- Has he anything to say. A. Nothing to say.

COURT:- Any evidence:- A. No.

COURT:- I order him to be committed to trial.”

Ali and I kept returning in the cold early April rain to those stables on East Pender.

Ali Kazimi, Sun Yat Sen Gardens, Vancouver, 7 April, 2008 [10]

The most complex of the anti-Sikh sodomy trials that we have found so far was around an ill-fated foursome in the winter following Vancouver’s terrible summer of 1914 where both Vancouver’s politicians and racist whites blocked the docking of the ship[9]. In the 1915 Rex versus Nana Singh and Rex versus Dalip Singh, there was a botched entrapment and arrest that saw a rather short, undercover officer, Detective Ricci, having the beginnings of sex (supposedly just for King and Country) with a much taller Punjabi male who soon after had his jaw broken. After Detective Ricci’s partner was arrested, he accused the officer of trying to extort a bribe from him.

“the said City of Vancouver, on the 2nd day of February A. D. 1915 Nana Singh a male person, in public, did unlawfully attempt to commit an act of gross indecency with Joe Ricci, another male person.”

“the said City of Vancouver, on the 2nd day of February A. D. 1915 Dalip Singh a male person, in public, did unlawfully attempt to commit an act of gross indecency with Ralph Pierce, another male person.”

“RALPH PIERCE

Q. What is your occupation?

A. I am a chauffeur just now…

it was in the afternoon the machine was l[ai]d up and I was down there at the Panama Hotel, and I first met one of these man.

Q. Which one?

A. The one with the white turban. I don’t know his name.”

“A. I first meet him and he wanted to take me up to the room.

Q. Up to whose room?

A. Up to his room, up to the Sunset Rooms. So I went up there with him…there were two detectives come in there, so then when they came in they kind of spoilt the whole thing, and he made an appointment at eleven o’clock at night to meet him at the Panama Hotel to go up - he didn’t mention where to go to but I said alright. And I dropped down in the Panama again that night after I had supper and I met this Hindoo down there again. This was about seven p.m. So he wanted me to go with him then; so I got Detective Ricci there and [Detective] S——r, and he wanted me to get my friend because he had another friend.”

“Q. Who wanted you to?

A. That Hindoo with the white turban on. So I got Ricci and introduced him at the tram station as my friend. So at the tram station he said he would give us seventy-five cents for the two of us and two dollars every Sunday and pay car-fare both ways to Central Park. That is for both of us; and so then he would not give us the seventy-five cents[.]”

“We took our pants down, and he had his penis out and everything, and came up on us, and then Mr. S——r came in a few minutes after that.”

“Q. Where did that happen?

A. That happened just a little the other side of the Georgia-Harris street viaduct on the C.P.R. [Canadian Pacific Railway] tracks.”

“A. When we were talking in the afternoon he was standing beside me and got talking about the Komagata Maru, whatever it was…

In the afternoon he asked me if I would like to fuck. That is just what he said to me, and I said ’sure any old thing’.”

“Q. Ever act as stool pigeon for the police?

A. No, sir, never did.

Q. Do you at the present moment?

A. No.

Q. How did you get in touch with [Detective] Ricci?

A. I didn’t think it was a very just thing that he was trying to do. I thought the matter should be reported..

A. And you reported the matter yourself?

A. Yes.

Q. The fact is you met this man, a perfect stranger, in the Panama Bar[]room?”

“Q. Now I tell you frankly this man doesn’t speak a word of English?

A. He did when I saw him.

Q. He learned English fir the occasion?

A. Perhaps he did.

Q. Well you talked English to him?

A. Yes and he talked English to me.

Q. Now I want you to tell me. You have given me four or five words in English. I want everything he said in English on that occasion and on the evening.

A. We were talking about the Komogata Maru.”

“Q. You tell me all he said in English.

Q. Well at the tram station he said ‘you come out to Central Park there and I will give you seventy-five cents tonight and two dollars every Sunday and pay carfare both ways’

Q. What for?

A. To go out there every Sunday and stay with him.

Q. Did he use the expression ‘to stay with him’?

A. I don’t know whether he used that expression.”

“Q. Did you hit him with a revolver over the head?

A. No, sir.

Q. Who did?

A. I don’t know.

Q. How did this man fracture his jaw?

A. I guess he did that when he jumped in the pool of water.

Q. I am advised that you and [Detective] Ricci held this man up on the street and asked him for money, and that Ricci hit him over the head with the revolver and he fell down and fracture his jaw?

A. I deny that.

Q. I also tell you very fairly that the tall man knows Ricci as well as he knows to see the Magistrate. He has talked to him frequently. Now do I understand you to say that this man came then and didn’t know Ricci as a detective?

A. Yes, sir. We he didn’t say anything about it, but it seems very strange to me that he would try to take down Ricci’s pants and try to go at him.

Q. And you and Ricci were perfectly agreeable that they should begin?

A. Yes.

Q. For seventy-five cents?

A. Yes.”

“DETECTIVE RICCI

Q. You know Nana Singh very well don’t you?

A. I don’t. I might have seen him but I cannot say I knew him at all. I never spoke to the man before.

Q. You never spoke to the man before?

A. I don’t think I did.

Q. Do you mean to say you didn’t caution this man several times on the occasion of the Bela Singh murder charge?

A. No.

Q. You were a witness on that case?

A. I was.

Q. And he was too?

A. I don’t know.

Q. He says he knows you very well indeed, that he saw you frequently in the Bela Singh case, and you cautioned him.

A. He didn’t know me that night.”

“DETECTIVE RICCI

A. The two accused can speak very nice.

Q. Just confine your evidence first to D—p S—g and give me the words that you describe as ‘nice’.

A. Do you mean Dalip Singh, can he speak English?

Q. I am not asking you if he can speak English, I am asking you to satisfy me.

A. He can speak English.

Q. Tell me what words in English he used.

A. He used in English, ‘you come up South Vancouver Sunday, you savvy Sunday?’ He said ‘you savvy Sunday?’ I said ‘yes’ ‘Me pay you’.

Q. South Vancouver?

A. Central Park.

Q. You said South Vancouver

A. I believe Central Park is in South Vancouver.

Q. You believe Central Park and South Vancouver is the same place.

A. I think so.

Q. Central Park and South Vancouver are two distinct municipalities.

COURT. Oh, no Central park is South Vancouver till it meets Burnaby.

Q. Go on.

A. He said ‘I got a shack’ this man here he pointed him out. Dalip Singh, Nana Singh I mean, ‘he sleep with me, if he don’t want to fuck, I will fuck you, two dollars every Sunday, street car all time, get automobile’ he pointed out automobile ‘only five cents’.”

“DETECTIVE RICCI

Q. Are you in the habit of getting men to go tricking these Hindoos into making suggestions of this kind?

A. No, sir.

Q. Why did you do it this time?

A. Because it was necessary.

Q. It wasn’t a case of seventy-five cents each it was a case of seventy-five cents for both?

A. It was seventy-five cents for both.

Q. 37 1/2 cents for apiece?

A. They didn’t have enough money on him, they will give us the money next Sunday and we will go up to their shack. Two dollars for each one and five cents for street car-fare.”

“DETECTIVE S——R

A. I went there to watch what I could see.

Q. And you saw Ricci take down his pants, then you went over to interfere?

A. I went over. I did.”

“NANA SINGH Called and Sworn…

Q. What nationality are you? A. Sikh from India.

Q. What village? A. Kordola…

Q. Do you know Detective Ricci? A. Yes, I know him very well.

Q. When did you first meet Detective Ricci? A. I remember him well in the Bela Singh case…

Q. Where you a witness in the Bela Singh case? A. Yes.

Q. Was Detective Ricci a witness in that case? A. Yes.

Q. Did you have occasion to speak to Detective Ricci during the progress of that case?

A. Very often.

Q. Can you tell us anyone of the conversations that took place?

A. Yes, I can.

Notes

[1] REX VS. SINGH. 2008. Directed by Ali Kazimi, Richard Fung and John Greyson /Canada /2008 /video / 39 minutes. Produced under the auspices of the Out on Screen Queer History Project of Vancouver.

[2] ibid.

[3] Ingram, G. B. 2003. Returning to the scene of the crime: Uses of trial narratives of consensual male homosexuality for urban research, with examples from Twentieth-Century British Columbia. GLQ (Gay and Lesbian Quarterly) (New York) 10(1): 77 - 110. [A PDF version of this article is available here. ingram-2003-glq-101-77-110]

[4] Indiana Matters. 1985. “Unfit for publication.”: Notes towards a lavender history of British Columbia. Presented at the Sex and the State Conference, Toronto, Ontario, July 3 - 6, 1985. (on file, Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, Toronto, Accession 91 - 258, Box 2).

[5] Mattew Hays. 2008. Unearthing the ignored and forgotten: Retelling the entrapment case of Rex vs Singh. Xtra! West (14 August, 2008): 25 (plus cover of issue). [Two versions of this article are available as PDF files: matthew-hays-2008-rex-vs-singh-discussion-xtra-west, matthew-hays-2008-unearthing-the-ignored-and-forgotten-xtra-west-n-391-14-august-2008-p-25.

[6] Ingram, G. B. 2003. Returning to the scene of the crime: Uses of trial narratives of consensual male homosexuality for urban research, with examples from Twentieth-Century British Columbia. GLQ (Gay and Lesbian Quarterly) (New York) 10(1): 77 - 110.

[7] Continuous Journey, 2004, Director: Ali Kazimi, 87 minutes, colour video DVD, http://www.socialdoc.net/kazimi/ali_html_pages2/1AK2Cont.html

[8] Rex versus Nar Singh, 1909, British Columbia Attorney General documents GR 419, V. 134, file 50 (on file British Columbia Archives, Victoria).

[9] Rex versus Nana Singh & Rex versus Dalip Singh, Vancouver, BC Attorney General documents (GR 419, V. 197, file 31 (1915) (on file British Columbia Archives, Victoria).

[10] http://www.vancouverchinesegarden.com/

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Charmed forces, accessories for `real men’ & exploding consumer landscapes: Conversations with Gaetano Fasciana

Friday, May 30, 2008

Charmed forces,

accessories for `real men’

exploding consumer landscapes:

Conversations with Gaetano Fasciana

Few have lived as charmed a life as Vancouver’s Gaetano Fasciana. A photographer who has bounced back and forth between Milan and Vancouver, Fasciana’s work has hovered on the cusp of fashion and more ironic forms of contemporary art. This spring, Fasciana took subtle aim at Canada’s mild militarization as more died in Afghanistan – and men as fashion victims.

Gordon Brent Ingram: Your essay, “Charmed Forces,” in the May 2008 issues of VLM came as an insert in the Globe and Mail on the 5^th of May. So with that kind of broad distribution, I want to ask a few questions about the agendas and practices that lead to ‘Accessories for real men’.[1]

Gordon Brent Ingram: So why the by-line, ‘Accessories for real men’? A few decades back, accessories were largely associated with female consumers. What’s a so-called ‘real man’ in a world of militarized consumerism and consumerized combat? Why is ‘accessorizing’ so important for males, in a country in an increasingly nasty war half way around the world?

Gaetano Fasciana: The name of the photo essay is “Charmed Forces”. I thought that was a fun play on words as well as a label for the forces that are now in play that are reorganizing current paradigms. The by-line “Accessories for real men” was added by the art director of the magazine. I think it was a pretty straight forward link to selling product. A kind of sign post, pointing the viewer (consumer) in the right direction. It is effective. Personally, I prefer the essay without the by-line, as it offers a more global viewpoint.

Gordon Brent Ingram: Why did you choose a military theme for a fashion spread in this particular season – when Canadians are becoming increasingly committed by the Harper government to a long-term combat role in Afghanistan?

Gaetano Fasciana: For that exact reason. I was looking at some old Vietnam and other WW photos and realized how iconic and important these images have been to the Propaganda machine of the past 90 years. Having been in the Fashion Propaganda Industry for the past 25 years, I thought that a mash up of the two would be a natural fit. I was amused by the idea that one could reach for ‘bling’ while there was a war going on right in front of them. Perhaps an obvious nod to the mass denial and hypocrisy now taking place. Is it possible to ignore the war reference and carry on shopping without some sense of disconnect?

Gordon Brent Ingram: In this cycle of military chic, accessories are relatively understated (though increasingly expensive and important for survival). The military-style accessories these days suggest less organizational insignias and camouflage but more combat readiness. And your models are military toys. The boundaries between peace and war are fuzzy. And your accessorized interzone is filled with over-sized accessories. And then there is the stress of consumer indebtedness (such as for items like the $2,620 Bottega Veneta flight messenger bag from Holt Renfrew). How are design allusions to the military being nested and sold in the fashion world these days?

Gaetano Fasciana: I think that the whole world is becoming a universal mix. I do love the analogy of ‘mash ups’ as I mentioned earlier. The boundaries are becoming blurred in practically all areas. It certainly doesn’t help when headlines are declaring a war on everything. A war on drugs. A war on disease. A war on peace! Ha ha.

Gordon Brent Ingram: What are the commercial uses of this kind of surreal fashion photography, that is almost anti-fashion, but isn’t? Or is it?

Gaetano Fasciana: Well. What are the current taboos? There really doesn’t appear to be any. It is an open and level playing field. I recall Oliviero Toscani photographing AIDS patients for Benetton in the 80’s. At the time, that was very controversial. How does one create ‘shock value’ beyond that? The 90’s stretched the limits of fashion and broke all boundaries. Anti-fashion is fashion.

Gordon Brent Ingram: In the images, you use those digital distortion lines, invoking video uploads from distant places, as part of the aesthetic. What do those lines say about the new space of militarized consumerism and consumerized combat? Do you think that men’s fashion today is a conflict zone for various notions of ‘real’ men?

Gaetano Fasciana: Again, the reference to ‘real’ men was something for the consumer sell. As part of the essay, I wanted to both distort time and contrast these images against the pristine and immaculate imagery of current fashion photos. The photos of models with photo shopped skin so perfect that to see someone in real life with that skin would require a double take.

Gordon Brent Ingram: How important, do you think, are these gendered ‘accessories for real men’, these days — in a time when the most important accessory is a cell phone, Blackberry, or iPhone and they are being marketed equally well to both women and men?

Gaetano Fasciana: I no longer see the accessories as gendered. Eyewear, knapsacks, scarves. What engenders these things? Certainly, there are still some shoe wear that most definitely fit into the gender category. Purses, well, the man purse has been with us for some time.

Gordon Brent Ingram: Do you think that the (re)militarization of consumer fashion, in this particular season with an economic downturn, represents a kind of defence strategy (for consumer fetishes)? Retrenchment? Over the last few years, we may have reached the maximum amount of consumer disposable income for accessories, at least for a while.

Gaetano Fasciana: I think not. Given limited resources, I think the consumer would opt for buying select accessories. Dress up or down. The accessories make the outfit. They denote the social status or the aesthetic.

Gordon Brent Ingram: In one image, a combatant is throwing a bottle of expensive men’s perfume as a Molotov cocktail? Is that some sort of rebellion against what was called, so quaintly, a few years back as ‘metrosexuality’?

Gaetano Fasciana: Not at all. I didn’t want to sexualize the imagery. I thought the perfume would make a great ‘stink bomb’. There is a certain playfulness to that. I could have used some other object. A watch or clock would have been perfect as a ‘time bomb’. In fact, in direct contrast to selling a product through sex, why couldn’t the imagery connect with something else. A playful innocence, perhaps? Hasn’t the novelty of sex worn off yet? At least in the superficial way it is portrayed. Monkeys do it. How novel is that?

Gordon Brent Ingram: In the photographic space, which you create with mannequins and toys, of consuming militarism, why does the landscape virtually disappear? In fact, you create a new kind of landscape, spaces from mud puddles and piles of sand.

Gaetano Fasciana: Many of my essays have used the same effect. I like to homogenize the local surrounding. It is more universal that way. It allows the viewer to both focus and expand consciousness at the same time.

Gordon Brent Ingram: The Paul Smith scarf as a flag for the Accessorized Nation is quite powerful (and sarcastic). What is left of allegiance when what is left of hegemony is more of an identification with a designer than a government? As Afghanistan breaks down into a number of war-lord-controlled narco-states, I wonder if countries like Canada are not vulnerable to fragmentation with the new ensigns defined by the designers and purveyors of fashion. But are the ‘real men’ in this New World models or manikins?

Gaetano Fasciana: Charmed Forces at play! Yes, new paradigms and allegiances. What is ‘Canada’? This question may become more relevant in future discussions.

Gaetano Fasciana’s photographic work and essays can be viewed at www.gaetano.com .

[1] Gaetano Fasciana and Jodi Sam. 2008. Accessories for real men: CHARMED FORCES. VLM (Vancouver’s Lifestyle Magazine) May 2008 Volume 15 Issue 4: 44 - 51.

PDF copy available: charmed-forces-accessories-for-real-mene28099-exploding-consumer-landscapes-conversations-with-gaetano-fasciana-designs-for-the-terminal-city-may-20081

Filed in The Terminal City, critical theory, queer space | | Comments (0)

Alexander & Columbia Streets, Gastown, Vancouver

Saturday, April 19, 2008

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Bolivians r us? Review of Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing. 2006. Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony & Popular Resistance.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Gordon Brent Ingram

Bolivians r us?

BOOK REVIEW

Kohl, Benjamin and Linda Farthing. 2006. Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony & Popular Resistance. New York: Zed.

Kohl, Benjamin and Linda Farthing. 2007 Bumerán boliviano: Hegemonía Neoliberal and Resistencia Social, La Paz: Plural Editores.

As the currency of neoliberalism weakens, while legacies of policies continue to undermine social fabric, popular resistance throughout the globe has remained muted. One of the earliest and most successful national coalitions against neoliberal policies has been in Bolivia. The few examples of successful resistance to neoliberalism are now taking on exceptional value to the development of new theory in political economy.

Three years ago, Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing published Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony & Popular Resistance as a study most relevant to the marginal regions of Latin America where “Bolivia’s experience of neoliberalism demonstrates the difficulties of creating hegemonies in countries with highly unequal power relationships, histories of extreme political instability, confrontational political styles and economic dependency” (page 192). Today, the relevance of Impasse in Bolivia has expanded and can also be also read to fathom the dimming prospects for the hegemony of neoliberal policies as the global financial crisis intensifies.

Impasse in Bolivia is first a book about the limits of globalized capital in attempting to use and transform a distressed nation-state, a country which has lost half of its territory since its inception – and which in the period since publication of this book has been threatened with even more secessionist disintegration. Impasse in Bolivia avoids today’s typical preoccupation with Evo Morales as Latin America’s first indigenous head of state. While Kohl and Farthing are some of the most knowledgeable scholars for a political biography on Morales, Impasse in Bolivia stays focused on the social movements pitted against the almost intrinsic weaknesses in the Bolivian state which have been exacerbated by decades of particularly aggressive, neoliberal policies.

Neoliberalism was predicated on its supposed inevitability which was often conflated with and labelled as globalization and global liberalization of regulation of the market. Today, the decline of neoliberalism is better seen as the difficulties of imposing often trite market-oriented solutions combined with often visceral hostility to state regulation. It might still be easy to dismiss the examples of popular resistance chronicled in Impasse in Bolivia as irrelevant to the wealthier parts of the world. The kinds of grassroots organizing chronicled in Impasse in Bolivia could even signal a new form of globalization — in defence of civil institution and in resistance to corporate capitalism..

Impasse in Bolivia chronicles a particularly volatile historical period for Bolivia between June 10, 2005, the beginning of the caretaker presidency of Eduardo Rodriguez Veltzé the former President of the Supreme Court of Justice, and the landslide election of Evo Morales on December 18, 2005. Kohl and Farthing encapsulated the opportunities and dilemmas of those heady months as, “Even a president of good-will cannot fix twenty years of neoliberal policies overlaid on 500 years of social exclusion in the forty-five days the social movements have given him to prove his mettle.” Impasse in Bolivia deftly describes how popular resistance was impressively organised well before Morales was elected President of Bolivia.

Paradoxically, Bolivia has the kind of fragile state that once seemed ripe for neoliberalism’s picking. Today, we know that assumption to be false if only because neoliberalism lead the Bolivian state to become so ineffectual as to be unable to implement those policies, on one hand, and also impoverished that government to the point where it could not provide the indirect subsidies, through infrastructure, typically necessary for multinational to do business. In 2006, Kohl and Farthing were painstakingly careful to not generalize, to provide an exceptional case study, and to never suggest a sort of ‘Bolivians r us’ approach to understanding these early movements of national resistance to neoliberalism. Much of the focus of Impasse in Bolivia can be encapsulated from the introduction as “For twenty years, like countries all over the global South, Bolivia has been subject to the constraints of global neoliberalism, a system that privileges the market, reduces the ability of the state to provide social services, and simultaneously concentrates wealth among an elite minority while it reinforces poverty among the majority” (page 2).

Based on two decades of field work, Impasse in Bolivia describes a set of shifting neoliberal policies that undermined a nation state — along with attempts by multinationals to take control of infrastructure that the Bolivian state had barely been able to construct. It would also be easy to over-attribute the exceptional grassroots resistance, especially that leading up to the Cochabamba Water War (pp. 162 – 167), to the marginality and extreme poverty of Bolivia’s indigenous majority. But few indigenous majorities, even without such crippling policies, have ever been able to organize as effectively as have Bolivia’s. Early on in Impasse in Bolivia, Kohl and Farthing revisit Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to understand how the IMF-imposed, neoliberal programmes purported to operate like a totalizing system (pages 22 – 25). The chronicling of the loss of Bolivian territory over the last century and a half (page 43) foreshadows much of the central message of Impasse in Bolivia, that neoliberalism needs viable states in order to ‘work’ but paradoxically allows capital to parasitize weak states as to render them so dysfunctional that neoliberal policies cannot be enforced.
Kohl and Farthing describe the process of neoliberal policies effectively undermining identifications of ‘citizenship’ and the loss of indirect social ‘rights’ to resources notably water (pages 88 to 100). Similarly the authors describe the unintended consequences of the decentralization of the Bolivian state in the 1990s with increasing political power to the municipalities and social movements (pages 125 – 145). As well as the conflicts over water were those over taxes and natural gas (pages 149 – 178). Both powerful indigenous organizations (pages 154 to 156) and rising social movements within cities (pages 159 to 152) converged and laid the groundwork for resistance to neoliberalism.

Impasse in Bolivia puts the celebrated Cochabamba water war, that culminated in April 2000, in a localized and nuanced framework while recognizing its symbolic significance as a popular uprising against globalization and in particular the foreign corporate takeover of water infrastructure. Kohl and Farthing argued more critically than most that, “The Cochabamba water war not only paved the road for more contentious politics in Bolivia, but anti-globalization activists elsewhere incorporated it into their critiques of privatization and neoliberalism…The dominant narrative as a ‘David versus Goliath’ struggle of a poor population against the evils of globalization story – one which offers a better base for shaping future actions. In Cochabamba, the water company – public once again—still does not provide adequate access to clean water” (p. 187).

Not content to rely on a simplistic model of the loss of hegemony through grassroots organizing, the authors of Impasse in Bolivia described more intrinsic aspects of failing neoliberal projects. Kohl and Farthing explore why in Bolivia these policies failed to deliver even though the country was once a poster-child of the IMF’s brand of structural adjustment (pp. 179 – 192). Impasse in Bolivia describes the burgeoning indigenous activism (page 184), regional pressures within Latin America (pages 184 to 186), and shifting and unreliable notions of nationalism (pages 186 – 187). While entire studies and books are being quickly penned on these topics, the powerful contribution of Impasse in Bolivia is its sketch of the movements in the year leading up to the Morales presidency along with the authors’ pessimism about the limited alternatives to ‘hegemony’ that can be generated by grassroots movements of highly marginalized social groups on resource frontiers such as Bolivia.

The most powerful paragraph of the final assessment by Kohl and Farthing, one grounded in reflections on the early months of the Morales presidency, has broader implications for the prospects for the state and social infrastructure has the political influence of global capital begins to slip. “Neoliberalism has shrunk the centralized Bolivian state, but rather than bringing about sustained growth through a miracle of the market, it has weakened the government’s capacity to address the population’s needs. Somewhat paradoxically, devolving state functions to municipalities has in fact increased the reach of the government into rural areas and strengthened its presence at the local level. The expanded government presence has awakened a new interest among the rural indigenous population in participating in democratic processes even as faith in democracy declines in the nation’s cities. Democracy in rural municipalities, however, is largely direct and highly participatory, a model that is poorly equipped to fill a national stage.” (page 193). So today, popular organizations in Bolivia are increasing in size and influence and even with Morales and his new constitution, the influence of the nation state remains limited, especially at constructing and maintaining critical infrastructure for basic social needs.

The Spanish version of Impasse in Bolivia was published a year after the English language version and contains an epilogue sketching the challenges facing the Morales government. The question of what specific aspects of neoliberalism’s Impasse in Bolivia might have prefigured today’s more general economic collapse, especially on resource frontiers with indigenous majorities, warrants a second, more theoretical book by Kohl and Farthing.

PDF copy available: ingram-2009-review-kohl-farthing-2006-impasse-in-bolivia-neoliberal-hegemony-popular-resistance2

Filed in critical theory, review | | Comments (0)

andesite & after: Interview with Annabel Vaughan + Rob Brownie by Gordon Brent Ingram

Bad things in the biosphere: Environmental crises as narrative [Re-casting The Terminal City (part 1)] * Reviews of H2Oil, Home, Island of Dreams, The Age of Stupid, and The Beekeepers

False Creek: Public Art and / versus Real Estate Marketing | Collective Memory and / versus historical editing | Cultural production and / versus heritage markers

John Greyson returns to the scene of the crime (one more time)

Retheorizing the So-called ‘Gay Ghetto’ of Vancouver’s West End

The re-emergence of Vancouver’s wooden streets

Returning to the scene of the crime — Again and again

Charmed forces, accessories for `real men’ & exploding consumer landscapes: Conversations with Gaetano Fasciana

Alexander & Columbia Streets, Gastown, Vancouver

Bolivians r us? Review of Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing. 2006. Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony & Popular Resistance.

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