The other day I did this because it really needed to happen. All that gleaming new-campus architecture, surrounded by other gleaming buildings and gleaming buildings yet-to-come was begging for a little fuzzying up.

I did my undergrad at the old Emily Carr University of Art and Design campus which was decidedly less smooth and metallic and more crafty, situated as it was in the Granville Island artisan mecca on the ocean's edge. I liked running my hand along the old wooden posts carved with decades of scrawled text, and all the wiring and ductwork that in the last few years looked like a set out of Brazil. I miss the giant murals on the cement factory silos next door and the funky houseboats and the food stalls in the public market and Opus Art Supplies 30 feet away from the front entrance.

The new serene, clean Emily Carr building is surrounded by new and planned condos that most students could never afford, high-tech companies and, soon, an elevated rapid transit rail line. As much as I wanted to return for graduate studies, I was not convinced that I would be a good fit here, so asking for permission and access to the sign was a bit of a trial balloon for me. I got quick and full support for the idea and its installation, and now see this new white space as a blank canvas, ready for the next era of student artistic expression.

This is my first solo yarn-bombing foray. A bunch of us attacked the old school back in the day for a textile-themed student show but I have yet to meet my people here. So the Emily Carr Cozy is not just a balloon, it's a flare. Is there anybody out there?

As I busied my freezing fingers with the stringy stuff (in hard hat, on the Skyjack operated by design tech services maestro Brian) I kept an ear out for reaction. And it was good. Sharing the fuzzy intervention on social media (#craftivism, #subversivestitch etc.) reminds me that I am not alone in my need for needling authority. Indeed, this public performance includes behind-the-scenes connecting with my community of makers to collect their leftover yarn and thrift-store finds even before the main act. (You know who you are.)

Textile interventions in the public sphere have a way of provoking polarizing responses. Some love the often-chaotic hand-wrapping of colourful fiber; others view the crafty messing with architecture with disdain of all things cozy and crafty and engendered female. I liked the idea of having to wear a hard hat and working for four hours in a Skyjack, in the mode of construction workers in the immediate vicinity of my rapidly changing hometown, to complete my knitting job.

A visual of the process, below. (All photos by Caitlin Eakins)

Living directly across the street from a swath of rubble, I think about the Field of Dreams line, “If you build it they will come.” Except in the case of the formerly thriving community gardens obliterated by CP Rail last month, it’s more, “If you destroy it, they will vamoose.”

And yet.

And yet there is nothing like an untenable situation to spark a creative response. There is evidence of it in the spaces between, beyond, behind, or otherwise outside the scope of authority. You see it in neighbourhood back alleys and in the gaps between buildings all over the world: small, bold, personal gestures. It may start with a graffiti tag (I was here, The Man can stuff it) and evolve into jaw-dropping unauthorized artworks. It may start with that one condo-dweller with no outdoor space who drags a chair down to the street to do some sketching or practise guitar. Last year some folks down the block put out a table at the corner park and had a sit-down neighbours’ potluck dinner. Down another block is a Country Lane, one of just a handful of alleys transformed into a garden-like thoroughfare in a pilot project with the City back in 2002.

These small acts are claims on our community. There’s nothing like an obliterated cherished social space to make us rethink this expectation that city planners or developers or Translink or the provincial government will make our corners of the world livable. That’s up to us. It requires a little courage and some questioning of authority. It may involve a little risk and the understanding that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. 

This is how I came to move a couple of wrought iron chairs from my deck to the acres of dead dirt across the street. I wanted to see if they would be confiscated or destroyed. Instead, they’re being used, to rest for a spell, to soak up the rays, to down a beer. It’s a small act but even two empty chairs are an invitation, a potential conversation.

I’ve been researching creative ways to carve out social spaces in the face of the residential-investment spree that’s taken over Vancouver. Even in the tightest spaces -- or especially in the tightest spaces – humanity can grow and thrive. From the thinnest walkway container gardens in Kyoto to a laneway festival in one of our city’s dumpster-blighted back alley, there is potential in occupying a lost space.

Don’t just say something; sit there.

  

The astronomical private art-investor feeding frenzy at prestigious auction houses is light years away from art. It's a greedy need for prestige, worlds apart from the hand of Picasso or Andy Warhol and, most recently, Francis Bacon and the other Important Artists who conceived those coveted works.

Art is outside the billions of dollars sloshing around the world's art investors; it's in the streets, provoking those who hold the purse strings and the power. You can see it in humble objects, like the garbage monster that prowled around the anti-pipeline rally last weekend at the end of False Creek, towering over the thick crowd, snapping its messy maw at excited kids.  It's not pretty, and it certainly has no retail value, as it's made of the usual stuff that ends up in the Pacific Gyre, but it functions as art has and always will. It provokes us to think differently, to re-consider, step out of our complacency and see the world for what it is and where it is headed or could be. This is the power of the visual object.

The makers (presumably the two operators) of the garbage monster were compelled to express themselves through their creativity and labour, with no profit or prestige motives in mind. The object serves to contest the ways and means and plans of those in power, in this place, at a time when the news broke that Canada is dead last in climate change policy in the developed world. It may be a small gesture, but when combined with other creative forms of expression, can turn the tide.

The prevailing discourse was there in the form of an image-object of an actual SUV receiving a giant lethal injection, during  Car-free Day on Commercial Drive this past June. The only motive behind this gesture was a need to comment. The high visual impact is art in its purest form and the makers are indisputably artists. And those artists are probably not getting rich if they're spending much of their creative effort on an expression outside of the system of capitalism. 

That pretty much has been the history of artists. Their work may have no cash value, but their value to society is priceless.

Thank god for The Walking Dead. It is the one force that has the power to kill off the overpopulation of pink princesses.

All that Pepto-Bismol-hued froth and glitter kicks in my gag reflex but I'm no censor; I've indulged in the princess fantasy of those little girls (and, shockingly, some grown women) for too many years to mention. But there is hope. Pink fatigue appears to have set in this year, at least for Halloween, due, no doubt, to the craze for the undead.

Next battle: the pink aisle.

Princesses and stupid Sexy costumes (popular YouTube clip at the end of this rant) are a waste of a great fantasy opportunity — and an art opportunity.

American photographer Cindy Sherman's long and rich career dedicated to using her body as a blank canvas on which to apply various female personas, makes her an artist of an ever-changing body-sculpture, earning her an important position in conceptual art, performance art, and gender studies.

There's a lot of concept to be mined when altering one's appearance, whether for art or undercover information. Former New York Times restaurant reviewer Ruth Reichl, who donned disguises to ensure she would be treated as a regular restaurant patron, discovered that her different range of personas garnered different reaction from the wait staff. That body effect became equally as interesting as her reviews, and even more so to many of her readers.

Buenos Aires photographer Irena Werning explores the persona of the past, recreating photos of subjects using their own childhood images. She not only recreates the pose and garments, but goes to great lengths to mimic the backdrops and particular photo quality of the original image. Werning insists she has no arching concept in mind in her two-part series, but the effect is there in black and white or colour: a riveting time-based visual study in changes in body and persona.

 

Above: Christoph 1990 and 2011, Berlin Wall.

 

Whenever I'm hit with another CBC countdown promo of its exclusive Canadian coverage of the Winter Olympics in Sochi that viral image of Putin in drag makeup pops into my head.

That one cheeky act packs a political wallop and reminds me that while the pen is mightier than the sword, there's the same power in the paintbrush. And Photoshop.

That image (which I'm still searching for in the form of a legal-fundraising T-shirt) has me dreaming of an Olympics that has athletes wearing rainbow scarves on the podium. More likely it will be the very real nightmare of the military dragging away brave individuals in the stands and the streets who are demanding justice in the face of a homophobic president and its national political policy of hate.

A taste of things to come was most recently seen when Russian artist Konstantin Altunin fled to Paris to seek asylum after his painting of Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in lingerie was seized along with three other paintings in his August show. The crime is unclear. It may be promoting homosexuality to minors. Or hooliganism, which sounds funny but landed the members of Pussy Riot with two years' hard time for performing a  "punk prayer" in Moscow's main Orthodox cathedral last year after Putin was reinstated as president.

So 'performance', even if it's a sloppy dance in homemade hoods, is mightier than the sword. The heavy hand of Putin's policies may be winning the battle — Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova ended her nine-day hunger strike last week to protest working conditions in the women's prison, to no avail, apparently — but the war for social justice is just beginning.

It's unclear whether these unlikely political terrorists (the three convicted seen here pose with their verdict) see it that way.

Taking on the U.S. President or his policies through art has none of that threat of individual freedom of expression.  True, there may be a sort of White House Down going on there at the moment, in the form of a government shutdown over a glacial move toward universal health care, but you don't go to jail for performing or painting or Photoshopping your president in a political artwork. 

You can march on Washington, carrying your homemade sign depicting your president's head on a Pez dispenser spouting one Lie after another, or you can even tattoo his face on the sole of your foot so you can stomp on his image with every step (below) but you can't mess with individuals. And in these parts that includes private companies, as we learned in viewing The Corporation (written by Vancouver's own Joel Bakan, UBC law professor).

You want a taste of the kind of trouble you can bring upon yourself via the paintbrush or Photoshop or performance, take on some of those individual-companies. You might not land in the gulag but you may find yourself paying through the pocketbook in legal defence fees for violating their 'individual' rights.