carlyn yandle
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Time is ripe for Occupy Neighbourhood movement

4/24/2015

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PictureOne of a handful of Vancouver's 'country lanes' from a 2002 pilot projects. (Photo: Ben Nelms for National Post)
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.

PictureDay after destruction: Giant doily on the bulldozed community gardens in Kitsilano (Carlyn Yandle photo)
And so it has come to pass. Where bloom-perfumed weeknight evenings in spring normally draw out elderly food-growers, young adults on after-class dog walks, tots trying out their new walking legs and commuter-runners with backpacks now there is barely a soul. “It’s so futile,” a neighbour said, hands on hips and gazing around at the remnant plant-bits fighting for traction in the bulldozer tracks. “This is just big male egos at work.”

My community, like all Vancouver communities increasingly hemmed in by one glassy, luxury edifice after another, is under threat of becoming no place in particular.

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.”
PictureVancouver's downtown alleys are typically sketchy, soulless spaces. (Photo: Jonathan Hayward , Canadian Press)
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. 

PictureLivable Laneways has taken on the west alley on Main Street north of Broadway, with various temporary installations and community events.
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.

PictureA laneway in Melbourne, Australia (Photo by Corbis via traveller.com.au)
  

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Public art tour by bike all part of the velorution

4/17/2015

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There is a symbiotic relationship between art and cycling. For me, I don’t get to work/play in the studio if I don’t get on my bike, and I don’t get my daily dose of hard-pumping exercise if I don’t go to the studio.

My father, a career artist and devoted cyclist, has long believed a cure to what ills is Dr. Bicycle. I take that to mean not just physical aches and pains but creative lethargy. Any artist who rides will tell you that inspiration often hits while she’s flying on two wheels.
PictureThe June 2007 ride shut down Lion's Gate bridge for 30 minutes and the Stanley Park Causeway that leads to it for 60 minutes. (Tavis Ford photo)
Cycling as daily transportation is pretty much mainstream in Vancouver’s downtown core now, but it took a lot of persistence by non-conformists and idealists to get it that way.  The early Critical Mass rides through the city’s main thoroughfares on the last Friday of every month were composed of a motley crew of creative-thinkers. When that critical mass of riders was reached, the infrastructure followed, thanks to a progressive city planning department and pedal-power-driven community leaders like Mayor Gregor Robertson, Gordon Price and Peter Ladner.

The bike has been my main mode for most of my life but I still feel like I'm playing a bit of Russian roulette every time I head out, even though negotiating city streets isn’t the life-risk it used to be. It’s mighty fine seeing old folks and tykes on bikes but you know there’s been a real sea change when you see guys in their 20s and 30s cruising the city on two wheels -- or maybe that’s all due to the new craft beer joints and weed stores. Drunk and stoned cyclists in traffic: not cool.



Picture
Meanwhile, there are still quite a few art-loving folks in my world who only rarely, if ever, take to the bike paths but if there's ever a time, this is the season for it, and this weekend is the perfect time for some pedal-play.

May I suggest this art-cycling combo: the self-guided bike tour of some of the city’s temporary public artworks on display for the Vancouver Biennale. (Map and key at right.) 

PictureVancouver artist Marcus Bowcott's Trans Am Totem
Not listed on this tour is one work that will have particular resonance to the bike-loving bunch: Trans Am Totem, by Vancouver artist Marcus Bowcott.

If the promise of fabulous spring weather this weekend won't tempt you, this call to action video will:


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Oh the irony: freedom of expression in a corporate media world

1/9/2015

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I'm writing this as the radio airs a live report of gunfire. The French police have just killed the two brothers who hunted down particular editorial workers at the satirical Paris magazine two days ago, murdering 12.

A bloodbath over hand-drawn images is over (for now), while the global reaction is unfolding in drawings.
PictureFrench illustrator Lucille Clerc's image that she posted on Twitter went viral after it appeared on a fake Banksy Instagram account.
The call has been sent - and heard - far and wide: Defend free speech by publishing the triggering images of Mohammed, and by taking up the pen or pencil in a massive freedom of expression effort. (Some early responses by cartoonists can be seen here.)

As much as I am deeply offended by some of the cartoons printed in Charlie Hebdo (like this one of the naked young woman with her burqa up her ass, in line with the magazine's support of banning women's right to choose) I will defend all extremists' right to draw and publish extremist drawings. Respecting the right of all dissenting voices is part of a (still mythical) free and open society that nurtures rational thought and behaviour. The world witnessed the alternative on Wednesday morning.

Here in Vancouver, former Province editorial cartoonist Bob Krieger took to the drawing board hours after the news of the murders of his fellow cartoonists and others.

Picture
But you won't find this one-panel in the local newspaper anymore; the last Province cartoonist was let go in 2013, the way cartoonists have been unloaded all over the country by their corporate media owners.

Surely it was simply a cost-saving measure, but the result is a pitiful amount of visual commentary, and a corporate curbing of free speech.

This week the Province (owned by Postmedia which also owns the only other paid daily newspaper in this town) ran a guest column on the topic of the need for cartoonists'  freedom of expression by Aislin (Terry Mosher) of the Montreal Gazette. That one voice ran in other Postmedia outlets including the Regina Leader-Post, Windsor Star and a whole whack of online news aggregators. And nothing against Aislin, but I miss our own, Vancouver-based critical drawings as we try to absorb the unfathomable. But as Krieger told The Tyee after he was shown the door, "corporate media is way too controlling and they don't want as much of a variety of opinion as newspapers should have." 

PictureYou can't keep good cartoonists down.
Yet suddenly Canada's corporate media can't get enough visual commentaries, and entire pages have been dedicated to the drawings, sometimes in full colour - a dream to many cartoonists. But look closer at the spread in yesterday's National Post  (also owned by Postmedia) and it's clear that less than half of the cartoonists are actually employed by newspapers. 

You can see the irony here. Freedom of expression: Yes! ... unless there's more money in clickbait that has no relevance to local readership.

Cartoonists are compelled to make art, to share their expression freely. The papers aren't paying like they used to but the people are clearly paying attention, via social media retweets, hits, and followers. There's a lot of value in that.

It's astounding that the penny has not yet dropped.



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Compelling art all part of the protest

11/28/2014

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The war in the woods is heating up again. Except it's not the people against forestry giants MacMillan-Bloedel or Fletcher Challenge; on this day it's Kinder Morgan. 
PictureYagis Eating an Oil Tanker by Ian Reid Nusi. (Photo by Christopher Glawe)
Oil-pipeline officials are doing their best to try to shape protestors at Burnaby Mountain these past weeks as a small group of environmentalist wackos. Meanwhile, the movement is growing. And so is the art.

Marshall McLuhan said, "Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it." And that's what I think about when I see this work by Ian Reid Nusi. Yup, that would be an oil tanker in that sea monster's mouth, carved in response to the prospect of the Northern Gateway oil pipeline moving tar sands diluted bitumen to the coast and onto tankers. (Artist interview clip below)

Environmental protests have shaped this province, and some important artworks have been a part of that.
PictureWallace's CP IV, 1993-95, 178 x 300 cm (from Canadian Art magazine)
It's in Ian Wallace's large-scale photo collage murals (reconfirmed as important works five years later in Canadian Art magazine).

His plywood patterns interrupt the protest images from the summer of 1993, the height of the fight to save Clayoquot Sound, the largest unlogged temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island. About 800 protestors were arrested and carted away, while Wallace created a whole new way of seeing art, protest and the role and position of the visual artist.

Wallace's artworks endure, and also serve as a reminder to those who view them in galleries that what multinational corporation spin-doctors would like to refer to as a green-y lunatic fringe is actually a large and diverse population of British Columbians who are willing to inconvenience themselves for the sake of protecting the oceans or the last of the great rainforests.
PictureHeadwaters of the Stein, B.C., August 1988 (from tonionley.com)
Toni Onley has been in there too. As part of the large protest to protect the Stein Valley from logging, he organized a plan to fly in well-established artists to the vital watershed area to paint their impressions, with sales going to help the campaign to save it from a plan for the Mitsubishi company to log the old growth for disposable chopsticks. 

Onley, who died in 2004, recalled painting a watercolour in support of a Stein cultural centre while “Chief Perry Redon, the chairman of the Lilloet Tribal Council... beat his drum and sang to the four quarters. I was inspired and soon we had a watercolour for the Stein poster….”

PictureKen Wu photo by T.J. Watt (tjwatt.com)
Many paintings of the beauty of the protested areas of the Stein, the Carmanah Valley, Clayoquot Sound helped fund the continuing protest, and today form important collections and are captured in coffee table books like Carmanah: Artistic Visions of an Ancient Rainforest. 

But there's nothing like a compelling photograph to bring the stark reality of the protest home.

T.J. Watt's photo of Ken Wu, the Ancient Forest Alliance’s executive director, sits atop a massive red cedar stump in the Upper Walbran Valley on Vancouver Island. The photo earns its place as an important visual of the struggle to retain a small portion of the natural environment, but its place is also determined by this image that is forceful in its subject of scale and a unique moment in time.

PictureShawn Hunt's Untitled, 2013
The Kinder Morgan survey crew has to be out of Burnaby Mountain in a few days, but the protests against the transport of a dirty, risky diluted bitumen in lieu of real government investment in clean energy sources has just begun. 

It's there on the faces of the growing protestors, and in the art that's growing along with it. And sometimes, as in this surrealist portrait by Shawn Hunt, it's in the faces in the art.

This is the history of environmental struggle in this corner of the world, and part of the history of art, too.

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