Toronto : Features
Art of Darkness
By Tom Gierasimczuk
Aug 21, 2008

“Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.” — Marcel Proust

Growing up in Toronto means realizing that just a few tweaks to your sprawling, crowded, nationally oblivious, infinitely textured city would make it, finally, the best hometown in the world. Hell, even if you’re a recent resident, 905’er, exchange student or refugee-status recipient, you start having the same basic needs as the born-and-raised, which amount to something along the lines of:

1) A Maple Leaf Stanley Cup win this side of the millennium.

2) That Toronto at night be the safe, diverse, remarkably respectful bazaar that it is during the day. An addendum: anyone caught with an illegal firearm will get life in prison… or at least Mississauga.

3) The Ohio Valley needs mandatory chimney scrubbers or the wind current needs to blow the resulting air pollution around—not through —the city. Ideally both.

4) And the subway needs to run around the clock.

On this night, at 4:47 a.m. on September 30, 2007, the city was batting .500. The Leafs still sucked and Toronto was still the Rust Belt’s spittoon, but the night was alight and mellow and full of people taking in 24-hour culture, and doing so nimbly on foot and on the all-night transit. This was not the result of some logical funding partnership between the municipality and Province, but because of the antithesis of budget allocation, sub-committee posturing and vote-chasing that chokes a city’s heart. Because of art.

The second annual Nuit Blanche was winding down, two hours before sunrise and the end to 195 art installations across the city. The saggy smiles of the passengers zipping west under Bloor Street—some going home, others seeking more art—confirmed that running around a place in a bizarre and playful and crowded context should, at the very least, be an annual event. Which in Toronto, happily, it is.

Tonight’s take on a six-year-old urban celebration tions was ignited in Paris, plugged into by Montréal in 2004 and was appropriated and expanded by Canada’s biggest metropolis two years later.

Tonight began for me and more than 800,000 others at 7:03 the previous evening. Before boarding the subway in the wee hours, I’d logged about 20 kilometres by foot, fuelled by the extended restaurant hours and delayed last calls, meeting up with friends across the city as we meandered across the downtown core’s three “exhibition zones”—individually curated swaths of the city where several dozen artists interpret the lead curator’s theme.

At dusk, I strolled with my wife and eight-month-old, taking in a samba concert, a parkour demonstration, a giant inflatable grasshopper and at least a half dozen galleries in Zone C, aka the once-feared, long-since loft-converted Parkdale neighbourhood, now dubbed the city’s Art+Design District, complete with two oh-so-boho art hotels.

My son’s 10 p.m. bedtime sent me strolling east solo, in blind faith that I’d be able to see most of the night’s eye candy. Little did I know that I wouldn’t make it east of Yonge Street. Or that I’d see carefree parents pushing strollers deep into the a.m., bonding with their children over a night they’d talk about until they returned in 2008.

“Last year had half as many people, and there was still no way you could see everything—unless you were on rollerblades and amphetamines,” said Kurt Krumme, my friend and fellow flâneur for the latter part of the night as we rested our feet and hydrated with pints at The Embassy in Kensington Market. (Meanwhile, a game of human Scrabble —yup, an art installation—raged outside). “Right, you can’t rush spatial transformation,” I answered, only to get a beer coaster in the head.

One cannot distill a lone impetus for the collective insomnia and giddy anticipation of these surreal 12 hours. But it has everything to do, it seems, with the vivid rediscovery of a city’s space that residents take for granted. Massive crowds and Red Bull and vodka tend to raise one’s appreciation for generic urban space. But so does the appropriation of a city works yard by local bands… especially when you’re present for that moment when audience and artist simultaneously realize that the acoustics of a totally unexpected place are better than any other venue in recent memory.

“Friendly” Rich Marsella, Ontario Regional Director of the Canadian Music Centre, played Regent Park in the city’s east end with his modern music ensemble, The Lollipop People. Despite the brisk drug trade carrying on as usual in the shadows, “It was our best-sounding performance in years,” he recalled. “The best venue is sometimes the great outdoors.”

And as he’d soon discover, the best transport during this night is by foot—it took him an hour to drive 12 kilometres along Queen Street through a sea of pedestrians who, no doubt inspired by the artists, reinvented the street as a sidewalk.

His hope for this October 4, and every year going forward, is that organizers reward the local artists that made the first two Nuit Blanche events so magical.

“I’d hope that the city can be proud enough of its own artists and fund from within, rather than importing things of so-called value,” he said on the very same day that the City of Toronto, along with title sponsor Scotiabank—the event’s official moniker is “Scotiabank Nuit Blanche”—announced a decidedly international lineup for 2008.

Perhaps the most recognizable name is Yoko Ono, avant garde artist and wife of the late John Lennon, whose installation will ask people to tie their written wishes to tree branches. As far as “most-anticipated installation” goes, the early favourite is titled Stereoscope , where Berlin-based group Project Blinkenlights will turn Toronto City Hall’s two towers into the world’s largest computer screen by arranging lamps behind each of the 960 windows.

It ain’t local, but after just two years it’s certainly a world-class event in a city obsessed with the designation. Call it transformation by transformation… and keep those trains running around the clock. scotiabanknuitblanche.ca

Give Me Liberty
Two of this year’s curators for Exhibition Zone C discuss their venue, installations and preparation

Haema Sivanesan is the Executive Director of SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) in Toronto.
Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator, living and working in Toronto.

What’s so special about Zone C?

HS : Liberty Village is a unique corner of Toronto that was once an important industrial and manufacturing hub, and which is now on the brink of redevelopment and gentrification. The zone features many extraordinary large-scale warehouses and 19^th-century factory buildings that house offices and studios. However, there is a sense of abandonment about the site and an eeriness after 5 p.m. when the offices close. I was interested in engaging with this disquieting mood of the place.

DD : This is the first time that Liberty Village has been part of Nuit Blanche, so it’s an area that hasn’t been explored before—by both artists and audiences. The city has gone to great lengths to disrupt some of the congestion that made wading through Nuit Blanche last year a little difficult.

What are some can’t-miss installations in your zone?

HS : Ruark Lewis [Sydney, Australia], Euphemisms for the Intimate Enemy , is a very large site-specific installation made with 500 55-gallon drums. The surface of the drums will be printed with a quote by the political psychologist, Ashis Nandy. The work explores the limits of language in the context of the cross-cultural encounter. Another work that is not to be missed is a large-scale installation by [Toronto’s] Brendan Fernandes, who will make a large-scale installation of 10 stacked shipping containers, which appears as a beacon in an abandoned parking lot. The structure will house a lighting score which flashes S-O-S. Brendan’s work investigates notions of immigration, the circulation of cultural capital and the economies of change.

DD : Toronto artist Jon Sasaki can always be counted on to produce a work that will resonate quickly and deeply with audiences. His sense of humour and pathos come together in a work involving 50 mascots attempting to whip the audience into a continual frenzy over the course of the 12 hours of Nuit Blanche. Brian Joseph Davis’ piece involves 20 television monitors playing the found sound of DVD menus, which he has orchestrated into a minimalist masterpiece. Sobey Award winner Michel de Broin is creating a waterfall from a third-story window in the old men’s prison in Liberty Village.

What is your one Nuit Blanche accessory?

HS : A fabulous posse of friends to stay up all night with, an open mind, a sense of curiosity and humour.

DD : The must-have take-home accessory will be an “Imagine Peace” pin by Yoko Ono. We’ll be handing out 50,000 of them in Zone C.