Sculpture in the Garden: Sanctuary or Exile?
Barbara Fischer
The idea of a special outdoor garden for sculpture belongs, in some fundamental way, to modernity. Throughout most of its history, and more than any other medium, sculpture's role was to commemorate or narrate the meaning of a particular place, event, and location. On account of its potential permanence, scale, and physical presence, sculpture assumed the highly visible tasks of marking time, ancestral status, kinship, and territories. It was called upon to measure the passage of the immortal soul from heaven to hell and back again; to celebrate the virtues of the city and the ideal view of the merchant-princes' town;[1] and, as late as the 19th century, it was one of the most visible means of forging a sense of national identity, symbolizing ideal citizenship, commemorating heroic history, and constructing the public sphere in the cities of the still newly emerging nation states.
However, by the end of that century sculpture was displaced from its once formidable participation as a tool of persuasion. If its secession was due, in part, to its usurpation by the more modern and literal means of mass communication (film, radio, television; billboards, roadside advertising, and LED pixels),[2] it was also due to the artists' own critical undoing. Traditional and commonly understood figural allegories failed when artists confronted the problem of the unrepresentable and cataclysmic forces of modernity (i.e. steam power and electricity, modern warfare, and not least of all, the encounter with the colonized Other through territorial violence and expansion).[3] Yet, by removing illustrative reference to memory, history, events and location, and by incorporating industrial forms toward an abstract representation of eternity, sacrifice and duration, sculpture's response to the experience of modernity illustrated the problem of disseminating a new language, or of convincing a broader constituency, including those in power, of the need.[4] This, combined with the fact that architects themselves increasingly conceived of the construction of urban space and buildings as integral, fully realized works of art, rendered sculpture, like ornament, a crime. If tolerated at all, it was reduced to mere organic accent in front of order, the tilted arc in a squared setting, the human bend in the administrative web of a bureaucratic grid. Like the urban park's running water and blades of grass, the shrub and the schrebergarten, the potted planter and the tree in concrete tiles, sculpture performed the "boogie-woogie" of the body,[5] the escapades of the wandering circus, the gesticulating aberrations in the pan-optically transparent city. Like the body in Eadweard Muybridge's locomotion studies, it was fodder for motion-measuring, architectural Taylorist grids. Entering a state of limbo, a type of homelessness, and an essentially nomadic condition, the formal institution of a special court or garden seemed to be among the only ways out.[6] Such a space consecrated the endeavour of modern sculpture, its self- and imposed exile, by giving it a place in the city and yet guaranteeing the special privileges that museums accord to art, such as protection from vandalism, weathering, and other perilous open air conditions.[7]
By the time that The Toronto Sculpture Garden opened its gates in 1981, however, the condition of contemporary and public art had changed again. In fact, the appearance of the T.S.G. came on the heels of nearly twenty years of a vigorous re-investment in public art or art in the city, and the critical dismantling of the premises of modernism, at once. Since the 1960s, North American cities including Toronto began to demonstrate a new civic attitude. The surging sense of modernity and prosperity had to be marked by permanent emblems of modernist art.[8] Coupled with the nearing centennial of the country, the province of Ontario embarked on a 1% in public (government) spaces program of sculpture which, in 1966, resulted in the first major commissioning of modern sculpture (at the Macdonald Block at Queen's Park). Signalling the government's desire to take a more active role in constructing and humanizing the urban landscape, these initiatives also included the construction of Toronto City Hall itself (a giant space-ship with benevolent embrace) and the placement of Henry Moore's pastoral modernist Archer.[9]
Yet, just as the emblematic form of modern sculpture came to be recognized as communicative form by the official channels of governments and commissioning agencies, contemporary artists were radically renegotiating the relation between the spaces of art and the practices of everyday life. No longer interested in enacting the anthropomorphic armwrestle with modern materials,[10] sculpture broke with the tradition of the autonomous object to enter, what Rosalind Krauss, in 1979, theorized as the expanded field of postmodernism. Situated along the various axes between (not-) landscape and (not-) architecture, the new sculpture (re)claimed the role of constructing and shaping the experience of space through site markers, axiomatic structures, and site constructions.[11] Often described by the short-hand notion of site-specificity,[12] a form of rapprochement was taking place which represented not merely a re-negotiation of the relation between sculptural practices and geographic location, but also, eventually, of the relation between art and specific social, cultural and historical contexts. Opening up the complexity of urban space to (phenomenological, then increasingly critical and social) interventions, some of the concerns of the new work eventually, by the late 1980s and early 90s, would be redefined as new genre public art. Distinct from, and in fact opposed to so-called public or corporote commissions, the latter is an activist art serving the issues and concerns of particular communities or constituencies.[13] In Toronto, the history of this re-engagement began in the late 1970s, in the activities and array of projects initiated by individual artists and the artist-run centres (culminating in the activities and interventions of the Public Access collective in the mid 1980s),[14] but also in a series of outdoor projects at Harbourfront, and at the most official level, The Art Gallery of Ontario's Structures of Behaviour exhibition (with Richard Serra, George Trakas, David Rabinovitch, and Robert Morris) in 1978.
In light of this history, the timing of The Toronto Sculpture Garden as an institution for art appears positively idiosyncratic. With its urbanized waterfall and viewing terrace, its graded steps and manicured landscaping, its decorative brickwork and gates that could be locked, this place seemed ready to welcome sculptural objects of the modernist kind. In fact, some of the TSG's early exhibitions did revisit the modernist tradition. Perhaps to lay a bridge between esoteric, abstract languages and common symbols and/or experiences, John Noestheden presented ambiguously linguistic symbols in his Opus Fifteen (1983); and Marshall Webb's curatorial debut in 1984, titled Visual Rhythms, made reference to music to legitimate (as universally accessible) the tonality, harmony, and dissonance of modern sculpture, and works by Patrick Thibert, Dieter Hastenteufel, Svitlana Muchin, Andre Fauteux, Reinhard Reitzenstein, and Tim Jocelyn, in particular. However, by 1992, that language had clearly become subject to ironic quotation. In proto-postmodern fashion, Claude Mongrain's Deux monuments à une étoile filante re-invoked the part-to-part relation of high-modernist sculpture, but replaced its forms and conventions with surrogates (piles of marble chips, found mini-monoliths, flower pots, and a column of alternating studio stools). Stacked up in reference to such monuments as Brancusi's "Endless Column" and his dissolution of the pedestal as a separate entity in sculpture, Claude Mongrain's work imbued these forms with the pedestrian meanings of found objects, as well as with humorous self-reference and self-deprecation.
From the very beginning, however, the inclusion of abstract sculpture -- totemic in its ambitions, elliptical in its references, and therefore approximating closest the conditions of modern art in exile -- was an exception. Indeed, against the expectations set up by the traditional nature of the site, the Toronto Sculpture Garden programme quickly established itself in support of more immediate concerns in contemporary sculptural practices -- namely, the return to reference and the significance of context and location. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, the newly recuperated narrative agenda of sculpture revolved around the fate of nature, and all that had been expelled by the city's dominatrix, modernist, urban architecture. For instance, John McEwen's flame-cut steel horses One and One (1979) toyed with the industrial abstraction of the minimalist object (i.e. the use of raw steel slabs in Richard Serra's work); but, the miniature cut-outs and their organic array-like placement (as opposed to the strictly serial logic of minimalism), transformed the garden into a miniature farmyard and rural pasture, confirming, as numerous others from then on did, that the significance of the garden was its role as sanctuary, as protected enclave separated from urbanity and modern life. Whether in the form of more traditional statuary (such as Elisabeth Frink's bronze "Hose and Rider" of 1975), or abstract constructions [Sorel Etrog's corten steel Ploughspace (1981), John McKinnon's abstract, welded steel resembling the shape a deer in "Topography of a Deer" (1982), and the fluted, bolted wood slats of "acred Trees by Louis Stokes (1982), for these works the garden served as a backdrop, a reminder of the pre-modern, paved over, and buried past. As late as 1994, artists paid such tribute. Stephen Cruise's G''R A Winter Piece, for instance, presented farm-yard animals as statuary around the fencing columns of the garden (like the lions, eagles and sphinxes of imperial projects and schemes), thereby commemorating a general history of the city in the form of a rural past.
Whether or not the references to animals or settler-life (now a very established tradition of public art in Toronto)[15] were nourished by lingering anxieties of a specifically Canadian kind, the suggested sense of urban alienation provided an immediate source of images for the long displaced forms of sculptural narrative, including figurative art. Yvonne Singer's Back to Back (1984) with its fifty body cast, draped backs, shared its evocation of loneliness and lack of human relationships with Susan Beniston's Into Limbo (1989), Gilbert Boyer's I looked for Sarah everywhere (1992), and Cynthia Short's Pilgrim's Planting (1987). The latter featured a solitary figure planting a garden by hedging herself in, thereby expressing the desire for belonging amidst the bewildering uprootedness and displacement of modern life.
Arguably set against the pastoral attitude, whereby the garden was made into the foil for a state of longing and mourning, some artists related to the space of the garden in a more present tense manner, and in terms of an experience of natural phenomenon or geographic location. Hugh Leroy's The Arc and the Chord (1987) consisted of a flat row of 33 wood blocks each of which collected rain water in a specially carved groove. As the water was absorbed, the expanding wood forced the blocks upward, changing the flat path into a subtly curving arch. Emphasizing the experience of the present moment, in view of continuous change and transformation, was also the subject of Panya Clark's 1996 installation At this Point. Researching the history of the immediate area, her work consisted of a miniature reconstruction of the lighthouse from Gilbraltar Point of Toronto Island to commemorate the changes in Toronto's topography over one century. With its seductive, jewel-like reconstruction, the greatest strength of the work was its ability to evoke a sense of geological time experienced in the present; it caused a diminution of human history and worked as reminder of a more precarious or temporal sense of the city's existence in nature.
Throughout most of its history, however, the majority of projects at the Sculpture Garden can best be understood as attempts to reconfigure the relation between landscape and architecture, and between nature and the built environment, through the medium of sculpture and installation. Cautious steps in this direction were works which made reference to or suggested a functional utilization of space through furniture. They included Ted Rettig's suspended chairs, Susan Schelle's garden furniture complete with faux fountain, and Dmitri Kaminker's funky suburban-rural wood constructions (i.e. a dog-house, out-house, fencing, folk-art and mythical creatures). Lee Paquette's Recess (1984) went furthest by transforming the Sculpture Garden into a richly overdone, colourful Kindergarten (complete with toys, teeter-totters, and other kids' amusements) as if to point the finger at the jail-like play spaces of public housing projects.
From the very beginning, however, the references of much contemporary sculpture revolved around more literal architectural forms (such as windows and wall constructions). Already Robert Bowers' Sand-castle and Mark Gomes' untitled enclosure (both selected for the inaugural exhibition), and Judith Schwarz' House within a House in Venture down the Garden Path (1982), had used common, garden-shed variety materials in structures that referred to enclosed gardens or urban sites. Later, Herb Parker's Transient Earth Structures (1986) incorporated the entire garden by digging up slabs of sod to construct a temple-like "garden house". The idea that sculpture could, in fact, be a means by which to shape space and its experience -- a function which for so long had been the specialized domain of architecture -- was also, clearly, the intent of Wendy Habenicht's oddly angled, topsy-turvy wooden towers in Dream Retreat (1989), and especially An Whitlock's dark, but diaphanous enclosure entitled shadowline (1989). Highly interactive and encouraging physical involvement, both works made a strong argument for architectural construction as a sculptural concern, not unlike Brian Groombridge's conceptual work, Within one action there are many gestures (1990). A minimal piece, consisting of nothing but an upright, 20ft I-beam with a cylindrical hook at half way holding an empty frame (made of two carpenter angles), it represented anticipation, the realm of the possible rather than the already actualized gesture. If Groombridge's work was an exercise in understatement, it nevertheless shared the concerns of larger, architectural installations by suggesting art could be considered as an architectural project. For instance, Andreas Gehr's monumental wooden structure, titled Found Foundation (1985), physically echoed, and thereby linked the experience of sculpture to that of the imposing neo-gothic church across the street, sharing its spiritual references with Stacey Spiegel's Sculpture Heaven (1986), a subtly swaying glazed and pointed polygon.
If Andrea's Gehr's work was "site-specific" through architectural quotation (it was anchored to its surrounding, physical site by literally repeating or restating an existing element), in the late 1980s and early 90s artists departed from the emphasis on perceptual experience and the potential formalism of this type of reference, foregrounding instead that various forms of art and architecture were elements of an existing language that could be used at will and toward a number of different ends. Renee van Halm's 1988 sculptural installation Display (Temptation to Follow) for instance, consisted of a montage of various types of architectural surfaces, inset windows and store-front structures. Evoking the general picture of an urban shopping street, the work invited reflection on the urban experience of looking, gazing, mirroring, and window-shopping.
Exceedingly, however, the quotation of elements gave way to the open, and limitless possibilities of altered combinations, such as Pierre Granche's Thalès au pied de la spirale (1988), which used statuary and building types retrieved from the ancients to show architectural history in a vertiginous tail spin. If Granche's work collapsed all notions of evolution and progress, Carlo Cesta employed quotation as a strategy of affirming cultural hybridization. Included in the 1993 exhibition Artes Moriendi, Cesta's ironic, mausoleum-like bird-feeding station inter-married Italian vernacular fencing with the monochrome panels of the Schroeder House and subsequent International style -- a gesture not unlike Robert Venturi's seminally postmodern architectural treatise, "Learning from Las Vegas." The most ambitious, and only direct quotation of an industrial type of architecture, however, was Kim Adams' 1994 Crab Legs (A Studio). Modelled off a a gravel tipple the work belonged into an industrialized landscape, such as mining fields or other types of modern "waste-lands," rather than into an urban garden. Displaced twice over by its skewed, oversize model and undersize architectural scale, this real structure in proposal form hovered somewhere between the realization and projection of an ideal artist's studio. As a vehicle type -- on track and wheels -- the work was a layered visual analysis of the placeless/displaced condition of modern sculpture, its relation to manufacture and small-scale industry in post-industrial culture, and, ultimately, of its own resolve to belong nomadically -- up and running, always already here and somewhere else.
As important as the subject of architecture had become in the history of the Garden's exhibitions, the idea of nature remained a persistent theme throughout. Especially in the last few years, the TSG had become the site of a rush of projects concerned with the industrial transformation of nature, its displacement by culture, and general anxieties concerning the environment. Shared by artists who no longer were concerned with upholding a pastoral ideal, it had already been a central focus in Doug Buis' Chaotic Encounters (1990). A technological simulation of natural phenomena, he presented a ground-hugging, glazed wind tunnel in which large fans would blow sand back and forth, thereby revealing and concealing found industrial objects and non-identifiable residue -- the archaeological traces of ravaged nature. Fastwurms' 1994 contribution to Artes Moriendi (an exhibition which also included Carlo Cesta and Lisa Neighbour's exuberant memorials), shared these concerns albeit in more ironic form. Consisting of a greenhouse with burial mound, weeping birch and bell rope, the installation doubled the enclosed nature of the garden as "nature on life support" or memory in a mausoleum. Coupling the fear of being buried alive (through reference to the convention of placing a bell rope in the hands of a deceased) with the fear of the disappearance of nature, this beautiful, luscious, and colourful work poignantly raised the fear of "being alive on a dead planet," as Dai Skuse put it in his catalogue statement. Similar anxieties seemed to underlay Reinhard Reitzenstein's and Carl Skelton's work in their joint exhibition Blur (1997). Reitzenstein's Arbour Vitae (1995) warned of the fate of humans in the death of nature with a dead-looking, uprooted bronze tree that had its trunk modelled in the form of a human spine, while Skelton's skinned "begging bear" with its mock bronze patina was a satirical take on the representation of captured animals as an enjoyment of nature (1995-96). If theirs was a surrealist diorama, Bernie Miller's Cornucopia (1995) employed the language of productivist utilitarianism to undo the latter's industrial utopia of overcoming nature. A precariously tilted billboard-sized image of colourful vegetables is accompanied by heaps of equally colourful storage boxes, shopping containers, and toxic waste barrels. Yawning empty in front of an image of visual desserts, promise of abundance, and ample supplies (so common to advertising), the work put a seemingly insurmountable distance between harvest and shopping, but suggesting a circular relation between labourers, reapers, the mass of consumers, and waste.
Not surprisingly, commentary on the contemporary condition of nature was frequently levelled at the most obviously artificial element of the sculpture garden, the electronically pumped water fall. While the subject of water had already come up in the works by Hugh Leroy and Panya Clark, more recently Pierre Bourgeault installed architecturally-scaled fragments of an industrial-type ship to look as if it had been docked or run aground, thereby transforming the landscape into the grave of an industrial, albeit restored ruin. This was preceded by Brian Scott's 1991 trompe l'oeil installation Stray Plow which emphasized the cultural artifice of the garden by describing nature as disturbed by culture. Using an actual boat, Scott re-shaped the grounds with earth and sod to make the boat appear as if plowing through the green waters of an imaginary lake. Later projects more directly related to the waterfall similarly circulated on issues of mediation, reproduction, and the world of the simulacra. In Jerry Pethick's (1996) installation, a super-scaled dog, made from stacked up, large industrial-scale steel tubes (used perhaps to transport water or other fluid), sat by a photographic reproduction of a wild waterfall seen through a veil of Fresnel lenses. While the large steel tubes were perhaps a reminder of the industrial harnessing of nature, the lenses transformed the array of repeated images into an integrated, three-dimensional virtual form— spectacular simulation and rendered nature as expendable surplus. James Carl's Fountain (1996), consisting of vending machines with a split-screen backlit image of Niagara Falls, followed up with a quick, clever unravelling of nature as managed, modern spectacle and consumer product. The managed water supply of the Sculpture Garden's waterfall was revisited in the image of the modern sublime of Niagara Falls, managed to allow for power-supply and continued use as tourist attraction, and, finally, in the bottled water available for cash from the vending machines, all set up to serve the convenience-oriented urban consumer of nature.
The disappearance of the real, and specifically the disappearance of nature in mediated spectacle, had already been the subject of an exhibition curated by Bernie Miller at the Toronto Sculpture Garden in 1986. Presenting works by Robin Collyer, Spring Hurlbut, and Robert Wiens, this exhibition was in fact one of the first to critically analyze the setting, and the idea of the garden, as a possibly utopian projection of a kind of Paradise or Garden of Eden. Rather than maintaining the modern (utopian) separation and opposition between culture and nature, all the works short-circuited the imaginary distance between both. Spring Hurlbut, for instance, used real tree trunks (with bark) as columns complete with lathed wooden capitals and bases; Robert Wiens mounted a backlit transparency beneath the gushing "rains" of the waterfall; and in the most sophisticated statement, Robin Collyer's empty replica of a backlit advertising kiosk (standing on a pedestal overgrown by ivy) signified the transmutation of the old sculptural monument into a new type of message-bearing, urban spectacle, which, in Roland Barthes' famous formulation of the advertising photograph, continuously transformed culture into nature, into a nurtured nature, so to speak.
However, the work that most powerfully tracked the demise of the pastoral ideal was Liz Magor's 1997 installation entitled Messenger. Not unlike Adams' Crab Legs (A Studio) Magor's work effected a series of displacements. A perfectly re-constructed old pioneer log cabin, complete with newly planted trees, immediately transformed the garden into a remote, picture-perfect forest clearing and urban get-away. Stocked with cans of food, weapons, armour, and other defensive paraphernalia, however, the work immediately changed the connotations of the cottage, suggesting its use by a loner, an outsider, perhaps even the so-called Unabomber. Against the idealization of a withdrawal from culture, perhaps, Magor's work closed in on the myth of the individual who, in search for comfort and for a way to ward off the shocks of urban life, set him/her self up against the forces of modernity -- and was now seen as possibly a threat for the city. (Just recently, in fact, images of the cottage of the Una-bomber were beamed around the world on television news. Transported as a "wide-load" by truck into the U.S. city where his trial was being held, the undertaking had been initiated by the man's lawyers to demonstrate his insanity, thereby increasing urbanists' suspicions concerning the outside, the fringe, and no-man's land beyond the city.) Rather than exiling as insane the desire for a (re)turn to nature, the arrival of the cottage in the city, its placement near the city centre, suggested not only the very collapse of boundaries between the country and the city, and between nature and culture, but also of the very possibility of the ideal of that separation. For the practices of sculpture and installation in the context of the Toronto Sculpture Garden this work posted, perhaps, a point of no return. It somehow seemed to ask, or run head on into the question, what of the outside(r) in the city? What place is there for a flight from the city? What is exiled from its cleansed streets, urban parks, plazas, and public spaces? Where do all those, where does all that, return?
Throughout its history, the Toronto Sculpture Garden has provided sanctuary for sculpture in exile, and both the conditions of sanctuary and exile have, inevitably, been the site-specific subject of art. Equally inevitably, the Garden provided (and remains) a place for artists to examine the condition of the modern city as a place that found (or is founded on) precisely the construction and enforcement of exiles and outcasts, and museums and sanctuaries. Contemporary art and the other exiled outsider(s), in that situation, are reminders of the two torn halves of freedom to which they do not, however, add up.[16] In this place of sanctuary, art puts exile as an open question to the city.
Endnotes
[1] For an interesting discussion on the perspectival construction of space, and the participation of sculpture in that construction, see Dan Graham's "Theatre, Cinema, Power," in Parachute 31 (June/July/August 1983), pp. 11-19
[2] As Walter Grasskamp points out, the prevailance of the graphic over sculptural form in the city as narrative space can be traced back to the invention of book printing. It made architectural narrative redundant in that the book would come to claim all narrative traditions, both oral and sculpture, of setting and of ritual, and would dominate them from that time on. Greenberg's stress on deliberately expunging literature to purify modernist art may be seen as relevant here. Walter Grasskamp, "Art and the City," Contemporary Sculpture. Projects in Munster 1997 , eds. Klaus Bussmann, Kasper Konig, Florian Matzner (Germany: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997) p. 8
[3] One might just cite Barrias' monument to "Electricity" as an example of the way in which sculptors sometimes resorted to old-styled seduction to lead the spectator into a suspension of disbelief, or at least, a distraction from the impossible theme.
[4] The beginnings of this chasm between means of communication and means of understanding can be traced back to at least the late 19th century, and Auguste Rodin's deliberate destruction of narrative space in the Gates of Hell, which remained incomplete, literally in pieces; his portrait of Balzac, commissioned only to be refused, humiliated, as shapeless and unrecognizeable mass; and, in another sign of the ensuing crisis of modern sculpture, to the complications around the placing of the Burghers of Calais, literally teeter-tottering on the absence of a pedestal, and seen as an upfrontery to the civic demand for elevation, the idealist separation of art from the everyday, and the status of the represented men. The Burghers were to be placed in a level playing field, evoking empathy for solitary choice and sacrifice instead of demanding of the spectator to kiss (or rub) their feet.
[5] Brian O-Doherty, in his essay "The White Cube," wrote about imagining Mondrian doing the Boogie-woogie in the Salon he designed for Madame B. (an interior space painted divided into squared and rectangular colour fields).Brian O'Doherty, "The White Cube," in Museums in Crisis ed. by Brian O'Doherty (New York: Brazillier, 1972)
[6] See Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," in The Anti-Aesthetic ed. by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. 35
[7] The defenders of abstract (modernist) public sculpture were eventually found reduced to exasperated arrogance, such as British sculptor William Turnbull's declaration that "the problem of public sculpture [was] largely with the public -- not with sculpture." Quoted in Lawrence Alloway, "The Public Sculpture Problem," Topics in American Art since 1945 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1975), p. 247
[8] For a discussion of this period and the beginning of institutional public art in the U.S. see also Suzanne Lacy (ed.), Mapping the Terrain (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995)
[9] One may also include in this list Dorothy Cameron's "Sculpture 67" (in tandem with Expo 67), which advanced the cause of the avant-garde, its claims perhaps, to be a participant in future visions of the city.
[10] This is John Tucker's metaphor describing some of the sculpture along University Avenue. At the beginning of the 1980s, New York artist Robert Hamon, was making tiny tinsel sculptures satirizing the "heavy-metal" school of sculpture.
[11] Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," op. cit., p. 38
[12] Robert Irwin distinguished the various forms of site-relatedness as site dominant, site adjusted, site specific, and site-conditioned and/or determined. Robert Irwin, "Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Confidential Art," in Theories and Documents of Contoemporary Art eds. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 572
[13] Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, op. cit.
[14] A Space, Mercer Union, and others collaborated on several ventures, utilizing billboards, but also the medium of performance, and other types of activities, leading up to several outdoor projects (across the nation) in the early 1980s. For a more detailed history of these events see my essay "YYZ -- An Anniversary," in Decalog (Toronto: YYZ Publications, 1996).
[15] One could cite Michael Snow's geese in the glazed vault of the Eaton's Centre; Joe Fafard's slightly larger-than-life cows parked on a small patch of grass below the towering buildings of the business district in the downtown core; and more recently, Fastwurms' giant woodpeckers, mounted on a hollow industrial-scale steel tube at the newly built Metro Convention Centre, illuminated from the inside out like a giant, irregular pixel board and tilted against the backdrop of office-buildings as if from a black swamp in an urban forest.
[16] Adopted from Theodor Adorno, who wrote this concerning the relation between high art and mass culture.