Hundreds of pieces of what is now called public art — from the outrageously dull to the playful and cryptic — are on display in public spaces around Vancouver. Those who want to explore this scene in detail — locations, artists, dates, conceptual statements — can find the info on the Public Art Registry (www.city.vancouver.bc.ca). The downtown peninsula alone has more than eighty listings, and the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association produces a brochure, available at Tourism Vancouver (210—200 Burrard Street, Downtown, 604-683-2000), that includes a public “art walk” of the central downtown area. Among the more interesting sightings is Four (fiberglass) Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White, 2001, which amounts to four seagoing vessels of radically ditTerent historical and racial origin perched on the roof of the Vancouver Art Gallery (750 Hornby Street) by artist Ken Lum. (You’ll have to walk around this former courthouse to see all four of them). In the Robson Square plaza below sits an evocative bronze replica of a carving by noted Cape Dorset Inuit artist Abraham Etungat, titled Bird ofSpring. And in the CIBC bank building at 586 Granville Street, an abstract mosaic wall mural by B.C. Binning perfectly expresses the optimism and creativity ofVancouver in the 1950s.
A traditional work is the King Edward VII Fountain, built in 1912 and recently hauled out of storage and reerected on the Hornby Street side of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The two granite lions sitting guard on the stairway on Georgia Street (which was an entrance when the building was a courthouse) were modeled after a pair in London’s Trafalgar Square.
From here, things get a lot crazier. In a sandwich of a park at Hastings and Hornby streets, artist Daniel Laskarin has installed three wooden platforms with potted trees and wooden benches titled Working Landscape, 1998. You’re unlikely to notice, but these platforms rotate (respectively) every one, eight, and 48 hours — commenting, presumably, on the unsavory rhythm of life in the surrounding business district.
Some of the most interesting and controversial public art is found in the recently redeveloped North False Creek and Downtown South areas, because the city has managed to extract significant sums from (albeit exceedingly flush) developers for public amenities.
Spectacular, if not obvious, is Brush with Illumination, a massive and elaborate steel, electronic, and solar-panel installation located
sixty feet into False Creek, south of David Lam Park. Created by Buster Simpson, it’s said to represent a giant calligraphy brush that, while taking environmental measurements of the tide and whatever, makes regular dips into the water — supposedly to be interpreted as paint or ink. Just to the east along the False Creek shoreline walk you’ll find Welcome to the Land ofLight. Woven into the guardrail is a series of phrases expressed in both English and the native Indian Chinook language — a comment on cross-cultural activity here in the creek.
Attracting more attention, for better or worse, is a giant steel sculpture called Street Light at the foot of Davie Street at Marinaside Crescent. A resident of one of the surrounding towers went to court in an unsuc¬cessful effort to get it removed. He declared Street Light an ugly piece of trash that blocked his view and should be replaced by an ordinary garden plot. (No doubt he feared, with justification, that the public art committee might replace it with some kind of wild, postmodern landscaping.)
City officials will defend this piece to the hilt. I’m not entirely sure how it works; a camera that casts images onto its forty-foot beams sits in the center of the traffic circle (in what might have held daffodils and tulips, further infuriating our litigant). However, the result is that Street Light projects grainy images of False Creek in its industrial, railroading days when the position of the light is exactly right.
Even less popular is GRANtable on Beach Avenue between Hornby and Howe streets. This sixty-six-foot-long slab of concrete in the form of a dining table and end chairs takes up most of what otherwise would have been a nice park for picnicking or Frisbee-flying. State the artists: “Taking its cue from the grand rooms of neo-Classical architecture, GRANtable completes the axis of the existing grand stair by terminating the procession in a grand outdoor dining room.” (Believe me, this is a prime case of “only in Vancouver.”)
To restore your mood, you’ll find a little whimsy in the 1300 block of Hornby Street, just north of Pacific Boulevard. Footnotes comprises ninety-four unpolished black granite paving stones engraved with a few evocative words or phrases. And Collection is a series of concrete and steel wedge-shaped receptacles designed to challenge the public perception of what constitutes “a public work.” Is it a hip mailbox or garbage bin? It’s kinda fun.
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