Nuit Blanche, Toronto, 2014

This post is jumping ahead of a couple of reviews I wanted to do (and owe faithful readers), only because it is easier to pull together and I would like to get it up while it is still somewhat timely.  Last Sat. evening I had a bit of trouble getting downtown to Nuit Blanche, but I did finally make it.  In some sense, I had kind of wanted to start at Union Station, so maybe it was for the best that I ended up on the subway, which took me right there.

There was an exhibit called The 8th Wonder of the World that was in the Great Hall.  Now believe me it wasn't easy to find the Great Hall, given that the station is still under construction and there was a general lack of signage.  But I did find it eventually.  (I actually enjoyed the fact that the little restaurants and a couple of stores in the Union Station concourse were buzzing at 9 pm, as it reminded me of Penn Station in New York.)  The installation was sort of a blow-up tentacled monster with an eye projected onto its top "pod" (perhaps slightly inspired by the one at the end of Watchmen) and there was some electronic music playing.

This was cool, but I didn't stick around that long. I then started heading down York to Bremner to go by the CN Tower where they had some other installations along the way.

I had been intrigued by a piece of a woman rowing in the clouds or in ice or both.  It was called Icebreaker by Diane Landry.

This is the promo shot, but the reality was a lot less magical.  I probably should have taken a bit of video, but I'm still figuring out my new phone and all its features.  This is the best shot I managed to get of the installation.  The physicality of the exhibit definitely seemed exhausting for sure, and they had women from a rowing team taking shifts all night!

 

There were a few things of interest along Bremner, but I generally felt it was the crowds out late that made it a special event.  There was also a totally different feel to the Bremner/Fort York crowds (a few more families and people interested in the art) versus the Queen Street/Spadina crowds where it was basically a street party, very similar to Taste of Chicago, and a lot of young people out for a good time, amused by the novelty of walking down the middle of Queen Street and most of Spadina.  (The Spadina streetcars were running, but not Queen, or they were rerouted somewhere completely different, perhaps up Dundas.)  I was thinking that it would be fun to take my son in another year or two, but that would mean keeping the visit much shorter.

Fort York had a few interesting exhibits, many focusing on light shows or video (there was one where there were male models walking down a runway in female fashions, showing how somewhat gross they looked when hairy bellies were exposed). 

I thought the most successful was a series of doors where the participants would choose one to go through (Past/Present/Future; Truth/Fiction; Lost/Found).  What was kind of cool was at the very end was a monitor where the choices were mapped and you could sit where you fit within your peers.

In general, most of the work was pretty conceptual, and most wasn't terribly artistic, but it is hard to come up with works that display well in the middle of the night!  Installations with participation worked best, like the doors project or a live action version of Chutes and Ladders or the screaming booths (see below).  I honestly just didn't feel I had the time to stand in line (many were quite long, particularly on Spadina), and the one time I actually waited for a performance, it was unbelievably lame.  Someone near me said it looked like the performers were running around trying to put giant slices of cheese onto a cracker (rather than being two people getting into an argument -- obviously).

 

While it was already later than I had planned to be out (about 10:30 by this point), I decided I really did want to check out some of the exhibits on Spadina and Queen, so I braved the streetcar (the Bathurst one actually), and I made it into the heart of Nuit Blanche.  

By far the most intriguing was Walk Among Worlds by Maximo Gonzalez which was a garden of globes where coloured lights changed the appearance of the garden.  Unfortunately, the line to get in was just too long, but even from the outside, you had a sense of how cool it was.

The walk down Queen Street was definitely overwhelmed by younger people.  Apparently, they shifted Nuit Blanche away from Yonge Street due to too many drunk people.  I think there was a fair bit of drunken revelry that still going on along Queen, but for me it was ok.  I heard some people say it was too commercialized or that they were sick of Nuit Blanche, and others who were just entranced by the idea that so many people would come out and take part in this event (even if the art itself was somewhat secondary).  I guess I do fall in the second camp, although I think if I had only seen Queen/Spadina and not Bremner/Fort York, I might have been a bit more negative about the evening.  Certainly one of my co-workers was really put off by it, saying that the art was ugly and not displayed well at all.

This artist (outside Lulumon) was attempting to meditate in a big plastic bubble.  As you might imagine, there were plenty of passersby who argued that this wasn't "art."

But fewer would argue that the palm trees in the cherry-pickers (by David Brooks) weren't art, but there wasn't much more "craft" involved. 

I was pretty thoroughly exhausted by this point, but I had promised myself to end at City Hall (Nathan Philips Square).

There was some exhibit in the fountain where they had turned the water black and had this video about oil pipelines being safe etc. yada yada yada.  Then there two graffiti artists who climbed on these oil tanks in the fountain and painted skulls on them.  Everyone predictably cheered (and then turned quickly back to all their consumer products that are only possible in a carbon-intensive world).  But it was so amusing reading comments in the paper later with people thinking that this was a serious corporate exhibit put on by the energy producers of Calgary, rather than being performance art against the oil sands.  In other words, a lot of people got punked.

There seemed to be another fairly trite performance artist but what was quite amusing was a probably unsanctioned person drawing enormous penises on the sidewalk in chalk right next to the performance artist, possibly making the statement on the quality of works at Nuit Blanche in general or that anyone now can do modern art.  Anyway, I didn't take any photos of that.

I had mostly come to City Hall to see some piece that was supposed to be in the loading docks (Dress Rehearsal by Tor Lukasik Foss).  It was supposed to look something like this.

I think security concerns changed the location a bit and there were some other changes.  It ultimately looked like this, which is still decent but slightly less gripping.

And that wrapped up my long evening of art.  I think I'll still go next year but with slightly lower expectations of the art and more of a focus on just enjoying the communal aspect of it.  And with that, I really have to go, as I am running quite late.