MAY 2009
Bios: Amber Landgraff is an emerging artist/curator living in the Toronto area. Her work often takes the form of performative gestures and public interventions. She is currently interested in pursuing collaboration and connection in as many different ways as possible. She has been involved in multiple curatorial projects including It's like a revolution! (XPACE, 2009) and The Matter of Loss (Art Gallery of Ontario, 2009). Her artwork has been also included in the Infinite Exchange Gallery 2008 (Sub Zero, ICA, San Jose) and Eyelevel Reshelving Initiative 3 2008 (Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax). She has exhibited performances and installations in Toronto, Edmonton, and Guelph. When not dressing up in cardboard robot and space suit costumes little Sean, liked to pretend that he held a Bachelor of Design from Emily Carr University and maintained an engaging multidisciplinary practice. He fondly dreamt of the day when he might attend the prestigious Ontario College of Art and Design as a bright-eyed and irrationally idealistic graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art Media and Design program. Simon Rabyniuk is an office administrator living in the Greater Toronto Area. He enjoys working with artists. He hopes to have the opportunity to do so again. If so, he would be interested in exploring the topic of conflict mediation. He can be reached at <
[email protected]>.
Thanks, Lauren and Rose, for some dogs.
I only drift
By Amber Landgraff, Sean Martindale, and Simon Rabyniuk
A Situation i only know i drift without you Meeting Agenda, Feb. 22nd Some Dogs I Know
Symposium Toronto, Ontario, Canada To the Beaches! Free Time Bios
A Situation
But what action have we taken? Interventions are for emergencies. And sometimes, something turns into nothing; and sometimes, nothing turns into something. As you know by now, the phrase, “create this situation”, is rooted in a 60’s youth counterculture movement, with roots in street theatre and symbolic politics. Simon, authoritatively defines symbolic politics as the ability to envision and represent change. They are gestures worked on, to be worked out, in aesthetic form. Actions forever falling on deaf ears; always limited by their necessity for interpretation. Again, interventions are for emergencies. Avoiding simple reaction to the ailments of contemporary urban life, we’ve looked to our heros of the city for guidance, Francis Alÿs, Andrea Bowers, Guy Debord, Fredrick Engles, Harrel Fletcher, and many more. In their lives, work, and writing, we’ve found clues for re-imaging city space, and our interactions in it. We’ve taken these precedents as workable solutions, and in a caffeinated state, adopted them to our city, and to our lives. It’s been a process of misquotation.
Theodore Adorno, The Culture Industry: Free Time
It happened more than once
The three of us have met on Sunday, twice a month, since February. We meet, drink coffee, eat, and talk. Simon, makes mock gestures towards formal meeting etiquette by drafting agendas; including topics like ‘our feelings’, and ‘our feelings about the project’. It takes us awhile to focus; the agendas don’t entirely help. With clear direction or not, we always re-enter into the circulation of the city.
Spending entire days together, we generally bundled cultural events into our meeting time. There is a certain narrowness to our backgrounds, relationships, and activities. Or, a visible pattern to our use of Toronto. Regardless of the size of the city, by virtue of being a city, it is big. And, big cities are built through repetition; a repetition of needs, and a repetition of desires. A city's large scale provides the room required for all possible permutations to find form in neighborhoods, based on wealth, ethnicity, or lifestyle; with handfuls of spaces to meet. Our meetings have served as an occasion to at least marginally veer from the familiar. Our three lived lives literally exchanging familiarities.
Our Feelings
How does any one feel while in the city? It’s expensive to live, hard to find work, over crowded, the affordable housing stock is shrinking, neighborhoods are being turned over, working class people are being displaced to the under-serviced margins, zoning variances are allowing an unheard of concentration of bars in certain residential neighborhoods, sexy condo towers have shitty branding and worse advertising campaigns. Its exciting, there is a sense of possibility, people are working hard, opportunity exists, including interaction with diverse people and ideas. Again, how should one feel? We're not really po-litical; although, we each have our ideals. Our Feelings about the Project (a subset of “Our Feelings”) We know each other beyond this work. Although, this project has allowed us to set aside time to meet regularly. Our feelings about the project don’t simply mirror those for each other. Clear communication, inciting focused action, feels good – of course. Frustrated expression, failing to find audience does not. We’ve experience both; and continued to speak to each other in spite of it. A running joke emerged, our 'stupid idea song'. It was a not so subtle way to call people on bad ideas.
Us: If we were going to the beaches what would be the best stop? Helpful Transit Worker: Any where here to the end of the line.
Us: Is there anywhere that you would recommend for lunch/brunch? Helpful Young Family: You could go to Fresh on the Beach or Sunset Grill. No place is better than the rest.
Us: We’re down here for the day, any suggestions for what we could get up to? Helpful Restaurateur: Well its a nice day so you could walk by the lake. There’s nothing on Queen St except the Sunset Grill. Do you have a car? You could take the streetcar downtown it goes right to the Eaton’s Centre.
Helpful Beach Elderly Sisters: Have you been to Queen St.? Us: No... Helpful Beach Elderly Sisters: Walk a bit further on the boardwalk, Queen St. has shops and restaurants.
i only know i drift without you From our earliest conversations on we expressed an interest in exploring unfamiliar areas of Toronto. We discussed wandering as a tool for having new experiences. Past work led us to the idea of small public interventions. We also held the belief the city would provide our necessary materials. Amber, spoke first, misquoting bp Nichol. She choose the line “I only drift without you”, for its beauty. Walking south of Queen W., through side streets, we collected and ordered found materials. Courting impermanence, we fixed maple keys, paper, twigs and pepper in the realm of language. As a group, it was an action surprisingly unaware/unconcerned with any potential audience.
To the Beaches!:
Distant Places Are No Longer Different Places
For our third project, we decided to act as tourists in our own city. Not such a stretch really, considering that we are transplants from other parts of the province/country. We choose the Beaches because none of us had explored it before.
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All of our projects for this zine involved exploring Toronto in ways that we hadn’t before; here we explicitly wanted to let others guide us in a more direct fashion. We consulted with strangers for insider tips about where to eat, where to go, and what to do; wondering what the collective experience of a neighbourhood could show us. After several locals thoughtfully directed us back downtown, we specified our interest in the district at hand. When a security guard at Toronto’s Water Works, our final stop, offered to take a group photo, it felt like we had successfully embodied our tourist roles.
Helpful Baker: Have you ever been to this bakery before? Us: Actually, we haven't been in this area before. Helpful Baker: Are you familiar with any Can. Lit? Michael Ondaatje, referes to the Water Works building, just East of here, in In the Skin of a Lion -- it's an architectural marvel.
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Sean: Is that really true? We are choosing to deal with materials that we find wherever we are – and we could find these materials any where.
meeting minutes its a bout ettiquite focus
Amber: The materials might be present any where, but what we are doing with them is at least partially determined by our location within a city broadly, and Toronto specifically. Take the action that we set for ourselves in High Park – that could really only occur in a city. In the country people have a different relationship to their environment and open spaces. There is an obvious community of people that, perhaps by necessity, walk their dogs in High Park. Their relationships to each other are also determined by their context. People recognize each other because of the dogs, they might pass each other unknowingly if it weren’t for the presence of their pets, not even realizing that they are sharing the same space outside of the park. Sean: So what you are saying is that our interaction in a location is determined by that location – even when we aren’t specifically making the choice for that to be the case (like we are doing with this project)? Amber: Is that what I’m saying? I’m not sure. I think that this project has helped to solidify my feelings that living in Toronto is different than living in some of the other places I have lived in before. And the way that I interact in the city also changes because of the fact that it is Toronto and not somewhere else. But I’m not sure if I can describe how this relationship to the city manifests itself exactly in my interactions. I mean, really, the fact that you, Simon, are coming into the city in order to take part in this project with us, changes your experience of being here. It becomes a different experience than that of someone who is spending all their time in the city. The things that we are doing are things that I might conceivably be doing anyway because I live here and spend time in some of these locations. But you are always travelling to be here – and travelling to return home, that must influence your experience, even if you aren't conscious of it. We are interrupted by the arrival of the bill. The restaurant is small and we feel like we have taken up the table for long enough. We pay the bill, we leave Yasi’s Place. 1 Theodor Adorno. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. (New York: Routledge, 1991). Pg. 190.
Symposium
I recorded our conversation because I record all of our conversations – I was hoping that by recording the things that we spoke about we could find the purpose behind what we were doing. I think that these conversations are demonstrative of something, although I am not sure exactly what is demonstrated. Perhaps in some small way the roles that we each took on in the project are revealed. But then again, perhaps not. I begin the conversation, because I often begin the conversation. Amber: I feel like the city is more than the sum of its parts – or rather that each part becomes a place that is wholly its own universe, with each of these little universes overlapping and ultimately making up the city as a whole. I miss the feeling of living in a small place where I know everyone and everyone knows me. It is so easy to be anonymous in the city. I think that somehow, in some small way, I have been using these visits as a way of inserting myself into the city, giving myself a place here – a place that we can occupy together. Simon: But you’re forgetting that living in the city is a struggle – its difficult to find work (and getting increasingly more difficult), living expenses are high, and entertainment - “doing something” - always seems to cost money. When you think about it, even these activities that we set for ourselves in creating a situation involve spending money, even if its just for a coffee or tea. There is an irony in the ‘leisure industry’ where ‘free time depends on the totality of social conditions, which continue to hold people under its spell... [it] is tending towards its own opposite, and is becoming a parody of itself.’ Take camping for example, with roots in old German youth movements, sleeping under the stars was a protest to bourgeois convention. While their protest has passed, camping has not, becoming a huge industry. We are sold huge quantities of gear to allow us to ‘get out’.1 We are caught in a capitalist system, and it doesn’t seem like there is any real way out. Amber: I think that I prefer to think about it not as forgetting that living in the city is a struggle, but that the struggle is worth it for the experiences that the city reveals to us. We couldn’t be doing the things that we are doing if we weren’t in the city.
Some Dogs I Know For our second project we decided that we would choose a location, a material to work with, and an action to perform. Amber was in charge of determining location – and she chose Toronto's High Park because of the large number of dogs that she knew would be walked in that area. (Amber is easily distracted by dogs). When we arrived at the park we wandered around, letting the park reveal an action to us. While we wandered around, we pet as many dogs as we could. We found that we were making a collection of names of the dogs we were petting. We decided that that could be our action – meeting dogs – and that we could make a poster with the names we were collecting attached to different drawings of dogs. The next time we met we brought the posters we had made. We postered around Leslieville because it also had a high population of dog owners, a small attempt at introducing Toronto's dogs to each other.