Guelph "works" the way that people speak of cities as "working." The streets are clean and safe, it has a living downtown core of small business, well-preserved historic neighbourhoods and a variety of social and cultural amenities. The housing stock is moderately and stably priced. It also has a small, active and engaged art community.
In the time that I have lived outside the urban core I have never felt that the culture surrounding me was anything else other than natural and logical. I have sometimes struggled to express myself. I have struggled to understand too, by listening carefully to patterns of language, by analysing publicity and by examining codes of dress and manners. I drive on highways, ride escalators, walk through malls. It is a life that I had previously seen only as a child at my parent's side. Now I am back, like a stranger in my home town. I recognize the place, the people, the streets, but I feel that I am anonymous. I really could be anywhere.
I once sat in on a town council committee meeting in which a participant strongly insisted that the town "had to have a theme." "A theme," I thought to myself, "how could one theme possibly represent the stories of all the people in the town?" My mind drifts to a reverie, to the feeling of myself, dashing across the town's main street in a drizzling rain. I have a six-pack of beer under my arm. I'll trade it to the owner of the junk shop for a souvenir - a favour for some German tourists. Is this a theme or is it a nightmare?
The city or town, large or small, was once simply a place in which to live and do business. It is now common for civic minded people to speak of municipalities as tourist attractions. Towns and cities marketing their communities as such will have to face a choice. They may decide that the cultural life of their community is unique and feature civic life as a consumer spectacle. Fundamental to the marketing of the spectacle will be the idea that there are unique experiences that can only be obtained by travelling to the place itself. It will be an experience unlike anything you can see on TV or buy at a shopping mall. Real people will be seen living authentic lives. Do you like to eat? It is guaranteed that the tourist destination will have absolutely unique eating establishments. Do you like pictures? It has the originals. Sports? The real thing, as seen previously only on TV!
If it is agreed that there is nothing particularly unique about the community then it may be necessary to import a spectacle: Perhaps mud wrestling at the mall? Or, if that doesn't work, the business people could wear cowboy hats and pretend they live in Dodge City.
We know that big cities and artists seem to go together. What other class of people could redeem the modern metropolis's transparent greed? Cities need artists to create the illusion that urbanity is about more than the axes of commerce and the accumulation of capital. The urban art community assures us that contemporary urban life is meaningful and that the manifest social and cultural forms of the city are rich and significant. Artists make their art at great personal sacrifice and their interpreters admonish the craven and the philistine to pay heed: "Think about what you are doing," we say. "Just think about it."
The urban environment is dominated by the presence of the commercial, journalistic or popular entertainment references. The information culture now defines the community environment more significantly and has a greater influence on the course of North American life than do the cycles of nature. The view from my window is more likely to reflect the character of my cable feed than the weather. In this sense, the civic environment is no longer defined by physicality. It is virtual. The urbis is now a web of communications that connect our northern-most communities with the same product, information and entertainment culture as the South. One can no longer speak of a rural culture that is substantially different from any small city or from the suburbs of our big cities. Rather, rural culture has become sub-rural, reflecting as much the values and way of life of sub-urbanity. The battle lines of the 21st century already pit the culture of the urban media classes against the sub-urban and sub-rural image consumers for control of the language.
Artists have traditionally gravitated to the centre of the production of images. Product advertising, news and journalism, popular entertainment - these fields of image making are evolutionary primate cousins to the fine arts and are central industries in the modern metropolis. The creation and exchange of images in the urban centre, the cross fertilization of arts and the intersection of the different fields breed a hardened, antidotal fine art culture highly resistant to commercial trivialization and banality. This culture is at once despised for its lack of enthusiasm for the commodity circus, and desired for the same reasons. Sub-urbanity typically resists the hardened urban culture. It is resisted because image producers play with written, oral and symbolic language - they subvert its authority by shifting contexts and suggesting the infinite plasticity of language and meaning. This formless language mocks earnestness and sincerity with irony. It undermines optimism with scepticism and casts doubt on fundamental beliefs of progress.
The Install Art collective, representing a core group of Guelph artists, proposes that 25 artists from Guelph and from Toronto find their "niche" in the city of Guelph. In as much as a title can signify anything common about a diverse group of artists, the title, Niche, betrays a desire by the artists to fit in: "Our intention is to build connections between artists and their communities - whether that be other artists or the larger community..." (Niche statement p.1). These are not Dadaist, or Surrealist or Situationist interventions that challenge the prevailing idealogy or aim to disturb the functional surface of community life. This is post cold war art, stripped of its political ideology and agit-prop roots. This group of artists does not function as an avant-garde for a new society. They retain a strong belief in the self-evident necessity of the work they make: They make art as a strategy for survival in the present, as a way of attaining something real in a virtual world and as a balm to a bruised post-industrial psyche. The work does not intervene to change - it is necessary to survive. It fits in. The question is: Does it fit in Guelph?
What and where is Guelph? Is it a city? Well, yes. Is it a town? Well, yes it is that too. We associate art with major cities (great art from great empires?), but historically, major art movements have also had roots in the country. Small villages such as Pont Aven and Collioure and Emma Lake have played specific roles in art history. Small cities like Bielefeld, Birmingham, Dijon and Baltimore, however, have never held much interest for artists. It would probably surprise no one that many successful and important artists were happy to have escaped such places. Can small cities such as these - university towns, mill towns, regional centres - support an art subculture? Do they even need one?
It is possible that the proliferation of images has accelerated at such a rate in recent years that it is no longer necessary for artists as a group to live in the urban core. It may be that a component of the creative process, that of reflection, has been sacrificed in the recent past to reaction. The regional centre, the mill town or the university town can play a role, perhaps, as a place where images can more slowly coalesce and where ideas can anneal. Perhaps Guelph can support an art subculture, establishing roots for successive generations of artists or perhaps Niche is merely the result of the passage of a few remarkable people at this particular time. If the people who call Guelph home continue to demand more from their language and culture than what is offered to them, if people outside of the media industry and the urban core demand more from their culture and not less, then it is possible that a non-commercial, participatory art culture may yet become a part of the sub-urban fabric.
Gordon Hatt, 1995
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