An article in yesterday's Globe and Mail questioning the long-term benefits of Cultural Olympiads for local artists and arts communities. Apparently attendance at marquee galleries and museums in London plunged in the lead-up to the most recent Summer Games. And Robert Everett-Green does a good job documenting the wholesale negative consequences the Olympics and BC's giveth-with-one-hand-and-taketh-away-with-the-other approach to cultural funding has had on the Vancouver arts community, where we are down one regional theatre company, and where granting levels still haven't returned to pre-Olympics levels.
Meanwhile over at the Georgia Straight a Vancouver Olympics-related scandal of potentially momentous consequence. Investigative reporter Laura Robinson has uncovered that former VANOC CEO John Furlong, celebrated far and wide in this province and country for his stewardship of the 2010 Games, appears to have deliberately fudged key details from his personal and professional past, including when he arrived in Canada. In his 2011 autobiography, Patriot Hearts, Furlong claims he emigrated to this country in 1974, to take up a teaching position at a high school in Prince George. In fact, Furlong arrived in 1969 as an Oblate Frontier Apostle missionary, working at a Residential School in Burns Lake. Several former students at the school have signed affidavits testifying to Furlong's mental and physical abuse.
We'll see where this story goes, but kudos to Robinson and the Straight for breaking it. I guess the fact that Gary Mason co-wrote Patriot Hearts with Furlong meant that the Globe was not interested in pursuing questions about Furlong's CV.
P.
Showing posts with label Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Show all posts
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Monday, August 13, 2012
Olympic Hangovers
Given that this blog was set up in part as a local
anticipatory response to the 2010 Winter Olympics here in Vancouver, you would
think I’d have something to say about the most recent Summer spectacle that has
just concluded in London. Especially now that the postmortems have begun: on
the pre-Games embarrassments for the host country (the line-ups at Heathrow,
the security concerns and costs) that slowly gave way to collective national pride
as the weather cleared and their athletes started racking up the medals; on the
potential post-Games legacy for East London, and for Mayor Boris Johnson, who
many are already touting to replace David Cameron as ruler of the Conservative
Party (especially now that Cameron’s coalition with the Lib Dems seems to have
collapsed); on the rote American jingoism and frustrating time delays of NBC’s
television coverage; on the IOC’s continued corporate fascism in monitoring
everything from British citizens’ infringements of the official Olympic brand
to what messages athletes could or could not tweet; and, as is usually the case
here in Canada, on our failure once again to ascend the heights of the medal
podium in several events that were supposed to be a lock.
Let the public bloodletting begin!
In fact, I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to avoid, as
much as possible, anything to do with the Olympics (which is easier said than
done, believe me—even for someone who doesn’t have cable and was squiring
around visiting relatives to local tourist destinations). I maintain that the
entire enterprise is a colossal waste of money, a media spectacle whose
excesses seem grotesque when set alongside the corresponding diminution of
coverage for real crises like the civil war in Syria, and a largely
pre-determined sporting contest whose outcomes seem designed only to maintain the
divide between moneyed Western nations and the entire global South (though
we’ll see if that changes somewhat when the Games move to Rio in 2016).
What I wrote about the Olympics in my book World Stages, Local Audiences two years
ago (in a chapter comparing the Beijing and Vancouver showcases) still seems
the most apt performative response. At the Olympics, I suggested, “tribal
nationalisms join forces with late capitalism, neo-liberal individualism,
cultural tourism, gender binarism, the modern security state, and local weather
patterns to produce a two-week media showcase of drug and judging scandals,
political grand-standing, corporate sponsorships, regional boosterism,
heart-tugging human interest stories, spectacular opening and closing production
numbers and, very occasionally, sublime moments of athletic excellence” (18-19).
Plus ça change à
Londre.
P.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Blame Australia: A "Circum-Pacific" Approach to Vancouver 2010
Patrons enjoying a pint at the Candahar Bar, an installation by Theo Sims, for Presentation House Gallery, at the PTC Studios on Granville Island.
Well, the Games are (blessedly) over. Let the post-mortems begin (starting with that cliché-ridden Closing Ceremonies). In fact, I’ll save mine for the time being, or at least until we get a better picture of the long-term fallout for the city (although I will admit to breathing a huge sigh of relief that Canada won the men's hockey game--not because I'm a hockey fan, but because I shudder to think what would have happened downtown had they lost). Instead, let me offer you a different sort of take, one that is excerpted from my forthcoming book, which includes a chapter comparing the Beijing and Vancouver Games, and which was supposed to be out at the beginning of this month, before Vancouver’s Opening Ceremonies. Unfortunately, it’s been delayed, but that didn’t stop my friend and colleague Michael Turner from inviting me to present on my research as part of the final day of programming at the Candahar Bar on Granville Island. Here’s what I had to say.
For his contribution to the 2006 Sydney Biennale, curated by Charles Merewether around the theme ‘Zones of Contact’, China’s most celebrated contemporary artist, Ai Weiwei, created World Map, an 8-metre long, 6-metre wide, and 1-metre high installation that used 2,000 layers of precisely cut cloth to construct and fit together in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle a replica international atlas. Given the media interest in Ai’s high-profile collaboration with Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron on the design of the architectural centerpiece of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Bird’s Nest Stadium, viewers might be forgiven for initially reading World Map as a cynical marketing stunt, high-end advertising for the benign globalism of sport as trumpeted by the official slogan of the Beijing Games: ‘One World, One Dream’. However, Ai, famous for giving the finger to Tiananmen Square, has never been one to toe the official party line, even when enforced as rigidly as the Communist Party of China’s. Indeed, little more than a year later, in August 2007, Ai would publicly condemn the Olympics as a glorified propaganda exercise, criticising those artists—including his former classmate Zhang Yimou, tasked with overseeing the opening and closing ceremonies—who had agreed to collaborate with such a regime.
Ai Weiwei's World Map.
Rebecca Belmore's America 2006.
A performance event like the Olympics trades equally in images of global cosmopolitanism and tribal nationalism, and most often via recourse to the very emblems used by Ai and Belmore in their respective installations: a map of the world, and various countries’ individually brandished flags. As crucially, what these works also demonstrate is that it is local audiences’ embodied and place-based engagements with the different symbolic registers of the national and the global that provide both international art fairs and international sports showcases with their real drama. In other words, the ‘dream’ of worldliness is revealed to be nothing less, and nothing more, than the sum of one’s material location in the world. And it is here, I would argue, that we see the city emerge to challenge the nation as the key site of local performative inquiry and global political connection. In this respect, Vancouver’s geopolitical positioning as Canada’s “gateway to the Pacific,” in the lingo of Premier Gordo and the original Vancouver 2010 Olympic Bid Book, is key, and explains why, in making sense of the competing local/global claims of these Games, we should be looking east to Beijing (and Shanghai, and Hong Kong, and Sydney) rather than east to Ottawa.
Coincidentally, my partner, Richard, and I were having drinks on a patio in Sydney in June 2003, enjoying spectacular views of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, when our server, upon learning where we were from, informed us that Vancouver had been picked by the IOC to host the 2010 Winter Games. It seemed strangely appropriate to be receiving this news Down Under, during the antipodean winter season, with Sydneysiders huddled under heat lamps in what for us were relatively balmy conditions. Let me dwell a bit further on Sydney’s relevance to Beijing 2008 and Vancouver 2010, and to the local/global approach to performance, place, and politics I adopted in my research on the Olympics more generally. That relevance has as much to do with the fact that Sydney had only narrowly beat out Beijing for the right to host the first Summer Olympics of the new millennium on a controversial fourth ballot held by IOC members in 1993, as it does with disgruntled expat silver-medal-winning freestyle skiers wearing their national colours too lightly for media in Sydney and Vancouver alike, or with David Atkins, the Australian Executive Producer of the Vancouver 2010 Opening and Closing Ceremonies, failing to understand not just the place of Quebec within Canada’s national imaginary but, more pertinently, the local significance of holding the Opening Ceremonies on the eve of Chinese New Year. That is, the Olympics—the national logic of its competitive structure notwithstanding—are at once tranparently transnational, or global, in their message-making—their event brand strictly controlled by a supra-national corporation, the IOC, and an athlete’s or coach’s “franchise” loyalty as fickle as that of a World Cup player—and resolutely local in their biopolitics, with the host city registering the material effects of the administration of an Olympics’ message with more or less resistance depending on specific contexts.
In Sydney in 2003 I kept experiencing déjà vu. The Harbour Bridge reminded me of the Lion’s Gate, the vast expanse of green known as The Domain of Stanley Park. The ocean we share also gives each city a rich supply of accessible sandy beaches. Then, too, Canada and Australia’s linked colonial past, and the forced relocation of Aboriginal peoples that forms its shameful backdrop, means that Vancouver and Sydney are home to large numbers of urban Aboriginals, many of whom live in poverty and/or, by necessity, are involved in prostitution or the drug trade. The centres for these activities are the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver and the Kings Cross area of Sydney, both home to controversial safe injection sites, and both subject to increasing pressures related to gentrification. As Pacific Rim cities, Sydney and Vancouver also have large Asian populations, with Chinese immigration to both cities—and attendant racist immigration laws—dating back to the nineteenth century and momentarily spiking in the years leading up to the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong back to the People’s Republic of China. Finally, Sydney and Vancouver are both lifestyle cities with extremely inflated real-estate markets.
In fact, it is the connection between the migratory flows of the recent Chinese diaspora and the equally migratory flows of global financial capital that at last brings me to the main point of departure for my research on Beijing and Vancouver as Olympic host cities, showcasing how both cities (and others besides, including Sydney, but also Hong Kong and Shanghai) form part of an economic and geopolitical nexus of Pacific Rim property speculation and urban redevelopment. Indeed, in terms of the performance of place, and its local/global significations, one must not underestimate the relationship between ‘mega-events’ like the Olympics and what Kris Olds, with particular attention to Vancouver, has called urban mega-projects, ‘large scale (re)development projects composed of a mix of commercial, residential, retail, industrial, leisure, and infrastructure uses’, often built on abandoned inner-city tracts of land, and usually oriented around signature buildings (see his Globalization and Urban Change, 2001, p.6). The Sydney Olympic Park redevelopment of Homebush Bay has provided the model for most summer and winter Olympics host cities post-2000. Similarly, ‘mega-events’, according to Maurice Roche, are ‘large-scale cultural events which have a dramatic character, mass popular appeal and international significance’, and which are likewise designed to project a particular global image of the host city, repositioning that city ‘in the world of global inter-city and economic competition’ (see Mega-Events and Modernity, 2000, p.10).
In developing his theory of the ‘sociology’ of mega-events, Roche focuses his attention not just on the Olympics, but also on the historical legacy of World Expositions, and in terms of the specific ‘event horizon’ governing my comparison of the Beijing and Vancouver Games, it is worth contextualising my discussion a bit further by first looking back to the 1986 Expo in Vancouver (and it’s great that we have excerpts from Jeremy Shaw’s “Something’s Happening Here” poster project lining the stairwell up to Candahar) and forward to the 2010 Expo in Shanghai. Connecting both events are the ongoing UMPs that resulted from the successful host city selection process, not to mention legendary Hong Kong business tycoon and property developer Li Ka-shing’s strategic involvement in some of the more significant of those projects. After all, it was Li, chief shareholder and managing director of the property development firms Cheung Kong (CK) and Hutchison Whampoa (HW), who together with his eldest son Victor formed Concord Pacific in 1987 with the aim of buying and developing the former Expo 86 lands on the north side of Vancouver’s False Creek. In the 20 years since the sale of the land to Concord Pacific, and in particular since the Li family transferred control of the firm to Terry Hui in 1993, the area has been transformed into one of the most densely populated downtowns in North America, and has become an urban planning model for similar developments around the world. And yet this global performance of place has come at a local price, with an increasing lack of affordable housing in Vancouver’s urban core resulting in a form of enclosure that sees companies like Concord Pacific at once encroaching on and seeking to contain the social blight of the DTES, for example, through a phalanx of luxury condominium towers.
While Li’s primary investment interests in Shanghai relate to the operation of container ports in the Mingdong and Pudong districts, HW’s property development wing has sought to capitalise on the real estate potential associated with the extraordinary urban transformation of Shanghai into a global financial, high tech, transportation, and trade zone centred around the Pudong New Area Project and the Lujiazui Central Finance District. Specifically, HW has a number of grand luxury property and hotel developments currently in various stages of development throughout these areas. However, unlike Vancouver, the major development initiatives in Shanghai over the past two decades have been fueled by the economic (and political) engines of Beijing, rather than Hong Kong. Arguably it is the Chinese government’s desire to see Shanghai overtake Hong Kong as the major financial capital of Asia and, consequently, regain some of the glory of its cosmopolitan past that explains an architectural re-branding of a city now in eclipse of Tokyo as the stand-in for urban futurity in Hollywood.
A telling sign that Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo is seen within China as a showcase event as - if not more - significant as the Beijing Olympics is the fact that a clock counting down the Expo’s opening in August 2010 was installed in Shanghai’s People’s Square in February 2003, more than a year before a similar clock counting down the Beijing Olympics was installed in Tiananmen Square. Of course it was an earlier countdown clock in Tiananmen, this one ticking off the days to the transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty in 1997, that established the precedent of symbolically showcasing the future-oriented temporality of China’s emergence as a major player on the world stage. And if, in this regard, the coming out party that was the Beijing Olympics was measured in the West - as an indicator of China’s social progress - against the brutal suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen in 1989, in China the timing of the Olympics arguably had much more to do with celebrating the country’s amazing economic progress in the thirty years since Deng Xiaoping opened the door to global markets in 1978.
While no countdown clock was put in place in anticipation of Expo 86, one was installed in February 2007 in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery to inaugurate the three-year countdown to the 2010 Olympics. The clock was an Omega, the official timekeeper of both the Beijing and Vancouver Games, and this is as good a metaphor as any for the compression and consolidation of the local specificities of space and time into the unreal, non-material scapes and flows of globalisation. But the well-orchestrated ceremonial unveilings of these various clocks also speak, metonymically, to the relevance of a performance studies approach to the Olympics as a mass public spectacle that, to adapt Guy Debord, obliges one to participate in an abstract construction of the world at the same time as it separates one from the concrete material conditions of the local as it is produced by that world (see The Society of the Spectacle). As television broadcast statistics consistently bear out, events like the Olympics really do focus the eyes of the world on a given city, and not just for the two weeks of the Games themselves. Whether or not those eyes all share in the dreams being sold in and by that city is another matter entirely, and in the larger study from which this talk is excerpted I examine the different local, national, and international investments and contradictions in the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics’ showcasing - sometimes willfully, sometimes not - of questions relating to urban sustainability, cultural heritage, and human rights.
For the purposes of time, let me skip over the environmental and cultural comparisons and conclude very briefly by stating that in focusing on human rights, my aim has not been to vaunt Vancouver and to single out China for special condemnation in sacrificing individual rights of public expression and assembly to the supra-political stage managing of Beijing’s collective Olympic optics. As Helen Jefferson Lenskyj usefully reminds us, the IOC, ‘an autonomous, non-elected body’, abets host cities’ curtailment of basic civic rights by insisting that organisers play by their tightly controlled rules (see Olympic Industry Resistance, 2008, p.23), including a guarantee that there will be no public protests in or adjacent to Olympic venues, or any behaviour that might be considered an affront to Olympic values (and valuation). Hence Vancouver’s Safe Streets Act, which mimics similar anti-panhandling legislation passed in advance of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the 2000 Sydney Olympics; and hence the controversy surrounding Vancouver’s anti-Olympics sign by-law. Rather, I want simply to suggest that Beijing’s attempts to control not just the message of its Olympics (‘One World, One Dream’), but also their mediation (via, among other electronic channels, the World Wide Web), returns us to the special applicability of performance in highlighting a fundamental asymmetry at the heart of local and global practices of place. That is, as noted China and Pacific Rim scholar Arif Dirlik has commented, in terms of the fostering of ‘place-based consciousness’, the spatially abstracted routes of globalisation are often pitted against the concrete locations and historical roots of everyday social and political activity (see Dirlik's essay in his co-edited collection Place and Politics in an Age of Globalisation, 2001, p.15).
Thus, China’s swift and brutal suppression of the protests in Tibet, for example, was read by most Western media - and certainly CNN - as evidence of China’s failure to integrate itself successfully and fully within a global development narrative of capitalist modernity, where universal human rights necessarily follow upon economic prosperity. However, the subsequent protests against the torch relay in London, Paris, and San Francisco, among other international locales, were seen within China - and not just by the state-run news agency Xinhua - as further evidence of the West’s ongoing marginalisation and isolation of the country. As my colleague Zhao Yuezhi has noted, were China ever in fact to lift the ‘great firewall’ it has erected around the Internet, foreign web browsers might be quite shocked by what they read, with many popular - and populist - blogs trading in a nationalist discourse far more jingoistic and muscularly anti-Western than that promoted by the CCP, and playing to an impatient and expectant generation of only children coming of age with no memory of Tiananmen, let alone the Cultural Revolution. Some of these referential paradoxes were underscored for me as a result of an informal email survey I conducted in June of 2008, asking Chinese students studying at my university to compare Beijing’s hosting of the Summer Olympics with what - if anything - they had taken note of regarding Vancouver’s preparations for the 2010 Winter Games. One young woman’s response was particularly illuminating, framing the politics - and performance - of place at work in the two Olympic cities not simply in terms of differences in national temperament, but also, implicitly, in terms of a critique of neo-liberalism’s abstract prioritisation of individual human rights at the expense of ‘place-based’ considerations of new models of collectivisation, even post-Maoist ones that have resulted in the (apparently willing) resettlement of her own family:
Like millions of Chinese people in my generation, I have been waiting for the Beijing Olympic Games since I was 13 years old. Finally, I can see my home city shine on the world stage this summer. It is a feeling most Canadians will never be able to understand. It is more about … national pride and glory than having fun. It is about sacrificing individual freedom for the greater good of the country…. I am sure you know all about the new Olympic venues being built in Beijing. But you might not know that tens of thousand[s] of citizens had to move away to make the land available for the venues. My family happened to be one of them and we were honored to do so, although we had to lose some money due to the resettlement…. The difference between the Chinese philosophy and the Canadian philosophy is what the general public considers to be more valuable: individual freedom or … national pride. In China, people who fight for individual rights might gain more property and glamour, but people who sacrifice their rights for the country gain more respect. It is a fresh image for me to see how Canadian people see their Vancouver Olympics…. I saw people protesting against the Olympics on Commercial Drive, [saying] that it’s a businessmen’s money-making event…. Athletes have to advertise through sponsors to get their funding. When I ask Canadian people how they feel about winning the right to hold the [W]inter Olympics, many of them don’t even care (personal email).
What lessons might such a complexly articulated statement hold for Vancouver, where, as this student suggests, we take for granted our right to protest as well as our right to disinterestedness? And how might thinking critically about both the real differences and the complex lines of historical connection in local audiences’ responses to globally mediated sports spectacles like the Olympics in turn foster a particular politics of place that resists the universalist narratives of development (athletic, economic, social) championed by supra-national institutions like the IOC? The well-publicized rights challenges launched by Pivot Legal Society, the IOCC, Carnegie Community Action Project, United Native Nations, and VANDU on behalf of the street homeless in the Downtown East Side in advance of the 2010 Olympics offer one possible way to begin answering these questions by exposing the performative exclusions embodied within the very category of the human that such narratives are meant to uphold, highlighting some of the social groups left behind when host cities harness their particular urban aspirations to abstracted messages of Olympic inspiration: if human bodies can be engineered - via equipment vested or drugs ingested - to go ‘faster, higher, stronger’, then why can’t the places those bodies reside? Yet as women ski jumpers’ own unsuccessful rights challenge against VANOC and the IOC attests, such fundamental inequities are actually built into the very fabric of an athletic movement based on the cohesion of body and world that has for most of its history done its best to ignore over half of the bodies in the world.
Whither sport. Despite its Charter’s principled avowal that ‘the practice of sport is a human right’, the Olympic Movement remains deeply entrenched within binaries of human difference. Sex and gender are chief among them, but exclusionary divisions and categories based on race, class, sexuality, age, religion, physical mobility, and geography are just as persistent. Indeed, one of the main arguments in awarding Beijing the 2008 Olympics - that the world’s most populous nation should have the right to host the world’s premiere sporting event - seems slightly specious when one considers that most of the sports showcased at that event were invented by white European men at the height of colonialism. In the politicised spectacle of place promotion that is the Olympics, final medal tallies belie not just the unspoken story of ‘performance enhancement’, but also a long history of the global south, or the communist east, having to beat the West at its own game.
Whether art. In May 2008 Ai was back in Sydney for the first international retrospective of his work, also curated by Charles Merewether as a joint exhibition between the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and the Campbelltown Arts Centre, and meant to overlap with the 2008 Sydney Biennale. The show featured the world premiere of the video Fairytale, a three-hour documentary following from concept to realisation Ai’s invited contribution of the same name to Documenta 12. In Ai’s piece we see the process behind his invitation and facilitation of the journey of 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel in the summer of 2007, where in groups of 200 over successive one week periods, participants, having first been extensively interviewed on everything from their definition of a fairytale to whether or not art can change the world, lived and ate communally, toured the city and the Documenta shows in matching uniforms, and came together at the end of each day for various group demonstrations orchestrated by Ai. Participants acted both as spectators and performers, conventional ‘tourists’ and exhibitionary ‘specimens’, the resulting spectacle designed at once as an experiment in cross-cultural exchange through art and as a more pointed local intervention into the West’s fantasies of the history of collectivisation and social interaction in China.
Well, the Games are (blessedly) over. Let the post-mortems begin (starting with that cliché-ridden Closing Ceremonies). In fact, I’ll save mine for the time being, or at least until we get a better picture of the long-term fallout for the city (although I will admit to breathing a huge sigh of relief that Canada won the men's hockey game--not because I'm a hockey fan, but because I shudder to think what would have happened downtown had they lost). Instead, let me offer you a different sort of take, one that is excerpted from my forthcoming book, which includes a chapter comparing the Beijing and Vancouver Games, and which was supposed to be out at the beginning of this month, before Vancouver’s Opening Ceremonies. Unfortunately, it’s been delayed, but that didn’t stop my friend and colleague Michael Turner from inviting me to present on my research as part of the final day of programming at the Candahar Bar on Granville Island. Here’s what I had to say.
For his contribution to the 2006 Sydney Biennale, curated by Charles Merewether around the theme ‘Zones of Contact’, China’s most celebrated contemporary artist, Ai Weiwei, created World Map, an 8-metre long, 6-metre wide, and 1-metre high installation that used 2,000 layers of precisely cut cloth to construct and fit together in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle a replica international atlas. Given the media interest in Ai’s high-profile collaboration with Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron on the design of the architectural centerpiece of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Bird’s Nest Stadium, viewers might be forgiven for initially reading World Map as a cynical marketing stunt, high-end advertising for the benign globalism of sport as trumpeted by the official slogan of the Beijing Games: ‘One World, One Dream’. However, Ai, famous for giving the finger to Tiananmen Square, has never been one to toe the official party line, even when enforced as rigidly as the Communist Party of China’s. Indeed, little more than a year later, in August 2007, Ai would publicly condemn the Olympics as a glorified propaganda exercise, criticising those artists—including his former classmate Zhang Yimou, tasked with overseeing the opening and closing ceremonies—who had agreed to collaborate with such a regime.
Ai Weiwei's World Map.
In fact, World Map is more in keeping with past works by Ai that likewise engage with the nation as at once an imaginary cultural construct authenticated by a global consumer market and as a real physical entity monitored by local government. So, for example, Ai is famous for deliberately destroying pottery from the Han and Ming Dynasties, or defacing it with bright paint and logos from Coca-Cola; and in his Map of China series he carves monumental sculptures of the ‘official’ geographical mass of the People’s Republic (including Taiwan) out of beams salvaged from Qing Dynasty temples. As with World Map, these objects’ abstract metaphysical representations of place are interrupted, challenged, and rendered mutable by an audience’s local - and very tactile - encounter with the medium of their performance: latex, wood, felt. As such, the fabric used in Ai’s Biennale piece, and the time and effort required to cut, pile, and fit it, speak to the conflicting and situationally contingent layers of history, politics, and economics that continue to circumscribe the contact zones available between nations in this age of globalisation, with China’s ability to stage a media event as extravagant as the Beijing Olympics, no less than its ability to serve as primary manufacturer to the worldwide garment industry, dependent on abundant local supplies of cheap labour.
At the same Sydney Biennale, Vancouver-based Anishinabe-Canadian artist, and Candahar participant, Rebecca Belmore, exhibited America 2006. Combining textile work with sculpture, the installation saw her stitch together by hand fragments from the flags of all the countries of the Americas in a manner that at once served as a witty comment on the United States’ diminishing geopolitical influence within the hemisphere (its flag ended up next to Venezuela’s) and as a serious indictment of the dispossession and cultural genocide of the continents’ Indigenous peoples. In Belmore’s work, ‘contact’ thus has a very specific historical referent, and to the extent that all territory in the Americas might still be considered occupied or colonised space, borders per force remain arbitrary and transferable, which makes Belmore’s opening night Candahar performance all the more resonant. Likewise, allegiance to a flag can only be defined in terms of instrumental outcomes, a point made abundantly clear by members of the Native Warrior Society and local artist Alex Morrison in equal measure. In both the original NWS photo that ran in local newspapers in March 2007 and Morrison’s equally daring appropriation and re-staging of this image, it is the clearly visible Mohawk flag in the foreground rather than the fragment of the Olympic flag displayed in the background that is meant to give VANOC and FHFN members, along with all BC residents generally, pause. For it necessarily evokes memories of the 78-day armed stand-off in Kanesatake in the summer of 1990.
At the same Sydney Biennale, Vancouver-based Anishinabe-Canadian artist, and Candahar participant, Rebecca Belmore, exhibited America 2006. Combining textile work with sculpture, the installation saw her stitch together by hand fragments from the flags of all the countries of the Americas in a manner that at once served as a witty comment on the United States’ diminishing geopolitical influence within the hemisphere (its flag ended up next to Venezuela’s) and as a serious indictment of the dispossession and cultural genocide of the continents’ Indigenous peoples. In Belmore’s work, ‘contact’ thus has a very specific historical referent, and to the extent that all territory in the Americas might still be considered occupied or colonised space, borders per force remain arbitrary and transferable, which makes Belmore’s opening night Candahar performance all the more resonant. Likewise, allegiance to a flag can only be defined in terms of instrumental outcomes, a point made abundantly clear by members of the Native Warrior Society and local artist Alex Morrison in equal measure. In both the original NWS photo that ran in local newspapers in March 2007 and Morrison’s equally daring appropriation and re-staging of this image, it is the clearly visible Mohawk flag in the foreground rather than the fragment of the Olympic flag displayed in the background that is meant to give VANOC and FHFN members, along with all BC residents generally, pause. For it necessarily evokes memories of the 78-day armed stand-off in Kanesatake in the summer of 1990.
Rebecca Belmore's America 2006.
The Native Warrior Society with the stolen Olympic flag, March 2007.
A performance event like the Olympics trades equally in images of global cosmopolitanism and tribal nationalism, and most often via recourse to the very emblems used by Ai and Belmore in their respective installations: a map of the world, and various countries’ individually brandished flags. As crucially, what these works also demonstrate is that it is local audiences’ embodied and place-based engagements with the different symbolic registers of the national and the global that provide both international art fairs and international sports showcases with their real drama. In other words, the ‘dream’ of worldliness is revealed to be nothing less, and nothing more, than the sum of one’s material location in the world. And it is here, I would argue, that we see the city emerge to challenge the nation as the key site of local performative inquiry and global political connection. In this respect, Vancouver’s geopolitical positioning as Canada’s “gateway to the Pacific,” in the lingo of Premier Gordo and the original Vancouver 2010 Olympic Bid Book, is key, and explains why, in making sense of the competing local/global claims of these Games, we should be looking east to Beijing (and Shanghai, and Hong Kong, and Sydney) rather than east to Ottawa.
Coincidentally, my partner, Richard, and I were having drinks on a patio in Sydney in June 2003, enjoying spectacular views of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, when our server, upon learning where we were from, informed us that Vancouver had been picked by the IOC to host the 2010 Winter Games. It seemed strangely appropriate to be receiving this news Down Under, during the antipodean winter season, with Sydneysiders huddled under heat lamps in what for us were relatively balmy conditions. Let me dwell a bit further on Sydney’s relevance to Beijing 2008 and Vancouver 2010, and to the local/global approach to performance, place, and politics I adopted in my research on the Olympics more generally. That relevance has as much to do with the fact that Sydney had only narrowly beat out Beijing for the right to host the first Summer Olympics of the new millennium on a controversial fourth ballot held by IOC members in 1993, as it does with disgruntled expat silver-medal-winning freestyle skiers wearing their national colours too lightly for media in Sydney and Vancouver alike, or with David Atkins, the Australian Executive Producer of the Vancouver 2010 Opening and Closing Ceremonies, failing to understand not just the place of Quebec within Canada’s national imaginary but, more pertinently, the local significance of holding the Opening Ceremonies on the eve of Chinese New Year. That is, the Olympics—the national logic of its competitive structure notwithstanding—are at once tranparently transnational, or global, in their message-making—their event brand strictly controlled by a supra-national corporation, the IOC, and an athlete’s or coach’s “franchise” loyalty as fickle as that of a World Cup player—and resolutely local in their biopolitics, with the host city registering the material effects of the administration of an Olympics’ message with more or less resistance depending on specific contexts.
In Sydney in 2003 I kept experiencing déjà vu. The Harbour Bridge reminded me of the Lion’s Gate, the vast expanse of green known as The Domain of Stanley Park. The ocean we share also gives each city a rich supply of accessible sandy beaches. Then, too, Canada and Australia’s linked colonial past, and the forced relocation of Aboriginal peoples that forms its shameful backdrop, means that Vancouver and Sydney are home to large numbers of urban Aboriginals, many of whom live in poverty and/or, by necessity, are involved in prostitution or the drug trade. The centres for these activities are the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver and the Kings Cross area of Sydney, both home to controversial safe injection sites, and both subject to increasing pressures related to gentrification. As Pacific Rim cities, Sydney and Vancouver also have large Asian populations, with Chinese immigration to both cities—and attendant racist immigration laws—dating back to the nineteenth century and momentarily spiking in the years leading up to the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong back to the People’s Republic of China. Finally, Sydney and Vancouver are both lifestyle cities with extremely inflated real-estate markets.
In fact, it is the connection between the migratory flows of the recent Chinese diaspora and the equally migratory flows of global financial capital that at last brings me to the main point of departure for my research on Beijing and Vancouver as Olympic host cities, showcasing how both cities (and others besides, including Sydney, but also Hong Kong and Shanghai) form part of an economic and geopolitical nexus of Pacific Rim property speculation and urban redevelopment. Indeed, in terms of the performance of place, and its local/global significations, one must not underestimate the relationship between ‘mega-events’ like the Olympics and what Kris Olds, with particular attention to Vancouver, has called urban mega-projects, ‘large scale (re)development projects composed of a mix of commercial, residential, retail, industrial, leisure, and infrastructure uses’, often built on abandoned inner-city tracts of land, and usually oriented around signature buildings (see his Globalization and Urban Change, 2001, p.6). The Sydney Olympic Park redevelopment of Homebush Bay has provided the model for most summer and winter Olympics host cities post-2000. Similarly, ‘mega-events’, according to Maurice Roche, are ‘large-scale cultural events which have a dramatic character, mass popular appeal and international significance’, and which are likewise designed to project a particular global image of the host city, repositioning that city ‘in the world of global inter-city and economic competition’ (see Mega-Events and Modernity, 2000, p.10).
In developing his theory of the ‘sociology’ of mega-events, Roche focuses his attention not just on the Olympics, but also on the historical legacy of World Expositions, and in terms of the specific ‘event horizon’ governing my comparison of the Beijing and Vancouver Games, it is worth contextualising my discussion a bit further by first looking back to the 1986 Expo in Vancouver (and it’s great that we have excerpts from Jeremy Shaw’s “Something’s Happening Here” poster project lining the stairwell up to Candahar) and forward to the 2010 Expo in Shanghai. Connecting both events are the ongoing UMPs that resulted from the successful host city selection process, not to mention legendary Hong Kong business tycoon and property developer Li Ka-shing’s strategic involvement in some of the more significant of those projects. After all, it was Li, chief shareholder and managing director of the property development firms Cheung Kong (CK) and Hutchison Whampoa (HW), who together with his eldest son Victor formed Concord Pacific in 1987 with the aim of buying and developing the former Expo 86 lands on the north side of Vancouver’s False Creek. In the 20 years since the sale of the land to Concord Pacific, and in particular since the Li family transferred control of the firm to Terry Hui in 1993, the area has been transformed into one of the most densely populated downtowns in North America, and has become an urban planning model for similar developments around the world. And yet this global performance of place has come at a local price, with an increasing lack of affordable housing in Vancouver’s urban core resulting in a form of enclosure that sees companies like Concord Pacific at once encroaching on and seeking to contain the social blight of the DTES, for example, through a phalanx of luxury condominium towers.
While Li’s primary investment interests in Shanghai relate to the operation of container ports in the Mingdong and Pudong districts, HW’s property development wing has sought to capitalise on the real estate potential associated with the extraordinary urban transformation of Shanghai into a global financial, high tech, transportation, and trade zone centred around the Pudong New Area Project and the Lujiazui Central Finance District. Specifically, HW has a number of grand luxury property and hotel developments currently in various stages of development throughout these areas. However, unlike Vancouver, the major development initiatives in Shanghai over the past two decades have been fueled by the economic (and political) engines of Beijing, rather than Hong Kong. Arguably it is the Chinese government’s desire to see Shanghai overtake Hong Kong as the major financial capital of Asia and, consequently, regain some of the glory of its cosmopolitan past that explains an architectural re-branding of a city now in eclipse of Tokyo as the stand-in for urban futurity in Hollywood.
A telling sign that Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo is seen within China as a showcase event as - if not more - significant as the Beijing Olympics is the fact that a clock counting down the Expo’s opening in August 2010 was installed in Shanghai’s People’s Square in February 2003, more than a year before a similar clock counting down the Beijing Olympics was installed in Tiananmen Square. Of course it was an earlier countdown clock in Tiananmen, this one ticking off the days to the transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty in 1997, that established the precedent of symbolically showcasing the future-oriented temporality of China’s emergence as a major player on the world stage. And if, in this regard, the coming out party that was the Beijing Olympics was measured in the West - as an indicator of China’s social progress - against the brutal suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen in 1989, in China the timing of the Olympics arguably had much more to do with celebrating the country’s amazing economic progress in the thirty years since Deng Xiaoping opened the door to global markets in 1978.
While no countdown clock was put in place in anticipation of Expo 86, one was installed in February 2007 in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery to inaugurate the three-year countdown to the 2010 Olympics. The clock was an Omega, the official timekeeper of both the Beijing and Vancouver Games, and this is as good a metaphor as any for the compression and consolidation of the local specificities of space and time into the unreal, non-material scapes and flows of globalisation. But the well-orchestrated ceremonial unveilings of these various clocks also speak, metonymically, to the relevance of a performance studies approach to the Olympics as a mass public spectacle that, to adapt Guy Debord, obliges one to participate in an abstract construction of the world at the same time as it separates one from the concrete material conditions of the local as it is produced by that world (see The Society of the Spectacle). As television broadcast statistics consistently bear out, events like the Olympics really do focus the eyes of the world on a given city, and not just for the two weeks of the Games themselves. Whether or not those eyes all share in the dreams being sold in and by that city is another matter entirely, and in the larger study from which this talk is excerpted I examine the different local, national, and international investments and contradictions in the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics’ showcasing - sometimes willfully, sometimes not - of questions relating to urban sustainability, cultural heritage, and human rights.
For the purposes of time, let me skip over the environmental and cultural comparisons and conclude very briefly by stating that in focusing on human rights, my aim has not been to vaunt Vancouver and to single out China for special condemnation in sacrificing individual rights of public expression and assembly to the supra-political stage managing of Beijing’s collective Olympic optics. As Helen Jefferson Lenskyj usefully reminds us, the IOC, ‘an autonomous, non-elected body’, abets host cities’ curtailment of basic civic rights by insisting that organisers play by their tightly controlled rules (see Olympic Industry Resistance, 2008, p.23), including a guarantee that there will be no public protests in or adjacent to Olympic venues, or any behaviour that might be considered an affront to Olympic values (and valuation). Hence Vancouver’s Safe Streets Act, which mimics similar anti-panhandling legislation passed in advance of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the 2000 Sydney Olympics; and hence the controversy surrounding Vancouver’s anti-Olympics sign by-law. Rather, I want simply to suggest that Beijing’s attempts to control not just the message of its Olympics (‘One World, One Dream’), but also their mediation (via, among other electronic channels, the World Wide Web), returns us to the special applicability of performance in highlighting a fundamental asymmetry at the heart of local and global practices of place. That is, as noted China and Pacific Rim scholar Arif Dirlik has commented, in terms of the fostering of ‘place-based consciousness’, the spatially abstracted routes of globalisation are often pitted against the concrete locations and historical roots of everyday social and political activity (see Dirlik's essay in his co-edited collection Place and Politics in an Age of Globalisation, 2001, p.15).
Thus, China’s swift and brutal suppression of the protests in Tibet, for example, was read by most Western media - and certainly CNN - as evidence of China’s failure to integrate itself successfully and fully within a global development narrative of capitalist modernity, where universal human rights necessarily follow upon economic prosperity. However, the subsequent protests against the torch relay in London, Paris, and San Francisco, among other international locales, were seen within China - and not just by the state-run news agency Xinhua - as further evidence of the West’s ongoing marginalisation and isolation of the country. As my colleague Zhao Yuezhi has noted, were China ever in fact to lift the ‘great firewall’ it has erected around the Internet, foreign web browsers might be quite shocked by what they read, with many popular - and populist - blogs trading in a nationalist discourse far more jingoistic and muscularly anti-Western than that promoted by the CCP, and playing to an impatient and expectant generation of only children coming of age with no memory of Tiananmen, let alone the Cultural Revolution. Some of these referential paradoxes were underscored for me as a result of an informal email survey I conducted in June of 2008, asking Chinese students studying at my university to compare Beijing’s hosting of the Summer Olympics with what - if anything - they had taken note of regarding Vancouver’s preparations for the 2010 Winter Games. One young woman’s response was particularly illuminating, framing the politics - and performance - of place at work in the two Olympic cities not simply in terms of differences in national temperament, but also, implicitly, in terms of a critique of neo-liberalism’s abstract prioritisation of individual human rights at the expense of ‘place-based’ considerations of new models of collectivisation, even post-Maoist ones that have resulted in the (apparently willing) resettlement of her own family:
Like millions of Chinese people in my generation, I have been waiting for the Beijing Olympic Games since I was 13 years old. Finally, I can see my home city shine on the world stage this summer. It is a feeling most Canadians will never be able to understand. It is more about … national pride and glory than having fun. It is about sacrificing individual freedom for the greater good of the country…. I am sure you know all about the new Olympic venues being built in Beijing. But you might not know that tens of thousand[s] of citizens had to move away to make the land available for the venues. My family happened to be one of them and we were honored to do so, although we had to lose some money due to the resettlement…. The difference between the Chinese philosophy and the Canadian philosophy is what the general public considers to be more valuable: individual freedom or … national pride. In China, people who fight for individual rights might gain more property and glamour, but people who sacrifice their rights for the country gain more respect. It is a fresh image for me to see how Canadian people see their Vancouver Olympics…. I saw people protesting against the Olympics on Commercial Drive, [saying] that it’s a businessmen’s money-making event…. Athletes have to advertise through sponsors to get their funding. When I ask Canadian people how they feel about winning the right to hold the [W]inter Olympics, many of them don’t even care (personal email).
What lessons might such a complexly articulated statement hold for Vancouver, where, as this student suggests, we take for granted our right to protest as well as our right to disinterestedness? And how might thinking critically about both the real differences and the complex lines of historical connection in local audiences’ responses to globally mediated sports spectacles like the Olympics in turn foster a particular politics of place that resists the universalist narratives of development (athletic, economic, social) championed by supra-national institutions like the IOC? The well-publicized rights challenges launched by Pivot Legal Society, the IOCC, Carnegie Community Action Project, United Native Nations, and VANDU on behalf of the street homeless in the Downtown East Side in advance of the 2010 Olympics offer one possible way to begin answering these questions by exposing the performative exclusions embodied within the very category of the human that such narratives are meant to uphold, highlighting some of the social groups left behind when host cities harness their particular urban aspirations to abstracted messages of Olympic inspiration: if human bodies can be engineered - via equipment vested or drugs ingested - to go ‘faster, higher, stronger’, then why can’t the places those bodies reside? Yet as women ski jumpers’ own unsuccessful rights challenge against VANOC and the IOC attests, such fundamental inequities are actually built into the very fabric of an athletic movement based on the cohesion of body and world that has for most of its history done its best to ignore over half of the bodies in the world.
Whither sport. Despite its Charter’s principled avowal that ‘the practice of sport is a human right’, the Olympic Movement remains deeply entrenched within binaries of human difference. Sex and gender are chief among them, but exclusionary divisions and categories based on race, class, sexuality, age, religion, physical mobility, and geography are just as persistent. Indeed, one of the main arguments in awarding Beijing the 2008 Olympics - that the world’s most populous nation should have the right to host the world’s premiere sporting event - seems slightly specious when one considers that most of the sports showcased at that event were invented by white European men at the height of colonialism. In the politicised spectacle of place promotion that is the Olympics, final medal tallies belie not just the unspoken story of ‘performance enhancement’, but also a long history of the global south, or the communist east, having to beat the West at its own game.
Whether art. In May 2008 Ai was back in Sydney for the first international retrospective of his work, also curated by Charles Merewether as a joint exhibition between the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and the Campbelltown Arts Centre, and meant to overlap with the 2008 Sydney Biennale. The show featured the world premiere of the video Fairytale, a three-hour documentary following from concept to realisation Ai’s invited contribution of the same name to Documenta 12. In Ai’s piece we see the process behind his invitation and facilitation of the journey of 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel in the summer of 2007, where in groups of 200 over successive one week periods, participants, having first been extensively interviewed on everything from their definition of a fairytale to whether or not art can change the world, lived and ate communally, toured the city and the Documenta shows in matching uniforms, and came together at the end of each day for various group demonstrations orchestrated by Ai. Participants acted both as spectators and performers, conventional ‘tourists’ and exhibitionary ‘specimens’, the resulting spectacle designed at once as an experiment in cross-cultural exchange through art and as a more pointed local intervention into the West’s fantasies of the history of collectivisation and social interaction in China.
A more recent history of collectivisation and social interaction in Vancouver informed Althea Thauberger’s September 2008 site-specific Carrall Street, in which she threw a one-night live art spotlight (quite literally) on a contact zone in the city that runs a scant six blocks - from the red brick buildings of historic Gastown, through the strewn hypodermics of Pigeon Park, to the gleaming real estate offices of Concord Pacific on the north side of False Creek - but that in that distance maps a fraught and polarising social history relating to the ethics of livability and the politics of development in Vancouver. Working with housed and unhoused DTES residents, local service organisations, artists and theatre directors, politicians and city planners, Thauberger and her collaborators created both scripted and improvised scenes in which the roles of performer and spectator, local denizen and curious passer-by would deliberately blur on a stretch of streetscape cordoned off and brightly illuminated like a film set. For me, the piece’s plainly visible fictional scaffolding, and the highly telegraphed orchestration of its ‘scenes’ threw into relief the different performance publics (between business owners and residents, artists and activists, tourists and addicts, security guards and the homeless) that are daily negotiated at street level. In the process, Thauberger brought out in ways often obscured by abstract policy discussions relating to the proposed revitalisation of the area, the historical connections between this particular street’s past (as a tavern-lined, working-class byway connecting Vancouver’s old port to Chinatown), present (as a thoroughfare traversed on one end by visiting tourists and local hipsters negotiating both the tack and trend of Gastown, and, on the other, by the homeless, addicted, and mentally ill citizens of the DTES), and future (as a showcase street targeted for a controversial clean-up and beautification in advance of the Olympics).
Fairytale and Carrall Street thus read as interesting comments on a showcase event like the Olympics. The dream of global cosmopolitanism is always a game where the competing national and transnational stakes and scales of what it means to be human play out in local acts of display and concealment, celebration and protest, formation and fragmentation.
P.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Performing Vancouver Olympics Links
My students over at Performing Vancouver have been posting up a storm on the Olympics, including capturing a lot of amazing photos. Check out the following links by:
and
P.
The Story of the Olympics So Far...
... has been mostly negative, at least to judge by the international media--especially the British tabloid press, which has already dubbed Vancouver 2010 the "worst Olympics ever."
Abandon Normal Devices and W2 Launch Cultural Collaboration Between Vancouver 2010 and London 2012
February 16, 2010 - Vancouver, BC - On February 18, 2009, Abandon Normal Devices (AND) and W2 will launch a four day programme constituting the only Games-time cultural collaboration between Vancouver 2010 and London 2012. The programme will feature academics, artists, producers, activists and scientists from the UK, Canada, Netherlands and the US.
The speakers will come together for debates and film screenings that consider the impact of the politics of ability and disability on the Olympics, the implications of genetically modified athletes and surgically sculpted children for the future of sport, and the connections between environmental debates and the Games.
The programme will take place at W2 Culture + Media House at 112 West Hastings on February 18th, 20th and 21st. It is produced in association with FACT, Tenantspin and Dada for Vancouver 2010 and the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad programme in England’s Northwest.
AND is an environmentally-friendly collaboration and will be entirely webcast. Some of the speakers will participate by remote video and interested audiences can participate in the live-streaming debates and discussions by visiting http://www.creativetechnology.org/ and selecting W2 TV.
Admission to AND is by donation. Check http://www.creativetechnology.org/events/abandon-normal-devices for a list of speakers.
Feb 18 CONTRACT: 7pm-9pm
An Olympic Games raises a number of exciting and challenging questions for a city. It proposes new spheres of investment, the redistribution of funds, inclusion and areas of exclusion, new laws that affect civil life and a vast, global media profile. How do these structures affect the obligations of citizens and institutions who become bound by collaborative contracts? And how does the scrutinization of this work by traditional and new media affect local identity and global perceptions? What can be learned from Vancouver 2010? How can this inform London 2012? How is work by artists contributing to urban city and citizenship development?
Feb 20 COMPETE: Faster, Higher, Stronger 4:30pm-8:30pm
The Olympic Games are measures of human excellence but what happens when those measures are disrupted by self-augmentation and body modification? Our biological apparatus is in flux, vulnerable, yet re-imagined by technology. What will ability and disability mean in an era of genetically modified athletes and surgically sculpted children? How are artists contributing to this research and debate? For example, genetically screening for ‘perfect pitch’ may produce ideal singers, but whose ideal? Alternatively, what will the integration of future technology within biology mean for how humans communicate with each other via performances (dance, music or sport)?
Feb 21 INFECT: Environment, Pollution, Resilience 7pm-9pm
The third Olympic pillar after sport and culture is the ‘environment’. Yet, the 21st century environment is characterized by debates about climate change, pollution, global warming and new forms of disease. Our desire to transcend our biology is inextricable from the complex ways in which our own resilience can be suddenly brought into question, as manifested by the ‘swine flu’ pandemic, itself a new(s) virus. Can humanity be ‘fixed’ or are utopian projects merely processes of normality maintenance? How does artistic research engage with and inform the health, wellbeing and environmental agenda?
AND, which is based in England's Northwest, is a cross-regional festival of New Cinema and Digital Culture. It is part of the cultural legacy project of the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. AND exists to create a space where artists and filmmakers can offer striking new perspectives, and visitors can enjoy, discuss and interact with ideas, in a festival that questions the normal and champions a different approach.
W2 Community Media Arts is a highly anticipated project opening in 2010 at the landmark Woodward’s redevelopment in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. In the lead-up to opening, W2 is operating the 13,000 sq ft W2 Culture + Media House across the street at 112 W Hastings. W2 provides a vibrant and complementary focal point in the redevelopment of Woodward’s and acts as a catalyst in the revitalization of the Vancouver Downtown Eastside by emphasizing the development capacity by and for DTES residents.
An overview of W2 Culture+Media House is covered by City of Vancouver's Snap 2010 Stories seen here: http://www.youtube.com/vancouvercityhall#p/a/u/2/yf8JDncHpoE.
For more information, please contact Irwin Oostinde, Executive Director of W2 at 604.689.9896, 1.877.689.9896, mobile 604-644-4349 or e-mail irwin@creativetechnology.org.
From Georgian luger Nordal Kumaritashvili's tragic death on opening day, to criticisms of the lack of French and ethnic diversity during the Opening Ceremonies, to faulty ice-resurfacing machines in Richmond, to poor weather and cancelled tickets on Cypress Mountain, to out-of-province anarchist vandals trashing Bay storefront Windows on Granville Street, to an Olympic torch imprisoned behind chain-link fencing, to general transportation woes galore, and now a strike by restaurant workers at YVR: it seems VANOC can't catch a break.
It would be easy to sit back and nurse one's Schadenfreude if the longer term consequences for the local communities whom we were all told would benefit from Vancouver's two shining weeks in the global spotlight didn't look so grim: shops, businesses, and restaurants outside the downtown core that stand idle and empty, regular customers having been scared away by unnecessary traffic restrictions and general scare tactics about the difficulty of getting around the city; an arts community that, notwithstanding the just showcasing of the city's immense creative talent and imaginative resources during the Games, is still facing cuts of upwards of 90% in the upcoming provincial budget at the beginning of March; and community and social housing activists who have seen the grand promises to push to end homelessness made in Vancouver's Bid Book and the Inner-City Inclusiveness Statement evaporate amid cost-overruns.
Better to sit back and nurse a beer at The Candahar Bar on Granville Island (1889 Cartwright Street, 3rd Floor), which is what Richard and I did last night (taking the Olympic line trolley to get there--here's hoping that, regardless of Bombardier's claims that it wants its loaned cars returned, that's one transportation legacy that remains). A project by artist and curator Theo Sims, The Candahar Bar is a working reconstruction of a Belfast public house, complete with authentic Northern Irish bartenders pulling pints for thirsty installation participants/spectators. Produced by North Vancouver's Presentation House Gallery (in conjunction with the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad), the installation, open noon to 4 pm and 8 pm to midnight daily, coincides with a nightly line-up of artist's talks, performances, discussions, and DJing sessions programmed by my good friend and SFU English's current Writer-in-Residence, Michael Turner.
Last night was a series of music, sound, and performance art pieces called "Clamour and Toll," guest curated by the Or Gallery's Eli Bornowsky. Richard and I stayed for Christian Nicolay and Ya-chu Kang's opening "Recipe for Morning Rituals," a whimsical sound and theatrical experiment in which the performers mime waking up and doing exercises, before going on to "play various instruments and/or objects to compose the dream you just had." That was followed by Absurdus' "Strains of Liquid," a "noise experiment" that uses John Cage-like principles of indeterminacy to creative "electroacoustic conversations" between amplified violin and keyboard, digitized music via computer, and ambient sound.
All in all a most enjoyable way to block out the white noise that has become the cacophonous meta-discourse on these Olympics.
For something really worth listening to on the subject of the Olympics, check out the following conversation being launched by W2 Community Media Arts and Abandon Normal Devices tonight down on West Hastings:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Abandon Normal Devices and W2 Launch Cultural Collaboration Between Vancouver 2010 and London 2012
February 16, 2010 - Vancouver, BC - On February 18, 2009, Abandon Normal Devices (AND) and W2 will launch a four day programme constituting the only Games-time cultural collaboration between Vancouver 2010 and London 2012. The programme will feature academics, artists, producers, activists and scientists from the UK, Canada, Netherlands and the US.
The speakers will come together for debates and film screenings that consider the impact of the politics of ability and disability on the Olympics, the implications of genetically modified athletes and surgically sculpted children for the future of sport, and the connections between environmental debates and the Games.
The programme will take place at W2 Culture + Media House at 112 West Hastings on February 18th, 20th and 21st. It is produced in association with FACT, Tenantspin and Dada for Vancouver 2010 and the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad programme in England’s Northwest.
AND is an environmentally-friendly collaboration and will be entirely webcast. Some of the speakers will participate by remote video and interested audiences can participate in the live-streaming debates and discussions by visiting http://www.creativetechnology.org/ and selecting W2 TV.
Admission to AND is by donation. Check http://www.creativetechnology.org/events/abandon-normal-devices for a list of speakers.
Feb 18 CONTRACT: 7pm-9pm
An Olympic Games raises a number of exciting and challenging questions for a city. It proposes new spheres of investment, the redistribution of funds, inclusion and areas of exclusion, new laws that affect civil life and a vast, global media profile. How do these structures affect the obligations of citizens and institutions who become bound by collaborative contracts? And how does the scrutinization of this work by traditional and new media affect local identity and global perceptions? What can be learned from Vancouver 2010? How can this inform London 2012? How is work by artists contributing to urban city and citizenship development?
Feb 20 COMPETE: Faster, Higher, Stronger 4:30pm-8:30pm
The Olympic Games are measures of human excellence but what happens when those measures are disrupted by self-augmentation and body modification? Our biological apparatus is in flux, vulnerable, yet re-imagined by technology. What will ability and disability mean in an era of genetically modified athletes and surgically sculpted children? How are artists contributing to this research and debate? For example, genetically screening for ‘perfect pitch’ may produce ideal singers, but whose ideal? Alternatively, what will the integration of future technology within biology mean for how humans communicate with each other via performances (dance, music or sport)?
Feb 21 INFECT: Environment, Pollution, Resilience 7pm-9pm
The third Olympic pillar after sport and culture is the ‘environment’. Yet, the 21st century environment is characterized by debates about climate change, pollution, global warming and new forms of disease. Our desire to transcend our biology is inextricable from the complex ways in which our own resilience can be suddenly brought into question, as manifested by the ‘swine flu’ pandemic, itself a new(s) virus. Can humanity be ‘fixed’ or are utopian projects merely processes of normality maintenance? How does artistic research engage with and inform the health, wellbeing and environmental agenda?
AND, which is based in England's Northwest, is a cross-regional festival of New Cinema and Digital Culture. It is part of the cultural legacy project of the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. AND exists to create a space where artists and filmmakers can offer striking new perspectives, and visitors can enjoy, discuss and interact with ideas, in a festival that questions the normal and champions a different approach.
W2 Community Media Arts is a highly anticipated project opening in 2010 at the landmark Woodward’s redevelopment in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. In the lead-up to opening, W2 is operating the 13,000 sq ft W2 Culture + Media House across the street at 112 W Hastings. W2 provides a vibrant and complementary focal point in the redevelopment of Woodward’s and acts as a catalyst in the revitalization of the Vancouver Downtown Eastside by emphasizing the development capacity by and for DTES residents.
An overview of W2 Culture+Media House is covered by City of Vancouver's Snap 2010 Stories seen here: http://www.youtube.com/vancouvercityhall#p/a/u/2/yf8JDncHpoE.
For more information, please contact Irwin Oostinde, Executive Director of W2 at 604.689.9896, 1.877.689.9896, mobile 604-644-4349 or e-mail irwin@creativetechnology.org.
P.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Should Old Acquaintance, or, For Naught
Hard to believe how quickly the end of this year snuck up on me, let alone the end of an entire decade. I can get quite maudlin on such occasions, so I'll keep my comments in this final post of 2009 as terse as possible.
Images on the news last night reminded me how this decade began--with the manufactured panic over Y2K and the mass computer meltdown that never happened. Of course, here on the west coast of North America, where we're virtually the last to ring in the new year, the story was already old news by the time fireworks exploded without a hitch over Sydney's Harbour Bridge.
I think I had forgotten about Y2K because, as I'm sure is the case with most people the world over, I really mark the start of the past decade with 9/11. Fitting, then, that we should be leaving it more or less the way it began, the recent attempted terrorist attack over the skies of Detroit on Christmas Day having sent airport security around the world into full lockdown mode.
As for Canada, while we politely declined to join George W's "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, we were soon enough embroiled in Afghanistan, deploying our first combat troops since the Korean War, and fighting an insurgency for the first time since the Boer War! Yesterday turned out to be one of the deadliest days of the mission so far, with four soldiers and one journalist killed by yet another roadside IED--bringing this country's total war dead in Afghanistan to 138.
Meanwhile, back at home our benevolent dictator of a prime minister, Stephen Harper, has prorogued parliament for the second time in less than a year, the better to avoid more embarrassing and probing questions about the Afghan detainee scandal, no doubt. Has anyone noticed? Our government has effectively absconded with democracy, and won't be back until after the Olympics, in March.
Speaking of the Olympics, while the event itself will technically be registered as belonging to the next decade, for Vancouver, and for better or worse, this past decade has largely been about preparing for a certain five-ring circus. Readers of this blog know by now my own position on this interminable exercise in place promotion (and my conscience is clean--I voted "no" in the referendum back in 2003), and the promises (such as ending homelessness in the city) as yet lived up to from the original Bid Book and the flurry of official "agreements" signed in conjunction with it. Come tomorrow I will be laying off the slagging somewhat and concentrating--hopefully together with some of my students in a related blog--instead on simply reporting what's going on Olympics-wise in the city over the next three months. And I'm sure some of that reporting will even be laudatory--I mean Laurie Anderson's coming to town, for heaven's sake!
Still, as the final 17 hours tick down on this decade, it's hard not to feel cynical. And I haven't even mentioned the environment yet. The recent toothless deal brokered in Copenhagen at the last minute by an increasingly concessionary and compromising President Obama seems to me symptomatic of the opportunities lost during the past 10 years (from using our shared grief over lives lost to violence to forge bonds across religious and ethnic and economic difference, to using the recent financial meltdown to rethink our dependence on automobiles). It's also a slap in the face to the victims of the devastating tsunami that struck Southeast Asia almost exactly five years ago, not to mention those killed and displaced by Hurricane Katrina less than a year later. The oceans will rise, and while I'm not saying I subscribe to certain recent theories divined from the ancient Mayan calendar, I am saying that's it's not too difficult to predict, climate skeptics and University of East Anglia researchers notwithstanding, what the next decade will bring weather-wise.
As of yet, this first decade of the second millennium is without an official catchy shorthand name, media pundits unable to decide what to come up with from its zero-sum middle digits. I say leave it that way. These past 10 years have been for naught.
P.
Friday, November 6, 2009
100 Days/14 Shows
A short post long on numbers for those into keeping count (and/or accounts)...
This past Wednesday marked the 100-day point till the start of the 2010 Winter Olympics here in Vancouver. The occasion coincided with a new role for VANOC: strike-breakers. That's right, the provincial government is preparing back-to-work legislation for striking paramedics in the province, in part based on a document forwarded by Olympics organizers stating that in the wake of a likely escalation of the H1N1 pandemic, the government would either have to put an end to the strike or ensure that some contingency plan was in place should emergency health care workers potentially still be off the job come February.
Needless to say, this wasn't being played up in various symbolic ceremonies around the city celebrating the countdown event. Among those ceremonies, perhaps none was more weighted with significance than Mayor Gregor Robertson handing over the keys to the False Creek Athletes Village to VANOC CEO John Furlong. Media and invited guests were treated to a tour of of the facilities, and the rhetoric surrounding the whole event was decidedly more upbeat, conciliatory, and even congratulatory than the doom and gloom scenarios painted a year ago by the newly elected Vision Vancouver City Council, who upon examining the books, forecast a billion dollar deficit for the Village that taxpayers were potentially on the hook for. Now, it seems, things are looking up, with condo king (and contemporary art collector) Bob Rennie on hand to assure everyone that post-Olympics sales in the development were looking golden.
Today, however, we learn that the overall economic benefits of the Olympics for the 2003-2008 period have been much less than predicted by Games organizers and government politicians alike. As Vaughan Palmer notes in his Vancouver Sun column today, parsing the numbers outlined in the 4-part report on Olympics impacts prepared by PriceWaterhouseCooper, you eventually discover that the mega-event boosted both the provincial GDP and job creation by, respectively, one-tenth of one percent.
Whooeee, baby! Let's not spend it all in one place--like on wage increases for those paramedics, for example, or, heaven forfend, on arts and culture!
Arts and culture in this city was in fact precisely what I and 100+ other people were celebrating yesterday at the VanCity Theatre on Seymour Street, as we gathered there to witness the launch of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival's 2010 line-up. Full disclosure: while I was there as a supporter and fan, I also attended in my official capacity as a new PuSh Society board member, a role I am very excited about.
But just now I'm even more excited about the program Executive Director Norman Armour and his talented team of colleagues (including new Associate Producer Dani Fecko) have assembled for this coming January and February: 14 shows totaling 93 performances over 18 days at 11 different venues across the city, and featuring artists who hail from 12 different cities and 6 different countries working in at least 6 related disciplines (theatre, dance, music, film and video, installation, and multi-media). How about them numbers?
Or how about these, cited by Norman in his program guide message, and repeated at yesterday's event: "BC's arts, culture and heritage industries generate 80,000 jobs in the creative sector and $5.2 billion of annual revenue." In strictly monetary terms, then, art is a good investment, and would that Liberal politicians who've been anticipating windfalls from the Olympics that have yet to materialize pay closer attention to the wealth of creative resources we have immediately to hand.
Then, too, as those of us who listened yesterday to an excerpt from Stefan Smulovitz and Eye of Newt's new PuSh-commissioned score, to accompany a January 28th screening of Carl Dreyer's classic 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc at Christ Church Cathedral, were undoubtedly thinking at one point or another, there all sorts of other ways (aesthetic, social, political, ethical) that art's value far exceeds one-tenth of one percent.
The Festival officially launches on January 20th with a performance of Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's. The first chance to get a glimpse of this amazing new venue (even before Robert Lepage touches down in it with The Blue Dragon later in February), the show itself promises to be truly "spectacular": in its showcasing of the potential for emancipated response in live performance; and in its use of the talents of 20 dynamic local performers, some professional dancers and actors (Noam Gagnon, Billy Marchenski, Adrienne Wong), some not, or no longer (Jim Green, Max Wyman). Definitely not to be missed.
PuSh passes are now on sale. Visit the Festival website for purchase details, and for descriptions of all the shows. Or pick up a free program guide at any JJ Bean location across the city. For information on how you can become a member of PuSh's new Patron's Circle (and reap fantastic benefits in the process), contact our Fundraising Manager extraordinaire, Bobbi Parker at 604-605-8285 or bobbi@pushfestival.ca.
This public service announcement has been brought to you by...
P.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Pollster Shocked by Olympics Fatigue!
In a column by Gary Mason in yesterday's Globe and Mail, the results of a recent poll revealed that over 70% of British Columbians couldn't give a rat's ass about next February's Olympics, and that only 20% continued to think the Games were a good idea. Pollster Greg Lyle said he was shocked by the numbers.
Well, duh?!
When we are being bombarded daily with the latest announcement about how much further in debt we can expect to be after all this is over; when our civil liberties continue to be eroded in increasingly Kafkaesque ways (the latest directive being contemplated is legislation that would give police the right to enter the homes of people living within designated Olympic zones and seize any signs being publicly exhibited that promote a competitor of a Games sponsor); when we've been told that basically we should put a stop to life as usual and barricade ourselves in our homes for the duration of the Games, what did he expect?
Furthermore, given the recent pummeling that the arts and culture, publishing, and social services communities have taken as a result of the provincial government's financial mismanagement (which includes the costs associated with planning for the Olympics), who in their right mind would be in a mood to celebrate anyway? I for one will not be bullied into jumping on any boosterist bandwagons for the sake of our global image and collective civic pride. You'd think we were living in China...
Having got that off my chest, let me mention that colleagues in Urban Studies at SFU have organized another symposium on the Olympics and its legacies. It will take place this Thursday and Friday, October 22-23, at SFU Harbour Centre, and, among other highlights, will feature a "Mayor's panel" with Al Duerr and Valentino Castellani. The former was mayor of Calgary immediately after the 1988 Winter Games and the latter oversaw Torino's winning bid for the 2006 Winter Games. For information, see the following link.
More performance-related posts soon, I hope.
P.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Beijing One Year On
Re my previous post, there was an interesting article in today's Globe assessing the legacy of the Beijing Olympics--today marking the one year anniversary of the spectacle of the Opening Ceremonies.
Much of what the article has to say was confirmed to me earlier this week by my friend, and former student, Amy Zhang, who together with her partner, D'Arcy Saum, hosted me during my visit to Beijing last June. Amy is in town briefly en route to Yale, where she will begin a Ph.D. in Anthropology this fall, concentrating on informal waste communities in China. Amy was also the lead writer on Greenpeace's Environmental Assessment of the Beijing Games, and I relied on her expertise extensively during the research and writing of the Beijing sections of my Olympics chapter.
At any rate, as noted in the Globe article, Amy told me that pollution is definitely down in Beijing following the Olympics, with the new subway lines helping to offset somewhat the increase in automobile traffic. The showcase venues, while still a draw for out-of-town tourists, remain unused, and one shudders to think what Herzog and de Meuron's Bird's Nest Stadium will eventually be converted into. Relatedly--and something not reported in the Globe article--Amy told me that even the iconic Rem Koolhas-designed CCTV building remains unfinished, its fate in jeopardy ever since the fire at the adjacent Mandarin Oriental Hotel in January.
Needless to say, and despite Jacques Rogge's grand claims about Beijing repeating the model of South Korea, there have been no great leaps forward in terms of human rights in China. But, then, as I pointed out in my previous post we here in BC should be chary about wagging a disapproving finger.
Amy does believe the environmental legacy has the potential to be significant long term, with a similar clean-up model being employed in Shanghai in advance of next year's World Expo, and in Guangzhou in the lead-up to the 2010 Asian Games. She also notes that Greenpeace seems to have established itself as a viable player in the environmental activist scene in China, with increasingly bold protests and challenges to government policy.
One wonders what Vancouver's legacy will be? Barely breaking even, according to a related article in the same section of the Globe.
P.
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