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By Jordan Lypkie. This essay charts the complexity of two recent public artworks by Stan Douglas and Ken Lum, installed in Vancouver on the occasion of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, through their formal engagement with the local discourse of art and their inversion and subversion of images and forms of representation. The connection of these works to speculative economic forces in contemporary society is considered, as well as the ways in which the artists have provided nuanced spaces for reflection within the complex and blinding spectacle of daily life in this post-Olympic civic moment. Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 and from shangri-la to shangri-la are analyzed visually and thematically, and are described in terms of how they utilize the rearticulating of repressed local history to critique the ‘progress’ since the moment and/or places inspiring their re-enactment. This approach, the paper argues, empowers the artworks' viewers with a new knowledge to resist the obfuscating forces of urban development and globalization
Оригинальное название
Détourning the Image of Everyday Life, by Jordan Lypkie
By Jordan Lypkie. This essay charts the complexity of two recent public artworks by Stan Douglas and Ken Lum, installed in Vancouver on the occasion of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, through their formal engagement with the local discourse of art and their inversion and subversion of images and forms of representation. The connection of these works to speculative economic forces in contemporary society is considered, as well as the ways in which the artists have provided nuanced spaces for reflection within the complex and blinding spectacle of daily life in this post-Olympic civic moment. Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 and from shangri-la to shangri-la are analyzed visually and thematically, and are described in terms of how they utilize the rearticulating of repressed local history to critique the ‘progress’ since the moment and/or places inspiring their re-enactment. This approach, the paper argues, empowers the artworks' viewers with a new knowledge to resist the obfuscating forces of urban development and globalization
By Jordan Lypkie. This essay charts the complexity of two recent public artworks by Stan Douglas and Ken Lum, installed in Vancouver on the occasion of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, through their formal engagement with the local discourse of art and their inversion and subversion of images and forms of representation. The connection of these works to speculative economic forces in contemporary society is considered, as well as the ways in which the artists have provided nuanced spaces for reflection within the complex and blinding spectacle of daily life in this post-Olympic civic moment. Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 and from shangri-la to shangri-la are analyzed visually and thematically, and are described in terms of how they utilize the rearticulating of repressed local history to critique the ‘progress’ since the moment and/or places inspiring their re-enactment. This approach, the paper argues, empowers the artworks' viewers with a new knowledge to resist the obfuscating forces of urban development and globalization
Public Artworks by Stan Douglas and Ken Lum Jordan Lypkie UBC Undergraduate Journal of Art History Issue 1 | 2010 Just as the accelerated history of our time is the history of accumulation and industrialization, so the backwardness and conservative tendency of ev- eryday life are products of the laws and interests that have presided over this industrialization. Everyday life has until now resisted the historical. Tis represents frst of all a verdict against the historical insofar as it has been the heritage and project of an exploitative society. Guy-Ernest Debord 1 Te 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games provide an interesting set of circumstances to frame the context of two new public artworks in the city by Stan Douglas and Ken Lum. Directly or indirectly funded by the Games, these artworks, whether through the now obliga- tory investment in cultural capital as a part of the spectacle or through their incorporation into new real estate developments speculatively built on the market after-efects of the global exposure of the city, have been placed in a manner that seems to criticize the very conditions which engendered their creation. Global capital investment and gentrifcation can be con- nected to tourism and the branding of Vancouvers image internationally, while also being controlled by political and economic reconstruction. 2 Te public display of artwork in this context serves to add a layer of culture to the worldwide marketing of local identity; as past industries of resource extraction have been eclipsed by the creation of a more abstract, sym- bolic economy tied closely to globalization, a global stage is required to ensure its prosperity and expansion. 3 Te recent Olympics can be seen as a manifestation of this desire. Emerging out of the context of the Games scope and zealous late-capitalist ambition, these two works 1 Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 73. 2 Neil Smith and Jef Derksen, Urban Regeneration: Gentrifcation as Global Urban Strategy, in Every Building on 100 West Hastings, ed. Reid Shier (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), 66. 3 Melanie OBrian, Introduction: Specious Speculation, in Vancouver Art & Economies, ed. Melanie OBrian (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007), 13. 2 Jordan Lypkie are entangled in a cultural production that subversively questions the nature of representation within postmodern circumstance. Stan Douglas and Ken Lum engage local activist and counter-cultural histories of possibility and disappointment, resurrecting past ideals of Vancouver art and political prac- tices to contrast them with the very systems of complexity and control that have emerged out of their ashes. Land use has become governed by a speculative economic model of real estate caught up within the spectacular, utilizing as it does a branded image of Vancouver as an iden- tity for sale to global wealth. Using public space that exists precisely because of its allotment by private interests, Douglas and Lum juxtapose these turning points in local history with the subsequent solidifcation of a globalized economy and its efect on the course of local urban development. Situated within this complex spectrum of history and its representation, both artists, and their works, consequently demand a particular reaction from their viewers, creating moments of refection within everyday life. Te theoretical discourse of the Situationist International, a group of artists, writ- ers, and architects operating mostly out of Paris in the years leading up to the uprisings of May 1968, considers this dazzling alienation to be the result of a consumer-driven economy. Debord describes the spectacle both as the totalizing scope of a consumer society mediated by images, 4 and the movement of living into mere forms of representation, 5 where the true is the moment of the false. 6 More than a simple critique of contemporary capitalist society, Debords essay is also signifcant as a methodological outline, as applicable now as it was when it was originally published. 7 Debord articulates methods for discovering the freedom implicit in everyday life, seemingly driven by a consumer economy and vested proft-driven interests, through creativity and activities that promote free consciousness. Seeing the potential for his- tory to lend a space of lived time, Debord advocates that individuals imagine environments as autonomous domains of lived experiences, and understand life as a voyage of self-contained meaning. 8 In between the voids of the consumer city, he found the power of recollection to be one aspect of the conscious resistance to this way of living. Vancouver, in its desire to be- come a world class city in the wake of the Olympic moment, has developed itself as a place to attract wealth at the expense of tearing down and neglecting important aspects of its past. Notwithstanding the relatively new status of the city, critical memories embodied in historical architectures are an important aspect of regional identity. Te rediscovery of these histories within the spaces of the metropolis then become a more potent form of transparency than their ubiquitous glass walls pretend to suggest. 4 Guy-Ernest Debord, Te Society of the Spectacle, Situationist International Text Library, http:// library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/, thesis 4. 5 Ibid., thesis 1. 6 Ibid., thesis 9. 7 Tis position is partially afrmed by Debords 1988 addition, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, UbuWeb, http://www.ubu.com/papers/debord_comments.html. 8 Debord, Te Society of the Spectacle, thesis 178. 3 UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010 9 Scott Watson, Against the Habitual, in Stan Douglas, ed. Scott Watson (London: Phaidon, 1998), 36. 10 Sharla Sava, Cinematic Pictures: Te Legacy of the Vancouver Counter-Tradition, in Vancouver Art & Economies, 51. Sava charts the history and validity of the term in her very informative essay. 11 Ibid., 57. 12 Tim Lee, Specifc Objects and Social Subjects: Industrial Facture and the Production of Polemics in Vancouver, in Vancouver Art & Economies, 105. 13 Ibid., 107. 14 Debord, Te Society of the Spectacle, thesis 11. 15 Ibid., thesis 18. Since its very beginnings, Douglass work has sought to deal with repressed history and its subsequent imagination, often using advanced photographic and cinematic techniques to articulate fateful stories that nonetheless suggest possibilities of radical political freedom. 9 Working with large-format photography, flm, and installations involving video and music, he uses modern media and methods of storytelling to analyze history, its use, and the context in which it is represented. In this manner, Douglas has been vital to the artistic production of what may be labeled the regional school of photoconceptualism. Issues of art-market brand- ing and generalization aside, the term photoconceptualism can perhaps allude to a discourse around local history and political engagement through exploration of formal techniques de- rived from flm and commercial media. 10 Rather than push against formal conventions, as had often been the drive of the avant-garde, photoconceptualists like Douglas deny the complete refusal of representation, and, in fact, use it to their advantage, accepting theatricality as a suitable method of confronting social injustice in the writing and staging of history since the 1970s. 11 In efect, they adapt the media most commonly used in the construction of spectacu- lar society, such as photography, flm, and television, in order to expose its means of doing so. Te creation and cultural reception of images are examined in such a way that the viewer can recognize the ideologies behind representations. 12 Additionally, the viewer is made aware of how his or her response to these media is so passively accepted in daily, primarily visual, life through Douglass inversion of the spectacle. 13 If the spectacle is characterized as the sensation of a self-perpetuating socio-economic ensnaring of society in its historical moment, 14 then Douglas discovers a way to use the spectacles materials of appearance as reality to mine critical historical moments lost in the midst of a development driven for its own sake. He reverses the nature of the spectacle as the opposite of dialogue, 15 using its privileging of the visual to elicit radical cognition. In this manner, and by using public space to open debate, Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 is a signifcant work in Douglass oeuvre and in the discourse of an increasingly public Vancouver School practice. Situated outside of the gallery and literally built into the walls of market housing (albeit here with concessions to public meeting space and social housing), the work refects its conditions as glaringly as the windows of so many new condominiums. Te piece is unmistakably connected to place. Te Woodwards building, that it is both contained in and adorns on one side, is a historical centrepiece of Downtown Eastside community and 4 Jordan Lypkie history. What was once the neighbourhood commercial centre is nostalgically held by many to have also been a place of community and of shared interaction between all levels of the urban fabric. 16 Te buildings closure in 1993 efectively led to the demise of the area as a typically functioning urban sector and contributed to the proliferation of an underground drug economy. 17 Subsequently occupied by squatters and left vacant by developers, the former department store re-emerged as market housing units, giving confrmation to talk of immi- nent gentrifcation in the area. In this sense, Douglass involvement with the project could be interpreted as part of the way that art is implicated in globalization, lending a cultural texture to the consumptive landscape. 18 However, by confronting the history of the area, Douglass artwork uses the photographic medium to reveal a depth normally lacking in the sort of bill- boards with which it ostensibly shares qualities of medium. 19 Given a stage in the context of public reception, and, in efect, calling attention to the privatization of public space, Douglas uses the opportunity to draw attention to a repressed collective memory of the area through a re-enacted demonstration. If the aftermath of the Olympics intends to attract mass tour- ism and subsequently sell real estate in an already infated market, it then follows that public space becomes a rare privilege in a community of commodities. Where street-level views so often feature signs advertising new developments or extolling a particularly livable Vancouver lifestyle, Douglass space at Woodwards presents us with an instance of resistance from the past and its unfortunate violent culmination so as to question certain values inherent in our present stupor as consumers living in this city. In the 1959 Internationale Situationiste journal, dtournement is described as a radical critical technique of altering or negating the original intent of a medium as a way of organizing a new meaning with an increased scope and efect. 20
By appropriating the form of murals or billboards that advertise lifestyles, commodifed in themselves and fxed by market speculators, Douglas creates an image that gains strength not only in criticizing such media but in utilizing the power inherent in these visual forms. Tis strategy, in turn, has the efect of calling into question the historical and social compromises made in order to satisfy the exploitative ends of media imagery. Te scale of Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 is immense. Seeming to appear almost as large as the city block it portrays, and positioned above eye-level, its presence is undeni- able. Tis visual strategy is commanding, and is further accentuated by elements of the works formal composition and creation. Artifcially lit in a studio re-creation of the nearby street, 16 Jef Sommers and Nick Blomley, Te Worst Block in Vancouver, in Stan Douglas: Every Building on 100 West Hastings, ed. Reid Shier (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), 51. 17 Reid Shier, Introduction, in Stan Douglas: Every Building on 100 West Hastings, ed. Reid Shier (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), 14. 18 Smith and Derksen, 74. 19 Douglas has also analyzed this area in his photographic contributions to Stan Douglas: Every Building on 100 West Hastings, ed. Reid Shier (Vancouver, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002). 20 Ken Knabb, ed. and trans.,Dtournement as Negation and Prelude, in Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 55. 5 UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010 the scene of the photograph appears carefully composed through active direction and digital studio technique. A triangle of aggressive police confrontations forms the central motif, the cast light of street lamps creating slightly misaligned areas of conjunctive illumination for the entangled fgures. Within this zone, two fgures appear running mid-stride, one visibly fear- ful and the other acting with defance, and yet another, a woman with no apparent direction, refusing to look back at the violent scene she fees. Upon closer examination, her position, feet frmly planted on the ground, seems contrived and forced. Trough the artists direction and digital insertion, she seems to represent the emotions of surprise and confusion in the face of shockingly violent police oppression. Trampled fowers, broken glass, and Vancouver Sun newspapers litter the scene, representing a kind of symbolic confrontation between hippie subculture, anarchy, and the manipulative media, allied with the state forces. Cars painted in primary hues frame the scene and align visually with the mosaic of the Woodwards building, connecting the built environment to the circulation of outside citizens. In the foreground, a charging policeman on horseback draws the viewer into the scene, while of to the side an ado- lescent seated on the curb looks back, not to the viewer, but into the seemingly empty studio where Douglas triggers the shutter release. Te dual nature of the work, capable of being seen from both sides, creates a curious sense of transparency. When viewed from inside the Woodwards building, storefront letter- ing appears reversed, backwards, and therefore unintelligible. Tis element of the background provides an astute parallel to the formal consideration that Douglas brings to his work, along- side historical and social strands. Te entire image, then, becomes a mirror of its creation, and is replicated multiple times by partially refective strips of glass that vertically divide the artworks placement on the wall. Tese mirrored surfaces and divisions become metaphors for the way Douglas inverts intentions in representation and reception: refecting the past while also distorting it. In this way, numerous histories are inevitably altered from various angles and perspectives, and attention is drawn to the system of representation rather than to the artist. 21 Meanwhile, outside, the text achieves legibility. Tis diferent view could possibly attest to the artists sympathies for those beyond the conditions of the housing complex, those simply pass- ing by or left out of its shelter. Similarly, by presenting a visual anomaly to the viewer while inside, Douglas, in a way, respects his or her self-consciousness of place. Te viewer, therefore, does not have a clear view of exterior life when inside the comfortable interior. Paradoxically, Debord observes that separation between reality and image maintains the unity of life. 22 Tis distinction, then, in regards to Douglass work, is rendered in a striking visual parallel. If the city is the locus of history and contains a concentration of social powers that make possible its re-understanding in order to defect its subordination to a diversionary economy, 23 then Abbott & Cordova is a complicated snapshot of an instance meant to be forgotten, but here 21 Lee, 113. 22 Debord, Te Society of the Spectacle, thesis 7. 23 Ibid., thesis 176. 6 Jordan Lypkie 24 Shaun Dacey, Te Gastown Riot as Public Art, in Megaphone Magazine, February 11, 2010. 25 Jef Derksen, Fixed City & Mobile World: Urban Facts & Global Forces in Ken Lums Art, in Ken Lum Works with Photography, ed. Kitty Scott and Martha Hanna, (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2002), 32. 26 Some examples include Four Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White (2001), Tere is no place like home (2000), and Lums series of portrait-logos (1984-86). 27 Kitty Scott, Ken Lum Works with Photography, in Ken Lum Works with Photography, ed. Kitty Scott and Martha Hanna, (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2002), 13. reinserted into the social memory. Douglas retrieves a piece of partially forgotten local history, of a counter-culture pro- test opposing undercover police tactics, and pressing for the legalization of marijuana. Te violent crackdown of the protest that Abbott & Cordova portrays ultimately led to the rezon- ing of this blue-collar area, made up of industrial buildings, which were used as hippie squats, into a commercial district, thereby collapsing the social infrastructure, and creating changes to police intrusion upon public and private spaces. 24 In the restructuring of space following the aftermath of the Gastown riot, the police department greatly beneftted from the improve- ments to surveillance these spatial changes entailed. Today, police ofcers can now control public gatherings of protest more acutely from their onset, negating the possibility for the assembly of large groups in public areas, and can powerfully assert their patriarchal presence before the need to disperse a crowd with force arises. Te democratic rights for groups to con- vene publicly and protest have been thus carefully squandered and exacerbated by a market hungry for spaces previously unavailable for sale. Furthermore, by mandating use for the area, the new zoning laws allowed police to restrict and inhibit spatial occupation by those that had until that time squatted and lived there. By reassessing this particular moment of change in the context of the present, Douglas confrms the way the spectacle mutates in order to hide its dubious origins, controlling society through the very manipulative images it propagates. At the same time, Douglas reopens the past to active dialogue, leading the viewer to draw con- nections between the use and refusal of history in the present, and to consider the ideology behind the will to forget the moment that his image articulates. In his new work from shangri-la to shangri-la, Ken Lum realizes similar concerns. Trough a less dramatic, but equally complicated, public artwork, Lum connects an obscured moment of local history to the present day entanglement of globalized economy. Issues of identity, class, and place have long been central themes in Lums practice. Another touchstone of Lums oeuvre has been his critical engagements with globalization through playing with notions of immigration, language, and stereotype. 25 Tese works have often been infuenced by commercial billboards, as well as by sculptures that criticize Minimalism, in order to produce a social examination of place and identity. 26 In this new public work, he draws from a variety of these practices. Kitty Scott observes of Lums work that he poses aggressive interventions in public and social spaces as a means of exploring anxieties and contradictions within that very space. 27 While this particular work may be considered less confrontational in comparison to 7 UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010 previous ones that, for example, rely on the use of large text and portraits full of gestural body language, its message and utilization of place are similarly complex and critical. From shangri-la to shangri-la is situated adjacent to the new Shangri-la building, a luxury hotel and condominium tower that ironically derives it marketed image from the nos- talgia for imperial privilege and snobbery of a Hong Kong institution in a city with a past of Asian racial exclusion. 28 Tis Orientalist imagery becomes just one aspect of the concept for Lums complicated work. Historically, the piece refers to a squatter community on the Maplewood mud fats in North Vancouver. Intertidal squatter fats have long been an aspect of the citys history, and were able to exist due to unclear jurisdiction over the land in the intertidal zone, whose ownership was disputed due to its ephemeral nature. Te eventual arson by au- thorities of the makeshift buildings of this community of artists, writers, and counter-cultural fgures seems in retrospect to provide a point of no return in the transformation of metropoli- tan Vancouver. 29 Trough this act, the city seems to have set a precedent for the eradication of socially experimental communities and humanist ideals in favor of market-based develop- ments, supposed embodiments of progress. Increasingly neo-liberal government practices in the interim have allowed economic conditions to dictate land use in accordance to that which reaps maximum profts. Tis laissez-faire attitude is exemplifed in the recent suggestion that by using taxpayer money to partially fund the recent Olympics, increases in local economy and land values would follow, benefting all members of the community through trickle-down ef- fects and a distributed share of the profts. Astute observers, however, recognize that one side benefts at the expense of the other. Built of the detritus of North Shore construction and inlet driftwood, the shacks pro- vided a symbolic counterpoint to the prevalent Modernist development of Vancouvers urban identity at the mid-century mark. 30 Situated at the margins of the expanding city, the mudfats community can be interpreted as a utopian reaction against such corporate civic development, closely tied to the counter-culture of the period. As an example of this contrast, a period National Film Board documentary on the community, Mudfats Living, depicts the seemingly idyllic lifestyle of hippie families set against the stif conservatism of the mayor, who planned to demolish the area in order to build a shopping centre. 31
Lum also references an early work of photoconceptualism by Ian Wallace, La Mlancolie de la rue, which examines suburbanization and the modern architecture of civic 28 Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe, Architizing: Te Subjugation and Exploitation of the Architectural Profession Trough Seductive Marketing Is Examined in the Context of the Explosive Vancouver Condominium Market, in Canadian Architect (August 2006): 27. 29 Scott Watson, Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos, and Squats Vancouver Art in the Sixties, in Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists, ed. Dieter Roelstraete and Scott Watson (Vancouver: Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2005), 40-41. Tese counter-cultural fgures included, at times, Under the Volcano scribe Malcolm Lowery, Greenpeace founder Paul Spong, and sculptor Tom Burrows. 30 It should be noted that the great irony of Modern architecture is that its own social aims were cast aside in its transformation into a corporate International style. 31 Robert Fresco and Chris Paterson, Mudfats Living (National Film Board of Canada, 1972). 8 Jordan Lypkie cultural institutions by counter-positioning them with an image of the mudfats. 32 In a similar fashion, Lum alludes to the mudfats in the context of urban development. Calling upon both social and artistic histories, he adds layers of engagement to the piece, increasing the scope of its critical boundaries and testifying to the complexity of his own considerations of urban form, social values, and identity. Just as Wallace prompts his viewer to observe the tension of locality embodied in architecture, 33 Lum complicates this very tension in his own work by incorporating the globalized nature of downtown business and condominium development. Te squatter community was part of a suppressed local history of marginalized communities defying the dominant middle-class culture that characterized the growth of the city. 34 By stag- ing a visual memory of this history within the downtown core, he draws a connection to the sort of protest of place that had rallied against the economic and social systems of the down- town fnancial district since the beginning of its recent development. In this method of using urban form, Lum creates the sort of environment Debord envisions, that is, an environment as a game of participation. 35 Lums work asks the viewer to actively consider his or her environ- ment in regards to its history and context, encouraging participation in the social construction of urban form. Te passerby, enthralled by everyday life amongst built icons of unattainable wealth and global prestige, participates with Lums work at a reduced physical scale. At the same time, the viewer witnesses an expanded historical and social scope. In accordance with the precepts of dtournement, Lum determines his public (in this case, largely consisting of white-collar workers, tourists, and patrons of the hotel), and manipulates the built environ- ment in order to produce a parodic form that reorders its context. 36 Another determination of dtournement, Debord claims, is to evoke the idea that by reconstructing one neighbourhood within another, the resulting confusion would be beautiful. For him, life can never be too disorienting. 37 Te backdrop of Lums work evokes Minimalist style, as it is contained and set within an entirely tiled corner. Tis allusion is ironic considering Lums previous engagement with the style, creating critical and playful inquiries into the genres forms. Here, such a visual strategy serves as a backdrop to the Vancouver Art Gallerys rotating ofsite exhibition space at street- level beside the hotel. Lums replica of the mudfat squatter housing appears like an oversize architectural model, seemingly crafted by hand and decorated with an environment of fake plants and sand that defle the austerity of the pristine Minimalist backdrop. An artifcial tidal 32 Jef Wall, La Mlancolie de la Rue: Idyll and Monochrome in the Work of Ian Wallace 1967-82, in Ian Wallace: Selected Works 1970-1987, ed. Christos Dikeakos (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1988), 67. 33 Sava, 54. 34 Ian Wallace, Te Frontier of the Avant-Garde, in Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists, ed. Dieter Roelstraete and Scott Watson (Vancouver: Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2005), 55. 35 Guy-Ernest Debord, Unitary Urbanism at the End of the 1950s, in Te Situationists and the City, ed. Tom McDonough (New York: Verso, 2009), 101. 36 Guy-Ernest Debord, A Users Guide to Dtournement, Bureau of Public Secrets, http://www. bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm. 37 Ibid. 9 UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010 38 Lance Berelowitz, Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), 27. 39 Scott Watson, Discovering the Defeatured Landscape, in Vancouver Anthology: Te Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talon Books, 1991), 247. 40 Watson, Urban Renewal, 38. 41 Wall, Four Essays on Ken Lum, in Ken Lum (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1991), 39. 42 Sava, 55. area separates the constructions from pedestrians, and also refects the forms of both its ar- chitecture and that of the surrounding high-rises, reassembling their axonometric projections together into Constructivist shapes, a tacit reference to another form of failed historical uto- pianism. By exploiting the sites jarring placement, Lum debunks the myth of nature espoused by the mudfat dwellers, and emphasizes the reality of globalized urbanization. Interestingly, the site, like so much of Vancouvers real estate, faces the North Shore Mountains, as though buying into the marketed values of this impressive view is a primary concern for the local real estate industry. When in fact, in doing so, the property is shadowed from the sunan irony of local development strategy used in a city that is so frequently overcast. 38 Lum thus places the memory of the mudfats within the overbearing and deceptive public space of late capitalism, where the privatization of basic living values is starkly contrasted with the communal pos- sibilities earlier artists and activists saw in truly public space. Scott Watson, an art historian and curator specializing in Vancouver, connects the emergence of the contemporary Vancouver School of artists that Douglas and Lum belong to with the art of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 39 Te era is remembered as one of protest and youth engagement with the capitalist system, in both its faults and imperatives. Vancouvers place on the West Coast lent further emphasis to this counter-culture: the citys naturalness and laid-back living style was suitable to the ideals of the movement. Tis period, however, saw unprecedented expansion and reconstruction through demolition across the capitalist world, creating new downtown cores that paved over the revolutionary ambitions of bohemian art- ists. Jef Wall calls this the creation of the generic city. 40 It was in these circumstances that a new turn toward art concerned with the urban form began to emerge, marking a move away from the nave natural utopianism of the island artists (so named because they took up resi- dence away from the urban core on various Gulf Islands). 41 As has been pointed out in the case of Wall and others, the alterations to the social and economic construction of the city managed even to institutionalize transgression. 42 For Douglas and Lum then, working within the contexts of the construction of the social and economic spectacle must now seem like the most useful means of staying politically radical. Utilizing methods of dtournement to create instances of clarity within the muddled conditions of cultural appropriation, both Douglas and Lum conjure past examples of revolutionary ideas in order to push towards a new histori- cal continuity perhaps waiting to unfold. Even as these works exist on the basis of allocation from a small fraction of Olympic expenditure, their continued presence in Vancouvers post- Olympic moment is signifcant in regards to the values propagated at the expense of the citys 10 Jordan Lypkie 43 Derksen, 35 44 Debord, Te Society of the Spectacle, thesis 164. collective wealth. Urban spaces where people may gather are rendered as welcome opportuni- ties for corporate advertising, or as benefcial luxuries adjacent to expensive condominium de- velopments, and patrolled by security guards wary of those not speaking into a Blackberry and walking along at a brisk pace. Te public becomes a conduit for various private realms where one expresses their identity through consumption of status-objects and by partaking in the images that they seek to attain and that surround them. If public art is just another piece of this consumption, and Douglass and Lums works appear on the terms of the social spectacle, these public pieces nevertheless become hard to swallow as everyday life. Trough looking back, they fnd ways to look ahead, and to look at all, imparting to the viewer the necessity of consciousness in the realm of the everyday. Local poet and writer on art and urbanism, Jef Derksen, writes that globalizations efects are realized in an urban reality flled with dense tensions, time-worn activities, major crack-downs, mercurial eruptions, and all the other pressurized or mundane determinants and perplexing or libertarian indeterminacies. 43 It is these moments of the pot boiling over that Douglas and Lum look to elucidate, capturing the instants where the spectacle is partially rup- tured before repairing itself with images of a history constantly updated in order to reinforce the present and describe a future of progress, caught within a cycle of continual economic development for its own sake. Te current spate of resource industry propaganda and publicly funded private development, which advertises proximity to nature in the midst of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, contradicts the environmental and communal qualities the event itself advocates. Refection, then, becomes a force for understanding an alternative future, and for focusing on failed utopias and the now recognized navet of late 1960s and early 1970s idealism. Douglas and Lum revisit the resistance created in these moments to address current societal conditions. By recognizing the dissolution of these moments and movements, both artists reveal the connection of these events to contemporary moments, instigating another chance for their rearticulation, albeit heavily modifed and adapted to the complexity that has grown out of them in the time since. For Debord, the world already possesses a dream of a time whose consciousness it must now possess in order to actually live it. 44 Bringing forgotten histories back into the spectacle of the globalized late-capitalist present, Douglas and Lum seek to transform places of public viewership into new spaces for critical resistance within everyday life.