[URBAN NOTE] On Nuit Blanche 2009

[rfmcdonald]

Even though I was so exhausted by Toronto's Nuit Blanche Saturday night that I ended up collapsing when I got home at 4 am and ended up sleeping to 11 pm, it was fantastic. I remain rather glad that Toronto managed to adopt the whole concept via Paris and Montréal (here's to bilingualism's ability to create unlikely linkages!), and am very happy that I got a chance to tramp around the downtown (King Street, Queen Street, Bloor Street, other streets and subways) at night. And yes, for that reason I'm glad that the weather was decent.

Russell Smith's 2007 criticism in The Globe and Mail of that year's Nuit Blanche does make a valid point or two.

Almost everybody I spoke to was disgruntled: The crowds had tripled, the art had dwindled. Everybody was stuck in traffic human or vehicular, the whole night. The city was in total immobile gridlock. And where was the art? Every now and then, you'd pass a gallery that was open and it would be so jammed with people you'd be exhausted just contemplating working your way in. There were queues outside some of the big university buildings so long that it would take you half an hour even to find out what you were queuing for.

In the parks and on the streets were mostly just a bunch of goofy things – people dressed in costumes or singing silly songs. There were balloons holding up strings of lights. Whatever. It was a great night for quirk.

[. . .]

Of course, some people remember a time when the state used to fund these things in their entirety, and we didn't have to give up control of our art and our public spaces to corporations. Ridiculous, I know.

There were lineups, sure, and there was obviously a fair amount of commericalism, but the whole point of Nuit Blanche for me was the sheer amount of quirk. This article describes pretty well my experience of the highlights.

Concentrated in a tighter geographical area, and built around key events, Saturday night's Nuit Blanche was a more concentrated focused event than in years past. With an estimated million people on the streets, the lineups were already hours deep by 10 p.m., the city lit by a full moon rising in a cloudless blue velvet sky.

In the mayhem, magical moments unfolded - sometimes literally, as in the Tarot-reading fair staged by the artist collective FASTWURMS in the waterfall court of the Sheraton Centre hotel which they transformed into a candle-lit mystical glade. (I'm in for some heavy weather, apparently, but the Princess card in my future looks promising.)

[. . .]

Meanwhile, the Church of the Holy Trinity beside the Eaton Centre served as the lovely backdrop for Geoffrey Farmer's installation of stroboscopic hallucination-inducing "dream machines," modelled on experimental devices from the sixties. People sat around on little red cushions, their eyes closed in sincere, expectant contemplation. Compared to the big-budget ebullience in the Eaton Centre next door, where crowds assembled beneath Jeff Koons's giant inflatable rabbit, Farmer's project felt hushed and soulful, its low-budget charm refreshing. (The devices rotated atop reclaimed LP players.) His jerry-rigged banner reading "Destroy the Word" slipped seamlessly into the fabric of the little activist church, with its handmade banners in support of political activism, aboriginal rights and gay liberation. For one night only, radical Anglicanism held hands with Eastern meditation.

At new City Hall, Phoenix artist D. A. Therrien's 4 Letter Word Machine was suspended dramatically between the curving armature of the Viljo Revell designed towers, 65 metresabove the ground, the letters illuminated to a dazzling, Kleig-light brilliance. The severity of the typeface suggested Soviet austerity, lending an eerie, stylistically Dr. Strangelove vibe to the event as throngs of people gathered to decipher the oracle. (During our sojourn, the word shifted from FREE to FATE, eliciting a roar from the crowd.) At times, the letters devolved (whether intentionally or not) into meaningless ciphers, but the audience stood spellbound all the same.

I'd also like to mention "Through a Night Darkly,", hosted at St. Thomas's Anglican Church, a combination of avant-garde music in that wonderful acoustic against slides of star charts. I wish I could have appreciated it more, but, well, I was starting to crash.

What was my favourite experience of the night? It was the certain knowledge, as I went from exhibition to exhibition, from street to street, that all of the crowds were here for the same reason that I was here, that we really did form part of a tangible community. As the National Post's Maryan Siddiqui observed, the festival could have some broader appeal into the whole of Toronto and even the GTA, being more accessible generally, but still. It was a wonderful night.

Now, I have to start prepping for 2010 . . .

I'f your curious, blogTO has photo essays of the different exhibitions in Zones A, B, and C, and I'll be deluging you with photos as soon as I can.