[URBAN NOTE] On Villa Toronto at Union Station

[rfmcdonald]

There has been a fair bit of media coverage of Villa Toronto. Two articles in particular seemed relevant.

James Adams' article in The Globe and Mail, "Villa Toronto brings art to the heart of Union Station", outlines the background of the project.

The dividing line between art and life always has been more wavering and smudged than firm and fixed. The past 100 years, especially, are strewn with projects that have striven to make art a part of life and not just commentary on it, or an interpretation or an enhancement or a consolation.

Add Villa Toronto to that list. For the next eight days it’s inhabiting the Great Hall of Union Station in downtown Toronto. Currently in the throes of an almost $1-billion revitalization, the station funnels more than 200,000 subway and train commuters through its doors each weekday – the kind of “audience,” in other words, any art gallery or museum, public or private, would love to engage for 20 – heck, even 10 – minutes a day.

Defining Villa Toronto is next to impossible, so description might be the best way to limn its contours and content. It’s actually the fourth iteration of an event/exhibition/performance/party that was started in 2006 by Warsaw’s Galeria Raster and held for a week in a villa in the Polish capital. Others have since been staged in 2010 and 2011 in, respectively, Reykjavik and Tokyo – centres that, though not global arts hubs à la New York and Berlin, nonetheless “have a lot happening” and deserve wider exposure, according to Villa Toronto project co-ordinator Stu Monck.

Don’t think of Villa Toronto as kin to, say, Art Basel Miami Beach or the Toronto Art Fair. All Villa Toronto happenings are open to the public and free. Nothing’s housed in cubicles. And forget about selling. The Great Hall is Villa’s heart and hub, hosting 24 or so artworks or events from eight Toronto and 11 international arts institutions (including galleries from Milan, London, Tokyo and Berlin), but none of what’s being presented there carries a price tag.

The same goes for venues such as the Drake Hotel, the Goethe-Institut, the Stephen Bulger Gallery and the 8-11 art collective, which are mounting performances, screenings, panel discussions and the like. Of special interest at the Art Gallery of Ontario Friday evening is the renowned boundary-crossing/guitar-playing Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. A participant at every Villa to date, Kjartansson will be presenting “an evening of misery” at the AGO’s Walker Court in association with long-time collaborator/pianist Davio Por Jonsson.

Murray Whyte in the Toronto Star is not very enthusiastic about the project,

Here's what works: A pair of works are the event's two towers, positioned at opposite ends of hall and embrace the building's soaring, barrel-vaulted height: Dean Drever's towering 17-foot tall, wryly goofy totem pole, fashioned from thousands of sheets of stacked paper, stands at the western end and Derek Sullivan's Endless Kiosk, a nod to the high-modern purity of Constantin Brancusi, stretches to similar heights to the east.

Both embrace the building's proportions — as much as they can, at least. In Sullivan's case, it also goes a little deeper, as he festoons his version of Brancusi's primal Endless Column with the impermanence of tattered public notices — apropos and then some for a very public site where rushed walk-bys and ephemerality are the day-to-day.

[. . . ] Here's what doesn't: Walking into Union, the first thing that grabs you isn't Drever's totem pole or Sullivan's Kiosk, but rather the ungainly cubicles of white-painted plywood that cleave the Great Hall more or less in half.

This is the product of a practical dilemma — where to hang artworks when there are no walls? — and Villa solved it in the most straightforward manner: By building some walls of their own.

[. . .]

But the structure that contains them is a hard lesson of what happens when you work against a building and not with it. The incongruity is hard to reconcile; Villa Toronto is meant to embrace the grand old structure, but instead seems at war with it. It self-declares as non-commercial and anti-art fair — that gleefully commercial species of art road show that relies on more on thoughtless spectacle than contemplative experience — but with its bright white booths, comes off looking more than a little fairy.

For the record, I enjoyed what I saw, but I spent less than a half-hour there.