Do you enjoy public art, sculpture and monuments, and have you considered its relevance?
The intent of public art is so very diverse. Some monuments and sculpture remind us to never forget the horrors and ravages of war. Other pieces might depict a heroic event, such as the Terry Fox statue at Mile Zero.
Some public art may 颅simply be intended to bring joy to those who walk past 鈥� think of those towering, joyous colourful 颅flowers beside the parking lot at Victoria International Airport, welcoming you home.
And occasionally, a piece of public art or sculpture or 颅installation will actually 颅challenge the observer, 颅shocking us into uncomfortable and uneasy reflection.
I saw two installations that I will never forget when I was a child, both in Quebec. A warning: Don鈥檛 read this if you are eating.
The first was next to a 颅restaurant in a busy shopping mall. The towering plexiglas structure was meant to 颅represent our digestive system.
At specific times of the day, the restaurant dumped its great white buckets of food waste and plates of uneaten food into its 鈥渕outh鈥� at the top. The spectators then witnessed the food being slowly digested.
Throughout the process, various squirts of dark green bodily fluids were added as the food churned and oozed into a brown slurry sludge into the lower winding twisted regions of the 鈥渂ody,鈥� which was finally (this is the part I recall the most vividly, being six years old) squeezed and squirted out with great 颅guttural sound effects in one final purging push into a huge shiny white bowl.
The little cluster of spectators gazed at the splattered plastic contraption, perhaps in disgust or perhaps in fascination, but did not walk away until the process was completed.
The other installation I recall was in a museum. I was with my mother, and the room was dimly lit by only a bare bulb on a string. Below the bulb was an electric chair, the kind used in executions. Strapped into the chair was a lifelike man. The chair had a lever on the side and museum visitors were invited to pull the lever, thus performing the execution.
I remember vividly, although I was very young, that the atmosphere was rather horrifying. This installation was exhibited during the capital-punishment debate in sa国际传媒. Mum wouldn鈥檛 pull the lever and neither would I 鈥� nobody did.
If you would like to read about sculpture and public art, I suggest the book Sculpture In sa国际传媒: A History, by Canadian cultural historian Maria Tippett (2017, Douglas and McIntyre).
In this large and heavy informative book, you will find chapters on prehistoric artifacts, war memorials, First Nation and Inuit carvings, contemporary works from across the country and, yes, a chapter titled Sculpture Shock.
In this chapter, the author describes the 鈥淔lesh Dress鈥� by artist Jana Sterbak, with a colour photograph: 鈥淪ome twenty kilograms of raw flank steak must be acquired, then sewn together and hung on a tailor鈥檚 dummy ... 颅during the course of exhibiting 鈥� the meat dries and flakes 鈥� and smells 鈥� thereby reinforcing the themes of death, decay and the transience of life 鈥︹�� This type of sculpture is too obvious for me, but at the time, 1987, the meat dress was considered innovative and extraordinary.
Shocking public art is intended to provoke thought and reflection about controversial or uncomfortable issues. While it was quite common for art to provide shock at one time, I feel that shock has lost its impact 鈥� perhaps society is becoming jaded, or hopefully, gentler.
A far more meaningful and profound kind of art these days uses subtle and simple symbolism, the most moving being, in my view, the Red Dress Project, which reminds us all of 颅missing and murdered Indigenous women. This type of public art quietly urges us to feel and to think on a deeper level, and thinking on a deeper level and feeling moved lasts longer than being momentarily shocked.
If you drive up-Island, you will see the dresses, entangled amongst the roadside shrubbery, or twisting high in tree branches, perhaps freely flapping in the breeze, or draped over the banks of wild lupines and daisies that line the highway. In winter, the dresses become wind-whipped and saturated but cling on mightily, their grip strong.
The Red Dress concept, originally spelled REDress, was created by the Winnipeg M茅tis artist Jaime Black. There鈥檚 a stunning photograph on the internet of the original exhibit of dresses hung in a grove of birches.
Public art is a unique perspective on our country, past and present. The shared grief over the unmarked graves of 215 residential school children found in Kamloops has created a very profound piece of public art on the legislative steps 鈥� silent, but there for all to see, deeply moving and relevant to our times.
