For more than a decade, six neon words in front of Vancouver’s downtown library — “The Words Don’t Fit The Picture” — drew in tourists, polarized residents and slyly questioned the library’s Roman-inspired architecture.
This week, the city quietly dismantled the $200,000 public art installation. All that remained at the corner of Homer and Robson streets Friday was a blue porta-potty.
Maintaining and replacing the installation’s 1,280 LED light nodes, which relied on aging technology, proved too costly, according to the city.
“I feel sad about it,” said Eric Fredericksen, head of public art for the city. “I think it’s a fantastic work.”
The installation, designed by Vancouver-based artist Ron Terada, was unveiled in the library’s south plaza in January 2010 as part of the city’s efforts to bolster public art for the Winter Olympics.
The three-dimensional sign pitted the downtown library’s grandiose design — inspired by the Colosseum in Rome — against its dutiful civic function. Its Las Vegas-style letters nodded to the city’s legacy as one of the neon-sign capitals of North America in the ’50s and ’60s.
Tourists and locals often posed for photos in front of the sign. (City of Vancouver)
‘Constant repairs’
But according to the artist, the sign was never installed to his liking.
“It was meant to be placed on the facade of the VPL,” Terada wrote in an email. “Instead, it functioned more like a typical plop sculpture. Worse still, the lighting on the work was nearly always down and in need of constant repairs.”
In October, the city’s public art committee was told the installation hadn’t been lit for several months. The city estimated restoring the installation would cost $75,000. Moreover, the library had plans to redesign its plaza, and relocating the sign would add $53,000 to the price tag.
The site, pictured Friday, where the installation once stood. (Maggie MacPherson/CBC)
“Given this situation,” Terada said, “I proposed an easy way out: dismantle/terminate the work.”
The city’s public art committee voted in November to take down the sign. Crews spent three days this week disassembling it. The removal drew a divided response online.
I work across the street from that installation and I can’t believe that when I go back to work for the first time since March, it won’t be there…
The 2010 installation marked a shift in the city’s public art efforts toward more ambitious projects from local artists, Fredericksen said. The city commissioned more than 20 temporary and permanent works for the Olympics, including Ken Lum’s East Van Cross. It later launched a reserve fund in 2014 for “signature projects” at high-profile public spots each year.
The library sign, conveniently situated steps away from tourist bus stops, ascended to Instagram fame, with travelers and locals regularly posing in front of its gaudy letters.
Its poetic expression — the title of a Willie Nelson song — “points to ways that public spaces are never as singular as they may appear,” Jeff Derksen, an art critic and professor at Simon Fraser University, wrote in a brochure for the city.
Rather than preserving the letters, the city is destroying them, a practice that’s common with public art built for specific locations, Fredericksen said.
“You have a responsibility not to let it live on in a sort of souvenir way, or let zombie versions of it re-emerge.”
Terada, the artist, said he never anticipated the installation would last for ten years, given other installations were removed shortly after the Olympics.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
