Illarion Gallant cups his hands and hollers to the men in the hardhats, the ones oh-so-slowly craning his canoe sculpture into place: “You guys have got it backward!”
The artist is joking, having some fun with the crew carefully erecting his giant installation at the downtown end of the Johnson Street Bridge. It wouldn’t be the first time a boat-as-art piece had pointed the wrong way, though: New York’s Museum of Modern Art once hung Henri Matisse’s Le Bateau upside down for 47 days.
article continues below
Trending Stories
Happily, there were no mistakes Wednesday, a relief considering the precision needed to reassemble the work known as Commerce Canoe. You know the one: it soared above Bastion Square from 2008 until last October, an aluminum boat suspended in five red-topped green reeds.
City council decided last year to move Commerce Canoe to its new home, a triangular island at the junction of Wharf, Pandora and Johnson, after staff warned that the cost to put in the interactive artwork originally envisioned for that spot — orcas re-imagined as 11 stylized surfboards — would likely blow past the $250,000 budgeted. The orca idea, already controversial, sank.
Gallant can tell you all about controversial. It comes with the territory when you create public art. Artists who are used to exhibiting only in hushed, church-like galleries would have the vapours were their works subjected to the bluntly honest, often voluble assessments of people who stumble across art in the open air.
Note that even before Commerce Canoe was installed in 2008, some balked at the idea of placing modern art in an historic square. After it was announced that Gallant had won a 20-entry competition for the commission, a letter to the Times Colonist groused: “Was it a decision based on money saved or were the other 19 submissions that bad?”
Letters to the editor are a favourite place for critics to have their say about public art, particularly when the art is paid for by the public. When Mowry Baden’s $120,000 abstract sculpture Pavilion, Rock and Shell was unveiled in front of the Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre in 2003, one wag suggested dragging it to the airport and renaming it Cessna, Rock and Fog.
Similarly, when Jay Unwin’s marble Truth and Harmony appeared outside the Victoria police station in 1996, a reader called it “that block of cement with the bare bottoms.” In 2006, a writer was aghast that a statue of Swans Hotel owner Michael Williams held a drink in its hand. Public art turns everyone into an expert in the same way the pandemic has turned us all into epidemiologists.
Sometimes, the vision for public art doesn’t meet the reality. After a 55-metre totem pole, the world’s tallest, was erected at the entrance to the Inner Harbour to mark the 1994 Commonwealth Games, Victorians were dismayed to learn that thick guy wires and steel collars were needed to hold it aloft, and that authorities mandated a flashing red light on top so that float planes didn’t smack into it.
The Globe and Mail described it thusly: “From the front steps of the Empress Hotel across the harbour, the new totem pole looks like the giant flag poles that grace Husky gas stations, minus the flag.” It was shortened in 1997, which felt like cutting the head off the Mona Lisa because it didn’t fit the frame.
People do not always treat open-air art with the reverence the artist might have hoped, either. The Inner Harbour bronze sculpture The Homecoming, featuring a little girl rushing to greet a returning sailor, occasionally pops up in tourist photos in which a woman thrusts a hand into the bronze child’s face while tilting forward so the sailor’s outstretched hand is cupping a breast. Likewise, people used to send Gallant photos of 3 a.m. drunks climbing Commerce Canoe.
He shrugs. After decades of public art — among his many Victoria-area works are the metal flowers outside Victoria International, the granite avocados outside the Hotel Grand Pacific, a sculpture high up on the outside of a 15-storey building in the 800-block of Yates Street and, overlooking Patricia Bay on the north side of the airport, a striking memorial to the 179 fliers who died while training there during the Second World War — it’s part of the package.
As for Commerce Canoe’s new home, he’s happy. He designed it with the harbour in mind, he said. The open setting by the bridge fits. “I liked it in Bastion Square, but I thought that it was cramped.”
The relocation was paid for with vendor fees collected from the Bastion Square Market. The same source will fund a welcoming pole in the square.
In some ways, showing the piece in a new setting, having it seen from a new vantage point, is like presenting it to the world all over again — and he loves seeing people run across a piece for the first time.
“You know what’s cool? Seeing people’s visceral reaction,” he says. “That’s honest. That’s authentic.” That’s the real world. That’s public art.
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.
