DON BRAID,
Peace Bridge was a tempest in a teapot compared to outcry over Bowfort Towers
This will make the Peace Bridge uproar look peaceful.
The first comment I heard about Calgary’s latest public art installation was “it just makes me think of more damn road work.”
One reader likened it to a “bombed-out building.”
Grahame Newton asked on Facebook: “Can the city be charged with littering?”
It will get worse. Nothing lights up Calgary like a “conversation” about public art, especially when it cost $500,000 in city funds.
The latest is an odd sight, a seeming jumble of upright girders cradling rocks, located beside the Trans-Canada Highway near the new underpass at Canada Olympic Park.
A lot of people thought it was just part of the road construction. The name — Bowfort Towers — sounds like a highrise apartment. The symbolism, embracing everything from downtown highrises to Blackfoot culture, is forced, to say the least.
The artists chosen for this job — Del Geist and Patricia Leighton — are from New York. People will hate that fact, even though they love New York.
Calgarians generally love Spain, too, but were likewise incensed that the Peace Bridge architect is Spanish.
No public project (before this one, anyway) was as vilified as the bridge, which went over budget and missed construction deadlines.
Only five years later, it’s beloved and famous.
The New York Times showed a picture of the bridge in a flattering article about Calgary.
A candidate for city council fulminated against the bridge in one election campaign, and had his picture taken on it in the next.
It’s only a pedestrian bridge, for heaven’s sake, but it has already become Calgary’s most recognized civic symbol, overshadowing even the brilliant St. Patrick’s Island bridge.
The same cycle plays out every time. The bold new thing is scorned and attacked at first.
Over the years it comes to be admired, like the sculpted fish that line the Glenmore underpass at Elbow Drive. Or grudgingly tolerated, like the big blue ring near the airport. Or revered, like the Peace Bridge.
This happens almost everywhere with new and striking public art, even in western Europe where most people accept and even demand it.
It’s hard to imagine, although absolutely true, that in the late 1800s the Eiffel Tower project tore Paris apart.
Famous artists rebelled. They called it, among many other things, “this truly tragic street lamp,” “this belfry skeleton,” “this mast of iron gymnasium apparatus, incomplete, confused and deformed.”
Writers, painters, sculptors and architects vowed “to protest with all our strength and all our indignation, in the name of the underestimated taste of the French, in the name of French art and history under threat, against the erection in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower ...”
When the World’s Fair opened in 1889, the Eiffel Tower was instantly famous.
Nearly two million people came to see it, and 30,000 climbed the stairs to the top.
Our new Tower of Girders is a long way from any of that, of course. But it already fits the first word that always defines good public art: “provocative.”
UCP leadership candidate Jason Kenney instantly condemned the project.
“People who make ... decisions like this are doing a great job of undermining public support for the arts,” he said on Twitter.
We’ll ask him how he feels in five years.
A candidate for city council fulminated against the bridge in one election campaign, and had his picture taken on it in the next.