IDEAS OF THE FUTURE FROM EXPO 67 CONTINUE TO INSPIRE.
HOW PAST VISIONS OF THE FUTURE CONTINUE TO ENTHRALL
Tin Montreal hese days, when social media and smartphones help fuel polarization and populism, it can be hard to remember how technology once promised to assemble us all into a harmonious, diverse “global village.” But when Marshall McLuhan, the high priest of Canadian techno-utopianism, coined that term in the early 1960s, a world improved by new media really did seem in the offing. He could see it forming half a century ago in this city, where McLuhan beheld “a huge mosaic” of culture and media, a global rendezvous unlike any before.
“What is happening today around the world,” McLuhan proclaimed, “is what is happening at Expo.”
Once upon a time, there really was a global village, and it was Expo 67. This pinnacle of the last century’s world expositions brought record audiences, 50 million strong, to a pair of islands in the middle of the St. Lawrence River, where they discovered a cosmopolitan panorama before the whole world fit on a hand- held screen. Innovative technologies were on display. Chic employees, mostly women, strolled past in spaceage uniforms. Ambitious young architects and engineers wowed the crowds with new building types.
Most of the sites of Expo 67 are gone. The baseball team named for it moved to Washington. But 50 years later, Montreal’s museums are in the grip of Expomania, and no fewer than five exhibitions revisit the summer of 1967 and dreams of the future that could have been. This city is perpetually in festival mode, but now is an especially jubilant moment: 2017 is also the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation and the 375th of the founding of Montreal. Saturday, to boot, was the Fête de la Saint- Jean- Baptiste, Quebec’s provincial holiday.
The most engrossing of these shows is In Search of Expo 67, an incisive, sometimes wistful exploration of the fair and its after lives by nearly two dozen contemporary artists, on view at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, known as MAC. Most of the Canadians included here were not yet born when the world came to town. But they are captivated by the Expo’s lofty, humanistic rhetoric and nationalist underbelly — and while the show fits into a larger vogue in the art world for all things late ‘60s, it also pulses with a tenderness toward Expo’s utopianism that makes it more than just a belated critique.
Expo happened to fall on the 100th anniversary of Canada’s leave- taking from Britain, and the fair served as the country’s international coming- out party. ( A jamboree, too, for the wealthy, newly dynamic Quebec, transformed in the 1960s by its so- called révolution tranquille — and soon to be gripped by separatist zeal.) In 1967 Canadians celebrated the centenary at a pavilion shaped like a large inverted pyramid ( known as Katimavik, or “meeting place,” in Inuktitut), where an artificial, abstracted maple tree was bedecked with photographs of everyday people.
Today, several artists in In Search of Expo 67 look askance at that nationalist project, including the indigenous Quebecker Geronimo Inutiq, who contributes a trippy installation that commingles videos, prints and a Katimavik- inspired dance floor. Duane Linklater, another indigenous Canadian artist in this show, has produced a new mural whose motifs — googly eyes, antlerlike tendrils — riff on the decorations of the Indians of Canada pavilion. ( The 1967 wall text read, “Walk in our moccasins the trail from our past.”)
Yet only a fraction of the pavilions at Expo 67 hosted individual nations. Private companies used them to show off new technologies; you could try out a newfangled videophone at the Bell System pavilion, which also included a cinematic projection in the round. Canada’s chemical companies put together a psychedelic Kaleidoscope pavilion, its exterior festooned with waving multicoloured fins. A Christian pavilion was one of the few that broached the topic of war.
Most popular then were the thematic pavilions, with names like Man the Explorer or Man in the Community, whose exhibits fused a thoroughgoing humanism with audacious, immersive image technologies.
Expo 67 was an epochal event in the history of new media — particularly for multi- projector cinema, screened for audiences who often sat on moving platforms — and several of its feats have been rebooted this summer.
At the Stewart Museum, the exhibition Expo 67 – A World of Dreams includes a virtual reality re- creation of one of the central film experiences of the fair, the five- screen Labyrinth. And, at MAC, the high point of In Search of Expo 67 is a partial re-creation of Polar Life, by the director Graeme Ferguson, which showcased Arctic and Antarctic landscapes against a bold modernist score across 11 screens.
Far more people came to Expo 67 than expected, at a time when Canada’s entire population was just 20 million, and the islands were more than j ust a f airground. They were a cosmopolitan pleasure garden, a place to see and be seen. The swankiest Expo denizens were the 1,800 or so pavilion hostesses, kitted out in polyester or lamé uniforms and hired for more reasons than just bilingualism. (“Montreal is generally known for its attractive women,” a male Canadian Broadcasting Corp. broadcaster intoned in 1967, “but this year the situation has become ridiculous.”)
Expo 67’s subtitle was Man and His World, an English approximation of the title of Saint-Exupéry’s Terre des Hommes. The place of women at the fair, and the expression of modernity and national ambitions through clothing, is the subject of Fashioning Expo 67, on view at the McCord Museum downtown. Mannequins display Bill Blass’ mod uniforms for hostesses at the U. S. pavilion: a white tent dress with a red-white-and-blue head scarf, plus a killer striped raincoat. At the Quebec pavilion, the attendants wore bulbous cloches, while the Brits toted Union Jack handbags; newly independent African nations went for more traditional designs and wax fabrics.
Throughout the Expo, hostesses wore pale blue A- line skirts, blazers and pillbox hats. (Over at MAC, the artist Cheryl Sim wears one of these sky- blue uniforms in a contemplative three- screen video, in which she sings a melancholy remix of the Expo theme song Un Jour, Un Jour.)
The futuristic fashions had a counterpart in the Expo’s architecture, entrusted to young, experimental engineers and backed by budgets unimaginable today. Many made use of industrial materials and modular construction techniques — above all, Frei Otto’s West German pavilion, whose swooping tensile roofs were re- prised at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
The Expo’s most lasting architectural project was not a pavilion at all, however, but an experimental housing development. The Israeli- Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, then just 28, proposed a new mode of living that married urban density and suburban spaciousness, in the form of concrete cubes stacked like building blocks. Habitat 67 was initially imagined as a self- contained community, similar to the “superblocks” of Brasilia, which could be endlessly repeated. It became uppermiddle- class condos, and when I walked past Habitat this week, residents were sunning themselves on the balconies while gardeners buzzed the grass. (Safdie’s designs and models are now at the Centre de Design de l’UQAM, a university art gallery downtown.)
Many cities have gained an iconic structure from their days hosting the world: the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Space Needle in Seattle, the Atomium in Brussels. Montreal’s legacy, along with Habitat, is a massive geodesic dome on Île- Sainte- Hélène, designed by Buckminster Fuller, which served as the U. S. pavilion in 1967. Inside were paintings by Warhol, memorabilia from Elvis and Hollywood, and space capsules from the Apollo and Gemini programs, but it was Fuller’s pavilion itself, pierced in two spots by a monorail track, that enthralled fairgoers most.
At MAC, the Canadian artist Charles Stankievech has assembled a bulging archive of materials that limn the contradictory aims of Fuller’s dome, as indebted to U. S. military ambitions as to Spaceship Earth environmentalism. But I decided to head out to the island, where Fuller’s dome gleams beneath the sun. The acrylic panels went up in flames in 1976, and the dome sat vacant for years. It’s since been rechristened the Biosphère, and the museum inside hosts exhibitions on the natural world and climate change — though, for the summer, a temporary exhibition, Echo 67, includes testimonials from Expo visitors and a small display on environmental impact.
As the clouds went by, and the maple leaf flag fluttered beneath Fuller’s awing, column- free expanse, I found myself overcome with a feeling I don’t often confront when I look at the art of the recent past. That feeling was envy — an envy of the certainty in cultural and social advancement felt by the millions who passed across this island, and an envy shared, I think, by many of the artists in MAC’s exhibition. It’s one thing to identify the gaps in Expo 67’s narrative, to call out its sexism and nationalism. Harder, and more urgent, is to admit why artists are still infatuated with past visions of the future that didn’t come true. We would give anything to believe in progress again.