Go Sell It on the Mountain

Banff Centre started off as a remote artists’ retreat. Now it’s trying to help creatives adapt to the modern world

Banff Centre started off as a remote artists’ retreat. Now it’s trying to help creatives adapt to the modern world by Tom Jokinen

One afternoon in 2017, while visiting Alberta’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, I took shelter from the rain in Glyde Hall, the visual-arts building. Deep in the basement, near the ceramic and paper-making studios, I came across something odd.

Rock, from the nearby mountains, was coming out of the floor. Not a wee chunk but a huge shelf of limestone, tall and wide enough for at least six people to climb onto without feeling crowded. This, in the middle of a workspace. Embedded in the rock, I later learned, are around 300-million-year-old fossils: stromatoporoids from a reef environment of the Paleozoic era, back when Banff was undersea. Tectonic forces brought the limestone up to where it is now. What I was seeing was an architectural hack: they built the basement around the rock to save having to blast through it. But the effect was deeper and weirder, science-fictional, as if the rock had pushed into the building like the Blob, oozing through a crack in the floor.

This sense, nature as animated and commanding attention, has helped make Banff Centre one of the premier artsand-culture institutions in the world. Hundreds of artists, of every school and discipline, come through here every year — some by invitation, most as applicants — to escape urban life, figure things out, and get to work. There’s a residence, a library, rehearsal halls, and theatres. There is a gym. There are yoga classes. There are places for students to eat and areas, like Glyde Hall, where they can create and exhibit the results. Lodged in a national park in the Rocky Mountains, Banff is supposed to be cut off from the real world, the better to act as crucible for inspiration. Weather rolls in as metaphor. The air is scrubbed clear, and something new is set in motion: country music, abstract paintings, ceramic bowls, sonnets, one-act plays, avant-garde sculptures, the odd theatrical wig — all the fine things that artists can produce when free from distraction. Notable alumni over the years range from Yann Martel and Joni Mitchell to Bruno Gerussi and Claudia Rankine, Guy Maddin to John Luther Adams. Artists have to make a living, but Banff, for me, has always looked like a place where that fact can be postponed, briefly, in the act of creation.

The link between nature and creativity is an old idea and one on which

Banff Centre’s reputation is based. The site is significant: the campus is in the middle of rugged, whitewater wildlife. It’s a mood, as if the mountains are closing in on you. Nothing fatal, just dark and weird: Twin Peaks for cellists and painters. Those surroundings provide the “peculiar mental background” — isolation, stark weather — that Stephen Leacock believed Canadians shared and that, for generations, has been a boon to writers and artists. About a ten-minute walk away, in the town itself, is a main drag whose gift shops sell fridge magnets, expensive Arc’teryx jackets, dream catchers, and stuffed rainbow poo- emojis. Tour buses egest people dressed too warmly for mild weather. Last year, the town considered a ban on backyard bird feeders as they become food sources for bears. With its faux–gold Rush architecture, Banff is a quasi–theme park in which nature, often red in tooth and claw, lurks just behind a theatrical curtain. Same with Banff Centre — which you’ll find up the hill on Wolverine Street, past the old cemetery — where Newfoundland writer Joan Sullivan was charged, she once told me half-proudly, by an elk.

I went to Banff over two years ago to see what was behind a rebranding of the famous arts centre. While the idea of the solo artist in a quiet studio was still relevant, Banff now wanted to be the place to teach artists how to be entrepreneurs, to brand themselves. In other words, there appeared to be another idea being built around the living rock of the mountain: commercial success. This involves promoting, teaching, and nurturing the business smarts of the artists; not shielding them from the working world but preparing them for it. Classical musicians, depending on the program, are coached on everything from building marketing and business plans to the intricacies of touring.

None of this changed the underlying purpose of Banff Centre for artists: to be amazed, and not a little spooked, by the sublime, by the unknown, by that which startles the impressionable. “They meet other artists, they think about their art and commune with nature,” says Janice Price, president and CEO of Banff Centre since March 2015 and the main driver behind its new image. “But I don’t know any artists who are not doing the work for an audience.” Price knows something about the kind of audience artists often crave. Before coming to Banff, she was head of Toronto’s Luminato Festival, a kind of culture-crawl which, every June, brings theatre, film, and art installation to public and private spaces. She was also interim executive director of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan, home to the Met Opera — and arguably the Buckingham Palace of North American arts centres.

Banff Centre, Price suggests, has ambitions too. It is interested in artistic entrepreneurship on an international scale and in being noticed. In this context, that means producing art that can raise approving eyebrows in not just Calgary but Berlin and New York. (As an example, there’s Betroffenheit, a dance-theatre piece on trauma and loss that Vancouver choreographer Crystal Pite developed at Banff in 2014 before eventually taking it to London, England, where the Guardian called it “raw and riveting.”) To that end, I was told in a communications brief, “every artist and arts administrator needs to be an entrepreneur, to understand how to create great work, find an audience, find a donor base, and propel that work to Canadians and the world. That’s what we are teaching at Banff Centre.”

When she started, Price was quick out of the blocks. Thirty-three jobs terminated in her first year (about 8 percent of the centre’s staff). “The Banff Centre” became “Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity”; after much consultation, they’d decided to lose “The.” The centre’s mission, for Price, is simple: she wants Banff to be the global leader in arts and culture. Not a global leader but the global leader (as if this is where the missing article from the centre’s name wound up). She got pushback from her team. How could they claim such a thing? “Guys, you’re being so Canadian,” she told them. “People can take us to account or not. Enough of this constant mushing down of what’s supposed to be aspirational, an accurate, bold statement of what you want to be.”

So she’s hoping for big projects to carry the Banff name. Case in point would be Pepperland, an idiosyncratic modern-dance musical adapted from the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and presented by Banff Centre, in 2018, with seventeen international partners, including the Sony Centre (now Meridian Hall) in Toronto, the City of Liverpool in the UK, and Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois. Not addressed in the dance musical’s marketing is a question that wants answering in a world where young Canadian artists struggle for attention and resources: Why take on a project created by an American choreographer and an American composer, neither of whom worked on it at Banff?

On that score, according to Price, I am missing the point. “Well, I don’t see a problem,” she says. “For me, it’s a combination of working with an important partner in Toronto who is also trying to bring international dance to the city.” Furthermore, “It’ll be completely sold out, and the Banff name will be attached to it.” In short, Pepperland is good business.

Business is a word that Price tends to favour. As she said last year in a release announcing the extension of her contract to 2023, “One thing I always like to remind people is what a big business the arts are. When you factor in film and digital, our sector is bigger than the

“The world can still crush them, or they can burn out, but nonetheless, a place like Banff really validates what they are doing.”

forestry, fishing, and auto industries combined. It is a big economic driver in this country.” Fair enough. But is Pepperland what Banff’s founders had in mind when they built a wilderness arts centre?

Banff Centre was founded, in 1933, as a summer drama school. Instruction in visual arts soon followed, and students would troop into the woods and mountains to take down the landscape in oils. A. Y. Jackson, of the Group of Seven, taught painting at Banff from 1943 to 1949. Donald Cameron, one of Banff’s early directors, wrote in 1956 that the centre “could be the Salzburg of America” — referring to the Austrian city considered one of Europe’s fine-arts hubs. “As one surveys those majestic hills the atmosphere becomes at once peaceful and serene, a shield against the grinding abrasions of a mechanized and discordant age.”

It’s a romantic idea that Banff Centre eventually outgrew. The centre currently gets $21.78 million a year from the Alberta government and $2.62million from Ottawa, and it holds over $41million in endowments. It runs leadership-training programs for governments, corporations, and NGOS. It also runs a popular Outward Bound–style program called Foundations of Purpose, in which high achievers face down fears, go into the wild, and encounter the complexity of nature. The dining hall serves 90,000 meals a year, going through 300kilograms of onions, 250 kilograms of carrots, 380 litres of 2 percent milk, and 50 kilograms of chicken breasts a week. While we’re on numbers, residency stays for artists can cost — depending on program and length of stay — several thousand dollars in tuition. (A five-week workshop for opera musicians, for instance, will run you $5099.69 plus GST.) But most programs are eligible for up to 100 percent in subsidy from Banff Centre, which in 2018 spent $3.9 million covering scholarships and tuition for students who didn’t have that kind of money. (The median annual income of a Canadian artist in 2016, according to the Canada Council, was $24,300.) That’s 60 percent of the student body covered, fully or partially, according to the latest annual report.

Given the stakes, the entrepreneurial focus seems, at least in part, directed to potential donors: donors who want to feel their money is being well spent, that the investment is of value. But the pro-branding pitch also conjures Cameron’s “discordant age.” The point of Banff, historically, has been to look away from the world to the mountains. This idea of an art-of-the-wild is what Northrop Frye partly had in mind, in 1965, when he wrote of Canada’s “garrison mentality.” There is, he argued, a cultural urge, from colonial times, for “small and isolated communities” to build walls against nature’s hostility. In Banff, it’s hard not to see, in literal terms, what Frye was banging on about: here’s a place where you can confront the dark roots of colonial Canada, that which is created from some kind of romantic, nostalgic terror.

But then, even in Frye’s time, the idea of art inspired by nature was seen as only part of the story. Takao Tanabe, who ran the visual arts program at Banff from 1973 to 1980, wanted professional art students to come through the Banff programs: those interested in modern

form and technique. I asked him if his students found inspiration in being Canadian, in the nature at Banff, and he laughed. “I don’t know what you mean by Canadian!” he said. “I mean, some of the team were national, international types — they certainly did admire the mountains, but that wasn’t the focus of their work or their ideas.” So Price’s global focus is nothing new.

Harvey Locke is a photographer and conservationist who lives in the town of Banff. The area, he says, “is a powerful place, and that’s what artists who are open to the energy feel when they come here, and that’s what helps them create great art.” So, when talk turns to globalization, the buzzword that Banff seems to be inviting into its mission, Locke takes a step back. “Does that mean,” he asks, “following trends and patterns that are being cooked up in global media centres, let’s say New York or Tokyo or some other place? Or are you talking about relevance to the globe and what you offer the world? Those are two different conversations.” In other words, if Banff’s goal is to be like other urban arts centres, then “it’s just an inconvenient place to get to.”

Yann Martel, whose novel Life of Pi won the Booker Prize in 2002, was in his thirties, pre-fame, when he first came to Banff to write. “Sometimes you look at people’s careers,” he says, “and it looks preordained. And it really isn’t. You give up, even if you have talent. The indifference of the world can grind you down.” The world, he says, mostly tells you it doesn’t need another novel, doesn’t need another painting, doesn’t need another composition. And, still, creators go to Banff. “What happens afterward,” he says, “is the world can still crush them, or they can burn out, but nonetheless, a place like Banff really validates what they are doing.” In other words, there really is no marketplace for art in advance of the accident of success. And success can’t be taught. Art can be created in the right environment and then dispatched to the market, where something might happen, but the process has never been predictable. So why teach artists to be entrepreneurs?

Some of it is necessity: Amazon rankings, Goodreads reviews, and Spotify algorithms have all changed the way people find books, art, and music. But the promotion of the artist-entrepreneur may run counter to the cherished myth of the artist as oddball. So, when it comes to fundraising — something that matters deeply to Price at a time when culture is the first to go under austerity programs — it’s best to avoid the subject of oddballs and instead talk, with enthusiasm, about personal branding, about fostering Banff graduates who have a firm grasp on the marketplace.

Imre Szeman is a professor of communications at the University of Waterloo who also taught at Banff Centre. He thinks the rebrand might come with a cost. He believes artists are being “encouraged to become more entrepreneurial.” Most artists, Szeman says, instead operate on a “labour discount,” meaning they create way more than they earn for it. “If one orients their work toward an end, it changes what one does and how one does it.” Is it enough for Banff to be a hothouse of artists, or do artists need to think more like small businesses? If the latter, Szeman is saying, they will likely fail: “The vast, vast majority of entrepreneurial enterprises don’t work out.”

But fine art is, in part, what made Banff Centre, and location matters. Ian Brown, a feature writer for the Globe and Mail, was the head of literary journalism at Banff back when I took the program in 2011. “It’s a small town,” he says. “Everybody knows everybody, but part of it is also physical, the mountains. I will sound like a lunatic when I say this, but the mountains are big, and they ring you in and they look down on you. They’re like this condo board that’s never going to approve of anything.”

This tension enriches a life of the imagination, sharpens its flavour. Banff, Brown says, “exists as this encapsulation, the kind of physical embodiment of a point of view where ideas can exist for their own sake. Art can spring up out of inspiration, away from commercial concerns, away from the city, away from political concerns. You’re high up. It’s rarefied like the oxygen.”

Where Banff Centre, located on Treaty 7 land, is arguably most progressive—high-profile partnerships aside — is in producing and funding Indigenous art and in educating political and business leaders on justice, as it did with a Truth and Reconciliation Summit in October 2016. Reneltta Arluk, atheatre artist of Inuvialuit, Dene, and Cree descent, was appointed the director of Indigenous arts, and artists can now take advantage of Indigenous-focused residencies on choreography, playwrighting, and the creative use of digital technology.

One takeaway from Indigenous art, for me, is that the world is complex, especially at the level of raw nature. Commerce may be impatient with complexity, but commercial fashions are transient. It’s hard to brand complexity, however. The arts “have always been good at ferreting out the deep forces and impulses that animate us,” Szeman says. “In place of the arts, what we have now is a fixation on and fetishization of entrepreneurial culture.” As for the message this gives to the artists who come to Banff, “This might be subtle, but it’s there.”

That is, it’s the artist’s job to see what’s out the window and say something, make something. Or, perhaps, it was. Now, it’s hard not to think that we’re in the time of the citizen-producer, when creative people can not only present their work unfiltered via social media but use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to promote themselves and find their audience (think poet Rupi Kaur, who writes short, accessible poems designed for social media — or what’s been called “instapoetry” — and has sold 3.5 million copies between two poetry collections). While it’s true that artists have always found a way to promote themselves to buyers and patrons, the fact is that social media becomes an end in itself. What happens on Instagram doesn’t just point you to art, it replaces art: people seek out the “influencer” and the so-called content creator to understand their culture. We are all artists now; what separates us comes down to who has the most robust promotion strategy.

“Sounds like bullshit to me,” says Banff artist Dustin Wilson, who was working

at Glyde Hall the day I encountered the rock Blob (and, just to dial up the weirdness, he was watching The Blob, the 1988 remake, on a desktop in his studio). “That model,” he says of the artist-as- entrepreneur, “is a straight line to the consumable, evading any critical thought.”

But then Vickie Vainionpää, a visual artist in Montreal, seems happier about Banff’s rebrand. “One hundred percent I think of myself as a brand,” she says. “And I think every artist should do the same.” The world, she says, has turned into a giant house party where everyone is talking and where the smart artist needs to compete to be seen. “I describe my brand as optimistic, multipassionate, polished, and thoughtful,” she later wrote in an email. “I really think that, for artists, at least looking like you have your shit together puts you miles ahead of the competition.”

What about the value of facing up to the wild outside, as per Frye, or the wild inside, as per Freud, or globalization, as per Harvey Locke, and making art for art’s sake, not for art’s sale? This, says Vainionpää, goes along with the “myth of the ‘artist-genius’ and ‘starving artist.’”

“There is a huge gap in artistic education right now,” she adds. “Nothing to the effect of managing the business of creativity, pricing work, creating financial statements, marketing, sales, branding, or the importance of websites and online media. These are the skills you will need in the real world if you want to bring your A-game and are serious about art.” God knows these skills help, but it’s still possible to imagine a world-class arts centre like Banff existing apart from all that, a very rare exception to the commodification of art, if only because that’s how it seems to have been imagined in the first place.

Price doesn’t entirely disagree: no artist is obliged to finish anything at Banff, never mind sell it. “We feed them,” she says. “We make their beds. We encourage them — in some cases force them — to work on their art. They’re working harder than ever before.” She’s just done with what she calls the “elite” notion of Banff Centre as some kind of artists’ spa. But, for Price, art is also big business, like forestry and fishing. For Szeman, this is the problem. The “entrepreneur,” he wrote in a 2015 paper on the subject, is “no longer a minor figure at the margins of capital.” Instead, they are “the neo-liberal subject par excellence — the perfect figure for a world where the market has replaced society.”

Banff appears to be positioning itself less as a “shield against the grinding abrasions of a mechanized and discordant age” and more as a fellow traveller for commerce, for creators and influencers, whether they see themselves as artists or not. That’s fashionable and rational, but it might easily miss the point of putting your arts centre in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. So maybe I’m wrong about the stone Blob in Glyde Hall. Maybe it’s a reminder of an older Banff that won’t be ignored: the muse, which remains misunderstood but insists on pushing its way in.

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