First, Cohen took Montreal
MONTREAL— Many years ago, when he first started scratching out lines and lyrics on paper, it was Montreal that made an impression on Leonard Cohen.
The tables have turned less than a year on from his death. Now it is Cohen’s songs, his words, his mood, his voice and, most noticeably, his face that are being etched, projected and painted onto his hometown.
Not one, but two oversized murals depicting Cohen have sprung up in the city of his birth over the summer — not without some controversy.
Legends in their own right, including Sting, Elvis Costello, k.d. lang, Lana Del Rey, Feist and Philip Glass, will take to the stage the day before the one-year anniversary of the 82-year-old’s Nov. 7 passing for a tribute concert in Montreal.
Days after that, the most fortuitous of tributes will open at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Planned before Cohen’s death as part of the city’s 375th anniversary celebrations, “A Crack in Everything” is an exploration of Cohen’s voice, words and music by visual artists, filmmakers, musicians and performance artists from Quebec, Canada and around the world.
“He was aware of it and he approved of it. He had given his OK,” said Kara Blake, a Genie Awardwinning filmmaker originally from Cambridge, Ont., who has contributed to the exhibition.
The effort took on an extra urgency following his death. “It kind of made the pressure a little greater, I think, with this huge outpouring of love for him,” Blake said.
The pieces in the exhibition range greatly. French pianist and composer Christophe Chassol has harmonized Cohen’s famously monotone voice and set to music — a technique he calls “ultrascore” — the then-30year-old’s recitation of a poem, “The only tourist in Havana turns his thoughts homeward,” from the 1965 National Film Board documentary, Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen.
The American director Zach Richter has produced a virtual-reality performance of the singer’s most famous song “Hallelujah,” while multidisciplinary artist Michael Rakowitz draws on Cohen’s archival photos, journals and other artifacts to explore his relationship to Judaism, Israel and the Middle East.
There will even be a projection on the roof of a bird on a wire, a nod at Cohen’s famous 1968 song of the same name.
A number of other pieces try to get at the essential nature of Cohen and his motivations.
Israeli director Ari Folman has created a “Depression Box” that allows museum visitors to enter into Cohen’s “emotional space” and confront “the demons of depres- sion” that were among his lifelong companions.
Blake, who lives now in Montreal, delved into the NFB and CBC radio and television archives, as well as Cohen’s personal archives at the University of Toronto, to put together her 35-minute piece, which strives to present Cohen on themes such as writing, spirituality and love in his own voice.
“I liked the idea of participants feeling like they were in an intimate conversation with him. It’s kind of a quiet, dark room where they can immerse themselves in his voice and his ideas,” she said.
Kevin Ledo, a native Montrealer who was commissioned to paint Cohen’s likeness on the side of a nine-storey building off of Saint-Laurent Boulevard, said he had already been bathing in his music and words.
“He’s definitely an artist who affected me quite a bit,” he said. “I identified myself in a lot of his struggle and saw myself in a lot of what he would sing about.”
Ledo’s piece shows Cohen in black and white looking out over Montreal’s main street with a purple ribbon fluttering over his shoulder and behind his head.
“I was trying to capture the mood of the last two albums in this artwork. So there’s kind of like a dark intensity, but always with a glimmer of light in it,” he said. “The different colours are kind of symbolic of the different moods, for me anyways.”
Media critics have been kind to Ledo’s mural but have tended to savage a second 20-storey painting of Cohen’s likeness that was commissioned by the city of Montreal and is nearing completion along the bars and restaurants of Crescent Street as “monstrous” and “nonsensical.”
The larger mural seems to make more sense when viewed from a popular lookout atop of Mount Royal, but the critiques are a reminder that Montreal’s celebration of Cohen should be about more than just sentimentality.
It’s a way of giving back to a man who put Montreal on the world’s map and helped new arrivals, including Kara Blake, navigate their way through a new city that would become their home.
She first learned his work through an older sister who played his music and read his books, but had her requisite sighting of Cohen, near his Montreal home in the Little Portugal neighbourhood, in the first year after her arrival.
“I started reading more of his work after that, especially The Favourite Game, which is about his growing up in Montreal,” she said. “There were so many references to specific places I was discovering in the city.”
These places will inevitably mean more to her, and many other Montrealers, than an oversized work of sentimental art. En Scène is a monthly column on Quebec culture. awoods@thestar.ca