TTC’s stalled art exhibit is a costly case of bad planning
$1.9 million is a lot of money to spend in order to learn that you don’t actually want to hear the voice of the people. Most of us could learn the same thing for free spending a little time online.
I’m talking about the so-far unused art installation at Pioneer Village subway station. Commissioned in 2011, it has been installed and ready to go since the station opened late last year. It consists of a series of lighting panels that can spell out words and numbers. It is designed to be controlled by keypads that riders can access on the station platform. Whatever message of up to eight characters a person types will be displayed in the lights until the next message is typed in.
It is, according to the description the TTC approved the installation based on, “an experiment in public interaction and will entail various aspects regarding the freedom of the individual versus the interest of the larger group.” The “demands of the community” are always served by the light the sculpture provides to those standing below it, no matter what message any individual indulges the freedom to display.
The potential problems posed by the “freedom” part of that will be obvious, I’m sure, if you have ever looked at a public bathroom wall, or sat next to a kid in class using the numbers on his calculator to type “BOOBIES,” or even paid a passing glance at Twitter.
For every person who types LOVE or MARRYME or GO LEAFS there are going to be people who type racial slurs or coarse insults or intentionally threatening or abusive messages: FIRE or JUMP or KILL ED. That last one might sound hilarious to some readers who are not fans of mine, but I can imagine a young, awkward student seeing that one of his classmates has sent that kind of instruction out during the after-school rush might experience it differently.
From a certain point of view, of course, this is not a flaw in the art piece, even if it may reflect a flaw in the public. A piece specifically intended to reflect the vox populi and to celebrate and display the cacophony of free speech will have these warts built into it. That’s democracy. If someone doesn’t like the message, they can immediately erase it or replace it with their own. Like a public whiteboard for which everyone has both markers and erasers. It is, I think, entirely fair for the TTC to decide that a piece of subway infrastructure is not the platform for the unfiltered id of the public to be displayed.
After all, as the TTC report being considered Tuesday says, the agency aims to make its stations a “welcoming environment that is free from any form of discrimination or harassment.” But why would you commission (at great cost) a display devoted to open public expression in the first place, if you are afraid of allowing open public expression?
I remember there used to be a “Speaker’s Corner” platform in Nathan Phillips Square (which may be reinstalled sometime late this year, according to the city). Inspired by the famous anything-goes podium in Hyde Park in England, it was intended as a monument to free expression. It said right on it that it was “dedicated” to the “concept of free speech.” But right on that same plaque, it went on at great length to advise people about the limits of free speech — reminding both speakers and listeners that defamatory speech is prohibited, and about hate speech laws, and then reminding anyone speaking of the “risks” they assumed by speak- ing, as the city would not accept liability.
It was a weird thing to see prominently displayed on the front of the podium whose intention was to provide a tribute to and venue for freedom of expression.
We like the concept. The practice? Eh.
Similarly, the TTC likes the concept of lighting installations, but has a sketchier history with the practice of them. A rainbow-light arch over the platform at Yorkdale station, celebrated for the strobing of its colours controlled by the coming and going of trains, was allowed to rot and then was put into storage in the 1990s because the TTC couldn’t be bothered to replace $28 transformers.
Commission the art. Then don’t display it.
Man, how I wish, almost every day, that the TTC had taken a similar approach to the depression-inducing mural of forlorn passengers stuck in some kind of transit gulag that adorns the walls of Union Station. If only there were a keypad there that would allow us to overwrite that installation.
Anyhow, the TTC, it seems, might reach some arrangement with the artists of the Pioneer Village piece to allow some words (hate speech and safety threats) to be pre-emptively blacklisted, and a bureaucratic panel formed to review decisions about censored messages.
It seems like a plan opposed to the principle of the work itself, but it may be the only way we ever see it operate, given the TTC’s objections about allowing it to be an open forum for 8-character messages.
But maybe we could keep this expensive lesson in mind for the future: decide if we support the purpose and message of a project before spending millions to install it.