ARTS AT CBU
Panorama looks at Hollywood, real life
Looking closely at a painting.
Feeling a lack of fantasy and daydream at CBU? Then take a few minutes to pass through the looking-glass (or spin through the zoetrope) to pause by “Once Upon a Time,” the monumental 21-foot long mural hanging outside the multipurpose rooms.
Originally commissioned by theatrical producer, entrepreneur (and later felon) Garth Drabinsky and featured in the lobby of Cineplex Odeon’s Woodbine Centre movie theatre, the work was created by Toronto artist, Phil Richards, well-known for his large scale projects for spaces such as Toronto’s Eaton Centre, Canada’s Capital Congress Centre (Ottawa), and the Cinedrome Media Complex (Cologne, Germany). The Cinedrome painting, entitled “Gala,” includes 187 celebrity portraits.
“Once Upon a Time” is a panorama of Hollywood’s histories and fantasies, its lights and shadows. Just as the movies play with our sense of space and time, so Richards’ work plays with the traditional boundaries of the canvas. It is composed of nine uniquely shaped sections, include floating diamond-shaped lights, contemporary Corinthian pillars, and an extruding piece of a popcorn box.
How should we “enter” or view a work like this? The Abstract Expressionists instructed their viewers to stand within six inches of the canvas, so that audiences would feel totally immersed in the painterly environment. To be immersed in Richards’ post-pop scene, I’d recommend a distance of about six feet and 60 years back in time, so that viewers feel like they’ve just exited a yellow cab on Broadway and pulled open the heavy door to the theatre lobby . . . .
Lit within and without, the painting takes on the shape of the cinema: its costumes, history and grand illusions. Stars hang from ceilings, secret doors stand ajar, Coming Soon playbills and black and white posters advertise scenes from “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers spin behind a colourized, overly made-up couple. Jimmy Stewart draws, Clarke Gabel smooches, and Charles Laughton paints in a Rembrandt turban.
Mirrors and screens reverse so that viewers are both inside and out: standing below the marquee and sitting in the darkened theatre. In our shadowy comfy seats, we are both noisemaker and husher – “can you keep it down please” - acting out the most typical and annoying of theatre scenes. Indeed, at whatever point we approach the canvas, viewers are matched by screen doubles, past and present. Just as each Hollywood figure is paired with an image of one of Richards’ personal friends, our own fantasies are played out (as in the movies) by doubles in black and white.
At the height of the scene and the panel we see Hollywood’s dark hero, Orson Welles, playing three infamous roles: actor, artist, and entrepreneur. He is both Phil Richards (in self-portrait) and Garth Drabinsky (as secret double), the shadowy entrepreneur who commissioned and then lost the painting in his own fall from grace. (Or maybe Garth is the man in the pink shirt and 3D glasses, a contemporary Klaatu, posing Christ-like and casual, with Gort, his filmic robot son?)
And what about the suspicious cigarette smoker in the shadows, in Village People fatigues and Michael Jackson glove? As Frank O’Hara reminds us in his own homage to Hollywood: “fresh air is good for the body/but what about the soul/ that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images …”
At the centre, a child stands stunned over his monumental small defeat: spilled popcorn, spoiled empire. We’re told that the model for the boy is Richards’ son, but I can’t help seeing him as a young Drabinsky, deposed founder of Cineplex Cinemas, crying over fallen popcorn in this eerie prequel to his Kanesian tragedy to come.
As in an early moving pictures montage, we watch the boy grow up, climb the mirrored stairs to adulthood, to stardom - half in film, half in dream - why are there always so many mirrors in movie halls? It’s like the climax in Orson Welles’ “The Lady from Shanghai,” a fun house of shattered mirrors, the actual and the virtual, ever harder to distinguish.