>‘DAY’ BLANCHE
This year, six of the installations will still remain on display
It’s not too late to enjoy part of the night festival. Some of the exhibits are still on display,
For years, one of the complaints — or one of my complaints — about Scotiabank Nuit Blanche was that it exists in a flash and leaves nothing behind except a knee-deep sea of garbage and more than occasional blotches of vomit from over-indulgent art lovers. Part of the magic of the event, if there’s any to be found, exists in its fleetingness, but impermanence as a strategic weapon for art has been so little used in past years that it seems only fitting that Nuit Blanche, at least in part, lingers into the cold light of day. This year, there are six such pieces, lasting for varying stretches into October. A rundown:
1. Ai Weiwei, Forever Bicycles: The city desperately wanted to have a name-brand bona fide international art superstar on its Nuit Blanche marquee, and Ai certainly fits the bill. Famously confined to his Chinese homeland for his ongoing tilts at the ruling Communists, Ai is both artist and cause célèbre, and for the majority of people who recognize his name, maybe more the latter.
In any case, Forever Bicycles has nice synergies with curator Ami Barak’s mission to mark the100th anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s firstever “readymade,” a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool.
Ai’s piece is a deliberately literal echo of that, but the weatherproof aluminum bikes assembled in Nathan Phillips Square — all 3,144 of them — are an oddly sterile monument, despite their presence. Better to see the more intimate version at the Art Gallery of Ontario, entitled According to What? It runs until Oct. 27, when the one at City Hall comes down as well. 2. Tadashi Kawamata, Garden Tower in Toronto: Glowing from within on a windy night that turned to rain, Kawamata’s chaotically arranged column of weary old chairs was equal parts beguiling and ominous, like a post-apocalyptic fortress cobbled from scavenged cast-offs. I loved it. Installed in the front yard of the Metropolitan United Church at Queen and Church Sts., a favourite haunt of the homeless population that tends to gather here, don’t expect that to change. Whether Kawamata could have guessed it or not, his tower will stand as a monument to urban inequity in one of the city’s troubled corners. 56 Queen St. E., until Oct. 14.
Darned if Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou’s PLASTIC BAGS installation doesn’t have presence
3. Pascale Marthine Tayou, PLASTIC BAGS: I was prepared to shrug off Cameroonian artist Tayou’s enormous, dangling net filled with multicoloured plastic bags as a simple, pedantic scold, but darned if the thing didn’t have presence. Martine’s piece, colourfully abstract and seductive because of it, nonetheless comes into sharp focus. Up close, you’re confronted with that everywhere material that, in an odd irony, the city this year gave up trying to encourage us to stop using. A sly, possibly unintended inflection comes in the piece’s conservation, which, unlike most art, it barely needs. As we all know, plastic bags are forever. At Bell Trinity Square, tucked behind the west side of the Eaton Centre, until Oct. 11. 4. Cal Lane, Tanks: Speaking of pedantic, Cal Lane’s intricately cut lace patterns into the hides of rusty oil tanks and I-beams seem to lack several ticks on the checklist of Nuit Blanche in particular, and public art in general: It’s a small, unassuming installation, illuminated on the night of Nuit Blanche in a futile attempt to amplify its impact. We get it: Relics of an industrial age repurposed as aesthetic objects. But this is an old song, sung better and with more potency and originality by dozens of others. At Metro Hall, 55 John St. (at the eastern end of the building at David Pecaut Square) until Oct. 14. 5. Janet Biggs, The Arctic Trilogy: Video work seems like an odd choice for an extended project — how it will play in the daylight should be in- teresting — but Biggs’ three-piece narrative, focused on a female coal miner in the High Arctic, will give it a go. On the night of Nuit Blanche, it was gorgeously sinister, as a kayak was seen gliding through sheaves of sea ice. But at Nuit Blanche, video is a little too easy for my taste, eliding the real challenges of endurance, duration and ephemerality. At Scotia Plaza, 15 Adelaide St. W. until Oct. 14. 6. Boris Achour, The rose is without why: A giant illuminated stretch of text, quoted from the titular poem by 17th-century German philosopher Johannes Scheffler (a.k.a. Angelus Silesius), provided an oblique — not to mention blinding — comment on the nature of art for Nuit Blanchers at Nathan Phillips Square. More practical than profound — if nothing else, you know where you can go to read your newspaper if you’re out and about at 3 a.m. — it sticks around until Oct. 27, assuring, at the very least, that low-flying aircraft will know to steer clear of City Hall’s curving towers.