PUSH FESTIVAL AFTER HOURS
Push Festival show takes place after hours at the Vancouver Art Gallery
PUSH FESTIVAL: GUIDED TOUR
Where: Vancouver Art Gallery When: Wednesday, 6 p. m.; Thursday to Sunday, 6 p. m. and 9 p. m. Tickets: $ 26- 32 in advance from ticketstonight. ca or 604- 6842787; $ 28- 34 at the door
Unlike most people, Peter Reder isn’t at the Vancouver Art Gallery to have an esthetic experience with the art. While he’s not ignoring the works on display, it’s not the British artist’s main focus. Instead, he’s on the prowl for memories and stories about the historic building.
For more than a week, he’s been wandering around the galleries and the offices, looking into the building’s nooks and crannies and generally poking around places that members of the public usually don’t have access to.
He’s doing that to collect material for Guided Tour. As the title says, the work is both a guided tour that explores the building’s official and unofficial history.
In a process he’s honed in similar institutional settings around the world, Reder’s research includes chatting to anyone he meets, whether it’s a janitor or a security guard.
“From those bits and pieces I decide what I’m going to tell,” Reder said in an interview.
“It combines some of the features of a regular tour. I felt early on if you don’t fulfil some of those desires, it would be quite annoying to you as an audience member. When you come to a building, you want to be shown areas you don’t normally see. My principal story is to tell you the story of the building but I’ll do it with a minimum number of dates and facts.”
Guided Tour takes about 70 minutes and includes a mixture of video and performance. There will also be an opportunity during the performance to take a break from standing and sit down.
Guided Tour is the second year in a row Reder has brought a work to the Push Festival. Last year, his City of Dreams explored memory, place and identity through the creation of a map of Vancouver out of hundreds of objects that were assembled by a team of artists during the performance.
“I like the collision of these historical things and personal things,” he said. “I like the idea that one might illuminate the other, humanize the history.”
The idea for Guided Tour was sowed in 2004 when Reder created Aide- memoire, a tour of Somerset House in London. Once the site of a palace that had been demolished in the 17th century, the building’s basement had original gravestones set into the basement walls.
Because Reder found Aidememoire was too site- specific, he developed Guided Tour as a similar idea with a framework that could travel.
It premiered at the 2005 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. One reviewer said it started as an “absolutely conventional tour” that turned into an exploration of the “history we choose to conceal, both politically and personally.”
Since then, Reder has performed Guided Tour in venues that include the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the National Museum of Singapore and the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.
During our interview, Reder was still gathering stories about the building and asked me how the building functioned during the 2010 Cultural Olympiad. He also talked about how the building wasn’t originally designed to house art but to hear court cases.
( Francis Rattenbury’s main building facing West Georgia opened as a provincial courthouse in 1906; Thomas Hooper’s annex of court rooms on Hornby in 1912; and the renovation to both buildings by Arthur Erickson to house the VAG’S exhibition space and administrative offices in 1983.)
“I think often there are changes of use that are very interesting,” he said. “Often if you look at the history of a building, there can be a historic shift in what the building meant even if it was founded as a museum. Often those are contentious or provocative.
“Now people are attached to it being a gallery; it’s interesting to think how quickly that happened. I know some people want a new art gallery and want it to move and I’m sure that will provoke opinion for and against.”