THE INN CROWD
Vancouver Art Gallery features a provocative look at hotel culture.
We can’t talk about hotels without talking about Lindsay Lohan. Or maybe we can. But not if we’re talking about the Château Marmont, the hotel that is known as, among other things, a hangout for the actress, along with other troubled Hollywood children.
Château Marmont is one of many hotels represented in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s upcoming exhibit, Grand Hotel: Redesigning Modern Life, which runs April 13 to Sept 15. Covering two floors of the gallery, the show examines hotels from four perspectives, using a variety of methods to demonstrate the hotel’s relevance in the social, cultural, travel and design arenas.
“We went at it many different ways,” VAG senior curator Bruce Grenville said. “One of the biggest challenges was to come up with a general structure we could use to talk about hotels.”
Representing the idea of hotel design was a fairly straightforward proposition ─ the gallery commissioned architectural models of 10 hotels known for their groundbreaking design. The colonial hotel Raffles, in Singapore, the ( no longer standing) Frank Lloyd Wrightdesigned Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and the Waldorf Astoria are among those selected by Grenville and project co- curators Jennifer Volland and Stephanie Rebick.
“The Waldorf is the epitome of the grand- hotel style,” Volland said of the New York landmark, which flourished in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Volland is a writer and curator based in Long Beach, Calif.
The hotel not only “changed the skyline of New York,” as Volland said, it represented a cultural shift, one that saw hotels begin to incorporate restaurants, hair salons and other amenities to become self- contained centres.
Other hotels included in the design category are the Flamingo in Las Vegas, the Istanbul Hilton, and the Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles, designed by John Portman. “He brought the atrium concept to hotels,” Volland said. “This one has a dizzying, crazy environment inside.”
For the social aspect, the curators are relying mostly on photos and video to illustrate how hotels have reflected and sometimes instigated change. “How do hotels affect race, class, gender?” asked Grenville. “There aren’t many buildings that change the way we interact the way hotels do.”
Grenville notes that there was a time when women were not allowed to check into hotels by themselves. “Hotels have become these places where change is acted out,” he said. “The decision was made at the Ritz to encourage women to dine there, and that created a public beacon for change.”
The social wing also features a replica of a Japanese hotel room designed by Dutch designer Richard Hutten. A mattress takes up most of the 20- foot- by- 15- foot space, the walls of which are horizontally striped with thin strips of coloured tape. Some of the strips play on phrases commonly found on some kinds of tape with inscriptions like “Tiny crime scene — do not enter” and “Fragile.”
The room is a replica of a room in a Tokyo love hotel ─ a place where people go to have sex. “We were interested in the idea of the private and the public,” Grenville said. “You can go to a hotel and you’re not at home, but you have the privacy of home.” There’s also the element of eroticism “that is an underlying theme of the hotel. Richard’s room spoke to that.”
The travel section looks at how hotels have responded to changes in transportation and tourism over the years.
“Different modes of travel have changed the nature of hotels,” Grenville said.
“Early hotels are really about trade. In the late 1700s, early 1800s, there’s a lot more commerce going on.”
Movement between cities becomes easier with the advent of different modes of transportation. “The train, the steamship, and plane ─ each produces a new idea of a hotel. The motel arrives because of the automobile.”
While the social and travel facets of the exhibit are thought- provoking, the cultural section promises the most fun for celebrity- watchers and art fans.
“We’re looking at how hotels have been sites of cultural production, and fostered creativity within them,” Volland said.
The Chelsea and Algonquin hotels in New York, the Imperial Hotel in Vienna, the Beat hotel in Paris and of course the Château Marmont will be represented by photos of the hotels and their famous guests. Works that have been created, or partly created, within hotel walls will be represented by albums and books, like Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde album, and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, as well as film ( Andy Warhol’s three- hour movie Chelsea Girls will be screened on opening night).
“There’s a sense that hotels have had a long and direct relationship to cultural production,” Grenville said. “Artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers and photographers have all gathered and often lived there ( at hotels), and see it as a desirable and appropriate place to produce their work.”
As part of their research, the curators of course had to travel. Grenville’s conclusion?
“There’s an extraordinary range of hotels,” he said. “They map everything from the miserable and abject to the spectacular and life- changing. I have the fondest memory of a 25- room hotel in Lucerne, called The Hotel, a hotel that lit the street on a snowy night, and of staying there and getting a tour the next day. It was absolutely transformative. It changes the way you see where you are and how you see the world, like a work of art.”
The Grand Hotel exhibit, he added, “is a chance, really, to look at those things that make a great hotel, and see how that works, and to see examples of some outstanding hotels.”