Toronto’s Nuit Blanche – which just completed its fourth run in early October – is the first all-night art festival in North America to establish itself as an ongoing concern. The whole concept of compressing an art exhibition – something on the order of the Venice Bienalle, say – into the single pause between a sunset and a sunrise is an idea that surfaced in Paris some years back (nuit blanche is a French idiom for “sleepless night”). The idea is to transcend the notion of an art exhibition by creating something else altogether, a must-see urban spectacle.
A million people reportedly showed up in Toronto, but it is a good bet that few if any of them, with only eleven or so hours of darkness to work with, took in the whole thing. Hundreds of art projects — from curated commissions to artworks produced thorough open calls, from independent projects (some of which were vast exhibitions themselves) and even guerilla events (sometime around 2:30 a.m. I received a text message urging me to hurry over to a samba party) — sprawled throughout downtown and into several adjoining neighborhoods. Lines to access some events were an hour long.
As a result, each viewer’s journey through the night became uniquely individual, connecting place and time in a distinct way, creating a unique snapshot (or video) of the spectacle for each person. And therein lies the true fascination of Nuit Blanche – it was not just an art festival, but an overlay of art into a particular warp of place and time, a geography that temporarily inhabited the streets and spaces of a shadow city, then disappeared again. A million of us made our pilgrimages through the night, ostensibly to search out the art, but in the end experiencing how the art filled out an alternative landscape of sorts, and for one night shaping a new urban landscape ourselves.
In downtown’s civic, cultural, entertainment and financial districts, the heart of the exhibition, the revelers and the light and the sound seemed to reflect inward on themselves and reverberate off the surfaces of the streets and buildings with the ferocity and ribaldry of a New Year’s Eve celebration that kept intensifying long after the clock struck midnight. But at its extremities, Nuit Blanche reached into districts such as Liberty Village, the Distillery District and Cabbagetown, into neighborhoods and parks (and in one case a supermarket) where the little clumps of visitors, and the modest scale of the projects, had the feel of a Hallowe’en party. Indeed, each area of the city revealed itself in its own way, as much a result of its everyday cultural landscape as of the one-time curatorial vision that was laid over it.
Toronto’s financial district, along Bay and King Streets, is the commercial heart of the city and the nation, sort of a cross between Park Avenue and Wall Street. Here, curators Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher (DisplayCult) organized artworks that contemplated the financial and moral consequences of the worldwide credit crisis and economic collapse. In the lobby of the Commerce Court West building, artist Dan Mihaltianu created a pool of spilled excess on the floor, a black liner filled with vodka (Vodka Pool); across the street Melissa Brown offered an all-night seminar, How to Win the Lottery; and next door to that, artist Iain Baxter recreated his 1973 event in which local luminaries played Monopoly, using real money, under the watchful eye of the public (Monopoly with Real Money). But spectacle overtook the artwork, none of which was as powerful as the sight of thousands of revelers pouring in and out of the lobbies, under the uncertain eyes of a night watchman or two.
A few blocks away, the city’s entertainment district (focused on the Times Square-like intersection of Dundas and Yonge) featured performances and exhibitions that ranged from cerebral to surreal. In one space, musicians eked out eerie tones on piano wire strung throughout a classical concert hall (Gordon Monahan, Space Becomes the Instrument). In a cage erected in the central bus station, artist Shaul El C. Leonardo fought to the end with twelve boxers, and when he was done in, audience members were invited to spar with each other (Battle Royal). Perhaps that’s why crowds retreated to the nearby Sounding Space (Karlen Chang, Dafydd Hughes, David McCallum), where they could twitch and turn, jiggle and jive in designated spots, thereby triggering sensors that activated playful sounds, turning a corporate plaza into a realm of antic choreography and cacophony.
There was more to see in the Distillery District, many blocks to the south and east. There, a developer has transformed a former distillery into an arts compound, converting a warren of century-old buildings into studios and galleries and residences and eateries that would be the envy of any city seeking to hitch its star to the creative economy. This night, though, the economy overwhelmed the creative – while the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf staged a dance in one square, Las Vegas-style stilt walkers and fire eaters held court in another. I was tempted to walk in shops and purchase ceramics and fabrics and artesianal breads that I did not need, but had to remind myself that I was not staying up all night to shop.
Liberty Village, a mile or so west of downtown, and distanced thankfully from the raucous crowds and inevitable lines, had no such commercial pretensions. The artworks there, curated by Makiko Hara, explored all manner of urban anxiety in familiar places, yet they managed to meld well with the family-oriented, urban village kind of feel it seemed like this neighborhood would radiate during the day. Here was The Apology Project (Maria Legault), staged in the lobby corridor of a residential and retail building: Several dozen volunteers wore body-length paper bags, arrayed themselves to inhibit passage through the corridor; automoton-like, they leaned into and brushed against people walking through, all the while murmuring, “I’m sorry” – were they being playful or menacing? Just beyond, speakers dangling from the ceiling transmitted sounds of people crying (Surrounded in Tears, Oswaldo Maciá). In a nearby supermarket, the normal shopping routine was interrupted every few moments by the sound and shadow of jet planes swooping through, in a sort of post 9-11 apocalyptic kind of way (Invade, Kuo I-Chen).
For me, the most resonant artwork was a performance piece, staged throughout the neighborhood under a series of tents, from which hot chocolate, sausages and blankets were dispensed to passersby (Tom Dean, Fire and Sausage: Small Mercies). The conviviality of the fire pit, and of sharing small bits of food, created a sense of neighborly warmth. But as food and drink ran out, the mood became more of a soup-kitchen than a Starbucks, a world in which scarcity reigns, survival is a matter of mercy, and time is measured not in the seconds it takes to procure a latte but in the minutes and hours those without means must walk, and then wait for the smallest bits of sustenance. The memory of this project is still fresh every time I urgently head for a coffee shop.
Did a million people really show up? I was fascinated by that crowd estimate, just as I was of the Obama Inauguration’s estimate of two million attendees (including me, as well). Crowd counts seems to be numbers that we will ourselves towards, as if there is validation or power in achieving some plateau or another. The real power of mass events — spectacles — such as these might be in the way that each of us can inhabit them as individuals, creating our own pilgrimages and narratives, aided by technologies such as PDA-apps that help us navigate and text messages that help us gather real-time news about the road not taken. The real power of Nuit Blanche, the exhibition as spectacle, might be to create a new kind of place, one that makes the geography of the city more vivid by melding it with curatorial and artistic vision.