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Article Excerpt
Introduction
Places are constituted by more than tangible material realities; places are constituted by vernacular memories. In this article, I explore the relationship between 'vernacular memory' (Osborne 2002) and geographical place through the narrative reminiscences (1) of a selection of contemporary Canadian visual artists. I focus in particular on three downtown Toronto neighbourhoods that have the potential to become 'forgotten places' of artistic production: Yorkville, King Street West and The Junction. Through an examination of these three neighbourhood case studies, I demonstrate that spatially grounded narratives help to constitute these urban neighbourhoods as places of artistic production even when they may not be composed of 'landmarks that provide spatial and temporal coordinates for remembering' (Osborne 2002, 1903). It is artists, I argue, a social group with strong emotional and physical ties to place, who have the potential to challenge the material and imaginative disappearance of places at the neighbourhood scale.
The artistic knowledge of Toronto neighbourhoods that I invoke in this article is drawn from a selection of semi-structured interviews with Toronto visual artists conducted between July 1999 and April 2000. (2) Over a 10-month period I interviewed eighty professional visual artists. These forty men and forty women reflected on the multi-layered relationships that they have with Toronto neighbourhoods, the local art scene and the spaces where their artistic labour is grounded. In order to obtain a diverse group of male and female artists to interview that maximized the range, coverage and variability of different ages, career stages, studio arrangements, work locations and lifestyles, I initiated several different points of contact. I began by regularly attending exhibition openings at art galleries, restaurants, bars and cafes across the city. These events familiarized me with the active public exhibition outlets, and introduced me to the artwork and the names of artists currently exhibiting in Toronto. Gradually, I developed a mailing list of artists from which I sent an introductory letter and survey questionnaire (that was designed to provide essential background information on the study participants). In addition to this preliminary means of forging indirect contact with artists, I interviewed staff at arts organizations, commercial galleries and business improvement associations who worked closely with artists; posted notices soliciting interview candidates in art supply stores and in buildings with high concentrations of studios; and placed a paid classified advertisement in a widely read membership newsletter of Visual Arts Ontario. Taken together, all of these sources provided a core group of informants, who in turn provided referrals of their own.
I selected artists for this study on the basis of their commitment to fine art as a central life activity and as a publicly proclaimed profession. All of the study participants identified themselves as professional visual artists: they had exhibited professionally; they had practiced art professionally for anywhere from one to fifty-six years; they worked an average of thirty-five hours per week on artistic labour; and the majority of the sample had a fine art degree from an art college or university. The artists ranged in age from twenty-four to eighty and they practiced a variety of art forms, including sculpting, printmaking, photography, painting, mixed-media, drawing and installation. Three-quarters of the artists had a studio in the home (whether it be in an attic, a basement, a garage, an apartment, a condo, a co-operative or a warehouse), and as I have discussed elsewhere (Bain 2003), these studios were distributed across Toronto in a range of different neighbourhoods with marked concentrations in the downtown and smaller clusters in the west and east ends of the city. In this article, I focus on the narratives of artists who at some point in their professional careers have lived and/or worked in one of the following Toronto neighbourhoods, which are in danger of becoming forgotten places of artistic production: Yorkville, King Street West and The Junction (Figure 1).
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Theorizing 'Forgotten Places'
The concept of 'forgotten places' has been engagingly introduced by Ann Markusen (2004). In a thought-provoking article, she explores the complex decision-making process of different urban actors around the creation of forgotten places. She defines forgotten places as 'communities and ecologies that are deprived of leadership and stewardship by the actions and attitudes of people both present in and absent from these environments. Such deprivation implies the wasting of human and natural resources, a form of destruction of community, and a sense of place and individual potential' (Markusen 2004, 2304). From this definitional base, she goes on to argue that in global and regional cities there are numerous professionals in leadership positions in finance, governance, advertising, construction and education who are responsible for making places forgettable, but that it is local groups of residents with strong emotional and material ties to place who can challenge the material and imaginative disappearance of places--in this article I argue that artists are one such group. In an increasingly integrated world economy where cities and regions compete with one another for investment, inevitably 'some places are emptied out and robbed of their leadership, stewardship and natural beauty while others gather in human talent and physical resources from elsewhere' (Markusen 2004, 2308). Leadership in Markusen's framework is concentrated in the hands of professionals who possess the economic, the political, the educational and the social resources, and the power to make decisions that can affect the character and the viability of places. There does not appear to be any room in her professional equation for artists. This oversight is surprising given that she has undertaken an in-depth occupational study of artists and their relationship to regional economies in the U.S. (Markusen and King 2003; Markusen and Schrock 2004; Markusen 2005).
Yet, why would we not ask artists to comment on the degeneration of our cities and neighbourhoods, particularly when an extensive scholarly literature in geography and sociology documents the significant urban pioneering role of artists in the gentrification, redevelopment, and regeneration of neighbourhoods in cities (Zukin 1982; Jackson 1985; Cole 1987; Ley 1996, 2003; Smith 1996; Podmore 1998; Solnit and Schwartzenberg 2000; Bain 2003; Slater 2004)? Zukin (1982) initiated much of this research with her now classic book Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change in which she provides a critical analysis of the loft-conversion process in SoHo, New York. Zukin effectively demonstrates how artistic production became a vehicle for the revalorization of urban space and a public-private cultural consumption strategy for the urban middle classes. Building on Zukin's work, Ley (1996, 191) examines the spatial involvement of urban artists in the gentrification of Canadian inner cities and concludes that artists are the 'expeditionary force' who 'pacify new frontiers ahead of the settlement of more mainstream residents'. The use of frontier language and imagery in the narration of the gentrification process (3) has been critically analyzed by Neil Smith (1996) in his important book The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. In his opening chapter he insightfully examines how art has 'tamed' New York City's supposedly 'wild' Lower East Side. He is especially critical of the tendency to refer to artists as 'urban pioneers', because this phraseology, he suggests, mistakenly implies that artists are the first social group to enter a neighbourhood, when in fact many of these neighbourhoods have been profoundly shaped by working-class histories and geographies. For Smith, the frontier language of gentrification is part of a deliberate effort to forget places, and to give them a new and a fashionable identity. The power of gentrification to displace the poor, the working class, and 'those who have chosen to give their lives over to the unlucrative pursuits such as art, activism, social experimentation, and social service' and, in the process, to evict collective urban memory, is a theme that is provocatively explored in a collaborative photo essay by Solnit and Schwartzenberg (2000). Through powerful photographs and passionate text, the authors examine how San Francisco's inner-city has been rendered socially and creatively 'hollow' by gentrification. In light of this substantial body of research on artists and their relationship to neighbourhoods and cities through the process of gentrification, it is surprising that artists have seldom been directly consulted on urban issues.
The art-school educator Carol Becker (2000, 239) might suggest that we do not seek the opinions and concerns of artists with respect to urban issues because the predominant image of the artist in North American society is 'the romantic one of the artist on the fringes--wild, needy, visionary, alone, ahead of his or her time, misunderstood ... But we do not have in our collective consciousness, or probably unconsciousness as well, images of artists as socially concerned citizens of the world, people who could help determine, through insight and wisdom, the correct political course for us to embark...
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