Notes from the Front: Nuit Blanche

Nuit Blanche is the sort of thing that sounds good as a concept, because it sounds batshit insane. And I rather wish it had been as mad as all that, but in the epic battle against my numbing exhaustion, it didn’t stand a chance. Might have helped if there had been more zombies.

Jillian McDonald’s Zombies in Condoland seemed a perfect fit to an ‘all-night contemporary art thing’ in that it hits on all the earmarks of Nuit Blanche - the nocturnal urban setting, the vast hordes of people, and did I mention the numbing exhaustion? I was downright giddy to see the warning sign at the edges of College Park, but lamentably encountered only a single zombie bride lurching through the capacious crowds before she and her zombie brethren were called to gather at some undisclosed location, no doubt as part of the film-shoot structure of McDonald’s event. I did spot considerably more zombies walking the streets of Toronto between the various Nuit Blanche sites, which proved a far more rewarding experience. The lesson here clearly being that if you want zombie action, best stick to the Annual Toronto Zombie Walk.

Kelly Mark, Horroridor, Union Station, York Street Concourse, Zone B

For a superior iteration of late-night schlock-horror, the real winner was Kelly Mark’s video installation Horroridor at Union Station. Since I was launching into Nuit Blanche directly from the Toronto Art Fair, this was my first stop of the night and remained the most memorable as well. The two facing walls of this echoing concrete space each bore a three-channel projection of brutally short clips from various horror films spliced together in rapid-fire succession - though Mark clearly took ‘horror’ as a loose brief, since I recognized clips of Cameron Diaz bludgeoning a man to death in a wedding dress from the black comedy Very Bad Things. The particulars aside, however, this was an incredible experience, not only for the intensely immersive atmosphere of torturous gore and ceaseless screaming but also for the awestruck delight of the spectators, all clearly immune to any element of horror intended by this content. Even without the social comment, there’s something truly transformative at work here.

Amanta Scott, 15 Minutes of Fame, 330 Bay Street, Zone B

I largely went to see Amanta Scott’s 15 Minutes of Fame in Zone B for the sheer convenience of comparing the experience to Daniel Olson’s 15 Seconds further north of Bay and Adelaide in Zone A, and in so doing had my first encounter with what would prove to be the scourge of my Nuit Blanche experience - damn bloody lines. As an interesting narrative sidenote, it was while waiting to see this installation that I heard of House of Leaves over at Ryerson University, which caught my ear on account of Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel of the same name; on reading my Nuit Blanche brochure more closely it became clear that this was potentially the weakest work of art yet to be appropriated from that gem of a book and thought I’d go for a gander anyway, but refused to queue around the block for the dubious privilege of gawking at an alley lined with book pages. As a forum for art in the open public sphere, mile-long queues seem rather contrary to the point.

Oh, but I was going to talk about Scott’s 15 Minutes of Fame, wasn’t I? Funny how my attention wandered off like that.

Besides the wait time itself - which, in fairness, was fairly negligible - the real flaw of Scott’s project was its inability to sustain itself for the full fifteen minutes in which an audience member was invited to construct an installation using a bed from Kingston Penitentiary and a selection of blandly sentimental items such as one would expect to find in a blandly sentimental suitcase. I was on hand for the twelfth ‘artist’ of the evening, a sporting young woman named Jennifer who did her best with the goading of some of her mates on the sidelines but could only achieve some six minutes of fame between their support and Scott’s lukewarm direction from a barstool in the corner.

Daniel Olson, 15 Seconds, Yonge-Dundas Square, Zone A

Terence Dick’s Akimblog preview of Nuit Blanche said that Daniel Olson’s 15 Seconds ’sounds just about right’ and he wasn’t wrong. Operating from a wooden tower in the Zone A information centre, Olson caught spectators and passers-by alike in a bright spotlight for fifteen second bursts, eliciting more than a few shouts of delight depending on whom he happened to focus his light upon. The jumping and yelling seemed a bit excessive to me until the spotlight landed on me once I turned away to leave - at first I thought it was a fluke but sure enough that light followed me along the full fifteen second walk to the street corner. And I have to say, it felt pretty damn nifty.

LIGHT UP THE NIGHT: Sitting Ducks, Ryerson University, Zone A

Also sitting nimbly in the category of accessibly cool was this installation of lights, fog and rubber duckies in a pond on Ryerson’s campus. There’s something incidentally simple about this that I wish had been more in evidence across Nuit Blanche - less crowding of art into small incongruous spaces and more open uses of the spaces that already exist for the sake of creating something quietly wonderful. In this case, it’s as simple as a smile; Horroridor works on the same level but achieves something else entirely. But both work because they transform what’s already given in the space: they invite, they don’t impose.

Fujiwara Takahiro, Into the Blue, Toronto Eaton Centre

And now for an even less elegant segue. Not that I had any intentions of making a political point of any of last weekend’s proceedings, but the sight of so many breeds of ‘ordinary people’ crowding into the Eaton’s Centre, not to shop but to gawk admiringly at what is essentially a giant formalist art object, is just too good to pass up. I won’t belabour the point but for today’s kick-in-the-arse statement I’ll direct you to Edward Winkleman’s blog addressing non-voters in his own rather unfortunate country. This isn’t America, but for those Canadians too enthralled with the circus south to the border to heed our own election, his impassioned call for voters to step up is a timely one.

I’ve heard all the lame, lazy arguments for why people don’t register and vote: The system is corrupt. There are no real choices. This isn’t a real democracy. Not voting is my way of protesting. My vote doesn’t matter anyway. My candidates never win. Boo hoo. Poor you. Something you do doesn’t instantly gratify you. Implicit in the “my vote won’t change anything” argument is the notion that their vote should count more than other people’s do. If they truly believe that they should run for office and represent the rest of us on legislative matters. Otherwise they’re deluded and anti-democratic.

A bit snarky, and exactly to my taste. And if all the people, zombie and otherwise, who attended Nuit Blanche this weekend turned up to vote, I’m sure Harper would indeed have something to worry about.

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