An open letter on Hamilton’s post-steel future

Partway through this lovely Victoria Day weekend, I received an email from an associate producer of The Agenda with Steve Paikin on TVO. Besides feeling relief at knowing I wasn’t the only person using the May Two-Four to catch up on work, I was pleased to learn that The Agenda will be hosting a panel this Thursday May 21 asking the question, ‘Is the end of steel in steeltown the best thing for Hamilton?’

This hardworking producer, Stavros Rougas, made the rather silly mistake of asking me to elaborate on my post following the AGH panel, ‘Can the Arts Save Hamilton?’, probably not aware of just how rambling I can get when otherwise free from normal weekday obligations. My salient part of my response to his email follows below:

As you will already know from the blog post you mention, that AGH panel asking ‘Can the Arts Save Hamilton?’ revealed only one true point of consensus, that being the passionate belief that the arts are precisely the thing that will ’save’ Hamilton. A lot of this naturally stems from Richard Florida, whose theories you will hear quoted with considerable reverence among the movers and shakers of James Street North, but I think the time to take a serious critical look at Florida and unpack the system he proposes in closer detail will be arriving soon, given that a lot of what I’ve read (albeit, in passing - a closer read of Florida et al is on my summer reading list) is heavy with intangibles that might not necessarily speak to the hard realities of a city like Hamilton with its significant workforce of skilled labourers who must not be written off the map. That’s not to dismiss the rise of the creative class as a concept, but rather I think that the momentum of the idea, in the hands of tirelessly enthusiastic artists of all disciplines who are plenty comfortable running with intangibles, is just starting to catch up with our understanding of what it means to be a creative city. What we lack is a clear picture of what that Hamilton looks like on a practical scale, which is where examples start to come in handy. I think that’s where Glasgow comes in.

The most fortunate and brilliant thing about the AGH panel was the insight offered by Eddie Friel, who was chiefly responsible for what we might call the cultural revival of Glasgow throughout the 1980s, its designation as European Capital of Culture in 1990 and its all-round awesomeness today. By some incredible good fortune I was able to study my MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (2003-2005) and witness firsthand both the incredible calibre of internationally engaged visual art (and fantastic rock music) happening in the city but also the striking familiarity that I came to recognize as the vestiges of a working-class city still inhabited largely by unpretentious blue-collar sorts of people. In a recent conversation I had with Japanese artist Yoshiko Shimada during her recent residency here in Hamilton, she also remarked on the strong cultural parallel between Glasgow and Hamilton; the comparison is strong enough that I think it serves as the most tangible example that Hamilton could follow as a post-steel city.

That being the case, Hamilton has a long way to go before it can achieve even part of what makes Glasgow such a culturally compelling city. I’ve remarked on this before in earlier blog entries, probably most notably ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ from January 2008, in which I ultimately emphasized the need for a stronger educational infrastructure in Hamilton following the example of the Glasgow School of Art, whose graduates throughout the 80s and 90s were chiefly responsible for putting Glasgow on the cultural map through the founding of Transmission and other ground-breaking initiatives. It is, frankly, an unfair comparison as GSA has a long and rich history running parallel to key Scottish art movements (the ubiquitous Charles Rennie Mackintosh and so forth) and Hamilton’s best educational hope right now is an underfunded art department in a university that chiefly values medicine, engineering and business. On the other hand, I think that situation might speak to part of the solution for Hamilton’s future, as many of the best artists I’ve seen go through McMaster in recent years are those that see the program’s scale in the shadows as an asset. McMaster artists have the opportunity to study drawing in the medical school’s anatomy labs (I took massive advantage of this opportunity in my own time there) and today’s students now actively engage in collaborative works with the engineering school to the extent that a joint artist-engineer talk was held during this year’s graduating exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art. In short, emerging artists are taking advantage of the unique conditions that Hamilton offers to artists to engage in highly relevant interdisciplinary practices, an effort that is paralleled in a lot of the more prolific developments in Hamilton’s visual art community in recent memory - the conversion of old factory sites into the Imperial Cotton Centre for the Arts and the TH&B group show held at 270 Sherman; the Urban Moorings installation of floating sculpture in Cootes Paradise in response to the ecological half of our civic inheritance; The Print Studio’s community art initiatives through the Juravinski Cancer Centre would also fit this category of artistic ventures unique to Hamilton.

All of that activity adheres to something Eddie Friel said in his keynote address at the AGH panel - the need for creative cities to build a culture around its own existing strengths. Hamilton and Glasgow do have a few things in common - an industrialized heritage, great botanical gardens, indy rock music - but we should not be fooled into thinking that we have all the same advantages that Glasgow does. That difference is going to require Hamilton to take a different tack in adapting itself to life after steel, and I think that change isn’t something that the arts alone can accomplish. Eddie successfully mobilized culture as an engine for tourism and civic pride in Glasgow, and if Glasgow could do that with Edinburgh only a 50-minute train ride away, then there’s no reason why Hamilton couldn’t thrive on its own terms, even in Toronto’s shadow. But it’s going to involve a pretty transformative effort at self-recognition and adaptation away from the steeltown mindset, or rather towards a mindset where the compelling blend of industrial grittiness and ecological uniqueness can yield a new civic narrative. I think artists can play a significant role in creating, packaging and selling that narrative to the world, but I also see Hamilton’s strong medical sector as a potent collaborator in that process of redefining ourselves.

So in returning to your question for Thursday, ‘Is the end of steel in steeltown the best thing for Hamilton?’ I suppose my answer is a tentative yes, insofar as wider global circumstances have already dictated an end to the industrial age well outside our control, and the sooner Hamilton begins the hard work of adapting to this cultural shift, the better. I think it’s a blessing that steel has produced a civic culture that values hard labour, because we’re sure gonna need it and it’s a legacy that will need to inform Hamilton’s future as a creative city, not something that gets swept under the proverbial carpet. It also bears noting that Glasgow, for all its present-day awesomeness, still contains pockets of abject poverty and a disillusioned working class. The transformation is incredible, but it’s a work in progress and likely won’t happen in one generation alone. I think the end of steel will prove to be a great thing for Hamilton, but we might not get to enjoy the benefits anytime soon.

FRESH / LATEST POSTS

Archives

Blogroll