The Western Front

A couple weeks ago a letter was emailed to a number of people who have been involved with Vancouver's Western Front over its 47 years as an artist-run centre. The content of the letter concerned "sudden actions following a change in the organization's leadership." The email concluded with the words: "If the concerns of this letter resonant with you, please consider signing it before it is sent ... to the board."

Having already heard that the WF had dissolved its Media Arts program and summarily dismissed its curator, a move justified by budgetary concerns (I'd heard), I read the letter hoping for further details (I'd also heard that the WF was in sound financial shape prior to the leadership change), but received only an interpretation of the WF's actions. Yesterday I re-opened the email that linked to the letter, hoping to re-read it, but the letter had been taken down. All that remained was the petition, which I had signed. I scrolled down the petition again.

There were some new names added, as well as an absence of names I thought would be there. Most disturbing were a couple of comments where, instead of "first last [names], affiliation, title," as requested, someone supplied a character assessment, presumably directed at the dismissed curator, while another provided a legal line about the curator having signed an employment contract where the terms of her dismal had been laid out.

Because I am human, it pained me that someone would use a space reserved for names and relations to issue a character assessment of someone hurt by the WF's actions. As for the second comment, if ever there was a justification for the letter I signed my name to -- a letter that points not to the open and improvisatory centre many of us have come to know and love, but a closed and "contract"-ing one -- this comment was it.

As it stands, I hope the WF leadership does the right thing and responds to this letter and its petitioners in a public fashion. Doing so would contribute further to the "cultural ecology" the centre once heralded in a mandate it no longer carries on its website, as if that world were a dream it woke up from and shook off in favour of a hyper-normal, property-driven world where finance trumps discourse.