On My Way to Being Early

Prior to killing time at the VAG I walked south from the Granville Street Skytrain Station (the original one -- I can never remember the Line names) to see what's changed and what hasn't. The answer? Not much, and a lot.

The only difference between Granville Street from West Georgia to Drake, and Hastings Street from Cambie to Dunlevy is people, which the latter has and the former doesn't. Access to social services accounts for part of that presence, just as City Council policing directives (tax-base protection) accounts for the absence. You can see why Yaletown residents were so worried about a proposed Overdose Prevention Site, despite the fact that the opiate crisis is everywhere, not just in the downtown eastside. 

Walking back along Howe Street I saw a sign that read B.C. ALLIANCE FOR THE ARTS, a non-profit that was once on Davie Street, but in a more modest, less corporate form. At the northwest end of its diagonally recessed storefront, a glass-protected closet featuring thirteen wall works, with the intriguing exhibition title "Outsiders and Others" below. And below that, in fine print, an orienting definition: "OUTSIDER | NAIVE | SELF-TAUGHT | INTUITIVE | FOLK | PRIMITIVE". 

I was under the impression that the "Outsider" was the "Other" (indeed, it's mentioned a second time in the definition below). If the sign is suggesting there are other Others, should't it read as such -- Outsiders and Other Others? Or rather than get all Rumsfeldian about it, why not risk the dreaded negative conception and call it (a la Roland Barthes?) No Insiders. Either way, the centre-ing of the Outsider is of interest to me, as it speaks to our age old mistrust of anything that is found inside a museum that could be done by one's child, and called Art.

As mentioned in yesterday's post, I visited the VAG's Uninvited show and, amongst some strong or charming paintings, noticed that the curator, Sarah Milroy, didn't use any of the Main Floor's corner spaces for any of her selections, and that the only occupation of a corner space was the lower case "young activist reading room" which, the more I stared at it, the more I thought of Godard's La Chinoise (1967), expecting Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Paul Léaud to plop down on it's ottoman for Omar Diop's seminar.

I'll conclude with a picture I took on my way to the Broadway and Commercial Skytrain Station, where I boarded the train for Granville. The picture was taken from the alley behind East 10th Avenue, one shovel swing away from the complete demolition of the house that once stood there. What struck me in this moment was the glass design of the house's front door, a gorgeous example of the moderne era, which is all but gone in Vancouver. Why someone chose not to salvage this door speaks to the speed with which things change in this city and our inability to keep up with those changes. A shame to see a work like this as rubble.