The Seduction of the Bureaucrat
An image taken from the artist Steven Shearer’s installation of archival imagery along the Vancouver Arbutus Greenway, created for the city’s Capture Photography Festival. Following complaints, the works were removed (image: Dennis Ha, courtesy of Capture Photography Festival).
“I went to the fridge to pour myself a drink, triedto remove the cap from a bottle of sparkling apple juice, and burst into tears, wondering: What has happened to this world, this new world of culture that we thought we were building, that has shape- shifted into a simulacrum of the world of finance and is equally unregulated, corrupt, and morally bankrupt?” —A.A. Bronson, ‘The Transfiguration of the Bureaucrat’
In 1983, the Canadian artist A.A. Bronson, a founding member of the General Idea collective and former director of the Printed Matter, Inc non-profit book store and art space, wrote his influential essay ‘The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat’. It outlines and documents the formation of non-profit artist-run centres – a distinctly Canadian type of publicly funded organisation first developed in the 1960s and 1970s. The model was inspired by a youthful ambition to design a new kind of gallery – one in which artists would be in charge – and in 1976 the Association of National Non-Profit Artists Centres/ Regroupement D’Artistes Des Centres Alternatifs (ANNPAC/RACA) was formed to represent all such ventures to the government. Dedicated to establishing the exhibition of art as the artists’ domain, the artist- run centre was, Bronson argued, premised on its “beveled edge”: the humbling (ie: humiliating) process of bureaucracy. The artist in Canada, as Bronson saw it, should not be self-interested but indebted to their community and the general public. Bronson remained uninhibited in this optimism, writing in the ‘The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat’: “ANNPAC has a life of its own. We call it the living museum.”
In 2011, Bronson wrote ‘The Transfiguration of the Bureaucrat’, a follow-up to ‘The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat’ in which he mourns the professionalisation of the artist in Canada. Artist-run centres no longer serve as petri dishes of creative gestation, he argued, but have largely been swallowed by bureaucracy and careerism. They persist, but now operate within a terrain where an artist’s foremost occupation is to locate a doorway to the international art market: artists work neither for themselves, the community, nor the public, but for finance. In Bronson’s words, “What we seem to be looking for, both in the USA and Canada, is not a healthy vibrant culture bristling with ideas and innovation, but access to the international marketplace. This makes me sad.” It is Bronson’s bevelled edge, ground to a stub, and nowhere in Canada has the role of the local artist become more intertwined in the landscape of finance than in Vancouver.
Image: Dennis Ha, courtesy of Capture Photography Festival.
I See Dead People
“It made me want to vomit,” and “It reminded me of dead people.” These were some of the vitriolic responses that the Capture Photography Festival received in April 2021 in response to its site-specific billboard installations of the artist Steven Shearer’s work along Vancouver Arbutus Greenway. The greenway is a 9km pathway stretching from False Creek to the Fraser River that forms the city’s southern boundary line. It crosses some of Vancouver’s most expensive neighbourhoods – Shaughnessy, Kitsilano and the rapidly gentrifying Mount Pleasant – but in a city where the benchmark price for residential housing is CA$1.175m,[1] singling out wealthy neighbourhoods feels like splitting hairs. Regardless, residents the length of the greenway sent emails condemning Shearer’s work, while others expressed their concern via social media. “Some people were disturbed by the images themselves, others objected to the appropriated nature of the images, and there were those who felt the images were triggering,” explains Capture’s executive director, Emmy Lee Wall.
Shearer (who declined to be interviewed for this essay), informally belongs to the Vancouver School of photoconceptualism, employing a range of mediain his work – drawing, painting, sculpture and found photography. His series of billboards for Capture, Untitled, were drawn from his archive (including internet searches, found print and eBay purchases) and picture people in various stages of sleep or unconsciousness. The images appear to be mostly drawn from the late 2000s: a woman sleeping in the passenger seat of a car wearing a cap-sleeve graphic tee; a man lit by a fluorescent flash that brightens his blond goatee and gaping mouth; a young man, his jacket draped over his head, with a ray of light hitting his closed eyes. The compositions recall canonical, art-historical iconography, such as Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Giorgione’s The Sleeping Venus and Fuseli’s The Nightmare. Shown in a traditional gallery space, the works might more closely conjure these associations, but blown up to billboard size and placed along a pathway, they have a more disquieting impact. The images were removed after 48 hours following a decision made by Capture’s sponsor Pattison Outdoor Advertising, which was uncomfortable with the negative response. “It also seemed like a lot of the people just didn’t like the work, which is fine,” says Wall, “but [it’s] not exactly a nuanced critique and, in my view, an insufficient reason to demand its removal.”
“Some people were disturbed by the images themselves, others objected to the appropriated nature of the images, and there were those who felt the images were triggering.”
Just a few weeks before, in March 2021, residents of the same neighbourhood (Kitsilano, average home price, CA$1,447,466) had voiced outrage at a proposed 12-storey supportive housing building. Developed by BC Housing, this building would supply 140 studios for those who are unhoused or are at risk of becoming unhoused, and would also provide a monitored space where residents would be able to use drugs safely. “That’s a polite way of saying if you have drug issues, alcohol issues, you are welcome in this project,” said Kitsilano resident Karen Finnan to CityNews. “[In] fact they don’t want to look at any alternatives that would not involve persons with drug or alcohol issues because they can’t find people willing to move in.” Michael Yaptinchay, principal of the nearby St Augustine School, also voiced concern that the building and its residents would overtake the neighbourhood.
Finnan and Yaptinchay’s dehumanising narratives of invasion are chilling and cruel, especially given Vancouver’s infamous unaffordability and its worsening overdose crisis. Since the 2016 declaration of a public-health emergency, nearly 6,000 illicit drug overdose deaths have been reported in British Columbia and Covid-19 seems to have exacerbated the crisis. During the height of the pandemic, more people died of an illicit drug overdose in the first eight months of 2020 than all of 2019 combined. In May of 2021, an Oxford Economics report confirmed Vancouver as the most unaffordable city in North America, beating out New York City and Los Angeles. Bluntly stating that “North American housing markets are on fire”, the report’s authors went on to note that “[unaffordability] is a persistent issue in Toronto and Vancouver, and the recent price surge has served to exacerbate thismore than decade-old trend”.
Open-mouthed, passed out in cars, bare-chested and laid flat on dead grass – perhaps for residents along the Arbutus Greenway, Shearer’s Untitled did not recall the art-historical canon. Maybe, it was something more dangerously close to home.
Image: Dennis Ha, courtesy of Capture Photography Festival.
City on the Edge
Looking to Los Angeles may help contextualise Vancouver’s crises and paranoia. Vancouver, like Los Angeles, is an urban settlement on the edge of the world. Each evening, both cities watch the sun sinking into the Pacific Ocean. In both, oceanfront views are highly prized and economic-geographic inequalities are arranged west to east – the western-most neighbourhoods are home to the most expensive real estate, with rents and property prices declining eastward.
Both conurbations also have downtown areas of visible unhoused and drug-user populations, whose presence threatens tourism and depreciates real-estate values. Just as Los Angeles’s Skid Row is buttressed by the fine-art epicentre of the city (the blue-chip gallery Hauser & Wirth is just a few blocks away), Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is home to many art galleries and cultural institutions. Although the area has gone through a few stages of gentrification – it was once home to many studios, artist-run centres, and DIY galleries drawn to the neighbourhood for its cheap rents – the Downtown Eastside is now also home to larger commercial exhibition spaces such as Monte Clark Gallery and Catriona Jeffries, all of which recently moved from their previous locations, drawn to the larger, more affordable industrial units behind East Hastings Street. Meanwhile, developers such as Low Tide Properties (owned by Lululemon founder and billionaire Chip Wilson) have renovicted[2] DIY galleries (including Index Gallery and Red Gate Art Society) along East Hastings Street to make way for more profitable businesses, such as breweries and office spaces.
Unlike Los Angeles, however, Vancouver is not home to a robust class of urban-élite art patrons. Instead, Vancouver’s commercial galleries largely serve to introduce artists to the international market. And unlike Los Angeles, Vancouver relies on public funds such as the Canada Council for the Arts and, of course, the artist-run centres to bolster opportunities and spaces for emerging professional artists. A small number of commercial galleries representing mostly Vancouver-based artists do exist, but of these Catriona Jeffries is the only one to regularly show at major international art fairs.
“Real estate is Vancouver’s true passion, its blood sport.”
What has emerged amidst rapid financialisation and real-estate construction – “architecture as finance, finance as architecture,” as the University of British Columbia’s Matthew Soules describes it – is a symbiotic relationship between art and development. This trend is perhaps best represented by the public gallery Presentation House’s 2017 decision to re-name itself Polygon Gallery after a generous sponsorship from Polygon Development that facilitated its new, multi-million-dollar, waterfront gallery space.
It’s no surprise, given Vancouver’s primary money-maker is real estate, that the city’s art patrons come from this world. In recent years, however, a quieter, more insidious relationship between finance, real estate, architecture and art has emerged. Like many cities, Vancouver’s developers, artists and their representative bureaucrats are reshaping the socio-spatial makeup of the city under the guise of cultural amenities. In Vancouver, this accelerating process is made visible through a new kind of public art –one that is tethered to the imperatives of development, paraded beneath the banner of social service.
Vancouver is a city built on speculation. While resource extraction (fishing, mining, forestry) motivated and funded the city’s initial and ongoing colonisation ofthexwməθkwəyə̓ m(Musqueam),Sḵwxúwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) homelands, it has been sustained by development. As the urban planner and architect Lance Berelowitz describes in Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination, “Real estate is Vancouver’s true passion, its blood sport.” Vancouver’s culture of speculation – and its reliance on economies predicated on expansion and progress – accelerated in the 1980s. Moving from an extraction-based economy to an increasingly abstract and financialised one, Vancouver aimed to attract investment on the global stage. Like Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s America, Canada took on policies that privatised formerly state-run sectors, ostensibly to generate what the economic geographer David Harvey termed a “good business climate”. As Melanie O’Brian describes in her introduction to Vancouver Art & Economies (2007), Vancouver’s actions in the 1980s exacerbated a scarcity of low-income housing that had plagued the city since the 1970s, capitalising on investment in order to rezone downtown and facilitate an increase in condo developments. These new towers acted primarily as investment vehicles for luxury housing, pushing low-income residents towards the periphery, notably east Vancouver.
Image: Dennis Ha, courtesy of Capture Photography Festival.
Living Sculpture
“[Nikolas] Pevsner claimed that baroque art had rendered the supernatural tangible. After 1968, urban space had suddenly rendered capitalism tangible.” — Daniel Defert, ‘Foucault, Space and the Architects’
In 2019, Vancouver’s housing market was named the fourth most expensive housing market in the worldfor the second year in a row by a CBRE Group report. Curiously, Vancouver still regularly ranks high on global “liveability” indexes, which extoll its public parks, waterfront access and bike lanes. “I think that it is no coincidence that Vancouver is such a famed liveable city but also so famed for its housing unaffordability,” says Soules. “[These] things go well together.”
Many of the factors that are weighed on such liveability indexes are captured in British Columbia’s unique Community Amenity Contributions programmes (CACs). CACs are in-kind or cash contributions made by property developers after the city council grants rights to development through rezoning. In lieu of giving money, developers can support a number of community initiatives, such as affordable housing, public spaces, childcare facilities, community centres, libraries, transportation, and cultural organisations. As the journalist Christopher Cheung summarises, “For developers, CACs [get] them the density theywant and sometimes result in a more attractive project, for example, if a new library branch on-site is part of the contribution. For the public, CACs capture a share of the increased profits from rezoning to pay for amenities that would otherwise require tax dollars.”[3]
CACs, however, are not simply an opportunity for developers to generously give back to communities – that is a fiction. In reality, CACs present a lucrative model for companies to market their product and, for the city’s most powerful firms, provide a state- sanctioned avenue for orchestrating the city of their dreams. “In my mind, the pursuit of beauty and the pursuit of our advancement as a society are one and the same,” writes Westbank Corp. CEO Ian Gillespie in his manifesto ‘Fight for Beauty’, a meandering, audacious text that places Westbank Corp. on the same plane of influence as the Renaissance, Ming dynasty and Ancient Egypt. As one of Vancouver’s most successful and influential developers, Gillespie is nothing if not ambitious.
Vancouver House, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group for Westbank Corp. (image: courtesy of Westbank Corp.).
“A lot of people would look at this site and say, ‘Okay, it’s a weird area.’ I looked at it as this tremendous opportunity, this gateway into Vancouver,” Gillespie told The Globe and Mail in 2018, reflecting on land purchased by Westbank Corp. in downtown Vancouver in 2010. To build this gateway, Gillespie enlisted Danish it-boy Bjarke Ingels. More generally, in his efforts to rise above a Vancouver cityscape that, he told Bloomberg, “looks like shit”, Gillespie has imported a global vanguard of high-profile architects, such as Studio Gang and Kengo Kuma, to a city whose landmark buildings have previously been designed by largely homegrown practices. But Ingels’ Vancouver House – 388 condominium units with prices ranging from CA$225,000 for a studio to a CA$15m penthouse – is part of a new class of super-prime towers, marketed towards international investors, further decoupling Vancouver’s economy from the local housing market. Gillespie, however, isn’t shy about his prosaic plans for the City of Vancouver, and he is increasingly claiming a presence in additional cities such as Toronto, Seattle, Tokyo and San Jose. “It’s about giving me a canvas to produce something I feel good about producing,” he told The Globe and Mail. Westbank Corp. has a strong presence in Vancouver, but it has not been won without controversy and public resistance.
The Downtown Eastside Woodward’s building was completed by Westbank Corp. in 2009, redeveloping the former Woodward’s department store, a site of social significance. As one resident told the Vancouver Sun in 1997, Woodward’s was “one of those places people could go and feel like a regular person instead of a poor person”. The store closed in 1993, marking the beginning of a years-long fight for control of the site. Social housing deals were made, and fell through, resulting in multiple protests and occupations of the building. In 2004, the city awarded the development to Gillespie’s firm. The redevelopment features 536 market condos and 200 units of social housing – two- thirds of the latter are segregated in a separate tower and not granted access to the development’s rooftop hot tub. Its ripple effect in the Downtown Eastside has led to increased rents and the further erosion of low-income housing. Or, as Westbank would have it, Woodward’s has served as “a catalyst for the economic, social and physical revival of the Downtown Eastside”.
“A lot of people would look at this site and say, ‘Okay, it’s a weird area.’ I looked at it as this tremendous opportunity, this gateway into Vancouver.”
It is Vancouver House, however, that stands as Gillespie’s magnum opus. A restrictive triangular lot gave rise to the building’s unusual tapered bottom, which expands and twists as it reaches its 49th floor. The triangular base is 557sqm, but the floorspace expands to 1,300sqm by the time it has reached its rectangular top. The turned structure appears to defy engineering – its head much too large for its body. The building’s international marketing campaign followed Gillespie’s penchant for borrowing art-speak to describe real estate, with Westbank employing words such as “practice” in reference to its business; “canvas” to describe what it deems to be the blank slate of the cities in which it operates; and “body of work” to describe its completed projects on its website. Vancouver House, meanwhile, is described and marketed as a “living sculpture”. Falling in line with Vancouver House’s artistic marketing campaign, Gillespie worked with the City of Vancouver on a CAC that would match the project in scale and impact. For this, Gillespie partnered with Reid Shier, former curator of the artist-run centre Or Gallery, and current curator of the Polygon Gallery (he declined to be interviewed for this essay). Together, they commissioned Rodney Graham (who also declined an interview request) to create a site-specific installation mere steps from Vancouver House.
Spinning Chandelier is suspended under the Granville Street Bridge, a space that was formerly a gathering point for the city’s unhoused. The chandelier is 7.7m high and 4.2m long, its structure made of stainless steel with LED lamps and 600 polyurethane faux crystals. Inspired by an earlier video work of Graham’s, the piece is activated for about four minutes multiple times a day, during which it flashes its LED lights, illuminates its crystals and spins. Its 2019 unveiling was met with controversy, with many accusing the piece of stoking class warfare in the increasingly unaffordable city. Glibly, but prophetically, Mayor Kennedy Stewart called it, “the most important piece of public art in the history of our city.”
The artwork furthers Gillespie’s city-building aspirations. Westbank Corp. has branded the area around Vancouver House the “Beach District”, with both the phrase and Graham’s piece working to assert Westbank Corp.’s presence in this area. While Vancouver House is constrained by its triangular plot, Westbank Corp. is ideologically laying claim to the neighbourhood – its flag a CA$4.8m spinning chandelier.
The city made special considerations for Westbank Corp. to facilitate the work’s completion. The piece was initially presented to the city council as costing CA$900,000, but as a result of its complex installation and engineering requirements this quickly rose to the final CA$4.8m figure. Yet the project was never re- submitted to the Public Art Committee. Westbank Corp. was also allowed, for the first time in any CAC for public art, to pool CACs from three other developments into this single site.
Spinning Chandelier, an artwork created by Rodney Graham for Vancouver house, which is installed under the Granville Street Bridge (image: courtesy of Westbank Corp.).
There were further exceptions made. “Spinning Chandelier was a bit different because it came to the process as a direct selection, which we do allow occasionally but not frequently,” says Eric Fredericksen, head of public art for the City of Vancouver. “It came to the Public Art Committee along with various letters of support from various persons in the Vancouver and international art community.” This process of direct selection had not, in fact, been done previously. Importantly, Spinning Chandelier is listed as a public art piece on the City of Vancouver’s website but is not owned by the city. As Fredericksen explains, this is “rare”. When asked what other privately owned works have been permitted for permanent installation on city land, he responds by email: “One other springs to mind, the Martin Boyce piece installed in the laneway at Telus Gardens.” Another Westbank Corp. project.
If we are to understand Graham as the artist chosen to represent Vancouver in this “gateway” to the city (specifically, the not-shit city of Gillespie’s vision) then Graham’s position as an artist whose practice is in Vancouver, but whose value exists in the international art market is worthy of consideration. Simultaneous to the decoupling of the housing market from the local economy, Spinning Chandelier operates not as public art that is owned by its public, designed to engage and activate space for residents. Rather, it has a dual function: as a marketing tactic that assures condo buyers of Vancouver House’s investability; and as a mechanism to annex public space as the ideological property of Westbank Corp.
“It has a dual function: as a marketing tactic that assures condo buyers of Vancouver House’s investability; and as a mechanism to annex public space as the ideological property of Westbank Corp. ”
The Mythical Artist
“Since we cannot know what we cannot know, this mantra about the impenetrability of the realm of art is evidently nothing but propaganda.” —Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated
In 2021, a new kind of social housing is slated to open in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. Thirty units of non-market housing have been procured on the lower floors of Second + Main – a 12-storey, 226 market unit development from Create Properties. Its 388-483sqft studios start in the mid-CA$500,000s (a benchmark price for the neighbourhood). Unlike the 12-storey development planned for Kitsilano, these 30 live-work units have been specially reserved for lower-income artists and artist-led families.
The application process and units are being managed by BCA, a non-profit organisation formerly known as BCArtscape, that works to “develop cultural spaces in BC that serve the needs of artists and cultural organizations as well as the communities where they are located”. It is led by Caitlin Jones, former curator of Mount Pleasant’s artist-run centre, Western Front. Currently, it manages the rental and leasing of the Sun Wah building, a cultural hub in Chinatown, as well serving as the operator for a to-be-built 1,952sqm artist studio space in downtown Vancouver, a CAC for a 39-storey luxury tower. BCA represents a new kind of artist organisation – a liaison between the art world, city and developers.
Image: Dennis Ha, courtesy of Capture Photography Festival.
“The artist bureaucrat is no longer the downstream recipient of urban planners or real estate – they are now taking an active leadership role,” says community organiser Vince Tao of the Vancouver Tenants Union and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. “The concentration of art power in real estate I think goes two ways – it’s not art being exploited by real estate, it’s part of the same machine.”
While its intentions are to allocate affordable space for artists and cultural organisations, BCA operates in contradiction to the recommendations of many housing experts and housing activists. In 2021, for instance, the provincial and federal government commissioned a far-reaching report looking at how to improve British Columbia’s housing supply in large urban areas; it recommended that the practice of negotiating community-amenity contributions from developers end.
Second + Main (confusingly billed as 3rd + Main on the BCA website) presents a range of potential problems. Tao, for instance, heard of the proposed social housing for artists when he was an education librarian at 221A – an artist-run centre that also manages CAC spaces and independently run artist studios. “To have an artist organisation – and I guess it’s debatable whether BCA could be called that – be the arbiter of your domestic and work life, it begs a lot of questions I asked years ago,” he says. “Like, how are we going to evict people? What is the criteria for eviction? What if they stop making work? What if they hurt themselves and they have to stop making work? Who is going to do it? You or me?” The allocation of social housing for artists assumes special regard for the role of the artist in the city. Underlining this privileged place is the understanding that the artist should be able to both blend in with their environment and pierce through its capitalist context. It’s a heavy burden to bear.
“The concentration of art power in real estate I think goes two ways – it’s not art being exploited by real estate, it’s part of the same machine.”
Shier and Graham, for instance, surely did not intend Spinning Chandelier to act as a symbol of Gillespie’s influence. They most certainly had more nuanced, critical aspirations, and both artist and curator have yet to comment publicly on the response to the work, silently emphasising the assumed mystical, unknowable properties of art. But Spinning Chandelier nevertheless emerges from a cultural complex ingrained with the logics of financialised real estate. It is this guise of criticality that benefits city-builders such as Gillespie who wish to appear to be culturally engaged; the unknown unknowables of an ambitious artwork such as Graham’s are, for developers, its real value.
Because of its high maintenance costs, the city has allowed Westbank Corp. to retain ownership of Spinning Chandelier in perpetuity. Westbank Corp.’s permanence is one assertion the piece makes clear. Imagine Spinning Chandelier years in the future. Floating above the Beach District, illuminating the surrounding parks, waterfront walkways, bike lanes and green spaces. Some passing under its sparkling lights will look up and see Saint Teresa. Some will see a corpse.
1 And this statistic represents the greater Vancouver area – the actual housing price for Vancouver proper is likely much higher.
2 “Renoviction” is a term used in British Columbia that means exactly what it sounds like.
3 Introduced in the 1990s, CACs took off under Vancouver’s centralist Vision Vancouver mayor, Gregor Robertson, with many urban planners utilising terms associated with “addiction” to describe his office’s relationship with CACs. In 2020, leftist mayor Kennedy Stewart made modest changes to the CAC programme, mostly aimed at increasing transparency, limiting refunds of cash and stopping alterations being made to CAC proposals without a public hearing.
Words Alison Sinkewicz
This article was originally published in Disegno #30. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.