Vancouver curator Scott Watson’s essay Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos and Squats is part of the impressive and totally compelling Vancouver Art in the Sixties website project. It’s a well-organized archive of Vancouver’s 1960s art production and it’s far too large a topic for one post. What I found immediately interesting though was Watson’s historical contextualization of residential architecture and interior aesthetics in the 60s, especially its turn away from modernist minimalism and toward more baroque historical styles. He suggests that the Edwardian bric-a-brac and Art Nouveau styles that were adopted by Vancouver’s arts and hippie communities in the 60s were a reaction against the City of Vancouver’s move to demolish the crumbling inner-city Edwardian houses, which housed its art and social protest, and replace them with corporate architectural brutalism and strata-controlled condos. This was no doubt replayed in cities all across North America. Watson’s essay is particularly interesting in light of the current revival of Edwardian/Victorian granny chic in interior design and craft. It seems to me this is revival without any politics, but I could be wrong. In many cases it seems the farthest thing from radical, however you understand that word, but it could also be an echo of a similar problem in urban planning. Photo above by Michael de Courcy shows a screening on December 31, 1969 of a collaborative video at Vancouver’s Intermedia art centre.

The following are excerpts from Watson’s essay (click the link at top for the whole text).

“At the advent of what we now call postmodernism, the doomed Edwardian building inventory that provided bohemia’s living, studio and event spaces also provided an aesthetic opposed to Brutalism, the heavy concrete fortress style of public buildings that had arisen in response to the riots and demonstrations of the 60s. Late Victorian and Edwardian furniture and bric-a-brac furnished communal houses. In these spaces Art Nouveau was revived and deployed to advertise concerts and events. Rejection of the “brutality of the new” was, in essence, a very real concern about the disappearance of places to live, eat, congregate, exhibit and perform. In defnse of a crumbling inventory of modest, poorly built pioneer-era wooden and brick structures, the art community of the day rejected not only the Brutalist idioms of the 1960s and 1970s, but the gentler suburban modernism of the 1940s and 1950s. Or to be more precise, the authoritarian, normalizing, “design for living” modernism, with its unarticulated suppression of libidinal circulation, was an anathema for the generation of the 1960s and 1970s. The hippie movement as appropriated by fashion and popular music adopted Edwardian and Art Nouveau as its style of protest and renunciation of consumer/spectacle society.” [This excerpt was the last paragraph of several excerpts below. Click for more.]

Art Nouveau-influenced Doors poster by Bob Masse, Vancouver, 1967. Below, Bob Masse, William Tell & the Marksmen Great White Light, Vancouver, 1960s.

Will your home be next? Poster by Don Gutstein, poster, Vancouver, 1975

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Apologies to non-Canadian readers, but I need to address our national broadcaster. Dear CBC, Canadians need much more Seán Cullen on CBC radio, and much less Stuart McLean. Why do we have to wait until summer to listen to Simply Seán on the radio? Why only in the summer, CBC? What is the logic of giving us the oily, faux-down-home Stuart McLean all year, and the droll, off-offbeat Seán Cullen only in the summer? Is this supposed to remind us of high school – 10 months of annoying and sometimes embarrassing drudgery, followed by two months of happy enjoyment? It is? Well, it’s working.

I love this art object/piece of furniture by artist Fia Backstrom, who has had a number of exhibitions in Vancouver. From the NYT article “Artful Lodgers“:

Fia Backstrom describes her apartment near the Gowanus Canal as a perpetual battle between organization and chaos. ‘‘It is simultaneously studio and bed in one,’’ she says. But she has silence, solitude and a full view of the sky. Backstrom’s question-mark chaise was part of her summer show, ‘‘that social space between speaking and meaning,’’ at White Columns, and the wallpaper is her 2003 work ‘‘1.000.000 people incl. satellite suburbs.’’ Her shows ‘‘A Choreographed Exhibition’’ at Le Centre d’Art Contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson in France and ‘‘Pottery and Poetry’’ at the Apartment in Vancouver, Canada, both open this month, and she is currently reading ‘‘The K. Protocol,’’ a book of haiku by the artist Karl Holmqvist, whom Backstrom calls ‘‘pivotal to my practice.’’

“Dazzle painting,” devised in Britain during WWI, was based on the theory that its complex optical patterns would confuse enemy naval rangefinders by disguising a ship’s speed and direction. It employed a number of visual tricks including the painting of false bow waves on portions of the ship other than the prow. There’s a fascinating explanation of how it was meant to work here. Interestingly, the concept was invented by an artist, a marine painter named Norman Wilkinson. When devising dazzle painting Wilkinson adapted some of the abstract, graphic style of constructivism and cubism even though he himself was a much more traditional painter (click below). Women artists from London’s Royal Academy of Arts dazzle-painted small scale models for optical studio testing before the design for each warship was finalized. It would be impossible to make this kind of stuff up, though perhaps it’s not surprising that historically it’s been standard practice for artists and designers to devise wartime camouflage. In the end the military effectiveness of dazzle painting was uncertain, but it did have the effect of being very good for ship’s morale, and it produced some surreal and beautiful ships. More photos in our Flickr pool, and see also the Tate Modern article on their camouflage exhibition, and more historical information here.

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You can lose hours in The Selby. Completely addictive. Todd Selby takes fascinating photos of the real, unfluffed interiors of artists and designers. And then he does a droll Q&A with each in coloured markers. Via the style files. More below…

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