Seemingly impossible, but true. Similar to the way the statement “Arnold Schwarzenegger is Governor of California” is true. The Canadian Pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai is to be designed by Cirque du Soleil’s in-house designer. This is someone without architectural training or larger architectural insight beyond interior stage set design – and kitschy set design at that. Not surprisingly, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada is underimpressed by this decision, and a multitude of others feel the same way. Just look at this thing! Read the whole Globe and Mail article here. This Harper Conservative government – which in its rightwingery, its bold, uninformed appropriation of responsibilities it is ill-equipped for, and its generally arbitrary approach to power is starting to look Sarah Palinish – doesn’t know anything about architecture, but it knows what it likes. Tra la! The design and arts sector in Canada is increasingly under siege by this type of government interference and stupidity, and it can either lie down and wait for its supplies to run out, or it can prepare for a big fight. From the Globe:

“A fully engaged architect might have referred in the design to the pavilion site located within an old industrial district on the Pudong side of the Huangpu River. But urban context matters not at all to creators of theatrics. Treating space as a stage set – one that comes with a VIP lounge affording views on the interior courtyard – is how the Cirque approaches architecture. That’s okay when you’re designing tents, but it’s hardly the way to communicate deep architectural insight.”

Graphic design isn’t usually my focus, but when you’re interested in design and are living amidst the deluge of an impending Olympics in your hometown, the tide of graphics is impossible to ignore. Here’s a small sample of political cartoons and posters that incorporate the various Olympic logos – the standard logo with the five rings, as well as the Vancouver 2010 “Inukshuk” logo. (For controversy about the Inukshuk logo see here.) Above is Corey Rollins’ poster about Vancouver’s famous drug and prostitution problem (at left), which is based on the official Vancouver 2010 logo (at right). Rollins also did the healthcare poster below, and the taser shirt too, I think, but I’m having trouble verifying that. I’ll add more graphics to this post as I collect them, just in order to keep them all in once place, so check back if you’re interested. The issues being addressed in these graphics, as you can see, are homelessness and eviction, Vancouver’s infamous drug problem (which is sort of headquartered a few blocks from the stadiums and Olympic village, not to mention my studio), appropriation of First Nations’ imagery and land, environmental destruction, corporate/real estate development, debt, police action, suppression of free speech (Google “Free Speech Zones”), corporate perq’s and all of the other problems that generally accompany an Olympic Games. Being saddled with an Olympics during an economic downturn is no doubt increasing Vancouver’s level of unrest even further. Before you imagine that these are all overreactions, consider this: there is BC legislation waiting to be passed that could mean a 10,000 fine and/or jail time for anyone putting up an anti-Olympics sign in the window of his/her own house, under which law police will have the right to enter your home and remove it. I’ve even had elderly women tell me they’re so incensed that they’re planning to put a sign up too. In a surprising and much-appreciated move, though, the Vancouver police (who are really in need of good PR) held a press conference two days ago announcing that they will not enter any house to remove a sign nor will they lay charges. This will win them a lot of fans. Almost all of these graphics were found here. For a post on the official 2010 graphics on this blog, see here. NOTE: I’m not sure why people conclude that political cartoons equal violent protest. They don’t, and it seems to go without saying that trying to repress them stands a much better chance of causing violence than allowing them.

The flag above was produced by artist Kathryn Walter back when Toronto was bidding (unsuccessfully) for a summer Olympics. The artist recently donated the flag to one of the non-profit art centres in Vancouver that has had its funding abruptly cut by the provincial government, just prior to the Olympics. The government has claimed that the Olympic debt has nothing to do with the recent radical cuts to cultural funding in BC but there are doubts. Projected economic benefits of the Games have this year been downgraded from approx 10 billion to just under 4 billion [update - 1 billion], while the cost of the Olympics leapt from 3 or 4 billion to 7 or more billion. For a small province of only 4 million people, that’s a big debt to be carrying, especially on top of the recession-related deficit of billions we were already burdened with.

Above are the 3 Olympic mascots: Sumi, Quaatchi and Miga. Below is a graphic from the Poverty Olympics, “Give 2010 the finger.”

The four political cartoons immdiately below are from the No2010 site – not sure who the artist is. The 5 interconnected handcuffs motif has actually appeared at prior Olympics as well, including Torino and the Chicago bid.

Above, image by Gord Hill, Kwakwaka’wakw & Riel Manywounds, TsuuT’ina/Nak’azdli, June 2007. Below, Wolves by Ange Sterrit, Gitxsan.

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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On a trip with friends to the west coast of Vancouver Island one summer, I found a Holly Hobbie mug that had washed up on shore. The next morning I showed it to my friend Jonathan, who was cooking us breakfast.

Me:  Look! Isn’t that sweet. “Good friends are like sunshine…”

J:  They come around every couple of weeks.

Me:  And give you cancer.

For those who don’t live in this part of the world, the line about the sun coming around every couple of weeks identifies this as a Pacific Northwest joke. Listen, the reason I’m bringing up Holly Hobbie and her ilk is that I’m going to implode if I don’t say something about the Rise of Cute. A scary proportion of the highest-traffic decor blogs and sites, not mentioning any names, has lately undergone some sort of bodysnatching by a powerful, unholy agglomeration of down-home samplers, gingham, cutesy illustrations of big-eyed, bonneted little girls in country dresses, grandmothery country kitchens, wan girls on bicycles, wan girls doing nothing but looking wan, posters with bromide-y mottos, lace, doilies, frilly stationery, tiny flower arrangements, illustrations of birdies on branches, tiny flower prints, early childhood decor in apartments not even occupied by children, general pinkness and the whole gamut of unrehabilitatable little-girl kitsch. The words “sweet,” “precious” and “darling” are appearing with a frequency that’s becoming really alarming.

This Little House on the Prairie Redux – all these children in patchwork and smiling women in frocks with their forearms dusted in flour – seems to be harking back to a simpler time that frankly never existed and even if it had, god forbid. Quite apart from my aesthetic recoil from this particular category of kitsch, I’m worried that on a broader level its flight from reality is an indicator of a politically conservative retrenchment. There’s also a lot of safe, semi-but-not-really-updated Edwardian or Victorian genteel traditionalism around in decor. It’s not as bad, but definitely on the same continuum. The Neo-Stuffy traditionalism of all this airless decor isn’t just mildly backward-looking. A lot of it actually feels like a disposal not just of adulthood, adventurousness and any engagement in our real historical moment, but of feminism, too, which is all the more distressing when this region of the internet, with its multimillion-dollar glut of cutesy decorative craft, is so completely female-dominated. More and more I’m having moments of wanting to stab myself in the eye with a fork. I can already hear people saying “live and let live” and “to each her own” and all that, but culture and aesthetics are not comfortably separate from the rest of the social realm; they’re not meaningless, sheerly personal follies. They’re the thin end of the wedge of politics and philosophy. I’m sorry to be ornery, but as Lizzie Bennet liked to say, I speak as I find. And what I find is that this Cute Utopia is my dystopia. [Stomps foot.]

Click below. And if you think I’m exaggerating, click here.

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If tumblr is a bellwether – and it may not be but it’s fun to speculate – then the sixties & seventies are back. In style, if not in substance. So many of tumblr’s weird little blogs, each of them a kind of eclectic personal bulletin board, feature this kind of rock and roll Hair: The Musical meets back-to-the-land handmade-house thing. More than a bulletin board, actually, since each one also exists as a sort of complete photo essay and a sustained non-verbal argument. In this case it’s an argument for a simpler yet groovier style of living, and you get a feeling there may actually be a politics behind the aesthetics. Thanks to the way tumblr makes it simple to re-post an image from someone else’s tumblr blog in your own tumblr stream, while providing you with a link back to theirs, each tumblr collection instantly leads you on to many others with a similar world view. I’m not sure how I first came upon cosmic_dust, possibly it was here, but it led to alaskaneyes and self_romance which led to endless numbers of strange little worlds. These images are a tiny sample from the superb cosmic_dust.