Gallery Manifesto

You can imagine the thrill when only hours after finishing my talk on manifestos, I should be walking into the Vancouver Gallery of Art, into the Emily Carr gallery completely taken over by a show entitled We: Vancouver 12 Manifestos for the City. They commissioned several manifestos, which are available online, but the show is focused around twelve verbs, themselves identified as manifestos, for example:

SEE: We perceive. We experience. We witness. We survey and scrutinize.

DETOUR: We divert. We drift or swerve. We change direction. We take the long way around.

The show is massive and wildly entertaining. Multimedia is certainly its medium. The show takes manifestos in their performative quality and presents examples or illustrations of the 'event' that occurred, or would occur, in the city. It includes: recommending that an old, large tree be 'placed' in every roundabout, a video and a mixed audio sample of a June day in 2010 when a group of citizens went out into the city and made music by tapping with sticks and hands on the physical body of the city (trashcans, grates, lamp-posts, etc), the development of an aboriginal restaurant with a high flair, several environmentally conscious construction projects, a selection of books that six separate people offered as their definition of Vancouver, the clothing of the woman who decided to make anything she would wear for one year (from shoes to underwear to hairbands), the street art of Cameraman–among other things known for producing a Louis Vuitton dumpster in 2008–who was allowed to produce optical tricks all over the museum for the duration of the show, a reminder of the June 1976 world gathering Habitat: United Nations Conference on Human Settlements on the global problem of homelessness (a major issue in Vancouver), and more. It was overwhelming, indeed "overdose and overdrive" as Caws says a manifesto ought to be.

Is the show itself a manifesto? Well, yes. It is a collage work wherein each piece would fall apart without the vibrance of the manifesto concept that unites them. There are elements that are more interesting to me, and presumably to you, than others. But it certainly makes its point, that Vancouver isn't just a place surrounded by trees, water and sky. That it is also a city, one that has a lot to say and should not shy away from it, is a point made and made again. At the end of the show was a large piece of paper with one design of the show lightly on it to take home, to write on, to draw/write the word you want said, to keep, to give, but at any rate to manifest for yourself.

There was a lot else, but that at any rate blew my mind because you'd have to be dead not to get excited about manifestos.