The title of this post is from a conversation with James Takeo, as I often enjoy ‘speaking in collage.’
Like many of my generation, I have mixed feelings regarding labour movements and the rhetoric on both sides of this debate. This is especially true for me, as someone who’s worked in cultural spaces (where I’m sure I’m one of many men who’ve been sexually harassed and are still told we must have ‘liked it’) but also service industry spaces. My anecdotal education and resultant understandings of the larger national and international narratives are both very positive and very negative.
The first real job I had was at a private Golf Club here (I still have contempt for golf, and it may have made me very sympathetic to radical Marxist thought at a young age, hah), and in the tenure of my employment there (from about grade 10 to the summer of my departure for university) it ‘went union.’ This could have been easily avoided – it was an acrimonious fight – if the Manager, and especially the person ‘in charge’ of the servers (the place employed women almost exclusively as wait staff and you can connect the dots on your own as to how that influenced the situation) were not so fond of punative responses to concerns both genuine and trifling.
This was the first union I held membership in, and the last one I held a membership in was the union for sessional instructors at the University of Saskatchewan – which was often wilfully or hopelessly ignorant and useless, and fed my distaste for the Saskatchewan NDP. So, I’ve had very different ‘levels’ of experience, therein.
However, as I said, I’ve conflicting emotions: one of the primary reasons I chose to leave Saskatchewan after nearly two decades there is that the board of an artist run centre I worked at was as incompetent as they were interfering. Several were good and faithful partisans for the Sask NDP, but happy to treat staff like serfs. That is the situation that comes to mind when I hear someone warn that when an employer – even, if not especially in cultural spaces – says you don’t ‘need’ a union, you’d best watch your back.
I’m unsure what I think, right now, as there’s too little information, regarding this story about the Remai Modern’s board and implied civic interference (oh, do not ask me or others about how we gave up applying for jobs at the Mendel, the Remai’s precursor, as being a unionized City Employee mattered more than experience or competence, and the ongoing turnover in many of the jobs there was a predictable consequence, which also feeds my ambivalence or dismissal of unions). But several of the people who are leaving the board, by choice or not, are not people I would ever work with or for, ever again.
So, I’ve returned to Niagara after an absence of many years – years spent in the (theoretical) labour stronghold of Windsor, Canada’s ‘automotive capital’ and then in Saskatchewan. Remember when Tommy Douglas was voted ‘The Greatest Canadian’? Not long before my departure, there were few places that were worse, for most workers, than the land god gave to Cain.
I say that not just from working as a sessional at the University of Saskatchewan but also at Pepper Bros. Pizza while doing my post grad degree. A few months back when several attempted to shame Geoffrey Owens, I shared on Twitter that while doing my MFA, when I was teaching as part of a scholarship, I was also working at an artist run centre, doing some freelance design and writing work, and at the aforementioned pizza place. The latter ensured I would always be able to eat, at least, as that delusionally smug Boomer bullshit that you should only be paying a percentage of your paycheque for rent is as ludicrous as their idea that they hit a triple when they were born on third base….
In my previous post, I talked a bit about my research regarding the labour histories of Welland (this book is one I’m making my way through, not in order, and also as a good reason to visit the Welland Library, on my daily walks about the Rose City). Although I’d intended – and I still will be doing so, at The ArtSpace – to be connecting with contemporary artists and cultural instigators here, reading that has helped shape and direct where some of my thoughts have gone, as I walk the Rose City, sometimes during the day, and recently at night, when I require my evening cigarette(s)…..
One of the works that I wrote about for Art in the Open was Bas de Groot‘s Welland Canal Monument, that was completed after his death (though if you visit it today, you can also walk across the street and see a mural on the side of the Welland Museum, also by de Groot. His work is found in various locales around Niagara). This was one of many pieces (the various pieces in Lundy’s Lane in Niagara Falls, or the Battle of Beaver Dams 1812 memorials that spoke caustically and relevantly 200 years later about ‘nation building’ and ‘how mighty tongues tell mighty lies‘, or the Welland Mural project remnants I’ve passed every day here, in different parts of the city) that was a visual history of Niagara.
There’s a line from an artist / writer I admire of how he sometimes will “…become inebriated on history in its material forms…” (Jeremy Borsos), and that’s something that happens to me, with public art, monuments or memorials.
The figures in this installation are life size, and though rough, are very human, very dynamic, and sometimes relate to each other, and other times seem isolated. Any ‘proper’ art historical consideration of public artworks that employ and combine a number of figures – especially in the sense of commemorating an event – has to look back at Auguste Rodin‘s The Burghers of Calais. Several are less defined by their faces than by their actions, in carrying a heavy burden that bends the form of the man, or another that seems to be taking a moment to rest with his shovel between his knees, the turned head and clasped hands suggesting contemplation, not just of the enormity of the task of the Canal, but perhaps considering the future it will help build, for this city, region and country.
Conversely, the kneeling worker and the sitting woman seem engaged in conversation, with her head tilting in an ‘interested’ manner, and both figures with their faces expressive, suggesting an interaction that alludes to how the Canal was a site of interaction and intersection for many peoples and groups. The text from the Welland Heritage Council offers the following summation:
The monument will remind us of the importance of multiculturalism to development in Welland – past, present, and future. Industries, businesses, and citizens have prospered in Welland and the Niagara Peninsula through the efforts of people who built the canal. Some of these workers lost their lives digging with picks and shovels, many left their families and friends when they came to Canada in search of work.
There’s another figure, removed from the group, dressed more casually, seeming younger, and ‘his’ gaze looks out towards the water, and is the only member of the group that seems to be here, now, in Merritt Park. On my visits I think of him as ‘the boy’, the descendant of the workers who make up the rest of this scene, and the physical space between them is also the space of time.
A further historical / factual consideration, from Art in the Open’s informative site: Although the statues and fountain were originally designed by Bas de Groot, he passed away before its completion […] It was completed by Mylinda and William Jurgenson and the aforementioned child [sitting separately] was the work of Perry Wakulich (more work by Wakulich can be seen in The Spirit of St. Catharines public work). Scott Robinson Landscaping was responsible for the landscaping and fountain itself. It is unlikely that the city of Welland, and much of Niagara, would have thrived as it has in the past, and continues to do so now, without the Canal. In that respect, this monument is just as much about those who made that happen, and their descendants and beneficiaries, as the Canal itself.
From where I’m staying, the Welland Bridge (also known as bridge 13) is easily visible, and walking towards it and then to the left will bring you to de Groot’s work. Walking in the opposite direction brings you to the remnants of the Atlas Steels plant, something I mentioned in the previous post: a site that’s captured my imagination.
Part of that is due to how, since my return to Niagara, I’ve been capturing images as I’m out walking of abandoned and discarded items. This started with shopping carts, but has since expanded to couches, chairs, anything that piques my visual interest. In that respect, I knew that when I visited Welland again I’d have to revisit the Atlas space on East Main, and that it would still be snowy and wintry – or perhaps we might have an early spring thaw – would simply make the site more intersesting, like any landscape that transforms and changes.
When I visit places (eiter new or revisiting) I often employ impressions of places and then let both my intuition and research guide me, in responding. As I was braving the minus twenty wind and blowing snow to get these shots of the Atlas detritus, I was reminded of the excellent works of Julianna D’Intino, whose lens – based practice often explores very local and personal narratives (we met at the Rodman Hall 5 x 2 which I faciliate, and I offer a shameless plug in inviting any and all in Niagara to visit this group, when we meet in downtown St. Catharines). The personal is political, but I often felt that this phrase has been – like many slogans – more coloured by those using it than by its original intent, or perhaps by the idea that it can be more open, more adaptable, than one specific interpretation.
I mentioned D’Intino’s work because a number of artists in this region have been exploring the legacy – and the loss – of the industrial and manufacturing base that was the reason for this region to prosper and even exist. Some did it in more mediated ways, others in more immediate. Its almost amusing that as I write and post these images and ideas online, in response to sculptural installations in the public sphere, or monuments intentional or incidental, that a line from Steve Remus about GM comes into my head, from an abrasive and amazing piece of writing from him (which I paraphrase): look around the city, and there’s nothing here with GM’s name on it, they just used the place up and left, and left nothing behind but a mess (I paraphrase, but have the sentiment accurate).
The ongoing legal issues over the old GM site in St. Catharines are “history in a material form”, but not so much a sculpture, a monument, an artist makign work about the history of the place in both words and objects, but the leftovers, what’s unwanted and discarded for someone else to clean up.
Places are often imaginary: they exist more truly in our heads, in our memories and in senses of nostalgia or faith (or perhaps hope, which seems encapsulated in the figures in Merritt park). As well, the objects – or perhaps the absence, the emptiness – of the Atlas space also spurs recollections and reflection. I’m fond of Jeanne Randolph‘s positing that when we encounter an art object, we are both influencing and influenced, defined and defining, and in this collaboration create the meaning of the work, but really just use it to help define our own selves and experiences.
de Groot’s memorial shares this mental and emotional space for me, with the Atlas wasteland: both are landmarks in the ‘Rust Belt Wonderland’ that is my Welland, here, in 2019.
All images were taken by the writer during the week beginning March 4th, 2019.