Post #86
Rebecca Belmore
This past weekend, I went on a very short to trip to Toronto to visited some family and explore the city a bit. I was kind of nervous about going on a trip while still having to do work for this course, but given that many of the readings talk about Nuit Blanche in Toronto, I’m so glad that I did. Being born and raised in Winnipeg, and only my second time visiting Toronto, I saw and experienced several places in “the big city” that sparked/inspired different ideas for me in regards to my coursework. One of these places was the AGO. I spent a lot of time with the works there, with some of them speaking to me and my experience in the urban centre of Toronto. One of these works was Tarpulin No.1 by Rebecca Belmore. The work resembles a tarp, constructed out of ceramics. Its raised, and meant to seem as though there is a human figure underneath, “embodying ideas around displacement, eviction and housing insecurity”¹This work struck me, as right before we came into the gallery, we had parked the car in a parking lot and upon exiting, we came across a mat or blanket neatly woven out of plastic bags, nestled in between what looked like a coat and a blanket. This work and experience made me think of something Nagam shared in the article “Disrupting Toronto’s Urban Space through the Creative (In)terventions of Robert Houle” which is that “dialogue is created through the different interactions people can have with the images and the presentation of the material”² This made me reflect on what is presented as art and what is considered art in terms of the institution and the public, and also what does it mean to take site specific art and place it somewhere else, and what changes about those interactions and dialogue? When looking up Tarpulin No. 1, Belmore states that she created this work in response to “the crisis of homelessness in the city of Vancouver”, being inspired from an interaction she had with someone in Vancouver.³ When thinking about site specificity within this work and the plastic tarp that I saw in Toronto, it brings me back to the dialogue within the article “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity” in thinking of the site as a “cultural framework defined by the institutions of art”⁴ and how
“Whether the place in which the work is shown imprints and marks this work, whatever it may be, or whether the work itself is directly-consciously or not-produced for the Museum, any work presented in that framework, if it does not explicitly examine the influence of the framework upon itself, falls into the illusion of self-sufficiency-or idealism”⁵
Even though I love this work, I was reflecting upon the influence of institution, and how there is often this implicit idea that practicality isn’t valid, that “the institution’s idealist imperative of rendering itself and its hierarchization of values “objective,” “disinterested” and “true.”⁶ That work must be disconnected from those who are in conversation with it, and to that I ask: why? The woven plastic I saw is able to be used for many things by a houseless person. It’s waterproof and it can be slept on, it can be used as a blanket or a rug and it’s also artistic, as it requires some kind of skill at weaving to be able to construct it. It displays a level of community care, as the bags were clean so they must have been given or retrieved from somewhere that wasn’t the garbage. When thinking of the conversations about displacement and houselessness that Belmore has brought up within her work, this tarp was a stark reminder to me when looking at these sorts of works, the influence of the framework of the institution must be examined by the viewer. We cannot allow ourselves to become so removed from these conversations within the white walls of the gallery space, because even though art sparks a lot of those conversations, what are the actions we are going to take going forward as communities?
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1 Object label for Tarpulin No.1, 2018 by Rebecca Belmore. In exhibition " The McLean Centre for Indigenous + Canadian Art” at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON. Seen on: May 28, 2022
2 Nagam, Julie. "Disrupting Toronto’s Urban Space through the Creative (In) terventions of Robert Houle." 13 Culturas visuales indígenas y las prácticas estéticas en las Américas desde la antigüedad hasta el presente: 205.
3 “Rebecca Belmore, Tarpaulin No. 1, 2018,” SFMOMA, June 24, 2021, https://www.sfmoma.org/essay/rebecca-belmore-tarpaulin-no-1/.
4 Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (1997): p. 85, https://doi.org/10.2307/778809, 87.
5 Daniel Buren, “Function of the Museum,” Artforum (September 1973) quoted in Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (1997): p. 85, https://doi.org/10.2307/778809, 88.
6 Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” 88.
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Shaneela Boodoo