Urban EncoU ntErs The Culture of Cities Series editors: Kieran Bonner and Will Straw Cities have long been a key focus of innovative work in the humanities and social sciences. In recent years, the city has assumed new importance for scholars working on cultural issues across a wide range of disciplines. Sociologists, anthropologists, media specialists, and scholars of literature, art, and cinema have come to emphasize the distinctly urban character of many of their objects of study. Those who study processes of globalization are drawn to analyzing cities as the places in which these processes are most deeply felt or where they are most strongly resisted. The Culture of Cities series has its roots in an international research project of the same name, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada during the period 2000–05. The series includes books based in the work of that project as well as other volumes that reflect the project’s spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry. Case studies, comparative analyses, and theoretical accounts of city life offer tools and insights for understanding urban cultures as they confront the forces acting upon them in the contemporary world. The Culture of Cities series is aimed at scholars and interested readers from a wide variety of backgrounds. The Imaginative Structure of the City Alan Blum Urban Enigmas Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities Edited by Johanne Sloan Circulation and the City Essays on Urban Culture Edited by Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw Cartographies of Place Navigating the Urban Edited by Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault Speaking Memory How Translation Shapes City Life Edited by Sherry Simon Urban Encounters Art and the Public Edited by Martha Radice and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier Urban EncoU ntErs Art And the Public Edited by Martha Radice and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 ISBN 978-0-7735-5005-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-5006-3 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-5007-0 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-5008-7 (ePUB) Legal deposit second quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Urban encounters : art and the public / edited by Martha Radice and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier. (The culture of cities) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-5005-6 (cloth).–ISBN 978-0-7735-5006-3 (paper).– ISBN 978-0-7735-5007-0 (ePDF).–ISBN 978-0-7735-5008-7 (ePUB) 1. Public art–Canada.  I. Radice, Martha, author, editor  II. Boudreault-Fournier, Alexandrine, 1978–, author, editor  III. Series: Culture of cities N8846.C2U73 2017      701’.030971      C2016-908270-9       C2016-908271-7 contEnts Colour plates follow page 248 vii Acknowledgments 3 Introduction: Encounters with Art in the Urban Public Martha Radice and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier 16 PArt OnE: PErfOrMIng Art PUbLICs Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Martha Radice 25 Chapter 1 Artworks as strangers? Encounters with two Monumental Artworks in Montreal Laurent Vernet 51 Chapter 2 Urban Pranks as Activist Performance Susanne Shawyer 74 Chapter 3 Dance Encounters: Performing Arts as an Experimental Platform for Urban Publics Sebastian Matthias 100 Chapter 4 narratives in space+time society (nis+ts): the Hippodrome Project Robert Bean, Léola Le Blanc, Brian Lilley, Barbara Lounder, and Mary Elizabeth Luka 126 PArt twO: MAKIng Art, MAKIng tHE CIty Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Martha Radice 134 Chapter 5 Crawling with Art: Public Art Installations on James street north in Hamilton, Ontario Alison L. Bain and Nicole Rallis 161 Chapter 6 brief Encounter Lawrence Bird and Solomon Nagler 182 Chapter 7 body rhythms in Urban space: field Evidence Ellen Moffat and Kim Morgan 192 Chapter 8 Creative Engagement with Interstitial Urban spaces: the Case of Vancouver’s back Alleys Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Nick Wees 212 PArt tHrEE: MEEtIng Art In PUbLIC Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Martha Radice 219 Chapter 9 Door to Door to Door Christof Migone 249 Chapter 10 technological regionalisms: the fieldwork residency Project Wes Johnston 269 Chapter 11 Pop-Up Ethnography at the situated Cinema: Confronting Art with social science at the winnipeg festival of Moving Image Martha Radice, Brenden Harvey, and Shannon Turner 295 Illustrations 299 bibliography 325 Contributors 329 Index acknowlEdgmEnts Such an interdisciplinary book could only have come out of the kind of project where people say, in the tradition of improvisational theatre, “yes, and!” Urban Encounters: Art and the Public was, first, the name of an innovative international colloquium held in Halifax in 2013, which brought together artists, academics, and members of the public for three days of conversation and collaboration stimulated by academic papers, roundtables, artists’ talks, exhibitions, installations, and art performances. Many more people participated than are represented in this book, but we would especially like to acknowledge here the commentators in a roundtable on public art, whose discussion contributed to the arguments and structure of the introduction: Alison Bain, Peter Dykhuis, Eleanor King, and Jamie MacLellan, who were skilfully interviewed by CBC radio journalist Stephanie Domet. The colloquium would not have been possible without the hard work of Tonya Canning, who coordinated the conference side of things, and Michael McCormack and Annie Onyi Cheung who coordinated the art exhibitions and performances. We would also like to thank the student assistants at the colloquium, especially Brenden Harvey and Brenna Sobanski, for taking notes on the roundtable and research- creation workshop. NSCAD University and the Khyber Centre for the Arts graciously hosted the event’s urban encounters. The colloquium itself was a crucial part of a broader research-creation project, Tracing the City: Interventions of Art in Public Space, funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that also supported this publication (award no. 848-2010-0019, 2011–15). Principal investigators Solomon Nagler, Kim Morgan, and Martha Radice started delving deep into interdisciplinary research-creation when they met in 2009, later inviting collaborators Christopher Kaltenbach, Ellen Moffat, and Erin Wunker to join in too. The colloquium, this book as a whole, and in particular the chapters by Bird and Nagler, Moffat and Morgan, and Radice, Harvey, and Turner, are the fruits of a collaboration that was as exciting and productive as it was challenging. The Tracing the City team would like to thank NSCAD University colleague Bruce Barber for his unflagging support for the project, as well as Nethra Samarawickrema for her early research assistance in gathering in its intellectual strands. Working together on this book has been a real pleasure for us. We would like to thank all the contributors for their patience, diligence, and rapid response times but most of all for their stimulating, creative ideas. Will Straw, coeditor of the Culture of Cities series, and Jonathan Crago, editor-in-chief at McGill-Queen’s University Press, have been champions of the book since its beginnings and offered wise counsel at all stages. We also thank the anonymous reviewers whose astute comments strengthened many parts of the book. Emily Fraser provided invaluable research assistance and eagle-eyed skills in manuscript preparation. We are grateful for the McGill-Queen’s production team’s help during the final steps toward publication. Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences granted Martha Radice a Burgess Award, which gave her precious extra research time in winter 2015 for editorial work. We both appreciate the general support of our departments and colleagues at Dalhousie University and the University of Victoria, as well as the fertile field of anthropology in Canada, which keeps both of us inspired. viii Acknowledgments Urban EncoU ntErs