“The houses in Toronto are so close to each other, but they never touch,” remarked performance artist Jacob Wren on Saturday at a Culture Congress panel on artistic intimacy. Centered on the question “l’art du CONTACT — how do we make it?”, last weekend’s gathering at Harbourfront was designed to cultivate discussion between Montreal and Toronto artists. Instead it seemed fixated on the paradoxes inherent in communication, creativity, and conflict — or as Wren put it, “the alienation of making art in an mediatized world.” Relational aesthetic practice — going out into the big, bad world to make audiences your actors, the mundane into a performance — is only possible in a city where the real estate connects as frequently as its citizens.
Seemingly though, Toronto artists are consumed with reaching out. A recent Toronto Life profile on theatre practioner Darren O’Donnell —whose Mammalion Diving Complex company has staged make-out sessions on school buses and gourmet meals prepared by Parkdale preteens — compared the possibility of using art to create social change to “hitting a hammer with a tulip.”
When local performance artist Diane Borsato dressed up local Argentian tango dancers in police uniforms and had them slow dance on random street corners for her Nuit Blanche 2006 project How To Respond in An Emergency, she wanted participants to become “distracted by intimacy”, turning the city into a happenstance musical. Her past project, Touching 1,000 People went one step further. With imperceptible gestures towards strangers — a reassuring pat on a waiter’s arm, the brushing of hands in the produce aisle — Borsato forced herself into contact with 1,000 people in Montreal and Vancouver, hoping to affect their behavior and well being. “I learned that it’s very easy to touch old people and men,” she revealed onstage. “It’s almost impossible to touch teenagers.”
But where does this contact end? And why do artists need to fill out a grant application in order to engage with other human beings? While we may believe intimacy comes from proximity (though not entirely — as Sunday’s panel discussion on online social networking would belie), touch is being touched by the art that we’re engaged in. “Art has to focus on the part that hurts,” instructed Kitchener-based sculptor Robert Linsley. “It’s all about feeling the experience, not conceptualizing it.”
This reliance on experiental communication seemed prevalent in the Congress’ kindergarden-style programming: “Show And Tell” introductions to artist’s work, a four hour-long collaborative group project between actors and animators, a tour of Parkdale as envisioned by dancer Jenn Goodwin, rewritten as personal narrative. By turning Toronto into an urban playground where children cut our hair, blowing bubbles defiantly on the steps of Queen’s Park, are local artists refashioning the city? An opportunity, as relational aesthetics critic Nicolas Bourriaud first defined the practice in 1998, for “learning how to inhabit the world in a better way”?
Over a lunch of apple juice, tuna sandwiches, and chocolate chip cookies, attendees admitted to finding their own role problematic in collaborative creation. Said director Brendan Healey, “I think I have intimacy issues."