Cavalia Tents, Seen from Hinge Park, Village on False Creek, Vancouver 2011, © Leslie Hossack

By Jess Linnay   /   Photos by Leslie Hossack

“City of death, city of friends.” — George Stanley, Vancouver: A Poem

What is to be said about the municipal culture in Vancouver, this hodgepodge of artists, activists, addicts, transplants and tax brackets? There are many descriptions. Depending on whom you ask, Vancouver is sterile, too loose, too stiff, out of touch, gaining ground, innovative, missing something, progressing in the right way, the city of the future, or not at all present enough.

Perhaps Vancouver is all of these things, each definition standing inside out and on top of itself.

Most agree that Vancouver exists in a state of deep paradox: a complex, competitive place for West Coast-style easy livin’ and a paradise that makes such work out of life. Vancouver contradicts itself—shamelessly yet reserved—injecting itself into you beautifully, the way a painter begins brush strokes from somewhere in his or her gut and horribly, the way an addict’s needle slides through the skin. Nothing and everything is possible here: the place that’s home to the yuppie uniformity of Lululemon and to the notorious Downtown Eastside, where women disappear. Vancouver has owned both the country’s highest real estate prices and homicide rates.

Though the city dominates Canada’s “friendly West Coast” it is a community known for shrugging, cold shoulders.

This paradoxical, fragmented image extends to the arts and cultures scenes, too. Culture here often seems a puzzle with one piece missing.

For instance, as Stan Persky pointed out in the B.C. culture publication The Tyee, poet George Stanley’s book-length work Vancouver: A Poem caused nary a ripple when it was published in 2008 by New Star Books. This despite Stanley’s standing as the pinnacle of poetry talents in Vancouver.

Persky bemoaned how the book was reviewed almost nowhere, not even in Vancouver itself:

“Nothing in the Globe and Mail, Canada's allegedly ‘national newspaper.’ Ok, you say, that’s Toronto. But nothing in the Vancouver Sun, either, even though the book is by a local author and about a subject, Vancouver, that's supposedly the Sun’s bailiwick.”

The book traces the Stanley’s visions of the cityscape and as he traverses neighbourhoods by bus, reflecting on changes he’s witnessed in his almost half century in this coastal city.

Fearing not the muggers or the buggers
but that the city would tear away
from me, leaving only the mind

No, I would not
have any other knowledge (echoes Mariana
in ‘Measure for Measure’:

‘I crave no other, nor no better man’)
than this, split
between a city
that goes on (dreamed of,
through the fog, of which I am
indissolubly part--& that is imagination)

& this other dreamless part
obsessing on myself
in which I will not believe,
I will not believe in my own mind, then.

I learned

(somewhere, somewhen)

the balls & lights on the trees
& outlining the houses
stand for the fruits
of summer. That means
I can look at them & love them
for they are what they are not
& persist in their belief.
The belief that the world has in its own
real time, of which we are part.

— From Vancouver: A Poem, George Stanley

The West Coast Thing

Vancouver has been known periodically as the leading art scene in Canada, most notably in the 1960s when the city trembled with Californian rebellious, hippie culture and adopted it as a central theme in social and aesthetic art contexts. Much artistic conflict explored industrialization versus preservation of nature and the plight of gentrified neighbourhoods—ideas still prevalent in Vancouver art today.

In 1966, Iain Baxter recreated an entire four-room apartment inside a gallery and bagged everything in clear plastic wrappers, calling the installation Bagged Place. According to UBC art history professor Scott Watson, the work was a “critical referencing of the sterilization standards inherent in the abusive packaging of consumer goods, and the consequent harmful effects on the environment.”

The inherent contradictions of 1960s hippie Vancouver were not lost on observers like Watson. In his 2005 essay titled “Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos, and Squats,” Watson notes “The counter-culture of consciousness raising, Tibetan Buddhism, faux agrarianism, wilderness worship, LSD, and sexual exploration found its biggest Canadian colony in Vancouver. This “West Coast Thing” was a social and aesthetic context for Vancouver art in the 1960s. It is remarkable, despite the growing—or abiding—interest in the 1960s all over the world, that so much artistic work from this period in Vancouver is lost and, cruel to say, how many sixties artistic careers subsequently entered the twilight. This is especially odd in a city whose artistic community’s boosterism seems to know no limit and where the 1960s are forever recalled as a golden time of artistic freedom in lived and transmitted memory.”

Empty Lot, Olympic Village Site Looking East, Vancouver 2009, © Leslie Hossack

Today, in the heart of the troubled Downtown Eastside, a parking lot long untouched by developers but well worn by the homeless sits surrounded by a tall fence made of thick metal rods. A non-profit community art project brightens up this lonely corner of the city called Gastown with the work of 15 artists exhibited under the theme “Living Here.”

One of the works, by Luchia Feman, speaks of the resilience of the locals.

“It’s a child alone at night in a quasi-dangerous area, and you know it’s still going to be okay,” the artist explains. “That’s my sense of this neighbourhood.”

Feman used encaustic, a wax material, to create the piece. “I was wondering how it was going to weather, but if it degrades, so much the better,” she says. “That’s Gastown.”

Vancouver as a whole both weathers and degrades. The numbers of painters, jewelers, sculptors, furniture makers, musicians, weavers, potters, writers, printmakers, photographers, and glassblowers of all levels are simply staggering. And therein lies another paradox: no matter how bad things get you know you can find a poetry circle in Vancouver—sometimes more easily than a soup kitchen.

Southeast False Creek, Seen from Cambie Street Bridge, Vancouver 2008, © Leslie Hossack

In Persky’s insistence that more attention should have been accorded to Stanley’s Vancouver verse, we see the inherent challenge for all of the city’s artists:

“My point is: if you’re a writer in Vancouver, there’s an obvious temptation to figure out the enigma of a city that’s a cross between a multi-ethnic Floating World Shangri-La and a shabby netherworld of boarded-up storefronts, discarded heroin needles, and basket-carts of the homeless rattling through the back lanes. It might be interesting to know how a poet sees this West Coast patchwork.”

_____

Everyone wants to know
what you don’t know, or are afraid to know.
There’s no need to make anything up, I’ll tell you,
and as I do, passing

through this –passing?– heading
uphill, on Lonsdale, on the 239, in the back seat-
& it’s not time passing—still
there a sense of passing, not deeper, quite the opposite, obvious,
as
passing something from one hand to another, one person,
relinquishing—

(as if our unwillingness to leave kept getting undermined
by our unwillingness to leave it alone?)

I won’t look back, but let you know where I am,
not to locate myself in a landscape

“Left brain Capilano, right brain Kitsilano”

— From Vancouver: A Poem, George Stanley

Road Construction, Olympic Village Site Looking North, Vancouver 2008, © Leslie Hossack

Jess Linnay is a Vancouver cultural observer.

Images by Leslie Hossack are among the 24 photographs currently featured in her solo exhibition, Vancouver’s Village 2008-2011, on view until April 23, 2012 at the City of Vancouver Archives Gallery.

For more on Hossack, visit her website or her blog.