Vancouver Art in the Sixties: A Digital Trove

1/10 Boxes on Pender Street, work by Bob Arnold, photo by Michael de Courcey, 1969.

Bob "Box" Arnold placed several configurations of cardboard boxes on the street. Photos were taken of passers by interacting with the box structures. This attracted the interest of the police, who eventually requested the installation be removed.

2/10 "No Ow Now", from USCO Hubbub, by Gerd Stern, 1962.

Poem for the co-founder of USCO, a media art collective founded in New York. Gerd Stern came to Vancouver for the Fifth Festival of the Contemporary Arts.

3/10 Raw Egg Costume, art by Carole Itter, photo by Taki Bluesinger, 1974.

This photo was taken at the New Era Social Club, and the costume was used in a subsequent performance at the Western Front.

4/10 Carol in Front of Painting, photo by Richard Trueman, 1967.

5/10 Dancers in Geodesic Dome, photo by Michael de Courcey, 1970.

The Dome Show exhibition, held in conjunction with the Vancouver Art Gallery. Members of the Intermedia art collective were invited to build domes individually or communally in a variety of public spaces, from the Maplewood Mud Flats to 4th and Arbutus and in front of downtown Vancouver’s Bentall Centre.

6/10 Trips Festival, photo by Jack Dale, 1966.

Filmmaker David Rimmer is pictured with Elli Gomber at the Trips Festival, a three-day multimedia extravaganza, headlined by the Grateful Dead, at the PNE's Garden Auditorium.

7/10 Beach Assemblage, Dollarton, by Al Neil, 1960.

Longtime Dollarton Flats resident Al Neil has been a fixture in Vancouver for 50 years as an avant-garde jazz pianist and assemblage artist.

8/10 Ellen Neel and Son David, photo from the Vancouver Sun.

Traditional native art rediscovered its roots just as it became more commercial and more modern in the 1960s.

9/10 Drain #1, by Gordon Payne, 1969.

Intermedia veteran Gordon Payne was just one artist whose work evolved from LSD-influenced exuberance to practised minimalism.

10/10 Balloon Dream, by Bill Bissett, 1964.

Bill Bissett was key figure in bringing literary influences into the Vancouver visual art scene.

Previous Next

If you look to your past you'll find your present. Take the website Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. Much Vancouver art of that era was multimedia-obsessed process-based work that emphasized collaboration and community. You could say the same about the Internet.

For Ruins in Process, the ironies simply begin there.

Another is that we simply don't see enough websites like Ruins, which offers a trove of artwork, essays and interviews of interest to both academic and popular audiences. Sure, there are countless blogs about art. Any artist with a painted shake to sell has a website where you can buy it. Academics use the Internet extensively for research. But there are too few smartly curated online galleries like this one.

"The institutions and systems of the art world don't know quite what to do with [the Internet]," says Lorna Brown, a visual artist, curator and the site's editor and project manager. Perhaps, she says, artists' obsession with the notion of a permanent archival record underlies this tentative relationship with a medium that can have its plug pulled.

Ironically, of course, artists in Vancouver in the 1960s would have had no such difficulty with the Internet's ephemeral aspect. Assemblages of marine flotsam and jetsam, performance art, a pile of unmarked boxes in the middle of a Pender Street sidewalk -- these things were made to disappear. Their impermanence was essential to them.

An historical feast

Also essential at that time was the idea that Vancouver offered a blank canvas unfettered by history and expectation. Notwithstanding the efforts of artists and architects from Jack Shadbolt to BC Binning and Arthur Erickson, Vancouver really was Nowheresville in the art world. Of course, that meant most history came from elsewhere. Yet Ruins also offers a window on the roots of the internationally influential Vancouver School of photography, on the origins of a strong text-based tradition in Vancouver art, and on an important transitional period in aboriginal imagery.

For the serious student, there are essays like "Making Indian Art 'Modern'". For the '60s nostalgia junkie, there are the films What Happened Last Summer and The Be In, and a provocative Jerry Rubin speech to an auditorium full of amused acolytes and skeptics. For people who doubt that anything really important to the international art world happened way back when in Vancouver, there are bios of people like Iain Baxter. For those curious about the lively UBC scene, there are the recollections of people such as Abraham Rogatnick, who seemed to remember everything until he died on August 28 at the age of 85.

The site is rich with the images and stories of people -- Al Neil, Carole Itter, Robert Davidson, Gathie Falk -- whose work has continued to evolve and influence life in this city. It's a fascinating site to browse.

What money can buy

Of course, one reason Ruins is so good, and why sites like Ruins are so uncommon, is that it did cost money -- that annoying anathema to both democratizing process-based artists in the 1960s and some current internet aficionados. Ruins was built with a $268,000 grant from Heritage Canada and another $120,000 in in-kind contributions from the grunt Gallery and UBC's Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery.

These are hardly trifling sums of money. And here's another irony: as the Internet lays waste to entrenched ideas about intellectual property and who pays for what, the site hews to one very old-fashioned ideal. More than a third of the Heritage Canada money covered payment to artists whose work is exhibited.

Mostly that's a good thing, yet some frustration arises from copyright concerns: the images are often smaller than they ought to be, a concession to the fears about unauthorized duplication and use of the artwork on the site. In that regard, at least, this new-tech online exhibition is rather more conservative than the old art scene it documents.

It's a trifling complaint, however, about a project that shows the way for those who want to bring artwork that's dispersed in private collections or squirreled away in darkened museum storage rooms out into the light of public view.

Ruins in Process: Art in Vancouver in the Sixties will be celebrated with a party Thursday, September 3 at the Or Gallery, 555 Hamilton Street, at 7 o'clock.