The National Gallery Of Canada As An Automotive Showroom

Just possibly, I’m more familiar with this rotunda than most people are, because from September 1996 to May 1998, during an NGC research fellowship, I occupied an office whose only window overlooked it. And while the view was not spectacular, I became very familiar with that softly illuminated octagon, and with its austere cut-stone walls and four routes of egress: one to the 20th century art exhibition rooms; one to the wide concourse that leads to the Great Hall, one to the restaurant, and one -- via a flight of stairs -- to the locked doors of the curatorial wing, which was closed to the public.

But if I recognized the space, I could see also that its contents had drastically changed.

When I had the office, the rotunda was occupied by a very different kind of car: John Scott’s TransAm Apocalypse #2, that had been moved to this less conspicuous part of the Gallery from the Great Hall, after a high-profile stay there of many months. Rumour at the time was that this move was due to the cash cow status of the Great Hall, which was rented out at $5000 per day for charity functions, parties, and affairs of state. There was, I was told by someone within the Gallery, an extra expense in guarding the car. But there was also the problem -- I was told by someone else -- that such festivities beneath the symmetrical glass and steel ceilings, overlooking the Parliament Buildings and the Ottawa River, did not always welcome the silent presence of a most uncanny guest: the all black TransAm (actually a disguised Pontiac Firebird) that was hand-engraved in white with the entire text of the Book of Revelation.

Ah, that John Scott. What a sense of humour. As well as of other things. Once upon a time, I was so impressed with the semantic volatility of TransAm Apocalypse #2's presence in the Great Hall that I even wrote an article about it, called "Which John? Visions of the Apocalypse at the National Gallery." (C Magazine #48, January 1996)

But I’ve also been given to understand that, over the past few years, and under the post-1998 directorship of Pierre Théberge, TransAm Apocalypse #2 has most of the time been banished not simply to the rotunda or even to one of the more neutral display rooms, but to basement storage, so that its thought-provoking blend of automotive technology with biblical end-of-the-world prophecy goes unconsidered by anyone.

That’s been disappointing enough.

Now, though, it seems that Théberge -- whose personal expense account, autocratic style and cultivation of favour with the politically powerful suggest the predilections if not the mind of a Cardinal Richelieu -- has not been content with cleansing the NGC’s access route of this brilliant example of art as a thoughtful questioning of dominant norms.

In a big and very publicly visible step further, he’s provided the National Gallery as a prostrate context for the affirmation of precisely those norms.

So to elaborate on that commercial: The rotunda was lit with low-gothic melodrama, as within it the silver car -- that I quickly learned was a Hyundai -- rotated slowly. The car was then shown from above moving smoothly along the wide flat concourse toward the Great Hall, with the modulated lighting suggesting that the ad had been filmed at night. There was the usual hype-filled vocal commentary, but my focus throughout these surprise thirty seconds was almost entirely on the visuals. Once the car reached the glassed in round of the Great Hall, the camera angle seemed to widen, emphasizing -- with continued background darkness and dramatic lighting -- the symmetry and expansiveness of the glass and steel ceiling above the car. I’ve seen this version of the commercial only once, so I’m not entirely clear as to its final seconds. But it seemed as though the car was then linked, through rapid jump-cuts, with the ceiling, whose symmetries themselves converge to a single centre.

Cut to the Hyundai logo on a black background, and thence to the CBC National News.

Which I at this point did not even watch, striving as I was to digest this other news that the interior of the National Gallery of Canada had not only just appeared in a car commercial, but provided the context for the figurative launch of this car toward the outside world. For the route followed by the car in the ad was indeed from the very core of the building out: directly the opposite to both the entry route taken by a visitor to the NGC, and the route followed by TransAm Apocalypse #2 in its demotion from the Great Hall to the rotunda, and then to storage. Yet the silver Hyundai did not get all the way out. Instead, it stopped in the Great Hall, so there was no trace of the access route's most immediately distinctive feature: the long, straight, gradually sloping colonnade ramp that leads to the Great Hall from the Gallery entrance. This absence was accompanied by two others that seemed just as germane to unpacking the significance of this ad. At no point in the commercial was there any trace, anywhere, in any form, of that art which is, supposedly, the raison d’être of the National Gallery of Canada. And thirdly: at no point either was the setting itself identified as the National Gallery.

I’ve since seen another version of this commercial, after being told by a Gallery spokesperson Emily Tolot that there are three. Indeed I may even have seen all of these, given that a Hyundai spokesperson, Mark Orlando, told me that two of them differ only in the models of car that appear. But in this second and possibly third ad, the ending is not so spectacular. Instead, not one but several silver cars move slowly in line from the rotunda along the concourse to the Great Hall, where they are then arranged as in a literal automobile showroom. In front of them is an easel-mounted sign (this is an art museum, remember) in white on red (this is Canada, remember) that indeed emphasizes the "launch" theme by proclaiming "2004 LAUNCH SPECIALS," above the Hyundai corporate logo. But again, there’s a negative complementarity to this identifying logo, in the form of a three-part absence: no recognizable Colonnade ramp; no art, at least as it’s been historically defined; and no identification of a building designed, with $165 million in public funds, to house not simply art, but Canada’s national approach to art, developed and assembled over one and a quarter centuries.

The view the first Hyundai representative to whom I spoke about this last and most prominent absence ˆ a woman named Barb who did not give her last name -- was blunt: "Why should the building be identified? The ads are promoting Hyundai, not the National Gallery of Canada." And the Gallery spokesperson indeed confirmed that the commercials were contracted as part of the Gallery’s "rentals program." Mr. Orlando elaborated, telling me that the ad’s concept was developed by Peter Gilboy, the creative director of the agency Bates Canada, who apparently saw a lot of "potential" in the building’s architecture. The agency itself then approached the Gallery administration, found them congenial, and arranged for the space in exchange for an undisclosed sum of money, and conditions that included the absence of any exhaust fumes within the Gallery. The cars were therefore, according to Mr. Orlando, towed or "free-wheeled" along the concourse.

The overall implication seemed however to be that, in legal terms, the National Gallery once rented out by its administrators could with minimum fuss be demoted to neutral, if especially spectacular, space for Hyundai’s commercial publicity. The Gallery’s own process of demotion ˆ in analogue to that of TransAm Apocalypse #2 a few years ago -- perhaps adds some further spin to the absence in the commercials of the long straight Colonnade ramp as an especially distinctive part of Gallery architecture. Were the NGC’s administrators just a bit ashamed, perhaps, that they had rented out this publicly owned building ˆ described by its board in 1982 as "the most significant of our national cultural institutions" ˆ as background shill-space for a South Korean-based multinational? Was their assumption that the less prominent rotunda and concourse would not be as easily recognized as the Colonnade ramp might have been?

But maybe I’m giving the administration’s sensitivities too much credit even in suggesting this. Maybe the commercial’s designers simply felt that the Great Hall would provide the most spectacular climax. This is not the sort of thing that the principals in the event seem disposed to talk about. One of the bottom lines, however, is surely this: Precisely because of the car’s initial siting -- in the rotunda so close to the curatorial wing as the Gallery's operational inner sanctum -- the sense in all the ads, for anyone familiar with the building’s design, is that the cars are moving out from this inner sanctum. So what is conveyed more subtly is the message that this is the image of the NGC itself which the administration working within that sanctum has now opted to present to a national audience.

As an unidentified automotive showroom.

For the manufactured products of a South Korean corporation.

There is a sense, I suppose, in which this use of the National Gallery is a direct, and maybe even predictable development of Théberge’s 1995 show on automobile design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts while he was director there. Yet this conspicuously commercial but anonymous use of the National Gallery seems a big step even from that, as well as an indication of just how much funding models have been transformed, without much protest, in Canada. Back in 1984 John McAvity, as director of the Canadian Museums Association, protested loudly in the Globe and Mail about a proposal that private funding sources might be found to bring the National Gallery building itself to completion: "We need guarantees that our national cultural institutions will not be held hostage to arbitrary and private interests, guarantees that our national institutions will remain truly ours." How things have changed, with the placement of these Hyundai ads before the CBC national news, and their frequent repetition in several versions and on several TV networks, ensuring a full-spectrum Canadian audience for a much humbled, unnamed version of this very building.

Now I’m aware, of course, that a lot of money, and a lot of corporate advertising ingenuity, are going into car commercials these days, emphasizing both the extent to which the auto industry is one of the engines of the Canadian ˆ or should I say North American, or should I say global -- economy, and the profitable role of cars themselves as high status symbols of the marriage between the human and the technological. And in a society that honours freedom of speech, that’s fair enough. But that cars are also major contributors to greenhouse gas production; major transformers of cities into pollution-choked gridlock; and major adjuncts to a shift of cultural paradigm from the human to the techno-dependent cyborg does not tend to be emphasized in such tightly edited and flashy ads. No, these are the sorts of links with automotive technology that were suggested, with subtlety and eloquence, by TransAm Apocalypse #2, as exemplary of contemporary art itself in its questioning and implicitly critical role. In the role, that is, which was identified with it in 1982 by the Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee, under Louis Applebaum and Jacques Hébert, which wrote that " the cultural sphere, embracing as it does artistic and intellectual activity, has as one of its central functions the critical scrutiny of all other spheres including the political."

Sadly, though, the National Gallery of Canada has, especially since Théberge’s arrival in 1998, been turning sharply away from such a role. Throughout this period, I’ve myself been trying to play down and even ignore the trend, hoping that it would reverse, while I’ve worked in Toronto on completing an independent critical history of the NGC as an institution. But instead the trend has just jumped energy levels, even as -- ironically -- this critical history has just been published. Hitherto under Théberge’s directorship, the NGC’s distinctiveness as an art institution has, from my perspective anyway, been corroded most visibly through a close relationship with the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien, making for a pliant, spectacle-friendly site for affairs of state, and even -- at taxpayers’ expense -- for an additional NGC branch plant in Chrétien’s home riding of Shawinigan. Now, however, the Gallery’s administration, by providing the building as an equally pliant background for a Hyundai car ad, has linked both building and institution not only with a single corporation, but with unquestioning complicity in the methods of corporate advertising, and with the accelerating fetishization of the automobile in North America. For this is, as Mr. Orlando of Hyundai was quick to emphasize, the first time the National Gallery of Canada has ever been used as background for a commercial. And that this high profile alliance with corporate convention has come with the paradox of implicit shame, through the building’s appearance without identifying markers, only adds further to the National Gallery’s almost relentless diminution as a dynamic public presence in Canadian life since Théberge’s arrival, after a semantically rich, and often dramatic period of controversial installations from 1991-97. A period that basically came to an end with Trans-Am Apocalypse #2's departure from the Great Hall on its own path to storage.

And so what is to be made of the fact that the Gallery’s administration has opted for this style of public linkage just months into Théberge’s appointment to a second five-year term by the Chrétien cabinet? To speak out of my own eight years’ worth of research into NGC history: just possibly an even more profound if subtle betrayal of the Applebaum-Hébert assessment of the artist’s role in a pluralistic democracy. This is because, in offering the NGC as a venue for this sort of ad, the current administration is also implicitly linking it with corporate advertising’s customary reduction of the very concept of "the artist" to a technically skilled but anonymous someone on a corporate team, who unquestioningly and uncritically lends his or her skills to execution of a paying client’s top-down requirements for commercial promotion. And however neatly this model may fit with an especially self-serving style of postmodern cynicism, it’s a very far cry not only from Applebaum-Hébert, but from the questioning role assumed by modern art generally.

As someone who has had enough respect for the National Gallery of Canada as an art institution to investigate and try to give narrative form to its history, I’m disappointed at this very clear signal that it has, as a significant crucible for art as a questioning and critically revealing activity, just rolled over and died. But at the same time, I see in this development an if anything even more ominous caving in to one of the risks that was implicit both in the selection of Moshe Safdie as Gallery architect, and in the building that evolved from that selection. And at this juncture, just months into Théberge’s second five year term, when the National Gallery seems to be announcing its further changed role via a car ad, perhaps the nature of this risk should be clarified.

In the just-published book, I make the case that Safdie as architect brought to the project of the National Gallery some extremely reactionary views on art, that he articulated in his own 1982 book called Form and Purpose. There he accused modern artists of "narcissism" and "egocentricity," and declared that "practically nothing that has been done in the name of art during my lifetime has had any significance for my understanding of the universe. It is not a factor in how I conceive buildings." This book came out in the very year that the Applebaum-Hébert Committee presented its report. But 1982 was also the year the government of Pierre Trudeau set up a crown corporation to construct new buildings for the NGC and the Museum of Man (later the Museum of Civilization) under the guidance of Jean Sutherland Boggs, the NGC’s director from 1966 to 1976.

So how did someone with such conspicuous hostility to modern art come to be commissioned, by the government of Canada no less, to design a museum that would house, among other things, modern art? Given the extent of incongruity, I put a fair amount of energy in my own book into trying to make sense of this question. I think I found a compelling logic to the decision, that had a lot to do with Boggs’ own experience and frustrations while director of the NGC at a time when both radical artists and a Liberal super-bureaucracy called the National Museums of Canada were showing little respect for the concept of an art museum as she wanted to develop it. And the book suggests that with Safdie, Boggs found an architect who was sympathetic to her goal of providing what she called "museum aura" and "that very hallowed atmosphere within the museum which separates it from the community."

Obviously, there’s still further irony in the fact that this pursuit of "museum aura" and "hallowed atmosphere" has now been turned, by the NGC’s current administration, toward the service of a South Korean auto company, via a slickly made TV ad. The Canadian government, however, by investing in Boggs’ recommendation of Safdie as architect, was also investing in someone who not only disliked modern art, but also had uncommon regard for the sacral and authoritarian architectural styles of the ancient past. This regard extended to an assessment of the preferred role of artists. In Form and Purpose, Safdie showed particular relish for how artists were treated at the court of the absolute emperor Darius the Great in sixth century BC Persia. According to Safdie, when Darius built his capital Persepolis, "he searched for the great artists or craftsmen and commissioned them to carve the story of the kingdom... If we attach the label Œartist’ to those who did the more complex work, then we can say that the artists of that age were directly involved with creating the environment."

As I note in my book, Safdie made no distinction, with this enthusiasm, between the status of artists in the "environment" cultivated by an ancient despot, and the status of artists in the "environment" of a modern democracy. Instead, he seemed to derive a surly pleasure in speculating on what might happen to an uncooperative artist under Darius. "Examining the wall-reliefs at Persepolis of the horses, parading figures, and lions all carved in stone," he wrote, "I imagined the artist going to the master mason, or maybe to the king himself, and saying, ŒI’m not going to carve horses and lions; I’m in my elephant period.’" Safdie did not elaborate on a next phase to this scenario. But he gave the distinct impression it would not be pleasant.

Under Darius as an absolute emperor, then, "the artist" was absorbed into a collective, anonymous, but entirely top-down project of carving "the story of the kingdom." And no, this model of "the artist" does not correlate well with the questioning and implicitly critical role that "the artist" has assumed in modernity, and that so offended the Safdie of Form and Purpose. Yet this ancient example may have its own contemporary analogue precisely in the seductions now offered artists -- as those who do "the more complex work" -- by the sort of activity exemplified by that Hyundai commercial: well-paid assignments within collective, anonymous, but entirely top-down ad agencies, that carry out corporate instructions. This analogy also extends to the likely fate of "dissenters," as Jean Boggs herself once approvingly described contemporary artists. Clearly the "artist" who dared declare under Darius that "I’m not going to carve horses and lions; I’m in my elephant period" risked at the very least his livelihood, and possibly even his life. But in a ubiquitous marketplace ruled increasingly by corporations, is it farfetched to suggest that "the artist" who dares declare within a corporate ad agency that cars may not merit stylized representation as vehicles of earthly bliss will just as certainly be risking, if not life and limb, certainly his or her livelihood?

Yet eloquent voices raising just such questions are surely indispensable to the health of both the public domain and pluralistic democracy, as counter-weights to the deep pockets and media slickness of big corporations. Among these eloquent voices can be individual artists whose sense of visual form and of compressed gesture may enable them to produce objects that expose, in compelling ways, what is often hidden or taken for granted . The National Gallery has in the past provided a venue for such artists. And paradoxically, the authoritarian and sacral symmetries of the Safdie/Boggs building are even such as to make for intense contrasts, that ensure that this art stands out and challenges all the more. Examples of such installations abound from the early to mid 1990s, when the terms of the new building were often tested: Jana Sterbak’s Flesh Dress for an Anemic Anorectic; Tadashi Kawamata’s Favela, Teresa Marshall’s Elitekey, and, of course, TransAm Apocalypse #2.

But that is not the version of the artist that got such high profile visual linkage with the National Gallery, and implicit affirmation by the National Gallery, via the Hyundai ad, placed so prominently right before the CBC national news. And there’s also a more sinister side to the building that certainly does lend itself -- especially under an intellectually weak, politically compromised, or power-besotted administration -- toward that version of "the artist" which was promoted by Safdie in his panegyric on Darius’ Persepolis. This is indeed a version that has little to do with the aggressive and often iconoclastic inquisitiveness of modern art: the kind of art Safdie made clear he loathed. But it’s a version that has a lot to do with the sources of many of the building’s motifs in the architectural styles of not only of Darius’ Persia but of dynastic Egypt, the Mesopotamia of Sumer and Babylon, and mediaeval European Catholicism: all of them hierarchical and absolutist societies that had little respect for the individual, no investment in democracy, and little tolerance for art-as-dissent.

The atmospherics of the Hyundai car ads set in the NGC are in this sense doubly suspect. No human beings appear in the ads: not even the drivers of the cars. Nor is there any trace of the individually-produced art that is, supposedly, the NGC’s raison d’être. There is only a direct one-to-one visual relationship between the inside of the unnamed Safdie-Boggs building, and an anonymously produced, visually glamorized corporate product: the silver Hyundai. The innuendo is such as precisely to affirm Safdie’s linkage, in Form and Purpose, of the term "artists" with the anonymous craftsmen "who did the more complex work" in Darius’ Persepolis. But with an equally anonymous ad agency and a South Korean car corporation taking the place of Darius as top-down authority.

So are the unnamed designers who, as part of corporate production teams, compliantly did "the more complex work" on both the car and the ad the kind of "contemporary artists" with which the National Gallery of Canada now seeks to be identified, in one of the few images of the institution likely to reach a wide audience? Certainly, the Hyundai car company seemed to recognize the building’s potential in terms of putting an especially depersonalized spin on their own product. And given the Théberge administration’s already pliant coziness with the government, perhaps this new prostration before corporate wealth and power is only a logical next step, amid the already authoritarian motifs of the building. But if this signifies an ominous beginning to Théberge’s second term as appointed director, it also signifies a sad retreat from the NGC’s own complex and nuanced history; from any affirmation of art as questioning or critical; and even from the potential that was created by the building design in regard to a questioning, context-specific contemporary art. Instead, the visual equation is of the NGC not with art, or with the people of Canada, but with corporate profitability, dehumanized techno production values, and a South Korea-based multinational.

That’s pretty sad.

But as a final comment, I must also note that, in the four months since my critical history of the National Gallery came out with McGill-Queen's University Press, I've not heard a peep from anyone inside the NGC, though the institution received ten free copies. Perhaps even formerly independent curatorial opinion has now been bullied into silence, I don’t know. But my overall impression after seeing these commercials is that rather than rise to the challenge of the book on its own level of thought and concept, the NGC administration has opted to flee in the opposite direction by implicitly renouncing both of these, and publicly identifying itself, the building, and the National Gallery of Canada with uninterrogated corporate values. Indeed, the best they seem to be able to do by way of response, via the directional atmospherics of a Hyundai ad, is suggest that the administrative core of the National Gallery has now become a source of such values. As also of a nice shiny (South Korean) car.

That’s not just sad. It’s pathetic.

What ever happened to art as a form of questioning?

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A visually enhanced version of the Foreword to The National Gallery of Canada: Ideas Art Architecture can be read at Ord’s Website