Canadian Art Galleries: Fire, Fine Lines and Bats!
- drawhoorah
- Sep 8
- 4 min read
What is the purpose of art? Why is it presented in galleries? How are we supposed to engage with the art pieces and then with each other? Galleries across Canada have had ideas to get your attention and to help you understand what you are looking at.
In 1989, The National Gallery of Canada purchased Colour Field painter Barnett Newman’s 1967 painting, “Voice of Fire”, for 1.8 million dollars. The gallery used up ¾ of their annual tax payer funded budget to acquire this one painting and the public was outraged. The National Gallery has been getting skewered in the press since then for spending so much money on a single piece of American art. After the purchase I decided I had to see it for myself so I jumped on the bus and went to Ottawa.
“Voice of Fire” looked unremarkable in my art history textbook. It was three vertical stripes, alternating blue to red that depicted the biblical story of the burning bush. The photo of the painting had oversized dimensions but didn’t give any hint of the actual scale. So when I walked into the National Gallery I was not prepared for the real ‘Voice of Fire”. It towered above me at 18 feet high by 8 feet wide. Three vertical stripes shot up to the ceiling but the colours flared up against each other making it look like the stripes were moving, glowing on fire and alive. I stood below the painting feeling small as an ant and completely hypnotised.
An older man walked by me on his way into the gallery.
“What a waste of money”, he muttered. We looked at each other. He was expecting validation.
“But it’s so beautiful”, I insisted.
He pulled a face and kept walking. He had bowed to the public pressure and had closed his mind to the possibilities.
We both had such different opinions but art exists to create discussion and different points of view. I felt bad for my immediate indignation when I should have invited discussion instead. Meanwhile the National Gallery cleverly put itself on the map with this controversial acquisition and the discussion and the ticket sales continue to this day with just this one piece of art.
While I was not prepared for the scale of “Voice of Fire”, a scale switch happened to me again at the Vancouver Art Gallery. I had been working in a framing shop helping to frame massive wall sized posters of Salvador Dali’s “Persistence of Memory”. The real work was being shown at the VAG so I went on a break to go and see it.
Dali’s real work was actually only 11x 14 inches! It was the same size as the page of a notebook. The painting was a tiny, detailed, melting nightmare. Dali must have used a magnifying glass and a size 0 brush or maybe even the tip of his moustache to paint some of the details. The lines were so fine it almost looked like a drawing.
“Persistence of Memory” was on a wall all by itself so viewers could understand the true scale of this Surrealist masterpiece. I was delighted to see the tiny painting and the thoughtful effort of the VAG’s presentation to remind us that not all masterpieces are mammoth or representational.
On a different trip to the VAG, my boyfriend and I decided to check out “Bat Project", an installation by Huang Yong Ping. Huang Yong Ping was a Chinese dissident and Avant garde artist. Huang was one of the earliest contemporary Chinese artists to consider art as strategy. The installation contained the decayed fuselage of a real American spy plane with a bat logo on its tail fin. The installation had to do with an international spy plane crash incident between China and the US and somehow, resourceful Huang Yong Ping had managed to purchase the body of the plane wreckage. But when we walked inside the plane the ceiling and walls were lined with hundreds of taxidermied bats! There were other bats suspended from the ceiling carrying away parts to the plane. Bats are considered good luck in China but somewhat feared in North America the wall mount description stated. I was definitely uncomfortable inside the plane, worried I might accidently touch one. I was shocked that there were so many dead bats. How did he obtain all the bats? But I liked the installation even though I didn’t fully understand it at the time. My boyfriend tried to keep it together but ended up humming the batman theme in an uncomfortable loop.
The artist had left packs of post it notes and pens to leave comments and post them on the wall. This part of the show was extremely important as Ping wasn’t able to do this part of his installation in China. My thoughtful boyfriend grabbed a chair, built the batman logo out of sticky notes and put it up high on the wall to vindicate him. I read some of the other post-it notes. Everyone, like me, was getting too hung up on the sheer volume of bats. Some of the notes were not kind, people were getting a bit grossed out.
A couple of weeks later animal rights activists tried to shut down Ping’s installation citing animal cruelty. Ping responded that he had obtained all his bats as donations from taxidermy shops and private citizens from around the world. He had not killed them himself. The VAG backed him up and his controversial installation stayed. I was very happy to hear that Ping’s installation had stayed; differing opinions are great but not censorship. The success of Ping's show actually spurred the Museum of Vancouver to do a display show of their taxidermy collection a few years later titled, “Ravishing Beasts.”
Art Galleries draw on controversial art on purpose to get you to think about what is important to you. They do their best to communicate the artists ideas through presentation and marketing. Art Galleries are defenders of free speech. Art Galleries want you to talk to everyone about what you have just seen. It’s like reading a book and recommending it to a friend. To anyone who has never visited a gallery, consider it. It might change your mind about certain topics or just challenge you to think differently. You might remain steadfast in your own opinion but at least you have looked into someone else’s reality or idea and learned from it.
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