Denver Art Gallery


The ROM Crystal

When a building as radically different as the ROM's Crystal juts into our visual consciousness, the natural instinct is to think it is unique to our city. With the opening on Oct. 7 of Denver's new art gallery addition, also by architect Daniel Libeskind, some Torontonians are wondering if we got a copy of a crystal, not the original.

It is important to remember the Denver Art Gallery's Frederic C. Hamilton Building began its life years ahead of the ROM's Michael Lee Chin Crystal. Libeskind was already designing the Denver building before he dashed off the infamous napkin drawings as his entry to the ROM expansion competition.

So, it is no surprise both buildings adopt a language that Libeskind first brought to world attention with his Jewish Museum in Berlin. He continues to use his personal design style in proposals for the World Trade Center in New York and many others.

Why not? After all, we all know a Frank Gehry building when we see one. Why can't the ROM Crystal be part of a series of architectural works by one of the world's more innovative building designers?

Still, some say they feel cheated. Maybe the experience is like being a child waiting expectantly for the newest bike at Christmas, only to wake up and see every kid on the block riding one.

Novelty is serious business in the world of art tourism. A city's unique architectural treasures attract visitors. Those people bring tourist dollars. We need them.
How important are those dollars? In New York, marketing firm Audience Research & Analysis says that the Museum of Modern Art generates about $2-billion in spending in that city. That is billion with a ''b.'' Culture is big business.

What happens to those dollars when almost overnight an attraction's uniqueness is seemingly undercut by the opening of another, familiar looking building? Will this lessen tourists' desire to visit our city?

The ROM's CEO, William Thorsell, says no, it is a mistake to look at two different buildings from ''35,000 feet'' and conclude they are the same.
''There are some superficial resemblances,'' says Thorsell, ''but they are two very different buildings. If you look at Libeskind's buildings up close, each is a unique solution to its context and program.''

''The Denver gallery is much different than the ROM Crystal. Their building stands alone on a side street, while ours engages the existing building on one of Toronto's major streets. Theirs is less transparent.''

Thorsell is confident enough to speculate that, ''Many people would find it a great thing to go back and forth between the two buildings to see how different and unique they are.''

It is easy to agree. Toronto is in the process of constructing buildings that will define the city's culture for decades to come. Diamond and Schmidt's opera house led the way, along with KPMB's Gardiner Museum renovation. Both are successful and both are unique in that they respond to local site conditions and (...read more...)

Every once in a while we have the opportunity to look at how other countries manage their transportation infrastructure (you may remember our "Traffic Without Control" posting). Reader J. Loewen passed these images along. They were taken in Asia. While we don't recommend these techniques as the answer to reducing truck traffic on Toronto's roads, they do suggest that there are more efficient ways to move goods and materials around town. Instead of using tractor trailers we just have to be innovative.

By Gary Michael Dault

I was reading in bed last night, as I always do before I sleep, and in the middle of p. 12 of John Livingstone Lowes’ endlessly charming and often dangerously intoxicating book about the means and methods of aesthetic invention, The Road To Xanadu (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927)—gratefully bought at the Trinity College Book sale on Monday for five bucks—the learned and witty professor Lowes notes in passing that “Chaos precedes cosmos” (The Road to Xanadu, which, at its centre, is an epically-scaled attempt to understand the making of just two poems by Coleridge, is subtitled “A Study in the Ways of the Imagination”.)

He goes on to insist that “every expression of an artist is merely a focal point of the surging chaos of the unexpressed” (p.13).

For some reason, this led me to muse not on Coleridge but rather on painter Harold Klunder, whose latest exhibition, now at Toronto’s Clint Roenisch Gallery, is such a endless delight. I wrote about Klunder’s exhibition last Saturday in The Globe & Mail, but there’s more I want to add about his work—and it’s specifically about paint.

Paint—pigment—is, as we all know, a presumably beleaguered medium with which to make art. It is always under siege, regarded as a substance, now five hundred years old, that has outlived itself a useful means to any expressive end. Paint, so the clichés of animadversion upon it run, is mostly a matter of overly-hedonistic play: paint leads to a kind of finger-painting for adults, a therapeutic messing-around that may well be relaxing, but can scarcely be significant.

And yet artists, who wish (who demand) to be taken seriously, continue to paint. Why?

Harold Klunder, who came to Canada from The Netherlands in 1955 and is now sixty-three, has been painting for forty years. For him, paint is as hedonist as it is for any other painter—considerable more so, I’d say, judging from the lushness, the generosity, and (to quote myself for a moment), the “full-stop plenitude of his pauseless inventiveness with the brush…”. I encourage the viewer (in the Globe piece) to “look up close and revel on the poolings, clottings and vortices of the artist’s painterly worlds-within-worlds”.

Klunder’s paintings may look fast at first glance; they may look like the broken, convulsive aftermath of some abstract-expressionist storm that has broken over them and moved quickly by. But Klunder is no action-painter. Look closely at this detail (above) from one of his current paintings, and you’ll see straightaway the degree to which the artist has been deliberate in his adding of colour to colour, layer over layer: see how daubs rest heavily on previous daubs? How a twist of a red-laden brush (at the upper left) deposits its redness on a previously positioned disc of pink which has, itself, been carefully bounded by yellow—which yellow has further occluded a swabbing of coral at the very upper left. You can see how deliberate—almost ponderous—all this is—the process is as much like building as (...read more...)

Our apologies to Reading Toronto fans for the site down time. Technology! We are back though and will be posting a Gary Michael Dault blog later this morning.