For almost a year now, Vancouver’s artist-run centre Artspeak has been focusing on off-site, publication and performance activities rather than (and sometimes alongside) traditional art exhibitions. Cynics have implied that Artspeak’s decision may be one way for the ARC (and all like-minded organizations which likewise feel the budget pinch more severely than other art spaces) to do the most with their resources, but I’ve been impressed with the inventive and multidisciplinary projects that have emerged through their support. The Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism symposium, publication and reading room that they co-produced with Fillip seems to have provoked a wide variety of important discussions, for instance (see Clint Burnham’s report at Canadian Art for proof), while Allison Hrabluik told her audience at York University earlier this month that her PENELOPE! mail project provoked more than just artistic reciprocation: including a cease and desist letter on university letterhead and a screenshot printout of her grant application with the result (rejected) highlighted. Ouch.

Documentation of Althea Thauberger’s Carrall Street, 2008, from flickr.com

Now, in the latest issue of Fillip, Vancouver-based artist Joni Murphy has weighed in on one of Artspeak’s first OFFSITE projects, a performance-installation-intervention by multidisciplinary artist Althea Thauberger in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood titled Carrall Street. Last September, Thauberger closed down the 200 block of Carrall Street, which Artspeak occupies, with the help of the police, lit the street with cinematic lighting and had a mix of actors/performers, art viewers and unknowing passersby interact over the course of several hours. Some performers recited Wobbly-inspired speeches drawn from the city archives, while others improvised typified roles such as “drunken bar-goer” or “panhandler.”

Documentation of Althea Thauberger’s Carrall Street, 2008, from flickr.com

As Murphy points out in her review, because the location of Thauberger’s event was (and is) a highly charged one–an intersection where the tourist-friendly Gastown neighbourhood meets the Downtown Eastside, also known as “the poorest postal code in Canada”–Carrall Street created a complicated, fraught and sometimes confusing viewing experience. By lighting and dramatizing the streetscape, Thauberger drew attention to the ethical and relational issues that the Downtown Eastside inevitably raises, but Murphy questions whether this temporary intervention will be effective in any meaningful or long-term way. Echoing Claire Bishop‘s critique of the social effects of relational aesthetics, Murphy poses the question, “what types of relations are being produced [in Carrall Street], for whom and why?”

Documentation of Althea Thauberger’s Carrall Street, 2008, from flickr.com

Key to Murphy’s critique is her argument that the theatricality of Thauberger’s project put its polemical intent in jeopardy. By theatricalizing an already over-represented area (in commercial film, news media and even contemporary artwork, especially in Vancouver) and setting up a fairly clear divide between performers and spectators, Murphy worries that Thauberger’s project reemphasized differences between the viewers and subjects rather than engendering unexpected meetings and interactions. She writes, and I can’t help but agree,

I can’t help wondering what Carrall Street would have been like if Thauberger had illuminated the street where John Furlong, the VANOC (Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games) chief executive, lives. Or set up lights in front of developer Bob Rennie’s house. As a collector, Rennie is a huge force in the art community, and both Rennie and Furlong control projects that have a far greater influence on the face of the city and on the DTES specifically than any individual at Carrall Street that night. Yet, their neighbourhoods are rarely the subject of representation, and few people in this town would recognize them by sight. Wealth can often buy protection from bright lights and scrutiny.

Carrall Street Public Forum hosted by Artspeak, October 2008, from flickr.com

The problem, of course, with any project that attempts to represent the under-represented or demonized is that it suffers from a burden of representation: it becomes encumbered by a lot of expectations from viewers to ‘represent everything,’ which is impossible. I think that Carrall Street suffers in part from these expectations, which Vancouver viewers in particular have for art projects about the Downtown Eastside. Perhaps the public forum that was held in conjunction with Thauberger’s project was meant to address some of these issues through dialogue and to unpack some of the results of the artistic intervention. It’s something Murphy doesn’t have the chance to explore in her review, but I, for one, am curious about the discussions that resulted from it.