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Shape-shifter, Canadian Art, Winter 2008, pp. 90-91 |
OCAD’s location—close to other universities, hospitals, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the city’s media and theatre districts and business— has provided the school with a thriving situation, though it is her students’ diversity that perhaps excites Diamond most of all. The multicultural student body with which Toronto has provided OCAD is eager, competitive and inventive, such that even the yellow stairwell descending from the Sharp Centre has been transformed into a gallery of politically motivated graffiti art. (The theme was antiwar when I passed through.) Its polyethnic dynamic is a clear manifestation of Florida’s ideas about how urban clustering results in the unexpected—and the creation of wealth.
OCAD’s current sensibility is underpinned by the business ties that Diamond is fostering and by the transformation of OCAD into a credited university. The school’s ability to offer students degrees is a tool that Diamond as well as students can use to add value to the school’s titular poles of “art” and “design.” Society has been in the habit of imagining a tension here. We tend to think of the former as the inherently “creative” pursuit—and one whose practitioners, says Florida, are typically less susceptible to authority or conventional corporate hierarchies—and the latter as more manageable and commercially inclined. It is a friction that Diamond recognizes, but one that, she believes, can contribute to rather than hinder the development of those “disciplined imaginations that can blend emotion and form.”
“In Canada, because of the nature of arts funding,” says Diamond, “we tend to see ourselves as operating outside the market, but young people move quite easily between support systems and practices; so there is a great deal of malleability between the two poles. We want to keep those frictions in play and that’s why the ethical discussion is so interesting. Can we have a critical practice? What is our influence outside? At OCAD, this discussion is happening all the time—at the student, program and faculty levels. It’s understood that design is changing so fundamentally that the debates about how research is managed, or how these fields interact at a global level in a world of AIDS, poverty and sustainability challenges, are actually quite Heideggerian.”
Diamond is frank about being a “keen lobbyist” and is proud of how OCAD is developing a “deep cluster strategy about how to bring people together.” It is an essential part of her platform, which foregrounds research, community involvement and viable contributions to the market. Under her tutelage, the school has identified a set of “institution-wide thematic priorities” that deliberately anticipated the budget priorities of the Government of Ontario.
OCAD’s greatest advantage, however, still resides in the fact of the city itself being the greater studio. Only the studio has been altered and aggrandized. In OCAD’s early days, its location in the park named for the Grange—the old York-era building that is now part of the Art Gallery of Ontario—typified thinking that was, by virtue of its context, perhaps experimental but certainly somewhat agrarian. But now the city sprouts around OCAD and demands a different dialectic, something Diamond is taking full advantage of. “Toronto,” she says, “is at a really interesting moment in terms of its lack of allure, architecturally, so that new projects have real gravitas, and in terms of technology are about making ugly corners beautiful and sustainable. Part of the advantage of Toronto having such a positive awareness of these issues is that there’s an arts scene that just keeps going. Toronto has a force and a quality of growth that makes it a very exciting ally.”
For Florida, Toronto is an example of “what geographers call a new spatial fix.” In history, he explained, there was the town, the industrial city and then the suburban one, but now there’s a new kind of urban form such as you see in Toronto and Mississauga— one that has both an intensive and an extensive reach.
“We’re developing a new kind of city and who knows what it’s going to look like,” Florida has said. “Perhaps a dense mass. The countries that can figure these places out and the infrastructure that will support these new sorts of megacities that are urban and suburban at the same time are going to have a real economic advantage.”
If Diamond has her way, then OCAD will have made a contribution.
Such may be the school’s, and Toronto’s, avenir. And yet an equally fundamental point about urban context is that all cities have a distinct character and each is rooted in a particular history and place.
We will respectfully borrow and acknowledge the Métis tradition of the runner—the community facilitator who ran from home to home, bringing news and editorial, linking stories and ideas within a community, and binding together fragments, playing a provocative role in anticipating, initiating and facilitating dialogues, healing conflicts…
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The nature of Toronto and the city’s own relationship to place is that—as John Ralston Saul has argued in his book A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada—it is a city in a Métis, not a European or American mould, though it lacks an appropriate vocabulary to discuss or take advantage of this fact. OCAD is helping to develop that vocabulary. The day before we spoke, Diamond attended a meeting of OCAD’s Aboriginal Educational Council, of which James Bartleman, the part-Ojibwa former Lieutenant Governor of Ontario (and now Chancellor of OCAD) is Chair. Following on her experience in Alberta, Diamond believes in and promotes the qualities of negotiation and respect, and the inclusive values of the Circle that Saul believes are integral not just to the First Nations but to Canadian civilization as a whole. She has used these ideas to improve OCAD’s syllabus and anchor it in a geography that extends beyond the immediate city.
“Like any other part of Canada,” says Diamond, “Toronto is actually an Aboriginal place. There are more than 17,000 Aboriginal Canadians living in the metropolitan Toronto region,” she continues, enthusing about the optimism and qualities of leadership and self-realization that, contrary to the popular mythology, she encounters on the Aboriginal Educational Council. At OCAD, where courses in Native art have been offered since 1990, she has embarked on a full-scale Aboriginal Visual Culture Program, which is expected to be launched in its entirety in the academic year 2010–11. This is not a hollow gesture. It is intended, in keeping with her Floridian ideas, to augment not just students’ consciousness of art but their readiness for jobs, and includes plans for a meeting place and improved links to the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation.
The program will be, in effect, another means of bridging that often calamitous divide between rural areas and the gregarious city. “Along with the Sustainability Program,” says Diamond, “the Aboriginal Program is absolutely a way of allowing us not to forget the non-urban and to respect that even in the most nomadic of Native cultures there is always a profound relationship to place.”
Diamond wants the best. She wants excellence. But she is circumspect about the place of a school that, no matter how original or stimulating its program, no matter how exciting its urban environment, is nevertheless situated in a city that, by virtue of Florida’s own laws of aggregation, lies a concentric ring or two outside North America and Europe’s uncontested metropoli — London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles—and the greater professional clusters and possibilities that exist in these cities, not to mention other world centres like Mumbai, Beijing and Mexico City. She expects her students to step out into the world—wants them to. And so she speaks of Canada as “an amazing base for artists and intellectuals to act globally,” but also of “the need to build a loyal culture in the city that sees the world outside Toronto and that has worked outside Toronto.” Eventually, she knows, the vitality of OCAD’s student body—its fecund diversity, the dynamism born out of Toronto’s “spatial fix”—will reward a city that may learn, in time, to appreciate its arts institutions more.
She can wait. In the meantime, there’s enough excitement at her gates.
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