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GGs in Review: Raising the Ottawa Bar

When I lived in Montreal there was a special term that used to come up from time to time: “Ottawa bar.” It meant a bar that was tidy and serviceable, if a little bit dull and early to close. This contrasted, of course, with the implied “Montreal bar” ideal, which meant something messy and vibrant, disordered and bohemian—and most certainly open late.

Yet visiting Ottawa last weekend—in part to take in the just-opened Governor General’s Awards exhibition at the National Gallery—seemed to put the lie to Rideau’s dull-as-dishwater psychogeographic stereotype. Sure, Ottawa’s the seat of our (mostly) sedate government. Sure, it’s rife with civil servants and other stable, risk-averse, middle-class professionals. Sure, its best-known festival focuses on delicate tulip-sniffing, not hot, crowd-thronging jazz nor cool, paparazzi-hunted film celebs.

But by golly, Ottawa is interesting in its own ways—ones quite acutely important to those of an artistic bent.

Visually, the city is a treasure trove of national iconography. Almost every viewpoint along Sussex Drive offers rich architectural juxtapositions: A peacekeeping monument superimposes on, alternately, the American embassy or the Canadian parliament, at the same time seeming to surveil both powers. The American embassy has that incredible, can’t-believe-the-architect-got-away-with-it two-faced façade, transparent on its parliament-facing side and fortress-like on the other. Further down the drive, two silvery spires of a Catholic church mirror twinned Canadian flags reaching heavenward across the way. Viewed through the legs of Louise Bourgeois’s primal, scheming, organic Maman, the church, and its Virgin Mary figurehead, becomes something else completely. The National Gallery’s transparent glass atrium mirrors the opaque Peace Tower across the Bytown Locks. Further afield, across the Gatineau River, the buildings of Hull loom, so close and yet so far away, contemporary evidence of those fabled two solitudes. And speaking of those rivers, which curl through it all—they evoke at once archaic military advantage, valued aboriginal traditions and the complexities of the natural landscape.

Robert Morin / Coop Vidéo de Montréal And You, Are You Lucky? 1984 Video still Courtesy National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

So Ottawa, it turns out, is where the prime symbolic battles of Canadian visual culture are made, however slowly and however quietly.

Moshe Safdie’s National Gallery architecture—opened back in 1988 but seen with new appreciation following recent reno-mania at the AGO and the ROM, with more to come at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Alberta—reinforces this sense of Ottawa as a visual amalgam, as architectural metaphor. Though Safdie’s palace of Canuck culture has had its own problems with roof leakage and renovation (with construction, in fact, ongoing during this visit), a stroll up its glass-walled entrance ramp is an education in architecture’s ability to reframe. Its expansive vista treats our existing landscape of power as image, underlining the visual arts, in turn, as a key means of communicating power and importance.

Given all of the above, it’s clear that the smallish space for the GG Awards exhibition, reached by traversing galleries in the process of installation, does well to reflect the Canadian tendency to self-diminishment. Not only is the room small, but there are just one to four works representing each artist—generally too few to get a sense of each award-winner’s full impact, or, in other words, what made each artist award-winning in the first place. While the awards themselves were no doubt deliberated for some time before being announced on March 24, this related exhibition feels quite slapdash, a bit of a “whatever we have in the permanent collection” type of thing. It best functions as a 3-D (or, in a few cases, 4-D) support to the awards website and brochure, rather than vice versa.

Still, thanks to the geographic and generational span of the artists chosen, the exhibition is likely to hold some interesting discoveries for many contemporary art viewers, particularly younger ones.

Rita McKeough Long Haul 2008 Performance still Courtesy of the artist / photo Dave Kempt

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