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Reviews / June 16, 2016

Luminato and the Hearn: A Critical Discussion

Response to Luminato's new venue, the Hearn Generation Station, has been largely positive. But there's a big accessibility problem—and that's just to start.
The Hearn Generating Station, built in the 1950s and decommissioned in 1983, makes for a spectacular Luminato venue—but one with many problems, too. Photo: Jonathan Castellino. The Hearn Generating Station, built in the 1950s and decommissioned in 1983, makes for a spectacular Luminato venue—but one with many problems, too. Photo: Jonathan Castellino.

This week, Luminato launched its 10th-anniversary edition in Toronto by moving its previously cross-city programming to a single venue, the Hearn Generating Station. As outgoing Luminato director Jorn Weisbrodt told the New York Times in one of many glowing pieces of press coverage surrounding the launch, the Hearn, a 400,000-square-foot facility decommissioned in 1983, is “an artwork in itself… It’s not just a venue.” Yet this structure presents problems that haven’t been addressed deeply in much coverage of the festival, which continues until June 26. Here, Canadian Art’s editorial team discusses the Hearn’s,and Luminato’s, powers and pitfalls.

David Balzer: First, some thoughts about the Pierre Huyghe [installed outside the Hearn]. I’m tired of this approach to curating. It’s Documenta shopping.

Rosie Prata: I actually really liked the Huyghe piece. I know that multiple versions exist and they’ve been exhibited all over the place, but this is the first time I’ve seen the piece in real life, and I thought it was so cool! It totally set the mood for me, of this being the first thing you encounter as you approach this enormous, post-apocalyptic industrial space. It’s also a clever way of making an artwork that feels truly local and contributes to the community—this beehive has been growing on the roof of the Four Seasons hotel for four years. I only wish that dog with the pink leg, Human, was there, too.

Accessibility is a huge problem, however. There’s no clear pathway leading up to the sculpture. I went the wrong way when I was leaving and ended up climbing underneath some barbed wire to get to the parking lot. And as for getting to the Hearn: there’s a shuttle bus from Union Station, but it is first-come, first-serve, and not accessible. I’d never been to the Hearn before, and ended up walking 45 minutes down a dirt road to get there, which wasn’t very fun. And when I was trying to leave at the end of the night on Saturday, after Unsound [the experimental music festival that kicked off Luminato], the cab situation was chaotic. Lots of exposed rebar, too, and puddles of dirty water that you had to walk through during Unsound—or were those “dystopian” water features? People were also talking about how dust was falling from the ceiling into their drinks because of the reverberations from the music, and were worried that it might contain lead or asbestos or something.

To their credit, though, they had lots of excellent security at Unsound, and first-aid tents set up. I never actually felt unsafe. Also, I saw a girl with a sprained ankle on a crutch at the end of the night, and security guards offered to get her a golf cart to transport her to the area where cabs were.

A photo posted by KateKate (@kateaspencer) on Jun 16, 2016 at 3:21am PDT

Nicholas Brown: It was interesting that you didn’t have to sign a waiver, though. I know for the Kara Walker installation at [Brooklyn’s] Domino Sugar Factory in 2014, people had to sign waivers to get into that.

That probably has a lot to do with how much more litigious America is. But it definitely seems like the kind of space where there is all kinds of potential for injury.

Rosie: At the media tour, Weisbrodt was saying—and I’m paraphrasing—“Our intention with having this festival contained within this one space this year is to prove to the city that this is a building worth saving, not demolishing. It’s only 10 minutes from Union Station and it’s twice the size of Tate Modern, and there is so much potential.”

Meanwhile, I was looking around and thinking, Nope, this just can never be that. It’s too big, it’s too inaccessible, and it’s too dangerous to be inside. The only way to utilize it is to build a self-contained cage-space within it that you can move around in.

Merray: And haven’t they already poured $2.5 million into it, just to get it to look the way we saw it this past weekend?

Nick: Yeah, and it looks like ruins porn.

Rosie: Still, being inside that building was absolutely the most interesting part of the event. It reminded me of going to Extermination Music Nights back in the day. A friend of mine said he used to come to the Hearn to go to illegal raves.

Nick: Right—so part of the legacy of this is going to have to also be, How can you get this place to have the effect that it has, but also be able to accommodate living culture, not just the beautiful ruins of disused industrial spaces?

David: It feels like Jorn Weisbrodt’s last stand in terms of bringing this Berlin sensibility to Toronto. It feels very much along the lines of the things he was doing there, and the kinds of things that happen there with disused spaces.

But we don’t have a lot of spaces in Toronto that might lend themselves to a Hamburger Bahnhof or a Berghain.

With the Hearn, there’s a tension between the space being inherently conducive to temporary events versus the desire to make it permanent. A permanent space like that poses a lot of difficulty, and, as we were saying, is expensive to fully renovate.

Nick: It makes me think about that whole festival-versus-biennial paradigm, where this space is so much more conducive to liveness, something where you can switch it on for a couple of hours.

But to have it be a place where you can look at exhibitions and look at art—it is so compromised.

Rosie: I feel like an art festival in the city should attract foot traffic. And that’s impossible [at the Hearn].

Unless you are already an insider and you know about this venue, you’re not going to see any of the festival. It’s not like last year, where people walking through Trinity Bellwoods Park could encounter works by world-class artists like Marina Abramovic and Geoffrey Farmer.

Merray: I think the only way to do that—attract “general public” foot traffic—on any kind of consistent or sustainable basis is to always do Nuit Blanche–type programming.

Rosie: Party art.

Merray: Exactly. To enable people to take #artselfies.

Nick: Yeah, the Michel de Broin mirror ballOne Thousand Speculations, is the most successful thing in there in terms of art programming, because it uses the space and uses the spectacle of it and kind of slows it down in an interesting way. But it is also very conducive to any kind of [live] programming—it is very adaptive.

How do you compare that mirror ball to the Pierre Huyghe bees outside? I mean, there is almost nothing else—except the Scott McFarland project, Trove, which kind of broadcasts what they can’t do with that building, and the Stan Douglas project, Circa 1948, which only one person can experience at a time. Even when I went on a Sunday afternoon and it was dead in there, there were two families ahead of me for the Douglas and I would’ve had to have waited an hour.

Rosie: The mirror ball looked so funny, because relative to the space, it wasn’t giant at all. It was just, like, the right size. The coolest thing about it was how the refracted light moved around the Hearn like little clouds, scanning the structure’s interior, beaming squares of light into the areas that were blocked off, so that you got tiny, fleeting glimpses of the building’s nooks and crannies. The patterns it made on the walls were also like clouds in that they started looking like birds or script or jellyfish if you looked at them long enough.

To my great dismay, however, the lights weren’t turned on for the mirror ball during Unsound! Coupled with the totally underwhelming patch of light on the smokestack that ended up being the big #TurnOnTheHearn reveal, it made for a real wasted opportunity for a festival whose name literally means “to light up.”

And then next to the mirror ball, upstairs on the mezzanine level, are the Scott McFarland works. They’re rectangular photographs installed as adhesives directly onto the brick walls, are not well lit at all, and the mirror ball is really distracting. When the light from the mirror ball hits the glossy surface of the works, you can hardly see the image.

There are billboards by McFarland around the city too, and a companion website. It feels like a lot of work for the visitor to piece that all together. However, I think it’s the only Luminato visual-art project this year that isn’t contained within the Hearn.

A photo posted by SYLVIA JADE (@hellosylviaa) on Jun 14, 2016 at 5:10pm PDT

Bryne McLaughlin: For Luminato, there’s always a question of how much money is spent on it.

I’ve never really understood, like, for the amount of money that is spent, and the duration that it’s on, and the sort of lacklustre overall effect—admittedly, people must have different experiences of it based on where they are coming from—I’m not really sure: What is it for? What’s its purpose? What is the purpose of any of these things, essentially?

It’s such a huge amount of money. Would that money be better spent in culture, dispersed in other ways? Do we have to do Luminato? Is it necessary?

Rosie: I don’t know. I always think Luminato is more exciting than a lot of other things. I think it’s better than Nuit Blanche, for example.

Nick: But if you’re not a ticket holder [and you don’t have the money to be a ticket holder], I don’t think it’s better than Nuit Blanche.

Rosie: True, it seemed like most things were sold out before the festival even opened. But I don’t know. There are a lot of things that aren’t visual arts that seem really interesting—like, the set for the The James Plays is really spectacular. The Unsound festival line-up was very exciting.

Bryne: But I know from the artists who have installed with Luminato in the past, it is an exorbitant amount of money they get to do these things. Like, basically the sky’s the limit as far as putting installations together.

Nick: But if that’s the case, why is the Scott McFarland not better presented?

Bryne: Exactly. For that kind of money, why are we doing this?

David: I was sorry to hear it’s pretty much all at the Hearn this year. I liked the David Pecaut Square concerts. I saw Buffy Ste-Marie there a couple of years ago; it was amazing, and it was free.

Luminato’s visual-arts initiatives have always been a little weak or scattershot. For me, it seems the festival is about performance, about international theatre and performance culture.

When it started, it seemed like it was a way to bring the Canadian theatre scene, which has really struggled over the last 25 years, to an international level. Especially with this avant-garde theatre practice going on the UK—like, uniting Canada with other theatre practitioners internationally.

And it seemed to be effective that way, and it also seemed to be effective in the sense that it brought those works to spaces in the city that are typically used for theatre performance. It reminded audiences that these spaces existed. So stuff at the Hearn seems to defeat that purpose.

Nick: Yeah, this is more proprietary in a sense. It’s like, “Okay, you gotta come here, and everything has to work here, because we really want this to succeed.”

So it’s at the expense of those better contexts, or also, as you say, bringing people to venues they might not otherwise attend.

David: And it almost makes it more specific, but it really restricts what it is—it becomes this event for sort of young, bougie, experiential Instagrammers.

Rosie: Or, like, doom bros and tech bros. That was a huge part of it, I felt. It felt very broey.

I mean, it makes sense: when you have an event in a building like that, everything has to fit with the mood of that building to feel appropriate. So that’s sort of a foregone conclusion: everything has to have this doomy, broey, dark, scary, industrial vibe.

Merray: Back to access: I was checking the Unsound event page to see if I could get tickets and there were lots of complaints about how long it took to get in there on Friday—which is another accessibility reducer.

Also, all the lights were really bright. I don’t have epilepsy, but….

Rosie: The strobe lights! My brother has epilepsy, and I invited him to come, but he couldn’t make it, and I just thought, thank God!

Merray: I put my sunglasses on.

Rosie: I ran outside. I couldn’t handle it.

Merray: That was really inconsiderate of them.

Rosie: Can we talk about the acoustics as well? When I walked in on Saturday night, I was like, where is the music? It’s 11 p.m. Why haven’t they started? I had to walk deep into the Hearn before I heard it.

I get it: it’s a massive space and you can’t fill it with sound. I just really wanted and was expecting a sensory overload, and I didn’t get that. Although the Side Room was pretty loud.

Nick: That’s the space that’s long, but has low ceilings.

Rosie: Yeah, they had a bunch of the female DJs in there.

Merray: Of course, that’s what’s in the Side Room!

Rosie: Well, let’s talk about representation for a second: Jordan Söderberg Mills, Scott McFarland, Pierre Huyghe, Stan Douglas—all guys. The vast majority of performers at Unsound were male; the Situation Rooms piece, which is about international weapons trafficking, is by Rimini Protokoll, a German collective made up of two men and a woman; The James Plays are written and directed by women, but tell the story of three Scottish kings. The two chefs running the restaurant are guys.

And a lot of the programming is about endurance, about things being huge and exhausting and time-consuming, which is such a thing that dudes think makes something “art.” I’m not saying other groups weren’t represented at all—there are some POC performers, some female, some queer—but overall it feels heavily weighted on the white, hetero male side. Bit of a bro-fest.

Merray: How does this stuff not occur to them to check?

Rosie: I guess they know who they’re catering to.

Nick: Also, when I was there on Sunday, I noticed a lot of programming was other organizations’ programming—so it’s kind of at their expense. It struck me there were a number of smaller installations in a little corridor, but they were clearly not programmed by Luminato. They are given less space. When I was there, stuff wasn’t turned on, because people have to come down and activate it themselves, like this whole OCAD University area.

So it’s similar to Nuit Blanche that way too: there’s the commissioned big-budget stuff, then there is the smattering of stuff other people have to provide and pay for. And it feels quite clear which is which.

Luminato continues in Toronto until June 26.


An outside view of the Hearn Generation Station, Luminato’s new signature venue. Photo: Rosie Prata.