Hume and Goddard discuss the murals in Islington Village
Nostalgia dulls art's potential
Islington's murals miss the chance to breathe new life into old village's generic streetscape
Jun 06, 2008 04:30 AM
Christopher Hume
Peter Goddard
To celebrate its heritage, the old village of Islington is holding a street festival on Saturday to highlight four new historical murals. They add to the eight wall-size images of the village's past already in place along Dundas St. W. between Kipling and Islington Aves.
Tucked away in midtown Etobicoke, the mural project began as a community-building initiative designed to link Islington's contemporary, multicultural residents with the area's roots.
The Star sent Christopher Hume, its architectural urban issues columnist, and art critic Peter Goddard on a tour of the new/old village to assess the quality of the existing murals, and to determine how well they fit with the neighbourhood's current multicultural community.
Hume and Goddard drove around Islington, stopping to survey one mural after another. Both were mindful that, only 80 years ago, shoppers weary of Toronto's bustling downtown stepped off the old Guelph Radial Line into the tree-lined tranquility of Islington's leafy streets, lined by houses with welcoming verandas, and overlooking meadows filled with apple trees.
Peter Goddard (behind the wheel, turning west along Dundas St. W.): You know, I can admire Islington's passion for reminding itself – and all of its new residents from all over the planet – of its past.
But don't you think it's a bit sad – and hugely ironic – to see a scene of Islington at the turn of the century, with people out for a quiet stroll as a team of horses pass them by, next door to a shoddy mall and a tacky convenience store?
Christopher Hume: I agree entirely. There's something sad, even poignant, about this whole program. The murals could depict anything; they could be abstract for that matter. It's not the form; it's the content, and the terrible feeling you get when you see these images of a history so dead and buried that there's virtually no trace of it left.
Yet in their own unexpected way, they address the hollowness that lies at the heart of contemporary life.
They illustrate the emptiness we feel living in communities like Islington which are generic and anonymous, not to mention hideous.
PG: Yet, the artwork itself – by the Toronto painter, John Kuna – has its merits.
CH: It's much better than I expected. A few communities have tried doing murals, but they're not usually so well executed.
PG: According to Kuna – I talked to him recently – he was given some guidelines by the Islington Business Improvement Area, but otherwise it was up to him to choose the imagery and how it was presented. We've got nostalgia for nostalgia.
CH: There's one mural where Kuna has painted a stretch of Dundas St. W. as it looks today.
I thought it was interesting because it almost seems as if the artist wanted to see for himself what a painted image of contemporary Islington would look like.
There's no nostalgia; maybe it's more about trying to discover whether there's any possibility future generations will look back at today with the same kind of longing we feel for the 19th and early 20th centuries.
PG (turning into a side street, to turn around): Maybe. That Somali woman we just passed by, the one who went into the convenience store, she went right by the mural of the old main street without even noticing it. I wonder if the Islington BIA would have done more for the community if they had scenes relevant to people who live here now?
John Kuna made a big point of the importance of murals to communities. He'd been to places like San Francisco where they have mural alleys where the images change every number of months.
It's a big tourist attraction. That's part of the thinking behind the Islington murals too: attract people from the inner city.
In that sense Islington wants to portray itself as still being a village next to the big city.
CH: Except that Islington isn't still a village next to the big city. It has been absorbed into the big city. It is the big city, or at least a part of it.
To be blunt, Islington is little more than a name and a memory.
I think it would be more constructive and engaging to do a mural project based on the potential of the form, not on some idea of the way we used to be, no matter how appealing.
PG (now heading back east along Dundas St. W): You're right. Art on a wall doesn't have to be about a wall. There are all sorts of wall-projections during Nuit Blanche and Contact where walls are alive with imagery that's over-the-top abstract. They feel more citified than any city image.
CH: I can see it now, Les Nuits d'Islington, an international festival of projection art. For a couple of nights every year, all eyes are focused on Islington to see what's new in this contemporary art form. Even that Somali woman we saw walk by with supreme indifference would stop and pay attention. If nothing else, she'd want to know why a crowd had gathered. By the time she figured out the people were there to see a neighbourhood that had been transformed into an enormous outdoor art gallery, she might be paying attention.
