[smuncky]

one word: AWESOME!

i gotta say i had a great time last night and this morning. so much to see and do. and the crowds! so many people were out on the streets chatting, dancing, and enjoying the vibe of the urban city. this has to be one of the most successful events in toronto.

i started out my night around 8.30 when i went to the ryerson campus/dundas square/eaton's area. at ryerson they had a cool installation with toilets and steam rise out from them. there was also some interprative dance going on beside it.

we then went to the eaton center and there was an interactive installation where people would draw something, and then it would get displayed on this screen that was suspended from the ceiling in the form of clouds.

the next installation was also interactive. ballons were used to create various shapes by people inside and outside the structure. imo, it was one of the more creative displays of the night.

the video installation at the four seasons of performing arts was disappointing. i thought they would've used the whole glass facade to display images and videos, but instead only used one small panel. we then walked up university to queens park which had an audio installation with alien sounds mixed with classical music.

we finally came up to the ROM just after 10pm. getting there was quite a trek though because of the amount of people there. the roads and sidewalks were filled with people coming and going. and i was really happy to see the new ROM plaza being used by the people. this new venue will be great for other performances and entertainment in the future. the DVJ, charles kriel, was actually playing some nice tunes the whole time we were there. people of all ages were dancing and enjoying themselves to the max. i really hope this is the start of something new in toronto, where we have more outdoor electronic music events. he ended around 11pm and the crowd started to chant "1 more, 1 more, 1 more". just amazing.

ROM Plaza and DVJ Charles Kriel

we then went back on university and through the UofT campus going east towards yonge. we saw a cool installation that consisted of ballons holding up a suspended "roof". a big crowd was there walking underneath and taking pictures as it was quite interesting.

along our way to the toronto reference library, there was an installation of flags which decorated cumberland ave. in a Feast of St. John fashion that they have in Brazil.

i've never been inside the toronto reference library and i must say it's quite an amazing space inside. they had different installtions going on inside from the AGO, gardiner musuem, and others.

i then went to the CN tower around 2am and took photos of the city from the observation deck and skypod. it was great meeting SeanTrans as well. We both took some amazing photos.

here is how one part of the tower is lit up. the LED lights are installed around the top of the observation deck.

CN Tower lights in action

my last stop of the night was lower bay station. since i went really late, around 3.30am, the line up was not bad at all and i got in right away. i've been there before when they had doors open, but this was interesting as well. the dimmed lights were a perfect effect for the old "ghost station". and the rumbling noise of the installation was very unique and added to the experience.

while waiting for a train home, i saw that nuit blanche was on the screens as well. they had poems running all night as part of the installation.

unfortuently, i didn't make it out to a couple more places i intended to go, but being out for that long and constantly walking really wore me down.

i hope everyone who went had a good a time as i had.

 

[FutureMayor]

Not as good as last year....Nuit Blah

As someone who attended last year's inaugural event and is a big supporter of the arts and culture, I was really disappointed with this year's event.

I know a lot of people who commented that this year's installations was far less interactive, less spontaneous, severly understaffed, with many works being overrated and venues seriously overcrowded with line ups. It became way too mainstream and overly commercial this year. A lot of facebook groups are calling it Nuit Blah.

I personally would like to see Nuit Blanche merged and folded into LuminaTO as one of its signature events. The combined resources of the two cultural events would make for a better and bigger experience for all.

Still a great event and concept to celebrate the very best of Toronto culture, I just believe it needs a major rethink to make it sustainable in the long run.

Louroz

 

[simply Dan]

Perhaps next time you should try staying out later than 11pm, Future Mayor. We were all there when you went home, and many of us participated until 7am and truly experienced another incredible year of Nuit Blanche!

 

[RJR123]

As someone who attended last year's inaugural event and is a big supporter of the arts and culture, I was really disappointed with this year's event.

I know a lot of people who commented that this year's installations was far less interactive, less spontaneous, severly understaffed, with many works being overrated and venues seriously overcrowded with line ups. It became way too mainstream and overly commercial this year. A lot of facebook groups are calling it Nuit Blah.

I personally would like to see Nuit Blanche merged and folded into LuminaTO as one of its signature events. The combined resources of the two cultural events would make for a better and bigger experience for all.

Still a great event and concept to celebrate the very best of Toronto culture, I just believe it needs a major rethink to make it sustainable in the long run.

Louroz

I'm sure you can apply the lessons learned to Mississauga's own verson of NB that you discussed earlier in this thread...the one being held in a mall parking lot.

 

[alklay]

Thanks for the great pics.

Some of the art was 'blah' and disappointing but I expected few gems from 195 or so works. Its just a matter of odds. I have nothing to compare it too as I did not see any of last year's work but with a lot of contemporary art (and this was not jury selected stuff), there is a lot of hit and miss.

But with one out of five or so pieces being mildly interesting and the crowds and excitement of an evening out late in the city, its a great night. The popularity is going to be a problem (I wanted to see Ghost Station but the lineup looked like it would take until dawn to move - so I moved on to other zones), but art and the city should always have such problems.

 

[RedRocket191]

Thanks for the great pics.

Some of the art was 'blah' and disappointing but I expected few gems from 195 or so works. Its just a matter of odds. I have nothing to compare it too as I did not see any of last year's work but with a lot of contemporary art (and this was not jury selected stuff), there is a lot of hit and miss.

But with one out of five or so pieces being mildly interesting and the crowds and excitement of an evening out late in the city, its a great night. The popularity is going to be a problem (I wanted to see Ghost Station but the lineup looked like it would take until dawn to move - so I moved on to other zones), but art and the city should always have such problems.

Tuscani01 & I got into Ghost Station with no lineup. Of course, it was about 4:30 am by then. It was pretty interesting.

 

[alklay]

Yorkville/U of T was probably the most popular zone. Next year I will do it differently and hit that area last, not first.

 

[FutureMayor]

Debrief

Perhaps next time you should try staying out later than 11pm, Future Mayor. We were all there when you went home, and many of us participated until 7am and truly experienced another incredible year of Nuit Blanche!

You are assuming I went straight home to Mississauga after I left you guys on church street at 11:00pm, when as a matter of fact, I stayed out until 2:00am, dispite the fact I had to run a youth program with 150 kids at 9:00am back in Mississauga.

I started my tour of this year's Nuit Blanche at 7:03pm with a visit to the top of the CN Tower and from there onwards I got a taste of the event this year.

I am not dismissing yours or any other's experience of this year's event. My point was that from my own personal observations and from debriefing with literally two dozen of my friends today about their experience and via facebook, the concenus was that last year's event was better than this year's presentation and the experienced could be improved in the future.

The beauty of last year's event was the compact, spontanious, free flowing and interactive nature of the installations, I truly found those qualities lacking this year.


Louroz

 

[ShonTron]

Sorry Sean and smuncky, my partner and I were unable to make it down to the tower. I hope you two enjoyed.

Yep, we met up and wondered where you were!

CN Tower was worth it. Allowed us up to the SkyPod, where pics were great because the lights were out and no glare. They just let us have free reign of the place, and really cool. Great meeting up with Smuncky. I'll upload my pics tomorrow.

Damn TTC though. The 5:04 310 Bathurst bus never arrived at College Street, and the 5:34 was jam-packed. At least 20 were left behind at Bloor, despite waiting up to an hour. It was still standing room after I got off at Wilson.

Highlights:

Aurora Preparedness Centre (the biggest thrill were the 1950s maps on the wall)
Ghost Station (it was a 30 minute wait, but worth it)
MOCCA - Food
Gladstone
Alien crash at Trinity Circle
CN Tower
Dumpster Hotel
Walking along a crowed Queen West from Gladstone east and seeing crowds spilling into the streets.

What an amazing night, though already I'm wondering if it will become too corporatized as it gets more popular.

 

[alklay]

I'm wondering if it will become too corporatized as it gets more popular.

As long as the artists remain independant, I do not think there is a danger of it being 'corporatized'. The crowds though (and the lines) prevented a lot of people from seeing some of the art (or seeing it well).

 

[urbandreamer]

Incredible--Toronto's coming of age party?

The people watching made my night; most of the art was blah but there was some interesting sites and all those ppl--imagine toronto with that kinda action 24/7!

 

[Sir Novelty Fashion]

Interesting reactions. My own experience of Nuit Blanche - and the experience of everyone I've talked to in person - is that it sucked in a world-class manner.

It was great to see the city so alive at night, and the night itself was gorgeous. But while it seems that somehow we managed to miss a few of the highlights mentioned here, the "art" we did see was, for the most part, INCREDIBLY BAD. The night seemed to involve a lot of fighting through crowds and waiting in line to see projects that might, at best, merit an anguished 'meh'.

High points: The dumpster hotel was a whole lot of fun. The tinfoil cornfield on McCaul was neato. The newmindspace kids' white lights-on-balloons were charming, in a kind of ghetto way. Um, that's it.

Low points: The amateur-hour "crash site" on front campus. The speakers playing squash noises inside the Hart House squash courts. The floodlit sound installation pictured at Queen's Park, whose visual focus was the equipment's packing boxes, covered in a green tarp that everyone kept staring at, expecting meaning. (Random guy next to me: "This is incredible. THIS is what post-modernism has come to.) The geodesic dome at Trinity Bellwoods with a sign on it saying it was really a non-heirarchical "sculpture of democracy," when really it was just a half-assed bucky ball. (Random girl next to me: "Look! It's a sculpture of democracy!" Guy next to her: "Fuck me.") The intermidable video projections with nothing to say. The interpretive text with even less.

It was just sloppy, half-assed installation after sloppy, half-assed installation... not so much art-school final projects as first-year end-of-term art-school projects. In the main areas, at least, there was nothing iconic, nothing bold, nothing fun. Why was the giant locust exiled to Lamport Stadium?

I heard that Scotiabank almost withdrew from the thing this year. If they make good on that threat this year, maybe Nuit Blanche will reinvent itself as something more focused, more cohesive, and a little more serious about being fun.

 

[dt_toronto_geek]

Thanks for the great pics.

Some of the art was 'blah' and disappointing but I expected few gems from 195 or so works. Its just a matter of odds. I have nothing to compare it too as I did not see any of last year's work but with a lot of contemporary art (and this was not jury selected stuff), there is a lot of hit and miss.

But with one out of five or so pieces being mildly interesting and the crowds and excitement of an evening out late in the city, its a great night. The popularity is going to be a problem (I wanted to see Ghost Station but the lineup looked like it would take until dawn to move - so I moved on to other zones), but art and the city should always have such problems.

I got to Yorkville (my first stop) at about 10:30 itching with anticipation to see the first installation at the lower Bay station and then saw the lineup. It began on the sidewalk at Bellair Street, wound around in a "U" shape behind 110 Bloor (at about Hazelton) and then wound back towards the entrance. I stood there in disbelief but finally decided to join the line anyway. It took about an hour to get in and it was well worth it.

 

[syn]

I would have to agree as well with some of the art being disappointing. The single string single coloured Christmas lights held in the air by ballons at Trinity College was pretty sad.

 

[alklay]

The Globe tends to agree that while there is fun involved, and lots of crowds, the art did NOT live up to expectations:


A fun night at the art circus
After taking in dumpster art and an inflatable locust, Sarah Milroy wishes Toronto's institutions had given the event more thought
SARAH MILROY

October 1, 2007

'Is it a party or is it art?" Under a waning harvest moon on Saturday night, my sister, a friend and I were navigating our way through a maze of back alleys off of Huron Street in downtown Toronto, and we were hearing the sounds of people congregating. Following the signs for a Nuit Blanche project, ThunderEgg Alley: A Dumpster Diver's Paradise, by an artist named Swintak, we rounded a corner and came across a backyard party. It looked like 150 souls crammed into a space the size of a mini-laundromat, with plastic lights strung overhead and the beer flowing freely.

It was nearing midnight, and we had already seen a lot of the projects that had been commissioned for Toronto's second Nuit Blanche, and we knew enough to know that some of the projects don't look like projects at all. But this looked a little bit too much like a party so we forged on, turned the next corner and bingo: another party, but this one was taking place in a large dumpster.

Climbing up and looking in over the side, you could see a crush of people drinking and eating potato chips in a furnished interior, complete with sofas and working lamps. A concierge in evening attire stood nearby taking reservations for the dumpster hotel (was this the artist?), and, around back, a woman was administering a facial and manicure to a prone woman whose head was concealed inside a facial steamer. The atmosphere was ebullient, but I found my sister's question hanging in the air: Is it a party or is it art?

The answer: It's a little bit of both, but with definite leanings towards the party side. Traversing the city for seven hours, we took in dozens of projects, but only a handful stick in the mind as fully realized projects. Still, everyone seemed to be having a great time.

Print Edition - Section Front
Enlarge Image

At Lamport Stadium, on King Street West, we saw the giant inflatable locust by Japanese artist Noboru Tsubaki serving as a bouncy castle for drug-glazed twentysomethings, who leaped and frolicked on the giant bug with no apparent compunction. (I can't help but wonder if the work survived the night.) The midnight performance by Camille Turner at the Women's Art Resource Centre felt like a drop-in social scene, a place to crash and drink beer. Attentiveness to the artist's glacially-paced performance as one of four cape-clad extraterrestrial visitors was lax to nil. Annie MacDonnell's Aurora Readiness Centre in the basement of the U of T Faculty of Architecture, was a half- baked recreation of a real 1960s bomb shelter for city officials (dismantled in the 1990s), but the simulation was weak and only partially thought through, as if there was neither the money or time (or skill?) to do the thing right. Janet Morton's Femmebomb (a fabric cladding of a public health building on Queen Street West) was only a partial success; one couldn't help but wonder why she didn't complete the idea by wrapping the entire building instead of just the front façade. As the evening wore on, there were too many moments like this - moments when you had to struggle to find your way to something only to find yourself underwhelmed.

There were, however, some notable exceptions. I was lucky enough to catch Ann Hamilton's "listening choir" performance at the Ontario College of Art and Design at the start of the evening, where she lined up with students to listen to the ambient sound in the art school, thronging with visitors. A beatific assembly of tranquil souls in the midst of the hubbub, their stillness was a little startling, calling you back to a kind of mindfulness in the midst of all the hoo-haw.

Adad Hannah's video installation Traces, in The Rex Hotel, was beautifully considered and beautifully installed, a series of time-based looping videos that show people (some of them Rex regulars) holding various poses in the bar - a band, a pair of young lovers on the brink of a kiss, a studious girl reading a book on museum security, and so forth.

White Line Light (2002) , at the Old Police Station in the urban badlands of lower Strachan Avenue, was a menacing and compelling union of sight (two incandescent parallel white lines suspended in space) and sound (variations on a disturbing techno hum) that together made your hair stand on end. This was one of the evening's best sited works, seeming perfectly suited to the marginal zone of the city in which we discovered it.

Likewise Non-Specific Threat, by Northern Irish artist Willie Doherty. Staged upstairs in an abandoned garage at the corner of Bay Street and Grenville Street, the piece reverberated with a sense of barely suppressed violence. As the camera circles a bald headed man, we hear his voiceover intoning phrases that suggest a sort of global Armageddon ("there will be no flights," "there will be no computers") and a host of other blunt statements that make of him a kind of all-purpose alien, available to be feared or despised. ("I am unknowable. I am beyond reason.") Sound and image come together wonderfully in this piece; the audio speakers were up to the task and properly installed, and the sound was thunderous, gravelly, getting under your skin and to your core. I had seen this work before, in a gallery context, but this presentation enhanced it immeasurably. I saw a thing or two after this, but Doherty's piece sort of put an end to the evening. At 2:00 a.m., it suddenly felt like it was time to go home. I had found the aesthetic rush I had been looking for.

A thought for next year. True, some of the real delights of the evening were the small things, like the stuffed architectural model of the city of Toronto by the UpBag collective, which we discovered by chance in a hallway at 401 Richmond. (I particularly enjoyed the Mies towers rendered in black corduroy, and the knitted CN Tower.) But the big guns - The Power Plant, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the Royal Ontario Museum - were all more or less passive (throwing dance parties or staying open late to show your regular programming doesn't count), leaving it to Barbara Fischer at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, at Hart House, University of Toronto, to be the only museum director in town to catch the Nuit Blanche fever. Her Night School program was packed with onlookers when we checked in.

What's wrong with these people? We shouldn't really need to apply the heart paddles - they are supposed to be the folks that believe in art, after all - but if heart paddles are indeed required, maybe the city/sponsors of Nuit Blanche or other patrons should consider grants to these leading centres to fund one major one-night-only project either in their gallery space or out in the city. (How about $20,000 each?)

These institutions have the curators on hand who can make good decisions and who know how to install works properly, and it would likely provide a core group of unequivocally major pieces by accomplished artists to anchor the night.

It needed it. The great thing about Nuit Blanche is the way in which it mobilizes a vast public, making the city a canvas for artistic embellishment. But I felt some queasiness, as I made my rounds, that such a large public had been engaged (hooray) but not really given the hit of great work that the occasion deserved (boo). Happily, this is a fixable problem. Let take this thing to the next level.