a little while …

This is not about art.
This is about lining up to see it.
Two main types of indoor venues for exhibition were contrasted at Toronto’s 4th annual Nuit Blanche yesterday.
The first, as seen at Dance Dance Evolution is, by design, 100% participatory, even for non-participants! No lining up required. The setting is such that people arrange concentrically around the spectacle, as in a concert, where your proximity to the source is proportional to your level of participation.
The second, exhibited by As Could Be by Paulette Phillips required one to queue in a straight line away from the spectacle. After waiting 10 minutes and progressing only a few feet, my impatience overwhelmed my desire to see the piece.

My deficiencies as an art critic aside, I can recognize the differences between the two pieces in that the former’s existence requires the participation of its audience, whereas the latter requests participation in a different, more orthodox context.

Fascinatingly though, the act of viewing, and in a sense, interacting with art has the same expectations of its audience regardless the content – expectations that need to be tempered by how an installation sets its audience up to fulfill them. A queue, for instance, exploits the influence of human curiousity of collective choice through its insatiable urge to grow longer – to become more popular. Waiting in line shares this with social networking vehicles like Twitter. Whether the participants in the queue are aware of the installation’s contents as spectacle or not is secondary to the fact that in participating in the queue, the queue becomes the spectacle people are drawn to. This immediately reminded me of a scene from the film Laila’s Birthday screened at the most recent Toronto Palestine Film Festival. A couple hop in a taxi driven by the protagonist in the film (played by Mohammed Bakri) and instruct him to stop upon seeing a queue, which they surmise to be for social handouts. Upon inquiring about the nature of the line, the woman in front of them replies that she was in the line because there was a line.

From a social/political point of view, a well designed queue is a quintessential component of orderliness.
Waiting in line at an art festival in a fortunate Metropolitan city in the West versus lining up in front of armed soldiers are remotely distant realities.
In a world where lineups are a product of basic necessity, the orderliness can be justified, I suppose – as the desire for orderliness is a desire for control. And a disorderly occupied oppressed and humiliated people can wreak havoc on the status quo. However, in a world where an all night art festival can exist in a violence free calm, there is a certain clever civility about how Dance Dance Evolution has leveraged the crowd’s participation without treating its individuals like cattle. It is that cleverness that is lacking in most of what Nuit Blanche is about. It is exactly what all mass creative outlets (and in this, I include peaceful resistance and protest) in the West seem to lack.

There is a fine line that divides the cultural relevance a work of art has in the context of an obedient audience.
Practically applied, however, a small installation at an event like Nuit Blanche seems to be served better by being in an closed-off space invisible to the throngs save for its flagella-like queue. As contrary as that may sound.

Anyway, here’s what – to borrow from Marissa (who I thank for finding this) – I regret missing, but what I don’t regret not lining up for:
As Could Be