I was on vacation with the family for the last week, and it seemed that everywhere I went I was presented with visual reminders of the past, present, and future of our society's obsession with globalism and consumption.
I spent an afternoon at the
Vancouver Art Gallery, where I took in the great Vermeer and Rembrandt Dutch Masters
exhibition. The art, particularly the still lifes, is impressive, but just as interesting is the accompanying written commentary.
The Dutch "Golden Age", during the late 1600s, was marked by rapidly increasing wealth brought about the country's web of trade links. The new bourgeoisie sought to flaunt its wealth by sponsoring the visual arts, a wonderful selection of which are presented at the Gallery. It all was a reminder that Asian trade and globalization is not new and has been at the center of Western, if not world culture, for hundreds of years.
For a more contemporary example, just around the corner in the Gallery was Reece Terris'
Ought Apartment, a half-dozen mini-apartments all stacked in the building's rotunda. Each apartment is built entirely from reclaimed materials that Terris rescued from the dump. Going through them raises feelings of nostalgia as one remembers familiar colours and objects from the past. That nostalgia, however, is tinged with unease as one recognizes that all the apartments have the same basic functions and that it's not necessary to replace, every decade, the styling of our homes. It's a visceral, personal reminder of our culture of consumption and waste.
Reece Terris' Ought Apartment; image from inklake.wordpress.com
Upstairs at the VAG was a great selection of photographs from famous German photographer
Andreas Gursky . Gursky is famous for his large-format photos that bring into stark relief the effects of global capitalism. Many of them are jaw-droppingly amazing. Much of it is similar to Canada's own Edvard Burtynsky, who was featured in a great exhibition at the Surrey Arts Centre
a few months ago. (If you haven't seen Burtynsky's film
Manufactured Landscapes, check it out)
Andreas Gursky's 99 Cent II Diptychon
My pensiveness and guilt about all this was not helped when, about the same time, I sat down with my kids to watch Pixar's
WALL-E.
WALL-E
Those of you who have seen the film will know that it is an entertaining story of a robot trying in his own small way to inadvertently rescue humanity from a gluttonous dystopia. If Rembrandt and Vermeer captured globalism's past, and Terris, Gursky and Burtynsky are addressing its present, I suppose it is apt to leave it to Pixar to paint its possible future.
