Multiculturalism is a Montreal value

Yesterday we visited Pointe-à-Callière, Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History. There were three main exhibits that we saw: one about the history of St. Catherine Street, another about the history of the museum site in Old Montreal, and a third called Montreal Love Stories, that is an introduction to the many cultural communities and various heritages that make up present-day Montreal.

John:

This might be my favourite museum so far: it had maps, streetcars, hockey, ruins and dioramas. The exhibition on St. Catherine Street allowed the visitor to take in the entire history of Montreal, from 1760 to 2011. Focusing on one street and its development is a great way to get a lot of info into one exhibit. The series of maps that show the growth of the street also detail the growth of the city from when it was just the Old Port and farm land, to the heyday in the 19th century, to the decay after the Quiet Revolution (way to ruin it, ruiners), to a rebound today. There were three main subjects: entertainment, shopping and community. The entertainment portion featured photos from the first movie theatres, and of course Lili St-Cyr's famous reverse strip-tease. I love that Montreal had a DA who tried to "clean up" the town, as Pax Plante teamed up with Jean Drapeau in 1946 to tear down all the brothels, only to leave the women of the night on the street. Sex in Montreal is just an inevitability: why fight it? Another inevitability is shopping. The development of big department stores, and later specialty boutiques, defined St. Catherine and was part of what made Montreal the economic engine of Canada for a long time. Even as stores changed hands (check out how the Morgan's M recalls the B of its new owner, the Hudson's Bay company), the people kept coming. They got there on the streetcar, and then the metro. The metro was built under de Maisonneuve and Dorchester so as not to disturb the main shopping drag on St. Catherine. Now, the shopping malls sprawl under the street, spanning from the Green line to the Orange line.

It's amazing how quickly and easily we get to today as we walk along St. Catherine. I had to buy the book in order to really drink it all in. It's too cold now, but the exhibit made me want to walk the length of the street, from Westmount to the east end, and remember each section, each story. It's only 11km long, but it has about 250 years of history to it.

The basement of the museum houses its permanent collection, another view of Montreal's history, this time from the museum's site, which was formerly the Royal Insurance building, as well as an old Customs Office, and also the site of Montreal's first cemetery. The empty graves and shadow's projected on the stone walls was Platonically eerie. They list all the dead, Iroquois and European, and how they died. The official causes of death were: killed by Iroquois, accidental death or natural death. For the Iroquois, there's no indication of whether they were killed by Europeans. Ah, the old Quebecois arrogance is never far...

The Montreal Love Stories exhibit is strictly for tourists, I have to say. It's just an overview of Montreal's ethnic neighbourhoods, some videos of multi-cultural couples, and displays of "cultural" objects, like the 5 K's of Sikhism, or a set of bocce balls. Seriously. I suppose as a Torontonian and now a Montrealer, multiculturalism is not really museum worthy to me, it's just a way of life. It's just normal that different people can live together and get along. I don't see the big deal. Although when the Parti Quebecois' culture critic Louise Beaudoin says that "multiculturalism is not a Quebec value," I can see why it's important to put it out there.

Miriam:

Hier nous sommes allés au musée de la Pointe-à-Caillière, nommé d'après le premier gouverneur de la Nouvelle-France qui y avait établi résidence.

Le musée est très intéressant et la visite des ruines nous mets en contexte histoire de Montréal. L'exposition sur la rue Sainte-Catherine et charmante et bien remplie, tellement qu'elle serait bien mieux installée dans une salle beaucoup plus grande.

Ce qui m'amène à un sujet qui devrait être rappelé régulièrement aux visiteurs de musée en général et qui pourrait dans certain cas faire le saut à la vie de touts les jours.

1. S.V.P. gardez vos distances.

Le musée est une expérience que vous devez partager avec le public, si vous êtes à 30cm de l'affiche, peinture ou autre, vous empêcher toutes les autres personnes derrière vous d'apprécier l'expérience.

2. Pensez-y a deux fois avant de donner votre opinions.

Il est certain que pour plusieurs le musée ce partage avec leur accompagnateur et qu'une partie de l'échange ce passe à travère vos commentaires. Pensé aux autres qui n'ont pas pris le tour guidé des commentaires gratuits et déplacés. D'ailleurs vous courer le risque de vous faire rétorquer par quelqu'un qui a des commentaires plus tranchant que vous

3. Lisez dans votre tête

A moins que vous ne fassiez la visite avec un enfant qui ne sait pas lire je vous en prie lisez dans votre tête, car il n'y a rien de plus emmerdant que d'avoir un mec qui lit tout à sa blonde, de grâce laisse la lire pour elle-même!

4. Un peu de respect

Ne vous moquez pas du passé, dans un futur plus proche que vous pensez vos UGG et Canada Goose vont être aussi ridicule que les habits des amérindiens vous semblent maintenant.

Voilà quatre petites règles qui rendent l'expérience pour tous tellement plus intéressant.

Maintenant allez voir pour vous-même le musée de l'archéologie de Montréal. Ça vaut la peine.

Note: Someone else had the same idea as us. Here's what she thought about the Pointe-à-Callière museum. Different exhibits and different perspective.

Blue (Dabadee)

This week, we went to the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and saw two exhibits: Bleu and Actes de Présences.

John:

Ah, contemporary art. Whenever I go to see contemporary art, I usually have this conversation in my head: "I could do that." "Yes, but you didn't, did you?" "No, but that doesn't make it good art, that just means the person who had the idea to paint the entire canvas blue has a better agent than I do." Ok, maybe that's not exactly fair or true, but I can't help but roll my eyes at some stuff. Don't get me wrong: I like the colour blue! In fact, the two canvases, each painted two shades of solid blue by Claude Tousignant, were quite nice to look at. The darker blue was almost exactly the same shade of blue I chose to paint my living room in Fredericton. Yes, it's true, and though I was criticised for it at the paint store, once we got it on the walls, my decision was valourised.

At least I did learn something new: blue as the representative colour for water emerged only in the 1400s. Prior to that, water had been coloured green on maps. That was the only bit of information I gathered from the exhibit, as the decision to highlight the elements of the collection based on the colour blue seemed to have no other common thread than that. I'm surprised there was no Virgin Mary. There were, however, skies. Genius!

As I was underwhelmed (but not disappointed) by the Blue exhibit, I thought perhaps the Actes de Présences would be more inspiring. It was hit and miss.

First, the misses: The blue canvases were on the simple, minimalist side of things, and that's usually the side I'm on. I'm not a big fan of meta-art, or artist-centric, self-indulgent stuff. A series of photographs of the artist cutting herself with the thorns of a rose? Does it get more high school angst than that? I didn't even bother getting the name. I was also disappointed to read the info next to the Michael Snow piece, Venitian Blind 1970, which told us that the blurry self-portrait head-shots taken by hand with Venice as the background are supposed to remind us that "someone made this." Wow, thanks, I hadn't thought of that. I mean, I understand that perspective is something artists like to play with, and it can be interesting, but this was basically just a series of post-cards of Venice ruined by Snow's squinting mug. Next.

Ok, so there were some things I liked. Dennis Oppenheim's "Two-stage transfer drawing Dennis and Erik" 1971 was pretty cool. The artist, Dennis, had his son, Erik, draw a pattern on his back in magic marker. As Erik was drawing, Dennis tried to draw the same thing on the wall, based on what he was feeling on his back. Then they switched places. The result was not all that attractive or interesting in and of itself, but this is a cool trick of perspective. Not sure it's art, exactly, but it was cool.

The piece that I loved was Francis Alys 4:12 video called El Gringo, from 2003 (second video down in the link). The artist took a video camera into a Mexican village, and was confronted by the local gang of dogs. At first, you see the dogs approaching, from the perspective of the person holding the camera. Then, as the dogs get angrier and more aggressive with their barking, the artist seems to shove the camera in their faces a bit. There are some serious fang shots: cute little dogs become raging wild beasts! Eventually, with six or seven dogs at his heels (or throat!), he abandons the camera to the ground and runs away. We can hear the dogs barking and chasing him away. Then they come back to the camera (still running, left laying in the dirt), nose it, lick it. Back to being cute puppies again!

Well, you can watch the whole thing yourself, but I wanted to describe it, because it was really neat. To me, that's what makes good art: when you want to, no you have to, describe it to someone. The need to share the experience is the essential element for me, which is why some things that are maybe too private (self-cutting? really?) or too banal (measuring tapes stacked as a cone--I have done that one!) turn me off. I guess what I'm saying is, artists, if you want to impress me (and this should be your goal! Ha!), you'll need to come up with a story of some kind, a good colour (like blue!), and cute puppies.

Miriam:

A la demande générale je vais écrire mes pensées en français. Aujourd'hui nous sommes allés au Musée des arts contemporains de Montréal. Pour être entièrement honnête je ne suis pas une grande fanatique de l'art contemporain. Ce n'est pas tout à fait vrai, j'aime beaucoup certaines pièces, mais je n'aime pas les pièces accompagnées de longues descriptions abstraites qui asseyaient de me convaincre que la moitié de la patate trempez dans la gouache rose représente les amours perdus par la sur-urbanisation des terres fertiles durant le 20e siècle. Je trouve que lorsque l'art doit être expliqué c'est parce que l'artiste n'a pas fait son travail. L'exposition "Bleu" a su trouvé des pièces qui évoquaient chez-moi un sentiment de compréhension. En les regardant, j'ai cru être capable comprendre l'état d'âme de l'artiste, sans explication et d'une façon plutôt innée je crois. Ces pièces sont rare mais Bleu a su en regrouper plusieurs. Mais je dois donner une mention spéciale à la boutique du musée. Elle est remplie de curiosité et d'idée cadeau, mais aussi plusieurs créateurs locaux un groupe qui mérite d'être encouragé. Je n'ai rien à dire sur l'exposition "Acte de présence" allez-y un mercredi soir l'accès au musée est gratuit et dites-moi ce que vous en pensez.

Saturn Floats: Montreal Planetarium

For our second trip, we headed down to the Montreal Planetarium, to see a show about Saturn.

Miriam:

Today's destination was a surprisingly fitting follow up to the architecture museum. The planetarium had on display the candidates and the winner for the architecture of the new planetarium planned to be constructed between the Olympic stadium and the Biodome in two years. It won't be too soon if you ask me since the current building is one of those ugly brown boxes with no windows built in the 60's I was talking about in the last post.

We assisted to "Saturn: beyond the rings." It seems that Titan, one of Saturn's moons, is the most likely candidate to be the next earth. So if you are looking to invest in up and coming real estate that's a good long term bet. You heard it here first.

I'm looking forward to going to the new planetarium to witness what 50 years of technology as brought to the light show.

John:

As Miriam mentioned, there was a nice segue between our last visit and this one. The architecture here was more what you think about when you think about architecture: plans, models, that sort of thing. Models are fun. It's too bad they could only pick just one.

The Saturn show was informative, if a little cheesy. The background music sounded like it might work in a porn flick. The funny thing is that the narrator/host was the guy that picked the music (according to the credits). Oh well.

The typical night sky show was interspersed with props: a to scale model of Saturn placed in a tub of water to show its density (not as dense as Jupiter, which explains the ringed planet's squashed shape), a replica (probably not accurate) of Galileo's telescope, and mock-ups of Saturn's moons.

Ok, so I admit to being a Trekkie, so anything space is automatically cool for me. (Side note: I also enjoy Star Wars. Why can't one be both?) The idea that Titan could eventually be an inhabitable planet is tantalizing, even if the time line is long term to say the least. What makes all the sci-fi stuff attractive is that we just don't know what's out there. The more questions we answer, the more questions we have to ask. Last week we ate at the restaurant at the top of the CN Tower. Looking down on the city put life in a different perspective: the buildings were like blocks, the cars like toys. When you pull back for an outside view of our galaxy, it's the same idea, but magnified so much that it's hard to get a clear picture. It's easy to let imagination kick in.

Architecture and Cucumbers

John:

Today we visited the CCA. In the seven years I've lived in Montreal, I've walked or run past the CCA several times a week. The building is on Baile, between St-Marc and du Fort. It looks out on to Rene Lesvesque so every time the Concordia team runs over to Westmount Track, we run by.

The first piece that you see when you get to the top of the stairs is Douglas Coupland's "Brick Wall." I gotta say, I'm a sucker for Lego and such things. Brick Wall is just the sort of thing I could see myself building in my room when I was a kid. But that's not to start some "a six year-old could do that" rant. When I look at this installation, it takes me back to a time before I'd made all the decisions I've made. I used to build things all the time. At the cottage I would make elaborate sand-cities, with moats and bridges. In high school I dropped English Literature (a second English) to take Calculus, because I knew I would get a higher grade. In university, I almost switched my major from English to computer science. And then when I did the whole "go back to school" thing, I went to law school. Maybe I should have thought about architecture or engineering.

There were two main exhibits at the CCA today. One, 404 ERROR: The object is not online, focused on the use of computers in architecture. It was a pretty small exhibit, and to be honest, I don't really get the AUTOCAD thing, but the glass blocks trapped inside a cube, to be manipulated only by rubber gloves, nuclear-style, were cool, even if a girl was hogging them the whole time. Lego, glass blocks...it's pretty clear what I like!

The other exhibit, Journeys, consisted of 15 mini-exhibits that showed "how travelling fruit, ideas and buildings rearrange our environment." There were several interesting takes, from a table featuring European Economic Community regulations "laying down quality standards for cucumbers" to an examination of cocos nucifera, the gallant coconut. While the EEC standards appealed to my legal side ("maximum height of the arc: 10 mm per 10 cm of length of the cucumber"), my favourite was the movie describing how entire towns in Newfoundland were moved to follow fish populations. They just picked up their houses, floated them around to the next bay, and then hauled them back up on shore. Amazing!

Don't worry, I won't be embarking on a "third career" of architecture, but I did really enjoy the exhibits. They were slices of life, but not in that faux-ironic hipster way that is unfortunately popular (think mile-end rusty bicycle in a tree installation sort of thing); no, they were smart, interesting, and real.

Miriam:

Today, knowing nothing about architecture, we decided to make the Montreal Museum of Architecture our first destination using Montreal museum card. I had never been and I have always wanted to go. The building is an impeccable juxtaposition of old and new. It feels like the most utopic representation of Montreal, its architecture, and philosophy.

Two exhibits were up and the first one cheekily called error 404 made the link between the invention of the computers and its influence on architecture and the architect's work. Somehow I had never realized the really ugly brown boxes with no windows built in the 1960's were built that way because the very first computers were enormous monsters no more performing than our common calculator. They were super sensitive to light, dust, humidity and everything, so much so that the building housing them had to be, well, a really ugly brown box with no windows. I feel somewhat more at peace knowing that there was a reason behind these eye sores, however uncreative they are. The architect's work was turned on its head following the invention of the computer. The integration of software like autocad, I would imagine, must have been welcomed by them since it meant tons of time saved from not having to sketch everything by hand and redo everything at each change. The rendition of the final product on your screen saves the time and sanity of building the maquette out of foamboard.

The second exhibit called Journey: how fruit, ideas and travelling influences architecture (John has the right title but it was something like that). The exhibit was really more about the journey than the conveyor belt. Full of interesting information, it settled the "Bungalow: 1 floor or two floors" dilemma I have been having with myself since I started shopping for a house. Answer: one floor. It has a pretty interesting story: the word was first used to describe the one floor houses preferred by the British in the Indian colonies. The word actually comes from Bengal house, try saying it with a British accent and it makes more sense. Some of the information provided felt more like a joke. How does a Newfie move? He puts his house on a boat and he floats it away. But that's that actually what they did when the fish ran out. My favorite was the regulations on cucumbers in France and its amendment to allow cucumbers not "straight enough" to be sold in stores provided they bear the notice that they are meant for transformation only. What's up with that, and how does it connect with architecture? I have no idea but I am glad to have learned that! From now on I will try to buy the most crooked cucumbers I can find. Call it rebellion.

Our plan

Hello! This Christmas, my mom got Miriam a Montreal Museum's pass. This pass gets us two entries to all of the museums in Montreal. The plan is for us to blog our thoughts about them. We are certainly not art critics, but we're confident in our own opinions. We hope you enjoy!

Museums List

Here's a list of the museums we plan to be visiting this year: Avataq Cultural Institute, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Biosphere Environment Museum, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Centre d'histoire de Montréal, Centre historique des Soeurs de Sainte-Anne, Château Dufresne Museum, Château Ramezay Museum, Cinémathèque québéboise, Cité historia musée d'histoire de Sault-au-Récollet, Darling Foundry, DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, Écomusée du fier monde, Exhibition Centre La Prison-des-Patriotes, Maison Saint-Gabriel, Marguerite-Bourgeoys Museum, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montréal Biodôme, Montréal Botanical Garden, Montréal Holocaust Memorial Museum, Montréal Insectarium, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal Planetarium, Montréal Science Centre, Musée de Lachine, Musée des Hospitalières de l'Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Point-à-Callière Montréal Museum of Archaeology and History, Redpath Museum, Sir-George-Étienne-Cartier National Historic Site of Canada, Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Stewart Museum, The Fur Trade at Lachine National Historic Site of Canada.