Recently having read that The Death of the Artist book, wherein a subchapter detailed at length not just the brutal gentrification process that artist presence in a neighbourhood is part of/causes/is a result of, but lays out how, in intentional urban neighbourhood design, the visible presence of artists is considered an amenity for middle class residents and sought as such (though apparently we are replaceable by small fun restaurants? feels great.)
It’s bleak, but it got me thinking again about ecosystem metaphors and how artists (and in the book it tries to use artists to mean an umbrella term that includes writing, film, music, etc., but I would argue that in the visible-as-neighbourhood-amenity sense, artists means visual artists, musicians and maybe sometimes filmmakers, depending on their visibility/indie-ness) are this sort of decorative scavenger presence that dramatically change an ecosystem, even so much as to make it uninhabitable for themselves.
And that got me thinking about whale falls, and how for very new, utterly unsuccessful artists, an urban presence in terms of occupied space is often only really possible in the liminal moments of transformation of the space – when one round of neighbourhood occupants has left and the other not yet moved in, as it were.
Pop-ups.
I got to be in a gallery pop-up for the third ever Nuit Blanche in Toronto. It was very new and very respectable at the time as an event and it also happened only in particularly artsy neighbourhoods still. I had graduated that May and so by September, myself and my fellow fine art grads had come to the realization that we were going to have to haul ourselves up into the fine art world by our bootstraps apparently, and we quickly formed a slightly incoherent collective, pooled our funds, and booked a small manufacturing warehouse in the Right Neighbourhood and pulled together a group show for Nuit Blanche.
This was not my first nor my last artist collective, but it met a similarly dispersed end. As far as I know, only one of the … eleven or twelve? of us? went on to become a gallery artist, and unfortunately I’m out of touch with everyone from that point in my life. You may have noticed I am a commercial artist now.
Anyways! A pop-up gallery by a bunch of 21-year-olds four months out of art school, smack dab in the middle of the biggest art walk event in our large and culturally illustrious city.
This was only even possible because the warehouse was empty at the time; and it was empty because it had been sold to a developer who would shortly gut it and build something much more expensive in its place. For Toronto locals, this was at Queen and Ossington, a neighbourhood I can’t afford to eat in regularly anymore, even with my commercial art career income, moretheless rent retail-adjacent commercial space for a full month.
These sorts of nearly-dead spaces in otherwise vibrant neighbourhoods undergoing the inevitable condoification are almost always filled by pop-ups – gallery pop-ups, small businesses, catering companies testing out restaurant life, tattoo studios designed to pack up quickly at the end of their temporary lease. These all still pay rent to the landlord, whether the original one or the future condo tower owner, I imagine it varies. They wring the last little bit of potential out of the space – they pick the bones, as it were.
All these lost art students and ambitious young chefs and body mod artists just spreading out over the urban abyssal plain, waiting for some decaying piece of property to become briefly accessible, and then lighting it up with culture and drama and foot traffic like a brief firework before it ultimately fully disappears into the grey sands of unaffordable rent.
Even the Starbucks that opened in that neighbourhood as a harbinger of the great Gentrification Construction Wave is gone now, by the way.
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