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Ted Bieler Mudra, 1974. Government of Ontario
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Anne and Patrick Poirier, Memoire du futur, 1992, Polished steel and stone. The
Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto/Marathon Realty Corp.
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Eldon Garnet, Time and a Clock, 1990 (top). Kosso Eloul, Meeting Place, 1984 stainless
steel, Crown Life Insurance Company
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Kosso Eloul, Meeting Place, 1984 stainless steel, Crown Life Insurance Company
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B Y G A R Y M I C H A E L D A U L T
Nickel magazine, October 2002 -- Marble and bronze may have the upper hand historically,
but the single most advantageous material available to today's sculptor is stainless steel.
Stainless is strong and easy to maintain, its reflectibility is highly sensuous, and it responds to
detailing, articulation and nuance. Indeed, it is a medium which the sculptor can use as delicately and
precisely as a painter uses paint.
The city of Toronto, Canada, features numerous examples of stainless steel used artistically in public
sculpture.
The goal of the city's former Percent for Public Art Plan, established in 1985 and remaining in place
until the new City of Toronto's "Official Plan" is adopted, is to "enhance and humanize both specific sites
and the City in general" and to create "harmonious relationships between public open spaces, streets and
development projects." This is to be done by the allocation of one percent of the gross construction costs of
a project to public art. The percent for public art plans are "required for all proposed developments [except
for public housing developments] with a gross area of 20,000 square metres or more". The new City of Toronto
official plan draft policies, adds to that by "encouraging the inclusion of public art in all significant
private sector developments across the city".
One of my favourite public art works in the city is the witty and ironic Memoire du futur (1992) by the French husband-and-wife team of Anne
and Patrick Poirier. Situated in the lobby of Metro Hall on King Street West, this enormous, seismically
misaligned Greek Pillar, with its individual drums stacked up into a wobbly pile (as if the column had fallen
and been hastily and precariously put back together again) is like a piece of antique jewelry. The fact that
each of the column's stacked drums is luxuriously coated in shiny stainless steel transforms the work from a
reminiscence of the cultural past into a luxurious (if precarious) object -- a work of fragile, evanescent
beauty. If this is a "memory of the future," then the future is clearly glamorous but unstable. I don't know
when I've seen stainless steel so cunningly employed. Here, the very seductiveness, the narcissism, of its
surface is integral to the meaning of the work.
Renowned Canadian sculptor and filmmaker Michael Snow employs stainless steel to similarly witty effect in
his Red, Orange and Green, a complex stainless steel "tree"
installed beside the Confederation Life Insurance Company at Jarvis Street and Mount Pleasant Road. Using
stainless steel not only for its strength but for its reflectibility, Snow assumes that the only fall colours
this tree will display will be those reflected in it from its surroundings and from passing traffic. On the
other hand, it will obviously remain steadfastly colourful all year round, and not just in autumn. The tree
literally reflects the seasons. And everything else.
One of the sculptors most devoted to the use of stainless steel in sculpture was Kosso Eloul (1920-1996).
In work after work, he folded sheet steel into airy volumes that, once they were welded together, assumed
their new role as heavy masses. Leaning together or balanced, one upon the other, they are suggestive of the
slabs at Stonehenge. One of the best was Meeting Place,
installed (admittedly under rather cramped conditions) at the entrance of the Crown Life Insurance Company at
Bloor Street East and Church Street.
I used to argue with Kosso that one cannot pass off volumes (in this case, stainless steel shells welded
and bolted together) as ponderous, slabby masses, but he always remained cheerfully unmoved by my point of
view. He must have been doing something right, since he ended by making more public sculptures -- and making
more of them from stainless steel -- than anybody else in Canada.
What is so important about using stainless steel is that it is wonderfully ductile and folds beautifully.
A case in point is the 11-metre stainless steel work Triad,
by Toronto artist and teacher Ted Bieler. It is at 123 Front Street West at University Avenue and was
commissioned in 1984 by the Marathon Realty Company Limited to mark Toronto's Sesquicentennial. Its upwardly
proliferating, origami-like folds aptly symbolize the city's rapid and continuing growth.
Toronto-based artist Eldon Garnet is one of the most inventive designers of public sculpture in Canada.
Normally working with stone, wood and bronze (he frequently casts full-size human figures), Garnet turned to
the flexibility of stainless steel for what was certainly one of his most ambitious projects -- a three-part,
architecturally scaled installation called Time: And a Clock
(1990).
The clock part had to do with the first third of the installation -- a graceful scroll of sheet-metal
letters garlanding a clock installed on the bridge over the Don River and the Don Valley Parkway on Queen
Street East. Taking his cue from the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who said "you cannot step into the
same river twice," Garnet's text reads: "This river I step in is not the river I stand in."
Continuing under the bridge and travelling east on Queen Street brings you to the work's second phase -- a
four-part meditation on time conducted by means of four texts, composed of stainless steel letters, sunk into
the sidewalks of each of the four corners of the Queen-Broadview intersection. One text reads "Distance =
Velocity x Time." Another, a favourite with local merchants, proclaims that "Time is money, money is time"
The third and fourth say "Too soon free from time" and "Better late than never."
Farther east still on Queen Street, near Empire Avenue, stands the work's third sculptural cluster: four
slim steel flagpoles with stainless steel banners "fluttering" from them -- that is to say, the banners are
cut from sheet stainless steel and shaped to look like cloth banners waving in the wind. A stainless steel
letter rides atop each pole (adding up to T-I-M-E), and each of the banners, which are made up of stainless
steel letters, addresses, by means of its solitary word, the behaviour of time. The first says "coursing";
"disappearing" and "trembling" are next, and the last says "returning."
Gary Michael Dault is a well-known Toronto writer and art critic. He has written or co-written eight
books, including Architecture Canada 1997: The Governor General's Awards for Architecture (editor
and essayist), and is a weekly columnist for the Globe & Mail.
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