Vancouver: sculpture you can wear
I travel a lot, and wherever I go I look at what others are proposing: how a city shows its art, how a museum earns its life, what it does with its own artists. In September 2023 that curiosity took me to the Vancouver Art Gallery, in Canada, and I left with more questions than I came with. The good kind.
The first thing that catches you is the building: the grandeur of a classical courthouse in the middle of a city as young and modern as Vancouver, with a square in front that pulls people in by itself. It is a hook. But the real surprise was inside, in Fashion Fictions, and in one of its sections in particular, Material Futures.
There were treasures made by very creative people, from America, from Japan, from Europe, from everywhere, many of whom work for the great brands of the world, the kind that make our trainers. And they were doing real madness: sculptural shoes, garments that brush against sculpture, pieces that will never reach a shop. But behind that madness there was serious work, research into materials, into structures, into textures, and out of it come the models that later reach the street, with more or less success. They are building a language: the language of materials, of surfaces, of what we might wear tomorrow.
And it was sculpture. The same principles I had worked with in sculpture, during my years at art school, were all there: weight, balance, volume, the way a material wants to fold or resist. Only now they were meant to be worn.
Standing in front of the whole thing, I understood what the museum does so well: it attracts, and then it inspires. If I were a Canadian entrepreneur walking through those rooms, I would leave motivated, first of all. Then I would leave with the names of real people doing real things, people who might help me improve whatever I make. And when the exhibition comes down, I would still carry a handful of ideas, not only about the past but about the future. It is a living place.
And there is one more door. On the ground floor, the museum runs Art Rental & Sales, a programme that has been renting and selling works by local artists since 1952. If you want to take a little of that grandeur back to your office, you can rent an original work from around ten dollars a month, and if you fall in love with it, buy it. The artists, chosen every year by a committee, receive the largest share. The prices left me speechless.
I love that idea: that art goes out, that it goes out properly, and that it comes back if it is not loved, or once you have grown tired of it. There are thousands of works waiting, and so many people who have never known what it is to hold a piece of human creativity, a piece of humanity and soul, something that will never happen again and that tells you something unique about its moment. Vancouver showed me that a museum can do all of that under one roof. I came home wondering whether we could do it here.
Photographs: Samuel Casavella, Fashion Fictions, Vancouver Art Gallery, September 2023. Works © the designers.
Wherever you are, if a work has caught your eye, or you would like my view on a piece you own or are thinking about, write to me. I will be glad to look at it with you.