Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (21 page)

On television, I caught the spokesman I referred to earlier, obviously dazed by the stress of rehearsals, saying the performance was “about” expression, and going on to make the truly lunatic observation that our society was “erotophobic.”

Erotophobic? Western society of the last fifty years, erotophobic! There are not enough exclamation marks in this universe to convey the extremity of my recoil from a statement so reality-impaired.

Eroto
mania
is the condition of our times, not erotophobia. Every pulse of pop culture is sexual. Every square inch of public space breathes sex. Television, movies, music, advertisements, lifestyle—sex drives every atom of Western culture in the modern world. From
Charlie’s Angels: Full
Throttle
back to
Oh! Calcutta!
and the sixties. This generation discovered sex. Philip Larkin wrote a poem about it.

So: if one of the reasons piously offered up for Vancouver’s latest “artwork” is to free the Western polity from the chains of its own prudery, I say, look about you. If you think this is a society starved of sex, and afraid of it, you have been living on a desert island. Swim ashore, lad. Have a gin and tonic, and catch the latest Viagra pitch from Bob Dole.

I have the low suspicion, actually, that the “play” in question is just sex in a public place, and all this chatter about “art and democracy” is the latest tacky styling of the emperor’s new clothes.

Erotophobic! Look out the window, man. Caligula would blush.

I expect that most people in the country have heard or read by now the short, dim story of Thorarinn Jonsson, a student at the Ontario College of Art and Design. This is the young man who, propelled by the muse of Conceptual Art, placed a fake bomb at the entrance to the Royal Ontario Museum. He pasted a message on his “installation,” the fake bomb, saying it was not a bomb. It seems to me he missed a turn in this fascinating dialectic, because a real genius would also
have posted another message on the first message saying, “This is not a real message.” But who’s perfect?

He chose a really unfortunate time to lay his alarming creation near the doors of one of Toronto’s most famous public buildings. I realize this thought might suggest there
is
a fortunate time to place fake bombs on public thoroughfares and in front of landmark buildings, but, having no background in conceptual art, I really lack the mental machinery to “contextualize” all this. For that matter, I don’t even understand how you can contextualize a bomb, fake or not—bombs, real or spurious, not being text to begin with.

It was unfortunate in this particular case, because this was an evening for the ROM to put on a gala to raise money for the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research. The young Picasso of the fake pipe bomb then left a voice-mail message on a randomly selected phone at the museum that must have immensely cheered the sad soul of whoever first heard it: “Listen, there’s no bomb by the entrance to the museum.”

Then—oh Lord, he’s fertile—this Duchamp of detonation posted a video on YouTube showing a young woman walking through the ROM before a bomb—apparently—explodes. This provocative and scary posting was, as they say in art circles, to help “facilitate discussion.” And in the high-minded discussion that followed, it was opined that the entire sequence—the placing of the bomb, the gnomic phone message, the note pinned to the package—was
meant to illustrate, wait for it, the hoary cliché that has adorned every feverish, moronic installation that the avant-garde has ever inflicted on a patient and weary world. It was meant to illustrate “the banality of day-to-day life.”

Well, of course it was. I know that every time I stumble over a facsimile of a bomb when wandering into Union Station or going through some airport terminal, the first thing that pops into my head is: “Oh, Lord. The deep banality of life. I’d forgotten. Witless me.”

As these events unfolded, the less artistically receptive portion of Toronto—people who actually have a life that extends beyond a project of telling everyone else how banal theirs is—reacted with a shameful display of sanity and caution. The police were summoned. Traffic was shut down. The ROM was evacuated, its patrons unwilling to take the note on the bomb that said it was not a bomb in the aesthetic spirit in which it was so clearly intended.

I expect that, to some of the luminaries at the Ontario College of Art and Design, these thoughts will be looked at as very Philistine—or, even worse, bourgeois—responses, but it is not to be expected that people soaked in the banality of day-to-day life vibrate to the same strings as those who have given themselves over to the mistress muse of Conceptual Art. This is the same school, one recalls, that gave the world Jesse Power, who, along with some other artistes, produced a film—“performance art,” they chose to label it—featuring the torture and killing of a cat.

Dead cats and fake bombs. Oh, for the bohemian life.

It is hard to know what to say with any real seriousness about this whole monumentally stupid and essentially arrogant tale. Except, perhaps, that it is yet one more wearying illustration of how utterly empty, in some cases, the very words “art” and “artist” have become. Remember the “crack in the floor” of the Tate Gallery in London recently—the crack in the floor was the piece of art. Or how about this even more recent example executed during a “green party” of “four male Viennese conceptual artists who wore high heels and buckets on their heads but no pants, and who spent the evening building a plywood structure over the bewildered guests’ heads”?
The New York Times
story continues: “And then the Gelitin members, along with three Icelandic artists, also men, … took the buckets off their heads and urinated—with dead-eye accuracy …—into one another’s pails.”

Some dare call it art.

We have burned away excellence and mastery as the only fit criteria for real artistic performance, and crowded the world with the petty, foolish projects of poseurs and imposters.

Conceptual art, it would seem, is a passport for mediocrity and mischief.

My first thought is that it was a couple of playful environmentalists’ premature April Fool’s joke. On Thursday, like a lot of others I suspect, I was very taken with
The Globe
’s front-page photos.

More precisely, I was very taken by one of them: the picture of the golden eagle. Most birds are lovely to look at. Eagles are noble.

I suppose that, in these careful and enlightened times, to say that one animal is “noble” and others are not is a mortal sin against the grim egalitarianism that is the first principle of the keener consciences of our age. This principle holds that, while we may register differences, as between people or animals, to rate those differences—and, accordingly, to say of this person or that animal that one is superior to another—is a dreadful moral failure. In fact, in the rarer altitudes of ecological enlightenment, it is a fatal offence even to draw a line between human and animal.

This toad and that nuclear physicist, this slug and that classical pianist, they are both, in all that is of consequence, one. He who unpacks the quark is as one with the belcher of the bogs; she who unravels Liszt in all his tormenting keyboard velocities is no more than that still, wet blob on the underbough.

To speak or think otherwise is “species-ist,” one of these new and arid Orwellian coinages by which the true believers castigate and categorize the morally underdeveloped of our kind.

It is all bosh, of course. People do not travel thousands of miles and book passage on expensive tour boats to look at halibut. They do to look at whales. Whales are more impressive than halibut. This might not be nice if you are a halibut, and is probably quite a nick in the self-esteem of that unassuming and, happily, quite delicious fish, but alas, it is so.

This ranking holds for creatures of every element. Cougars will draw a crowd where armadillos open to an empty house. The Bengal tiger, to my taste, is the most wonderful spectacle that has ever prowled the Earth. The scaly-tailed rat, known to the connoisseur as the pier rat, is a damn nuisance. As opposed to the tiger, it has a very low fan base.

But it is the creatures of the air that, at their finest, speak to mankind’s wish and need to appreciate the beauty and wonder of nature’s living marvels. And of these, surely there is none quite so simply impressive as the eagle.

The poet Tennyson has covered this point so very well before me that it would be churlish not to quote him:

All together now: “Yeah! Alfred!”

So, let us return to
The Globe
’s pictures of Thursday morning, of a golden eagle and a marmot—specifically, the dead eagle and the live rodent.

The story was of a clandestine operation by the British Columbia government, which set out the carcass of a dead deer to lure golden eagles to lunch—and then shot six of them. This, because golden eagles, under God’s providential assignment of these matters, is a predator of the marmot, and the marmots of Vancouver Island are a dwindling clan. And because, one must presume, under the missionary zeal of ecological “management,” some wizards in the B.C. wildlife division felt a little shotgun intervention on the pro-marmot side of the equation was the really sensitive thing to do.

There was even a Gagliano touch to the story. A ministry spokesman indicated that, while the public wasn’t told of the kill, neither was it a secret.

I should add, just to gild this bloodied lily, the ministry in question has also “encouraged” the shooting of cougars and wolves under the same demented idea of marmot protection. This may well be the My Lai moment of the endangered-species movement.

There are six dead golden eagles in a refrigerator somewhere in B.C. because official conservationists wanted to spare some weasel’s cousin the wear and tear of the wild.

It’s a mischief on the same scale as harpooning a whale to “save” the sculpin.

In the civilized nation to the south of us, they have a better sense of priorities. In Bush country, it is a criminal offence to vex eagles; loggers have paid fines ranging into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for cutting down trees wherein they nest.

Lord, let us be saved from the people who care about things. There is no insolence stronger than that which springs from a caring heart.

Will Al Gore save the world?

Well, he was on
Larry King Live
the other night, which, as we all know, is the very hospice of our ailing world. When a man has a world to save, where else would he go?

Whenever the great, the rich or the famous feel the itch of social conscience, they head to Mr. King’s amicable chat hospital to have it scratched. For us. For the peons who, without their guidance, and a comatose nod from Larry, would not recognize the handbasket of the week in which our green and fragile world is careering to hell.

Bono ends a gig in Amsterdam, say, and remembers Africa is in a spot of trouble. There is no G8 meeting in session, and it’s pointless to issue press releases slagging Paul Martin anymore. Gives Larry a call. Appears next night. Africa fixed.

If tubular Dr. Phil fears America is too fat, a quick call to Larry, a fresh set of suspenders, and the alarm is sounded. America shrinks.

And it was only recently that Paul McCartney and his then-loving spouse, Heather, found themselves agitated over the parsimonious earnings from the “cruellest harvest” in the world, the Newfoundland seal hunt. They went to Larry, and now, of course, the ice floes of the North Atlantic are a floating daycare centre, a Christmas on ice, for unmolested seals.

Go on, Larry. Vent. All is well. It’s better than a syllogism. It’s neater than physics.

The seals are doing fine. Paul and Heather have hit cold water, though. Their marriage is
finis
. The publicity is horrid for Heather, and the sorting out of the marital spoils promises to be nasty. And yet, just a few weeks ago, there they were, cute as squirrels, on Larry’s show.

Yesterday, their troubles seemed so far away. And now—well, now it seems they’re here to stay. Oh well, it’s their business. Let it be.

So, when I saw Al Gore on with Larry, fresh from his jetting to Cannes and hopscotching the globe with his new documentary film/presentation,
An Inconvenient Truth
, I knew—as surely as I know that Liza Minnelli will be a guest again on
LKL
—that whatever state the world is in, we were saved.

Mr. Fixit was on with Larry. The Pied Piper of Global Warming (climate change, for those at the front of the class who have been keeping up) was executing a passionate seminar for our doomed planet and … was it just my imagination, or could you feel the ice caps mending? Were perspiring polar bears suddenly high-fiving each other? And was there, finally—thank God—a (recuperative) chill in the global biosphere?