Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  Arnaud and Spring do tai chi on the road to Toulouse

  Although for decades Arnaud’s chief medium has been photography, he remains, at heart, a designer. He loves the formal properties of objects — letterforms, signs, even funnels and water jugs. He loves the theme and variation. And he loves assembling and ordering the variants in a grid. Control. The average designer is not so much a creative person as one who loves order, craves it and needs it to get by in a messy world. Although Arnaud had been a very good graphic designer he became much more than that. He saw the beauty in mundane things. He could make the quotidian visible, even authoritative and majestic. He made us pay attention: he helped us to see.

  Only later back in Toronto do I discover that Arnaud has a secret — cancer. His thin frame has turned against itself, day upon day, beckoning that other guy in black, the one with the scythe, ever closer.

  Arnaud Maggs

  We both once sat in a small boardroom session with a former provincial cabinet minister who was chairing one of those commissions on the state of the arts that periodically erupt like an outbreak of shingles. After Arnaud had described what it was like to work alone, hour upon hour, day upon day for weeks and months producing work that no one exhibited or bought the ex-minister exploded in a rage. Why would one persist? Why make work no one wanted? It was incomprehensible! Who needs photographs that clinically describe the shape of people’s heads or reproduce catalogue numbers of jazz albums? It was crazy. You make things that people need like car tires, can openers or toilet seats. And why were so many claiming to be artists?

  For me it spoke volumes about the government’s commitment to the arts when it would appoint someone with a mickey of hard stuff on the floor beside his chair and a belief that producing artists could be as efficient as training dentists. Arnaud suffered through this outburst with quiet restraint. There was little point in talking to a drunk.

  I’ve now been around long enough to see who succeeds and who falls under the bus. In the early days of organizing exhibitions at Harbourfront, working on a photography magazine, hosting the Toronto Photographers Workshop in my studio and sitting on many arts juries I encountered some wonderfully original talents. They explored unexpected subjects, processed film in unconventional ways and scribbled, drew and vandalized their prints. There was a vigorous urgency to their work.

  As the years went by I watched them get ground down by the institutions. Their so-called peers on the granting juries usually argued badly and turned them down. There was a gradual triumph of the academy as more art schools taught photography and promoted various safe, imported orthodoxies. The big Canadian museums were totally deaf to new and local voices, having been mentally colonized by modes promoted by American institutions like New York’s Museum of Modern Art or the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester. The National Gallery in Ottawa bought enormous numbers of prints by second- and third-string Americans all the while ignoring and rejecting a wave of vigorous and original work by young Canadians. The director of one important Ottawa institution eventually used her position to exclusively buy and promote work by her boyfriend. As a result the most interesting young photographers got hungry and backslid into commercial work or gave up all together. It was just too difficult.

  And who achieved what is commonly called success in this timid and derivative culture? It seems to me that all too often the ambitious plodders of convention got the rewards. It is true that succeeding requires a complex mix of talents — for self-promotion, a head for business, a desperate hunger for material success, a tin ear to criticism and a vigorous, if uninformed, belief in one’s self. It also requires making work that is always recognizably yours, that is accessible and, on some level, decorative. To succeed you built a brand.

  The curious, and the truly curious, try many things as part of their journey. This makes it difficult to self-brand. In our crowded and noisy world it is much easier for the public to understand and recognize work that beats the same rhythm on the same drum year after year. Thus in many ways we are served up the second best. Time and history can be a corrective but both can only select from what has been promoted and preserved by the past. The jury faces much pre-selection. I don’t begrudge the commercial success of some: they’ve worked hard for it. But I do regret the losses and the public’s confusion of success with excellence.

  This, of course, was not limited to photography or the visual arts. I first-hand witnessed the progress of my ex-father-in-law’s music students. All his most brilliant students fell off the bus while the driven mediocrities went on to public careers. Their technique was imitative and their interpretations borrowed but they got the concerts and recording contracts. The crudities of the marketplace triumphed in the end.

  ***

  Late October morning light slashes through the pines, highlighting some, ignoring others. The woods become deeply dimensional.

  I once saw her naked. It was like watching bubbles in a bath — sphere upon sphere upon sphere. Dressed she looked like a rolling tent. What little flesh her screaming prints didn’t cover was buried in aggressive jewelry — silver pendants, chains, bangles, bracelets, rings and baubles. Anita Aarons was big and brassy. Chaos followed her everywhere as she swept grandly through life. But she got things done.

  Her father back in Australia had been an itinerant theatre organist, a showman playing a flashy Wurlitzer on the road all over the Far East, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Anita grew up and married a prominent Australian economist. They had a couple of troubled daughters. One eventually retreated into a quiet marriage to a French engineer and the other, Tina, followed her grandfather into show business. For a few years in the ’60s Tina was a fey princess on the British folk circuit, tra-la-la-ing her way into the fantasies of numerous English boys.

  After her marriage failed Anita went to New York to participate in a World Crafts Council conference. It was there that she met Merton, a baby-faced London, Ontario, potter working in Toronto. Being a nice Canadian WASP he politely invited her to come and visit if she ever found herself in Canada. A few weeks later she was banging on his door. He kindly put her up for the night. She never left.

  After a few years in Toronto she landed a job with the Extension Department of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Extension circulated art exhibitions to small cities and towns all over the province. Anita’s job was to develop some of these exhibitions and get them on the road. She was no intellectual but she was crafty and intuitive. Persistent and inventive, she created numerous interesting shows and gave many young artists their first chance. However, she was a poor politician and when time came for cuts she was out the door.

  In the early ’70s when the Trudeau government bought up much of the central Toronto waterfront and gave it to the city as a park Anita realized it was a great opportunity. She managed to get appointed to create an art gallery at what soon came to be known as Harbourfront. The Liberals’ gift was in some ways an empty one. It was a spectacular piece of real estate but it came with no money to create or operate a big urban park. The various grain elevators along the waterfront were handsome industrial structures but almost impossible to repurpose. Most of the warehouse buildings were at the end of their structural lives and would eventually have to be razed. None of this seemed promising.

  However just west of where Bay Street meets Queen’s Quay there was a long, low trucking transshipment warehouse. With a lot of scrubbing and some white paint a couple of its bays could be used as an exhibition space. Anita set to work and collared as many people she knew as possible to help. At the same time Greg Gatenby began working there in parallel to develop what became a famous reading series. I soon found myself on the first gallery board and helped Anita swish, bully and beg the gallery into existence. It was soon a vibrant success. It’s still there as is its grander offshoot, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.

  Anita’s energy and ego kept her right on the edge. S
he often ricocheted out of control and made enemies. She also made mistakes. When the Gardiner family began poking around Harbourfront to site their proposed ceramic museum Anita fought hard against what she witheringly referred to as “that teacup museum.” She succeeded in driving it away to the corner of Bloor and University where it flourished. Quite a few of her artists simply faded away. None of this slowed her down.

  It was if she generated her own energy field. Watching her lose it could be fascinating. When this round woman decided to marry the mild Merton we were all sharing a studio building on Queen East. Pat Fulford, a sculptor friend of Anita’s, helped create a wedding dress for the blushing bride who then had to be in her 60s. Pat put the finishing touches on the black-and-white gown the morning of the wedding. By noon Anita had become so hysterically excited that she somehow outgrew the dress. Pat hastily added a couple of panels. An hour later it was again too small. Pat added more. I’d check in from the floor above every hour or so to watch Anita blow up minute by minute as the day wore on and the wedding hour approached. It didn’t seem humanly possible but she kept getting larger in defiance of all physical laws.

  I had a number of encounters with her that were like this. Her new husband taught at a college back in London so she spent most weekdays and nights alone in the studio. On occasion I’d come in around two or three in the morning to process some film. I’d attempt to sneak quietly up the stairs but sometimes woke her up. She’d sweep out onto the second floor landing, see my shadowy ascending figure and start to scream. Even after she realized it was only me she couldn’t stop. She’d call out my name between gasping breaths, hyperventilating faster and faster until she’d collapse against the wall. I’d have to watch over her for an hour or two until she restored herself. This high-strung hysteria could be terrifying. It also had power.

  Before she and Merton moved into the studio building they’d had a large, comfortable house in the Beaches. At least once a month they’d invite me to a small dinner party. At one of these Merton mentioned Anita’s sleeping problems. They’d be in their bedroom under the eaves when Anita would cry out, “It’s here again.” Whatever “it” was would move around the room, hovering above the floor menacingly, until finally moving over the bed to settle upon Anita’s chest so she couldn’t breathe. While it was totally real and present to her, Merton never saw it. As he related this story I began to feel cold. My hair felt electric and slowly I became aware of a shadow hovering up by their dining room ceiling. In the beginning it was just a small amorphous mist, but it soon condensed into something darker and began slowly roiling. Anita cried out. She saw it too. Everyone else at the table looked baffled as Anita and I watched it progress around the circumference of the room. The air was electric as the presence grew and solidified. But only the two of us saw and felt it.

  After a half hour or so it began to recede. The room seemed to get brighter and become pacific. Finally it was gone and a new conversation began. After a while I got up to go and pee in the basement washroom. While I was down there I felt it again. As the feeling intensified I heard Anita scream in the dining room above. It was back for her too. This dybbuk, this duppy, this spook returned several times that night. It would arrive for both of us simultaneously even when we were in different rooms or on different floors. But it remained ours and ours alone until the first thin light of dawn.

  Anita often seemed to be operating on the brink of hysteria. At various times she got illnesses of unspecified diagnosis. I remember a month when she’d whoop to anyone who’d listen, “I’m leaking from every orifice.” I never found out exactly what that meant. Eventually the leaks were forgotten, replaced by another pathology.

  Life with Anita was never predictable. One year her daughter Tina flew in from England with her Australian friend Jim to stay a few weeks. She sashayed around the building in see-through dresses that somehow made her look angelic. Her friend Jim seemed very studious, spending his days reading music scores. One day he knocked on my studio door with a boxed set of vinyl LPs under his arm. Like many photographers I had a powerful stereo with huge speakers in my studio. He wanted to use it to audit his recordings. They were of one of the warhorse operas — I’ve since forgotten which one. For the next few days he come up and play the recordings and follow the score while I worked. Finally he revealed that he’d been asked to direct performances of it at the Sydney Opera House. Up to that moment I’d had no idea what he did.

  The Rocky Horror Picture Show was playing at the Roxy, a run-down little rep movie house on the Danforth. Tina convinced Jim to go for a laugh. The place was jammed with teens all dressed in costumes from the film. During the musical numbers hundreds of kids would get up to dance, mime and sing the parts. They had the whole film memorized. Jim, who’d been holed up almost as a hermit for several years, was out of touch. He had no idea that this low budget film that he’d directed as a young man had become the object of a teen cult. Jim Sharman was stunned.

  In time Anita and Merton retired to Queensland in Australia where she started a local gallery. Back in Toronto planning and building for the Power Plant accelerated. When I’d first walked into the raw building as a gallery board member I was overwhelmed. It had a huge engine hall filled with giant antique compressors — they’d been built to chill the enormous five-storey Terminal Warehouse Building immediately to the east. There were still lunch buckets on the staff canteen table and socks and long johns dangled from lines in the locker room. I regret to this day that I didn’t get around to photographing how the light fell on those machines and abandoned coveralls.

  Finally the plant conversion was complete and a great opening bash was announced. Anita, who’d often destroyed as fast as she built, was not invited. She was almost forgotten and many of those who did remember treasured the little hurts and slights that she’d dispensed. It was a classic instance of dissing and dumping the entrepreneur who, in many ways, had made the whole thing possible. She decided to come anyway. She flew in from Australia and walked around the party, a short, dumpy, forgotten woman. The managers, the mediocrities, the civil servants had taken over. The crazed creator was left just a shadow drifting in the corners, invisible to all but a tiny handful who knew.

  2009

  My city neighbour Carmel knocks on the door of our house in downtown Toronto and settles in tell us about her recent trip to meet her new beau’s extended family back in the mountains outside Rome. First day there she was emboldened to go for a walk through his ancestral village. She’s a lapsed Irish Catholic party girl with bright red hair. Astonished villagers would ask where she’s from. Canada. “Ah,” they say, “Wood-a-bridge-a. Wood-a-bridge-a.”

  ***

  The water sparkles, the clouds scud, wind sings in the pines. There’s nobody in the township but me. I spot something moving down the middle of the inlet maybe 1,500 feet from where I master the world from my big screen porch. I run inside and dig around in a drawer for my 10x50 binoculars and train them on the disturbance in the waters. It’s huge, it’s got a big rack, it’s a deer — a buck, no it’s an elk, no it’s a moose casually swinging its head from side to side as it paddles right down the dotted line in the centre of our boating channel. Wait a minute, those aren’t moose antlers. I stare intently through my Nikons. That’s the rack of a woodland caribou. It has to be; I’ve got a set hanging from the collar ties of the room not a dozen feet behind me. They’re from in back of Rankin Inlet and have tiny little hunting scenes scratched into the tines. At this distance I can’t see hunting scenes but the form is unmistakable. Wow! They’re back! Nature can be so forgiving, so resilient, so brimming with opportunity and opportunists.

  Now Carmel is getting married to the Italian guy. The wedding is taking place in the backyard of his minor monster house in deepest Wood-a-bridge-a. She’s all tricked out in a white 50-year-old-virgin-bride outfit and looks terrified. He’s done this marriage thing before and seems pretty relaxed. His kids are there as is his whole
enormous, glorious, riotous Italian Canadian extended family. Carmel’s section of the guest crowd is centred on her gay buddies from the design world of her work. They swish through the crowd of cabinet-makers, guys in tile, landscapers and house-builders. Carmel’s gays are totally relaxed and funny as hell. It’s a good party.

  The wedding tent covers the whole backyard. I drift toward the back of it and discover tomatoes growing just outside the tent’s rear wall. It’s only the beginning of July but the plants are already five feet high. Hundreds of huge shiny green tomatoes dangle enticingly from monster stalks. I’ve got a dozen plants growing in soil pockets on my hard rock island but they’re only a foot high. How do the I-ties do it?

  “You-a-like-a?” It’s the groom’s 80-year-old father. Turns out he’s the gardener. And he’s perfect to type — a short, barrel-chested Italian mountain peasant who’s worked hard and made it in the New World. We struggle to talk but it’s tough. After more than 50 years here he still speaks little English and I always get by in Italy with my stale Spanish. They’re very forgiving.

  The groom’s sister appears and offers to translate for her father. We begin a talk about growing tomatoes. I’ve got lots of questions. I’m going to infiltrate these ethnic gardening mysteries. Just because I’m a lapsed white-bread Anglican choirboy doesn’t mean I should be damned to bad tomatoes for life. The groom’s son now joins us as well. He tells me about the first time he met Carmel at his dad’s house. She was determined to master the tomato pasta sauce thing and please her new boyfriend. She wasn’t competing with his mum, just learning the basic Italian husband-pleasing skills for the future. He walked into his dad’s kitchen at the precise moment Carmel hit the switch on his dad’s commercial kitchen blender. She’d forgotten to put the lid on. He offers to take me into the house to see the special tomato speckles effect still on the ceiling. Even new paint doesn’t hide it.