Adrian Blackwell

Front Gallery

July 6 - August 5, 2000

It's a dream of the perfect party where conversation, as powerful as a song, cascades along a slow twisting course, leading nowhere in particular. Stand back and it makes a gleeful remark on what the modernist architect shares with the skate punk: a love of aerial feats.

An amphitheatre-like conversation pit, Adrian Blackwell's Model for Public Space offers no single spectacle to arrest or direct attention. The piece begins with a simple drawing and an engagingly open-ended hypothesis about shared time and space. A Skilsaw-etched circle spirals outward to a thirty foot radius. Rings of plywood are propped up on supports in order to make a continuously unfolding ramp of bleachers that will hold the weight of walking, sitting, and talking. People enter, or stand at the perimeter. They hoist themselves up, navigate other bodies, make room for the newly arrived, watch and offer their reflections to any others who happen to be in the space. Some will arrive to participate in scheduled discussions. In this space, words can weave their way through the various levels, moving from beneath to above, falling inward, or floating across the centre. An ideal of social being cast in wood, Blackwell's model looks like a speaker on its side, amplifying upward.

As the city, fearful of loitering and lawsuits, removes the swings and monkey bars from parks and school yards and permits franchise developers to replace city life with 'urban event space', artist and architect Blackwell speculates about how design and structure can nurture other public possibilities. His Model for Public Space casts doubt on the values that contemporary culture ingests along with the incentives and returns of transnational capital. His notion of the public-indebted to Habermas, Arendt and the Situationist's theory of the derivé-upholds the ideals of collective action and open discussion, and allows for layer upon layer of spontaneous, emergent behaviour. This appreciation of sedimentation and trophyless play remains resolutely at odds with the prevailing ethos of efficiency, surface, and surveillance. Perhaps this is why the project, although originally conceived within the context of a collaborative proposal for the redevelopment of the Yonge and Dundas intersection, has necessarily taken on a life of its own.1

Richard Serra's work provides an interesting point of comparison. Large scale minimalist public sculptures capable of impeding the tide of commuter traffic, they too suggest a challenge to the maniac cycles of efficient production. His torqued steel ellipses invite the viewer to veer off-course and enter into their immaculate interior spaces. Although the sculptures offer a scenic route that can transform the passer-by into a visitor, they are nevertheless still about flow, rather than congregation. They demonstrate how jumping track to wander can lead one into the spaces of solitude as easily as into the realms of public life and convivial sociality.

Embracing the elemental with extraordinary rigour, Serra encourages an attentiveness to the stark thresholds between inside and outside, empty and full, life and death. Blackwell's work, in contrast, approaches the question of distinct identities or states of being as temporary and transformable, products of historical process and social action. His focus is not on the exact moment when motion and stasis divide or turn one into the other, but on the dynamic effects of site, contagion, and multi-level living in a world of appearances and others. His Model for Public Space provides a structure, extruded from the flat surface of everyday materials, that seeks to encourage our attraction to scalable heights, both physical and social.

Kathleen Pirrie Adams

Images: Adrian Blackwell
Spiral Space, 1999
University of Manitoba
Photo: Rafael Gomez-Morima