HOLDING GROUND: NUIT BLANCHE AND OTHER RUPTURES
Edited by Julie Nagam and Janine Marchessault
PUBLIC Books, 2022

By Jenn Goodwin

12 hours, once a year.

15 years.

180 hrs.

# of artists – 5800

# of curators – 51

# of artworks – 1600

# of spaces – 2000

# of talks – 64

# of Ai Weiwei Bikes – 3144

# of tears/break-ups/kisses/spilt beers – unknown

# of volunteers – over 9000

# of student co-op placements – 42

# of complaints – TBC

# of first encounters with contemporary art – TBC

# of mayors – 3

# of economic impact – $443 Million

# of kilometers I walked working 1 Nuit (12 hrs) – 43

# of kilometers of public space turned into cultural space – over 118

An all-night, one-night-only, free-to-the-public contemporary art event in public space. With the goal of making art more accessible to more people, bringing art to the public rather than waiting for the public to come to the art, and softening the often intimidating or alienating arena of the art world, Nuit Blanche deepens engagement between the public and public art in the city and has changed the way Toronto’s artists and audiences engage with art in the public realm. Using the city as canvas and the above framework as foundation, Nuit Blanche sees the city of Toronto—working in collaboration with Toronto’s arts communities, museums, and galleries—stay open all night while artists use buildings, streets, billboards, parks, and city architecture as their landscape and backdrop. Both event and exhibition, festival and fete, Nuit Blanche creates monumental spectacles and some surprisingly subtle moments, and has become a night for the city to come together under the stars to experience contemporary art. The founding principle of Nuit Blanche was to break down barriers to contemporary art for both audiences and artists. It is the ephemeral nature of the event that has been critical to its success, and ironically, a key factor in its endurance. Both its blessing and its curse is that people come out in droves.

Obstacles to attending art events often include cost, distance, time availability, a fear of not “getting it,” or a lack of perceived value in attending,1 as well as the general challenge of making people aware of when and where things are happening. The mandate and scale, the come-one-come-all energy, of Nuit Blanche helps to address and dissolve some of these barriers.

I started working at the City of Toronto in 2005 and went to Paris to learn and understand the original intentions from the founders and adapt the model for Toronto, developing the first Nuit Blanche in the city with my colleagues. The first year of Nuit Blanche in Toronto was subtitled “A Contemporary Art Thing.” We wanted to deliberately situate the event within the contemporary art world, while also offering a casual and playful welcome to those less, or not at all, familiar with contemporary art. The exhibition was to be unpretentious, to use spaces familiar to the general public, and to free the art from the often-impenetrable artworld and its walls. It began on Queen Street West, in Yorkville, and around McCaul Street. As the festival grew over the years, it came to incorporate the financial district, Yonge Street, Chinatown, Bremner Avenue, Wellington Street, Liberty Village, and other locations, with an anchor at City Hall/Nathan Phillips Square. The original intention was to have Nuit Blanche move from neighbourhood to neighbourhood around the city from year to year. However, because of its popularity (425,000 people attended the inaugural night on a rainy and cold September evening), consideration needed to be given to the safety of attendees, transportation, food, bathrooms, emergency services, security, and a million other things. We responded to the public’s desire to be able to move from artwork to artwork fairly easily and quickly, and to be able to see a lot of works during the course of the night. Addressing the barriers to attending art events, and producing an event of this nature, involved a huge degree of coordination with city services, but in the end allowed the public to approach the art on their own terms.

In some cases, the connection to the art was approached a little too literally on select viewer’s own terms, and some works were damaged or stolen. We came to realize quickly that certain works could not be left unprotected and some types of work were too fragile or vulnerable for the situation, and so we worked closely with curators and artists to ensure proposed works would be materially resilient to the Nuit Blanche environment. In one instance, while walking with the art collective SuttonBeresCuller, we noticed a young and fairly inebriated man climbing the tall sculpture they had made. The artist yelled up to him, “Dude! What the hell are you doing?” Dude said: “Dude, I’m climbing this, why do you care?” Artist said: “Dude, I made this!” The dude then crawled down, said, “No way man! this is so awesome,” and continued to talk with the artist about the artwork for the next thirty minutes.

Another key factor to Nuit Blanche’s connection to the public is that it is a free, non-ticketed event. Removing the price barrier allows people to experiment more with their choice of what to attend, and perhaps opens doors for many who would not normally have art events on their radars or in their budgets. Entire families could be seen wandering around the large-scale exhibit by artist/activist Ai Weiwei, who we worked with from afar while he was under house arrest or Early Morning Opera’s 360 degree aquarium made for performances. Groups of teenagers socialized and took selfies next to sports fans and the art cognoscenti as they watched John Sasaki’s spirited mascots in I Promise It Will Always Be This Way (2008) together. They later stood next to each other to see Brendan Fernandes’s dramatic shipping containers of Future (∙∙∙ --- ∙∙∙) Perfect (2008), which addressed the trauma of migration, displacement, and change. Not only is the event free, but attendees are free to observe it at their own pace for as little or as long as they want. The fact that viewers can see divergent works allows room for a variety of appreciation and differing viewpoints. And it seems to be appreciated that photos are not only permitted but encouraged, making Nuit Blanche one of the most privately documented events in the city, and allowing the public to bring home evidence of their connection to contemporary art on their phones. Barbara Fisher, Executive Director/Chief Curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and the University of Toronto Art Centre, who curated the Nuit Blanche exhibition Taking to the Streets in 2017, notes:

The end effect, after having Nuit Blanche in the city annually for over a decade, there is a… receptiveness and awareness… to how art works. In a way, contemporary art’s ways of working—performance, installation, video, conceptual and other immaterial practices—have become familiar and… young people will have experienced hundreds of different works over the course of their life; they would have grown up with art, and I imagine integrate the experimentation of visual art, the multiplicity of possible visual languages, and expanded literacy with visual and physical communicative forms and media—in their own lives and work.

The timing of Nuit Blanche is also important for reaching the public—it takes place between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. in the early fall. Though often the weather is cool, this time of year was purposefully selected to not infringe on summer festivals and events and to take advantage of early autumn nightfall, which adds theatrically to the streets, turning the familiar into something magical, and drawing the audience in.

Nuit Blanche appears and is gone in twelve hours. There is no ‘maybe I’ll go tomorrow’. It lives for the moment, and it asks its audience to do the same. Turn the corner in the financial district and all of a sudden you are transported to a floodlit tennis court featuring John McEnroe replaying Bjorn Borg in the 1980 Wimbledon championship, created and performed by Tibi Tibi Neuspiel and Geoffrey Pugen. Sit on a park bench and watch a human glacier comprised of 50 contemporary dancers from the Anandam Dancetheatre slowly roll past you. Call 1-855-IS-IT-ART (2013) and ask the group VSVSVS if what you are looking at is art … or not. Witness and dance alongside the flatbed-truck performance of Deanna Bowen with Syrus Marcus Ware’s work Won’t Back Down (2017), where the artists and activists’ work evokes a moment in the Black Lives Matter movement’s history. Often the juxtaposition of works concerned more with aesthetics with works making powerful political statements allows the audience to stumble onto themes and viewpoints outside of their daily experience, providing an experience rich in variety and depth.

The event is often reasonably criticized for its party like atmosphere, and yet it is this feeling of playfulness and joy that subverts the often awkward and intimidating relationship between the public and contemporary art. Removing the walls removes the conditions of how viewers are expected to act in relation to art. You do not need to know about art to enjoy it.

The underlying philosophy of Nuit Blanche also expands the playing field for artists. Its massive scale requires the participation of a large number of creators and works, and often leads to a juxtaposition of works by internationally recognized artists with works by emerging local artists. Each curated exhibition is assigned a geographic area within the city and headed by a curator to create an exhibition within this area, supported by city programming and production staff. The works are categorized as monumental, curated exhibitions, open calls (picked by the curators), as well as independent projects, major institutions, sponsor projects, and unsanctioned exhibits such as Off Nuit (Les Rues Des Refusés) and Off Off Nuit (DIY and aspiring artists who show their work pop-up style all over the city). All of this makes up the ecology of the event, and the lines between each category are often blurred. Many viewers don’t know (or care) about the categories of exhibitions (which has its pros and cons in terms of quality assurance). Open call artists are regularly incorporated into curated exhibitions. This organizing structural intent is to link curators to a wide variety of local, new, and emerging artists each year, in hopes of new presentation and exhibition opportunities being opened to those artists in the future.

It has been argued that the ephemeral construct of Nuit Blanche diminishes the value of the event. Is it worth the money, time, and effort for one night? I would argue that it is its ephemeral nature that has been the key to its success and the key to fulfilling its goal of making art more accessible to more people. Because the event only lasts one night, it can take over large and unique spaces. Because the ask for these spaces is so limited, the City can take responsibility for issues of safety and infrastructure. Because of this extraordinary access, spaces can be repeatedly transformed by artists and their visions, expanding our ideas of how space is used, altered, and occupied. As a result, the negotiation and potentiality of public space becomes more critical and collective. Questions of who uses the space, why, how and when receive new and unique latitude and license. In 2008, Chaos Computer Lab (CCC), Berlin-based artist/hackers, worked inside City Hall to turn its facade into a light sculpture. In 2014, Critical Art Ensemble staged an oil spill on Nathan Phillips Square, creating a theatrical dialogue around corporate and environmental investment. The 2017 exhibition Monument to A Century of Revolutions, curated by Nato Thompson, centred artist-activists with a focus on revolutions past, present, and future. Rebecca Belmore’s Gone Indian (2017) situated the financial district as grounds for the reclamation of land in a restorative performance for spectators of the present and past.2 And in 2019, the Scarborough civic centre became the site of an artistic filibuster. From government buildings to streets, churches, movie theatres, alleys, lakes, and lobbies, artists’ work and the public’s presence transform spaces and reflect upon their histories, their uses, and their possible futures. Working in different spaces creates opportunities to consider and reflect different histories, communities, and narratives, and creates the necessary conditions for distinct questions and conversations. The here-today-gone-tomorrow aspect of Nuit Blanche provides the possibility for extraordinary presentations, which in turn produce lasting echoes throughout the city.

In 2018 and 2019, in its desire to break down barriers with audiences and reinvent itself every year, Nuit Blanche presented a curated exhibition in Scarborough. Known for its flourishing arts scene, Scarborough is also home to grassroots organizers and artists who are committed to building strong and sustainable communities. As noted by Emelie Chhangur and Philip Monk in their Art Gallery of York University exhibition Migrating the Margins, “Migrating the margins to the center does not mean moving them ‘there.’ It means realizing that the margins, or the suburbs, are now the center.” Curated by Alyssa Fearon and Ashley McKenzie Barnes respectively, these two Scarborough exhibitions were situated in and around the Scarborough Civic Centre and Scarborough Town Centre (STC), a former city hall and a shopping mall respectively—two vastly different yet meaningful spaces. A government building centres the artistic voice in a place of political presence and decision making and opens the institution itself to comment and critique. The Scarborough Town Centre is as much a community centre as a shopping mall—a place of significance and meeting for many. Scarborough has a reputation in the media that is very different from what residents actually experience living there. In the first year, much of the work by 100 artists and residents spoke to transcending media and misinformed public stereotypes, systemic racism, and marginalization. The extraordinary Scarborough pride, the natural mentorship and engaged community were inspiring to witness. After watching audiences in the mall engage in conversations until 6 a.m. about toxic and positive masculinity, inspired by the work From Boys to Men: The unearthing of a poorly structured identity (2019) by Anthony Gebrehiwot, I will never see STC as simply a shopping mall again.

In many cases, the limited duration of the event and access to unique spaces freed artists to think in forms, materials, and content they may not otherwise have worked with. As a result, producers and audience alike are annually surprised by what the curators present. Annually, artists are given an urban playground for their imaginations to run wild in, and access to spaces that would normally be completely inaccessible. Participating artist Brandy Leary notes:

Nuit's scale allows an artist to imagine beyond conventional modes of engagement, opening alternative possibilities of working with time, space, attention, bodies, gazes that are unavailable through established institutional contexts. For me, it has allowed an expansion of aesthetics within my practice and communities of practice. It has highlighted that intimacy, relationship and critique can maintain integrity if scale and spectacle are consciously being subverted.

Nuit Blanche does provide some definitive conditions, among them the 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. timeframe. It appears almost out of nowhere and disappears twelve hours later. Yet, for something to disappear it had to have been present in the first place. The double-edged sword of its radical temporality is that Nuit Blanche has been perceived more as event than exhibition. Historically, live art events were usually “programmed” rather than “curated” in visual art contexts such as museums and galleries and as such they were often seen as secondary to exhibitions of visual artworks, relegated to the outskirts of the institution. Because of their ephemeral nature, live works do not frequently find their way into the archives of the institution or into the canon of contemporary art. Nuit Blanche’s attempt to straddle event and exhibition has created a compelling strain and something of an identity crisis. Conceptions of the value of event-ness is perhaps why it has taken 15 years, a new model of artistic director, and a pandemic to realize this book, document the Nuit Talks series, and create an appropriate archive. Exhibitions usually have these things. Events often do not. Because works were no longer available to the public after the yearly twelve-hour event, it took several years before the media wrote critical art reviews rather than event previews. The average attendee probably does not notice or care about these tensions. That’s not what they attend for. But in the artworld, if it’s not documented, it’s like it didn’t happen. Documentation, reviews, and archives hold great value and exhibitions usually garner wider critical response. If there was a lack of criticality it surely came from more than the line-ups, corporate activations, and street party atmosphere. Though conceivably not every work merited it, a missed opportunity for close and critical attention prevailed at times perhaps due to the event-ness of it all. Feasibly a publication at an earlier stage, or even annually, reviews of the artworks, a fully realized archive, and perhaps even a populist vs elitist acknowledgment by some may have shifted this.

Either way, as organizers, we looked to address this intriguing tension and deepen engagement with, and critical analysis of, Nuit Blanche where we were able. The talk and lecture series Nuit Talks (thankfully now recorded and online for extended viewing and access) provides opportunities to engage with curators, artists, and themes in greater depth. Docents and volunteers meet with artists and curators so as to be ready to speak about the art to the public eager, to engage in opportunities for deeper conversations about the works. Over time, assessing our own mandate and model, we extended some works for ten days allowing a longer viewing option for those who may not be able to or interested in attending during the busy and crowded 12 hours. In some cases, work has been left up for months at a time in spaces like City Hall and Scarborough Town Centre. Thanks to a social media campaign started by Mark V. Campbell, and reinforced by University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) and the local community, which appealed to the city and the STC to allow art to remain, much work was left up for months and some is still there today. Art and culture has since become a major mandate for the mall and its connection to the community and local artists.

Other offshoots of this desire for deeper engagement include Nuit Connects, a new mentorship and knowledge-sharing program created in collaboration with the Doris McCarthy Gallery and UTSC to facilitate long lasting reciprocal relationships and partnerships with artists and stakeholders. In addition, it is not rare for Nuit Blanche co-op students and volunteers to became employees or freelancers at the city of Toronto. Job training and creation is important as our team expands and contracts throughout the year. Whether the Nuit Blanche producers work directly on a Nuit Blanche project with an artist or not, consultations are frequent and welcome, forming new relationships, and the producing team acts as champions for artists, assisting with grant development, production development, and connections to other artists, curators, potential buyers, and galleries.

Many Nuit Blanche or similar events are now presented in over 120 cities globally. That is a lot more art in a lot more places. The structure appeals to many cities and organizations because of the accessible connection to the public. In an article, Rebecca Carbin states:

Temporary public art programs can push buttons and boundaries far more than permanent ones. They can ask questions that are as provocative as those asked in a gallery. They can elicit conflicting responses and heated debate. The work is not going to be there forever, but a growing legacy of civic engagement and dialogue will be, and as it grows so does an audience more comfortable with the sometimes-uncomfortable questions art can really ask.3

Throughout the night, even amongst the selfies, line-ups, and crowds, meaningful questions, conversations, and connections occur. These then make their way into stories, text messages, arguments, and artworks. They develop over family dinners, in workplaces, school grounds, and digital spaces. They exist as memories and experiences, both individual and collective. Nuit offers a feeling of being part of something. Together. To participate: in the night, the art, the city.

And almost as quickly as it arrives … it is gone. Seemingly. By 7:30 a.m. the cleanup has begun, and spaces are restored at lightning speed. A few viewers dawdle, most are long in bed. The fatigue and hangovers will pass, yet something lingers. Like many works of art, the works were released into the world to be taken in by the beholder. The viewers then hold, carry, and become material and message from the artworks themselves. They emerge as manifestations and potentiality of the night’s images and ideas, turned into modest but mighty remnants of the art itself. Living, breathing, archives.

A hard reality now in 2020 is that gathering in small numbers let alone in masses has changed entirely with the pandemic. Those crowded collective moments and memories seem radical and distant. Yet, our connection to and comfort with the ephemeral in public art is more so because of the presence and “disappearance” of Nuit Blanche. And we may need that. In a recent Nuit Talks panel, scholar Janine Marchessault noted:

I think we will demand different things from our cities now... the world is changing. It’s exploding in painful and exciting ways. What’s going on with art now, it’s transformative, it’s temporary, it’s ephemeral. There is nothing permanent… it’s an incredible time for us to be reflecting on the role of public art to bring us together but also to initiate and ignite demands for a better city and spaces for us to be together.

An awareness of the impermanence of experiences can actually increase our delight and presence within them. We don’t hold on to them per se, but as we look ahead, they are in our past and our subconscious and can contribute to how we move forward into the future. This is Nuit Blanche.

The event, the exhibition, the festival, the fete.

This is public art, for the public.

And this is what it looks like: a little chaotic, a little magical, and very real.

Not forever, but for everyone.

NOTES

1Glenn Voss, Zannie Voss, and Young Woong Park, “At What Cost? How Distance Influences Arts Attendance,” SMU DataArts, 10 October 2017, https://dataarts.smu.edu/artsresearch2014/ncar-arts-activity.

2 See the CCCA Canadian Art Database Project, http://ccca.concordia.ca/nuitblanche/.

3 Barbara Fisher. Personal Interview. November 12, 2020

4 Emelie Chhangur & Philip Monk, Migrating the Margins. Circumlocating the Future of Toronto Art (Toronto: AGYU, 2019)

5 Brandy Leary. Personal Interview. Nov 13, 2020

6 Rebecca Carbin, “The Artful City: Public Art Doesn’t Have to be Forever,”. The Artful City. November 2017. http://www.theartfulcity.org/home/2016/11/6/public-art-doesnt-have-to-be-forever

7 Janine Marchessault. Nuit Talks Panel. Nuit Blanche. Thinking Through Public Space in the Time of Covid. September 24, 2020. https://www.toronto.ca/explore-enjoy/festivals-events/nuitblanche/nuit-talks/

I’d like to acknowledge the work, passion and dedication of the entire Nuit Blanche team over the years who produced Nuit Blanche behind the scenes and made it all come together working within unique conditions.