“Actions: What You Can Do With the City”

Artists are familiar with the problem. As aesthetic recycler and antic junkmeister Jack Smith said back in 1978, “I can think of billions of ways for the world to be completely different.” That plainspoken, di y spirit animates the core of “Actions: What You Can Do With the City,” a fat archive of human ingenuity, loaded with ideas and fun, on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal. Curators Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini wisely focus on the most pragmatic things people make and do, presenting a variety of actors as small-scale heroes bettering life in the city.

There are 99 “actions” in all, a number suggesting the incompleteness of the to-do list. The works included emphasize ordinary actors in a celebration of the skill and imagination required by reuse. Here’s a show that truly lends muscle to the ideal of the blurring of art and life. Organized loosely around the rubrics of walking, playing, gardening and recycling, the exhibition avoids hardened categories like artist or activist and, in its emphasis on possibility and mostly real goings-on, it is stunningly avant-garde. If it’s global scope feels limited—no projects from Beijing or Mumbai?—its sensibility is expansive and generally right on.

The walking section, for instance, nailed the gross inequity of mobility in the city. I liked New York-based J Marsten’s photographs of anti-sitting devices— spikes and rods used to stop people from resting on building facades. The funhouse mirror for this action came in LA artist Sarah Ross’s pale blue track suit, with foam extensions for back support; the foam fills in the negative spaces of park benches designed with arm rests or other obstacles to prevent reclining. I laughed out loud. But you get the pattern here: critics of the status quo have long argued that in observing the problem, you initiate its defeat. In a sweet nod to the slyness required of daily urban life, “Actions” also displays building ornaments used to keep skateboarders off surfaces. This is a reminder: the underdog cheek of today will become tomorrow’s tool of enforcement.

Three cheers, then, for the sheer poetics of walking, solo or en groupe, as evidenced in a project from São Paulo wherein the elevated Minhocão or “big worm” highway that cuts through an urban residential area is closed each evening and on Sundays. Imagine the urban core made quiet, a concrete river rolling through a forest of apartment towers, no cars in sight, just people strolling through the park economy of snack stands and cyclists. Similar projects, as diverse as the restoration of the High Line in Lower Manhattan or the use of crowd movement as source of electrical power, conjure the eloquence of the individual and the crowd in bringing about new visions of urban life.

That said, wanna play? Lots of folks do, but I especially liked Max Kohen, the kid from Columbus, Indiana, who devised the technique for “soap shoes.” Cut out the centre soles of a pair of shoes, insert a shard of plastic cutting board, then enjoy riding and sliding over various banisters, railings and barriers. It’s always fun, too, to mess with big shots. When free climbers began ascending the New York Times Building in mid-town Manhattan in 2008, the newspaper and architect Renzo Piano deemed it “an inappropriate use of the building.” They removed the lower horizontal bars that had proved so enticing and made the climb possible, but I trust there are others out there making new plans.

Meanwhile, signage warns passersby against running up Oscar Niemeyer’s dome-shaped, concrete pavilion in São Paulo; just the same, video footage shows people making a break for the top, then sliding down over the surface in a gestural manifesto: “Wheee!” This is the message of the movement genre known as Parkour. Never mind the attempts at commodification in 007 movies or car commercials. The action remains autonomous, inventive, graceful and ready to turn obstacles into amplifiers.

Okay, I’m a believer. But there is much more to be uncovered in this gem of an exhibition (visit cca-actions.org). English botanist Thomas Leo Ogren, for instance, discovered that cities plant mostly male trees, which drop no seeds and leave fewer bits to clean up but which are the primary cause of allergens; his activism fights for the planting of “messy” female trees. In another high-five for urban air quality, the worker-owned cooperative in the South Bronx, ReBuilders Source, collects, repairs and sells city scraps to prevent their dumping in the Bronx, a borough with sinister asthma statistics.

The realm of everyday life, it’s been said, explodes with contradiction, often understood as invisible, habitual, ideological and immediate, immersive and banal. It’s the place where festival, revolutions and day-to-day transformations happen; and it invokes routine, repetition and the utilitarian in aim and aesthetic. The thrill of “Actions” is that it sweeps aside such either/ors for a sense of the lush heterogeneity—intimacy, beauty, possibility—of the cities that keep us wanting more, though space is limited and rent is hell.❚

“Actions: What You Can Do With the City,” curated by Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini, was exhibited at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal from November 26, 2008, to April 19, 2009.

MJ Thompson is a writer living in Brooklyn and Montréal.