Adrian Blackwell

In the fall of this year, I watched the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention, and I kept thinking about what riveting entertainment it all was—however dangerous the outcomes could be to our health and safety (the constant realpolitik situating of Governor Sarah Palin a “heartbeat” away from the American presidency and so on). And I’m not just talking about conflicting issues (I love all that churchy talk about “crossing the aisle” and making amiable raids on the political other) or energetic and/or abrasive personalities. What I found most engaging, I think, were the surges and eddy-ings of the delegates-as-bodies, their Brownian motion on the convention floors, their endlessly “conventionalized” expressions of face and body.

After the balls were over, I headed into a revisitation of the charming, almost kindergarten clarity of Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (Penguin, 1981), where I would find clutches of reminder aphorisms: “Our pride in standing consists in feeling independent and needing no support,” “Sitting always involves a downward pressure on something which is defenseless and incapable of exerting counter-pressure,” and “When a man sits it is physical weight which he displays, and, if this is to make its full effect, he needs to sit on something raised above the ground.” Every sentence in Canetti is an ur-metaphor.

Adrian Blackwell’s “Models for Public Spaces,” installed at the Art Gallery of Mississauga for the second half of the summer, curated by Suzanne Carte-Blanchenot, unlocked and traded in some of those metaphors, offering an inside-outside exploration of the Toronto-based architect-theorist’s current work with the unruly energies of social space and with various schemes for exploring, analyzing, shaping, documenting, naming and learning from the transactions of public discourse.

Central to Blackwell’s enterable essays in the spaces for public discussion was his Model for a Public Space (Speaker), erected in the square next to the gallery and the Mississauga Civic Centre: a small spiral amphitheatre made of bent and laminated planks, a graceful and attractively etherealized, quasi-architectural structure that underscored the fact that space is psychological and ideological rather than subservient, proscriptive or declamatory.

Take up any responsible dictionary of symbology—Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols (Philosophical Library, 1962) is exemplary, and you’ll be reminded of the vitality, of the kineticism of the spiral form—as opposed, say, to a mere nesting of concentric circles that generates a lifeless, hieratic tone in any concert of contending voices. The spiral is a glyph for the evolution of the universe. It denotes “the relationship between unity and multiplicity.” And, continues Cirlot, it is usually expressed in three forms: expanding, as in a nebula; contracting, as with a whirlwind or whirlpool; and “ossified (like the snail’s shell).” Looked at as a volute, the spiral form symbolizes “the breath and the spirit.” It symbolizes the relationship “between the circle and the centre.” It is a dance. And, finally, and central to our discussion here, “by virtue of its significance in connection with creation, with movement and progressive development, the spiral is an attribute of power.”

Evincing a positively Habermasian faith in the essential role of the intellectual as the catalyst in the burgeoning energies of public debate as argument and critique—and in the expanded role of the wider concerned public in the embrace of the colloquium—Blackwell erected his open, permeable, spiral amphitheatre as a model (he calls it a “diagram”) “for the strategic relations between different people in social space, raising questions about boundaries of the ‘public’ in a city like Mississauga.” Or, one supposes, anywhere else. In the matter of “boundary,” the spiral amphitheatre/ platform is slyly, wickedly omni-directional, exuberantly embodying an Arthurian roundtable disdain for frontality or handedness and (therefore) for the imperatives of the hieratic. “After the age of the ‘balance of terror’ which lasted for some 40 years,” writes Paul Virilio in 1996 in A Landscape of Events (MIT Press, 2000), “the ‘age of imbalance’ is upon us.” What better structural outering of imbalance than the spiral? The spiral is torque, not resolution.

As Blackwell writes in a brochure accompanying the exhibition, the specific geometry of the spiral structure “delineates a terrain of positions along its continuous surface: inward, outward, beneath and beyond….” Wherever you go, “you will be the polis,” he adds, quoting Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition.

Inside the art gallery, there were passages of relevant wall-mounted text and, as a kind of crowd-friendly respite from reading, a writhing of rubbery black lengths of thick tubing— gathered into visceral, intestinal, serpent-like Laocoön-esque coils. Symbolically suggestive of rumination (i.e., the digestion of ideas), the work, titled Monster, seemed to offer a kind of lounging, informe, semi-architecture where people reclined in it and wallowed there—perhaps a morphological foil to the time-honoured imperatives of Speaker. ■

“Adrian Blackwell: Models for Public Spaces,” curated by Suzanne Carte- Blanchenot, was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Mississauga from July 17 to September 7, 2008.

Gary Michael Dault is a critic, poet and painter who lives in Toronto.