EDMONTON – At the public launch of Make Something Edmonton, ATB president and Light the Bridge project leader Dave Mowat enthusiastically led us into his Technicolor dream.
He grounded his pitch on mega-decoration and art installations elsewhere — from where all Edmonton ideas must apparently come.
Shown to tempt: the now pastel Empire State Building, a blinking Eiffel Tower and the San-Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The California span’s triangular peaks flickered with birds and water ripples, accompanied by Eastern-influenced adult contemporary music. But artist Leo Villareal’s mammoth screen saver was a temporary art project.
It also looked nothing like the rather inexplicable act of digital manipulation that’s been Light the Bridge’s visual carrot — doctored scenes of the High Level mystically aglow with purple and green, seemingly painted by the rears of a trillion cosmic fireflies.
It’s hard to imagine anything could or should physically resemble these pictures, but used they were to successfully hawk crowd- and corporate-team-funding in a gesture of public art, made possible by us.
The thing is, Light the Bridge isn’t even public art.
Hilariously enough, in a city where people spray coffee out their mouths if asked to consider street art as “art,� Light the Bridge is closer to a behemoth act of indelible, enforced graffiti.
Consider: it is brightly coloured and participatory with a sense of “I did this.� It visually claims public territory, with a web page stressing, “That light is mine.�
And anyone who doesn’t like it has absolutely no recourse. That last part’s the kicker.
Semantics, sure — but it’s actually just decoration. Fireworks, if duller, that won’t go away or even be special, running night after year. And a quick question: what groundbreaking hue do you imagine we’ll see on St. Patrick’s Day? Halloween night? Repeat for all holidays with a yawn. Then there are promises for game night. Art, not so much.
The High Level Bridge is Edmonton’s most iconic structure, a masterpiece.
In 1967, sober civic minds stopped it from being painted gold for Canada’s centennial. Peter Lewis’s Great Divide waterfall — at least a conceptual wink at our topography used rarely — was shut down in 2009 because of its chlorine’s possible effect on Mother Nature.
In our rush to hustle this version of the vestigial Simpsons Monorail, what consideration has been given to dropping a shifting Lite Brite across the path of our deservedly hyped, uninterrupted valley ecosystem? Whether it will still count as uninterrupted at night is an interesting question.
Some argue, numbly and insultingly, that it might lower the suicide rate, as if clinical depression was a matter of brief exposure to the Incredible Hulk’s or the Eskimos’ colour palettes.
Oh, and despite Light the Bridge’s propaganda, one can easily photograph the bridge at night because it’s already beautiful. Anyone who doesn’t know this hasn’t tried.
One of the most disappointing flavours of this done deal is it falls in line with the very compromised idea that the river valley is a thing that needs to be “fixed.�
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