On Bloor St. E. in Toronto, you’ll find a large bronze sculpture of 21 life size figures titled “Community” by Kirk Newman and commissioned by Manulife Financial in 2001. Here’s what we learn on Kirk Newman’s web site about the sculpture:
“Community” is a spectacular bronze sculpture consisting of 21 life-size figures, standing proudly on the grounds of Manulife Financial’s Head Office in Toronto.
Completed in June 2001. “Community” is a comptemporary [sic] representation that uniquely reflects Manulife’s diversity and international operations.
On his work and methods, we find this statement:
Newman began his exploration of the figure by creating small sculptures of anonymous businessmen. While their suits identified them as figures of power and authority, their crouching, falling, and grasping postures revealed vulnerability. Cast in bronze, the figures took on an unexpected timelessness.
As Newman’s focus shifted toward the whimsical and satirical, the figures suggested the inflated egos and social pretensions of their subjects. By the 1980s the businessmen, now distorted, flattened and shadow-like, conveyed the fast pace of contemporary life.
Let me see if I understand. Are we to suppose that Manulife Financial commissioned this sculpture so Kirk Newman could poke fun at its executives? Is that what’s going on here? Let’s take a look at the sculpture, and then consider its context:
Of the 21 figures, six are children, five are women, and nine are men. One man is a labourer and wears a hard hat. Eight of the men wear suits, although one appears younger and wears a baseball cap and carries a knapsack. Eighteen of the figures are Caucasian. One man is Asian and talks on a cell phone. One woman is Afro-Canadian and carries a child (presumably her own) on her back. The four Caucasian women appear to be professionals.
This was commissioned in 2001.
In Toronto!
Executed by a man raised in Texas.
Who has founded a school in Kalamazoo whose lead sponsor is a car manufacturer.
Is this what diversity looks like? Is this what an international corporate concern looks like?
Where is Kirk Newman’s satire? This looks more like horror to me.
In understanding ourselves, perhaps the greatest challenge we confront today is the reconciliation of our global reach to the fact that each of us exists in a local context. I view Newman’s sculpture as a symptomatic of our struggle to answer this challenge. A financial company with global interests flies in an American artist who has little or no connection to the city. Although the artist is no longer here, his work remains. Like a real person, the sculpture abides in a local context.
Does the sculpture integrate well with the local context? Does the context contribute meanings to the work quite apart from those one might infer by its placement on the gracious lawns of Manulife’s corporate headquarters?
Here are some of my own observations about the sculpture’s context. Take another look at the photo which appears on Newman’s website. If the photographer had stepped back two metres, he would have taken the shot through iron bars. Manulife’s grounds are gated by high wrought iron fences and padlocks. To the north is the community of Rosedale, one of the wealthiest communities in the country. If we walk east along Bloor Street, looking south, we find Cabbagetown, celebrated for its working-class roots in Hugh Garner’s novel of the same name. Now, Cabbagetown has become gentrified so that writers like Barbara Gowdy and partner, poet Christopher Dewdney, can work in relative peace while two streets over, women hook and the homeless sleep on park benches.
Moving further east along Bloor Street, past Sherbourne subway station, there is a sign that says “Nature Trail”. It is supposed to take you down into Rosedale Valley which feeds into the Don Valley River system. Don’t follow the trail — certainly not alone. As the valley descends, the subway emerges from the hillside in a big concrete tube that meets with the Prince Edward Viaduct. The supports for the subway provide shelter for many homeless people, and the concrete surface is covered in graffiti. For a nice white middle-class boy like me, this is a scary place to venture because it’s hidden from city streets, densely wooded, and inhabited by people who fall outside any conventional understanding of what it means to live in community.
Walking east from the “Nature Trail”, we arrive at the western footings of the Prince Edward Viaduct, which looms large in Michael Ondaatje’s In The Skin of A Lion. The first thing we encounter is a Bell pay phone and a sign for a distress centre and the number: (416) 408-HELP. The Prince Edward Viaduct was the once the world’s second most deadly structure (after the Golden Gate Bridge). In 2003, the “luminous veil” anti-suicide barrier was completed. Even so, the distress phones remain.
Mine is a cursory sampling of the context in which Manulife Financial has situated its “Community.” The work is caricatured. The work is sanitized. But most of all, the work is as divorced from local realities as the company which commissioned it. In a world dominated by financial institutions with global interests, it’s increasingly easy to ignore local context. It is increasingly easy to pretend there is no causal relationship between global policy-making and local quality of life. Community is a fine value, but it’s not a static thing to sit in bronze on a manicured lawn; it’s a living network of relationships that requires constant nurture. Otherwise people go missing, as they have from this sculpture. The missing figures are the homeless, the mentally ill, the sexually exploited, the hungry, all within a few hundred metres of Kirk Newman’s “Community”.
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