[BCMA] CMA Clip Serv: VAG: Battle of Larwill Park rages on

[Moderated BCMA subscriber listserv.]

Look at para 8.  David Aisenstat VAG Chairman, surely was misquoted: what I think he was saying is, "For generations we've being investing in mediocrity to build a crappy art collection".

Now they want a new billion dollar building to house it and to ensure many more generations of VAG staff and directors need not change their acquisitive ways. Jeez . . . .

Dan Gallacher
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Moderated BCMA subscriber listserv. 
  To: bcma at lists.vvv.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2010 10:22 AM
  Subject: [BCMA] CMA Clip Serv: VAG: Battle of Larwill Park rages on


  The battle of Larwill Park rages on 
  The Vancouver Art Gallery wants the three acres for a new landmark building, but city councillors want a mixed-use development. Meanwhile, the public is caught in the middle 
  Jeff Lee, Vancouver Sun, Saturday, July 31, 2010 


  >From its earliest history, Larwill Park was a place marked by contest and conflict. Boots of the volunteer artillery corps stomped in drill. The dusty parade ground housed men in tents as they enlisted to fight in the Boer and First World wars. In peacetime, the field, once called the "Commons of the Pioneers," was where rivalries in lacrosse, baseball and football were settled. 


  And when the park died in 1946, leased to the new B.C. Electric Co. as a "temporary" bus depot while the men were still away following the Second World War, it was again marked by conflict, with the city promising it would be reclaimed later for a new civic theatre. And when in 1954 voters rejected a proposal to sell the land in order to buy the adjacent block for that long-promised civic theatre, the city bought the block anyway and left the park as a bus depot and then, in a final indignity, turned it into a parking lot. 


  Now, contest and conflict, those old companions to the city's storied commons, have come calling again. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of public and private interests again fighting over the three-acre parcel. 


  At the fore of this fight is the Vancouver Art Gallery. It has laid moral claim through a very public campaign, portraying its need for the entire block as a matter of its survival. 


  Blessed with growing public support and a hefty city-owned acquisition of important works, the VAG claims it can no longer justify staying in the cramped old Provincial Courthouse at the north end of Robson Square. It has rejected studies that show it could enlarge its site underground along the lines of the Louvre in Paris or 
  reconfigure itself south into Robson Square. 


  A landmark museum 
  Instead, it has focused on Larwill Park, the last undeveloped piece of civic land downtown, where it would build a grand gesture, a 320,000-square-foot "landmark art museum" that befits the city's art collection and would also become a gathering place for the public. 


  "It has to be something fitting of our community, fitting of an art gallery with a major reputation in the world representing a major region from which great artists have come," said David Aisenstat, the chairman of the VAG's board of directors. 


  "Why would you go out and take a project that is going to be here for generations and invest in mediocrity? We are a great city, a beautiful city, a green city, a creative city, and you don't build a crappy art gallery in a city with those aspirations." 


  The VAG has staked its claim in the most public way possible, through expensive advertising campaigns in newspapers and with a website that presents as virtually assured, "a new home for the Vancouver Art Gallery." 


  At $400 million or so, there are some who see that as too grand a gesture, an overreaching of an institution that hasn't got the philanthropy to back it up. 


  "The MOMA [Museum of Modern Art] cost $900 million for its expansion. Well, they've got the Rockefellers, we don't," said real- estate icon Bob Rennie, a longtime collector and one-time member of the VAG board. "We don't have the right to spend 50 per cent of what a city like New York spends. We don't get the ticket sales." 


  Rennie, who is also the chairman of the North American acquisitions board for London's Tate Modern Art Gallery, is famously critical of the VAG, which he worries is set on building a monument to itself without knowing what kind of museum it wants to be. 


  "I don't think architecture is art when it sacrifices the art," he said. "What I think they should do is show their DNA and describe what they want to be, whether it is contemporary or historical or both. That's where I get confused because I don't see it." 


  He's joined by architect Bing Thom and his partner Michael Heeney, who think the VAG hasn't proven its need to move. 


  "I feel the art gallery in [its present location] is very important to the city of Vancouver," said Heeney, a former VAG director who in the 1990s did a study showing the gallery could reconfigure its space and build another 160,000 square feet under the Georgia Plaza. "It does bring an important amount of activity to the area, and if they were to leave the vacuum scares the dickens out of me. They have to do their homework and I just don't think they've done that." 


  Cultural precinct 
  Thom, who in a pre-Olympic proposal for Premier Gordon Campbell suggested including the VAG in Larwill Park as "a gallery in the sky" under which would live a multitude of arts and public institutions, thinks it has missed its chance. 


  Thom's vision, which led to the development of a "cultural precinct" plan for the area by the city and province, envisioned a 150,000- square-foot gallery 80 feet in the air, acting as an umbrella under which a range of small and medium-sized institutions would cooperatively share the site. 


  He said the idea was modelled after Granville Island's successful mix of theatres, public market, art school and industrial services. At the "front door" of the site on Georgia would have been a first nations cultural and art facility, something he saw as necessary to recognize the growing and important native arts community. 


  The VAG's unwillingness to share the site stalled the proposal, which eventually died when necessary federal funding dried up, he said. 


  "I think the train has left the station. The federal government is not there, the economy tanked, the Olympics are over. It's the wrong idea, wrong time, wrong process," Thom said. "It's really a one-way conversation with the gallery talking but nobody else is around the table." 


  Kathleen Bartels, the VAG's director and the main driving force behind the plan, doesn't believe there is a lot of opposition to the VAG moving out of the old courthouse. 


  "I have to really say there are few naysayers out there," she said. The gallery's public information campaign has shown "an overwhelming support for the gallery." 


  She thinks the province, Ottawa and the city will be willing to carry two-thirds of the cost, with the city's portion coming in the form of the land cost of Larwill Park. Private donors and a public support campaign would carry the rest, she said. 


  But this fight for Larwill Park -- which is no more a park in reality than in name -- is more than just about the VAG. Talk to any city councillor, the very people the gallery needs to convince to hand over a whole city block worth nearly $100 million, and they all are resistant. They each have their own idea of what should be there -- 
  the Non-Partisan Association's Suzanne Anton, who wants the VAG there, also wants a 60-storey office spire at one end where people 10 miles away can say "that's where the art gallery is." 


  COPE Coun. Ellen Woodsworth, also a VAG supporter, isn't convinced the gallery has to move and believes it shouldn't be wasting valuable land under the Georgia Street plaza as a storage vault for its collection. Larwill Park, she thinks, is best meant for a range of civic uses. 


  Vision Coun. Heather Deal wants office towers on part of the site. 


  Then there are those who worry about practical financial matters. In 2006 the council of the day laid a $48-million encumbrance on the site to help partly cover the deficit of renovating the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on the block across the street, effectively driving down the assessment equity in the land to between $14 million and $52 million. 


  Coun. Raymond Louie and Mayor Gregor Robertson both say that $48-million debt to the city's capital financing fund likely can't be paid by the overly ambitious VAG. Sharing the site with office towers or other public institutions is more acceptable, they say. 


  Not to be lost in the mix are other institutions. Two weeks ago the city met with backers of the long-delayed Coal Harbour Concert Hall, including Bramwell Tovey, the conductor of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. 


  "We encouraged them to also get in touch with the VAG as well," said David McLellan, the city's general manager of community services. "They don't want to be forgotten in the mix. They've got this idea for this concert hall and they don't want to be forgotten. But I don't think they're as advanced as the VAG in their plans." 


  But for Aisenstat, who is among a small handful of patrons who have pledged $40 million so far to add to a $50-million gift from the province two years ago, isn't in a mood to share Larwill. 


  "This is our proposal. We have asked for the city to give us the site. We're not thinking of sharing it. But we're also not asking for the density, just the plate on which to build a great art museum." 


  Urgent need for change 
  There isn't any doubt that the VAG needs to find a solution to its problems. Its collection, largely housed under the Georgia Plaza, is at constant risk of damage. There is limited public education programming, largely because it has no space. The gallery has missed opportunities to expand into other government-owned space on 
  Robson Square. 


  Bartels, whose expertise is in contemporary art, chafes at the lack of suitable space to honour the works of artists such as Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham. But she says the museum is also committed to collecting and displaying art that represents to the world the essence of Vancouver and Canada, whether first nations, contemporary or Canadian historical art. It's hard to do that in a building built for the legal system instead of the arts. 


  Bartels, who was recruited from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2001, says the VAG has shown it is ready for bigger digs. For the last decade it has been deficit free and since her arrival the gallery's operating endowment has risen from less than $200,000 to over $10 million. But in order to afford the operational cost of the new building, it would need an operating endowment of $50 million. 
  "The board is certainly committed and understands the need for a significant endowment," she said. 


  Aisenstat said what he wants now from the city is two or three years to prove the VAG can raise both the construction capital and the necessary operating funds. 


  "All we want is a chance to prove we can do this. If in two or so years we can't, then it [Larwill] goes back to the city." 


  But is Larwill Park the answer for the VAG? And is the VAG the answer for Larwill Park? 


  A place where visiting monarchs walked and pioneers celebrated, and which is tied tightly to the city's earliest history, Larwill Park could soon become a museum or a stack of office towers or even house a mix of urban uses. 


  Whatever its fate, one thing's for certain: the people of Vancouver will have a say in it. 


  And it's it's bound to be better than a parking lot. 


  ---   30   --- 





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