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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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new work by Lorna Mills curated by Cheryl Sourkes
at akau inc. 1186 Queen Street West, Toronto, Canada
April 13, 2007 - June 9, 2007
L to R Bletchingly, Infomint, Lucky Hubble 2007 MFD, latex paint, video
Last night Derreck Roemer and Neil Graham's documentary, Last Call at the Gladstone Hotel, was on TVO. Has anyone else seen it? SPOILERS ALERT. I found it pretty gripping and pretty upsetting. Christina Zeidler, local artist and the hotel's manager (and a woman I've known since she was a kick-ass young sprite doing Petzine and the brilliant "Domestication is Resignation" animal stickers with her pals), gave amazing interviews, very honest and sometimes hard to watch.
Anyone who's been around the Queen West scene for awhile is probably going to feel implicated. The crux of the story is the transition of a flop-house and neighbourhood watering hole staffed by working class women, into a hopping boutique hotel and city-wide art venue. The development started when the place was sold to a partnership, the Tippins and the Zeidlers. The Tippins seemed to be pretty uninterested in the welfare of the residents, focussed on preserving the building as a piece of heritage architecture. The Zeidlers, who eventually took over full ownership, had a much more ambitious plan, which was to keep the residents and bring in artists and art audiences, slowly renovating and maintaining a space where these two classes could co-exist.
But it turned out that the building was in such bad repair that slow renovation was not an option. Also, members of the staff were not really comfortable with the increasing art crowd.
Eventually, Christina Zeidler had to implement the very hard decision to relocate the residents. The Zeidlers worked to make the transition as easy as possible, helping financially, and helping secure new places to live. Meanwhile the bars and stages downstairs were filling up with young and beautiful art people. (Not being particularly young nor beautiful, I am nonetheless part of that crowd.)
Roemer and Graham give us intimate profiles of one of the residents, and one of the staff members. The resident is Marianne, a frail but charismatic hoarder who is eventually forced to leave (I don't know by whom) because roaches are running through all her stuff. In a series of heart-breaking scenes she packs her overwhelming things into garbage bags and piles as much as she can into a taxi while the filmakers try to help.
The staff member is Marilyn, a chamber maid who's been there for many many years and cares a lot about the residents, to the extent that she buys sheets and curtains and art for the rooms at yard sales, out of her own pocket. Throughout the film we see her losing faith in the place, which is physically falling apart. Eventually, crying, she tells the camera that she's planning to retire.
I admire Christina for her ideals, and for the courage she showed in facing her role when she had to let some of those ideals go. But the whole thing is super sad. Christina spoke passionately about how the former residents are "remembered" at the Gladstone. It's hard not to see their shadowy former presence as a kind of value-added feature for the artists who have taken over, much like the shadowy former presence of artists is a selling point for condos sold as genuine "artists lofts." (And much like the residents' actual presence in bar was a draw in the early days. You know the way that artists tends to gravitate towards a really great "seedy" bar full of "neighbourhood characters".)
I don't know who rents rooms at the Gladstone now. Do poor people still stay there? Are there any long-term residents? The rates before the transition were cheap for hotels, but high compared to rent (Marianne was paying $1500 a month for a single room!). Would it be financially possible to keep the rooms open to poor folk and the bars open to artists? I'm very curious.
Even if it was possible to balance the books, however, I supsect that the ongoing grinding demands of working with poverty on a daily basis are not terribly compatible with the work of running a successful culture destination. I wouldn't be able to do it. The Zeidlers are ethical and committed and honest about the issues they face. They also partake in an activist role in urban development issues beyond their own buildings. I really admire them for all of that. And it's partly because of their honesty that Roemer and Graham are able to show us the heart-breaking damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't aspects of the Gladstone story. That's better than burying it!
Note: I knew that Leah Sandals, an art n' politics writer whom I admire, had some good strong opinions on this doc, and so I intentionally wrote this before I read her review. It's here.
There is another review of the film here by S. James Wegg.
Both of the above reviewers cut the Zeidlers less slack than I do. I can't extricate myself enough to condem the power politics of the situation with such clarity. But I very much appreciate both writers' points of view.