By J.D.R. Brown (The Cascade) – Email
Date Posted: October 21, 2011
Print Edition: October 19, 2011
There is nothing more depressing than walking through campus or across town on a fine autumn day—really the perfect sort of day—and appreciating the overwhelming lack of art and beauty which surrounds us. With nothing to keep me company but the vinyl siding of the never-ending tract-homes and the nauseating “strawberry” (which adorns the spires of our ivory towers), I can do nothing but lament the entirely pedestrian and provincial sort of attitude which has given rise to this most depressing civic-scape. We have abandoned art and beauty in Abbotsford, and certainly at UFV, in favour of ersatz efficiencies and poorly painted stucco.
I have in the past railed against the crime that is modernist architecture, and while I feel just as strongly today as I did then, I don’t mean to rehash that particular diatribe here. Rather, under the influence of a very well made documentary by London’s finest artistic subversive (and no, I’m not talking about Damien Hirst), I’ve begun to contemplate just what it would take to make our city and our university not just more beautiful but more vibrant, too. And the solution that I keep coming up with is one that many might find distasteful: graffiti.
It’s simply not possible for us to tear down the Peter Jones Learning Commons and replace it with something approaching the elegance and sophistication of the Radcliffe Camera. But it is certainly possible for us to banish the salmon-inspired blandness that currently adorns most every building on our Abbotsford campus. We could enlist our long suffering BFA students and local street artists to turn our walls into works, to make them beautiful and provocative and vivid. And I bet we could do it for cheap, too.
Sometimes I think about what elements make Abbotsford and UFV different from bigger cities and better universities. It’s true that in both cases, the city and our university are much smaller than many more vibrant or prestigious institutions and cities, but the most important difference is not one of numbers or resources. It’s the difference in attitude that we have here. There is a pervasive attitude which exhorts us all to not rock the boat and to continue on our middling path to mediocrity.
If ever we are to rise above the utter cultural irrelevance that most of the Fraser Valley currently enjoys, we must begin to be fearless, rather than bland. Promoting public art on the campus and in our community is a small but significant step toward that, and like most of the very best things in civic society, public art is potent and subversive. Even if you are like me and find much of modern art to be unworthy of the label, even something approaching art is better than yet more vinyl siding.
Let’s graffiti the school and the city and fight for a more beautiful community.
