Ottawa trip highlights artful bent

April 30, 2007

Last week in Ottawa, a city with which I am entirely unfamiliar, I was walking along Sussex Drive on the first warm day of the year.

On my left was what appeared to be a Hydro installation, or possibly the Lubyanka prison reborn on an Ottawa lawn. It even had those long slits that are the fashionable architect's version of a window, like those splayed slit windows in medieval castles. They let in little light, but luckily, the same goes for bullets. The University of Toronto placed similar windows in its new gray horror of a graduate students' residence. I take the charitable view that it was aimed at making the suicides of depressed doctoral students slightly more difficult, while deterring other students from even trying for a PhD.

Then I realized that this tombstone blocking my view of the water was the U.S. Embassy, as it announces from behind fences, roadblocks, an eagle and something that looks like Checkpoint Charlie.

I always laugh at modern architecture, mainly to forestall hurling spears at it, but really, the Americans could have had an elegant version of Monticello or indeed something curving, fanciful and bulletproof from Frank Gehry. But no, the architect gave them a U-boat.

It's good though, because I would have felt very foolish giving the finger to an elegant Federal mansion. It seems right to do it to a coffin with a gray fez on top.

Shopping, the universal cure

The sight depressed me so I decided not to go next door to the National Gallery's sculpture show. Instead, I turned into the next shop to buy comfort. It was a Nicholas Hoare, the best independent book chain in Canada. Yes, I bought armloads of books when I have an unread stack hip-high at home and, yes, I already have a Nicholas Hoare in Toronto (as the staff gently pointed out). I don't need books. I need a wire cake tester, a new cheeseboard and a set of rubber gardening gloves.

But a good bookstore is an Aladdin's Cave to me. It glimmers with jewels, such as Rory Stewart's stunning The Places In Between, his story of his 2002 walk across central Afghanistan, a tale of deprivation and misery to rival Apsley Cherry-Garrard's 1922 Antarctic holiday. David Bennun's extremely funny memoir, British As a Second Language, tears the Brits into strips of biltong. Margaret Forster's novel, Over, about the disintegration of a family after a child's death, was as wonderful as all her novels and explains that mystifying (to outsiders) phenomenon of the bereaved couple heading off in different directions. The Observer review of Rupert Thomson's novel, Death of a Murderer, about a policeman guarding the body of the child torturer Myra Hindley, was correct to call it triumphant and I thank the paper for directing me to it.

Lumpen humanity

The Hoare staff urged me to go to gallery so I did.

Ron Mueck, an Australian sculptor, has created disquietingly lifelike models of human beings, mostly naked, mostly infantile or geriatric, and in such odd sizes that the viewer can never look at bodies again in quite the same way. Big Man, an obese lumpy old nude squatting with his baggy scrotum on the floor, is gigantic, a bubbling puddle of pale flesh. Two old women in tweed coats chatting to each other are the length of my arm. Mueck's giant Head of a Baby could encompass most of the other sculptures.

But the point is, we all look like these creatures whose every hair, every bit of mottled skin, every dot of sweat has been placed there by an artist taking infinite care. All six billion of us looked like this baby, we look like this naked now and we will die pale and quiet, looking either like shrimps or sea lions.

It's so odd that in 2000, then-New York mayor Rudi Giuliani tried to ban the art show Sensation that included both a portrait of Hindley done in children's handprints and a Ron Mueck sculpture of a crouching boy. But he didn't notice these two works. He only censored the show because of a religious painting using elephant dung.

This year, Giuliani's presidential campaign is doomed by a video of him in drag, a Bates Motel-type creature far more frightening than a bit of dung impasto in a painting.

That evening, I attended an Ottawa Writers Festival poetry reading on a whim and heard Simon Armitage read his best poem, You're Beautiful . It's a recitation by a lover of the reasons for his unworthiness.

It begins: "You're beautiful because you're classically trained. I'm ugly because I associate piano wire with strangulation."

It continues, "You're beautiful because when you were born, undiscovered planets lined up to peep over the rim of your cradle and lay gifts of gravity and light at your miniature feet. I'm ugly for saying 'love at first sight' is another form of mistaken identity, and that the most human of all responses is to gloat."

It gives me enormous pleasure to hear his poetry, which is the perfect combination of the theoretical and the tactile, and know that I cannot write as well as he does and thus, will not ever have to try.

And it does not escape my attention that after all the gloom of a Canadian winter, it isn't nature that gives me the most pleasure any more. Nature, clearly out of whack because of global warming, just worries me now. This morning I lay in bed as a bee, out of season and perhaps maddened by cellphone radiowaves, buzzed nonstop like a drill and slammed itself repeatedly into the window. It was either aiming for death or trying to break in and pollinate me. Nature is sinister.

No, the thing that gave me most pleasure and interest, as I realized in the course of my wandering through the capital city on one day, was architecture, sculpture, literature and poetry.

Art is the great consolation now. It's very wrong that this should have taken me by surprise, but it did.