other sights

An art wave hits Granville and Robson

Ad action on giant video screens will be inter­rupted by a line fig­ure doing the wave

By John Mankie, Octo­ber 18, 2008 The Van­cou­ver Sun

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The two giant video screens at Granville and Rob­son nor­mally snap and crackle with quick-hitting, colour­ful ads for com­pa­nies such as Telus, Fido and WestJet.

But next week, they’ll be show­ing some­thing some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent: two short films by inter­na­tion­ally acclaimed artist Anto­nia Hirsch.

“You really get a con­trast,” Hirsch said with a laugh. “Most of those [ad] spots are like 10 sec­onds long, then you’ll get this epic one minute.”

Non-profit orga­ni­za­tions get some access to the screens as part of the agree­ment to put them up on the side of the build­ing that houses Future Shop and Win­ners. Nor­mally, the time is allo­cated to orga­ni­za­tions like the Van­cou­ver Sym­phony: Hirsch’c films are the first art projects to be screened.

The work is called Vox Pop, and deals with the mod­ern phe­nom­e­non, the crowd wave at sports games.

Hirsch has been fas­ci­nated by the wave for years.

“I found it inter­est­ing how it is really exhil­a­rat­ing in a way to be in it and to be par­tic­i­pat­ing, but it’s also a bit scary,” she explained.

“Because it has that herd instinct in it, where you really don’t know if any good inten­tions are kind of dri­ving this.”

One film is a slow pan of a sports sta­dium, at the same speed of a typ­i­cal wave. The other shows a lone fan sit­ting in the stands, doing the wave.

“By iso­lat­ing this fig­ure, I tried to high­light the kind of odd­ity of this ges­ture,” she said.

“Once somebody’s just by them­selves, it seems ridicu­lous, in a way, what they’re doing.”

As funny as it is to see a lone fig­ure doing the wave, Hirsch said “it could also be a bit sin­is­ter. It has some­thing maybe of the sort of raised hand ‘heil,’ or [a] very fer­vent reli­gious gesture.”

The films will be shown in the mid­dle of the reg­u­lar ad spots, which she thinks might be quite jar­ring for passerby.

“It is very slow and unevent­ful com­pared to the other stuff that’s going up on those boards,” she said.

“I don’t want to annoy peo­ple, but I do want to cre­ate a sit­u­a­tion where peo­ple might stop and go ‘Hang on for a sec­ond, what is this?’ There is this won­der­ful moment that can hap­pen by throw­ing some­thing into a known con­text that’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent — you start to ques­tion what you really know.

“It may make you look dif­fer­ently at adver­tis­ing, it may make you look dif­fer­ently at the type of imagery that’s thrown at us.”

Hirsch, 40, was born in Frank­furt am Main, Ger­many, and has lived in Canada since 1994.

Her works are in the col­lec­tions of insti­tu­tions such as the Van­cou­ver Art Gallery, The New York Pub­lic Library, the Yale Uni­ver­sity Col­lec­tion of Rare Books, The National Art Library a the V&A and the Tate Gallery Library in Lon­don, England.

Vox Popwill start run­ning at 12:01 a.m. Mon­day and run through mid­night next Sun­day, Oct.26.