Imagine you’re a tourist in downtown Ottawa. Think of the sites on your “must see” list.
There’s Parliament Hill of course, maybe a museum or two.
What about the Human Rights Monument on Elgin Street? Or the tomb of the unknown soldier at the National War Memorial?
Our city is one of monuments. Every nook and cranny seems to be graced with some sort of statue or art installation.
Even after spending a lifetime in the capital, it’s entirely possible to do a double-take on your morning commute and discover a statue you’ve never seen before.
Ottawa is our nation’s capital and these monuments give it the sense of officialdom and dignity worthy of that status. Compare our monuments to those that come instantly to mind when we think of other world capitals: Big Ben in London or the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
It’s safe to say the latest art installation to grace the national capital region lacks some of the nobility of those world-famous monuments, but harsh public criticism of it is unwarranted.
Our monuments, regardless of your personal tastes, are what make this city great.
The proposed sculpture, called One Hundred Foot Line, has been commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada from American sculptor Roxy Paine.
The NCC announced on Jan. 20 it would donate land at Nepean Point, between the gallery and the Alexandria Bridge, to host the metallic sculpture.
The piece is meant to evoke a barren tree. It will rise 10 storeys in the air, growing thinner and thinner, eventually whittling away to nothing.
The gallery has been criticized for choosing to commission a piece representing the Canadian wilderness from an American artist.
Reaction to the sculpture itself has been lukewarm, to say the least. It’s been called everything from “an exclamation point” to “a piece of junk” to a waste of taxpayer’s dollars.
I agree that Canada’s national gallery would be better off commissioning a Canadian sculptor to produce the piece, thus supporting Canadian visual art, and I can’t pretend that I’ve been altogether impressed by graphics depicting the integration of the sculpture into the city’s skyline. But artistic subjectivity aside, critics of the project should give it a rest.
Regardless of whether or not you find the sculpture aesthetically pleasing, works like it make for a vibrant and diverse national capital region, especially when the artist is internationally renowned like Paine.
Take Maman, the work the gallery installed in front of its glass-domed exhibition space in 2005.
The giant work by French-born Louise Bourgeois depicts a mother spider protecting her white marble eggs.
At the time the work was called a monstrosity. The gallery came under fire for erecting it directly across the street from the century-old Notre Dame Basilica. But despite this initial furor, the bronze sculpture has become one of those “must see” Ottawa sites.
Love it or hate it, the One Hundred Foot Line has the potential to become the same, to help define Ottawa as a world capital like no other.