When I was first approached to design a public sculpture for 5 St. Joseph Street, I was informed that, since the city required the developer to spend more than $1 million to maintain the original facade of the “historic” warehouse, the public art budget would be severely limited.
I vaguely remember in the early 1980s going to a club in this warehouse, not particularly emblematic, merely another small downtown utilitarian building where I could have had a studio and lived illegally. Of course, I resented the fact that this nondescript facade was considered 10 times more important to city planners than a public sculpture.
Three years later, after an excruciating process too common in the difficult pursuit of building a site-specific artwork in the public domain – city engineers were overly concerned about how snow and ice would interact with my stainless steel texts and how hydro and electric lines would emerge from their hidden underground lairs once excavation for my foundations had commenced – the work was successfully installed.
It was originally planned to place my sculpture at the entrance to the new building cleverly designed to employ the main entrance of the old warehouse so as residents entered and exited the condo they would walk under my sculpture.
Imminently clear from the outset was that the sculpture could not touch the facade. The city would never approve even minor contact with their precious historical remnant. In fact, I was instructed to site my sculpture to the east, closer to Yonge Street, away and safe from visually “interfering” with the historical facade.
This second site, closer to the busy artery, in front of a modern facade, is undeniably more in keeping with the deconstructive nature of my sculpture. Its beams of text compel you to look up, to become acutely aware of the scale of the new building and the city. Titled Artifacts Of Memory, in deference to the history of the site, it unapologetically interacts with the elegance of the modern.
It was only after this re-siting that I noticed for the first time without prejudice the importance of the historical facade.
Standing on the sidewalk at 5 St. Joseph Street, you are visually unaware of the immense building behind the red brick facade. This might not be an architecturally interesting construction remaining from a utilitarian past, but in its banal invisibility it’s certainly a fitting street-level barrier for those unappreciative of towering condos.
Eldon Garnet is a Toronto-based artist and novelist and a professor at OCAD U.
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