Vancouver Artists Mournful As Civic Strike Concludes
By Paul de Plume

VANCOUVER (CP) Vancouver residents can finally take out the trash after outside city workers ratified a collective agreement on Sunday, ending an almost three-month strike.

As garbage collectors return to the job today, the City of Vancouver said it would throw the maximum number of available staff toward tackling the mountain of waste that has been piling up at residences since the strike began on July 19.

Residents are allowed to put out six bags of garbage -- in addition to their regular garbage bins and their garbage-filled yard trimming cans -- for the next two weeks of scheduled pickups, city spokesman Jerry Dobrovolny said.

At Granville Island's Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, photography department staff and students held two minutes' silence for the late strike.

"My students have been out every day, documenting the bonanza of abjection and informe provided by the strike," said Jerzy Botkin, a ECIAD photo instructor. "That's okay. I wasn't even at the school during my posted hours. I was working on a new series." Botkin showed this reporter selections from a sequence of over thirty-five hundred photographs of street refuse he has made since the strike began.

Botkin's series may have to wait a while for its public debut. According to curators and directors at public galleries and artist-run centers around the city, the nine-week city strike generated an unprecedented number of single-artist and group exhibitions.

"We're booked solid until 2013," said Helene Froufrou, curatorial assistant at Artspeak Gallery. "Upcoming we have studies of fast-food clamshells, plastic vegetable holders, stir sticks, wet napkins, dry napkins, coffee-cup holders, eggshells, cigarette butts, lawn clippings....I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed down here."

Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Jonathan Tichy declined an interview from his cellphone, en route to the Vancouver Transfer Station with visiting American installation artist Mark Dion. "I'm too busy right now to talk," said Tichy. Dion agreed: "An opportunity to work with this quantity of civic waste only comes along once in a lifetime."

According to some Eastern art critics, garbage is simply garbage. But for Vancouver's visual-arts community, garbage is apparently gold.
- posted by cjb @ 6:09 PM