Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir 9781442660205

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Expo 67 Not Just a Souvenir

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Expo 67 Not Just a Souvenir

EDITED BY RHONA RICHMAN KENNEALLY AND JOHANNE SLOAN

University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9708-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8020-9649-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Expo 67 : not just a souvenir / edited by Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8020-9708-8 (bound)   ISBN 978-0-8020-9649-4 (pbk.) 1. Expo 67 (Montréal, Québec).  I. Kenneally, Rhona Richman, 1956– II. Sloan, Johanne T752 1967 B1E96 2010   907.4971428   C2010-906221-3

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

List of Illustrations  vii Acknowledgments  ix 1 Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir  3 rhona richman kenneally and johanne sloan PART ONE: THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF NATIONHOOD 2 ‘The greatest Dining extravaganza in Canada’s history’: Food, Nationalism, and Authenticity at Expo 67  27 rhona richman kenneally 3 ‘Britain Today’ at Expo 67  47 elizabeth darling 4 ‘Une terre humaine’: Expo 67, Canadian Women, and Chatelaine/Châtelaine  61 eva-marie kröller PART TWO: BECOMING MODERN 5 Obsolescence as Progress and Regression: Technology, Temporality, and Architecture at Expo 67  83 tom mcdonough 6 The Ambiguous Modernity of Designer Julien Hébert  93 martin racine 7 Girl Watching at Expo 67  109 aurora wallace PART THREE: VISUAL TRANSACTIONS 8 Into the Labyrinth: Phantasmagoria at Expo 67  125 ben highmore

vi  Contents

  9  The Christian Pavilion at Expo 67: Notes from Charles Gagnon’s Archive  143    monika kin gagnon 10 Andy Warhol at Expo 67: Pop In and Pop Out  163 jean-françois côté 11 Postcards and the Chromophilic Visual Culture of Expo 67  176 johanne sloan PART FOUR: URBAN EXPERIENCE 12 Montreal and the Megastructure, ca 1967  193 inderbir singh riar 13 Brian Jungen: Habitat 04  211 kitty scott 14 Tabloid Expo  221 will straw Contributors  239

List of Illustrations

BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1 Selection of Expo 67 postcards.  4 2.1 Page from Cuisine of Pakistan.  40 3.1 Brochure from the Great Britain pavilion.  48 3.2 Tableau of a British family in the ‘Britain Today’ exhibit.  56 5.1 Exterior of the Federal Republic of Germany pavilion.  84 6.1 Maquette of The Buffet restaurant in the Canada pavilion.  95 6.2 Picnic table from The Buffet restaurant.  95 7.1 Attributes required of an Expo 67 hostess.  111 7.2 Uniforms of the hostesses of Expo 67.  114 8.1 Multi-screen display in the Czechoslovakia pavilion.  126 8.2 Cruciform arrangement of screens for Labyrinth.  134 8.3 Crowds line the balconies of the Labyrinth pavilion.  135 9.1 The garden in front of the Christian pavilion.  147 9.2 Christian pavilion interior.  149 9.3 Charles Gagnon, The Eighth Day/Le huitième jour.  155 10.1  Sculpture in the Youth pavilion.  169 11.1 Postcard showing the Canada pavilion.  182 12.1 Banham’s ‘comprehensive airview’ of Megacity Montreal.  201 12.2 Metro Education and the strategy of ‘urban infill.’  204 13.1 Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67.  212 13.2 Brian Jungen, Habitat 04: Cité radieuse des chats/Cats Radiant City, 2004.  217 14.1 ‘Enfin, L’Expo!’ Cover of Le Journal de Montréal.  229 14.2 Coverage of a possible rat invasion of the Expo site.  232 14.3 A rat catcher applies noxious gas to a rat nest.  235 COLOUR PLATES (Colour plates follow page 22) Plate 1 Commemorative ‘passport.’ Plate 2 Colour slide of young visitors.

viii  List of Illustrations

Plate 3 Canada Day cover of Weekend Magazine. Plate 4 The Canada pavilion as presented in Daredevil comic. Plate 5 Annotations by one visitor to the Expo 67 guide. Plate 6 The Expo Lounge internet blog (from 2007). Plate 7 ‘Experience Weightlessness’ advertisement. Plate 8 ‘How to Become a Connoisseur without Leaving Canada.’ Plate 9 Menu of the 4 Regions Restaurant in the Switzerland pavilion. Plate 10  The ‘Fashion and Music’ tableau in the ‘Britain Today’ exhibit. Plate 11 Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany pavilion. Plate 12 Expo 67 logo designed by Julien Hébert. Plate 13 Sculpture by Julien Hébert, Place des arts. Plate 14 ‘One of the Best Jobs in Canada.’ Plate 15 Pavilion hostesses in front of Places des Nations. Plate 16 The film Canada 67, made using Circle-Vision 360-degree film. Plate 17 Display and visitors in Zone 1 of the Christian pavilion. Plate 18 Interior of the U.S. pavilion. Plate 19 Postcard showing an Expo 67 maquette. Plate 20 Brochure for the Kaleidoscope pavilion. Plate 21 Postcard of the Quebec pavilion. Plate 22 Man the Producer – a ‘rational and romantic’ megastructure. Plate 23 Brian Jungen, Habitat 04: Cité radieuse des chats/Cats Radiant City, 2004. Plate 24  ‘Hookers Descend on Sexpo 67!’

Acknowledgments

Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan would like to express their thanks to the following individuals and institutions, for their abiding support in facilitating this project. The exhibition Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir that we co-curated in 2005 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and a colloquium we co-organized, held jointly at the CCA and at Concordia University and entitled Montreal at Street Level: Revisiting the Material, Visual, and Spatial Cultures of the 1960s, were inspirational points of departure for this collection of essays. We would thus like to thank Phyllis Lambert, Founding Director of the CCA, for her enthusiastic support of these projects, as well as Nancy Dunton, Helen Malkin, Serge Belet and Mirko Zardini. We gratefully acknowledge both funding and encouragement from the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Office of the Vice-President, Research at Concordia University, as well as additional funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Aid to Scholarly Publication fund of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Bruno Paul Stenson, MA, has been unfailingly generous with his expertise regarding Expo 67, and in giving us access to his outstanding collection of Expo 67 memorabilia. Sara Spike’s demonstrated proficiency as an editor and organizer, as well as a historian, has been of immeasurable assistance throughout this project. We are grateful to Siobhan McMenemy for her expert stewardship of the book through the various stages of production at the University of Toronto Press, and to Ryan Van Huijstee and Frances Mundy at the Press. Finally, we would like to thank our contributors for all their efforts, and for having brought both breadth and nuance to the study of Expo 67.

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Expo 67 Not Just a Souvenir

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1 Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir rhona richman kenneally and johanne sloan

On 27 August 1967, a couple named Claire and Leonard sent an Expo 67 postcard from Montreal to Croton-on-Hudson, New York. The postcard depicted ‘a gondola ride on Ile Notre Dame [one of the islands comprising the Expo site], passing along the way the beautiful pavilions of Monaco, Haiti and France’ (fig. 1.1). Given this juxtaposition of continents and countries, their scrawled message seems apt: ‘Having a wild time running to and fro.’ Presumably, the postcard reached its destination, but that was not the end of its voyage. Years later, it was purchased for a pittance at a flea market, became a cherished artefact in a personal collection of Expo 67 souvenirs, and appeared in a formal exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2005, one of the world’s premier architectural museums. Thus this modest object has proven to have cultural longevity, beginning at the spatial and temporal coordinates of Montreal, 1967, and then continuing to resonate in life stories and institutional contexts up to the present day. Such images and objects are still taken out of boxes and drawers to be marvelled at anew, because even a lone Expo 67 souvenir seems to contain some vital spark from that memorable event. Like other Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs1 which had been staged in Europe and North America since the mid-nineteenth century, Expo 67 began with the demarcation of a new space, the material base on which a vision could be concretized. In 1962 Montreal was officially chosen by the Parisbased Bureau des Expositions to host an exhibition, in 1963 the overarching theme of Terre des Hommes/Man and his World was put forward, and construction began immediately afterwards on an alluring conglomeration of pavilions, entertainment zones, and transportation networks occupying two man-made islands in the St Lawrence River. This exurban apparition was meant to exist for a short time alongside the real city of Montreal, provisionally detached from the usual commercial, political, or ideological imperatives which govern the lives of people around the globe. At Expo 67, buildings, machines, technologies, foodstuffs, artworks, and myriad other cultural artefacts would be removed from everyday life and re-presented according to the phantasmagoric logic of the world’s fair. The socalled ‘passport’ issued to visitors reinforced the idea that Expo 67 functioned as a miniaturized mirror image of the entire planet (see plate 1). Having gained entry to the Expo islands with this document in hand, the visitor was temporarily transformed into a citizen of the world, challenged to bear witness to the tremendous

4  Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan

1.1  Selection of Expo 67 postcards, including one with the handwritten message ‘Having a wild time running to and fro’ sent 27 August 1967. Collection of Johanne Sloan.

range of peoples and things on display, and consequently drawn into processes of cultural exchange. The contributors to this book attest to a widespread fascination with what transpired on those manufactured islands in the summer of 1967, and they also set out to analyse the imaginative and ideological vestiges of Expo 67 that remain lodged in contemporary culture. The essays interrogate aspects of Expo 67 in light of current scholarly and theoretical concerns – postcolonial and national discourses, gender studies, visual culture, the critique of modernism, the interdisciplinary study of cities, and histories of technology, for instance. At various moments throughout these essays, Expo 67 is also regarded as an important conjuncture in histories of Canada, Quebec, and Montreal. And then, because Expo 67 was arguably one of the last great world’s fairs, this book is also an opportunity to assess the legacy of

Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir  5

this phenomenon. Most world’s fair scholarship focuses on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century exhibitions, but relatively little has been written about the late twentieth-century incarnations. Expo 67 has certainly not been forgotten, but it is only recently that artists, architects, teachers, and scholars from various disciplines have been exchanging their respective insights.2 We realized early on that unravelling the complexity of Expo 67 would demand an interdisciplinary conversation, and so this book brings together scholars from art history, architecture, design, communications, media studies, sociology, and literature. Certainly, we make no claims that this book is comprehensive: rather, we see it as a point of departure and hope that it will contribute to further investigation. The essays have been grouped under four headings: ‘The Material Culture of Nationhood,’ ‘Becoming Modern,’ ‘Visual Transactions,’ and ‘Urban Experience.’ In methodological terms we have chosen to regard the ephemeral artefacts and experiences of Expo 67 as revealing cultural markers, to the same extent as the more monumental architecture and rituals enacted during the exhibition. The intellectual respect we accord to the above-mentioned postcard, for example, underscores the opportunity lost when such souvenirs are treated as trivial stuff, or regarded apart from the trajectories they describe through social space. Expo 67 was developed under the thematic rubric Terre des Hommes/Man and His World, a phrase borrowed from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French author/ aviator best known for writing The Little Prince. One foundational document, prepared in 1963, states: ‘“Terre des Hommes” has been chosen as the central motif. The intent will be to examine the behaviour of man in his environment, extolling his achievements in the fields of ideas, culture and science.’3 Here and in countless other texts in circulation around the time of Expo 67, a similarly essentialized notion of ‘Man’ was put forward. All of the planet’s inhabitants would supposedly be represented by this singular, aspirational figure. In Saint-Exupéry’s writings, the distanced view from above the surface of the planet (literally the view from his airplane, that is) allowed the emergence of a humanistic point of view, with the implication that this perspective was impossible at ground level; indeed, the author’s extra-planetary stance has been described as ‘cosmic humanism.’4 This airborne gaze allowed any number of geo-political, ethnic, or religious differences and conflicts to be reduced to insignificance, thus seducing Expo visitors into concluding that the earth belonged collectively to humankind, to ‘Man.’5 This central positioning of Man, and the idea that every visitor could simply step into the shoes of this idealized Everyman to survey the world, would serve as the event’s ostensible unifying principle. Yet if Expo 67 shows the popularity of this brand of humanism at this particular time, its intellectual foundation was nevertheless under threat as well. The idea of ‘Man and His World’ as borrowed from SaintExupéry can be measured against the contribution of a rather different French writer, Michel Foucault, whose book Les mots et les choses (published in 1966, the year before Expo 67) attempted to dislodge this phantasmatic figure of Man from its place as the privileged subject of history. Following Foucault’s lead, we might therefore ask: what kinds of subjects were produced by the humanist discourse of Expo 67? The Man and His World theme branched out into sub-categories, such as Man

6  Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan

the Creator, Man the Explorer, Man the Producer, Man the Provider, and Man and the Community. If the majority of pavilions ultimately reverted to the traditional programming of previous world’s fairs by representing countries, states, and provinces, these ‘Man and His World’ meta-pavilions were meant to serve as the common denominators speaking to the needs and desires of all humankind.6 And despite the implicit masculinity of these ‘Man’ pavilions, it can be argued that the official female presence on the site most successfully epitomized this humanist aspiration. The official Expo 67 hostesses, fashionably attired in sky-blue miniskirts and white go-go boots, visually punctuated the environment and interacted with visitors at all times. While every national pavilion had its own cohort of hostesses, each wearing her own representative costume and voicing a particular nation’s agenda, these official hostesses seemed to transcend that nationalist consciousness by articulating (while pleasantly smiling) Expo 67’s fundamental message of a unified planetary community. Our contributors address this humanistic message in various ways, showing how it was translated into images, objects, and forms of display, and analysing its success as an ideological veil overlaid onto more complex social and political realities. And indeed, this book builds on a body of scholarly literature which points out such contradictory impulses from the outset of the world’s fair phenomenon. Writing about the first wave of nineteenth-century exhibitions, Paul Greenhalgh notes that ‘brotherly love and understanding between nations was the single most laboured aspect of exhibition diatribe, the sentiment usually being ridiculed by displays of military technology, imperial conquest and abject racism on the sites themselves.’7 In a book examining the ideological foundations of American world’s fairs, Robert Rydell brings the story more up to date by showing how the 1958 world’s fair in Brussels was permeated by Cold War politics, undermining the fair’s inevitable rhetoric of global understanding. He argues that the American pavilion in Brussels served to ‘give material shape to a vision of American culture as a paradise of mass consumption developing under the benevolent guidance of corporate capitalists, government authorities, and academic experts.’8 If world’s fairs have historically been sites of contradictory messages, ideals, and ideologies, it is all the more important to submit each fair to close scrutiny, and hence to determine what was distinctive about Expo 67. We cannot ignore that previous world’s fairs coincided with chapters in the history of colonialism, and that forms of display, education, and entertainment were typically entwined with assertions of cultural superiority. By 1967 the geo-political map of the world had dramatically changed, however, and Expo 67 could be regarded as a promotional opportunity for an emergent post-colonial consciousness, with countries such as Algeria presenting themselves as newly independent entities on the world stage, and the ‘Africa Place’ pavilion providing testimony to that continent’s ongoing national liberation struggles. The Cold War, meanwhile, was in full throttle, but Cuba could gleefully advertise itself in the official Expo 67 guidebook as ‘the first socialist country of the Western Hemisphere,’9 and Canadian soil provided a lessthan-hysterical setting for the inevitable showdown between the American and Soviet pavilions, and their competing world views. It is also significant that the summer months of 1967 would achieve renown both as the ‘summer of love’ and

Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir  7

as a time of violent racial clashes in the United States, which is to say that Expo 67 coincided with the rise of youth and counterculture movements, feminism, civil rights activism, and anti-war protests. Several of the essays show that even the fair’s most prescriptive messages would be appropriated and modified by visitors. An example of this appropriation centres on the ‘passport’ issued to Expo 67’s paying customers. In accordance with the event’s official message of global friendship, this multi-use ticket, in the guise of a travel document, promised temporarily to overwrite the reality of nationally determined identities; that is, Expo 67’s facsimile passport had utopian connotations. Nevertheless, the very idea that people must move through the world bearing passports was challenged by the anarchist social critic Paul Goodman, who spoke on ‘Youth Day’ at Expo 67, taking the opportunity to suggest that ‘young people should tear up their passports when travelling abroad so as to promote real international understanding.’10 And so, while our object of study is a highly orchestrated event, intended to articulate government agendas and the dominant ideological tendencies of the Western world, this book attempts to do justice to the dynamic interaction of people, places, things, and ideas that was triggered by Expo 67. The Material Culture of Nationhood The concept of the nation remained central throughout Expo 67, precisely because the array of self-promoting national pavilions, exhibitions, and displays was situated against the backdrop of Canadian and Québécois nationalisms. It is significant, too, that the assertion of nationhood at Expo 67 – whether by newly formed nation-states, ex-colonies, or long-established nations in the process of renegotiating their own identities – would be continually juxtaposed to principles of inter-national commonality, universal human truths, and the transcendence of boundaries. Everywhere at Expo 67, the very concept of the nation would be propped up, even while its ideological limits were being questioned. The effectiveness of Expo 67 and the other centenary celebrations as manifestations of Canadian nationalism can to some extent be measured by the many expressions of nostalgia for these events in subsequent years. The popular historian Pierre Berton published a book on the thirtieth anniversary of Expo 67, rather melodramatically entitled 1967: The Last Good Year. Glossing over social and political conflicts as well as the rise of Quebec’s separatist movement, Berton avows that ‘1967 was the last good year before all Canadians began to be concerned about the future of our country.’11 Referring to ‘the miracle of Expo 67,’ Berton envelops the whole event in a nostalgic, nationalist bubble.12 Berton’s testimony resembles what Svetlana Boym has termed ‘restorative nostalgia.’ Boym writes: ‘This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths.’13 Certainly Berton has not been alone in wanting Expo 67 to represent that one perfect moment (now forever lost) of Canadian unity, and even more than forty years later, as we will see, such aspirations manifest themselves. Expo continues to elicit powerful affective responses from people who attended the event, as well as from those who acquired mementos and souvenirs at the

8  Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan

time or subsequently (see plate 2). But Boym also points to a more productive and complex kind of nostalgia which ‘does not pretend to rebuild the mythical palace called home,’ and so is unlikely to be yoked to political goals.14 Instead, with this ‘reflective nostalgia,’ as she terms it, ‘the past opens up a multitude of potentialities’ and ‘awaken[s] multiple levels of consciousness.’15 The articulation of Canadian nationalism around Expo 67 would ultimately encompass a range of official voices, unsanctioned views, and polemical positions. One such voice is that of author Gabrielle Roy: as a member of the select group of intelligentsia invited by the federal government to brainstorm about the upcoming world’s fair, Roy was no doubt expected to trumpet (however eloquently) the glorious achievements of the nation.16 But in the end, in an oversized picture book issued by the Expo Corporation, this pre-eminent Quebec author expands upon the humanism of Saint-Exupéry, but has remarkably little to say about the Canadian nation: she observes only that Expo 67 would permit ‘the word “Canada” [to] re-echo throughout the world like a rallying cry and an invitation to friendship.’17 If Canada is hereby reduced to a word, for Roy it is an almost talismanic ‘word,’ to be launched into a global environment rather than being contained within our national borders. Expo 67 is regarded, in this case, as a kind of instrument or technology with the capacity to broadcast Canada’s ‘rallying cry.’ Roy apparently chose not to describe a troubled or fractured Canadian nation, although she would have been well aware that competing visions of nationalism were in play within Canada’s borders by the 1960s. Indeed, Expo 67 might have told a triumphant story of the modern Canadian identity, but this event also coincided with the so-called révolution tranquille in Quebec, that modern and secular coming-to-consciousness of the Québécois.18 Against the inter-national backdrop provided by Expo 67, a great many people in Quebec were reconsidering the status of their own language, culture, and nationhood. It is relevant that the Parti Québécois officially came into existence the following year, while the Québécois writer/activist Pierre Vallières was in jail during that summer of Expo 67, having just completed the manuscript for Nègres blancs d’Amérique, a book which addresses the Québécois people as victims of sustained and systematic oppression within the Canadian state. Vallières encourages his compatriots to ‘sweep away the rottenness that poisons their existence,’ and ‘in solidarity with the exploited, the niggers of all the other countries, to build a new society for a new man, a society that is human for all men, just for all men, in the service of all men. A fraternal society.’19 In a way, this author’s message of futurity and international solidarity echoes Expo 67’s (and Roy’s) humanist doctrine, although this was undoubtedly an angrier, more confrontational vision of how global harmony might eventually be achieved. Even if Vallières’s militant stance was not the majority view, the question of a distinct Québécois destiny was in the air in 1967 and would achieve notoriety through the visit of the French president to Expo 67, culminating in his infamous ‘Vive le Québec libre!’ speech, delivered to an exultant Montreal audience, and to livid politicians. (The irony of De Gaulle’s cheerfully glib support of Quebec’s ‘national liberation struggle’ would not have been lost on those who so painfully overthrew French colonial rule in Algeria.) These were some of the ideological stakes around the time of Expo 67. But the

Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir  9

ideology of nationalism does not only operate at the level of abstract concept; it acquires physical form as landscape, architecture, exhibition display, not to mention the unassuming souvenirs that would inevitably become detached from the site.20 It is fascinating, then, to realize that in the early planning stages of the event, the possibility was raised of staging this world’s fair without the concept of nationhood as the central organizing principle. The architects/urban planners H.P. Daniel (Sandy) and Blanche Van Ginkel were part of a team of experts hired to translate the Expo 67 vision into a material form. Throughout 1963, the Van Ginkels put forward their view that adhering to a national paradigm was old-fashioned and even reactionary, and that it was preferable to bring the world together without providing a separate container for each nation-state. Support for this position was both local and international. Lewis Mumford, the renowned urban and cultural theorist, responded positively to memoranda the Van Ginkels sent him on this issue. He espoused a plan to ‘get rid of national exhibitions, or at least national buildings: have each country contribute its best products and skills to buildings that would display the works of all nations together.’21 In this document Mumford does not deny the right of each country to show off its achievements, but he challenges the imperative that each nation remain sequestered, unto itself, in a discrete pavilion. One can only imagine how different the impact of Expo 67 might have been if, for example, visitors had encountered American and Soviet ventures into space only within the neutral environment of the Man the Explorer pavilion. Instead, visitors were forcefully reminded of the ongoing and competitive space race, through the dramatic artificial moonscapes and simulations of space travel featured in both the U.S. and USSR pavilions. Mumford’s opinion about Expo 67 is significant because it provides a genealogy for an alternate discursive thread within the world’s fair tradition. Mumford had himself contributed to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, while his mentor, the Scottish scientist and social theorist Patrick Geddes, participated in the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Both these men argued for the world’s fair to be taken seriously as an opportunity for civic and social planning, and as ‘a form of citizen education,’22 and it can be argued that this perspective, as taken up by the Van Ginkels, might have corresponded more closely to the macrocosmic mapping of human endeavour expounded by Saint-Exupéry. The Van Ginkels would resign from their posts when it became clear that these radical ideas were not going to be adopted, and admittedly, a critique of nationalism as the fair’s organizing principle would have been strange, under the circumstances, as Canada exuberantly prepared to celebrate its centenary. Examples of this refocused Canadian identity include the introduction of the new maple leaf flag (1965) alongside more symbolic gestures such as the approval by Parliament of ‘O Canada!’ as the national anthem (1967).23 Throughout the centenary year and all across the country, historical re-enactments, art exhibitions, concerts, educational events, and so on, were underwritten by the public purse, as well as by private sponsors. Still, for many Canadians the ultimate affirmation of nationhood was that trip hundreds or thousands of miles across the country to attend Expo 67 in the summer of 1967, an event proudly captured on the cover photo of the Montreal Star’s Weekend Magazine on Canada Day. (see plate 3)

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The contributors to the first section of this book – Rhona Richman Kenneally, Elizabeth Darling, and Eva-Marie Kröller – approach Expo 67 as a site where nationalism was negotiated, contested, and destabilized. These essays are innovative insofar as they explore nationalism from the perspective of material culture. Nationhood became intelligible to Expo 67 visitors in a variety of ways – through the architecture of the pavilions, the presentation of industrial objects, artworks, and crafts; through guidebooks, pamphlets, photographs, and films; through costume and clothing; and also through food and drink. In focusing on the food at Expo 67, Rhona Richman Kenneally explores gastronomic opportunities for the articulation of nationalism. Her argument is that the foods served in the thirty or so restaurants housed within the national pavilions were themselves important markers in constructing and transmitting the cultural values and riches that each country wished to emphasize. These were mediated for the public through taste, smell, and texture, but also through menus, restaurant decor, and the names of dishes, not to mention the Expo 67 venue itself. By assuring eaters that the oftenexotic dishes they would be served were ‘authentic,’ subjected to rigorous quality control guided by culinary heritage on the one hand and the recognized vicissitudes of modern life on the other, the administrators of these restaurants asserted their national cultural hegemony. The result was an interactive, combined entertainment/pedagogic opportunity to experience a nation’s bounty first-hand – one worthy of the high prices, not to mention the long lines, that characterized these eating experiences. Expo 67 served as a venue for many investigations and re-presentations of nationhood, through a range of cultural artefacts. Elizabeth Darling’s essay on the ‘Britain Today’ exhibition in the Britain Pavilion examines how a sense of British identity was made available to Expo 67 visitors. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s contemporaneous writings about ‘open symbols,’ Darling argues that the semiotically ‘open’ quality of the displays functioned to challenge the monolithic representations of British identity that had prevailed in past exhibitions and world’s fairs. And so, displayed alongside tweed-clad gents sipping teas was the new youth culture of Carnaby Street and the manufactured goods to be found on any high street in the country. In this way, the national character of Britons emerges as a complex and ‘unfinished’ cultural process, with the implication that Britain was changing before one’s eyes. This case study is crucial insofar as what unfolded in the British pavilion paralleled the strategies of other national pavilions to achieve some kind of balance between tradition, heritage, and folklore on the one hand and a more cosmopolitan modernism on the other. Eva-Marie Kröller’s analysis of ‘What to wear to Expo,’ as prescribed in the English and French versions of Canada’s Chatelaine magazine, suggests that much more was at stake than sartorial advice in the magazines’ anecdotal accounts of celebrating the centennial and travelling to Expo from various parts of the country. The debate about nationalism is embedded in the very pages of a ‘woman’s’ magazine, conventionally focused on domestic matters and the everyday life of families but beginning to contend with changing gender roles and the rise of feminism. Kröller tracks the magazine’s advice about how a Canadian family should dress the part at Expo 67. Thus she regards these seemingly minor journalistic fragments

Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir  11

– as well as the visitor’s suitcase-full of garments – as tangible evidence of how a newly modern Canadian identity was being tried on for size by both anglophone and francophone women. Becoming Modern Expo 67 brought art, architecture, design, fashion, and technology together into a glittering, modern package. If the exhibition organizers deployed a humanistic vocabulary to establish common ground for its heterogeneous crowd of contributors and visitors, one could argue that modernism itself became a lingua franca at Expo 67, seemingly capable of traversing borders, nationalities, and even ideologies. Almost every pavilion was striking for its modern-looking appearance, and indeed very few national pavilions referred to vernacular or nationally specific architectural traditions.24 Thus the ingenious geometry of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome for the United States, the unusual ‘folded-paper’ architecture of the Cuba pavilion, and the abstract shapes of the Canada pavilion could all become iconic manifestations of the event, the modern language of the buildings proclaiming a unified project, despite the many historical and political differences between these countries. In a way, all world’s fairs were modern. The first Great Exhibition of London in 1851 had showcased Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace as a new engineering and architectural feat to be marvelled at for its own sake. The enormous iron and glass building composed of prefabricated elements, unlike anything seen before, was itself a glimpse of the future. Even when subsequent world’s fairs created an architectural environment that evoked, in a more nostalgic way, a grand and monumental European tradition (and even if the buildings in question were quickly erected replicas made of plaster and other ephemeral materials), 25 it was a given that world’s fairs would put the metropolis’s very latest products, technologies, artworks, and fashions on display. And it is possible that the sparkling newness of these artefacts became even more evident to visitors when viewed against a historicized (however ersatz) architectural backdrop. It was in the twentieth century that world’s fairs most unabashedly embraced futurity. The 1939 World’s Fair in New York, for example, provided its visitors with awe-striking glimpses of a future world that would be radically different from the daily lives of most New York residents. E.L. Doctorow’s novel World’s Fair conveys this very effectively by contrasting the old-fashioned habitus of working-class Jews in the 1930s with the hyper-stimulating world of new technologies, architectures, and transportation systems introduced on the nearby Flushing Meadows site of the 1939 fair.26 If Expo 67 also announced a future world, by the 1960s this futurity was already on the doorstep. And if colonial-era events had once denied the possibility of cultural change and improvement to non-Western participants, at Expo 67 the entire planet was apparently becoming modern in sync.27 Indeed, Expo 67 made it seem as if modern life was accessible to all visitors, to embrace and take home. The ‘modern’ only acquires meaning, however, in relational terms. What is construed as modern at any given moment will be opposed in myriad ways and con-

12  Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan

texts to something else that is un-modern or anti-modern. And so at Expo 67 every national pavilion flaunted its modern identity in some way; very often this was in architectural terms, and the attention-grabbing designs of the aforementioned American, Cuban, and Canadian pavilions were echoed many times throughout the site. Another striking signifier of the modern was provided through the extensive use of large-screen and multi-screen cinematic projections, as well as other innovative visual technologies (to be discussed in some detail in the section of this book entitled ‘Visual Transactions’). Inevitably, though, such gestures towards the modern were counterbalanced by exhibits, displays, performances, meals, costumes, and so on, which emphasized tradition, heritage, and folklore. This meant that each pavilion inevitably contained a (sometimes blatant) tension: the affirmation of a cosmopolitan, urban, technologically sophisticated identity had to be conjoined or opposed in some way to the specificity of a given nation’s traditions and history. The Czechoslovakia pavilion, for instance, became an extremely popular venue because of its experimental cinematic multi-screen projections, but also due to its displays of centuries-old traditions of glassware and puppetry; in such instances it seemed as if the modern and the traditional could be seamlessly reconciled. A less reassuring version of this modern/traditional tension could be found in the Indians of Canada pavilion, where the displays included hand-crafted artefacts bespeaking traditional spiritual values, but where state-of-the-art photographic murals and textual panels also addressed the contemporary struggles of Native peoples in Canada to restore a culture decimated through contact with Europeans. What it meant to appear modern, or to become modern, at Expo 67 is therefore not so straightforward, and the essays in this section, by Tom McDonough, Martin Racine, and Aurora Wallace, approach their case studies as complex moments in the implementation of modern forms and ideas. McDonough’s primary object of study is Frei Otto and Rolf Gutbrod’s polyester-and-steel tent for West Germany, and he analyses how the legacy of architectural modernism would have been understood at Expo 67 by comparing the Otto and Gutbrod structure with Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 – a model of which was, in fact, prominently displayed in the West Germany pavilion. While the modern character of these buildings is linked to their materiality, spatial configuration, and use of new technologies, McDonough expands the discussion of architectural style and spatiality to address modernism in more theoretical, and more political, terms. The concepts of ephemerality and obsolescence might circulate within the discourse of architecture, but they also appear in the social theory of Henri Lefebvre, and in the contemporaneous journal Utopie. McDonough questions whether there was still utopian content embedded in the modernism of the Otto and Gutbrod building, and this is indeed a key theoretical question, one that can be directed to the entire modern-looking built environment of Expo 67. The overall visual coherence of the architecture and design on the Expo 67 site camouflages the complexity of what it meant to ‘become modern’ at Expo 67, as this was by no means a uniform experience. Martin Racine’s essay addresses the distinctive conditions under which Quebeckers were becoming modern in the 1960s by examining the contribution of the designer Julien Hébert. Hébert was

Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir  13

responsible for Expo 67’s distinctive logo of stylized human figures which would be emblazoned on innumerable signs, documents, and souvenir objects, and he also designed urban furniture, fixtures, exhibition displays, and pavilion interiors on the Expo site. Racine argues that it is wrong to regard this body of work as simply another iteration of an internationally viable style, because the designer’s approach was forged amid debates concerning the appropriate aesthetic and cultural forms for the emergent Québécois nation. Hébert’s career intersects at various points with that of the abstract painter and manifesto writer Paul-Émile Borduas, but Hébert insisted on the need to go beyond easel painting to embrace the design of objects associated with everyday life. Expo 67 can be seen as his materialized ‘manifesto,’ showing how a modern Québécois consciousness could be expressed through the reinvention of these objects and furnishings, through the embrace of industrialized materials, and through the integration of art and architecture. Modern impulses can become intelligible through visual form and shape, and just as the previous essays begin with specific examples of architecture and design, so too does Aurora Wallace zero in on the modern-looking silhouette of the miniskirted hostesses at Expo 67. Certainly this collective fashion statement contributed to Expo 67’s overall modern impact, but if the space-age sheaths in evidence throughout the exhibition echo the bold architectonics of sixties design in general terms, Wallace also reminds us that more was at stake in the conceptualization and presentation of the hostess costume. In one sense hostesses were part of the visual spectacle to be consumed at the world’s fair, and Wallace introduces the era’s peculiar phenomenon of girl-watching to analyse how women were constantly being scrutinized as they occupied public space and assumed new urban apparel. At the same time, much like airline hostesses – their uniformed counterparts in the sky – Expo 67 hostesses were also enticing the public to experience modern practices while serving as cultural mediators for visitors to the site. Effectively undermining, then, the gendered rhetoric of ‘Man and His World,’ this essay points to the mutable identity of modern women at Expo 67. Visual Transactions In the summer of 1967, the Queen of England visited Expo 67 and rode on the monorail – receiving the adulation of her subjects just as if she were riding in a royal carriage – even if the next person to occupy her seat might have been a nineyear-old kid visiting from Saskatchewan. Each of such moments stood a chance to be transformed into a visual representation – as photo-journalism, snapshot or slide, filmed news footage, or home movie. Expo 67 was a highly photogenic event, and the experience of it was largely constituted in visual and pictorial terms. This is yet another way that Expo 67 followed in the footsteps of earlier world’s fairs. During their nineteenth-century heyday, these events were admired as visual extravaganzas, and the European venues in particular were opportunities for the most powerful states to show off (with an emphasis on show) their colonial wealth to each other and to the rest of the world, with the aim of asserting a sense of cultural (racial, ideological, spiritual, artistic, etc.) superiority. Timothy Mitchell has written that in these exhibitions the colony was destined to become ‘picture-like

14  Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan

and legible, rendered available to political and economic calculation.’28 A rather different take on the visual impact of world’s fairs was described by Walter Benjamin, however. His Arcades project includes the testimony of visitors to London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, for whom the overall effect of the light-filled interior, containing every new mechanical invention under the sun but also adorned with plants, statues, and birds, was one of enchantment.29 Benjamin labels this experience ‘phantasmagoric,’ following the Marxist idea that the commodity casts a spell over consumers. These analyses are therefore markedly different: Mitchell asserts that the world’s fair strove to be ‘picture-like and legible,’ but Benjamin argues against this kind of ideological transparency, suggesting instead that the dominant visual paradigm was a dreamlike illusion. (Expo 67’s fantastical quality is perhaps most apparent when it seamlessly becomes the setting for a 1967 comic book featuring Daredevil, one of the Marvel superheroes [see plate 4].) In fact, both of these conceptual models co-exist and are legitimate, and the resulting ambiguity is a feature of world’s fairs. Expo 67 as a whole was a veritable showcase for new visual technologies. If visitors to the exhibition were probably familiar with a limited repertoire of moving and projected images – the cinema, the domestic television set, the home slide projector – a tour through the pavilions provided encounters with a whole new world of moving pictures. The panoramic film Canada 67 shown in the Telephone Pavilion completely enveloped the spectator in a 360-degree circular image. The Man the Explorer pavilion had slowly revolving theatres, so that multiple screens could be seen all at once. The previously mentioned Czechoslovakia pavilion featured three different experimental-screen presentations: an interactive narrative film, a multi-screen cinema where a computer controlled the sequencing, and the Diopolyecran, whereby fifteen thousand photographic transparencies (slides) formed a constantly moving kaleidoscope of imagery. The complexity of the cinematic experience in the Labyrinth pavilion, described in this volume by Ben Highmore, was also much admired. These are only a few examples, as many more oversized, multiple, or faceted screens could be found throughout the exhibition, presented as a foretaste of the future. It is important to remember, though, that novel, experimental screen experiences had been presented at earlier world’s fairs; for instance, Rosalind Williams’s book Dream Worlds describes over twenty protocinematic visual entertainments at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, which explored the boundary between still and moving images and which drastically altered or enhanced perception through some mechanical contrivance. Visitors to the 1900 event could view the world from above in a Cineoramatic balloon trip, while the ‘Trans-Siberian Railway’ moving panorama had spectators seated in real railway carriages with the illusion of moving past or through a sequence of Russian landscapes.30 At world’s fairs leading up to and including Expo 67, the formal and technological aspects of these visual experiences was marvelled at, while the subject-matter or narrative content routinely remained of secondary interest. Whereas a conventional filmic presentation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would have been terribly banal, this same material, repackaged in a cinematic panorama for Canada 67, resulted in what one critic at the time called an ‘optical amusement park.’31

Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir  15

The architecture and spatial layout of the Labyrinth pavilion at Expo 67 was purpose-built to house the immersive cinematic environment conceived by Roman Kroitor, and Highmore’s essay in this volume asks whether such new architectural/visual technology marks the advent of a new cinematic language. To address this question, Highmore introduces the concept of the phantasmagoria, particularly as it pertains to the world’s fair experience. For Walter Benjamin, as mentioned above, as well as for other authors such as Theodor Adorno, the phantasmagoria implies the interdependence of visual experience, commodification, and ideology. In his discussion, Highmore points to paradoxical aspects of the phantasmagoria: it permits the inculcation of dominant values, but through its multi-sensorial assault suggests the ‘potential for other sorts of experiences, ones that might possibly be utopian or critical, or simply new.’32 In the context of Expo 67, it then becomes possible to analyse the entertaining visual thrills of the Labyrinth pavilion while also considering how it might serve as the catalyst for a genuine kind of social and perceptual awakening. Another kind of experimental cinematic experience is addressed in Monika Kin Gagnon’s essay about The Eighth Day, a film made by her father Charles Gagnon for the Christian pavilion at Expo 67. The Eighth Day was composed of found footage, and in this sense it resembled the many instances at Expo 67 of montaged and collaged imagery, whether cinematic or photographic, which showed diverse people from around the world. The film’s confrontational approach was a far cry, however, from the conciliatory messages of universal human values that characterized so many of the displays. This is an important case study because it shows how Expo 67’s rhetoric of universalism and humanism could be appropriated and to some extent undermined. And although Gagnon’s film appeared under the rubric of Christianity, its explicit anti-war stance brought it close to the countercultural values of the 1960s, while the absence of any religious iconography would have resonated with the anti-clerical mood of Quebeckers in the very throes of the révolution tranquille. Expo 67 was replete with movement, colour, and visual stimuli, and it could be argued that the entire space of the exhibition was aestheticized – but what does this imply about the status of art, both within the ideological and physical construct of the exhibition itself? Discrete works of art did punctuate the pavilions and exhibition grounds, sometimes very dramatically, as was the case with Alexander Calder’s monumental abstract sculpture, Man. At other times, works of art were integrated into more general displays, for example in the U.S. pavilion, where Pop and Colorfield artworks appeared – from certain angles – to merge with the recreated lunar landscape which occupied a seemingly floating platform inside Buckminster Fuller’s dome. On many other occasions, the elaborate displays and decorative schemes throughout the Expo 67 site resembled, in a variety of ways, works more formally sanctioned as art, further blurring the identification and differentiation criteria supporting that imprimatur, criteria that, themselves, were in flux during this period. Jean-Francois Côté’s essay in this collection addresses precisely these questions by examining the fleeting presence of Andy Warhol at Expo 67. Warhol was the main figure associated with the Pop Art movement, whereby the category of art

16  Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan

was apparently dissolving into a bigger category of pop culture. Was this Warholian paradigm in evidence at Expo 67? At a certain level it does seem as if the Expo 67 experience was an object lesson in how education, entertainment, technological innovation, commercial display, and aesthetic concerns could all be rolled into one highly desirable pop-culture image/product. But Côté argues that the levelling out of cultural hierarchies at Expo 67 was more complicated than that, and so he contrasts Warhol’s triumphant assertion of a Pop Art world, manifested at the U.S. pavilion, for example, with the local phenomenon of Ti-pop (examples of which were displayed in the Youth Pavilion). Ti-pop artworks embraced Americanized pop culture but simultaneously regionalized its conceptualization and execution by addressing, and repackaging, the religious iconography and parochial traditions of the Québécois people. Thus we see that Expo 67 was an opportunity to negotiate the meaning of an expanded visual culture. Johanne Sloan’s essay presents the glossy, intensely coloured postcard as a key artefact for studying the visual culture of Expo 67. Throughout the exhibition site, still photographs were introduced into elaborately conceived spatial environments, integrated into sculptural forms, set in motion, and bombarded with coloured light. The artificially enhanced, colour-saturated postcard epitomized all that was fantastic and dreamlike about Expo 67. If the result was a pleasurably chromophilic experience, this was an integral part of the world’s fair promise – to create, if even temporarily, a new imaginative space, a utopian glimpse. Urban Experience This idea of a kind of adjacent, captive utopia as a goad to the reorganization of public spaces in the ‘real’ city is remarkable. Expo 67 … constantly informs what’s happening across the river in Montreal.33

This comment was delivered by the architect and theorist Michael Sorkin on the occasion of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s (CCA’s) exhibition The Sixties: Montreal Thinks Big, held in 2004–5. The city of Montreal was indeed booming in the 1960s: monumental architectural and engineering feats such as new skyscrapers, freeways, industrial zones, and an underground Metro system, were transforming the city. Some urban planners predicted that the population of Montreal would reach seven million by the year 2000.34 This anticipated growth fostered much speculation about this enlarged city of the future, and indeed, many of the documents included in the CCA exhibition showed grandiose visionary schemes for Montreal’s development – hence the exhibition’s title, Montreal Thinks Big. And so Expo 67 was (and sometimes still is) regarded by commentators such as Sorkin as a kind of materialized blueprint for the future city, an idealized model of urban space, a ‘captive utopia.’35 Officially, of course, Expo 67 was the stage on which Canada’s centenary was celebrated, but one could argue that the evolving city of Montreal also played a key role in shaping and defining the world’s fair experience in 1967. Significantly, the same Van Ginkel design team that lobbied for a less nation-oriented prism through which to study Man and His World had also argued forcefully that the

Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir  17

exhibition grounds should be built, not as a more or less autonomous zone unto themselves, but as a directly linked outgrowth of Montreal. Such a strategy, they believed, would greatly facilitate the integration of the new construction into the real, workaday city once the exhibition was over.36 As we know, this plan was not realized, and Expo 67’s physical segregation from the rest of Montreal was asserted all the more strongly by the fact that it was situated on islands of its own in the St Lawrence River. Yet Expo 67 nevertheless maintained many city-like qualities of its own by virtue of its strategically laid out ‘urban’ design, which included promenades, plazas, state-of-the-art public transportation, shops, restaurants, and ‘streets.’ In that sense, Expo 67 can be seen as a kind of utopic urban satellite in opposition to the wider municipality that fed and sustained it – a municipality that, despite the intentions of Mayor Jean Drapeau to sanitize Montreal’s street scene by sweeping its detritus (human and otherwise) under the rug for the visitors, maintained a seamy side commensurate with its reputation for hedonistic activities.37 Certainly, this was not the first time that a world’s fair seemed to function as a kind of alter ego for the actual city hosting the event – emerging as its cleaner, more well-ordered self, its future self perhaps. The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 was known at the time as the ‘White City’ because the entire urban environment – buildings, streets, sculptures, and fountains – had been made pristine with a coat of white paint, which differentiated it rather dramatically from the gritty ‘grey city’ of Chicago. Peter Hales has written that this fair was ‘a piece of inspired civic boosterism’ on the part of Chicago’s entrepreneurs, who saw the fair as ‘an opportunity to create the ideal city and realize their grand scheme: an urban environment based on concepts of planning, order, monumentality, and symbolic historicism.’38 The chapters in this section explore different modalities of urban life in the interstices between Montreal proper and Expo 67. Inderbir Singh Riar’s essay examines the discourse of urbanism that arose around this world exhibition alongside the more focused discussion of architecture generated primarily by the pavilions. One of the most sustained – and most famous – discussions about the urban potential embedded in Expo 67 was provided by Reyner Banham, both at that time as well as some years later, when he published the renowned book entitled Megastructure. This work included a chapter on Montreal circa 1967 and devoted attention to the entire Expo site, as well as Moshe Safdie’s Habitat and the newly built subway system, not to mention a range of new buildings within the city proper – many of them furnished with atriums and indoor plazas. Whereas the title of course implied a consideration of size – a mega structure – and the concept acknowledged the future city as a massive network of interconnected units, Banham nevertheless conceived of this urban space as liberating and ludic, rather than as oppressive and dehumanizing. Revisiting comments by Banham, as well as Umberto Eco, Melvin Charney, and others, Riar shows that Expo 67 provoked conflicting understandings of architecture, modernism, and urban space. Moshe Safdie’s Habitat housing complex still lies stretched out across the water from downtown Montreal, so close, so visually accessible, and yet, ultimately isolated from the life of the city. In 1967, Habitat captured the imagination of so many people because this seemingly flexible kind of architecture promised to provide an easy

18  Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan

and imaginative solution to global housing problems. There was an affinity between Safdie’s project and the ‘plug-in’ notion of architecture championed by Banham, namely the idea that modular units could be provisionally inserted into the main body of a city, in order to fulfil specific needs. Habitat proved, however, not to be the panacea after all: for example, the modular units could only be standardized to a degree, because their location in the final massing (at the top, bottom, or middle of the pile) demanded different structural accommodations. Hence, Safdie’s original building was and still is a deluxe, one-of-a-kind apartment complex. In 2004, however, the artist Brian Jungen appropriated this iconic building, miniaturizing it and reinserting it into the industrial heart of Montreal and turning it into a refuge for some of the city’s homeless cats. Kitty Scott’s essay discusses how Jungen’s version of Habitat takes the form of a sustained social experiment, whereby the structure’s inhabitants are under constant surveillance. Clearly, this dystopian picture is quite far removed from the social and architectural ideals of 1967, and yet it can also be understood as a commentary on the ‘relational aesthetics’ so prevalent in contemporary art. This case study is a striking example of how Expo 67 continues to be a source of fascination for contemporary cultural producers. The popular press, both local and international, waxed eloquent in 1967 in its praise of the Expo 67 project, no doubt in part as a response to the positive spin induced by the organizers of the event, Mayor Jean Drapeau, and other interested parties. The covers of Life, Maclean’s, Actualité, Saturday Review, Saturday Night, Popular Mechanics, Paris Match, Chatelaine, Sept-Jours, Sky and Telescope, and so on, splashed images of the exhibition across the supermarkets and airports of North America and beyond.39 More obscure magazines including Holiday Inn, Canadian Boy, The Dodge News, and The Ford Times, and rather less obscure ones such as Newsweek, Road and Track, Redbook, the Saturday Evening Post, and Reader’s Digest, alerted many target audiences. It seems reasonable to assume that these inducements helped generate 50 million visits to Expo 67 during the spring, summer, and fall of that year.40 As compared with this barrage of positive publicity, Will Straw analyses tabloid newspapers to examine how Montreal’s project of urban transformation and the staging of Expo 67 was inserted into a typical parade of entertaining stories about the city’s crime, vice, and corruption. As previously mentioned, Montreal had for decades maintained a reputation as a ‘sin city,’ but the mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, had been waging a battle against his city’s disreputable character; the cleaned-up city that surrounded the luminous Expo 67 was the culmination of this effort. The response of the mainstream press was overwhelmingly positive and tended to parrot the boosterism of city administrators, as well as the humanistic messages disseminated by Expo 67 officials. And so the headline ‘Hookers Descend on Sexpo,’ or stories about rats infesting the Expo site, can be regarded as welcome bits of satire, but they also point to the contested image of Montreal that is all but subsumed by the overwhelmingly positive hype. Memories of Expo 67 On 29 October 1967, Expo 67 closed its doors, and everybody went home. Despite the extraordinary efforts of Mayor Jean Drapeau to extend the lifespan of the exhi-

Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir  19

bition as Man and His World in subsequent summers, these later iterations never had the allure of the original world’s fair. Around the time of Expo 67’s fortieth anniversary, a group of individuals (including Yves Jasmin, OC, Expo 67’s Director of Public Relations, Marketing and Communications) even went so far as to put together a proposal for a sesquicentennial celebration along the lines of Expo 67 that would take place on the original site as well as at other locations in Montreal. To be called Expo 17, it is intended, among other goals, to ‘encourage unity and self-esteem by recalling the glory of Expo 67.’41 In the summer of 2008, a similar goal was expressed by Benoit Labonté, Montreal’s municipal opposition leader. Waving a pair of the famous passports, he invited citizens of the city to develop a bid to hold a Universal Exposition in 2020. ‘It was probably the biggest moment of collective pride felt by Montrealers in the 20th century,’ he said.42 But whether or not an intact physical site is ever made available to visitors, the people who had attended Expo 67, and, eventually, others born after 1967, continue to collect and amass souvenirs and other physical traces. Sometimes these were intentionally devised as triggers of memory, as is the case with the list made by one enthusiastic Expo 67 visitor on the inside back cover of his official Expo 67 guidebook, documenting the exact dates, times, and number of hours he spent on the site (see plate 5). Much of the traffic in such visual and material culture takes place via eBay, the online auction site, and there are devotees who scrutinize each day’s new entries as carefully and routinely as they update their Facebook page. More generally, the internet has come to play a crucial role in commemorating Expo 67, serving as a virtual memory bank to sustain a thriving online community. With the fortieth anniversary of Expo 67 in 2007, a whole new flurry of responses has arisen, both from the intellectual milieu and from the wider public. Commentators on Expo 67 include many scholars, artists, and writers beyond those whose essays are contained in this collection. For instance, Expo 67 forms a backdrop to the extraordinary lives of some marginalized characters in Michel Tremblay’s novel Le cahier rouge, published in 2004.43 In the summer of 2007, a public art project, Artefact 2007, was organized by Gilles Daigneault and Nicolas Mavrikakis: twenty artists created work on the old Expo site, reinterpreting the concept of the pavilion.44 Also in 2007, the Landscape Architecture Department of the Université de Montréal offered a special-topic course on Expo 67, taught by Thilo Folkerts and Roberto Zancan. Less predictably, a 2007 summer studio course from the College of Architecture at Texas Tech University, on Construction Documents, brought students to Montreal and asked them to construct digital solid models of Expo 67 pavilions.45 Among the most fascinating assessments of Expo 67 are the reveries and reminiscences of men and women whose reactions are personal, rather than professional. Some conversations have been driven by hard-core enthusiasts, through blogspots such as Expo Lounge run by jason67, a Montrealer born ten years after Expo 67.46 Jason67’s extraordinary internet profile includes a Flickr account to store his Expo-related photos; MySpace and Facebook accounts, both accessible through the Expo Lounge blog (see plate 6); and videos posted to YouTube using the moniker bonjourexpo67.47 As jason67 recounts, My favorite part of Expo 67 is the way in which people got dressed up to go to this

20  Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan international event. Women wore hats and gloves. There was a sense of respect and honor that people don’t have these days. Anyone who is old enough to have seen and remembered Expo say it’s the best summer they ever had. Anyone who hasn’t seen it have [sic] been told they really missed out on something special.48

In 2007, local newspapers injected some interactivity in their historical accounts of the exhibition by soliciting individuals’ descriptions of their Expo experiences, whether actual or imagined. An online forum from the Montreal Gazette, inviting Expo 67 memories, reveals levels of nostalgia and idealization comparable to those of jason67. One individual who was actually there writes: ‘I hope that in the future we will be able to see something like that again … I will be the first one waiting in line shoud [sic] a time machine ever be invented and Expo will be my first stop. Mayor Drapeau with all his flaws did this great thing and we will never forget him for that.’49 Claire and Leonard’s postcard – the artefact which opened this introductory essay – has survived for forty years as a physical, tangible trace of Expo 67, but YouTube provides opportunities for new generations of Expo enthusiasts to inhabit the Expo site, with an immediacy and a vitality that were previously experienced only by people who were there, or others fortunate enough to be shown home movies in someone’s living room. Expo 67 Part 1, a home movie posted by ‘rhoughtonny,’ is remarkable for the way it weaves together conventional touristic sights of the fair with very intimate details of one family’s experience of the event.50 We see shots of a recreation vehicle towed by a car, out of which a family emerges (including a woman in a mini-dress), and which is eventually parked in front of a house … We see the car being disconnected from the camper, and then a dashboard view of the approaching vista of Expo 67 … A man counts out his money, and hands it over to two Expo 67 hostesses who apparently sell the group the necessary admission tickets … The camera zooms in on Buckminster Fuller’s gridded dome from the outside … Inside the pavilion, a boy photographs the Americans-in-space exhibit. What is wonderful here is that a seemingly spontaneous five-minute home movie manages to visualize a number of the artefacts addressed in this collection. More than that, the film can be viewed as a complex narrative that persuasively conveys the ways that individuals could inhabit Expo 67 and personalize its ostensibly universal messages and ideals. We hope that this book is as effective in offering multiple points of access to, and new ways of thinking about, this pivotal moment in Canadian history and culture. NOTES 1 These are, respectively, the French, British, and American terms to describe the same kind of event. Montreal was officially an exposition universelle, but we use the term ‘world’s fair’ throughout this book to adhere to the anglophone scholarly convention. 2 Previous publications about Expo 67 have tended to be subjective, anecdotal, and laudatory. See, for example, Yves Jasmin, La petite histoire d’Expo 67: L’Exposition universelle et internationale de Montréal comme vous ne l’avez jamais vue (Montreal: Éditions

Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir  21 Québec/Amérique, 1997); Peter H. Aykroyd, The Anniversary Compulsion: Canada’s Centennial Celebration, A Model Mega-Anniversary (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1992). See also, the Bulletin d’Histoire Politique (the journal of the Association québécoise d’histoire politique), featuring a thematic dossier on Expo 67, with several essays questioning how this world’s fair might have played a role in Quebec’s political and ideological destiny. See Bulletin d’Histoire Politique 17, no. 1 (Autumn 2008). 3 ‘The Theme “Terre des Hommes” and Its Development at the Canadian World Exhibition in Montreal, 1967,’ Van Ginkel fonds (027), Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Box 3-01, Folder 27-A21-04. 4 Mark Bell, Gabrielle Roy and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: ‘Terre des Hommes’ – Self and NonSelf (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991), 4. 5 In fact, Saint-Exupéry’s view from an airplane would be superseded, at Expo 67, by the even more distant perspective onto Planet Earth of astronauts and cosmonauts: both the United States and the USSR would highlight such imagery by presenting spacecraft and other paraphernalia pertaining to their respective space programs. 6 Ironically, these theme pavilions did not wholly live up to the internationalist impulse, and Canada was often the primary case study or reference point. 7 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester University Press, 1988), 17. 8 Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 211. 9 ‘The Cuban Pavillion’ advertisement in Expo 67: Official Guide / Expo 67: Guide officiel (Toronto: Maclean-Hunter, 1967), 125. 10 Paul Goodman, quoted in Nika Rylski, ‘The Expo Love-In,’ Ottawa Journal, 18 August 1967, Q8. 11 Pierre Berton, 1967: The Last Good Year (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1997), 364. 12 Ibid., 256. 13 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 41. 14 Ibid., 50. 15 Ibid. 16 The meeting, which took place over three days in May 1963 at Montebello, Quebec, was attended by such individuals as the architect Ray Affleck; Allan Jarvis, former director of the National Gallery of Canada; physician Wilder Penfield; Claude Robillard, Director of Urban Planning for the City of Montreal; and theatre director JeanLouis Roux; as well as Gabrielle Roy. 17 Gabrielle Roy, in Terre des Hommes – Man and His World (Ottawa: Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, 1967), 34. It is fascinating to note that another version of this essay gives a different timbre to this observation, with the addition of one short phrase: ‘That word Canada! – at the same time strong and sweet to hear – would resound throughout the world like a rallying call’ (our emphasis). Gabrielle Roy, ‘Man and His World: A Telling of the Theme,’ in The Fragile Lights of Earth: Articles and Memories 1942–1970 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 203. We would like to thank EvaMarie Kröller for bringing this discrepancy to our attention. 18 See Marcel Fournier, ‘A Society in Motion: The Quiet Revolution and the Rise of the Middle Class,’ in The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big, ed. André Lortie (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 2004), 31–73.

22  Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan 19 Pierre Vallières, White Niggers of America, trans. Joan Pinkham (1968; Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), 214. 20 On the way nationalist sentiment assumes physical form, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991). 21 See Van Ginkel fonds, Box 3.01, Folder 27 A2-02. See also the long letter by the eminent Harvard architectural and urban historian John E. Burchard that suggests new ways of organizing the exhibition into distinct national, international, and trade zones. Van Ginkel fonds, Box 3.02, Folder 27-A21-10. 22 Piet van Wesemael, Architecture of Instruction and Delight: A Socio-historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a Didactic Phenomenon (1798 – 1851 – 1970) (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2001), 467. 23 See Martin Racine’s essay in this collection. For an additional analysis of Canada’s flag debate that emphasizes the priority given to designing an iconography that reflected modernist principles, see Michael Large, ‘A Flag for Canada,’ in Made in Canada: Craft and Design in the Sixties, ed. Alan C. Elder (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 40–50. 24 The Thailand pavilion was a meticulous reproduction of an eighteenth-century Buddhist shrine, and the Burma pavilion was likewise a traditional-looking building, but these were anomalies on the Expo site. 25 The Beaux-Arts buildings of the World’s Columbian Exhibition, for instance, started out as wood and iron sheds which were then sheathed with ‘staff’ as it was called, a ‘mixture of plaster, cement and jute fibers’ which had been invented in France and had already been ‘extensively employed in European fairs.’ Stanley Appelbaum, The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (New York: Dover, 1980), 5. 26 E.L. Doctorow, World’s Fair (New York: Random House, 1985). 27 For a critique of how the concept of modernism could affirm colonial relations, see Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2001). 28 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 33. 29 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 184. 30 Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds. Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 73. 31 Judith Shatnoff, ‘Expo 67: A Multiple Vision,’ Film Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1967): 2. 32 Ben Highmore, ‘Into the Labyrinth: Phantasmagoria at Expo 67,’ in this volume. 33 ‘Learning from Montreal: Roundtable with André Lortie, Michael Sorkin, and JeanLouis Cohen,’ in The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big, 154. 34 Lortie, The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big, 88. 35 It should be noted that André Lortie, curator of the CCA exhibition, is not one of those who regarded Expo 67 in this utopian light. 36 For a more extensive account of the alternate strategies envisioned for Expo 67, see the Expo 67 files in the Van Ginkel fonds, especially Box 3.01 and 3.02. Also, see Margaret

Plate 1  Commemorative ‘passport’ (actually the seasonal entrance ticket) used by Montreal teenager Pamela McBurney, who visited Expo 67 many times during the six months of the fair. Courtesy of Pamela McBurney Manning.

Plate 2  Colour slide of young visitors to Expo 67. Courtesy of Reuben Raichel.

Plate 3  ‘Youth Takes over Expo.’ Canada Day cover of Weekend Magazine. Montreal Star/The Gazette (Montreal) ©1967.

Plate 4  The Canada Pavilion as presented by Stan Lee and Gene Colan in one frame of a Daredevil comic, dated November 1967. Reproduced by permission of Marvel Entertainment Inc.

Plate 5  Annotations by one visitor to the Expo 67 site, made on the inside back cover of the Expo Guide. Collection of Johanne Sloan.

Plate 6  The Expo Lounge internet blog (this entry is from 2007) displays Jason Stockl’s ongoing passion for all things Expo 67. Courtesy of Jason Stockl.

Plate 7  ‘Experience weightlessness’ advertisement, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition. Courtesy of Bruno Paul Stenson.

Plate 8  ‘How to Become a Connoisseur without Leaving Canada.’ Expo 67 press photo, published in Toronto Star Weekly, 11 February 1967. Photo credit: Peter Croydon, R.C.A.

Plate 9  Menu of the 4 Regions Restaurant in the Switzerland pavilion, showing the offerings from the German-speaking part of the country. Collection of Rhona Richman Kenneally.

Plate 10  The ‘Fashion and Music’ tableau in the ‘Britain Today’ exhibit of the Great Britain pavilion emphasized aspects of youth culture such as the Beatles and Mary Quant. Design Archives, University of Brighton (ESD00645).

Plate 11  Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany Pavilion at Expo 67. Copyright Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2008).   Library and Archives Canada/Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/e000990885.

Plate 12  Expo 67 logo designed by Julien Hébert, on the cover of the Expo 67 Graphics Manual (1963). Courtesy of Bruno Paul Stenson.

Plate 13  Sculpture by Julien Hébert created for the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, Place des Arts, Montreal (1963). Photo: Martin Racine.

Plate 14  ‘One of the Best Jobs in Canada.’ Cover of Weekend Magazine, 29 July 1967. Montreal Star/The Gazette (Montreal) ©1967.

Plate 15  Pavilion hostesses in front of the flags of Places des Nations, Expo 67. Copyright Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2008). Library and Archives Canada/Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/e000990933.

Plate 16  The film Canada 67, made using Circle-Vision 360-degree film, was shown in the pavilion of the Telephone Association of Canada. Image from Jean-Louis de Lorimier, Expo 67: The Memorial Album/L’album memorial (Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons Canada, 1967).

Plate 17  Display and visitors in Zone 1 of the Christian pavilion. Courtesy of the estate of Charles Gagnon.

Plate 18  Interior of the U.S. pavilion showing the proximity of Andy Warhol’s artworks to the staged moon landing. Image from Jean-Louis de Lorimier, Expo 67: The Memorial Album/L’album memorial (Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons Canada, 1967).

Plate 19  Postcard showing an Expo 67 maquette against a Montreal skyline. Collection of Johanne Sloan.

Plate 20  Brochure for the Kaleidoscope pavilion. Courtesy of Bruno Paul Stenson.

Plate 21  Postcard of the Quebec pavilion. Collection of Johanne Sloan.

Plate 22  Man the Producer pavilion – a ‘rational and romantic’ megastructure. Images from Progressive Architecture, June 1967.

Plate 23  Habitat 04: Cité radieuse des chats/Cats Radiant City, 2004. Installation by Brian Jungen at Darling Foundry, Quartier Éphémère, Montreal, 2004. Plywood, carpet, cats. 3.35 3 4.57 3 8.53 m (11’ 3 15’ 3 28’). Photo: Guy L’Heureux. Courtesy of Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.

Plate 24  Cover of Tab International, 27 May 1967.

Introduction: Dusting Off the Souvenir  23 Hodges, ‘Blanche Lemco van Ginkel and H. P. Daniel van Ginkel: Urban Planning,’ PhD thesis, McGill University, 2004. 37 See William Weintraub, City unique : Montreal Days and Nights in the 1940s and ‘50s (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997). 38 Peter B. Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839–1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 134. 39 Life, 28 April 1967; Maclean’s, June 1967; Actualité, February 1967; Saturday Review, 29 April 1967; Saturday Night, May 1967; Popular Mechanics, May 1967; Paris Match, 20 May 1967; Chatelaine, May 1967 (both the English and French issues); Sept-Jours, 29 April and 6 May, 1967; Sky and Telescope, August 1967. 40 ‘Expo 67: The World Onstage,’ Holiday Inn Magazine, August 1967, 4–7; George Bourne, ‘Expo for you,’ Canadian Boy, March-April 1967, 7–9; Jerry Hulse, ‘Expo67: It’s the Best Fair Ever,’ Dodge News Magazine, April 1967, 11–13; Jeannine Locke, ‘Expo 67 – Canada’s Fabulous World Festival,’ Ford Times, May 1967, 30–7; A. Bochroch, ‘All Roads Lead to Expo ’67,’ Road and Track, July 1967, 30–7; M. Cohen, ‘Redbook’s Guide to Canada’s Fair,’ Redbook, April 1967, 19–26; Anne Chamberlin, ‘Expo 67: The Big Blast Up North,’ Saturday Evening Post, 22 April 1967, 30–7; David MacDonald, ‘Expo 67: Canada’s Billion-Dollar Birthday Party,’ Reader’s Digest, April 1967, 32–8 [cover shows a painting of the Canada pavilion]. It is important to recognize, however, that whereas most of the news related to Montreal and Expo 67 was rosy, this was not always the case. Occasionally, under the more general radar of media coverage, lessthan-flattering information, or hints at discordant aspects of the celebrations, were conveyed. See, for example, two articles in Time Magazine – one of which was actually entitled ‘Snafus of Success’ – that brought to light problems related to circulation and signage, and also called attention to the ‘less exuberant’ response of French Canadians to Queen Elizabeth when she visited Expo that summer. ‘Snafus of Success,’ Time, 12 May 1967; ‘Making Up for Apathy,’ Time, 7 July 1967. 41 ‘Expo 17: A World’s Fair in Montreal,’ April 2007, http://www.expo17.ca/english/ expo_proposal.pdf (accessed 1 November 2007). 42 James Mennie, ‘Do We Dare Think Big Again?’ Montreal Gazette, 7 September 2008, A3. The idea did not catch on very well: an editorial in the same newspaper made it abundantly clear that times had changed in Montreal: ‘The truth is that after the traumas of the last 40 years … our city is no longer the brash, blossoming, boisterous boomtown of 1967.’ See ‘Montreal Has Lost the Exuberance of the ‘60s,’ Montreal Gazette, 5 September 2008, A18. 43 Michel Tremblay, Le cahier rouge (Montreal: Lémeac, 2004). 44 See also a special issue of the periodical BlackFlash, entirely devoted to Expo 67, guest edited by Susan Schuppli. BackFlash 2, no. 22 (2004/2005). 45 Texas Tech University, Study Abroad, ‘Architecture in Montreal’; available at http:// www.iaff.ttu.edu/Home/OIA/StudyAbroad/TTUDeptPrograms/ArchMontreal.asp (accessed 2 November 2007). 46 As of October 2007, the website claimed to have had over forty thousand visitors. 47 The various incarnations of Expo Lounge may be viewed at http://expolounge.blogspot.com/; http://www.flickr.com/photos/expolounge; http://www.myspace.com/ expolounge; and http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=bonjourexpo67

24  Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan 48 Jason67, ‘Why Expo 67?’ posted 29 April 2006, Expo Lounge, http://expolounge.blogspot.com/2006_04_01_archive.html (accessed 5 October 2010). 49 ftlvorlons, ‘Memories of Expo 67,’ posted 25 April 2007, Montreal Gazette, Montreal Forum, http://communities.canada.com/MONTREALGAZETTE/forums/1/68435/ ShowThread.aspx (accessed 5 October 2010). 50 Expo 67 Part 1, posted 8 January 2007, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=x0Z3fvRoG7U (accessed 5 October 2010). This clip had been viewed over 9,000 times by the time it was accessed for this Introduction.

2 ‘The greatest Dining extravaganza in Canada’s history’: Food, Nationalism, and Authenticity at Expo 671 rhona richman kenneally

Above all else, Canada’s world fair is a highly sensual experience and a highly personal one: the theme is Man And His World, and individual responses to the centennial world that’s been created in Montreal are as varied as those that separate one person from another in less magic years.2

This comment introduces a series of articles that appeared in the Saturday magazine insert of one of the major English-language newspapers in Montreal during the summer of 1967. Having named the series ‘The Wondrous Fair,’ the authors devote each article to one of ‘the five senses of Expo,’ and thus focus their perception of Expo 67 as an accumulation of sensory responses that ultimately underwrite the visitor’s experience of the site and the event. To reinforce such a perception, the cover of the magazine shows five images: a woman taking a photograph; a clown playing the bagpipes; a child touching a stone sculpture; another woman bending to sniff an unidentifiable object; and a human hand, clutching a forkful of food over a partially filled plate, the fork presumably about to make contact with the mouth of the person to which the hand belongs. As other essays in this collection demonstrate, Expo 67 was unmistakably a celebration of sight. The elegance of the U.S. pavilion’s geodesic dome in addition to other unusual-looking buildings, many of whose geometric forms evoked the modern movement in architecture; the visual, multi-screen technological innovations at the Labyrinth and elsewhere; and the mini-skirted hostesses echoing contemporary fashion trends, are but a few examples of the visual stimuli that dazzled visitors. Tactility was addressed in many ways, not the least of which were the multiple modes of transportation available to visitors on the Expo islands that offered contrasting ways of experiencing the physicality of the site. A wide array of sounds both harmonious and shrill filled the pavilions through video or audio presentations and encompassed open-air spaces through a myriad of musical performances or through the garish aural beckonings of the rides at La Ronde and children’s shouted responses. Smell and taste had their place on the Expo 67 site as well. As had been the case at other international exhibitions, a wide range of drinks, meals, and other gustatory experiences were available for consumption, at locations ranging from snack

28  Rhona Richman Kenneally

bars to elegant formal restaurants that shocked some observers with their prices. These were noted in the official Expo 67 guidebook and mentioned in advertisements that appeared in national magazines. They were also a key subject in a comprehensive official booklet that began with a two-page chart listing sixty-seven food establishments, their locations throughout the Expo site, their price range, and the ‘cuisine items’ available at each venue. In this guide, through both advertisements and editorial descriptions, visitors were led to anticipate, in no uncertain terms, exciting and often exotic gastronomic possibilities: ‘Your “table is waiting,”’ went the claim, ‘at the greatest Dining extravaganza in Canada’s history.’3 This essay lifts the lid on food practices at Expo 67 as a function of wider issues that have been isolated for exploration in this collection. Its primary focus is on those restaurants that operated within the pavilions of the nations that participated in the event, as one means of understanding the complex constructions of authenticity, national identity, and modernity that were also undertaken in a wider context on the site. At these pavilion restaurants, foods were selected, cooked, and served according to predetermined ideas about how they would best reflect and activate the culture of their origins. That is, carefully defined national cuisines were a central vehicle through which visitors to these pavilions could be introduced to – could actually ingest – these markers of national identity as an experience consistently described, by the authorities that generated them, as ‘authentic.’ In this way, diners would, under the guise of entertainment and leisure practices, be exposed to and take away with them some understanding of the people and their rituals, and the environment and its produce, of the targeted country. However, as critics have demonstrated, authenticity is a concept that requires careful unpacking, and this investigation also brings to light the mutability of such claims and the degree to which they are mediations generated both by the authorities who make the claim and by the knowledge and experience of the audience that receives it. Teasing out such constructions of national identity through gastronomy underscores wider fragilities in the transactions between those who visit the pavilions and those who conceived, designed, and created the exhibition material contained within them. And this exhibition material, in a fundamental way, included the dishes on offer in these restaurants. In turn, such an investigation also reinforces the synthetic nature of Expo 67 as a stage on which practices of cultural harmony as conceptualized by the notion of ‘Man and His World’ could be performed. If Expo 67 was repeatedly acclaimed an overarching success by many commentators on the exhibition – including the associate editor of the aforementioned Canadian Magazine who deems it ‘a brave and boastful monument to our own genius … a place of international alliance, private liaison and weird community of spirit’ – it can also be understood as a collection of national aliases. Assumed in each country’s pavilion, these aliases had a didactic as well as an entertainment component, inasmuch as they projected a sanitized, idealized version of that country’s heritage, aspirations, and hegemonic practices.4 What was consistently being served up, then, was the sweet without the bitter. Expo 67 was by no means the first international exhibition in which food served as a means of entertainment and education. Early twentieth-century American

Food, Nationalism, and Authenticity at Expo 67  29

events – for example, The World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893; the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair; and the New York fair of 1939 – all have rich histories that cover this domain. Chicago organizers planned for seventeen thousand people to eat at any one time at the fair, and fifty cattle were slaughtered every morning to feed them.5 The St Louis exhibition had over 130 eateries to feed a maximum of thirty-five thousand people at one time.6 Extraordinary displays of food products were to be found: in the Chicago exhibition’s Agricultural Building, one could admire a twenty-two thousand pound Canadian cheese encased in iron.7 In New York, dioramas in meat producer Swift and Company’s building illustrated the procedure of converting hog to ham, or visitors could watch an animated stage show on ‘the story of strained baby food’ at the H.J. Heinz pavilion.8 Gastronomic urban myths were founded at some fairs, with St Louis 1904 subsequently remembered (erroneously) as the first place in which iced tea, hot dogs, Dr Pepper soft drink, hamburgers, club sandwiches, and peanut butter were served.9 Certainly food played an important role at these fairs in communicating aspects of national culture. For example, the Tyrolean Alps Restaurant at the St Louis fair was underwritten by prominent German citizens of that city, no doubt to satisfy their own gastronomic urges as well as to expose their culinary arts to others. Its menu listed Deutsche Kraftsuppe and Frischer Zwetschenkuchen while also serving some more broadly ranging dishes such as Hamburger steak and plain and Spanish Omelette [sic].10 The menu of Le Restaurant Français in the France pavilion was written entirely in French and was bordered by a motif incorporating the names of such legendary Parisian restaurants as Fouquet, Drouant, and Pré Catelan, representatives of which joined in a Syndicat des Restauranteurs to supervise what was to become a famous New York destination in its own right. Dishes served there included Petite Marmite, Poularde Poelée Monselet, and Poire Hélène.11 Some food practices were more complex gestures of national identity: the Fair Japan Restaurant on the site of the St Louis fair served a one-dollar Thanksgiving meal including turkey and cranberry sauce.12 On the other hand, in a newspaper article about the New York World’s Fair of 1939, an Edmund Gilligan conveys his pleasure in being exposed to what he understood to be an authentic tea ritual in the Japan pavilion: ‘If you’d like to take tea in the style of the Japanese tea cult,’ he tells readers, ‘this is the place. Some of these charming ladies, with their high hair combs and bright kimonos, will show you how it’s made and how it is sipped.’13 Montreal’s Expo 67 was therefore following the culinary footsteps of earlier international exhibitions when its organizers acknowledged food as being ‘one of the key factors’ in the exhibition’s success.14 There was a myriad of choices of where to eat and drink at the fair. One category consisted of restaurants inside the national pavilions of the participating countries, including Italy, India, France, China, Iran, Belgium, Algeria, and Mexico, pavilions whose architecture and displays were designed by their respective countries most effectively to display the strengths and traditions of the particular nation. Maurice Novek, head of Expo’s Restaurant Division, made specific reference to these restaurants when he thanked all those who ‘installed, as part of their exhibit, restaurants and cocktail lounges, etc., to portray their authentic cuisines … [since] without their participation, much of the colour and atmosphere of Expo ’67 would be missing.’15 There were also

30  Rhona Richman Kenneally

stand-alone restaurants that focused on the food of a particular country (such as the Swiss Fondu Pot) at the Carrefour International of La Ronde, Expo 67’s entertainment zone and the location of its amusement park. Concession stands throughout the Expo site also sold fast- and snack foods, and specialty food shops (where packaged goods could be purchased) created possibilities of home experimentation with new gustatory experiences. Not to be discounted, either, as a means of creating excitement regarding food, were the displays in many pavilions that glorified elements of their country’s national cuisine: the Soviet pavilion, for example, presumably in a quest to highlight the broad range of its engagement with the modern world, housed a miniature fish farm of sorts, complete with baby beluga sturgeon, to underscore both the excellence of a traditional product – its caviar – and also the new technologically sophisticated means of producing it.16 Certainly, the gastronomic possibilities afforded by the cluster of national cuisines at Expo 67 were not lost on its promoters. A variety of documentation asserted the efforts of Expo 67 organizers to convey the impression that gastronomic ventures at these venues would be forays into the actual cuisine of the particular country. The aforementioned official restaurant guide to the site, a one-dollar, forty-eight-page, 8½ by 11-inch bilingual booklet, was in itself a strong signal of the organizers’ desire to flag dining as an Expo 67 contact sport. One of the ‘six great reasons to visit Expo 67, Montreal’ tempted one official advertisement of the world exhibition, were the ‘restaurants, restaurants, restaurants. Over 60 different establishments offer you every kind of food under the sun. From meat pie and pints of wallop in a real English pub, to Polynesian delicacies, and other attractions, in the Hawaiian Theatre Restaurant.’17 ‘At Expo 67, Montreal,’ proclaimed the headline of another official ad, ‘you can dine on Creole Gumbo, Prairie Grouse, Mutton à la shaslik, Suckling Pig and Viennese Apfelstrudel. Then experience weightlessness’ (see plate 7).18 A press release from 1966 even went so far as to equate meals at the pavilion restaurants with actually visiting their respective countries: ‘On pourra prendre son petit déjeuner à Tokyo, le repas du midi en Inde, le thé à Ceylan, l’apéritif à Trinidad, et le diner en France, ou au Mexique, aux Pays-Bas, en Suisse, en Tchécoslovaquie, en URSS, en Scandinavie, dans l’une ou l’autre des provinces du Canada, etc., etc.’19 Numerous reviews and articles appearing in newspapers and magazines chimed in all the more to disseminate the message that Expo 67 was to be considered a mecca for food enthusiasts. One particularly powerful illustration that appeared two months before the world’s fair opened demonstrates this point by showing six smiling chefs of various ethnicities surrounding an exuberant would-be restaurant patron and enticing her with their various gastronomic creations (see plate 8). ‘How to become a connoisseur without leaving Canada,’ instructed the caption, ‘Go to Expo and dine on the dishes of over thirty nations.’20 The success of the restaurants in the national pavilions is strongly suggested by the fact that on 23 May less than one month into Expo 67’s six-month tenure, a press release was issued by Expo organizers to advise journalists that pavilion restaurants would no longer take reservations, ‘à la suite de la grande vogue qu’ils connaissent depuis le 28 avril. On peut même affirmer que tous ont été pris d’assaut, malgré leurs prix parfois élevés.’21

Food, Nationalism, and Authenticity at Expo 67  31

Food as Nationalist Marker On 3 July 1967, Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II stepped off the royal yacht Britannia, made a brief stop at the Great Britain pavilion, and then attended, as guest of honour, a state luncheon hosted by Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson.22 The venue for this event was La Toundra (The Tundra), one of the two restaurants in the Canada pavilion at Expo 67. Escorted into this space, Her Majesty and the other invited guests would have had much to absorb, as they cast their eyes on this architectural interior. Looking up, beyond the Queen’s pink and white frilly hat, they would have observed the eggcarton-like stalactites of the plastic roofing material covering much of the pavilion, translucent, yet imposing due to their peculiar geometry – unmistakable reminders of the modernist design of the massive Katimavik and six-storey People Tree that highlighted the exterior grandeur of the complex. At their feet, a rug in ‘tundra colours’ of green, orange, and gold added an organic touch.23 Surrounding them, carved into the white plaster beneath the greenish-grey paint on the walls, were vestiges of another world, albeit of everyday life: two Cape Dorset sculptors, Elijah Pudlat and Kumukuluk Saggiak, had been commissioned to transform the space, like some modern-day Knossos, into a pictorial rendering of the rituals and other practices of, in this case, Inuit life. Taking up the theme of the walls, the seats around those tables were upholstered in sealskin; even the servers’ uniforms borrowed their look from the parkas worn by the figures on the walls – ‘soft tan jackets with black turtleneck sweaters.’24 Perhaps on this day, too, as was routinely the case, ‘three genuine Eskimo [sic] girls’ welcomed the guests and took them to their seats.25 And if Her Majesty had been given the standard restaurant menu of La Toundra, the ambiguous nature of the place would have been reinforced by the contents of this document. Its cover was dominated by figures in a style evocative of Native art; drawings of hunting scenes or of fantastical animals marched across the interior recto-verso pages about a third of the way down. The menu itself – the list of foods on offer – was divided into three parts. ‘International dishes’ referred to a group that nonetheless contained ‘Pork Chops Hochelaga’ (Hochelaga being the name of the First Nations settlement where Montreal is now situated) and ‘Canadian Lobster à la Nage.’ The dishes in the section of the menu called ‘La Toundra’ contained such ingredients as Beluga whale meat and buffalo meat, notwithstanding the fact that buffalo (really bison) once roamed below, not above, the tree line. Dishes from the category ‘Cuisine canadienne’ included choices with geographical or vernacular affiliation such as Duckling Okanagan (named for a region of British Columbia) and something called Ojibway Kee Wee Sen, a fish dish ‘as enjoyed by generations of Ojibways braves.’26 For those members of the royal entourage who had been hitherto uninitiated as regards the national cuisine of Canada, then, this gastronomic jumble might well have offered little enlightenment. Was Kee Wee Sen as familiar to Canadians as Bubble and Squeak would have been to those guests who enjoyed traditional British food? Did people in Canada regularly sip beaver tail broth (curiously listed, given the geographical habitat of these animals, in the ‘Tundra’ section of the menu)?27

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These are not idle questions. The Canada pavilion was no mere building at this exhibition, and its principal restaurant was no mere restaurant: they were the host country’s carefully presented repository of architecture, material culture, ideology, and aspiration, created to uncloak a mature, robust, sophisticated modern nation with, nevertheless, a noble history. Was this not the goal of any national pavilion at any world’s fair? Would the contents of each pavilion not be carefully selected most impressively to convey elements of the collective identity of its peoples?28 And if so, what could diners at La Toundra have deduced from this melange of heritage-folkloric and modern, inhabited by unfortunate servers forced to wear pseudo-Arctic garb in the heat and humidity of a Montreal summer? That the collective identity of the people was, indeed, in the mind of the restaurant’s administrators was apparent as early as 1964. H. Leslie Brown, the commissioner general responsible for the Canada pavilion, signalled as much in his announcement that ‘[t]he Canadian pavilion is going to make an “all-out” effort in its restaurant to serve “typical Canadian dishes.”’29 Evaluating the degree of success in – not to mention the very intention of – achieving a representative assortment of ‘typical Canadian dishes,’ when there was nothing to stop a diner from ordering a meal of grilled muktuk followed by Black Forest Omelette, and Crêpes Suzette for dessert (washed down with Chilled Niagara Juice), necessitates a close study of all the cultural markers within the confines of this eating establishment. To this end – as will be the case for all the pavilion restaurants examined below – a multidisciplinary study of architecture, decor, and furniture; clothing; even restaurant names and menu terminology will accompany a more direct analysis of the foods served and ingredients used. Was this an eclectic and incoherent hodgepodge? Or could this heterogeneous array possibly be an accurate representation of Canada’s cultural heritage? Moreover, the findings of such an investigation will be assessed alongside existing knowledge of the history and culture of the country in question. Consequently, the ultimate goal of this essay is to track and analyse the meals on offer in certain restaurants in the national pavilions in order to contribute to a wider understanding of the 1960s beyond the case studies in this essay and even beyond Expo 67. Studying Food Nationalism The study of food and food culture has gained credence over recent decades as a particularly rich means of accessing and investigating the practices of everyday life. Early advocates of this field of research approached it from many disciplines, including sociology (Mary Douglas’s canonic work on the constituent elements of a meal),30 philosophy (Michel Foucault’s analysis of food as a common pleasure controlled by the imposition of ethical practices),31 anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss on the balance between nature and culture as expressed through food),32 geography (Yi-Fu Tuan on the aesthetics of food and eating in Europe and China, through what he called the ‘proximate senses’),33 and social history (Wolfgang Schivelbusch on ‘spices, stimulants, and intoxicants’).34 Its multivalenced character continues to be very clearly in evidence in the numerous articles and books that have since been written on the subject and within the many

Food, Nationalism, and Authenticity at Expo 67  33

associations, research centres, websites, and other venues, worldwide, currently dedicated to the field.35 That foods themselves can be vital contributors to the conceptualization of a national identity has been effectively demonstrated.36 For example, in their book Consuming Geographies, David Bell and Gill Valentine consider the process by which certain dishes are classified as belonging to the food culture of a particular country, and hence to a perceived national identity. Challenging prevailing assumptions that take such linkages for granted, they interfere with the simplistic isolation of particular foods as ‘definitionally’ belonging to any nation’s cultural repertoire. In consequently considering how foods become affiliated with one national cuisine, they borrow from Benedict Anderson’s concept of a nation as an ‘imagined community,’ to develop the idea of a nation’s diet being a ‘feast of imagined commensality,’ the result of some agreed-upon determination that some foods carry more weight than others, that is, as symbolizing the tastes or cooking patterns of a national community.37 When Marcella Hazan, author of several highly respected cookbooks on Italian cuisine, begins a section on tomatoes by noting that ‘cooking in Italy is far less red than it is thought to be; most of it, in fact, is not red at all,’ she is supporting this point by dispelling the anecdotal perception of pasta doused with tomato sauce as a foundation dish in the canon of Italian food.38 How, then, are certain foods singled out as indicators of national identity? This is the focus of attention of a number of scholars, including the famed anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, whose study of mid-twentieth-century India was strongly influential for subsequent researchers. Appadurai sees the Indian model of an emerging national cuisine as ‘what might be expected to occur with increasing frequency and intensity in other societies having complex regional cuisines and recently acquired nationhood, and in which a postindustrial and postcolonial middle class is constructing a particular sort of polyglot culture.’39 Under such conditions in India, recipes having particular regional or ethnic origins were accumulated and exchanged among families migrating through the country, in a manner that reflects and demonstrates an ‘emerging culinary cosmopolitanism’ in the country at that time.40 Hence, an accumulation of ‘culinary stereotypes of the Other’ deriving from distinct regions of the country began to be standardized in cookbooks devoted to such a task.41 These definitive cookbooks were compiled by individuals who were recognized as having a knowledgeable overview of the dishes – methods of preparation, ingredients, and so on – that comprised the universe of foods served in the country, individuals who selected and juxtaposed these dishes under the broader rubric of a national Indian cuisine.42 Moving past this focus on the genesis of such an assemblage, it is also important to consider that other agents, with varying levels of credibility, inevitably develop and modify the list of sanctioned dishes and otherwise posit alternate readings of Indian foods – restaurants either inside or outside the country, not to mention cookbooks that de- and re-contextualize ‘Indian’ cuisine by including it in collections based on other food taxonomies, for example in cookbooks on South Asia, or on highly seasoned foods, or on what to do with leftover chicken.43 In short, the gastronomic constituents of any national or ethnic food culture are arbitrarily

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and culturally contrived, selected according to the particularities of certain sanctioned individuals with differing perspectives and motives. Inevitably, the construction of a national food identity, as perceived in this way, raises the question of the role of authenticity in such an analysis. The issue is particularly pertinent as regards Expo 67, a venue at which, as noted above, the head of its restaurant division bestowed specific appreciation on pavilion organizers who worked to ‘portray their authentic cuisines’ (emphasis mine). In one way or another, the beacon of authenticity is often invoked, say through advertisements for a restaurant whose cuisine might well be unfamiliar to prospective diners, as a reassurance that the meals served there conform to some privileged understanding of traditional cooking methods, ingredients, and so on. It is commonplace to differentiate, for example, between the type of ‘ethnic’ food served at a fast food outlet, and ‘authentic’ dishes served in its country of origin – between egg rolls and chow mein for sale at the West Edmonton Mall, for example, and food that is eaten in China. The concept of authentic food is revealingly investigated by a number of scholars including Lisa Heldke.44 She takes an experiential approach, bringing attention to ‘identifiable roles for perceiver and context’ and hence rejecting ‘the notion that properties of a dish inhere in the dish, independent of any perceivers’ (emphasis mine). Instead, she understands taste or flavour as ‘a property of the experiential work of the cuisine.’ Such a perspective ‘begins with the understanding that all works of cuisine involve transactions between dish (cook) and eater – and calls us to attend to the particular kinds of transactions represented in the cross-cultural experience.’45 Using this logic, egg rolls are authentically Chinese to a given eater because she or he experiences them as such, through coding enacted by the cook, the environment, and so on, within the realm of culture in which she or he (and the egg rolls) resides. Significantly, this conceptualization of authenticity precludes using the term as a value judgment concerning the degree to which the egg rolls adhere, or not, to a researcher’s predetermined paradigm of what constitutes ‘authentic’ Chinese food. Understood from this perspective, egg rolls are not devalued as a dumbing down of the cuisine of China for non-Chinese consumers; instead, they are valorized by food researchers as essential indicators of cultural behaviours and practices.46 At Expo 67, a variety of methods, both blatant and tacit, were employed to assure diners that the foods they tasted in the national pavilion restaurants met criteria of authenticity. Underscoring the credentials of the chefs, or the origins of certain ingredients as directly derived from the home country, were common techniques. A pamphlet on the four restaurants of the Czechoslovakia pavilion, published by its organizers, informed the public that their kitchens were under the jurisdiction of chefs from CEDOK, the Czech-government-run travel bureau that also operated hotels in Prague, Brno, Ostrava, and Carlsbad.47 The Cuba pavilion restaurant partook of several opportunities to tout the Cuban-ness of its offerings. ‘A wide selection [of seafood] is rushed to Canada to be served fresh at the bar-restaurant Caney,’ claims an advertisement in the Expo 67 restaurant review guidebook; a second ad in the Alcan News promises ‘In the 200-seat restaurant,

Food, Nationalism, and Authenticity at Expo 67  35

there will be fresh sea-food flown in from the Gulf of Mexico, authentic Havana cigars and genuine Cuban rums.’48 At the restaurants in the national pavilions of Expo 67, physical and performative markers of cooking and eating practices in the home country helped concretize the authenticity of the eating experience, since many – most? – of the diners would not have been able to confirm that what they were served emulated traditional methods. Certainly, the material and visual culture on display in the pavilions, and their staff, often dressed in traditional costume, contributed significantly to the ambience and supported claims that the cumulative effect was accurate in reflecting national heritage and culture. Some of the restaurants found ways further to heighten the impact. The India pavilion restaurant, for example, boasted a tandoori oven, and diners were encouraged to ‘watch the artistry of the Master Chef through glass panels as he prepares such delicacies as Fish Tikka … Even the bread ‘Nan’ is prepared to your order. After kneading the dough, the Chef, with a quick motion, places it against the inside wall of the oven.’49 Similarly, the credibility of the Ceylon pavilion’s Tea Lounge was enhanced by demonstrations of the five ‘Golden Rules’ of steeping tea that took place there, and even by the fact that ‘[t]o introduce Canadians to the Island’s finest Teas, identified by Ceylon’s famous Lion symbol, a special pack of 4 straight (not blended) Teas’ was sold at a ‘special booth’ in the Tea Lounge.50 What the research both of Appadurai and Heldke bring to light as regards these Expo 67 restaurants is that here, too, the definition, selection, preparation, serving, and promotion of a designated authentic cuisine was a deliberate construction of national food culture, determined, not because some foods naturally or logically belonged to that category, but because some decision maker or body of decision makers so determined. Similarly, the accumulation, arrangement, captioning – not to mention the scripting given to pavilion hostesses – of the other cultural markers in the pavilion were orchestrations by administrators in accordance with official national policies. In short, a key function of pavilion administrators was the creation of an environment whose cumulative effect was the establishment and maintenance of cultural credibility, using markers of national identity in whatever ways were most effective to support a sanctioned reading of their country’s politics, history, and society. What remains to be made clear is that the acknowledged authority to create and have a significant hand in controlling the public perception of that particular country (including its cuisine) is itself a gesture of power asserting the autonomy of that nation to speak with its own voice and underscore its maturity as one nation among many. This gesture can be tracked through a close examination of food markers in the pavilion restaurants of Expo 67. Lisa Heldke takes a reading of authenticity and food from the perspective of postcolonial studies in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of such power. Her assumptions derive from her own experiences as an eating ‘adventurer,’ seeking authenticated food from cultures other than her own, ‘motivated by an attitude with deep connections to Western colonialism.’51 That is, she writes, ‘I was motivated by a deep desire to have contact with, and to somehow own an experience of, an Exotic Other, as a way of making myself more interesting. Food adventuring,

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I was coming to decide, made me a participant in cultural colonialism, just as surely as eating Mexican strawberries in January made me a participant in economic colonialism.’52 For the cultural group whose culinary traditions are exploited in this way, one way to regain authority over their own domain, as noted by Heldke, is vigorously to activate the moniker of authenticity. Indeed, ‘strategic authenticity’ is the term she assigns to this method of grabbing back, from the offenders, an authoritative stance vis-à-vis these foods, and consequently garner respect as both the creators and legitimizers of this cultural practice. Such a strategy, she argues, can help to redress cultural imbalance between the exploited and the exploiter, by encouraging the latter to recognize and honour ‘the rights of insiders to make decisions about how their cuisine will be taken up’ (emphasis mine).53 Inherent in this argument is how the concept of authority over one’s cuisine can be configured as an expression of power, thus laying claim to one’s cultural identity. We have already seen that research on world exhibitions in Chicago, St Louis, and New York, for example, reveal the ways in which food was made part of the novelty and spectacle of the event. World’s fairs have also been studied as sites at which colonizers successfully used food culture as a way of differentiating themselves from the ‘inferior’ societies they controlled. In an article on the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris, Patricia Morton takes Roland Barthes’s observations about the link between food and nationalism in France as a point of departure in exploring how the selection and presentation of food drawn from in its territories, by French organizers at that exposition, was a means of asserting the cultural supremacy of the colonizer over the colonized.54 Morton applies Barthes’s logic to the consistent differentiation, at that fair, between the foods that the Parisian public was used to eating, and the unusual, often spicy and aroma-rich edibles of its colonies. She quotes attendees who noted such exoticized gustatory experiences as could be found, for example, in the Martinique pavilion, with its ‘strong odor of vanilla! … Under walls of violent stains of red, green, yellow, blue … sounds of its snuffling fifes and accordions attract visitors to a bar where the rum and coffee of the Antilles run in profusion.’55 Exposed to such sensory-shocking environments, observers would (seems the assumption) inevitably contrast them with the comforting, familiar memories of home, and finally be reassured that this was still Paris, and not a strange elsewhere. Morton’s conclusion is that at the Colonial Exposition, ‘[b]y displaying the cultures of subject peoples – which turned out to be overflavored, tasteless, or repugnant to the “civilized” observer – [colonizers like France] absorbed them into their empires and created renewed chains of being.’56 It is clear, then, that displaying, serving, and otherwise bringing attention to food (either one’s own or, for contrast purposes, the cuisine of outsiders) can become a means of hegemonic gastronomic enculturation, by drawing attention to one of the most ubiquitous, necessary practices of everyday life and employing it in the transmission of national values, beliefs, and expectations. Bringing the focus back to Expo 67, then, a venue at which the national pavilions were planned and run by the country they represented, it was logical for the administrators of these pavilions to take for granted that the national identity of their country could be most emphatically conveyed through the most spectacular artefacts, the most thrilling technologies, the most breathtaking architecture, and

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the most enticing gourmet experiences. Such a spectacle could also be depended on most effectively to deliver the national narrative sanctioned by those administrators on behalf of the governments they represented, narratives that were flattering and awe-inspiring, and in which the dominant ideology of the nation in question was embedded. Each national pavilion, then, as the repository of the texts and material and visual culture that generated such a narrative, was a beacon that signalled that country’s territorial and cultural autonomy. This, after all, was the nominally egalitarian space of Expo 67, whose rhetoric of Man and His World, as Julien Hébert’s symbolic rendering so clearly shows, was emphatically meant to suppress the imbalance between superpower states, newly independent states, and so on. At this world venue, each nation was idealistically displayed as one among many, each having its unique history and heritage, and having its unique global relevance. The restaurants in these national pavilion restaurants were implicated in the communication of these narratives. For example, the Soviet Union pavilion was certainly visually imposing, and its cosmonaut exhibit was a clear reminder in this Cold War age that the United States (whose pavilion featured a simulated lunar landscape) was not the only country to have sent men into space. But perhaps most effective in portraying the assimilation by Soviet Russia of the satellites that comprised the USSR, was its three-floor restaurant appropriately called Moskva. An article in a document entitled The Soviet Union Today describes the environment and foods in some detail, including the ‘six tons of caviar and 13,000 bottles of the finest Russian vodka’ that were shipped from the motherland to Montreal.57 The article also specifies that ‘twenty-six chefs were flown to EXPO from Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Ukraine, the Baltic republics and Russia proper’ to ‘tempt the palates and tickle the tastes of visitors with demonstrations of their respective peoples’ native ways of wining and dining.’ A photograph of a chef with decidedly Asian features supports this multicultural claim.58 The gastronomic offerings in this restaurant clearly reflected these politics inasmuch as regional dishes were all lumped together in one large menu: one could taste Caucasian shashlyks, Ukrainian borsch, Kiev vareniki, and Uzbek pilau all in the same meal and think that this was a normal eating experience for Soviet citizens.59 Another pavilion restaurant captured an intentional manifestation of the ability of its country harmoniously to unite four distinct regions and subcultures under the rubric of one nation-state. The menu of the 4 Regions Restaurant in the Switzerland pavilion has a decidedly pedagogical tone and uses photographs of its people, landscape, and architecture, descriptions of dishes (in both English and French), and cultural-geographic history lessons about the four regions of the country that are being represented, to contextualize and support the authenticity of the dishes that are on offer.60 The cover itself asserts that the restaurant ‘in its décor and cuisine’ represents ‘the German-speaking[,] French-speaking[,] Italianspeaking[,] and Romanish-speaking regions of Switzerland.’ And, after a drink list that singles out, but is not confined to, Swiss beverages, the menu breaks into sections listing the specialties of each of the four contributing ethnicities. Each section (see plate 9, representing the German-speaking part of the country) is given one spread across two pages of the menu booklet: a sequence of photographs pre-

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sumably of the country takes up one of the pages, and the list of dishes are printed on the adjacent page. Below this list, for each of the four food zones, is a paragraph that begins with ‘Welcome to Switzerland’ and ends with ‘So long Switzerland’ in the relevant language, sandwiching some light but informative data concerning the region in question. For example, the blurb on the French-speaking part of the country says that ‘Geneva and Lausanne, the two principal Swiss towns where French is spoken – the third is La Chaux-de-Fonds, centre of the Swiss watchmaking industry – have each so many good things about them that they have no reason at all to be jealous of each other.’ Remarkably, the menu, having thus identified Switzerland as a peaceful union of ethnicities that were not always so harmoniously intertwined elsewhere, went one step further. A final, fifth section moved beyond the strictly nationalist rhetoric (and no doubt reassured timid eaters) and revealed a country also negotiating its internationalism, inasmuch as it merged Swiss dishes, which were tagged ‘recommended specialties,’ with more generic favourites such as Fresh shrimp cocktail with Delmonico-sauce, Juicy chopped top sirloin steak, and ‘Choice of freshly baked tarts and pies from our display [of] famous Swiss pastries,’ the latter, curiously, not designated as a recommended specialty of the restaurant. Even with such accommodations as were found in this last section, the food of the 4 Regions was served up with quite a heavy splash of Swiss nationalist tourism promotion, promotion that underscores the success of this country in encompassing its different cultural components. The pavilion restaurants of two other countries show evidence of shedding a residual post-colonial identity and embracing modernity, while preserving a sense of national heritage. What is interesting is that both of these cases come with an acknowledgment of a multicultural past synthesizing into a current identity that reflects the modern nation. The first is the Pakistan Restaurant, which was actually situated in the United Nations pavilion and could thus not count to the same degree on architecture, artefacts, and other such markers to convey national identity.61 The extant document that can be explored in this case is not so much a menu as a cookbook, but it is composed of recipes of dishes ‘as served’ at the restaurant and hence is a clue to how the food was conceptualized for Expo visitors. Fascinating here is the blend of traditional and modern characteristics, which seems to reveal the desire on the part of this restaurant’s administrators to demonstrate its unique cuisine, but also, at least to some extent, to de-exoticize that cuisine so it can potentially be incorporated into the routine of cosmopolitan eaters. Indeed, the Pakistan Restaurant was apparently under the jurisdiction of PIA, Pakistan International Airline, whose own chefs routinely faced the challenge of feeding, on its flights, travellers both familiar and unfamiliar with its cuisine. An advertisement for PIA in the menu confirms a cosmopolitan perspective inasmuch as it encourages passengers to consider ‘catch[ing] a show at the Bolshoi, en route to Karachi. Or the fashion openings of Paris. Buy a watch in Geneva, a rug in Beirut. Make up your own little world … On a whole new way of flight!’ An ad on the inside front cover for Pepsi, ‘the taste that turns you on,’ confirms this accent on an internationalized palate. The diner begins the process of immersion into Pakistani cuisine on the first page, by being introduced to a narrative that champions the nation’s cuisine as a

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distinguished cultural treasure that advantageously modified itself over the years through exposure to the foods of those who passed through its territories. By virtue of the Khyber Pass, explains the introduction, the country was visited ‘over a span of 5000 years,’ by ‘traders and raiders alike’: hence the confluence of culture has given rise to many dishes and recipes reminiscent of the Middle and Near East, with a delightful difference varying from region to region and even family to family. Many dishes flavored by the royal chefs of the fabulous Haroon-al-Rashid are to this day common in the Middle East. The art of cookery reached its artistic perfection at the expert hands of the Iranians and from Iran it was brought to the land of Indus by the Moghuls.62

In addition, whereas on the one hand, patrons are told of ‘Red Pepper … introduced into the recipes to improve upon what was almost perfect for the palate,’ any concern that the flavouring might prove too potent on the palate was allayed: ‘[i]n recent times the accent on nutrition and caloric counting has brought about yet another change – a trend away from hot spices. This makes the current Pakistani dishes the delight of the Western world and others who find rich spicy food too hot.’63 It seems as if Pakistanis were modifying (in this case, modernizing) their dishes even for themselves, just as all national cuisines undergo variation over time as a function of being subjected to diverse influences. The recipes themselves, in this cookbook, also straddle the traditional/modern dichotomy. They have Pakistani names that must have sounded very offthe-beaten-track to many diners in 1967 – chicken tikka; biryani; shahi tukra. Revealingly, shahi tukra itself is a recipe that displays cultural hybridity: it is translated as ‘bread pudding’ and required twelve slices of ‘White Bread’ along with rose water essence, slivered pistachios, and ‘silver leaves…available at Oriental Spice Shops.’ However, the list of ingredients of most recipes usually consists of products that are reasonably accessible, with the possible exception of such spices as turmeric, cardamom, and whole cumin seeds. The directions in the recipes usually did not ask for unusual equipment or special techniques, although assumptions were occasionally made that the cook would have background knowledge. For example, the recipe for chapaties (translated as ‘Pakistani flat bread’) instructs the preparer to roll out the balls of flour until they are oneeighth of an inch thick, and then ‘Put on a very hot plate and cook for ½ minute on each side.’64 A Canadian cook may not have understood what a ‘hot plate’ meant in this context. Visually, the recipes carry both exotic and familiar coding: the names of the recipes are a mixture of Urdu and English, and they are printed in a stylized font that seems meant to evoke the Urdu alphabet (fig. 2.1). On the other hand, each recipe is short, and has a narrow border around it to make it look like it could easily be cut out and placed in a standard North-American-type recipe file (although the recipes are printed on recto and verso sides and do not really lend themselves to such treatment). The simple line drawings that accompany each recipe are of familiar ingredients or kitchen implements such as a pot or measuring cup. On the whole, then, this measured approach to offering Pakistani cuisine for appropriation by interested tasters seems intended to encourage

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2.1  Page from Cuisine of Pakistan. The Pakistan Restaurant in the United Nations pavilion offered this souvenir cookbook for visitors to take home. Courtesy of Bruno Paul Stenson.

Food, Nationalism, and Authenticity at Expo 67  41

experimentation yet discourage intimidation. By virtue of the foods promoted by this cookbook/menu, then, the administrators of the Pakistan Restaurant achieve the apparent aim, to identify the country as a thriving post-colonial nation able to re-appropriate its gastronomic heritage and effectively bring it forward to the here and now. A rather fascinating manifestation of post-colonial mirror gazing can be read in the two restaurants of the host pavilion at Expo 67.65 As a counterfoil to the aforementioned La Toundra, the second restaurant in the Canada pavilion, called The Buffet, had a decor derived less from the ancestral heritage of the country than from that of the Swinging Sixties: it was ‘like a one-room “Happening” [with] huge cages holding 80 singing Birds.’66 Although less is known about its menu, like La Toundra, its foods seem either to have emulated that of the varying heritages of the Canadian mosaic or to have subscribed to the tenets of contemporary cosmopolitan cuisine – hence Tourtière (a meat pie of French-Canadian origin), Seafood Newberg in Patty Shell, and Curried Seafood.67 What the interior design as well as the gastronomy of both restaurants suggest, then, is that the officially sanctioned Canadian narrative seemed intent to boast a distinguished pre-colonial heritage, manifested in the First Nations art (which by 1967 had distinctly modern connotations) that decorated La Toundra, and in the inclusion, in both restaurants, of locally derived foods and dishes that demonstrated the ability of its chefs successfully to exploit its bounty of indigenous food resources. Yet the country seemed also to be laying claim to cosmopolitan aspirations, in offering dishes whose pedigree – and whose appeal – was international. Notwithstanding the fact that the ‘Tundra’ components of the menu of the premier restaurant were substantially oversubscribed, this gesture at multiculturalism, and the similar ones evident in the restaurants, mirrored other elements of the Canada pavilion proper – the People Tree with its ‘leaves’ displaying photos of men, women, and children of multiple ethnicities being among the most prominent – that carefully crafted a sanctioned Canadian identity.68 At this juncture in its history, Canada, as celebrated in its pavilion restaurants, its pavilion as a whole, and through Expo 67 itself, offered itself as culturally diverse, open to the world, proud of its roots, and standing on its own two feet. As did the restaurants showcasing the cuisines of Switzerland and Pakistan, La Toundra and The Buffet defined a national cuisine that touted their gastronomic inheritance as derived from both indigenous practices and international stimuli (differing from the Soviet Union’s Moskva restaurant in this regard, since its menu range apparently concentrated on those dishes that emanated directly either from its own land or its Soviet satellites, and eschewed an internationalist profile). In Canada’s case, such a narrative overwrote the negatives – those that, nevertheless, called attention to themselves in the Indians of Canada pavilion, for example, where the curtain of centennial optimism was pulled back to expose problematic relations between Natives and the federal and provincial governments.69 Neither was there any acknowledgment of the Quiet Revolution already underway in Quebec, or of unfair gender practices about to be addressed, that same year, in the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. The construction of identity throughout the Canada pavilion, one realizes, systematically left such traces on the cutting room floor.

42  Rhona Richman Kenneally

It seems apparent, then, that food, as well as the environments and circumstances in which that food is encountered, serve as important arenas for the expression of national cultural identity at international exhibitions. At Expo 67, as at previous international exhibitions, they could be depended on as reliably effective conduits for this purpose, precisely because food experiences are so embedded in the practices of everyday life. Moreover, the sensory-based networks through which knowledge and experience were conveyed are integral agents in this cultural exchange. The enormity of the USSR restaurant, the graceful demonstrations of tea making in the Ceylon pavilion, the rousing music at the Bratislava restaurant in the Czechoslovakian pavilion all effectively tap into the mind and imagination of each participant, to layer new food experiences over each individual’s knowledge base – just as madeleines provoked the ‘aha’ moment in Marcel Proust’s La recherche du temps perdu. Hence, both blatantly and tacitly, international expositions were, because of the close proximity of the carefully conceptualized culinary exposures they enabled, opportunities to eat one’s way to gaining some understanding of a given country’s history and culture. NOTES 1 This research was made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am indebted to Sara Spike and to Bruno Paul Stenson, each for their exceptional assistance on this project. 2 Harry Bruce, ‘The Wondrous Fair,’ Canadian Magazine, 17 June 1967, 2. 3 Répertoire des Expo 67 Restaurants Review (Montreal: Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, [ca 1967]), 1. 4 Bruce, ‘Wondrous Fair,’ 2. 5 Norman Bolotin and Christine Laing, The World’s Columbian Exposition: The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 82. 6 Pamela J. Vaccaro, Beyond the Ice Cream Cone: The Whole Scoop on Food at the 1904 World’s Fair (St Louis: Enid Press, 2004), 9, 28. 7 Bolotin and Laing, World’s Columbian Exposition, 76. 8 Larry Zim, Mel Lerner, and Herbert Rolfes, The World of Tomorrow: The 1939 New York World’s Fair (New York: Main Street Press, 1988), 124–5. 9 Vaccaro, Beyond the Ice Cream Cone, 108–19. The debate continues as to whether the ice cream cone made its first appearance there. See Vaccaro, Beyond the Ice Cream Cone, 123–7. 10 Ibid., 59–61. 11 Zim, Lerner and Rolfes, World of Tomorrow, 229; Crosby Gaige, Food at the Fair: Food Guide of the Fair with Recipes of All Nations (New York: Exposition Publications, 1939), 30–1. 12 Vaccaro, Beyond the Ice Cream Cone, 142. 13 Gilligan, quoted in Zim, Lerner and Rolfe, World of Tomorrow, 42. 14 ‘Licensing and Concessions,’ Expo Digest, 2 September 1964, 2. 15 Novek, quoted in Répertoire des Expo 67 Restaurants Review, 5. 16 ‘Visitez l’expo,’ Radio-Canada, 1997, television footage of Expo 67, 4 videocassettes.

Food, Nationalism, and Authenticity at Expo 67  43 17 Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, ‘Six Great Reasons to Visit Expo 67,’ advertisement, unknown periodical, [ca 1966–7], R1. Access to this, and other documents to be noted below, courtesy of a private collector of Expo 67 memorabilia. 18 Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, ‘At Expo 67, Montreal You Can Dine …,’ advertisement, unknown periodical, [ca 1966–7], n.p., private collector. 19 ‘One can have one’s breakfast in Tokyo, lunch in India, tea in Ceylon, an aperitif in Trinidad, and dinner in France, or in Mexico, in the Netherlands, in Switzerland, in Czechoslovakia, in the Soviet Union, in Scandinavia, in one or another of the provinces of Canada, etc., etc.’ (my translation). ‘Les restaurants à l’Expo 67,’ Expo 67 press release, 7 November 1966, 1, private collector. A similar comment was made by a journalist writing for L’Actualité the following February; had she read the press release? See ‘Cuisine: Terre des hommes des gastronomes,’ L’Actualité, February 1967, 46. 20 Isobel Ledingham, ‘Eating Exotically and Otherwise at Expo,’ Star Weekly (Toronto), 11 February 1967, 32. 21 ‘following the great popularity they experienced since 28 April [opening day]. One can also confirm that all were literally taken by surprise, in spite of their sometimes elevated prices’ (my translation). ‘Reservations et cartes de crédit dans les restaurants de l’Expo 67,’ Expo 67 press release, 23 May 1967, private collector. 22 ‘Queen Elizabeth II,’ Expo 67: A Virtual Experience, Library and Archives Canada http://www.collectionscanada.ca/expo/0533020403_e.html (accessed 3 July 2007). 23 Margo Oliver, ‘Man and His Menu,’ Montreal Star Weekend Magazine, 22 April 1967, 43. 24 Frank Rasky, ‘The Wondrous Fair: The Tastes,’ Montreal Gazette, 17 June 2007, 9. 25 Ibid., 9. 26 Menu of La Toundra Restaurant, Canada pavilion, Expo 67, McCord Museum, Montreal, Fonds Gilberte Christin de Cardaillac, P573/D02. 27 One commentator surely had tongue – as well as food – in cheek, in a gentle critique about the misrepresentation of certain dishes as pervasive throughout Canada: ‘If you don’t visit [the] Tundra restaurant,’ she told her Toronto-based audience, ‘you may never again have the opportunity to taste such well-known Canadian dishes as claybaked grouse.’ Ledingham, ‘Eating Exotically and Otherwise at Expo,’ 34–5. 28 See Robin Bush, ‘The Land and the Growth,’ in My Home My Native Land, ed. H. Leslie Brown and Lucien Parizeau (Montreal: Canadian Government pavilion Expo 67, [1967]), 3–17. 29 Unfortunately, a limitation in pursuit of this quest immediately presented itself to Brown: ‘“Of course,” he added with a grin, “when the Exhibition opens its doors, it’ll have to be imported because Canadian lettuce just won’t be ready that early.”’ ‘Canadian Cuisine,’ Expo Digest, 23 September 1964, 3–4. 30 Mary Douglas, ‘Deciphering a Meal,’ Daedalus 101 (Winter 1972): 61–81. 31 For a study of Foucault and food see John Coveney, Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating (London: Routledge, 2000). 32 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). 33 Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘Pleasures of the Promixate Senses: Eating, Taste and Culture’ (1993), in The Taste Culture Reader, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Berg 2005), 226–34. 34 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (1980; New York: Pantheon, 1992). For a sampling of other

44  Rhona Richman Kenneally food-related texts see Warren Belasco, Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Carole Counihan and Peggy Van Esterik, eds, Food and Culture: A Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Sherrie Innes, Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Sherrie Innes, ed., Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Carolyn Korsmeyer, ed., The Taste Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005); Harvey Levenstein, Revolutions at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Sidney W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past (Boston: Beacon, 1996); Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Modern Library, 2001) Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (New York: Viking, 2004). 35 Examples of such associations, each of which has a resource-rich website, include the influential Association for the Study of Food and Society that operates a listserv, holds an annual conference, and collects syllabi of food-related courses; and the Canadian Association for Food Studies, which also generates an annual conference as well as a newsletter, and provides a list of Canadian food scholars and other non-academic experts. Academic units include the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, which offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs in food studies. Dedicated periodicals include Food, Culture and Society; Food and Foodways; and Gastronomica. 36 In addition to the authors cited in this essay, see, for example, Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton, eds, Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies (New York: Routledge, 2002); Susan Kalcik, ‘Ethnic Foodways in America: The Performance of Group Identity,’ in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, ed. L. K. Brown and K. Mussell (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 37–65; David E. Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Oxford: Berg, 2001). One Canadian example is Steve Penfold, ‘“Eddie Shack was no Tim Horton”: Donuts and the Folkore of Mass Culture in Canada,’ in Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, ed. Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton (New York: Routledge, 2002), 48–66. 37 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6–7; David Bell and Gill Valentine, Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 169, 177. 38 Marcella Hazan, Marcella’s Italian Kitchen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 12. 39 Arjun Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (1988): 5. 40 Ibid., 6–7. 41 Ibid., 7. 42 Ibid., 17–19. These admixtures arise from different incentives, for example, out of a nostalgic urge of an emigrant from India to reconstitute a remembered cuisine, or to articulate a colonial perception of Indian food (as a series of curries, for example). 43 See ibid., 19–22. A cooking course entitled Cook Global, Eat Local, offered in Montreal in May-June 2007, for example, comprised six sessions: The Flavours of India; Greek Traditions; Spicy Thai; Lebanese Texture; South American Feast; and Vegetarian World Cuisine. The instructor, Juliana Espana Keller, asserts her expertise on a promotional

Food, Nationalism, and Authenticity at Expo 67  45 flyer as derived from ‘[living] in many countries such as Switzerland, NYC and South America’ and the appropriateness of her recipes, inasmuch as they were ‘gathered over years of global travel.’ 44 For individual case studies on authenticity related to food see, for example, Meredith E. Abarca, ‘Authentic or Not: It’s Original,’ Food and Foodways 12, no. 1 (2004): 1–25; Carol Harris-Shapiro, ‘Bloody Shankbones and Braided Bread: The Food Voice and the Fashioning of American Jewish Identities,’ Food and Foodways 14, no. 2 (2006): 67–90; Young Rae Oum, ‘Authenticity and Representation: Cuisines and Identities in KoreanAmerican Diaspora,’ Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 1 (2005): 109–25. 45 Lisa Heldke, ‘But Is It Authentic? Culinary Travel and the Search for the “Genuine Article,”’ in The Taste Culture Reader, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 385–94, esp. 389–90. See also Lisa Heldke, ‘Let’s Cook Thai: Recipes for Colonialism,’ in Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 175–98. 46 Indeed, egg rolls have been so considered: see G. Tuchman and J.G. Levine, ‘New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern,’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22, no. 3 (1993): 382–407. 47 Restaurant Praha at Expo 67, pamphlet issued by CEDOK Czechoslovak Travel Bureau (New York), Expo 1967 Department, ca 1967, private collector. 48 Cuba pavilion, Expo 67, advertisement, Répertoire des Expo 67 Restaurants Review (Montreal: Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, [ca 1967]), 29; Alcan News, April 1967, 5. 49 Répertoire des Expo 67 Restaurants Review, 33–4. 50 L.P. Goonetilleke, Ceylon at Expo 67 (Colombo, Ceylon: The Government Press, 1967), private collector; Répertoire des Expo 67 Restaurants Review, 28. 51 Lisa Heldke, Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (New York: Routledge, 2003), xv. This she sees as resembling the attitudes of European artists, anthropologists, and explorers seeking ‘“newer,” ever more “remote” cultures that they could co-opt, borrow from freely and out of context, and use as the raw materials for their own efforts at creation and discovery’ (xvi). 52 Ibid., xvi. 53 Ibid., 194–5. 54 Patricia Morton, ‘Consuming the Colonies,’ in Eating Architecture, ed. Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 60. 55 Fair attendee Henri Cossira quoted in Morton, ‘Consuming the Colonies,’ 54. 56 Morton, ‘Consuming the Colonies,’ 67. 57 The fish farm contained in the pavilion, and noted above, featured baby belugas that presumably would grown up to create new supplies of caviar. 58 ‘Bon Appétit,’ in The Soviet Union Today, [n.d.], 33. McCord Museum, Montreal. 59 The Soviet Union, the Soviet Pavilion, the Soviet Character (the Shortest Guide-book to the USSR), pamphlet issued by USSR pavilion, Expo 67, ca 1967, private collector. 60 Menu, 4 Regions Restaurant, Switzerland pavilion, Expo 67, author’s own. 61 Cuisine of Pakistan, Pakistan Restaurant, United Nations pavilion, Expo 67, private collector. 62 Ibid., 1. 63 Ibid.

46  Rhona Richman Kenneally 6 4 Ibid., 9. 65 For a more extended study of the Canada pavilion, see Rhona Richman Kenneally, ‘The Cuisine of the Tundra,’ Food, Culture, and Society 11, no. 3 (2008): 287–313. 66 Répertoire des Expo 67 Restaurants Review, 22. 67 Oliver, ‘Man and His Menu,’ 43–4; Répertoire des Expo 67 Restaurants Review, 22. 68 See Norbert Lacoste, ‘The People Tree,’ in My Home My Native Land, ed. H. Leslie Brown and Lucien Parizeau (Montreal: Canadian Government pavilion Expo 67, [1967]), 19–26. 69 For a study of the Indians of Canada pavilion see Randall Arthur Rogers, ‘Man and His World: An Indian, a Secretary and a Queer Child. Expo 67 and the Nation in Canada,’ Master’s thesis, Concordia University, 1999.

3 ‘Britain Today’ at Expo 67 elizabeth darling

The subject of this paper is the British pavilion which was one of the nearly 120 such structures built for the eighty-fifth World’s Fair held in Montreal between April and October 1967 (fig. 3.1).1 Commissioned by the British state, designed by Sir Basil Spence, with interiors and displays by Sean Kenny, Beverly Pick, James Gardner, Theo Crosby, and Mario Armegnol, it was visited by more than five million people and acclaimed as among the best at Expo 67 in a poll taken by a Montreal radio station.2 Neither the building nor its contents have received much attention since its opening, the one notable exception to this being the cultural theorist Umberto Eco, whose thoughts on it will be considered in detail below. The concern here, however, will not be to resurrect an overlooked ‘masterpiece’ of British architecture. The pavilion cannot be counted among Spence’s finest moments: as the Architectural Review commented, it had ‘an unexpectedly old-fashioned exterior.’3 Instead, the intention is to use the pavilion and its contents, in particular the section ‘Britain Today,’ which was designed by James Gardner, as a means to do three things. Firstly, this study will consider the inter-relationship between particular design systems – here, modernism – and the projection of British national identity in the emerging post-industrial age; secondly, it will explore the very nature of that identity at this moment of transition; and finally, it will posit some observations about the ‘material and imaginative residue’ that the pavilion left.4 A Tour of the Pavilion It tells a compelling story, about a people who became a great nation and helped shape the world of today.5

The Commonwealth Relations Office of the British government formally committed the country to participation in what would become Expo 67 in January 1963, and the organization of the pavilion and its contents was placed, as was the norm for overseas exhibitions, in the hands of the Central Office of Information (COI) among whose roles it was to project the image of Britain beyond the islands’ shores. In response to Expo 67’s theme, ‘Man and His World,’ Britain chose as its focus ‘The Challenge of Change’ – which, translated into French as ‘Le Défi de l’Evolution,’ has to British ears at least a slightly different meaning. A budget of

48  Elizabeth Darling

3.1  Brochure from the Great Britain pavilion. Courtesy of Bruno Paul Stenson.

‘Britain Today’ at Expo 67  49

three million pounds was set by early 1964 and, following consultation with the Royal Institute of British Architects, Sir Basil Spence (who had designed Coventry Cathedral) was appointed pavilion architect. As the COI had a policy of ‘using the best resources available,’ the design of the interiors was assigned to a team of freelancers, all of whom were eminent or emerging in the field.6 Their site was three acres on the Île Notre Dame and was adjacent to that of the future French pavilion, a contiguity which was, as we shall see, to be important. As realized, the pavilion stood on a platform that was surrounded by water on three sides. On this were accommodated three structures, steel framed and clad in cream-coloured asbestos panels. Two housed the displays, and the third contained a theatre/cinema. The most noticeable feature of the scheme was the two-hundred-foot tower which was topped by a 3-D Union Flag designed by F.H.K. Henrion (fig. 3.1). Visitors entered the pavilion through the base of the tower and immediately joined what was described as a journey through three thousand years of history.7 In a darkened space, and standing on a revolving carousel, visitors encountered the first display. ‘Shaping Britain,’ by Sean Kenny, was intended as ‘an experience of primeval Britain.’ Through ‘sounds, mist and [film] projection onto rocky formations,’8 visitors experienced how ‘a nation slowly formed … science and industry developed and then, in a burst of curiosity and with an emerging sense of adventure, Britons went on to discover the world.’9 This linked into the next section, ‘The Genius of Britain’ by Beverley Pick, which, reflecting its French title ‘L’Appel,’ comprised a three-dimensional photo-montage mural that spiralled up into the shaft of the tower and featured a roll call of great figures from Britain’s past: ‘explorers and pioneers, statesmen, learned men, inventors and artists, writers whose work had contributed to the formation of the English language and men of today who are preparing the way for progress.’10 This host of mostly dead white males was complemented by an Olympus jet engine suspended from the tower’s apex. From the tower, the visitor then descended by escalator into the other display halls. First they encountered ‘Britain Today,’ designed by James Gardner. Here on a catwalk display were a series of tableaux that depicted the changing nature of British society and sought to challenge some of the preconceptions which visitors might have about the British. It asked ‘What are the British really like? Pompous or friendly? Shy or stern? It is to the visitor to decide. All the clues are there. For here is Mr Smith at different moments in [his] daily life. Here are quite simple scenes, but full of expression and which convey their message in a lively and original way.’ Next was the largest display, ‘Industrial Britain’ or ‘À la Tête du Progrès’ by Theo Crosby. Set in a white plastered cavernous space – recalling Aladdin’s cave11 – the display was mounted into the wall surface and comprised both objects and films, slides and peep shows. All projectors and equipment were concealed, the idea being that this would demonstrate how ‘Britain in the sixties is moving into an industrial era in which man is in a more organic relationship with the machine.’12 Lastly, the visitor exited the pavilion through the display ‘Britain in the World,’ by Mario Armegnol, housed in an ‘egg-shaped and pure-white hall,’13 which dealt with another aspect of Britain’s future: its share in the ‘universal hope for a world

50  Elizabeth Darling

at peace’14 (echoing of course the rhetoric of global harmony evident throughout Expo 67). This sentiment was embodied in a series of large sculpted figures. As well, a series of bays housed panoramic tableaux which depicted Britain’s history as a trading nation; the diversity of nations that formed the Commonwealth; the spirit of liberty and democratic institutions in Britain; and the last, Britain as a good neighbour. A colour film showed children of all races playing together. The pavilion had a staff of thirty-two hostesses and twenty-two male guides as well as an information desk. The British Council devised a program of cultural events to parallel the displays within. A rolling program of twenty-one films was shown in the cinema; there was a British bookshop and a pub; theatre and ballet performances were given; and there was also a display of fine art. This, then, was what visitors could see, but what did it mean? Talking about Exhibitions An immense amount of scholarship has emerged in the past twenty years exploring the meaning and function of museums, galleries, festivals, and world’s fairs. Regarding these forms of exhibition and display, scholars such as Michael Baxandall, Tony Bennett, Carol Duncan, and Eco have made salient observations which enable the historian to draw some conclusions about how the British pavilion presented culture and national identity at the end of the sixties. It should be clear that the pavilion is understood in this study as a pre-eminently un-neutral space, something shot through with meanings – meanings which may, or may not, have been apparent to those involved in its production. Here Baxandall’s notion of the exhibition as a field in which the maker of the object, exhibitor of the object, and viewers are all active participants in the making of meaning is a useful one.15 This allows us to consider the discrepancies between how a message about Britain was constructed and conveyed, and how it was received by an audience that was not predominantly British. Related to this is the notion of the museum space as a site where citizenship is cultivated through ritualization. Duncan has noted how, in the modern period, the museum developed as a place apart from everyday life. It was a site which promoted particular rituals of behaviour related to nationhood, and to which people went with a certain receptiveness to that ritual. In Duncan’s schema, visitors to a museum are ritualistically drawn into the national narratives embedded in the institution. One example is Britain’s National Gallery, symbolically sited in a square dedicated to the nation’s great naval victory at Trafalgar in 1805. The museum – and hence the pavilion at Expo 67, too – can thus be regarded as performative and potentially transformative spaces.16 Bennett’s concept of the ‘exhibitionary complex’ has extended this model and emphasized the idea that this ritualization undertaken by institutions such as museums and world’s fairs is an essential tool of control, serving to regulate behaviour and cultural attitudes, and to turn people into docile citizens.17 Bennett has also noted that the world’s fair’s emphasis on the future ensures that the ‘visitor is enlisted in the limitless project of modernity.’18 Finally, Umberto Eco has offered a succinct theory of ‘expositions’ (including world’s fairs) that is especially useful in a consideration of the British pavilion.

‘Britain Today’ at Expo 67  51

Drawing on Walter Benjamin, he argues that the modern exposition – of which Expo 67 was, in his view, an ‘unsurpassed, quintessential and classic’ example – operates as a phantasmagoria that people enter to be amused: the goods on display lose their intrinsic value and become ‘play, color, light, show.’19 Goods become a pretext to display something else: the exposition exposes itself and ‘the prestige game is won by the country which best tells us what it does, independently of what it does.’20 In the scenario described by Eco, the architecture of the exposition is used to connote symbolic meaning, while both the buildings and the objects in them likewise project the image of a civilization. He then considers how these messages are received, noting that this can be relatively straightforward when shared cultural assumptions allow, in his example, moonlight to connote a romantic moment, or perhaps the music of Beethoven. Eco also suggests, however – and this is where the British pavilion becomes a pertinent case study – that expositions can communicate more ambiguously through ‘open symbols’ which allow the perceiver a broad field of possible interpretation, including the possibility of misinterpretation.21 For Eco, the British pavilion exemplified the open symbol in the strangely truncated architecture of its tower, and the contrast between stodgy exterior, captured so well in the illustration included here, and playful interior; an observation which, linked with the other ‘ways of seeing’ Expo already mentioned, will serve as the starting point for a more complex reading of the pavilion. The British Pavilion: Open Symbol? For the British government that commissioned the British pavilion its purpose and meanings were quite unambiguous. In 1946 when the COI was set up out of the ashes of the wartime Ministry of Information, Prime Minister Clement Attlee declared: It is essential to good administration under a democratic system that the public shall be adequately informed about the many matters in which Government action directly impinges on their daily lives and it is, in particular, important that a true and adequate picture of British institutions and the British way of life shall be presented overseas.22

If we follow Bennett’s argument, the formation of a quango such as the COI, and the work it carried out, formed part of the process of bringing people into the project of modernity: to be informed and to accept the message was to participate in corporate life, or in other words, in nationhood. This was especially important at a time when the British people were being asked to make considerable personal sacrifice – rationing of food and commodities persisted and became more draconian after the war – in order that every penny could go towards reconstructing the shattered British economy. In the case of the overseas exhibition, the concern was perhaps a less specific one, namely to bring people into an understanding of Britishness, if not citizenship; to bring people into an allegiance with a major, if slightly fading, Western power. This is a process which, of course, has significant connotations in the context of both the Cold War and the transition from Empire to

52  Elizabeth Darling

Commonwealth. Also, and more simply, it can be understood as an act of advertising, or today we might say branding: imprinting an awareness of Britain in consumers’ minds. Whether viewed as a means to consolidate national identity for Britons, or to advertise it to outsiders and encourage them to ally themselves politically (or through consumption) to the West rather than the East – or both – the fact that Britain was a founding member of the International Expositions Bureau in 1928 allows little doubt that the British thought the expense and effort entailed by events such as world’s fairs were worthwhile. Indeed, Sir Fife Clark in his official history of the COI makes clear how systematically the Office approached the business of exhibitions. He outlines the three main principles developed. The first is that finance and organization should be of a piece, and a total sum was awarded at the outset to cover the three-year period the COI set aside to plan exhibition pavilions. This meant that the structure of the pavilion and its contents could be planned and costed together so that the architect could take into account the interior displays for which he was designing the ‘frame,’ and the individual designers could be briefed. Secondly, the pavilion should tell a continuous story and have controlled circulation – visitors start at the beginning and proceed in a linear way until the end, as they would do in 1967. Finally, ‘the building must be clearly, instantly, recognizable as British.’23 From the start, then, pavilion designers were operating under some constraints, and, as might be expected, additional ones became apparent, not least that the COI had the ultimate veto on content, especially when not using in-house designers. James Gardner recalled that when he planned the contents of the British pavilion for the Exposition Universelle held in Brussels in 1958 he was warned ‘no sex, it will be opened by the Queen.’24 Less a constraint than an advantage, however, was the great emphasis placed by the COI on each exhibition as an occasion to give ‘the fullest scope and opportunity to Britain’s best display designers and to include specially commissioned work by leading artists and sculptors.’ Fife Clark noted in this respect that ‘without a doubt an Expo stimulates innovation in architectural and display design and communication techniques.’25 Clark’s emphasis hints at a more immediate context in which the design of the British pavilion and the message of its contents might be located: Britain’s postwar negotiation with the modern world. What was its place in the emerging post-industrial and post-colonial world? How could it place itself, not least economically, in relation to the new superpower of the United States by which it had well and truly been sidelined? In this context, the pavilion for Expo 67 might be understood as part of a process by which modernity was performed culturally, convincing Britons and the world at large of the nation’s continued claim to modernization and forward progress. This claim can be supported in more solidly materialist terms by noting the dependence placed by postwar politicians, particularly Labour politicians in the first years of reconstruction, on the importance of design. Design would not just provide the means to reinvigorate British industries and make them competitive but would also transform the bomb-scarred built environment and create a modern Britain; it was intrinsic to Britain’s economic recovery. Nor would any sort of design suffice, because the

‘Britain Today’ at Expo 67  53

consensus was that modernism was the appropriate language through which the new Britain could be signified. Modernism became, in effect, the ‘corporate image’ of the welfare state.26 The re-presentation of the nation in modernist form is evident in Britain’s first foray into the postwar world of exhibitions, The Festival of Britain of 1951.27 Seven years later, this time in an international context at Brussels in 1958, a similarly selfconscious image of modernity was presented in the pavilion designed by Lobb and Ratcliff. However, while the buildings and spaces on London’s South Bank and in Brussels were quite straightforward in their equation of Britain’s modernity with architectural design, something more ambiguous was housed within these buildings. At the Festival of Britain, and also at Brussels, the displays suggest a more complicated negotiation between British identity and progress. Many of the Festival of Britain pavilions contained displays which dealt with traditional Englishness, folklore, and rural life. The Lion and Unicorn pavilion, for example, whose subject was the British people, was a steel-framed, open-plan building with its entrance wall entirely glazed. Yet the centrepiece of the display was the figures of the British national emblems, the lion and the unicorn, made of corn (corn figures being a traditional folk product) with the couplet ‘We are the Lion and the Unicorn, twin symbols of the Briton’s character. As a Lion I give him character and strength with Unicorn he lets himself go.’ In the design of the pavilion at Brussels, James Gardner had been encouraged to create ‘a panoply of pageantry.’28 Visitors entered what he described as ‘a great cathedral-like entry hall. Deep purple, lit by narrow shafts of light admitted through navette-shaped apertures filled with stained glass. A thick carpeted walkway flanked by heraldic banners’ – the room culminated in Annigoni’s wellknown portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. Le Monde’s reporter commented ‘C’est magnifique, c’est trop.’29 This ‘Hall of Tradition’ was flanked by a ‘Hall of Technology’ and a display on the ‘British Way of Life.’ In a souvenir brochure published by the Daily Mail – then as now a deeply traditional and conservative paper – the pavilion was described as representing ‘the country in which tradition is stubbornly and gracefully preserved,’ but it also ‘shows clearly the United Kingdom is still foremost amongst the pioneers in this nuclear age who are uncovering the secrets of nature and with inventions of incredible promise are helping to build a world of a kind which none can yet see fully revealed.’30 If in 1958, Britain’s modernity was proclaimed and projected through the exterior of the pavilion but conveyed more ambiguously within, in 1967, by which time the world, and Britain’s place within it, had changed considerably, the reverse seemed to be true. Spence’s pavilion was, by common consensus, a surprisingly dull and old-fashioned edifice, which, if one were being exceptionally kind, might be seen as an attempt to convey the ‘character and strength’ of the British spirit. Its solidity and lack of innovation were especially apparent when compared with the structural magic displayed in the U.S. and German pavilions, for example. The very embodiment of an ‘open symbol,’ the meaning of the exterior of the British pavilion mystified many. The Architectural Review commented that ‘the intended symbolism of the island site and broken off tower don’t really tell,’ and continued: ‘Britain … possesses more live architectural ideas than are seen in [the

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pavilion’s] design.’31 Eco went on at some length about the possible interpretations of the truncated tower. Perhaps it meant ‘tension in progress’ or a ‘still moment in the process of growth’ or was intended to recall a Celtic menhir.32 More recently, the authors of a catalogue accompanying the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s exhibition The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big seem equally baffled: ‘One can only wonder what Britain was trying to accomplish with its Brutalist monolith and deconstructed Union Jack (alluding, perhaps, to its dismantled empire?).’33 Spence’s building certainly is a curious structure, only loosely related to contemporary British developments in architecture. As a piece of Brutalism it shares none of the verve or shock of the contemporary South Bank Arts Centre complex in London, for example, and has little in common with Spence’s other work. The island symbolism seems, however, fairly self-evident, and the tower? According to one contemporary, this was intended to connote that Britain had ‘unfinished business,’34 and its crowning with the Union flag sculpture presumably met the COI’s requirement that it be recognizably British. Another possible explanation, and one which hints at a vainglorious attempt to signify a global position now slipping away, is given by John and Margaret Gold. In a repetition of the face-off between the German and Soviet pavilions at the 1937 world’s fair, they cite the recollections of Gilles Gagnon, Expo 67’s planner: [The British] wanted to have the biggest pavilion on the site, because Canada was a former colony … and because of the Commonwealth. France next door had a pavilion which was getting bigger, adding more floors, it was getting higher than the British one. The British decided that they would do this truncated tower so that it would be higher than the neighbour’s.35

Moving into the interior of the pavilion, things appeared more explicitly modern. Indeed, as so many commentators noted, both at the time and more recently, the British pavilion shared what was agreed to be the key innovation of Expo 67: the use of multi-media installations. It can be argued that this was principally where the modernity of the British pavilion lay. For the Architectural Review, the British pavilion was a ‘first rate example’ of this tendency towards what the author called ‘software space,’ somewhere ‘in which, without any physical change, the whole atmosphere can be made terrifying, exciting or contemplative.’36 All the installations in the British pavilion combined film, soundtracks, and special and kinetic effects to involve the visitor. Here the museum rituals described by Duncan might have been updated, but the ambition is the same: to engage the visitor in the contemplation of a distinctive national project and to facilitate their interaction with it. Further, the controlled route through the British pavilion, and perhaps also its island setting, also reinforced it as a ritualistic space in which a particular vision of Britain was proffered. To understand how this vision was constituted, it is helpful to return to that tension between content and form evident in Britain’s 1951 and 1958 exhibitions. In 1958, the split (or, lack of accommodation perhaps) between progress and tradition was evident – not just in the contrast between exterior and interior, but also within the interior, as the so-called ‘hall of tradition’ was spatially distinct from the hall of

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technology. The commentator quoted earlier was not sure where this presentation of tradition versus progress would lead. If we regard the Expo 67 pavilion as the fulfilment of this earlier development, the results were indeed quite strange. Spatially, Spence’s pavilion was more complex than the 1958 one: the fact that visitors had to progress through different buildings, and experience changes of level by staircase and escalator, made it so. Above all, technology was foregrounded here much more than previously. Yet, when scrutinized, the content was still remarkably traditional. It still trotted out the idea of Britain as an ancient nation, admirable as the founder of democracy, still as inventive as ever, and so on. The difference in 1967 was that this traditional content was, for the most part, subsumed into a state-of-the-art technology of presentation. That said, there clearly had been a conscious attempt, manifested most loudly in the ‘Britain Today’ section, to complicate the traditional idea of Britishness presented at exhibitions. Gardner recalled how, when a representative of the COI asked him to design this section of the pavilion, he was presented with a script which had already been commissioned from an Oxford professor of English. This, he commented drolly, aired ‘all the old clichés: we have the Mother of Parliaments, cricket on village greens, Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, and bagpipes in the Highlands. He had added for good measure, that we love children.’37 Gardner was not impressed and turned the offer down. Within a week the COI’s man returned with a new offer. The clichéd script would be abandoned if Gardner would take on the project. He agreed, provided that he have a completely free hand to develop script and content. This was granted, and Gardner set out to transmit the understanding that contemporary Britain was in a state of flux: ‘We are a hotch-potch of the old and new, the traditional and the modern … We still have stately homes and cottages, old universities and Eton, but we also have council flats, redbrick universities and technical colleges.’ Instead of confirming clichés about British identity, he wanted ‘to offer quirky reinterpretations of people’s expectations.’38 Gardner’s display was designed as a series of themed tableaux. With one exception, these were placed on a raised catwalk so that visitors could view them in the round. Each section offered a contrasting view of contemporary Britain, a theme which was established as soon as visitors entered ‘Britain Today.’ The first thing they saw was a tableau of a British family (fig. 3.2). Composed of larger-than-life figures sculpted by Astrid Zydower, it depicted a ‘stiff-upper-lipped’ country family standing in its drawing room. Its formality was reinforced by the fact that it was the only tableau in which the figures were contained as if inside a museum display cabinet (although the foot of one figure does protrude, just, over the edge); all the other displays were freestanding. This ‘corny stereotype’ of Britishness was intended, however, as a trick to lull visitors into a false sense of security about what to expect from the display as a whole. Gardner noted: ‘viewing a national presentation, people feel rather superior when you give them what they expect to see.’39 But on closer inspection, this stereotype was carefully undermined by Gardner’s placing of the figures and through his use of explanatory text. To signal the emergence of the generation gap, the figures of the parents and older son were

56  Elizabeth Darling

3.2  Tableau of a British family in the ‘Britain Today’ exhibit of the Great Britain pavilion. Design Archives, University of Brighton (ESD00649).

placed to one side of the room, the younger children to the other. Visitors then read the caption which declared: ‘the English, are they … hypocrites … pompous asses … devious exploiters … stiff necks … stuffed shirts … or just shy?’ Visitors subsequently walked around a series of sets that developed this theme of the contrast between traditional and modern Britain. Each set used Zydower’s sculpted figures arranged into vignettes illustrating some aspect of British behaviour. Thus, for example, a section entitled ‘DIY’ (do-it-yourself) depicted a traditional English obsession, gardening, alongside a newer preoccupation, a couple cleaning their car (subtitled ‘We love our car’ which was, of course, a Mini). Here we are further reminded of Baxandall’s observation that the label is a crucial interface between the producers of exhibitions and their audience. Other sections included ‘There’s no place like home’ in which films and pictures of suburban houses and new council flats were intermingled, and, perhaps not surprisingly, there was a large section on fashion and music. Since the mid-1960s, the former, in the designs of Mary Quant, and the latter, in the form, first, of The Beatles, had launched the British (cultural) Invasion of North America, unleashing new types of clothing and music on a transfixed public. A sort of counter-imperial-

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ism against the significant Americanization of British culture in the 1950s, Gardner could have been assured that this was the one display in ‘Britain Today’ which would have immediate resonance with its audience. It featured large backdrops depicting the Beatles, mannequins wearing Quant’s clothing, a pair of teenagers in conversation, as well as an electric guitar (see plate 10). Perhaps inspired by this, Gardner made particular use of sound and image – still and moving – to bring each set to life. The display which dealt with housing, for example, featured film footage of the construction of new buildings projected onto the backdrops, while a vignette of modern youth was accompanied by a recording of a student discussion. Elsewhere visitors could walk through a soundscape which included pop music, as well as snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan and the twittering of birds. The pièce de résistance, and an element of high camp, was the song ‘Tea for Two’ ‘played’ by a teapot. But what did this all mean? Did this heterogeneous display confound visitors’ expectations as James Gardner intended? Did it successfully transmit to its primarily North American audience the idea that Britain, while rooted in tradition, was a progressive, liberal, democratic nation, one at the forefront of technological advance – a nation with ‘unfinished business’? While this was seemingly the intended theme, it is difficult to judge whether it was indeed the message received by Expo 67 visitors; Eco certainly thought the building as a whole was too ‘open’ to be understood fully. In Conclusion A number of conclusions can be proposed about the further levels of meaning to be discerned in the pavilion. These pertain, in the first instance, to questions of modernism. It is clear that modernism (in its architectural, design, and artistic sense) was still understood to be one of the most important cultural tools through which people could engage with the project of modernity, as undertaken by the state. Further, the British pavilion at Expo 67 suggests that practitioners of modernism, like Gardner, had established the designer as a central figure in Britain’s cultural industries. His free hand with the content of the displays suggests the ascendancy of the expert form-giver without whose guidance no project of modernization, social or material, could hope to succeed. Moreover, the interiors of the pavilion, in their engagement with technology, can be understood as part of the process by which British architectural modernism developed into its high-tech phase – culminating perhaps in Nicholas Grimshaw’s British pavilion at the Seville world’s fair of 1992. Simultaneously, the British pavilion at Expo 67 also hints at longer-term shifts in modern architectural thinking which have become dominant today. The emphasis on the experiential in the interiors, the desire to use light, sound, and space to affect the visitor, a desire for a more haptic – ludique, as Reyner Banham put it – architecture is now a commonplace.40 The solemnity and honourable modernism of the 1950s and early 60s gave way to something more flexible and more fun; the unicorn prevailed over the lion. In time-honoured world’s fair tradition, then, we might see the pavilion as the shape of things, good things, to come. Secondly, the technology of the displays in the pavilion might be understood as

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‘spectacle’ in the Situationist sense; here it was the British themselves who were transformed into a kind of alluring, consumable product. This returns to the idea that one of the purposes of such displays is to present an image of the nation in which visitors are asked to participate, to buy into, to lend their consensus. As already suggested, the Britain presented here was not necessarily as modern as was suggested by the sophisticated, technologized displays. Visitors were more likely to be impressed by the medium than the message, and hence they did not walk away from their encounter with the British pavilion as transformed pro-Britishers. Perhaps they just had a fun time. But might it be possible – countering Baxandall’s model – to understand the spectacle in relation to the pavilion’s producers? While Gardner and his collaborators seemed to firmly believe that they were conveying a picture of modern, not traditional, Britain, my contention is that what was underway in the British pavilion, and most notably in the ‘Britain Today’ section, was the formation of a new set of traditions related to British identity and culture and ones which, if we look a little more closely at socio-political events going on in the same year that Expo 67 was held, can be understood as a sort of instant nostalgia for the modern Britain on display. For however glamorous, progressive, and fun the image of Britain projected through ‘Britain Today’ was, it represented a snapshot of – almost a farewell to – the boom years of sixties Britain. The images of the Beatles are pre–Sgt. Pepper’s and other references are to ‘mod’ culture (the scooter) and mini-skirts, not camper vans and maxi-skirted hippies. There is little sense here that 1967 was a tumultuous year in British social history, one which saw the decriminalization of homosexuality, the legalization of abortion, and the provision of free contraception by health authorities. One cannot detect any sign of the political agitation that would result in the uproar of 1968 or that the women’s liberation movement was about to erupt. Nor is there any evidence of the ethnic and racial heterogeneity that was already evident on the streets of Britain, largely because of the influx of immigrants from its dissolving empire. Innovation was firmly ascribed to male protagonists both with Gardner’s display and in Pick’s ‘Genius of Britain’ photo montage, which, it will be recalled, featured ‘the men of today who are preparing the way for progress.’ A similar process of effacement and displacement was applied to the black and Asian immigrants from Britain’s Commonwealth, who increasingly formed a significant part of the British population.41 Such citizens, in Gardner’s display, had no presence. Instead, their ‘place’ was in the ‘Britain in the World’ section, in their Commonwealth rather than their new context.42 Perhaps it is too much to expect of Gardner that he could have acknowledged such changes, yet it is worth alluding to them because it throws light on the choices that he did make. For by emphasizing the wild Carnaby Street side of modern life in Britain, the pre-LSD Beatles, and by focusing on quirky pastimes and DIY (do-ityourself) attitudes, Gardner did two things. Firstly, he merely paraphrased in new ephemeral and technological clothing the time-honoured tradition of the eccentric English. Secondly, he created a new mythology of Britishness which remained overwhelmingly white and male, and whose concession to modernity was to bring in suburbia and consumer goods but not new and diverse communities.

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Moreover, in his use of tableaux featuring life-size figures we see this representation of British culture inching towards a new condition: themepark Britain. Looking at these tableaux recalls nothing so much as the ethnographic sections so beloved of nineteenth-century exhibitions, even though this was clearly not a colonized nation presented for its ‘otherness’ and value as colonial spoil. From the late 1960s onwards, Britain was progressively divested of its manufacturing base and entered the post-industrial Western world as a nation which operated primarily in the realm of representation: through service industries or through rehashing its past as heritage. The resulting ‘heritage industry’ then becomes the basis for economic growth and a form of cultural progress. This Britain operates at the level of smoke and mirrors, reminiscent of Eco’s ‘play, color, light, show,’ whether it draws on the heritage of a medieval past, an industrial past, or a more recent one. It is thus that Carnaby Street mutates into (a still overwhelmingly white) Cool Britannia, which feeds into the rebranding of cities like Birmingham and informs campaigns such as London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics. This is still a Britain which, like the pavilion of 1967, masks tradition with technology but does not represent progress. It is perhaps for this reason, as a correspondent with the Guardian newspaper revealed, that when he asked his Parisian students to list the ten most famous Britons, Princess Diana was number one, Prince Charles number three, Benny Hill came in at eight, Shakespeare at nine, and Sean Connery and the Queen tied at ten.43 NOTES 1 John Gold and Margaret Gold, Cities of Culture, Staging International Festivals and the Urban Agenda, 1851-2005 (London: Ashgate, 2005), 122. 2 Sir Fife Clark, The Central Office of Information (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), 144. 3 ‘Expo and the City,’ Architectural Review, August 1967, 157. 4 This eloquent phrase was used in the call for papers for the conference Montreal at Street Level: Revisiting the Material, Visual, and Spatial Cultures of the 60s, April 2005, at which this paper was first presented. 5 Expo ’67 Catalogue (Montreal: Maclean-Hunter, 1967), 126. 6 Clark, Central Office of Information, 13. 7 Wherever possible I have drawn on descriptions from contemporary accounts for this ‘tour.’ 8 Architectural Design, special issue on Expo ’67, July 1967, 346. 9 La Compagnie Canadienne de l’Expo Universelle et Internationale de 1967, Rapport Général (Ottawa: HMSO, 1969), 306. 10 Ibid., 306. 11 Ibid., 306. 12 Architectural Design, 346. 13 Clark, Central Office of Information, 143. 14 Rapport Général, 306. 15 Michael Baxandall, ‘Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects’ in Exhibiting Cultures, the Poetics and Politics of Museum

60  Elizabeth Darling Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 34–36. 16 Carol Duncan, ‘Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,’ in Karp and Lavine, eds, Exhibiting Cultures, 88–103. 17 Tony Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex,’ New Formations 4 (Spring 1988): 73–102. 18 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995), 213. 19 Umberto Eco, ‘A Theory of Expositions’ (1967), in Travels in Hyperreality (London: Picador, 1987), 294. 20 Ibid., 296. 21 Ibid., 300. 22 Clement Attlee (1946) cited in Clark, Central Office of Information, 33. 23 Clark, Central Office of Information, 138. 24 James Gardner, The ARTful Designer (London: Centurion Press, 1993), 219. 25 Clark, Central Office of Information. 26 On this process see my Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (London: Routledge, 2007); John Gold, The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation (London: Routledge, 2007); Cheryl Buckley, Designing Modern Britain (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). 27 For an insightful survey of the Festival see ‘Festival of Britain,’ a special issue of the Journal of the 20th Century Society 5 (2001). 28 Gardner, ARTful Designer, 219. 29 Ibid., 219. 30 Daily Mail, The British Pavilion from Brussels (London: Associated Newspapers, 1959), n.p. 31 ‘Expo ’67,’ Architectural Review, August 1967, 107. 32 Eco, ‘A Theory of Expositions,’ 300. 33 André Lortie, ed., The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2004), 194. 34 L. Ferrabee, ‘The Shape of Expo ‘67,’ Design 217 (1967): 27. 35 Gilles Gagnon (1998) cited in Gold and Gold, Cities of Culture, 126. 36 ‘Expo ’67,’ Architectural Review, August 1967, 107. 37 Gardner, The ARTful Designer, 342. 38 James Gardner, quoted in ‘Designing Britain’s Show,’ Illustrated London News, 29 April 1967, 21. 39 Gardner, The ARTful Designer, 345. 40 Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976). 41 By 1962, for example, total net immigration was 388,000, of whom three-quarters were Commonwealth citizens and of this nearly a half from the West Indies. See Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 230–1. 42 The tensions occasioned by immigration were addressed in the 1965 Race Relations Act, which criminalized racial discrimination and set up a Race Relations Board to act as a monitor and arbitrator in disputes. See, Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000 (London: Macmillan, 2002), 363–4. 43 Michael Sheahan, letter to the Guardian (London), 19 March 2005.

4 ‘Une terre humaine’: Expo 67, Canadian Women, and Chatelaine/Châtelaine1 eva-marie kröller

In March 1967, a month before the opening of Expo 67, the Canadian women’s magazine Chatelaine featured an article by fashion editor Vivian Wilcox entitled ‘What to Wear to Expo,’ with the subtitle ‘Going to see the sights? Don’t forget that to our guests from overseas every Canadian is on show, too.’ The item adopts a stern tone toward visitors from rural areas and small towns across Canada, reminding them that this was ‘no ordinary fair with honky-tonk atmosphere’ and admonishing especially the close to half-a-million campers among them to bring ‘at least one outfit of a much more urban type than you would normally take on a camping trip because you will be visiting Canada’s largest, most cosmopolitan city.’ Wives were reminded to ensure that their husbands looked soigné too and that a suit or at least sport jacket and tie had been packed. The journal’s French-edition counterpart Châtelaine ran an equivalent of the essay the following month, but ‘Quoi porter à l’Expo’ omits Wilcox’s name and, upon closer inspection, shows significant differences in wording and tone from the original. These differences are well summarized in the subtitle which reads ‘Songez, qu’à ce rendez-vous international, vous serez vous aussi, un point de mire et il faudra être élégante.’ This version assumes that even campers need but a gentle reminder to include ‘quelques vêtements un peu plus chics’ in their rucksacks, and that ‘les imprimés audaces sont à la mode cette année’ is sufficient advice for them to choose the right sort of garment. Throughout, the syntactic and modal features that enforce the hectoring tone in Wilcox’s original are missing and with them the assumption that provincial visitors may understand only by negation or analogy how they might live up to the Expo ambiance. Thus, ‘l’Expo 67 est une entreprise gigantesque’ is definitely not a literal translation of ‘Expo is no ordinary fair with honky-tonk atmosphere,’ nor is the matter-of-fact suggestion that women select ‘une robe courte mais élégante’ for the concert or ballet a close equivalent of the elaborate advice that ‘you will want a dress such as you would wear to the theatre or a concert at home: short but festive, in keeping with the occasion.’2 Viewed in the context of Chatelaine/Châtelaine’s overall coverage of Expo 67, these seemingly negligible pieces of fashion advice assume iconic meaning. In both its French and English versions, the magazine perceived Expo 67 as a transformative event even well before it got underway. Getting ready for the fair threw into relief differences between Canadians and non-Canadians, English and French, regional

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and urban Canada, men and women, the comfortably off and those who had to make every penny count. The initial, dual task for a publication like Chatelaine/ Châtelaine was to acknowledge Canadians’ distinctive backgrounds and to provide counsel that would help smooth out any differences that threatened to get in the way of a dignified occasion. In this way, the fashion advice offered by the magazine seeks to ensure that the harmonizing rhetoric of the centennial is translated into the practical terms expected by the presumably typical reader of a women’s magazine, namely to be told in concrete terms ‘what to wear to Expo.’ From what we shall see, even eccentric travellers to Expo accepted that the occasion was significant and agreed to make themselves presentable for what editor Doris Anderson promised to be the major event in ‘an eye-popping, exciting year of affirmation and discovery.’3 However, in other, more rebellious ways not usually associated with a traditional women’s magazine, the editors also ensured that nation-builders not given their due in the centennial rhetoric were drawn out and acknowledged. In keeping with the mandate of the publication, women were at the top of the list: thus, one column in Châtelaine bears the belligerent subtitle ‘À l’Expo hommes et femmes se préparent au 28 avril. On a beaucoup parlé des hommes. Mais on connaît peu les femmes.’4 In an editorial written after the fair had closed, Fernande Saint-Martin, Châtelaine’s first editor between 1960 and 1972, proposed the phrase ‘une terre humaine’ to highlight the social responsibilities and inclusiveness that ‘Terre des Hommes’ had failed to realize. She was thinking especially of bureaucrats’ reluctance to consider the welfare of ordinary Montreal citizens on par with the interests of tourists and investors,5 but her apt phrase could be used to include all other groups who had been neglected in Expo’s nationalist enterprise, women among them. Its insistence on covering all the concerns of a traditional women’s magazine while engaging in feminist and nationalist debate made the magazine an effectively camouflaged activist tool during the sixties and seventies, crucial decades for the development of contemporary Canadian society. That readers should, as a matter of course, turn to Chatelaine/Châtelaine for both practical information about and philosophical discussion of the centennial speaks for the stature of the publication. First published in 1928 by the Canadian communications company Maclean Hunter, the English-language magazine was joined by its French counterpart in 1960. By the decade of the centennial, the magazine was the sole survivor among its generation of Canadian women’s magazines.6 Swift and wide-ranging response to developments affecting the nation’s women across the economic and ethnic spectrum, together with down-to-earth household advice and fiction by well-known Canadian authors, ensured a solid subscription base even against overwhelming competition from U.S. publications. Indeed, Chatelaine prided itself on being ahead of feminism south of the border and famously turned down a request to serialize Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) because editors had ‘run most of this stuff in Chatelaine.’7 Now owned by Rogers Consumer Publishing, the English-version magazine is currently (in 2006) the country’s top-selling magazine with a readership of 4.5 million, while the French version, with a subscription base that is by necessity smaller, makes a respectable showing. The avant-gardism, however, that characterized the

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magazine in the sixties and seventies appears to have been largely lost in what is now mostly an advertisement-driven mainstream publication, and recent press about the magazine’s difficulty to retain an editor-in-chief highlights certain incompatibilities between the principles behind its distinguished history on the one hand and the measures that are believed to ensure its commercial success on the other.8 Discussions of the reasons for these developments invariably serve to confirm the former importance of the magazine, as well as turning into fundamental debates over the public mandate of magazines in a culture where questions of collective identity, including those of feminism, become submerged in economic priorities often enforced by a dominant neighbouring nation.9 Although ready to speak on behalf of disenfranchised groups of the population, the magazine’s ambivalence between tradition and progress during the centennial years was still such that there were some startling contradictions among the views expressed in it. These remind the contemporary researcher time and time again that Chatelaine’s contributors wrote in a historically specific context, and that she is viewing their work with the wisdom of hindsight. Many of the inconsistencies arise from contributors’ own exhausting efforts to live both traditional and progressive lives and to mesh personal and professional concerns, while others are the result of the gap of education between editors and the women they wrote about or addressed, and others yet (and perhaps most seriously) are the result of prejudice that contributors shared with the male centennial organizers they criticized in other areas. Assuringly, the magazine’s and individual contributors’ positions are often seen to change over time, influenced by their readers’ critical response, as well as authors’ own life experience and the disillusionments and maturity gained from it. There is also the political emancipation of groups – such as Aboriginal people – that were previously dismissed but were increasingly in a position to demand respectful attention. Because the magazine appealed to and was produced by women of many different backgrounds, a study of Chatelaine/Châtelaine during the sixties and early seventies – a period associated with pivotal transformations of Canadian society – offers a unique opportunity to observe these various developments from the ground up. The research situation is made even more exceptional by the ability to consult both a French and English version of the same magazine. In including this linguistic component, the following essay will add a dissenting footnote to Valerie Korinek’s assertion, in her magnificent study of the magazine during the fifties and sixties, that despite ‘a different tone,’ ‘there was a large degree of overlap between the two publications [i.e., the English and French versions of the magazine].’10 For the months of Expo 67 at least, nothing could be further from the truth. In May, English and French versions did share much of a lavish Expo special with centennial history, food, and fashion, but Chatelaine also prepared its readers for trans-Canada travel to Montreal by printing two model itineraries, neither of which was picked up by Châtelaine. This, however, seems to be the only incidence where the anglophone coverage exceeded its francophone counterpart. Throughout the fair, anglophone readers were given ample information on good-quality souvenirs to purchase on site or via mail-order,11 but by mid-summer Chatelaine carried few extended items on Expo. By contrast, the interest of the magazine’s French editors and readers continued unabated into the

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fall, columnists were kept busy with a steady stream of Expo-related questions, a romantic short story appeared in late summer subtitled ‘Découvrir le monde et aussi l’amour à l’Expo,’12 and the fair was frequently revisited, both physically and conceptually, in the years after it had closed. If Châtelaine’s advice on ‘quoi porter à l’Expo’ differs from its anglophone counterpart, then this is an early signal that the fair stood for something different in the two publications and that Canadians of English and French backgrounds did not dress for the same occasion. My approach in exploring this and other questions is deliberately descriptive. In choosing it, I concur with Elsbeth Heaman, who concludes about nineteenthcentury Canadian exhibitions that ‘to reduce this rich popular culture to bloodless academic categories would bely the argument … that on the fairgrounds, popular culture was able to defy the intellectual imperialism of the Enlightenment.’13 If we replace ‘intellectual imperialism of the Enlightenment’ with the more specific ‘intellectual imperialism of centennial rhetoric,’ then we have an appropriate characterization of the material below. Because it elaborates from readers’ perspectives on the magazine’s advice on ‘what to wear to Expo,’ I would like to begin with ‘Expo 67: Here We Come,’ a two-part travelogue published in the Expo special of May 1967, with no equivalent in French. The first travelogue was written by Jacqueline Hooper from Vancouver, the single mother of two pre-teen boys. Hooper performed ‘a trial run to Montreal’ in 1966 in a family sedan ‘to see if the cross-country return trip could be accomplished on five hundred dollars, and to satisfy our curiosity about what lies on the other side of the mountains,’ and she provides delightfully precise evocations of Canadian geography as seen through the eyes of her children along with an efficient discussion of the practical challenges to be tackled. The second essay is by Eleanor Culver, also from Vancouver, who travelled with her husband and nine children in a ‘family bus.’14 Both writers thus confirmed what startled Expo organizers told Pat Carney of the Vancouver Sun in early 1967 that ‘British Columbians [made] up the third largest group of Canadians planning to attend Expo.’15 The narratives are in the tradition of similar travelogues printed previously in the magazine, to great success, the ambition generally being to bring the whole enterprise off as inexpensively as possible and occasionally ‘play[ing] down’ the writer’s ‘upper-middle-class status’ that did not really necessitate such frugality.16 In 1952, for example, Chatelaine published ‘We Drove the Kids to Alaska,’ a story about a family’s travel from Aurora, Ontario, to Alaska and back, all for $465 and with enthusiastic proof of the ‘good-natured manner in which they all got along.’17 Inspired by the success of this trip, another family ventured from Welland, Ontario, to the Gaspé and the eastern United States and back again: ‘Mother and daughter slept curled up in the car seats. Father and son slept on a collapsible table with their heads inside the trunk. The trip was such a success they are planning to go to the Rockies this summer.’18 These models notwithstanding, the goal in ‘Expo Here We Come’ was to go not to a place where one ‘heard the wolves howling in the night’19 but to the country’s most urbane city, one that the House of Anansi’s Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada (1968) described as possessing ‘a verve and panache lacking elsewhere [in Canada].’20 Culver’s and Hooper’s essays go to great lengths to demonstrate

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sobriety and thrift, but it is the writers’ exuberant, even eccentric, individuality that makes these pieces stand out, an inconsistency not found to such degrees in their jovial 1950s predecessors. When I first skimmed through Culver’s quasi-military plan for her large family’s cross-Canada trip, I was tempted to stop reading at the obsessive detail, including the advice that the reader should ‘early in [her] preparations buy a 12-to-20 slot accordion file. Ours is 9½ by 7½ inches and comes with an elastic band to hold in all the slips of paper that eventually will find their way there.’ These instructions are followed by a list of labels for twelve different sections ranging from ‘recipes and groceries needed’ to ‘specific projects en route or at destination (including addresses of friends and relatives to be visited).’21 However, one realizes soon enough that Culver is not quite a 1960s Martha Stewart when one reads that ‘when the children complain that they wore that same T shirt yesterday and want a fresh one, I tell them to give it the tree test. (Throw it at a tree and if it sticks, I will wash it).’ Her zesty evocations of en-route squalor also include the suggestions that, in order ‘to avoid curlers and fussing,’ teenage daughters be persuaded to ‘cut … their hair … short-short, Mia-style,’ that all children be ‘educate[d] … not to wear socks,’ and that clothes ready to be thrown out be worn instead and ‘deposit[ed] … in the litter cans as you go along.’22 This advice is offered in an energetic and even festive manner that echoes the paradoxical but persistent resistance by some of Chatelaine’s readers (and editors) against excessive fastidiousness.23 As Korinek has illustrated, the pinnacle of this protest was the self-nomination, in 1961, of ‘Mrs Slob’ in response to the superhuman accomplishments of the typical ‘Mrs Chatelaine,’ a competitive title ‘awarded on the basis of family life, community volunteer work, philosophy of marriage and child rearing, interior design, and fashion sense.’24 Although ‘Mrs Chatelaine’ had, on occasion, been a farm wife whose priorities were probably not interior decorating and fashion, readers objected vigorously to the exhausting standards stipulated by these paragons, and they proposed alternative job descriptions that allowed room for a healthy dose of selfishness, no matter how constrained the circumstances. In refusing to become a slave to her family’s laundry, seek their approval for her cooking, or permit her large brood to destroy the companionship between their parents,25 Culver uses expedients that are modest but apparently effective enough. She packs ‘a good fruitcake – solid with fruit and nuts for the deserving parents (this should be wrapped in brandy-soaked cloth) and a plainer gumdrop cake for the children,’ finds that ‘toss[ing] drained mushrooms into anything’ improves a meal with little effort, and recommends her recipe for ground beef patties for being ‘a dish I can cook and not have one of the darlings peer into the pot and remark, “Gee, Mom, I thought you already fed the dog.”’ Moreover, she casually watches her figure by insisting that the holes in egg-in-the-holes ‘are theoretically calorie-free.’26 If Culver’s slapdash cooking contrasts with Chatelaine’s elaborate if inexpensive centennial cuisine, including a cake shaped like a maple leaf or wieners arranged around a dish of potatoes to suggest a ‘stockade,’ the facetious reference to calorie counting acquires particular zest alongside the increasing number of dieting schemes and of slimming foundation-wear advertised in the magazine.27 Culver’s resistance to obsessive housekeeping notwithstanding, both she and

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Jacqueline Hooper heeded Chatelaine’s advice that Montreal called for careful grooming. Culver packed ‘clothes for Expo and visiting … in boxes [that were] not opened until arrival.’28 Hooper, who appeared to have experience camping in Europe or had read about the facilities available there, felt ‘fortunate in having relatives in the Toronto-Montreal areas with whom we could stay and spruce up,’ because she did not feel that Canadian metropolitan campgrounds, Montreal’s included, were equipped to ensure that visitors were tidy enough to show themselves at Place Ville Marie.29 However, more was at stake for visitors than overcoming the distance between rural or small-town Canada on the one hand and its cosmopolitan centres on the other: a visit to Montreal stood in for a glimpse of the future, and by early 1967 Chatelaine began to educate readers in the city’s new futurist architecture and transportation facilities. Printed in both languages, future Chatelaine editor Mildred Istona’s feature evoked the world in 2000 as it was already laid out in Place Ville Marie, Place Bonaventure, the new freeways, and a subway that was ‘so much more handsome than Toronto’s,’ as the Canadian Forum pointed out.30 Assuming that female visitors would particularly look forward to flânerie and window-shopping no matter what the budget or the weather, Istona’s article dwells on architectural features that make these activities possible, adding the cheerful news that the installation of a nuclear plant in the near future would make things even better by heating up the atmosphere and preventing further air pollution. Although this article is virtually the same for both versions of the magazine, the French version conveys a stronger degree of identification when it is read alongside other descriptions of the city throughout the year. Thus, gazing at the skyline of Montreal from the roof of the French pavilion, reporter Hélène Pilotte admires her city as the most attractive exhibit of Expo, but also as a place that confirms her personal and collective identity: ‘Et j’ai été heureuse d’être là, à ce moment précis, consciente de vivre un moment privilégié.’31 In addition to providing a vision of the future, Expo and the centennial in general were an opportunity to review Canadian history and to pretend that this history had been a potent indicator of a glamorous destiny all along. One area that deserves separate study is the keepsakes produced for the centennial year to remind Canadians of all backgrounds of this important year, particularly those that – inadvertently or not – parody organizers’ strenuous efforts to fabricate a national identity. Chatelaine featured lists of souvenirs especially commissioned for the occasion, including Canadiana gift wrap, ‘scenic plates,’ ‘Great Seals trays,’ ‘Canadian character jugs,’ a game of Canadian Checkers ‘using the … mapleleaf symbol on the playing surface,’ floral cameos, and a special perfume named ‘1967’ with ‘a modern, unusually fresh … bouquet.’32 Some of these souvenirs are remarkable, such as the gently disrespectful but also quite sinister ‘Father of Confederation.’ This was a ‘silk-hatted mustachioed gentleman’ who would make either ‘a decorative cotton wall hanging’ or, if filled with ‘foam rubber, kapok, or authentically, with rye (seed),’ a three-dimensional ‘instant ancestor.’33 More problematic is the extensive commodification of First Nations art34 and the gender stereotyping of figurines, ‘carefully researched as to costume detail,’ that featured ‘a waltzing couple, woman with a butter churn, woman with a baby in a cradle, woman with a basket of apples, butcher, trapper, prosperous banker and woman

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with tray of freshly baked bread.’35 Also worthy of more extensive attention are the numerous interactive schemes, forerunners of today’s history reality shows such as Pioneer Quest or Quest for the Bay, that were designed to teach Canadians about their history. Inserted in leading Canadian newspapers, Weekend Magazine carried features on such historical play-acting variously entitled ‘Historic Home on the Range,’ ‘This Is Canada: Marching out of History,’ ‘Climbing for the Centennial’ or ‘Canada’s Longest, Wettest, Rip-roaringest Race,’36 that is, the centennial Canoe Race along the old voyageur route from Rocky Mountain House to fur-trading Montreal.37 As could be illustrated at some length in an extended study, there were quite a few groups of the population whose role in Canadian history was not well accommodated by such schemes.38 Although many of the souvenirs were, where applicable, issued in both anglophone and francophone versions and centennial activities organized by the federal government were generally bilingual, there were – as may well be expected – differences in the French and English perceptions of history, and Chatelaine and Châtelaine are no exceptions. In preparing their own out-of-town readers for historical Montreal, both January 1967 issues printed a feature on Old Montreal. The subtitle in the francophone version, ‘Le Vieux-Montréal: dernier-né des quartiers chics,’ has a more complex cultural resonance, however, where it is in keeping with the insistence throughout the magazine that the energy of the province arises out of traditions preserved against all anglophone odds. Thus, a chronology entitled ‘Les douze mois de l’année 1867’ in the July issue emphasizes dates of historical interest to Quebec and France, as well as international events that directly affected francophone Canada. Describing the excellence of contemporary FrenchCanadian food to be served at the Quebec pavilion, Châtelaine cites complimentary remarks made by seventeenth-century visitor Marc Lescarbot on local game and fish as proof that ‘notre tradition de bonne table’ received its ‘lettres de noblesse’ early on.39 A feature on antiques bears the title ‘Arts d’hier, trésors d’aujourd’hui,’ while an exhibition at Place Bonaventure documenting ‘Cent ans du progrès dans l’habitation et la façon de vivre’ showcases ‘une exposition de pièces anciennes qui feront un agréable contraste avec la production récente.’40 Furthermore, it was reassuring to find that the connections with France were strengthened by the ease with which that country too linked the old and the new. An article describing an exhibition of seventeenth-century artefacts at the French pavilion concludes with the emotional ‘La France, notre mère-patrie se souvient, elle aussi’ but then veers into a commentary on ‘son audace dans les pièces d’ameublement ultra-modernes’ that are on display on another floor.41 Some francophone visitors to Expo must have come a fair distance as well, but Châtelaine assumes that the typical visitor not only comes from Montreal but is also a sophisticated urbanite who has no difficulty formulating the appropriate insights. Throughout the summer of Expo, Châtelaine’s columns ‘Tout sur tout’ and ‘Aux mille trouvailles’ kept visitors up to date on exhibitions to visit, events to attend, items to purchase. Generally assuming that the magazine’s subscribers only needed to get on the Metro for yet another afternoon on the Expo grounds, these and other features assume a discriminating, well-educated, and elegant reader. She attends the fashion shows at the various international pavil-

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ions, observing that the models at the Soviet pavilion look healthier and ‘un peu plus en chair’ than their Western counterparts, admiring the multimedia fashion extravaganzas organized by the Czech, and looking forward to the choreographed performances of ‘Le Grand Boum de la mode canadienne’ at the Canadian pavilion.42 These excursions to other pavilions notwithstanding, however, the typical visitor assumes that the most reliable place for her to locate what she is looking for is the French pavilion, where one may find ‘un monde riche, hétéroclite, fascinant.’43 This world includes haute couture by ten leading Parisian designers shipped over on the liner France, which had also carried more than two thousand French visitors44 and appears to have been received with a similar enthusiasm as the French frigate La Capricieuse, sent more than one hundred years earlier to help re-establish diplomatic ties with Quebec for the first time since the Conquest. During a visit to ‘Gloires de Paris’ just in front of the French pavilion, the visitor, ‘surtout si vous êtes coquette,’45 can sample Guerlain or Patou perfumes (no centennial perfume for her, thank you, no matter how ‘modern’ and ‘unusually fresh’ the bouquet!). This visitor will also spend all afternoon looking at the interactive display of French literature and observe with approval that school children enjoy it too, even take notes.46 She will be determined to explore the last nooks and crannies of the French pavilion and discover, after climbing a hidden stairway to the fifth floor,47 an exhibition entitled ‘L’amitié franco-canadienne’ with maps, manuscripts, and other objects documenting early French colonization in Canada, all of which she will contemplate with warm approval, though there is surely some involuntary irony here considering De Gaulle’s infamous utterance ‘Vive le Québec libre!’ during his visit to Expo.48 On the seventh-floor terrace, she discovers the nanas by French artist Niki de Saint-Phalle, known for her flamboyant and erotic sculptures, and revisits them at dusk when, she regretfully admits, they are not at their most advantageous.49 Having been promised ‘de cuisine fine … et non de mets paysans,’ she will be critical of shortcomings in menu and service at the restaurant of the Quebec pavilion, and will have something to say about the failure of the same pavilion to showcase francophone artists.50 In an instance of magazine and readership failing to connect, both Chatelaine and Châtelaine writers were distraught when readers did not measure up to their standards of sophistication, and contributor Catherine Sinclair reported with ill-concealed dismay on women’s arts and crafts projects underway across the country, declaring many of them ‘trite and even asinine.’51 While the magazine was willing to print features displaying contributors’ questionable hygiene during their camping trips to Montreal (and to admit to bohemian practices in editors’ own lives), such generosity was apparently not always available for popular culture. Indeed, looking at it from this perspective, one wonders whether Culver’s eccentric travelogue was printed not so much as practical advice for other campers than as a cautionary illustration of the uncouth wave of visitors rolling in from the west. Yet some of the centennial projects dismissed as unsophisticated by the magazine were remarkably avant-garde in their invention of new meaning through traditional media such as ‘nationalist’ quilts and rugs.52 Occasionally, when the ambition of such an undertaking caught the eye of the media, the magazine had to backpedal even then, as was the case with Mrs Kenneth Sinclair’s ‘giant pictorial

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rug … depicting the Dominion of Canada,’ which made it onto the centennial train after being featured on television.53 In general, however, the magazine’s own ideas about fitting ways to celebrate the centennial did not always mesh with those of its readers, and Chatelaine/Châtelaine is seen to erect boundaries around the nationalist enterprise at the same time as it is seeking to tear down others. Genial notions from readers were printed, including the one that the Katimavik not be dismantled after the end of Expo but transformed into ‘une Méditerranée artificielle,’ in addition to constructing a hundred Katimaviks across the country.54 It made good sense for the editors to feature this particular letter, especially as the self-deprecating writer complimented the magazine for providing a safe, because non-masculine, place for making such off-the-cuff suggestions. This item appears in the letters-to-the-editor column at the back of Châtelaine, ‘Vous avez le dernier mot.’ Although they were selected carefully and edited for publication,55 these letters are as direct an expression of opinion by Châtelaine readers as one can find in the published magazine and a place where readers were free to vent their disagreements with the magazine’s philosophy, generally because they found it either too impractical or too feminist. A good touchstone for the former is the ‘Chatelaine Expo Home.’ This pavilion received extensive coverage, with equally extensive ‘adjacent’ commercial advertisement, in the May 1967 issue of both versions of the magazine, but appears to have been of little interest to its reporters afterwards and does not feature in Hélène Pilotte’s lavish farewell tour of Expo in the August issue. Was this lack of interest perhaps the reason why readers were permitted to criticize ‘la maison Châtelaine’ and left to wonder where the average family was going to find $30,000 to pay for a house that did not even have a place to put ‘la chaise-haute du bébé’ or keep pre-schoolers entertained?56 I am raising this question because there were other lapses into provincial attitude (as, one assumes, editors would have perceived it) that the magazine appears to have allowed into print only because one of its formidable contributors was lined up to deal firmly with them. Thus, a reader suggesting that the numerous nuns who had ‘envahi’ the grounds of Terre des Hommes were surely better off working or praying in their convents found herself sharply rebuked for her lack of generosity and her short-sightedness. Did she not understand that the sisters were busy collecting excellent suggestions for their teaching, and would she not be the first to complain if her children were not well taught?57 Another reader worried at what age it was safe to take the children to see the displays of European art featuring nudity and ‘scènes érotiques’ and was briskly informed that early exposure to such art would ensure that sex education proceeded ‘d’une façon plus eclairée et plus saine.’58 These particular responses came from Claire Kirkland-Casgrain, one of a number of high-calibre columnists at Châtelaine who were remarkable for their readiness to deal attentively both with mundane subjects and with larger ethical and political questions, and whose advice was so diverse as to be not infrequently at cross-purposes. In addition to its formidable editor Doris Anderson, Chatelaine counted Barbara Frum, Adrienne Clarkson, Christina McCall, and June Callwood among its regulars, all of them star journalists with long careers ahead of them and one of them a future governor general of Canada. Chroniqueuses and reporters at Châtelaine were no less impressive. They included Henriette Major, who held a degree in education from the Institut pédagogique de Montréal and became well

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known for her television series and children’s books; Hélène Pilotte, co-founder of l’Hexagone; and novelist Jovette Bernier. Editor Fernande Saint-Martin (married to the Hard-Edge painter Guido Molinari) came to her position with degrees in medieval studies, philosophy, French studies, and French literature and with six years of experience as director of the women’s page at La Presse. In 1968, a year after Expo, she submitted a doctoral dissertation in art history but was unable to defend it because Université de Montréal had failed to accept the doctoral program proposed by the Fine Arts department. However, in 1973, a year after she stepped down as editor of Châtelaine, she defended a dissertation on Samuel Beckett, having accepted the post of curator of Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 1972. Positions as an art historian at Université Laval and the Université du Québec à Montréal followed.59 The contributor with perhaps the most impressive credentials was KirklandCasgrain, one of whose last decisions as Quebec’s minister of cultural affairs was to ensure Saint-Martin’s 1972 appointment as curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Even more than Saint-Martin’s impressive credentials, Kirkland-Casgrain’s biography illustrates the almost superhuman efforts required of a woman in the sixties and early seventies who attempted to reconcile traditional and progressive feminine roles and, in this particular case, also assume the role of nationalist icon (federalist, French-Canadian, wife and mother, attractive career woman) thrust upon her by the context of the centennial. Dwelling on her complex background before discussing her column in Châtelaine will also help to explain the problematic nature of some of her views. She was a lawyer as well as the first woman elected to the legislative assembly of Quebec in 1961 and the first woman to be named cabinet minister in Quebec the following year. She was minister of communication and transport 1964–6 in Lesage’s cabinet but in the opposition while Expo was in progress, a position that allowed her to voice the occasional criticism against government practice, such as the introduction of a sales tax just prior to the official opening of the fair.60 In a memoir published in the English version of the magazine in 1975,61 two years after she had retired from politics, she candidly spoke about the difficulties of maintaining both her work schedule and family life. When she was elected in 1961, her children were six, five, and one years of age, and she ‘kept to a rigid schedule’ to see them regularly: ‘The House sat from Tuesday morning until Friday noon, so I would leave home early Tuesday morning. Since members did not have to sit Wednesday night, I usually flew home to stay overnight with my children and then flew back early Thursday. Then on Friday afternoon it was home for the weekend.’62 In her response to a reader who wants to know more about her cooking skills, she provides charming details about dinner with René Lévesque and other well-known politicians, but her memoir describes how ‘on weekends [she] had to prepare a whole week’s worth of meals because [her] family did not like the housekeeper’s cooking.’ She adds, ‘I became adept at preparing meals and speeches at the same time.’63 Her marriage disintegrated under the pressure, and she filed for divorce in 1971 (one of her most impressive accomplishments having been the introduction of Bill 16, giving married women legal rights). Separatist activities placed exceptional strains on politicians during the period. During the October crisis, ‘bodyguards were assigned to all members

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of the cabinet and their families,’ and Kirkland-Casgrain feared that ‘Kirkland,’ her grandfather’s Scottish name, would make her a special target.64 A ‘plot to murder [her]’ was discovered in late 1972, and the escalation of security and ‘constant fear of physical harm’ became decisive factors in her decision to retire from politics. As minister of cultural affairs (and in her columns for Châtelaine, as we shall see), she made it clear that she was not in agreement with indépendantiste cultural positions, by refusing Michel Tremblay’s Les belles soeurs the subsidy to take the play to Paris: ‘I didn’t think it was a good example of Québécois art since it was written in joual,’ the latter being ‘a rather folksy version of the French language,’ as she describes it.65 Given her schedule, it is all the more remarkable that Kirkland-Casgrain maintained a regular column in Châtelaine, ‘Voila ce que j’en pense,’ between 1964 and 1969, in which she not only taught readers whose views she considered narrowminded a lesson or two, but in which she also patiently responded to queries about the ‘maxi-jupe,’ advised on where to place a visiting dignitary at the dinner table, or pondered the question whether man was descended from the ape.66 Indeed, some of the queries were such that one reader was incensed at their triviality, considering them an imposition on Kirkland-Casgrain, ‘une femme intelligente, instruite, cultivée, qui possède une très forte personnalité’ and recommending that such inquiries were better off in the ‘courrier de coeur’ section.67 In dealing with seemingly mundane subjects, however, Kirkland-Casgrain often tackled larger questions, and she encouraged letter writers to think of their inquiries in broader terms as well. Thus her response to a question early in 1967 about her own plans to visit Expo turned into a lesson about the pressures of time on a senior female politician with children. A mother inquiring whether, with incidents of rape on the rise, it was advisable to allow her daughters to wear mini-skirts is told that the example of Expo’s glamorous female visitors (Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, the Crown Princess of Denmark, Princess Grace of Monaco, Jacqueline Kennedy) might convince the girls otherwise without their parent having to be too heavyhanded about teaching the lesson.68 Her responses to questions about her favourite pavilions (October 1967), about the failure of the Quebec pavilion to display the artistic riches of the province (September 1967), about press coverage of separatist protests during the arrival of the Confederation Train in Dorval (November 1967), but especially her defence of Confederation (March 1967) and high hopes for the conciliatory effect accruing from the work of the Royal Commission for Bilingualism and Biculturalism (February 1968) all reveal a liberal, moderate, and idealist mindset, as does her sharp answer to a reader’s complaint that there was little acknowledgment of war, violence, hunger, and poverty at the fair. There was plenty of evidence if one only bothered to look, she wrote, singling out the pavilion of Cuba as the one where the walls were covered with photos documenting ‘les atrocités fascistes les plus révoltantes et les plus troublantes’ (August 1967).69 Somewhat incongruously considering that this display proves her point but also logically considering her own ideological sympathies, she concludes that this is the pavilion she liked the least. Given the radically progressive nature of many of her accomplishments, some of Kirkland-Casgrain’s advice does miss the mark. For instance, she brushes aside a correspondent’s concern – fuelled by newspaper

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reports – that her daughters’ miniskirts may provoke sexual assault. In a response peppered with ironical quotation marks, she offers the practical advice discussed above but also asserts that, in her legal practice, she has more often than not found the alleged victim of rape to have been consenting (January 1968). The response is all the more remarkable as ‘Voilà ce que j’en pense’ comes with the disclaimer that the author does not offer legal advice. For Kirkland-Casgrain and other contributors to Châtelaine, de Gaulle’s visit and his infamous exclamation ‘Vive le Québec libre!’ became a pivotal moment in the contemporary relationship between France and Quebec. Reflections about this connection culminated in the November 1967 issue with the dossier on ‘Les Françaises et nous’ and Fernande Saint-Martin’s editorial, which asked the question ‘La France peut-elle devenir notre mère-patrie?’ From the beginning of its coverage of Expo, the French Châtelaine combined its advice on how to enjoy the festivities with worried reflections about the future of francophone Canada. The favourite trope of English Canada for the country in its centennial year was that of a vigorous youth finally breaking free from colonial and other dependencies. By contrast, Châtelaine’s book reviewer Paule Saint-Onge writes in a discussion of Solange Chaput-Rolland’s embittered travelogue Mon pays, Québec ou le Canada? about ‘le géant malade qu’est la Confédération’ while Saint-Martin in the editorial cited above speaks of ‘une certaine mentalité d’orphelin’ that needs to be overcome.70 The same sentiment informs Hélène Pilotte’s long, elegiac essay ‘Fête dans les îles,’ prepared in collaboration with photographers Michel Monticelli and Chet Rhoden and published in the August 1967 issue. Pilotte, who claims to have visited Expo every single day for a month, speaks of the proximity of the French and Quebec pavilions as that of a long-awaited family reunion, and she refuses to consider purely coincidental the fact that France is positioned so as to separate Quebec from Great Britain (though organizers probably intended to underscore the connection between the three rather than the separation between the two). She does concede that, across the way, ‘le Pavillon du Canada fait la synthèse des richesses de toutes les provinces.’ While the implied analogy is one of France as a muchloved and protective parent, Pilotte is annoyed that Quebec does not make more of its determined and solitary survival, thus establishing itself as offspring that does its parent proud by commanding respect for its own achievements. Eschewing Pilotte’s nostalgia, Kirkland-Casgrain takes the family metaphor a step further when she writes of her disillusionment with de Gaulle and the France he stands for.71 She criticizes both politician and nation for their paternalist, neo-colonial attitude in claiming the right to travel the ‘chemin du roy’ in itinerary as well as in attitude. Coming from a woman of Kirkland-Casgrain’s stature, this view all but equals a call for divorce. The reflections of Châtelaine’s contributors on the nature of Quebec’s identity resemble those found in other types of centennial discourse and are, by themselves, perhaps nothing new. But in a magazine that regularly featured poignant stories about adoption and caregiving, about the difficulties of breaking out of an unwanted marriage and establishing an existence of one’s own in the absence of legal autonomy or economic security, such tropes slide more easily from the metaphorical into the material than they would in a more consist-

Expo 67, Canadian Women, and Chatelaine/Châtelaine  73

ently abstract discourse. For this reason alone these stories would be worthy of our scholarly attention, as are the stories of women in Châtelaine’s anglophone counterpart. Even after Expo had closed, the differences between anglophone and francophone coverage of Expo continued. Doris Anderson’s New-Year editorial, ‘Blowups and Put-Downs of 1967,’ did give Expo pride of place as turning out to be ‘more splendid and dazzling than all of our most extravagant expectations.’ Seventeenyear-old Douglas McEachen from Regina must have shared her view enthusiastically: as Chatelaine of January 1968 reported, he won the magazine’s Man in the Home Pavilion and cashed it in for his future university education.72 However, in the following months there was little to match the sustained interest among Châtelaine writers and readers. For the latter, Terre des Hommes provided ‘Beauté et Détente à Votre Portée’73 well beyond the event, and the 1968 ‘reprise’ on a more modest scale brought another flurry of Expo-related coverage, including an update on the offerings of ‘Terre des Hommes, renouvelée, rajeunie’ and a photo essay documenting the attractions of a facility that no longer needed to be shared with fifty million visitors.74 However, the aftermath of Expo also gave rise to more critical and cautious observations. As mentioned earlier, Editor-in-Chief Fernande Saint-Martin deplored the city’s neglect of ordinary Montrealers during Expo and after the event, and she proposed a pointed shift from ‘Terre des hommes’ to ‘notre conception de ce qu’est une terre humaine’ to remedy the situation.75 One reader made the wary inquiry to Kirkland-Casgrain whether the 1968 ‘reprise’ was worth the effort, to which she responded with an expression of hope that the grounds be transformed into ‘une entreprise québécoise’ and an extended showcase of ‘Montréal, métropole du Canada.’76 Perhaps the most impressive evidence of the delayed effects of Expo occurs in the magazine’s 1968 special issue on First Nations People. Both language versions, mainly authored by Barbara Frum and Hélène Pilotte respectively, link their discussions to the remarkable showing of Native people at the Pavilion of Canada’s Indians.77 In her New Year review of 1967, Doris Anderson praised the pavilion for ‘telling it the way it was and is,’78 and the ‘Canadian Indians 1968’ issue in November elaborates on this laconic statement by singling out Aboriginal artists and activists who distinguished themselves during the centennial year. They include Ojibwa Norval Morriseau, for creating ‘the outdoors mural’ for the pavilion; Chipewyan Alex Janvier for his part in designing the pavilion; Mohawk potter Elda Smith for providing Secretary of State Judy LaMarsh with gifts for foreign dignitaries; and Iroquois Ernest Benedict for conceiving the ‘Indian Traveling College,’ a venture that was partly inspired by the Centennial Train and Caravans.79 Yet significant as they are, these acknowledgments are restricted to brief biographical sketches. By contrast, Châtelaine offers a penetrating look at the linkage between Native prise de conscience and Expo, focuses on the difficult relationship between city and reservation that was thrown into relief by the event, and pays sharp attention to the situation of Native women in particular. Respectful and interested, Hélène Pilotte’s work for this issue differs remarkably from the condescension that characterized her coverage of the Pavilion of Canada’s Indians while the fair was in progress.80 In her interview with two of the pavilion’s

74  Eva-Marie Kröller

Montagnais hostesses, Rollande Rock and Philomène Desterres (photographed against Morisseau’s mural, one in hostess uniform, the other in Montagnais regalia), the reporter learns about their backgrounds and aspirations and also about the political work already accomplished. She learns of the networking opportunities offered by Expo, but also about the ephemeral nature of the experience if no robust infrastructure is put into place to sustain it. Hostess Rollande Rock wants to be ‘speakerine à la radio,’ hoping for future broadcasts in indigenous languages.81 The frequency with which radio is mentioned as a desirable and influential occupation is noteworthy: elsewhere, the issue introduces Monique Nolet, ‘la cousine de Jean-Paul Nolet,’82 a well known Radio-Canada announcer whose Aboriginal background was highlighted at the Pavilion of Canada’s Indians. These discussions further illustrate how Expo, sometimes without its organizers’ intention, triggered important and broad questions about histories that were not accommodated by the officially scripted narrative of the Canadian centennial. The special mandate of Chatelaine and Châtelaine was the welfare of Canadian women, and – as one reader gratefully pointed out when she feared her ideas would be considered insubstantial – both magazines provided safer environments than ‘une revue essentiellement masculine’ in which to raise the necessary questions.83 It is apropos that the last reports on Expo in 1967 should coincide with questions of how to best prepare a submission to the upcoming Royal Commission on the Status of Women. Editor Fernande Saint-Martin sets Expo and the work of the Commission side by side as potentially groundbreaking events, but concludes that, because it will concern itself with practical aspects of women’s existence, the latter will eventually reveal itself to be ‘l’initiative la plus féconde.’84 That the English and French versions of the magazine should not always agree in their understanding of femininity only further proves the point that, at Expo and elsewhere at the year’s celebrations, there were more versions of Canadian identity to be considered than the centennial commission had bargained for. NOTES 1 My thanks to the librarians at the Fraser-Hickson Institute in Montreal for making rare copies of Châtelaine available to me, and to Rhona Richman Kenneally for drawing my attention to their existence. 2 A year earlier, Wilcox educated readers in the meaning of Expo chic by offering a fashion spread of models in Courrèges- and Givenchy-inspired outfits, the whole photographed against a backdrop of slide projections showing Expo architecture, but the assumption was clearly not that the average reader of the magazine would be able to afford such clothes herself. See Vivian Wilcox, ‘Expo 67 Bound,’ Chatelaine, March 1966, 44–8. 3 Doris Anderson, ‘The Happening of the Year – Ours (editorial),’ Chatelaine, March 1967, 1. 4 Henriette Major, ‘Tout sur tout,’ Châtelaine, March 1967, 8. See also Eva-Marie Kröller, ‘Expo ’67: Canada’s Camelot?’ Canadian Literature 152–3, special issue Remembering the Sixties (Spring-Summer 1997): 41–4.

Expo 67, Canadian Women, and Chatelaine/Châtelaine  75 5 Fernande Saint-Martin, ‘Le peuple de Montréal doit-il être sacrifié aux touristes?’ editorial, Châtelaine, May 1968, 1. 6 Doris Anderson, ‘Chatelaine,’ The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2006 Historica Foundation of Canada, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params =A1ARTA0001540 (accessed 29 September 2007). 7 Managing editor Jean Wright, quoted in Doris Anderson, Rebel Daughter: An Autobiography (Toronto: KeyPorter, 1996), 174. As former editor, Anderson may not be the most impartial observer, but her views are confirmed by others. See Valerie Korinek, Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 3 and passim; Judy Rebick, Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution (Toronto: Penguin, 2005), 5 and passim. 8 Wendy Warburton, ‘Hard Times at Chatelaine,’ Ottawa Citizen, 8 July 2006. 9 Lisa Rundle, ‘What Women Want,’ This Magazine, January-February (2005), http:// www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2005/01/whatwomenwant.php (accessed 29 September 2007); John Geddes, ‘Magazine Deal between Canada, US,’ Maclean’s, 7 June 1999. Much of the discussion of Chatelaine’s recent difficulties in maintaining its former intellectual stature appears to be concerned with ‘adjacency,’ that is, the close linkage between specific coverage and advertisement that has become the rule in magazine publishing. See, Warburton, ‘Hard Times.’ By contrast, advertisements in Chatelaine during the period covered in this paper were often in startling contrast with the stories. For example, the casual approach to hygiene defiantly practised by some of its contributors and editors (to be discussed later in this essay) sat side by side with advertisements for feminine-hygiene products ensuring a ‘dainty’ solution for ‘the intimate, embarrassing problem married women face.’ See Norforms advertisement, Chatelaine, March 1967, 88. 10 Korinek, Roughing It, 35. Des Rivières briefly outlines connections between the English and French versions of the magazine, but a systematic comparative study remains to be written. Marie-José Des Rivières, Châtelaine et la littérature (1960–1975) (Montreal: l’Hexagone, 1992), 85–7. 11 See for example the regular ‘What’s New’ column or Carol Taylor, ‘Chatelaine Shops for Centennial Souvenirs,’ Chatelaine, July 1967, 66. 12 Louise Gareau-Des Bois, ‘Un jour, un soir,’ Châtelaine, October 1967, 32–3, 89–93. 13 Elsbeth Heaman, The Inglorious Arts of Peace: Exhibitions in Canadian Society during the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 112. 14 Jacqueline Hooper and Eleanor Culver, ‘Expo 67: Here We Come,’ Chatelaine, May 1967, 42. 15 Pat Carney, untitled column, Vancouver Sun, 31 March 1967, n.p. Before becoming a Tory cabinet minister and a senator, Pat Carney wrote for Canadian publications, women’s magazines included. The short-lived City Woman for example carried several of her features. 16 Korinek, Roughing It, 280. 17 Ibid. The article is Blanche Gunton, ‘We Drove the Kids to Alaska,’ Chatelaine, January 1952, 8–9, 50–1. 18 ‘Chatelaine Centre,’ Chatelaine, April 1953, 1. 19 Gunton, ‘We Drove the Kids,’ 9. 20 Mark Satin, ed., Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada (Toronto: House of Anansi,

76  Eva-Marie Kröller 1968), 62. In 1966, Chatelaine printed an article by Marilyn Leese describing her family’s trip ‘around the world,’ including visits to major cities. Urban travel was therefore not ignored in the magazine, but it was new to consider a Canadian city a destination as desirable as Florence, Paris, or Tokyo. However, methods of transport and accommodation not conventionally associated with urban travel posed special challenges. Wilcox’s fashion advice about ‘What to Wear at Expo’ cited above strikes one as a panicked and, to this reader, hilarious moment of realization of what the consequences of that combination could, at worst, turn out to be. Chatelaine had earlier published advice on the etiquette of travel, including the warning that women wearing slacks would be certain to receive poor service (see ‘Kate Aiken Tells You How to Travel,’ Chatelaine, June 1952, 14–15), but the issue was not as overwhelmingly one of national reputation as it became with Expo. 21 Hooper and Culver, ‘Expo 67,’ 169. 22 Ibid., 171. It is interesting to compare Culver’s flippancy with Gunton’s description of her family’s trip to Alaska. The Guntons had seven children, but undertook their expedition only when four of them had left home. There are details on suitable camping attire and laundry arrangements, some of them humorous, but the closest Gunton ever comes to Culver is her riff on the ‘sock bag’ containing ‘socks of every condition of wearability,’ the most frayed of which ‘could be worn once and thrown away.’ Gunton, ‘We Drove the Kids,’ 50. 23 See Korinek’s discussion of Doris Anderson’s editorials ‘All Hair Combed and No Knotty Laces,’ ‘A Summer’s Day Confession,’ and ‘Here’s Dirt in Your Eye, House,’ all of which rebel against the tyranny of flawless housekeeping. Korinek, Roughing It, 314–18.   A feature on ‘How Readers Beat the Housework Rat Race’ includes punctilious lists of daily, monthly, and annual cleaning routines and of Christmas baking programs that start in the early fall, but also a lengthy letter extolling the cavalier housekeeping habits of British women as more conducive to personal freedom and ‘get[ting] on with the real job of being people.’ The letter was by none other than Carol Shields, then virtually unknown as a writer, who along with her young children had accompanied her husband to Britain where he was doing post-graduate work. ‘How Readers Beat the Housework Rat Race,’ Chatelaine, September 1966, 106–7, 146. 24 Korinek, Roughing It, 89. 25 Culver’s failure to equate motherhood, even of nine children, with willingly endured martyrdom clashes with a medical note elsewhere in the magazine that chastises women who are childless by choice and whose allegedly excessive desire for control results in psychosomatic illness. Culver can certainly not be blamed for ‘lead[ing] a self-centred existence,’ but neither can she be faulted for neglecting her own (and her husband’s) interests. ‘What’s New,’ Chatelaine, May 1967, 12, 14. 26 Hooper and Culver, ‘Expo 67,’ 178. 27 In another failure to practise ‘adjacency,’ Chatelaine also reported on medical evidence, partly related to dieting schemes, that ‘some women become obsessed with ‘internal cleanliness’’ and fall prey to ‘laxative addiction.’ ‘What’s New,’ Chatelaine, August 1967, 8. 28 Hooper and Culver, ‘Expo 67,’ 171. 29 Ibid., 168.

Expo 67, Canadian Women, and Chatelaine/Châtelaine  77 3 0 Cole Harris, ‘The B and B: Book 1,’ Canadian Forum 48 (1968): 250. 31 Hélène Pilotte, Michel Monticelli, and Chet Rhoden, ‘Fête dans les îles,’ Châtelaine, August 1967, 21. 32 ‘What’s New,’ May 1967, 6, 8; July 1967, 8, 10. 33 ‘What’s New,’ October 1967, 18. 34 Taylor, ‘Chatelaine Shops for Centennial Souvenirs.’ See, for example, one of the ‘character jugs’ issued by Royal Doulton, ‘showing a chief of the Blackfoot tribe, with feathered headdress’ (see ‘What’s New,’ May 1967), or the work of potter Elda Smith discussed in the conclusion of this essay. From a Native perspective, Smith’s involvement was complicated: the Queen received a piece inspired by ‘motifs from old Iroquois wampum belts’ that Smith had been told by a chief ‘never to sell … because of its significance. So I gave it away.’ ‘Aware, Involved, Committed: The New Indian,’ Chatelaine, November 1968, 53. The gifts jointly chosen for presentation to foreign dignitaries by Maryon Pearson, Pauline Vanier, and Judy LaMarsh included ‘a shallow platter of brilliant hand-fired enamel, a hand-woven blanket, a Buffalo carving, an Eskimo print or sculpture, an Indian basket or mask.’ Judy LaMarsh, Memoirs of a Bird in a Golden Cage (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 200. 35 ‘What’s New,’ July 1967, 6. 36 ‘Climbing for the Centennial,’ Weekend Magazine, 7 October 1967, 2–8; Patrick Nagle, ‘Historic Home on the Range: A Centennial Restoration, the O’Keeffe Ranch in B.C. Once Was Almost an Empire,’ Weekend Magazine, 9 September 1967, 9–10; Paul Rimstead, ‘Canada’s Longest, Wettest, Rip-Roaringest Race,’ Vancouver Province, 22 July 1967, n.p.; ‘This Is Canada: Marching Out of History,’ Weekend Magazine, 9 September 1967, 12. Also see LaMarsh, Bird in a Gilded Cage, 191–4. 37 The race was revived for the 2005 centennial celebrations of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and numerous museums along the route of the 1967 race contain mementos of it. 38 There were a number of counter-activities. For instance, fourteen Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq organized their own equivalent to the centennial Canoe Race by performing ‘a onethousand-mile, forty-five-day canoe trip from Cape Breton to Montreal to relive an 1894 treaty signing between their people and the Quebec Iroquois.’ Pierre Berton, 1967: The Last Good Year (Toronto: Doubleday, 1997), 48. The idea for the centennial Canoe Race had come from Gene Rhéaume, first Métis MP (1963–5) since Louis Riel and project director of Indians and the Law (1967), a report prepared by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Aboriginal people were involved in the race, but the media coverage of their contribution tends to be dismissive. See Rimstead, ‘Canada’s Longest, Wettest, Rip-Roaringest Race.’ 39 ‘Vive la cuisine du Québec,’ Châtelaine, May 1967, 66, 77. 40 ‘Arts d’hier, trésors d’aujourdh’hui,’ Châtelaine, July 1967, 48; Major, ‘Tout sur tout,’ March 1967. 41 Major, ‘Tout sur tout,’ August 1967, 4. 42 Major, ‘Tout sur tout,’ July 1967, 14. 43 Pilotte, Monticelli, and Rhoden, ‘Fête dans les îles,’ 60. 44 Yves Jasmin, La Petite Histoire d’Expo 67 (Montreal: Québec/Amérique, 1997), 139. 45 Laurette Tougas, ‘Aux mille trouvailles,’ Châtelaine, August 1967, 8. 46 Pilotte, Monticelli, and Rhoden, ‘Fête dans les îles,’ 60. 47 Such accidental discoveries, the result of deliberate or involuntary failures to follow

78  Eva-Marie Kröller the scripted path of the exhibition, are a frequent trope in writing about world expositions. See, for example, Canadian school teacher Andrew Spedon’s desperate search for the Canadian display at the 1867 Paris exhibition. Eva-Marie Kröller, Canadian Travellers in Europe, 1851–1900 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), 154–5. The parallel to travel writing, where travellers rebel against, or are forsaken by, their guidebooks, is particularly strong here. 48 Major, ‘Tout sur tout,’ August 1967. 49 ‘Nana’ is French slang for ‘woman, chick, girlfriend.’ According to the translator’s website proz.com, the expression is now ‘un peu daté.’ Major, ‘Tout sur tout,’ June 1967; Pilotte, Monticelli, and Rhoden, ‘Fête dans les îles,’ 58. 50 ‘Vive la cuisine du Québec,’ 66; see Fernande Saint-Martin, ‘Comme dit la chanson,’ editorial, Châtelaine, June 1967, 3. 51 Catherine Sinclair, ‘What Women Are Doing for Canada’s Centennial,’ Chatelaine, April 1967, 38. This in a magazine featuring instructions for ‘a Canadiana Tapestry,’ ‘centennial Rug,’ and ‘Petit Point … Canadian Emblems’ (‘Embroider,’ ‘Hook,’ ‘Petit Point’) as well as offering advice on how to launder ‘family heirlooms from trunks and attics’ (‘Homemaker’s Diary’) or to organize a ‘centennial Dress-up’ or ‘pageant’ (‘What’s New in the Shops’ [May 1966], 6; ‘What’s New’ [October 1966], 4, 6). 52 See, for example, ‘The Grand National: Constructions of Canada,’ an annual quilt exhibition, and ‘The Quilt of Belonging’ initiated by Canadian artist Esther Bryan. Janice Weaver, The Quilt of Belonging: Stitching Together the Stories of a Nation. Toronto: Maple Tree Press, 2006. 53 ‘What’s New,’ May 1967, 6. 54 Clémente Létourneau, ‘Un Katimavik, cent Katimaviks (Vous avez le dernier mot),’ Châtelaine, November 1967,108. Katimavik, meaning ‘meeting place in Inuktitut,’ was ‘an inverted pyramid’ at the centre of the Canadian pavilion. Next to it (and possibly included in this reader’s ‘Mediterranean’ vision) was an ‘enormous stylized tree adorned with 1,500 fall-coloured leaves made up of photographs of Canadians.’ See ‘Pavilions – Canada,’ Expo 67: A Virtual Experience, Library and Archives Canada, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/05/0533/0533020201_e.html (accessed 29 September 2007). 55 In the April 1968 issue, chroniqueuse Kirkland-Casgrain explains the process of selection and preliminary editing at some length to one reader who was disappointed that her letter had not been featured. ‘Voilà ce que j’en pense,’ avril 1968, 14. 56 P.E. Perreault, ‘Les maisons Châtelaine: à repenser (Vous avez le dernier mot),’ Châtelaine, August 1967, 68. 57 It should be pointed out in all fairness, however, that it was not only this reader but also reporter Hélène Pilotte who contemplated the ‘dix mille religieuses ayant envahi l’Expo’ with some suspicion. Pilotte, Monticelli, and Rhoden, ‘Fête dans les îles,’ 60. 58 Kirkland-Casgrain, ‘Voilà ce que j’en pense,’ August 1967. See also des Rivières’s observation that some letters to the editor demonstrated ‘plusieurs écarts […] entre l’idéologie du magazine et les propos de certains éléments du lectorat.’ Des Rivières, Châtelaine et la littérature, 76. Given the magazine’s selective practices, the question remains which dissensions were allowed into print and which ones were not.

Expo 67, Canadian Women, and Chatelaine/Châtelaine  79 59 ‘Fernande Saint-Martin,’ L’Infocentre littéraire des écrivains québécois, http://www.litterature.org/recherche/ecrivains/saint-martin-fernande-420/ (accessed 29 September 2007). 60 ‘Voilà ce que j’en pense,’ June 1967. 61 Oddly enough, the item does not appear to have been picked up by Châtelaine. 62 Claire Kirkland-Casgrain, ‘A Woman in Politics: My Own Story,’ March 1975, 68. 63 ‘Voilà ce que j’en pense,’ September 1967; Kirkland-Casgrain, ‘Woman in Politics,’ 68. 64 In addition to persuading separatists that her background was not pure laine, her name also caused difficulties when she first stood for election, and the various mutations it has undergone during her lifetime may be read as a model exercise in asserting female identity in public office (and beyond): ‘during the election, an old Duplessis-appointed judge ruled that I had to run on the name Casgrain, but a lawyer friend, now Judge André Nadeau, ruled that the hyphen was legal. Finally I had to run as Casgrain, Kirkland Claire – as if Kirkland was my middle name.’ Kirkland-Casgrain, ‘Woman in Politics,’ 66. See also Royal Commission for the Status of Women in Canada, Report (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1970), 234–5, on the question of names.   In a conversation with McGill News, she explained that she dropped the ‘Marie’ from her double-barrelled first name in order to accommodate her maiden name along with her married name. After her divorce, she called herself Marie-Claire Kirkland, and after her second marriage she became known as Marie-Claire Strover. See Janice Paskey, ‘A Conversation with Marie-Claire Kirkland,’ McGill News, Spring 1998, http:// news-archive.mcgill.ca/sp98/kirkland.htm (accessed 29 September 2007). 65 Kirkland-Casgrain, ‘Woman in Politics, 72. 66 ‘Voilà ce que j’en pense,’ November 1967; December 1967. 67 Madeleine Masson, ‘Une chronique ou un courrier de coeur? (Vous avez le dernier mot),’ Châtelaine, janvier 1963, 52. 68 ‘Voilà ce que j’en pense,’ janvier 1968. See Aurora Wallace’s essay on the miniskirt in this volume. 69 Oddly enough, Kirkland-Casgrain does not include The Eighth Day/Le huitième jour (1965), Charles Gagnon’s powerful film in the Christian pavilion. On Charles Gagnon, see Monika Kin Gagnon’s essay in this volume. 70 Paule Saint-Onge, ‘Châtelaine a lu pour vous,’ Châtelaine, February 1967, 78; Fernande Saint-Martin, ‘La France peut-elle redevenir notre mère-patrie?’ editorial, Châtelaine, November 1967, 1. 71 ‘Voilà ce que j’en pense,’ September 1967. 72 ‘At Chatelaine,’ Chatelaine, January 1968, 3. 73 This is the subtitle of Hélène Pilotte and Michel Monticelli, ‘Terre des hommes revisitée,’ Châtelaine, August 1968, 16–19. 74 Major, ‘Tout sur tout,’ May 1968; Pilotte and Monticelli, ‘Terre des hommes revisitée.’ 75 Saint-Martin, ‘Le peuple de Montréal.’ 76 ‘Voilà ce que j’en pense,’ April 1968, 14. 77 Brydon provides an excellent discussion of the Indians of Canada pavilion but does not, to any extent, address the question of women. See Sherry Brydon, ‘The Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67,’ American Indian Art Magazine 22, no. 3 (1997): 54–63. For another discussion of the Indians of Canada Pavilion, see Randal Arthur Rogers, ‘Man

80  Eva-Marie Kröller and His World: An Indian, a Secretary and a Queer Child: Expo 67 and the Nation in Canada,’ Master’s thesis, Concordia University, 1999. 78 Doris Anderson, ‘Blowups and Put-Downs of 1967,’ editorial, Chatelaine, January 1968, 1. 79 ‘At Chatelaine,’ Chatelaine, November 1968, 4; ‘Aware, Involved, Committed,’ 53, 55. In her memoirs, Judy LaMarsh remembers that visitors of the Centennial Train complained about ‘the prominence given to Sitting Bull who was an “American” Indian,’ adding that ‘an explanation soothed away the complaint.’ She does not elaborate on the nature of the explanation (187). 80 The passage deserves quoting at some length: ‘Pour clore [le] périple canadien, je me suis naturellement rendue jusqu’au Pavillon des Indiens. J’ai savouré leur humour [sic] et leur impertinence. Leur présence à l’Expo est l’occasion d’un violent réquisitoire contre les Blancs qui, prétendent-ils, leur ont volé leurs terres, enseigné une religion dont ils n’avaient aucun besoin et imposé une mode de vie contraire à leurs désirs et à leurs traditions. J’ai envié le petit garçon indien qui se rebelle contre l’école parce que la cloche le met hors de lui, pauvre enfant habitué à dire l’heure du jour d’après le soleil. Je me suis assise au coin du feu, comme ils m’en priaient, pour “bavarder” avec eux et j’ai écouté la bande enregistrée dans laquelle ils lançaient cette promesse: “Un jour, nous aussi, nous serons quelqu’un, comme vous qui nous écoutez.” C’est un pavillon à inclure dans un tour même rapide, de l’Expo.’ Pilotte, Monticelli, and Rhoden, ‘Fête dans les îles,’ 61.   The general seriousness of the coverage in the ‘Canadian Indians 1968’ issue notwithstanding, both versions of the magazine also demonstrate that public perception had as yet far to go: a fashion spread titled ‘Indians 1968: Pow Wow’ (‘Jolie Squaw’ in French) illustrates how ‘suddenly everyone’s whooping it up, Indian fashion.’ One also wonders about the CBC’s announcement of ‘The Long Hundred,’ a program about ‘this vigorous, sprawling, squawling and often kooky country.’ Vivian Wilcox, ‘Indians 1968: Pow Wow,’ Chatelaine, November 1968, 56; ‘The Long Hundred,’ CBC advertisement, Chatelaine, March 1967, 88. 81 Hélène Pilotte, ‘Etre Indienne au Québec,’ Châtelaine, November 1968, 56. Rock has since made a name for herself as one of the initiators behind Montagnaises de paroles (1993), a film and book about the situation of women in several Montagnais communities. At the time of her interview with Pilotte, Desterres had been with the Bureau des affaires indiennes of both Bersimis and Quebec. She also appeared in Jacques Brault’s film Entre la mer et l’eau douce (1967), acting alongside Claude Gauthier, Geneviève Bujold, Gérald Godin, and Pauline Julien, and more recently in Arthur Lamothe’s Le silence des fusils (1996). 82 Châtelaine, November 1968, 42. 83 Létourneau, ‘Un Katimavik, cent Katimaviks.’ 84 Fernande Saint-Martin, ‘Un cadeau à offrir à toutes les femmes du monde,’ editorial, Châtelaine, April 1967, 3.

5 Obsolescence as Progress and Regression: Technology, Temporality, and Architecture at Expo 67 tom mcdonough

Varying notions of obsolescence circulated in the discourse around the architectures of the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal. But to consider the notion of obsolescence is already, in a larger sense, to open up the question of temporality, of what is past, what is no longer. A profitable point of departure is an observation about past-ness, suggested by an exhibit within Rudolf Gutbrod and Frei Otto’s German pavilion (fig. 5.1), one of the most iconic structures of this fair: among the machine tools and microscopes, amid the images of pre- and postwar life in Germany, there was a display documenting the great painters and architects of the Bauhaus which included a model of Mies van der Rohe’s earlier national pavilion from the 1929 Barcelona exposition, as well as one of the famous chairs designed for that space. It is immediately striking to note that the thirty-eight years separating the construction of these two exhibition structures is precisely the temporal gap separating ourselves from the 1967 fair, and our task as historians and as critical critics (as we used to say) will be to hold all three of these moments in mind simultaneously, not so much as a unity, but in dialectical tension the ones with the others, the better to comprehend the very real historical breaks, the temporal distances, that are interposed between them. Now the first thing to be said about the re-staging of Mies’s classic structure in the 1967 German pavilion is that it was precisely meant to erase that distance, to repress those breaks. Indeed, ideologically the exhibit had a plainly obvious message for the viewer, which was to insist that the postwar democratic society of West Germany was the rightful successor to and continuation of the Weimar Republic and had fully and successfully purged itself of the taint of the Nazi regime. This was intended to be seen as true of the architectural realm as well as of the political and social realms, for certainly the visitor was meant to compare Mies’s structure to that of the present fair. Here too continuity, a seamless progression from past to present, would predominate: Gutbrod and Otto were positioned as the inheritors of a modern lineage of experimentation whose outstanding German exemplar was the designer of the 1929 pavilion. The latter’s free, open, and elastic plan was taken up and pushed further in their tent structure, so that the dual qualities of modernist space – namely, spatial continuity (both between interior and exterior space, and internal to the building itself) and incorporeal structure – attained a new limpidity. From Mies’s slender skeletal framework of steel to Gutbrod and

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5.1  Exterior of the Federal Republic of Germany pavilion at Expo 67. Copyright Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2008). Library and Archives Canada/Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/e000990939.

Otto’s steel cables and masts was merely a logical development in structural form, the advance of a shared paradigm. Or so we might infer from this display. But despite these superficial similarities, it is the profound disjunction between the architectural project of 1929 and that of 1967 for which we must account. And this entails, first, acknowledging the dual, if not contradictory, character of the Barcelona pavilion itself: that is, its ambivalent position with regard to what we might call the ontological status of its space. Of particular interest is the way that the architectural volume was broken up in order to create a continuous space, and the way that the vertical planes which cut this space never formed closed, geometrically static areas but rather produced an uninterrupted flow.1 What was countenanced here was nothing less than the dissolution of the room (a closed, geometrically static area) as the fundamental syntactic unit of architectural vocabulary, a destruction which – as Fredric Jameson has noted – could serve to ‘open up some radically new space which might enable

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… radically new ways of living.’2 On the other hand, however, Mies continually retreated from the extremity of this position. For the volumes of the pavilion were also experienced by visitors as ‘elegant and suggestive of the drawing-room,’3 an analogy which immediately functions to counteract what had previously appeared as radically emergent, and to re-inscribe this building within the logic of the bourgeois home and its spaces of public reception and entertainment. In this light, the free plan merely replicates and implements ‘local transformations within our own bourgeois society itself,’ to once again echo Jameson, its newness being only stylistic and not, so to speak, ontological.4 I want to argue less that one reading must prevail over the other than that both must co-exist at every moment we experience this building, that this duality was in fact constitutive of its modernity as such: both radically new space and drawing room, as it were. It was Baudelaire in his essay on Constantin Guys, ‘painter of modern life,’ who had defined modernity as ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable,’5 and we should certainly see Mies as existing within this same domain of juxtaposition, contrast, and dissonance. In the words of literary historian Jean Starobinski, The modern was distinguished by conflict and contradiction: it would openly embrace the present, but not exclusively. The present would be perceived in its changeable relation with the historical past … It is by no means a paradox to see in artistic modernity something completely other than pure and simple acquiescence to the resources acquired by technological civilization: speed, communications on a global scale, easing of manual labor through improved tools and new power sources. This yes unreservedly bestowed upon technology … is by no means the condition sine qua non of an art of modernity.6

Rather, we might say, that condition lay in the superposition of the technological order in all of its transience upon the order of the historical past, now imagined as an eternal substrate, or in the duality of free plan and drawing room as imagined by Mies in 1929. Given the differential between Gutbrod and Otto’s structure of 1967 from the Barcelona pavilion, and considering the historical break that interposed itself in the intervening years, it is evident that we have passed from a modernity whose project entailed the uneasy juxtaposition of the fleeting and the immovable to a new dispensation which has hypostatized the first of those terms – an architecture, that is, that does unreservedly affirm technology and all the resources of technological civilization. Certainly this break was sensed by perceptive critics even at the moment of the fair. In Paris’s Le Monde, Jacques Michel concluded his article on the German pavilion of 1967 with a brief description of the homage to Mies contained within and reminded his readers of the New National Gallery that the architect was, at eighty-two years of age, completing in Berlin: ‘It is,’ he wrote, ‘a temple of space and light that is the final, classic work of the “industrial” style in a world that has already entered another era,’ an era which he characterized in the same article as that of ‘automated, post-industrial civilization.’7 So we already have a sense of one age passing and another dawning, and we should at least

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briefly unpack Michel’s characterization of this new dispensation, which firstly suggests (in the semantic shift from ‘industrial’ to ‘automated’) the broad restructuring of the economy that would go under the umbrella term of ‘post-Fordism,’ and which secondly hints at the broader shifts in consciousness (or, we might say, in the hegemonic ideological formation) that accompanied this transformation of production and the relations of production: ‘post-industrial’ society was, after all, a phrase coined by Daniel Bell in the late fifties to describe what American elites wished to see as a new, consensual order in which class antagonism had been superseded through a broad extension of wealth. It was, in other words, a key term in the constellation of ideas mobilized around the notion of an ‘end of ideology’ during these years of postwar boom. But let us consider just what an architecture that fully inhabited the conditions of transience, fleetingness, and contingency might have been. If an extended analysis is beyond our scope here, I would like to emphasize at least one salient feature that encapsulates the break from modernist space. For certainly in the German pavilion we seem to face something impossible to assimilate to traditional conceptions of enclosure (and again this goes beyond a quantitative development of modernism’s spatial continuities). What we find here is neither a sequence of closed, static areas nor a complete continuity between interior and exterior space via walls of glass; instead, we are confronted with what we can only call a new nature, an artificial landscape. This structure, even as it refused the defined edge of conventional architecture, nevertheless marked an absolute break from the landscape surrounding it, a break signified by the refusal of a continuous ground plane. Once inside the pavilion, as even the briefest glance at a section reveals, the visitor encountered a multitude of levels and platforms, none of which was referred back to the phenomenal ground of the site (see plate 11). This was a kind of microcosmic realization of a pervasive fantasy of the moment: that of the selfenclosed city. Such projects communicated a fantasy of the complete imbrication of nature and culture, or rather of the utter subsuming of the former under the latter – a world, in other words, in which the technological order reigns uncontested. It is important at this juncture to expand the purview of this discussion, to consider that other much-remarked exhibition structure from 1967, Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic-domed U.S. pavilion. For certainly the same fantasy was at work in this building, and in many of Fuller’s projects of this time (one thinks immediately of his famous proposal of 1962, in which midtown Manhattan would be covered with a vast pneumatic dome); what is at stake here is less the dome itself than its interior, which demonstrated perhaps even more clearly than the German pavilion the new conditions of architectural production. What is key here is the proliferation of platforms and even more strikingly the mechanization of human movement through an almost baroque multiplication of escalators. If one of modern architecture’s greatest acquisitions was the introduction of the promenade architecturale, its insistence on a spatialized narrative of exploration, we might say that in Fuller’s pavilion this movement was simultaneously underscored and eradicated through the reification of our most basic locomotor skills.8 By now this experience has become banal – the daily stuff of airport transfers, mega-malls, and high-rise living – but in 1967 it could only have appeared as a portent of the future. To quote

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Jacques Michel once again, ‘the immense ball [seemed] to have descended from another planet,’9 an image that both captured the strangeness of this object and underlined (through the analogy with a spaceship) its radically altered relationship to the gravity-bound, earthly realm of walking. And indeed, world’s fairs had long been occasions for experiments with mechanized movement – whether in the spectacular vertical ascent of the Eiffel Tower or in the horizontal passage of cars over the displays of the Galerie des Machines – but these had always depended upon the reference back to a normative ground plane for their impact. What we find in 1967, both in the U.S. and in the German pavilions, is the complete abandonment of such a phenomenological referent, and the substitution of a wholly artificial or man-made one in its place. This seems to be the emblematic moment of the disappearance of what Baudelaire would have called the eternal and immovable. And that disappearance was greeted, in some corners, with relief and utopian hope. Certainly this was the case for the French Marxist sociologists and architects grouped around Henri Lefebvre and the young journal Utopie; indeed their discussions in these years continually circled back to the world’s fair and its innovative structures as crucial exemplars for how revolutionary design might function. Their observations were based on an eminently dialectical understanding of the current situation, one oriented around the concept of obsolescence. On one hand, the built environment had remained a domain of permanence, stability, fixedness, equilibrium (a set of qualities that, moreover, explicitly aligned architecture with the interests of those presently in power, who wished to present just such an image of continuity), while on the other hand the economic motor of this society had become dependent on the ever more rapid aging and disappearance of consumer goods, from clothes to articles of daily use like furniture to the automobile. The point was neatly made in a table appearing in the first issue of Utopie, in May 1967; drawn by architect Jean Aubert with notes by Jean Baudrillard, it traced the accelerating pace of obsolescence by noting the decreasing life expectancies of various commodities from 1900 through 1960, with the exception, at the bottom, of architecture. What can be concluded from this intervention? ‘While the obsolescence of numerous objects that we frequently use is tending to diminish, the lifetime of the “built environment” remains essentially indefinite.’10 Lefebvre would make a fundamentally identical point in his contemporaneous book, Everyday Life in the Modern World, in which he argued that a contrast, or rather a contradiction, is evinced between what has been established and objectively ‘structured’ as durable (according to a logic of forms, among others all that affect the State and the administration, including that of the city, housing, and the human environment understood as stable) and what has been devised to be ephemeral, consisting of a rapid deterioration of objects.11

Aubert’s chart, we should note, could be read as a kind of Situationist détournement, or subversive appropriation, of an earlier graphic representation of obsolescence: it seems to echo the form of industrial designer Raymond Loewy’s famous ‘evolution charts’ from the 1930s, which sought to assimilate the process of

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design to an almost Darwinian operation of natural selection. In these visual representations the logic of capitalist development has been naturalized as ‘progress,’ and an ever-improving standard of living equated with styling change. Indeed Loewy’s charts were an early demonstration of the significance of ‘style obsolescence’ as a motor of modern market economies: originating as an attempt to build consumer markets in the shrinking economies of the Depression years, it would become the vital underpinning of the postwar boom, first in America and slightly later in Western Europe. Essential to the success of style obsolescence was the institution of a particular psychic economy on the part of the consumer; in the words of social historian Stuart Ewen, ‘it sought to erect a visible environment of change in which the profit margins of business would neatly mesh with a nurtured condition of consumer dissatisfaction, perpetual feelings of disorientation and self-doubt.’12 Lefebvre recognized as much in 1967, when he wrote that obsolescence belonged ‘to a class strategy directed toward the rationalized exploitation … of the everyday.’ And he concluded his reflections (in which he nodded precisely to Aubert’s article) with a formulation that at once returns us to Baudelaire’s great definition and compels us to consider it in an entirely new light: ‘the cult of the ephemeral,’ he noted, ‘reveals what is fundamental to Modernity, but reveals it as class strategy – and one in open contradiction to the cult (and the necessity) of stability, equilibrium, and durable austerity.’13 But this was not to say that ephemerality and obsolescence were necessarily bound to bourgeois domination; the key for these French thinkers would lay precisely in dissociating these terms in the name of an emancipatory project of Modernité. Just how this could be accomplished was explained by Lefebvre in his text on the ‘right to the city’: it would be achieved ‘by imagining the reversal of the current situation, by pushing to the limit that inverse image of the topsy-turvy world.’14 That is to say, through a renewed commitment to the classic Marxian operation of standing society on its head (or, rather, placing our upside-down society back on its feet): Lefebvre’s image of a ‘topsy-turvy world’ came straight from the third volume of Marx’s Capital, where it was invoked to portray the fetishism of commodities, in which the inanimate assumed human qualities while people became mere things. The reference was certainly timely: the Right to the City had been composed in 1967, the centenary, Lefebvre noted, of Marx’s great work. The idea was that this world could be salvaged through an inversion of its governing terms, so that if bourgeois society was structured by the accelerated deterioration of commodities within a stable spatial framework (by, in other words, a built environment that both symbolized and shaped the permanence of this reigning order), its counter-model would be structured precisely by ‘the obsolescence of space’ itself, an ‘accelerated shift of abodes, locations, arranged spaces.’ His ideal urban form of the future would be ‘the ephemeral city,’ he wrote, ‘perpetual creation of its residents, themselves mobile and mobilized for/by this creation.’15 Presently such an experience of the ephemeral, of the consumption of space, was ‘the monopoly of a social class, the one that dictates fashion and taste, the one that possesses the whole world as its space.’16 For it the ephemeral was not something to which one passively acceded in the marketplace, but had become a qualitative adventure, something actively desired and full of pleasure. For this small

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segment of society, the consumption of space through travel (enjoyment of nature, the sea, the mountains, old cities) was continually possible, while the remainder of the population was relegated instead to the space of consumption, to its realm of minor satisfactions and incessant longings. But this was an irrational arrangement, whose sole goal was the maintenance of the privileges of those Lefebvre called the ‘masters’ of a ‘New Athens.’17 Why should this spatial jouissance not be available to all? It was, he would insist, within our grasp: ‘there is no doubt that technology makes the ephemeral city – apogee of the ludic, supreme creation and luxury – possible.’18 The same social class that monopolized the possibilities of free movement also fettered the full realization of the potential of the means of production, but within the current situation a utopian promise could be glimpsed: ‘productive capacity,’ Lefebvre explained, ‘has henceforth made possible an extreme mobility of life, objects, houses, cities, dwelling. “Real life” need no longer be frozen in everydayness.’19 Once again we should note that the Utopie group was exploring these same issues, and that Jean Aubert’s article of 1967 had reproduced, for example, projects by Archigram. But mobility, Aubert would insist, was not simply to be recognized in such visionary projects; it could be found at the very heart of a history of modern architecture, if one looked to the structures built for various world’s fairs since the nineteenth century. Sites of technological experimentation, they were intended to be temporary constructions that realized not only a new sense of architectural space but of time as well: the Eiffel Tower and Galerie des Machines in Paris in 1889 were, of course, classic examples, but so was, Aubert contended, the German pavilion at Montreal, and he included a photograph of its erection on a page devoted to these projects. And so the 1967 fair once again enters this debate over the notion of architectural obsolescence. Certainly Lefebvre was thinking of Gutbrod and Otto’s Grosshülle as well when he cited the Montreal exposition as an anticipatory sign of the future ephemeral city in his Right to the City;20 he would expand on this observation two years later in The Urban Question, where he explained that ephemerality and mobility did not have to entail a literal movement from place to place. Rather it was a question of building spaces that were ‘multifunctional, polyvalent, transfunctional, with an incessant turnover of functions.’ Such spaces would allow for collective appropriation and transformation, for modification in a continuous cycle of construction/destruction. This was precisely what he had seen as the import of Montreal: ‘An admirable example of such a conjuncturally modeled space, modified by the actions of a group: the site of large expositions, especially that of Montreal; an ephemeral city rose up from a transformed site, a magnificent city, where everydayness was absorbed in festival, where the urban was transparent in its splendor.’21 Here Lefebvre seemed to have in mind not only the structures of the fair but the creation ex nihilo of two large islands in the middle of the St Lawrence River for its grounds as well. This space was literally, we might say, a ‘utopia,’ a kind of no-place: a world with no past, where the old city had been abolished in favour of an artificial landscape, where nature itself had been subsumed under the sign of technological rationality, and where a new flexible architecture embraced the quickened tempo of obsolescence. At thirty-eight years’ distance, it is difficult not to hear this as the last gasp of

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Promethean modernism, one of the final moments when a wholly redemptory vision of technological progress was possible: if only we would push the potentialities of speed, global communications, and automation to their limits, Lefebvre seems to say, their liberatory qualities will become apparent. But already in 1967 this imminent triumph of one-half of Baudelaire’s conception of modernity left others rather less sanguine. When Bruno Zevi came to speak in Montreal in 1967 as part of the ‘Man and His World’ lecture series, for example, he ostentatiously refused the ambient optimism of the fair and opened his paper with a recollection of Francesco Borromini’s suicide three hundred years earlier, in 1667. Now the meaning of that event was undoubtedly bound up for Zevi with a host of Romantic notions about misunderstood and unrecognized genius; ‘he killed himself,’ he said, ‘because he felt and knew that everything he had been struggling to accomplish during his life was doomed to failure.’22 Borromini in this account seems to act as a stand-in for the figure of Zevi’s great twentieth-century hero, Frank Lloyd Wright, whose legacy he felt was being ignored within the profession. But behind this wholly unsurprising defence of the architect-as-genius lay a deeper pessimism about the possibilities for architectural culture that requires closer examination. In this view, the 1667 suicide functioned as a metaphor for the generalized failure of nerve that had come to afflict the Modern movement in the years following the Second World War, the retreat from the radical experiments of the inter-war years; Zevi’s formalist language masked his profound conviction that the spatial innovations of those years (in his talk he mentioned as examples the Bauhaus and the Barcelona pavilion) had promised a new setting for a new life. The compromises of the postwar years could only be read as a betrayal: ‘architecture stops being a human art, and becomes a commercial mass-medium,’ he remarked; and just to be sure the political significance of that statement was clear, he later called much of contemporary design a cynical capitulation to ‘the neo-capitalist reaction.’23 Borromini’s suicide of 1667 became a means, then, of reading what he saw as the capitulation of architecture in 1967 to the conditions of ‘automated, post-industrial’ society and its apotheosis of the commodity-form. It was a way of thinking about the failure of contemporary architecture to shape an environment adequate to human needs. Here it is possible to be more specific, and to consider how Zevi viewed the place of the computer in the design process. Certainly its centrality in the production of a structure like the U.S. pavilion, and in the regulation of its climate, was much noted at the time. But, Zevi cautioned, ‘the fact is that the computer can answer very few questions concerning the biological, psychological, sociological, and aesthetic aspects of the architectural problem.’24 The danger was that these fundamental questions might, in the search for a technological perfection, be ignored in favour of those that the computer might answer. This was recognized even by Michel at Le Monde, who similarly commented that ‘the electronic brain is incapable of posing an original question, of creating.’25 The computer’s memory has nothing in common with that of human memory, he insisted, with its accretion of archaeological layers; with the increasing place afforded to the computer, the surrender of human volition in design, ‘progress’ and ‘regression’ might come to be interchangeable terms.

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Perhaps the last word in this discussion should go to the Heideggerian philosopher Karl Löwith, who in fact had lectured at the 1967 fair precisely on the topic of the uncritical acceptance of technological progress. He had titled his lecture ‘Progress: A Fatality,’ and in it he reminded his listeners of Freud’s term for Promethean humanity: the psychoanalyst had called we moderns Prothesengötter, gods walking on artificial limbs. Human history was a vast compendium of efforts to subdue the recalcitrance of nature through the use of instruments that perfected the body’s motor and sensory organs, or that removed the limits to their functioning. From the first primordial tools, the control of fire, and even the construction of dwellings to the vast expansion of motor power of the Industrial Revolution, humanity has continually engrossed the capacities once reserved to the gods, to the point that Freud could write, in 1930, that we were about to usurp all their omnipotence: we have become, he claimed, ‘prosthetic gods.’ But of course prostheses do not always work, and their malfunctioning could be disturbing: ‘when he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.’26 By 1967 Freud’s diagnosis of the Promethean quest for progress appeared, if anything, understated; Löwith would insist that today such protheses have proliferated to the point that they risked fundamentally overwhelming their users. His talk seemed a direct reply to the utopian hopes afforded by the promise of mobility, ephemerality, and obsolescence: What were once utopias have become reality and ‘the only’ problem now seems to be how to transform and condition man in order to enable him to live up to his own inventions. The lamentation raised by Nietzsche that man has become ‘homeless’ is already obsolete. For we are at home nowhere, precisely because we can be anywhere. Man is now able to put himself in a metal capsule revolving within an hour around the earth and returning to it at his calculating will.27

That final image of a lonely space capsule revolving, weightless, far above the earth, an image of technological rationality and transience pushed to its (then) limits, may stand as the logical rejoinder to Lefebvre and his followers, a reminder of what is lost with the eclipse of the eternal and the immovable. NOTES 1 See Bruno Zevi, Architecture as Space, ed. Joseph A. Barry, trans. Milton Gendel (New York: Horizon Press, 1957), 144. 2 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Utopia,’ in Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography (Boston and Cambridge, MA: The Institute of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1988), 20. For a restatement of this theme, see his Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 107. 3 Zevi, Architecture as Space, 192. 4 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Utopia,’ 20.

92  Tom McDonough 5 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P.E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 403. 6 Jean Starobinski, ‘Les cheminées et les clochers,’ Magazine littéraire, September 1990, 26. 7 Jacques Michel, ‘Montreal 1967: La Foire de l’architecture, II. – Préhistoire du futur,’ Le Monde (Paris), 27 October 1967, 13. 8 This description again draws on Jameson, Postmodernism, 42. 9 Jacques Michel, ‘Montreal 1967: La Foire de l’architecture, I. – Avant-première pour une utopie,’ Le Monde (Paris), 26 October 1967, 11. 10 See Jean Baudrillard, Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967–1978) (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006). 11 Henri Lefebvre, La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, Coll. ‘Idées,’ 1968), 158. Although published in 1968, this book was written in 1967. 12 Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images (New York: Basic, 1988), 243. 13 Lefebvre, La vie quotidienne, 159. 14 Henri Lefebvre, ‘Right to the City’ (1968), in Writings on Cities, ed. and trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 172 (trans. modified). 15 Ibid., 172–3 (trans. modified). 16 Lefebvre, La vie quotidienne, 159. 17 Lefebvre, ‘Right to the City,’ 161–2. 18 Ibid., 173 (trans. modified). 19 Lefebvre, La vie quotidienne, 158. 20 Lefebvre, ‘Right to the City,’ 173. 21 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Question (1970), trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 130–1 (trans. modified). 22 Zevi, ‘Architecture 1967: Progress or Regression?’ in Man and His World/Terre des Hommes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 175. 23 Ibid., 190, 198. 24 Ibid., 191. 25 Michel, ‘Montreal 1967: La Foire de l’architecture, II,’ 13. 26 Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ (1930), in The Complete Psychological Works, vol. 21, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1964), 92. 27 Karl Löwith, ‘Progress: A Fatality,’ in Man and His World/Terre des Hommes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 92.

6 The Ambiguous Modernity of Designer Julien Hébert martin racine

We are living in a functional world, and we are influenced much more by all the functional objects that surround us at home and at work, than by art objects. It is for this reason that everyday objects deserve serious attention from those that create forms. Julien Hébert1

Between Universality and Specificity: The Logo for Man and His World at Expo 67 As the creator of the emblem chosen to identify Expo 67, Julien Hébert wanted his design to express a particular vision of modernity (see plate 12). The theme of the exhibition was to be ‘Man and His World,’ a phrase borrowed from the writer Saint-Exupéry, and whose implications corresponded to a humanist ethic espoused by Hébert (1917–94), Montreal-based artist, designer, and philosopher.2 In order to represent this theme, the designer wanted to avoid references that were too culturally specific. He therefore developed a concept with a more universal resonance, using an ancient Greek symbol that he placed in twos around a circle that evoked the earth. It is a striking image of human fraternity where couples with arms raised seem to express a sense of joy, standing in acclamation and celebration. These couples arranged in a circle appear as simply monochrome, and it is no accident that there are no colours to differentiate the figures.3 According to Gestalt theory, colour functions to segregate elements and to establish hierarchies, as in the case of descriptive schemata or geographic maps (with the Olympic emblem for instance; the coloured rings symbolize the five continents).4 By excluding colours to differentiate the figures of the pictogram, the designer wished to eliminate all sense of segregation. The figures are arranged into couples, yet there is nothing to evoke gender. The connotation of this choice is that there is an equality between the couples without distinguishing race or gender. Although the graphic design is flat, it tends to evoke another spatial dimension. Looking more closely, leave behind the figures arranged in couples, and perceive instead either a magnified snow crystal, or a series of trees arranged around a circle in a schematic fashion. The Expo 67 logo can therefore also evoke nature.

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Yet unlike the image of a Universal Man just suggested, the perception of nature depicted here does not suggest the same universality. It is more specifically reminiscent of northern climates like Quebec and Canada, an environment of trees and snow, as opposed to the south with its palm trees or deserts. It is in this nature-culture duality that one begins to see Julien Hébert’s vision of modernity. We have a search for, on the one hand, the universality of human experience and, on the other, the specificity of a territory, of a country. For Julien Hébert, Quebec’s own modernity ought to express itself in a similar manner: as a reaching for the universal, for progress, without falling into a radical modernism, where the notions of history and cultural distinctions would be forgotten. A Process of Integration Hébert was also given the mandate to design several thematic exhibition displays within the Canadian pavilions – notably for the Natural Resources pavilion – and he also designed the furniture and installations for the Buffet restaurant (fig. 6.1). Here too one sees the ingenuity of Julian Hébert’s design approach. The restaurant table is a unique arrangement of forms, a variation on the conventional picnic table that is both functional and innovative (fig. 6.2). The absence of ornamentation and superfluous details is the result of a truly modernist sensibility.5 It should be noted that the V-shaped seats establish a visual link between the seats and raised arms of the Expo 67 logo. This indicates that some effort was made to extend the logo’s design concept to furniture. Hébert was indeed hopeful that the various designers on the Expo 67 project would consult each other, with the aim of producing a coherent language, a harmonious integration of forms connecting graphic design to interior design, furnishings, and architecture. Like the logo, the table design was conceived for a specific event – Expo 67 – and for a specific location, rather than as an autonomous object that could be put to use in any context. The choice of wood for the construction of the furniture was also a deliberate gesture towards Quebec’s tradition of furniture building. The tables were not painted, as Hébert wanted to expose the lush wood grain. Another project developed for Expo 67 illustrates Julien Hébert’s interest in bridging modern design with tradition and history. He was commissioned to design an organ for the Canada pavilion, to be built by the famous Casavant organ builders, a company based in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec. Because of their painstaking construction and exceptional sound, Casavant organs were the jewel of the province’s traditional crafts movement. Hébert suggested that the organ’s traditional appearance be modified in order to correspond more adequately to the clean, modern lines of the pavilion interior. He therefore designed an instrument with clear geometric lines and a striking, asymmetric appearance and was thus able to modify a traditional artefact so that it echoed the exhibition’s emphasis on youth and modernity. Modern Design: Towards a Process of Continuity The various Expo 67 projects gave Julien Hébert many opportunities to express

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6.1  Maquette of The Buffet restaurant in the Canada pavilion, designed by Julien Hébert. Julien Hébert Estate Archives, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, Bibliothèque et Centre de documentation.

6.2 Picnic table from The Buffet restaurant in the Canada pavilion, designed by Julien Hébert. Julien Hébert Estate Archives, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, Bibliothèque et Centre de documentation.

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his vision of modernity. This vision was inscribed within a cultural specificity and anchored in the memory of a place, yet it also involved a functional visual language, streamlined and adapted to the demands of industrial production. This view of modernity could be considered ambiguous, in that it does not seek a complete rupture with the past. This is in contrast to the methods and the discourse of more radical proponents of modern architecture and design such as Le Corbusier, Gropius, or Mies van der Rohe. This more radical modernism was represented at Expo 67 by Otto Frei’s suspended tents for the German pavilion and by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome for the American pavilion. Both these contemporaries of Hébert seemed intent on breaking away from traditional forms while calling into question the basic tenets of building construction. Another example was Moshe Safdie’s project for Habitat 67, which presented a radical approach to urban housing that was a sharp contrast to the construction methods of row housing with exterior staircases typical of Montreal. As a person attuned to modernity, Hébert was of course able to appreciate the projects that his modernist colleagues put forth, but he was certainly not as radical. One reason for this was that he greatly valued the vernacular side of architecture, as well as traditional craftsmanship and woodwork. He did not want to turn his back on these practices, nor did he wish to reject this heritage. He sought rather to make use of the know-how of craftsmen within the practice of design, as the Scandinavians had done. The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) was, for Hébert, the model to follow.6 Aalto had made good use of his own cultural heritage, with the result that he contributed to a reintroduction of wood into modern design. Indeed, throughout his many projects (the Sanatorium of Paimio, the furniture line named Artek, and the Finnish pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937) his avant-garde architecture and furniture were permeated with a Scandinavian spirit, a feature that was internationally recognized.7 However, Quebec was rather different from Finland, and indeed the modernist vision evident in Julien Hébert’s projects at Expo 67 emerged from a particular historical, social, political, and cultural context. In Quebec, the form of modernity that seemed to emerge very suddenly in the 1960s, manifesting itself vigorously in the visual arts, design, and architecture, as well as in the social practices of the time, must be seen as a reaction against the repressive social climate of the 1950s. It was in those years that the most avant-garde minds defined what would become modernity in Quebec. They opposed the conservative ideology of the time, the yoke of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, and the moral domination of the clergy. At the beginning of the 1960s, Quebec’s Catholic Church included fifty thousand priests and nuns, who controlled the universities, many high schools, convents, most hospitals, the unions, publishing houses, and numerous parish associations. This produced a conformist spirit that suppressed the evolution of the society and the arts.8 Julien Hébert was among those artists who helped to revolutionize the arts in Quebec society. Hébert also had to struggle, however, against conservative tendencies, whether teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts or at the École du Meuble. He often stood alone as he promoted and taught design in Quebec. On the one hand, his cause never received any support from the avant-garde art movements,

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and certainly Borduas and the other artists associated with the Automatiste movement cared little for design at the time.9 Hébert also fought to include principles of modern design in the curriculum of the École du Meuble, against the wishes of the school’s director Jean-Marie Gauvreau, who opposed modern tendencies as he tried to preserve artisanal traditions. Borduas and Hébert: Intertwined Destinies The emergence of modern design in Quebec occurred within a particular context. It is impossible to consider how modernism took hold without highlighting the influence of Paul-Émile Borduas, whose manifesto entitled Refus global (Global Refusal) was published in 1948. Most historians agree that this text was the first major step leading to Quebec’s ‘quiet revolution.’ Even though it did not have a direct impact on society at the time of its publication, the manifesto was later recognized as a founding moment, a quasi-mythic origin for the Quebec nation. The manifesto attacked the very foundations of the traditional Québécois society. Much more than a manifesto on modern art, aesthetics, or the value of abstract art, it announced a social project that sought to replace established structures and to overthrow clerical authority. It promoted liberty, love, anarchy, and happiness, calling for a transformation of sensibilities that would then spontaneously unleash a new order: We must break with the conventions of society once and for all, and reject its utilitarian spirit. We must refuse to function knowingly at less than our physical and mental potential; refuse to close our eyes to vice and fraud perpetrated in the name of knowledge or favors or due respect …   We refuse to serve, or to be used for such purposes. We reject all forms of intention, the two-edged, perilous sword of reason … Make way for Magic! Make way for objective mysteries! Make way for love! Make way for international drives … Set against and balancing this total refusal is our complete responsibility.10

It was at the time of the manifesto’s publication, in August of 1948, that Julien Hébert returned to Montreal after a two-year stay in Europe, where he had studied with the cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine in Paris.11 Thus Julien Hébert returned to find the Quebec art scene quickly evolving.12 Hébert, like Borduas, had graduated from Montreal’s École des Beaux-Arts. He was receptive to the approach adopted by the young artists who hovered around Borduas and the École du Meuble.13 In the mid-forties, Hébert was already interested in abstract art, and in order to escape what he saw as a regressive artistic environment, he had decided to abandon his teaching position at the École des Beaux-Arts and leave Montreal with the hope of discovering first-hand the European avant-garde. Unlike Borduas, however, Hébert was not attracted to the artistic vision of André Breton and the surrealists, an aesthetic approach based on unconscious and intuitive creation. Hébert was too much of a rationalist to adhere to such an approach to art.14 Under Zadkine, Hébert explored a new sculptural language in his work, playing with corporeal proportions. The figurative sculpture he produced at the time is some-

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what sensual while remaining mechanical and cold, with faces devoid of emotion. These works are far removed from the idealized figures and the academic poses that were valued in Montreal’s premier artistic institutions at that time, while, as mentioned, his art was not informed by the irrational impulses of surrealism. His art practice would remain grounded in a reasoned, coherent process. This was partly due to the influence of Zadkine, for whom every object in the environment was considered as a sculpture; every shape, whether object, furniture, or architecture, was to be considered from the point of view of a sculptor.15 According to Borduas, artworks serve to express an individual’s freedom and spontaneity, and this can produce a collective energy, a power that has the potential to transform the whole of society. Returning from Europe in 1948, Hébert did not share the view that a work of art was only the free and spontaneous expression of an individual: ‘Upon my return, I had to admit that I had no desire to send out personal messages through art works. I realized that I had no taste for the life of a sculptor; to work isolated in a studio in the hope that I might sell my masterpieces to Museums or to collectors. This for me made no sense.’16 Hébert’s training was first and foremost as a sculptor, yet he was questioning this artistic identity: ‘I was ill at ease as a Sculptor. I would have liked to have been commissioned to make sculptures in relation to architecture. In those days, this type of project was not done. One made sculpture in an almost secret way. It was above all a form of personal expression.’17 For his sculpture to become meaningful, Hébert wanted to produce works in an urban environment, integrated with public space and architecture, and coming directly into contact with people. Hébert as Anti-Borduas? The integration of artistic forms with the built environment was Hébert’s foremost concern.18 And because of his rationalist and utilitarian outlook, Hébert appears as an ‘anti-Borduas.’ His conception of modernity was not based on the language of abstract art, or on free and spontaneous creativity, nor did it require, as Borduas claimed, the transformation of man by means of automatist artistic practices that would reveal the unconscious. The manifesto of the Refus Global contained several passages that bitingly criticized rationality, a notion perceived by the artists as negative, and to be condemned: ‘In the name of maximum productivity, rational exploitation gradually spread to everything society did … The struggle between psychic and rational powers is near paroxysm.’19 Clearly, Borduas and Hébert had different views of the world. Both, however, wished to see Quebec society transformed. Borduas believed that one had to begin by systematically refusing and sweeping away the grip of the Church and the bourgeois elite on social institutions. Borduas did not however offer up a political model other than that of anarchist refusal. Nor did he promote any kind of direct action or social commitment. The function of art was for him an act of personal liberation that would then serve as the ground for social change. The publication of the manifesto was of course in itself a social act, a political gesture. So one should not cast doubt on the commitment of Borduas and his group to directly influence the evolution of society. One must again repeat that,

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unlike Hébert, Borduas’s reflection on aesthetic matters in society did not lead him to think about modern design, even though he taught at a school for furniture design! On the other hand, Julien Hébert was among the first artists in Quebec to take an interest in design. Design appeared to him as an art form involved with everyday life and public space, an art with social repercussions that could affect people because it was in immediate contact with them. He believed that art should play an active role in modern life instead of being confined to art galleries and museums. This is why he quickly took an interest in modern design even though he had initially been trained in the fine arts and had begun his career as a sculptor. Design was for him a more useful art, accessible to all, and helped to improve society and to better Man’s material condition. Unlike Borduas, Julien Hébert saw in design and urban planning the basic issues that signalled the advent of modernity. Indeed, as a sculptor, Hébert saw in physical environments and spatial relations a world of forms and colours where the artist would have to intervene if he wished to have any social impact. As the epigraph to this essay clearly states: ‘Everyday objects merit serious attention from the creators of form.’20 Despite these seemingly incompatible views on art, Hébert was drawn closer to Borduas’s ‘disciples’ during the sixties, as the engagement with public space became a major concern for many artists. Several members of the Automatiste group (Mousseau, Ferron, Riopelle)21 were commissioned to create public works in the Metro, Montreal’s new subway system, and in other public spaces, while others, like Gauvreau, redirected their careers towards theatre and later television.22 These artists gradually moved away from easel painting to embrace an interdisciplinary practice. Hébert would have an important influence on artists like Madeleine Arbour (who had also signed the Refus Global manifesto) as she evolved towards designing environments.23 The rival careers, destinies, and visions of Paul-Émile Borduas and of Julien Hébert can hardly be reconciled. One can only imagine what their combined impact on the students of the École du Meuble might have led to – Borduas initiating students to modern art and composition, Hébert encouraging students to explore new furniture design and urban planning. The alliance of these two brilliant intellectuals and pedagogues might have helped shape designers of international repute, contributing to a dynamic discipline. This however was not to be, for Borduas was soon dismissed from the school in the wake of the scandal caused by his 1948 manifesto. Hébert was only hired at the school in 1956, and he was not assertive enough to teach courses in modern design since the director Jean-Marie Gauvreau was strongly opposed to it. Gauvreau and Hébert: How to Teach Design In 1964, Hébert along with long-time design enthusiasts Jacques Guillon and Henry Finkel, created a Quebec chapter of the Association for Industrial Designers, then called l’Association des Esthéticiens Industriels. The aim of the association was to have the expertise of its members officially recognized and to

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promote the discipline. This brought up the question of training standards. Hébert felt that for design to develop in Quebec, there would have to be a university-level training program, but it would take until the beginning of the 1970s before design programs were established in Montreal universities. The school of industrial design of the University of Montreal opened in 1969; a few years later came the departments of graphic design and environmental design at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM). Concordia University opened a design department within its fine arts faculty in the 1980s. If it took so long for design to be accepted, we should remember the situation of the École du Meuble, and the fact that its director, Jean-Marie Gauvreau, was not receptive to design being taught in his institution. From the time he was hired at the École du Meuble in 1956, Hébert’s relationship with Gauvreau was strained. Gauvreau conceived of the school as an institution dedicated to preserving traditional methods of craftsmanship. He had trained as a cabinetmaker in France at the prestigious École Boulle from 1926 to 1929, during the best period of the art deco style. And while the deco style was modern in a sense, Gauvreau was most insistent on preserving traditional woodworking techniques. Unlike Hébert, he did not recognize the value of industrial production, new technologies, or modern materials. Harbouring nationalist sentiments, he wanted to develop local products that employed indigenous wood and that were distinct from imported furniture. Gauvreau thought his school should keep industrial aesthetics at bay, and was therefore also hostile to the innovations of the Bauhaus.24 It was only at the beginning of the 1960s, when the school changed its name to the Institute for Applied Arts, that Julien Hébert was able to develop courses and workshops on modern design. Hébert would later blame Gauvreau for hindering the development of design in Quebec, yet Hébert also suggested that this opposition was not justified, since in Hébert’s view modern design was not opposed to traditional crafts, but rather was its logical extension and evolution. At the time of Gauvreau’s death in 1970, Hébert wrote in his journal: ‘What would have happened if Gauvreau, by some chance, had spent a few months in Scandinavia? His entire philosophy would have changed, and his undertakings would have had extraordinary repercussions on industry in Quebec. The craftsmen of his day would by now be industrial designers. Their modest businesses would have flourished, and today many young people would be ready to continue this project.’25 Such remarks perfectly illustrate the difference between Hébert and Gauvreau on the subject of artisanal production and its relationship to industry. For Hébert, these views were not incompatible. He was convinced that modern design was in some ways simply ‘modern craftsmanship’ and did not necessarily imply discarding heritage, the past, or tradition. Expo 67: A Turning Point The sixties in Quebec were strongly affected by the preparations for Expo 67. These massive undertakings produced a new outlook in Quebec on the role of the arts, and in particular on the visual arts. Previously, art and sculpture had

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been relegated to art galleries, museums, and to the interiors of churches. Suddenly, modern artworks appeared in the public sphere, often in symbiosis with the architecture.26 In 1963, a major project called Place des Arts would begin to change Montreal’s urban landscape. Numerous established artists were commissioned to produce works for the site: Alfred Pellan, Norman Slater, Louis Archambault, Robert Lapalme, Micheline Beauchemin, and also Julien Hébert.27 Hébert created an aluminum mural for the lobby of the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier concert hall (see plate 13). This work was well received by critics in the media. For example, one journalist for Le Devoir wrote in 1963: ‘If we associate Julien Hébert’s name with an industrial design aesthetic, one must not forget that he remains above all a sculptor. With the decoration of the large room of the Place des Arts, in which he has participated, he has once again demonstrated that such a project not only stimulated the inventive genius of our Canadian artists, but that it has also favoured technical innovation in the process.’28 Hébert had indeed been quite bold in the creation of the mural. It consisted of a series of rectangular panels with rounded edges, aligned in a vertical manner. The various aluminum pieces were fastened to a background that had a height of twelve feet and a length of twenty feet. The originality of the mural lay in its texture and the unique finish of each panel. In order to obtain the effect of an organic texture, Hébert had the panels made according to a unique process: rather than using a single mould, he had each of the thirty-six panels cast in individual moulds with distinct textures. The same 1963 article noted Hébert’s insistence on linking sculpture and design: ‘For Hébert, who sees himself simply as a “creator of forms” a chair or a table, even a telephone have as much a claim to being “sculptures” as objects created with the sole purpose of being seen. So they deserve as much attention from those who create forms. The only difference between these objects is in the function.’29 Hébert told his interviewer that the work of art that impressed him the most in this project was not produced by artists but rather by a team of engineers responsible for the acoustic ceiling. He saw this functional work a sculpture of great beauty.30 One recognizes once again Hébert’s point of view on the world of art and design. One should not be surprised that for the Place des Arts mural he chose to work with aluminum, a modern material produced in Quebec. He had once given a lecture at the offices of Alcan in Arvida, Quebec, where he praised the virtues of aluminum and encouraged the production of aluminum products in Quebec. A little later in 1963, Hébert designed a travelling exhibition on aluminum products titled ‘Good Design in Aluminum,’ organized by Alcan in partnership with the National Council for Industrial Design.31 In the meantime, the National Industrial Design Council (le Conseil Canadien de l’Esthétique Industrielle) had become more active in promoting design in Canada. They decided to set up an information centre in Toronto and later another in Montreal on the eve of Expo 67. Julien Hébert was commissioned to conceive the layout of the Design Centre located in Place Bonaventure.32 For the displays, he used an ingenious system of wooden modular panels which could be interconnected by metal joints. Hébert saw the Canadian government’s initiative to open a design centre in Montreal as a step in the right direction. However,

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it clearly did not have the scope of a design institute with university-level training, which he hoped to see in Montreal. The centre, named Design Canada, had the mandate to promote design to local industry and to the public at large. They presented product design in Canada and made information available to business and to designers. The Impact of Expo: A New Status for Design As Montreal prepared for Expo 67, the city was teeming with creative activity. At the opening of the Universal Exhibition, it was as if modern architecture and design had been revealed for the first time to the general public. A similar level of enthusiasm accompanied the Expo 67 visitor’s encounter with foreign cultures, new technologies, artistic traditions, and the culinary arts. Montrealers discovered the world, as the international community discovered Montreal. This cultural effervescence was also stimulated by the political scene in Quebec: Pierre Bourgaut and his Rassemblement pour l’Indépendance’ (RIN) was often a topic of discussion, while the independence movement was egged on, so to speak, by the famous ‘Vivre le Québec libre!’ speech delivered by French President Charles de Gaulle during his state visit in July 1967. As one of the important contributors to Expo 67, Julien Hébert lived through a period of intense, but enthusiastic work during this period, surrounded by passionate young designers such as Albert Leclerc, Ian Bruce, Michel Dallaire, and Marcel Girard. And, with Expo 67 as a showcase for modern design, Hébert envisioned a great future for the discipline that he had helped to nurture in Quebec. Suddenly, design appeared to be on an equal footing with architecture and to have reached the status of fine art. The various pavilions, the design of the exhibits, the display of artefacts, the staging of themes, the lighting, the lamp posts, the gondolas, the benches, the graphics, the signage – all these elements contributed to make the visitors realize the importance of design in the urban environment. It also made them aware of the quality of modern design – its ingenuity, simplicity, and clarity. Despite the opinions earlier voiced by Borduas, design could no longer be regarded as a second-class art form. Design was part of an enlarged understanding of the arts, which could include the mural on an architectural facade, or a stained glass window above the subway station exit or a sculpture in the lobby of a building. Hébert was delighted to note the disappearance of the old hierarchical system which had separated artistic disciplines and media. In a 1964 article entitled ‘An Industrial Aesthetic Will Be Responsible for the Face of Expo 67,’ Hébert stated: In the visual world that will be the exhibition, elements such as furniture, objects, posters, traffic signs, lettering, wall coverings, accessories, as well as the inter-play of all these elements from the smallest to the largest will take on a great importance … All these things will make up the visual universe of the visitor, to the same extent as the buildings, the bridges, the landscape and the crowd … The role of the designer is to present solutions to unprecedented problems that such an exhibition poses. His

The Ambiguous Modernity of Julien Hébert  103 works must, first of all, be functional. But beyond what is functional, these works must not only serve man, it must also express him. Like a shelter, equipment can be merely functional, but it can also be poetic and excellent.33

Hébert goes on to criticize the quality of the urban environment in Canadian cities. While stressing the importance of creating a high-quality environment for Expo, he felt that this would, by sheer contrast, make visitors and government officials aware of how visually poor Montreal was as a city.34 Expo was a laboratory of formal and visual experimentation for designers, and this experimental spirit was part of the overall experience of Expo 67. Indeed, modern design was at the heart of Expo 67’s success, providing its distinctive public face. Many visiting designers were impressed by this. They had come for the ICSID Congress (International Congress of the Societies of Industrial Design) that was held in Montreal at the same time as Expo 67.35 From this point on, it would be impossible to ignore the importance of design as an art form integrated into its environment. Design and Politics: The Controversy Concerning the Expo Logo Because of his work promoting design as well as his brilliant career as a designer and teacher, Julien Hébert had acquired a reputation as a pioneer of design by the start of the 1960s. He had contributed to the founding of the Association of Canadian Industrial Designers and had even been elected president of the association in 1956. It should also be mentioned that at that time the business world and industry were almost exclusively anglophone. Hébert thus became a model for a generation of francophone students enrolled at the Institute of Applied Arts in Montreal. Many of his best students were even hired by his office to work on his Expo 67 projects: Michel Dallaire, Albert Leclerc, and Marcel Girard, among others. And if Hébert was unable to convince the provincial government to create a Design Institute in Montreal in order to promote this field of activity, Expo 67 was that dreamed-of opportunity for him to show off the importance of design in Quebec society. As for the logo Hébert designed for Expo 67, it is evident that the undertaking to introduce modern design was not won without a struggle. When Expo 67’s organizing committee asked the House of Commons to approve the logo that Hébert had drawn for the event, a stormy debate erupted in the parliamentary session of 20 December 1963. John Diefenbaker, ex-prime minister and leader of the Conservative opposition, was dismayed that this logo would represent Canada. He argued: When I was a boy we used to draw men like that, just two or three lines; it was simple. It was the only artistry we could indulge in. To me this looks like an artistic monstrosity. I would have thought that this would be the ideal occasion to place the maple leaf in the center to show it was Canadian. I hope this is not a precursor of the kind of flag the government is going to bring in as a distinctive Canadian flag.36

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Other members of Parliament were also highly critical that no traditional Canadian symbol such as the beaver, the maple leaf, or the Queen was to be deployed. This is perhaps one of the few occasions when the House of Commons sustained a discussion about the function of art in society, the correct aesthetic criteria, modernism, and of course the matter of Canadian identity. The minister of public works, JeanPaul Deschâtelets, defended the logo, praising its simplicity and stating that it was well suited for identifying both the site and theme of Expo. But the Conservative opposition continued the attack: ‘I suggest this looks more like a combination of a tractor wheel and a bunch of power poles. I am not satisfied with it; I think it is crazy’ (Mr Leboe). ‘Is the Minister seriously telling us that this weird looking thing will be plastered all over the world’s fair? Thank heaven it is in Montreal and not in Toronto’ (Mr Scott).37 Diefenbaker had more to say as well: ‘I should like to know which is the English version and which is the French version. I have never seen a monstrosity like it. It will bring ridicule to Canada. There is nothing to indicate Canada in it, either indirectly or otherwise. Is there going to be a glossary with the issue of every one of these so that people will understand it?’38 The most sarcastic detractors pointed out that the logo looked like a primitive drawing, or worse, they accused it of being inspired by the ‘Peace and Love’ sign of the beatnik generation. They feared that it might signal an invasion of anti-nuclear activists at the event. These attacks were also an occasion to put modern art on trial: ‘As to the character that such symbol might give, be it primitive or modern, I submit it falls into almost the same group as a certain mural which has just been unveiled at the Edmonton airport and which, incidentally, looks as if someone had thrown a few dozens of eggs on the wall’ (Mr Lambert).39 The Minister of Public Works had submitted the logo to the House, not to have it approved, but to protect its copyright, as it had to be protected against illicit copying or other illegal reproductions. The House of Commons would declare it exclusive property of the Crown. Hébert had ceded his rights for one dollar to the Canadian Universal Exhibition of 1967 Company. But the opposition’s outrage and criticism intensified, and Diefenbaker demanded that the organizing committee suggest a new logo, while keeping in mind the House’s comments. Hébert was staggered by the reaction and disappointed by the shallowness of the comments made by the politicians on aesthetic matters. The matter did not end there. The media got hold of the story and the Julien Hébert supporters made themselves heard. The president of Canada’s Royal Institute for Architecture, John Levat Davies declared: Now everyone in Canada knows the Expo symbol – designed by Julien Hébert! It is alarming that a few representatives of the Canadian people have rejected in such an offhand way the first-rate symbol that was conceived for Expo. One of the unexpected, yet positive consequences of this matter has been to interest Canadians in Expo. The design has received so much publicity, that it has for many people indeed become the symbol of the exhibition – and it will remain so no matter what. If we want maple leafs for Expo, let them plant trees!40

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Certain editorialists, such as Claude Jasmin, made a point of speaking to graphic design specialists.41 Pierre Garneau, director of Radio-Canada’s graphic design department, stated, ‘The symbol designed by Hébert has all the qualities required for a good design. It is easily recognizable. It is interesting. In fact, if it was boring and insignificant, no one in Ottawa last Friday would have made such a bloody fuss. Too simple some complained? Not at all; is the Japanese or French flag too simple? … Simplicity is a quality in these matters.’42 The experts that Jasmin consulted agreed that the logo was ingenious and that it had everything needed to represent an event like Expo 67. Because it was so legible, it could easily be reproduced and even printed against a variety of colour backgrounds. At the same time, students from the Institute for the Applied Arts in Montreal organized a march to defend their teacher’s design. The selection committee reconvened to evaluate other propositions, but remained convinced that Julien Hébert’s design was the best, and so refused to choose any other. Fortunately for the designer, the controversy took on a more positive dimension when the logo garnered an international prize, for best logo, at the Thirteenth Annual Exhibition of Advertising, Editorial and Television Art in 1964. Aware of this achievement, Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson overturned the House of Commons decision and approved the logo. This controversy left Julien Hébert rather bitter. He was also a little irritated by the fact that he would receive virtually no return on the logo copyright, and that this emblem would be reproduced thousands of times on various artefacts, souvenirs, clothing, and even on traffic signs. Hébert saw this as yet more proof of a lack of respect for the role of designers in Quebec. Yet he was convinced that from a cultural perspective the role of design was as important as that of the visual arts, of music, of literature and cinema. So it was with some satisfaction that years later (in 1979) he became the first designer to receive the Borduas Prize, the most important prize for the arts in Quebec. The fact that the prize bore the name of Borduas added to his pleasure, because it was a sign that design had finally been recognized as a ‘fine art.’ There is no doubt that Julien Hébert contributed greatly to the development of design in Quebec and that he was an important player in the ‘quiet revolution’ of the sixties through his numerous initiatives and involvement on the frontline at Expo 67. He trained several generations of designers, working as a teacher until the 1980s. He was commissioned to design the interior of Quebec’s pavilion at the Osaka Exhibition in 1970. If his work and his legacy are still not well known, this is proof that design continues to deserve more of our attention, the better to grasp the emergence of modernity in Quebec. NOTES 1 Julien Hébert, quoted in ‘Une murale d’aluminium de Julien Hébert,’ Le Devoir, 19 July 1963, 22. 2 For an overview of the work and career of the designer, see Martin Racine and Alain

106  Martin Racine Findeli, ‘Julien Hébert and the Emergence of Industrial Design in Canada,’ Design Issues 19, no. 4 (2003): 31–43. 3 The emblem can be used in white on a black ground (or inversed, as in figure 1), or be applied in a single colour on a contrasting background. 4 Gestalt is a German word signifying form or structure. It designated a theory of perception developed by German psychologists in the 1930s and 1940s. 5 Visitors to Expo 67 remarked on the practical aspect of the concept and appreciated being able to place their personal effects at the centre of the unit. 6 In his writings and his speeches, Hébert often referred to the Scandinavian countries as a source of inspiration. There is no doubt that he saw the architect and designer Alvar Aalto as a model to follow. 7 For a detailed presentation of Alvar Aalto’s work see Collectif Gallimard, Alvar Aalto designer (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). 8 Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher, and Jean-Claude Robert, Histoire du Québec contemporain, vol. 2 (Montreal: Boréal, 1989). 9 The same can be said of the group of the Plasticiens that formed in the 1950s. They never created any links with the design movement, even though their formal approach seemed to share similar concerns. 10 Paul-Émile Borduas, Refus global [Total Refusal], trans. Ray Ellenwood (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1985), 37–8. One should note a strong critique of utilitarianism. Because design is fundamentally useful, there is an inherent conflict between the manifesto and the aspirations of design. 11 Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) a sculptor of Russian origin who worked in Paris. Inspired by cubism, he was a precursor in the making of modern art for public spaces. 12 The painter Alfred Pellan and his group had also published a manifesto in 1948. 13 For an exhaustive study of Borduas’s work, see François-Marc Gagnon, Paul-Émile Borduas (1905–1960): Biographie critique et analyse de l’oeuvre (Montreal: Fides, 1978). 14 In his writings and his teaching, Hébert insisted on the importance of grounding the creative process on rational principles. For example, in conceiving a piece of furniture or a sculpture, every formal detail had to be justified; nothing could be left to chance. 15 Hébert throughout his career stayed in contact with Zadkine. He invited him to come to Quebec in 1956 when he organized an exhibition of his work. At the beginning of the 1960s, he worked with Zadkine to create a fountain for the National Arts Center in Ottawa. Archives de Julien Hébert, Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec. 16 Julien Hébert, quoted in Régis Tremblay, ‘Julien Hébert prix Borduas,’ Le Soleil, 17 March 1979. 17 Julien Hébert, quoted in René Viau, ‘Julien Hébert, le design, l’architecture de l’objet,’ Le Devoir, 20 October 1979. 18 In this he was similar to his friend Charles Daudelin (1920–2001), an important figure in Quebec sculpture and a pioneer of works conceived for public space. See Daudelin, retrospective exhibition catalogue (Quebec: Musée du Québec, 1997). 19 Borduas, Refus global, 34 and 36. 20 Julien Hébert, quoted in ‘Une murale d’aluminium de Julien Hébert,’ 22.

The Ambiguous Modernity of Julien Hébert  107 21 Jean-Paul Mousseau became artistic director of the Montreal Métro in 1972 and initiated the inclusion of non-figurative art in the subway system. He himself made works for the Peel, Viau, and Honoré-Beaugrand stations. Marcelle Ferron produced the stained glass works for the Champ-de-Mars station. We can now rediscover Jean-Paul Riopelle’s famous sculpture fountain ‘La Joute’ in the heart of Montreal’s new International Quarter. 22 Pierre Gauvreau is best known for his televisions work; notable examples are Le temps d’une Paix and the Cormoran presented by Radio-Canada. 23 Madeleine Arbour, interview with the author, January 2007. 24 On Gauvreau’s attitude towards the Bauhaus, see Gloria Lesser, École du Meuble 1930– 1950 (Montreal: Château Dufresne et Musée des arts décoratifs de Montréal, 1989), 16. 25 Excerpt from Julien Hébert’s journal, 23 November 1970. 26 It was for the Métro that Quebec put forth for the first time a policy of introducing works of art into public spaces. Robert Lapalme, the first artistic director for the subway system, initiated this policy. At first, it favoured didactic art that would tell the story of Montreal to the users. It stood firmly against the presence of abstract art. This position was contested by many artists (many among them former Automatistes), who eventually succeeded in having non-figurative works included. Jean-Paul Mousseau replaced Lapalme in 1972 and favoured the integration of numerous abstract works into the system. 27 It should be noted that Julien Hébert remained active as a sculptor while he worked as a designer. He maintained his membership in the Canadian Society for Sculpture. 28 ‘Une murale d’aluminium de Julien Hébert,’ 22. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 In the sixties, Alcan Aluminum was active in promoting design in Quebec. In 1961, one of its directors, Henry Strub, wrote to the premier of Quebec, Jean Lesage, to encourage him to support the field of design. Subsequently, the minister of industry and commerce asked Julien Hébert to write a report on the establishment of a Design Institute in Montreal. This project was carried out at that time. Information taken from the Archives de Julien Hébert, Musée du Québec. 32 Archives de Julien Hébert, Musée du Québec. 33 Julien Hébert, ‘An Industrial Aesthetic Will Be Responsible for the Face of Expo 67,’ En Ville, 15 February 1964. 34 Ibid. 35 The congress of the ICSID was held during Expo 67. In the papers delivered during the meeting, one could hear triumphant statements on the role of design at Expo 67 and on the maturity of the discipline that was now finally recognized by the general public. See the ICSID Catalogue of the Montreal Congress, 1967. International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, ICSID Canada Congress: 5th General Assembly and Congress of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, Ottawa/Montreal Canada, September ‘67 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1968). 36 John Diefenbaker, in Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), vol. 6, 1963, 6226. At the same time there was an official competition to design a new flag for Canada. 37 Hansard, vol. 6, 1963, 6226.

108  Martin Racine 3 8 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 ‘Le success inattendu du symbole de l’Expo crée par Julien Hébert,’ La Presse (Montreal), 23 December 1963. 41 La Presse (Montreal), 28 December 1963. 42 Ibid.

7 Girl Watching at Expo 67 aurora wallace

The theme may have been ‘Man and His World,’ but for many, Expo 67 was all about the women. The fair celebrated Canada’s one hundredth birthday, but it was also the country’s first real coming-out party, and like any worthwhile debut, it was liberally ornamented with beautiful, well-dressed women. The island paradise constructed on Montreal’s Île Ste-Hélène and Île Notre Dame was an open-air theatre and runway spectacular in one, and people came from all over the world to look. That women were a highlight of the six-month event is apparent in photographs, promotional material, and widespread media coverage, but they were not mere decorative embellishment; women at Expo 67 were important mediums of the fair’s message, signifying the wider world beyond the gates as banner-bearers of the future. Whether it was their presence or merely their appearance at the fair that was most noteworthy remains unclear. They were chosen for their beauty, constantly on display, and clearly objects of male attention and desire, while at the same time they were enacting the new social roles for women in the 1960s – participating in the workforce, confidently claiming public space, and embracing new modern clothes as a way of liberating themselves. Expo 67 hostesses embodied the paradoxes and contradictions experienced by women outside the fairgrounds, and as symbols of modernity they merit a closer look. Canadians remember Expo 67 as the time when the country gained long overdue international exposure. Internal disunity and identity insecurity were set aside for six months while the world’s eyes were trained on Montreal. When visitors came to Expo 67, they encountered an idealized world in miniature, with pavilions representing sixty-two different nations. Each country, industry, and organization that had an official showing on the grounds sought expression through architecture, demonstrating what each was capable of in art, science, and design. Circulating around these immovable structures were female guides to explain and enhance the experience, the physical embodiments of national values. On the fairgrounds, it was not only a newer and prouder Canada that was on display; Expo 67 exhibited a new cosmopolitanism, largely symbolized by its most visible icon, the Expo hostess (see plate 14). The fairgrounds provided an exquisite stage for observation and unrestrained looking, borrowing the techniques of display and exhibition common to museums and art galleries. Pavilions were distinguished by their glass box transparency,

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most visibly at the Canada, USSR, U.S., and Quebec pavilions. Canadian National Railways and the pulp and paper industry exhibits used glass extensively, as did the many glass-topped boats ferrying visitors around the islands. The fairground views were engineered from every angle: from overhead in open-design minirails and gondolas, and from ground-level benches that were positioned to take advantage of open-plan vistas. Narrow bridge overpasses encouraged proximity for more concentrated looking. The ground plan did not have a preordained path; fairgoers could wander, get lost, and retrace their steps. In this, hostess guides were useful informational nodes in the network, but they were also destinations in themselves. Just as collecting passport stamps from each pavilion became an amusement, checking off different hostesses was also a game for some: Montreal journalist Nick Auf der Maur famously tried to date a hostess from every pavilion.1 If hostess watching was one of the main attractions of Expo 67, it was due in no small part to a small but organized group of professionals. The American Society of Girl Watchers (ASGW) was an assemblage of Madison Avenue advertising men who were invited by the Expo Commission to bring their expertise to the fair. Following the publication of Don Sauers’s The Girl Watcher’s Guide in 1954, the ASGW was formed as an ad hoc organization dedicated to the profession, complete with membership cards and lapel pins. Borrowing from the ASGW’s rulebook, Montreal reporters offered the fairgrounds as a space of erotic possibility, where large crowds, sunglasses, cameras, and indiscriminate gazing provided ideal girlwatching conditions. As the Montreal Star reported, ‘Attention all girl-watchers: shift base of operation to Expo 67 immediately. There awaiting you is a feast probably unequalled in the history of this highly enjoyable pastime. Fifteen hundred girls who have everything – beauty, charm, gorgeous proportions and intelligence – are hostesses for the six-month event.’2 The Montreal Gazette claimed that ‘Expo abounds with so many perfect girlwatching subjects that watchers can have a field day there without spending a dime, eating a morsel or touring a pavilion,’ and that ‘never has a girl watcher been able to see so many at one time and place that are so pleasing to watch.’3 In August 1967, founder Don Sauers, president Ray Baur, director of field operations Copp Collins, and director of field development Bill Garland were dispatched from headquarters and arrived in Montreal in search of Expo 67’s ‘most watchable’ girls. Greeting them upon arrival were hostesses from different pavilions who gathered at the Montreal Men’s Press Club for an official viewing.4 Setting up a temporary headquarters in Westmount, Quebec, the society recruited five hundred new members, largely on the strength of Expo 67. During their thirty-day exploration, the officers chose and certified fifty fairgoers a day with badges, offering Air Canada tickets to their top choices to fly back to Montreal for the ‘final selection.’5 This selection followed a much more thorough, rigorous, and state-sanctioned process by the Expo Commission to enlist Expo’s official hostesses (fig. 7.1). A six-week recruiting trip across Canada began in 1966 in a nationwide search from which 235 women were chosen from over three thousand applicants on the basis of physical appearance and a combination of diplomatic skills including bilingualism, friendliness, and mastery of Canadian history and geography. In-person interviews helped narrow the applicant pool to those best suited to represent Canada: ‘girls who [we]re European as far as culture is concerned and American in their

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7.1  This Expo 67 press release lists the attributes required of an Expo 67 hostess. Courtesy of Bruno Paul Stenson.

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way of living’ were the most sought after. Potential hostesses were to be ‘cleancut,’ but not professional models. The search, according to the head Expo hostess, Monique Archambault, was for ‘bright, intelligent girls with nice personalities,’ extroverts who could ‘communicate what they fe[lt] about Canada and Expo 67.’ Once selected, the girls submitted to a training course lasting ten weeks, covering topics such as grooming, etiquette, and Canadian economics.6 Hostesses were the fulcrum balancing European culture and the American way of life, occupying that ambiguous place in the middle that Canada itself was trying to negotiate. Blending an Old World sensibility alongside that of the New, mixing tradition and modernity, nobility, and democracy, hostesses were the new emissaries of Canada’s self-determination. Despite whatever educational value the fair espoused, hostesses were there to make the experience more palatable, enjoyable, and fun. As Pierre Berton wrote, ‘Even the dull pavilions are fun to look at and so are the various hostesses – smart, cheerful, aggressively helpful – all dressed in the smartest uniforms and costumes yet devised.’7 Their modern dress contrasted with the indigenous costumes found at many country’s pavilions, whose ornament was anathema to the modernist project in fashion, design, and architecture. Insofar as ornament represented the past, it had no place at the fair or on its hostesses. As testimonials to the perfectability of form, minimalism, and simplification over complexity, the hostess was form and function, designed to exist in harmony with her environment. Like the female schoolteacher or librarian, the hostesses’ innate sensitivity and compassion made learning less onerous. Underscoring the fair’s emphasis on youth culture, the hostesses were young, single, and mainly recruited out of university. Wide-eyed and enthusiastic, they absorbed the shock of the new, not only in art but also in science, technology, and politics, by being feminine, adaptable, and progressive. Hostesses were the soft sell of the new world order, taking some of the edge off of the pedagogical and instructional role of the fair. In the face of daunting postwar technology and politics and a still fomenting Cold War, they represented a renewed humanism. Easing potential intercultural conflict, they were trained to negotiate different local customs on site with a sunny disposition. They were the chosen instruments of international diplomacy on a small scale. To perform this complex diplomatic role, hostesses were clothed in a uniform that communicated both style and control in the signature form of Expo, the miniskirt. The built environment records the significant legacy of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat, but in most fond recollections, the miniskirt was the iconic artefact. The Globe and Mail credited the success of Expo to precisely this fashion item: ‘Can you imagine Expo being a success in a year when hemlines dropped to the calf, or the height of female fashion was a mannish tweed suit? You can put up a pavilion anytime, but [mayor] Jean Drapeau might be unknown in the world today if it hadn’t been for the lucky chance that he peopled his and our pavilions with women in miniskirts. We should all be properly grateful.’8 Fashion was the bellwether of change and a clear representation of progress, and those seeking a new aesthetic vision for a world exposition could not overlook it. As the standout feature of Expo 67, the miniskirt spoke volumes. It evoked

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an earlier era of female liberation in the 1920s with its more relaxed social mores, and marked a distinct break from the longer, fuller skirts of the 1950s. The miniskirt was ‘the uniform of a freer way of life’ for young women in the 1960s.9 The constant fluctuation of skirt lengths was contested by men, women, and designers, with young women typically adopting a ‘less is more’ attitude. It moved more easily for being short, but it also hastened the extinction garter belts and old-fashioned hosiery. Commentators wrote that in the ‘Swinging Young Age, where everything is action and motion, the short skirt is symbolic of youth and motion and going places and change.’10 As Anne Hollander has suggested, insofar as the unconstrained female leg represented mobility, it was central to twentieth-century modernism.11 In the 1960s hemlines were a generational battlefield and a barometer of social change, and Expo fell at a fortuitous time to exploit the change for good. Both André Courrèges and Mary Quant have been credited with the invention of the miniskirt, although clearly both designers were responding to styles that they had already witnessed on the street. The power of the miniskirt to shock was tempered only by discourses of freedom and liberation by those who wore it. As Quant herself claimed, the miniskirt meant, ‘Wow, look at me. I’m young, liberated, exuberant and all-girl. It was the beginning of women’s lib.’12 Even when the designs were quite short, according to Quant, ‘the Chelsea girls, who had wonderful legs, would get out the scissors and shorten the skirts themselves.’13 Her skirts were imported to the United States through a distribution deal with J.C. Penney, and the skirts were made even shorter. That the skirts would later become associated with pre-marital sexuality, youth rebellion, and pre-pubescent androgynous body shapes was just part of what made them thrilling. Fashion historians and other cultural commentators staked the significance of the miniskirt on all of these attributes, along with many others. Hemlines continue to be employed as a euphemism for the stock market and for the weather, their ups and downs signalling good fortune or depression, and warmer or colder temperatures. That the miniskirt is so easily inserted into the domains of economics and meteorology, despite the fact that only women and girls wear them, speaks to their social and cultural relevance well beyond the feminine sphere. To understand the complex role played by the hostesses at Expo 67, one can begin with their uniforms as a fruitful object of analysis (fig. 7.2). On and off the Expo site, the uniformed female silhouette would become a signifier of authority, modernity, stylishness, and sexiness. The signature blue uniform of the Expo hostess consisted of a blue skirt-suit of interchangeable separates adaptable to changing weather conditions: a white sleeveless shell blouse, a three-quarter sleeve, four-button, fitted collarless jacket, and a narrow skirt worn to the knee. The uniform was accessorized with white gloves, a handbag, and a distinctive blue, white, and black pinwheel-patterned spherical tam. The designs were modern and streamlined, with little superfluous detail save for the hat. They were a nod to futuristic design, made from easy-to-wear synthetic fibres and without frill, a glimpse into the future of fashion that was to be unfussy yet flattering, functional and structured: better living by design. There is a kinship between the Expo hostess and the airline hostess that also bears closer investigation. It was no coincidence that the uniforms made its wear-

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7.2  Uniforms of the hostesses of Expo 67. Copyright Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2008). Library and Archives Canada/Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/e000990867.

ers resemble flight attendants; they were created by the Montreal couture designer Michel Robichaud, who had also designed the uniforms for Air Canada’s flight attendants. In the 1960s culture of airline travel, flight attendants too were symbols of glamour, style, and cosmopolitanism. Their uniforms similarly mixed a quasimilitaristic buttoned blazer with figure-flattering, aerodynamic skirts that rose incrementally above the knee as the decade progressed. As air travel was assumed to be a largely male domain, the costumes of flight attendants were understood to be their prerogative. At Canadian Pacific Airlines, passengers travelling in business class were given ballots to vote on the length of the uniform’s hem, exploiting 1960s male fantasies about personalized service in the air.14 The Chicago Tribune’s coverage of Robichaud’s designs for Air Canada demonstrated this attentiveness to stewardess fashion down to the last stitch: The charcoal green uniform has a semi-fitted jacket with set-in sleeves, a V-neckline with tailored collar and three self-covered buttons. The jacket is completely top-

Girl Watching at Expo 67  115 stitched and has a breast pocket for a white handkerchief. The A-line skirt is trimmed with fake pockets on the side seams. The white overblouse has a jewel neckline and short sleeves. Completing the wool and terylene ensemble is a charcoal green coat of basket-weave wool and a green felt hat.15

The cabins of jet airliners were space-age bachelor pads, and airline hostesses were so named to underscore their role as facilitators of the party. As Olympic Airlines boasted in their ads, ‘on board we have cocktails, first-run movies, our superb “21” Club food, one of the great wine cellars in the air, seven stereo channels and stewardesses with a knack for turning it all into a big party.’16 Jamaican Airlines proudly announced that its stewardesses, ‘aside from being lovely to look at, [will] fluff your pillow [and] bring you delicious things like mangos and rum swizzles.’17 Their training in safety procedures was always secondary to their implicit function as comfort- and caregivers to be looked at and enjoyed. For marketing purposes, it served airlines better to insist on the latter so as not to remind passengers of any inherent threat to passenger safety. Short-skirted women, officially called stewardesses, hostesses, or cabin attendants, but sometimes known colloquially as ‘trolley dollies,’ were an essential part of the air travel experience. United Airlines was the first carrier to staff their planes with ‘sky girls’ in the 1930s, hiring only trained nurses to fly ‘the friendly skies.’ In an attempt to personalize its service, National Airlines gave airplanes female names, conflating the machinery and attendants in ads which read, ‘I’m Margie, Fly Me.’ Southwest Airlines raised the bar and the hemline with micro miniskirts and hotpants. By the 1960s, all of the major airlines were adorning their flight attendants in styles by the leading designers of the day, putting them on a par with professional dress models. Hollywood designer Jean Louis outfitted United Airlines, Pierre Balmain designed Air France’s uniforms, and British Airways commissioned Sir Hardy Amies to dress its staff.18 Mexicana Airlines advertised their ‘stewardesses in high fashion couture.’19 Emilio Pucci famously adorned Braniff’s crew in bright contrasting pastels in Op-art geometric shapes in a full wardrobe advertised on television as ‘the airstrip,’ because passengers could expect several cabin crew costume changes during the flight to mark the passage of time through the air. With the aisles of the cabins functioning as fashion runways bisecting forward-facing seats, it would be impossible for passengers’ attention to be focused anywhere else. Travel, whether in real airplanes or virtually at international expositions, was to have female accompaniment, fixing the use of women’s bodies to transportation in a tradition still evidenced by ‘booth babes’ at car shows and superfluous bikiniclad models in motorcycle magazines. In air travel, the female form acted as an antidote to the loud mechanical engineering of the jet propulsion, setting passengers at ease inside a contraption otherwise prone to cause panic and fear. Whereas travel by rail (where porters were overwhelmingly male and of colour) or by ship has rarely included such a modulating influence, air cabins were constructed as a natural occupational habitat for women. While cabin crews on boats and trains were selected for physical strength in order to carry passengers’ bags, stewardesses were important carriers of an airline’s brand and keepers of the company’s

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image, maintained through their uniforms and their friendly and positive outlook. As one TWA crewmember described, ‘We’re basically public relations girls. I mean, let’s face it. We can make or break the airline. After all, we’re with the passengers longer than any other employee.’20 There was a public feminine identity common to both stewardesses and Expo hostesses through which women were used as bearers of corporate, or national, values. Like flight attendants, Expo hostesses were often pictured in groups, with the uniform subordinating individual identity. When photographed in rows or other geometric formations, they had precisely standardized equivalence, with identical body types as if chosen for a kick line in a musical revue. Like stewardess outfits, hostess uniforms were perfectly tailored for fit, facilitated by the unvarying body types of their wearers. In the air this was achieved through the strict guidelines that most airlines had for the height, weight, and age of their employees. As American Airlines advertised in 1960, women could ‘travel while they worked’ if they were single, high school graduates, aged 20 to 26, weighed between 105 and 135 pounds and measured 5’3” to 5’8” tall.21 Expo hostesses had to be between 20 and 28 with a university degree, and the Ontario pavilion specified intelligence, self-assuredness, a ‘sense of responsibility and a good personality’ as qualifications.22 Although professional models were discouraged as Expo hostesses, the Canada pavilion chose former Miss Canada pageant contestants and winners to serve, indicating that ideal body types were preferred.23 Both hostesses and flight attendants also had to pass regular inspection once they were in their uniforms. Flight attendants were surveyed for hair length (which could not touch the collar of their uniform), nail and lip colour (company-issue red), and the presence of a girdle, which supervisors would sometimes pinch to ascertain at the beginning of a shift.24 Hostesses were checked for neatness, the whiteness of their gloves, and the length of their skirts, which were measured up from the knee (although some rolled up the waistband after inspection to wear them shorter).25 In addition to the at-large Expo hostesses, each country’s pavilion also outfitted its hostesses in national colours and designs, making hostesses the bearers of the graphics, symbols, and culture of their pavilions (see plate 15). That fashion was a primary concern at Expo could be seen by the fact that most countries, like national airlines, looked to their premier designers to create their uniforms. The fifty hostesses at the United States pavilion wore uniforms designed by Bill Blass, who would later also design uniforms for American Airlines; at the British pavilion, red, white, and blue striped miniskirts were created by ‘New Wave designer Roger Nelson.’26 In addition to Michel Robichaud, Montreal designers were well represented at the fair: Murielle Fleury designed the uniforms for the Atlantic Provinces pavilion hostesses, and Serge and Réal designed for the Quebec pavilion hostesses.27 The French pavilion was outfitted by France’s Jean Louis Scherrer in dresses of silver lamé, and Mexico’s hostesses wore costume designer Pedro Loredo’s creations. Hostesses for the Greek pavilion wore the blue and white of the Greek flag, and the Israeli hostesses wore costumes evocative of those worn by El-Al Airline attendants.28 Beyond the hostesses, regularly scheduled fashion shows were held at many pavilions. Paco Rabanne exhibited his fashions at the France pavilion, the

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Czechoslovakia pavilion held regular fashion shows, as did the Soviet Union’s, which had models participate in a twice-daily fashion show in short skirts and fur-trimmed coats.29 The Association of Canadian Couturiers presented their fall and winter styles at the Canadian pavilion in honour of International Women’s Day at Expo.30 At the fair, fashion was one of the main conduits through which national culture, innovation, and modernity were conveyed, levelling the international fashion hierarchy that once privileged only France. As Christopher Breward has observed, ‘fashion emerged as a currency that encouraged cities and nations to compete, its value equivalent to the promotion of state architecture, exhibition culture, grand street plans and organized tourism.’31 For many people at the fair and beyond, fashion was easily appreciated and identifiable and did not involve the arcane language or training involved in the connoisseurship of architectural form, industrial design, or new technology. The fashion shows were among the most popular attractions for men and women, drawing crowds to the permanent exhibits and organizing the gaze of visitors toward the national treasures of each country’s women. It was through fashion and style that Canada oriented itself somewhere between the United States and Britain, and Montreal aligned itself with France. With Expo following closely on the heels of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, comparisons with the Americans were inevitable. Owing to the earlier fair’s poor crowd control, hyper commercialism, and dowdy presentation, even the New York press was eager to put their fair behind them and embrace Montreal’s. While the New York World’s Fair was run as a profitable commercial enterprise, indeed so much more like a trade show than an exposition that it was not technically given the status of an international exposition by the governing body in France, Expo 67 was intended to be national in character with no overt mandate to make money. Because the fair was supported by all levels of government and with limited commercialism, Canadians would take the financial loss in exchange for good international publicity. Surpassing the 1964 fair in New York was an unstated goal for Expo planners, who tried to learn from its mistakes. As Maclean’s reported, ‘New York was very cold, impersonal … we’re making sure Expo will be a very personal fair.’32 The leading role of the hostess was clearly part of the overall strategy of personalization. Prior to the fair, the Expo Corporation promoted Montreal to Americans with an approach designed to highlight its cosmopolitan and fashionable allure, using women as the symbols of the city. Macy’s became the New York home of Expo 67, previewing the event with a season-long campaign that included a four-hundredsquare-foot scale model of the site and official on-site hostesses. As the New York Times wrote, ‘While Scottish pipers provided a temporary melodic background, the pretty girls in uniform were official, multilingual hostesses who will serve at the exhibition when it opens. Meanwhile they will conduct 10-minute guided tours of the walk-around model at Macy’s throughout the day.’33 An ongoing series of fashion features and ads in the Times encouraged New Yorkers to visit their friendly neighbour to the north over the summer. Contests were held to give away trips to Canada and fashion tie-ins provided wardrobe ideas, asking travellers, ‘What better place to show you fashions to take traveling this summer than the exciting

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vacation land across the border … where there are sights and events you won’t see anywhere else this side of the Atlantic? We discovered, to our pleasure, that Canada is both cosmopolitan and unspoiled, both worldly and wild.’34 Canada was positioned at the intersection of opposing features and qualities, between the urban and the wilderness, and between nature and culture, and there to reconcile any disjuncture was the Expo hostess. In the three years between 1964 and 1967, a shift in the ethos of the single girl was evident, at least as measured by their appearance at fairs. While Montreal’s Expo was a celebration of youth and women, with hostess posts staffed almost exclusively by single women, New York’s World Fair discouraged single women and teenagers from applying for work, and married women were specifically courted to staff some pavilions.35 The grounds at Flushing Meadow were not to serve as a playground for romantic liaisons, and the propriety of women there was closely guarded. Perhaps as a safeguard against fresh fears of the dangerous city, and falling only a month after twenty-eight-year-old Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death outside her Queens apartment building, the 1964 fair was overtly presented as a site of ‘family’ fun. While there was considerable American presence at Expo 67 – celebrity visitors included Jackie and Robert Kennedy, Jack Lemmon, and Robert Wagner – the United States occupied a precarious status at the fair. Several young people used the American presence at Expo as an opportunity to oppose the war in Vietnam and to publicly burn their draft cards. The American pavilion itself was criticized for its superficial devotion to American celebrity, Hollywood, and pop culture, and for not embodying the true modern spirit of Expo. The exhibit expressed American creativity through Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls, an enormous Raggedy Ann doll display, cowboy paraphernalia from film sets rather than the frontier, guitars, astronauts, and oversized photographs of screen stars.36 About the only part of the U.S. pavilion that was praised, aside from Fuller’s geodesic dome, were the vinyl-skirted hostesses inside. The twenty-foot photos of pin-up girls had gotten it wrong: this might have been the American way of displaying the female form but it was not the Expo way. By contrast, the British pavilion was lauded for being interesting, entertaining, and funny. It presented a light-hearted display of everyday life in Britain that did not take itself as seriously as the Soviet pavilion nor as casually as the American pavilion. Swinging London was conveyed through tableaux of Carnaby Street and Beatles music. Youth culture was at the forefront, echoing the larger themes of Expo. As the inventors of the miniskirt, the British were on point at Expo, and it did not escape notice that the British hostesses’ skirts were the shortest. The female form, fashion, and Montreal were so thoroughly fused during Expo that it was difficult to determine which came first. As Maclean’s asked: ‘Why are Montreal’s women so chic? Is it the clothes or the women themselves? Who knows? Who Cares? Look!’ … ’Montreal’s got it made – it has the most beautiful women in the country, and they have the style to show off the best designs.’37 But while Expo certainly helped to make Montreal a more glamorous world destination, couture was already at home in Montreal long before 1967. Montreal had been considered the ‘Paris of North America,’ since at least Prohibition in the United States, a des-

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ignation used to mark a place as artistic, bohemian, or colourful. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the similarity of Montreal to Paris was a claim ubiquitous in advertising copy for Canadian National Railways, Trans Canada Airlines, and the Queen Elizabeth hotel. In order to highlight the tourist appeal of a foreign language, cuisine, music, and nightlife, Mayor Jean Drapeau was fond of referring to Montreal this way in his speeches. After the Second World War, the Parisian connotations were even more in evidence, and with clothing imports curbed by the war, Paris lost much of its status as a fashion capital. By necessity, fashion manufacturing, if not always design, shifted to New York, and in Canada, Toronto and Montreal were its centres. In Montreal, the garment trade took advantage of large pools of low-cost immigrant labour, a good local market, policy support, and a sense of French style. Insofar as Paris has maintained its place as a fashion capital, Montreal by virtue of its Gallic character was prone to enjoy the benefits of association. But it was not only these industrial conditions that led Montreal to be heralded as feminine in its charms. Like Paris, Montreal had an atmosphere of street theatre, café society, music, and wine drinking. Describing it as a fashionable destination was one way of describing the women of Montreal, who, like the stylish Parisiennes, were well suited to their beautiful surroundings. Such feminized city associations were strengthened further at the fair, fortifying Montreal’s reputation as a city with an unusually high concentration of beautiful women. Photographic fashion features were one of the central ways that these conflations were, and are, established. Through the use of iconic urban features, cities, women, and fashion are linked. As David Gilbert suggests, the imagined cities of fashion press rhetoric become visualized as the city is presented as a fashion object by photography. Fashion photography has had a close relationship with the representations of cities on postcards and in tourist guides. In both cases there is a value in those symbols that are unambiguous identifiers of a particular city … Fashion photography is very good at accessorizing the city by drawing upon everyday iconic elements as markers of place: pillar boxes and black cabs, or water hydrants, steam vents and yellow taxis.38

In Montreal, fashion photography in the late 1960s took the Expo 67 fairgrounds as their nearly exclusive backdrop. The newly completed skyscraper Place Ville Marie, Habitat, and the other increasingly recognizable pavilions of Expo were the visual establishing shots that came to epitomize Montreal. That there should be harmony between the hostesses’ appearance and the overall look of the fair was an obvious goal. The Expo 67 hostess was not only part of the landscape; she was the landscape. In keeping with the tenets of modernism and the search for a universal and revolutionary form that would elevate the human spirit, fashion was as important to the overall aesthetic as the architecture. The new rule that progressive styling should inform all areas of contemporary life was a key element of the harmonious utopian plan envisioned by such world expositions. The hostess uniform suited its surroundings in the same spirit that prompted Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright to design fabrics and furniture

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for the interiors of their houses, because when designing for living, form knows no boundary. As Elizabeth Wilson has claimed, ‘fashion links beauty, success and the city. It was always urban (urbane), became metropolitan and is now cosmopolitan, boiling all national and regional difference down into the distilled moment of glassy sophistication.’39 Even where difference was being expressed at Expo 67, in the form of national costume, the overriding commonality was youthful female beauty sheathed in a miniskirt. For all of the variety in colours and styles found in the uniforms of national pavilions, they were linked together in a universal language of modernity that made each legible, accessible, and approachable, just as the international corporate uniforms of flight attendants do more to express unity than difference. Expo 67 presented a new world order of communications and technology, and the Expo hostess was its medium. The American pavilion seemed to exemplify a certain failure of representation, providing evidence of the difficulty of showing something new and modern by retreating to the safe icons of the past. This was in part a symptom of new technology: where the 1964 fair had been largely about impressive new machines, both industrial and domestic, by 1967 computerization made such displays outdated and difficult as a result of the tiny and unimposing microchip. Exhibit designers were challenged to come up with ways of showing technology that resisted spectacular display. As one designer put it, ‘How do you show what a little black box does? Often, you can’t even show the box, or the transistor; you’ve got to represent its importance, its great power, symbolically.’40 It was in this realm of representing the unrepresentable that the Canadians excelled. Elevating the image over the machine, Expo 67 presented itself to the world through light and pixels. It was saturated with screens, multimedia, and visions of the future, and the hostess stood firm against any representational uncertainty. She was a clear message, pure information easily accessible and readable. Through her emblematic dress, she unambiguously represented modernity. Although Canada had a negligible reputation as a glamorous destination, Expo was successful for putting it on the international jet-set map, helping Montreal reinvent itself as a new ‘world-class’ city. Embodying movement, change, dynamism, and flow, hostesses were the personification of modernity and spectacle. In this world in miniature, old divisions were effaced – public and private, culture and nature, man and his world. If Montreal was to be the way of the future, as so many commentators suggested in 1967, it would not be only for its modern skyscrapers, Habitat housing, or rubber-wheeled Metro system. It would also be about a new vision of urbanism hospitable to women on the street, single or in groups, free to wander and watch. The practice of girl-watching at the fair may have looked like simple objectification, but out of this pastime a new female subject was emerging. Modernity privileged the new and the fashionable, in a reciprocal process that claimed the modern as fashionable and the fashionable as modern. By packaging this shift in the camera-friendly guise of young attractive women, it may have even seemed more palatable. Being anti-tradition opened up the possibility that those aspects of traditionalism that did not favour women could also be scrutinized anew.

Girl Watching at Expo 67  121 NOTES 1 ‘Tributes to Nick from Near and Far,’ Montreal Gazette, 9 April 1998, A1. 2 Donna Logan, ‘Hostesses – Color Them Blue,’ Montreal Star, 28 April 1967, 12. 3 David Tafler, ‘Expo’s Girls are Delightful,’ Montreal Gazette, 9 September 1967, 69. 4 Donna Flint, ‘The Fine Art of Girl-Watching,’ Montreal Gazette, 5 August 1967, 8; Beverly Mitchell, ‘Girl-Watchers Seek Most Watchable,’ Montreal Star, 16 August 1967, 45. 5 Zena Cherry, ‘Man Is Never To Rich or Poor to Girl Watch, Professional Says,’ Globe and Mail (Toronto), 21 July 1967, 9. 6 Frederick H. Guidry, ‘Wanted for Expo 67: Hostesses with Mostest,’ Christian Science Monitor, 13 September 1966, 16. 7 Pierre Berton, ‘By God We Did It,’ Maclean’s, June 1967, 3. 8 Scott Young, ‘The Pelvic Bone and Miniskirts,’ Globe and Mail, 19 September 1967, 7. 9 Donna Flint, ‘Montreal Hemlines a Girl-Watcher’s Delight,’ Montreal Gazette, 6 July 1967, 12. 10 Melinda McCracken, ‘Wait a Mini,’ Weekend Magazine, 27 December 1966, 8. 11 Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (1975; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 216. 12 Bill Martin, ‘Mini Marvels,’ London Daily Star, 28 April 2006. 13 Ibid. 14 Canadian Pacific advertisement, Montreal Star, 26 October 1970, 43. 15 ‘People and Places,’ Chicago Tribune, 1 November 1964, I8. 16 ‘Do the Olympic Hop,’ Olympic Air advertisement, New York Times, 16 May 1967, 12. 17 ‘Jamaica,’ Jamaican Airlines advertisement, Chicago Tribune, 21 May 1967, H9. 18 Keith Lovegrove, Airline: Identity, Design and Culture (London: Laurence King, 2000); Kim Mitchell, ‘Air Carriers Turn to Designers to Update Flight Uniforms,’ Modern Uniforms, 1 August 2005, 18. 19 ‘Jet Fashion Parade,’ Mexicana advertisement, Chicago Tribune, 18 June 1967, H8. 20 Mary Reinholz, ‘The Stews in Their Summer Dresses,’ Los Angeles Times, 14 May 1967, A28. 21 ‘Travel While You Work,’ American Airlines advertisement, Chicago Tribune, 1 June 1960, B3. 22 Ontario Pavilion, Expo 67 advertisement, Globe and Mail, 16 August 1967, 9. 23 Donna Logan, ‘Hostesses – Color Them Blue,’ Montreal Star, 28 April 1967, 12. 24 Corey Kilgannon, ‘When Flying Was Caviar,’ New York Times, 19 October 2003, 23. 25 Catherine Wallace, ‘The Way We Were; Expo “Greeters” Reunite, 25 Years Later,’ Montreal Gazette, 29 June 1992, A3. 26 Logan, ‘Hostesses.’ 27 Ibid. 28 ‘Costumes for Hostesses at Expo Include Pillbox Hats and Jumpsuits,’ Globe and Mail, 29 May 1967, 17. 29 Marylin Bender, ‘To Paco Rabanne, Most Fashions Are a Lie,’ New York Times, 3 May 1967, 33. 30 ‘Haute Couture at Expo,’ Globe and Mail, 6 June 1967, 11. 31 Christopher Breward, Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004), 15. Breward paraphrases David Gilbert, ‘Urban Outfitting:

122  Aurora Wallace The City and the Spaces of Fashion Culture,’ in Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, ed. S. Bruzzi and P. Church Gibson (London: Routledge, 2000), 7–24. 32 Ian Adams and Desmond English, ‘For 183 Days – Showplace of the World: Expo 67,’ Maclean’s, 15 October 1966, 19. 33 Joan Cook, ‘Macy’s Pushes Montreal Fair,’ New York Times, 13 May 1966, 37. 34 Macy’s advertisement, New York Times, 14 June 1966, 7. 35 McCandlish Phillips, ‘Sleep at the Fair Is Just a Dream,’ New York Times, 29 April 1964, 30. 36 Clarence Newman, ‘The U.S. and Russia: Some Expo Contrasts,’ Wall Street Journal, 3 May 1967, 16; Paul J.C. Friendlander, ‘A Citizen’s-Eye View of the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67,’ New York Times, 2 July 1967, 214; ‘U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67 Opens with Space and Art Displays,’ New York Times, 24 April 1967, 18. 37 Marjorie Harris, ‘Montreal Style: Why It Swings,’ Maclean’s, 3 December 1966, 21. 38 David Gilbert, ‘Urban Outfitting,’ 9. 39 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 2003), 9. 40 Anthony Monahan, ‘Soft Sell on the St Lawrence,’ Chicago Tribune, 9 April 1967, I40.

8 Into the Labyrinth: Phantasmagoria at Expo 67 ben highmore

One of the notable characteristics of the pavilions at Expo 67 was the preponderance of multi-screened film presentations. But, as journalist Robert Fulford noted, this was not a new feature of international exhibitions: By now the multi-screen cinema was no surprise to anyone. At Expo it was everywhere. There had been multi-screen before – not only at New York but at Brussels in 1958 and at earlier fairs, including one in Paris three decades before, and in a few isolated feature films – but this time multi-screen was a dominant factor rather than a special attraction. This time, we were present not at the introduction but at the development of a new cinematic language.1

Among the pavilions using multiple screen displays the most popular, according to the Expo Corporation’s rough-and-ready surveys,2 was the Telephone Association of Canada with the ‘film’ Canada 67 (see plate 16). This display was by Walt Disney Studios and used their ‘Circle-Vision 360°’ film technique, ‘in which the screens completely surround the viewer [and] gives him [sic] the feeling of actually participating in such typically Canadian events as a National Hockey League game, the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] Musical Ride, the Calgary Stampede, the Quebec Winter Carnival, etc.’3 For Fulford this was a ‘cinematic hymn to the glories of Canada, so blatant in its chauvinism that one could hardly imagine Canadians producing it.’4 Already it is worth noting that the commentary on expanded cinema at Expo routinely emphasizes the paucity of a display’s content (in terms of images and ideas), which is seen in marked contrast to the power, excitement, and effectiveness of its phenomenal form. The Kaleidoscope pavilion, sponsored by various Canadian chemical firms, overcame this discrepancy by abstracting their reference to the outside world and creating ‘a psychedelic experience without LSD,’5 ‘a horizonless adventure in incredible colour, motion and sound.’6 Other notable pavilions using expanded cinematic forms were the Czechoslovakia pavilion (fig. 8.1), which in one display combined twin screens with multiple-choice narrative options (to be voted for by the audience); the Canadian Pacific – Cominco pavilion, which used Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid’s six-screen presentation We Are Young!; and the U.S. pavilion’s threescreen film A Time to Play by Art Kane.

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8.1  The multi-screen display in the Czechoslovakia pavilion. Image from: Jean-Louis de Lorimier, Expo 67: The Memorial Album/L’album memorial (Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons Canada, 1967).

The pavilion that seemed to make most demands on the interpretative skills of professional commentators and Expo visitors, and also produced the longest queues, was the National Film Board of Canada’s Labyrinth. It was Labyrinth that seemed to speak most emphatically and eloquently of a new, exciting, yet uncertain, media form. For Fulford it was, ‘a kind of a dream, or a nightmare, or maybe a secular religious ceremony.’7 For Bill Bantey, the editor of Montréal (a magazine designed to promote and celebrate all aspects of Expo), writing before Expo 67 opened, Labyrinth was going to have a privileged place in the exhibition. This is Montréal as it prepares local audiences for Labyrinth in the run-up to the opening of Expo: Few spectacles at the exhibition will surpass Labyrinth for sheer excitement. Revolutionary film techniques will be screened in a monumental concrete building as cav-

Phantasmagoria at Expo 67  127 ernous as a Gothic cathedral. In one chamber, viewers will be elevated to a ramp 40 feet above the floor where they will view images on a 60-foot screen in front of them and simultaneously a projection on an equally vast screen below. In a second huge chamber [the third chamber in the actual pavilion], films will play on five screens at once. Ramps in Labyrinth lead to mazes where a system of reflecting mirrors and flashing lights will give the visitor the sensation of being surrounded by elusive iridescent images. In one corridor, transparent glass floors, ceilings and walls will eradicate all sense of perspective. Sound effects are calculated to evoke a series of moods: Fear, joy, awe. The mazes have been designed to communicate a new perspective on life in the modern world.8

Labyrinth lived up to Bantey’s prediction. The pavilion was enormously popular even though it was a slow process getting in to see it. Jeffrey Stanton, for instance, remembers visiting the Labyrinth pavilion with his parents: The lines for this movie were often two, three, even four hours long. And as those who exited the Labyrinth often came up to those waiting patiently in line and reassured them that the wait was worth it. The night that I saw the film, my parents and I waited nearly two hours in line. Young people enjoyed the movie more than older people who were often somber after thinking about their advancing age. Children found the movie confusing, yet hardly anyone really understood what it was all about.9

Besides the long wait, the common experience of visiting Labyrinth was a mixture of bewitchment and bewilderment. The recognition that a display could be hugely popular, absolutely compelling, while also confusing and without a readily describable message, exemplifies a key characteristic of some of the most important displays in international exhibitions in the modern age. More generally, I want to claim that Labyrinth makes vivid and visceral a form of address that has been (and still is) a central component of modern industrial and capitalist culture. One way of situating Labyrinth would be to see it as an exemplary instance within a history of immersive and virtual display forms. ‘Immersion’ is the favoured term of media historian and theorist Oliver Grau in his book Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Prompted by a desire to understand the latest computer-based media, and impatient with bombastic claims that blindly assert computer culture as absolutely innovatory, Grau uses ‘immersion’ as a way of recognizing phenomenological continuities and discontinuities between disparate media. By looking at immersive forms across history (from Roman wall painting, through panoramas, and on to recent artworks using virtual reality technology), Grau inoculates himself against the twin pathologies of media studies: to mistakenly posit the present as the new (underwritten by a linear history of media progression); or, inversely, to only see the age-old. Both pathologies suffer from a failure to recognize the specific qualities of display forms. Grau’s historical approach is designed to reveal both old and new media forms in a new light. In his privileging of the immersive quality of new media forms, older media are reconfigured in the process: ‘Older

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media, such as frescoes, paintings, panoramas, film, and the art they convey, do not appear passé; rather, they are newly defined, categorized, and interpreted. Understood in this way, new media do not render old ones obsolete, but rather assign them new places within the system.’10 The work of Grau and others11 combines media archaeology with media theory and does much to interrupt the linear narrative of media progression. This is crucial, I think, for understanding pavilions like Labyrinth because it refuses to see them primarily as a forerunner to something else (IMAX cinema, for instance) or as a straightforward continuation of previous world exhibition pavilions. Yet because ‘immersion’ is primarily concerned with the phenomenological character of display, Grau’s analysis is not driven by a need to explain the social role of immersive display forms. While Grau gives us a much more complex history of media and a more nuanced understanding of present-day media practice, ‘immersion’ never fully spills out into the larger social world.12 To my mind the term ‘phantasmagoria’ offers a more productive and critical context for the study of Labyrinth because, while the term includes a phenomenological orientation (phantasmagoria necessarily includes some form of enchantment or bewitchment), it also links the phantasmagoric to some of the key features of modern industrial culture – widespread technological mediation, the commodity form, the contradictory amalgam of reason and superstition, the dream-like quality of its entertainments, and so on. Since Marx’s claim that commodities were phantasmagoric, the term has been used in cultural theory (however unevenly) to designate a form peculiar to capitalist society. To privilege phantasmagoria, then, is to insist that analysis takes a socially critical perspective. It was this perspective that the German cultural critic and historian Walter Benjamin most famously developed, and it is Benjamin who most persuasively deployed the term to understand the importance of world exhibitions for modern capitalist culture. So before returning to Expo 67 I need to flesh out my belief that it will be the deployment of phantasmagoria (as a critical category) that will lead us into and out of the labyrinth. Phantasmagoria and Critical Theory When in 1867 Marx wrote that the commodity form – that motor of capitalism – transformed ‘a definite social relation between men’ into ‘the phantasmagoric form of a relationship between things,’13 the popularity of the original phantasmagorias had long faded. The original phantasmagorias were stage shows that conjured phantoms out of the ether using magic lanterns, mirrors, smoke, and gossamer cloth. Their novelty and popularity lasted from the 1790s and into the early 1800s, to be superseded by panoramas, stereoscopes, and other visual technologies.14 The phantasmagoria traded on a contradiction: they used the rhetoric of science and the latest technology to make ghosts manifest. For Marx there was a clear analogy here for the way that inorganic ‘things’ became animate and magical when they became commodities. We only need to think of present-day television advertisements for contemporary examples of the way commodity culture enlivens the most inanimate of things.15 Phantasmagorias were not just a trick of light, producing ghostly movement by wheeling the lantern forward so that the

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phantoms grew progressively larger; they were also a trick of address. Spectators were invited to see a scientific display which would demystify the spirit world: what they saw seemed to confirm their most atavistic superstitions.16 Technology, it seemed, was determined to make manifest ‘the ghost in the machine.’ It was Walter Benjamin who most clearly saw the way that the term phantasmagoria could be used as a central figure for understanding the attractions and distractions of modern industrial culture. While Benjamin was clearly indebted to Marx in a number of ways, he also courted the thought of other writers, not least the sociologist (and Benjamin’s former teacher) Georg Simmel. In the 1930s Benjamin worked intensely on his unfinished project investigating the prehistory and emergence of modernity in nineteenth-century Paris – the Arcades Project. The idea of phantasmagoria was one of its central motifs. It is worth quoting at some length from Benjamin’s ‘Exposé of 1939: Paris Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ to get a sense of the term’s importance for Benjamin: Our investigation proposes to show how … new forms of behaviour and the new economically and technologically based creations that we owe to the nineteenth century enter the universe of a phantasmagoria. These creations undergo this ‘illumination’ not only in a theoretical manner, by an ideological transposition, but also in the immediacy of their perceptible presence. They are manifest as phantasmagorias. Thus appear the arcades – first entry in the field of iron construction; thus appear the world exhibitions, whose link to the entertainment industry is significant. Also included in this order of phenomena is the experience of the flâneur, who abandons himself to the phantasmagoria of the marketplace. Corresponding to these phantasmagorias of the market, where people appear only as types, are the phantasmagorias of the interior, which constituted by man’s imperious need to leave the imprint of his private individual existence on the rooms he inhabits. As for the phantasmagoria of civilization itself, it found its champion in Haussmann and its manifest expression in his transformation of Paris.17

This overview of the themes that the Arcades Project explores shows just how ubiquitous phantasmagoria was for Benjamin: there it was in new shopping complexes (Arcades), in world exhibitions (and other entertainment forms), in the meandering activities of city wanderers (and perhaps most insistently in the practice of window shoppers), in domestic decoration, and in city planning. So while the original phantasmagoria has been tied into a history of cinematic and pre-cinematic forms,18 Benjamin extends the idea of the phantasmagoric to designate characteristic phantasmatic relationships between human subjects and their environment. This will be crucial for understanding Labyrinth. But why should all these activities get categorized as phantasmagoric? What does Benjamin hope to achieve by stretching out the term in this way? If you had to highlight one specific theme in the Arcades Project, and in Benjamin’s work more generally, then there would be good reason for highlighting the theme of experience and what Benjamin sees as the death of experience within modern industrial culture.19 This is not the place to explore this systematically, but we can note some insights here that will be important to a discussion of phantasmagoria and

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link it to the troubled fate of modern experience. One is that Benjamin sees a continuum of cultural forms that seem to jeopardize a traditional idea of experience. To be clear: Benjamin does not think that experience is quantitatively diminished in modern life (quite the opposite: human beings are bombarded by much more sense stimuli, for instance), but he does see the quality of experience (what we can make from the sense stimuli we receive, for example) as being impoverished. Thus, experience, as a growing knowledge that could lead to wisdom and to communicative material, is withering away. The industrial factory or mechanized warfare cannot accommodate experience in this second sense, even though anyone would agree that in terms of immediate (and unprocessed) experience they constitute a brutal intensification of what went before. Because we cannot take our distance from this immediate world, we have difficulty finding reflexive forms for understanding it, which leaves us caught in the deep sleep of the capitalist dreamworld. The original phantasmagoria promised knowledge and demystification but sent the viewer reeling back to the myths of old. The continuation of the phantasmagoria, in all its different forms, works to sustain the fantasy of rational modernization. It casts a spell over us, offering us a cornucopia of beneficial devices, entertainment, and knowledge, but (for the most part) delivering mere phantoms that leave us unsatisfied, befuddled but bewitched. Factories and modern warfare are phantasmagoria’s hidden engine room; shops, world exhibitions, funfairs, and the entertainment industry provide its samplers and training manuals: ‘what the amusement park achieves with its dodgem cars and other similar amusements is nothing but a taste of the training that the unskilled labourer undergoes in the factory – a sample which at times was for him the entire menu.’20 But if the phantasmagoric form is one of the determinants for the withering away of experience, it might (and this was the glimmer of hope caught in the nightmare of actuality) also provide the antidote. For experience to be rekindled as a form of knowledge and wisdom, it requires new artistic forms that are adequate to the material circumstances they are confronting. It was clear to Benjamin that the narrative forms of nineteenth-century realism were not able to convey much about the dislocated intensities of modern life. Cinema, especially montage cinema, might be better placed. But this is an argument that is caught within a conflict: in this case (and cinema is an obvious candidate for the label phantasmagoria) the medium is simultaneously both poison and cure. Cinema (along with the entire range of phantasmagoria) is partly responsible for the withering away of experience (it is most often a form of distraction, rather than a critical reflection on modern life), and yet it might also have the capacity to furnish new cultural forms that might offer a new sort of productive reflection on life (a distracted critical reflection). Thus cinema might be seen as phantasmagoria with the potential to produce critical phantasmagoric work: work that uses the phantasmagoric form against itself, as new perceptional form. This argument is also spelled out by Georg Simmel in his account of the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition. Simmel’s understanding of modern life is premised on a psychological account of what happens when a society rapidly increases the amount and intensity of stimuli (particularly in its metropolitan centres). His is an account that posits neurasthenia and indifference as the two possible outcomes

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of modern life. Simmel’s interest in the Berlin Exhibition, which at the time was being described as a ‘temple to the cult of nervousness,’21 was directed towards its phantasmagoric qualities (though he does not use this term): The way in which the most heterogeneous industrial products are crowded together in close proximity paralyses the senses – a veritable hypnosis where only one message gets through to one’s consciousness: the idea that one is there to amuse oneself … Every fine and sensitive feeling, however, is violated and seems deranged by the mass effect of the merchandise offered, while on the other hand it cannot be denied that the richness and variety of fleeting impressions is well suited to the need for excitement for over-stimulated and tired nerves.22

World exhibitions, then, participate in neurasthenic culture, paralysing the ability to take stock of what we are experiencing, leaving us caught in the dream world of amusement. Yet because modern culture in general is also involved in draining our nervous resources, the industrial exhibition, ironically, also provides the cultural form that might be able to attract, and communicate with, the modern city dweller. Its potential for acting on phantasmagoric culture, as well as being symptomatic of it, is its secret cargo. For Benjamin world exhibitions of the nineteenth century were important for understanding modern technological life, because they supplied particularly vivid examples of phantasmagoria which were also related to other cultural forms: World exhibitions … provide access to a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted. Within these divertissments, to which the individual abandons himself in the framework of the entertainment industry, he remains always an element of the compact mass. This mass delights in amusement parks – with their roller coasters, their ‘twisters’, their ‘caterpillars’ – in an attitude that is pure reaction. It is thus led to that state of subjection which propaganda, industrial as well as political, relies on.23

Like funfairs and technological entertainment, world exhibitions are (in this analysis) forms of propaganda. But here Benjamin is forcing us to rethink what could be meant by such a term: clearly the ideological work (mental propaganda) that a roller coaster can do is rudimentary when compared with a newspaper, a film, or a novel. The clue here is that Benjamin is talking about a propaganda not aimed at the intellect but addressed to the body, and he confirms this by adding ‘industrial’ to qualify the idea of propaganda. Industrial propaganda (or rather the propaganda of industry) does not just need to convince hearts and minds; it needs to inculcate the senses into a new relationship with technology. For Benjamin what was demonstrated time and again was that this relationship was phantasmagoric. But while political propaganda conjures up images of mass rallies and hectoring voices, industrial propaganda was often designed to be fun. Indeed for Benjamin the power of phantasmagoria is its pleasurable, playful form. To fully register this insight we must recognize that play is not the opposite of work, for Benjamin. Play

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and discipline are not opposed; rather they form the various characteristics that commercial, industrial culture can take. Phantasmagoria is a training ground that foregrounds plasticity and play. Not only does this make it potentially an ally in a fight against social regulation, but contradictorily, it makes it a more successful mechanism for inculcating social habits. In a review of a book on the history of toys, Benjamin makes this crucial point about the relationship between play and habit: For play and nothing else is the mother of every habit. Eating, sleeping, getting dressed, washing have to be installed into the struggling little brat in a playful way, following the rhythm of nursery rhymes. Habit enters life as a game, and in habit, even in its most sclerotic forms, an element of play survives to the end. Habits are the forms of our first happiness and our first horror that have congealed and become deformed to the point of being unrecognizable.24

The play element in phantasmagoric culture is an invitation into new material environments, an initiation that starts to habituate the visitor to new industrial forms. This passage on play and habit offers the key to unlocking Benjamin’s understanding of how modern industrial culture trains the sensorium both to submit to its formal protocols at the same time as it offers the possibility of shaking loose of its disciplinary grip. The function of film, for instance, ‘is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily.’25 The outcome is not necessarily hopeful but neither is it hopeless: industrial modernity trains us to cope with the increased industrialization that is its central characteristic, but in training us in this way it facilitates the possibility of a radical reassertion of our democratic agency over industrial culture. Phantasmagoria, then, is a powerful form for insinuating technological relations at a basic and pleasurable level. Yet the social implications of this are undecided. Play as a form of adjustment and inculcation insists that the human sensorium is always more or less protean, more or less able to adjust and readjust. While it is likely that phantasmagoria is put to use to make adjustments that are accommodating to industrial capitalism, there is also potential for other sorts of experiences, ones that might possibly be utopian or critical, or simply new. If the creaturely self that is summoned by the phantasmagoric is always becoming, then there is always the possibility of becoming otherwise. Though Benjamin was writing about the nineteenth century, he was trying to make sense of his most immediate present. His interests in the exhibitions of the Victorian era were accompanied by astute analyses of current exhibition practices.26 His reason for categorizing the second half of the nineteenth century as phantasmagoric is precisely because he could see phantasmagoric forms intensifying in the present. Indeed, the period since Benjamin’s death (he died in 1940) might rightly be seen as even more phantasmagoric. In this I think we need to remember the particularity of the term phantasmagoria and how it might differ from other terms: not just ‘immersion’ but also terms like ‘the spectacle’ in which it might (at both first and second glance) be seen as aligned. Like Grau’s notion of ‘immersion,’ phantasmagoria usefully orientates us to the formal and phenomenal prop-

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erties of displays, but unlike ‘immersion’ it insists that we inquire into the social role that these forms take. Phantasmagoria suggests both a crisis in experience (a veil of unreality obscuring actuality while enlivening the inorganic environment) and the limited potential of addressing this crisis. It has the same critical power as Guy Debord’s notion of ‘the spectacle’ but it is not anchored to its politics of total refusal.27 Debord wanted to see the end of spectacular society: for him this meant the total refusal of the spectacle in all its forms. Benjamin wanted to see the end of phantasmagoric culture: for him this had to mean recruiting phantasmagoria to criticize phantasmagoric culture and to awaken us from the sleep of unreason. If we re-enter the Labyrinth pavilion as a phantasmagoric environment we will, I hope, be more sensitive to its playful and bewitching power. The confusion that it seemed to generate will not, now, be seen as a failure to communicate effectively but as a key feature of its phantasmagoric form. I want to suggest, with some trepidation, that the makers of Labyrinth, and some of the best commentators on that pavilion, were clearly aware that they were producing and viewing a phantasmagoric form, even though this was not a word they used. A question remains of course: was this phantasmagoria in the service of industrial capitalism (in the loose sense I have been describing), or do we catch a glimpse of what it might mean to use phantasmagoric forms against industrial propaganda? You will forgive me, I hope, if I do not finally give a definite answer to this question. Labyrinth, I think, was both, and simultaneously, and it might well be this that makes it such a compelling example of phantasmagoria. But to analyse its phantasmagoric powers we need to look at its production, concentrate on the specifics of its display, and importantly, distinguish the playful energies it mobilized. Into the Labyrinth Labyrinth was the product of two groups of cultural workers. The first group, and main instigators of the project, was from the National Film Board (NFB). This group was lead by Roman Kroitor with filming roughly divided between Kroitor, Colin Low, and Hugh O’Connor. Kroitor, Low, and O’Connor had all been involved in developing a documentary poetics at Unit B of the NFB (which was, incidentally, established by the documentary filmmaker John Grierson in 1939), and they had become known for their cinema verité documentary films. The second group was the architectural partnership of John Brand (who was also director of the School of Architecture at McGill University, Montreal), Roy E. LeMoyne, Gordon Edwards, and Anthony Shine. The film images that Labyrinth projected show how close the filmmakers were to the documentary conventions of the time. The material was filmed across a variety of countries and sequences included a crocodile hunt in Ethiopia, the Angkor Wat temples in Cambodia, and images from Russia, the United States, Japan, Britain, as well as Canada. Most of this material was used in the third chamber, which was the most conventional of the various spaces in Labyrinth. Using a cruciform arrangement of five screens this chamber showed filmed sequences that worked across the screens as one image, or used each screen independently, or used a mixture of the two (fig. 8.2). The closest and most important precursor to the series of

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8.2  Cruciform arrangement of screens for the film Labyrinth, produced by the National Film Board of Canada for the Labyrinth pavilion at Expo 67. Photo courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.

global comparisons that this part of Labyrinth performs is the photography exhibition The Family of Man, which was first shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1955.28 The Family of Man set about establishing homologies across the structural inequalities of the world, as if to say that we all cry and laugh, get born and die, and the fact that some of us have an excess of material comforts and others lack essentials should not obscure such things. When it travelled to France, Roland Barthes recognized it as performing the most elemental ideological move: eradicating the historicity of social worlds and pretending instead that they are the products of a universal and timeless nature.29 In the first chamber (fig. 8.3) a story was told of a child being born – ‘a life in the day.’ Visitors stood along balconies and looked down at a massive screen that

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8.3  Crowds line the balconies of the Labyrinth pavilion to view the multi-screen story of ‘a life in a day,’ which documents a baby rapidly maturing to become an adult. Photo courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.

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constituted the floor and across at another screen perpendicular to the floor. This chamber played on the vertical and horizontal aspects of the screens: for instance, showing on respective screens, a vertically standing boxer winning a match, while the horizontal loser is sprawled on the floor. The story of a baby becoming an adult included material that utilized this form – the child becomes a construction worker with the building occupying the vertical screen and the distant ground the horizontal – but it also included material that seems to question some of the more cozy assumptions of the projections; in one sequence there is a street riot, for instance. It is in this chamber that we can see how ideational content (boy becomes man and faces both pleasures and dangers) is secondary to the spatial interest caused by the use of horizontal and vertical screens, and by the viewer being placed above the massive horizontal screen looking down from a gantry. The physicality of movement as a baby moves from one screen to another, from the mother’s bed (horizontal) to be picked up by a nurse (vertical), seems designed to cause a vertiginous effect in viewers. It was Colin Low who was responsible for liaising with the architects and for realizing some of the non-cinematic visual and spatial effects. The maze and the various liminal corridors worked to continue and to intensify the vertiginous experiences that were being generated in the first chamber: ‘The maze was three prisms in an octagonal room full of mirrors on all the walls, floor and ceiling. The prisms were made of partial-silvered glass so when the lights were on the audience, it would be the audience reflected back to itself, and when the lights went off the audience and came on in the prisms, it made an infinity of stellar lights. A cosmos.’30 The maze and the first cinematic chamber utilize play elements that were designed to produce unsettling physical and perceptual effects. They were dizzying, confusing – spatially disconcerting. The gigantic swoops and falls of the first chamber were followed by the mirrored light show of the maze – a cosmic depth transformed, in an instant, to a hard surface that brought you face to face with your own image. According to Roger Caillois, in his 1958 taxonomy of games Les jeux et les hommes (translated in 1961 as Man Play and Games), the vertiginous experience of much of Labyrinth would fall into the category of play that Caillois terms ‘ilinx.’ While it is a more managed form of ‘ilinx’ than some of the examples Caillois uses (which often include dangerous rituals) it still mobilizes the vertiginous energies that Caillois describes. Ilinx, for Caillois, ‘includes [games] which are based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.’31 For Caillois ‘ilinx’ play is distinguishable from games of chance (alea), competitive games (agôn), and forms of mimicry. Of course, many forms of play combine a number of these elements, but it seems clear to me that the sort of affects associated with phantasmagoria are best seen as ilinx play. Ilinx is not rule-bound, nor is it primarily expressive of the world already perceived: its pleasures revolve around a new and unsettling relationship with the world. It momentarily dissolves the architecture of the self and ego. The vertiginous nature of Labyrinth (its ilinx aspect) is part of what energized the visitor, instilled a fraught pleasure (of ‘voluptuous panic’), and contributed to the pavilion’s mythological atmosphere. This was also something

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that was encouraged by the choice of images. Indeed the filmmakers had sought out the advice of the Canadian literary theorist and tracer of literary archetypes, Northrop Frye, when they were planning the pavilion. For Roman Kroitor Labyrinth (or Labyrinthe in French) was set to revolutionize the form of cinematic narration and performance: New kinds of storytelling and new audience tastes will result from this technology. People are tired of the standard plot structure. New film experiences will result, in which there’ll be a tight relationship between the movie and the architecture in which it’s housed. We took a step in that direction in Labyrinthe. A new language is going to develop. There are ways in which shaping the relationships of images cuts through the superficial realities and reaches something deeper.32

As a filmmaker it is understandable, I would assume, that Kroitor thinks in terms of the future of cinema. Yet from this perspective Labyrinth, and most of the other expanded cinema forms at Expo 67, seem eccentric – blips of technological experimentation that never make it into the front rank of society’s culture industries. There might be a range of explanations for this; for instance it would not be hard to provide a compelling account that argues that the possibilities that expanded cinema represented in 1967 were soon eclipsed by other possibilities, not the least of which was the massive and continuing expansion of television. But part of asking historical questions about a cultural formation necessitates asking questions about what it is that is being historicized. It is only by being able to describe and characterize something that we can see it as ‘belonging’ – or rather, intermingling and connecting – to a particular historical sequence (of items that are similar or distinct). The question that Labyrinth raises concerns its relationship to cinema: should we see Labyrinth as part of a history of cinema or part of something else? From the evidence of the commentary surrounding them, these expanded media spaces were not always thought of in terms of cinema. Or, more pointedly, the best of the contemporary commentary is engaged in asking questions about the kind of media forms that were being staged. Kroitor has a sense of this when he is describing the importance of combining the architectonic and the cinematic. Roman Kroitor went on to develop IMAX, a large-format cinema that has some of its antecedents in Expo 67 and Labyrinth. Yet to see IMAX as the main or only outcome of Labyrinth is to emphasize one minor element of the pavilion and to ignore other larger but more dispersed factors. The expanded media being developed by pavilions like Labyrinth suggest that architectural history as much as cinematic history will be germane to its analysis. In this way the study of phantasmagoria will need to exceed disciplinary specialism if it is going to catch the particularities of specific forms. To my mind the commentary that most convincingly describes and conceptualizes Labyrinth, by catching something of its problematic phantasmagoric dimensions, is provided by a British architect, Jeremy Baker, living in Montreal at the time. One of the reasons that it is convincing is that it attends to Labyrinth as a spatial experience. It is also convincing, not because it tries to explain Labyrinth, but because it struggles to describe and name something that as yet has no name

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– it is trying to describe an emergent form. It is worth giving Baker some room here: Labyrinth … has created a new space without even the use of film. Connecting its two film display spaces (there isn’t an existing word to describe them) is a series of meditation galleries. They have none of the recognisable hardware of spaces; no walls, no ceilings, no views; this is true software space, in which, without any physical change, the whole atmosphere can be made terrifying, exciting or contemplative. The architectural significance of this is two-fold. First the effects are just too powerful to ignore; when you have got used to the excitement of software space, it is impossible to be thrilled any more by the conventional space system. It is a difference in the scale of excitement. Secondly, as the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther said, ‘the nature of the architectural surround is becoming more and more a factor in the compound of this nameless medium.’ Similarly any conventional space, however well designed, cannot compete with the thrills and effectiveness of the software spaces. These suggest what might happen when the limit has been reached with what can be done with the standard methods of designing interiors. In the same way that the new spaces are multi-media, so they are multi-purpose. The fun life has merged into the education system, and it is perhaps the influence of Expo that the medium has suddenly developed along didactic lines.33

The architectural perspective is crucial here; what is being described is the design of interior space, where the architecture itself takes on the condition of being a projection, an image. Here the materiality of the immaterial is of central concern, and we should note that it is not the film chambers that are the focus of attention but the connecting chamber of the maze and adjoining corridors. We should also note how this connects to Benjamin’s description of phantasmagoria as orchestrating the energies of the funfair for pedagogic purposes. We might also want to notice the way that Baker describes the interior as ‘software space,’ as a space whose virtuality can only be described in terms of an emerging computer culture. For Baker this space is forceful, energized, and didactic. Yet the question still remains: could Labyrinth awaken its visitors from the dreamworld of industrial capitalism, or was it destined to simply maintain the hypnosis that Simmel recognized in Berlin? To my mind Labyrinth was a site and a moment that was unresolved, that had not finally decided where it should or could direct its energies. Kroitor was clear that it should sustain a dreamworld, but what kind of dreamworld was not clear: ‘A long time ago, when we started working on it, I said to the other people involved that the ideal effect would be like a very real, very vivid dream which you don’t really understand. You know only that something inside it is explosive and important. The film is addressed only about twenty per cent to the ordinarily conscious part of the mind, and eighty per cent to the rest.’34 The dreamwork of the pavilion was designed to allow for new perception, and like many of the other pavilions the dream was fashioned from banal elements (the residues of the workaday world). Even Robert Fulford, an enthusiastic champion of Expo 67, recognizes how empty such images could become: ‘after a while one

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became used to a set of visual clichés – babies with umbilical cords, steel mills, teenagers dancing to rock bands, cars (or motorcycles) racing down highways, rocket-ships blasting off.’35 Such images were often fantasy sequences, wish fulfilments, and celebratory mirages that veil more traumatic material: ‘Stand up, Canada, and take a bow: In record time, you’ve built the greatest world exhibition this earth has ever known. You’ve proven that “the quiet people” can make dreams as big as their land come true.’36 Labyrinth exhibited its fare share of banalities, of a vague universalism, but still there is something there – in the maze, in the gantry looking down and across at the massive screens – that suggest its task could never be fully consistent with the task of industrial propaganda. There is, I think, no way of fully resolving how we assess the phantasmagoric impact of Labyrinth, but it is worth finally, and all too briefly, casting it within the context of Expo 67 (as I did at the start of this essay) to get some sense of its comparative phantasmagoric address. The Phantasmagoria of Expo 67 Expo 67, like most international and universal exhibitions, was a phantasmagoria, a dreamland: a dreamland of nation-building, of conspicuous consumption, of industrial promotion, and of the occasional reminder of the structural inequalities that underwrite this culture. The fantastic and the virtual seemed to overcome the fixity, the limitations of material life. Perhaps the most phantasmagoric aspect of Expo 67 was the site itself. Expo 67 took place in a newly fabricated Montreal. In the years leading up to Expo 67, Montreal’s mayor, Jean Drapeau, undertook a building program that was unprecedented in scale. One important aspect of this was the extensive Metro system that started running in 1966; another was the Expo site – now mostly a public park. The Expo site included two islands in the St Lawrence River – Île Sainte Hélène and Île Notre Dame – as the main landmasses for the Expo which would be connected by underground tunnels and above-ground bridges. The problem was that only one of the islands existed when Expo 67 was being planned in 1962, and that island was far too small for the planned exhibition site. During 1963–4, the island of Sainte Hélène was extended so that it was twice its original size, and the island of Notre-Dame, which was just a few acres of mud flats, was created ex nihilo, fashioned out of rocks and earth. For the island of Notre-Dame, 26,970 feet of external walls had to be raised along with 21,150 feet of internal protection walls. This new landmass was created with 6,825,000 tons of rock, either dredged from the river or taken from the Metro construction sites. The site itself represents a newly configured phantasmagoric urban space, a new land geography that treats physical space as manipulable, as endlessly mutable space. There are links, then, to be made between the ‘software’ space of Labyrinth and the manipulated landmass of the Expo site and Montreal’s new transport infrastructure. Similarly, the phantasmagoria of Labyrinth can be linked to pavilions like the U.S. pavilion, which offered an array of oversized artworks and NASA paraphernalia inside the massive geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. If nothing else they are linked by the vertiginous scale of their spectacular displays. But these connections are not the whole story. Commentators saw in Labyrinth a

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certain refusal of the commodification that seemed to characterize the U.S. and other pavilions: ‘It is perhaps the only theme pavilion which doesn’t take progress for granted, and insists on taking a personal view of man. “You are the hero” says Labyrinth, not “you are the product.” It’s really an essential stop on the expo tour … but line-ups are long, and slow.’37 I have been claiming that what could be said about Labyrinth and other displays at Expo would depend on how we recognized them as material things. Recognizing Labyrinth as part of the longue durée of the phantasmagoric means that we need to inquire into the practical and material capacities of the display, look at the kind of sensorial training that a display could perform, ask what kinds of routines such a machine was a preparation for. Just as the department store never realized the emergent practices of the arcades in Benjamin’s account, so the various technological progeny of Labyrinth (IMAX, for instance) never realized its potential. The banal images that Labyrinth uses in its film chambers prevent us from recognizing its untapped potential as a phantasmagoric machine. We need, I think, to grasp it as a contradictory machine. As a political machine it performed identification with the alibis of universalist humanism; as an industrial machine it worked to unhinge any form of identification. For the former the energy of ilinx works to perform a pedagogic duty; for the latter the same energy exceeds its duty, working to unthread the pedagogic relationship. And it is here that the maze and the corridors, the actual software space, seems so much more important than the film chambers. It is here where the phantasmagoric is not aimed at destabilizing identity for the purpose of re-securing it. In the maze Labyrinth is simply in the business of unwinding the ties that bind. And here the vertiginous energy is aimed at nothing but the potential to be otherwise: ‘when the lights were on the audience, it would be the audience reflected back to itself, and when the lights went off the audience and came on in the prisms, it made an infinity of stellar lights. A cosmos.’ NOTES The research for this essay was funded by the British Academy and was facilitated by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. 1 Robert Fulford, This Was Expo (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 87. 2 The Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, General Report, Expo 67: Universal and International Exhibition of 1967, 5 vols (Ottawa: Queen’s Printers for Canada, 1969), 2831. 3 General Report, Expo 67, 509. 4 Fulford, This Was Expo, 90. 5 ‘Psychedelic Experience without LSD’ is the title of Architecture Canada’s article on the Kaleidoscope pavilion. See Architecture Canada, October 1967, 52. 6 Fulford, This Was Expo, 91. 7 Ibid., 95. 8 Bill Bantey, Montréal, January 1967, 5.

Phantasmagoria at Expo 67  141 9 See Jeffrey Stanton’s Expo 67 website (1997), http://naid.sppsr.ucla.edu/expo67/mapdocs/cinema.htm (accessed 4 September 2006). 10 Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003), 8. 11 For instance Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 12 When it does attempt social explanation, for instance in the large chapter on ‘the Panorama of the Battle of Sedan,’ it is often highly truncated and unconvincing in its conceptualizing of these cultural forms as social machines. Grau’s claim that the Sedan panorama reverses Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, for instance, seems particularly underdeveloped. 13 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1 (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 165. Translation adjusted to bring it closer to the original German. 14 Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), chapter 6. 15 As I write, UK television is showing advertisements in which mobile phones commit suicide because they are ashamed of how old-fashioned they are, and blackcurrants fight tooth-and-nail to be included in a fruit cordial. 16 See Terry Castle, ‘Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,’ Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 26–61, for the best analysis of early phantasmagorias. 17 Walter Benjamin, ‘Exposé of 1939,’ in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 14. 18 For instance, in Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000.) 19 Mapped out in essays like Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933), in Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 731–6, and Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’ (1936), in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935–1938 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 143–66. 20 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1940), in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 329. 21 Berlin neurologist Albert Eulenburg, cited in Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2006), 16. 22 Georg Simmel, ‘The Berlin Trade Exhibition’ (1896), Theory, Culture and Society 8, no. 3 (1991): 119–20. 23 Benjamin, ‘Exposé of 1939,’ 18. 24 Walter Benjamin, ‘Toys and Play: Marginal Notes on a Monumental Work’ (1928), in Selected Writings: Volume 2, 101. This essay was first published in Frankfurter Zeitung in March 1928. 25 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility (second version 1936), in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 108. 26 See, Walter Benjamin, ‘Food Fair: Epilogue to the Berlin Food Exhibition’ (1928), trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings: Volume 2, 135–40. First published in Frankfurter Zeitung, September 1928.

142  Ben Highmore 27 See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). 28 See Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). The Family of Man went on an extended tour of Canada in the second half of the 1950s. 29 Roland Barthes, ‘The Great Family of Man’ (1957) in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Granada, 1973), 100–2. 30 Colin Low, ‘Interview II,’ Take One: Film and Television in Canada (Winter 2000): 32. 31 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (1958), trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 23. 32 Roman Kroitor, cited in Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 352–4. 33 Jeremy Baker, ‘Expo and the Future City,’ Architectural Review 142, no. 846 (1967): 154. 34 Roman Kroitor, cited in Fulford, This Was Expo, 95. 35 Fulford, This Was Expo, 88. 36 Editorial in Montréal, May 1967, 2. Canadian national identity, and the impossibility of generating a consensual image of Canada, is obviously a context that a more detailed analysis of Labyrinth would need to address. In concrete ways Expo heralded the beginnings of the Parti Québécois and a much-intensified independence struggle; it also saw important examples of First Nations consciousness-raising. In this ‘traumatic’ context an address to the kind of universalism peddled by exhibitions like The Family of Man must have struck many as decidedly conservative. 37 ‘Expo Inside Out!’ Omniscope Magazine, 1967, 22.

9 The Christian Pavilion at Expo 67: Notes from Charles Gagnon’s Archive monika kin gagnon

It is a misnomer to call this pavilion ‘Christian.’ It would be more appropriate to name it ‘Ecumenical Shock Pagoda.’1 Don’t come here looking for pat answers or liturgical clichés. It’s a diary of human events, starting with your own heart beat. You are faced with yourself and with your brothers, with human sorrow and human joy, despair and triumph, war and peace, starvation and over-production.2

‘Ecumenical Shock Pagoda’ is how Reverend Lindsay Howan, president of the Association of Regular Baptist Churches of Canada, described the Christian pavilion at Expo 67. Howan’s was one of numerous outraged reactions to this controversial pavilion, and in his emblematic letter to the editor of the Windsor Star, he would go on to complain that there was no reference to the gospel, and too much pornography, nudity, obscenity, and vulgarity. Hardly the descriptors one would expect from a Christian-sponsored event. The 1967 Christian pavilion differed from previous religious pavilions in that it radically broke away from conventional public representations of religion, religiosity, and ecclesiastical reference, which tended toward practising and promoting religious gospel and soliciting church membership. Instead, Expo 67’s Christian pavilion was an avant-garde, humanistic engagement with the paradoxes of the human condition presented as a multi-screen, multimedia spectacle. Composed as an environment of photography, moving images, soundscapes, and film projections, the Christian pavilion was rife with the entanglements and tensions for which world’s fairs, beginning with London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, have come to be known. If previous world’s fairs had tended to be unquestioningly celebratory of industry and technology, the post-Second World War ‘Atomic Age’3 world’s fairs have exhibited more ambivalent engagements with technology’s benefits. Dialectical tensions between material progress and its social consequences reverberated throughout Expo 67 and its theme, Terre des Hommes/Man and His World, inspired by the writing of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Quebec’s secularization, known as the révolution tranquille, combined with the provocative influences of Marshall McLuhan’s Catholic humanism and widely popular media theories, were set against the anti-war, sexual revo-

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lution counterculture of the 1960s, creating a fertile context for exploration and representational experimentation in the Christian pavilion’s creation. The pavilion exudes the complexity of this particular conjuncture and is representative of the unlikely bed partners that can form in the unpredictable climates of social upheaval, and the central roles that culture, art, and media play at such moments of transformation. Designed by Montreal artist Charles Gagnon, and featuring his film The Eighth Day (1967), the Christian pavilion was one of three official religious pavilions at Expo 67. Historian Gary Miedema provides an insightful account of the planning and reception of the Christian pavilion, analysing it in relation to Expo 67’s two other religious pavilions: the Christian evangelical pavilion entitled Sermons from Science, and the pavilion of Judaism.4 Miedema’s sustained analysis of the Christian pavilion engages the complex discourses of modernity, public religion, and aesthetics that were entwined at this critical moment in Quebec.5 Meanwhile, historian L.B. Kuffert has situated the Christian pavilion alongside other social critiques that circulated within pavilions at Expo 67. Kuffert writes that ‘innovative exhibitors such as the Czechs, distinctive exhibits such as Canada’s Labyrinth, and especially the “vigorous contemporary idiom” of the Christian pavilion made their own lasting impact because they dared to leaven the gospel of material progress with questions about its social implications.’6 When the American commercial magazine Popular Photography honoured the ‘outstanding’ use of photography within three pavilions at Expo 67, they chose the Christian pavilion, Labyrinth, and the Czechoslovakia pavilion, selecting the ‘Christian pavilion for taking two ideas: of an imperfect world and of man in need of help – and socking the point across with a photographic right hook. For sheer impact in showing our-worldthe-way-it-is, pictures have never had such brute force.’7 The Christian pavilion was designed by my late father, Charles Gagnon. He was a painter beginning in the 1950s and is primarily known as a multidisciplinary artist with artworks in numerous public, corporate, and private collections, achievements recognized by a Governor General’s Awards in the Visual and Media Arts in 2002, and the Quebec Prix Paul Emile Borduas in 1995.8 He spent part of his early professional years in the 1960s, during his twenties and thirties, undertaking graphic and industrial design work in Montreal, with his design firm, Gagnon/Valkus Incorporated.9 The pavilion’s multimedia design would anticipate the multidisciplinary character of his later artistic work, with its rigorous attention to photographic idioms (which he had practised since his youth) and was the impetus for the creation of the first of four films he would make between 1966 and 1972.10 Between 1965 and 1967, Gagnon and Gagnon/Valkus Inc. formally contributed to Expo 67 as the principal exhibition designers of the Christian pavilion, as well as the Agriculture pavilion, part of the ‘Man the Provider’ theme pavilion which examined problems of population explosion and malnourishment around the world. My affective proximity to the Christian pavilion and The Eighth Day archive has propelled many idiosyncratic trajectories that I will not pursue here, but which have admittedly obfuscated clear research paths. (My father’s detectably petulant interview in the religious news film On the Eighth Day, for instance, remains one

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pleasurable distraction, especially his evasiveness on the question of his own religious beliefs.)11 As the official archival components for my father’s Christian pavilion materials have yet to be finalized, those of us composing them have been faced with quandaries about selection, inclusion, and excision of documents and images, as well as epistemological reflection concerning archives and how to best, as opposed to, how to most faithfully, compose one. What becomes an archive? What constitutes the best or most accurate archive? My practical preoccupation with tending to my father’s artistic and personal materials since his death in 2003 brings me to elicit such queries as both the annoyance and fateful pleasures of inheritance that have characterized my hands-on engagement and reflexivity about this task, with its often unsettling devotional quality. Such inquiries fortuitously resonate with those reflections on history (as public) and memory (as belonging in the private realm) that underlie the makings of this book anthology, with its revisitation of the landmark event of Expo 67 as just far away enough now to merit sustained reflection. Issues of history and memory also dovetail with those very themes in my father’s found footage film, The Eighth Day, and explicitly in the nature of the film’s ‘collage’ genre itself, drawing as it does on existing newsreel and news photography that may be recognizable from the public domain.12 The challenge offered by the researching and writing of this essay has been to navigate, highlight, and tack some suggestive paths through a diversity of materials that will come to be organized as ‘The Christian pavilion at Expo 67’ in the Charles Gagnon fonds of the National Gallery of Canada Archives. The occasion testifies, in one way, to my first-hand experience of the constitution of an archive and the tangible sense of mnemonic triggers in objects. These have concerned basic issues such as how materials and elements arrive in an archive in primary, secondary, tertiary ways through various sources, and how they may also be separated into different archival collections. But this experience also touches on the sensory dimensions of archival composition and research, and the material dimensions of memory.13 In another way, this occasion also speaks to the challenges of reconstituting multimedia events such as the Christian pavilion, as I have largely done through original floor plans, slides, descriptions, documentation, and photographs in Expo 67 books. Finally, it animates the seemingly unlikely collaboration of Gagnon’s avant-garde sensibility as an artist and a paternalistic church consortium in the throes of reinvention through the kind of iconoclastic acts that this pavilion represents, enacting the utopian vision that Marshall McLuhan had for the prescient role of the artist and the capacity for heightened perception. Given the paucity of sustained documentation and critical commentary on the Christian pavilion (save for Miedema’s book and its religious focus), this paper begins by describing the Christian pavilion, situating it within Expo 67, and providing an overview of some of the media coverage, including religious alternative media, that productively demonstrates the various investments and challenges facing public religion in Quebec in the 1960s. Miedema’s book effectively lays out the planning and execution of the three religious pavilions at Expo 67 through his attention to primary archival documents and analysis through a frame of public religion. This essay attempts to describe the material facets of the Christian pavilion’s creation and imaginatively reconstruct its innovative multimedia from the

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artist’s archives. This includes single 35 mm slides, quarter-inch audiotapes, as well as planning documentation of still photographs, the film itself, and the paper archives that surrounded its making. Building on Miedema’s reconstruction and analysis of the social factors surrounding the pavilion’s inception, attention to the media sheds light on the particularities of the pavilion’s contradictory dimensions, and how the paradoxes – in breaking away from expected representations – may have contributed to its limited critical discussion. In so doing, this paper brings attention to those intersections between the media of the 1960s and differentiated humanisms, and the neologisms inspired by media theorist Marshall McLuhan that permeated Catholic Church and popular discourses during this period. The Christian Pavilion as Prayer ‘God is not here,’ said a priest.14

The Christian pavilion was one of several private pavilions located on Île NotreDame, in addition to the thematic, national, and regional pavilions that made up Expo 67. The pavilion was located on northwest lot number 416, measuring a halfacre, and flanked to the west by the United Nations pavilion and its 155 national flags, and the controversial Indians of Canada pavilion, with its distinctive tipi-like structure, which took a critical view of colonization and featured the artwork of Alex Janvier, Norval Morrisseau, and other artists.15 Documentary images clearly show the UN’s flags and the Indians of Canada pavilion’s tipi crosspoles visible through the Christian pavilion’s garden (fig. 9.1), suggestive of a complex intertextual play between aboriginal and non-aboriginal nationhoods, colonial history, inter-national relations, and the Catholic Church’s controversial role in this tightly bound nexus. The Greece pavilion, with its austere white cube architecture, was situated to the immediate east. The butterfly-roofed structure of the Christian pavilion was designed by Montreal architects Roger D’Astous and Jean-Paul Pothier (architects of numerous Catholic churches throughout Quebec) for $1.3 million and was considered relatively modest in cost. Like most of the Expo 67 pavilions, it was created as a temporary structure. The pavilion was co-sponsored by an ecumenical consortium of seven churches, consisting of Roman Catholic, United, Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist, and Greek Orthodox churches. As Miedema discovered through his detailed examination of documents from the Canadian Centre for Ecumenism, the final design was the result of complicated and often conflicting visions, discussions, and negotiations of the involved constituencies: the Expo Corporation, and particularly Expo’s CEO, Pierre Dupuy, with the representatives of each of the seven churches, and the pavilion designers themselves. While Dupuy had strenuously attempted to restrict a didactic religious presence, the evangelical Sermons of Science had managed to ensure their presence, as they had at previous world’s fairs.16 Past the illuminated fountains in the garden outside the pavilion, one entered three thematized interior areas called ‘zones.’ Zone 1 represented ‘The World around Us.’ Zone 2, situated beneath the first level, was a small theatre, seating

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9.1 From the garden in front of the Christian pavilion, the flags of the United Nations pavilion and the tipi of the Indians of Canada pavilion are visible. Canadian Centre for Ecumenism, Montreal. Documentation Photos of the Christian Pavilion, Expo 67.

one hundred viewers, showing The Eighth Day. This zone represented ‘The Dark Side of Man.’ Finally, following the film, the visitor ascended into the uplifting Zone 3, ‘The Light in the Darkness,’ which contained the only explicit references to Christianity in the pavilion: quotations from the Bible, ‘suggesting (but never insisting) … that God is involved in everyday life,’ as one Christian magazine journalist noted.17 Oblique references to God were both the bane and the brilliance of the exhibition, eliciting extreme responses from the wide constituencies of viewers that made up the pavilion audiences. As Reverend Jean Martucci remarked in the pavilion’s opening address, ‘The Holy Spirit’s Gamble’: ‘The Christian pavilion is neither a believer’s monologue nor a simple dialogue between Christians. Like Paul, at the Areopagus, it means to speak to the world. The pavilion is therefore a proclamation of, as well as education in, faith and hope.’18 Rather than prayers being held within a chapel, he concluded, the pavilion itself constituted a prayer. The pavilion’s modular exhibition design, its innovative use of photographs, audio, and multimedia, as well as its broader humanist thematics, dramatically departed from previous religious participation at world exhibitions, which had generally tended towards more literal and instrumental religious iconography to

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attract viewers and deliver clear religious liturgy. At New York’s World Fair in 1964–5, for instance, the Vatican pavilion exhibited objects from its enormous fine arts collection, including Michelangelo’s celebrated marble Pieta (1499), which was dramatically displayed with a blue velvet backdrop and hundreds of simulated votive lights, and available to visitors from one of three moving walkways set at various heights to enable viewing at different speeds. Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair, as historian James Gilbert describes, ‘in its desire to juxtapose science and religion, to encourage Christianity to witness at the celebration of science – made a profound statement.’19 Regarding the 1958 Brussels World Fair, Time magazine reported on the extravagant plans of the Vatican’s Civitas Dei (The City of God), and the more modest Protestant pavilion, both of which were intended to attract and recruit faithful church members. The extravagant Holy See pavilion (one of the ‘Big Four’ foreign pavilions, with the United States, France, and the USSR) included a golden statue of the Pope at its entrance, a 1,100-person church where masses in four languages were held daily, and the Civitas Dei restaurant.20 In July 1964 and 1965, the consortium of churches organizing Expo 67’s Christian pavilion was itself still discussing an evangelical theme that would be represented in ‘an exhibit area where biblical texts would be illustrated; a chapel where the Bible would be publicly read, where prayers could be offered and where special days of each denomination could be celebrated; an auditorium for special meetings of visiting organizations and for showing films; and a bookroom in which the various denominations could provide information on their churches in the city.’21 The proselytizing quality of this earlier plan challenged the Expo planners’ desire to reduce the didactic religious presence at the fair, exemplified, for instance, by their denial of a pavilion to the American evangelist Billy Graham. Gagnon’s proposal responded to a tender call in May 1965, and in departing radically from the churches’ initial plan, it animates the dramatically shifting face and contested terrain of religion in Canada, and particularly in Quebec, in the 1960s.22 While another proposal, for instance, had called for ‘an over-lifesize figure of Jesus Christ welcoming people of the world,’ the final shape of the pavilion clearly challenged traditional expectations of how Christianity would be publicly represented, and reflected the churches’ ambitions to both reform and innovate their public image within this international forum.23 Miedema’s book details the disputed nature of these discussions, which resulted in the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church’s withdrawal (although they are cited as participants in the official Expo 67 guidebook),24 hinting at the contested, but ultimately consensual, approval of the pavilion’s final design. In his article ‘McLuhanite Christianity at Expo 67’ published in the Roman Catholic weekly Commonweal, the American theologian and author of The Secular City, Harvey Cox, succinctly writes: ‘no overt religious symbolism. No open Bibles, no displays of historic crosses, no ecclesiastical robes, no pictures of religious leaders. I saw more gothic art in the Czech pavilion. The Christian one is a masterpiece of indirect communication.’25 The Christian pavilion exhibition featured over three hundred photographs of different styles and subject matter. There were photographs in the genre of photojournalistic realism, others that were enlarged and mounted on cubes and modular grid structures (fig. 9.2), and still others that were displayed in murals, large-scale collages, and various forms of projections. Most of the photographs exhibited in

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9.2  Christian pavilion interior with modular structure of photographs and slide projections. Courtesy of the estate of Charles Gagnon.

the pavilion were obtained from Magnum and Black Star photographic agencies in the United States and included images by well-known photographers such as Cornell Capa, Robert Capa, Helen Levitt, and Bruce Davidson. Portraits of individuals, men and women of different ages and ethnicities, as well as pictures of people engaged in everyday leisure and professional activities, were featured: bullfighters, sailors, strippers, spaceships. Additionally, local Montreal-based photographer John Max was assigned to photograph some of New York’s cityscape for the project. Audio-visual elements included projected slides and various mechanized apparatuses that are evident in documentation images and from the planning documents. These show spinning cylinders with close-up portraits that were horizontally segmented and featured rotated eyes, nose, and mouths, like children’s flipbooks (see plate 17). Mirrored surfaces, such as those in an amusement park house of mirrors, brought the viewer’s own reflection into the interior visual landscape. These images were accompanied by a wild cacophony emanating from over forty speakers that were spread out through the spaces: soundtracks of ambient sounds looped live into the exhibition spaces, original interviews in English and French, modernist music compositions, and recorded sounds of the everyday – including the distinctive heartbeat to which Montreal journalist Bill Bantey refers at the beginning of this essay.

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Public responses to the pavilion, including from within church ranks, varied dramatically and ranged from favourable reactions to the contemporary communicative idioms employed, to horror at some of the alleged vulgarity of the imagery. Some public responses lambasted the pavilion for being ‘blasphemous,’ particularly in its portrayals of nude strippers and the horrific images from Nazi concentration camps. Rev. Ronald E. Baxter, pastor of First Baptist Church, said: ‘The peak of corruption at Expo 67 must surely be … strip-tease dancers, obscenities on washroom walls, homosexuality, sadism and old immorality … And for this trash, $1,300,000 of what is supposed to be God’s money.’26 Yet others expressed the relief at the alleviation of traditional religious iconographies: ‘Pour une fois que des chrétiens ne font pas de propagande et de publicité pour leurs églises respectives … pour une fois que des chrétiens se posent en point d’interrogation [For once, the Christians are not presenting propaganda and publicity for their respective churches, for once, the Christians are questioning themselves].’27 Paul-Émile Cardinal Léger, who had contributed to the stewardship of the pavilion, characterized the generation gap that seemed to underlie viewership: ‘My generation visited the pavilion and came away with a deep sense of frustration (while) many of the young generation, teen-agers, went through the pavilion two, three, five, 10 times,’ further suggesting that it was important to find ways to put complicated dogma into language everyone could understand, and that the Church should get inspiration from the pavilion’s use of multi-media techniques.28 Another visitor confessed that he did not understand the complete ‘message’ but also invoked a generation gap: ‘For I’m getting into that late generation, and I usually have to have these wrapped-around experiences of communication explained to me. I don’t know what Professor Marshall McLuhan is talking about most of the time. [But] that says more about me than about them. And if you come away from Expo ‘67 saying, you didn’t understand the Christian pavilion, you have lots of company. If you come away damning it as obscene – well you are saying a lot about yourself.’29 He also went on to comment on the multiple visitors who sat for long periods of time in the pavilion. Pavilion hostess Esmeralda Thornhill reported: ‘It’s interesting to listen to reactions as people come out of the pavilion. Many come out complaining there are no stained-glass windows, no image of the church. Others, like some beatniks, for example, walk in nonchalantly but express their awe and appreciation of what they have seen when they step outside.’30 Other patterns of response suggest that a recognition of the ‘artistic’ nature of the pavilion contributed to a certain vagueness of message. The non-traditional display vernaculars excluded didactic panels or any narrative ‘hand-holding’ that might explain the photographs or the relationship between them, leaving some viewers perplexed as to the intended ‘message’ being delivered. Some bemoaned the lack of specificity and the absence of narrative coherence, its obliqueness and, therein, its eliteness. Gagnon was quoted as having made these aspects of openended communication intentional to the design: ‘There’s no guide, no explanation. The visitor doesn’t have time to stop, exactly as in everyday life. The pavilion has a message common to all religious denominations, that God is involved in everyday living.’ He further claimed that it was intended to represent life itself, and of the film, The Eighth Day: ‘There is no fake footage in it … it’s all genuine. I looked

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through 70,000 feet of film to put it together.’31 Gagnon also stated that ‘this pavilion is what Marshall McLuhan talks about – total communication. There is no new technique, but the first time in public you will see what everyone has been talking about; like McLuhan.’32 Total communication, as Marshall McLuhan characterized it, involved a complex extension of human perception through technology and mass media, ideally to inspire consciousness through a ‘poetic process.’ ‘McLuhan would stress the creative configurational process of perception in all of his writings,’ writes Janine Marchessault. ‘This is why he … would highlight the role of the artist in providing knowledge of the world around us. Art as a “criticism of life,” as an expression of heightened perception that permits the teasing out of existing patterns of existence could lead the way to paradise on earth.’33 Seemingly paradoxically, technology, in extending consciousness, would usher in and enable a critique of technology’s limits. As McLuhan himself described: ‘the drama of ordinary human perception seen as the poetic process is the prime analogate, the magic casement opening on the secrets of created being.’ Arthur Kroker continues (quoting McLuhan throughout): ‘And, of course, for McLuhan the “poetic process” – this recovery of the method of “sympathetic reconstruction,” this “recreation” of the technological experience as a “total communication,” this recovery of the “rational notes of beauty, integrity, consonance, and claritas” as the actual stages of human apprehension – was the key to redeeming the technological order.’34 First-hand testimonies give an impression of individual responses and some discursive tendencies in the Christian pavilion, yet it remains challenging to ascertain the full effect of viewing through partial and elusive documentation. Repeated references to McLuhan bring to the fore his influence on this cultural period and the intersection of media, perception, and transformation that he envisaged. McLuhan’s actual participation at Expo 67 included his consultation on the ‘Man and the Community’ pavilion, the book launch of the French translation of The Gutenberg Galaxy at the Quebec pavilion, and his critical comments on the Ontario pavilion’s film, A Place to Stand. McLuhan’s more generalized influence can be discerned from a chapter title, ‘Where the Medium Was the Message,’ in Robert Fulford’s book, Remembering Expo: A Pictorial Record (1968), as well as Donald Theall’s comments that ‘Expo 67 became McLuhan’s fair, a fact openly acknowledged by the extent to which the theme pavilions of “Man and His World,” whose designs blended Canadian history and culture, were based on McLuhan’s writings, which were liberally quoted throughout the pavilions.’35 These references to McLuhan also allude to a particular conception of communication that provides insight into the Christian pavilion itself. As Kroker writes: ‘If only the mass media could be harmonized with the “poetic process”; if only the media of communication could be made supportive of the “creative process” in ordinary human perception: then technological society would, finally, be transformed into a wonderful opportunity for the “incarnation” of human experience.’36 Multi-image, Multi-screen, Multimedia Art history is, of course, not the history of works of art; it’s the history of slides of works of art.37

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Craig Owens underlines how, as art historians or cultural theorists, we are frequently not viewing or analysing actual artworks, or by extension, cultural objects or multimedia pavilions, but their documentation and their respective capacity to circulate. Much of the official memory and documentation of Expo 67 focuses on innovative uses of multimedia – photography, film, and audiovisual installations – a tendency Judith Shatnoff has characterized as being ‘multi-image, multi-screen, or multi-media.’38 The National Film Board’s Labyrinth, with its multiple-screen, three-storey environment, as well as the 360-degree Circlevision film Canada 67 at the Telephone pavilion created by Walt Disney, were among those spectacular highlights that continue to be critically engaged and analysed. In Montreal Thinks Big, Marcel Fournier writes about the general disappointment with the architectural displays at Expo 67 and their eclipsing by the programming inside them. Instead, he claims, the defining features were to be found ‘in the general organization of the fair, especially its transit system, and in the multimedia spectacles,’ notably, he remarks, in the Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Great Britain pavilions, as well as the Labyrinth and Kaleidoscope pavilions.39 The multimedia and innovative monorail transportation circulating throughout Expo 67 suggest multi-sensory, immersive experiences that sought to pioneer display vernaculars and modalities of exhibition, while defying traditional ways of viewing. The Christian pavilion’s combined multimedia techniques, along with its non-didactic and non-narrative modes of presentation were arguably as challenging to visitors as the lack of edifying Christian scripture throughout. Viewers entering the Christian pavilion were initially surrounded by photographs displayed, illuminated, and projected on modular structures. The use of combined recorded and live sounds, as well as experimental music, further made the Christian pavilion distinctive from a straightforward photographic exhibition. Darkened rooms and hallways were infused with a complex use of sound and acoustical space that included modernist compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tony Schwartz (who would go on to write the influential The Responsive Chord [1973]), and John Cage’s Variations IV (1963), a brilliantly cacophonic and radically avant-garde work whose subtitle describes it to be ‘for any number of players, any sounds produced by any means with or without other activities.’40 Also included was Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question (1906). In Zone 1, recorded interviews, industrial noise, and corporeal sounds such as the amplified heartbeat, as well as live sounds channeled from outside of the pavilion into the exhibition rooms, were played on over forty speakers dispersed throughout the spaces. The use of ambient soundtracks by avant-garde composers and artists defied any conventional musical or sound accompaniment aesthetic, further positioning the pavilion alongside experimental engagements with sound and everyday life that would have been circulating in avant-garde artistic circles during this period. The photojournalism and humanist themes that comprised the principal Zone 1 area of the pavilion resonate with the photographic display vernaculars of the large postwar exhibition The Family of Man, curated by Edward Steichen in 1955, inspiring some provocative parallels. One of the most widely viewed photographic exhibitions of the twentieth century, The Family of Man travelled to thirty-eight countries between 1955 and 1962 for audiences that totalled over nine million

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viewers.41 Comprising 503 images by 273 photographers taken in 68 countries, ‘Steichen played with depth of field and peripheral vision in order to envelop the viewer in a world of images,’ while ‘the declarative sentence, “Mankind is one,” whether voiced in words or in pictures, drove the formation of the exhibition.’42 The Family of Man has been the subject of pointed critiques by a range of cultural theorists since its first exhibition in 1955, including Roland Barthes (1957), Susan Sontag (1977), Allan Sekula (2003), and Donna Haraway (1997), who in distinctive ways bemoaned the homogenizing, liberal humanist impulses of the exhibition.43 Yet, The Family of Man’s perceived romantic or sentimental humanism is dramatically undercut by Gary Sandeen’s observation, in his substantive analysis of the show’s production and reception, that several key images that appeared in the first Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 1955 – a hydrogen bomb mushroom cloud explosion, and a photograph of a violently lynched African-American man – were eventually withdrawn from international versions of the show.44 As Marchessault recently argues (following Siegfried Kracauer, who had seen the original exhibit at MoMA in New York), this image of annihilation is crucial to (re)reading The Family of Man, not as a sentimental humanism that homogenized global difference into a harmonious unitary vision of humankind (as Barthes, Sontag, and Haraway had maintained), but rather, ‘a deeply historical version of humanism, a progressive humanism, whose central articulation rested on the image of destruction through war and technology.’45 In this image of destruction, the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan by the American military, combined with an image of a lynching that was also eventually removed, can both be understood as highly racialized images, if not evidence of deeply embedded racism within the American psyche. Two parenthetical moments in Roland Barthes’s short review essay, ‘La Grande Famille de l’Homme,’ create an undertow to those grand narratives of humanity and universalism allegedly espoused in the photographic exhibition of which he writes. Referring to the fourteen-year-old African-American boy whose brutal lynching in 1955 in Mississippi is associated with the beginnings of the civil rights movement, Barthes writes that we should ask Emmett Till’s family what they think about the great family of Man? And perhaps, Barthes later suggests, we should ask the same question to North African labourers in the Goutte d’or district of Paris. Inscribing difference as racialized difference, one deeply marked in the historical conditions of black slavery and segregation in the United States, and the exploitative labour conditions created under French colonialism, Barthes challenges the exhibition’s drive toward asserting commonalities in this post-Second World War period, with its alleged privileging of Nature over History, by inscribing black bodies in the parentheses of his own text. In these instances, the capacity of a single image – an invocation of Till’s lynched body, or those of labouring North Africans – to disrupt the seamless discourse of hundreds of images, is the basis for a provocative analysis of certain elements in the Christian pavilion at Expo 67. While world’s fairs are often characterized as hegemonic expressions of national identity, it is also widely acknowledged that oppositional discourses find themselves circulating within the seemingly coherent spaces of exhibition pavilions. Paige Raibmon compellingly details how members of British Columbia’s Kwakwaka’wakw nation, who were invited to perform at the 1893 Chicago

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World’s Fair as part of a North West Coast anthropology exhibit by anthropologist Franz Boas, effectively managed to perform the hamatsa, or cannibal dance, which had been banished by law in Canada.46 The international forum of the 1893 fair thereby produced a venue for contesting the colonial forces of capitalism, Christianity, and civilization that undergirded the paternalistic Canadian laws to control and destroy aboriginal cultural practices. The Eighth Day was screened repeatedly in the Christian pavilion in what came to be described as the hellish depths of Zone 2. Its content and form contrasted dramatically with Zone 1’s ‘The World around Us,’ which surrounded the viewer with still images and sounds that suggested everyday reality. The Eighth Day, by contrast, was a fourteen-minute, 16 mm, black-and-white film constructed from existing newsreel footage and animated still images in a ‘collage’ technique that formed a frenetic critique of war technologies and destruction (fig. 9.3).47 The film was assembled by Gagnon beginning in 1966, with the assistance of New Yorkbased film researcher Judith Trotsky, who undertook research in various film libraries to locate the very specific materials that Gagnon requested. Catherine Russell writes that the histories in found footage films are frequently wrenched from their referential contexts,48 and yet, the chronological structure of The Eighth Day and the copious correspondence between Trotsky and Gagnon (including a detailed listing of the newsreel researched by Trotsky), offers specificity to the historical images. Admittedly, attention to these detailed notes are suggestive of another exercise in reading cultural objects alongside their archives, and my intention is not to assert the veracity of some historical ‘real’ to these images, nor to maintain some privileged relation of the historical signified to these newsreels, as might more straightforward ‘compilation’ films. For this, indeed, would undercut the nature of collage film and its problematizing of this very relation between media representation and ‘reality.’ As P. Adams Sitney has observed, ‘the natural irony of the collage film, which calls attention to the fact that each element quoted in the new synthesis was once part of another whole, thereby underlining its presence as a piece of film, creates a distance between the image depicted and our experience of it. Montage is the mediator of collage.’49 It is nonetheless productive to highlight the historical specificity of war that the film produces, in its contrast to the themes of the everyday that are thematized in Zone 1’s photographs and acoustic spaces. The Eighth Day, which drew its title from Christian scripture in which humankind inherits the Earth from God,50 begins with a meditative image of a waterside sunrise, accompanied by Japanese shakuhachi flute music, then continues with a number of sequences depicting so-called leisure activities, which gradually accrue to reveal violent spectacles of entertainment culture: bumper cars on fairgrounds, boxing matches, high-speed racing car crashes and explosions, Laurel and Hardy jostling each other in typically slapstick fashion. The images then progress to identifiably historical ones beginning with the early twentieth century: the funeral of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand following his assassination (1914), largely attributed to beginning the First World War; American President Wilson signing a War Declaration (1917); bi-planes dropping bombs and themselves exploding in midair. There are close-up shots of Mussolini and Hitler from the 1930s; kamikaze pilots and the bombing of Pearl Harbour (1941); horrific images from concentra-

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9.3 From Charles Gagnon, The Eighth Day/Le huitième jour (1967), 16mm black-and-white film, 13 mins. Distributed by Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Image courtesy of Monika Kin Gagnon

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tion camps; and atomic bomb explosions. When Trotsky initially wrote to Gagnon with her newsreel descriptions, she impartially assessed them for their visual impact: – ‘1917 Russian Revolution. Czar’s troops on horseback firing into crowd, chasing peasants’; – ’French Indo-China, 1954: Excellent scenes civilians caught in fighting; troops, civilians and a dog run down road’; – ’excellent hydrogen bomb mushroom.’51

Although the images and scenes depicted become generally and specifically recognizable, the thematic drift of the film accumulates in the repetitive and endless cycles of violence and destruction enacted through war, gradually blurring into each other. The images and their compilation lack any inherent ethical evaluation in themselves, but their accumulation and repetition become oppressive and definitive. Various editing techniques associated with the subgenre of ‘collage film’ are employed: vertical montage’s juxtaposition of incongruous image and sounds is used, as when fascist Mussolini and Hitler’s public addresses are accompanied by an operatic track. Two sequences break the montage of moving images using animation techniques of still photographs. (By this, I mean the development of narrative qualities to still images, as the 16 mm camera isolates various areas of a photograph, rotating it, repeating it, thereby forming other modes of collage.) The sequence includes both moving and still picture sequences and, chronologically speaking, moves us into the 1960s, introducing scenes suggestive of the excesses of consumer culture and spectacles of consumption (which are strangely evocative of Guy Debord’s later film, The Society of the Spectacle [1973]). As well, troubling constructions of a commodified femininity appear: portraits of Marilyn Monroe, and Barbie’s rhythmic juxtaposition with exotic dancers, are contrasted with an image of folksinger Joan Baez, a known peace activist in the 1960s. Film editing’s complex ability to shape meaning, including ambivalence and dialectical relations, is the quality that gives collage filmmaking its political potential. In this sense, The Eighth Day sits alongside other collage films that employ ‘apocalyptic’ archival imagery – wars, disasters, catastrophes, nuclear and atomic bombs, all alleged favourites of the collage genre.52 Yet, one specific newsreel sequence in the last moments of The Eighth Day seems to open up the film suggestively to a less apocalyptic and more explicitly anti-war conclusion, particularly when situated within the larger discursive frame of the Christian pavilion, with its inescapable sense of religion as the path to and saviour of humanity. This provocative image is that of a Buddhist monk’s self-immolation. While the film dominantly portrays acts of violence and war imagery, the monk’s self-immolation produces a form of ‘undertow’ to the apocalyptic images of destructive technology and consumer culture that otherwise drive these last moments of the film. Self-immolation by a Vietnamese Buddhist monk first occurred on 11 June 1963, when Thich Quang Duc set himself aflame as a protest to the repression of Buddhism under the regime of Roman Catholic General Ngo Dinh Diem, the prevailing leader in South Vietnam who had been instated in the 1950s by the

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French government. Buddhism was the most widely practised religion in the country, and Catholics constituted only 10 per cent of the Vietnamese population but were favoured under Diem’s regime.53 Duc’s immolation precipitated what came to be called the Buddhist Crisis, which brought attention to the religious conflict between Catholics and Buddhists. The immolation would neither directly remove Diem nor end the Vietnam War, although over one hundred monks and nuns would immolate themselves for peace by the end of the Vietnam War. The effectiveness of such public acts of protest was the singularity and individuality of the act itself propelled for collective purpose, in this case, to bring attention to the repression of Buddhism under the Catholic regime of General Diem. That such a scene of violent public protest against the Catholic Church appeared within the Christian pavilion during the ongoing controversies and protests against the Vietnam War is in many ways remarkable. It amplifies the profoundly contradictory, if not paradoxical, qualities of already oblique narratives and themes within the Christian pavilion. Gagnon’s contemporary photographic and experimental cinematic idioms, combined with avant-garde soundtracks, embodied the multi-image/screen/media phenomena within Expo 67 more generally, but further, it dramatically ruptured expectation and propelled its viewers toward a vast spectrum of responses. Michael Biggs has characterized media images of selfimmolation as powerful because of two factors: the decline of state-sanctioned public violence (such as public hangings or executions) and the rise of mass media. He writes that ‘self-immolation as a form of protest was a creative response to the opportunities offered by the modern media … self-immolation can serve to make the state’s violence manifest. In addition, it can have an emotional impact on a “public” unused to death presented as a spectacle.’54 In addition to the multiplicity of media forms employed within the Christian pavilion, such paradoxes of representation in the pavilion seem amplified. Notwithstanding claims to spectacular novelty at Expo 67, innovative multimedia explorations had appeared at previous world’s fairs and it is perhaps within this lineage of artist/architect/designer-created world’s fair design that the Christian pavilion may be best situated. French architect Le Corbusier’s automated eight-minute multimedia performance with composer Edgar Varèse, Poème électronique, was commissioned by the Philips Corporation at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. It involved a single-screen film, created by Le Corbusier, projected into an environment enhanced by colour lighting projected in geometric shapes and threedimensional forms. Edgar Varèse’s site-specific composition was recorded on tape through several hundred speakers, a ‘montage of unmodified sounds: machine noises, distorted organ music, bells, percussion … pure electronic sounds, human chant and selections from the composer’s Étude pour espace.’55 Charles and Ray Eames’s Glimpses of the USA at the Moscow World’s Fair in 1959 was housed in a Buckminister Fuller-domed pavilion and used seven 20-by-30-foot screens that were suspended in the air above large, standing audiences.56 The Eameses would produce multi-screen installations again at the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 and at New York’s World’s Fair in 1964.57 Time-based and ephemeral multimedia installations and the nature of their documentation and archive are elusive and fragmented. One relies on photo-

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graphic documentation for a sense of visual design, layout, and content, but the kinaesthetic and sensory qualities that created the immersive ‘total environments’ of acoustics, moving images, projections, and sculpting of space through lighting and sound require a dexterity of imagination and analysis. Jeffrey Shaw recently characterized an ‘immersive’ environment as one that is ‘an experience of physical and imaginative relocation that induces a totality of engagement in the aesthetic and dramatic construct of the work … these augmentations of the image space are sought after as a means of achieving semantic extensions of the narrative space.’58 Whether or not Gagnon was aware of these earlier pavilion designs, the Christian pavilion seems to emerge from these multidisciplinary, multi-image/screen/ media phenomena of the post-Second World War period. The sensory experience of the Christian pavilion was created with conventional, older media such as still photographs in large format, transparencies in lightboxes, slides and projections, ambient sound on tape layered through multiple speakers, and a single-screen 16 mm film flickering in a small theatre. While Shaw is predominantly referring to new media and cinematic immersive environments as augmenting image space, it is equally illuminating to consider how photo collages and montages, acoustics, and single-screen cinema in the Christian pavilion creatively combined to exponentially enhance the communicative capacities of any single medium alone, conjuring an alchemical ‘poetic process’ and an unexpected incarnation of human experience. NOTES his paper is the fruit of numerous contributions and discussions. Thanks to Johanne T Sloan for her initial interest in this material and the invitation to situate it within the conference and book. Thank you to Cyndie Campbell at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, and Bernice Baranowski and Soeur Françoise Martel from the Canadian Centre for Ecumenism Library and Archives, for generous access to archival materials. Thanks to research assistants Isabelle Blouin-Gagné, Craig Stewart, and Lisa Gasior. And thank you to all those who posed questions at conference presentations and generously added pieces to this archive-puzzle: Eva-Marie Kröller, who pointed out the proximity between the Christian pavilion and Indians of Canada pavilion; Janine Marchessault for pointing me to Eric Sandeen’s book on The Family of Man; Jerry White for the comments on the Catholic origins of the Quiet Revolution; and Peter van Wyck for archival techniques. The following archival collections were consulted for this essay: Canadian Centre for Ecumenism, Montreal, Christian pavilion Archives; National Archives of Canada, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exposition Papers; National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives Charles Gagnon fonds. 1 Reverend Lindsay Howan, letter to the editor, Windsor Star, 17 May 1967. 2 Bill Bantey, Bill Bantey’s Expo 67 (Montreal: The Gazette Printing Company, 1967), 61. 3 Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). 4 The pavilion of Thailand housed a copy of an eighteenth-century Buddhist shrine as its

The Christian Pavilion at Expo 67  159 centrepiece, but this was a national and not specifically religious pavilion. See Bantey, Bill Bantey’s Expo 67. 5 Gary Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). 6 L.B. Kuffert, A Great Duty: Canadian Responses to Modern Life and Mass Culture in Canada, 1939–1967 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 231. 7 H.M. Kinzer, ‘Expography 67,’ Popular Photography, October 1967, 114–17; ‘POP Honors Three at Expo 67,’ Popular Photography, November 1967, 8. 8 Gilles Godmer, Olivier Asselin, and Louis Goyette, Charles Gagnon (Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2001). 9 Gagnon/Valkus Inc.’s contracts included, most notably, the Hydro Quebec corporate logo, which continues to grace Montreal’s cityscape. See Peter Wildbur, Trademarks: A Handbook of International Designs (New York: Reinhold, 1966), 11. 10 Philip Fry, ‘Foundations: Notes on the Work of Charles Gagnon,’ in Charles Gagnon, 23–125; Louis Goyette, ‘The Fragment, the Film and the Whole: the Films of Charles Gagnon,’ in Charles Gagnon (2001), 185–91. 11 On the Eighth Day (1967) was produced by Spectrum for CFCF-TV, prior to the pavilion’s opening. It features interviews with architect Jean-Paul Pothier, Charles Gagnon, and Reverend John O’Brien, who represented the sponsoring church consortium. Shot from both inside and outside the pavilion, the film gives a clear sense of the architecture and the interior design, and particularly the large scale of some of the murals. It also features the pavilion’s hostesses, who are introduced and are dressed in pavilion uniform. On the Eighth Day (1967), 16 mm film, 28 minutes, Spectrum for CFCF-TV. 12 José van Dijck’s Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) provides a useful overview of memory studies and explores the specificity of memory in relation to different media, especially the implications of digital media and their (de)materialization. William Wees, Recycled Images (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993), and chapter 8 of Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), both extensively discuss the complexity of temporal modalities inherent to found footage films. 13 Michael R. Hill, Archival Strategies and Techniques (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1993), usefully details the techniques of archival research and the mechanics of constructing archives. 14 Don Gain, ‘Christian Pavilion at Expo Shows All Life as It Is,’ Victoria Colonist, 26 August 1967. 15 Sherry Brydon, ‘The Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67,’ American Indian Art Magazine (Summer 1997): 54–63; Expo 67 (Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1968). 16 For a discussion of Sermons of Science at Expo 67 and some of the struggles and debates around their inclusion, see Miedema, For Canada’s Sake, 152, 155. For a broader history of religious representation in popular culture in the United States, including Sermons of Science at the Seattle World’s Fair of 1962, see James Gilbert, Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 17 Kenneth Bagnell, ‘What a Pavilion!’ The United Church Observer, 1 June 1967, 14. 18 Reverend Jean Martucci, ‘The Holy Spirit’s Gamble,’ Canadian Centre for Ecumenism, Christian Pavilion Archives.

160  Monika Kin Gagnon 1 9 Gilbert, Redeeming Culture, 319. 20 Websites initiated by collectors and fans provide some of the most rich, extensive (if idiosyncratic!) documentation and memorabilia of world’s fairs. See, for instance, the online World’s Fair Museum at http://www.expomuseum.com/ (accessed 15 May 2008). The original pavilion guide for the Vatican pavilion at New York World’s Fair in 1964–5 can be viewed at http://nywf64.com/vatican01.shtml (accessed 15 May 2008), including magnificent photographs of the Pieta in situ at the fair and pavilion visitors on the Pieta’s moving walkways. Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair is discussed in Gilbert, Redeeming Culture, chapter 13, ‘Space Gothic at Seattle.’ The 1958’s Brussels’ World’s Fairs site http://users.skynet.be/rentfarm/expo58/ (accessed 15 May 2008) shows different views of the Holy See pavilion (go to Foreign Pavilions, ‘Big Four,’ with USA, France, and the USSR). 21 Miedema, For Canada’s Sake, 171. 22 See Michael Gauvreau’s The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005). 23 Bagnell, ‘What a Pavilion!’ 14. 24 Expo 67: Official Guide/ Expo 67: Guide officiel (Toronto: Maclean-Hunter, 1967), 187. 25 Harvey Cox, ‘McLuhanite Christianity at Expo 67,’ Commonweal, 26 May1967, 277–8. 26 Timmins Press, 18 May 1967. 27 Pierre Deschênes, courrier des lecteurs, Le Devoir, 30 May 1967. (My translation.) 28 Lethbridge Herald, 22 August 1967. 29 Rev. A.C. Forrest, Bolton Enterprise, 22 June 1967. 30 Winnipeg Free Press, 6 May 1967. 31 Kelowna Courier, 17 April 1967. 32 M. Jane Scott, Windsor Star, 27 May 1967. 33 Janine Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media (Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 36–7. 34 Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1984), 64. 35 See Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 296, 46fn; Donald Theall, ‘Communication Theory and the Marginal Culture: The Socio-Aesthetic Dimensions of Communication Study,’ in Studies in Canadian Communications, ed. Gertrude Joch Robinson and Donald Theall (Montreal: McGill Programme in Communications, 1970), 7–26. 36 Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind, 64. 37 Craig Owens, ‘Pedagogy,’ in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 327. 38 Judith Shatnoff, ‘Expo 67: A Multiple Vision,’ Film Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1967): 2–13. 39 Marcel Fournier, ‘The Impact of Multimedia,’ in The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big, ed. André Lortie (Montreal/Vancouver: Canadian Centre for Architecture/Douglas and McIntyre, 2004), 70. 40 Cage’s Variations IV was a complex composition that dealt with social interaction and featured a somewhat random distribution of human-made sounds during a performance. A recorded version of the piece was played at the pavilion. The recording was made in 1964 at the Fiegen/Palmer Gallery in Los Angeles, where myriad sound sources from recordings, live broadcasts, and microphones on the street and in the

The Christian Pavilion at Expo 67  161 performance space were electronically modified, mixed, and distributed by several independent performers in various rooms. 41 Gary Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 95. 42 Ibid., 40. 43 Roland Barthes, ‘La Grande Famille de l’homme,’ in Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957); Donna Haraway, ‘Race: Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture: It’s All in the Family. Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century United States,’ in Modest_Witness@Second_ Millenium. FemaleManÓ_Meets_OncoMouseÔ (New York: Routledge, 1997); Allan Sekula, ‘The Traffic in Photographs,’ in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Centre of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003); Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977). 44 The hydrogen bomb mushroom cloud appears in a later edition of the catalogue book, The Family of Man (1955), that represented the exhibition in print form and from which most critics presumably reconstructed the exhibition, although the image is barely identifiable. It appears on the bottom right-hand corner of the last page of the book, and only as an in situ image from ‘A special portfolio of photographs by Ezra Stoller of the Family of Man exhibition on the walls of the MOMA, New York,’ with photos by Wayne Miller. See Edward Steichen, The Family of Man (The Greatest Photographic Exhibition of All Time – 503 Pictures from 68 Countries) (New York: Museum of Modern Art and Simon and Schuster, 1955), 207; Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition. It is quite literally the last image in the book, printed in small format and without identifying captions. 45 Janine Marchessault, ‘Manufacturing Humanism: Steichen/Burtynsky,’ Prefix Photo, Spring/Summer 2007, 58. 46 The Chicago World’s Fair’s larger anthropology exhibit was organized by Fredric Ward Putnam, curator and professor of the Peabody Museum at Harvard and coordinator of the fair’s Ethnology Department. Page Raibmon, ‘Theatres of Contact: the Kwakwaka’wakw Meet Colonialism in British Columbia and the Chicago World’s Fair,’ Canadian Historical Review 81, no. 2 (2000): 157–90. 47 William Wees’s typology of found footage films includes compilation, ‘collage,’ and appropriation methods. In fact, Wees mentions Gagnon among others when he writes: ‘Among Connor’s contemporaries, the most productive have been Arthur Lipsett, Standish Lawder, Chick Strand, and Stan Vanderbeck, but one might also mention Jerry Abrams, Stan Brakhage, Louis Brigante, Charles Gagnon, Adolfo Mekas, Paul Morrissey, and Raymond Sarnoff among older filmmakers whose found footage films have been – [with the exception of Brakhage’s Murder Psalm (1981)] – overlooked, underrated, or forgotten.’ Wees, Recycled Images, 13. 48 Russell, Experimental Ethnography. 49 P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde: 1943–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 310. 50 As with most religious scripture, there seems to be several explanations for the meaning of the Eighth Day; the Bible speaks of seven days of creation, and on the Eighth Day, man and the woman were confronted with the question: ‘How then shall we live?’ In Genesis 17:12, God specifically directs Abraham to circumcise newborn males on the eighth day.

162  Monika Kin Gagnon 51 Correspondence between Charles Gagnon and Judith Trotsky, 16 May and 3 June 1966, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, Charles Gagnon fonds. 52 See Russell, ‘Archival Apocalypse: Found Footage as Ethnography,’ in Experimental Ethnography, 238–72. 53 David Halberstam, ‘The Buddhist Crisis in Vietnam: A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Report,’ in Vietnam: History, Documents, and Opinions on a Major World Crisis, ed. Marvin E. Gettleman (Toronto: Mentor Books, 1970), 298–307. 54 Michael Biggs, ‘The Transnational Diffusion of Protest by Self-Immolation,’ unpublished conference paper, presented at Crossing Borders, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (October 2006), 21–2. Pdf accessed at http://www.wzb.eu/zkd/zcm/ aktuelles/crossingborders.en.htm (15 May 2008). See also Michael Biggs, ‘Dying without Killing: Self Immolations, 1962–2002,’ in Making Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 173–208. 55 Katie Mondloch, ‘A Symphony of Sensations in the Spectator: Le Corbusier’s Poème électronique and the Historicization of New Media Arts,’ Leonardo 37, no. 1 (2004): 57–61; I.M. Trieb, Space Calculated in Seconds: The Philips Pavilion, Le Corbusier, Edgar Varèse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 56 Beatriz Colomina observes: ‘While the artists’ use of these techniques tends to be associated with the “Happenings” and “Expanded Cinema” of the 1960s, architects were involved much earlier in very different contexts, such as military operations and governmental propaganda campaigns.’ Beatriz Columina, ‘Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture,’ Grey Room 2 (Winter 2001): 8. 57 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006), 205–6. 58 Jeffrey Shaw, ‘Introduction,’ in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Wiebel (Karlsrue [Germany] and Cambridge, MA: ZKM Center for Art and Media and MIT Press, 2003), 24.

10 Andy Warhol at Expo 67: Pop In and Pop Out jean-françois côté

The quick visit that Andy Warhol paid to Expo 67 late in the summer, mainly to see some of his own works on display at the United States pavilion, can be seen today as a key metonymic event. It is not that this ‘pop in and pop out’ of the city (made available to him by the private Lear jet of the de Menil family) was considered remarkable at the time – quite the contrary, in fact, since rather astonishingly it was barely noticed locally. Rather, the significance of this visit is linked to what Warhol himself noted about what was truly happening on this occasion: the fact that Pop Art was really in also meant that popular culture was going out at the very same time. This is to say that popular culture, in its vernacular sense, would be erased and reprocessed according to the logic of mass culture, thereby transforming it into ‘pop culture,’ something more suitable to the mindset of the age. In this respect, Expo 67 on the whole appears to lay bare some of the tensions and contradictions of this transformative operation at work in the city and in the world at large. While I will be addressing the issue of mass culture in general and its relation to the arts, particularly as this was reflected at Expo 67 and in the streets of Montreal in the 1960s, I first want to go back to Warhol’s ‘personal’ account of his visit, which, in my view, epitomizes the whole situation. Warhol’s contribution to the exhibition of contemporary artworks inside the United States pavilion consisted of six of his Self-Portraits, each one a six-foot-square canvas, presenting the same image in different vibrant colours. Hung on immense white panels suspended from the top of the building by cables, these works featured the photographic silk-screen technique which the artist had made famous (see plate 18).1 In Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett’s book Popism: The Warhol Sixties, this is how the ‘pop in and pop out’ visit is recalled: The Montreal Expo had opened in May on the banks of the St Lawrence River with six of my Self-Portraits up there at the USA Pavilion, and I flew up to Canada with John de Menil and Fred [Hughes] in Mr de Menil’s jet to see them. The American pavilion was Buckminster Fuller’s big geodesic dome, with its aluminium shades catching the sun, and an Apollo space capsule and a long free-span escalator. Those were things like you’d expect to find at an international exposition. What was unusual was that the rest of the American show was almost completely Pop – it was called Creative America. I remember thinking as I looked around it that

164  Jean-François Côté there weren’t two separate societies in the United States anymore – one official and heavy and ‘meaningful’ and the other frivolous and Pop. People used to pretend that the millions of rock-and-roll 45’s the kids bought every year somehow didn’t count, but that what an economist at Harvard or some other place like that said, did. So this U.S. exhibit was like an official acknowledgement that people would rather see media celebrities than anything else … The old idea used to be that the intellectuals didn’t know what was going on in the other society – popular culture … [But] everybody was part of the same culture now.2

This idea that Pop Art coincided entirely with ‘popular culture,’ and that this also meant the harmonized unification of everyone in American society – intellectuals included – is a dubious assertion to which we will return. But it is already undermined by Warhol’s own account when we read further: In the way of art there were works by Rauschenberg and Stella and Poons and Zox and Motherwell and D’Arcangelo and Dine and Rosenquist and Johns and Oldenburg. But a lot of the show was pop culture itself – movies and blow-ups of stars, and props and folk art and American Indian art and Elvis Presley’s guitar and Joan Baez’s guitar. And these things weren’t just part of the exhibit; they were the exhibit – Pop Art was America, completely … Pop references let people know that they were what was happening, that they didn’t have to read a book to be part of culture – all they had to do was buy it (or a record or a TV set or a movie ticket).3

While the commercialization and commodification of culture appear, in Warhol’s text, to define the new ‘pop culture,’ this provides only a glimpse into the deeper logic that was at stake in contemporary society. This is a logic that has seemed to find its greatest expression in world’s fairs, for example, as Walter Benjamin has noted in reference to Hausmann’s appearance as the ‘artiste démolisseur’ in Paris of the nineteenth century.4 Indeed, if mass culture achieved the synthesis of anything in the twentieth century in the form of ‘pop culture,’ this only happened through a shattering of both culture and the popular. The ‘Synthesis’ of Mass Culture and Its Side Effects While mass culture developed along the lines of mass production, mass consumption, and mass media, that is to say, with the ‘masses’ in its sights, and suffused with industrial and technological processes, the clear result of this development was the further fragmentation of cultural practices. Providing the background for a pseudo-universal point of reference since the mid-nineteenth century, mass culture in fact provided an opportunity for a new social hierarchy to be established. Here, one does not have to rely on the early critics of mass culture such as Adorno and Horkheimer, or even Hannah Arendt, in order to make the point that the development of mass culture was an attack on the canon of bourgeois culture. This argument on its own might have implied that mass culture was the ideal incarnation of popular culture – to the extent that the traditional working classes, including proletarian and even rural cultures, were opposed to bourgeois culture,

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with its (aristocratic) presumption to being the new leading class.5 In fact, early debates about the significance of mass culture often emphasized its positive, ‘antibourgeois’ qualities; it was likely to be perceived as more ‘popular’ and even more ‘democratic’ than bourgeois cultural forms.6 But one has to acknowledge that the old cultural oppositions at the heart of modern society were reshuffled under the auspices of mass culture in the twentieth century. Bourgeois culture, stripped of its emancipatory content, turned into mere commercial culture, while working-class, proletarian, and rural cultures, deprived of the authenticity of their traditional social roots, were led towards consumption and became at best folk cultures, to be nostalgically appreciated for what they once were. To therefore say that mass culture – as that which would engulf all these remnants of modern society – has ‘no class’ is only to hint at the idea that it could belong to everybody in general, and to nobody in particular; this perhaps explains the sense of cultural void and anonymity associated with that rising ‘middle class’ for whom mass culture was supposedly intended. It should be noted, however, that the development of mass culture did not prevent the persistence of an ‘elite culture,’ manifested in its diverse economic, artistic, or political branches, which are at times interrelated and at other times not so obviously related. Mass culture, inasmuch as it serves as the ‘official’ embodiment of normative social life in the twentieth century, especially through practices of consumption, nonetheless provides the opportunity for the development of many subcultures, if not of an ‘underground’ culture that promotes opposition, resistance, and even the subversion of these social and cultural norms. To the extent that this opposition to mass culture is generalized, it can even form a ‘counterculture,’ as it did in the 1960s. It was at this very moment that the internal tensions and contradictions of mass culture coalesced and became so evident. So much, then, for the presumed unification of ‘pop culture.’ Warhol was certainly not the only one to envision the possibility that Pop Art had helped to realize the reconciliation of high art and the popular in the 1960s, or that this particular expression should be equated with a more universal if not more democratic culture for contemporary society. This was the position explicitly developed by many art critics and cultural commentators at the time, as well as more recently by cultural historian Andreas Huyssens in his book After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Generally speaking, it is also still a prevalent view today.7 What is striking about such assumptions, though, is the lack of understanding about the deeper tensions of the age that are reflected in and expressed through the arts, and this is particularly relevant when considering culture in its urban context. Mass Culture in Montreal: Which ‘Pop Movement’ in the 60s? It is somewhat ironic that the cultural industries at the root of the new ‘pop culture,’ which became so pervasive in many North American cities, became prominent precisely when those cities underwent the severe and dramatic deindustrialization process that followed the heights of the postwar boom. In becoming ‘postindustrial,’ as sociologists such as Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine described in the

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late 1960s and early 1970s, North American cities like Montreal had to face the profound challenge of transforming their entire economic infrastructures, as well as their social organization and cultural development.8 And while it is not clear that this general turnaround proved to be successful, particularly for Montreal, we might also ask whether these changes were accompanied by the unification of cultural practices. All this is to say that despite its claims to egalitarianism and universalism, mass culture inaugurated a new hierarchization of social life, which is most clearly visible and tangible in the city. As André Lortie argued in a recent essay on the transformation of architecture and urbanism in Montreal in the 1960s, such a hierarchy accompanied the new requirements of contemporary life: new transportation systems (such as the Metro) and highways (the Metropolitan and Decarie highways, and eventually the Ville-Marie expressway), as well as new skyscrapers (such as the Place Ville-Marie and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce building) and the more or less brutal ‘renovation’ of the housing styles of old neighbourhoods. The city was thus reconfigured in a way that allowed the new priorities of circulation (of people, merchandises, and capital) to be put into practice.9 And this went along with the will of the main actors involved in transforming Montreal in the sixties: international capital invested in skyscrapers; international cultural trends were played out in urbanization, in architecture, and in the arts in general; the federal political agenda (culminating in the celebration of the centenary of the Confederation in 1967), as well as provincial dynamics (the many political, social, and cultural transformations brought by the révolution tranquille), and municipal priorities of avant la lettre ‘postmodernization,’ all fuelled this massive transfiguration of the city throughout the decade. Montreal thus underwent a truly massive transformation, although it is questionable whether this matched the definition of a ‘popular movement’ or if it better corresponded to the category of ‘mass culture.’ While it would be inaccurate to label this moment of social change as ‘popular,’ because of the tensions it generated and contradictions it inflicted on culture in general,10 can we instead link it to Pop Art, considering it part of a coherent, widespread ‘Pop movement’? This is so only if we can see in the latter the trace of those contradictions present in social and cultural life. Labels like ‘Pop architecture’ or ‘Pop urbanism’ are not often utilized, but perhaps the heterogeneous Las Vegas environment which inspired Robert Venturi’s architectural visions, or the ways Disney theme parks invented a kind of entertainment urbanism, gives some indication of this possibility even in the 1950s.11 And are these not precisely the schemes according to which Expo 67 was conceived? To a large extent, Expo 67 mirrored, and even promoted, these new trends in urbanism and architecture, giving a clear indication of the future of the city, while highlighting its present state. As we will see, it is only by producing a clash of utopia and counter-utopia that Expo 67 could be perceived as the dream city Montreal aspired to, which also resonated internationally, as a sign of the direction that the world was taking. After all, this had indeed been the role of world’s fairs since their very inception in the middle of the nineteenth century: they were the showcase for the present state of the evolution of mankind, an occasion for envisioning and experiencing the state of the art of human society en masse.12 And as such, as

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an extraordinary exhibition of a specific zeitgeist, Expo 67 certainly achieved its goal. As the first world’s fair to be held outside of Europe or the United States, Expo 67 attracted an estimated fifty million visitors. The site and the pavilions were clearly planned and realized to both convey and exceed the message the exhibition bore: Terre des Hommes/Man and his World, beyond its apparent humanistic claim, was equivalent to a coronation for mass culture. There, the Disneyan ‘themed environment’ became the site of futuristic extravaganzas and romanticized pasts, with the minirail carrying passengers over and even sometimes through the various exhibits, ranging from the First Nations artefacts in the Indians of Canada pavilion to the space capsules in the U.S. and USSR pavilions, or from the ‘traditional’ pavilions of India or China to the ‘foreign’ European cultural expressions. It is in this sense too that the architecture of the various pavilions went beyond the modernist ‘form follows function’ creed, only to launch itself into the new Pop understanding of a ‘sign building.’13 Thus the equivocations of the Quebec pavilion, with its mirrored facades strangely and ironically distorting its neighbouring pavilion of France, can be contrasted to the unenigmatic stance of Buckminster Fuller’s gigantic geodesic dome housing the United States’ ‘Creative America’ exhibit.14 If Expo 67 was thus mediating international cultural experience for the masses, at this point we can ask about the significance of this event for Montreal, then and now. Expo 67 at Street Level: Cultural Utopia and Counter-Utopia in Montreal What Expo 67 represented for the city of Montreal, and for the culture of the 1960s, is enmeshed in a global and local admixture that is difficult to define; indeed, Expo 67 seemed to start from a tabula rasa to reimagine a new way of living (on the Expo site itself), while offering a harsh historical lesson taught by mass culture (since the event was itself a consumable product available for a limited duration). As the culmination of the modernist architectural and urbanistic project in its ‘pop’ incarnation, Expo 67 thus came to represent Montreal’s in a dual sense, as both its positive and negative ‘other.’15 It has by now been recognized that Expo 67 acted simultaneously as both a utopia and a counter-utopia for Montreal,16 but these terms must be unpacked. Counter-utopia means here that the world’s fair embodied an idea of Montreal to which the city could of course never live up, even as this event actually did put Montreal on the map of the great cities by virtue of welcoming a world’s fair. Utopia in this context means on the one hand that Expo 67 did reach the almost surrealist climax that world’s fairs have promoted, by providing an international rendezvous and an intensified cosmopolitanism, while on the other hand it masked the cultural contradictions and social hierarchization that inevitably accompany these events. It is therefore interesting to pay particular attention to the relationship between Expo 67 and the cultural practices (and particularly the arts movements) in Montreal at the time in order to zero in on how the clash between utopia and counterutopia was expressed. Throughout the site of Expo 67, the arts were displayed amid other econom-

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ic, technological, social, and cultural achievements, while sometimes providing a point of contention. At the Youth pavilion, for example, an artwork provoked a kind of local scandal: André Montpetit, in collaboration with Marc-Antoine Nadeau, presented a sculpture called Le sous-marin jaune de la force de frappe québécoise (‘The Yellow Submarine of the Quebec Task Force’), which played with Pop Art aesthetics in a way that showed the cultural tensions and contradictions of the time (fig. 10.1). Thematically based on the pop music of the Beatles, the sculpture, formed by a home-made kayak painted in yellow, also integrated a toilet seat, some Catholic religious icons (such as a blessing by John XXIII, images of Cardinal Léger and a Sacred Heart), as well as a live budgie standing as the Holy Spirit, together with the typical French Canadian motto ‘Par la foi nous vaincrons’ (‘Through faith we will conquer’) painted on one side.17 This work is perhaps less ‘pure’ in its form than the better-known Pop Art (for instance, the Brillo Box sculptures of Warhol which explicitly mimic an everyday commodity), but this sculpture revealed how some aspects of an authentic popular culture could be integrated, using both irony and parody, into a new kind of Pop aesthetic (which in this instance has perhaps retained more of its Dadaist overtones).18 And precisely because it was not as ‘pure’ as American Pop Art in its aesthetics, this more politicized artwork highlights the social and cultural tensions at stake in pop culture at large.19 Le sous-marin jaune de la force de frappe québécoise, and the ‘Ti-Pop’ aesthetic to which it corresponds, reveal such tensions with an unusual clarity. From Pop to ‘Ti-Pop’ in Montreal’s Artistic Landscape Pop Art had been explored in Montreal since at least 1963, in the work of Serge Lemoyne, while other artists such as Gilles Boisvert, Pierre Ayot, and Yvon Cozic were also committed to Pop Art aesthetics during the sixties, as opposed to the modernist principles that the Automatists and other abstract painters of the previous generation had espoused.20 The use of popular images, advertisement icons, mass culture references, and media techniques thus informed the work of these Montreal artists, spreading in ever-larger circles to the point that something called a ‘Ti-Pop’ aesthetic emerged. This ‘Ti-Pop’ aesthetic was officially launched by an article written in 1966 by Pierre Maheu in Parti Pris, one of the leading intellectual and indépendantiste journals of the 1960s in Quebec. Maheu described a new aesthetic sensibility that relied extensively on a French Canadian popular iconology, now joined to the Pop Art momentum that was reconfiguring artistic and cultural landscapes.21 For Maheu, this particular aesthetic was enmeshed in the transformations of the age and was deemed necessary to allow Quebec culture in general to evolve towards a new identity. Ti-Pop was therefore poised halfway between an optimistic, futuristic hyper-modernization and a folklorization of the recent past. Ti-Pop managed to sustain a half-nostalgic and half-ironic look at Quebec’s traditional, anti-modern legacy. This was nothing less than revolutionary, and I want to argue that this aesthetic attitude was so attuned to its time that the city of Montreal itself, with its mix of new, modern transportation systems, its heritage of religious buildings and icons, together with multiple signs of an expanding mass culture, was expressing Ti-Pop principles. Seen from this perspective, the sculpture Le

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10.1  The Youth pavilion featured the sculpture Le sous-marin jaune de la force de frappe québécoise (The Yello Submarine of the Quebec Task Force), created by André Montpetit, with Marc-Antoine Nadeau. Image from Yves Robillard, ed., Quebec Underground, 1962–1972 (Montreal: Éditions Mediart, 1973).

sous-marin jaune de la force de frappe québécoise was then much more than a mere signal of disaffected youth, or simply evidence of a new style; rather this artwork is perfectly emblematic of the cultural change that Quebec society was experiencing, that was concurrently being played out in Montreal’s shifting urbanistic and physical character. This Ti-Pop aesthetic was thus symbolically leading the way, in showing how the last remnants of a genuine French Canadian popular culture could be transformed into a new Quebecois ‘pop culture,’ with the aid of Pop Art. The fact that Ti-Pop Art incorporated those remnants of an older culture into a new aesthetic can thus be interpreted as a sign that through ‘pop culture,’ popular culture in its older, vernacular sense became obsolete, became at best a ‘folk cul-

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ture’ that from this point on would have to be represented according to the new cultural requirements of the age. The authenticity of those popular culture signs of the past had to be reprocessed through a triumphant mass culture and through an industrial/technological mindset that reshuffled the terms of social and cultural hierarchies.22 A good deal of the cinéma vérité produced by the NFB at the time (Jean-Pierre Perreault’s films like Pour la suite du monde in 1963 or Le règne du jour in 1966, for instance) would also move in that direction, representing on film (and thus preserving in a new technological format) some disappearing cultural practices.23 The fact that Andy Warhol developed a ‘purer’ type of Pop Art could be related to the more complete industrialized/technologized version of popular culture that he was confronted with in the United States – a ‘pop culture’ that had already reprocessed various vernacular and authentic expressions into mass culture, to the point of achieving a form of cultural expression that was totally devoid, at least in appearance, of tensions and contradictions.24 Warhol’s own experiments in Pop Art were attuned to his own society in complex ways: the paintings of Coke bottles or Hollywood stars speak to a monolithic, commercialized culture, whereas Warhol’s early films, such as Sleep (1963), Haircut (1963), Couch (1964), Poor Little Rich Girl (1965), or Chelsea Girls (1966), expressed a crude kind of cinéma vérité that depicted an underground scene – involving druggies, queers, and drag queens from his own universe at the Factory – generated by the artist’s rejection of mass culture. This was a way of reintroducing something that was much too ‘genuine’ and ‘real’ to fit the usual mass culture commercial promise of happiness – and so Warhol’s ‘superstars’ would never really be equivalent to the ‘real stars’ from Hollywood he compared them to.25 And in the end, only Warhol himself would receive that ticket to the heavens of stardom, largely due to his role in the elite circles of avant-garde art. After all, not everything that Warhol produced would be equated with ‘pop culture.’ In any case, the Pope of Pop was already aiming for ‘business art,’ which in large part consisted of commissioned portraits of the elite people (in the arts, show business, politics, economics) who would speak to distinctions within the ostensibly unified cultural world which Warhol had described.26 We therefore understand a little better how Warhol’s portrait of Dominique de Menil (executed in 1969) might play a role in this story, since de Menil’s gallery and family were to become the biggest collectors and sellers of Andy Warhol’s works of art;27 and the ‘pop in and pop out’ visit to Montreal in the de Menil’s private jet indeed makes explicit the terms of the new social and cultural hierarchies. And so we return to the significance of the short visit made by Andy Warhol to Expo 67, whereby the Pope of Pop came to give his blessing to the ‘new universal cultural order.’ In return for the enthronement of his international persona, magnified by the giant self-portraits shown in the U.S. pavilion, Warhol would bless the new Pop order while christening its universal cultural status.28 Does this mean that since then we have all become Pop subjects? Conclusion: Pop Subjects? When Charles Baudelaire visited the second world’s fair in Paris in 1855, he remarked that the event illuminated the cosmopolitanism of his time. Comment-

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ing on the presence of many nations assembled on the site of the fair, Baudelaire noted the relative status of nations, not that the supremacy of one nation over others would be revealed, but rather that the individual visitor could regard the differences in the fair’s cultural expressions as ‘un échantillon de la beauté universelle’ (a sample of universal beauty).29 For Baudelaire, variety was a ‘condition sine qua non’ of life, to the point that beauty in culture and arts had to be bizarre, strange, uncanny, or in other words, had to reject banality.30 More than one hundred years later, after many more world’s fairs and the international development of mass culture, the picture had changed, with international capital shaping cities and genuinely popular forms of culture on their way out. Modernism in the arts was transformed to the point that Pop Art was in, and so was pop culture – a development that perhaps appeared inevitable in Andy Warhol’s America, but whose tensions were still apparent in the local Ti-Pop aesthetic. We have seen that Ti-Pop was ultimately more than just one of Montreal’s artistic trends, since it so powerfully reflected the cultural conditions and contradictions of the time. From this standpoint, Expo 67 in Montreal was an occasion when the universal mass culture on display to the world was explicitly informed by a hierarchical cosmopolitanism. If this same principle was now inherent to every nation, this was something that the ‘pop in and pop out’ visit of Warhol both revealed and masked, allowing us to ask: who is the subject of this universal order? Was this subject reflected in Warhol’s six self-portraits at the U.S. pavilion? A last comment by the artist himself will highlight the significance of the kind of subjectivity involved here. Visiting the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows in 1964, Warhol had a McLuhanesque flash that was key for understanding this new Pop subject generated by mass culture – corresponding on the one hand to the void and anonymity accompanying the ‘middle class’ as it negotiated the world of mass culture, and on the other hand to the ‘echoistic’ definition of the individual modern subject. As Warhol recalled it: The thing I most of all remember about the World’s Fair was sitting in a car with the sound coming from speakers behind me. As I sat there hearing the words rushing past me from behind, I got the same sensation I always got when I gave an interview – that the words weren’t coming out of me, that they were coming from some place else, someplace behind me.31

NOTES 1 David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 264. 2 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 220–1. 3 Ibid., 221; italics in original. 4 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle,’ in Oeuvres, III (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 63. 5 See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘La production industrielle de biens culturels,’ in Dialectique de la raison, trans. E. Kaulfhoz (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 130–76,

172  Jean-François Côté as well as Hannah Arendt, ‘La crise de la culture: sa portée sociale et politique,’ in La crise de la culture, trans. under the direction of P. Levy (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 253–88. 6 On this, see Russel B. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970). 7 Andreas Huyssens, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), esp. 141–59. 8 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Alain Touraine, La société post-industrielle (Paris: Denoël, 1969). 9 André Lortie, ‘Montréal 1960: les singularités d’un archétype métropolitain,’ in Les années 60: Montréal voit grand, ed. André Lortie (Montreal: Centre Canadien d’architecture, 2004), 75–115. 10 As André Lortie puts it: ‘Les années 1960, c’est l’histoire de la réception par Montréal de ces forces qui transcendent les volontés municipales et qui se trouvent mises au service, avec plus ou moins de bonheur, d’un projet collectif puissant, auquel chacun contribue à sa manière, mais dont personne ne semble détenir la clé, ni même l’énoncé … Pourtant, ce projet collectif existe, même si on peut l’estimer de prime abord plus technique ou technocratique que politique. Car à l’évidence, il ne paraît plus vraisemblable, à l’époque, d’abandonner la métropole du Canada à sa crise du logement endémique, à l’insalubrité de son habitat et à la vétusté industrielle.’ Lortie, ‘Montréal 1960,’ 83. 11 After mentioning that Pop architecture matches the new urban condition of ‘ville spectacle,’ Chantal Béret writes: ‘Reprenant la logique de la consommation, l’architecture pop sera toute extériorité, manipulation de signes ou appropriation d’objet – celui-ci perd dès lors la primauté de la fonction, sa finalité objective, au profit d’un système de relations et d’un discours de connotation qui rejette toute indexation sur des valeurs autonomes ou formelles pour figurer un dispositif de représentation: l’architecture devient parlante. L’exacerbation de l’image – dans les années 60 on parlait de son caractère “panique” – supplante l’effet de vérité et de “profondeur”: l’architecture pop se veut homogène à cet ordre de signes, homogène à la production technique, industrielle et sérielle, au caractère artificiel et fabriqué de l’environnement signalétique, à sa saturation.’ Chantal Béret, ‘Une architecture pop?’ in Les années Pop, catalogue d’exposition (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2001), 24, http://www.centrepompidou.fr/Pompidou/Communication.nsf/docs/ID89D499F9F02844C4C1256A10004BC178/$File/dosspresspop. pdf (accessed 29 September 2007). On the relations between world’s fairs, urbanism, and Disney theme parks, see Michael Sorkin, ‘See You in Disneyland,’ in Variations on a Theme Park, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 205–32. 12 As Maurice Roche writes on the cultural significance and social role of late nineteenthcentury exhibitions that established their permanent role: ‘The expos were a new and powerful cultural medium for conveying information and values to a mass public. What Marshall McLuhan famously once said of television, that to a significant extent “the medium is the message,” could also be said about expos. A large part of the excitement, attraction and spectacle of expos derived from the medium itself, namely the buildings and site architecture, together with the huge peaceful gatherings of people on an historically unprecedented scale outside of mass mobilisations for war. This was as important as the contents of the exhibition.’ Maurice Roche, Mega-Events and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2000), 45.

Andy Warhol at Expo 67  173 13 That ‘Pop architecture’ perfectly corresponds to the Disneyan ‘themed environment’ is no coincidence, since they both participate in the triumph of entertainment in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States. Here, architects, engineers, and ‘imagineers’ such as John Hench for Disney and Disneyland, and later Robert Venturi’s inspiration from Las Vegas, all converged to forge this new mindset. See John Hench, Designing Disney: Imagineering and the Art of the Show (New York: Disney Editions, 2003), and Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977). 14 On the Quebec pavilion’s characteristics, and on the ironic significance of its mirroring effect, see Lortie, ‘Montréal, 1960,’ 104, 56. On the ‘One-Town World’ idea and the ‘dymaxion concept’ embodied in geodesic domes, see Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 72–84. 15 While Mies van der Rohe and other modernists contributed directly to the architectural transformation of the Montreal landscape in the 1960s, in line with the ideals of Louis Sullivan defending the ‘form follows function’ principle, the ‘pop’ twist at Expo 67 came to stand for an extension and revision of this utopia-turned-real, with all its ornamental extravaganzas, where form always exceeded function. On questions related to these permutations of the ‘modern style,’ see James R. Abbott, ‘Louis Sullivan, Architectural Modernism, and the Creation of Democratic Space,’ American Sociologist (Spring 2000): 62–85. 16 See for instance Lortie, ‘Montréal, 1960,’ 112–13. See also Ingrid Peritz, ‘Expo 67 Legacy More than Merely Memory,’ The Globe and Mail, 18 April 2005, A9. 17 For a more complete description of the work, as well as the ‘scandal’ that surrounded it, see Serge Allaire, ‘Pop Art, Montréal, P.Q.,’ in Les arts visuals au Québec dans les années soixante. L’éclatement du modernisme, ed. Francine Couture (Montreal: VLB, 1997), 193–5. 18 As has often been noted, Pop Art owes much to Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaist movement for the use of everyday artefacts. The way that Pop Art turned to advertisements, comic books, media products and techniques, however, resulted in a distinctive aesthetic, allowing, I am arguing, ‘popular culture’ to be transformed into ‘pop culture.’ I would resist, however, equating Pop Art with Pop culture, the way Diana Crane does when she writes: ‘In other words, part of Pop Art was not simply using themes and images from popular culture; it was in fact a form of popular culture, in terms of the way in which it used this material.’ Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 67 (my emphasis). 19 In fact, the Ti-Pop aesthetic was probably closer to Pop Art as it first developed in England in the mid-1950s. On this see Lawrence Alloway, ‘Le développement du Pop Art anglais’ (1966), in Le Pop Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (Paris: Éditions Thames and Hudson, 1996), 27–67. 20 See Francine Couture, ‘Identités d’artiste,’ in Déclics art et société. Le Québec des années 1960 et 1970, ed. Marie-Charlotte De Koninck and Pierre Landry (Quebec: Musée de la civilisation, 1999), 51–82. 21 Maheu wrote: ‘Qu’est-ce donc que TI-POP ? Eh bien, le TI, c’est le Québec, comme dans “Chez Ti-Jean Snack Bar,” “Ti-Lou Antiques,” ou tout simplement comme dans “Allo, ti-cul.” Et le POP, c’est si on veut le Pop Art. Mais il ne s’agit pas spécialement d’art. C’est plutôt de culture qu’il s’agit, notre veille culture, qui se mérite bien le titre de Culture Ti-Pop. Le Ti-Pop, c’est une attitude ; fondamentalement, elle consiste à

174  Jean-François Côté donner valeur esthétique aux objets de la culture Ti-Pop … À la fois nostalgie et sarcasme, ironie et bonheur, retrouvailles et rupture … l’attitude Ti-Pop, qui transforme (l) es objets sacrés en objet de conscience esthétique, les rend profanes, est donc une attitude profanatrice … Ti-Pop, c’est une démarche paradoxale qui consiste à assumer un certain passé national, mais à l’assumer comme passé justement, c’est-à-dire à le poser du même coup comme dépassé.’ Pierre Maheu, ‘Laïcité 1966,’ Parti Pris 4, no. 1 (1966): 73–4. See also Allaire, ‘Pop Art, Montréal, P.Q.,’ 196–8. 22 Once again Maheu saw what was at stake with this cultural challenge when he wrote: ‘Mais entre le Canada français révolu et le Québec à inventer, il faut une démarche qui fasse le joint. Joual, Ti-Pop, ou ce qu’on voudra, l’histoire de cette métamorphose que doit être notre révolution culturelle passera par la période du cocon, ni chenille ni papillon, à la fois négation et affirmation, moment paradoxal d’une mise au monde qui est aussi une mise à mort. Ou bien nous réussirons cela, ou bien le problème du Québec se règlera tout seul: et nos petits enfants seront des américains [sic]. Ce n’est qu’en se transformant de fonds en combles [sic] que la culture québécoise ne sera pas tout à fait dévalorisée dans le monde des voyages interplanétaires. Et inversement, ce n’est qu’en assumant notre origine dans ce monde périmé que nous nous donnerons à nousmêmes et à nos idées le poids de réalité nécessaire pour vaincre l’inertie qui maintient encore le Québec dans la culture d’un autre âge.’ Maheu, ‘Laïcité 1966,’ 75. 23 It is indeed ironic that Perreault’s films were sometimes thought of as documentary films, given the staging that they required; Warhol’s films, in a quite opposite fashion, were thought to be ‘real fiction films’ without any script required – which, today, make them appear somehow like documentary films of the period. 24 Warhol’s invented persona is certainly a denial of his own ‘son of Czechoslovakian immigrants and lower working-class’ background. 25 Here there is a distinction between ‘artists’ and ‘stars’ that arises out of the reprocessing of mass culture – where ‘stars’ are only understood according to the level of their mass exposure, something which is often unrelated to their artistic talent and accomplishments; this sets them apart from artistic practices in general. 26 Warhol’s ability to negotiate the cultural divisions created by mass culture explains, in my view, a lot of his personal success in marketing anything from ‘high art’ to ‘underground films’ to ‘happenings,’ with correspondingly different results and benefits. 27 On this, see Victor Bokris, Warhol (New York: Da Capo, 1997), 337. 28 On the effect of Warhol’s presence at Expo 67 on his own career, David Bourdon writes: ‘Warhol’s inclusion in the exhibition furthered his reputation on two fronts. First, it prominently proclaimed him as an artist who could hold his own with some of the most eminent names in American art. Second, it disseminated the notion that he was an enigmatic persona, whose façade, in acid colors, masked his true identity. In contrast to the other artists, who were for the most part abstractionists, Warhol offered 216 square feet of flagrant self-aggrandizement. His multiple giant images of himself appeared charged with iconic overtones and helped to establish his international personality cult. He could not have made a more calculated appeal to the curiosity of Expo visitors, who were made to realize that his was a celebrity face.’ Bourdon, Warhol, 264. 29 Taking the example of one’s astonishment in front of a Chinese artefact, this ‘produit étrange, bizarre, contourné dans sa forme, intense dans sa couleur, et quelquefois déli-

Andy Warhol at Expo 67  175 cat jusqu’à l’évanouissement,’ he adds: ‘Cependant, c’est un échantillon de la beauté universelle; mais il faut, pour qu’il soit compris, que le critique, le spectateur opère en lui-même une transformation qui tient du mystère, et que, par un phénomène de la volonté agissant sur l’imagination, il apprenne de lui-même à participer au milieu qui a donné naissance à cette floraison insolite. Peu d’hommes ont, – au complet, – cette grâce divine du cosmopolitisme; mais tous peuvent l’acquérir à des degrés divers.’ Charles Baudelaire, ‘Exposition universelle – 1855 – Beaux-arts,’ in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 576. The inclusion of the arts at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris inaugurated a ‘second model,’ as compared to the Great Exhibition in London four years earlier, which only included industrial and technological products. On this, see Maria Cristina Maiocchi, ‘L’exposition universelle. Modèles et commanditaires,’ in Art et artistes de la modernité, ed. Antonello Negri (Rodez: Éditions du Rouergue, 2002), 117–32. 30 Baudelaire writes, in a way that undermines any attempt from mass culture to become a new universal cultural order: ‘J’irai encore plus loin, n’en déplaise aux sophistes trop fiers qui ont pris leur science dans les livres, et, quelque délicate et difficile à exprimer que soit mon idée, je ne désespère pas d’y réussir. Le beau est toujours bizarre. Je ne veux pas dire qu’il soit volontairement, froidement, bizarre, car dans ce cas il serait un monstre sorti des rails de la vie. Je dis qu’il contient toujours un peu de bizarrerie, de bizarrerie naïve, non voulue, inconsciente, et que c’est cette bizarrerie qui le fait être particulièrement le Beau. C’est son immatriculation, sa caractéristique. Renversez la proposition, et tâchez de concevoir un beau banal! Or, comment cette bizarrerie, nécessaire, incompressible, variée à l’infinie, dépendante des milieux, des climats, des mœurs, de la race, de la religion et du tempérament de l’artiste, pourra-t-elle jamais être gouvernée, amendée, redressée, par les règles utopiques conçues dans un petit temple scientifique quelconque de la planète, sans danger de mort pour l’art luimême? Cette dose de bizarrerie qui constitue et définit l’individualité, sans laquelle il n’y a pas de beau, joue dans l’art (que l’exactitude de cette comparaison en fasse pardonner la trivialité) le rôle du goût ou de l’assaisonnement dans les mets, les mets différant les uns des autres, abstraction faite de leur utilité ou de la quantité de substance nutritive qu’ils contiennent, que par l’idée qu’ils révèlent à la langue.’ Baudelaire, ‘Exposition universelle,’ 578–9; italics in original. 31 Warhol and Hackett, Popism, 72. I have developed a longer analysis of the implication of this ‘echoistic’ self-consciousness in Jean-François Côté, Le triangle d’Hermès. Poe, Stein, Warhol, figures de la modernité esthétique (Bruxelles: La Lettre Volée, 2003).

11 Postcards and the Chromophilic Visual Culture of Expo 67 johanne sloan

When Expo 67 opened to the public on 28 April 1967, a vast amount of textual and visual material had already been released to the public, announcing the marvels of the upcoming world’s fair. This advance publicity included a series of chrome postcards showing three-dimensional models or architectural drawings of the various pavilions to be built on the Expo site. In one striking night-time view, a miniature version of the Canada pavilion is artfully illuminated and photographed from the point of view of its future Île Notre-Dame setting: the shimmering silhouette of the (real) Montreal skyline stretches out horizontally in the background, while the St Lawrence River flowing between them pulsates with multi-coloured lights (see plate 19). Like the other architectural projects sponsored by individual countries for the world’s fair, the Canada pavilion was supposed to celebrate a sense of nationhood, and indeed this mandate was especially key for Canada as the host country, having invited the world to bear witness to its centenary. That ideological imperative does not come across in the above-mentioned postcard, however. Instead, this is a fantastical image which manages, due to its disguised montage techniques and amplified coloration, to seamlessly join the workaday city to an imagined, unbuilt place, while cloaking Canada’s national pavilion in a strangely alluring nocturnal atmosphere. This diminutive postcard is thus an elaborate pictorial construction, and I want to suggest that it points to larger questions about the colour-saturated visual environment of Expo 67. To understand the impact of this world’s fair, it is undeniably important to address the humanistic, modern-sounding, nation-joined-to-nation message which was trumpeted throughout Expo 67’s official publications, reports, and speechifying. This official story gets more complicated, however, if we take into consideration the range of visual experiences and material artefacts available throughout the exhibition site. Visitors who bought Expo 67 postcards continued on their trajectory through the exhibition grounds, encountering experimental displays of photographs, moving images, and projections; striking shows of ephemeral colour and light; and a range of immersive visual environments. It is thus possible to consider postcards as a constituent part of Expo 67’s distinct visual culture. Indeed the postcard can provide the axis for this discussion, because its repertoire of lowbudget special effects seems to enhance the temporal and spatial ambiguities of the world’s fair experience.

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The selection of Expo 67 postcards available for sale to visitors eventually included photographs of full-size pavilions, with recognizably flesh-and-blood people occupying the site. Even these allegedly truthful documents possess a synthetic quality, though. The nocturnal scene described above – with its fake pavilion, elaborate mise-en-scène, and enhanced lighting – is obviously a work of artifice. But there is a comparable pictorial/colouristic excess in the postcards based on photographs of real buildings. Expo 67 postcards (whether featuring real buildings or architectural maquettes) come adorned with those gaudy popsicle-blue skies which are so familiar to us from other postcards; the lawns, trees, and bushes of the exhibition grounds are endowed with a preternatural, neon green-ness; while the enlivening accents of carmine or turquoise on flowers, vehicles, or the garments of Expo 67 visitors are revealed upon close examination to be splashes of pigment added to the original photograph. As Peter White has commented about the postcards of this era, the heightening of colour had become ever more excessive, to the point that the ‘glorious affront to reality’ posed by postcard imagery was the very basis of its appeal.1 Added to this intensified colour scheme is the Expo 67 postcard’s glossiness, a characteristic of photochrome postcards (commonly known as ‘chromes’) when a coat of varnish laid atop of the photograph created an even shinier, more seductive pictorial surface.2 Expo 67 postcards must be considered in relation to the consumer/tourist economy which came into existence in the postwar era, whereby keyed-up images accompany the encounter with new products and places, and everything new comes wrapped in hyperbolic colours and shiny plastic. The garish quality of Expo 67 postcards is certainly a characteristic of other postcards from this era, those featuring roadside attractions and sightseeing destinations. And yet, even as they resemble conventional souvenir items and are full of punchy commercial appeal, the Expo 67 postcards signify something more. They present the world’s fair as a site of possibility and fantasy, where the material world has an unanticipated plasticity. The exaggerated coloristic effects common to postcards come to play an important role in conveying the utopian promise of Montreal’s world’s fair. World’s Fair Imagery Expo 67 postcards can be compared to the imagery of earlier world’s fairs, as some aesthetic and ideological traits have undoubtedly persisted throughout the history of these events. Robert Rydell has described how early world’s fair postcards coincided with the heyday of colonialism and served to transmit a sense of American/European cultural and racial superiority. He characterizes both the world’s fairs themselves as well as their accompanying postcards as ‘enmeshed in the struggles for cultural and political control stemming from efforts to build empires around the globe.’3 Understood in this way, postcards are destined to provide a visual affirmation of the West’s expansionist and exploitative policies. Rydell does nevertheless acknowledge that world’s fair postcards can also embody ‘sentiments of escape and enchantment,’4 but he does not fully explore these rather contradictory assertions. Yet this is a crucial question: how do postcards assert the world fair’s message (its imperialist, technocratic, and commer-

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cial imperatives), while also illustrating an escapist, enchanted leap out of this ideological paradigm? Turning to a specific case-study can be illuminating with regard to this contradiction. The 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago (also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition) launched the picture postcard craze in North America, and these early postcards took the form of coloured lithographs, each one dramatically isolating an individual pavilion from the so-called ‘White City.’ Peter Bacon Hales has argued that a very different kind of image – large-scale photographs of the fair, specially commissioned from Charles Dudley Arnold – faithfully replicated the vision of Chicago’s entrepreneurs, who saw the world’s fair as ‘an opportunity to create the ideal city and realize their grand scheme: an urban environment based on concepts of planning, order, monumentality, and symbolic historicism.’5 And so Arnold’s photographs reinforced this ‘message about urban civilization’6 – a message which must be linked to the world’s fairs’ bigger claims about the superiority of Euro-American civilization, as discussed by Rydell. But Hales is much more specific about how such ideas take material and pictorial form, explaining that Arnold used very large cameras and negatives to achieve precision and detail and to ‘maximize the illusion of photographic transparency.’7 And so these hyper-real black and white images connote documentary truth, while functioning politically to impose a vision of immutable beauty and power. In these photographs, the sparkling whiteness of this quasi-urban environment was in marked contrast to the greyness and grimness of late nineteenth-century industrial Chicago. Still, this was an ideal city only in appearance, for ‘people were never meant to occupy and use this city; they were meant to witness it.’8 Another author points out that ‘the varying architectural “styles” adopted affected the surface only,’ as the buildings were in actuality shed-like structures tricked out with Greek or Roman or Renaissance facades.9 So it is significant that the White City’s impact was all about surfaces and superficial impressions, about the manipulation of appearances and images. While Arnold’s photographs were disseminated as the fair’s officially sanctioned visual representations, ‘Official Souvenir Postal’ postcards, made by Charles W. Goldsmith and the American Lithographic Company, were produced, sold, collected, and sent in great numbers, and it can be argued that they were equally responsible for visually circumscribing and defining this important world’s fair, albeit in a very different way from Arnold’s photographs. Hales’s text does not mention postcards at all, but we might indeed regard these as rival sets of images. Most obviously, the chromolithograph postcards are based not on photographs but on vignette-type coloured drawings. The pavilions are enveloped in glowing sunsets and misty vapours, while an assortment of putti, allegorical figures, and mythic creatures linger in the vicinity. The images are somewhat in the style of J.M.W. Turner’s romantic, atmospheric watercolours of Venice, executed in the early part of the nineteenth century.10 Whereas the Arnold photographs endow the ephemeral White City with the illusion of realness, materiality and permanence, the Turneresque postcards have the opposite effect of de-materialization: the world’s fair looks like a dreamscape, about to disappear in a puff of smoke or fade away like a memory.

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These two groups of images thus represent extremes: a world’s fair could be rendered according to the conventions of realism or as alluringly embellished images, inviting a kind of escapist visual pleasure. This latter tendency has in fact been dominant in world’s fair postcards. Some world’s fair postcards were printed on silver-foil paper or had glitter pasted onto them, and others have fancy decorative borders or are ‘hold-to-light,’ which means that cityscapes or individual buildings get magically illuminated when the postcard is held to a light source. At one of the most famous early twentieth-century events, the New York World’s Fair of 1939, very little of the official imagery took the guise of objective documentation, and the postcards accompanying this event are some of the most extravagant and fanciful world’s fair imagery ever produced. These intensely coloured, non-photographic images11 seem to capture the futuristic ethos of this particular world’s far. It is not the evocation of a future world which is their essential characteristic, however, because in their pictorial excess they otherwise greatly resemble the above-mentioned World’s Columbian Exhibition postcards, which were based on architecture and iconography that deliberately set out to look ancient. Whether evoking historicity or futurity, then, what is key is that a genre of world’s fair postcard became a mechanism for imaginative dislocation and time travel. Whether a world’s fair set out to evoke historicity (like the 1893 event) or futurity (like the 1939 event), it is important to note that all the postcards under discussion are inescapably modern, in that both photography and lithography imply the mechanical reproducibility of images, as well as their mass production, distribution, and consumption. Thus postcards exemplify the emergence of a modern image-world, even if the availability of colourful and enticing imagery is so much a part of contemporary experience that we tend to take it for granted. The question of how world’s fairs intersect with modern visuality pre-dates the postcard, though, and one of the most remarkable world’s fair images is an artwork from exactly one hundred years prior to Expo 67: Édouard Manet’s painting of the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle.12 Manet’s painting shows a cross-section of Parisians out and about in the city, looking off in different directions, with the exposition a flickering apparition in their field of vision (and in ours too, as viewers of the painting.) The art historian T.J. Clark has pointed out that Manet’s painting appeared at a moment when there was a heightened consciousness about the old city disappearing and a new, modern urban environment arising to take its place.13 Manet is renowned for his sketchy, disintegrative approach to painting this urban environment as well as the people who inhabit it, as if this were the only way of describing the fragmentary and alienated nature of modern experience. It could be said that Manet’s painting is the antithesis of a postcard, or at least the stereotype of the postcard, understood as a glossy and seamless picture, as a throwaway visual commodity, and as an authorless point of view onto the world. Of course Manet’s painting is most unlike the lowly world’s fair postcard because this large painting (it is approximately two metres wide) is considered a masterpiece of nineteenth-century French art. But Manet’s reputation as an exemplary modern artist is linked to how he focused on ordinary people, instead of ‘timeless’ heroes and gods, and how he represented the geography of everyday life instead of idealized scenery. When something as ephemeral and vulgar as a world’s fair

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can become the object of profound aesthetic investigation, the distance between paintings and postcards is diminished. Finally, Manet’s painting sheds light on the subsequent history of world’s fair imagery, including Expo 67 postcards, because it problematizes the pleasure to be gained from the sight of the world’s fair. The Visual Culture of Expo 67 Postcards at Expo 67 were examined and bought at various locations throughout the site, got carried around and mailed off at the end of the day, or were brought back home at the end of a trip. These postcards entered larger circuits of image transmission, alongside many other instances of moving and still images throughout the pavilions and exhibition grounds. Elsewhere in this book Ben Highmore deploys the notion of ‘phantasmagoria’ to analyse the veritable assault of imagery, information, and entertainment which confronted the Expo 67 visitor. It could also be claimed that Expo 67 was a spectacle, in accordance with Guy Debord’s influential text The Society of the Spectacle, published in 1967. It is worth noting that the English translation of this book actually includes a few photographs of the 1964–5 New York World’s Fair as illustrations, so that when we read, ‘the spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life,’ the world’s fair becomes the visible evidence of that totalizing operation.14 Debord delivers an apocalyptic account of passive consumption and alienation, even if his own practice as a Situationist activist/artist insisted that the strategic repositioning of images could be a form of resistance.15 Is it warranted to regard Expo 67 only as a corporate, capitalist, and neo-colonial spectacle, given its tremendous range of visual displays and technologies, produced under the auspices of different nations, political systems, media practices, and aesthetic agendas? The conceptual vocabulary of visual culture is more productive, I would suggest, as a way to negotiate Expo 67’s complex network of representations and visual experiences. ‘Visual culture’ is sometimes presented as a newly capacious and inclusive category: instead of approaching paintings as the exclusive property of art history, films as belonging to cinema studies, and advertisements as the responsibility of media scholars, for instance, all of these can be regarded as comparable visual artefacts, occupying the same interdisciplinary field of inquiry. This rather hopeful view of visual culture as a wide open realm, where images of various descriptions float freely, available to one and all, has been challenged by other scholarly voices, however. Irit Rogoff has insisted that what is at stake is ‘the constitution of a new object of knowledge,’16 which can only be achieved through negotiation and struggle and when it is understood that ‘the field of vision becomes a ground for contestation.’17 The value of ‘visual culture’ as an intellectual project is precisely that it has triggered debates about the ever-shifting relationships between visual objects, practices of representation, spectatorship, modes of experience, and so forth. We can focus more closely on the epistemological boundaries erected by disciplines like art history, whereby only certain kinds of images are deemed worthy of scholarly scrutiny and aesthetic debate. This is certainly relevant to the present discussion, as the very marginality, anonymity, and disposability of postcards is in contrast to the more enduring value accorded to those images labelled ‘art.’

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It should be noted too that historians and institutions of photography have only recently begun to take postcards seriously, perhaps because some images are so painted over and gussied up that their photographic origins are barely recognizable.18 Some scholars are in agreement, though, with the historian of photography Geoffrey Batchen’s manifesto-like call to study ‘vernacular’ images ‘made in vast numbers by anonymous, amateur, working-class and sometimes even collective hands.’19 Visual culture can also point to certain telling gaps between disparate visual media and technologies, including those belonging to differing historical periods.20 In these terms visual culture is not merely a repository for multiple kinds of images, but has become a methodological challenge, a way of assessing how different modes of seeing and making images continually impinge on each other. Instead of regarding the postcard in isolation, therefore, this essay attempts to situate those little rectangles of coloured cardboard as part of a dynamic visual field. The range of images and visual experiences that became constituent parts of Expo 67’s visual culture include multimedia displays and experimental screen projections, as well as the extensive media coverage of this event in innumerable publications and programs. Added to these are the abundance of souvenir brochures, colouring books, ashtrays, or scarves imprinted with Expo 67 iconography and logos, which found their way into visitors’ possessions; and we might look to that unofficial archive of amateur snapshots, slide shows, and home movies which got produced and taken home, far away from the Expo site (although some of this erstwhile private material has recently become available to a much wider public, thanks to postings on internet sites and programs such as YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, etc.). Where Batchen talks about ‘vernacular photographies,’ W.J.T. Mitchell has described a ‘larger field of … vernacular visuality or everyday seeing’ which should be considered an integral part of visual culture.21 Sometimes, as Mitchell says, ‘even something as broad as “the image” does not exhaust the field of visuality.’22 We will never be able to reconstitute the innumerable, fleeting visual experiences of Expo 67 visitors, but a visual culture approach takes seriously this densely layered visual environment, with so much to look at, so many people looking intently, so many gazes intersecting. Postcards provide evidence of the links between official views and subjective experiences at Expo 67. The photographic image reproduced on the Expo 67 postcard is not supposed to correspond to the perspective of an individual viewing subject, nor is it meant to divulge the psychological or emotive interiority of the person responsible for taking the photo. To describe this perspective as ‘objective’ is to say that the image is made not according to the desires of a particular visitor wielding a camera, but in accordance with an established set of pictorial conventions: an architectural monument will be centrally positioned in the middle distance, small-scale human figures animate the scene, low-lying bushes or flowers create a framing device in the foreground, and so on. And as mentioned, incredibly bright and slick expanses of blue sky are ubiquitous and seem to hold everything in place. This pumped-up colour is not necessarily the work of a camera at all but, rather, can be the result of a subsequent intervention in a photo lab. And yet, the postcard also attests to a subjective encounter with the world’s fair.

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11.1 Postcard showing the Canada pavilion and its photographic ‘People Tree.’ Collection of Johanne Sloan.

The postcard first makes its appearance as a multiple, commodified, anonymously authored image, but it is soon held in the hand and brought physically close to the body, and it is transformed into a form of intersubjective communication once it is inscribed with proper names and a personal message. The Impact of Colour Expo 67’s experimental, high-tech cinema imagery has been much commented on, but in many cases still images too were enlivened and enhanced, and, in a way, set into motion through a range of spatial and technological interventions. Photographs were integrated into the built environment in unusual ways – on strings of suspended disks in the Iran pavilion, for instance, or embedded into a spiralling, machine-like structure in the Australia pavilion. Expo 67 showed how ordinary photographs could become part of (or subsumed within) a colourful and kinetic spatial environment. Probably the most elaborately designed of these contrivances was the so-called People Tree adjoining the main inverted pyramid of the Canada pavilion: a spherical structure standing the equivalent of six storeys high, it consisted of a metal armature supporting red and orange ‘leaves’ – these are actually hundreds of documentary-style photographs of Canadians going about their daily lives printed onto coloured nylon panels (fig. 11.1).23 These photographs came from the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division, an organization that existed from 1941 to 1984. As Carol Payne has noted, ‘the Division served as the country’s image bank, constructing a government-endorsed portrait of nationhood through documentary photography.’24 The NFB Stills Division com-

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missioned and amassed a huge body of images that most often appeared in narrative sequences in a range of national and regional newspapers and magazines. The Expo 67 visitor might have encountered examples of this black-and-white documentary-style photography in her or his morning newspaper but would be reintroduced to this archive of photographs under radically different circumstances at the People Tree. Here, the NFB photographs were dramatically enlarged, suspended in the air, while the significance of individual images was further obscured when the translucent panels were illuminated at night so that the whole structure became a glowing, golden orb. Did this fantastic overlay of colour and light undercut the moral authority and aesthetic integrity of the NFB documentary project, undermine its role as an ‘instrument … for promoting a specific model of nationhood and citizenship’?25 Elsewhere at Expo 67 photographs sometimes appeared in a more conventional exhibition context as individual framed units seen in sequence on an interior wall with accompanying panels of text, but just as often attempts were made to animate photographs with the addition of light, movement, and colour. This impulse was certainly evident in the Canadian Kodak pavilion, for instance, where the promise that ‘dazzling color pictures virtually spring to life’26 was fulfilled through a multiscreen slide show. The ‘dazzle’ of colourized photography was certainly associated with the realm of pop culture at this time. If the documentary photograph was supposed to be a soberly presented black and white print, this reflected a long-standing bias against colour in the artworld. The ‘art photograph’ of the early twentieth century was admired for its subtle shadows and tones; it was not supposed to be a vulgar blare of colour (it could even be said that it should be the antithesis of a postcard). An international photography exhibition at Expo 67, The Camera as Witness, consisting only of black and white photographs, provided this point of view in clear-cut terms. It was not until the late 1960s and 1970s that bodies of work by American photographers such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston became influential enough to change this strangely snobbish attitude towards colour photography, and it is noteworthy that Shore’s switch to colour was directly inspired by postcards: ‘I first became interested in color because of my interest in postcards and snapshots,’ the artist has stated.27 Both the expressive potential of colour and the conventionality of these vernacular images would become attractive to artists. This was hardly the first time that certain features of a world’s fair were strikingly illuminated and colourized. The 1893 World’s Columbian exhibition in Chicago had searchlights which ‘moved to bathe different facades in temporary washes of purple, yellow, green, blue, and scarlet.’28 Many other world’s fairs followed suit, with special lighting effects pointed at buildings and fountains – and with postcards on hand to gild the lily, so to speak, by adding even more pictorial embellishment to what was already a visual extravaganza. At Expo 67 the deployment of coloured light could have other connotations, too, linked to the countercultural ‘light shows’ of the 1960s. A recent exhibition/book about psychedelic art and experience argues for a complex field of signification around the play of flickering lights and swirling colours, whether found in artworks, poster design, fashion, film, or the ubiquitous light shows of the time. This psychedelic aesthetic promised ‘the fully-fledged liberation of colour and form in tune with music, drug

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experimentation and liberation on all fronts.’29 The visitors who climbed up inside the People Tree, becoming themselves drenched in coloured light, were perhaps not unlike the bodies moving through pulsating light at the Fillmore, the famous music venue in San Francisco during its ‘summer of love.’30 And so it is possible that the special effects added on to documentary photographs in the People Tree brought a suggestion of countercultural pleasure and release to an otherwise predictable nationalist project, and to otherwise conventional images of Canadians at work and play. Turning to some private (i.e., corporate) pavilions which also featured moving colours and lights provides yet another perspective on the layers of meaning attached to this phenomenon. The Kaleidoscope pavilion was sponsored by six Canadian chemical companies (although some, like Cyanamid of Canada and Union Carbide of Canada, were clearly affiliates of multinationals), and its very subject matter was colour, or more specifically, ‘Man and Color,’31 adopting the humanistic ‘Man and His …’ lingo of Expo 67 (see plate 20). The official Expo 67 guidebook announced: ‘The pavilion is dedicated to color in daily life, and dramatizes how chemistry, through color, contributes to the excitement of life.’32 By the 1960s these petrochemical industries were intent on introducing a rainbow of colours into the Western world’s appliances, vehicles, household goods, and so on. So it is striking that these commercially motivated pavilions did not put an array of such multi-hued commodities on display, but instead detached the encounter with intense colour from the object-world and, indeed, from practices of representation. Kaleidoscope’s presentation of colour was highly abstract: the exterior of the pavilion dramatically mimicked a colour wheel, while inside, the main attraction was a twelve-minute film of whirling, intensely coloured biomorphic shapes projected onto a massive screen. This film was meant to isolate the ‘the emotional, psychological, and even physical effects of color.’ Colour also featured prominently at the Polymer pavilion, which was sponsored by the Polymer Corporation of Canada, a company which had been making synthetic rubber since the Second World War. It was announced that this pavilion broached ‘the nature of light and color,’ alongside displays about ‘how to make things synthetically.’33 Again, the specific kinds of raw materials or finished commodities in question were only vaguely alluded to. The Polymer pavilion seemed to suggest that the world was now characterized by a new malleability, a magical kind of plasticity, that could also be multi-coloured. The chromophilic rhetoric evident in these pavilions is, surprisingly, not so different from the desire for subjectivized, hallucinatory experience expressed by the counterculture. Chemically and technologically produced colour, whether embedded in visual representations like postcards, or apparently detached and free-floating, was presented as something valuable and pleasurable for its own sake. Liquid, plastic, moving colour could be the basis of a potentially emancipatory experience for Expo 67 individuals. Quebec Pavilion Postcards The chromophilic visual culture of Expo 67 is particularly evident in the postcard of the Quebec pavilion. For the architectural historian André Lortie, the Quebec

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pavilion at Expo 67 conveyed the message that ‘the future of modern-day Quebec was resolutely industrial and urban.’34 Lortie has compared the architectural integrity of this building, designed by Papineau, LeBlanc, Gérin-Lajoie, and Durand, to the absurdity of much Expo 67 architecture, singling out the French pavilion as a particular object of derision. In contrast, the Quebec pavilion is lauded for its ‘modernistic signature,’ its ‘bold technical design,’ its ‘monumental quality.’35 Other authors have made different claims about the most significant buildings at Expo 67, but my purpose here is not to dispute the worth of this particular pavilion’s architecture. Rather, I am concerned with what happened to this building when it entered into representation, becoming a postcard image and, as such, a component part of Expo 67’s intensified visual culture. This austere, rationally conceived building acquired another sensibility when it was reinvented as a postcard image, although there are in fact two rather different postcard incarnations of the Quebec pavilion (see plate 21). One is based on a photograph of the built pavilion, and it is a matter-of-fact depiction of the architecture with the monorail passing by in the foreground and with small-scale people and buildings visible in the background. The photograph was apparently taken on an overcast day, and if the inclined, gridded glass walls of the pavilion could be highly reflective, here only dull patches of cloud and greyish sky are visible on these surfaces. This is surely one of the plainest postcard images produced for Expo 67, with little in the way of heightened coloration or other pictorial effects. The other Quebec pavilion postcard was based on a colourful drawing, produced by the architects in anticipation of the world’s fair, and it is an unreal nocturnal scene. This image of the Quebec pavilion circulated widely, appearing not only in postcard form, but also reproduced on souvenir trays, ashtrays and scarves, on sugar packets, coasters, and beer bottle caps. A version of this multi-coloured drawing was also chosen to publicize the pavilion in the official Expo 67 guidebook, where it appeared inscribed with the word ‘welcome’ in multiple languages.36 The most striking version of this image is in postcard form, though, because of the intensity and liquidity of its photographic colour: in this nighttime view the glass walls of the pavilion have become translucent, to reveal glowing red, yellow, and green elements within the interior of the building. The sky and surrounding environment are suffused with a molten blueness, ranging from a deep midnight hue in the higher reaches of the sky to an elegant frosty blue closer to ground level. People stand in small groups around the exterior of pavilion, bathed in this blue light and magnetically drawn, it seems, to the illuminated pavilion. In the extreme foreground is a woman who points towards the pavilion, accompanied by a man and two small children; these surrogate viewers draw our attention not only to the pavilion but to the strangely vast space within which it is apparently situated. This image is showy in the manner of other chrome postcards of the time, and its way of drawing the viewer in through heightened and abstracted coloration is, as we have seen, a characteristic of Expo 67’s visual culture. Beyond these more formal properties, we can ask whether this postcard conveys something about Quebec at this moment in time. The essays by Côté and Racine in this book attest to the questioning which arose in Quebec throughout the 1960s and that coincided with the staging of Expo 67, regarding the kinds of images, objects, or texts which

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could most effectively express the extreme social transformations of this period. As noted, Lortie looks back to the ascetic modernism of the Quebec pavilion and identifies a collective destiny embodied in this architectural project. The pavilion and its displays were certainly used to articulate the present and future state of Quebec, culminating in a futuristic gesture towards the year 2000.37 It is possible, though, that the postcard’s hallucinatory rendering of the Quebec pavilion more effectively evokes a sense of excitement about modern life and the open-ended future of Quebec society at this moment. The commercial pavilions’ homage to light and colour positioned the visitor as a consumer in an endlessly malleable (and profitable) material world, while we have also seen how exaggerated illumination and synthetic colour could destabilize existing cultural forms, whether buildings or photographs. If this chromophilic visual culture, with its connotations of plasticity, transformative energy, and pleasure, could be joined to a social project, however, the resulting image would be potentially utopian. I would suggest that this throw-away pop-culture souvenir is particularly open to utopian readings because this was a moment of great social and political upheaval in Quebec, and Expo 67’s fiction of stepping into a wondrous world was being enacted on our very doorstep. It is not that the Quebec pavilion postcard illustrates a socially convincing future world – just the opposite, in fact: the pavilion seems to occupy an uncannily open, stretched-out space; the objects on display in the pavilion are as unintelligible as particles viewed in a microscope, and the ‘citizenry’ occupying this space are ambiguous figures, wandering through. But as theorists of utopia have noted, a utopian impulse does not necessarily accompany a direct intervention into political processes, nor does it imply a fully articulated and realistic representation of a better urban plan or an improved set of social relations. Instead, as Louis Marin has suggested, utopia becomes evident as a horizon-like opening within the world as we commonly know it, a ‘gap between two frontiers or two continents, the old and the new worlds.’38 A no-place has the potential to become a ‘limitless place,’39 and a previously unimagined realm of pleasure and freedom becomes apparent. With its exaggeratedly open space, its expanse of surreal blueness, its pleasurably pulsating lights and colours, the Quebec pavilion postcard suggests such an imaginative space – for the people of Quebec, but possibly too for all of Expo 67’s temporarily global citizens. When Images Stop Moving Over the course of Expo 67 and afterwards too (since souvenir artefacts continue to be collected today), different categories of Expo 67 postcards circulated at the same time. As was true of the Quebec pavilion, there were double versions of the pavilions of France, Ethiopia, Mexico, among others – one a photograph of an architectural drawing or maquette, the other a photograph of the built pavilion. Surely these images of unbuilt pavilions remain so compelling because, for the person who holds onto such a postcard, the Expo 67 experience remains forever a realm of possibility. One of the defining features of the postcard is its mobility. It is an image that gets picked up somewhere but then travels; it traces a trajectory between people and

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between geographic locations. The status of the postcard as an image on the move resonates in distinctive ways at Expo 67 because the entire event demanded active and moving viewers, and because the nations, ideologies, and products on display were swept up in a visual rhetoric of pulsating colour and light. But is the postcard an image in motion, exemplifying our contemporary image-world of ever-moving and fleeting visual impressions? Or is the postcard best understood as an essentially immobile image? Richard Dienst writes: ‘Postcards serve as emblematic frozen moments in the ceaseless transmission of culture’;40 this suggests that postcards inscribe a provisional point of stillness within a world of constantly streaming imagery and information. This notion of a ‘frozen’ moment or image returns us to what might be called the bad reputation of the postcard, its status as an unreliable document of a particular time and place. Here we might recall that it was in 1967 that the American artist Robert Smithson made one of his most important works, entitled A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey. Smithson’s project can be thought of as a kind of anti-Expo, as it set out not to celebrate technology and new forms of cultural exchange, but rather, to describe the entropic edges of modern urban life, what the artist characterized as ‘a kind of self destroying postcard world.’41 Here the postcard represents a congealed and commodified image that does not permit us to see that every social and natural environment exists in a state of constant change. Smithson reminds us that a postcard world becomes a self-annihilating world when it is not implicated in historical, human time. Today the Expo 67 site is still recognizable from a few buildings which remain, and from various bits of signage and urban furniture which were somehow allowed to gradually lose their modern sheen, becoming overgrown with vegetative life. Yet alongside these more substantial material fragments, Expo 67 postcards have also remained, and they continue to circulate, to move, to shine brightly, and possibly, to suggest the immanence of new worlds. NOTES 1 Peter White, It Pays to Play: British Columbia in Postcards 1950s–1980s (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press and Presentation House Gallery, 1997), 26. See also an appreciative discussion of the Irish photographer John Hinde’s vividly coloured postcards, in Martin Parr, Our True Intent Is All for Your Delight: The John Hinde Butlin’s Photographs (London: Chris Boot, 2003). 2 Photochrome cards were first introduced in 1939, but were widely produced in the postwar era. See the Smithsonian Institution’s online ‘Chronology of the Picture Postcard,’ http://siarchives.si.edu/history/exhibits/postcard/chronology.htm (accessed 1 November 2007). 3 Robert Rydell, ‘Souvenirs of Imperialism: World’s Fair Postcards,’ in Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards, ed. Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 60. 4 Rydell, ‘Souvenirs of Imperialism,’ 53. 5 Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839–1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 134.

188  Johanne Sloan 6 Ibid., 133. 7 Ibid., 141. 8 Ibid., 149. 9 Stanley Appelbaum, The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (New York: Dover, 1980), 5. 10 See Ian Warrell, Turner and Venice (London: Tate, 2003). 11 It must be noted that some of the 1939 World’s Fair postcards indicate a photographic source for the image. For example, a view of the Theme Tower indicates ‘Photo by Keystone,’ but the postcard image has been so embellished and over-painted that the photograph virtually disappears. Also these ‘linen’ cards (printed on textured paper) inevitably produced a blurry effect. See Jeffrey Miekle, ‘A Paper Atlantis: Postcards, Mass Art, and the American Scene,’ Journal of Design History 13, no. 4 (2000): 296. 12 The title of the painting is: L’exposition universelle de 1867 (108 3 196.5 cm), National Gallery of Norway, Oslo. 13 T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1984). Paris was undergoing massive restructuring, largely through the efforts of the Baron Haussmann. 14 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977) (paragraph 42). 15 In Debord’s production, visual images are indeed constantly transformed so as to unfix their meaning and ideological positioning. See Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide (London: Black Dog, 2005). 16 Irit Rogoff, ‘Studying Visual Culture,’ in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 15. 17 Ibid., 22. 18 Some of the best scholarship on postcards to date has been anthropological and post-colonial – see Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb, eds, Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998) – rather than specifically oriented towards visual questions. See also Mark Wollaeger, ‘Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in The Voyage Out,’ Modernism/modernity 8, no. 1 (2001): 43–75. 19 Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Vernacular Photographies,’ History of Photography 24, no. 3 (2000): 262. Mary Warner Marien’s Photography: A Cultural History (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hill, 2006) does imply a more comprehensive attitude towards photographic production, including postcards. Perhaps more significant still are some recent instances of institutional recognition: London’s National Portrait Gallery put on We Are the People: Postcards from the Collection of Tom Phillips (London: NPG, 2004), while the curator of photography at the George Pompidou Centre in Paris, Clément Cheroux, has organized The Stamp of Fantasy: The Visual Inventiveness of Photographic Postcards (Zurich: Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2007). 20 Horst Bredekamp, for instance, has discussed how photography and cinema could transform the way art historians perceived painted or printed images from the past: thus Erwin Panofsky described ‘cinematographic’ passages in the sixteenth-century artwork of Albrecht Dürer. Horst Bredekamp, ‘A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft,’ in The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices, ed. Michael F. Zimmermann (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2003), 152. 21 W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,’ in Art History, Aes-

The Visual Culture of Expo 67  189 thetics, Visual Studies, ed. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002): 247. 22 Ibid., 248. 23 For an account of the People Tree in relation to other centennial projects, see Martha Langford, Contemporary Canadian Photography from the Collection of the National Film Board (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1984). 24 Carol Payne, A Canadian Document (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 1999), 12. 25 Ibid., 16. 26 Expo 67: Official Guide / Expo 67: Guide officiel (Toronto: Maclean-Hunter, 1967), 189. 27 Stephen Shore, quoted in Drusilla Beyfus, ‘Reality Show,’ Daily Telegraph (UK), 20 April 2005. Shore’s series American Surfaces dates from 1972, but it was Eggleston’s 1976 exhibition of colour photographs at the Museum of Modern Art which marked a major institutional shift. 28 Dietrich Neumann, Architecture of the Night: The Illuminated Building (Munich and New York: Prestel, 2002), 11. 29 Christoph Grunenberg, ‘The Politics of Ecstasy: Art for the Mind and Body,’ in Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era (London: Tate, 2005), 12. Of course experimentation with colour crosses many artistic movements: contemporaneous colour-field painters were exploring the flow and movement of coloured paint, while pop materials and iconography offered many more possibilities; a striking example is Bruce Nauman’s first neon-sign artwork, dating from 1967, spelling out the words ‘The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.’ 30 It is worth noting that Place des Nations, the large plaza used for official ceremonies during the day, became an open-air dance party at night, during Expo 67’s summer months. 31 The pavilion and guidebook use the American spelling ‘color.’ 32 Expo 67: Official Guide, 194. 33 Ibid., 179. The company was a crown corporation at the time, although it would eventually be acquired by the German chemical company A.G. Bayer. 34 André Lortie, ed., The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big (Montreal and Toronto/Vancouver: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Douglas and McIntyre, 2004), 59. 35 Ibid., 56. 36 Expo 67: Official Guide, 13. 37 For a close reading of the Quebec pavilion’s ideological framework, see Pauline Curien, ‘L’identité nationale exposée. Représentations du Québec à l’Exposition universelle de Montréal 1967 (Expo 67),’ PhD diss., Université Laval, 2003, chap. 5. 38 Louis Marin, ‘Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present,’ Critical Inquiry 19 (Winter 1993): 411. 39 Ibid., 412. 40 Richard Dienst, ‘Sending Postcards in TV Land,’ in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 297. 41 Robert Smithson, ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,’ in Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 72.

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12 Montreal and the Megastructure, ca 1967 inderbir singh riar

Among its contributions to architecture culture, the 1967 Universal and International Exhibition, the world’s fair commonly known as Expo 67, came to be celebrated as emblematic of avant-gardist theories on the ‘megastructure.’ A symbol of the optimism of large-scale thinking of the 1960s, the megastructure was broadly imagined to be a flexible framework that enclosed the functions of a city, thereby making immanent new forms of human interaction, social control, and the technical organization of space. Central to the heroic articulation of the megastructure were the techniques of long-span structures, inside or under which would be housed a new mass public. Expo 67 was believed to be redolent of megastructural intention. The journal Progressive Architecture found extensive evidence of this throughout the fair, notably in the use of space frames, tensioned membranes, and prefabricated modular assemblies. ‘Techniques of building’ in world’s fairs, an editor declared, ‘are often as indicative of the future of architecture as are the finished buildings.’1 The most perspicacious and polemical architects and critics did not, however, see the megastructures of Expo 67 in isolation; rather, they read these architectures against the backdrop of what had already been labelled as Montreal’s ‘multilevel city,’ where a new ‘core’ of subterranean links between skyscrapers and public infrastructures was described as a ‘network’ and an ‘organism.’2 The polemic on this expanded scape of city and fair sought to overcome the rules of functionalist planning in favour of urban space built around notions of ‘flexibility’ and ‘obsolescence.’ Here, the role of the citizen-participant would be crucial to a belief in the megastructuralist city as a kind of ‘open’ system. An ensuing critique of ‘everyday life’ in Montreal would focus on how the city could be continually adapted to the changing needs of its ‘users.’ This discourse had, however, a corollary: it would reveal those aspects of urban culture left unameliorated in the wake of the so-called Megacity. If the debate on the megastructure as found in Montreal was resolved in the desire to create a genuine ‘social condenser,’ a concept central to the urban imaginary of the modernist avant-gardes, then a renewed interest in the subjective view of the individual in the city would come to reveal the extent to which the helical processes between city and fair may well have been Janus-faced.

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Late in the spring of 1967, the critic and historian of modern architecture Reyner Banham found himself, much to his chagrin, stuck in a queue. Standing among the crowds at Expo 67, Banham paused to think long and hard about the fate of his fellow visitors. ‘When you think that this Expo is officially subtitled La Terre des Hommes,’ Banham remarked, ‘and what fun they had with la Terre, dredging up artificial islands and lagoons and things all over the Saint Lawrence, it is astonishing how little they do with l’Homme.’3 Playing with the title of the book by the French aviator-philosopher Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that had lent the theme of Expo 67, Banham quipped that La Terre des Hommes was hardly a paean to some supposed internationalism; rather, it was simply the culmination of a fifteen-month geotechnical operation in which 250 million tons of earth and gravel were shifted to form Île Ste-Hélène and Île Notre-Dame, the two fairground islands in the middle of the St Lawrence River. Banham’s sarcasm stemmed from his belief that the cultural and spatial experiment at work in the exposition was largely incapable of resolving ‘the $64,000 problem of all great exhibitions – l’homme, Mensch, folks, gente, us lot.’4 Despite being ‘viewed through the filters of statistic and the lenses of rhetoric,’ notwithstanding being ‘sentimentalised in technicolor and stereophonic sound,’ and regardless of being ‘hectored, directed and asked to respect the yellow line at the edge of the platform,’ l’Homme à l’Expo was largely written out of the act – ‘hardly anyone has had the wit to put him on stage.’5 Architecture, it seemed, was inadequate to its task of cultural representation. Banham’s misgivings pointed to a larger cultural crisis. Like almost all world’s fairs before it, Expo 67 inevitably announced its modernity by its most visionary forms of architecture. Like the competitive celebration of commodities and the cultures they embodied, these architectures crystallized an exposition’s claim to symbolize the civilizing process of humankind. John Ruskin had hence railed against the legacy of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, erected for the Great Exhibition of 1851. ‘Must this little Europe,’ Ruskin asked, ‘this corner of our globe, gilded with the blood of old battles, and grey with the temples of old pieties – this narrow piece of the world’s pavement, worn down by so many pilgrims’ feet, be utterly swept and garnished for the masque of the Future?’6 Ruskin anticipated that the rise of the modern nation-state would be necessarily emblematized by the most typical products of industrial culture – in this case a ‘masque’ of ferro-vitreous construction. Indeed, his ‘little Europe’ was being irreversibly shaped by the network of glass-and-steel railway stations linking the spread of capital throughout the continent, a reflection of the very Saint-Simonianism undergirding the fairs of the nineteenth century.7 The public sphere was, literally and figuratively, reflected in an aesthetic of advanced technique. This twinning, whether in 1851 or 1967, invariably revealed an internal tension. The architecture that was consciously articulated as mass-produced could not present a critique of the world in which it appeared – that is, along the symbolic realignment of geopolitical lines by a world’s fair – without at the same time challenging its own right to existence.8 The set pieces of Expo 67 – Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome for the United States pavilion, Frei Otto’s tensile roof floating above the Germany pavilion, or Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67

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housing complex – exhibited this conundrum to varying degrees. As Banham observed: The way in which the architectural aspects of great exhibitions have been institutionalised and rendered harmless is all too aptly demonstrated by Habitat 67. Billed as ‘a new concept of urban living’ it represents, in fact, the established status quo monumentalised in concrete. While we can all join in congratulating Moshe Safdie on actually getting a fifth year student thesis built, and solving all the technical problems involved (which most fifth year students never do, since their schemes never get off the paper), the fact remains that like three thesis designs out of five it is a craggy ziggurat of projecting apartment units; like three out of six it has an exposed megastructure of horizontal and vertical circulation; and like three out of four it is put together out of pre-cast room-units hoisted into place by crane.9

In Habitat was a re-articulation of both a kind of modernism – a polemic of prefabrication – and an ideal of modernity in which Expo 67 was necessarily invested. Unlike the temporary pavilions at the fair, Habitat was to be a permanent showcase reflecting ideas about housing in a modern society. The 354 pre-cast concrete boxes were poured in a temporary factory alongside the building site. Equipment, services, and finishes, including a one-piece fibreglass bathroom, were incorporated before each unit was hoisted by crane up to twelve storeys. The boxes were combined to form 158 interlocking dwellings of various sizes, each with a terrace garden, resulting in an overall seemingly random zigzagging pyramidal composition (although the complex had clear symmetries due to structural loading). For Safdie, the project demonstrated completely ‘an industrialised building process.’10 The stacked modules of Habitat served as reminder that architecture achieved an intense form of means-ends rationalization within the spaces of world’s fairs. This owed to two related demands: the need for quick erection and the role of public exhibition. For Banham, however, the institutional framework of Expo inevitably compromised the extent to which a project like Habitat 67 was, indeed, a full-scale version of a reality desired but as yet unachieved: The official view of the world’s Establishment is about two jumps behind the human race. Ministers of culture, trade, information and other forms of glass-beads-for-theWogs have now arrived, mentally, at the late 19th century, and understand that great exhibitions are supposed to make major contributions to architecture. They therefore hand over the design of their pavilions to someone they understand to be a major architect – a knight in Britain, a professor in Venezuela or Germany, and so on – forgetting that the major contributions to architecture at great 19th century exhibitions were made, typically, by Eiffel (an engineer) and Paxton (a gardener).11

The Crystal Palace had, of course, systematically arrayed ‘glass-beads-for-theWogs.’ Since the nineteenth century, the typical taxonomies of world’s fairs registered the unequal division of things and hence the uneven distribution of power among peoples. Nevertheless, despite its utilitarian assembly, a structure like the

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Crystal Palace remained exceptional; its techniques of construction were not necessarily equivalent or reducible to the end-product processes of commodity production.12 In fact, its potentially recombinational structure offered a system for indeterminate programs. In Banham’s view, then, Expo 67 could only make its ‘major contribution’ by presenting an architectural complex responsive to far more indefinite and open-ended needs than the typical desire for monumental display and codification demanded by the regime of fair. In other words, architecture, circa 1967, could reinsert ‘Man’ into the ‘World’ if, and only if, it had ‘the wit to put him on stage.’ In contextualizing the present in the colossal precedents of the nineteenth century, Banham noted that large-scale architectural works were central to the construction of a world’s fair as a social body. These structures facilitated the display of peoples and things as well as the exchanges between them. It was thus unsurprising that Banham’s description of Habitat 67 crystallized in the term megastructure. The megastructure had been concretely defined only a few years earlier by Fumihiko Maki, a member of the avant-garde Japanese Metabolist group: ‘The megastructure is a large frame in which all the functions of a city or part of a city are housed. It has been made possible by present day technology. In a sense, it is a man-made feature of the landscape.’13 The megastructural ‘frame’ would be composed of ‘several independent systems that can expand or contract with the least disturbance to others,’ but also remain ‘engaged in dynamic contact with others.’14 Banham followed Maki’s evocations to suggest a new type of architecture that could emerge from but also transcend the intensification of cultural, political, and technological forces within a world’s fair. Banham knew that this ‘man-made feature of the landscape’ would have to operate along the lines of the ever-changing ‘people-garden’ – the public spectacle of ad hoc queues – he had found and celebrated in Expo: The only place where the human race was fully written into the act is in the most underrated, yet probably the best, building there – the Canadian theme pavilion ‘L’Homme à l’Oeuvre.’ Architected by the Affleck-Desbarats partnership (locals again) it is … hum … well … like, try to imagine a cross between Piranesi, the Eiffel Tower, and the Fun Palace project. An incomprehensibly endless-seeming structure of rusting steel tetrahedra, rational but romantic.15

The design of L’Homme à l’Oeuvre, or Man the Producer, was based on the manipulation of a truncated tetrahedral cell. Its basic unit was formed by bolted steel angles that, when joined together, composed the lattice frames of the walls and floors slabs. For the architects, ‘sound structure and maximum flexibility’ were achieved in recreating ‘the form of the cell at a large scale.’16 Whether supported on its triangular or hexagonal side, the tetrahedral unit could ‘form spaces with walls that grow “in” or walls that grow “out.”’17 Man the Producer was not, therefore, unlike the nineteenth-century models evoked by Banham, not least given the uninterrupted space afforded by a meshing of structure and envelope. The aim,

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central to megastructuralist thinking, was to make manifest a total system (see plate 22). In invoking the sublimity of Piranesi’s Carceri and the theatrics of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, Banham linked the aesthetic charge of Man the Producer with its social function. As one of the theme pavilions at Expo 67, Man the Producer was meant to exhibit humankind’s mediation of the world by technology. The pavilion was divided into three sections: Resources for Man, on the use of natural resources; Progress, on the ‘endless interaction between society and the technology it creates’; and Man in Control? on the question of ‘communications.’18 Man the Producer thus represented the values consecrated by the fair itself – that is, where Work set the relations between Man and his World. Against this kind of thematic ‘fix,’ however, Banham emphasized the pavilion’s spatial mysteries writ in the seemingly infinite web of canted walls and disappearing floors: It has the dumb authority of a primitive industrial plant, and through it are threaded staircases and escalators, delivering the visitor to galleries and walks and platforms, on and from which he sees other visitors living, moving and having their being and vanishing from time to time into dark holes … and emerging, slightly to their surprise, on walks and galleries they didn’t remember seeing before. It is so vast and three-dimensionally complex that in three visits I know I didn’t visit every exhibit, work every gadget, walk every platform – it is an Expo in itself.19

The pavilion displayed any number of everyday and emergent technologies: antique clocks, baby strollers, tractors and ploughs, and a series of telecommunications satellites. Nevertheless, Banham refused to read Man the Producer as an institution in which the relations between individuals and technologies were normalized. In his schema, the pavilion would not bear the burden of ordering the fair and the public into a recognizable whole, into a legible social body. Instead, he described an environment that privileged the itinerant and, accordingly, the fluid interactions between people themselves. Within the ‘dark holes’ of this ‘rational and romantic’ megastructure were entirely new kinds of individuals ‘living’ and ‘moving,’ then ‘vanishing’ and ‘emerging.’ Deep inside the ‘incomprehensibly endless-seeming structure’ visitors participated in an absorptive mode of viewing in which they were disentangled from the exhibits they supposedly visited, the gadgets they purportedly worked, and the platforms on which they apparently walked. Man the Producer offered, then, a transitional form. It did little to shape knowledge-power relations typical of world’s fairs – what was displayed and who viewed it – into a common culture. Despite its instrumentalized use of generic technology to normalize exterior and interior, Man the Producer, in Banham’s suggestion, ceased to materialize in the structural clarities of a building system or a method of display. Instead, this megastructure became a space for ‘situations construites.’20 Banham curiously but deliberately invoked a strategy developed by the Situationist International. Since the late 1950s, the SI had sought a behavioural reorientation towards the city. The group used the notion of ‘play’ to amplify the experience of

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fleeting human encounters. For Guy Debord, the SI’s intellectual nucleus, ‘constructed situations’ were ‘ephemeral, without a future; passageways’; they led architecture away from ‘emotionally moving forms’ and toward ‘emotionally moving situations.’21 Debord’s ‘passageways’ offered a theoretical conduit by which any existing space could be re-appropriated to expose its ‘lived ambiances and their transformation into a superior passional quality.’22 Banham’s appropriation of Man the Producer signified as much. His descriptions of the dynamism of moving people (and not of the display of things) indicated the possibility of passageways giving onto passageways, a labyrinth as a dynamic conception of space. Banham consequently described Man the Producer as ‘an accidental but instructive approximation’ of the Dutch ‘ex-artist’ Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon.23 Following his short-lived but influential involvement with the Situationists, Constant developed New Babylon throughout the 1960s as a vision of an infinitely networked future city. He envisaged an endless series of ‘sectors’ meandering across the landscape and suspended over existing cities. Inside this ‘enormous social space’ – an infinite link of megastructures – life ‘would be essentially nomadic.’24 Users would ceaselessly modify their habitat, thereby opposing those ‘functional cities in which human lives were consecrated to utility.’25 Echoing Constant’s rhetoric, Banham saw in Man the Producer an ‘improvised learning machine for Homo ludens.’26 Accordingly, he reimagined the pavilion as participating in an entirely different spectacle than that fixed by Expo 67. The synthesis of all technologies and forms of knowledge under a ludic regime – writ large as a type of architecture – left little of a world’s fair programmatic conceptualization as a civilizing and educative agency (and consequently its consecration as a ‘masque’ of modernity). The architecture of situations was by necessity an improvisational construction. It was both conducive to, and the result of, desires remaining to be invented.27 It demanded a surplus spatial quotient, particularly at the level of the imaginary. Thus when Banham recalled Man the Producer several years after Expo 67, he described the ‘redundancies’ deep within the infinite lattice as a condition that ‘may be of the essence of megastructure.’28 Rather than the obvious structural redundancies of the building, Banham celebrated the spatial ones. In this ‘space to spare’ were ‘nothing but alternative routes, to be selected at conscious will or simply at random – the Situationists’ psycho-geographical drift.’29 The Situationist dérive (a ‘technique’ outlined by Debord of ‘playful-constructive behaviour’ for ‘transient passage through varied ambiences’)30 and its corollary psycho-geography (‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’)31 dovetailed into the concept of unitary urbanism: a cityscape that ‘acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form a unitary human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be dissolved.’32 This was an open challenge to the orthodoxies of modern architecture: on one hand, it rejected the pre-war ‘functional city’ demanded by the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne; on the other, it denied the postwar call by CIAM for the ‘humanisation’ of the city ‘core.’33 In their stead, unitary urbanism uncovered designs for the emotional effects of the future city. The ‘learning machine’ for ludic life as envisaged

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by Banham in Man the Producer was, therefore, a possibly non-functional replacement to the formal and cultural plan of Expo 67. It was a permissive space in which visitors – les hommes – were experimenting on themselves. Here, then, was the eclipse of homo faber – Man the Producer: the ur-figure of all world’s fairs – by the wilful spirit of homo ludens. In its condensing of social relations, the megastructure, as the archetypal vessel of world’s fairs, whether in the Crystal Palace or Man the Producer, helped organize a differentiated public into a spectacle, notwithstanding the ‘universalism’ of the exhibitions. It did so via the almost literal, but no less phenomenal, manifestation of a building as a technological system. The ‘natural tendency of the truncated tetrahedrons to regroup themselves into larger tetrahedrons,’ wrote one of the designers of Man the Producer, led to ‘a system of growth’ that ‘would create a discipline in design.’34 Yet the techniques of ‘growth’ in Man the Producer – assumed in the use of the tetrahedral ‘cell’ as the basic unit for an occupiable and potentially infinite steel space truss – rested on a tension between the mechanics of the building system and the human motor of its inhabitants. The notion of ‘progress’ typically proffered by machine technology, whether represented by the Crystal Palace or Man the Producer, appears in the elimination of play. Play signifies the related movements of the elements of a machine; the more perfected the technology, the less play the individual parts have in relation to one another. The free and unimpeded relation of components to each other, like the technical and aesthetic effects of standardization in the megastructure, could result not only in structural efficiencies but also social ones. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has observed, ‘Technology is an expression of external domination: by means of technological constructs’ – say, buildings – ‘nature’s powers and materials become disciplined to produce cultural, i.e., economic achievements. The social rules are constructs designed to serve internal domination: they structure the individual in such a way that he fits into a social context and performs constructively within it.’35 Furthermore, ‘the constructs of external domination themselves demonstrate progress in terms of increasing self-discipline, as do the individuals who internalise the social rules.’36 Ruskin’s detested ‘masque’ was precisely this: a spectacle of simultaneously ordering an urban public and an attendant ‘artificial’ architecture (ferro-vitreous construction) into a new whole. The kind of socio-technical ‘machine’ embodied by Man the Producer (as a megastructure) was, however, governed by an altogether different notion of ‘play.’ The notion of the ludique suggested that ‘man’ could be liberated from the secretive and hermetic ‘world’ of industrial production. Yet the ambiguous implications of a ‘discipline in design’ indicated that the elimination of ‘play’ not only was embedded in the rationalization of building systems but was consequently invested in the total construction of a totally new public domain (including those of world’s fairs). Walter Benjamin had alluded to this dimension while describing the utopianist Charles Fourier’s phalanstery in the context of related environments of the nineteenth century, including the Parisian arcades and the 1867 World Exhibition. These spaces were marked by advanced building technologies, which helped to augment the spectacle of daily life in the city (they were certainly antecedent to

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megastructuralist tendencies). Of the phalanstery, a communal building replacing the fragmented city, Benjamin wrote: Its highly complicated organisation is like a piece of machinery. The meshing of passions, the intricate interaction of the passions mécanistes with the passion cabaliste, are primitive analogies to machinery in the material of psychology. This human machinery produces the land of milk of honey, the primeval wish symbol that Fourier’s utopia filled with new life.37

Benjamin’s description of an ‘intricate interaction’ of ‘passions’ inside the phalanstery was not unlike the social effects envisioned by Banham within the ‘improvised learning machine’ of Man the Producer. In both cases, the spectacle of simultaneously ordering space and collectivized life – the production of ‘the land of milk and honey’ – was enabled by the formal and technical organization of a building. But the ‘mechanistic’ construction of the phalanstery or megastructure was not only the twinned rationalizing of industrial and social processes; the ‘production’ of ‘the land of milk and honey’ offered the diffusion of social energies into potentially multiple sites of a utopian imaginary. When, several years after Expo 67, Banham published his book Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, he dedicated a chapter to ‘Megacity Montreal.’ Expo 67, Banham believed, ‘crowned with a flourish of exhibition megastructures a city which was showing powerful megatendencies throughout.’38 Banham opened his retrospective chapter with ‘a comprehensive airview of almost everything that made Montreal the capital city of megastructure in Expo year 1967’ (fig. 12.1).39 In the foreground were the tetrahedrons of Man the Producer, resting on the ‘megaform’ site of artificial islands ‘joined by bridges above water and Metro tunnels below ground’;40 in the background, the new towers of downtown Montreal, part of what critics had described as a ‘multilevel city,’ or what became popularly known as the Underground City. Banham’s photograph was reproduced from The Architectural Review, which, in August 1967, had devoted a full issue to Expo 67 and the transformation of Montreal. J.M. Richards, an editor of the Review (and champion of the modern movement in the 1930s), contextualized the photograph by describing the ‘ideological and organisational’ links between city and fair in terms of the shared ‘contribution’ made ‘to a controlled urban environment’ by the ‘the widespread use of public escalators, the experiments with monorail and other elevated transport systems and the overall landscape control.’41 A few years later, Peter Cook, a member of Archigram and an early proponent of megastructural ideas, would describe the same conveyance mechanisms and transport systems as exhibiting a welcome concern for a ‘link between mobility, choice and technology.’42 These kinds of evaluations evinced a shift in megastructuralist thinking: instead of the solution of a universal structure that would redefine the city in toto, architecture could, perhaps, be conceived in terms of technologies that allowed more impermanent relationships between components and peoples. In this emerging critique, the space relations between Expo 67 and Montreal were coded not necessarily in architectural terms but rather by notions of process.

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12.1  Reyner Banham’s ‘comprehensive airview’ of Megacity Montreal with Man the Producer pavilion in the foreground. Image from Architectural Review (August 1967). Courtesy of Architectural Review.

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Still, some form of architectural mediation between city and fair was required. Banham turned to his ‘airview.’ Between the twin islands of the fair and the terra firma of the city, Banham pinpointed ‘the giant grain elevators that were seen as proof that ‘megastructures grow wild in Montreal.’43 Part of the permanent infrastructure of Montreal’s port, these seemingly sui generis megastructures ‘came into their own in 1967’ as ‘their element-by-element composition, their extensive command of ground space, their linkages one to another’ provided a ‘loose, provisional combination on the scale of large urban design.’44 Banham likely based his reading of the elevators on a description by the Montreal architect Melvin Charney. Writing in a special issue of Architectural Design on Expo 67 and Montreal, Charney insisted that the grain elevators were neither the gestalt entities of the modern movement nor ‘para-symbols’ used ‘to give an up-to-date image to strictly traditional building.’45 Charney denied the temptation to see the elevators as sublime, arguing against their ‘visual wholeness’ as generating any psychological or emotional effect. The ‘concept of “elevator” as a design,’ Charney claimed, ‘is not readily to be grasped. Functionalism here relates to the action of each part, but more especially to the complex interaction of all the parts.’46 Despite their ‘consistent vocabulary,’ these ‘functional organisms’ were not examples of a ‘specific machine.’ ‘As an analogy for architecture,’ Charney reasoned, ‘the grain elevator can be taken to be a building, a system, or part of a system, the mechanisms of which are dominated by movement.’47 In giving Montreal’s grain elevators a prognostic value, Charney indicated a shift in megastructuralist discourse. The grain elevators exhibited a ‘complexity of organisation’ as they integrated ‘new requirements and technological innovation’; ‘new components’ would subsequently ‘fit’ as ‘a logical outcome of the process.’48 Everything would be open to adaptation but equally engaged in a kind of feedback, thus requiring, as Charney put it, an understanding that ‘architecture is an involvement with human processes rather than with designed things.’49 This was, above all, a way to see human needs and technological means as one in the same. Yet it was also to indicate the potential absence of any significantly large architectural ‘fix’ that could resituate social relations. Charney’s polemic indicated that architecture (the megastructure, the Megacity) would be necessarily provisional and open to modification. What mattered, above all, was the incorporation of existing conditions into a ‘system.’ Here, everyday life as found in the city offered the necessary criteria. A particularly strong vision of the possible social and spatial re-engineering of the city along these lines appeared in the Montreal architects Michel Lincourt and Harry Parnass’s Metro Education project of 1970. Metro Education was based on the foreseen creation of the Université du Québec à Montréal, a second French-language institution of higher learning in the city. While ultimately hypothetical, the scheme was developed through ‘dialogues toward consensus’ with ‘interests groups’ including local developers Concordia Estates, the Montreal Catholic School Commission, the Quebec Ministry of Education, and citizen associations.50 As its title suggested, Metro Education proposed to exploit the existing infrastructure of the city as sites for popular education. The goal was, above all, ‘not to centralize the entire university in an immense building’;51 instead, it was to initiate ‘a system of education, diffusion

Montreal and the Megastructure  203

of information, and culturization through the best possible utilization of existing urban resources.’52 These ‘resources’ were found in the ambit of the Underground City. ‘More than any other city,’ the architects asserted, Montreal ‘has developed a central core that integrates offices, conference centres, exposition halls, apartments, as well as cultural and recreational services’ that ‘relate to one another by a sophisticated network of pedestrian galleries linked to the Metro.’53 The architects accordingly proposed situations such as the president of Royal Bank, who sat in Place Ville Marie, meeting his students, who arrived by Metro, in the shared public space of the underground network. Rather than produce an urban plan for a new university, Lincourt and Parnass offered a cultural plan for reordering Montreal itself. Having inventoried the ‘resources’ of the city core, Metro Education advanced a strategy of ‘urban infill’; this would allow ‘a multi-functional organization of the urban environment.’54 With the polyvalent concept of ‘information’ (i.e., ‘education’) as its agent, the future city was anticipated to grow in four stages: first, by the exploitation of underutilized spaces, such as ‘the cinemas in the Metro, always empty in the mornings’; second, by the infilling of empty lots with temporary prefabricated structures; third, the erection of some permanent structures; and fourth, the combination of all three levels into a ‘total urban development.’55 In diagrams corresponding to their quadripartite planning, the architects demarcated the extant subterranean network, located areas for new construction by prefabricated modules, and united the whole into an agglomeration of horizontally and vertically integrated buildings and programs (fig. 12.2). Through Metro Education, Lincourt and Parnass presented architecture as an ever-changing social machine. Their project bore conceptual affinity to a host of contemporaneous experiments, including Cedric Price’s Fun Palace of the early 1960s. Designed for the impresario Joan Littlewood, the Fun Palace was to be a place for popular education and entertainment where visitors would assemble their own surroundings using prefabricated modules within a superstructure of demountable steel towers overtopped by a huge gantry crane. Like the Fun Palace, as well as related but even more fantastic efforts such as Constant’s New Babylon or Yona Friedman’s notion of Urbanisme Spatiale, in which a massive elevated lattice would be filled in by users’ needs and desires, Metro Education exhibited a particular streak of megastructuralist thought, one that sought to build a self-regulating environment that would endlessly adapt to people’s participation. The use of temporary elements was seen as commensurate to the notion that ‘educational activities’ were ‘agents of retraining, of storage and manipulation of data, and of the dispersion of information,’ which ‘provides an essential component of urban life.’56 By linking education with ‘other urban services such as shopping, transportation, recreation, or commerce,’ the architects argued, ‘it is possible to … increase the level of performance of the system through its synergetic action with the rest of the urban environment.’57 Lincourt and Parnass thus refused the ‘traditional linear organization’ of the city in favour of a ‘superimposed organization’ that ‘integrated rational functions’ such as housing, parks, offices, and, of course, education.58 Here, architecture depended on ‘feedback’ from human and infrastructural capital; the resulting city was

12.2  Metro Education and the strategy of ‘urban infill.’ Images from: L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (January 1971).

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imagined as homeostatic and not as an idealization of fixed future social or spatial relations. Metro Education was, ultimately, a program of urban reform. Its visionary scale was tied to laying bare the vicissitudes of everyday life, not least those presumably unameliorated in the Megacity. As a suite of photographs accompanying the project made clear, Metro Education depended on the quotidian – the fabric of local neighbourhoods, the grid of downtown storefronts, or the occupation of city streets by protesters – to trigger its more utopian ambitions. These images provided a map of conditions that Metro Education aimed to accommodate. Lincourt and Parnass anticipated eliminating any number of social and spatial divisions in the city, notably an education system based on language (French or English) and religion (Catholic and Protestant). ‘When the school becomes the city and when the place of teaching becomes the place of work,’ the architects asserted, ‘any past spatial preconceptions disappear … Only the city permits the “interface” of multiple activities.’59 Metro Education thus exploited the city as both an architectural site and a cultural scape in order to afford, in the political philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s formulation penned in the same period, a greater ‘right to the city.’ Metro Education indicated how Montreal could be opened to itself, specifically by large-scale architectural intervention, however flexible or temporary. Yet it also raised a troubling question: could architecture adequately represent a new city constructed from the charged climes of the familiar? In other words, did the notion of a megastructure (or, indeed, a Megacity) adequately describe a genuinely public space and a new type of commons? Or did it simply link quasi-public spaces into a larger spectacle of urban life? The legacy of massive infrastructural undertakings that had come to define Montreal, such as the construction of highways and their arterial links to the core (constructions seen by Banham and others in tandem with the megastructural effects of Expo 67), would force a reconsideration of (if not outright lament for) what may have disappeared in their wake. This critique crystallized with force in the 1972 exhibition Montreal: Plus or Minus? held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and organized by Melvin Charney. Along with his analysis of the grain elevators, Charney had helped situate the discourse on the Megacity in a ‘much reproduced’ cross-sectional drawing through downtown Montreal, which delineated the ‘basement architecture’ of the ‘earthbound extension to the public city.’60 Yet by the early 1970s, Charney would, along with other critics, be wary of the totalizing developments that marked the unification of the city. ‘All the Places of the core transform the public function of the city into pseudo-public commodities,’ Charney noted. ‘The minimum clarity required for the orientation of pedestrians through the new street network is missing. Don’t hesitate to ask for directions – you will need them.’61 Against this sense of loss, or disorientation, the aim of Montreal: Plus or Minus? was clear: to examine the ‘fabric of Montreal’ where the ‘traces of an urban tradition’ were vanishing.62 Pointedly, no architectural or urban proposals were presented: There are many plans and projects which should have been included in this show, but

206  Inderbir Singh Riar they were not. The plans for the 1976 Olympic installations; the exact position of the Eastern extension of the Trans-Canada Expressway; the plans for the St Sulpice lands in the centre of the city; the development of office buildings at the Windsor Station site; the plans for federal offices on the site of Montreal’s Chinatown. All this is kept secret, through the complicity of ‘experts’ who tend to remain quiet as long as they get the work … The projects that are publicly available may be interesting, but they are usually either utopian or irrelevant insofar as they distract from the real issues and the real potential for the development of the city. What we are looking for is the basis for realizable utopias.63

These ‘realizable utopias’ were depicted in photographs, poems, and comic strips that portrayed the ‘public and communal city’ found ‘in the streets, in the parks, in the signs, in the graffiti, in the water we drink, and in the lives we lead.’64 Exhibits described direct action in social affairs, like advocacy planning. Charney’s own contribution was an uninterrupted band of photographs documenting both sides of a block on St Laurent Boulevard, much in the manner of Ed Ruscha’s record of the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Above all, it was the quotidian character of the city that mattered. Whether technocratic or radical, the construction of a Megacity had demanded the blurring of socio-spatial boundaries. Yet as a contemporary critique put it, ‘the present efforts to make equilibriums work, to connect crisis and development, technological revolution and radical changes of the organic composition of capital, are simply impossible. To aim at the pacific equilibration of the city and its territory is not an alternative solution, but merely an anachronism.’65 Montreal: Plus or Minus? revealed the obviation of social divisions (French versus English) by their equal subjugation to the forces of modernization, like the destruction of neighbourhoods for the new autoroute running along Montreal’s continuous east-west escarpment (the geologic fact that had allowed the underground city). The social, economic, and political conflicts rife in the city led the poet André Major to write: but when you’ve got nothing better to do you walk along the water’s edge along the docks and you wonder whether Montreal has a heart even though you live in the heart of the city66

Photographers shot graffiti that screamed ‘Taudis Français Châteaux Anglais’; ‘Pouvoirs Ouvriers’; ‘La Merde pour Elliot Trudeau.’ The cry from the streets was clear. The streets had, for an instant, been charged in a completely different way. On October 1970, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, enacted the War Measures Act in response to the kidnapping of James Cross, the British trade commissioner, and Pierre Laporte, the Quebec minister of labour and immigration, by two independent cells of the underground Front de Libération du Québec. Mon-

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treal was filled with soldiers, and curfew was imposed. Laporte would be executed and his body found in a car abandoned on the outskirts of Montreal. Cross would be freed in exchange for the passage of his kidnappers to Cuba. Cross’s release took place on Île Notre-Dame in, ironically enough, the former Canadian pavilion, ‘an improbable huddle of white roofs clustered together like fallen paper airplanes.’67 The abandoned site of the world’s fair – ‘a manmade island, remote from normal pursuits, impregnable to casual violence’68 – briefly became, once again, the focus of worldwide attention. Yet the internationalism of the world’s fair now yielded to the séparatisme of revolutionaries who called themselves the white niggers of America. The site could not have been better chosen: an island in the middle of the St Lawrence River, a part of Montreal but decidedly apart from it, perhaps always apart from it even during the heady days of Expo 67. NOTES 1 Forrest Wilson, ‘How the Pavilions Were Designed,’ Progressive Architecture, June 1967, 133. 2 Peter Blake, ‘Downtown in 3-D,’ Architectural Forum, September 1966, 31–48. 3 Reyner Banham, ‘L’Homme à l’Expo,’ New Society, 1 June 1967, 813. 4 Ibid., 812. 5 Ibid. 6 John Ruskin, ‘The Opening of the Crystal Palace’ (1854), in Industrialisation and Culture, 1830–1914, ed. Christopher Harvie et al. (London: The Open University Press, 1970). Ruskin made his remarks in light of the re-erection of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in 1854. 7 Ruskin’s romantic resistance to the railroad rested in his acute awareness of its commoditizing purpose: ‘It transmutes a man from a traveller into a living parcel.’ See John Ruskin, The Complete Works, vol. 8 (London: George Allen, 1903), 159. 8 Paul Greenhalgh makes this comparison regarding nineteenth-century mass-produced consumer objects (once known as ‘design manufactures’) and their uneasy relation to industrialization – that is, as craft objects designed in resistance to the homogenizing tendencies of commodity culture. See Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 142. 9 Banham, ‘L’Homme à l’Expo,’ 811. 10 Moshe Safdie, Beyond Habitat (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). 11 Banham, ‘L’Homme à l’Expo,’ 811. 12 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Industrialisation and the Crises in Architecture,’ Oppositions 1 (1973): n.p. 13 Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective Form (St Louis, MO: Washington University, 1964), 8. The Metabolists were preoccupied with housing a burgeoning Japanese population; their visionary cities followed concepts of ‘cellular’ growth, both in principle and as an aesthetic, with a fixed macrostructure (e.g., roadways) and a forever changing microstructure (e.g., housing units).

208  Inderbir Singh Riar 1 4 Ibid., 12. 15 Banham, ‘L’Homme à l’Expo,’ 813. 16 Affleck, Desbarats, Dimakopolous, Lebensold, Sise, ‘Analysis of the Truncated Tetrahedron’ (1964), 2. Fonds Arcop, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Box 64-20-34. 17 Ibid., 3. 18 Man the Producer (Montreal: Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exposition, ca 1965), 8–30 19 Banham, ‘L’Homme à l’Expo,’ 813. 20 Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 116. 21 Guy Debord, ‘Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organisation and Action’ (1957), in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 25, 22–3. 22 Ibid., 22. 23 Banham, Megastructure, 116. Simon Sadler notes that Constant announced himself an ‘ex-artist’ at the 1956 First World Conference of Free Artists in keeping with his commitment to the construction of situations. See Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 107. 24 Constant Nieuwenhuys, ‘New Babylon: An Urbanism of the Future,’ Architectural Design, June 1964, 305. 25 Ibid., 304. 26 Banham, Megastructure, 116. 27 Thomas Y. Levin, ‘Geopolitics of Hibernation: The Drift of Situationist Urbanism,’ in Situationists: Art, Politics, Urbanism, ed. Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996), 113. 28 Banham, Megastructure, 116. 29 Ibid. 30 Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’ (1958), in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 50. 31 Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ (1955), in Situationist International Anthology , 5. 32 Guy Debord, ‘Situationist Theses on Traffic’ (1959), in Situationist International Anthology, 57. 33 ‘The Functional City’ was the theme for the 1933 CIAM summit that produced The Athens Charter. Architecture and town planning were rigidly defined along four lines: Habitation, Leisure, Work, and Traffic. In 1951, CIAM studied ‘The Urban Core’ as a re-evaluation of its Charter, with the telling subtitle ‘Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life.’ See Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter (1943), trans. Anthony Eardley (New York: Grossman, 1973) and J.L. Sert et al., eds, The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life (London: Lund Humphries, 1952). 34 Guntis Plésums, ‘Architecture and Structure as a System,’ Architecture Canada, April 1969, 24. 35 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (1977; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 168–9. 36 Ibid., 169.

Montreal and the Megastructure  209 37 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,’ in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1986), 148. 38 Banham, Megastructure, 105. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 105–6. 41 J.M. Richards, ‘Multi-Level City,’ The Architectural Review, August 1967, 89. 42 Peter Cook, Experimental Architecture (New York: Universe Books, 1970), 119. Cook was otherwise disappointed that ‘these aspects of sophisticated environment have been treated in a rather fundamental way’ at Expo 67 and ‘that such useful equipment’ would perhaps continue ‘to undergo the … cheesecake treatment.’ 43 Banham, Megastructure, 105. 44 Ibid. 45 Melvin Charney, ‘The Grain Elevators Revisited,’ Architectural Design, July 1967, 331. Images of Montreal’s grain elevators had circulated in polemical literature of the modern movement, from their inclusion by Walter Gropius in the 1913 Deutsche Werkbund Jahrbuch (devoted to ‘Die Kunst in Industrie und Handel’) to Bruno Taut’s Modern Architecture (London: The Studio Ltd, 1929). Le Corbusier would include the grain elevators in Vers une architecture (Paris: Éditions G. Crès et Cie, 1923) as part of his argument for an ‘engineer’s aesthetic.’ Charney’s descriptions of ‘process’ as found in the grain elevators led him to eschew Le Corbusier’s modernist maxim ‘vers une architecture’ in favour of an approach ‘vers une non-architecture.’ 46 Charney, ‘The Grain Elevators Revisited,’ 331. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Harry Parnass and Michel Lincourt, Urb/Education Design (Brussels: Centre d’Études et de Recherche de l’Environnment, 1970): 85, 89, 98. 51 Michel Lincourt, ‘Métro-université,’ Architecture-Batiment-Contruction, April 1968, 16; my translation. 52 Michel Lincourt and Harry Parnass, ‘Métro Éducation Montréal,’ L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, January 1971, 55; my translation; emphasis added. 53 Ibid., 56. 54 Ibid., 58. 55 Ibid., 55, 59. 56 Ibid., 55. 57 Parnass and Lincourt, Urb/Education Design, 31. 58 Harry Parnass and Michel Lincourt, ‘Ordinateur, système et designer urbaine,’ Architecture-Bâtiment-Construction, October 1967, 52; my translation. The architects’ rejection of ‘linear’ organization followed the influential theories of Christopher Alexander, notably his declaration that ‘a city is not a tree.’ 59 Michel Lincourt, ‘Les étudiants québécois en aménagement manquent-ils d’agressivité?’ Architecture Concept, January-February 1970, 12, 13; my translation. 60 Melvin Charney, Architectural Design, July 1967, 311. In his book Megastructure, Reyner Banham would describe Charney’s drawing as ‘much reproduced.’ 61 Melvin Charney, ‘Understanding Montreal,’ in Exploring Montreal, ed. Pierre Beaupré and Annabel Slaight (Toronto: Greer de Pencier, 1974), 22.

210  Inderbir Singh Riar 62 Melvin Charney, Montréal: Plus or Minus? (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1972), 16. 63 Ibid., 20. 64 Ibid., 19. 65 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia (1973), trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976). 66 André Major, ‘Au coeur de la ville,’ in Melvin Charney, Montréal: Plus or Minus? (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1972): 24. 67 Brian Moore, The Revolution Script (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1971), 248. 68 Ibid.

13 Brian Jungen: Habitat 04 kitty scott

They call it ‘the soul, the genius’ of the Fair, and suggest that, as symbols go, it will make the Eiffel Tower seem a collection of girders leading up to a hot dog stand. All this heady stir is over Habitat 67.1

There is no doubt that Expo 67 established Canada’s reputation, and more specifically that of Montreal, as a leading modern cosmopolitan destination. Arguably, one of the lingering signifiers of this shift in perception from an industrial to a progressive city is Habitat 67, architect Moshe Safdie’s highly experimental housing project overlooking Montreal’s Old Port (fig. 13.1). Like any futuristic paradigm shift, the accompanying rhetoric often overshadows a more complex narrative; in this case, it is one concerning the constantly evolving development of Montreal and the ever-fluctuating terms that define Canada’s identity. Almost forty years later, Vancouver-based artist Brian Jungen subtly illuminated these complexities with Habitat 04: Cité radieuse des chats/Cats Radiant City (2004), a temporary site-responsive installation. The work was made especially for exhibition at the Darling Foundry, located in Griffintown, a former industrial neighbourhood bordering on the western edge of Old Montreal that is currently undergoing a process of redevelopment and revisioning. Griffintown and its adjacent neighbourhoods were at the heart of Montreal’s industrial district beginning in the early nineteenth century. The opening of the Lachine Canal in 1825 provided a clear shipping route up the Saint Lawrence River to the Ottawa River Valley and the Great Lakes. The Grand Trunk Railway also established itself in the area, and with these two new routes inland, Montreal became a major North American seaport. This produced an era of rapid expansion and industrialization that saw many industries – foundries, flour mills, nail and spike factories, and woodworking shops – locate along the banks of the canal. Established in the late nineteenth century, the Darling Foundry flourished in this environment. At the height of its operation eight hundred people were employed in three different buildings: a warehouse, a foundry, and an assembly factory. Yet by the second half of the twentieth century, the fortunes of Griffintown had changed. The Lachine Canal closed in 1970; it was made obsolete by the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which had opened in 1959. Many of the factories in the area shut

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13.1  Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67. Copyright Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2008). Source: Library and Archives Canada/Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/e001096688.

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down or slowed their production. As Expo 67 thrived and heralded the modern, this neighbourhood underwent a major industrial decline. The Darling Foundry managed to survive in various incarnations but finally closed in 1991 and stood abandoned for ten years. In 2002, however, the foundry reopened with the name Quartier Éphémère; it had been converted, like much industrial architecture in New York’s SoHo or Chelsea, into a gallery – the Darling Foundry – and restaurant complex. In 2003 Brian Jungen was invited to propose a project for the gallery. Rather than create a conventional exhibition – a contemplative display of objects, such as sculptures, made under his direction – Jungen conceived of Habitat 04 as a much-needed service in support of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).2 For the duration of the exhibition the artist collaborated with the office of the Darling Foundry and the SPCA to establish a new network of relations – an alternative kind of fur trade perhaps – for the purpose of finding homes for a few of Montreal’s escalating population of stray cats while fundraising for the SPCA. Together the team engineered the opening: instead of the usual party with the Montreal art crowd, a fundraising dinner with the patrons of the charitable organization was held at the Darling Foundry. Pierre Barnoti, director of the Montreal branch of the SPCA, gave a speech in English outlining his current activities, and Jungen made available a limited edition of welcome mats inscribed with his own version of the Habitat logo. The event found its way onto the society page of the Montreal Gazette. Habitat 04 was partially inspired by an incongruous refuge on Parliament Hill, Ottawa, Canada’s capital. In a scenic location overlooking the Ottawa River, and set behind a stone-and-wrought-iron fence demarcating Parliament’s grounds, stand two crudely built, miniature, mansard-roofed plywood houses reminiscent of the Parliament buildings. Several arched entrances articulate the facade of each shelter, and bowls overflowing with food are scattered about. Within the rustic enclosure, a tabby sleeps ensconced in an old rocking chair while another sits perfectly still, like a nesting hen, watching the birds, squirrels, raccoons, and groundhogs as they come to feed. On one of the most widely used maps of the city, this compound is identified as ‘Cat Condos’ in contrast to the more humane terminology used by the Government of Canada’s Parliament Hill website, which refers to the location as ‘Cat Sanctuary.’ This unusual squatter community and its keeper intrigue tourists and local visitors alike, and an elaborate mythology has grown up around the cats and their supposed origins. For example, one story claims that they are the descendants of feral animals introduced to the area in 1877 to counter the local rodent population. In the 1970s, Irène Desormeaux began feeding and caring for these animals. After she passed away, her neighbour René Chartrand, now known as the ‘Cat Man,’ took over. He built the shelters and looks after the cats every day. Signage, in English and French, describes the mission and informs readers of the annual maintenance cost of $6,000. Chartrand depends on passersby who want to donate to the cause, since the federal government does not appear to support the endeavour. There are many other more prominent monuments on Parliament Hill, and all of them commemorate some aspect of Canadian identity and history. It seems that the Cat Sanctuary and its residents are permitted to occupy this territory because

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they represent a democratic and positive image of Canadian society: humane, tolerant, and generous. As the government’s website states, ‘The contrast between these modest shelters and the formality and tradition of the Parliament Buildings is a symbol of compassion, one of the important elements of Canadian society.’3 As a temporary and ephemeral artwork, Habitat 04 (see plate 23) possessed a ‘relational’ currency not easily disregarded. The French critic Nicolas Bourriaud maps out ‘relational aesthetics,’ a much-debated and newly minted category of art that some consider to be the definitive art of the 1990s – a time that coincides with Jungen’s art school education and emergence as an artist. Bourriaud remarks: ‘Its basic claim – the sphere of human relations as artwork venue – has no prior example in art history, even if it appears, after the fact, as the obvious backdrop to all aesthetic praxis, as a modernist theme to cap all modernist themes.’4 He continues: ‘[Its novelty] resides in the fact that this generation of artists considers inter-subjectivity and interaction neither as fashionable theoretical gadgets, nor as additives (alibis) of a traditional artistic practice. It takes them as a point of departure and as an outcome, in brief, as the main informers of their activity.’5 The artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, an agent of conviviality who, in his well-known works, has served meals to people gathered in the gallery, perhaps best exemplifies this artistic attitude. Relational works are often ephemeral, celebratory, open-ended, collaborative, and use the installation format. As critic Hal Foster states, ‘Discursivity and sociability are central concerns of the new work, both in its making and in its viewing.’6 Within Bourriaud’s version of the relational, all these characteristics represent the collective good. Habitat 04 embodied many of the aspects of relational aesthetics. It involved the conjoining and collaboration of previously unrelated institutions and demanded a complete transformation of the gallery. In what was both a practical and utopian perspective, the new space existed primarily to facilitate bonding between cats and people in the hope that some cats would find new homes. In its attempts to foster closer relations between animals and humans, Habitat 04 represented a new direction for Jungen, who had, for the most part, been making wall paintings, drawings, sculptures, and site-specific installations. Born in 1970 in Fort St John, British Columbia, to a Swiss father and Aboriginal mother, Jungen later moved to Vancouver, where he studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, graduating in 1992. Much of his well-known early work hinged on the simple act of transforming banal consumer goods into discrete art objects. For his Prototypes for New Understanding series (1998–2005), Nike running shoes were deconstructed and then reconstructed into objects similar to West Coast First Nations masks. His monumental, suspended, skeletal, whalelike sculptures – such as Shapeshifter (2000), Cetology (2002), and Vienna (2003) – were fabricated from fragments of common white plastic patio chairs.7 With these works, Jungen’s aesthetic language resides in the tensions sounded by the coming together of disparate ideas and ready-made objects. It is possible to detect the seeds of a relational practice in Jungen’s early wall paintings. First exhibited in 1997, these works are representative of the artist’s attempts to address the identity politics of the late eighties to the mid-nineties. To make these conceptual paintings, Jungen instructed volunteers to solicit draw-

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ings from non-Aboriginal people in the street. The volunteers asked the participants to draw their own versions of Native art. The artist then selected a series of these mostly abject and sometimes racist images and reproduced them as wall paintings.8 Jungen’s Arts and Crafts Book Depository/Capp Street Project 2004 (2004), inspired by two icons of twentieth-century architecture – Charles and Henry Greene’s Arts and Crafts–style Gamble House of 1908 and the suburban New Jersey home that American artist Gordon Matta-Clark cut in two in Splitting (1974) – is a later example of a more fully fledged relational project. Produced at the California College of Arts and Crafts, the installation takes the form of a quartered, miniaturized Arts and Crafts house filled with books and periodicals on architecture and crafts, borrowed from the host school’s library and from the artist’s own collection. The semi-comfortable interior was also a screening space for Matta-Clark’s video version of Splitting. As art writer and curator Ralph Rugoff has observed, Jungen altered the function of the college’s Logan Galleries for the duration of the exhibition so that it was no longer simply a place for exhibiting contemporary art; it also served as an integral part of the school’s research facilities, a place where people could study the recent history of crafts and architecture.9 Although the relational spaces of Habitat 04 and Arts and Crafts Book Depository are sites for encountering history through the reactivation of architectural forms, it is perhaps equally enlightening to situate Jungen’s oeuvre, as Vancouver curator Scott Watson does, within the project of retooling the minimalist gesture. Watson cites work from the late eighties and nineties by Felix Gonzales-Torres and Roni Horn, which he sees as indebted to an earlier critical minimalism as practised by Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Robert Smithson, and which arose out of a reaction to the neoconservatism of the Ronald Reagan administration. In this context, Watson elaborates on Jungen’s practice: ‘It is an investigation of sculpture as it impinges on modes of production, implicates architecture, asks questions about how we organize shelter, exposes the truth of materials, and also takes on the theme of identity.’10 Of Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time (2001), a work by the artist documenting the number of Aboriginal people in Canadian jails, Watson’s discussion introduces a darker, critical dimension that is unusual in the field of relational aesthetics and that has implications for a broader understanding of Habitat 04: ‘Jungen brings to the vocabulary of sculpture new strategies of representation and new thoughts on the condition of alienation.’11 Instead of mining consumer culture’s ready-mades, Habitat 04 followed a logical trajectory that, as the title of the work suggests, looked to resuscitate, if only partially, a pursuit of the modernist ideals set forth by artist and architect Le Corbusier in his visionary but unrealized Radiant City, and the exuberant utopian promise of Expo 67 as embodied by Safdie’s signature Habitat housing development. Habitat 67 is sited on a peninsula in the Saint Lawrence River not far from Quartier Éphémère and also near the monumental industrial concrete grain silos built in the early twentieth century that Le Corbusier cites in his book Towards a New Architecture (1923) as embodying the spirit of a new age. Both Le Corbusier and Safdie attempted to solve the problem of providing shelter for large numbers of people, and each proposed a radical solution whereby sunshine, fresh air, den-

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sity with privacy, as well as a strong sense of the social and communal would be privileged. In dreaming up his Radiant City, Le Corbusier sought to make affordable and livable spaces, rather than luxury dwellings signifying status. In 1935 the egalitarian Le Corbusier wrote: ‘My own thinking is directed toward the crowds in the subway who come home at night to dismal dwellings. The millions of beings sacrificed to a life without hope, without rest – without sky, sun, greenery.’12 Concerning apartment design, Le Corbusier stated that he ‘thought neither of rich nor of poor but of man.’13 The intention behind Safdie’s iconic modular building, whose forms were influenced by vernacular Mediterranean hilltop homes as well as traditional adobe pueblos like those still standing in the American southwest, was to make economical, high-density, community-oriented, mass-produced housing using a pre-fabrication process. It was hoped that this method of building would solve the worldwide problem of housing the masses – in countries such as India and Ghana as well as in cities like Detroit.14 However, as the building progressed, the units became incredibly expensive to produce, and, paradoxically, what was once a socialist dream became an exclusive condominium community. Still, after Habitat was completed, Safdie pursued the potential for change offered by the project: Habitat reminds us that a major reorganization in the technical field requires a major reorganization among the professions. Architect, researcher, manufacturer must all be a single entity working to a common goal. This will take place eventually, but it will take a revolution to bring it about. And this is where the large-scale prototype produces the shock treatment needed to bring about change.15

Jungen’s project, situated in the Darling Foundry’s largest gallery, was an ingenious, scaled-down sculptural interpretation of Habitat occupied by eight young, highly seductive but formerly abandoned cats, who, when not lounging about or sleeping, were curiously exploring their limited territory and visitors alike. Their activities alone – be they eating, sleeping, or playing together – constituted a whimsical gloss on the sociability that is at the heart of relational aesthetics.16 Fabricated from stacked plywood boxes covered with warm pink and beige coloured carpet rather than the harsher concrete associated with modern architecture, this newer, softer Habitat functioned as a humane and highly styled SPCA-approved cat jungle gym while simultaneously referencing, albeit playfully, cat furniture as sold in pet stores and minimalism as elaborated by Donald Judd’s sculptures and the International Style (fig. 13.2). The interiors of the individual modules were appointed with brightly colored mats from IKEA, trays of catnip and the occasional toy. Habitat 04 also incorporated a human presence, a volunteer from the SPCA, who watched over the animals and, if requested or required to, educated visitors about the SPCA and facilitated adoptions. For adoptees, the artist designed a series of takeaway boxes adorned with his Habitat logo. With Habitat 04, Jungen appeared to be salvaging the promises of Le Corbusier and Safdie’s projects, though what precisely was he doing populating a symbolic version of Habitat with disadvantaged and otherwise homeless creatures?

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13.2  Brian Jungen, Habitat 04: Cité radieuse des chats/Cats Radiant City, 2004. Installation view at Darling Foundry, Quartier Éphémère, Montreal, 2004. Plywood, carpet, cats. 3.35 3 4.57 3 8.53m (11’ 3 15’ 3 28’). Photo: Guy L’Heureux. Courtesy of Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.

One of the primary reasons the artist and the SPCA concern themselves with the welfare of cats is that the supply of animals far outweighs the demand. For example, in Quebec there are approximately 1.6 million stray cats, and, at the time these statistics were collected, 65 per cent of the animals at the SPCA shelters were cats.17 One of the SPCA’s goals is to find prospective homes for cats, and so those brought to the Darling Foundry SPCA remained there until they were adopted. New cats replaced those that left. During the course of Jungen’s project, twenty cats found new homes. At first glance, the whole scenario looks to be altruistic, an exemplary solution to Montreal’s homeless cat problem. For the cats adopted, Habitat 04 effectively extended their lives, and offered companionship and perhaps even love to both the animals and their new keepers.18 On closer inspection, Habitat 04 was wired with invasive technology. Tiny surveillance cameras discreetly placed throughout the central platform captured, in real time, close-up views of the cats’ activities and displayed them via individual

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quadruple-split screens in the restaurant attached to the venue and in the small, closed-off ‘backstage’ gallery.19 On the one hand, this gesture seemed relatively democratic and benign as it increased and dispersed the portals for viewing Habitat 04. On the other hand, this so-called community with its architecture, population, and inconspicuous technology spoke metaphorically of the systemic and sinister workings of power and surveillance. In contrast to the utopian Cat Sanctuary, Habitat 04 can be interpreted as a dystopia, a modern model of social control, a kind of death camp whose inmates have no knowledge of their fate, for those left behind are, euphemistically speaking, put to sleep. Although Habitat 04 married two failed examples from French and Canadian architectural history to a contemporary Canadian version of the SPCA, the latter is the one project of these three whose vision – the long-standing concern for animal welfare – remains tenable and true to its origins. The SPCA’s mission to provide humane conditions for animals resembles the architects’ desires to provide humane conditions for people,20 and its history coincides with Jungen’s interest in labour and particularly with issues of exploitation and commodification as they relate to industrialization and mass production in capitalist societies.21 In particular, Habitat 04, when discussed in relation to the venue, throws the city of Montreal into relief through historical moments that span centuries of change from its association with fur trading to its industrial past, from modernization to the current global and digital age. For example, the cats’ disenfranchised status reverberates in the history of the immediate locale. Already by the late nineteenth century, the welfare of the neighbourhood and its residents was a subject of public concern. Overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions plagued the working-class residents of Griffintown, who were being recruited to the area as cheap industrial labour.22 In the mid-twentieth century, the deindustrialization of Griffintown threatened the neighbourhood in new ways. Urban renewal strategies, such as rezoning and new developments that sought to ‘modernize’ the area changed the character of the neighbourhood and forced many businesses out. In the late 1960s, the elevated Bonaventure Expressway was built, cutting through Griffintown in order to provide access to the Expo 67 site. While Montreal was on the global stage, promoting itself as a cool, futuristic playground, it was simultaneously an industrial city in decline. The area that now surrounds Quartier Éphémère is in the process of being rebranded by the city as ‘Multimedia City,’ and the former factories and warehouses have since been converted into condos, lofts, and offices servicing the hightech industry. Jungen’s live video feeds threaded throughout Habitat 04 and the Darling Foundry evinced the technological era superseding the industrial past. Habitat 04 is at once a contemporary work of art, a charitable organization, cat furniture, a historical cipher, a portrait of the oppressed, and an architectural model. Perhaps the greatest strength of this contradictory work is its lack of didacticism. From the artist’s perspective, Habitat 04, as staged in Montreal, was simply a solution to that city’s cat problem.23 For others, it was and is at once emblematic of the easy togetherness characteristic of relational aesthetics and the critical position delineated by the minimalist reformation. As political allegory, Habitat 04 can be interpreted within a broad spectrum ranging from an experimental utopia for

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the disenfranchised to an exercise in social engineering to a death camp filled with detainees. Still, as much as Habitat 04 seeks to salvage Le Corbusier and Safdie’s utopian narratives, it points to the absurdity of this type of thought. Did Jungen really believe that the adoption of twenty cats represented a solution? And is the cat surplus really the problem? Whatever the answers to these questions, Habitat 04 points to the transformations that have taken place in Canadian society since Expo 67. NOTES I would like to thank all those who assisted with this project, including Erica Brisson for her help preparing this text. 1 Time Magazine, June 1964, as quoted in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Little Boxes: Habitat ’67: Did You Know,’ The CBC Digital Archives Website, http://archives.cbc. ca/IDC-1-68-1427-9350/arts_entertainment/moshe_safdie/clip2 (accessed 26 August 2007). 2 Jungen’s exhibition opened on 12 March and closed on 9 May 2004. 3 See Government of Canada, ‘Cat Sanctuary,’ http://www.parliamenthill.gc.ca/text/ explorecatsanctuary_e.html (accessed 28 October 2004). 4 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon-Quetigny: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 44. 5 Ibid. 6 Hal Foster, ‘Arty Party,’ London Review of Books, 4 December 2003, 21. 7 It is interesting to note here that Jungen appears to be drawn to the vulnerable. The cats he is working with have been abandoned, and many whale species are endangered. Both examples, though very different, point to societal apathy with respect to animal populations and the environment. 8 For a more detailed description and interpretation of these works, see Scott Watson, ‘Shapeshifter,’ in Brian Jungen (Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2002), 15. 9 Ralph Rugoff, Capp Street Project 2004 Brian Jungen (San Francisco: California College of the Arts, 2004). 10 Watson, ‘Shapeshifter,’ 23. 11 Ibid. 12 Le Corbusier, Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches (Paris: Éditions Plon, 1937), 280–1, as quoted in Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (New York: Basic, 1977), 230. 13 Le Corbusier, La ville radieuse (Boulogne-Seine: L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 1935), 192, as quoted in Fishman, Urban Utopias, 231. 14 Robert Gretton, ‘Habitat 67,’ Canadian Architect 12, no. 10 (October 1967): 31. 15 Moshe Safdie, as quoted in ibid. 16 It is surmisable that the cats were more captivated by the human visitors than the human visitors were by the art. 17 SPCA Montreal, ‘Did You Know …,’ http://www.spcamontreal.com/english/pages/ resources/know.html (accessed 26 October 2004). 18 Jungen dismantled Habitat 04 and at the time of writing had no plans to restage it. As

220  Kitty Scott a network of relations, the artwork exists outside the market with the exception of some possibly commodifiable aspects, namely the cats themselves and the edition of welcome mats, among other things. Arguably, the cats could be described as ‘living ready-mades.’ Ready-mades are typically commonplace prefabricated objects that have been isolated from their functional context and elevated to the status of art by the mere act of the artist’s selection. A cat, given its astonishing ability to multiply and its condition of oversupply, could be defined as an ordinary, mass-produced (and massproducing) living thing. By incorporating the cats as a component of the work of art, Jungen selected and displaced the role of the domestic cat and elevated it to the status of art. Every cat passing through the Safdie/Corbusier-inspired compound became a living ready-made imbued with all the worth the artist’s name signifies in the current art world. In other words, the value-added or commodified cat became a Jungen artwork; or perhaps a ‘living multiple’ is a better description. Possibly such signification increased the chance a cat would be ‘collected’ and survive. 19 This space was devised by the SPCA as a holding room, beyond the public eye, for cats to rest in and for additional cats required to replace those adopted. 20 The mission of the SPCA is to protect animals against negligence, abuse, and exploitation, represent their interests and ensure their well being, raise public awareness, and help develop compassion for all living creatures. See SPCA Montreal, ‘Give Animals a Chance,’ http://www.spcamontreal.com/apropos1.php?lg=en (accessed 26 October 2004). 21 Brian Jungen discusses his Prototypes for a New Understanding series in ‘Brian Jungen in Conversation with Matthew Higgs,’ in Brian Jungen (Vienna: Secession, 2004), 24: ‘Sometime later, in 1998, I was on a residency at the Banff Centre and started to investigate the possibility of using athletic equipment as a sculptural medium. Researching into Nike’s use of exploited labour – which was being widely discussed in the media – and thinking about the iconic status of their Air Jordan range of shoes fuelled my interest. I started to make connections between the issues of exploitation, production and commodification and started to think about how this might relate to native art generally.’ 22 For a contemporary account of late nineteenth-century conditions, see Herbert Brown Ames, The City below the Hill: A Sociological Study of a Portion of the City of Montreal, Canada (1897; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). See also, Terry Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty: The Condition of the Working Class in Montreal, 1897–1929 (Toronto: McClelland and Steward, 1974). 23 Brian Jungen in conversation with Kitty Scott, 5 February 2005.

14 Tabloid Expo will straw

The headline ‘Man and His Broad: Hookers Descend on Sexpo 67’ filled the cover of the 27 May 1967 issue of Tab International, a sensational weekly newspaper published in Toronto (see plate 24). One month after the opening of Expo 67, Tab described the migration to Montreal of thousands of prostitutes, heading there to serve the tourist populations who were arriving along overlapping routes. This ‘great trek of U.S. prostitutes,’ Tab suggested, had been going on for months: ‘They worked their ways north and east, stopping in towns on the way to make expenses and eating money.’ Many of the prostitutes, it was claimed, had set up temporary practice in Toronto, waiting out the time until Expo opened. Tab International estimated that 25,000 prostitutes were advancing on Montreal, in search of revenues expected to exceed $250 million. The hookers’ descent on Montreal was one of several invasions predicted or observed by the popular newspapers that covered Expo 67. The imminent arrival of pickpockets, counterfeiters, motorcycle gangs, east coast American gangsters, and rats produced waves of alarm in press coverage of the fair throughout 1967. This coverage relished the use of statistics to convey the scale of these threats to the physical and moral well-being of the fair and its host city. Three thousand Hell’s Angels, one million dollars in counterfeit bills, seven thousand abandoned children, seventy-eight nurses, five million rats – these numbers brought credibility and gravity to ongoing speculation about the fair’s vulnerability to a variety of perils.1 As one moved down the scale of journalistic prestige, from mainstream daily newspapers to the tabloid weeklies that flourished during the 1960s, the scale of these dangers seemed to become the most spectacular feature of the world’s fair, the most consistent reason for its newsworthiness. Covering the Fair Tab International’s treatment of Expo 67 was obviously idiosyncratic, set against the coverage of the fair that appeared in other magazines and newspapers. The sense that Expo 67 was both significant and photogenic had led well-known mainstream magazines like Life and Paris Match to fill their covers with images of Expo, while picture-dominated magazines like National Geographic and Look announced extensive coverage of Expo prominently on their covers.2 The most

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familiar images from the fair – those of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and the monorail transportation system, for example – circulated across a wide variety of periodicals, quickly conveying the futurism that was a core theme of press coverage of Expo. That futurism was evoked, as well, in mainstream Montreal newspapers like Le Devoir, La Presse, the Montreal Star, and the Montreal Gazette. These papers gave Expo 67, at its key moments, the spectacular coverage it so clearly seemed to warrant but also distributed the fair’s various events and features throughout well-established sections of the paper, like those devoted to youth, fashion, entertainment, municipal politics, and women. The focus of this article is the treatment of Expo 67 by tabloid newspapers published in Montreal.3 These have been chosen so that we might trace the contours of a popular discourse on the world’s fair that lacked, for the most part, the high-minded humanism and scientific futurism characteristic of coverage that appeared in more respectable venues. In the 1960s, the tabloid newspapers of Montreal (and of Canada more generally) seemed to reach their highest levels of brazenly lurid expressivity. This was the decade in which bold new popular papers like the Journal de Montréal emerged to capture the attention of commuters for whom Montreal’s Metro system would be built. It was the period, as well, in which Montreal’s tabloid paper Midnight came to be distributed throughout English-speaking North America, riding a boom in supermarket tabloids that left several newspapers (such as the New York Enquirer, now renamed the National Enquirer) disengaged from their origins as urban sensation sheets. During the 1960s, the weekly, Montreal-focused Allo Police rose to prominence from among the dozens of journaux jaunes which had been launched alongside it during the vice and corruption panics of the 1950s. Allo Police outlived virtually all of these papers, serving as a key chronicler of Montreal’s criminal undergrounds and popular sensations for half a century. The Media Ecology of World’s Fairs World’s fairs function at several levels as complex media environments. The bestknown examples of media phenomena at world’s fairs have been those technological spectacles designed explicitly to display emergent media forms within a broader imagining of possible futures. The World of Tomorrow building at the 1939 New York fair and the Labyrinth pavilion at Expo 67 are considered key events in the emergence of now-familiar media experiences (those of television and large-format cinema, respectively). Attractions like these condensed within themselves the broader thematics and marvels of their host fairs, standing metonymically for emergent regimes of sensory experience. At a more banal level, the media environments of world’s fairs will include a wide range of infrastructural, functional elements, installed to ensure the smooth passage of information, people, and things through the space of a fair. Like other miniature worlds (cruise ships and military bases, for example), world’s fairs have stimulated the development of media to serve (and exploit) the people within them, from signage and wayfinding systems through specialized daily newspapers and broadcasting stations. In this respect, expositions are complex semiotic machines, generating vast

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quantities of information to support their various levels of operation. The media infrastructure of the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair, for example, included eighteen information boards, nineteen post boxes, seventy thousand copies of a special guidebook for those using wheelchairs, ten thousand guidebooks in Braille, fifty closed-circuit remote-control TV cameras, one hundred emergency phones, and seven thousand telephones. Expo 92, in Seville, Spain, featured an online daily newspaper and electronic messaging system maintained by IBM in what was to be a model for the urban information systems of the future. The Coca-Cola pavilion at New York’s 1964–5 world’s fair hosted a radio station, K2US, run by amateur radio enthusiasts throughout the duration of the fair.4 The media environments in which world’s fairs participate extend beyond these self-contained systems, however. Typically, world’s fairs are built on the edges of cities and transform the broader media ecologies of the urban centres that host them. World’s fairs are occasions for the local media of host cities – their newspapers and television stations, for example – to reinvent themselves and adjust their relationship to their cities. Local news organizations may become providers of globally circulating content, syndicating photographs and television footage to media outlets around the world. Likewise, they may serve a translation function, explaining the fair to locals or the city to its visitors. Montreal’s English-language newspapers, read by visitors to Expo 67 from across Canada and the United States, assumed a new – if short-lived – importance during the duration of the exposition. Among other functions, they became key venues through which local businesses announced their products and services to tourists, through promotional rhetoric that linked their offerings to the broader attractions of Expo 67. World’s fairs may divert and extend the media systems of their host cities with effects which are often permanent. Expo 67 spurred the building of Montreal’s Metro system, itself a medium in an expanded sense of the term. The announcement of the Metro’s construction hastened the development of media directed at commuters, from tabloid newspapers like the Journal de Montréal through the large display advertisements which turned Metro cars into surfaces emblematic of a consumerist modernity.5 The media environments of world’s fairs thus include both the planned, circumscribed media infrastructures produced for fairs and the more informal mixes of media characteristic of their host cities. One way of capturing this difference is through the distinction, developed by Doevendans and Schram, between ‘creation’ and ‘accumulation’ cities. As planned, miniature urban worlds, world’s fairs are very much ‘creation’ cities, environments whose elements are all built more or less simultaneously and thus appear of equal age. In this, they are different from what the same authors (following Bruno Fortier) call ‘accumulation’ cities, places given form and character through the slow overlaying of the new upon the residual or outmoded.6 Without exception, the cities hosting world’s fairs have been ‘accumulation’ cities, urban environments of significant age whose media ecologies took shape in the sedimentation of media forms upon each other over time. As ‘creation’ cities, world’s fairs tend almost naturally to orient themselves towards the future and the speculative. Their host cities, in contrast, as sites of

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accumulation, impose upon these futuristic environments frameworks of understanding that often seem residual, unchanging, even archaic. The coverage of world’s fairs in host city media is typically shaped by long-standing traditions of journalistic commentary and by well-entrenched templates that meet each new urban event as a challenge to the tenor and stability of city life. The difference between these orientations is at its starkest where the moral character of a fair is at stake. Imagined by their planners as places for the reinvention of collective life, world’s fairs usually evoke, for their host cities, the spectre of moral and administrative disorder. It is common to refer to world’s fairs as ‘dream worlds,’ but these environments usually lack the palimpsestic layering of traces which led Freud to find, in ‘accumulation’ cities such as Paris or Rome, models for the psyche and the work of dreams.7 To find such layering, we must look instead at the host city itself, and the ways in which its deeply rooted fears and fantasies come to be interwoven with the sensations offered by its world’s fair. Evidence of this interweaving, I will suggest, could be found in the most sensationalistic and popular of Montreal’s newspapers. All through 1967, these newspapers covered Expo in ways that tied concerns over the fair’s security and moral well-being to an ongoing history of perils and sensations which had marked Montreal’s history in the postwar period. Newspapers and World’s Fairs Pieter von Wesemael has argued that the first world’s fairs ‘reflected the switch from a book culture to an image culture in the Western world.’8 This switch was not simply the result of technological modernization, as if image-based and audio-visual media merely took over the functions of print. This switch occurred as fairs came more and more to offer their own versions of the marvellous, rather than drawing together pre-existing marvels from elsewhere in the world. The exhibitions of the earliest world’s fairs, von Wesemael suggests, were dominated by objects and specimens acquired from such worlds as those of manufacturing, scientific experimentation, or colonial exploration. These artefacts became meaningful through the accounts of them published elsewhere, in newspapers and magazines. Since the late nineteenth century, however, explanation has been built more and more into the structure of exhibitions themselves. World’s fairs have come to be filled with media-based displays which offer their own protocols of instruction and reduce the need for external commentary. These newer fairs, in von Wesemael’s words, ‘also reflected changing notions on popular education: from pedantic conveyance of information to a passive audience … to self-realisation and image creation in which the public itself plays the active role.’9 With these changes, the role of newspapers or other print forms in rendering a world’s fair intelligible has seemed less and less clear or significant. By the time of Expo 67, world’s fair pavilions were dominated by photography, film, and electronic display systems. These media either provided their own, contextualizing information about phenomena on display or served as principal attractions in their own right. Expo 67 is remembered today for the rich variety of its

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audio-visual sensations, for the ways in which McLuhanist technophilia, satellite communications, videotape, and cinema screens large and small were felt to join seamlessly as constituents of an emerging media ecology. The city on whose borders Expo unfolded, however, was one in which the newspaper remained the primary vehicle for news and information. Confronted by the spectacle of Expo 67, newspaper coverage could not help but seem semantically impoverished and redundant, as if the pedagogical richness of the exhibition left little for journalistic reportage to explain. It is difficult, reading Montreal newspapers’ coverage of Expo 67, to reach any clear and coherent sense of the experience of particular exhibitions. While the specimens and manufactured objects of the late nineteenth-century fair were easily captured in photographs or engravings, themselves effectively framed within the pages of newspapers or magazines, the large-scale, integrated multimedia displays typical of later fairs lent themselves poorly to such coverage. The difficulty for newspapers of covering Expo 67 was only partially rooted in the challenge of translating richly sensorial experiences into the quiet, diminished languages of print. Newspapers also confronted the problem of the fair’s temporal rhythms. At one level, Expo 67 was a monumental, static cluster of symbolic forms, visited by flows of people whose character differed only in minor ways from day to day. Daily variation, during the fair’s existence, was quite minimal once the fair had been built. Variety came mostly in the form of visits by foreign dignitaries or celebrities, whose presence received substantial coverage in Montreal’s newspapers. Appearances by the famous usually came on the special focus days of their home nations, but these focus days offered little else that was newsworthy (and, by mid-summer, their sequence had come to seem monotonous). Celebrity visits gave a weak but persistent sense of temporal sequence to the life of the fair. A stronger sense of newsworthiness was found, not in the marvellous events constitutive of the fair’s spectacle, but in all those ways in which Expo 67 became like a city or partook of the ‘cityness’ of Montreal. Newspaper coverage of the fair often seemed preoccupied by problems of order and administration, by the logistical problems which the fair had confronted since the announcement that it would be built. One might have expected that these logistical problems would have been specific to the fair, meaningful only in terms of the unprecedented project of building so monumental an environment on Montreal’s edge. In fact, lines of association quickly linked most of these logistical challenges to deeply rooted problems more typical of the administration of city life. These problems of administration, in turn, were linked to the more enduring question of the city’s well-being and that of its citizens. On the cover of its 23 April 1967 issue, the weekly tabloid newspaper Le Petit Journal (then in its forty-first year of publication; it would last until 1978) claimed, in blaring headlines, ‘La province menacée – La Pégre internationale et l’Expo’ (The Province under Threat – The International Mafia and Expo).10 Below these titles ran four ribbons of text naming the specific dangers with which, according to Le Petit Journal, the Mafia sought to infest Montreal during the duration of Expo 67: ‘Règlement de comptes. Narcotiques. Traités des

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blanches. Prostitution. Homosexualité organisée. Fraude. Fausse monnaie. Faux chèques. Fausses cartes de crédit. Jeux organisés. Barbotes. Lotéries. Bookies. Hold-Up. Cambriolages. Protection. Extorsion. Chantage.’11 On the first interior page, Le Petit Journal repeated a Toronto journalist’s claim that Montreal was the international headquarters of organized crime and had been so since 1952.12 This reference to 1952 could not help but resonate profoundly with readers. This was the period when mayor-to-be Jean Drapeau and others led the Comité de Moralité Publique, dedicated to the eradication of vice and crime from Montreal, and when a Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Justice Caron, held hearings on municipal corruption. According to a widely shared, present-day belief, the rush by Mayor Jean Drapeau to prepare Montreal for Expo 67 led to the mass closing of Montreal’s jazz clubs, the destruction of many of the city’s working-class neighbourhoods, and a general sanitization of the city’s nightlife and popular culture. This account condenses a long sequence of events which, since Drapeau’s election to the mayoralty in 1954, had transformed the city in more gradual ways. Among these events was the completion in 1964 of Place des Arts, one of several attempts to move the core of the city’s commercial and cultural energies further to the east, into more francophone neighbourhoods. This sequence includes, as well, the extension of the VilleMarie Expressway in the early 1970s, an act that led to the destruction of urban fabric and several hundred homes in the city’s Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district. These events unfolded over a decade or more and represent the city government’s acquiescence to North American planning doctrines and developer pressure much more than they manifest the push to clean up Montreal for Expo 67. In the tabloid press’ coverage of the world’s fair, in any case, one finds little sense that Montreal, in 1967, had been cleaned up or its characteristically vice-ridden character diminished. Go-go and topless bars were mentioned more frequently than jazz clubs in the tabloid newspapers of the mid-1960s, and the corruption of city officials seemed less prevalent during this period than the unscrupulous practices of businesses seeking to profit from Expo. The long-standing sense of Montreal as a city of low civic virtue and unstable authority persisted. Le Journal de Montréal The Journal de Montréal began publication on 15 June 1964, three years before the opening of Expo 67, when publisher Pierre Pelardeau used a strike at La Presse, Montreal’s best-selling French-language daily, as the pretext for launching a newspaper that would compete with it. As a tabloid paper aimed at those who rode to work on public transportation systems, the Journal de Montréal had, as its primary focus, Montreal life and its sensations. In a decade marked by an ascendant internationalism, and by rich public debate over the transformations unfolding in Quebec, the Journal de Montréal’s preoccupation with low-level disruptions of municipal life (crimes, strikes, and moral transgressions) risked appearing oldfashioned and parochial. Nevertheless, the Journal was the first of Montreal’s newspapers to be printed using new offset technology, and the crisp photographs that filled its front pages made the paper resonate more strongly with the image

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culture of the time than most of its competitors. By 1967, when the Metro was running, full of its readers, the Journal de Montréal was among the artefacts of Montreal life which seemed to best express that year’s fluid modernity. In the Journal’s coverage of Expo 67, we may distinguish between events planned in advance, covered as evidence of the fair’s rich eventfulness, and those which emerged as unexpected disruptions of its unfolding. The difference between these two is a familiar one in studies of the press – between news generated by press releases, on the one hand, and stories written by reporters working journalistic beats, on the other. In January 1967, for example, the Journal reported, from official announcements, on a contest to name the universal youth pavilion, on the coming revival of the Broadway show Hellzapoppin at Expo, and on expected visits to the fair by General de Gaulle, the president of Italy, and more than one hundred thousand French tourists.13 These stories typically received no follow-up; they were brief and presented in ways that offered no apparent connection to other events. In the second category of coverage, however, we find news stories that organized themselves into cycles and unfolded over several days. These stories typically followed investigative arcs which led from the uncovering of transgressions through a narrativization of their impact. Throughout January, reporters covered on claims that a ‘lodging racket’ would raise the rents of city-dwellers in order to force them from homes that might be rented more profitably to tourists. Fears of a housing crisis were covered within journalistic narratives that pursued multiple lines of connection. One such line led from the ‘lodging rackets’ to strikes by public workers, which would add to a more general sense of civic crisis, for example. Another joined coverage of such rackets to fear of infiltration of all levels of Expo activity by organized crime.14 In the cycles of coverage which took shape here, we find the constant mobilization of issues that had preoccupied Montreal throughout the 1960s and the constant assertion of their interconnection. In this coverage, there is a regular back-and-forth between the world’s fair, as both an expression and test of civic purpose, and the broader drama of Montreal’s struggles with criminality and disorder. These overlapping cycles of coverage would continue through and past the month of April, when the fair opened. During February and March, the sense that threats to the city’s moral and legal order were emerging on several fronts was clear in the Journal’s treatment of preparations for Expo’s opening. In these treatments, we may glimpse the particular moral relationship of a world’s fair to its host city that has characterized most international expositions. On the one hand, there is a sense that the endemic moral disorder of the city must be controlled so as to prevent it from contaminating the ordered space of the fair. On the other hand, as a festive occasion detached from the order and responsibilities of everyday life, a fair represents the constant threat (or promise) of a moral loosening that might act as a corruptive force upon the city. For earlier world’s fairs, as Robert Rydell has shown, this tension was condensed within the morally suspect ‘midway’ districts, which had no obvious (or credible) pedagogical function and, arguably, stood as zones of mutual contamination between city and fair.15 Expo 67’s version of the ‘midway’ (La Ronde),

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however, played only a minor role in the moral dramas in which fair and city were embroiled. The ‘zone of contamination,’ in Montreal’s case, was the more dispersed circuit of nightclubs, bars, and hotels which seemed both left over (from Montreal’s days as a ‘wide-open’ city) and newly arisen (as entrepreneurs at all levels of legality sought to exploit the presence of tourists). In February and March, the Journal de Montréal reported regularly on the pre-Expo invasion of Montreal’s night-time economy by youth gangs, counterfeiters, prostitution rings, and car thieves from Vancouver. The most tightly woven cycle within this coverage had to do with the various manifestations of Montreal’s sex industry. Throughout 1967, all of Montreal’s newspapers reported on the efforts of police to control the spread of ‘topless’ dance clubs throughout the city. The expanding popularity of such clubs had little direct relation to Expo, and similar controversies erupted throughout North America during this period. Nevertheless, the wave of topless clubs was seen by newspapers in the context of a more widespread outburst of immorality challenging Expo’s reputation as a family destination. At the same time, and predictably, the fair itself was blamed for an influx of prostitutes and for the establishment of networks of ‘call girls à go-go’ in the vicinity of the Expo site.16 Nowhere was the connection between fair and city expressed more schematically than on the cover of the Journal’s edition of 27 April, the day before Expo 67 opened (fig. 14.1). The top of the page carried the large headline ‘La Régie ferme sept cabarets’ (The licensing board closes seven cabarets). Below it, beneath the image of dozens of national flags assembled majestically, the paper announced ‘Enfin, L’Expo!’ Of all the Expo-related stories published in the Journal de Montréal during May, the first full month of the fair’s operation, most either cover disruptions to the life of the fair or concern Expo’s smooth functioning. A striking feature of this coverage overall is that so little of it concerns the spectacle of the fair or the technological marvels for which it has come to be studied and remembered. (Throughout 1967, the Journal de Montréal wrote more about the price of food at Expo 67 than about its media installations.) The fair’s journalistic eventfulness seemed to consist of a succession of visits by public figures. Otherwise, we see the ongoing cycle of reports on crime and corruption give way, at least in part, to stories in which drama and insecurity stem from the insinuation of international geo-politics into the environment of the fair. (Threats of attacks on the Cuban pavilion, and uncertainty over the fate of the Kuwait pavilion, in the light of Canada’s positions on Israel, unfolded over several days in the early weeks of the fair.) With only minor fluctuations, this balance of disruptive and non-disruptive events would characterize the Journal’s coverage of Expo 67 throughout the summer and autumn. Pickpockets were apprehended; a gang of Hell’s Angels was dissuaded from attending the fair when the Sûreté de Québec demanded a security deposit of $3,000 per person. In mid-summer, tragic or criminal events (like the death of four people returning home by bus from Expo) assumed the character of fait divers, less connected to broader questions of Montreal’s moral or civic health than was typical of stories earlier in the year. This link between the moral worlds of the fair and the city was renewed in August, when the wave of

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14.1  ‘Enfin, L’Expo!’ Cover of Le Journal de Montréal, 27 April 1967. Courtesy of Le Journal de Montréal.

230  Will Straw

bank robberies involving Monique la Mitraille (Machine-Gun Molly) seemed to interweave Montreal’s long-standing reputation as wide-open city with an Expoinduced sense of insecurity. As a celebrity criminal who might have sprung from the popish imagination of Andy Warhol or Jean-Luc Godard, Machine-Gun Molly seemed part of the carnival of Montreal’s Expo summer. Midnight and Allo Police The Montreal-based tabloids Allo Police and Midnight were founded within months of each other, the former in 1953, the latter in 1954. Allo Police was one of several sensational papers introduced in Montreal in the 1950s to capitalize on a collective interest in vice, corruption, and criminality. Collectively, these papers were known as the journaux jaunes, and while their coverage of municipal crime, vice, and corruption expressed the preoccupations of Jean Drapeau’s reform movement of the 1950s, they themselves were frequently condemned as symptoms of the city’s moral decline.17 Midnight had been started by a teenager named Jo Azaria as a guide to goings-on within Montreal nightclubs. The paper’s concern with nightlife led smoothly to an interest in eccentric sexualities, and from there to coverage of crimes which were invariably sexualized. By the late 1950s, Midnight’s focus and that of Allo Police had converged, as both concerned themselves with violence, vice, and sin transpiring in and around Montreal. The two papers then occupied roughly adjacent spaces within the broader intertextual space of print culture sensationalism. Both newspapers, at some level, were mostly concerned with crime, but crime functioned during these years as the French cultural historian Dominique Kalifa has described it: rather than a specific set of acts, it was the foundation of a broad, intertextual collective imagining, through which danger and excitement, night-time and solitude, legality and passion are held together within a roughly coherent aesthetic.18 Allo Police had been launched to capitalize on public interest in crime and corruption, Midnight to chronicle the semi-illicit pleasures of nightlife. The radius of each newspaper’s concern came to overlap more and more with that of the other as the 1950s unfolded. After 1960, however, Midnight began its rise ‘upwards,’ out of Montreal’s urban netherworlds and into the more abstract space of international celebrities and social issues (such as the rise of ‘The Pill’) with no notable connection to place. The disengagement of Midnight’s reporting from Montreal corresponded to the paper’s own shift in distribution and audience. By the early 1960s, it had joined with other titles (like the National Enquirer) in the supermarket tabloid revolution that were now directing their appeal to potential buyers across the North American continent. Allo Police, in contrast, would move noticeably ‘downward,’ into the ever-murkier worlds of Montreal-based criminality. We might best understand the divergence of Midnight from Allo Police in the 1960s in terms of the changing focal length of these newspapers’ observation of Montreal. Allo Police’s mid-level overview of the city in the 1950s, when it was able to link individual crimes to larger questions of governance, seemed to give way, in the 1960s, to a tight, up-close view of crimes and other sensations. This close-up view

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rarely pulled back any more from a crime site or circumscribed neighbourhood to link crimes to broader questions of the city and its disorders. Midnight, by contrast, kept pulling back to a position from which Montreal was no longer visible. By 1967, the differences between the two papers were strikingly evident in their front pages or covers. As Midnight moved into the abstract social space of the North American English-language weekly tabloid, its covers and surfaces came to seem flatter, less adorned, as if they were meant to be glimpsed in a hurry. Unitary messages were stamped upon them in large typefaces. Allo Police, on the other hand, developed modes of surface presentation that strained to communicate an ever more intense busyness. With no opportunities for international distribution available to it, it would strive to convey the rich eventfulness of Montreal through increasingly cluttered layouts. The covers of Allo Police, from the 1960s into the 1970s, became more and more broken up, filled with arrows and pictures. Typefaces of descending sizes worked to pull readers from headlines into the detailed event structures of the city in which it was anchored. The issues of Midnight and Allo Police that appeared in the week following the opening of Expo 67 are striking for the absence of any reference to the fair on the covers, and this fact betrays the broader insignificance accorded it by these two papers. Midnight, born in Montreal and still published there throughout the 1960s, made no mention of Expo 67 in any of the twenty-six issues published during the run of the exposition. Allo Police acknowledged Expo 67 more regularly, but, even here, coverage was less frequent than one might have predicted. In fifty-two issues published during 1967 – half of them during the time of the fair – and amid hundreds of articles on Montreal or its environs, Allo Police published only sixteen articles that offered any significant connection to Expo 67.19 Many of these connections, it should be noted, seemed forced or obscure. Three of these articles simply juxtaposed Expo’s healthy spectacle with the misery or murder transpiring just beyond its boundaries and made the latter their principal focus. Another handful of articles dealt with the low-level logistical problems of Expo: the lost and found office in which crutches and brassieres piled up; the first aid service that treated calluses and headaches. Across these articles, one sees the effort to find in Expo 67 the challenges posed by the banal and the quotidian. The Rat Invasion The longest article which Allo Police devoted to Expo 67 appeared in its issue of 12 February, more than two months before the fair opened: ‘Tout est mis en branle pour éviter l’envahissement des iles de l’Expo par 5 millions de rats de Montréal’ (All efforts underway to avoid the invasion of the Expo islands by five million rats from Montreal). Over three pages long, this article raised the fear that millions of rats, which normally scurried around the Port of Montreal, might invade the Expo 67 site to harvest the abundant scraps of food left there by tourists. Like the tourists themselves, Montreal’s rats were said to have arrived from elsewhere, from innumerable places of uneven character. Brown rats, Allo Police told its readers in a detailed history, had their origins in Asia but had invaded Europe in 1727, then been introduced to the United Kingdom by ships arriving from the Orient. From

232  Will Straw

14.2  The tabloid Allo Police used a range of graphic forms in its coverage of a possible rat invasion of the Expo site. Image from Allo Police, 12 February 1967. Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library.

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England, the brown rat had followed the routes of seafaring vessels, invading port cities and using the docks and warehouses of marine commerce as its favourite refuges. Leaving the Montreal harbour, Allo Police suggested, rats might make their way to the Expo site through subterranean pathways. Allo Police, like other crime-oriented periodicals, mobilized an eclectic range of graphic forms in its reporting (fig. 14.2). Some of these (like maps or scientific drawings) marshalled the authority of official documents; others evoked entertainment forms like the adventure book or film serial. To show the impending rat invasion, and the ways in which it might be stopped, the paper used comicstrip-like drawings, zoological illustrations, maps displayed as battle plans, and reassuring, film-still-like photographs of officials busy on the telephone. Many of these images, like the encyclopedic rows of different rat specimens, added to the archaic character of this coverage. Indeed, Allo Police’s alarm over possible rat plagues, and the heroic efforts of the soldier-scientists who fought them, seemed to be the stuff of a late nineteenth-century science-adventure novel. The Allo Police article elaborated an invisible world unknown to most citizens and to even fewer tourists: a world of anonymous but heroic vermin fighters; hidden, subterranean transit ways; and large oceanic freighters filled with cargo of dubious provenance. The Journal de Montréal, too, covered the threatened rat invasion in depth, in a story that ran from the cover of its 11 February issue (‘Des millions de rats envahiraient Montréal,’ read the headline) through a lengthy story on page two. Like Allo Police, the Journal invoked the precedent of medieval, rat-based plagues which had ravaged cities like Paris and Hamburg, then moved to comfort readers with the assurance that North American rats were of a different sub-species than those of Europe and Asia. It becomes clear, however, from the Journal’s coverage, that the threat of rats had more to do with labour politics in Montreal than with the imminent opening of Expo. The Journal de Montréal emphasized what Allo Police had not mentioned at all, that the threat of rats followed the announcement of a strike by Montreal’s garbage collectors – a strike which, city officials claimed, would leave trash on the city’s streets and attract millions of rats to feast upon it. Allo Police’s alarm over a possible rat invasion of the Expo site seems to have been the product of its own sensationalistic speculation. Mainstream Montreal dailies, like the Montreal Star, La Presse and Le Devoir, covered the threatened strike with no mention whatsoever of a possible rat invasion.20 Allo Police’s story on a rat invasion stands for broader cultural impulses, however. Its focus on the port of Montreal recalls the writings of French author and critic Pierre Mac Orlan, who, in the 1930s, elaborated the notion of a social fantastic.21 The social fantastic is a sensibility that finds mystery and magic on the edges of cities, in the ports, railway stations, and shadowy underpasses that mark the arrival of people or sensations from far-off, exotic places. The social fantastic often presumes, as well, the knowledge systems of obscure specializations or discredited sciences. Over four pages, Allo Police seemed to revel in the idea of rats, brought here by foreign freighters, disrupting and contaminating the official grandeur and ceremoniality of Expo 67. At the same time, the article celebrated the quietly toiling rat specialists whose secret knowledges and magic potions

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14.3  A rat catcher applies noxious gas to a rat nest with Habitat 67 in the background. Image from Allo Police, 12 February 1967. Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library.

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might ultimately save the city and its fair from this imminent invasion (fig. 14.3). Allo Police’s coverage set in place a system of marvels that countered the celebrated spectacles of Expo 67 itself. Indeed, throughout the twenty-six weeks of the fair, Allo Police never contained a word about the attractions of Expo 67, as if it found no reason therein to be impressed. The ideological core of the fair – its monuments to humanism and celebration of clean new audio-visual environments – seemed far less interesting to both Allo Police and the Journal de Montréal than the forms of detritus or moral transgression that gathered in its shadow. We may account for Allo Police’s silence about the technological marvels of Expo 67 in terms of the newspaper’s explicit specialization in crime and vice, but this does not diminish the peculiarity of that silence. Dominique Kalifa has written that the great modernizing transformations of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century left, as one of their residues, a nostalgia for the medieval Paris of subterranean labyrinths and secret sanctuaries.22 Against an official image of ongoing progress, the popular culture of the crime novel or the tabloid press produced a topography of the city which left it full of hidden mysteries that modernist transparency and illumination could not erase. Allo Police’s stories of rat tunnels, rooming-house murders, and crutch repositories condense almost all of these thematics, implicitly setting these archaic, sinister phenomena against the carefully controlled environment of the island exposition. Allo Police, the Journal de Montréal, and newer Montreal tabloids like Crime and the People, would dig to ever deeper, subterranean levels of Montreal life as Expo ended, the 1960s wound down, and the narrative of Montreal’s modernization crashed with the debacle of the 1976 Olympics. Through the 1970s, the popular tabloid press increasingly offered an image of Montreal as a twilight world of full-time criminality, epidemics of drug use and violence, and a broadly based desperation. Already, in their coverage of Expo 67, these papers had disengaged themselves from the sunny optimism with which other, more official voices celebrated ‘Man and His World.’ NOTES Many thanks to Sara Spike for research assistance, and to the editors of this volume for very useful advice to guide my revisions. One of the joys and surprises in writing this article came with the discovery that the Rare Books Department of the McGill Library system holds a multi-year collection of Allo Police. Many thanks to the staff of the McGill Libraries and, in particular, Gary Tynski, for their expert help.

1 See, for example, ‘3,000 blousons noirs américains n’atteindraient jamais l’Expo … Sur leurs motos ou autrement,’ Journal de Montréal, 19 June 1967, 4; ‘Les faux-monnayeurs voulaient distribuer un million de dollars,’ Journal de Montréal, 11 March 1967, 1; ‘7000 enfants seront momentanément abandonnés sur la “Terre des hommes,”’ Journal de Montréal, 26 April 1967, 2; ‘Madame Montréal et ses trouvailles: les “petits soins” à l’Expo,’ Journal de Montréal, 6 April 1967, 20; ‘Tout est mis en branle pour éviter l’envahissement des iles de l’Expo par 5 millions de rats de Montréal,’ Allo Police, 12 February 1967, 9.

236  Will Straw 2 The 20 May 1967 issue of Paris Match featured Buckminster Fuller’s Biosphere on its cover, as did the 28 April 1967 issue of Life magazine. The 4 April 1967 issue of Look announced a ‘preview’ of the fair inside, but its only cover photo was of Jacqueline Onassis. The May 1967 issue of National Geographic featured long articles on Canada’s centenary and Expo 67, but its cover photograph was of a Micronesian native in traditional clothing. Unsurprisingly, Canadian magazines like Chatelaine and Maclean’s published many features on Expo 67, as did weekend newspaper supplements across North America. 3 The most succinct history of the term ‘tabloid’ is by John Osburn: ‘Coined as a trademark for condensed medicines in 1884, the word was applied, in rapid succession, to smaller-than-average newspapers, compact airplanes and efficiency yachts, and the linguistic condensations of slang.’ John Osburn, ‘The Dramaturgy of the Tabloid: Climax and Novelty in a Theory of Condensed Forms,’ Theatre Journal 46, no. 4 (1994): 507–22. For most of the twentieth century, ‘tabloid newspapers’ were half the size of the more respectable broadsheet. Their low cultural status generally derives from both their readership (commuters using public transit systems, who found their small size more convenient in crowded spaces) and their tone, which was sensationalist. 4 See The World’s Fair Exposition Information and Reference Guide, http://earthstation9. com/index.html?worlds_2.htm (accessed 30 March 2007). Among many online sites describing the IBM installations at Expo 92, see ‘IBM EXPO ’92 Guest Services System,’ http://musicman.net/exposum.html (accessed 9 July 2007). 5 Bill Marshall, ‘Montreal between Strangeness, Home, and Flow,’ in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Oxford: Blackwell), 206–16. 6 Kees Doevendans and Anne Schram, ‘Creation/Accumulation City,’ Theory, Culture and Society 22, no. 2 (2005): 29–43. 7 See, for a discussion, Karlheinz Stierle, La Capitale des signes: Paris et son discours, trans. Marianne Rocher-Jacquin (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2001); original publication, Der Mythos von Paris: Zeichen und Bewufstein der Stadt (Munich, Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1993), 8–9. 8 Pieter von Wesemael, Architecture of Instruction and Delight: A Socio-historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a Didactic Phenomenon (1798–1851–1970) (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2001), 18. 9 von Wesemael, Architecture of Instruction and Delight, 18. 10 All issues of Le Petit Journal are now available in digital form from the website of the Bibliothèque National du Québec, http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/petitj/ (accessed 1 June 2008). 11 Translation: ‘Settling of Accounts. Narcotics. White Slavery. Prostitution. Homosexual Rings. Fraud. Counterfeit Money. Counterfeit Credit Cards. Organized gambling. Barbotes [Québécois gambling game]. Lotteries. Bookies. Hold-ups. Armed Robberies. Protection Rackets. Extortion. Blackmail.’ 12 ‘Juges et policiers sont unanimes: la pègre est une monstrueuse réalité,’ Le Petit Journal, 23 April 1967, 2. 13 ‘Les Canadiens restent jeunes longtemps: Grand concours ouvert à l’Expo pour les jeunes de 16 à 30 ans,’ Journal de Montréal, 10 January 1967, 8; ‘L’Expo ressucitera un spectacle qui fit les beaux jours du Broadway,’ Journal de Montréal, 11 January 1967, 6;

Tabloid Expo  237 ‘Le général de Gaulle aurait de plus en plus l’intention de visiter l’Expo,’ Journal de Montréal, 18 January 1967, 6; ‘Le President Italien à l’Expo en September,’ Journal de Montréal, 25 January 1967, 7; Cent mille français à l’Expo,’ Journal de Montréal, 25 January 1967, 6. 14 See, among others, ‘Le directeur de la police de Montréal estime qu’il n’y aura pas de grève,’ Journal de Montréal, 5 January 1967, 4; ‘M. Leveillé voudrait un gel des loyers pour empêcher les propriétaires de chasser leurs locataires pour l’Expo,’ Journal de Montréal, 16 January 1967, 6; ‘Le gouvernment Johnson décide d’intervenir: fini le racket des logements pour l’Expo 67!’ Journal de Montréal, 19 January 1967, 1; ‘Le government Johnson décide d’empêcher le “racket” des logements pour l’Expo ‘67,’ Journal de Montréal, 19 January 1967, 3; ‘Un employé de l’Expo s’empare de 1,100 unités-primes,’ Journal de Montréal, 25 January 1967, 5; ‘500 ouvriers déclenchent une grève éclair sur les chantiers de l’Expo,’ Journal de Montréal, 27 January 1967, 8. 15 Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 16 See, for examples of such coverage, ‘Un réseau de ‘Call Girls à GoGo’ aurait été mis à jour après une longue et minutieuse enquête,’ Journal de Montréal, 24 July 1967, 11; ‘De gentilles petites danseuses “topless” qui ne discutent pas,’ Journal de Montréal, 23 May 1967, 6; ‘Deux petites danseuses traduites en cour hier,’ Journal de Montréal, 19 May 1967, 7; ‘Un cabaret se transforme en studio et un avocat en cinéaste pour un film sur les topless … Voilées,’ Journal de Montréal, 2 May 1967, 5; ‘Un juge choisit lui-même la vedette d’un film contestant l’obscenité des danseuses “Topless,”‘ Journal de Montréal, 18 April 1967, 7; ‘L’avocat de 5 danseuses à gogo aux mini-cache-seins regrette de ne pas avoir de … film à présenter,’ Journal de Montréal, 1 May 1967, 3; ‘La régie sévit: sept cabaretiers ont leurs permis suspendus pour ne pas avoir pu contrôler leurs clients et employés,’ Journal de Montréal, 27 April 1967, 3. 17 See, for one discussion, Will Straw, ‘Montreal Confidential: Notes on an Imagined City,’ CineAction 28 (Spring 1992): 58–64, http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/ahcs/montrealconfidential.htm (accessed 9 July 2007). 18 Dominique Kalifa, L’encre et le sang (Paris: Fayard, 1995). 19 ‘Pour l’Expo; seins nus, oui, “Phonies,” no,’ Allo Police, 26 March 1967, 19; ‘James Bond règle les problèmes de l’Expo,’ Allo Police, 16 April 1967, 15; ‘Il y en a qui ont fait pas mal d’argent malhonnêtement avec l’Expo,’ Allo Police, 10 September 1967, 11; ‘Des “anges du diable” arrêtés à Montréal,’ Allo Police, 10 September 1967, 19; ‘A Saint Michel: Pendant que ses trois enfants sont à l’Expo, il tue sa femme et se tire aussi une balle,’ Allo Police, 3 September 1967, 15; ‘Venue à Montréal pour l’Expo, elle se fait poignarder à onze reprises,’ Allo Police, 27 August 1967, 7; ‘Des maux de tête aux ampoules aux pieds, l’Expo prend soin de vos bobos,’ Allo Police, 30 July 1967, 24–5; ‘Perdus à l’Expo: béquilles, soutiens-gorge et dentiers,’ Allo Police, 23 July 1967, 24–5; ‘Pendant que la Brink’s croule: L’Expo défie les voleurs de piller ses blockhaus,’ Allo Police, 16 July 1967, 21; ‘Avec l’Expo ‘67, il faut que vos enfants redoublenet de prudence durant les vacances,’ Allo Police, 2 July 1967, 15; ‘Bébé de trois semaines victime de la misère noire: à deux pas d’Expo ‘67,’ Allo Police, 17 June 1967, 3; ‘Du haut d’un 50e étage, il empêche des embouteillages à Montreal devant l’Expo,’ Allo Police, 4 June 1967, 24–5; ‘Le vandalisme à l’Expo,’ Allo Police, 21 May 1967, 9; ‘Tourists de Toronto, attention aux cabarets,’ Allo Police, 21 May 1967, 19; ‘Drame bouleversant, à deux pas

238  Will Straw de l’Expo,’ Allo Police, 7 May 1967, 7; ‘Durant l’Expo, la police reste armée juxqu’aux dents,’ Allo Police, 7 May 1967, 17–18. 20 A 1968 Canadian Press article confirms that an attack on rats in early 1967 was launched in an effort to save Expo from a rodent invasion. See ‘Pill New Rat “War” Weapon?’ Winnipeg Free Press, 6 March 1968, 34. 21 See, for example, Pierre Mac Orlan, Images du fantastique social (Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin: Édition Musée des pays de Seine-et-Marne et Association des Amis de Pierre Mac Orlan, 2000). 22 Dominique Kalifa, ‘Crime Scenes: Criminal Topography and Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Paris,’ French Historical Studies 27, no. 1 (2004): 175–94.

Contributors

Jean-François Côté is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is also co-director of the GIRA (Groupe interdisciplinaire de recherche sur les Amériques) at the Institut national de la recherché scientifique (Urbanisation, culture et société). Elizabeth Darling is Senior Lecturer in Art History at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her research centres on twentieth-century British modernist architecture and design, and her revisionist study of interwar modernism, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction, was published by Routledge in 2007. Her current research focuses on ideas about design in 1920s Britain, and she is also writing a monograph on the architect-engineer Wells Coates. Monika Kin Gagnon is the author of Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2000), and she recently produced the DVD Charles Gagnon: 4 Films (2009), along with an accompanying essay, ‘Posthumous Cinema.’ Her recent work continues to research the multimedia archives and films of Expo 67 and the intermedia practice of Korean-American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She is Associate Professor in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Ben Highmore is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday (2010). He also edited The Design Culture Reader (2009). Rhona Richman Kenneally is Chair of the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University, and editor of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. Her current research addresses constructions of agency and identity in the context of everyday life, with a particular focus on food, architecture, and design. Related articles have appeared in Food, Culture & Society, Meals in Science and Practice, and What’s to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History. She is co-editor of a special issue of the Material Culture Review on Domestic Foodscapes. Eva-Marie Kröller teaches in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent publications include the Cambridge Companion to

240  Contributors

Canadian Literature (2004) and the Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, co-edited with Coral Ann Howells (2009). Tom McDonough is Associate Professor of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where he teaches the history and theory of contemporary art. His most recent book is the anthology The Situationists and the City (2009); other publications include ‘The Beautiful Language of My Century’: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945–1968 (2007), and the anthology Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (2002). Martin Racine is Associate Professor at the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. His articles on the history of design in Canada have been published in a number of journals, including Design Issues. His book on Julien Hébert (1917–1994) and the emergence of a design field in Quebec and Canada will be published in 2011. Inderbir Singh Riar is trained as an architect, and he is currently a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where he is preparing a dissertation on the visionary architecture of Expo 67. In January 2011, he will join the faculty at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, Carleton University. Kitty Scott is Director, Visual Arts at The Banff Centre, a post she has held since 2007. Previously she was chief curator at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and Curator, Contemporary Art, at the National Gallery of Canada. She is visiting professor for the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco; she is also an adjunct professor at York University, University of British Columbia, and University of Ottawa. Johanne Sloan is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. Her research and teaching focus on art and visual culture from the 1960s until the present day. Her book about Joyce Wieland’s film The Far Shore appeared in 2009, and she is presently working on a project related to the legacy of the picture postcard. Will Straw is Professor in the Department of Art History and Communications at McGill University. He is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 1950s America and of over one hundred articles on media, popular culture, and urban life. He is currently director of a research project on ‘Media and Urban Life in Monttreal.’ Aurora Wallace teaches in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is the author of the forthcoming Media Capital (University of Illinois Press, 2011), Newspapers and the Making of Modern America (2005), as well as articles in Journalism History, Philosophy and Geography, Space and Culture, Environmental Values, the Journal of Visual Culture, and Crime, Media, Culture.

CULTURAL SPACES Cultural Spaces explores the rapidly changing temporal, spatial, and theoretical boundaries of contemporary cultural studies. Culture has long been understood as the force that defines and delimits societies in fixed spaces. The recent intensification of globalizing processes, however, has meant that it is no longer possible – if it ever was – to imagine the world as a collection of autonomous, monadic spaces, whether these are imagined as localities, nations, regions within nations, or cultures demarcated by region or nation. One of the major challenges of studying contemporary culture is to understand the new relationships of culture to space that are produced today. The aim of this series is to publish bold new analyses and theories of the spaces of culture, as well as investigations of the historical construction of those cultural spaces that have influenced the shape of the contemporary world. General Editors: Richard Cavell, University of British Columbia Imre Szeman, University of Alberta Jasmin Habib, University of Waterloo Editorial Advisory Board: Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University Hazel V. Carby, Yale University Richard Day, Queen’s University Christopher Gittings, University of Western Ontario Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto Heather Murray, University of Toronto Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney Rinaldo Walcott, OISE/University of Toronto Books in the Series: Peter Ives, Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School Sarah Brophy, Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning Shane Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies Jasmin Habib, Israel, Diaspora, and the Routes of National Belonging Serra Tinic, On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market Evelyn Ruppert, The Moral Economy of Cities: Shaping Good Citizens Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greg de Peuter, eds., Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization Michael McKinnie, City Stages: Theatre and the Urban Space in a Global City Mary Gallagher, ed., World Writing: Poetics, Ethics, Globalization Maureen Moynagh, Political Tourism and Its Texts Erin Hurley, National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo ’67 to Céline Dion Lily Cho, Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan, eds., Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir

Expo 67 Not Just a Souvenir

Expo 67, the world’s fair held in Montreal during the summer of 1967, brought architecture, art, design, and technology together in a glittering modern package. Heralding the ideal city of the future to its visitors, the Expo site was perceived by critics as a laboratory for urban and architectural design as well as for cultural exchange, intended to enhance global understanding and international cooperation. This collection of essays brings new critical perspectives to Expo 67, an event that left behind a significant material and imaginative legacy. The contributors to this volume reflect a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and address Expo 67 across a broad spectrum ranging from architecture and film to more ephemeral markers such as postcards, menus, pavilion displays, or the uniforms of the hostesses employed on the site. Collectively, the essays explore issues of nationalism, the interplay of tradition and modernity, twentieth-century discourse about urban experience, and the enduring impact of Expo 67’s technological experimentation. Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir is a compelling examination of a world’s fair that had a profound impact locally, nationally, and internationally. (Cultural Spaces)

rhona richman kenneally is an associate professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University.

johanne sloan is an associate professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University.