Overview of Nuit Blanche 2006 October 3
So I’ve posted pictures about the event but haven’t actually said anything about it. Here we go.
I haven’t hung out with Chaddy in a while, last time I saw him was at Warped tour (he’s the drummer for Strap-On Tools) and I had got him to purchase my Warped Tour ticket so I could get in (turns out I didn’t need it) and he had hooked me up with it to be reimbursed by volunteering to promote a charitable organization through his work. Well for it to be reimbursed I needed to give him back his ticket, before the end of the weekend. So Saturday was a great day to do it. I rang him up, asked what he was doing and if he wanted to meet up to make this dropoff and he invited me to the event because he wanted a group of people to go.
I’d already heard about this event but didn’t really clue in that I would want to go. I figured that 12 hours of sleeplessness is going to be about 12 hours too many. It didn’t clue in to me at all that I was not required to stay the entire 12 hours. I met up with Chad at his place, and took a long and detoured way downtown, realizing while we were hitting traffic and road blocks that many of the streets were jammed. Chad was also hungry. We talked about nothing, and everything under the sun, and got frustrated doing so.
Parked at Chad’s work, and went to this Thai restaurant that Chad really liked, and ordered food for the both of us, I’d already eaten dinner but I have this horrible habit of eating if there happens to be food in front of me. Chad ate well, and generally we had more pleasent discussion over food. And planned on meeting up with Paul, his friend whom I’ve met a few times before.
From the restaurant to where we were supposed to meet Paul was quite the trek. We saw a few exhibits along the way, like a set of 3 people going around the U of T quad chained up, with mining equipment on, pouring rocks into buckets while very slowly moving in what I assumed is a circle. The fog in Toronto which was cool and less crowded earlier in the Evening, a few exhibits I didn’t realize were exhibits until reading the pamphelet… met up with Paul.
Grabbed Paul and in the end I believe we saw about 1/3 of the exhibits, and went through two of the three zones. The giant block of ice wasn’t nearly as interesting a spectacle as me and Chad had hyped it up to be. There was a peformance artist who was basically sleeping in a box, whether she was truly sleeping when I saw her, or merely pretending to sleep, is beyond me. My theory is she was severely drugged up but I say that in jest. A lot of movie installations which were interesting to watch.
In the end, I realized that I’m not really a creative enough person to apperciate giant fog machines through a section of a campus as art, nor do I see airing 3 stooges along a building, slowed down to 50% of it’s regular speed as art, nor do I believe a neon sign affixed to a church that says “Hold That Thought” as art. Lots of it WAS art, but some of it I can’t see as art, I see it as something anyone could have done. I was giving Chad some what I thought would be great abstract ideas as art installations for next year should he choose to enter. I hope he enters, and I hope he picks something I came up with!