Paper Trails

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On a summer evening in 1971, in Vancouver, some counter-culture types held an event protesting the continuing criminalization of marijuana. The locale was Maple Tree Square in the Downtown Eastside near the old Woodward’s department store. The "smoke-in" featured bands and peaceful protests.
   
The Vancouver police department raided the protest and sparked the Gastown Riot. There were reports that undercover police acted as provocateurs. The violence shocked the city.
   
Stan Douglas is one of Canada’s most respected visual artists, with a keen interest in urban areas, dissent, conflict and civil liberties. A few years ago, he was commissioned to create a piece to hang in the atrium of the newly-renovated Woodward centre, at the historical focus of the incident.
   
Douglas decided on a 30x50-foot photomural on tempered glass that depicts a moment in the riot, as mounted police officers charged protestors and bystanders a block away from the epicentre.
   
A new book, Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 (Arsenal Pulp), documents that work of art. It’s a fitting and informative companion to a provocative piece as well as a fascinating text on its own.
   
In an interview with Alexander Alberro that opens the book, Douglas explains the logistics of creating such a monumental work, one that required casting actors as bystanders, constables, hippies, mounted police, and narcs; hiring a large technical crew; building a set; even hiring (!) horse wranglers.
   
Douglas goes on to say that although that although the protest might seem "frivolous," he associates the riot with more recent confrontations between activists and authority. (He specifically mentions the recent demonstrations against budget cuts in Europe, for example.)
   
A series of essays from art scholars provide context for the work, placing it within Douglas oeuvre, along with discussions of media theory and cultural and political theory. The final essay, by Jesse Proudfoot, is perhaps the most interesting of the lot. It looks at the politics of representation of the people who live in the Downtown Eastside and how activism focuses on the "deserving poor" (hippies were a recent arrival to the area) instead of substance abusers and the mentally ill.
   
Douglas notes that after the riot, the city of Vancouver rezoned the neighbourhood as a purely business zone to push out the hippies living there. As a result, Gastown changed: a tourist draw during the day and a dead zone at night.
   
The Gastown Riot is largely forgotten nowadays (I’ve never heard of it), but as it happens, I was reading the book while also checking my Twitter feed for updates about the wholesale arrests during an action by Occupy Oakland. And while hippies and "smoke-ins" are as quaint as bell-bottoms, social inequity still brings people out to protest, and power still acts excessively to maintain its authority.