Redalyc. Humanists and Modernists at Expo 67. Revista Mexicana De

Revista Mexicana de Estudios Canadienses (nueva época) Asociación Mexicana de Estudios sobre Canadá, A.C. [email protected] ISSN (Versión impresa): 1405-8251 MÉXICO 2007 Johanne Sloan HUMANISTS AND MODERNISTS AT EXPO 67 Revista Mexicana de Estudios Canadienses (nueva época), primavera-verano, número 013 Asociación Mexicana de Estudios sobre Canadá, A.C. Culiacán, México pp. 79-87 Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y el Caribe, España y Portugal Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México http://redalyc.uaemex.mx HUMANISTS AND MODERNISTS AT EXPO 67 JOHANNE SLOAN Abstract This essay addresses the status of modernism at Expo 67, the world’s fair held in Montreal during the summer of 1967, insofar as it intersects with the humanist aspirations of this event, epitomized by the theme, “Man and his World.” The intersection of art, architecture, design, and technology is discussed, as are monumental artworks such as Alexander Calder’s sculpture Man, and Rufino Tamayo’s mural for the Mexico Pavilion. Key words: Art history, Expo 67, cultural studies of the XX century, Montreal. lexander Calder’s enormous abstract sculpture Man (1967) still resides on a Aman-made island adjoining the city of Montreal, where it was first installed as part of Expo 67, the world’s fair held in Montreal in the summer of 1967.1 Calder’s monumental artwork, along with Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome (originally the USA pavilion), remains one of the city’s most conspicuous material reminders of that epochal event. While Fuller’s building is a government-run building with a quasi-museological function, the Calder artwork in contrast has in recent years been unofficially appropriated by some of Montreal’s inhabitants, who periodically stage “piknics electroniks” – techno dance parties staged under and around the towering metal structure.2 This present-day scenario sug- gests a way to reconsider the status of art at Expo 67, because it could be argued that this subcultural response to the Calder sculpture is very much in the spirit of Expo 67, where art was conceived of as a dynamic force within the social environment, and as something to be encountered collectively. Time Magazine in 1967 reported that, “In its entirety, Expo 67 could be viewed as one long contemporary art gallery (Time, 1967).” There were indeed many free-standing sculptures throughout the plazas and avenues of the exhibition site, and many pavilions featured displays of paintings and other traditional art objects, but these in a sense are only a supplement to the aesthetic manipula- tion of the entire Expo 67 environment, indoors and outdoors. This essay asks RMEC / núm. 13 / primavera-verano / 2007 REVISTA MEXICANA DE ESTUDIOS CANADIENSES whether this expanded category of art represented a realm of commonality across “territories and societies.”3 Looking at how Expo 67 blurred the boundaries between art, design, technology, urban furnishings, and public space, I link this intentional ambiguity to the humanist discourse which permeated this event and influenced the display and consumption of artworks. It is no accident that Calder’s non-figurative imagery bore the simple and punchy title: Man, just as Expo 67 itself explicitly announced “Man” to be the conceptual foundation of the entire event. Calder’s enormous, jagged metal object might otherwise have been inter- preted as a broken-off piece of alien technology, or as a threatening hieroglyph, but the title “Man” served to shut down these avenues of signification, and instead offered (semantic) reassurance that art and technology both were under control. The year 2007 happens to be the 40th anniversary of a very successful and well-known world’s fair, and there are a number of reasons for re-visiting this event, beyond the more obvious kinds of nostalgic engagement.4 Its impact cer- tainly registered at multiple political and administrative levels: for the Canadian government which was responsible for staging the country’s centenary celebra- tions, Expo 67 provided a global context for the assertion of statehood; Quebec 80 was meantime in the throes of the so-called Quiet Revolution, and so Expo 67 could provide a potential link between the local struggle for a modern collective identity, and the global rise of national liberation movements; and then, for the thriving city of Montreal Expo 67 could become the template for the full-fledged emergence of a cosmopolitan city. It is key that these civic or national identifica- tions would develop in relation to the internationalism offered by Expo 67. The idea that Expo 67 provided a kind of inter-national interstice was rein- forced by the “passport” issued to visitors in lieu of a ticket. Having gained entry to the Expo islands with this document in hand, the visitor was temporarily transformed into a citizen of the world; moving freely through this parallel uni- verse, the holder of this ersatz passport was apparently no longer bound to a nationally-determined identity. At the present time, discussions about globaliza- tion often focus on connectedness through virtual, mediatized networks, but at Expo 67 visitors would become global, as it were, through an immersive environment which was highly mediated and technologized and yet also immediate in its material and spatial effects. Expo 67 should be understood as a paradoxi- cal territory, however, insofar as it provided visitors with a global purview. At one level there was a celebration of cultural diversity, since on display was a tremendous range of peoples, countries, ethnicities, artifacts, foods, etc. But simultaneously, there was a denial of cultural, political, ethnic, religious, or ideological difference, in the name of a common humanistic project. HUMANISTS AND MODERNISTS AT EXPO 67 Expo 67 took place under the rubric “Man and His World/Terre des Hommes,” which is the title of a book by the French author-aviator Antoine de Saint Exupery, best known for The Little Prince. From within his flying machine, gazing down at the surface of the planet, Saint Exupéry would conclude that the earth be- longed collectively to humankind, to “Man.” It was a version of this humanistic perspective which became the exhibition’s organizing principle, and which is evident in a multitude of texts, images, objects, and forms of display. One telling example is provided by the “Man the Explorer” pavilion, which was one of a sequence of thematic, non-nationally oriented pavilions. The guidebook’s en- thusiastic blurb states about this theme pavilion: “Man has an initial urge to explore. Throughout Man’s story, every man has been an explorer. From infancy on, Man explores…” (Maclean-Hunter, 1967: 46). This terminology is charac- teristic both of this particular pavilion and of the exhibiton as a whole, and it assumes that all the planet’s inhabitants can be absorbed by this singular, aspirational figure, “Man.” Once inside the “Man the Explorer” pavilion, the visitor would enter spectacular visual environments, which offered access to a range of macrocosmic and microcosmic worlds. One display featured an enormous illuminated globe, simulating the magisterial perspective of being posi- tioned far above the surface of the planet (like Saint Exupéry, or like contempo- 81 rary astronauts and cosmonauts), while a few minutes later the visitor would proceed to the so-called “walk-thru” into a human cell, magnified one million times. Thus the most up-to-date scientific knowledge and visual technologies are anchored to a humanist stance, in that every visitor, regardless of gender, age, ethnic origin, religious convictions, or educational level, was meant to simply step into the shoes of this omniscient Man – sharing the same enhanced visual experience, and literally seeing the world in a similar way. But if this brand of humanism and its corresponding visual regime was in evidence throughout the exhibition, it is important to remember that its intellec- tual foundation was under threat at this very time. The idea of “Man and his world” was taken from a 1939 text by the popular author Saint-Exupéry, but the contribution of a rather different French writer, Michel Foucault, whose book Les mots et les choses came out the year before Expo 67, might be equally important for an understanding of the event. With this book, Foucault set out to dislodge the phantasmatic figure of Man from its place as the privileged subject of history, arguing that humanist-inflected subjectivity is inevitably constrained by humanist knowledge production: “Man’s finitude is heralded… in the posi- tivity of knowledge” (Foucault, 1970: 313). Following Foucault’s lead, we might therefore ask what kinds of subject-positions were produced by the humanist discourse of Expo 67? REVISTA MEXICANA DE ESTUDIOS CANADIENSES If the version of humanism in evidence at Expo 67 was open to contestation, scholars of world’s fairs have pointed out that these events were often informed by ideological struggles, despite the inevitable rhetoric of global friendship and goodwill (Rydell y Gwin, 1994). It is also important to note, nonetheless, the progressive connotations of humanist ideas at various moments throughout the history of world’s fairs. Pieter van Wesemael has described how the 1900 Expo- sition Universelle in Paris, for instance, continued in many ways to adhere to the imperialist, colonialist and commercial imperatives set in place by earlier nine- teenth century exhibitions, but attempts were made to undercut this dominant set of values, by integrating the more radical humanism put forward by the Scottish scientist and urban planner Patrick Geddes – the ambition to make of the exhibition “an encyclopaedic synthesis of knowledge, a socio-ethnographic analysis of the human environment, and a hint for social reforms.” If a post-war humanist vocabulary can be discerned throughout Expo 67, I want to expand this discussion to include modernism, because in different terms it too promised to provide the common ground necessary for building a future world.

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