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 suggests 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 certainly 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 nineteenth 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. This is to say that at Expo 67 the vision of a common destiny for humankind could be expressed not only via the rhetoric of humanism, but perhaps even 82 more forcefully, through the recognizably utopian forms and shapes of modern art and architecture. Expo 67 can indeed be considered as a sort of modernist revival (a claim it would be difficult to make for the more pedestrian design of New York World’s Fair of 1964-65, on the other hand.) If the socially-dynamic buildings dreamt up in the early part of the twentieth century had by the 1960s degenerated into normative models for real-estate developers, the modernism on display at Expo 67 once again projected an optimistic picture of what a future society might resemble, in visual and material terms. This was to be sure a different stage in modern architecture and design, one which now incorporated extruded plastic and molded metals, and allowed for a new plasticity in the built environment. What is key, though, is how an innovative built environment could imply the emergence of equally innovative social practices, as if it was inevitable that these should appear hand in hand. These temporary constructions could serve as models for the kinds of spaces people might inhabit in the near future. Some architectural critics took Expo 67 quite seriously as an experiment in crafting a new, emancipatory kind of urban experience. Reyner Banham’s book on “megastructures,” published in 1976, included a chapter on Montreal circa 1967 as a striking example of this spatial/social phenomenon, which according to the author encompassed the entire Expo site, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat, the newly built subway system, and a range of new buildings within the city proper, many of them furnished with atriums and indoor plazas. Banham considered all HUMANISTS AND MODERNISTS AT EXPO 67 of these elements to be part of the same interconnected megastructure, within which movement and activity occurred on many levels simultaneously, while the threshold between indoor and outdoor spaces was continually shifting; these spatial ambiguities were regarded as deep, structural improvements to collective urban life (Banham, 1976). Although Banham’s book was not focused on the world’s fair per se, it is worth considering how these qualities of porosity, plasticity, and spatial flexibility, in the context of Expo 67, could suggest that the multiple national agendas and cultural energies of the exhibition need not re- main locked within specific structures or architectural frames, that they could instead infringe on each other in a more dynamic way. As an extension of this spatial complexity, Expo 67 proposed novel ways to encounter cultural artefacts, including artworks. Inside the domed space of the U.S.A. pavilion, large-scale paintings by contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol, Japer Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Barnett Newman were suspended on panels, and because of the lack of walls, the Pop and Colorfield artworks appeared – from certain angles – to merge with the facsimile lunar landscape (complete with real space capsules) which occupied a kind of floating platform within the space. Here and in many other pavilions as well, artworks were not isolated in separate rooms or sequestered as befitting rarefied objects; rather, an attempt 83 was made to integrated them into complex, multi-sensorial displays. On the sharply inclined rooftop of the Canadian pavilion, to give another example, assemblage-like artworks were not indoors, on flat surfaces, or mounted on pedestals, but rather, strangely encrusting the rooftop, while a spectacular view of the Montreal skyline became part of the aesthetic experience. It is worth remembering that Walter Benjamin identified the “phantasmagoric” quality of these exhibitions, right from the beginning. This is to say that visitors to London’s Crystal Palace in 1851 saw new mechanical inventions and products, but as the light-filled interior was also adorned with plants, statues and birds, the encounter with commodified things took on a quality of enchantment (Benjamin, 1986:153). Again and again throughout the Expo 67 site elaborately-mounted displays presumably meant to inform and educate could easily be mistaken for colourful and kinetic sculptural environments. The previously mentioned enlargement of a biological cell featured in the “Man the Explorer” pavilion, for example, con- sisted of lantern-like globes, shining ruby and turquoise-coloured shapes, and a web of filigree-like elements – resulting in a visually alluring experience, even if scientific knowledge was the pretext for this presentation. The visitor who left this pavilion might well proceed to a cafeteria-style dining area (conceived by the Quebec designer Julien Hébert) which was itself striking in its organic modern shapes and spatial dynamism. REVISTA MEXICANA DE ESTUDIOS CANADIENSES

If these examples of spatial complexity suggest a postmodern sensibility, the architecture at Expo 67 also espoused a conventionally modern preoccupation with pared-down shapes and clean surfaces, with colour, light, and transparency. Similarities between the USA. and USSR pavilions are telling in this respect. Buckminster Fuller’s dome was constructed out of steel pipes and molded acrylic panels, while the building designed by the Soviet architect Posokhin had steel pillars, glass-sheet walls, and an arabesque aluminum roof. Photographs and postcard views of the two pavilions taken at night accentuate the translucency of both buildings, as a sort of golden light seems to emanate from the respective interiors, flowing through the transparent walls into the surrounding environment. Perhaps there was cold-war intrigue occurring here under the cloak of darkness, but the architecture, and especially such visual representations of the architecture, suggests otherwise. At Expo 67, it was still possible to believe in the utopianism of modern art, as something which defied borders, nationalities, and even the competing ideologies of American capitalism and Soviet commu- nism. Finally, though, the concept “modern” only acquires meaning in relational terms. Something described as modern at a particular moment in time and un- 84 der certain circumstances will be opposed, in myriad ways and contexts, to something else that is un-modern or anti-modern. And so at Expo 67 it is evident that the terms of modernity – as something more than a mere style to be imitated or appropriated – are not fixed. Modernism was readily adopted by Expo 67’s national participants for its role as a unifying stylistic principle, but more pro- foundly, modernism can be understood as a particularly fraught form of historical consciousness, as suggested by Peter Osborne (1995: IX). Every national pavilion at Expo 67 flaunted its modern identity in some way, and very often this was in architectural terms: glittering, geometricized buildings provided the same kind of overdetermined gestures towards futurity evident in the American and Soviet pavilions, and overall there were relatively few references to local or ethnic building styles. But inevitably, this modern aspect would be counterbal- anced by exhibits, displays, performances, meals, costumes, etc., which related to tradition, heritage, and folklore. Indeed, every national pavilion can be regarded as an exercise in the negotiation of a modern style and a modern identity. The Mexico pavilion was one such site, where both architecture and art played a hugely important role, moreover. A Montreal journalist typically en- thused about this pavilion “whose traditionally-inspired architecture astonishes by virtue of its modern interpretation” (Mongeau, 1967:36). The gleaming white building was crowned with a shell-like crown, but this futuristic flourish could also be read as a reference to pre-Columbian symbology; hence the perception HUMANISTS AND MODERNISTS AT EXPO 67 that the traditional and the modern, the past and the present, were perfectly reconciled. Alongside the entrance to the building was the meticulous recreation of a Mayan temple, while the exterior of the building was further adorned with Baroque angels as well as an abstract metal sculpture by the contemporary artist Manuel Felguerez. Once inside the pavilion, the visitor would have seen replicas of the spectacular Bonampak frescoes, those pre-Columbian treasures rediscov- ered by the Western world in 1946. And then, alongside other examples of modern and contemporary Mexican art, the piece de resistance at the Mexico pavilion was meant to be Rufino Tamayo’s mural painting, El Mexicano y su Mundo, 1967 (“The Mexican and his World”). Thus the visitor would have been constantly moved backwards and forward in time, with various moments in Mexico’s history encapsulated in examples of architectural detail, sculpture, and mural painting. The modern identity of Mexico could thus be presented not as a rupture with the past, but as the inevitable fruition of thousands of years of culture. The artwork of Tamayo has indeed been admired for its ability to join motifs from Mexico’s pre-European past with the verve of European modernist painting. But does this mean that Tamayo’s artwork exemplified the goals of the Mexico pavilion at Expo 67, to seamlessly integrate past and present? Certainly 85 Tamayo’s version of modernism, his sense of historical consciousness, was different from that of the other muralists of his generation, los tres grandes. But if the mural art of Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieros is associated with a more po- lemical approach to the history of Mexico, Tamayo’s art too evinces an on-going struggle to forge a connection to the past, to develop a collective memory, and to invent a modern visual imagination. Octavio Paz has argued that Tamayo’s engagement with Mexican identity is sophisticated precisely because it doesn’t attempt to camouflage “the distance that separates us from the past” (Paz, 1982: 16). Instead of a direct or realistic representation of an archaic, pre-modern past, an ancient symbol in the hands of Tamayo becomes “a high-frequency transmitter that sends out a plurality of meanings and images” (Idem: 19). Tamayo’s El Mexicano y su Mundo depicts a temporally-ambiguous landscape, within which a lone human figure (probably male) lurches towards an illuminated horizon, with mythic-looking creatures on either side of him. The title of the work alleges that this unclothed figure represents the entire Mexican population, but is he moving towards a glorious future or perhaps fleeing an unbearable past? Or has this universalized human figure, so typical of Expo 67, lost his bearings and his identity, because he isn’t coming from a specific place, and has no particular destination? REVISTA MEXICANA DE ESTUDIOS CANADIENSES

The potentially troubling ambiguity in Tamayo’s work concerns the sense of a modern identity, as something which is not universally intelligible after all. What if the modern identity of Tamayo’s human protagonist only becomes mean- ingful when dialectically linked to specific signifiers of tradition, history, and otherness? What is also at stake here, however, is the status of the artwork. I have described a kind of dispersal of artistic energies throughout the exhibition site at Expo 67, in that ordinary objects, spaces, and visual experiences were activated and aesthetically enlivened in so many ways. This can be linked to the ambitions of avant garde and neo-avant garde movements before and after Expo 67. Throughout the twentieth century, really, artists attempted to move art out- side of galleries and museums, wanting to embed art in public space, and to detach aesthetic experience from the production of precious objects. But when the entire built environment is meant to be visually stimulating, the impact of individual artworks is necessarily put into question. In hindsight it is evident that the category of art was never completely absorbed by the phantasmagoric environment of Expo 67; this is rather obvious because while the ephemeral dreamworld of the fair faded away, large-scale artworks such as Rufino Tamayo’s mural and Alexander Calder’s sculpture sur- vived and have taken their place in national and international histories of art. 86 Tamayo’s El Mexicano y su Mundo is indeed comparable to Alexander Calder’s sculpture Man, in that both represent monumental solutions to the problem of how to reconcile the humanist message of the world’s fair with the aesthetic imperatives of modern art. And it is interesting too to compare the recent history of these Expo 67 artworks, because while Calder’s sculpture has come back to life for Montrealers amidst the quasi-ruin of the Expo site,5 Tamayo’s painting is now prominently exhibited in the offices of the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, near La Alameda, which is to say that it has become an official emblem of the contemporary Mexican state, as it continues to negotiate its identity in an international context. For a short time during the summer of 1967, though, as part of Expo 67’s artificial worldscape, an artwork had the potential to become, to repeat Octavio Paz’s words, “a high-frequency transmitter that sends out a plurality of meanings and images.”

NOTAS

1 Officially, Expo 67 was an “exposition universelle” sanctioned by the Paris- based Bureau des Expositions, but the terms exposition universelle, great exhibition and world’s fair are virtually synonymous, while the latter term is most commonly used in Anglophone scholarship. 2 See www.piknicelectronik.com HUMANISTS AND MODERNISTS AT EXPO 67

3 A version of this essay was presented at the conference “Territorio y sociedad en américa del norte,” the XII Congress of the Asociación Mexicana de Estudios sobre Canadá, Mexico City, February 2007. 4 Expo 67 has recently become the focus of interdisciplinary scholarly interest. The author is the co-editor of a forthcoming collection of essays, Expo 67: Not just a souvenir, edited by Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan. 5 While expositions universelles are supposed to be temporary events, some sections of Expo 67’s built environment were not dismantled, and over the years crumble and decay.

REFERENCE

Expo 67 Official Guide. 1967. “Too Good to be True” in Time Magazine, May 5. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (a translation of Les mots et les choses) (New York: Vintage Books). Rydell, Robert and Gwinn, Nancy (ed). 1994. The collected essays in Fair Rep- resentation: World’s Fairs and the Modern World (Amsterdam: VU University Press). Van Wesemael, Pieter. 2001. “Architecture of Instruction and Delight: A Socio- 87 historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a Didactic Phenomenon (1798- 1851-1970)” (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers). Banham, Reyner. 1976. “Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past” (Lon- don: Thames & Hudson). Benjamin, Walter. 1986. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Peter Demetz (ed.), Reflections (New York: Schocken Books). Osborne, Peter. 1995. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (Lon- don: Verso Books). Mongeau, Nicole. 1967. “Le Mexique ouvre enfin son pavillon” La Presse, May 16. Paz, Octavio. 1982. “Tamayo: Geometry and Transfiguration” in Rufino Tamayo (New York: Rizzoli Publications).

Fecha de recepción: Marzo 15 2007 Fecha de aceptacion: Mayo 20 2007