A different type of gathering
Matt Soar with Graham Carr at the exhibit organized in conjunction with the Logo Cities conference. The two are in front of the old Monkland Tavern sign. The show came together with the work of grad students Cecilia Chen and Grant Collins. Frances Millerd helped track down the signs for the show.
Photo by Andrew Dobrowolskyj
Three years ago Matt Soar (Communications) received SSHRC funding for Logo Cities. He was interested in how corporate logos had slid off products and posters and onto buildings, into films and our environment.
What began as an indictment of hypercommercialism has grown into an investigation of the alternate, personal and cultural meanings this “not quite architecture” has in people’s lives.
Much of that evidence is available at www.logocities.org/ *. The site has become an ode to the signs that fill our landscape and act as reminders of home. For instance, the cross on the mountain or Soar’s own “open love affair with the Farine Five Roses sign.”
That type of obsession was shared by the 60-odd academics, designers and community practitioners and activists who gathered to discuss signs in Mumbai, Istanbul, Qatar and across North America at a symposium held early this month.
“This is a community in the making,” said Soar. He organized the conference as a series of discussions in the DeSève Cinema. “The most successful conferences I’ve been to are very small, very focused, with people moving together through panels.”
It was also important for Soar to bring together people with very different points of view. A roundtable discussion featured keynote speaker Johanna Drucker, Robertson Professor of Media Studies, University of Virginia, Matt Blackett, of Toronto’s Spacing magazine, Chris DeWolf, Mile End host of www.urbanphoto.net/blog/, and Bill Kovacevic, who has been a sign constructor for over 40 years with Enseignes Transworld.
They are among the stakeholders who are interested in the place of signage in urban landscapes.
“It’s all too easy for a bunch of like-minded people to get together and say ‘It’s the sign-makers, they’re to blame,’” Soar said.
DeWolf described ‘ghost ads’ — the traces of advertising painted on blank brick walls — as “a window on the past.” They show where and what types of industry once occupied neighbourhoods.
That history is particular in Montreal, where language laws changed the voice of the city. The local phenomenon of older English words appearing under French “maps a cultural and linguistic geography of the city,” DeWolf said.
The phenomenon is iconically visible in the Simcha’s sign, a Plateau landmark until the store recently shut down. It, along with some of the letters of the Warshaw’s sign from the Main, were exhibited in the VAV Gallery.
Soar’s research into the significance of signs has underscored the importance of preserving these pieces of the past. Although other cities have heritage policies around signage, Montreal is far behind.
“These are material artifacts, in metal, neon and plexiglass,” Soar said. “They have never been in the same room and we may never see them again. They’re stored away in little dusty corners.”
Logo Cities demonstrated how signs embody a city’s sense of control. R. Hakam Ertep came from Turkey to present the results of a ludicrous bylaw that robbed Istanbul’s equivalent of Times Square of all personality by decreeing that all street signs (from McDonalds to banks) be in regulation height brass letters on a wooden background.
Kovacevic discussed a similar local phenomenon. Westmount forbids backlit signs on Sherbrooke, despite the fact that the gooseneck lighting used instead is more costly to run and not necessarily more ‘authentic.’
And while some cities can limit the number and type of signs a business can have, Vishal Rawlley described his city of Mumbai as “having more signs on one street than there are in Montreal.”
Soar organized the conference and exhibit to coincide with his presentation of the Montreal premiere of Helvetica. He had not anticipated much interest in Gary Hustwit’s “film about a font.”
However, 600 devoted letter-lovers (including a rogue group of dissenters in Arial T-shirts) proved him wrong. Hustwit’s rumination on the role of graphic design provided a fitting finale to the symposium’s focus on the physical and psychic place of letters in our environment.
* Since publication of the Journal, papers of presentations made at Logo Cities have been made available on their site on the right-hand side: www.logocities.org/