Anne Murray: Menace II Toronto

Last night the Toronto Psychogeography Society started one of our weekly drift’s at the corner of University and King after an Images-Geothe film screening. We saw Tatoo back at work on his carvings, fixing it up. We talked to him for a bit. He said he started another carving down the street but that he’s going to fix this one up and that city won’t stop him “because if they stop me, they’ll start going after other artists.” Then he said something about Picasso.

Whether you like this kind of public art or not, the city’s justification of its destruction is infuriating, and worse, makes me angry like a Toronto Sun reader worrying about his tax money being used to fund the arts. The city took a grinder to it, saying it was a trip hazard, and then left it deeper and more cut up than it was before. That was over a month ago. It bothers me that city bureaucrats used “Pedestrian Safety” as an excuse to carve this up. Had they just said, “we wanted him gone” at least we’d know they’re behaving honestly. It’s also hard not to draw a connection between the city’s action and St. Andrew’s church next door and their “no camping” sign.

What I want to know is how does the city decide what is a threat to pedestrian safety and what isn’t. Is there a hierarchy? A quick look around the area reveals some hazards that are without question more of a threat, like interlocking bricks “erupting” around most of the trees along King Street by Roy Thomson Hall. Or right next to Tatoo’s carvings there is a crevice in the sidewalk deeper and wider than anything he carved, waiting to catch a high-heel. Perhaps an equal menace is the Canadian Walk of Fame a block west. The “Anne Murray” carved into slippery looking granite should be grinded up too, for pedestrian safety. As somebody pointed out last night, this one is cut by lasers, not humans, so the city must think it’s different.

The city should either be honest about this, or actually get serious about tripping hazards and start grinding up and paving over the Anne Murray menaces across the city — or stop using pedestrian safety as an excuse to do something else. It’s as head-scratching as the Toronto Police saying they built those cedar-fence-barricades to “protect police date from hackers.”

To give the St. Andrew’s congregation the benefit of the doubt, this nice sentiment is from their website:

St. Andrew’s to-day is a living church. Its congregation, drawn from across the city, represents the diversity of Toronto. Presbyterianism at St. Andrew’s crosses cultural, educational and social boundaries. The congregation is united by a common commitment to worship and to community service. This commitment is reflected in St. Andrew’s mission statement—”The people of St. Andrew’s are called by God to serve in faith, hope and love in the core of Toronto”—a commitment to minister to the needs of the wide variety of people who live and work in the downtown area.