By Mike Levin

Despite copious antecedents, Nicolas Bourriaud may be the most-needed artistic philosopher the modern world has.  Just 12 years ago he founded the school of Relational Art, which sees art as “the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.”  In short, he believes art should be socially contextual, not just interpretational.

In good times – those perceived as prosperous, secure, tolerant and flexible – artistic creation is expected, and embraced. In bad times, it isn’t expected. But this is when it’s most needed by cultures to help spread a little joy around. Relational Art tells us we share something with the person standing next to us.

National Art Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan. Courtesy of Naeem Pasha.

While Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York may be stunning and stimulating, its aesthetic importance is not as great as Naeem Pasha’s National Art Gallery of Pakistan in Islamabad, which is the country’s first public gallery and is changing (slowly) how that traditional culture views art.

The problem is, architecture that inspires optimism is very expensive. Fortunately, Bourriaud’s view is no more about money than it is about big, and it is through this rabbit hole that Gatineau’s Denis Pettigrew has decided to step.

Pettigrew spent 25 years as a marketer, creating brands, systems and campaigns that would catch people’s imaginations. Art informs his family, but Denis always preferred managing creativity rather than producing it. “Getting the right people in the right place at the right time; I have no patience for the artistic temperament,” he admits.

By 2005 he was tiring of empirical systems, the Harpy our society embraces to keep consumer-driven corporatism from collapsing completely. He felt it was snatching the life out of cities, and Pettigrew loves cities.

Paris pissoire. Photo by Teo73.

In 2006 on holiday in Paris, he bathed in the city’s urban design, especially how it is integrated into commercial buildings and has kept Paris a visually inspiring community. Even public toilets there can be small works of art. So he decided to talk to someone in the city’s art department to find out why this is so.

“I wondered why there is so much design (in Paris), when in Canada, no. They have bureaucracy, politics, criticism from citizens, what’s the difference? And you know, he told me ‘yes we have the same problems, but here politicians get involved in design in their own neighbourhoods. It is expected of them. The higher it goes, the better the design.’ You know that one percent (in the budget of a public construction project designated for artistic components) we have? (In Paris) it’s a law, and politically expedient to use it.”

Pettigrew returned to Gatineau, finished off a high-tech contract with an Ottawa firm and, last year, walked away from corporate marketing forever. He may have been bored with it anyway, but it’s just as likely that the man who loves walking city streets was getting depressed by what he saw on both sides of the Ottawa River.  “Cities are communities. They should be discovered. They should give you surprises that delight. Psychologically, when that line is broken, to see something you didn’t expect, it changes the life of the user.”

If Bourriaud tells us that art should reflect the guts of society (our cities), then activist Jane Jacobs’ view on creative urban renewal must have been a spiritual guide. Add in Elie Wiesel’s warning that “the opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference,” and you’ve got a fertile template for change.

For that is what Pettigrew wants to be: an urban change-maker, an eraser of indifference. All he needed was a strategic plan that could show decision-makers how small artistic twists can create beauty in even the most sterile environment.

Denis Pettigrew. Photo by Mike Levin.

Earlier this year he started DAP Design District; its goal is to convince commercial building owners and designers that adorning existing, and often ugly, structures – an entry column, a rooftop air-conditioning unit, an atrium pool – could change how people relate to the building and, by extrapolation, to the city.

The idea is not new, but until now the timing has rarely been right. Pettigrew is betting that private administrators are now willing to listen. He’s not interested in lobbying the request-strapped public sector, but when Victor Tolgesy Award winners like Julian Armour, Christine Tremblay and Jennifer Cayley call for the cities’ businesses to take a more active role in arts funding, Pettigrew’s vision is gaining credibility.

“It will only ever appeal to 20 percent of people, the ones who see past the conventional. I think these kind of people want this, they just don’t know how to get it. Yes, it will appeal to feelings of elitism and quality, like a $2,000 glass vase, so people have to see (urban beauty) for themselves and then ask “what do I remember?’”

He brings up Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and how humans organize their motivational drives. He figures we expect to reach the top of the hierarchy (self-actualization) without going through the hard work in the middle (social needs and responsibilities).

Pettigrew forced himself to take theatre in his Catholic high school in Quebec City as a way to get past his painful shyness. He saw it as a path to independence, the same motivation that drove his father to break away from a large insurance company and become an independent broker. His mother and father loved opera; his maternal grandfather sang with Raoul Jobin before he chose medicine and Jobin moved to France to become an internationally acclaimed operatic tenor.

By university the muse had shifted. “I chose communication arts at Concordia because they had production-oriented studios. It was hands-on, like theatre, but my style always liked to manage projects and people,” Pettigrew says.  He decided on marketing, figuring he could use creativity to make the commercial pill go down easier. It worked, but then Florent Cousineau made him wonder what else might be possible.

The delight of small touches approaching Roch Garden, Quebec City. Courtesy of www.canadianarchitecture.com

Cousineau is a Stoneham, Quebec, artist who’s frequently hired by engineers and architects to soften institutional settings. His design work was integral to the revitalization of Roch Garden in Quebec City and to the restoration of Le Pont du Moulin in Deschambault. “He added another dimension to what can be done with (urban) construction. If you can’t hide it, then show it; make it beautiful and show it. It does not have to be expensive, a few hundred dollars, a thousand, and you have beauty, not just concrete,” Pettigrew says.

This can mean wrapping office-building pillars in a metal-leaf motif or using organic/vegetative statues to decorate parking lots; new technology is another creative tools that is only starting to be explored. “Architects, engineers and designers have always built to the limits of machinery’s function. Today, design commands how that machinery functions. This is how the human brain works,” Pettigrew explains.

He feels small, private, urban-art projects like these would provide work for local artisans; they wouldn’t be purely dependent on the shrinking arts budgets of governments; and they would add the punctuation of delight to Ottawa’s already remarkable beauty.

Denis Pettigrew has no pieces of paper on the wall that substantiate, academically, his design ideas for Ottawa/Gatineau. Convincing private enterprise to invest in superficial beauty will be a hard sell. “I know. You have to know people’s values, then talk to the intellect and hope it will listen,” he says.

But there is also economic method to his madness. “You know that (hospital) emergency rooms are empty during (Stanley Cup) playoffs. If you engage people’s imagination, you make them healthy. It’s about management, not money.”