Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 120: After Art — with Glenn Alteen
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Glenn Alteen
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Kathy Feng 0:02
Hello listeners. I'm Kathy Feng with Below the Radar a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by curator, writer, and recently retired co-founding director of grunt gallery, Glenn Alteen. They chat about the early days of starting an artist run center, the curatorial direction of the grunt gallery, as well as the Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency. I hope you enjoy the episode.
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Am Johal 0:37
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. We are lucky to be visiting with Glenn Alteen today. He was the long-time executive director of the grunt gallery, but has been done many, many things all over town. Welcome, Glenn.
Glenn Alteen 0:52
Thank you. It's good to see you.
Am Johal 0:55
Yeah, good to see you as well. Of course, I always run into you at Gene Cafe at Main at Main and Kingsway corner. You have your regular crew of people, but I'll come back to that. So, you recently retired from the grunt gallery after a long tenure there building up that really important space in the city. But you grew up in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, is that right?
Glenn Alteen 1:18
Yeah, yeah.
Am Johal 1:19
Yeah. Yeah. So, can you tell us about the context in which you grew up and how you found yourself getting involved in the visual arts?
Glenn Alteen 1:27
Well, I didn't start out being involved in the visual arts, I mean, my degree is in English. And most of my study was in theater. And for my early part of my career, I was like a playwright and a theater director. But then I just gradually morphed over into Visual Art, because I just found it more interesting, I found theater kind of dull after a while. The thing about theater is, you know, if everything goes exactly as planned, you know exactly what's going to happen. Whereas in lots of visual arts programs, and projects and all that stuff, there's always this element of surprise, where you never really know where anything is going. So, it's like, it's a very different process. And I just enjoyed that more.
Am Johal 2:10
When you arrived in Vancouver, and we're looking to set up an art space, when the grunt first started, it was a particular moment in time in the city, particular moment in time around artists run centers. So, wondering if you can talk about kind of the early days of getting it set up and started.
Glenn Alteen 2:29
Well, like it was never really a plan, I mean in some ways. I had moved here in 1980. And it was kind of an interesting situation. Because there was a bunch of us, we had lived in this university town on the east coast. And there was a whole pile of us that moved to Vancouver at exactly the same time within a year of each other. So, there was like probably 25 of us who had been friends on the east coast and moved out here for different reasons. Like Kate Hammett-Vaughan, there was either Kempton Dexter, there was a whole bunch of us that worked in different parts of the arts, and you know, singing, different stuff. So, we kind of came as a whole contingent, so, and then got into seeing what was going on in Vancouver, which was kind of fascinating.
Am Johal 3:14
Yeah, so there was an East Coast mafia angle that's interesting. At the time that you were starting out, I guess that, you know, other institutions like the Or Gallery, were starting out around the same time or just after and others. But wondering if you can sort of when you reflect back on the scene at the time with these types of spaces opening up, how do you think about that time now.
Glenn Alteen 3:35
I remember going to a bunch of different spaces, especially, you know, going to the UNIT/PITT when the UNIT/PITT was down across the Hotel Europe on Powell Street. And the earlier one that was over on Pender Street, you know, so the PITT was this, you know, there was lots of concerts there, there was lots of exhibitions there. I also remember going to the Western Front to see exhibitions there. So it was, it was kind of getting to know a lot of that stuff here. I mean, when I was in Nova Scotia, I remember going to the library lots of times and reading like The Village Voice or the Georgia Straight. So, I wasn't completely green when I came out here. I had some idea of what was going on here or what the scene was like here. And it was interesting.
Am Johal 4:16
Yeah. And I guess at some point getting set up as a non-profit society, some government funding coming in at some point, I imagine there would have been some transition in time before that happened. Can you talk a little bit about that sort of the process of starting out, because I imagine there's probably a few years that was just pure sweat equity.
Glenn Alteen 4:36
Oh, yeah. No, it was kind of crazy. I mean, it started out with me renting the space over on 6th and Main, where the Whip is, okay, and so I'd rented it. I was renting it basically to live there. And I hadn't really kind of, there was no kind of idea of having, you know, I wasn't going to start a gallery here or anything. I rented this storefront, I lived in the loft and then a friend of mine came to town for the island, Kempton, and he was a painter, and he said, "Oh, I should put up some of my paintings here." And that's kind of how it started. And then it kind of went from there. And then a bunch of us got together and had some meetings. And yeah, so that was kind of it. There was like maybe eight or 10 of us who started it.
Am Johal 5:16
Now, there wasn't a mandate at the grunt for necessarily showing Indigenous art or BIPOC artists, but certainly under your time at the gallery, you know, it certainly became known for its support of Indigenous artists, of new curators and other pieces and wondering if you can talk about how that curatorial direction evolved at the grunt.
Glenn Alteen 5:40
I mean, early on, we were really interested in kind of outsider artists and artists that weren't fitting into the, the scene in Vancouver, I mean, Vancouver, the scene at that point was, you know, this is the, the very beginning years of the Vancouver School, and so they're on everybody's lips, right. It's all about conceptual photography, and theoretical based art is very much the whole thing. And that's what you know, the Or is doing and Artspeak are doing and the Front, more or less is doing. So, we were kind of seeing ourselves as an alternative to that. And so, there was a natural kind of move over it. And I think, you know, our curatorial thing, one of our big questions we always took to any show we were looking at taking in, was, well, if we don't show this, will this get shown by somewhere else in Vancouver? Who else would show this? So, to us, I mean, it was always a, the things that we tend to show are that stuff that the answer was, nobody else was going to show this if we don't do. So that kind of became a thing.
Glenn Alteen 6:37
And then eventually, we started working with different artists came around from the Indigenous community starting with like Mike MacDonald, who was a videographer. And then, you know, we worked on this project with Public Dreams, and Archer came along, and he started working at grunt. So that was the whole thing. And with them, they brought a lot of Indigenous artists with them. You know, and it was a strange time for contemporary Indigenous art in Vancouver, because, you know, there was a big traditional market. But I mean, essentially, if you were doing contemporary work in Vancouver, nobody wanted to show that if you were Indigenous, like it was not, it was really hard to get a show. And so, we started showing that work. And then, you know, it just became more and more and more of it.
Am Johal 7:20
Yeah, so going into the 90s, you remember some of the artists that you worked with during that period of time that, you know, are still making work, or we're kind of pushing the boundaries at that time, because, like you said, the grunt was one of the few places that were showing their work.
Glenn Alteen 7:34
I mean, there was a lot of them, several, a lot artists have died. Mike MacDonald, and Âhasiw [Maskêgon-Iskwêw] and Aiyyana [Maracle], and you know, a host of those. But you know, I mean, I mean, I think the first performance, Indigenous performance, we did at grunt was Margo Kane. And Margo worked with us a couple of times. But there was also, I think we did Marie Clements' first play, was it in the First Nation series we did in 1992. So, there was a lot of artists, I mean, Evan Adams, there was different artists that were working with us at that point that it was very early on. Yeah, as well, as later were people like Rebecca Belmore and Dana Claxton, and, you know, Lawrence Paul, and all those others, you know.
Am Johal 7:37
As you see the Canada Council evolve over time, in terms of how they're making changes to their funding. And in many ways, the way that you're programming in the grunt is the direction that funding is starting to move into the last couple of years. And I'm wondering your sort of reflections as someone who ran a gallery for so long in terms of how the arts and culture funding has shifted from the three levels of government and how you kind of read into it now, having spent that time in all those entanglements, trying to work with government, cultural agencies.
Glenn Alteen 8:52
I mean, for us, I mean, I think that government agencies have been pushing it for a long time. And we knew that, but I mean, there was a slow uptake on the arts community in Canada, around showing Indigenous art. I mean, we were showing it for maybe 15 or 20 years before anybody else was showing it, it was really crazy. And there was a poll period in this town, if you were an Indigenous contemporary artist, and you walked into any gallery in town, they would send you over to me, because that would be the whole thing, was the "Oh, so and so sent me, so and so sent me, so and so sent me." And so, there was nowhere else for these artists to show. So that became this part of thing. But that changed about 10 years ago. And all of a sudden, there was a big uptake by all the other galleries that had not shown very little, you know, up until then. And then, now you see, it's a very pronounced difference. You know, I mean, they just announced the Governor General's Award and five out of eight of the Governor General winners this year are Indigenous. So that's a real, real different place we are at now.
Am Johal 9:52
The grunt has also known very much for giving space to young curators putting up shows and a place to experiment with work and wondering if you can talk about some of the curators you had a chance to work at the grunt.
Glenn Alteen 10:06
Well, early on, I think we decided that besides just showing Indigenous artists was to kind of, to give some voice to Indigenous curators. So, the first person who ever was kind of an intern at grunt, started working as an Indigenous curator was Aiyyana Maracle. And she worked with us for like a bunch of years and Archer too, but then later, you could get these grants for a year to hire somebody as an Indigenous curator, but they were kind of stupid grants, but we would get those, but then, when the year was out, we will keep the person on, which most other places didn't do. So, we tended to kind of go into these longer training periods like Daina Warren, who's a curator. She's started when she was still in art school on an internship in 1999. And then she came to work for us the next year and worked for us until 2007. So, it was like we these longer term and then after that was Tania Willard, and Tania was working with us doing grunt magazine before she did an internship with us. So, these people will work with us for five years in some cases. So it was, these were quite intense relationships. And you know, a lot came out of it.
Am Johal 11:16
Now, you also worked on the Blue Cabin Residency in your last few years at the grunt helping to get that launch. Wondering if you can talk a little bit about what that is.
Glenn Alteen 11:26
Okay, that was a, I'm good friends with or was good friends with Al Neil. And now it was like a real old avant garde musician in Vancouver, but also an artist and a writer. And he lived in the blue cabin, he had rented it, it was on the shores of Cates Park. And the only reason it had been saved because that was one of the oldest squatters communities in Vancouver. It was the squatters community that Malcolm Lowry lived in when he wrote, Under the Volcano. But all of that stuff had been burned out in the 50s. But because this cabin had a relationship with the shipbuilding place next door, it kind of got saved when everything else got burned out.
Glenn Alteen 12:07
And then Al Neil moved in, he rented it from the shipbuilding place, although they didn't own it, technically. And he lived there from like 1966 until, you know, they kicked him out of there in 2014. So, it was a long-term tenure in this place. So, once I kicked him out, there was just this idea that maybe we should save this. There is a lot of history in here. So, we got the idea that we were going to save it. And so luckily, what had happened was the Polygon had bought the shipbuilding company and was going to start a thing there. And thank God it was Polygon. And then of course, we appealed to Audain and Audain, I mean he paid to move that thing out for us, which was great. So, it got moved to a chemical plant that was about four miles away. And it was this chemical plant where they made all kinds of noxious substances with salt, like, so sulfuric acids and all these different. Yeah. And so, you couldn't go out, you had to have a hazard mask to actually go there, and the whole thing, so they stored it for two years while we kind of figured out what that what are we going to do.
Glenn Alteen 13:15
And in the process, we met with conservator, conservation person, Harold Kalman, who is like a heritage planner, and he reached out to us, so he actually did a complete heritage plan for it. And so that was really the first step. Okay, now we know what we're going to do with this thing. But we still didn't know what the hell we were doing with it. When he finished, we realized that it would be, you know, we knew we wanted to do some kind of residency. But the report that they did, they said that you should try to do as little as we could in this cabin, you know, it didn't have water and didn't have electricity. So, it wouldn't have been a very good residency at that point. So then came the idea of, "Oh, well, we'll put up with a small house on a float and it'll become this," because originally the cabin had been on the water, you know, it was moved over to the North Shore. We know this in 1932.
Glenn Alteen 14:06
And then when we started to do the remediation on it, the artist Jeremy Borsos and his wife Sus essentially took the whole cabin apart inside and out. They took it apart and rebuilt it piece by piece. And under the floorboards. They found like posters from 1927. So, we remember the date when the cabin was built by these posters. And it was like, you know, the year that the Orpheum opened, so these posters were to all kinds of events, what they would do is take these posters, they were big posters that they will put on the front of the street cars. If you sometimes see the street cars, they have these posters and they're made of thick card. And so, I guess because Vancouver was the end of the vaudeville circuit, there was lots of extra posters. Terry, the poster man, was telling me that this is quite natural in Kitsilano, is they would use them between the joints and the floorboards so the floor didn't squeak because they were, you know, about a quarter of an inch and they were just thick enough to do that. So, this is what they were doing there. But there were like 40 of them. So it gave us the ability to date it. So, through the process, we just kept going and going and going. And then it opened in the fall of 2019. And so.
Am Johal 15:15
Where is it located now?
Glenn Alteen 15:17
All of this was done in the North Shore. We moved it from the chemical plant to Maplewood Farm, because the city offered us that space free. So, we were actually allowed to move it into a sheep’s pasture in Maplewood Farm. So we were there with the sheep, while we fixed it up. And then eventually we hired Vancouver pile drivers to build the platform, which is concrete covered styrofoam, and we were able to build there too, in their dry dock. So, it moved. And then in the June of 2019, it moved into False Creek. And it was at the Plaza of Nations where it's in there now for going on. And it's going to move from there and in June of this year. And we're just in the process now of finding a place on the North Shore for it.
Am Johal 16:01
Oh, nice. And how long are the residencies when they happen there?
Glenn Alteen 16:05
They are usually about six weeks. So, it could be six to eight weeks, but we have done shorter ones, but I mean, we just started our new residency. I mean, it's been closed most of 2020. The last resident was in residency about a year ago, but a new resident just started Pippa and she is working on this piece of Al Neil's piano from the cabin. And she's created this big piece over it. And that's at the cabin right now.
Am Johal 16:31
Now, where I always run into you at the corner of Main and Kingsway, how long have you and your crew been meeting there? I mean, I'm just like an odd fly on the wall. I make cameo appearances, but you guys are like the regulars, so.
Glenn Alteen 16:46
Well, it was always Lawrence and I. I mean, I've known Lawrence for 30 years. And you know, we've always kind of gotten together for coffee in the morning. So, kind of the only time I see him and so when Gene opened, we kind of moved over there. So, I don't know, it's got to be 15 years ago, or 18 years ago, but before that we were at a coffee shop up at the corner. So, it was kind of like we've been, you know, at that part of Main Street. On that block on Main Street for 25 years anyway. And then other people join us because Ahmed, who's a costume designer, he's by every day on his way to work. And there's a whole bunch of other crew that just come through and it's just this never ending thing of coffee clutches. I mean, it was good. We really got a lot of us through the pandemic, because we just met right through the pandemic.
Am Johal 17:32
It's amazing how just sitting there, how much art and political gossip slash we've traded notes on which blood thinners we're on, you know, it's timely to the banal. It all gets covered off there on the street, so.
Glenn Alteen 17:46
Well, it is a bunch of people that drink coffee, they fix old cars, so the conversation could go from art to old cars back to Earth. You know, anyway, it's crazy. Yeah.
Am Johal 17:57
So, I saw a couple of photos of your last day at the grunt gallery, which was, you know, during the pandemic, but wondering if you could share that story a little bit, because I just saw the visual side of it.
Glenn Alteen 18:08
Oh, yeah. No, we well, it was so strange, you know, to be retired during pandemic, so we didn't know what to do. And in the end, they decided that we just have a thing, one of the last projects that I worked on, besides the blue cabin was a Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen up, at Kingsway and Broadway. And so, they decided that we just have something in the parking lot there, that was socially distanced, to say goodbye. But then, I guess before I got there, they got kicked out of the parking lot so we were on the street by the time I got there right across from the screen, and they were playing this program on the screen for my retirement. It was quite fun.
Am Johal 18:44
So, what are you up to now? Because I mean, you don't seem like the retirement type. You might not be working at the grunt anymore. But what are you up to these days?
Glenn Alteen 18:53
What am I up to, while I'm still working on the Blue Cabin, I've seemed to have gotten less grunt but the cabin.
Am Johal 18:59
Get that hammer in your hand.
Glenn Alteen 19:01
Yeah, no. So, I'm at this point, I'm trying to figure out where we're moving it to the North Shore. And then do some fundraising around it because of COVID is kind of really left us for a pickle. What else am I doing? We're working with his intern from SFU around putting together some of my writing archives, like a chronology and an archive of my writing, because I kind of wrote for the last 35 years, but I didn't pay much attention. Usually, I wrote if somebody paid me to write, or somebody said they would publish it, I would write something. So, I never actually collected all those things. So now we're trying to put that together and see what that looks like. I'm still working with Dan Pon, the archivist at grunt in the archives, where he's going through and asking me questions and reporting about different shows. So, a bunch of different projects. You know.
Am Johal 19:44
You got a Governor General's Award. You didn't even mention that.
Glenn Alteen 19:48
Oh, that was a couple years ago. Yeah, I did. Yes. Yeah. That was wonderful. Yeah. In 2018. So yeah, I was one of the few people to get one from that Governor General.
Am Johal 19:59
A short window of time, you could pick one.
Glenn Alteen 20:02
Yeah. So yeah, I know that's, I mean, that's mostly keeping me busy. But I mean, COVID is kind of thrown in for a loop, because it's hard to get out, you know, to do too much in this situation. On the other hand, I mean, I'm fine to not do too much for the time being, it's fine. You know, I don't feel like I need to push myself.
Am Johal 20:20
Totally. And if there's some government arts and culture funding types, listening to this, what would be your message to them in terms of coming out of the pandemic, how arts and culture funding ought to be kind of looked at as we go forward in the next few years?
Glenn Alteen 20:38
Well, I kind of got reading this guy named Hans Abbing, who was a Dutch artist and an economist. And he actually wrote a book called, Why Are Artists Poor. And it's quite interesting. And his recommendation around this, which I think is saying, is not to put more money into Arts Councils, and Arts Awards. It's to put money into employment schemes for artists, in terms of healthcare schemes for artists, things that are available to all artists, and are not awarded out by an award system. And I think it's really sound place to be going to, because, you know, as a government puts more money into the Canada Council, more people apply for Canada Council, and actually less people may get money, then we're getting it before. So, it's a real problem, when you're trying to change the economy of the arts, to try to do it to arts awards like the, you know, the Canada Council or the BC Arts Council. So, I think it's just like employment schemes that allow artists to get on unemployment insurance, that allow artists to get health care, all those things need to be made available, you know, resale rights, all those things.
Am Johal 21:43
Now, you know, at the time that artist run centers, were starting out here in the 80s, the way you describe the story about just, you know, renting an apartment and starting to do things, we have, you know, three different art schools here, probably more than that, in fact, and a lot of students graduating with a load of debt and trying to find a place to have their show, opening up their own spaces, what would be your advice to students coming out of school who are coming out of different visual arts programs in terms of how they might think about being an artist in the city, in such an expensive city like this?
Glenn Alteen 22:17
I think it's a whole new game. I mean, with the internet and how that's working and all that stuff. I think there's a lot more choices about how you put yourself out there than there was before this. So, I think it's really looking at where you see yourself being in a couple of years or a few years and try to work towards that. Because, you know, I mean, try to find, you know, see where you want to go because I think that's the hardest thing for artists right now is to actually see what their career path could be.
Am Johal 22:46
Do you think artists run centers could do a better job of providing a space and a venue for recent graduates to have their first show? Or is it that things have evolved in such a way that we might need new types of spaces to create that?
Glenn Alteen 23:02
I think artist run centres are doing that and have been doing that traditionally, for a long time. I don't think that's a new idea, I think that has gone on it, you know, will continue to go on. I mean, there's a lot of artists and centers whose mandate is emerging artists, you know.
Am Johal 23:17
Glen, my last question to you is, you know, I want you to mine your 35 plus years to finish off this interview with a good story from your mental archive.
Glenn Alteen 23:28
Oh, I don't know what that would look like. Should have told me that was coming. Good story from my mental archive. I think I'll tell a story about when I first met Lawrence, it was one of the earliest times, like I met Lawrence, we were living in the same building and didn't know each other and then somebody, a mutual friend, introduced us. And so, we would have coffee from time to time and I remember one time he went hunting, and he was gone hunting for two weeks and I came back, and I went through the back of the buildings, and I saw the lights were on in his apartment. So, I thought, "oh he is home finally" so I went up and on my way to my apartment, I went in and knocked on the door. And then I hear Lawrence scream, "come in". And so, I walk in, and I go into the kitchen, and they're in the dining room on the dining room table. He's got laid down this big piece of plastic tarp, and he's slaughtering a moose. There is like blood everywhere. It looks like a serial killers gone crazy in his apartment. It was one of the most amazing moments and eye fulls I ever saw was just like, whoa, whoa. That's harsh. Not that I've never seen a moose being slaughtered but not in apartment. It's like wow. Anyway.
Am Johal 24:43
I hope he makes a good moose stew. Thanks so much for joining us on Below the Radar Glenn.
Glenn Alteen 24:50
Okay, thank you very much.
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Kathy Feng 24:53
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. This has been our conversation with Glenn Alteen. You can find links to learn more about grunt gallery and the Blue Cabin Floating Artists Residency in the show notes below. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time on Below the Radar.
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