Arts Court
by Alex Sinclair

This article was originally written for ARTicles news magazine Nov/Dec 1987. ARTicles was published bi-monthly by the CAO for 7 years in the 1980's.

When I was approached to write an article on Arts Court, the building was several days away from its official opening; as I wrote the article, Arts Court was hosting a large segment of the Festival of the Arts and attracting significant crowds; as the article is being read, the building again lies dormant. This time, however, Arts Court's dormancy is cocooned in an increased awareness of its purpose, rather than the cloak of ignorance in which it had been wrapped.

Nevertheless, there may be aspects of Arts Court still shrouded from all but the most avid of art scene lovers, so let's try to shed a little light. First of all, the information-brochure facts: The building is at 2 Daly Street – the old courthouse – plus the old police station, which is on Waller Street, adjacent to the courthouse. The building has been committed for use as an arts centre, but has yet even to leave the hands of its provincial owners, let alone went its way through the regional and municipal maze to its adoptive parents, the Ottawa Arts Centre Foundation. The project is standing on sands that could shift as early as December when the City reviews its commitment. If serious funding is not in place by then, the rest of this article may be moot.

The Court is intended to have an art gallery, a craft gallery, a sculpture court, viewing rooms for video art, a small recital hall, and numerous small rooms for dance and performance art, seminars and workshops. That's Phase I. In Phase II, the police stations will be replaced by a commercial complex, which will contain a theatre of 500 seats.

Anyway, the ubiquitous bottom line is 40 million dollars: 9.5 million for the site, 20 million for construction, and 10 million for an endowment fund to keep the whole thing going. The 9.5 million dollar value of the site is almost in the bank. Eight million more dollars would come from profit on the commercial complex, except that there's a small Catch-22 at work. The City won't turn over the building (once they get it from the province) until the funding is in place; Arts Court has someone who wants to buy the commercial complex (there's the 8 million) but not until it's been leased; it can't be leased until the foundations are in the ground; the foundations can't go in until the site has been transferred; the site wont be transferred until funding for the arts facility is in place…Needless to say, there is some frustration involved with this project.

The rest of the money is supposed to come from provincial and federal grants ($16 million) and private fundraising ($6.5 million). The government grants are stuck in a netherworld of political interests; apparently the province has some preference to Toronto as a recipient for funds and the federal government thinks that the vast sums spent on national structures such as the Museum of Civilization and the National Art Gallery should keep Ottawa happy. It may be worth noteing that Project 88, the NCC's six-month party to celebrate the opening of the aforementioned buildings, was given a budget of $70 million, which would have built a complete Arts Court in a year and left $30 million for programmes. Oh well, I'd rather have a pink road and a royal visit any day; let's keep our priorities straight. On the other hand, the NCC had to cancel their plans for that pink road, so there must be $15 million floating around their offices somewhere that might be looking for a home.

The main function of Arts Court is to be a showplace for the arts. These showplaces can become Meccas for arts administrators, but word is that Arts Court plans to keep staff fairly small. Although not as extensive as Toronto's Harbourfront complex, Arts Court will have a similar mix of professional and amateur presentations, of education along with the art, and a similar ambience of activity. The intention is to have a place where artists can meet with other artists, and with the public in order to stimulate new energy and ideas, and to increase the community's awareness of who its artists are and what they do. Reciprocally, I suppose, it may help the artists discover what, and who their community is.

Anyone who wandered through Arts Court during the Festival of the Arts will remember the maze of small rooms which make up the courthouse. A few walls will come down to expand some the these rooms, but most rooms will be left intact to serve as space for seminars, workshops, dressing rooms, and offices. Many of the walls are paneled in the beautiful woods that one tends to associate with courthouses, and certainly never associates with the operating-room-sterility of modern art galleries with their hectares upon hectares of white drywall. There is no guarantee that this wood paneling will remain in Arts Court. The province still owns the building and may remove some, or all, of it fore use in other provincial buildings. Or, it may disappear from architect's plans, once such plans are drawn. No such plans have been drawn, because there's no point until funding is established and ownership is secure. Arts court may yet wind up as a complex of white cubes.

The visual arts galleries (there may be as many as six display areas) are to be run as a public art gallery. The programmes will be selected by a curatorial staff, with the emphasis on locally created art. Exchanges with non-local galleries will also be featured, especially with Québec galleries. The programming philosophy has yet to be worked out in detail, again, why bother until ownership and funding….but the curatorial staff will be hired with a view to sensitivity towards local artists and local concerns.

There will be no studio space for visual artists, too much space would be taken up by too few artists and public access would suffer. Also, there is so much demand for studios that is would be difficult to allocate space. However, writing groups would find a plethora of rooms in which to hold meetings, conduct workshops, develop ideas, and rehearse. There will also be performance areas ranging from 50 seats to 500 seats, allowing groups both amateur and professional to grow with their audiences. Dance groups and performance artists would also enjoy the benefits of these various development and performance areas.

Arts Court is to have a mandate for both entertainment and experimentation. The Foundation believes that diversity is necessary if one hopes to build and educate audiences, so there will be a mix of the popular and the esoteric in the programming of the theatre and the galleries. One advantage of having several performance areas in the complex is that small experimental groups will have access to good facilities in a high-profile environment at relatively low cost. The main theatre will be large enough to allow for profitable popular performances, which can subsidize the smaller groups.

And, as audiences become more sophisticated, and the esoteric moves toward the popular, the experimental groups can move into the larger theatre and make way for the new esoterica.

The theatre will be non-union. Fully professional shows can bring in union technical crews, but smaller productions and amateur groups will not be required to pay the prohibitive costs associated with union halls. Arts Court will not have a large full-time staff, but will provide a trained technician and perhaps an apprentice or two to assist productions. The seating capacity, greater than that of GCTC or the York Street Theatre, will allow the possibility of profit; it will also contain an orchestra pit, thus allowing chamber opera to be staged.

It has yet to be determined whether it will be the clients or Arts Court itself who will assume the monetary risk for performances and exhibitions. There is a recommendation extant that groups should receive a flat fee for appearing and that Arts Court should take the risk, and the profit. Alternately, groups could take the risk. Until funding is in place, especially the endowment fund, there is no way of knowing whether or not Arts Court could afford to assume any risk.

Programming will be mainly, but not exclusively, local and regional. Arts Court will be available for touring exhibitions of visual and performing art. The main concern is that the centre provide a place where local arts can flourish, but not to the point of introversion. Touring shows will allow for the cross-fertilization of ideas, as well as ensure that local productions continue to aspire to high standards of quality.

In addition to the galleries, theatres, rehearsal spaces, and seminar rooms, Arts Court has planned for a resource centre. This will include the PARASOL project (a shared database for arts groups), and a portfolio library for local artists and artisans. In such a library, videotapes, audiotapes, and slides could be filed as a convenient reference centre for other artists and potential clients. This will require the active participation of area artists to assemble a significant collection of portfolios; at the moment there is no acquisition budget. This resource centre could be operating before the rest of the complex opens. Arts Court is already collecting material, and could open a small resource area in their present office space. Such a centre would enable Arts Court to offer a concrete service to the community, and find out whether local artists were interested in having an arts centre of this kind.

There may also be limited space for offices for arts groups. This space is likely to be so limited that it will be available only to umbrella groups; the Council for the Arts in Ottawa has been suggested as a possible tenant. However, there may be space to allow provision of post boxes and answering machines, as well as storage space for records, and rooms in which to hold meetings. The centre will have facilities for photocopying and desktop publishing, and computers, but access to these services has yet to be determined. At the very least, Arts Court could run workshops on the use of technology, and perhaps open up some possibilities in the imaginations of Ottawa artists.

Arts Court is not located conveniently for cars. There's not much parking in the area, and it's easy to get confused driving around all those one-way streets. Maybe I'm just easily confused, but I have an intense dislike of the whole Rideau Centre, Byward Market district whenever I'm in a car. It's also somewhat akin to taking your life in your hands to try to bicycle to Arts Court. OC Transpo and Blue Line are the safest way to get there.

Although there is a building, as noted many times in this article, Arts Court is still very much a process, rather than a reality. The site has not been transferred, few funds have been committed, there are no architect plans for renovations. Even as a process Arts Court is fragile. The Foundation is in dire need of political support as well as money. They have as much interest in getting people to write letters of support as they do in getting donations. The efforts that they have put into this project may give the Foundation a vested interest in saying so, but they believe that if this opportunity slips by, Ottawa may not have another chance for a municipal arts centre for another fifty years.

Every conversation about Arts Court revolves around the need for money. However, the Festival of the Arts has demonstrated that the building has considerable potential for use even as it its. It may not be a perfectly controlled environment for art, but it has immense character, and could be a very good site for performance. With the resource centre operating and regular exhibitions and performances, Arts Court could rapidly prove its worth to the Ottawa arts scene.

There is an undercurrent of concern amongst some Ottawa artists, perhaps a carry-over of the NAC syndrome, that Arts Court will be yet one more insensitive monument to Culture. If it is to establish credibility as a focal point for the experimental as well as the popular, Arts Court could do no better than to extend the kind of programming that it has hosted for the Festival of the Arts. Granted, even this would require some stability in the form of guaranteed access to the building, if not outright ownership. Nevertheless, artists are by nature rather solitary, suspicious beasts, and if they are to be assembled into a political force, they need a clear demonstration of a good reason why they shouldn't remain a fragmented community. What is obvious to an administrator is not necessarily self-evident to an artist looking for a place to earn this month's rent. The long-range view is not always practical.

Toronto built a vibrant theatre scene in the Seventies in dozens of tiny spaces scattered throughout the city. Theses were funded by small grants, and an audience built on a cumulative excitement. At the same time, the O'Keefe Centre was siphoning millions of dollars down a sink hole of red ink. Large-scale showplaces have to demonstrate that they are a safer bet for the mythic Shrinking Arts Dollar than having the same investment spread through many small spaces.

I can well imagine the frustration of the Arts Centre Foundation waiting and waiting for final decisions on the government funding that will allow it to draw up final plans and present a true Showplace to, and for, Ottawa. They need the support of Ottawa artists; Ottawa artists need to be show that Arts Court can help them as much.

Alex Sinclair continues to work as a musician out of the Toronto area and his group Tamarack continues to perform and tour.