Page 58 - Studio International - October 1970

Drawing Walter de Maria
De Maria—Danger—Dwan
Advertisement for Bed of Spikes exhibition by
lines in the Walter de Maria at the Dwan
Gallery, New York (Reproduced from Studio
International, April 1969)
desert 2
Walter de Maria
Bed of Spikes 1969
Installation shot
(a study of (Photograph courtesy of Dwan Gallery)

North American

art)

Eric Cameron

My first impression of Canada was a deluge of and City Officials, there were such statistics aspirations in that direction for the future, an
statistics, of televisions per family unit, of per- as the numbers of trained firemen, the number outline history of the university of Guelph
centages of employed population engaged in of police cars and walkie-talkie radios, the from Toronto college days onwards and the
agriculture, of latitude, of longitude, of acres mileage of sanitary sewers and storm sewers, course enrolments in Fine Art for every year
and square miles, of mean daily winter the number of street lights, the number of from 1964 to 1969.
minimum temperature, of annual hours of schools, teachers and pupils at Junior, Senior I will admit that I would have been very hard
sunshine, of per capita production and con- Elementary and Secondary levels, and the pressed to give comparable information for
sumption, of washing machines, of auto- wavelength of the local radio station. Leeds or for Horsforth, the small town outside
mobiles, of refrigerators, of humidity, of inches What struck me more than any of this was that Leeds where I lived although I had worked at
of rain, of feet of snow and degrees of frost, perfectly normal reasonable people could give Leeds University for ten years, and I sus-
of comparisons inside and outside Canada, of me information about the height above sea- pected my friends were just as ignorant as I
hundreds of miles of railways, of thousands of level, precise distances from Hamilton, Kit- was. If any of them did know the height above
miles of roads and of millions of tons of ship- chener-Waterloo, Stratford, London, Buffalo sea-level they certainly never let on to me. For
ping. and Toronto, of the travelling time to Toronto that matter the 60-page official Guide to
Much of this information came from sources by train, bus or expressway, of the driving Horsforth doesn't say what height it is above
whose sole reasons for existence is to bombard time to Montreal, Detroit, New York, Wash- sea-level either or what the distance is to
would-be immigrants with information, so I ington and Boston, of Guelph's population anywhere except Leeds. It does give the area
took it all in good part, which is to say I threw figures and the projections for 1980, of the in acres and the population figures at the latest
most of it away and promptly forgot it. One present number of students enrolled in the census, but there are certainly none of the
item I did keep was a map of Guelph on the University and the projections for 1980, of the statistics which cram the single sheet of the
back of which, along with a message from the proportion of Canadians of University age Guelph map : no list of Council officials, no
Mayor and the names of the entire Council who were actually in Universities and of statistics of walkie-talkie radios, no numbers