A minimum of 16 people, dressed in GREY, occupy a street corner, making a SILENT grey square.
Someone in that group will be designated corner captain.
The corner captain keeps track of time and leads the grey square from one corner of the city to another.
After 15 minutes in a corner, led by the corner captain, they walk single file to another city corner and make another square.
This goes on all day, all around the downtown core.
People will be funneled in and out in hourly intervals so that no one except the most zealous need to commit more than an hour of their day.

At least 100m away, (this is important – so that people seeing the grey square have some time and space to go “what the hell?” and experience a bit of mystery in their lives before they are given an explanation) volunteers give out pamphlets that ONLY say:

The world without art is grey.

At the back of the pamphlet there will be an address to a blog:
http://worldwithoutart.wordpress.com/

This blog will tell them in greater detail what they are seeing and why.
Statistics, information, links to Alliance and other relevant sites etc.
Also, when there might be future grey squares.
(Future grey squares can be in front of performances, theatres, libraries etc and do not have to go on all day.)
It will eventually have videos and photos of past grey squares.

This grey square relay will also be documented – videos and photos.

This is not a protest. This is about art and artists taking their place in the world.

How to participate:
We need volunteers to:
- stand in the squares
- hand out pamphlets
- video the event and edit your version of the relay
- take photographs

Please email Justine Chambers at movingjac@gmail.com and tell her what you are prepared to do. She will give you more details.

Public Dreams Society, producer of the Day of the Dead-style festival on Commercial Drive, must enter a “revisioning process” for the future, which could include corporate sponsorship for the community event, as means to make up for receiving nothing from direct access grants issued by B.C. Liberals.

“Without the funding solidly in place we have to stop and there’s nothing wrong with doing that,” said Society managing director Pamela McKeown.

McKeown estimated at least $100,000 is needed to finance stipends for participating artists, operational costs and ensuring a safe and secure closure of the Drive for the event, which attracted upwards of 35,000 people last year.

The Society, a not-for-profit enterprise, will move forward on plans to hold the parade in 2010 should affected community groups feel the event “still fits” with the neighbourhood.

Reasons This Makes No Sense Economically:

 • B.C.’s arts and culture sector employs more than 78,000 people and contributes over $5 billion each year to the provincial economy

• Yes, billion.

• The B.C. government’s own research has demonstrated that for every dollar invested in the arts, $1.38 comes back in taxes

 • Contrast this move with the response to financial downturn in Ontario: Ontario increased their core arts spending by approximately 130 million in this year’s budget

How Does This Affect You?

• Arts foundations, non-profits and galleries will close or reduce their programming or services. Example: Between the announcement Friday, August 28 and Wednesday, September 3, 2009, 2 Vancouver galleries have announced that they are being forced to close their doors.

• Creative people will leave B.C. in droves

• Drastically reduced opportunities for cultural exposure in the province for yourselves and your children

• Huge damage to the reputation of B.C. – do you want to live in and bring up your children in a cultural wasteland? Was there a reason you chose to live in a city and not in a closet?

• Everything you attend, view, take your children to, or see in a cultural framework is partly subsidized by provincial infrastructure. Arts Umbrella? Children’s Festival? Vancouver Art Gallery? Gallery openings? Ballet BC? BYE!

Common Misconceptions

• Artists are not spending their time at champagne soirees at the taxpayer’s expense. Artists are among the most underpaid professions in our society.

• Culture is an industry, not something that just “happens”. You’re thinking of people who make pictures of owls using bottle caps.

• Not a hobby. Don’t argue that running the Children’s Festival or arranging an international visual art exhibition is something we’re supposed to do in our spare time.

• Artists are not “fancy”. Art is a hugely important part of our shared culture. Were the cave paintings fancy? Do you like written language? Have you ever seen a movie or worn a nice shirt or walked through a public space?

• You cannot argue that the cultural sector must be commercially viable or die. A huge amount of heavy lifting in terms of ideas, social good and cultural visioning is performed by the creative industries and this does not neatly align with commercial engagement.

• These grants we’re talking about do not entirely pay for the operations of these cultural associations so forget the word “parasite” when you make your economic argument. They represent a small but crucially important portion of total support and income.

• Art is not about artists, it is about communities and culture.

• This discussion is not only art, it is dance, film, heritage, publishing, media, sound, music, design, theatre, social outreach, community festivals.

• People in these industries work hard, have jobs and have families too, and are already underpaid.

• A healthy arts sector is essential for healthy communities.

The idea that this is about supporting art vs feeding needy children is a shell game. We need to do both.

Author: Kate Armstrong

The Helen Pitt Gallery is a non-profit artist-run centre dedicated to the promotion of experimental contemporary art that addresses social, political, cultural, and critical issues. They promote and facilitate public dialogue concerning critical awareness, social consciousness, contemporary art practices and community.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/vancouver-losing-helen-pitt-gallery/article1276688/

then the confirmation came.  the government had decided to back out of the deals they had made with most every established arts organization around.  they pulled funding that had been promised, funding that programs and festivals bad been built on, funding that in many cases had already been spent, sticking many groups with bills that would now go unpaid.

signing into Facebook that morning i thought, well, i may not be able to coordinate a community-wide event, but i can stage my own, one-woman art strike.  i did a google image search of the word “grey”.  found a shade ominous enough to match my mood, one stripped of all gradient values, all textures, all composition.  the one i chose is a colour swatch from an upholstery store.  no lovely folded fabrics, just a perfect, digital, square.  because “symmetry is dead” as anyone knows who studied design under Petr Perina.

i saved this colour sample to my hard drive, then uploaded it as my profile picture on Facebook.  i captioned it with a plea for others to do the same, to paint protest signs “without words, without fonts, just grey.”  that first day, nobody did it.  my friends wouldn’t do it because they said “it still seemed like art, in and of itself”.  which of course, it is.

as the phenomenon slowly (then quickly) caught on, i saw each person repost the caption with their own interpretation of the meaning.  some referred to it a s a triangle, some as a rectangle.  some said that the government had stolen our faces.  some said that the world would be boring without any art.  to me, the image is one of stifling, asphixiating silence.  it is art, unexpressed.  it is the artist in all of us, stripped of all joyous vibrancy.  it is a straight-jacket.

on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 nearly 1,000 people filled the steps of the art gallery, all dressed entirely in grey.  the rainy day matched our sadness.  all of our colours and all of our sunshine were gone.  some people painted their signs grey, some brought “signless” signs.  one young boy fell to the ground in mock death, a few red leaves falling from the corner of his mouth, his still open umbrella lolling beside him and a white chalk line drawn around where he lay.  these are the most haunting images of that day.

the provincial government had ultimately retracted their budget, and was forced to meet their legal commitment to pay up the funds they had promised, but they nonetheless cancelled the project, squelching any possibiliy for renewals.  so our lives had been extended for one year.  we all have just one year to live.  and that’s why they grey squares continue to appear all over the province.  they appear as stickers, as pins, as clusters of grey-soaked people silently bearing witness to the fall of Arts and Culture in British Columbia.

and on this page is where you will watch it happen.