Harley Parker’s Reconceptualization of the Museum as a Communication System
Adam Lauder
The contemporary transformation of the museum into a nodal space in a global communications network discovers an unlikely precedent in the innovative practice and writings of the Canadian artist and exhibition designer Harley Parker (1915-1992). Parker is best remembered today for his extended dialogue with Marshall McLuhan, an exchange that resulted in two book projects: the 1969 edition of Counterblast, designed by Parker, and the 1968 co-authored Through the Vanishing Point, an... Read more...
R. Bruce Elder
There is a strain of Canadian thought dedicated to developing a new poetics of space and time, more about it learn here; its particular virtue arises from an unusual ability to plumb the depths of mythic consciousness. This ability, I have no doubt, arises in part out of the Europeans’ encounter with a primal landscape and with original peoples, whose difference created an openness among the European settlers and their... Read more...
Ken Coupland’s Restaurant at Rochdale College
Robin Simpson
“Quantitative measurements will get you nowhere, and all descriptions are on their way to being out of date as soon as formulated.”1 So Rochdale College’s 1969 academic calendar prompted incoming residents as they prepared to join the then one-year old experimental free school at the north-end of the University of Toronto’s campus. For those weary of uppity collegiality and longing for community, Rochdale promised “a living articulate cross-section of contemporary society... Read more...
Iain Baxter&
When I parachuted into Vancouver in 1964, the city was beginning to exp& its global attitude & McLuhan’s musings were just gaining traction. My background in ecology & zoology, my experience photo-documenting the environment, & in 1961 my year-long studio, research & travels in Japan all prepared me to tap into McLuhan’s consciousness & its consequences for all our cultural thinking. People like Abe Rogatnick, Alvin Balkind & Victor Doray... Read more...
Jennifer Marman, Daniel Borins
Found materials juxtaposed into a social setting. A sculpture that plays dislocated sounds; to echo disconnected forms.1 Â A serial repetition of forms. A minimalist relief sculpture that is interactive.2 Â The needles measure the proximity of the viewer to the surface.3 Â A billboard and matching park bench. The viewer completes the piece.4 Â High art and popular culture in a continuously rotating cycle.5 Â An architectural feature presented... Read more...
Harley Parker’s Struggles at the Royal Ontario Museum
Gary Genosko
There can be little question that the new corporate stance as manifested by the tribal “hippie,” in fact by a large number of our teenagers, more or less eliminates those factors of intense individualism which have been observed for the last five hundred years.1 This essay considers Harley Parker’s deduction in theory, and his struggle in practice, to reach a specific audience with his museum exhibition designs. Conceptually, he deduced... Read more...
