- Grand Hotel: Redesigning Modern Life at the Vancouver Art Gallery until Sept. 15.
THE Vancouver Art Gallery's massive new exhibit, Grand Hotel, has been put together on a scale to match its subject.
The show, cocurated by Jennifer M. Volland, guest curator, and Bruce Grenville, senior curator, with assistant curator Stephanie Rebick, explores the entire history of hotels through various forms of media breaking the material down into four main categories: Travel, Design, Social and Culture. Each category has several rooms devoted to its area of focus with an enormous amount of detail packed into each aspect of the exhibit. You could literally spend hours in each room going through the photographs, documents, models and other material collected from hotels all over the world. This is one show that needs several visits to fully take in. A blog online (projects.vanartgallery. bc.ca/publications/Hotel/blog-2/) and a 336-page catalogue accompany the exhibit filling in even more detail on the subject.
Guest curator Jennifer M. Volland, who initially pitched the idea to the gallery and has spent six years working on Grand Hotel, talked to the North Shore News about the project.
North Shore News: Encyclopedic is a word that comes to mind in describing Grand Hotel. How did the show come together?
Jennifer M. Volland: I don't know how far back you want me to go but I've always been fascinated with hotels since I was a child and when I went to graduate school at UCLA my topic of study in the Critical Studies program was architecture but specifically hotels. When I finished that program in 2006 the following year I talked to Kathleen Bartels, the director here (at the gallery), about the idea of doing an exhibition on hotels.
Two years after that Stephanie Rebick and Bruce Grenville and I started collaborating on the project and of course it evolved tremendously with their input. I like that you used the word encyclopedic because that's what it feels like - it's just been many, many years of research. It's a very dense exhibition in some ways but also moments of immersive and experiential environments so there's something in there for everyone.
North Shore News: Was the creation of the blog the initial introduction to the project?
Jennifer M. Volland: Yes, we were working on the project before that time but the blog was the first public presence for the project. It was unique in that we wanted to use it as a public research tool to test out ideas but also we wanted to give people a behind the scenes look at our process. Even up to last week we were uploading photos and talking about some of the projects that were going to be in the show. We wanted to make the entire process more transparent to people and let them come along in our understanding of the hotel.
North Shore News: In one of the entries in the blog you mention your fascination with hotels as a child long before you studied their architecture in university. What drew you in? What interested you about them?
Jennifer M. Volland: My earliest memories are of travelling with my family. We were campers but on the rare occasion we were able to stay somewhere else it was such a treat for us. For us that was Motel Six so it wasn't that it was luxury accommodation but for a child it was very exciting to have somewhere different to stay. We could watch cable and we could go swimming and run up and down the stairs and use the vending machines. I think it was the idea that you could break rules a little and it was a place that existed outside of the norms of your home life. To me that was exciting and it was also a place of imagination. As a child you can create all kinds of scenarios in hotels and as adults I think we do that to a large extent as well.
North Shore News: The overall presentation is sort of like a mammoth cabinet of curiosities with streams of ideas branching out in many directions. How did you organize the material?
Jennifer M. Volland: We certainly needed an organizing structure and that's why we divided it into the four categories. We built up on that structure and from an organizational standpoint we all had areas of interest that we focused on. Stephanie took on the travel section, Bruce was working on the design objects, I was working on the design typologies, we all had input in the social and culture sections. That's how it kind of worked from a territorial standpoint.
Because of my interest in architecture I sort of took on the design typology section - the long room where you saw all the models. I didn't build the models but we came up with a list of 10 hotels that we wanted to look at that we felt were exemplary moments of hotel design and that's when we hired Goodweather to interpret our ideas. We gave them little dossiers on each of the hotels and kind of let them have a field day with their imagination in bringing those models to life.
North Shore News: That room is amazing. Jennifer M. Volland: I don't know how often you come to the gallery but it's so nice to see that room as one big space. They've opened the windows for the first time in years and I think the models just bring it to life.
North Shore News: Were there teams of people working on those models?
Jennifer M. Volland: Michael Lis' Goodweather Studio did all the models. He probably had a core team of four people who were working on them over the past six months although we started talking to him about a your ago, maybe even longer. Their work has been tremendous. What they've come back with is so much more than what we ever expected because they didn't just build the models mechanically they really thought about the process and just put so much thought into each one - from the peep holes in the Westin Bonaventure to the grid of photographs on the Waldorf Astoria - they really found something unique and played upon the salient features of each example.
North Shore News: What was involved in your research for Grand Hotel? The catalogue features interviews you did with some of the major players in the hospitality industry. You've covered a lot of ground.
Jennifer M. Volland: Research involves everything from going to hotels to recollections of past experiences. I had a lot of
historical background in studying hotels in graduate school and that was augmented tremendously by what Bruce and Stephanie and I did together. There is not a huge amount of scholarly work on hotels but there is a growing interest in them. I would say there is a half dozen to a dozen that seriously look at hotels and those provided a great foundation for us. I think because hotels are such an experiential type of place that a lot of the research comes from visiting or learning online or talking to other people about it so the research in this exhibition is sort of particular to the subject matter. It's different than you would go about researching a body of art or even a body of architecture for that matter. This is a unique subject.
North Shore News: The Waldorf Astoria seems to be the template for the Grand Hotel - a palace built during the height of the Great Depression.
Jennifer M. Volland: The Waldorf is the example that provided a lot of insight into the hotel for us because of the social connotations with it. Architecturally it is significant because it is built in the art deco style. This giant skyscraper hotel that was like a city within a city. It commented on every aspect of the exhibition. It changed the cityscape of New York and it also touched on the cultural aspect in that it was a place where people continued to meet and ideas were formed. Presidents visited and Andy Warhol had an underground party in the railway station (in 1965). The stories are there with that hotel and they continue.
Early on in the process we visited the Waldorf and got a tour of the back-of-house spaces and that was such an eye-opening experience for us. They are massive and the amount of people working behind the scenes and below ground in the kitchens - the soup pots alone are like two feet by three feet. It's amazing and I think that was eye-opening for us because we didn't want a show on hotels just to be the surface. We really wanted, to the best of our abilities, to show the big picture of the hotel and for us that included back of house and the negative side. The Waldorf Astoria was built at the height of the Great Depression and the discrepancy you see at that time and how a building like that highlighted all those inequities. North Shore News: The political aspect is also brought out with the material on the Intercontinental Hotels in Latin America.
Jennifer M. Volland: Yes that's right and Stephanie had a large role in that section. She was very interested in the politics of travel and she wrote an essay on it for the catalogue. Again you don't pause to think about the motivations behind hotels you just think of them as places to stay in a surface reading of hotels but there were strong political motivations behind those hotels in territories outside America.
North Shore News: At the other end of the socio-economic scale is New York's Chelsea Hotel - a perfect example of the hotel as a cultural hub.
Jennifer M. Volland: We called it a cultural incubator. It's a serendipitous meeting of things that happened at places like the Chelsea and the Beat Hotel. Certainly it's a combination of the people who were going there, the permissive environments and also the people who were running the hotel - whether it was Stanley Bard at the Chelsea or Madame Rachou at the Beat Hotel - they had an understanding of artists and creative thinkers in a way that fostered those sorts of environments. It was a melting pot of ideas and there were certain periods of prolificness that are hard to capture - with the Beat Hotel it was a short period of time, 1957 to 1963, when Ginsberg and Burroughs and Gregory Corso were all hanging out there and the Chelsea had a much longer history with well-known moments such as when Andy Warhol filmed Chelsea Girls there.
North Shore News: The show has an enormous amount of detail from the actual Gram Parsons vinyl recording of GP to a rare copy of Minutes to Go, a cut-up book of poetry put together by William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, and Gregory Corso in 1960. What was involved in researching and collecting the material?
Jennifer M. Volland: An amazing research team led by Stephanie. Multiple people, who were great at finding photographs and ephemera, with a driven interest in the work. For Bruce and Stephanie working at a cultural institution like the Vancouver Art Gallery it is second nature to them but for sure it was intensive.
There could be a book written about any one of those hotels in the Culture section.
