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news

Faux-hum, bobooooooring

By Jill

bohemian embarassment
This month, the frequently delightful Fly Gallery is even more responsive than usual to its immediate environment, with this poster and video installation by Michael Toke.
Timed to chafe against the impending opening of a certain condo sales centre, “Bohemian Embarassment” succinctly sums up the feeling that overcomes most locals when they chance to walk by its towering inspiration across the street.
Check it out in the window at 1172 Queen W. until August 31 or hurry over to www.bohemianembarrassment.ca to watch Queen West’s bourgeoise giantess yawn, fidget and drink straight from the bottle of self-loathing and boredom in this hilariously detailed parody.

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  • http://www.shoppingcartsinravines.com orbz

    She even throws up… I was just about to point out the offensive Bohemian Embassy ad across the street when this display took the words right out of my mouth :D Excellent piece of work
    I have a short video of it up on my blog

  • http://www.spacing.ca/wire Shawn Micallef

    The Bohemian Embassy was a bar on Queen Street that closed, I believe, around 1992 and was a long standing waterhole of the 1980s Queen West art crowd. So this new condo’s name has a direct historical reference for it — perhaps the art direction is a little over the top, but i’m all for condo’s named after things that relate to their location.
    The video is funny, but beyond that i’m not sure I get it or what it’s saying. What are the “cons and lies” here? Is it directed at the art direction or is it another anti-condo piece?

  • http://www.newmindspace.com kevin bracken

    i was so excited for a moment that this was actually a billboard hack. alas, it is clever.
    the actual naming of the condo seems a little self-mocking and tongue-in-cheek, wouldn’t you say? obviously the tenants are predicted to be “fauxhemians” seeking the “artistic” way of life in rapidly-gentrifying parkdale. moving into this building almost seems to be an admission of guilt?

  • Tiresome

    Here’s a report on the Bohemian Embassy c. 1963
    http://archives.cbc.ca/IDCC-1-69-1587-3080/life_society/60s/
    It was revived on Queen W. very briefly in the early ’90s.
    Kevin and Jill–you should travel back in time and show those hipsters who’s boss!

  • http://www.jillmurray.com Jill

    Thanks for the link, Tiresome, but if you’re trying to suggest that I am a hipster, you are barking up the wrong geek tree.

  • Still Tiresome

    I didn’t say you were a hipster. I am saying that the “Bohemian Embassy” name is actually living up to what seem to be your ideals. (Point sorta also made by Shawn above.)
    So, maybe you want to travel back in time to when your neighbourhood was “pure”, like 10 years ago, when nobody half-sane would set foot around there.

  • http://www.jillmurray.com Jill

    Would I get my own beret?

  • Patrick M

    I don’t know why people get so pissed off about gentrification. I lived on Queen W W around 1989 when it was fun to count how many misdemeanours and felonies in progress we could spot on our way home. Yep, there was always something happening down there.
    I thought the neighbourhood kind of sucked, but maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough.

  • http://www.jillmurray.com Jill Murray

    You don’t have to hate gentrification to think that sign is silly.

  • Patrick M

    True enough Jill. I just wanted to emphasize my own ahead-of-my-time hipness, and I thought there was an opening there.
    I think people object to the billboard because it sucks to see how you’re perceived by other people.

  • http://www.jillmurray.com Jill

    Could be, Patrick. Embarassment is the theme of the piece, after all.

  • Randy Savage

    Hold on a second brother. Did we all watch the same movie here? How could anybody think it was great. Did the so-called artist ever hear of something call editing? Probably not because he’s a self-gratifying, holier-than-thou elitist who probably thinks he’s brilliant because he’s so misunderstood and doesn’t fit into society. News flash, chicken-lips, your mom didn’t love you and you never got hugged as a child.
    Quit taking it out on the “so-called” evil condo corporations which will probably raise the value of your sickly properties and possibly bring in some other businesses which will enrich the area. Because we all know you avant-garde hipster doofuses aren’t bringing in any money to elevate the neighbourhood beyond the shifty dump it currently is.
    At least this development was trying to fit into the area with its campaign as opposed to creating some faceless uber-highrise condominium. I have a feeling that if there was nothing in the world to complain about, you so-called contributing artists would have absolutely nothing to do. And that really scares the crap out of you, now don’t it brother? So you take the easy way out and rag on some condo developer?
    Do us a favour, you wanna-be revolutionists. If you really want to make a difference in the world, get off your asses and help one of the many nations of the world that actually DO have problems. But you won’t. You’ll take the easy way out and continue to sling mud at some corporation that isn’t all that bad because it doesn’t require much work. Because all you have to do is sit on your high-horse and “critique” instead of creating something. Because society doesn’t accept you, and thus you have some altruistic notion that you must rebel against it.
    So you wear clothes you think don’t conform with the status-quo, and you listen to indie music because it isn’t being played on MuchMusic. But one day, the clothes you wear are being sold at the Gap, and your music is now the number #1 requested song on “Much on Demand”. All of a sudden, you feel screwed. You exclaim “Hey, the big bad corporations wrongly appropriated my image. They seized my originality. Down with the corporations!”
    Well listen here turd suckers. Anybody can buy a shirt and purchase a CD, no matter how underground it is. But doing so doesn’t make you a rebel. Spare me the sob story about how original you are, and how you don’t care about how society perceives you. Because deep down inside you do. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t find a need to change how you look because it’s now the latest fashion craze with kids under 14. You like feeling different. You like the fact that the older folks look at you funny. It gives you some sort of elitist thrill doesn’t it? That the so-called mainstream society doesn’t accept you, so you in turn find some need to reject them as well – creating a false perpetual machine justifying your existence. The point is this: you actually care how people perceive you, and you’ve been denying it all this time.
    Welcome to the club. You’re ordinary just like everybody else.
    So in summary, the “Macho Man” just delivered a flying bionic elbow from the top turnbuckle onto your bloated heads.
    OH YEAH BROTHER!

  • http://www.jillmurray.com Jill

    Randy, the video is meant to run all day in a loop. I think it’s probably long so that you see a different part of it whenever you walk by.
    As for the rest of your comments, may I suggest a long walk and few deep breaths?

  • http://htt://www.bethmaher.com beth maher

    Randy: your schtick is lame.
    Denis Leary did it better 15 years ago.
    The real question is: why do YOU care so much that everyone knows how angry you are?
    Why, is it maybe ’cause you’ve got an opinion too? How shocking, you’ve got an opinion and you want to express it!
    OH MY GOD EVERYBODY!
    He’s angry and he want’s us all to know it!
    HE IS the common man, and he speaks to us (the hipsters, of course) of our stupidity for wanting to express ourselves through art.
    Well, I guess we should all just shut up then.

  • http://www.jillmurray.com Jill

    The notion that art and artists don’t contrubute to the economy is an antiquated one that has already been dispelled many times over.
    I couldn’t find a Canadian report, but here are two from the US and Australia, for example:
    http://pubs.artsusa.org/library/ARTS068/html/1.html#pagetop
    http://www.ozco.gov.au/arts_resources/publications/the_arts_economy_1968-98/files/329/06_C4_value.pdf
    The arts are a growth sector, and artists of all kinds generally put more into the economy than they take out of it.

  • http://www.jillmurray.com Jill

    I don’t meet very many people around the neighborhood where this sign lives who go out of their way to dress outrageously.
    My neighbors are a pretty mellow bunch who express themselves primarily through their work.

  • http://www.michaeltoke.com michael toke

    “You don’t have to hate gentrification to think that sign is silly.”
    >this is close to my motivation. I am not against or for gentrification.
    >love the negitive criticism, made me bust a gut. thanx for all.
    signed
    self-gratifying, holier-than-thou elitist
    PS> I am heading down to the gap, if anyone needs anything…maybe I’ll call my mom later.

  • tanya

    I sure am sick of looking out my front window and seeing that amazonian sized bohemian accross the street. It has nothing to do with my hatred of anything except advertising that assumes people have the intelligence of flea. Thanks Michael for giving us a good laugh and some intelligent relief from bad ad campaigns. (i highly doubt the marketers even new about the bohemian embassy bar)
    tanya of fly gallery

  • hucklecat

    I don’t have a problem with gentrification as a concept. I DO have a problem with the fact that they are demolishing the 48 Abell st building that houses so many actual artists to make way for this mammoth development. And, adding insult to injury by selling these condos based on the lifestyle they are destroying. It’s so disrespectful.

  • http://www.michaeltoke.com michael toke

    the embassy is threating to to sue me if I don’t puplically apologize, censor the work and any other works I would do in the neighbourhood.

  • http://www.jillmurray.com Jill

    A lawsuit? Now that doesn’t sound very “Bohemian.”

  • http://www.publicspace.ca/sidewalksale.htm Jonathan

    You know that all you have to do to get them to drop the suit, Michael, is to send out a press release about it. Those fuckers are entirely concerned with maintaining an image that appeals to monied people who also happen to be nominally artsy and socially conscious; a few articles in the mainstream media (one in Now, one in Eye, and one in the Star, Post, or Globe), and they’ll be shamed into apologizing to you.

  • http://www.michaeltoke.com michael toke

    Well Jonathan, It was in the Star on Saturday, others are pendeing, no apologie yet.