Expo 67 and all that ARTS
ROY STRONG
As Jane Austen says 'Is he a man of informa- tion?' He would jolly well have to be to battle his way round Expo 67, three islands studded with seventy national pavilions, a dozen theme pavilions, besides funfairs, rose gardens, res- taurants, sanctuaries, theatres and other assorted cultural whatnots. I was there before it opened en route for London from Toronto, and splodged around in a fur-lined coat through acres of ice and mud to view what is billed as 'the wonder of the century.'
There is something relentlessly didactic about Expo, as if it were designed as the WEA
crash course on philosophical platitudes to end them all. The theme is 'Man and his World,' man the creator, the social being, the explorer, producer and provider. This is demonstrated in vast theme pavilions which punctuate the exhi- bition, the only one of which I saw in any detail being 'Man in the Community' on the Cite du Havre, three small pavilions around a lake (at that time of frozen mud) supporting a slender trellis work pyramid like one of Juvara's craziest Turin domes. Nearby Habitat 67, the living units of the future, evokes a cross between Assisi seen from afar and the rock churches of Cappadocia. This eerie electrifying jumble contains 158 housing units of twenty different kinds, precast in concrete and lifted into place by crane, piled up like an abstract sculpture of packing cases. Everything that opens and shuts is provided for the inmates, each of whom has a garden on his neighbour's roof, 'automatic- ally irrigated and fertilised from a central source. The occupants choose flowers and shrubs to suit their fancy.' They have to buy their own plaster gnomes.
Of the national pavilions only two stuck vividly in the mind, the American and the Ger- man. The American geodesic 'bubble,' like some spangled dandelion gone to seed, glitters from afar, 250 feet of it dominating the exhibition site and, since the monorail runs through it, not to be missed even if one should wish to do so. The German pavilion is 100,000 square feet of translucent plastic skin tossed over eight steel masts to create a super-tent (it was put up by a circus master). 'Work is the curse of the work- ing class' read the notice pinned up next to a meaty Miss August in their workmen's office in February. From the point of view of instant in- digestion, few exhibitions can beat this one for being gastronomically gaga. From Finnish mammi, gravlax, skyr and hangikjot you can totter on to vodka and caviar from old Iran via cosseting by kimono clad geishas. Thank heaven we stuck to our British pub and avoided the export of Staffordshire yeomanry pie.
My contact with the British pavilion was cursory, the outside seeming very 'thirties, closely allied to the architecture at the opening of Movietone News, only minus the search- light beams piercing the night sky. One expected Noel and Gertie to saunter out dreamy in chiffon. I must say too-that although I have nothing against the Union Jack, which is one of the few things we can be grateful to James I for, it has been so flogged by pop art gear mongers that someone surely could have re- sisted yet another gimmicky tarted-up version on the top of the pavilion.
At the time Astrid Zydower, who executed forty-five allegorical figures for the pavilion, was with me. She and her train of workers, en- larging her ravishing little maquettes, slept one night in three during the last hectic weeks of toil in Piranesi-like gloom under one of the arches of Waterloo Bridge. It seemed strange to think of all those buckets of glue and broken eggboxes ending up here as 'Britain Today.' Accounts of the interior, which in- cludes items like a teapot playing 'Tea for two' to illustrate the caption 'We like our cup of tea,' suggest a tastelessness and vulgarity bordering on Guy Fawkes Night in a crema- torium.
Nothing is more disastrous to my mind than this obsession with the idea of the 'national pavilion,' which seems to mobilise every piece of cultural mythology and folk art tat in the book. The Thailand pavilion is a real excrescence of tinsel trumpery, straight left-overs from The King and 1, and the Taiwan China and Burma Pavilions do not lag far behind in their debt
to the lineal descendants of Chu Chin Chow. That the east doesn't have to indulge in this trash is amply shown by the Japanese pavilion, a strange structure camposed of king-size matches.
What on earth is the point of these vast ex- hibitions? To my mind not very much if it is merely an excuse to trot out, at stupendous cost, a revamped nineteenth century romantic nationalism. On the other hand, Canadians may in retrospect look back on the event as some- thing as significant in their past as the first Great Exhibition was in ours. So much of Canadian life and environment is either dowdy provin- cial British, cast-off tatty French or anonymous mid-west American that for them to be inspired and mentally and visually charged by the most marvellous and beautiful buildings, the most ravishing music, ballet and opera, the ultimate in great drama and painting is more crucial than the load of crude nationalistic rubbish flaunting as high art in the Expo pavilions. For one performance by the Royal Ballet, even minus the divine Margot, I would scuttle the British Pavilion to the bottom of the St Law- rence. And this• is what the Canadians are hav- ing. They will also be left with tangible benefits in the form of a vast stadium, a theatre and a superb modern art gallery.
Canadians are absolutely dotty about Queen Victoria and still celebrate her birthday (some- how made to coincide with the present Queen's).
'We remained two hours and a half,' she wrote of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 'and I came back quite beaten, and my head bewildered, from the myriads of beautiful and wonderful things, which now quite dazzle one's eyes.' Prince Albert has an awful lot to answer for.
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