Q & A: Neil Wedman

A Vancouver artist takes a comedic fairground spin back through the Gastown riot.

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Perhaps you’ve heard of the Gastown riot? If not, the short version is this: In 1971, during the waning days of Vancouver’s late arrival at the Summer of Love, a group of Yippies organized a smoke-in at Gastown’s Maple Tree Square, where a giant fake joint would be lit and everybody could feel groovy and celebrate pot in peace. 

But the property value-fixated mayor of the day, Tom 'Terrific' Campbell, calls in the bulls and they charge over in their new riot gear, several on horseback, to bust some heads. Now this is only a year after the Kent State shootings, and the gravely out-of-step “law-and-order” mayor, as well as the Vancouver police, are eventually rebuked for their heavy-handed tactics after an inquiry headed by a Supreme Court justice dubs it a "police riot." Campbell was even scolded by old-school newshound Doug Collins, who later enjoyed infamy as a reactionary columnist for the North Shore News. 

Decades later, in 2008, Vancouver art star Stan Douglas turns the protest into high art, letting condo owners and students at Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus take in a massive, theatrically staged photomural, Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, on their way to score a latte at JJ Bean's.

Enter self-described wise guy Neil Wedman, a painter known for his wry visual take on just about anything. When he told me he was working on a piece based on the riot, I figured it would be unlike anything I’d seen before.

Wedman doesn't disappoint. He reimagines the riot in comedic terms and says he'd love to see people lining up, bags of mini-donuts in hand, to experience it as a fairground ride.

Surely, he jests? Apparently not. A visit to his Vancouver studio confirmed plans are in the making and, as per usual with Wedman, whose work is never less than masterful, his drawings are exquisitely wrought.

Mark Mushet interviewed Neil Wedman by email in July 2020. Their conversation has been edited lightly for clarity.

What was the genesis of your Gastown riot project?

I used to make history paintings of a type, grandiose renderings of minor or obscure events in the past. I think, at one time, they would have been called “antique themes.”

What was your personal experience of the riot, your memories?

Believe it or not, I’m too young to have been an all-out hippy. I totally remember the news coverage, but I wasn’t there.

Newspapers and reportage are themes you’ve touched on in your past work and you always seem to have a copy of the New York Times in your studio. Can you talk about the connection between the news reports of the time and your process in developing this project?

The impetus for the project came from a newspaper photo. It was probably about 30 years ago, in 1991, that the Vancouver Sun ran a photograph – the well-known one by Glenn Baglo – of the Gastown riot on the 20th anniversary of the event. It shows police on horseback climbing into a storefront while citizens flee in panic. It’s good, and it looked like a ripe subject for me. And, of course, there was then much research conducted to collect images of the Gastown event and most of it was done with hard copies of newspapers.

I work very slowly and it was a number of years before I started to make sketches of the kind of composition I wanted to use to make a huge painting of the subject. I remember I wanted to make it enormous and have it tour in a circus tent like The Raft of the Medusa. I love the look of sunlight filtered through canvas. 

The composition involved cops with riot sticks on rearing horses in the midst of a crowd of hippies. Sort of an equestrian battle scene in front of the imposing perspective of the Flatiron building with the Hotel Europe. It was quite an exaggerated scene. It was supposed to be funny.

But right around 1999, I think, my painting style changed, quite naturally, but also radically. I began to embrace art making on more formal terms. And, through various circumstances, Stan Douglas was commissioned to do a piece for the new Woodward’s development based on the Gastown riot.

Stan, carefully conscientious as he is, didn’t call it a riot, but named the eventual large photograph after the date, Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971.

Anyway, Stan and I talked about it and I even did some planning sketches for his work. I was into my own thing and didn’t reckon I’d ever worry about the Gastown riot again. However, at some point, I hauled out my original drawings and, as one is wont to do, started admiring them and thought that they would make a nice façade for some sort of grotesque midway attraction.         

In an ideal world, with unlimited funding, what form would this midway attraction take?

Well, in my mind, it would be an all-out dark ride, that is to say a sort of funhouse where folks move through on vehicles on tracks. In this case, the ride vehicles would be fashioned to resemble miniature street sweepers with the brushes twirling around and all, and the visitors would be guided through a maze of dioramas of animatronic scenes, mostly of cops beating the logs out of hippies, but with a few fun surprises. 

I think the technology would have to be on a Disneyland level, but I would want the actual displays to look a little cruddier than that.    

And if there’s no funding forthcoming, how might it be presented in the future?

A scale model with some working parts is what I’m shooting for now. It will still require funding but nowhere near the amount of the cost of constructing the real thing. The model could be exhibited with the planning drawings, which are quite nice. 

A lot has changed over the years particularly around the law on marijuana. And unrest in the streets over racial injustice has gone global on an unprecedented scale. Has that affected your view of the project at all?

Initially, when I was reviving this project, the prospect of legalizing marijuana was in the air. Then, as we know, it became legal and making a big deal project around a pro-marijuana rally 50 years ago began to seem a bit tone deaf. 

But in view of recent events, the deliberate and violent exertion of authority, with often-fatal consequences for Black citizens and other minorities at the hands of the police, the basic theme of the Gastown riot seems relevant again. I couldn’t say that the Gastown riot was racially motivated, but it also wasn’t actually a full-on riot in the typical sense. It’s mostly about the police shoving folks around but, now, maybe it’s not as comical as it used to be.

The drawings seem to partly fit the tradition of early satirical illustrative reportage of a type once popular in Europe in the 19th century. And then there’s a more contemporary fit with some of the underground comics of the ’60s.

Yes, that’s a good observation. There were a number of social satirists making drawings and engravings at that time; Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) is probably the best known and most enduring. His drawing style is one I have a great affinity for. But for truly grotesque and grisly comic exaggeration for social comment and satire, I think the earlier examples of Francisco Goya (1746-1828) would be closest to my heart. William Hogarth (1697-1764) too.

Regarding the influence of certain underground cartoonists, I have to acknowledge the Zap cartoonists, particularly Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson, as being tremendously influential, somewhat in a formal sense, but, ultimately, more integral to a sense of moral permission. 

Rand Holmes was a locally based artist who did a full page strip on the riot right after it happened. It was printed, I think, on the front page of the Georgia Straight. Holmes definitely had his drawing chops down, but his idea of satire lacked wit.

I remember The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers always had some hippies versus cops capers going on. 

That was a comic publication that seemed to be ubiquitous in specialty bookstores in Vancouver, although it was the work of American Gilbert Shelton. I never had the time of day for it.    

What about the era and origin of the funhouse facades you’re modelling it on?

Oh, I guess the ’50s or the ’60s. Nowadays, the facades are too slick, but I do consider the modern style, making a truly sincere facade to drag them in.

You like fairground attractions. Your Digger series depicts a law enforcement crackdown on fairground “grabbers,” those vitrines full of prizes where you have to manipulate a kind of crane or claw to grab a desired prize and deliver it to a slot. It was seen as a form of gambling, and the ferocity with which the G-men destroyed the machines was absurd. With both projects you make the enforcers look comical, but within a beautiful, meticulously crafted environment. How do these things work together? 

I think it might be a Surrealist thing. If you want to make a preposterous statement, you make it in most skilled way you can manage. But it’s also a core ethic of parody that it should be convincing.  

I have always loved the humour in your work, which is partly delivered by the perverse level of commitment to the beautiful rendering of absurd things. Where does this impulse come from?

Speaking as a natural wiseguy, I think it’s necessary to make works that will resonate on a richer and longer frame than a casual smart crack.  

Stan Douglas’ piece is placed in a very prominent area and is likely going to be the dominant image of the Gastown riot for new generations of Vancouverites. But it is a complete fabrication, a restaging based on meticulous research, placed in the heart of an academic setting. Is your funhouse setting a response to this?

I don’t know about Stan’s piece. I think he might have concocted the staging himself.

I know, or suspect, that he had to set the scene at Abbot and Cordova so to include a corner of the Woodward’s Building to appease the broad minds of the developers. In my own opinion, if the picture isn’t set in front of the Flatiron at Maple Tree Square, what’s the point?

In another way, I consider Stan Douglas to be a longtime friend and I have an abiding respect for his work, as anybody should have. But I don’t think that there is all that much connection between what I’m doing and his piece. Both ideas stand alone.

What response have you had to it?

A reproduction of one of the drawings was issued as a foldout in No. 28 of Public in 2003. It’s an art journal from Toronto. It was an early rendition of the riot and was pretty broadly rendered, although not as comically extravagant as the current versions. I don’t recall any particular reaction to it. I have no idea how it might be embraced by a broader public. I expect the Vancouver Police Department might have an opinion. ■ 

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