Excerpt from “When the White Night Spans: Nuit Blanche 2008” by Yam Lau, unpublished. If BGL’s “Domaine de l’angle” was an intelligent maneuver that capitalized on site, traffic and the night, Josh Thorpe took the opportunity of Nuit Blanche quite differently. Thorpe opted to offset the ethos of the spectacular. Strange as it may sound, his work, entitled Yesterday’s News aspired to drawing little attention to itself. But Thorpe’s work was really a great piece, if one managed to find it. But that was also precisely the point: that the work effected a positive sense of oblivion that signaled a strategic disposition. Yesterday’s News was installed at the Junior Common Room, a student lounge at the University of Toronto. The lounge, an old hall with a high ceiling, was accessible only through a narrow side entrance off the inner courtyard behind the University of Toronto Art Centre. Furnished with long wooden benches and tables, the lounge exuded the aura of an “old- school” university such as Oxford or Cambridge. It is evident that Thorpe had deliberately chosen an uneventful, off-the-map site where very few people would go to look for art. I remembered there was only a small sign posted near the entrance to direct the audience and it was hardly noticeable at night. When I visited the Junior Common Room, there were in fact quite a number of students there. Most of them, however, were sleeping, some were reading and others making out. I did not notice anyone paying attention to the artwork. Yet, seeing that no one actually cared too much about Yesterday’s News was, I think, paradoxically a proper way to regard the work. What was placed on display were groups of old newspapers positioned neatly and evenly spaced on the long wooden tables. Indeed, the old lounge could have been a reading room of some sort. Thorpe’s selection of old newspapers indexed the moments and events that were, on the one hand, too late to partake in the present and, on the other, too insignificant to make history. Yet their mute presence sustained a material resistance to the flow of time. The ethos of Nuit Blanche thus provided a backdrop against which Thorpe’s ethical and aesthetic position was foregrounded. Thorpe’s very quiet critique, I think, attempted to counter the acceleration of time-as-informational-instants with the material muteness of obsolete newspapers. What I like about this work is that Thrope’s exercise in endurance-in-oblivion did not get inflated into a heroic statement. The work was a modest gesture that exemplified the beauty and value of the insignificant and the ever-same. There was no clamor; Yesterday’s News appeared only for a night. Its brevity was its grace.

Excerpt from “When the White Night Spans: Nuit Blanche 2008” by Yam Lau, unpublished.

If BGL’s “Domaine de l’angle” was an intelligent maneuver that capitalized on site, traffic and the night, Josh Thorpe took the opportunity of Nuit Blanche quite differently. Thorpe opted to offset the ethos of the spectacular. Strange as it may sound, his work, entitled Yesterday’s News aspired to drawing little attention to itself. But Thorpe’s work was really a great piece, if one managed to find it. But that was also precisely the point: that the work effected a positive sense of oblivion that signaled a strategic disposition.

Yesterday’s News was installed at the Junior Common Room, a student lounge at the University of Toronto. The lounge, an old hall with a high ceiling, was accessible only through a narrow side entrance off the inner courtyard behind the University of Toronto Art Centre. Furnished with long wooden benches and tables, the lounge exuded the aura of an “old- school” university such as Oxford or Cambridge. It is evident that Thorpe had deliberately chosen an uneventful, off-the-map site where very few people would go to look for art. I remembered there was only a small sign posted near the entrance to direct the audience and it was hardly noticeable at night.

When I visited the Junior Common Room, there were in fact quite a number of students there. Most of them, however, were sleeping, some were reading and others making out. I did not notice anyone paying attention to the artwork. Yet, seeing that no one actually cared too much about Yesterday’s News was, I think, paradoxically a proper way to regard the work.

What was placed on display were groups of old newspapers positioned neatly and evenly spaced on the long wooden tables. Indeed, the old lounge could have been a reading room of some sort. Thorpe’s selection of old newspapers indexed the moments and events that were, on the one hand, too late to partake in the present and, on the other, too insignificant to make history. Yet their mute presence sustained a material resistance to the flow of time. The ethos of Nuit Blanche thus provided a backdrop against which Thorpe’s ethical and aesthetic position was foregrounded.

Thorpe’s very quiet critique, I think, attempted to counter the acceleration of time-as-informational-instants with the material muteness of obsolete newspapers. What I like about this work is that Thrope’s exercise in endurance-in-oblivion did not get inflated into a heroic statement. The work was a modest gesture that exemplified the beauty and value of the insignificant and the ever-same. There was no clamor; Yesterday’s News appeared only for a night. Its brevity was its grace.