"You're not just creative in one area,” Bob Rennie said.
From his desk in the Wing Sang building on Pender, Rennie turned and looked towards the small window that opened into the studio where Texas artist Richard Jackson, stood on a raised platform lost in the creative process. Rennie got up and went to the window.
The tall, slender Jackson worked beyond the wall and Rennie, a trim, young-looking 53 year old, observed his process with a look that bordered on joyous. The city's most successful condo marketer peered down into the sprawling gallery/studio that he had chosen to pour his wealth into. It was a controversial choice that emerged inevitably, it would seem, as a result of Rennie's resources, his collection and his sense that Vancouver Art Gallery was failing to challenge the city either intellectually and artistically. Perhaps, he thought, he could make a better gallery that would showcase the kinds of artists VAG seemed too staid to include.
Jackson, from Texas, toiled beside a dozen or so canvases placed in a precise pile. Sunlight cut through the skylight above the artist, dappling the top of his head and Rennie pointed out the floor to me. It looked like a puzzle cut from images of Jackson wearing a baseball cap, he explained. It also was art.
"The Museum is open to the public, by appointment...now up to three days a week," Rennie said. It isn’t open to the general public, because, "We can't afford to have security guards standing in each corner.”
That would be too great a risk, he said, and although Rennie said he believed in taking risks, he wasn’t referring to the security of the collection. As a former New Yorker who haunted Chelsea’s galleries and museums on a regular basis, it’s the kind of work I miss seeing in the Vancouver Art Gallery---art that smacks you right in the face, shows you something you don’t want to know, cracks your small mind open a bit. Rennie collects edgy art, the kind I used to encounter in the galleries around Twenty-Third Street.
Risky art. Like the installation by Martin Creed on the roof of the Wing Sang building that silently communicates an unlikely message for Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: “Everything is going to be alright.”
"Criticism of anything he does..."
At a party I attended at the gallery during the Olympics, I heard a man tell his date that it was wrong to project this message in Canada’s poorest postal code. "It's meant to be provocative,” said the woman, who wore a black cocktail dress and had curly brown hair. The guy wasn’t having it.
Rennie hoped the piece would catalyze conversation when he installed it.
As for the suggestion that he may have set himself up to be criticized by choosing that piece, Rennie acknowledged that he had. But he defended the deeper possibilities.
In a humanities class he teaches at UBC for people who have recently worked their way out of homelessness, he said, someone confronted him about it.
“Easy for you to say everything’s going to be alright," the student said, referring to Rennie’s wealth, which although, Rennie told me, "isn't what you might think," places him within a level of privilege few can dream of achieving. Rennie acknowledged that it IS easy for him to say this, but he said the work refers to a deeper level of “alright.” To the existential “alright.” In a 2008 Vancouver Magazine profile on Rennie, which might be called, “The Bible of Bob” for its sheer size and comprehensiveness, the author said Rennie Marketing Systems had generated over $1.5 billion in sales in 2007.
“This is what we’ve got,” he told me last April in a long interview in his beautiful office. “It better be alright.”
In the mode of Jenny Holtzer who created the piece in Rennie’s bathroom at home that reads: What country would you live in, if you wanted to get away from poor people entirely, Creed's work demands reaction, consideration and response.
“It forces the issue,” Rennie said. “And ultimately, what can we do? We have to have hope.”
Better way to be affluent in Vancouver
It’s not surprising that Rennie would be drawn to collect works of complexity and ambiguity. His collection of more than a thousand pieces includes: Mona Hatoum, Thomas Houseago and Amy Bessone, Martin Creed, Damian Moppett, Andrew Grassie, Robert Beck, Glenn Brown, Brian Jungen, Ian Wallace, Rodney Graham, and Henrik Håkansson. Rennie Collection Canada has pieces on loan at the Tate Modern, Pompidou in Paris, and Guggenheim in New York. Born and raised on Vancouver’s east side, his way of being privileged is more Mahattan then Vancouver. Yet he chooses to stay here. After earning a fortune, Rennie rejected Shaughnessy and Point Grey with their empty streets and relentless tranquility for a penthouse overlooking the Molson Brewery parking lot.
“The third-floor penthouse (five penthouses, in fact, combined into 4,600 square feet) that Bob Rennie has called home for the past 11 years sits on a grim patch of Burrard Slopes, overlooking the Molson Brewery parking lot,” Matt O’Grady wrote in Vancouver Magazine.
Then he chose an office with Chinatown as its frontal view and East Hastings out the back window instead of West Georgia.
“People with money should live and mix with people with less money,” he said, and the developments he has been involved with recently offer a mix of units priced to make that happen.
Despite the fact that Rennie has created a new way to be affluent in Vancouver, and opened worlds of possibility for himself through his art collection, some people I talked with were passionate in their conviction that has hadn’t given enough back to a city that had given him his wealth.
"Why didn't he make his gallery public, for starters," someone who has gone to Rennie for money for what he deemed a worthwhile project--- and been refused, told me on the condition of anonymity. The same person suggested that I would have a hard time finding anyone to go on the record with a criticism of Rennie. "He's way too powerful."
Yet, to refer again to the biblical Vancouver Magazine profile, Rennie may not give as much as people wish. But he gives. O’ Grady writes that in direct political contributions, Rennie gave Vision Vancouver $75,000 for the 2005 civic election and the NPA $10,000. He’s also a major benefactor for various charities, schools, and arts institutions throughout town. No wonder, he said, that in Vancouver Magazine's, annual Power 50 rankings, "a condo marketer is neck and neck with the most influential business leaders and politicians in the city." And the Emily Carr University web site speaks of Rennie's "long-standing and generous support."
Last month, in fact, he was welcomed by Emily Carr to its Board of Governors, an institution he feels more aligned to aesthetically than the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2008, he received an Honorary Degree from the university. At some point he endowed a bursary for art students there and he said he thinks of the Wing Sang as a laboratory where aspiring young artists can see world class artists at work.
“Given that some people see Bob as the evil agent of gentrification and resortification in the city, I’m sure there will be criticism of anything he does. Perhaps especially because of his interest in art that explores marginalization and oppression. He’s a challenging, contradictory character for sure, not easily explained,” Frances Bula wrote in a blog entitled “Bob Rennie emerges with new identity: Centre of Vancouver’s art world” that the Globe and Mail reporter posted on October 24th, 2009.
"Risk," Rennie said. "If you don’t take a risk, you don’t get anywhere.”
From his work marketing the Woodwards Building to his gallery in Chinatown to the works in his collection, Rennie seems in a continuous process of redefining Vancouver by pushing beyond conventional boundaries. "I really believe if everybody understands what you're doing, then you're probably giving in to mediocrity. You're going to ruffle feathers, if you're taking chances and really moving things. You can't cause change and satisfy everybody."
A Cultural Calendar
"If I owned the city, what I'd like to see is a calendar. One day a week, the VAG has its front doors open for a wine bar. One day a week, the library has its doors open for a poetry reading and a coffee bar. The contemporary art gallery, jazz, opera, ...if everybody did something one day a month or bi- weekly for two years and signed on that they're going to live through their bad nights and their good nights and their slow periods...where they got people engaged and got to the point where people said, 'we're going to a movie tonight, why don't we go there first?' You would bring people out of the closet and they would engage,and through that they'd find their philanthropy.
"Not everybody is supposed to like art, or ballet, or...but a general thread runs through them. What made everybody come into town for LiveCity for the Olympics, but yet the next Saturday they stayed home?" he asked.
"That fascinates me."
He talked about how the Olympics created "memory points," all through downtown. I knew exactly what he meant. For instance, Robson Square will always contain memories for me of dance, music and huge crowds of people from all over the world. The Canada Line stations contain memories of individuals bursting into "O, Canada," and the anthem spreading from person to person until crowds joined in. I can't walk down Granville at Georgia without the ghosts of the street sculptures from the Olympics hovering. I knew what he meant.
"It's so simple," he said. "Newcomers to Vancouver are going to insist on a cultural revolution."
What would it look like?
"We don't always need extravaganzas," he said. "There're people who go see the Temple of Doom and there're people who go to see a good art film. It's hard to make a lot of profit from a good art film. You're going to need a smaller place and donors. Obama did it with $10 donors. We have to get a lot of people involved in the arts from a lot of different demographics. You can't keep phoning Jim Pattison and Joe Segal."
Vancouver Art Gallery's "starkitechture"
"Why did they chose da Vinci to show during the Olympics when we could have showcased Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace, Stan Douglas or a show of the finest graduates from the Emily Carr University? It was an opportunity to show our excellence. Instead we opened with something that anybody in the world could have opened with. Anybody who could afford the insurance."
"There's amazing talent born in Vancouver, artists whose seeds are planted here, but their lives are elsewhere. Jeff Wall does not have a gallery in Vancouver. Rodney Graham doesn't. Ian Wallace does. So many artists and their careers are nurtured elsewhere."
"This is an amazing place to work from. How do we get Jeff Wall back, or get the next one not to leave?"
He turned to the proposal to build a new facility for VAG.
"I'm vocally against spending an extra 100 million on ‘starkitechture’ when we don't hear anything about the cost to run the museum," he said. Rennie has had many differences with VAG and he said part of his motivation for opening the gallery stemmed from his frustration at VAG's limitations.
"We're not hearing about the content. All we're talking about is the architecture. The contents are far more important than the box."
Location, location, location...
"How are sales going at Olympic Village?" I asked Rennie, as I put the last touches on this article, four months after my formal interview with him.
"We are just approaching 240 homes closed (paid for) and well over 150 million in sales and we will launch our fall sales campaign September 25th," he answered in an email.
"You know what we all forget...is Gregor took the helm during the worst economic downturn that most of us will experience in our lifetime. And good on him for carrying through with his housing and green initiatives when others would have succumbed to rhetoric. The way I see it is Gregor holds future values and isn't just waiting for yesterday to come back."
In talking about the mayor, perhaps Rennie is also reflecting a little of how he sees himself. He had to market the Olympic Village during that "worst economic downturn that most of us will experience in our lifetime." That was the year the housing bubble popped, at least for a moment. He kept moving forward. He didn't look back.
"With the Olympic Village,” Rennie said, “I had a philosophy on the economy and we went to all of our developers and said if you're not pregnant abstain. Stop. Don't build. I couldn't figure it out. I also had a philosophy that if you were still standing in September '09, you'd made it through, that the world would have stopped creating financial problems and we'd be on the road to recovery."
That didn't turn out to be the case, and the Olympic Village became "a financing nightmare."
"Something I never calculated was that Canada lost confidence based on what was happening in the rest of the world and I forgot that metric. As that came to light at the end of '08, my advice to the developers was, let's stop marketing. Let's just keep the ball in the air and stop marketing.
"As we got thru to Feb. 09, the city and developers saw the wisdom of that. If we had sold, then I don't think you could have guessed at the losses. There was nobody to buy it.
Rennie said that at the time The Sun and the Province "were having a race to see who could print the evilest story on the Olympic Village."
The project had recovered, he said, because the market came back more than anyone else could have imagined.
The units went on sale on May 15.
"Our new marketing is to say that there is no competition. Vancouver is the greenest community on the planet. The Olympic Village is on the water. The units have subzero refrigerators and nine foot ceilings and offer a real community. You can walk to transportation and walk to work.
"Location, location, location--- we've got it. It's always going to be a bit of a political football. The controversy over the non market units...people don't drill down. They don't separate it out. It's pretty special product on the water."
Rennie fought to bring the Olympics to Vancouver. He believed in the benefits then and believes in them today.
"We got a six billion dollar ad campaign for BC and Canada by having the Games," he said. "We had just come out of an economic downturn. How do you get a country to feel good about itself after that?"
"After day four, when we decided the world approved of us, we were galvanized as a country. Whether it was red mitts or the hockey game, for no agenda and no return, we stood up and were very patriotic.
"Chrétien not taking us into Iraq and the Olympics---they have both been so important for Canadian identity. We got so much benefit."
Advice to young artists
The Vancouver Sun's Miro Cernetig arrived for HIS interview with Rennie, before mine had ended. Rennie invited him to join us and I listened as Cernetig amiably told Rennie about the state of the media and changes in digital technologies. He compared VO with The Tyee, talked about some of the articles both have done, named their differences and potential, and was generous with his praise of both sites. Rennie listened with interest. His ability to listen was part of his charm and also part of his salesmanship.
I asked Rennie what artists were on his radar today. He named Pablo Bronstein and Lesley Vance, "a recent acquisition currently on loan to the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver."
Then, to a question I almost overlooked, perhaps the most important question of all. "Advice for young artists?"
"Do works for yourself, not your audience," one of North America's most prominent collectors of modern art replied.
Author's footnote: I rarely let an interview sit four months before crafting it into an article, but I wanted to take time to let my thoughts about Rennie form at a distance from the satisfaction and enjoyment I genuinely took in hanging out with him. It was as refreshing as reading a New Yorker, after a long stretch of reading only The Vancouver Sun.
Richard Jackson at work last April in Wing Sang Gallery: photo by Linda Solomon