The Exhibitionist

A few weeks after we first meet, Burnham is in Montreal’s red-light district, walking toward an art and technology centre. The brightly lit sign of Café Cléopâtre, with its caricature of a buxom woman, shines from across the street. (With a growing number of galleries and theatres, the area is revamping itself as the Quartier des spectacles.) He’s one of 11 people – mostly architects and designers – giving rapid-fire slide-show presentations to a crowd at a Pecha Kucha Night, the salon-type events that are held in dozens of cities around the world.

The mostly young, creative types sit in chairs and on risers and, when every seat is taken, huddle on the poured concrete floor like students in a gymnasium. He’s on-message tonight, describing the “open culture” theme for the Biennale as photos of his favourite street art are projected onto wall-sized screens. “I’m not curating the final work, I’m only selecting the beginning. The end work,” he says to the hometown crowd, “is determined by you.”

Burnham has become a kind of self-appointed evangelist for a more interactive way to experience art. “Scott’s strength is in creating an energy that’s as much about art as it is about promoting his machinery of ideas,” says photographer Angela Grauerholz, who has watched him in action. “Students lap it up. They don’t know that he’s recontextualizing ideas that have been around for decades. He’s getting them excited about art and making them question all the things they’ve taken for granted. They don’t look at the city the same way anymore.”

To show me how cities have become galleries, Burnham pulls out his laptop, which is filled with hundreds of images by the world’s leading “urban interventionists.” He comes to a series of pieces by the U.K. collective CutUp, which takes down billboards, cuts them up and reassembles them into provocative new images. “This is at the extreme edge of creativity. This is like Hemingway’s reports from Spain, this is like Miller’s writing in Paris in the ’30s. For me,” he says, clicking on CutUp’s billboard of a boy crying, “that’s more powerful than anything I’ve ever seen in a gallery.”

Learn more about Urban Play: The Spirit of the City by visiting urbanplay.org. To find out how to take part in the 2009 Montreal Biennale, visit biennalemontreal.org.

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