This sculpture by artist Ken Lum, funded as part of Vancouver’s Public Art Program, was erected just in time for the 2010 Olympics. Titled “Monument for East Vancouver”, it quickly became known as “The East Van Cross”.
The urban folk symbol once sported by Vancouver juvenile delinquents, the cruciform writing of East Van has for many decades been carved into high school desks and emblazoned on denim jackets with magic marker. Once a menacing symbol of the tough east-side working class, it has now been elevated to a luminous neighbourhood icon.
Many Canadian cities have cross-shaped monuments, the most renowned being the illuminated cross on Montréal’s mountain. The East Van Cross differs from all of the other urban crosses by being explicitly secular and vulgar. The luminous font echoes the graceless, unrefined and unmannered cursive of the rough east side. This cross is a sui generis monument which expresses the collective unconscious of the old ‘hood.
The symbology of the cross in Western culture has roots that reach back millennia, well before the birth of Christ. Many ancient religious traditions symbolized time-bound corporeal existence with a horizontal line. The horizon line was the earth – the time horizon, the line of matter. The spirit – the timeless essence, the inspiration from the heavens – was symbolized by a vertical line descending from above. The two lines placed together thus symbolized the descending spirit from above intersecting with time-bound matter. This was the descent of spirit into corporeal existence, hence the incarnation of the spirit: the word made flesh.
Interpreted psychologically, it is the power of consciousness of self, the self-reflective consciousness of the sensation of being, fixed within the matrix of our mammalian drives, desires and sensations. Hence the universality of the symbol. In most ancient traditions the cross was the symbol of life. Many Egyptian mummies have the sign of the cross on the chest, and crosses were often placed in the hands of the Egyptian dead as symbols of incarnation and reincarnation. The ankh, the cross with the loop on top, was the symbol for eternal life – the loop signifying continuing reincarnation.
In the late dark ages, Western Christianity introduced another meaning to the symbol – that of a historical human Christ suffering in agony, bound to a instrument of torture which Roman society reserved for those who rebelled against it – higher spiritual consciousness encased in the human body, suffering the hard lot of human existence and the unfairness of human society.
Certainly existence on the East side, the lot of the working class, was a lot tougher, more unfair and perhaps “realer” than that of the West-siders. Triumph over adversity. The greater suffering, if born with an open heart and without self-pity, creates character, giving rise to greater humanity.
Shine on, East Van Cross.
[Next post: Vitruvius and the Aesthetics of Classical Architecture]
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