For 18 years Guelph has been graced by the excellent presence of the Begging Bear, also known as the Giving Bear, Canadiana or “the bear in front of the art building.”
But do you know how it got there?
In the early 1990s artist Carl Skelton made the first Begging Bear out of fibreglass. From the beginning, when it was originally shown in a Toronto sculpture garden, fans and protectors had already been dressing up the Begging Bear.
“I honestly wasn’t that surprised to hear about the costumes early on - it’s a humanoid shape, easy to get at, in a college town,” said Skelton in an e-mail from New York where he now lives.
“There were already inklings of this kind of thing: spare change left on the upturned paw, a wristwatch … and the homeless guys watching over it as a kind of little brother. When it was being de-installed at the end of the run, a few of them gathered around to get me to promise to take good care of it,” he said of the first version.
Skelton took more than good care of the dear Begging Bear and in a twist, it was redone in bronze and placed in front of the Art Gallery of Guelph.
In contrast to the sculptures original entrance to the art world, the Begging Bear is now a full-fledged member of the Guelph community described by the University of Guelph as “an artistic metaphor for our native animals’ need for protection and our encroachment on the environment.”
Skelton, now an industry professor at New York University, had a different or additional purpose in the creation of Canadiana/Begging Bear that gives context to the full name of the piece.
“The Begging Bear was originally made as a prop for Canadiana, an installation/performance project parodying Anglo-Canadian contemporary art as an industry of ‘instant antiques’ that had evolved to manage the anxiety of a semblance of a nation with a desperate shortage of history, trying to hijack the present to patch that over,” said Skelton.
It is with some irony that the Begging Bear, being designed as an instrument of parody, has become timeless in the community.
“The Bear lives in a strange space, iconographically: between the pre-war figurative language of public art as propaganda and the post-war habit of public agencies seemingly making a point of putting whatever they please in the public’s face, under the banner of cultural leadership,” said Skelton.
Overtime the Bear has been vandalized, but again and again, the community has come together to make it right.
"Now the Bear is public in a whole other way: a monument to Guelph’s collective will to take care of its own, when the need arises, even if the person in question has some awkward manners and family history,” said Skelton.
