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The Secret Passion of Bob Rennie —
Page 3
Rennie’s other world—the one he guards
closely and cares most about—is centred for the
moment on an unmarked South Vancouver depot. “When
people tell me they collect art, I go in reverse,”
he says. “I don’t tell them about all this.”
Rennie—dressed in his workday uniform of tieless
white shirt and navy Louis Vuitton suit (“I have
20 of them, in different colours”)—has reluctantly
agreed to show me where he keeps the goods. It’s
Friday afternoon, the day after the Rennie staff Christmas
party, and 45 fir trees that adorned the Four Seasons
ballroom last night now sit in the loading dock, tagged
for employees to come pick up. Inside, cryptically labelled
crates are piled five metres high, with wall brackets
on either side teeming with more mysterious brown packages.
It looks not unlike an IKEA warehouse.
While the Rennie Collection Canada is spread across
the city—and indeed, around the world (with loans
out to museums such as the Tate Modern in London, Pompidou
in Paris, and Guggenheim in New York)—more than
80 percent of the art can be found in this climate-controlled
space belonging to Carey Fouks, Rennie’s partner
of 11 years. (They met when they both happened to be
shopping at Leone.) Fouks, 42, ran a business here until
five years ago; when that business folded, he retrofitted
the space and bought a forklift, and now—along
with director Wendy Chang and a handful of assistants,
including young artists Andrew Dadson and Angus Ferguson—he
helps to manage Rennie’s ever-expanding collection.
Rennie gingerly navigates the space. “This is
for a film Rodney Graham did called Loudhailer,”
he says, pointing to a Plexiglas display box that holds
a bullhorn and RCMP officer’s uniform. Across
the way, five sculptures of unfired clay, the work of
Rebecca Warren. (“They just came back from the
Tate.”) “And this is Mike Kelley’s
work,” he says, gesturing toward a six-by-four-foot
plaster statue of astronaut John Glenn, made of “found
articles” from the Detroit River. “His social
references are really, really watched,” says Rennie.
“He’s the most written-about contemporary
artist.”
Rennie started collecting when he was 17, buying a $375
Norman Rockwell print on a trip to San Francisco. (“It
was a boy and girl sitting on top of the world.”)
As he started to make money in real estate, he began
collecting realists like Ken Danby—paying $1,000
per print—and then Alex Colville, and the Group
of Seven. (“I bought A.J. Casson when he was $8,000.”)
He didn’t really know what he was doing, and—anathema
to Rennie—his collection was largely “without
structure.” In 1993, he met L.A. art dealer Patrick
Painter, who introduced him to photography and conceptual
work, and convinced him to give up his store of “old
Canadian masters.” With a new focus on collecting
artists in depth, particularly works dealing with identity
and “appropriation” (the borrowing of themes,
styles, or images from older works), Rennie started
to garner an international reputation as a serious collector.
His enormous profits from real estate (developers pay
him up to $50,000 per unit to market their condos) are
ploughed into not just his collection but also support
for younger artists. Ron Burnett is president of the
Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, a major recipient
of Rennie’s largesse. “There are not that
many major people, financially, who are interested in
art,” says Burnett. “You never hear about
Jimmy Pattison giving money to art institutions. In
Ontario, there’s a tremendous amount of support
from the top people for the Ontario College of Art and
Design; here, it’s very tough to get support.
Bob has always been the odd man out.”
The downside of depending on big donors (Emily Carr,
for example, gets only 60 percent of its funding from
the government) is the risk of offending them. One writer
received a blistering midnight email from Rennie after
a critical article questioning his commitment to affordability.
The writer’s employer, a Rennie-supported institution,
also received the note. When asked about it, Rennie
says: “There’s a part of our art collection
that deals with this [these kinds of writers]: ‘Injustice.’
It’s not balanced: there’s a predetermined
prejudice. And with a predetermined prejudice, you’re
always going to get the results you want, because you
control all the means. There’s no dialogue.”
That said, Rennie admits to being thin-skinned, and
prone to sending unedited, undiplomatic emails tagged
“With Prejudice” at all hours of the day
and night. “Ian Gillespie cut me off email for
a year, about two years ago,” he says. “I
was sending him ‘Fuck you…harsh letter to
follow’ messages.” Neither man will explain
the origin of the conflict, though Rennie allows, “If
somebody isn’t valuing you in a relationship,
it gets emotional. In the end, I am a very well paid
consultant. I have a lot of responsibility, but I don’t
have all the authority. Responsibility without authority
is tension.”
His art collection, on the other hand, gives him both,
and thus total control. Jessica Morgan, curator of contemporary
art at the Tate Modern, says Rennie appeared on her
radar over five years ago when she was trying to put
together a Brian Jungen exhibition; Rennie was one of
Jungen’s earliest, and most significant, patrons.
“Bob is one of the increasingly rare collectors
who is not only driven by a real passion and affinity
with the work that he collects, but who has himself—rather
than via a consultant—developed a fairly rigorous
and disciplined approach to collecting,” Morgan
explains. Each acquisition, she says, makes sense of,
or develops, the strand of art history or inquiry Rennie’s
interested in. After visiting Vancouver last spring
to see his collection, Morgan asked Rennie to join the
Tate’s American Acquisitions Committee and help
vet future Tate purchases.
Rennie sits on the board of the Morris and Helen Belkin
Art Gallery, and contributes financially to the Contemporary
Art Gallery. He recently donated Brian Jungen’s
untitled installation of 214 sewing machine tables (which,
combined, form a half-size basketball court) to the
Art Gallery of Ontario—a gift worth over half
a million dollars. As for our flagship museum, the Vancouver
Art Gallery, it gets nothing but disdain. “It’s
awkward, doing what we do on the planet with contemporary
art, but I have absolutely no respect for the director
[Kathleen Bartels]. I would really like our city to
have a major museum that actually makes an impact on
the art world,” Rennie says, “rather than
just regurgitating Georgia O’Keeffe and Monet
to Dali. The goal in life is to create your own identity—but
that might not be the goal of the VAG.”
Rennie sat on the VAG board for six months in 2002,
quitting when he realized he couldn’t support
what he calls Bartels’s “Lee Iacocca–ism.”
Six years on, he refuses to loan works to the museum
or go anywhere near the building. When SFU offered 20
works of Roy Arden’s to the VAG for a recent retrospective—works
that Rennie had donated to the university—he had
Wendy Chang call the museum and have his name taken
off the placards. “It’s petty at one level,”
he admits, “but if you’re going to draw
a line in the sand, draw it really deep.” Rennie
says there’s now a note in the VAG registrar’s
office prohibiting staff from talking to or about him.
(An unanswered request for an interview with Bartels
appears to confirm the allegation.)
“I think we’ve outgrown this place,”
says Rennie as we finish the tour, referring to the
warehouse, but perhaps also to the city. Above a desk
near the entrance, strewn with art catalogues and copies
of Art Forum and Frieze, is a black-and-white print
by Jenny Holzer. It reads: “It takes awhile before/you
can step over inert/bodies and go ahead with/what you
were trying to do.”
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