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Reviews: "Sixty Years Ago" at Château Dufresne; "Créer à rebours vers l’exposition" at Vox; "Street Actions" at Optica; "The Art Gallery Problem" at Dazibao

  This review is a trifle long, but the four exhibitions I discuss seem to dovetail quite nicely into one another and, in context, perhaps illuminate some points better than they would if discussed in isolation. What follows is mostly about curation and only secondarily about the artworks themselves. To start with an anecdote: I was touring MFA studios a few years ago (seven or eight, I think) and was told that one student was making art for wildlife, specifically, beavers. I naively assumed this must have meant they were doing wilderness installations intended solely for an animal audience to interact with. That sounded great. Unfortunately, that was just the “concept.” What they were actually doing was making underwhelming mixed-media sculptures that resembled discards from a costume shop if they’d fallen off a truck on the highway and then been stitched together. The work was produced for the typical display spaces and leaning on the discursive norms of Contemporary Art. T...
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Reviews: Miles Rufelds' “A Hall of Mirrors” at Centre Vox and Guillaume Lachapelle’s "Points de fuite" at Art Mûr

  Miles Rufelds ' Palais des glaces at Centre Vox consists of a 55-minute video isolated in a small viewing room and an installation in the larger room. There’s also an accompanying essay, but as with most supplements at Vox, you are better off ignoring it. The installation is dark, dramatically lit by lightboards featuring small photos, texts, slides, and other accumulated “evidence” with scrawling and lines implying relations. It’s the sort of generic image of speculative relationships and possible acts that you commonly find in cop shows to illustrate how detectives piece things together. You get similar boards in depictions of schizophrenics, conspiratorialists, and so on. In academic social science research, you get a textual variation of it to make it look more intellectually sober. Perhaps most relevantly, you get something like this in the work of art historian Aby Warburg (who was also possibly a schizophrenic) and whose noble ambition was to create a form of art histor...
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Review: Kent Monkman: "History Is Painted by the Victors" at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal

Kent Monkman: History Is Painted by the Victors is the latest large single-artist exhibition to open at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. A mid-career retrospective, it was organized in collaboration with the Denver Art Museum . John Lukavic, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum, co‑curated it with Léuli Eshrāghi, Curator of Indigenous Practices at the MMFA. As usual with such exhibitions, the press previews, notably from official broadcasters such as the English and French CBC, were effusive. Eshrāghi told Westmount Magazine that, “The stories Monkman tells offer crucial insights into contemporary realities for Indigenous peoples, while questioning dominant culture and society as a whole.”  A social media post from the institution markets it this way: ““My name is Miss Chief Eagle Testickle and I come from the stars.” [p] Meet Miss Chief Eagle Testickle (a play on the words mischief and egotistical), the fierce, time-traveling character cr...
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On Totalitarian Art and the Art of Social Optimism

If you take a survey course in the history of twentieth century art at most universities in this country, there is typically minimal, if any, substantial recognition of the art of totalitarian states. One exception I recall from my own art education was a survey course in the art of Asia in the past century, where it was unavoidable. But the generic line for most surveys of Modern to Contemporary Art follows different sorts of formalism into more thematic or identity-based art practices. Most textbooks on twentieth century art tend to be organized around these lines. Along the way, the two Futurisms (Fascist and Marxist) will pop up, Surrealism’s extremely dubious political implications may arise, the anarchistic aspects of Realism, Expressionism, or Dada may be mentioned, and so on. By the time you get to the 1960s, this more “activist” side then gets exploited as part of the genealogy that leads to the more seemingly overt political art that follows from the 1960s. The art of the Na...
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