Art in Montreal

“Au Québec, le mot le plus souvent recherché sur Pornhub est… « Québec » !” It would be difficult to legitimately object to the premise that pornography has been one of the central and most important aspects of artistic production in Québec since la Révolution tranquille . It was the success of the films de cul of the 1960s and 70s that established a Québécois film market, both at home and internationally, as viable. And many of the province's most significant directors - Carle, Héroux, Arcand, Fournier among them - worked within and against this tendency. There was a wealth of erotic visual art and music also created in that period, providing one of the strongest and most intellectually complex counter-directions to the more generically internationalist art contemporain that attained institutional hegemony in the 1970s and 80s. The complexity and wealth of the erotic material created in those two decades petered out somewhat in those that followed, in no small part thanks

Curated by Baruch Gottlieb, Feedback #6: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts at Fonderie Darling features a dozen artists (single and group) from four countries. It involves a dozen installations, mostly relying on sound and video, spread over two rooms at fair distances from one another. Texts from Marshall McLuhan's experimental publications are spread out in flat vitrines with a stress on his thinking about museums present in those texts that are easily legible, although the implications from this to the exhibition itself are not drawn out.  The artworks selected span from when he was alive until recent work and they tend to address technology in the most literal of ways. To put you into the appropriate mood, you are invited to plug into the droning monotone of Julia E. Dyck while staring at a hypnotic spinning disc as if you need therapeutic pseudo theory dripped into your ears like the nutrients of an IV.  One would expect that the choice to curate a show inspired by McLuhan would