Rose-Marie Arbour’s L’art qui nous est contemporain (1999) was one of the first extended attempts to conceptualize what the Contemporary Art that developed in Québec consisted of. In examining this issue, she set the province against models that had been established in the United States and Europe.
{All quotations are my translation.}
Arbour’s examination of Contemporary Art as it evolved in Québec is situated between two key statements.
First: “This essay is rather an attempt to historically link artistic aims of the relatively recent past with others that are current, for the purpose of reflecting on the links that can be sketched that could mutually illuminate them.” [Arbour, 137]
Second: “Today, the international is based in part on the local, contrary to what prevailed in the days of modernism when universal values were advocated in opposition to particularities and singularities. The contemporary is, in this respect, post-modern.” [Arbour, 138]
These two contentions are consistently complicated, and perhaps at times undermined, by much of the rest of her text.
To begin, she presents Contemporary Art as highly atomized and often seeking to divide itself from the past, even that which is quite recent. Most of Contemporary Art theory is formulated in the United States and Europe and conceptualizes art in an international mode.
Catherine Millet stressed that it is not an ideology or an aesthetic but a social concept that described a media-museographic-economic structure. [Arbour, 8]
Canadian and Québécois art remain at the periphery of major international structures, but are also penetrated by them. Yet, Arbour simultaneously insists on art as a space of freedom and fluidity, filled with ambiguity in bids to create new forms of adaptation to the alleged alienations of the social order.
Since the 1960s, contemporaneity in the province has been situated within this spectral presence. And within this arose tendencies toward a public art, primarily one that was highly institutionalized.
This process helped differentiate modernism from contemporaneity, with the latter primarily distinguished by its function in legitimizing institutions, and their audiences. Biennials, festivals etc. have marked out the various tensions of the milieu (largely around the questionable level of talent or relevance of its participants), or vaguer theoretical tensions which are not usually particular to its locality.
If, for modernism, the international was the enemy of the local, for the contemporary, the international was integral to it. [Arbour, 107]
The negative sense of international art is its more homogenous and commercialized sense, fulfilling market demand and losing the difference presumed necessary for the quality of a work of art. In the positive sense, it describes objects of diverse provenance which share common values for artists and the broader milieu. [Arbour, 120] A magazine like Parachute functions in promoting this, a tendency that extends the New Age utopian fantasies of the 1960s. [Arbour, 121]
The post-war years saw the rise of the artist as hero, as a specialist in perception, and as a utopian. [Arbour, 49-50] Contemporary Art is defined not by ontology or formalism but by the pragmatism of its use; aesthetics and semiotics are less important than functionality and interaction. [Arbour, 50] Claims about the ontological nature of art are usually called upon in contrast to the pragmatism of contemporary art, one detached from a normative project; the works involved are not concerned with the internal nature of art but its relation to other things.
In light of such a claim, she stresses its socially constructed nature, one which is heavily influenced by administration, although this does not seem to explain the aesthetic aspects of art. [Arbour, 76]
The administrative model of art can cover the most conservative and the most innovative with fair indifference. In the 1980s in particular, art increasingly relied on the “neo-” and the revamping of the old, the mixing of disciplines etc., best exemplified by phenomena like performance art. The Other became a major paradigm, one inherited from anthropology and, one could add, one remarkably amenable to the histories of museums, giving them an appropriately self-referential quality. [Arbour, 78] And also one remarkably in tune with the normative ideology of the Canadian state: multiculturalism.
The institutional growth of Contemporary Art tends to coincide with the growth of public indifference toward it. [Arbour, 14] While this often highlights the distinction between the art world and broader world, the contemporary can also take a role outside the institution as its critic and as a social critic.
If art “diversified” enormously since the 1950s in its shift to dogmatic practices of inclusion based on anthropological models, it also became more restricted, more elitist, more exclusive, in particular in regards to the world beyond the walls of its institutions that it would allow in. It is necessary to be initiated into it, it has to be mediated and interpreted, and its “democratisation” relies on an enormous amount of controlling bureaucracy and pedagogy.
Contemporary as a term seems to have a contradictory function because it designates what seems the most distant and exclusionary with respect to the general population. [Arbour, 22] The “wider audience” to which it has been directed does not designate the population in general, but only those who make up the art milieu. Nonetheless, she insists on connecting this to greater public imaginary, the collective identity of Québec. [Arbour, 10-11]
One of the paradoxes of Contemporary Art is that it has been largely predicated on state support and the individual artist (or group) de facto functions as its missionary or mediator. The state and the artist functionally serve to legitimate each other. [Arbour, 25] In 1965, MACM opened, and from the early 70s “parallel” gallery spaces were created thanks to government financing.
Modernist Art had ostensibly been defined in its opposition to capitalism and industry in its potential to offer means of escaping it. If it was oppositional, it was also amenable to professionalization. In opposition to “tradition,” it offered “conscience” as well as promises to change life and perception.
Modernist Art existed in a more familiar world attached to science, to notions of progress and opposition, to liberation and emancipation, which is what the contemporary or postmodern (at least perfomatively) question. For Hal Foster this took two forms, neo-conservatism (reactionary, concerned with style, narrative, centrality of artist) and post-structuralism (anti-humanist, critique of representation).
Modernism was, in a sense, a religious quest to redeem the self by recovering its origin and its social possibilities and the possible forms of an emancipated society. It also had the perfume of scandal to accompany it, as witnessed in the reputation of Refus global and the automatistes.
Contemporary Art also tends to be a site of controversies in the press, although in Canada this has been more about monetary cost than art itself. Artists would also protest museum exhibitions that highlighted design or craft rather than art. Blockbuster exhibitions would also raise the ire of artists by supposedly treating art as a consumer good and in the success of such shows in demonstrating the irrelevance of art criticism to the public. This was part of the democraticisation of art. It was also in keeping with the long history of art as representation and the celebration of illusion, the things that contemporary art tends to question. But this apparently critical position has not stopped their means of diffusion, museums, biennials, etc. from becoming tourist functions.
The museum functions to give art value and participates in the market (such as it is in the Canadian instance). Contemporary Art is such because of the function it plays in a specific form of international capital which legitimizes it. Its internationalization is a primary trait of its contemporaneity. [Arbour, 72]
After Modernism, according to Régis Debray, art becomes the world’s one universal religion, embracing all. The proliferation of museums, parallel spaces, and the academic studies of art, is a proliferation of churches. This is also interpreted by Arbour as part of a general move to the democratization of taste expressed in the growth of photography, cinema etc.
The aesthetic values of the exhibition Québec 75 were to become dominant, both in the province and in the anglophone culture more broadly. Art in the province was often politically and socially engaged, although this engagement left it confronted with the problem of being reduced to the normative claims of morality. [Arbour, 62]
The 1980s saw a significant increase in group exhibitions oriented around political themes and appealing to viewer experience. [Arbour, 64] Works of art themselves become more about “research” and the presentation of information. [Arbour, 81] According to sociologist Marcel Fournier, starting in the 1970s, art in the province had already taken on the function of being a source of knowledge production and experimental research.
By the 1980s, modernist tendencies had become obsolete; art had become effectively therapeutic and concerned with its social function. [Arbour, 68-69] Feminist art had developed in part against modernism to return art to a mode of communication. In the 1980s, contemporary art was more about reaffirming dominant ideologies and institutions. Pseudo-avant-gardes may have proliferated but any subversive aspect was increasingly minimal. When the artist ceases to be a subversive (dada, surrealism etc) they become a communicator and a rhetorician and this is where the contemporary and the post-modern coincide.
In Québec, it was artists who called for the institutionalization of contemporary art, she observes, although, one should add, this was hardly a consensus position among artists. [Arbour, 105] By the end of the 1990s, artists had become highly dependent on such institutions. Unlike in France or the US, the governments of Québec and Canada are the bosses of contemporary art in the country, and what its artists rely upon for their survival.
The Étude sur les arts visuels (1995) conducted by the Ministre de la Culture et des Communications suggested there was a total lack of cohesion among visual artists in the province and among the rest of their milieu. Fractured, individualistic, and parasitic, the visual art world is extremely fragile and weak in comparison to the rest of the arts, barely showing internationally or even outside of the province. [Arbour, 114]
The artist’s function in this context is a therapeutic one, both for them and the audience. [Arbour, 106] Whatever influence they have exists here. And in terms of their local media ecology, they are regarded as luxury goods, in spite of the way artists and those in their milieu may position themselves. [Arbour, 108]
Contemporary Art in Canada is almost entirely funded by different levels of government. Integral to its legibility and curation was its promotion of a progressive narrative of continuity and rupture and of art’s place in cultural communities.
This displaced the Modernist narrative of it following an internal formal logic which also relied on notions of skill and disciplinary divisions which were being institutionally eroded. Plasticity became less focal to art discourse than relationality and personal experience. Already for several decades, identity had become more central and privileged than plasticity. [Arbour, 47]
Arbour sides with Habermas against Baudrillard to insist on optimistic rebirth of art and community, and appeals to Stuart Hall. For her, art is entirely bound up with a relation to the Other, one which is supposed to give both dignity and therapeutically emancipate them. [Arbour, 89]
Fundamental to this has been the way that social identities have been privileged as has the redemption of marginal cultures. [Arbour, 99] As a space for conceptualizing possibility, the art world (artists, their mediators and institutions) create new forms of legitimacy. [Arbour, 74]
Johanne Lamoureux noted that compared to the militancy that often inflects art discourse in English Canada, that in Québec tended to remain firmly concerned with plastic issues rather than political ones, unlike Québécois film, music, and literature. [Arbour, 114-115]
Collaboration and interdisciplinarity are identified as “dynamism.” Art in the second half of the twentieth century tended to be about breaking down the division between art and life. The end of art is evoked when visual culture comes to occlude the plastic arts. She links the decline of social standing of artist to decline of spiritual values in age of consumerism [Arbour, 131] While mass participatory art has decreased steeply since the 1970s, symposia have increased. [Arbour, 135]
Contemporary Art is oppositional, if primarily to consumer culture (although she contradicts this), not seeking the purity of Modernism, but digging into and re-appropriating the past. The Contemporary artist remains heroic, but through concern for the environment, identity, the body, and spirituality.
It is debatable to what extent the oppositions she sets up between Modernism and the Contemporary hold in general and in the Canadian instance in particular. Her insistence on the centrality of renewed religion actually makes this clear. Effectively, the most sweeping thing one could suggest is that there was a shift from a pseudo-Protestantism to a pseudo-Catholicism.
Likewise, it is not remotely evident that, some superficial references aside, poststucturalism has had much of an impact on most cultural production in the country. More than once she contends that this was a break from sclerotic models, yet one could readily point out that the Contemporary, which remains the hegemonic one, was already sclerotic in practice and rhetoric by the mid-1970s and has retained its geriatric quality far longer than the thing which it displaced, such as it was.
The primary weakness of the book is that it does not offer a viable historiographic method for attempting to describe its object, let alone analyze it. Far from clarifying this, her approach tends to muddle it.
The benefit of this in part is that it demonstrates how unhelpful the appeals to social and cultural theory are for understanding what artistic phenomena historically are. It is not because the issue of the Contemporary is exceedingly difficult or complex. If anything, the historical facticity of art over the past 60 or 70 years in the province is unnervingly easy to trace compared to that which preceded it.
In a sense, the opposite of what she contends in her description is what needs to be addressed, not its supposed plurality, but the way that it can be readily reduced to something very limited and which to a large degree should be described and analyzed in terms of governmentality and institutionalism.
Strangely, given the conditions upon which Contemporary Art in the province has been predicated, the real politics of the province and its place in Canadian federalism are scarcely addressed.
Arbour is quite right to insist that much, though certainly not all, of the artwork that falls under the Contemporary umbrella cannot be readily explained by the structures that govern their diffusion. But this, along with the position that it occupies, only makes reading it in cultural terms that much more dubious.
It is less the periphery-centre structure of international art that is relevant here than the federalist structure of Canada that is crucial. In fact, her concern with internationalism or transnationalism is something of a red herring.
Contemporary Art in Canada may not be insular, but it may be a good example of what Guattari once termed, ventilated autism.
Her primary bifurcation between art and consumerism also continually collapses, not only because, as she admits, most Contemporary Art is scarcely opposed to it, but because the state structure of art in Canada has a relation to markets foreign to most of Contemporary Art, a point which she admits.
None of this explains the religiosity of the Contemporary or why it was appealed to in the first place.
Given the way it is structured as a bureaucratic field, a historiographic analysis of Contemporary Art in Canada would be better off looking to the methods of someone like Lewis Namier than Habermas or Hall. One would also be better off historicizing and questioning the models she takes for granted (sociological and anthropological) rather than allowing they plausibly describe historical phenomena in the first place.