Art is free, or it is not. It invents, expresses itself and explores in all directions, or commits suicide by serving causes that are not its own. It is plural, diverse, crazy; or doctrinaire, intolerant and terribly serious. It asks questions to which we are fed answers everywhere. It stimulates the imagination, awakens utopias, and offers man the only game that rules do not hinder. And in this way, art energetically calls the whole environment into question. [29]
Published in 1983, Guy Robert’s Art actuel au Québec: depuis 1970 provided an extensive survey of the art produced in the province in the 70s and early 80s (most of the art reproduced in the text is from 1980-1982.) It is a follow-up to his L'Art au Québec depuis 1940 of 1973 and examines what he takes to be the diversity of the plastic arts, under numerous names and tendencies, since the 1970s.
Robert insists on it as an essay or interrogation attentive to the role of the "socio-cultural" in art since the 1970s, a period after the Quiet Revolution and the era of Expo in which the centres of the province seemed to be drastically changing and which was filled with “vitality and dynamism.” [6-7]
After the 1970s dawned, there was a massive return to figurative art that accompanied the expansion of plastic means within the generally nebulous “bouillon de culture.” [7] “In the field of visual arts, in Québec as in many other areas, the 1970s saw the propulsion of heterogeneous works and events into the public arena.” [9] By 1980, art actuel had become an elitist ghetto rooted in academic institutions and the state funding that propped up its parallel spaces.
The growth of public art (sculpture, murals, architecture etc.) occurred in a space that was simultaneously chemically and visually polluted. [10] Public art was limited by climate, a frequent source of attacks by vandals, and covered by graffiti. Urban areas were dominated by the upheavals of construction, and “progress” was the god of the era. [10] If previously, 75% of the province’s populace were rural, by this time they had become 75% suburban. [11]
The 1970s saw a massive return to figuration, both in painting and sculpture. This could be experimental or reactionary, but was at any rate in part a reaction against the domination of abstract painting in the academy. At least half of Robert’s book breaks down the painting that occurred in the province between the 70s and early 80s. This is done both in terms of form and content.
He opens by discussing the utopian space of non-figurative, shape-dominated images, easily amenable to being placed in decor [33] and moves on to mathematical and geometric abstraction that stressed texture and tactile experience. In general, he understands abstraction as a celebration of colour and form in themselves. [51]
From these developments, he turns to the "enormous" place held by fantasy within the province’s contemporary art, and its mining of the irrational and unconscious. [57] Robert moves on to scenes of interiority, visionary scenes, and mythic ones. There is a shift back into a kind of narrative painting, also detectable in the implied narrative of magical or poetic realist imagery.
This general trajectory keeps painting hardly distant from its roots in the different strains of postwar surrealism. He stresses the degree to which Québec painting tends to develop eccentrically and indifferently to most international trends. This is perhaps best exemplified in the work of outsider artists like Villeneuve and Gendron, who has a high profile in the province in the 1970s. [75-77]
Observing in passing that still lives were quite rare in the 1960s, he notes that the growth of photography paradoxically stimulated the development of portraiture as a genre in Québec. [79, 87] Painting in a more verist mode was anecdotal when it wasn't fantastic and generally more concerned with a mythologization of everyday life than issues of its plastic presentation. With the influence of Neo-Expressionism, the treatment of figures became more hallucinatory.
Robert registers surprise at the quantity of nudes being produced, particularly of men. [107] He distanced erotic painting from the nude and from pornography before leaping into discussing figures in landscapes and a return to the picturesque and imaginary landscapes.
When he turns to drawing, he notes that it is rarely shown in the province and, as with painting, stresses its pluralism. [143] Although there is no dominant ideology or form, there is a tendency to subdivision loosely influenced by comics and a fragmentary sense of narrative. Nudes and eroticism are also prevalent in drawing. [148-149]
Prints and artists' books became more common, although most artists' books at the point of writing had been produced before the 1950s. [176] Prints often concentrated on texture, disfiguration, and the grotesque. [162-163]
Sculpture followed similar tendencies of other media, evoking meditative spaces, abstracted organic forms, irrational spaces, mystical symbols, and fantasies.
By the 1970s, the term “avant-garde” had become one of abuse and “research” became the privileged term (along with “quest” and “prospectus”) while diversity, divergence, and pluralism became the most common buzzwords.
Art as a form of illusionism became suspect and there was a greater investment and privileging of technology for privileging avenues to new ways of seeing. Gaming, the ludic, and the investigation of socio-cultural questions took the place of religion. [236] Religion had lost its prestige during the Quiet Revolution but its mystical aspect had been recovered through the lionization of the imagination. [240] If art celebrated the empirical, it was as a form of investigation with no necessary rules. [238] This could be tied to the forms of pseudo-contestation that became central to art practice and publicity. Unsurprisingly, this coincided with a rise of satire, travesty, and irony.
Robert’s book leaves most of what would typically be recognized as Contemporary Art at the end. As such, it provides a very useful foil to Arbour’s work of 1999 which expands beyond the period he was covering in 1983. What they share is a contention about the basic religiosity of art in the province and the questionable status of it as a form of (state-sponsored and mediated) contestation.
Robert’s book provides a far more representative view of art overall in the province while her book excludes most of this to concentrate on the narrow existence of the “contemporary.” As a result, he successfully relativizes the status of Contemporary Art and the extreme contingency of its celebration (neither really examines why it was so readily an institutional mode of art). One of the interesting things in comparison is that all the leading cliches that would guide her work were already present twenty years earlier as standard elements of art discourse. His book also successful shows just how continuous rather disjunctive most of the art being produced in the province was, which provides another means to question the status of the contemporain against the actuel.
Like Arbour, despite an initial promise that his essay would examine how all of this came about in its broader context, this does not really happen. What you get instead is a cataloguing of comparability and divergence that sets out a variety of trends that are never fully articulated or explained.