Art in Montreal

La multitude déchue is a show of drawings, photos, and little sculptures by Peter Gnass at Art Mûr . The majority of them are dated 2009-2011 and were previously shown at Maison de la Culture Côte-des-Neiges in 2016. Suggestive enough to be topical, they aren’t topical enough to suggest much. If it isn’t quite as visually crude as Félipe Goulet Letarte , conceptually, it seems even weaker. While the former was so (unintentionally?) ambiguous that it became paradoxical and farcical, Gnass is much more puritanical and dull.

  Clint Neufeld ’s All hat No cattle at Art Mûr contains pieces of glassware, serving plates and furniture in various vague period styles that roughly suggest the late 18th and early 19th centuries. On them, whether resting on pillows or seemingly growing from or embracing them, are various industrial implements. The ways his work has been talked about have been rather boring and predictable, seeing in it some sort of statement about gender or defamiliarization . An almost identical set of strategies were employed with Cal Lane in the same space just a month ago. Neufeld falls into this sometimes but usually seems to just tell anecdotes about his life. In a way, this is the far better way to approach the works.

Félipe Goulet Letarte 's Le Poème politique 3 at Galerie Popop is the third part of a series of paintings/performances. According to the artist, "Political Poem 3 is a conceptual painting series following the score: paint the phrase ‘I am ashamed to be white’ in a different language on each painting’’ It would be easy to dismiss it as crude agit-prop or trolling but there’s a little more to it, either deliberately or not, than something that asinine. And as easy as it would be to dismiss the gesture as exploitative and narcissistic, it’s interesting as a particularly naked instance of some of the tendencies in the city’s Contemporary Art. Letarte claimed that the idea for the works occurred to him in 2014, which means these have been gestating for nearly a decade. This may be true or defensive. It seems eerily too much an appropriation of the meme moral panic associated with the “It’s Okay to be White” posters from a few years ago to be coincidental.

The jeremiads of unrecognized geniuses, the antics and grimaces of coterie, the boutique esotericism, the imitation of the extremist fashions of the great American neighbour, the intellectual mediocrity and inculture, the easy temptations of craftsmanship and "balanced" beauty, all these features of the Montréal 'art scene'... [105] Published in 1975, Laurent-Michel Vacher’s Pamphlet sur la situation des arts au Québec is a time capsule for a specific sort of marxisant discourse on art, one worth digging up for what it suggests about the early period of Contemporary Art in the province. Some of its polemical points are, if anything, more convincingly applied to artists working today than those he attacked half a century ago. But his pamphlet is also worth reading for how much it fails to actually construct a viable critique, or even simple description, of the situation of art in the province or predict where it was headed. Between the late 1960s and 1974, the shi