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 shifting social dynamics of the province coincided with a wide series of diverging and converging artistic tendencies. Although products of historical specificity, they seemed strange/foreign and operating in a void rather than meaningfully integrated into the world around them.
Among these tendencies was a rattrapage with American art. This was aided by the recognition of a lack of either a tradition (save Automatism) or real art milieu in the province. The tendencies outlined in the three volumes of Normand Thériault’s Québec Underground were comparable to those among the Situationistes, the Yippies etc. avowing a socialization of art that seemed to have little to do with the actually existing society in the province. In Montréal, Québec Underground contended, this was split between plastic avant-gardists and para-artistic activities that had explicit socio-political directions.
But it is there that the most serious difficulties that the "arteurs" have encountered reside and that we will summarize by speaking about their social isolation. The "anti-art" actions and other underground manifestations could not find a sufficiently stable and solid sociological inscription (this is a euphemism...) in the network of the collective organizations, the political formations, the trade-union and popular movements, the progressive information media, the cultural institutions nor even simply of the currents of thought already existing in the milieu. There is a costly paradox here: a religious art without links to the churches would very quickly have been perceived as a socio-cultural dead end - even if such a cut-off may be viable in some rare individual cases. A progressive art outside of progressive social movements has obviously no better chance of playing a historical role, of lasting and consolidating itself; but our critic does not even seem to think about that. Significantly, the only clear point of reference has been able to find is in the YIP and Situationist ideologies, which, it will be agreed, do not provide particularly brilliant evidence of being rooted in the actual Québec context of the time. The "anti-art" manifestations and forms of expression generally remained confined to sociological islands (at best, to sociological appendages) marginal to the specific sets of social agents - already in themselves a minority in the whole of Québec's social formation - bearers of the same historical, political, and ideological values as those they claimed to defend. The example of Fusion des Arts is undoubtedly the most extreme case, since it is an enterprise that is in every respect autonomous, modelled on the most conventional structures and whose activities -independently of their content, which is not very convincing from the point of view of subversion - have most often wisely followed the most traditional socio-cultural networks (universities, governments, international exhibitions, art magazines, museums, folk festivals, etc.), making it possible for it to be seen as a comic autonomous organization… [18]
Any intellectually rigorous attempt to “to take stock of our ‘parallel quiet revolution’ of the cultural left” seemed absent. [22] Rhetoric aside, “The artistic symbolism of our time will not be able to hide for long, under the fireworks of its profuse diversity, the lack of a progressive vision that alone can give it a profound social and cultural validity. How do so many of these little artists remain insensitive to the emptiness…” [82] The art world is tiny, cynical, ironic, anti-theoretical; its inhabitants also fashion themselves as bûcheron, naif, or primitives, emotional and “folkloric” ultimately resulting in work that was amusing and decorative. [98-99]
Although, “[t]o leave art is the declared desire of several avant-garde artists,” this did not seem to mean abandoning all the conventional trappings of the art world and its associated careers. [23] This “leaving art” properly would mean leaving the specific petit-bourgeois milieu of the art world, not to remain as its antagonists or act as though one were taking place in a debate (a purely reactive position). Happenings, Cozic, Lemoyne, Vazan etc. all remain in this milieu. The same is true of the counterculture, of those associated with Mainmise and Hobo-Québec, of the freaks and hippies who are all still part of the anti-art bag, devoted to utopia and myth. [26]
The “marginal” or counter-culturalists are a relatively recent phenomena, a deracination simultaneous with a new mode of social mobility and social climbing made possible, in no small part, by the massive growth of the educational industry and state bureaucracy. “L’anarcho-artorisme” is the impasse that the artist tends to end at, unable to commit to a folk art for the worker and peasant, and equally unable to admit to being bourgeois. [31-32]
“Anarcho-artorism is one of the most significant dead ends in the field of artistic practices. Extremism meets irresponsibility, scandal is only an indirect appeal to admiration, playfulness and humour become instruments of social distinction, the institutional circuits of culture are confirmed and extended. A brief list of themes is sufficiently eloquent: eroticism, scatology, sadism, absurdity, diversion [détournement] of the usual object, parody, verbal or physical violence, wild rituals, regressions, refusals and rejections, monomania, marginality, psychodrama, etc., all of which have recently been tried out, shown, pushed to the limit, explored.” [33]
There is a fundamental difference between the artist and the worker between the oeuvre and travaille. If, for Marxists, labour and production were the essence of what it was to be human, what the artist produces is symbolic and part of the ordering of meaning. [39] Transgression and subversion become merely merchandise.
Québec is at a turning point: avant-garde art is still more subsidized than it is purchased, but that will come quickly. Its public being numerically and economically limited, creators could for some time still confuse their difficulties in earning money (which affect most of their colleagues, even traditionalists, in roughly the same proportions), with that resistance which signals the struggles. Since the conformisms of the petty and middle bourgeoisie are still very strong, and the social prestige they attach to culture is still relatively limited - factors that account for the phenomena of "catching up" already pointed out by Marcel Saint- Pierre and F. Gagnon - the illusion could persist here, despite the prosperity of certain galleries devoted to recent art, that artistic practice is still more or less "cursed" and therefore subversive. It would be a final "catch-up", which we must avoid, to discover in ten years what a mistake this is. [45]
Contemporary artists tend to demand and assume that they are entitled to salaries or funding by virtue of the roles they claimed as aesthetic or spiritual guides. Numerous avant-gardes fill this role along different lines: the modernist (recuperable as style innovation and assimilable to technocratic life), a “savage” or contestatory avant-garde (art povera, body art etc). Intellectual or academic Marxism tends to play an essential role in the definition and recuperation of these avant-gardes. [50] And Conceptual Art tends to take on the role of the ironic double of technocratic society which, while often claiming to avoid the traditional model of the capitalist object through strategies of de-materialization, incidentally commercialized a broader set of gallery practices. [52-53]
Whatever Contemporary Art might be, in practice it is not really an art of revolt or contestation. Modernist culture is a new form of academicism; its revolts and subversions are functional means for the acceleration of capital. [54] This fits perfectly with the norms of Trudeauism and with those of the Bourassa government. With them, capitalism is the perpetual revolution of appearances, and “culture” (innovation, difference) is the means by which elites formulate their destiny. [57] Art is the propaganda for the perpetuation of a snobbish otherness expressed through gadgets and newfound religion. [58] The normative ideological claims of this art (the new, the “subversive”) are assimilated to a narrative of progressivism (the acceleration of fashion waves and market expansion) and the “democratisation” of art. [67]
Modernist ideology in the visual arts is now in the same style as the official speeches of politicians: an agreed-upon genre in which the most dishonest rhetorical flourishes hold sway. Alongside dialectical reason and critical thinking, there is always the blind discourse of ideology. We must listen to it, because it tells us in hushed tones about the masks of power, its backstage games and its shifting interests. [70]
Critics recuperate art and subvert it by treating it in the terms of self-expression, cultural authenticity, personal style, etc.. In this context, works that supposedly transgress are easily assimilated by power and has no real efficiency. [11]
Art has lost all connection to the masses, he complains. Mikel Dufrenne condemned art actuel as sick, abstract, intellectual and part of a set of sclerotic institutions that needed to be torn down. [101] Although an exponent of art as space for struggle and liberation, Vacher is somewhat weary of the temptations of a popular art, however, given that they tend to get sucked into kitsch and to passivity to the same degree they risk being reactive.
As a polemic, of course, it is fundamentally unfair to most of its targets. This applies not only to his dismissal of the handful of artists he bothers to name, but his attacks on other critics, such as Gilles Toupin, who had, and would go on to, make more concrete criticisms of emergent art actuel in the province than Vacher does.
Although Vacher calls on Situationism, early Baudrillard, and Michel Ragon as theoretical points of reference, there is precious little recognition of art theory in the province, which he dismisses as effectively non-existent. It is in part due to his deep hostility to Québecois nationalism that Vacher can’t offer much of a response to the supposed desire to “exit” the art world and enter some other one.
He does not advocate for a specific (Marxist) ideological direction or prescription for art, only that it be rigorously critical, it could be nationalist, christian, anti-psychiatric, structuralist etc. Again, there is so little of the concrete analysis he claims to be advocating for that this is all quite meaningless. When he admires Borduas and Gauvreau for their “engagement” he cites only a vague phantasm of them that has little to do with anything they materially said or did. Even this is ambivalent given that he approvingly cites Barry Lord’s critique of Borduas.
Revolution, he contends, demands the integration of the arts and design, not their
autonomy, the fusion of art and life; a passion of becoming to overcome
fascist barbarism. [107-109] However, it is his political convictions that both open the way to a minimal insight and then completely stymy going anywhere with it. He doesn’t discuss what this suggests within a technocratic, mostly
non-capitalist art field such as that in Canada, the “deracination” of which has only a trivial amount to do with capitalism in any serious sense of the term, which he seemed to believe would be displaced rather than becoming substantially more expansive and sclerotic than it was in the 1970s.