While catalogues like the two discussed here are not intended to be rigorous historical examinations or even polemics, they are useful as instances of institutional self-justification, which in both cases is fairly ambiguous. The institutions are largely placed in the background with the theatre of Contemporary Art happening before them or, it is intimated, behind closed doors somewhere.
Published by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec with texts by Eve-Lyne Beaudry (conservatrice en art contemporain, MNBAQ) and Marie Fraser (professeure, département d'histoire de l'art, UQAM), Art contemporain du Québec: guide de collection (2016) contains a general essay which states the basic historiographic perspective of the institution and which is followed by nearly sixty two page profiles of specific artists (including duos and groups).
If abstraction had dissolved the traditional points of reference in the 40s and 50s, by the 1960s, the artists privileged by the artworld largely rejected that harsh modernism. Although the work of Molinari, Tousignant, Hurtubise etc. had helped establish the province’s reputation on the international market with an art of self-expression and optical effects, the reaction of a younger generation [jockeying for reputation, funding etc.] drove artistic norms in a different direction.
Casting themselves as opposition to the “bourgeois” and the previous generation of Plasticiens and Automatistes, they tended to advocate for a direct socialization of art through happenings, performances, agit-prop etc. This could take highly varied form, whether in the work of Lemoyne, Mousseau, or Demers.
In becoming “participatory” and “democratic,” art also became multidisciplinary and far closer to pop culture [although which one?] in terms of content, attitude, and form. Aside from the importance of printmaking and performance, cinematic forms also became a commonplace. In the shadow of Expo, a new kind of monumental and spectacular art took shape.
Fraser links the shifts in the artworld to various political “struggles” as the crystallization of broader social changes. As such, art took on a more ostensibly interrogative role as a probe into society. Minimalism, photography, video, conceptual and installation art all functioned as means to carve out definitions for a specifically Québécois Contemporary Art, or at least to test what Contemporary Art might be in the province.
As disciplinary boundaries were collapsing, art could move beyond traditional museum forms [although they tended to become more and more focused on the museum as a form] while pluralizing the kinds of document and object that could be institutionally funded or collected. By the end of the 1970s, with the help of critics, universities and institutions, art in the province was focused even more on taking part in the international scene.
By the mid-1980s, performance, interventionist, and installation art came to dominate institutional art practices, especially highlighted by Fraser in their feminist manifestations. After the erosion of representational art in the previous decades, the dominance of PoMo [whatever that is supposed to imply here] effectively made the radical claims for such residual "Modernism" politically incorrect and there was a greater turn to the body, to the treatment of art as self-expression and self-representation.
With these tendencies also came the normalization of remaking, of citation, re-enactment, referentiality, and the investment in alternative narratives, usually invoked to militate against some presumed political foe or historical injustice [that could be sanctioned by state sponsorship].
By the 1990s, all of these tendencies had been further solidified and Contemporary Art was more and more like mildly experimental (public) television, and work was marketed as educational (critical of society of consumption, advancing modes of decolonisation etc.), as a public act concerned with the intersections of various social categories.
It became the norm for art to be ephemeral, “relational,” a point of “conversation” and “participation” for the various parties that constituted the artworld and whatever contingent “community” was being invested in it or by it. All elements of life would be recycled within it, from objects and materials to discourses. To this, Fraser concludes, far from being banal, Contemporary Art is the extreme sensitivity to the surrounding world.
There isn’t much of even a cursory explanation for any of this, not that that is to be expected from such an institutional document, although it is hardly unheard of.
The catalogue Art actuel, Présences québécoises (1992), published by the Association française d'action artistique, Ministère des affaires étrangères, for instance, used fifteen artists to summarize the general trends of the previous dozen years in the province, and did offer a substantially more terse examination of the evolution of its Contemporary Art while keeping within the general norms of such discourse.
Echoing the line established by Thériault for Québec 75, it insisted that Québec art only existed in a strictly geographical sense, rejecting the notion of a properly Québécois or French art otherwise: there was only art made in the province. [19] This was nonetheless defined by being somewhere “between Riopelle and the third millennium” as well as being defined by a very specific set of institutions and financial arrangements.
Although funding had allowed the construction of almost 200 museums and art centres within the province, Contemporary Art was delineated almost negatively as an art that was barely known or understood, even by the few who came in contact with it. But at least the province had had a few great movements in the past, so it was “normal” in an international Contemporary Art way. [19]
Another essay stressed the ways in which the province’s contemporary Art was not “exotic,” regardless of the degree to which is relied on its quotidian life. If it wasn’t exotic amid the internationalism that it set itself within, it remained at least singular. [27]
Like other accounts, the book stressed the extent to which avant-gardism, a pursuit of largely self-taught artists, was destroyed and denigrated from the 1960s onward, in no small part do to the expansion of the arts within the educational system. The artist was no longer a scandalous figure, but a professional highly concerned with their reputation and career.
Schooling played a major role in the construction of Contemporary Art. Beyond this, one major feature of what makes it unique is that it has little to do with capitalism. Instead, it exists in the almost closed, highly bureaucratized artificial market of Canadian art.
Art actuel, Présences québécoises is certainly less vague, not relying on an entirely dubious notion of a transparent interrelationship between the artworld and “society” (whatever that is). It does share an uneasiness about the art of the province not being "normal," something which Fraser’s essay largely tries to efface by casting it in unambiguous terms as a kind of social activism with a positive referential relationship.
It’s worth noting in this respect that art as “representation” (in a sociological sense) becomes moralized when any hint of art careerism and reaction gets dropped from Fraser’s narrative. In fact, the broader historical context that she began with vanished so that, ironically, the more art became part of very specific modes of Liberal governance, the more transparently it is presented as part of, or reflective of, “society.”