Earlier in the century, the perpetually troubled MACM attempted to create a triennale Québécoise, which only managed to survive for two iterations (2008/2011).
These were among the most ambitious attempts of the city’s art institutions to portray themselves as part of the international art world, to normalize itself in the festival model on the model of the Whitney Biennial. This also tied it even further into the tourist industry, which it was hardly distant from anyway. The first triennale set attendance records.
René Blouin told La Presse that the latest crop of Contemporary Artists was decidedly different from the earlier ones: “‘For a long time there was a certain conceptual aridity in Québec art,’ he says, ‘but we’re really over that. The objects are well-made. There is a relationship to the body, to pleasure. Young artists are more erudite. It’s transdisciplinary. It’s a more generous planet that we are approaching. It speaks to us even if we are not specialists.” [Mario Cloutier, “Une Triennale québécoise déjà populaire,” La Presse, May 30 2008.]
I am not sure if I attended the first triennale. I am guessing I did not, although some of the work looks familiar. This is not aided by the catalogue, whose representation of the works provides no clue about how they actually functioned in space or why they were arranged in such a manner, which ultimately renders the whole catalogue record of it rather perplexing.
I did attend the second and final, but nothing about it made much of an impression. In fact, I barely recollected it until I stumbled on the associated catalogue.
Whatever they were like to attend, they certainly seemed to have more of a grandeur than the revamped biennial of Montréal, that was concocted following the demise of the old incarnation of the biennial. These have been different in size and organized in ways more like those of the art festivals of the 1980s and 90s.
I am not going to discuss the works exhibited because it is impossible to do so properly. As the curators themselves point out, the curation completely alters all of the individual works by superimposition. They were, to use their term, “transformed” and given an existence separate from their autonomy as artworks otherwise. What follows deals with the two catalogues produced.
The 2008 edition, Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme: la Triennale québécoise ran from May 24 until September 7, 2008. It had four curators: Josée Bélisle, Pierre Landry, Mark Lanctôt and conservatrice en chef, Paulette Gagnon, with Lesley Johnstone as conservatrice and co-ordonnatrice.
The title and guiding maxim was Anaxagore’s “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, all is transformed.” [15] As the first of what was presumed to be an ongoing series, Gilles Daigneault deemed it the first shot in a family album, an album that would unfold the history of the art in the province. [Daigneault, G. (2008). “La Triennale qui fait boum!” Espace Sculpture (86), 27.]
Extraordinarily, it seemed to function much the way most major Contemporary Art exhibitions in the province did until relatively recently, when they became more narrow and topical rather than whimsical indexes of the taste of a handful of people. [This is not to suggest that topicality necessarily escapes this.]
Pierre Landry explains that there was no basic discriminatory method other than curatorial unanimity and selection based on no consistent thematic concern. Tangential justifications were “vague” but they were certainly coloured by a moral concern with the social content and role of art in consumer society. [17] Art of the second half of twentieth century was marked by extraordinary continuity, he suggests, but as separate as these pieces of art may be from that, the works are not cynical or skeptical or ironic, but perhaps paradoxical [18-19]
All around the exhibition is polysemy in the works and between them because of their positioning in the context of one another. [21] All the same, according to Josée Belisle, they tended to fall into concerns with illusionism, various neo-baroque strategies, the grotesque, a strong sense of the romantic or exploitations of the banal, of re-enacting Contemporary Art models and playing with those of advertising with art acting as a means of reversibility, transforming day into night. [22-25]
Paulette Gagnon deals with another set of generic headers (complexity,
heterogeneity, pluralism, consumerism) as she maps out various ways in
which art seeks either the re-enchantment or disenchantment of the
world. It is mostly the former that is dealt with, generally by means of
allegory and myth, as well as appeals to the artist as shaman or
scientist. Relying on the testing of duration and perception, the art
works sought “limit experiences” to probe. The affective results were
generally uncertain, veering between horror and Camp. [Or camp-horror
but why these options is not made evident.]
Mark Lanctôt’s essay follows on, dealing with the issue of “mondialisation” in very broad terms. Concentrating on discussing four anglophone artists in the exhibition to create a wedge in any sense of unity, he suggests the strangeness of the artworld, supposedly a centre of cosmopolitanism, could take such an ostensibly nationalist form as a local survey show. He argues that the enterprise if anachronistic in its attempt at panorama and relativizes this with an appeal to the excluded international while noting the exhibition was justified not so much by identity as by the local “conditions of life” within global capital. However, he regarded it as being about “identity” and sought to separate it from the “French perfume” of the touristic idea of the place. The works he highlighted, nonetheless, focused on kitsch, popular culture references, and local anecdotes.
In his review, Bernard Lévy stressed the humour and plurality of the exhibitions, their general lightness and questioning of the art experience and the world more loosely, chiding some of the curators for offering overly restrictive (and political) interpretations. [Lévy, B. & Connolly, J. (2008). “La triennale québécoise : un air de légèreté,” Vie des arts, 52 (211), 80-81] The guiding notion he took away from it was “taking liberties” through kinds of playfulness that engendered delight and reflection. His fellow critic at Vie des arts, Jocelyne Connolly, echoed this, stressing the ludic dimension of the works and the heterogeneity of artistic choices. [ibid., 85]
In another article, Lévy would suggest that there was, “No particular theme other than the somewhat all-purpose theme of Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed, the real singularity of the Québec Triennial is ... to be Québécois!” [Lévy, B. (2008). “Un été muséal,” Vie des arts, 52(211), 15] In ETC, Patrick Poulin noted the mixed messages that the catalogue gave regarding the justification of its choices (including its definition of what it was to be Québécois) and concluded, “despite the lack of debate or formal discussions about the québécoiss in this exhibition, it is a success.” [Poulin, P. (2008). “Review of Transformeurs/ transformeuses/ transformateurs/ La Triennale québécoise 2008...” ETC, (84), 42. His emphasis]. Both seemed to agree that Québécois did not really designate an identity and that may have been just as well.
The most entertaining response came from Jean Larose, who complained about the institutional (“curatorial cartels”) discourse around the work that seemed to demonstrate no understanding of the implications of the theories it appropriated and the words the curators and artists misused. Accompanying texts tended to disable meaning and the whole thing was encased in a “Lewis Carroll-like fantasia of nonsense.” However, he was quite right, if not very generous about it, when observing that the scaffolding put up around the works was essentially a way to sell it as new or innovative, when both the strategies and content of the work, as well as the ways they were discussed, were all quite antiquated. The exhibition was effectively an exhibition of performative amnesia. [Larose, J. (2008). “Overkill cartel,” Vie des arts, 52 (212), 30–31.]
La Triennale québécoise 2011: le travail qui nous attend ran from October 7, 2011 until January 3 2012. It had most of the same curators. Its catalogue supplemented their essays with several by art historians and other scholars. “A work in its own right, the accompanying publication reifies the basic concept of the Triennial,” Paulette Gagnon explained. [13] For the curators, the book was intended as a reference text for Contemporary Art in the province. [22]
Although the previous triennale had been filled with art historical references, this became a central theme in the second, which was glossed as the “Bringing the past back to life [or, bringing it up-to-date].” [Éric Clément, “L’ère de l’interrogation,” La Presse, October 18, 2011.]
Paulette Gagnon’s forward places the event in the Duchampian legacy, stressing the role of the spectator in making the art and the function of art as a means to alter the way the spectator perceives the world. She glosses this as “a reversal of roles, a disruption of values.” [13] Repeating one of her most frequently used terms, she cites the exhibition as “a global testament to the vitality and power of Québec’s artistic production.” [13. My stress.]
The joint statement by the curators notes that its title was taken from a Tatlin essay and reflects the ongoing interest of artists in the history of the 20th century’s avant-garde. They see the exhibition as a response to the unanswered utopian promises of that time. [21]
Following these lines, Lesley Johnstone reads the works as “re-evaluating and renewing the premises” of the radical art (conceptual, relational, feminist etc.) of the 1960s and 70s, retaining only the “radical” aspect and leaving behind the “dogmatic.” [77. What the distinction between these is remains unclear.] Although superficially postmodern, the work of Québécois artists has almost no reliance on theory, irony, or cynicism [a curatorial insistence we also encountered at the previous edition and which was echoed in many reviews] and generally expresses a genuine investment in the “site” as a space where “anything can happen.” [77]
As such, exhibition takes priority over artwork, and the exhibition tends to function as the establishment of conditions for an event which may or may not involve the audience. Even with this attitude, there is a new insistence on the centrality of the artist as author. This, and the privileging of site, although she scarcely stresses it, has something to do with the centrality of the artist-run centre’s role in Canadian/Québécois art and the function of artists as bureaucrats. [79] This should, at the very least, complicate the implications of “radicality” but she does not address this.
As much as artists appropriate the familiar forms of the art of the 1960s and 70s, they do so to concentrate on phenomenal experience rather than the theoretical implications of these forms. The space becomes central to the point that artists would live in them, blurring the distinction between studio and gallery. Although most of the artworks discussed do this in a more or less earnest way, some, like Dean Baldwin, in transforming the site into a bar to mock institutional openings, plays against this.
Research/revisiting/processing function as basic keywords.
For Marie Fraser, re-enactments and the performance of the work of art as “something that actually happened” rather than a non-referential action is central. [97] Such works are gestural and often rely on the situational and the role of the spectator. Meaning comes from action and the engagement it invites, even to seemingly more traditional modes of performance such as the allegorical tableau vivant. Observing these various strategies, she contends that “temporal openness is, in my view, crucial to understanding what prompts so many artists to mime the recent or distant past.” [88] She appeals to Benjamin and stresses the triad of memory, repetition and slowness as essential, even to the point of verging on the narrativeless through ritual and duration. This is one means to de-anthropomorphizing nature and the world around us, to illustrate the movement of time by capturing its ambient qualities. And for this, she adds, sound tended to be of pivotal importance to much of the work on display.
Mark Lanctôt returns to the themes from his essay in the previous triennale catalogue, contrasting the cosmopolitan to the regional, now calling on the work of Benedict Anderson and attempts to relativize sight, demeaning the image with the rise of textual dominance which in turn only makes imagery (in a supposedly cheapened image-saturated society), that much harder to come by and to convincingly create. In all this, he senses a “persistence of the modern in contemporary practices.” [104]
For François LeTourneux, it is all funnelled through what he terms the “cold”, which is effectively the familiar forms of one form of Modernism, that which bared its formal apparatus and reduced its syntax. Minimalism and Conceptualism would be central here, and artists seemed to appeal to their original promises to link elementary forms with forms of social progress. However, most of the work is more design-oriented and about the qualities of various devices and materials. [None of this strikes me as especially “cold.” In fact, it tends to seem warm verging on the cheesy.]
All of these tendencies are described by the curators based primarily on artists’ statements rather than the phenomenal record of how these artworks functioned. Johanne Sloan’s essay casts the work of people like Geoffrey Farmer, Valérie Blass, and BGL in terms of material culture studies (Appadurai, Latour, Bennett) and Thing Theory. She detects in some of their work a tension between the coded commodity and a “wilder materiality.” [373] The metamorphoses of materials, whether to wood (and its indexing of a history of sculptural practice), or more everyday materials like those from the Dollar Store. If all of this is in keeping with a broader standardized history of 20th-century art, the distinction, she claims, is that Contemporary Artists are more concerned with the extended lives of these objects, mapping them in networks of circulation. Rather than simply being (typically negative) comments on commodities, they learn something from the commodity as they examine the “strange” lives commodities can have when they drift out of their intended use. [380] Weary of the possibly “romantic” implications of vitalistic matter and its collapsing of objecthood, she insists that these things be interpreted dialectically. [380]
However, one should add, it is precisely in her reading of them as meaningful and mapping an allegedly social world that they become mystifying in gaining “social” significance. This is in no small part because it ignores the actual material function of the artworks as such (and how they circulate in their limited milieu), and the fact that they do not really exist in commodity capitalism in any easy way at all.
Patrice Loubier deals with the works from the vantages of the “persistent vitality of interventions and process-based initiatives.” [385] These are taken to be probes of social reality and “an aspiration for experience.” [386] In practice, art becomes indiscernible from everything else; just another set of actions and materials to be archived. [386] These modes then are essentially forms of documentary, albeit ones that ostensibly rely on viewer involvement or the delegation of tasks within an economy of exchange. That the Contemporary Artist-as-bureaucrat effectively functions as a pseudo-sociologist goes undiscussed.
Eduardo Ralichas builds on this thematic by addressing the importance of relational art and the practices of the 1970s and 80s, here defined rather vaguely as “art based on social relations,” or a little more fully as the “political dynamic of art that takes society as its raw material.” [397] Such art tends to be “totalizing” and “salvationist,” relying on a romance of “social emancipation” that is shared by everything from happenings to pushes for the “democratisation of art” to the aesthetics of Nazism. [399-402]
For his part, Bernard Schütze contextualizes Contemporary Art in the light of technological acceleration. The “contemporary” is identified as a period of delay after a discredited past and suspended before an uncertain future. [411] As such, its attitude is intensely “presentist” wherein “immediacy” is granted absolute value. As a reaction to acceleration, the Contemporary is a withdrawal into the present as a space of waiting. In waiting, new modes of “dwelling” are cultivated allowing for a hyper-awareness of perception. Everyone becomes like Proust in his tub, only without any past to remember. He sees this, citing Agamben, as a kind of “untimeliness.” [413]
Analytically, the catalogue is all about what the artists claim, not what they do, not how their work actually works, but how they claim it could in an idealized situation that does not exist. If it is a “reification” it is also utopian (as catalogues tend to be). The book is a commercial or trailer, not a work of analysis. This is a glaring problem given what most of the work is purported to be concerned with (relationalism etc.). The record of reception does not help things much.
The curatorial statements also work to de-historicize the works by placing them in a fantasy genealogy of “Contemporary Art” rather than the very different specifics of Contemporary Art in the province.
Certainly it is the case, as some of those above stated, that art in the city has little theoretical or intellectual substance, that it is filled with kitsch, that the extent to which is has affects it is in the established, petrified, and morally sanctioned mode of Camp. All these things were noted by Vacher in the mid-1970s as generic to that period, along with the relational bent and other modes of touristic art. While he feared the expansion of the market and contemporary curators make vague noise about capitalism, these are trivial and misleading issues.
As the guiding line of triennale 2008 had it, “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, all is transformed.” For all its obsession with duration, the Contemporary is the site of going nowhere. What makes it interesting (and frustrating) is its almost total senility. The senile lose nothing; they achieve the phenomenological transformation of the end of history as the nothing. That is the reality of “dwelling.”
Contemporary Art has transformed in some ways in the dozen years since the last triennale. It has become far more twee, more intellectually crude (and even anti-intellectual, the “erudition” Blouin admired is a kind of educational grooming), generally less humorous but more “empathetic.” The “concerns” (social, political etc.) of today remain the dumbed-down variants of what they were half a century ago (colonialism, feminism, sexual identity, ecology). This is no surprise since the Contemporary performs the refusal (or incapacity/incompetence) to embrace actual historical reality. The great paradox of the Contemporary is that its “engagement” is a withdrawal.