Covering the “legendary period in Québec” of 1967 to 1977, Anithe de Carvalho’s Art rebelle et contre-culture (2015) seeks to “demystify” the myths around the Underground (or counterculture) and its role in the expanding apparatus of the Canadian government in the period. “I will try to demonstrate,” she writes, “Contrary to what some authors have claimed, that the politicised neo-avant-garde has not succeeded in its bet to remain on the fringe of the establishment and to work outside the system or the institutional field of art.” [9] Not only did it not succeed in staying “marginal,” but it has remained central to the state production of art since that period.
She uses an array of works to examine the “de-compartmentalization [décloisonnement] of the paradigm of the democratization of culture and …the beginnings of the cultural democracy model.” [55] Among these is: Les Mécaniques, Les Mondes parallèles and Le Pavillon du synthétiseur; Jean-Paul Mousseau’s Le Crash discotheque; Serge Lemoyne’s Événements 21-24; Fusion des arts inc.’s Vive la rue Saint-Denis!; the Fabulous Rockets’ Québec Scenic Tour and Salon Apollo variétés; Maurice Demers’ Appelez-moi Ahuntsic; Francine Larivée's La Chambre nuptiale; and Melvin Charney’s Les Maisons de la rue Sherbrooke.
In different ways, each of these works/events helped to articulate the new model of state art:
In contrast to traditional art forms, in which the work is only connected to the artist’s talent, the new art that was intended to be created could not be created without the active participation of a new audience, both before and after the work was created. Although all of these intentions were socially, culturally and artistically exciting, it must be concluded that the neo-avant-garde action failed politically. [217]
Art was re-conceptualized according to an anthropological rather than aesthetic model. Art was conceived of as communication, dialogue, community activity or expression, and a tool for personal liberation. The works promoted by the government reflected these values as well as anti-colonialism, feminism, socialism etc. Privileged by state intervention were the “popular, community, minority, depreciated and unknown forms of cultural expression.” [196]
This “dissipated” any elitist or radical art and the state fuelled a “popular” art filled with tourist and consumer values and content and to a large degree inseparable from them. The art of the state valorized the amateur and the marginal. Feminist art (by both the state and artists), in particular, was identified with state intervention and professionalization, largely through academic and other state institutions. [198] In addition to new funding, the new cultural model also meant that untraditional venues were often being used (factories, bars, schoolrooms, the street etc.). The desire of the “avant-garde” to bring art “closer to life” was frequently indistinguishable from tourist spectacle.
De Carvalho’s book is one of the better and most plausible historical accounts of the development of Contemporary Art in the province (its points often generalizable to Canada at large), but also at times excessively narrow.
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The democratization of culture was a way of making supposedly elite culture available to the masses. In this scheme, the new role of the artist was as a mediator (sociocultural animator) for the state, heavily reliant on their financing. The funding of new “innovative” forms of art was basic to the statization (state control or “d’étatisation de la culture”) of the arts. The counterculture was not seen by the state (or by de Carvalho) in opposition because it shared essentially the same humanist and personalist values and state funding provided means for creating youth programs and fostering social and Canadian unity. If the hip could mock the mid-hip “go-go” Trudeau for being a middle-aged bureaucrat appropriating youth culture, in the end, there was actually little separating them. “Social emancipation” and the extension of state power were co-extensive.
In the period, “A new notion of culture has been affirmed in the anthropological sense of the term, new forms of financing have appeared, new spaces of cultural mediation have made it possible to reach new audiences and, above all, a new role has been given to the latter, who have been invited to become the actors of their own culture.” [19] This did not appear out of a vacuum but it was a substantial change.
There was state funding before the 1960s but its spareness needs to be recognized. As early as 1830, cultural associations in the province (primarily libraries) were given some grants and there was also minimal funding of art associations, literary societies etc. Within the province, the state funded the construction of some monuments and décor, and the Church provided extensive work for artisans, while the middle class did buy some artworks.
By the early 20th century, funding was still meagre, but was growing with the establishment of artisanal schooling. A more urban-oriented, modernist, and individualist art began percolating in the interwar years along with some press coverage, small art journals, etc. This culminated in Plasticism and Automatism, interpreted as the affirmation of free expression and the repudiation of the past.
After the Second World War, an expansive welfare state was established in the country. The Massey Report was part of this programme of “modernization” and the Canadian Council of the Arts was founded in 1957 to intervene in the arts through funding and education. This was all explicitly done in reference to (and as an extension of) the ideas and policies of the Liberal Party. Museums, galleries, and theatres were created through the funding schemes that resulted.
This was less immediately or openly adopted in Québec given the antipathy between the Liberals and Union Nationale. The Rapport Tremblay was, she claims, one of the inspirations for the révolution tranquille, and its notions were denounced by some political rivals as “communism.” [28-29]
When Lesage took power, state interventionism and diffusion became the norm. This process was the “democratization of culture.” [29] The thought of the Minister of Cultural Affairs, Georges-Émile Lapalme, was heavily inspired by André Malraux. Lapalme resigned in 1964, disappointed by minimal budgets, and was replaced by Pierre Laporte.
Laporte’s Livre Blanc (1965) continued to affirm the democratization of culture. This helped perpetuate the understanding of culture as folklore and defended it as integral to the identity of the Québécois community, as well as being bound to the privileging (or emancipation) of minorities. [32-33, 53] All of this was also bound to an essentially utilitarian conceptualization of art. [35]
The notion of the Underground stressed the social role of the artist and the place of art in the everyday. The artist’s role was as an interventionist and their products might be immaterial and might not appear in the (in Québec's case, extremely limited) tradition of art’s housing.
Operation déclic (1968) was held to commemorate the release of Refus global which was symbolically associated (one could argue, very dubiously) with the révolution tranquille and the repression of the Duplessis era. De Carvalho assimilates the events of déclic to the révolution tranquille and to the advocacy for artistic humanism and for state intervention in the arts, the decentralization and regionalization of funding. This mass organizing of artists was a way of advocating for state patronage. [43]
Contemporary Art, unlike Modern Art, is defined, effectively, both by her and Catherine Millet, as professionalization and institutionalization, as an extension of the state. [45] For the most part, conservators and bureaucrats were open to new art and artists were open to institutions. Participatory art in particular was ostensibly a way of creating mass art, appealing to a wide audience and prompting them to take an active role in it. This was of a piece with the state’s desire to fund multidisciplinary and socially active art that privileged social meaning. [53]
This model of cultural democracy also defends the diversity of forms of expression and denounces the hierarchy of one form of culture over others. Although this vision was already being promoted in the 1970s, it did not really take off until the 1980s, when it coincided with the movement to decentralise the powers of the state. [52]
She cites Fusion des arts inc. as the most telling of groups, with a manifesto operating in an already established tradition that declared (with some unintentional irony), the rejection of “the prevailing social system and its institutions, rejects the intellectual tradition and previous art forms. It declares that the artistic trend it defends is the only essential and authentic one. In short, he grants a new status to the artist, the public and art.” [60]
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Like the different levels of government, Fusion des arts inc. and their colleagues advanced a ludic or participatory art with the viewer taking an active role in it. Being an active collaborator in the game of creation, they claimed, also implied potentially being a critic of the status quo rather than simply taking part in a diversion. Maurice Demers likewise stressed the active role of the audience in the environment, relying on sensual activation through cinematic and other forms, as well as the use of smell etc. For him, environmental art was tied specifically to the rehumanization of the audience after the dehumanizing effects of technology and urbanism and this was often expressed in mythical terms. This new form of art was also a way of denying the way museums operated as a “cemetery” for art. [68] To Demers, all of humanity was an artist and art was a means to make a new human life that escaped from the alienations of consumer society.
The works are therefore utopian without being in total rupture with the world as it is - they are not necessarily politically revolutionary - but the new spaces of the work of art allow the affirmation of the voice of people who are strangers to the world of learned art [l’art savant]. [119]
The various multimedia events that occurred around Expo were instances of cultural democracy because they were about social cohesion through recreation. [80] “The work of art thus takes on a triple character for the state: aesthetic object, leisure, and commodity.” [82] The artists (or mediators) themselves would add that the role of the viewer was quite restricted and marginal and the work could not seriously be interpreted as oppositional.
De Carvalho interprets Serge Lemoyne as a re-activator of the tradition of the avant-garde through his use of the St. Jean Baptiste festivities as a form of communal art. [101] There was a difference of course. As much as he played at being the “maudit” and denouncing the “establishment,” he relied heavily on its funding and support. [103] Lemoyne himself subsequently noted that the artist simply became an “animator,” that what was created en masse was entirely superficial, and spent the rest of his career going between the dream of the sociocultural work and working alone. [105]
On a more commercial side, with Jean-Paul Mousseau, the work of art becomes both recreation and therapy; the total artwork of the discotheque functioning as a space of potential emotional liberation.
All of the major events she covers were heavily financed by the state (and Mousseau to some degree by the private sector). In practice, the neo-avant-garde was giving a fresh face to the “establishment.” [114] Part of their role as the ambassadors of “cultural democracy” was to take it out of the traditional spaces of the museum and into the spaces where people lived and worked. In line with state ideology, they stressed the diversity of their appeal.
Liberalization in the province was not about radical change but about reform, and this was not a break from the past but in continuity with established liberal tradition and with the progressivism of the Catholic Church. Trudeau, who did his graduate work on Christianity and Marxism, in particular, was a strong advocate of the personalist bent as well as of participatory democracy. It was this bourgeois progressivist humanism that was the expression of things like Operation déclic. [127]
In the 1960s, there was no official Minister of Culture. The duties that would fall under that title were mostly assumed by the Secretary of State. Under them was the National Library, the ONF, the Society for the Development of Film, Radio-Canada, the national museums corporation, the Counsel of the Arts, the Art Bank etc. In 1968, Gérald Pelletier was advocating for the development of Canadian culture through its democratisation. He deplored elitist notions of culture and advocated for a more anthropological model. In funding, work that promoted interdisciplinarity and social mediation (especially on the part of young artists) was increasingly privileged by the state. [132]
Programming also tended to focus on the promotion of national unity and against Québécois nationalism, advocating for a vague humanist “imagination”: “The imagination mentioned must serve social peace, and if it is a question of ‘changing the world,’ it is the state that ultimately remains in charge and determines the limits of what is possible, tolerable and reasonable. This is reflected in the rejection of all the political projects submitted to the programme that are based on Québec nationalist ideology.” [135]
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The “new angle” of her book is to address the period as one of the “institutionalization of the neo-avant-garde.” [18] One could argue, as was done at the time and subsequently, that what this signalled was less institutionalization than erasure, that there was a substantial break and the establishment of Contemporary Art eliminated the avant-garde by definition, something which was clearly essential to the democratisation of culture model. While it was “avant-garde” in the sense that Socialist Realism was, it was also completely “reactionary” in the same sense. A weakness of the book is that she does not sufficiently probe the intellectual justifications of the claims the various state actors and artists were making. They tend to be presented matter-of-factly when they were anything but. After all, Demers’ insistence on returning to a medieval model of art (which she removes from her citations of him) was an essentially ahistorical one that projected an anthropological fantasy of art onto the past and then naturalized it as a lost reality. The whole medieval question, of course, also foregrounds less art form than the patronage form that seems to be central to the whole argument.
While she is attentive to providing some situating to the humanism and personalism of the period, the same isn’t really true of the anthropological hypostases of culture, their merits, and purpose. The book under-stresses how contentious the notion of culture itself was, what the competing ways of imagining it were, and how deeply theoretically problematic it is. Likewise, it remains too superficially “sociological” as a study, so it fails to properly interrogate the foundational categories that were at stake, even if it goes some ways to showing how they functioned in practice.
The substantial quantity of funding being made available to the young was new, and beyond the clear ideological bias against the province’s nationalism, state funding also stipulated the social utility of art. Whether artists were ostensibly populist or elitist, political or not, in practice they were entirely functional parts of liberal governance. But it was those more oriented to interdisciplinarity, to anti-elitism, and to culture (opposed to the autonomous notion of art) that were effectively enacting in practice what the state was advocating for in theory and offering to fund. The “underground” or “neo-avant-gardists” or “marginals” were all ultimately adherents and ambassadors of state order. Adherence to this likely had more to do with “professionalization” and simple self-interest than it did with anything more “political.” De Carvalho avoids these cynical or practical aspects, and while acknowledging a level of pragmatism on the part of artists, still tends to present them too idealistically (unlike in a contemporary account of these events such as Vacher’s.)
Although she consistently attempts to justify an optimistic interpretation of these events as some of their actors did - as introducing new critical attitudes, awareness etc. - she provides little to no evidence that anything like this occurred, and the record of popular reception leads one to believe it did not. She ends up concluding these things failed, and quite badly, although the reasons why and what they might imply are scarcely examined. And while she correctly stresses in her conclusion the extent to which what was practised in the 1970s persists, the reasons why this should be the case given the failure of this new understanding of art are unclear as is what this persistence really says about these practices as “social” or “relational.”
Certainly, the various experiments that occurred helped change things, although the “conventions” and “norms” they changed, and which were denounced at the time as “sclerotic,” were minimal and bare, quite unlike the significantly more vast network of Contemporary Art that was established with their reformation and which, if anything, have proven significantly more conventional and sclerotic.
Although she does take some pains to point out how fractious and antipathetic the various strains of “youth” were at the time, one of the weaknesses of the text is her portrait of the “Left” and counterculture, which remains as mythical as that of the romantic artist in revolt that she seeks to debunk. Curiously, while she appeals to Jean-Philippe Warren’s work on the role of personalism in the révolution tranquille, she ignores his more extensive (and substantially more rigorous) work on the careers of the Left in the province in the period, which provides a far more realistic and unflattering debunking of their pretenses than any of his other work has.
The Left, of course, had no greater purchase on the popular than the state did. Any survey of polling, the popular press, etc. in the period would put the lie to either of those groups credibly representing much of anyone. So the book finally misses the crucial irony of what it documents, namely that if it had been more substantially empirically situated, it would have shown the degree to which cultural democracy and the democratization of culture only made obvious the vacancy of the notion of culture itself, that culture as a hypothetical is actually an obfuscation. There is then a different form of generalization and differentiation at play than that of the order of cultural logic, which is the central dogma of Liberal governance.
She tends to use the rather inelegant term statization (or state-controlled) rather than calling it what it is, nationalisation, a word that has been so muddled by idiocy that its neutral sense tends to escape most people. But Contemporary Art is the only actual nationalist art Canada has ever had, however confusing this is for people (especially art historians and artists). This is not aided by a frequent reliance on Habermas etc. rather than far more pertinent theoretical models like much of the sociology of the period or de Jouvenal’s account of the parasitic and mutually beneficial patron-client relationship between marginality and elite rule. Her book also lacks, and would have benefited from, a cross-national analysis of other state-orchestrated cultural models, whether they were ostensibly democratic, socialist, fascist, etc.
These critical points aside, de Carvalho's book remains an essential critical work on the art of the period and provides some profitable insights into what sort of historical research should be undertaken.