The media declared it “the biggest contemporary art event ever held in Canada, (in the Promenades de la Cité du Parc) [welcoming] some 15,000 visitors (including schools, colleges and universities who have booked a visit in the coming weeks).” [Jocelyne Lepage, “Aurora Borealis: 15 000 visiteurs et bonne presse,” La Presse, September 12, 1985, B1.] This was less than half of the attendance that had been projected, and, the journalist added, significantly less than the two blockbuster shows occurring simultaneous to it, Ramses II (500,000 visitors) and a Picasso show (300,000 visitors). But if it scarcely competed with Ancient Egypt or a modernist master, it at least resulted in a “press kit [that] is quite interesting for an event of this order (glowing articles in Parisian magazines and American newspapers).” [ibid.]
“The CIAC is taking advantage of the cultural activity of the summer of 85 in Montréal to point out that in Québec and Canada there are artists who are still alive, working and producing very good work. It is important to make them known to the general public,” explained Claude Gosselin, director of the Centre international d’art contemporain (CIAC). [Marie Delagrave, “Les cent jours d’art contemporain,” Le Soleil, July 6, 1985, C3.]
Journalists were sure to situate the event in the political lobbying for the expansion of the tourist industry. La Presse observed that the MAC had marked its 20th anniversary that year, throwing a brunch that honored no one, and the museum was becoming best known for being run by corporate executives who knew nothing about art. With the museum “bogged down in its internal problems, [it] didn’t dare to shake up the planned programme…” so the CIAC stepped in, selecting 30 artists “from various regions of Canada, with a strong delegation from Toronto, [who] were for the most part established stars of ‘institutional’ art.” [Jocelyne Lepage, “Les arts plastiques en 1985: Quand la politique s’emmêle,” La Presse, December 28, 1985, C16.]
As a form, Daigneault asserted, installation was the readiest to capture the “dynamism” of the “rich diversity” of Contemporary Art. The cost and awkwardness of installation works meant they were rarely seen in the city and the assembling of so many installations at once was a feat the MAC never managed. If the exhibition was “scholarly,” it was also “a very pleasant place to visit.” In a generally positive review,
C magazine saw in it a didactic and almost positivist function for the “oblique” research carried out by artists before adding that the teaching seemed to be primarily for the benefit of the potential clientèle of dealers.
Effectively, the exhibition further codified something that had already appeared in the city’s museums, although its curation add a few ambiguous nuances. The 1980 Hier et Après exhibition at the MMFA featured a set of international artists (primarily American) who had played a significant role in the development of art actuel but had shown little in Montréal if at all. By the end of the 1970s, style was being deemed a non-issue, and art was no longer being limited to formal problem-solving but regarded as a form of research about the broad empirical world.
According to the catalogue:
Hier/Yesterday implies a searching for context. Where previously art sought to define itself in terms of its own language, the question of signification was overlooked. [p] The reverse is becoming true. To put into context is to acknowledge a specificity of time and place, and the consequent importance of site. [p] Hier/Yesterday is concerned with the personalization of time and place. [13]
This also meant re-conceiving the role of the artist in the age of post-style. So, rather than the artist as maudit, bohemian, or genius, they took on the mode appropriate to their new function as knowledge bureaucrats: “The artist as archaeologist, as sociologist, as storyteller, as librarian, as observor.” [16]
If Hier et Après had brought in international (primarily American) artists and art bureaucrats to further establish this way of conceptualizing the artist, something entirely in keeping with established state dogma in regard to culture, Aurora Borealis furthered this by re-varnishing the face of the city’s Contemporary Art with a specifically Torontonian sheen (pseudo-Americanism). In the catalogue, co-curator René Blouin declared that, “In the last five years, no major exhibition has given us the opportunity to question the practice of contemporary art in Canada.” The closest anything came was the Pluralities/1980/Pluralités exhibition.
Thériault, who had been so central to Québec 75, spelled out to degree to which this exhibition, one decade later, was furthering the territorial claims of Contemporary Art, one projected into the future. He stressed: “AURORA BOREALIS presents a reading of art by giving itself a grid with geographical and physical components. Any commentary on the event would imply that another exhibition will take place. Canadian art, and subsequently Canadian and Québec art, is understood through a reading that first passes through Europe to reach the World, then through an America which is culturally not even 100 years old.”
Thériault compared the goal of Aurora with that of the Ramses II exhibition: it was to create a portal to another universe. [But what, one should ask, does this really imply about art and culture?] The curator continued to stress the temporality of the work: “An exhibition is, for me, a given moment and place in a lifetime, an opportunity to see, feel and perceive the creation of other human beings, a way of experiencing the world.” If an exhibition is not this, he explained, it is just an assemblage of things.
Blouin defined the goal of the exhibition:
The primary objective of AURORA BOREALIS is therefore to provide pieces that will make it possible to initiate a re-examination of the practice of contemporary art in Canada from the reading of this group of thirty installation works in this exhibition. [p] Why installation? Because its idea has literally haunted the art world for the past thirty years, where it has been the strong point of Canadian art of the 1970s and that, through its problematics, touches the heart of of the cultural production of the 1980s.
Blouin took “installation” to be “an open-ended term that refers much more to methodological, theoretical and critical issues than to stylistic considerations” and normalized it narratively as “another step in the evolution of the notion of sculpture and theatre (or even opera).” This was perfectly in keeping with Contemporary Art’s “return to content, a tendency towards theatricality can be seen in some pop art works.” With the site functioning as “a constant concern as a formal and narrative value,” it was no surprise that all of this “content” and “narrative” should be set up in “a shopping mall, a mecca of North American culture, [that] offers the works gathered anchorage in the culture that shapes them.”
We will return to what the function of “culture” is in this, but for the moment, it needs to be noted how all of this was historicized. The catalogue contains an essay by Lesley Johnson based on her work as a graduate student that provides a very broad art historical narrative for the evolution of installation practice, especially in Europe, and serves as vaguely rationalized justification for it as an international artistic norm that the city was now in league with.
More interesting is that Blouin went some distance to historicize the exhibition in a more localized way. In his narrative, what emerged in Canada at the end of the 1960s were two basic and not necessarily overlapping tendencies. One was toward a great assertion of national identities, whether Canadian (Regionalism, Wieland’s nationalism, etc.) or Québécois (Ti-Pop, etc.), against the dominance of American culture. There was a resulting “veritable implosion” across all strata of society around this issue since it (at least potentially) affected governance, economic policy, and so on, in concrete ways. In practice among artists this also included an intense reflection on what art was and what it could do.
The second issue was the emergence of “parallel” galleries or artist-run centres that were filling up abandoned stores and refurbishing industrial spaces. Most of the artists in Aurora Borealis came from this world of administered art, which tended to reflect the kinds of artistic values present in Hier et Après. These spaces saw a plurality of directions in art, sometimes characterized as post-modernism, but included New Figuration, Neo-Expressionism, Conceptualism, Feminist Art, etc. Notably, Blouin does not dwell on how these two aspects overlapped or how (and why) the second eclipsed the first by the mid-1970s.
The plurality associated with the parallel spaces was itself an extension of the questioning of art. Blouin suggested that the “emergence of this analytical character seems to be linked to the awareness of the radical impact on the cultural matrix, the acceleration of communications and the rationalisation of their systems, and perhaps even to a certain schooling of art.”
In Parachute, René Payant noted how much the exhibition existed in the shadow of blockbusters and was dominated by Torontonians. Although he praised its diversity of approaches, he noted that “the overall tone of the exhibition remains that of the Seventies, and the notion of installation in so many different definitions that the novice viewer will not necessarily come away from the exhibition any better enlightened.” [René Payant, “Peinture au Québec: une nouvelle génération/ Aurora Borealis/ Interface II,” Parachute, September, October, November 1985, 49.] On the whole, the work seemed rather timid and safe, as well as dated.
A more thorough and ambivalent assessment came from Inter. Guy Durand saw three dominant tendencies in the work: Installations (Goodwin, Frenkel, etc.), Creative Approaches (Snow, McEwen, Magor, Snow, etc.), Canadian Kitsch (Wall, Whittome, Cadieux, Dorion, General Idea, etc.). Kitsch was defined here as “alienated from the cliché of assemblage.” [“The works had to ‘show’ the audacity of the art and the country, this Canada.” [Durand, Guy. (1985). “Aurora boréalis: une idée d’art,” Inter (29), 10]
The magazine also criticized the exhibition for excluding artists outside of the country’s three major cities, especially in the regions of Québec. This was in keeping with the aesthetic narrowness of the event: “Aurora Borealis conformed to the canons of the Arts Council themselves subservient to the laws of the international contemporary art market, which make official an art under the influence.” [Ibid., 12] This being the case, it is a wonder that Durand bothered this three-part distinction in the first place since the historiographic framing of the exhibition itself already made evident, if perhaps unintentionally, that installation itself was already kitsch. There was a basic tension between whether it was kitsch merely in content or in form and intention.
While its success was measured less by the quantity of visitors (which was less than anticipated and to a substantial degree either spillover or institutional [schools]) than by the fact that it attracted rare international attention from the press, beyond the ambivalent reviews just quoted, its reception at home, both in the general press and the art press, was almost without substance. That exhibition had helped solidify what its curators took to be a series of well-established international developments. Yet, this was, on the one hand, questionably historicist and on the other, fairly eccentric. Thériault’s essay, in particular, stressed the subjective aspect of the curation rather than the historical side, rooting it in anecdotal autobiographical detail that both suggested its international status (he alludes to Documenta) and its provincial one (he alludes to Borduas and Inter observed that Borduas’ Étoile noire was alluded to in its cosmic title.)
One of the curious things is that Blouin’s essay maintains a clear bifurcation between art and culture with the latter serving as a material (structural or otherwise) subject to analysis, while the former is defined in no small way by the degree to which is retains autonomy from it: “Culture and its models have become the privileged question of art. Today's art is working with unprecedented determination to critically analyse its structures and operating mechanisms and to make them transparent.”
Again, “culture” is what makes up the characteristics of a society, a vague “sediment” amid the even vaguer ocean of “ideological facts” that art can feed on in an era when any given is uncertain and styles and trends seem to be proliferating:
Culture has always permeated the art landscape. In the twentieth century, and more intensely in the second half of the century, it is no longer just the setting, it becomes the subject. Since the 1960s, art has devoted an important territory to the exploration and exhibition of the mechanisms of culture, culture understood as a sediment of political, religious and social structures, as a set of ideological facts characterising societies.
Alongside this tendency was a concern with the function of the image in “media culture” and its power in the “cultural landscape.” This could mean analyzing the formal/mechanical logic of photography or examining issues of voyeurism, narrative etc. Culture was treated conceptually as something that could be objectified by the means and techniques of art. This was even more explicitly the case in the culture-as-accumulation-of-stuff model: “Liz Magor, Rober Racine, Raymond Gervais and Irene F. Whittome discuss the notion of culture as sediment and as a deposit of conditions.”
Installation was also conceptualized as the symptom of a vague culture, its ephemeral and temporal biases signs of its response to the fluctuations of history, ingraining a sense of immediacy and relevance within the basics of the form:
Whether they were designed specifically for the site, had to adapt to a new environment, or play more freely in the space, all the works gathered here share a punctual existence. Just as the video work only exists when the tape is played or the performance at the moment of its unfolding in time, the installation lives only during its exhibition period. The relationships between its constituent elements are therefore only crystallised in the time in which the installation takes shape in a real space. But the knowledge resulting from the viewer's experience of it is imprinted on the screen of the memory. This interrupted temporality is one of the symptoms of the culture of our society, where the value and meaning of signs are constantly reformulated.
Obscured in this statement was the general implication of the rest of the catalogue’s framing, namely the normalization of installation as part of the progressive history of art and, within this context, of the role and expansion of state institutions in this progress. If “interrupted temporality” is a cultural symptom, the installation operates as a kind of suture on this mild rupture, its production of “knowledge” not merely imprinted on its viewers, but archived by institutions and integrated into a narrative of continuity that rehabilitates the ephemeral.
