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With this year’s biennial coming up and almost everyone lazing for the holiday season, it seemed like a good time to recall the defunct version of the event, which expired in 2011 after which it was revived (twice) and hybridized. The first came as one of the peak achievements of the Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal (CIAC), which, far more than the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), seemed to take the premise that the city needed Contemporary Art seriously.
The biennial is one of the most generic forms that Contemporary Art tends to be marketed in. It can have a national orientation, such as the Whitney, or an internationalist one, like the Venice. There are other variations and in Montréal it was a hodgepodge. A lot of ink has been spilled on the difference between these models of biennial and those that have been popping up in the “global south,” and that biennials, as associated as they may be with the “post-colonial turn” and/or with globalizing capitalism, were also a central part of art policies in totalitarian states.
Generally, at least in the past several decades, there has been a vague utopian fantasy attached to statements that curators and PR people make about such events. For instance, Spanish curator Rosa Martínez claimed that “The ideal biennial is a profoundly political and spiritual event. It contemplates the present with a desire to transform it. As Arthur Danto says, in a definition I love, a biennial ‘is a glimpse of a transnational utopia’.” As such, and as Julian Stallabrass once put it with typical glibness, “it not only embodies but actively propagandizes the virtues of globalization.” [Stallabrass, Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006), 26] Whatever one takes the virtues (or vices) of this to be, biennials are both tourist traps and easy means for critics and curators to project all sorts of (generally very rote) fantasies onto a given context.
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A major survey show such as Québec 75 stressed geographic location but was also split between local and more international tendencies. The subsequent solidification of Contemporary Art as an institutional genre of the state was a way of bringing the art of the city under the new international hierarchy, expressed best in government documents that attempted to cast the location as an international port of culture, stressing its diversity in a kind of rattrapage with (primarily American) cities. [Couture, 62] One should add, this is also a way of keeping it strictly in accord with Federalist ideology and in deference to what its governing bodies privilege in funding.
1970s and 80s exhibitions were anchored in their urban milieu, a gesture that was integral to the Montréalisation of contemporary art, establishing it in relation to international trends. Exhibitions served as a means to construct identities, largely through the work of curators but also through artists, critics, and theorists. Together, they formed a community of taste for “the reconfiguration of the territories of identity specific to postmodern culture.” [Couture, 56] This was done by privileging the city over the province.
The sense of Montréal changed significantly between the 1970s and 80s as substantial parts of the city were destroyed for the sake of modernization (destruction of patrimonial architecture), especially in its downtown. This started earlier with the Drapeau administration’s clean up and makeover of the city for the sake of Expo and was instituted further by the shifts in government funding for the arts. These changes were also fought out in battles throughout the city between citizens and municipal administration.
Shifts in the city’s urban landscape were central to several of the major public exhibitions in the period. Montréal: plus ou moins? (1972) offered a utopian idea of the city by interrogating its possibilities using people from multiple disciplines and stressing their heterogeneity. Corridart (1976), orchestrated in the context of the Olympics and the memorialization of Sherbrooke Street, was a product of a community of taste conforming to the same conception of contemporaneity. [Couture, 73]
In the 1980s, the diffusion of art labeled Contemporary intensified and the city was promoted as a launching pad into its international market, exemplified by transnational co-operative shows. Montréal tout-terrain (1984) organized by art historians and artists in a no-longer-used clinic on Laurier, stressed heterogeneity again, and orchestrated it in conformity with the norms of international Contemporary Art and its institutions. [Couture, 75] Montréal was identified as the point of confluence between Europe and the U.S. [Couture, 78] It could then be treated as a kind of hybridization point and this could be consistently called upon to provide the city’s events with a rhetoric of dynamism.
Montréal art contemporain inscribed the genre within the specifics of the city’s avant-garde history, the rejection of formalism and disciplinary specificity, and a stress on the personal. [Couture, 84] This was in keeping with international norms that ostensibly valorized the singular practices of artists, albeit those who were participating in the formation of a transnational art vocabulary. They could also be marketed as examples of local taste (Montréal ‘89) which stressed a “community” rather than a group and art as a social practice. [Couture, 85-86]
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The Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal (CIAC) had organized Les Cent jours d’art contemporain de Montréal from 1985 to 1996. The CIAC had one of the major venues for showing Contemporary Art in the city but had to close it due to budget restrictions while many of the other Contemporary Art centres in the province were verging on financial collapse. To survive, the CIAC turned to one-offs. [Bernard Lamarche, “Le chant du signe,” Le Devoir, December 3, 1998, B8]
In 1998, they organized, la Biennale de Montréal, an international event featuring 30 artists with works around the theme Poetry, Humour and the Everyday. The chief curator and artistic director was the CIAC’s Claude Gosselin. It received $1.6 million in funding from each level of government combined. This was difficult to attain. The Canada Council for the Arts initially refused to offer any funding because the event had been so badly articulated but ended up being pushed to give money at the last minute. [Stéphane Baillargeon, “Une subvention hors pair,” Le Devoir, October 28, 1998, B9]
The event attracted approximately 20,000 visitors, somewhat less than Aurora Borealis had more than a decade previously, although more than the subsequent editions of Les Cent jours, which were consistently critically derided and unpopular. The statistics for the Biennale were withheld until after the event closed because they were a public embarrassment. The Biennale was either ignored by critics or received negative to lukewarm reception with the exception of a few foreign outlets. [Stéphane Baillargeon, “Environ 20 000 visiteurs pour la première Biennale de Montréal,” Le Devoir, December 3, 1998, B8]
The works were divided into thematic exhibitions: Dreamcatchers, C’est la vie, Transarchitectures 02; films; a series of internet projects; lectures and round table discussions. Running from August 27th until October 18th, exhibitions were situated primarily in the Bonsecours Market, the Just for Laughs Museum, and the UQAM Design Center. The theme, of course, put it in league with the established Just for Laughs festival and the biennial structure could help reinforce the Mois de photos festival.
Despite the apparent broadness of this thematic, it was actually quite restricted by definition: “Poetry relates to a concise image of great density, the awareness of a gesture - simple and human, the space occupied by a moment charged with emotion; Humour is mockery in the face of helplessness, survival in the midst of the absurd, the capacity to laugh at oneself; the Everyday is the next instant open before one, a recurring rendez-vous with authenticity, a perpetual questioning.” This sort of generic existentialist humanism was matched by an appeal to Amerindian mythology, all clearly in line with the types of claims made by Yves Robillard for the city’s Contemporary Art.
The everyday was also lionized in familiar terms that recalled the artistic claims of the interventionist and participatory art of the 1960s, which the catalogue recognized as “This desire to marry art and life is as old as this century”:
For a number of years now, it has been evident that many creators are once again interested in less ambitious forms of expression, in contrast with artistic trends that often lack meaning or seem grandiloquent. Some artists have decided to go back to the very beginning, taking everyday life as their starting point. Analysis of the circumstances of their private lives (family, home and work) serves as their inspiration in the creation of works that are filled with a surprising freshness. Moreover, their creations enable us to discover aspects of this theme which are often forgotten but that are perennial within the world of art - the confrontation between what is intimate and authentic and what is false or artificial.
With this attack on the artificial came the privileging of new media (film, video, photography with the Biennale notably making room for the exoticism of web art [only %16 of the population in the city had internet access at home]) and the sanctification of the “feminine sensibility.” [Ibid.]
It was also rationalized by an appeal to its tourist potential:
La Biennale de Montréal is currently the only international biennial in Eastern North America. The biennial is in the heart of a territory of 50 million inhabitants which includes the cities of New York, Boston, Toronto, Chicago, Québec, Ottawa, Montréal. These cities offer a real potential for cultural tourists ready to come to Montréal for this kind of event. La Biennale de Montréal 1998 contributes as well to the international image of Montréal, which is the metropolis of Québec and the cultural metropolis of Canada.
Le Devoir offered one of the warmer receptions to it in the Francophone press, even while registering that it was the latest failure of many attempts to put the city on the map of Contemporary Art. Summarily: “Contemporary art, the world of contemporary art, is at once an empire of nonsense and an empire of the absurd, a kingdom of the beautiful, the true and the just (or what takes the place of them). It’s a large organisation on a state drip, artificially kept alive by ‘subversion subsidies’, but also a place of essential and existential questioning.” [Stéphane Baillargeon, “La logique du fourre-tout,” Le Devoir, September 5-6, 1998, C1.]
It was a “mishmash” that had done its best to copy an already tested model and import it, plugging it into an already existent festival circuit and yet it still failed. The work was uneven, some of it charming, some of it weak and obfuscated by jargon. Attempts to upgrade the city’s discourse on art also failed to be attractive or convincing to anyone, especially since the PR material was “full of quotations from Heidegger, the least funny philosopher of the century! So the critics have not skimped on the... criticism. The Globe and Mail’s Professor-Priest even refused to give Gosselin a passing grade.” [Ibid.] To Gosselin’s consternation, Vie des arts refused to cover the endeavours of the CIAC after they stopped purchasing advertising in the magazine. [Claude Gosselin, “Censure envers le CIAC,” Le Devoir, May 7, 1998, A6.]
As such, the biennial affirmed even more strongly what had been present in an event like Aurora Borealis, advancing a middle-class “Canada Council aesthetic” (international/transnational style) that celebrated “marginals,” albeit those morally sanctioned by the urban centres of transnational capital and the “subversion subsidies” provided by local state authorities.
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The intervening years were generally ill-received. Rather than going through them one by one, it is more useful to highlight what is often remembered as the better of the initial biennials. The 2007 edition was guest-curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, who authored one of the more interesting catalogues of the set. Although it is unified by the thin and often gratuitous generalizations and platitudes that typically make up institutional catalogues, it is more fluidly written and lapses into interesting suggestions here and there, revealing a fair amount in a bit of a backhanded way.
Baerwaldt stressed the inconsistencies, contradictions, plurality, and incompatibility of work by artists, something made more visible in their juxtaposition, which showed that most of it was “interrelated” by “genre hybridization[s]” that allowed them to be “[f]amiliar and distant,” leaving them as “border concept realities that are inevitably becoming fluid and impenetrable, volatile and highly politicized, or incomprehensible, stale and broken.” [Wayne Baerwaldt, Remuer ciel et terre: la Biennale de Montréal 2007 (Montréal: Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2007), 33]
This, it seems, was symptomatic of the “fragmenting state of cultural identity politics that have superseded any identifiable, current movement.” [Ibid., 33] Art in Canada was barely bonded to a local context but invested in a globalized artworld, something that he related partially to artists’ resentments over cutbacks in grants and the indifference of curators and critics. If this encouraged artists to be transnational in seeking out approval and investment, regardless of how conformist they may have been to trends, they carried on local colour regardless. [Ibid., 34]
In reaction to globalization, some of the artists revived slogans of the 1960s, practising a “stylized approach to revolution,” in the context of which the curator mourned the loss of “punk rock aesthetics” and blunting of protest. [Ibid., 38] “But the dismantling and enervation of a political sensibility is exactly what many artists intend to investigate, in the most introverted manner without discourse with political parties, or confrontations with authorities but offering an ongoing exploration as a sliver of hope for radical change by the performative artist in the twenty-first century.” [Ibid., 39] The results, as numerous biennial and triennial catalogues in the province over the past thirty years have pointed out, tend to resemble the “theatre of the adsurd [sic].” [Ibid., 44]
The unifying argument for the whole Biennale was about genre fluidity, which accidentally stumbled onto one of the more interesting issues in the country’s Contemporary Art while misinterpreting it. The curator claimed, “Unlike the one-genre dominance in artmaking, such as history painting’s role in defining nineteenth-century painting, new genre concerns in the twenty-first century are as fractured and interdependent as they are prevalent across Canada and beyond.” [Ibid., 32] However, unlike Baerwaldt, I would argue that Contemporary Art is very clearly a genre that, in this national and provincial context, is almost identical to the function of the nineteenth-century History painting.
The last in the series of the CIAC biennials occurred in 2011. Appropriately, it was anchored in a concrete historicization and localization to an extent that had not previously been the case. The event was overcast by the fact that it was clearly doomed, something that had to do both with public indifference but probably even more to do with the squabbling of Contemporary Art bureaucrats. The ongoing unease between the MAC and the CIAC seemed to be exasperated, especially since the museum was now poised to out-compete with it for attention, funding, and tourist dollars. As one article outlined:
“In other cities, Biennales are organized by large cultural institutions such as museums or regional agencies, not tiny independent entities like Gosselin’s own Centre international d’art contemporain (CIAC) which organizes it here. And in fact, when Gosselin launched his project in 1998, he approached the MAC to see if they could work together. He soon found instead that the MAC preferred “dividing to be king of a little village” than to work together around a unifying project. The MAC, once headed by Gosselin while it was still run out of the Québec government’s Ministère de la Culture, eventually went on to found its own Triennale québécoise in 2008, definitively opting for competition over cooperation (Gosselin’s Montréal Biennale is 50% pan-Canadian and 50% international artists). As for the MBA, Gosselin says they have been generally more receptive to cooperation, but logistical wrangling always came in the way.”
Taking the former École des beaux-arts as its central site, a gesture which affiliated it with the history of automatism and the legend of the city’s avant-garde, it also was quartered at La Fondation Guido Molinari (marking its official inauguration), with additional events at Le Cinéma du Parc. Making the biennial consonant with such an image of the city’s artistic history was central to how Gosselin framed it. In one interview, he explained:
Another good aspect of this Biennale is that we had the opportunity to enter what was the old Fine Arts School of Montreal, a heritage building built in 1922. This is precisely where the Automatistes, Pellan and others have studied, where they rebelled against the school directors at the time, this is also where the protests of 1968-69 were held. It’s a place that contains a lot of history and many people were very happy to re-appropriate the venue for themselves, to return here and see what the School of Fine Arts was like at the time.
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It featured more workshops and edutainment events than previous years and this, Gosselin claimed, helped strengthen the dwindling numbers. With a theme inspired by Mallarmé and centred on chance, some commentators worried that things would be excessively loose. Le Devoir noted how relieved they were to have David Liss back from Toronto to take on some of the curatorial duties and keep things in order. “The fact remains, however, that the event still trying to find its own identity some annoying missteps (texts by the curators untranslated from English to French and vice versa, for example). The BML will have to do more to achieve the international stature it claims to have.” [Marie-Ève Charron, “La Biennale de Montréal a meilleure mine,” Le Devoir, May 7-8, 2011, E7]
In terms of the theme, Gosselin told Canadian Art:
“Chance touches on the very idea of freedom,” he says. “To give yourself over to chance is to embrace freedom, the unknown, total openness. And today, with the popularity of co-productions, collaborations and works-in-progress, that’s exactly where contemporary art is going.”
Meanwhile, in 2b, he stressed the political implications of the exhibition:
“We live in an increasingly legalistic society,” co-curator and founder Claude Gosselin opines in the dusty side office of this year’s rambling exhibition space. With carpenters buzzing around turning every inch of the underused building into a venue worthy of the name, Gosselin, an out gay man and director of the Centre international d’art contemporain (CIAC), made no mistake about the seemingly abstract works having very real social import. “As we see with the Harper government, there is an increasing trend to restrict freedom by making more and more laws. This year’s theme, Elements of Chance, the ability to leave things to chance, is a statement of openness to possibilities. We’re promoting chance as opposed to constrictive conservatism.”
As usual, Gosselin complained about the critics. As with the previous edition in 2009, he bemoaned how little they seemed able to grapple with digital and internet-based art and found the more traditional work wanting. Coincidentally, one of the interesting things about this edition was that the press “clippings” collected to archive it are mostly from blogs and small websites that have long since ceased to exist and have been scrubbed from the internet. Almost all that remain primarily circulated the official press releases. Ironically, this ghostly quality is a fitting tribute to both the thematic of chance and what the highlighting of the digital arts say about futurity and history.
In their review, Canadian Art pointed out that much of the work didn’t really work, either being too thematically obvious to be engaging or too loose to seem relevant. Concluding:
All things considered, one wishes Gosselin and Liss might have grappled with more aspects of the theme. They started with Mallarmé and the poetics of chance, but it might also have been interesting to have further explored the science of chance, a branch of human understanding that is constantly evolving and endlessly fascinating. What about gambling, that ancient temptation that continues to embody the flash and fallacy of fortune? […]And the choice of artists seems at times eccentric. Certainly they could have made safer, less surprising, and in turn less disappointing selections of artists and works, but they didn’t, and perhaps rightly so. We need more wild cards in a heavily institutionalized, arguably status quo art world. The Biennale de Montréal is one of those wild cards. As Gosselin and Liss well know: Nothing risked, nothing gained.
In 2013 the Biennale had become:
an independent non-profit organization and forms a “strategic partnership” with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. The museum stops producing its Quebec Triennial event and collaborates curatorially and space-wise with the restructured organization. MAC board chair Alexandre Taillefer says he is confident it will become one of the top 20 biennales worldwide within 10 years.
By 2018, the Biennale filed for bankruptcy.
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As much as one can admire the devotion of Gosselin and his colleagues, it is not difficult to sense the farcical reality of the city’s biennials in this little history. One can likewise be moved by it and recognize that there is something sad about it all. Less sentimentally, one can see, in an attenuated form, the provincialism that has gradually overcome the city’s biennial, advancing to its current state. Provincialism, which was once a major theme in Canadian art criticism before Contemporary Art was institutionalized as a normative ideology, could be appealed to here as a useful direction for critique.
Given the chaos of the province’s politics spanning from the era of the Cent jours to the end of the biennial, a politically-inclined analyst could index all of this within the implosive misfortunes of separatism, the incompetence and corruptions of the Liberal Party, and equally unflattering history of the city’s various city councils and feuding mayors, and the competition between the city and the provincial capital. And such a reading could find plenty, both melancholy and comic, to sketch out the background where the biennial transpired. And, given the continuous way in which such exhibitions tend to be premised on the claim of the socio-cultural content and context, the extremely weird and often barely convincing way this is really present in either the work or the reception merits a theoretical explanation of its own.
And, certainly with the subsequent resurrections of the biennial, rather than interpreting all of this within the positive casting of Montréalisation (transnational neoliberalization) extolled by its advocates, one could read it critically, say, from the perspective of a separatist, or at any rate a Québécois nationalist, as symptomatic of something else. Like the rattrapage of the révolution tranquille for which the re-imagining of Montréal was so central, it could be seen as a kind of “cultural colonialism” perpetuated by the “elite” in a desperate bid to belong to a world that isn’t very real: the utopian fantasy space of other biennials. One could read it all less in terms of seductive sophistication, but as a kind of Grattonisme, with Gosselin less of a Don Quixote than an Elvis Gratton (coincidentally, Pierre Falardeau’s Elvis Gratton II: Miracle à Memphis went into production during the first year of the biennial).
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