Review: Antoine Larocque’s Démissionner de la vie des arts at Galerie Université du Québec en Outaouais

This week, I leave Montréal and travel to Hull to see a show at the Galerie Université du Québec en Outaouais. Over the rusting bridges from the purgatory that is Ottawa, Hull is an eccentric mixture of heterogeneous architectural styles that garishly clash with one another thanks to the city’s history of consistently stunted growth, lopsided development, and near collapse.

Passing by the rather sad Parc Jean Dallaire (still nowhere near as depressing as Montréal’s Parc Prudence Heward), I got lost navigating the circular streets and cul de sacs broken up by green paths and intersected by dead and overgrown rail lines.

The university building housing the gallery feels more like a high school, seemingly dropped in at random beyond one of the main stretches, which itself was mostly devoid of people, only boulangeries run from the basements of converted houses and random massage parlours.

This exhibition by Antoine Larocque was housed in a blank gallery space at the corner of a cafeteria, just beyond the microwaves for vending machine Kraft Dinner. Self-branded as the sovereigntist of art and, more entertainingly, the Mathieu Bock-Côté of art, Larocque showed at Laroche/Joncas in Montréal last year and had a show in Québec City a few months ago.

The exhibition runs up and down all of the walls and then in several rows breaking up the centre of the space. Dozens of sheets of indifferent white paper contain large, scribbled words. Each is a one-liner, somewhere between a joke and a distilled image, some a little more evasive than others. They are usually in one colour, but some sheets include a couple. The use of paper and handwriting serves as an ironic counter to the fact that most of the content is concerned with the media "life" of art and its remediation through institutions, the press, and Instagram.

There is a sense of minimalist humour to them in their all-at-once quality and their function as conceptual jokes, either obvious or opaque. There is also something bordering on the austere to it all. But in terms of scale, in their unfolding over dozens of sheets with repetitions and variations, the viewer's engagement with the work makes it become more like an immersive collage conducted through an almost primitive use of text.

In terms of content, the texts make up a sort of self-portrait as a fictionalized version of the artist passes through the Montréal art world, specifically its educational institutions, and mocks them. The fictive self functions mostly as a skin on which these things can be projected. 

He has, with some irony, claimed to be a sovereigntist in art, although explicitly as a role, or as a personnage. Larocque rehearses many of the traditional themes associated with the part: the use of joual, the artist as poet maudit, as trou de cul, etc., and recycles the figure of the artist as a drinker of beer, which is as much a cliché in Québécois art as the gas can is to the Indigenous. Beyond the mockery of grocery store art prizes and the proliferation of obligatory and largely pointless MFA shows, he also denigrates his colleagues as accent switchers to suit the market, relying on a series of imported homilies to frame and justify work that has all the ambitiousness of the intellectual lives of civil servants. All in all, he displays the recognition that to become a "cultural worker" is perhaps the most degrading possibility for an artist of all.   

Aside from his minimalism, there are aspects of funk and art povera running throughout his general body of work, which tends to be made of trash and polemical scrawling. It is in the immersive aspect displayed here that such tendencies are hybridized into something more coherent. Whether it was by his design or that of curator Marie-Hélène Leblanc, the exhibition takes on the quality of a satire of the trend for immersive exhibitions that have become commonplace in Montréal. And it is in this strategy of satirization, if that is what it is, that it comes off the best. It certainly works better as presented here than in his book Notes d’Atelier, from which many of the pieces in this exhibition have come. That book, like his recent show in Québec City, went further in stressing and theatricalizing his role as an artist by making his studio its object and frame. But I think the work gets stronger when it breaks that framing, which allows it to be reduced to something too seemingly personal.

The title is a joke. Vie des arts suggests the life of the artist, the life of the art world, and one of the province’s most established art magazines, which he has consistently defaced, mocked, and aligned with the province’s tabloid media in other projects. Added to this, the term resignation has numerous quite different implications, from the resignation from a job to the embracing of fatalism. His stress on referring to the province’s art history gives this a certain scope.

One of the more interesting things about his work is its deliberate historicization. In an interview at the back of Notes d’Atelier, and in several sheets featured in the show, he explicitly ties himself to a tradition that includes Borduas, Roussil, and Vallaincourt and laments the lack of such an identification among young artists in the province. While this identification, however vague and often baseless it may have been, was fairly common in Montréal until the mid-1970s, it has become something derided since then and is certainly anachronistic among the artists of his generation. It is anachronism more than anything else that works in his favour.

Larocque is at least interesting on a polemical level and as a curiosity. He is not all that aesthetically interesting, which seems deliberate to the point it verges on the obnoxious. In a lot of ways, his work comes off like a radicalization of tendencies from the earliest days of Conceptual Art and text-based practices. 

His contemporaries tend to be obvious in their implied meanings and strategies to the point that a viewer barely has to think when encountering most of it. If anything, he is even less subtle, and it is this aggressiveness in part that makes a significant difference. To his credit, his work is also not about some vague thing. Rather, Larocque provides a concrete objectification of the extremely limited reality of the Montréal art world.

Two generic tendencies in Contemporary Art in the city follow from a longer lineage: they are "estrangement" (by varied means: appropriation, re-contextualization, etc.) and a "critique" of some sort of institutional or museological discourse, usually in the name of some identity. The two are related, both coming from the oldest tendencies of Modernism, making them both more than geriatric as rhetorical gestures. 

The museum, in rather infamous ways, has been castigated for its deterritorialization of ostensibly cultural objects while the avant-garde used to be celebrated as subversive for applying this to the banal in a far more extreme way. [This celebration did not last long.] The dullness of all of this usually gets re-branded now, as though the "queer" or "decolonizing" were not as bland and lazy and which, with their moralizing reterritorializations, are never anything other than reactionary. 

Larocque, whether he is aware of it or not, belongs within these tendencies, although his inflection is certainly different and, despite his crudeness, actually more complex than those one generally encounters. Like most of his colleagues, his work relies on exploiting a simulacrum of the past. Unlike those who endlessly rehash the long zombified imported fantasies of feminism, decolonization, etc., his work is aligned with the now less molested artifact of mind: regionalism, one of the leading and more controversial issues in art across Canada in the 1970s. There is also something close to ti-pop in his work (such as the work of the Fabulous Rockets), with its stress on the performative aspect of sovereigntism, its fascination with the trash and garbage of the regions, and its distance from the pretensions of metropolitanism associated with Montréal. 

One text suggests that his art practice is the resignation from art. There is, one could argue, a kind of de-contemporization in the offering, a desire to escape from the fatality of the Contemporary, although this easily folds back into it. The resignation itself is exaggerated by his own consistent self-caricature and self-denigration, which prevent the satirical caricature of the city’s art world from being as vicious as it should be and so inhibits the work. But what would resigning imply? This is unclear. What we get is the practicing (or rehearsal) of resignation rather than its practice.

* The installation photos are my own.