To reflect on this, here is a review of Sophie Dubois’Refus global: Histoire d'une réception partielle (2017), based on her award-winning dissertation, and one of the most admirably anti-lyrical depictions of the function of Automatism in the province’s intellectual (or spiritual) life that has been published.
Dubois’ basic concern is what allowed the original collection, possessed and read by so few initially (or subsequently), to reach the point that it could become a generic referent in pulp fiction by the end of the millennium. She asserts that “The survival of the work does not depend on internal factors, but on the reactions it provokes. However, the effect of scandal is not enough to inscribe the work in history: once the uproar has died down, it loses its effectiveness; the critics must then take over and remind us of the upheaval in the horizon of expectations caused by the work on its publication.” The work relies less on its substance as a work of art than as an artifact to be exploited for the construction of a historiographic narrative.
Although originally only a part of a compendium of texts and visual materials, the specific text Refus global began appearing on its own in compilations and journals of different disciplines, assimilated either to literary compendia or to sociological ones, cast as a political text. In the process of integrating it as a text and part of literature or a document, its actual collective and art object status suffered or was erased, with the authorship falling on Borduas. In the process, it was striated by a paratextual exploitation of the work as a “text” in league with Leftist emancipatory ideology.
The material status of Refus global: there were only 400 copies made and re-issues were quite different from the original. These were either the complete or partial texts, often supplemented with other writing by Borduas and critical commentary. The original editions of the work, which blossomed in re-sale value from $1.00 originally to more than $30,000 at a recent auction, would also appear in exhibitions where they became unreadable objects or functioned like images on a wall: “either it is a work of art to be contemplated for its material quality, or it is an icon with indicative value.”
In its passage from being cast as a form of rupture to prophetism, from inauguration to dialogue, a process which roved from rupture to continuity, and then from rupture to nostalgia, the collection becomes an image of the “pivot” of art and its place in society. It also becomes a functional object of whatever perspective the critic or historian tends to have a bias toward (apolitical, engaged, nationalist, nihilist, anarchist, feminist, etc.). “In the last few decades of its reception, under the impetus of the commemorations, the dominant narrative has been joined by the topoi of the work’s permanent topicality and incorruptibility, which help to justify the celebrations by the conviction that ‘Refus global’ carries a polysemy and an openness that preserves its relevance.”
It was rare that the manifesto itself was treated in its material reality. It did not generally register as a form. Even among its earliest “reception,” it was not so much something that was read but reacted to. It was an unwelcome gift put in the trash. This was due either to aversion, lack of access, or the awkwardness of its heterogeneous form. Dubois, nonetheless, insists on reading it, even going so far as suggesting it contains its own hermeneutic instructions, treating it as a set of texts, or as forms that can be treated as texts.
Many of those who first came in contact with it were reluctant to regard it as a book or such-like at all. Not a book but a thing or object to a book, it fundamentally destabilized its own legibility, disabling its function as a work of ostensible communication. This would also be called upon as a way of dismissing it as puerile. The Prisme d’Yeux manifesto, in comparison, was a relatively straightforward text, not an odd art object in itself.
If the collection was heterogeneous in form it was also received heterogeneously through a variety of disciplines around multiple themes. It was released when the various disciplines had not been highly autonomized and were quite porous and subject to the norms of state and religious power. Accused by some of being linked to communism, the Automatists for the most part tended to be hostile to assimilating their projects to the cause, something which tended not to sit them in good stead with actual communists. This stress on disengagement from explicit political orientations was part of a drive, particularly in the visual arts, for greater autonomy for them, likely part of the reason Borduas tended to be privileged among the other contributors to the collection.
Depending on the receiver, the collection either tested their acceptance of deviation from the norm or left them perplexed. To its detractors, it was a morbid symptom of “vice,” devoted to irrationality, the annihilation of self and society. Underlying much of the initial reception was less the aesthetic value of the work than its perceived ethical dangerousness. Denied the status of an “authentic” work of art, it was treated as a symptomatic document. (It was, one could add, effectively treated the way cultural studies approaches to art tend to treat it.)
For those more aware of avant-garde practice, it remained inauthentic because it simply seemed to be a pastiche that added nothing new. It, and the work associated with the group, were regarded as the insincere, mediocre work of posers. In this respect, it was Claude Gauvreau more than Borduas who was attacked. For those who would defend them, it was Borduas who would be held up, old enough to seem “sincere” by comparison to his youthful colleagues (they were often condemned as inoffensive but daft “adolescents”).
The collection became a matter of polemics for years and the press was where most of this played out as Claude Gauvreau bitterly argued with numerous people, primarily left-wing Catholics, notably Gérard Pelletier, about the status of surrealism, what happens after surrealism, poetic revolution, the function of language, etc. The polemics were crude, irrational, frequently ad hominem, and defensive to the point of farcicality.
In this respect, Dubois largely fails to understand what was happening, treating these phenomena as though they were debates in any rational sense of the term rather than performative, or theatricalized demonstrations of the idiocy of pretending that art was about communication or was a form of social intercourse. Pelletier at least eventually realized that the whole thing made a show of the impossibility of dialogue; there was only strategy and sarcasm. The attitude of Gauvreau helped to further isolate the Automatists, eliminating the limited public sympathy they had accrued. Surrealism in the province attained the image of being a “dangerous farce.”
In light of surrealism’s dodgy reputation in the province, Dubois stresses that Borduas was not dismissed from his teaching position because of the content of his work, written or otherwise, but because his extracurricular activities were seen as compromising his function as a teacher. This quickly overshadowed Refus global itself, which became something that was referenced as a source of the “Borduas affair” and exploited by journalists and others in the scandal-mongering that followed and which solidified the public image of Borduas as the manifesto’s author and reduced the curious object into a singular text.
The flurry of letter-writing and polemics that followed were central to creating the image of the artist as the new Rimbaud, as a “liberator” and a polyvalent sign for the city’s various newspapers and journals to exploit to their own political ends. His glorification as a victim by his proponents made him a mythical figure that would be central to much of the discourse on art in the province from the 1960s on.
“What’s more, at the end of the first reception period, Borduas’ reappearance on the art scene was seen as a resurrection, a motif that contributed to the sacralisation of the artist's figure. Such mythologising (need we say it?) distances critical discourse from the reality of the work and places it, along with its author, in the realm of the collective imagination.”
Claude Gauvreau, in particular, would be central to creating the myth of Borduas as a martyr to Modernism, the genius victim of a stultified culture. The painter became a sign of the indignities suffered by humanity and the artist a kind of Socrates. As the legend grew, any substantial relation to reality receded. After 1950, it was even less likely that the allusions to Refus global were made by those who had much of an engagement with it and certainly it was not engaged with in any kind of rigorous way. “On the contrary, we can speculate that the omnipresence of ‘Refus global’ in the discourse justifies a kind of relaxation in the analysis of the work: judged to be well-known, it enters the realm of allusion, and commentary on it no longer seems necessary.” Its reception moved away from the popular press into specialized ones.
With Borduas leaving the country in 1953, Claude Gauvreau became the primary face and voice of Automatism. Unlike his colleague, he was not treated as a martyr or visionary but continually attacked and not cited as an influence on poetry but as a minor character.
By the end of the 1950s, the scandal around the manifesto and Borduas’ status as a martyr were minimized and the importance of the collection as a signal of the province’s modernity and the modernity of its art was stressed instead. By the end of the decade, it would become a “caractère inaugural” or a “paradigme de la rupture.” This paved the way for what it would become to the “counter-culture” that would exploit allusions to it:
“‘Refus global’ was not mythologised until the 1960s, when it was given a prophetic content. The text only became myth thanks to Borduas and his defenders, who elevated the author to the rank of enlightened guide, victim and martyr, an exemplary figure of the failure of greatness in Québec.”
Situations was a left-leaning publication founded by Jacques Ferron and Fernande Saint-Martin with the goal of critiquing Québec society in the interests of artistic expression. Saint-Martin’s reading of Refus pivoted it back to its ostensible social content, seeing it as a potential moment of “salvation” for a democratic art that failed. It was the beginning of the collection being imagined as part of a revolutionary lineage in the province that could lump Borduas in with Papineau. To revamp Refus for the 60s, it had to be made to conform to the latest model of liberatory rhetoric, part of which meant criticizing it for being naive in its depiction of the social world.
No longer understood as a work of art, it became a social document: “There has been a paradigm shift in the horizon of expectations and in the criteria of legitimisation employed: the ethical, axiological and even aesthetic dimensions have given way to theoretical and scientific issues.” The Automatists became lionized for their interdisciplinarity and for initiating a rupture from what was taken as a conformist society.
Borduas’ status as a martyr would be revised and expanded. Marcel Barbeau would dub him a victim of conservatism as the painter was re-appropriated as the imaginary father for a generation that deemed themselves rebels. Borduas was not really read let alone his paintings seriously examined, but was mythologized as a figure.
Meanwhile, Refus became a document integrated into intellectual history as part of a progressivist narrative of thought and culture. In Barre de jour, the sociopoliticization of Automatism grew. With the Révolution tranquille in swing, it was retrospectively taken as prophetic. Marcel Barbeau, Marcelle Ferron, and Claude Gauvreau helped to formulate the collection’s reputation as a work of prophetism. “Gauvreau’s portrayal of the history of the Automatist group is part of a myth-making process that uses images of persecution and resistance.”
This was a way of positioning Automatism within the socio-political context of the 1960s and in the process of adding to the Borduas myth even at the exclusion of the rest of the group. Pierre Gauvreau, Françoise Sullivan, and Leduc were also committed to this mythology, casting the collection as part of a rupture with the Duplessis era. Chroniques, Possibles, and Maintenant, all advanced sociological interpretations of it, assimilating it to narratives about decolonization and secularization.
“Under the influence of authors such as Aquin, Lalonde, and Miron before them, ‘Refus global’ became a symbol in the artistic milieu of the 1970s.” It was claimed as part of the heritage of the counter-culture, both by artists and in the collection Québec Underground. A dozen different reissues of Refus were put out between 1968 and 1977, as well as the writings of Borduas. Along with reissues of work by other Automatists, they all become privileged as documents of an era around which sociological conferences and debates could take place.
Against this, numerous novelists satirized Automatism, notably, Réjean Ducharme, generally regarding them as mediocrities who exploited scandal for attention. “Not only were the Automatists ridiculed for their mythocratic tendencies, to use Jacques Marchand’s neologism, but their affiliation with the group and the excessive importance accorded to it in posterity were also criticised.”
At its twentieth anniversary, it was a rallying cry for strikes by artists and art students and as the decades wore on it would be a point of reference to be unilaterally appropriated. “Borduas, referred to in the Latin Quarter as ‘Québec’s Guevara’, established himself as a revolutionary because he had written a revolutionary text.” Operation déclic expressed this the most famously.
“It is difficult to pinpoint the origin of this belief, which emerged in the early 1970s around the exhibition Borduas et les automatistes. The exhibition catalogue, which describes ‘Refus global’ as an ‘insurrection’, refers to the closure of the communist weekly Combat after government intervention, in parallel with Borduas's dismissal.”
But as time wore on, it became a citation for authenticity: “As ‘Refus global’ is known as a protest work, referring to it lends a protesting character, a manifesto aspect, to any project, be it literary, artistic, political, media, ecological, economic or other.” Moving from its marginal position, it becomes a means for normalization or legitimation rather than subversion.
With the end of the 70s, the attention paid to Refus subsided to some degree. The focus on the work under sociological rubrics became less central and its place in the visual arts of the province, thanks in part to the ongoing work of François-Marc Gagnon, more pronounced. This meant a degree of turning away from (and critique of) the way it had been warped by nationalist and Leftist interpretations.
Pierre Vadeboncœur was central in positioning Borduas as part of the conscience of intellectuals verging on the saintly and the heroization of him as an individual occluded the importance of the group or collective work. Gagnon likewise assimilated Automatism into the notion of rattrapage and rupture. It was generally treated sociologically in English Canada and in reference in painting to France, where it was taken under the wing of surrealism. When the text was dealt with, it was again in social terms.
Its sociologization had come at the expense of its violence and surrealism. It also meant a greater academicization of the text as it was historicized along a seemingly more objective set of practices that tended to treat Refus more as a subjective expression. In this light, it was usually treated as the text of a single person, rather than a collective enunciation or an object.
Other critics, such as Réné Payant, stressed the place of Sullivan in the collection because her mutidisciplinarity had become the norm for the province’s institutional art. For others, it would be Riopelle or Viau who were singled out, but there was a general push for relativization among the Automatists. This transformation of its function was strongly linked to the myth of the Révolution tranquille and the place of the text as one of its initiating gestures. In this context, the collection is cast as a utopian projection and exploited for its grim depiction of the Grande noirceur.
“In the 1980s and 1990s, a demystifying counter-discourse was grafted onto the common narrative, and the positioning of the signatories became more complex.” While Riopelle seemed to be increasingly skeptical about its scandalous status, in general, the signatories furthered their careers and reputations by offering “testaments” to the authenticity of the collection and its place in the province’s history, even if that became murkier with time.
Still, even in the 1990s and later, knowledge of the existence of Refus was taken as a basic necessity in understanding the culture of the province, ignorance of which could be a point of ridicule, it remained the case that extremely few people had read it in any form or knew what the document contained. It was mostly known by name and entered discourse as that. Losing its status as an object or text, it became “an act whose subversive aspect compensates for its aesthetic and logical flaws.” There was some very minor pushback against the sacralization of Borduas and his identification with the Révolution tranquille in the 1990s while the era of Duplessis was being critically re-evaluated.
For the turn of the millennium, there was a bit of a bump to mark the 50th anniversary. “In addition to the counter-discourses of the 1980s and 1990s, which attacked the nationalist reading of Borduas’ text and the paradigm of rupture, there is a severe critique of the phenomenon of commemoration.” Hostility to Borduas and the group, even from former mythographers of them, became a norm, albeit one mostly relegated to a few newspapers. The work was reduced to a symbol and marketable product, a fetish item. For those more sympathetic, there was an air of nostalgia and sense of the glamour of rupture. Aside from these polarized appraisals, there were also feminist readings by Rose-Marie Arbour and Patricia Smart that stressed the importance of multidisciplinarity and identity construction.
A noticeable feature of the book is that while it legitimately concentrates on the self-serving and even cynical function that Refus was put to until the 1970s, it becomes significantly less critical of what happened after and why. The critiques are often lopsided. After all, it is not as though Smart’s Les Femmes du Refus global is really any less mystifying than the work of Gauvreau. Unlike Smart’s book, which claimed to examine the “atmosphere” around the manifesto, what Dubois produces is a history devoid of atmosphere.
One of the primary things that the book struggles with is the problem of myth. This, she defines as:
“Myth, because it exacerbates the gap between a thing and its representation embodied and transmitted in discourse, is a favourite subject for cultural history, which sees it as an opportunity to explore both the modes of representation and the process of reification of meaning at the heart of myth. In its ancient origins, myth was a narrative that was considered to be true, insofar as it allowed us to envisage a complex reality that was difficult to grasp in any other way. It is thus relayed by hegemonic discourse, which confers on it properties of social cohesion. In this sense, the creation of a myth around ‘Refus global’ attests to the dissonant, marginal, elusive nature of the work in its time, which requires recourse to a higher-order mode of explanation to account for it.”
Reception analysis seems intended to function like this higher-order mode of explanation, but because it lacks a metahistorical critique of the intellectual spheres that produced the reception, it is so weakly situated that it cannot actually explain anything. While she would contend that “Claude Gauvreau's writings, like those of Pierre Vadeboncœur and François-Marc Gagnon, contribute to the constitution and reification of the meaning attributed to the work, forming what I call, following Micheline Cambron, interpretive barriers [verrous],” the implication of this in practice is that cultural and narratological approaches to art history necessarily mean its misinterpretation.
While Dubois argues that “From an institutional point of view, the multidisciplinary nature of the collection continues to hinder its acceptance by scholarly discourse in a context where disciplinary fields evolve in a vacuum and are defined by the development of a specific history and by the search for their own formal characteristics,” the evidence she lays out suggests that both the period without this strict disciplinary boundary and the later institutional proliferation of interdisciplinarity since the 1950s, have both been instrumental in the incapacity to recognize the work.
Although she does not set out to propose a new reading of the work, Dubois does point to “new readings that emerge from my analyses will be based on the flaws in the reception of the work, which may appear to be relevant avenues for renewing our reading of it.”
Dubois takes the manifesto as an ephemeral document, essentially polemical and dialogically addressed to a specific moment and situation.
“In Québec, one manifesto seems to have succeeded in breaking free from the contingency of current events to become part of history: the Automatist manifesto ‘Refus global’, published in 1948.” Dubois consulted 639 documents interpreting or (more often) referencing Refus global and wrote her document with an eye “looking in the rear-view mirror of reception, beyond the canonical discourse, can indeed be relevant, especially when, as in the case of the common narrative on ‘Refus global,’ the discourse taking the central route seems to stagnate and become reified, a victim of over-concentration - of clogging up.”
The fame of the manifesto came with concealing what it was as a material thing at the same time as it was reconstructed by activists, scholars, and journalists as a canonical text for the province’s history. Collectively created and multidisciplinary, it was unclear what aspect of it was the manifesto. And while this remains an ongoing bone of contention, Dubois treats it in basically literary terms, which effectively functions as the kind of “interpretive barrier” she frequently isolates to cite as a form of blindness or reification.
And so, following “Alain Viala’s definition, the literary work will be considered here as an act of communication centred on aesthetic pleasure, whose destination is open and random, and whose reception is deferred in time and space.” This is in keeping with the historical nature of an art object, which “[u]nlike the historical event, which is punctual in nature, the aesthetic work is transhistorical: it is a ‘past that remains’” and is destined for an aleatoric relation to the future, in some ways integrated into “collective memories,” and in others far more unpredictable and shaded by fashion or personal interest.
And so, the reception of a work is a two-pronged exercise in territorialization and appropriation: “Reception is seen as the conjunction of two moments - the past of production and the present of reception - and the work is freed, at least partially, from the weight of previous discourse.”
As we saw, in practice and empirically, this is highly problematic given that within the early chapters on reception, Dubois observed that the notion that the manifesto actually functioned as an act of communication was absurd. Its subsequent history of blindness and misinterpretation only buttresses this point.
Automatism was taken as a kind of ethos as much as an aesthetic. “In other words, automatism would shift art from a ‘regime of community’, in which the work aims to reach an audience and share an emotion, to a ‘regime of singularity’, in which it is rather the product of vision.” This, suffice it to say, should pose significant issues for attempting to study it in terms of “reception,” but this is strangely elided for most of the text.
One curious thing that gets lost is that the “mythification” taken on around the collection by several of its signatories was clearly as much a part of it as the collection itself, that the years that Claude Gauvreau spent fighting with people about it, rehashing and re-imagining it, were as much an aspect of “pluridisciplinary” practice as dance etc., if not much more so. Dance, after all, is not really present in the work; it is translated to another medium. This also raises all sorts of issues related to reception and to what “reading” even could be in this context that gets ignored.
Reception is defined as: “a series of readings arranged in such a way as to form a coherent ‘plot’ that makes them inter-readable.” This arrangement then allows for the “consideration of reception on the basis of the formation of a common narrative about the work has the advantage of countering the criticism frequently levelled at reception studies concerning the indefiniteness of readers. Indeed, in the process of competing discourses, what determines the impact of a criticism in the reception narrative is first and foremost how it is taken up by commentators.”
The “narrative” she constructs is the mostly linear superimposition of a succession of textual citations. The impression ultimately is that what occurs was more an act of non-communication, that they do not become “inter-readable” but are just a series of contingent, aleatoric epiphenomena that only trivially share a common object.
This points directly to her concluding remark: “It’s as if, in the end, reading Refus global was like re-reading history.” While presumably this is intended to imply reading “history” in the common sense of the term, it applies far more forcefully if one takes it to mean historiographic practice. If the book says something (potentially) about academia and journalism, there is not enough of a metahistorical argument for anything meaningful to come out of it. What the methodology of the work demonstrates, even if it does not stress it, is that the hermeneutics that came into fashion either in the press or among academics, tended to make them even more incapable of plausibly interpreting much of anything. In this respect, the book almost verges on a satire of the creation of the city's Contemporary Art scene.