But first, I will start with an anecdote. There was a mild furor created (deliberately) in La Presse during November of 1991 when Jean-Claude Leblond, then editor of Vie des arts, wrote a series of polemics for the paper. The articles he published were thick in rhetoric and explicit in relying on clichés and caricature, presenting a borderline satirical and inelegant imagining of the province’s art world. Unsurprisingly, the sorts of people he was lambasting (particularly professors from UQAM) took umbrage and voiced their objections in the paper’s pages while others interjected humourless rejoinders, apparently unused to reading hyperbolic language. As with most public “scandals” around art in Montréal, it was more farce than debate and did not succeed in making anyone look particularly good.
Leblond’s polemic is worth revisiting for the broad image that it provides of the city’s Contemporary Art world, one quite different from say that of Rose-Marie Arbour. According to Leblond, “An organism has been built on art, on the production of artists, which, like a cancer, functions from it, takes it as a pretext, feeds on it like a vampire to its own ends.” [Jean-Claude Leblond, “Arts visuels: de la grande noirceur a ‘l’opaque grisaille’ de nos jours” La Presse, November 12, 1991, B3.] As with most things, there is a drive for power in the art world, that is, a drive for control and survival. Even if history does not repeat itself, stupidity is perpetual and seductive.
And because there is always, continually, inevitably a monumental stupidity in all systems of power, it is sometimes necessary to stand up and strike a few good, prophylactic, necessary blows for the health of organizations, of societies. We must therefore to make a distinction between what belongs to the research of eminent scientists and work that which navigates intuitively between clichés and commonplaces presented by the powers that be as truths.
In his sketch of the province’s art history, starting with Borduas and his offspring, we were in the realm of the myth of transgression for which the Grande noirceur serves as stage dressing. Borduas played the role of the anti-academic who helped revolutionize the province’s art and society along with his surrealist cohort. The barely existent academy was rapidly replaced by a new and more expansive order [even John Lyman was pointing this out at the time]. The 1960s saw the continuation of this in even more extreme forms and a general lowering of the already low standards for art in the province.
If the early century followed pseudo-scientific theories toward an art for art’s sake formalism, the second half of the century fell under the sway of a different set of pseudo-scientific fads, like structuralism. In particular, what he singles out is what others would term the linguistic turn, especially in psychoanalysis. Leblond regards this “craze” as one which evacuated the “mystery” from art and with it the beautiful, good, and ineffable. His position on art for Vie des Arts was that it was “mysterious.” [Leblond, J.-C. (1987). “Éditorial: la Position de Vie des Arts.” Vie des Arts, 32 (127), 21–21.] With the turn to structuralism and its intellectual aftermath, art became more about discourse and rhetoric which could be perverted. The methodologies that came from the structuralist turn claimed the truth. The work itself was displaced by language and a set of theoretical assumptions that were tautological and brooked no questioning. [Jean-Claude Leblond, “Arts visuels : la critique à la remorque du courant dominant,” La Presse, November 13, 1991, B3.]
With the privileging of rhetoric also came a paradoxical evacuation of substantive criticism, both within institutions and in the art world in general. “The entire system of state support to the arts is perverted by the same logic and placed under the sway of the network. Media columns operate like megaphones to the four corners and validate the system, providing the basic material for the grant judgements…” [Jean-Claude Leblond, “Arts visuels: 'Scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.'” La Presse, November 15, 1991, B3.] Unless a critic is positive, giving artists and curators the PR they feel entitled to, they are expected to remain in polite silence since negative publicity could affect future grant allocations. The system is one based on faith; the basic article of faith is Contemporary Art as defined by the discursive norms of academia, curators, etc. who provide it with its ecclesiastical order. The priestly class of Contemporary Art then works on a quid pro quo basis to promote their interests, hidden behind a façade of rhetoric and committee structures that occlude responsibility.
Older artists tend to be marginalized by the young, usually under the claim that Québec is a young society that reinvents itself with each generation. The funding system puts an accent on this. The order of Duplessis was replaced with one of secular mandarins (peer juries and civil servants) functioning through a system that is not really any more pluralistic. Against this, he argues that, “Quality and excellence in art should not be based on the judgement of a few mandarins, but on a form of consensus where, as in traditional Mohawk democracy, the decision is not made by a majority of votes, but by unanimity, although opponents must be honoured more than ever. […] Otherwise, you know, passing off arts and letters as Culture is a childish and self-serving abuse of language.” [Jean-Claude Leblond, “Arts visuels: un système pourri jusqu'à l'os,” La Presse, November 18, 1991, B3.]
Leblond’s themes were explicitly taken up in Marcel Deschênes’ polemical book more than a decade later and given some empirical substance. Promising to crack the husk of the closed world of Contemporary Art, it stressed that it did not deal with professionals against amateurs but the former only. It is a world of “peers” rather than apprentices, as in days of old. And they are peers that tend to sit on juries in one way or another. Their work is largely suspended from public judgement, even if it is entirely parasitic on it given its reliance on the limited market. “And yet our reality contains a market, but today's artists largely reject it and withdraw from it, in disgust, to be paid by the state. Quite simply, they reject the public and its bad taste!” [Deschênes, 8]
If the artworld is one of elitist faith, it is also one that uses anarchist language. [39] And if it is a “milieu which nonetheless relentlessly sings of 'rupture', subversion, deconstruction and so on,” it is also one that is functionally not so distinct from that of 19th-century academicism. [59]
Critics and art historians tend to occlude this as much as artists do: “Our recent art history provides definitive reassurance of the development and health of living art, as opposed to the frozen academic art of the 19th century. Today's art is, in fact, unambiguously presented: we have well and truly abandoned the sclerotic era of medals and academic palms leading to the completion of a triumphant career for the artist of merit.” [119] While the clergy has no doubt changed, the system, even with its rhetoric of refusals and change, has only become more dogmatic. Using Jocelyne Alloucherie (one of the province’s most heavily funded artists) as an example, he maps out a parallel between her career and that of a generic 19th-century academician. [120]
In 1972, major funding bodies made it clear that they renounced the establishment of a real market and with this any substantive public scrutiny or criticism. This was an extension of the establishment of group studios (Graff, Vehicule, etc.) and of the expansion of performance art, happenings, video, etc. [20] The aversion to the market was a kind of puritanism. Contemporary Art is a series of forms that were congruous with this highly subsidized mode of production. It designates a “resignation” by artists to a cul-de-sac. [22] “This was what Refus had proclaimed: ‘art without constraint.’ But many hadn't quite understood that this achievement could only last in a universe parallel to real life, on the margins of the real world.” [22]
Contemporary Art lives in a parody of university science where people are said to conduct “research” detached from the banality of the world. The most subsidized artists (by bursary) are also those who teach and have an established market for their work. [45] The ideal artist is educated, preferably at the graduate level, but not necessarily in art. They belong to an artist-run centre so that they can keep in touch with their peers and their values. They likely teach or want to. Their pitches for funding are made in utilitarian or pedantic terms as forms of research. Demands for grants extend to the catalogues they can commission and the bureaucrats they bring on board. The press is used to help establish their position, preferably early in their career. And shows overseas are arranged with funding for the artist to travel with their work. [47-49]
The establishment of the Canada Council and the Art Bank resulted in a market where the state is the primary consumer, substituting for any real market (it is “commercial mimetism” [56]). “The filtering by certain types of artists or certain types of professionals who proclaim themselves to be high-level or ‘cutting-edge’ is so tight and so well validated by the milieu that, over time, a self-selection has developed among the ensemble of artists. A large number of artists never submit their works to the acquisition committees, knowing that they are automatically excluded.” [52]
The Art Bank model reduces art to the decoration of governmental offices. Contemporary Art is primarily a form of governmental furniture and the décor of bureaucrats is largely determined by a peerage system bent to favoritism and, in the province, a bias to Francophone artists. “In short, except for a few artists well established in the system, it quickly became apparent that the implementation and, above all, the extension of this program had become a complete dead-end by 1995.” [55]
But most art funding goes into state-friendly public art, the kind that suits its architecture, and the committees that select this art (made of artists, historians, and bureaucrats) vastly disproportionately privilege a small pool of artists with great consistency. [71] Although programs of public art commission were created to bring the public and artists into dialogue and help cultivate both, in practice they have been the self-serving reserve of an art elite. [83]
The system of peers forms a nomenklatura, operating in a circular fashion as part of technocratic rule. Sometimes termed a “business without customers” or a “productor company,” it is a system where the consumers and producers are barely differentiable. [86] The peers are “the best” and the maintenance of this hierarchy allows art to repudiate populism. “…the problem of the peers of the realm is a permanent one, inherent in the choice of system for an art that proclaims itself self-managed and finds itself flatly trapped in the status of an administrative parasite of a state apparatus.” [87] Surveying half a century of funding and jurying, he recognizes that the system is saturated by conflicts of interest and favoritism in what amounts to a sort of parallel economy. [96]
Today's art system, which has been subsidized for so long without being held accountable, has established a way of thinking that we're still trying to make sense of. We can only conclude that this system of support by peer juries has established the rules of the game in an absolute and unquestionable way: an artist's principal practice now consists in building an honorable curriculum by accumulating grants in an orderly fashion, building an indisputable reputation through this curriculum, and then settling into this recognition so as to maintain his cruising speed as an artist supported by his peers. He will then have to do the same for them... as a peer and member of a selection jury, whenever his turn comes. All this futile and sterile game is played with the blessing and good care of the State, which gives itself a clear conscience, seeing itself play the role of enlightened prince and buying the peace of the intellectuals in the process. [105]
Creation of debate through performative “subversion” or attack is a means of seducing the patron. This strain of art is a dream of complicity, to become part of the technocratic elite, although by no means stating it as such. In practice, as a system of peerage, it is also one of exclusion; its “transgressions” are acts of conformity within the “autonomizing” or minoritizing of the field of Contemporary Art. These actions are part of a way of producing value, the redemption of art either as “cultural representation” and its limited range of political projections, and/or as a product for this artificial economy.
This economy, of course, is not just the patron/client relation of artist and state but the ever-expansive regime of art functionaries that keep it running. Contemporary Art also exists in mimetism to transnational tendencies; simultaneously an infantile dependent on the state with a performative autonomy and an elitist conformism to an international market it scarcely exists within.
After several decades of subsidies, an art world has been created which is mostly invisible on an international level and irrelevant on a local one. What has been created has only been a cul-de-sac. [126] With this structural situation has also been a basic intellectual and creative sterilization. “You could say that some artists are dogged, that they work hard, while others spend their lives being dogged. [which could arguably be translated either as ‘bitching’ or ‘getting screwed’]” [13]
None of this, I would hasten to add, is a question of Contemporary Art being corrupted or any such thing. This is simply an enormous part of what constitutes Contemporary Art as a practice, in particular as a practice of self-government or care. The issues that this raises in terms of what has structured Contemporary Art more broadly in the country will be the topic of the next installment, which will take a longer historical view from the 1960s until now.