In the background, more implied than argued here, is that Contemporary Art is a genre, at least if this term is understood in the way it has been employed by film theorists like Rick Altman and Steve Neale, to designate a heterogeneous matrix with consistent furniture, strategies of hybridization, and a clear pattern of industrial production that has to a substantial degree determined its formal qualities. As Altman has claimed, genres are best understood as “contraptions capable of performing multiple tasks” that allow for the general summing up of formula, structure, and expectation, providing a “conduit” for the flow of desires. [Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 14-15]
Terry Smith has suggested that fears of essentialism have largely repressed attempts to define Contemporary Art. A dogmatic defense of its non-generalizability and the untenability of sweeping historical narratives tend to dominate instead. But this is an “idiot mask” put over what it is. [Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1] Certainly, if you survey the history of what has been produced within the local industries/institutions as Contemporary Art as opposed to simply art produced now, it demonstrates a quite limited and predictable set of practices and rhetoric. And despite a performative aversion to grand narratives, suppurates with them.
According to Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, the Contemporary is invisible yet all-encompassing and hegemonic; it absorbs all art and makes the distinction into movements untenable. It is a useful term for institutions, displacing the “modern” with a seemingly more neutral term. If grand narrative ends, “soft consensus” is enforced. In insisting on its pluralistic and temporal aspect, its dogmatic dynamism and fantasies of flux, it evades being recognized as an ideological “ism”: “The contemporary suggests movement, yet itself does not budge.” [Aranda, Julieta; Wood, Brian Kuan; Vidokle, Anton “What is Contemporary Art?” What is contemporary art? (Berlin; New York: Sternberg Press, 2010), 7]
In other evasions, the authors continue, Contemporary Art maps the world through a series of largely interchangeable “centres” that supposedly possess their own “local knowledge” and the contemporary seems “vital” because it is the constant translation between these different nodes. While the authors have no nostalgia for the past and commend the possibilities of these proliferating peripheries that act as centres, they worry that this can reduce all to spectacle, that the Contemporary circuit could just be its own language that is not a listener or translator. As “the invisible,” the Contemporary is a glass ceiling that hides its structural function. [Aranda, Wood, Vidokle, 9]
Within the Canadian context, and distinct from the global image of the genre, Contemporary Art is clearly articulable as a state art practice, one that not only mirrors and mimics the values and the structure of ruling governance but extends them through “pluralizing” its proliferating “centres.” As a historical and formal phenomenon, this is more important than its ostensible content or the intentionality that tends to be appealed to in its apologetics.
It also should be stressed that coincident with the construction of Contemporary Art in Canada has been that of contemporary academia, that the two things share substantive structural and economic ties and even deeper ideological ones, that they both emerged as part of a “knowledge economy” whose industrial manufacture applies to everything from public art installations to the historiographies that would appear to provide them referents. Deschênes’ critiques of the corruption, to say nothing of ideological bias, of the artworld apply, if anything, even more convincingly to critiques of the works manufactured under SSHRC guidelines and within the confines of graduate programmes than they do of the Canada Council.
While there were sporadic murmurings and conferences, it was not until after the Massey-Lévesque Commission that much happened, largely under the pretense that the arts were a means of creating some form of national identity and part of supporting the growth of the educational industry. It was only with the heavy duties that the government extracted from the estates of two deceased industrialists that money was dumped into universities and the arts in the form of endowments.
For several years up until then, arts councils had pressured governments to take action when it was mostly indifferent to them. The Massey-Lévesque Commission argued that it was in the interest of the people to know as much about the nation and its history as possible and to give expression to common life and feeling. [George Woodcock, Strange Bedfellows: The State and the Arts in Canada (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1985), 45] No artworld existed, almost no one in any discipline earned a living by it, and almost no one other than artists were interested aside from a few cultural nationalists. The Canada Council was first proposed in January 1957 and formed in March to promote work in the arts and social sciences.
The St Laurent government was adamant that the state should support but not control art. The result was a particular type of model, “an administrative hybrid of the arm’s length British public arts council approach and the American private foundation endowment-based style of arts funding. The Canada Council is also unique in its mandate, resembling the French humanist attitude toward the arts that includes related areas such as education, science, and culture.” [Monica Gattinger,The Roots of Culture, The Power of Art: The First Sixty Years of the Canada Council for the Arts (Montreal; Kingston; London; Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 20]
The peer-evaluation system at the heart of arm’s-length arts Council model has been basic to its “mythos” of justice and self-justification. Its corporate structure (collective noun-collective intelligence), made of a board, public advisors, and peer jurists, has allowed for power to remain primarily in the hands of arts professionals with board bowing to their expertise. [Clive Robertson, Policy Matters: Administrations of Art and Culture (Toronto: YYZ Books, 2006), 123]
This has been altered over the years, notably with the splitting off of the research aspect into SSHRC in 1977, which, for a period, marked a shift from the more holistic approach. In both instances, one of the central purposes was the establishment of a form of cultural sovereignty, primarily in relation to the United States. These two primary funding/administrative bodies have been supplemented by ministries of culture, heritage, tax break initiatives, and other financing formulas since then. The Heritage Ministry, created by the Chrétien government in 1993, amalgamated culture and communications with citizenship and multiculturalism, rendering explicit the generic assumption of holism and the functionary role of the artist-citizen. [Robertson, 112]
The provinces began moving into arts funding a few years after the Council was launched. This went along with an increased stress on regionality. Provincial funding also tended to stress craft as opposed to the fine arts. [Woodcock, 84] Ontario set up its Cultural Industries in 1975, and regional vs federal antagonism over the arts proved to be particularly strong under Liberal governance with Conservatives taking a more pragmatic and confederationist approach when they were in power. [Woodcock, 90]
Initially, the Council was given almost complete autonomy and dominated by British immigrants into the 1970s, who built many of its institutions. Patronage went primarily to institutions rather than individuals. By the mid-1960s, there was potential development of a Ministry of Culture through the Secretary of State which raised further questions about the autonomy of art. In the 70s under Trudeau, government interference became more pronounced. [Woodcock, 62] From early on, Trudeau and Pelletier treated the arts as an industry, not as “muse-ridden vocations” [Woodcock, 108] but as a “total arts industry” administered from outside, regarding its products as commodities. Pelletier’s view of the function of arts was, according to Woodcock, basically a Marxist one.
The clearest early articulation of the cultural model for art espoused by the state was produced in the mid-60s. In 1965, Pierre Laporte oversaw a white paper justifying this model, one which articulated the basic metaphysical presumptions that would remain consistent to the governmental justification of the arts. According to the document, “it is essentially through culture that a community expresses itself, translates its mentality, in other words identifies itself in its own eyes, recognises itself, has pride in the moral being that it builds.” [Livre blanc (Ministère des Affaires culturelles, Novembre 1965), 3] Identifying culture in reference to Hegel as the “life of the spirit,” [Ibid., 7] the Ministère des Affaires culturelles insisted on defining it in light of the massive industrialization of education, and in the logic of what would eventually be termed multiculturalism.
Stressing that the state could no longer be understood in a limited or laissez-faire liberal model, for it to be contemporary it needed to be interventionist and expansionist in the “cultural destiny” of those it governed. The function of the state was to promote the well-being (institutionally manifest as the police, health care, and education) and spiritual life of the nation. [Ibid., 15]
Culture was defined as a human right and the justification of the state is, to a large degree, in its protection, especially through the educational system and the safeguarding of “creators.” [Ibid., 16-19] The state functions as the preserver of what exists and the catalyst for present and future creation. [Ibid., 20]
This came (I am glossing this slightly differently than Gattinger does) with the institutionalization of biculturalism and then multiculturalism, the extended urbanization of the country, the collapse of its manufacturing sector, the rise of Indigeneity as part of the national mythos, and the explosion of the bureaucratic-ideological apparatuses as one of the central economies of state. Thus, “Concepts like the ‘knowledge economy’ and the ‘creative economy’ emerged to capture this shift, and point to the growing importance of education, intellectual capital, innovation, and creativity to economic development.” [Gattinger, 53]
The rise of this economy, which had to do with redefining art in primarily anthropological terms rather than those that were generic to art history and criticism, was an aspect of the changes spearheaded by Trudeau and Pelletier for the “democratization” and decentralization (regionalization) of “culture,” notably with the Explorations programme and the increased lauding of interdisciplinarity.
This ontologization of the arts to fit into conformity with Trudeauvean ideology continued well into the 1980s and even became an integral aspect of the disciplining of the disciplines to fall into conformity with the ethos of the state: “The Council’s juries could no longer be comprised of men hailing mainly from central Canada: gender, ethnic, and geographic representation had to be taken into account. The shift was also in keeping with Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier’s cultural policies of democratization and decentralization.” [Gattinger, 62]
By the mid-80s, there was a shift from the “democratization of culture (access) to cultural democracy (representation)” that emerged within the “neoliberalization” (stress on performance and outcomes) of arts funding and the increasingly normative definition of art as a practice rather than a product (a relationship that she does not really interrogate). [Gattinger, 63-65] This was co-extensive with the legalism that tended to bubble up as a tool in the service function of arts governance. In their work with “communities,” art centres often advocated for the transformation of aspirational demands into legal demands or assertions of rights, treating laws as cultural conventions and legal actions as action strategies for negotiation. [Robertson, 44] In this respect, like many civil servants, art workers have operated to “judicialize” state administration. [Robertson, 45]
With the primary issue rendered as the “socially desirable outcome” for art’s function (as a means for identity formations, community participation [Gattinger, 10]), state-sponsored art is defined as a means for “Canadians to know one another, to have an understanding and awareness of their collective histories, cultures, shared challenges, and opportunities, and their innate capacity for unique self-expression.” [Gattinger, 7] The rise of identity-based and participatory art were both tailor-made for state policy initiatives. Artist-run centres also proved perfect for this model precisely because they were invested in a system of patronage to begin with.
Artist-run spaces started in the later 1960s and early 70s were connected to strategies in the art-making practices of the 1960s, especially those that stressed context (minimalism, land art, performance art, etc.) and were intensified by political activism and concerns about art’s social function. [Robertson, 1]
Institutional reformation was central to Conceptual Art and a dissatisfaction with the traditional limitations of the art market. Conceptualism’s legacy was administration and bureaucracy even on the level of iconography. What was at stake in some ways was a shift in conceiving art from a commodity to a service. [Robertson, 2]
This tendency would be manifest both in the construction of a self-serving and highly artificial cultural industry and in the conceptualization of art as a broader socio-political function. By the late 1970s, the art press had begun to recognize that the construction of new institutions of governing and distribution were central to Contemporary Art as an art identity.
Artist-run centres in Canada have been both parts of nation-building and other forms of social activism. Organized as service forms, they “mimic” the “federal machinery of political representation” providing services, responding to lobbying, and serving special interests. [Robertson, 6] The use of the term “mimic” here is something of an obfuscation since it marks a difference in kind, but it is entirely unclear what this difference is or what substantively distinguishes these centres from liberal governmentality.
By the turn of the millennium, the notion of artist-run centres as parallels or alternatives to a traditional museum and gallery system rather than their equals paled as an extension of professionalization and mainstreaming. Artist-run centres had tended from the beginning to reject the parallel label and cast themselves as networks tied to local communities. [Robertson, 8]
The “transfigured artist” of the “institutions by artists as a practice” that Khonsary and Podesva regard as the possible future of art in the country explicitly relies on a definition of art taken from anthropology and delimited in terms of “relational processes of becoming” in which the “institutions reflect the processes of sociality and mutuality that bring into existence ourselves.” [Khonsary and Podesva, 17] Or, in A.A. Bronson’s terms, they are “a practice of exchange, of community, of a creative formation of culture.” [Khonsary and Podesva, 16]
The sorts of bureaucratic rhetoric employed by those involved, and which dealt with “representation” and function were, perhaps, occlusions of a more fundamental set of psychological issues, at least according to one of the central figures in their emergence. As “community” forms that were usually bound to regions and facilitated the interchange between national and international institutions, they also functioned as embodiments of federalism.
In Bronson’s narrative, what was constructed after the 1960s was an image of this world, one ironically built from “our national attributes – the bureaucratic tendency and the protestant work ethic” that was more gestural line than physically real, and rendered possible not only by state funding but by the state’s travel infrastructure: “now suddenly all these characters in this epic plot began to intertwine into that Rococco [sic] form of bureaucracy called Canadian art today.” [Bronson, 10]
Ventures that were not limited to galleries proliferated, including publishing projects, mail art, performances, and so on. With the creation of FILE magazine, the artworld became as much, if not more, about lifestyle (“interest groups”) as anything else, and there was “a means to see oneself as a part of this configuration of personalities, that is, as a component of a ‘scene.’” [Bronson, 12] In the 70s, it was primarily through various magazines that this scene seemed to exist.
This coincided, one could add, with the decline in the value of art in the media in general and its increased specialization/elitisim. During the 1950s-70s, the Ottawa press core covered national art institutions closely, as did many local presses for their own institutions, and frequently sought scandal. This material reached a national audience, but all of this collapsed in the 80s with changes in media consumption. [Robertson, 154] The rare occasions in which the arts registered as anything other than tourism beyond their sanctified borders would be linked to salaciousness and controversy in the public press, taking on a more tabloid quality that the “arts community” tended to embarrass themselves in attempting to fend off. [Robertson, 155]
While there have been a handful of “controversies” over the arts in Canada, largely in regards to purported pornographic or nationalist/separatist content, and these have sometimes been exploited by activists of various stripes, as George Woodcook observed, the guidelines for federal and provincial funding already severely limit what kind of art is produced and shown. [Woodcock, 111]
Notably, Bronson recognized that the image of community did not actually refer to one. There was a media fabric, but on close inspection only continual fragmentation and tangents. The image he constructs of it resembles the way Gattinger describes contemporary Canadian bureaucracy: “With governing becoming ever more multifaceted, decentralized, balkanized, and demanding, this kind of expertise, insight, and experience could prove invaluable to Canadian governance and policy-making in the years ahead.” [Gattinger, 137]
In this stress on community and culture, again (and Bronson certainly does not say it), it was following the utopian fantasy of Canadian federalism and Contemporary Art advanced by the Liberal Party and its reterritorialization of art as the museum without walls: “ANNPAC [Association of National Non-Profit Artists Centres] has a life of its own. We call it the living museum.” [Bronson, 13]
For Bronson, at least initially (his subsequent take on what occurred historically has been far more pessimistic), the establishment of a “community of communities” was an essentially perverse kind of sado-masochistic fantasy tinged with religiosity and ressentiment: “And what better place to develop the interior kingdom of the soul, than in the humiliation of the bureaucrat, the constant death of palace coups, the submission of rational consciousness to this sleep song drifting down the long chain of dream-palaces, this idealised vision of the ‘museum,’ of history, in which the artist animates the quaking body of the institution with his own obsessive will?” [Bronson, 14]
Robertson notes that in the wake of “cultural democracy” as applied to new forms of institutions, the role of the artist seems increasingly weak and contingent as the functionaries of the expanding bureaucracy. In order to cast them as “real actors of history [societal struggle]” and to allow for artist-run centres to then work as “subjectivities” [sites of experience and responsibility] that can direct and shape history, he has to call on cultural theory as a means for interpolating pathos into the process, a strategy, I would add, that merits substantial criticism given the function of “culture” as the linchpin of liberal governance. [Robertson, 29]
In practice, and structuring a substantial amount of Gattinger’s narrative, is the “core tensions in [the Council’s] work: between ‘art for art’s sake’ and pursuing broader social and economic aims through the arts.” [Gattinger, 9] That the former is barely discussed in her book suggests something both about the lack of much tension or the minimal function the issue has had in the governing of the arts. If the primary clientèle of the Council is the art’s community, the ultimate client remains the public.
What this “art for its own sake” means historically is not something she dwells on, but it does not seem to have much to do with aestheticism and has more to do with securing financing. Indeed, Robertson’s work illustrates that the “own sake” in practice is primarily welfare for artists, and the various debates and conflicts around the construction of arts “communities” have historically had almost nothing to do with form and everything to do with an ambition that ends in the construction of a community of convalescence as a praxis of social justice.
We might instead view artist-run centres as a continuity of the reform of exhibition sites where Canadian artists and independent curators or programmers contribute to and participate in a sprawling do-it-yourself project of national and international exchange. At the same time, we also have to account for an array of local artist-run places that includes retail book and magazine outlets and archives; print and new media publishing; artist-run festivals and performance spaces; radio, TV, and Web initiatives; community-arts projects; and artists’ initiatives in public housing co-operatives. In other words, the creation of a series of self-help and community building that if extended would culminate with the provision of retirement homes (or their imagined equivalents). [Robertson, 12]
With the turn of the millennium, as a practice, art was no longer conceptualized as something to be given but as something to be engaged with as “shifting thinking about the Council’s value proposition from that of serving artists (a particular sector as “the client”) to serving Canadian citizens as a whole.” [Gattinger, 67-68] This was a reinvestment in the original holistic anthropological conception of art advanced in the first Trudeau regime and a doubling up of the service model. This reached its governmental mode in the Council transforming its “approach from discipline-based funding to activity-based multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary funding programs, with a greater focus on equity.” [Gattinger, 69] The model of explicitly socially-engaged art, implicit from the beginning, was fully institutionalized by 1999. [Gattinger, 82]
Simon Brault, Director and CEO of the Canada Council, stressed that, “We believe a non-disciplinary approach to granting, an approach based on artistic interventions, processes and impacts rather than disciplines, will deliver the greatest benefits to artists, arts organizations and audiences.” [Gattinger, 72] As a practice, this has been translated into, “program outcomes are the organizing principle, with the disciplines supported within a broader context of programmatic themes, and what was once marginal and marginalized (for example, Indigenous art) has been brought to the fore in a way that’s unprecedented.” [Gattinger, 73]
Summing all of these trends up, Gattinger argues
The New Funding Model, which transforms the Council’s program arrangements from disciplinary to non-disciplinary, and vastly reduces the number of funding programs, is a decisive statement by the Council about the evolution and future of the arts in Canada, and the organization’s role therein. The new approach places artistic activities and themes at the fore. This is made plain in the names of the new funding programs, which speak to activities, not disciplines: Creating, Knowing and Sharing: The Arts and Culture of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples; Explore and Create; Engage and Sustain; Supporting Artistic Practice; Arts Across Canada; and Arts Abroad. The change also highlights the sort of impacts the organization seeks to achieve, not the art forms receiving the funding, and is in keeping with the Council’s shift from the roots of culture (fostering production/supply and building the disciplines) to the power of art (fostering enjoyment/demand and the arts’ impact in society). [Gattinger, 98]
It is not a matter of the state funding art in a straightforward client-patron relationship, but of the state constructing, often with the willing participation of many artists, an art practice in which the roles of producers, consumers, the medium and the mediator, become fused into something alien to what existed in the far more limited artworld that existed before that. It was, as Robertson has observed, a way of creating a particular institutional subjectivity that was not reducible to persons. Given the actual conditions of the production, dissemination, and consumption of art, it seems right to argue that interpreting it in the mode of romantic aesthetics (individual or cultural expressivity) is limited and often dubious.
One of the reasons why Contemporary Art has come to stress and administer the breakdown of other genres and media-defined disciplines has had less to do with an organic breaking from traditions (most of which had barely been established in the country anyway) than it has with establishing a normative genre and medium. That genre is Contemporary Art itself and that medium is primarily the state.
Contemporary Art is this genre of mediation, one which is not media-specific, but specifically a kind of entity. In a sense, teratology would provide a far better avenue for understanding all of this than the type of ethological or sociological analyses that has tended to be embraced. This would stress that what occurs is a kind of breeding, a reproduction that takes place in the embrace shared by artists and the state. This was, after all, explicitly what Foucault recognized as an integral aspect of the practice of care.
Care, as Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard has outlined in Le Schisme identitaire (2022), is one of the central techniques of liberal rule, something that he persuasively maps as being central to the post-referendum ideology of the Liberal Party, expressed explicitly in its cultural conceptualizations of ethics, and best expressed by figures like Stéphane Dion and, subsequently, by the second Trudeau regime.
If Contemporary Art eviscerated the fragile and limited media-defined disciplines, it has done so by reducing art to a technique in an ethos of governmental care. As a practice, then, it designates a very different disciplinary regime. It is the extremity of this change that makes it differ from previous forms of academic art or what Aleksa Čelebonović deemed “bourgeois realism” or kitsch.
The closest thing to a rigid academicism and a genuinely “bourgeois” genre like History painting in Canada has been Contemporary Art. To fail to understand this is to fail to understand the most basic reality of art in the country. This extends far beyond “content” since it is, as Robertson and other authors have noted, primarily the “subject” manufactured by this economy that is in play as the practice. The shift from art-as-object to art-as-practice is this programme of subjectivation.
While the polyvalence basic to artworks renders them inevitably autonomous from the intentionality of artists, practices pose a different problem because their objective reality is distinct. While they may involve communication, they are primarily transient means of embodiment. And while they are certainly encased in meanings (artist and curatorial statements, critical reviews) this means less than their institutional casing, which is what forms their body. It is trivial whether this is in a “white cube,” street intervention, community outreach, or what have you when it remains encased in the funding and ontological principles of the state (culture and the socio-cultural subject).
One can, and should, read all of this not in terms of resistance, contestation, or other lazy tropes that tend to litter catalogue essays, but simply as the positive affirmation of liberal hegemony for which the Canadian artworld (although by no means necessarily the works of art produced within it) functions as a symptomatic example. And certainly, insofar as art-as-institution is defined by the scholars of this world’s evolution, it is parasite, mime, and extension of the government.
As Boris Groys has pointed out, discourses of heterogeneity, hybridity and diversity, such as those of Contemporary Art, with their dread of the “repetitive, geometrical, minimalist, ascetic, monotonous, boring—everything gray, homogeneous, and reductionist” are both deeply moralistic and, certainly in their more contemporary iterations, predicated on a fairly parochial set of aesthetic prejudices, namely those of postmodernism and cultural studies as they emerged at the heart of American imperial power in the 1970s and 80s, bound to the flows of globalized capitalism. [Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 150] In Canada these prejudices are bound to the institutionalization of multiculturalism as state doctrine and a fundamental tool in the maintenance of Liberal hegemony.
The positive task of a historical criticism of Contemporary Art is to provide counter readings, to read these phenomena in terms of the evolution of genre and its stereotypes, in critiquing its master narratives (even Robertson tacitly acknowledges that post/de-colonizing narratives have been hegemonic since the 80s), in recognizing practice and medium as governance. This would also require a critical mode of meta-history that would dismantle the credibility of the modes of “representation” on which these things were predicated and of the economy of “knowledge production” that occurs in the universities and state institutions.