Over a few articles, I will speculate on what else criticism might do, something I will attempt largely through the critical evaluation of a series of theoretical texts. But for this, the first instance, I will only make some very general remarks, some of which are quite obvious, and some even stupid, but which will serve to frame a little of the ground for what will follow.
Curiously, there seems to be less art criticism in Canada than there has ever been. This is not to suggest that there is not more “art writing” than there has ever been. There is and it matches the contours this peculiar market has taken on and suits the expansion of its bureaucratic apparatus.
The criticism of the 1960s and 70s that existed in the country, largely written by people with no or little training in art history or theory and learning on their feet, tended to be markedly different and arguably better than whatever it is we have in newspapers (and most journals) now. And it was usually bound to a pragmatic kind of journalism oriented to the general public without being too patronizing about it.
What exists now is mostly different and more specialized. There are a number of art journals, although, as one artist pointed out to me, they contain extremely little actual criticism. Instead, they extend the function that gallerists, curators, agents, artists themselves, and authors of exhibition statements and catalogues do -- they provide mediation, or art writing, which is not the same thing as criticism. These sorts of writing fall somewhere between providing an edifying lecture and authoring PR statements, but being a critic is actually, to slightly paraphrase Donald Kuspit, about being a pervert. (*The implications of this will be discussed in a subsequent article).
One could argue that this is only fulfilling the typical function of journalism, that is, the manufacturing of an image of a social world. While newspapers traditionally (although these barely exist at this point) proliferated such images, historically they also formally complicated this in extreme ways that ended up inspiring avant-garde practice throughout the early part of the twentieth century. Despite the intentions involved, journalism did as much to severely undermine the credibility of a social image as it did to create it.
I have attended enough crits and thesis exams either at the graduate or undergraduate level to know that almost everyone involved is aware that what artists generally claim their work is “about” or “does” rarely has anything to do with what it actually is. Ironically, it is when it enters the “professional” or public sphere of gallery framing, artist’s talks, roundtable discussions, fairs, and journalistic discourse that the analysis of art becomes much more idiotic and much less critical. It is the idiocy (as a form of “social identification”), or what Kuspit would term the “moronic,” that makes it Contemporary.
It is in part due to their specificity and targeted audience and its biases, that the art press goes significantly further in manufacturing an illusion that evinces far less criticality, a criticality that is to some degree formal. This is not an ideological mystification for, either in its original Marxist or post-Althusserian formulations, ideology concerns the misrepresentation of social relations whereas the real issue is that the social premise is a misrepresentation in itself.
It would be quite easy for a staff of two or three even remotely competent people working part-time to provide blanket coverage of the city’s art world including reviews of most or all exhibitions, events, and of the latest books as well as interviews and critiques of the image that is journalistically manufactured for the “scene” or “sector.” But judging by the writing that has accrued over the past several decades and the way the press seems organized, there is little will to have a remotely accurate or plausible description of what Contemporary Art in the city actually is and does.
For logistical reasons (my limited time and energy), this revue has not done this either, although, for good and ill, it has provided a relatively more realistic, broad, and historically plausible description of art in the city than its other publications have.
If you wanted to just review art being made now, you could visit studios, Instagrams, or artist websites. It is debatable how much any of that is Contemporary Art beyond the fact that the art press tends to rely on interviews with artists and profiles to create the suggestion of a meta-narrative of contemporaneity. A very different critical practice would be involved and it is entirely legitimate to interrogate art as art in the medium of the internet (whatever media it employs otherwise). However given how lazy and utilitarian most artists’ websites are, this would probably be quite boring and even less flattering than reviewing them as part of Contemporary Art. Perhaps that says a lot more about what artists actually tend to do now than when they get dressed up for the catwalk of Contemporary Art.
Aside from technical fascination, good visual art probably should not inspire a linguistically-based reaction. This may explain a lot about the quality, or lack thereof, in writing on the visual arts. I do not exclude myself from these failures.
I come from a village that was renowned, at least for a period, for its pot-making. I knew plenty of potters and watched them making lots of pots. They might have been functional pots or decorative pots. Usually, a potter would say that they were just making pots, either to sell them or because it is what they felt like doing. And they would usually evaluate them on things such as an affection for their shape or colour. If you wanted to aim at a higher market, you might overcoat it with expensive glazes or some folksy “concept” for your website or business card but generally, you made pots.
This is all well and good. There is very little conceptual significance here but there is, as anyone who makes things has likely realized, a profound and visceral understanding of what creation is, of what it is to make things. This may not be an intelligible thing and it does not need to be. And it does not need to have any social, cultural, or subjective meaning. It is something other than any of those things. That is art.
Art is not particularly human. Insects and dogs make art. Since even that seems too sentimentalizing, it should be added that even rocks do. And, if you have a religious bent, you can argue that the divine does as well. Gilbert and George were right when they facetiously suggested that one of the primary artistic and aesthetic experiences is defecation, that most basic mode of form giving. While art may be the most profound practice of life and death summarized in defecation, it does not need to be assumed to be more than this. That is already more than enough. Art is the neutral practice of objectification, whether that is as a thing or an image.
What Contemporary Art is, is something else. It may use a pot, whether the “artist-function” made that pot or not. They might give it a title referencing anything from Heidegger to the Spice Girls, frame the whole things in terms of colonialism or cultural identity (memory, the archive, trauma, etc.) and they might use the space they show it as a way to comment of museological presentation. It would be constructed using old modernist techniques and strategies that have been generic for more than a century and re-branded with labels like “queer” or “decolonizing” to give them an aura of sanctimonious morality. The entire thing would likely be funded by the state (more or less directly), ensconced in supplementary rhetoric, and invested in a very specific and highly limited professional milieu primarily to be viewed by people who are part of that milieu, professionally or otherwise. It is all of these things other than the pot that make Contemporary Art what it is. While, to a degree, this is a more extreme variation on the marketing that a potter might do, it remains something more than that.
In the exhibition text for the 2007 Montréal Biennale, curator Wayne Baerwaldt stressed that Contemporary Art in the city was a fragmentary swarm of a plurality cultural identities and concerns. He added, that it was not like History painting. But this is quite wrong; that is precisely what it is and what he described in his text essentially spells out what the first Trudeau had very explicitly outlined as the goal for the state’s cultural policies half a century before.
The thing about Contemporary Art is its artificial antiquity, its way of forgetting things while pretending to remember them (the reconnaissance of the archive or the renaissance of cultural identity). The point is that the difference between Kent Monkman and Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (beyond a very substantial level of technical quality and conceptual rigour possessed by the American) is quite trivial. And if Monkman highlights performative kitsch as “kitsch” and slightly neutralizes it while exploiting the actual kitsch of its implied referentiality, most Contemporary Art simply practices kitsch while pretending otherwise.
Contemporary Art is almost exchangeable with kitsch, at least according to several of the definitions the term has been given. It is certainly kitsch in the sense that Clement Greenberg gave it and which is detected in Socialist Realism and disposable industrial products but, more importantly (and this is usually ignored), in the mentality of people who read The New Yorker. It is kitsch in the sense that Ugo Volli spoke of it, as a hypocritical mediocrity that obfuscates what it is with a halo or semantic sophistication (this is the role of almost the entirety of art discourse). And it is kitsch in the sense that Hermann Broch spoke of it as an essentially false form of “self-recognition” stemming from a decaying of Romanticism (truthful intuition) into cliché. And it is also kitsch in the sense that Aleksa Čelebonović described the “Bourgeois Realism” of nineteenth-century academic painting as a formulaic and pathos-laden form of mythology.
As all of these critics and historians have admitted, being kitsch is not enough to exile something from art. It is possible to be kitsch and be good art. This does not alter most kitsch being bad art or that “kitsch humanity” is effectively the mimesis of evil, as Broch (and later Baudrillard) would put it.
Contemporary Art is foremost a genre made up of a set of sub-genres. It is highly generic in terms of its rhetoric, points of reference, modes of display, implied meanings, political function, and frameworks of emplotment, and in most of the ways it treats materials. It is restricted and predictable, following clear formula and dominated by clichés that fulfill pre-determined and highly conditioned audience expectations. Although it possesses a level of heterogeneity (although no more than any genre in Hollywood), it also exists in a far more artificial industrial market that is directly determined by state doctrine.
There are specific political and historical connotations to this. In Canada generally, and Montréal quite specifically, Contemporary Art is the art practice of the government, more specifically of Liberal governance. It is the careers of specific people in specific and fairly limited institutions, realities that tend to be occluded by the appeal to the social and cultural as referents. Nor is this to dismiss them. For while defecation may be the essence of form it is also a form of territorial marking and territorialization is primarily an art project in the most serious sense of the term.
As Deleuze and Guattari pointed out (although it is generally ignored by their adherents), it would be difficult to find more basically artistic practices than nationalism and colonialism. These things are only trivially political. Unfortunately, they tend to be dominated by politically-minded people, perhaps the stupidest people in the world other than artist-activists. And, in a largely unfortunate way, it is the latter who have had a substantial functional role in the state-sanctioned art of the city since the 70s.
Following from the original theoretical influence taken from Surrealist theory, the ultimate point of Borduas was that art is the same thing as dogs shitting in the snow. Not only do his late paintings show a world where figure and ground has collapsed, but they embody a world where the ontological possibility of culture does not exist, its specific use of paint a strategic form of self-demolition that challenges the institution to prop it up and prevent it from collapsing. Pretty much all Contemporary Art contains within it the seeds for destroying it as Contemporary Art.
It is the role of the critic then, to de-contemporize Contemporary Art. One way to do that is to historicize it, although not in the way that Fred Jameson would prescribe since that would be just another layer of misinterpretation. Another is to de-naturalize the referents they tend to allege (primarily the fantasy of culture itself). This is not much of a feat because they are rarely very convincing. But it is necessary to deal with what art actually does in the city.
To make a few obvious points: when you are reviewing an exhibition, you are not reviewing the artworks in themselves, you are reviewing the exhibition as such. Reading a script and watching it being performed are two very different things and the distance between an individual work and its presentation is no less far. Or, perhaps more apt, as Centre Clark’s Maison modèle perhaps unintentionally suggests, reviewing an exhibition is much more like reviewing a “living room group” from one of the showcases on The Price is Right. At its best, Contemporary Art is downstream from Bob Barker as much or more than Joseph Beuys. But more typically, Contemporary Art in Canada is far more like The Trouble with Tracy.
One of the central generic aspects of Contemporary Art is the pretense that it is an act of communication or some type of research project that is bringing knowledge to the world. But it rarely has much of either of these aspects. On the occasions when work is not visually illiterate, it is so crudely propagandistic it becomes laughable. Typically, what is experienced is a kind of artistic implosion and this is where its primary interest resides. If it provides knowledge, it is mostly here, as a demonstration of the absurdity of the cultural framing that the work tends to be housed in.
The primary medium of Contemporary Art is the exhibition space and that space tends to be institutional. It also tends to be heavily supplemented, whether by statements from the artist, the staff, or hired writers. This is part of why many galleries or centres have quite recognizable house styles that tend to overwhelm any singular aspect of the art they show. All of these things are as much a part of the exhibition as the artworks themselves and merit the same degree of scrutiny. In this respect, all shows are to an extent group shows and this is an integral aspect of the genre. Reviewing Contemporary Art means reviewing all of this.