We have already seen how a leading technocrat for the cultural sector has justified its existence as a form of enchantment, how the sector was critiqued for being essentially corrupt and fostering incompetence by two of its insiders, and how even its apologists recognized that what resulted from the various strategies of artists, artists’ groups, federal, provincial, and municipal governments was primarily the establishment of a system of pastoral care for its ideological bureaucrats. We have seen a justification of Contemporary Art by one of its leading proponents, scholars, and teachers as a form of neo-paganism that stressed the erasure of genius and the future of art amounting to a mall staffed with shamans. And we have seen a justification of it by another exponent as an extension of the media system and a tool in the maintenance of the public sphere.
All of these texts, even more than catalogues and exhibition statements, are what amount to a corporate or ecclesiastical history of Contemporary Art. They are histories almost exclusively written by its actors and advocates and, even when self-serving, consistently show significant critical insight, sometimes deliberately and sometimes less so. Durand’s critical statements about his milieu tend to come in the form of questions that he often does not directly answer. But obscured by this passive-aggressive form of analysis are some clear implications that he typically refuses any full commitment to. These are what this review of the text will tease out from the loose narrative that he constructs.
Durand’s book studies the period that directly followed in the wake of Laurent-Michel Vacher’s critique of what was emerging as Contemporary Art in the city. The “anarcho-artorists” that Vacher mocked as already sclerotic by the early 1970s took a degree of power that he could not have imagined, in part because he overestimated the relevance of capitalism and severely underestimated the extremity of state expansion.
After providing some background context, Durand’s book focuses on twenty years of artistic production in the parallel system. The basic argument is given in the first twenty pages, expanded over the first two hundred, and then reiterated over the next two hundred with more concrete examples. Most of the last 90 pages of the book amount to listing the deployment of the standard clichés of the genre and notes small differentiations in their use.
You could critique the text back to front, going through the examples and providing counter-interpretations of the works he’s discussing. Or you could meta-historically critique the latent narratives that underpin the whole thing and which are not really delved into (and should have been to justify the kind of claims he is making about “society”). Because I am not going to write 30 or 40,000 words about this, I will stick to the central argument, which is mostly a formal/structural one about artistic organization and the function of art.
Durand stresses that it is a hybrid book, part art criticism, part sociology, part social history. He consistently defines the “parallel” spaces he discusses as art “beyond” institutions, a world of art in the streets, in events, roundtable discussions, and arts journalism. [16] Art is conceived after Marcel Rioux as a “laboratory of ruptures” [16] that is occurring within postmodernism. The latter he defines in reference to Michel Freitag as an alienated world of techno-bureaucracy that is highly self-reflexive, reliant on technology, and a culture of the self. [17] Insofar as the art of the parallel is one of a “counter-society,” it is as an alternative to postmodernism. [171] But, as he shows at length, this opposition continually collapses.
Durand seeks to present the “complex” picture of an “artistic imaginary present” that exists outside of museums and commercial galleries, in artist-run centres, in the work of collectives, individuals, and cultural publications. What is termed art actuel or Contemporary Art consists mostly of environmental works, installations, performances, events, and a general political engagement. It is not popular or naive art but one that largely comes from universities, depends on state intervention, and employs theory. It tends to see itself operating in “parallel” to official art and in league with various “social ruptures.” These practices are organized as part of a utopian social network, but it is a utopia filled with conflicts between its actors. [13] The consistent primary actor in all of this is the state. [20]
This parallel world is defined by three things: its network structure and associated strategies; its political ideology of a counter-project for society (self-determination of an artistic community and the fabrication of its narrative); and artistic practices that largely reinforce the former through the critique of society, linking practice to social emancipation, etc. [14] The general historical process that evolves from this is one of counter-institutionalization-normalization-institutionalization (CI-NI). [20]
The manufacturing of the cultural field (from university to market) is the construction of a system of standardization that is largely bound to urbanization, a field that is governed by the state which creates and absorbs both the market and the museum. [21] This is a general process of technocracy that operates through formal and informal hierarchies of “expertise.” It is this technocracy (as professionalization and normative ideological interpretation) that enables the production of the parallel market.
This technocracy has a professional class that is both postmodern (self-referential, fragmenting) and narcissistic. [23] Both of these tendencies are reflected in artworks that blur the lines between the private and the public and which are symptomatic of the state’s erosion of old social forms through the expansion of bureaucracy. [23] The “bureaucratization of the spirit” is best expressed through the cult of subjective identity. Body art, performance art, public art installations, and art that stresses immediacy and theatricality are possible symptoms of this.
He opposes the self-determination of parallel art to that of the “decision-making society” (technocracy/functionalism) or the art of institutions [17-19], and opposes the bureaucratic pyramid (cybernetic) to the co-operative network (self-determining). [27] “Immediate” art or art actuel highlights the alienation within this functional society but it is not itself a counter or alternative. That comes in part from a different mode of organization, one that moves against the cybernetic order ushered in by the Révolution tranquille (and the Trudeau government), and tends to stress regionality over urbanism. [24-25]
There is, he recognizes, a paradox to this “opposition.” The cybernetic state is defined by its interventionism and the existence of the parallel artworld is the direct product of this intervention as much as the standard institution is. [25] The counter (marginal, alternative, emancipatory, oppositional) practice is functionally and concretely difficult to distinguish from what they ostensibly oppose. The distinction comes to a substantial degree from its proponents' utopian fantasies about what social life could be and the distribution of the funding they receive through a more horizontal form of bureaucracy. [26] The “alternative” privileges pluralism, decentralization, and autonomization. But, in practice, the art produced under both “regimes” (if we can call them that) is normatively characterized by immediacy and impurity (or hybridism). [29]
Spiritualizing this situation, Durand defines the parallel as an impulse not in recent history but dating to the time of the Conquest and the ongoing Québécois opposition to the ruling order. [31-33] His (extremely broadly sketched) historiography rehearses all the basic mythologies of the traditional society versus the spontaneously created modernity that clashed with it. The eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth are essentially lumped together. He gives a pretty standard progressive soft-modernist account of the shift from conservative and church art to work more influenced by modern European trends.
When he gets to the postwar era, he notes that nothing like a parallel existed. [34] To suggest its authenticity (rather than the severely artificial way it actually came into being), Durand places them in a genealogy and then rehearses the institutional hagiography of Borduas, the automatistes, Prisme d’yeux, the plasticiens, etc. as initiating a passage into modernity through the influence of external art currents and by staking art in protest or socio-cultural reformation.
All of this is presented as the logical groundwork laying the foundation of parallel artistic development in keeping with the narrative presented in Robillard’s Québec Underground and a substantial amount of tranquilliste and the first PQ-era discourse. The “frontier” or “lone ranger” era of the postwar years gave way to the Révolution tranquille and the massive setting down of bureaucratic infrastructure. The counter-culture was not only born of the baby boom but the massive expansion of the ideological state apparatus that molded it and which it went on to staff. Students may have given the period its colour, but it was the state who remained the primary actor. [44]
While there was a “democratization” of art, meaning a relatively more affordable market, this developed in distinction from the expanding market that was more strictly controlled by the state. In other words, you had an extension of what had preceded the Révolution with the art of the church replaced by that of the state and a slightly more varied consumer market. [62] Art was further elevated not only by grants but also by prizes that gave heightened authority to artists in the service of government.
The parallel art produced after 1976 was a prolongation of the Révolution tranquille and an acceleration of art as a form of technocratic bureaucracy. [62] The spontaneous organizations that had cropped up in the postwar era gave way to more organized forms. The Contemporary Art that exists in the country and province is inseparable from state intervention and this includes work in the network “beyond” its institutions. The parallel is a form of wishful thinking or vague desire [velléité] within the normalization process of Contemporary Art. [65]
RACA, created in 1976 as the first collective art association that was an “alternative,” was created by the Canada Arts Council (they [Philip Fry] coined the term “parallel” in 1973). Following Clive Robertson, Durand suggests that the invention of the “alternative” or “counter-institution” had clearly conservative functions, designed in the hopes of assimilating the anti-social (youth in particular) into the folds of pluralism. There was a massive increase in arts funding after the October Crisis. [66] Not only is the parallel system an integration of potential negativity, but it is also a means to assimilate potential innovation and render it more profitable. [69] One of the primary purposes of the cultural industries is to professionalize the artist and make them a producer of cultural goods and for cultural goods to be socially functional. [71-73]
From its inception, the Art Bank became one of the primary levers of market development and the key factors in an artist’s career and the promise of their being added to museum collections. Most of the Bank’s lending has been to government offices. (Contemporary Art in Canada is primarily the interior decor of the state, whether that is Molinari or Meryl McMaster).
The Canadian state’s modes of intervention (RACA [1976], Art Bank [1972], the Explorations programme [1978]) have been sweeping and generally hierarchical. Québec’s mode of intervention has generally been more decentralized, relying on market initiatives, institutional guardianship, and a lot of announcements. The province tended to stress regional development, particularly in terms of the development of museums and the aid to artists. In 1988, they instituted Law 78 which recognized the professional status of the artist.
The discourses of the PQ government around culture were both centralizing and decentralizing but essentially followed a cybernetic logic of control. Universities played a substantial role as extensions of the state in the new controls put on art as the role of a cultural animator became a more lucrative career. [77] Much more than at the Federal level, the provincial government tended to quickly and directly respond to the demands of artists for increased intervention. [80] The parallel art system was to a large degree a form of welfare and accelerating dependency. [81] It was also, as part of its general programme of professionalization, a form that demanded self-censorship and conformism in order to retain its grants. He sees this as clashing with the promises of the “alternative” system. [82]
By 1976, there was an established “institutional rhythm.” Although there were significant disparities in scale between museums, commercial galleries, and the parallel spheres, Contemporary Art was pretty standardized in terms of its rhetoric, modes of display, and general content. Whatever antinomies had existed before had largely ceased to do so by the 1980s. This normalization is an essential part of the network function of the genre. [85] By the 90s, a third level of state intervention was introduced with the inclusion of a greater role for municipal governments (public art, biennials, festivals, the maisons de culture). The growing importance of the city (as metropole or transnational centre) was part of “decentralization” and the shifts in transfer payments. The growth of regional centres and the arts programming through cegeps and universities were also part of this decentralization.
“Participation” or engagement and the affirmation of socio-cultural identities has been the primary ideological justification for arts funding and diffusion by the state very explicitly since the 1970s, and across the political spectrum. [89] This was largely a retrenchment of what it had already been in the mid-60s.
Parallel galleries (and/or artist-run centres), activist groups in Montréal, collectives, periodicals, and events are the aspects of the “self-governing” artworld that emerged. All of this developed in league with the growth of professional associations, but not identical to them. [99, 104] From 1976-84, the parallel operated as a counter-institution, distinguished from the institution by being less clearly hierarchically organized, and by being as interested in social as artistic form. All the same, most of what occurred in it was “parallel” or shared deep “affinities” with what was happening in cegeps and universities (and in the regions, with the local museums). In such “centres of experimentation,” the artist was considered a “cultural worker” and the collective to which they belonged a utopian social movement. Durand describes all this as a “rupture.” [102-103] In Montréal, such groups tended to define themselves against the museum and commercial sphere, but in the regions they were more often tightly bound to local folkloric tradition and structures. [114]
Symposia and other events became major aspects of the parallel, although these were also explicitly funded by different levels of government and generally orchestrated through associations and the educational system. This is one of the defining features of the province’s art. [127]
The system of artist-run centres was part of a pan-Canadian movement, bound to federalist ideology and, in Montréal at least, initially anchored in the political-economic interests of the anglophone sector of the arts. [107] In the province, the system was gradually francified by the 1980s following years of polemics and in-fighting over Ottawa’s privileging of anglo artists and the Toronto market’s ratcheting up of their prices. [107-110] Persisting within this was more or less a continuation of the counter-culture, an ongoing growth of nationalism, and the entrenchment of a more radical Leftism in the ranks of the arts that insisted on the social function of art. [110]
The parallel had initially experienced a “golden age” with substantial federal patronage on one side and extensive decentralizing and regional funding from the province on the other. Whatever “experiments” were conducted, even in terms of its governing structures, were easily assimilated to the norm to the point that within only a few years it risked disappearing into either formalism or utility. [128] But with professionalization, by the 1980s associations and groups had effectively become gatekeepers to entrance to the art market and a potential career. There was greater conflict between regional art and that of the city (Montréal) and women began dominating most of the urban infrastructures. [131] There were divergences between RACA and the RCAAQ over the place of autonomy in art and its relationship to the national question that only accelerated in the period leading up to Meech Lake and the referendum. [133]
Through this there was also a growth in (particularly) Montréal periodicals (the city being the central bastion of federalist or pan-Canadian power in the province) and a shift away from attempts at theorization, social history, and concrete, localized analysis toward international trends and a more autobiographical way of thinking about art history. [134]
Revues and other collective art publications (catalogues, videos, etc.) frequently emerged, creating the image of a “common front” for groups and serving as both their ideological machinery and PR, quite distinct from either historiographic practice or art criticism. [120-122] These publications were forums of advocacy, critiquing cultural policy, advertising events, constructing their own version of recent history, advancing the collapse of disciplinary divisions, and advocating for the functional role of art. [122-125]
Centres and galleries began producing far more textual supplementation. This was also a form of “auto-history” that became “imposed” and normative. The 80s also saw the birth of the CIAC, the creation of the Cent Jours de l’art contemporain, biennials, and other festivals that were all part of bringing the province into conformity with more global norms and with integrating art as an extension of urban and corporate planning. The installation form proved perfect for this kind of spectacularization of art and the perfect sign of an institutionally normalized art that relied on a weak market but strong state patronage. [135] {We saw this clearly with Aurora Borealis}
Initially, political art was clearly of a marxisant variety and relied on well-established categories (nationalisms, whether Québécois or Amerindian [Durand’s term]). Banners, posters, prints, and environments were privileged over things like painting (in part because they superficially resembled the aesthetics of “the worker” more and seemed to avoid the taboo of formalism). By the mid-80s, this had shifted with the rise of postmodernism and the shifting of politics closer to what had more commonly been regarded as the private realm (the body, etc). There was overlap between these two things, especially in terms of feminist art which grew substantially as an institutional force. [174-180, 184-185]
In the early 80s, Montréal’s “engaged-art” tended to be more generically Marxist while the regions were more feminist and ecologically oriented. The former were more interested in the variance between structure and surface and the latter with a starker opposition between nature and culture. Both tended to stress environments and the regions privileged performance and outdoor sculpture to a greater degree. All of this was part of the normalization of multidisciplinarity, the dominance of thematism, and the appeal to the sociological as an authoritative discourse. [181-182] All of this was also explicitly part of keeping the art in the province within international norms. [188]
Central to the tendency of the sociologization of art were photography and video, a stress on documentation (which at times was an extension of the media system of the parallel), and on symposia. The appeal to sociology was another tool that was exploited against the claims of formalism. [186-187] The artist was either part of a collective, or they were a host or presenter of events (animateur) designed as affirmations of social identity and belonging. [188]
By the mid-80s, he suggests that there was a slide from the political into the poetic as public sculpture became more conformist and formulaic as had events and installations. If much of the rhetoric remained, the messages were losing clarity. With increased political vagueness came a greater emphasis on questions of identity. [190] Work became more subjective and more difficult to interpret. Collective work was out and the single artist was back. Ecologism remained a constant theme but other political issues were less cut and dried. Most of the strategies and themes that had been “marginal” a few years previously were now the mainstream of the museum. Slogans did not go away, but they became more simplistic and they appeared more and more like advertising. [192]
Being political had become banal. Artists may have often been less political in the fashion they had been in the 70s, but they were more politically savvy and adept at using the system to get money. The society they ostensibly opposed had already made their lives much easier. The practices of the 70s, the communal work of the studios, and the stress on utilitarian items (prints, t-shirts, banners, artist’s books, etc.) had succeeded in making art more user-friendly and fungible, if no less dependent on the state. [193] If museums and the minimal commercial sphere had assimilated their ostensibly challenging “outside” with little difficulty, artist-run centres themselves established recognizable house styles and ideological norms.
By the mid-80s, there were few surprises. The province’s artworld had become assimilated to a set of rhythms, both that of the festival circuit and bureaucratic life. In general, the new generation was not involved in politics in the same way as their antecedents and the older generation had become the establishment. The only real subversiveness could be formal, and even there it amounted to little.
Art suddenly was re-politicized at the beginning of the 90s (albeit only for a moment before the tendency to singularization returned as dominant by mid-decade [208]). The individualism of the late 80s gave way to a renewed obsession with socio-cultural identity (Amerindian activist art was particularly suited to the norms established within the parallel and artists from numerous tribes had played an active role in their creation since the 70s). Bodies and humour (caricature and farce) played central roles in this iteration of these tendencies. [196] Why this was the case is not really addressed beyond recognizing that it was an established rhetorical norm in the broader economy of global Contemporary Art. Internationalization (and transnationalization) is institutional normalization. [273]
But his claims here are rather dodgy. While he can cite specific political events as (very loosely) tied to Amerindian art, their status as a counter is belied by the extent to which they were honored and promoted by the state. Likewise, in the period around the referendum, there was markedly less avowedly nationalist Québécois art, in part because this had become increasingly taboo in art circles which stressed hybridism and métissage as well as minoritarianism, all of which were conceptually and politically tied to federalist doctrine and power. In practice, the “political correctness” dictated by postmodernism meant this as much as it meant “neoliberal” economics. [201] The minimal old-fashioned politics that did return, judging by his examples, was largely a hangover of a previous age, and Armand Vaillancourt ends up being its primary exemplar.
He claims that, at least initially, performance art was not wholly narcissistic because it was shielded from the “anglo saxon context” and part of the community of Québec Underground. He stresses that as part of such art events, they were part of a “real community” and not just the aspect of a programme. They were part of a “tribalistic” practice that occurred in private or at bars and clubs. By the 80s, performance had become an autonomous field operating on an international scale and it was an established genre like installation and video. [266-270] By the 90s, performance art was “sclerotic” as a practice but had become a substantial component of the international circuit and a privileged form for women. [272] In a sort of attempt at a return to origins, “manoeuvers” were advanced as a practice to displace to dominance of the performance model and to escape from institutionality. [274]
Performance art was part of the dematerialization of art, which stressed rituality, immediacy, the act of creation over the artifact, and the body, all necessarily policed within the bounds of intentionality (which Durand identifies with ideology) while also insisting on being an “open work.” Nested within events, it was fundamentally a form of economic critique of the sumptuary object, whether collected privately or publicly. [278-279] But in practice, certainly by the 1980s, it seemed essentially narcissistic. It followed rote norms of discourse and gesture, relied on new technologies and fads, centred on the subjectivity of the artist and the affirmation of their existential identity, and the “public” role was almost exclusively the milieu of the artworld. It was a form of exhibitionism with fake interaction and a controlled context that would all be captured and archived or sold on video. [280]
Performance was increasingly linked to video, photography, and other forms of documentation that followed the closed media circuit of the artworld. The multidisciplinary aspect of it made it more compatible with the state-funded spaces in which it could appear and travel, extended in time, and evidence for juries to peer review for subsequent financing. It became one of the easiest and most lucrative forms of merchandise to manufacture. [282, 285]
Performance tended to rely on the exploitation of “ephemerality” as a new kind of luxury good for the initiated just as its practitioners and surrounding PR machinery tended to market it with a borderline pornographic stress on the body and sexuality. “Immediacy” is a commodity. But it is their function as the ultimate of juried, archived, and subsidized forms that ultimately is their historical importance and the most functionalist expression of the bureaucratization of art.
Environmental sculpture, which means both public sculpture and installation, is conceived by Durand as another extension of the “dematerialization of art” because it stresses context and sociological function. [296] They are to be evaluated not on their use of materials or media (video, painting, sculpture, dance, sound, etc.) in traditional formal terms but in terms of their adaptation to the territory. In general, they thematically reiterate all the basic clichés that have been accumulated (feminism, ecologism, urbanism, etc.). Because they are couched in a rhetoric of social transformation, he continues, these are the terms in which they need to be evaluated. As with performance, all of this became quite standardized by the middle of the 1980s, especially within the circuit of artist-run centres. [311]
Probably the best examples of successful environmental sculpture are the artist’s (individual or collective) houses that he discusses, in which they would transform their residences into total works of art. [318-319] In general, however, we should stress that “dematerialization” is actually the materialization of a more expansive cultural bureaucracy.
By the 90s, environmental art had already become effectively “cybernetic” (although you could easily track this back to the 60s and to many of the things Durand attempts to argue for as counter-institutional). The cybernetic (or techno-nature) describes all the basic clichés of pomo art and the art of the state: transculturalism, métissage, ecologism, interdisciplinarity, the increased importance of animal imagery, historical referentiality, and the entire premise of “cultural worlds.” [324]
Durand claims that sculpture resisted institutionalization more than painting or performance because of their reliance on public display. The “deterritorializations” that he discusses purport to relativize the institutionalization. [330] These are works that question that space of the traditional artistic sphere (such as installations themselves) and step beyond it; works that renew the original premises of installation practice; and works that create new media environments that operate on the ideology of interactivity and participation. [330] In practice, most of this means “transgressing” the norms of architectural functionality or (very vaguely) “complicating” it. [332-333]
One could argue, and without much difficulty, that what he describes as “deterritorialization” is no such thing. In fact, it is a perfect example of the reterritorialization of space by the state. That what he terms the “invasion” or “symbolic possession” of space central to the practice of much Contemporary Art is an extension of colonialism (the obfuscation of this in terms of the “actions” of various “cultures” is not a real objection but the furtherance of this reterritorialization). [335] In general, as he concedes, the result of all this is just external décor produced by nomadic cultural citizens. [337]
The resulting implication, which he completely avoids addressing, is that the most concrete example of the counter-institution ends up being the most extreme form of institutionalization. The exit was an extension of the state just as disciplinary collapse and the collapse of institutional boundaries have in practice resulted in their totalization. So no wonder the ultimate example of this ends up being what he terms Total Art.
Event art, or Total Art, is defined variously as the fusion of life and art, permanent celebration, or collective participation. He roots this utopian fantasy in Dada (rather than Wagner) and links it up to surrealism, Fluxus, and Pop. [345] Total Art is generally bound to the internationalization of art, which includes its regionalization.
Durand should be commended for being relatively honest (in a back-handed way) about how much the attempts at “counter-institutionalism” have failed. One of the other useful things he accomplishes is to extensively catalogue the emergence and stultification of so many of the basic tropes and clichés that still dominate a significant quantity of Contemporary Art nearly half a century later. This has less to do with whatever vitality they may have initially had (which is implied largely by decontextualizing it from material reality) but more with a kind of institutionalized senility (something I discussed in relation to the triennials).
One of the biggest questions his text begs is just how “counter” to the norms of the state the limited existence of this “parallel” system was. The answer: barely. While the art that was produced in this system has been, as he somewhat ironically suggests, dogmatically impure, the doctrines of the system -- which is even more so what defines it -- can be regarded as more dogmatically puritanical than the rest of the art produced by the state, something he does tacitly admit.
As he notes -- he expresses it as speculation -- the framing of art in terms of the contemporary, performance, interdisciplinarity, strategy, installation, intervention, etc. already severely reduces art (and ethics) to a techno-rationalist instrumentalization that mirrors the interventionism of the state in the manufacturing of the cultural sector (and this is not a consciously ironic mimicry). [322] This applies equally to the feminist and Amerindian reliance on all of these things as the dominant tendencies of their thematic practices. They simply provide a set of generic tropes to an already generic set of forms in a normative function that embodies state doctrine (that is the “real” body of Contemporary Art in the province). That is its realpolitik, the rest is mystification.
He cites the primary success of the parallel as “ideological self-management.” [149] It is this management form that is central to its utopia and for which its publications and discursive norms function. Art events and exhibitions increasingly came to serve as “accompaniments” of the production of ideology (whether written, oral, or captured on video). [149] By the mid-90s, there was an abundance of publications, themselves tied in various ways to the university system, both of which provide grounding for grant applications and the “intellectualization” of the milieu to accelerate its bureaucratization. Meanwhile, art “events” function as part of an increased “internationalization” of art and as part of urban or regional tourism. [153-154]
The dualities (he goes so far as to call them “antagonisms”) that he sets up between the dominant ideology of the state (national self-determination, social democracy, decentralization, participation, institutionalization) and that of its alternative (collective creation, politically-engaged art, peripheral art, art as network), suggest that the “duality” is more a matter of quite limited ideological differentiation than anything else (the terms tend to slip from one category to the next chapter by chapter). [172] Although the alternative is defined essentially by being situated in “the real” that situating is also fundamentally “utopian.” [172]
The parallel, like the circuit of maisons de culture, tend to be essentially interchangeable in terms of their methods of diffusion and display. The latest generations of academicized artists can flow through them indifferently. The more that such spaces proliferate, the more exchangeable they are. This is also basic to their utopianism. [169] This banalized nowhereland should be seen in more damning terms by him given his appeal to Rioux’s contention that Europe imagines culture in time, Québec in space. [312]
Within his definitions, politically-engaged art tends to operate along strict binarizations in terms of critique, mirrors various international trends, tends to employ “realism” and participation and is linked to more overt forms of activism in a bid to demystify society. Beyond its actual institutionalizing function, what the “politics” of the parallels concretely amounts to is an idealistic gesture. Denunciation is equivalent to emancipation and this act is a “rupture” that transforms the real (reality is generally identified with cultural identity [ex. 341]). The success of all this is determined by an appeal to intentionality. [173] This is the only thing that enables the romantic alibi of the history of the parallel since the material history of the province’s art clearly denies its oppositional claims.
Durand insists that “[w]e must name a society in the hope of understanding its art.” [19] However, there is almost no meaningful engagement with historical context or milieu in the text. “Society” is just the service economy in which the art practices he discusses function. Perhaps accidentally, but accurately, this pinpoints precisely what “socially-engaged art” really is.
That Durand’s work contains no substantive analysis of the society (concrete modes of governance, political doctrines, economy, etc.) his sociology claims to be describing is more than a lacunae (there is no evidence of substantive research in this regard in the bibliography either). Particularly strange from a sociological perspective is that while he acknowledges that these phenomena were the product of the state’s management of the baby boom he does not recognize, as numerous studies of the phenomena have shown, that the “critical” values of the parallel were clearly the products of discipline, indoctrination, and entitlement, not “resistance.” This can be seen in the ongoing advocacy on the part of the sector that continues to this day.
Almost all of his research comes from the uncritical regurgitation of the ideology produced by his milieu. This is a particularly significant problem when it comes to discussing mostly ephemeral work. It is reconstructing history based on what amounts to advertising. Although he tends to rely on curatorial and artists’ statements and generally reduces art to intentionality, he largely ignores reviews and assumes “experiences” of these events and objects -- which are defined and defended based primarily on their allegedly experiential value -- that have no clear evidentiary ground. In other words, it all becomes thematic and, strangely from his marxisant perspective, is never really dialecticized. The only place this shifts, and quite dramatically, is near the end, where his writing becomes the anecdotal relaying of his experience at various events.
While he recognizes that the “dominant” norms of society are actually social democracy, utility, etc., he persists in castigating “individualism” as depoliticization rather than as a counter-politics. [194] And yet, one of his positive examples of an art that has escaped the sclerotic drift of institutionalization is Pierre Falardeau’s Le Temps des bouffons. He observes that Falardeau’s work, in its appropriations and its format, which relies on no artist’s right, no grants, and no centre of diffusion, and so possesses a radical liberty that had become absent from the parallel world which was ruled by political correctness and self-censorship. [202] This fate of art against the parallel should not be a surprise given that the sphere was justified by being a form of both the social welfare of artists and the ideological policing of art.
Durand compares the artists of the parallels (as the “marginals” of the market economy who are almost entirely parasitic on the state) to the indigenous peoples of the north. [136] The irony is that the parallel rapidly developed and sanctified their own sets of norms and specializations. By the 80s (at the latest) they had ceased to be an “alternative” so much as just another type. [136] Certainly as social phenomena or structures, they ceased to have any plausible claim on being counter-institutional. If such a thing existed at all, it was, he recognized, only a basically thematic aspect of the work itself. [137]
This goes some way in explaining the immense anxiety about formalism. The attack on formalism has been one of the guiding “leitmotivs” of alternative art. [172] “Art pour l’art” is described as something to do with international trends not properly concerned with Québécois issues and in opposition to the assimilation of art and society. [54] This was anathema to the dogmatic Leftism that held sway in the establishment of the parallel system. [110-111] It was a form of “hyperspecialism” [128] that was also decried as “narcissistic.” [350] The “dematerialization” of art, the attack on art as a “sumptuary” object was central to the privileging of art as an ideological vehicle for different variants of anarcho or marxisant (more or less feminist, decolonizing, or nationalist) “critique” and utopianism. [111] But as he describes at length, this ended up being a more extreme variant of what it ostensibly opposed.
It is possible to oppose “society” to the state and art to both. But clearly what occurred was that art was in the service of the state and the state served the art economy (which, as Clive Robertson has observed, is primarily a service economy for artists). You could make a quite reasonable empirical argument that art had an essentially anti-social function (broadly speaking) as an extension of the state; that it served elite interests and was the perfect means for the extension of minoritization that was central both to federalist doctrine and practices of government. He vaguely references this in terms of the growing taboos and dogmatism (political correctness) that were established in the system but does not flesh it out. This could have been examined in more concrete terms by dissecting what he accurately recognized as some of the most artistically inert institutions that were established, such as Skol, Optica, Articule, or Artexte.
Most of the shifts he describes from the mid-70s to the end of the millennium clearly follow the pattern of rattrappage with global norms. In real terms, “contestation” and “denunciation” were petitioning the patron for more funds and more enshrined (policed) protections. This is already what they were with Opération Déclic. Whatever real conflict or “controversy” that emerged (beyond artists’ demands for money and unified political dogmatism) tended to be little media farces around things like the sexual crudeness of Ronald Thibert’s Femme et terre (itself a rehashing of what happened with Arthur Handy two decades before).
Durand avoids what Robertson’s analysis of the comparable set of phenomena on the pan-Canadian level implied but did not bring to conclusion, namely that what was constructed, very unintentionally (and so, in a non-trivial way surrealistically) was a form of subjectivity that was distinct from either culture or persons, and a form of medium specificity for the state’s practice of art that made the distinction into groupuscules of any form no more than decor. That the “politics” of the parallel only ever amounted to the pretense that it was committed to a “nowhere” (utopia) is obvious. As Durand constantly reiterates, the real context of art in the province is its role in the state’s mode of production. By 1985-89, these forms had been mostly normalized. [100]
I have eaten off Dominique Blain’s lousy tables at BANQ. This is no great achievement but this is the concrete historical effect of what counter-institutionalism or the parallel or the alternative, etc. amounts to in practice, particularly when what is celebrated is “participation” or “engagement.”
