I trip my fucking injectors in the heart of the System and feel that at the end of this mad satyriasis I have found again in the purity of its violence the language (désaintciboirisé) of my ancestors. The girls of good family (cock-teasers, every one) whom I pursued with incalculable assiduity, forced me to chasten my language (to castrate myself, that is) and deprive myself of my identity as a poor F.-C. condemned by two centuries of delirium to speak badly and without pleasure, and even to fornicate incestuously with my maternal tongue in a series of very lowlife sucking operations and lame bowings and scrapings, by turns fucking and being fucked: for the majestic and maternal tongue — it must be noted and said — has the status of a dead language! To speak it well is already a proof of necrophilia, or at best a morbid and regressive excess. [Hubert Aquin, Trou de mémoire, 1968]
Johanne Lamoureux’s Profession, historienne de l’art (2009) was written for UdeM’s press as part of their series explaining what various lines of work do. She has been a journalist, curator, and teacher, so she has operated in several very different registers of what the profession of art historian tends to involve. The tension between those different types of art historical practice is one central theme of the text, the other being how the profession has changed in the province since its academic institutionalization fifty years ago.
Outside of the profession, the basic stereotype of what art historians do is that they study the methods and iconography of artists and interpret these as the expressions of a particular period. While this may be the case in a limited and largely trivial way, it is also a very dated idea. This was the image of art history that was constructed around the study of things like Renaissance art nearly one hundred years ago. It is the Panofsky legacy, one which is still alive in the general iconological or many cultural approaches to art. As Lamoureux points out in passing toward the end of her text, this is not a particularly helpful way of understanding much of the art of the twentieth century when the status of art as a precious object — whether a painting, sculpture, or architecture — or a picture of the social or divine order was often repudiated (although it has certainly been retained as an aspect of the art privileged by the state). While these three canonical media persisted, they were part of an expanding field that often did not contain things that were discernible as objects at all. They might just be gestures, concepts, forms of bureaucracy, and so on. Situation/context become the centre of Contemporary Art. [63] She notes that Contemporary Art tests the limits of how the discipline has traditionally been defined and should add to the historicization of art history as a field. [62] As such, she stresses that it threatens the ordinary and protected image of art.
According to Lamoureux, more than other forms of history writing, art history has a bicephalic form, dividing between the work of museums and the academy, both of which have different ends. And more than other nineteenth century historical disciplines, art history tends to clash directly with the public in terms of its use in the museum. There is a clear discrepancy between the market demand for major shows that tend to be indexed to celebrated names and movements, relying on spectacle and biography, and the research practices of academics. [20]
Art history as an autonomous discipline in Montréal barely existed academically until the 1970s, when it was institutionalized as part of the massive expansion of the human sciences. [25] Museum institutionalization preceded this, largely following a contrary path of “de-culturation” of its objects and a stress on form. [26] Previous to this, art history was mostly a matter of private collecting and its organization in terms of content (primarily in terms of ancestry) rather than according to the historicity of form. [26]
Art history, like archaeology, evolved as an amateur practice that mixed biography, criticism, and bibliography. Conservators have since worked primarily as the authenticators and maintainers of patrimony. This shifted in stress with the “democratization” of museums in the 1970s and the focus on the museum as the source of divertissement and pedagogy. [30]
If the conservator was denigrated for working on a level of micro description that stressed the object’s materiality, the academic could in turn be denigrated for operating on a macro level that was detached from the object, privileged trendy theories for their peers, and treated art in a mostly instrumental fashion. [35] Both were pedagogues but operating in quite different markets. These were not strictly opposed.
On an international level, more than most university researchers, art historians have a foot in “vulgarization” or commercialization. [37 (I seriously doubt this is true in comparison to the hard and soft sciences)] As she points out, however, in Québec, this is less the case since both sides of the field are so heavily parasitic on the state and the market is so negligible. [38] Montréal gets significantly less museum traffic than is the international norm. The MAC, in particular, has always been of almost total irrelevance.
Lamoureux claims that her work has been nourished by the “postmodern moment” that helped initiate Contemporary Art and posed substantial problems to the norms of historiographic practice. [55] She rehearses an extremely generic narrative of the emergence of the postmodern as a reaction against modernist purism and medium-specificity and their function as a new form of academicism. [54-66] The centrality of medium was depreciated and the artist-subject became privileged as an index of social identities. [60] This was also reflected in the new British art historiography, which was heavily inflected with social history, and a general rehabilitation of phenomenology to incorporate site work and the importance of the viewer. Notably, this, what I would characterize as a fundamentally reactionary shift, is not described as a rival, more severe and reductive form of academicism, resulting in a new Art Pompier, something applicable both to this art and much of its historiography. The curious thing that happens as the text goes along is that while it advances the importance of the province’s art history becoming more historiographically sophisticated (which I entirely support), its historiographic claims become increasingly less so.
Within the art history that developed in Montréal’s francophone universities, there was a domination of semiological and sociological forms of description and analysis. She suggests these developed as a way of resisting the pull of historical research into the paradigms of social history that had become dominant among anglophones. This skepticisim largely seems to have rescinded, although she does not hint at why. What the shift to the social history of art means, in part, is the reduction of art to its socially defined and used function as well as its referentiality. This essentially coincides with the ways that the state has defined the culture industry. Whether out of brevity or sympathy, the text does not get into the nitty-gritty of these shifts in institutional norms.
Lamoureux provides three broad paradigms — the imitative, the expressive, the communicative — as modes for understanding art. These coincide with a shift from the conceptualization of art in terms of the production of the individual subject to art as the production of a subject within a social nexus. This shift, which she characterizes as an integration of new historical methods, however, is still an essentially nineteenth century form of analysis that ignores the substantial, and generally convincing, critiques of such history that have been mounted by philosophers of history over the past half century and more. Art history has only intellectually pivoted from the era of Louis XV to that of Napoleon III. Or, if you are of a Marxist bent, it has become “bourgeois.” In fact, this is precisely how the neo-Marxist Canadian history Bryan Palmer once described this more general shift in the country’s institutionalized historiographic prejudices since the 1980s.
Much of her book is expressed in the mode of an intellectual journey from a more semiological to a sociocultural understanding of art. Leaving aside how limited that leap itself really is, and the extent to which this conversion only seems to result in intellectual impoverishment and clichés, I should say that I went mostly in the opposite direction, perhaps because most of my training was in English Canada or simply because the shift she is describing had become nearly totally hegemonic more than 20 years ago. Her book was released after a decade of texts published by leading historians had spelled out the historiographic failures that were the “social” and “cultural” turns, which nonetheless remain central mythopoetic fantasies for the ideological state apparatus in Canada and have become the commonplaces of its art history. Effectively, the cultural approach, like the phenomenological one, is a kind of hysteresis, a seemingly endless dwelling in the long nineteenth century of the mind.
All of this highlights something that is never really broached, namely whether art history is defined by its object or its methods. It is possible to do one or the other or a mixture of both. That the former tends to be privileged is not a surprise given the institutional function of the discipline, but this also, to an enormous degree, neutralizes its analytical power. This awkwardly comes up as a more general historiographic problem.
One of the more striking things about the book is how clearly it marks the intellectual regression of historiographic discourse on art in the province. This sort of intellectual collapse seems to be obvious to foreigners. I have met numerous Americans and Europeans who have commented that art historical discourse in Canada seems almost uniquely retarded into a set of clichés and a total inability to come to grips with the logical implications of post-structuralism, regardless of how much they use its linguistic tics. Art history in the province (unlike art journalism), could once be credited with not fully settling into the lobotomy ward that constitutes a growing quotient of contemporary academic historiography. That has changed a lot over the past generation or more, and art historians tend to be stupider and more incompetent and crudely faddish than they used to be. A book like Unsettling Canadian Art History and The Great Canadian Baking Show are intellectually and aesthetically interchangeable.
To use a rightly hated phrase, what is required is a “paradigm shift” away from precisely what Lamoureux is advancing. One should recognize a real difference between the social history of art and the art history of the social. The former is only an aesthetic artefact that has been irrationally accorded an epistemic privilege it cannot legitimately claim. It is the aesthetic that conditions the possibility of the social illusion and not the other way around. This is not to say that the spectre of the “social” should be banished from art history. Recognizing that the “social” is an entirely historicizable doctrine with a specific institutional and intellectual genealogy and modes of deployment that have been instrumental in people’s careers is not the same as writing social history.
It is true that art history is history foremost and likely should be far closer to history as a field than it is to the others that it tends to overlap with. It is also true that history is an art and an object of art history. It is art that provides the key to history and not the other way around. History is reducible to art but art is not reducible to history. The value of art history is that it should not be encumbered by the limits of “subject matter” that have been generic to other forms of history writing. Art history is valuable because, when it is done well, its epistemological claims are far stronger than those of the social sciences and the rest of the humanities.
One way to examine the type of historiographic shifting that Lamoureux is describing can be seen in two catalogues, one of which was authored by her earlier in her career. Catalogues are often interesting documents because they tend to express normative narratives in their more unsophisticated form while offering shaky surveys of objects they throw under this shadow.
Spread more than half a decade apart, the two catalogues for exhibitions curated by two of Montréal’s more influential critics took place in English Canada, offering surveys of what they saw as significant tendencies within the city’s art. Lamoureux’s Seeing in Tongues: A Narrative of Language and Visual Arts in Quebec was shown at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver (1995) while Chantal Pontbriand’s The Historical Ruse: Art in Montréal was shown at Toronto’s Power Plant (1988).
The two texts/exhibitions dealt with many of the same artists and, to a degree, with the same theme. Pontbriand was far more specific about her Montréalcentrism while Lamoureux, very questionably, generalized more to the province at large. While both hinted at “the socio-cultural” extensively, and harped on the political implications of technology and the artworld, what any of this meant came off largely as trite. Lamoureux was less guilty of this, although the “social” was usually just vague allusions to anecdotal experience along the lines of “everyone there knew” or annoyed mentions of Mordecai Richler. Both of them elided the actual politics of the artworld as an extension of the state, although Lamoureux was at least overt in recognizing the domineering role of academia in the city’s Contemporary Art.
Lamoureux set out to discover how the “language issue” had left its own “figures and traces” on the visual arts of the province. [Lamoureux, 1] “Language” was the tool she relied on to try to inject social content into art. This was an entertainingly perverse gesture since all the evidence, and most of her arguments, seemed to suggest the repudiation of this. Most of the works shown were from Montréal artists, and she acknowledged that they were not enough to substantiate the notion that the linguistic situation was concretely tied to the production of the visual arts, but persisted with the argument anyway.
Identity had been “hegemonically” defined in terms of language (accent and voice), she argued. The independence movement closely aligned language and identity, both in terms of French against English, and Québec’s French against that of France. [1] If, in their art, English Canada had generally been defined in geographic-spatial terms of territory and technology (the landscape), Québec had mostly been defined in oral terms (audible minoritarianism), and in those of urban landscapes and other genres, including non-representational ones. [1. One can, and should, object to this cartoonish opposition given that the historical reality was far more muddled.]
The province’s literature had been institutionalized and defined in terms of linguistic awareness and this inflected the way its “culture” has been governmentally defined, at least until the 1990s. With the Arpin report, there was some recognition that “culture” could not be reduced to the linguistic, but that language’s role in identity made it necessary to privilege linguistic forms (literature, theatre, etc.) [2] In state doctrine, identity and language were tautologically bound to mirror one another, giving Québec “a face.” [3]
Aside from the question of the visual “referent,” there were also significant institutional differences between the province and Canada. Art in Montréal, in particular, had been deeply tied to the universities and their discourses (usually reflected in the local art press), even more so than to the museum system. The universities tended to be dominated by either a formalist/semiotic set of approaches or sociological ones and these in turn influenced artists. Her argument seemed to want to bridge or interweave the two approaches. The stress of curators on semiotic codes implied the centrality of language even if the local significance was rarely emphasized, and, to the extent that it was, it was to internationalize it (it was displaced to contemporaneity).
Divorcing the title of the exhibition from its theological suggestiveness, she placed it in the context of glossolalia, that is the mimesis of language which has the form or façade of language but not the content, undermining “all enunciative orientation” and the notion of language as speech between people. [6] In disembodying language from voice, it displaced maternal language and de-semiotized it. [6] The works she employed created a “language effect” through their borrowings from language. This is a development of the general hybridization of codes (the interstices of which highlights the borrowings) that had become common in the province’s Contemporary Art. She called this “aesthetic transfer” and suggested that the recourse or appeal to rival sets of codes was a means of “dethroning the visual” in league with a longer history of “committed” art practices. [7]
Following certain psychoanalysts, she separated glossolalia from glossomania, with the latter being an untranslatable non-sense and the former following a logic that can be translated and interpreted. Aesthetic transfer was identified with this kind of “translatability,” not understood in a strictly literary sense (in which literary models would provide rules) but in the sense of a shared “sociocultural factor” namely “the hyperawareness of language.” [8] Translatability was the “postmodern heroine,” insistent on the impossibility of a return to origins, and persistent in the claim of art “inserted” into context, on the centrality of referentiality, and art’s social responsibility.
Translation also brought into relief the issue of the overt and the instrumental (the official or governmental model of translation) while showing the boundaries of languages, their aspects that are not reducible to this utilitarian form, or strictly to form itself, like the eccentric sounds made in a language that survive reproduction in a variety of media.
What concerned her was something even more particular, something so paradoxically particular that it was defined by its non-specificity. Borrowing from Payant (and his borrowings from Deleuze), she stressed the function of language not as part of a homogeneous identity but as something heterogeneous which was both averse to direct referentiality and minoritarian specificity. These tendencies of distancing were what she detected in most of the work in the show, and the ironic implication of this logic was its disavowal of “positions,” by which she seemed to mean relations of possible sublation. [10]
This leads to the second major theme, which she termed the threat of aphasia. Language, posed on the edge or tip of the tongue, is a “selective suspension” that she saw as a failure or lack. This was a breach in identity and the symbolic system. [13] Aphasia was defined as a “similarity disorder” that attacked the capacity to translate codes and disabled the “relational” aspects of language. [14] This extended the general tendency that she was trying to outline, namely, “that the ‘pieces of language’ deployed here appear to have nothing to do with identity, or at least with language as the emblematic vector of a monolithic cultural identity.” [7]
From all of these intriguing observations (and it is an almost anomalously rich catalogue essay), she extracted this hypothesis:
I think that such critical silence aptly indicates the degree to which visual arts discourse in Québec follows the two main lines of development I have analyzed so far: on the one hand, one has analyses that show a fascination for the work as the site of a hybrid use of codes and languages, an interest in other languages; on the other hand, one encounters a refusal to take up pressing social issues, particularly public debates over language, inasmuch as the work of art is desired, envisioned, accomplished as the Other of language or, more precisely, as it leads ‘elsewhere.’ [16]
But is it not simply a matter of art being this anti-social, anti-public or anti-political elsewhere? Not so much “anti” as indifferent to the point of being radically Other. Or is it not that the “public” or “social” world is a linguistically-inspired delusion that visual art ironizes through its peculiar sovereignty? Clearly, the works that she discusses point to the dubiousness of these social categories in the first place. They appropriate the façades of languages and demonstrate their vacuity, suspending the referential claims that their forms of codification (or narrativization) would claim as epistemologically legitimate and which she naively takes for granted. It seems to me that this has less to do with “de-throning the visual” than undermining the viability of social reference that she seems determined to rescue from art; the figuring of language was only a means of de-culturing it while de-naturalizing the institutional artifice around art that operates as its official translator, preventing the obscenity of the visual through the “insertion” of “context.”
In her catalogue essay, Pontbriand cast the late 1960s and 70s as a period of “great risks on the aesthetic level” before the return to more readily marketable forms in the 80s. Even if there was barely an art market in Canada, this turn to “citational” and “historical” work occurred. Such work tended to be voyeuristic rather than critical, and tended to employ painting in ways that questioned the function of art. The 80s were cast as a period of “reflection” before they gradually closed with a return to the concerns of the previous decades. This return is to one of “great epistemological rupture” and the critique of the “system of art.” [Pontbriand, 7]
With the teleological claims of the “master narratives” of painting and sculpture displaced by the rise of new technologies
[i]nstead of a representation of the world, art became a process: a mechanism rather than a closed view. And the society that welcomed these changes has found itself confronted with phenomena that have expanded during the 20th century: massive industrialization and amnesia. As far as art’s concerned, we witnessed the development of the cultural industry — the concept of ‘the public’ took on an unprecedented scope: during the 20th century, the number of museums and major exhibitions for the general public escalated. New technologies — photography, cinema, television, computers — also changed the link between the public and art. These phenomena are part of the artistic discourse that artists must address. Art that counts is art that thinks, art capable of making a coherent reflection on the cultural world and on art as an institution within this world. [9]
Keeping within the pathological register, she suggested that “amnesia” was particularly felt in Canada due to the way the population was spread out, and communication has played a crucial role in alleviating the isolation and solitude of the populace. She goes so far as to suggest that the vitality of the country’s art was due to this difference. [10] Language was also a central issue. Montréal’s art was placed in, what she admitted was the naive position of a “resistance” to anglophone hegemony on the continent, although none of its art looked regionalist or nationalist (whatever those look like). Instead, it resembled the “international avant-garde.” [9] Defensively stressing the “quality” of this work, she defined this as “basically critical, informed, in tune with contemporary reality” and definitely not “provincial” or “mimetic.” It was a hybrid of European and American tendencies. This is what defined the “art that is exclusive to Montreal’s artists.” [9] She termed this the “historical ruse” and suggested it could be the future of art.
“Montréal” was present in terms of architectural references, its function in historical allegory, or as a “position” in relation to international art. [10] Pontbriand’s essay continued her romanticization of the city’s Contemporary Art world, something that she played a key role in with her significant contributions to Parachute. Lamoureux’s position, while no less imbricated within the city’s artworld, at least attempted to take more distance, a strategy suitable to its interest in the butting together of surfaces.
The work discussed by Pontbriand tended to be citational and analyzed power, calling codes into question and deconstructing master narratives. She regarded artists doing this as being on the same “wavelength” of international artists working and faced with “a socio-cultural reality dominated by difference and resistance.” [9] But her text remains unclear about how an art that “reflects” is also one that is not “representational” and it is equally unclear how art is differentiated from general “culture” since they are both processes and institutions. The only meaningful distinction she calls on is this notion of a presumably critical reflection (although it is the reflection of an amnesiac, a point she does not draw much from) This “reflection” largely seems to be the laundering of imagery through imported theoretical tropes, a strategy which, if we wanted to draw from Lamoureux’s argument, was a kind of mimetic hollowing out.
The “historical ruse” is really the notion that art is a “reflection,” something that sets up a critical mirror to “culture” so that it can “count.” For Pontbriand, artists are the accountants of the industrialization process but their role as functionaries in the cultural industries — which is certainly what Contemporary Art and the university are (and far more than Hollywood or the usual suspects) — is rather romantically obscured. This accounting procedure is the ruse.
Likewise, the “amnesia” is a ruse, like one borrowed from a soap opera when a character can avoid their past life, persisting as a “similarity disorder” where it is unclear where the subject has vanished to, if they have only been hidden, or if they were ever there at all. As we have seen lately, the problem of the “similarity disorder” has hardly gone away. I am inclined to suggest that conceptualizing art as a “similarity disorder” may be a more fruitful way of thinking about it than either as representation or process.
One useful metahistorical question is why should curators and historians have felt so compelled to attempt to cast any of this in socio-historical terms when their arguments and the works they discuss consistently undermine anything plausible about this. Insofar as there is a socio-historical content, should that not be located in the disciplinary regime that underwrites the appeal to such a notion? As they concede, it is not in the art.
