Art in Montreal

  If the previous review examined two very different ways that the “haunted” was presented, this time around is another way of presenting “spirit.” In both of those instances, the mediation of spirit and the performative spiritualization of this mediation were central. And in one of those exhibitions, the hunt for the spirit was expressed largely through a parody of generic church forms, a use of the supposed spiritual significance of monochromes, and the mystique of tourist imagery. In Jeremy Shaw ’s Localize Affect at Bradley|Ertaskiran , something close to this is played out more directly and, importantly, not filtered through romantic mystique but a sense of the demonstrative. Atypically for the gallery, this exhibition spans both of its floors. At the entrance is a series of photos of stuttered bodies which have been manipulated by processes to convey the impression of intense experience. They are rendered in a fashion familiar from high modernist and fashion photography ...

For the sake of the season and keeping in line with the ongoing thematization of horror common in the art shown in the city, this week’s exhibitions pivot around the haunted in direct but different ways. It is stark stuff. Some of it is lush and stark, some muffled to the point that it seems shuffled together. Both exhibitions are playing on the spectre of the archive, that canonical trope constantly trotted out as the operating room for the birth of Contemporary Art. Here it takes two forms that echo one another in their insistence on the archive as a repository of mementos (often of a “visitation”) or of captured decay. Ashy residues figure in both, in one case as a burned remnant of art careers and absent subjects. In both cases, images are juxtaposed with what suggests archaeological display cases containing monochromized bones or black and white. Both stress an inarticulate distance between “ruins” or “fragments” and some ostensible reality that only seems to exist as an aphori...

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I was getting drunk with a painter recently and, when the topic of this site came up, they asked me: how do you do this to yourself week after week? What is wrong with you? Most of the work in this city is barely even mediocre at best. How can you justify writing about it? Cruel questions? Perhaps. It is difficult to justify writing about a lot of it. A great deal of it, maybe even all of it, is mediocre. This is not a matter of taste. Most of it is ontologically mediocre. As a historian, mediocrity is something that I take an interest in. Human history, like most history, is merely a minor chapter in the long evolution of death. This chapter could be written as comedy, tragedy, or some hybrid. In the end, it likely is not a narrative at all, just a digression. Human beings are not even protagonists in this. The most generous thing you can say about them is that they are tools. Most historians are bad historians because they do not have much of a sense of humour and because they...