Thankfully, summer is ending, and the undeserved holiday season that galleries take is coming to a close. I review two current exhibitions below, but they come with a preamble. Prefacing that, I should say that I have little doubt that the tendencies discussed below would have emerged without AI; so, the suggestion is not that they share deep cultural continuity, but that they share incidental formal traits.
I am on the fence about the likely implications of AI for art (it seems much clearer for other fields), but it annoys enough people that it is at least potentially interesting. Despite the “newness” that people associate with it, AI’s artistic potential seems to be entirely in step with the ambitions of significant aspects of the avant-garde from a hundred years ago. However, the dreams of an automatic, depersonalized art made by machines that would eliminate elitism — and which were central to many Modernist ambitions — seem entirely out of step with the reactionary subjectivity that is central to a significant proportion of Contemporary (and “post-contemporary”) art.
While exhibitions at Elektra are often devoted to exploring the potentials of this new technology, typically in the form of “world building” exercises, there have also been shows that approached its collision with media. For instance, last year I reviewed an exhibition by the usually intriguing Christian Messier where his suite of paintings had been made using experiments with clunky, now quite antiquated, AI image-generating programs. The translation of these images to paintings helped to isolate and exaggerate the rough edges of that translation with some comical and mildly grotesque results. In doing so, it also provided an appropriately crude portrait of a moment of codification.
AI’s rendering competence has accelerated significantly since then to the point that a lot of the work being generated by programs like VEO 3 is almost indistinguishable from, and in some respects better than, common forms of video production relying on human actors and artisans that circulate online.
Unsurprisingly pragmatic, CARFAC/RAAV is fine with AI as long as it can be exploited to reinforce and further entrench the professionalization of the country’s artists and maintain their market. Most animators I know are relieved that AI has advanced to the point that it can cut back significantly on the absurd amounts of tedious grunt work they have to do. In general, the older culture industries, here and abroad, have been rather defensive about AI, mostly due to its potential to erode the rights and privileges they have amassed, and have been seeking legal guarantees to protect their products.
One relevant trend in AI modeling that has emerged has been the use of (typically widely recognized) works of art and their filling out, or “worlding” and transformation into “immersive” environments that can be interacted with and explored. You can go and see the landscape beyond the Mona Lisa or find out what kind of shoes she might be wearing. To take another example, here is an AI adaptation of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) and a few responses.
While some would correctly point out that phenomena like the Hopper-inspired AI above misunderstand what paintings actually are and do, it does transform an image into the kind of pedagogical and relational space that is central to a great deal of Contemporary Art. The distinction between this sort of thing, immersive Van Gogh shows, and what Donald Kuspit termed post-art (installation, performance art, happenings, etc.) is mostly discursive (marketing), not really artistic.If Contemporary Art has many of the superficial characteristics of AI, it is due to being the product of an artificial, highly restricted economy that is heavily codified in generic discursive and visual terms.
Typically, when AI is attacked as something other than a potential aggressor on the sanctity of legally protected identities and other types of brands, or as something “uncanny,” it is referred to as “slop.” While spam was canned, in a way not dissimilar to most curatorial writing, slop is slightly more elusive. Figuratively, slop comes a little closer to “culture” than simply an industrial canned good designed to ease consumption. Culture, in its anthropological sense, is a metaphorical way of thinking about the world as what amounts to pig farming or as a petri dish of bacteria. The former is more relevant here since slop is what you feed pigs. Slop is usually taken to be a mixture of bland and off-cut materials that are thrown together into a nominally nutritious slurry that looks like vomit (the concrete objectification of culture as a process). However, culture, in its sense as refined taste, is typically what people appeal to when they want to contend that something is art, not slop. This tends to boil down either to mystical statements or appeals to authority. This preamble brings us to the objects of this article.
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One recent example that involves these things would be the group show Nourrir la nostalgie at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain. Curated by María Andreína Escalona De Abreu, it advertises itself this way:
Here, the ingredients of nostalgic and diasporic dishes are also materials for artwork. The table is set using practices of care and hospitality that become critical gestures of resistance. And tensions over the emotional and political power of food are on the menu. By questioning the effects of immigration, globalization and the food industry, the works intended for this recipe pose the question: how do these consumer goods, which have become cultural markers, nourish or exploit nostalgia? [p] To nourish nostalgia, soothe a heart (and belly) in diaspora, revive a craving memory, please follow these directions, in no particular order: [p] Invite what reconnects you with what you thought was lost, far away. Whatever transports you to memories of childhood (or adulthood), however familiar and personal, reveals rather deep ties nurtured by the collective. You'll find these guests in grocery stores, youtube tutorials, the dining room, the kitchen, photo albums, offerings from the familiar garden and even in a gallery. For the artists, it's beans, avocados, SPAM, tea for the ancestors, challah, clementines, steak on a wood plank. [p] Play the game the artists propose. Through the senses and offerings, they invite you to participate, contribute and feed (from) the works present here. Eat Miao's beans and Joni's sweets, share a cup of tea on Madison's table, and peel a clementine offered by Armando. Embark on visits to Asian supermarkets by Sam, a hangry hallucination by Sacha, an exploration of identity by Isabela. [p] Cultivate a critical stance toward food, even food that feeds your heart. Think about imported foods and how they embody a misplaced nostalgia: that of a "home" lost, idealized or recomposed here in Canada.
The exhibition spans the entire narrow, awkward space of the gallery, cluttering it up with activity stations, makeshift shrines, oddly positioned artworks on the wall, and clumps of stuff that provide it all with an adults LARPing as kindergartners feel.
The artists employ a variety of media and techniques in mostly characterless and unremarkable ways that seem to mirror the generally instructive tone of the thing, and lend it a greater "amateur" quality. Presumably, the use of food and the appeals to the tactile are meant to stress a more homogeneous “bodily” experience. But there is little to smell or hear, and there is no significantly interesting tactile aspect to any of the work. What might seem to set it apart from AI slop is the level of "human" sentimentalism (or what is usually marketed as “caring”) that all of this involves (mixed with an extremely vague appeal to “criticality”). Yet, it is this, even more than the rest, where the slop factor resides. After all, the other implication of slop is sentimentality.
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The various instances of the artist biography genre and its appeals to authority that the gallery exploits in the marketing of the show read like AI slop. For instance:
Snack Witch Joni Cheung is a grateful, uninvited guest born—and knows she wants to die—on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh peoples. They are a Certified Sculpture Witch with an MFA from Concordia University (2023). As a wicked #magicalgirl ✨ who eats art and makes snacks, she has exhibited across Turtle Island and beyond. Currently, they're based on the stolen lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka and Mi’kmaq peoples, working under precarious conditions as a sessional professor at Concordia University and NSCAD University. Their practice is supported by various funding bodies, including the BC Art Counsil and Canada Council for the Arts.
Since there is almost nothing visually substantive to any of the work, it is the text slop that dominates and leaves a taste in your mouth. Other than that, interacting with the exhibition mostly consists of eating some random bits of cheap and unhygienically maintained food. For this microwave dinner version of slightly repackaged relational aesthetics tropes from decades past, the result is the ritualistic sacralization of garbage production filtered through art world clichés and state-sanctioned ideology.
In terms of intent, rhetoric, skill, or comment, it is all slop. The “nostalgia” that seems to be addressed is not one for “home” but seems to be about more of a desire for the uncanny, which, in an art context, inverts this to mean the familiar gesture to the “defamiliar.” What is at play is a fantasy of redemption; a desire to make slop not only nutritious but moral. The most “uncanny” relation between AI and Contemporary Art is this slop factor.
Art Mûr’s annual exhibition, Peinture fraîche et nouvelle construction (now in its 21st iteration), is always decidedly mixed. In providing a survey of the basic trends of the moment among the debutantes of academic art, it is historically valuable. Given how it is structured, it has consistently been all over the place in terms of technique and quality. In the past few years, it has become notable less for its heterogeneity than its narrowing predictability. As always, there are a few artists who stand out as being somewhat anomalous, but most of what is on display is so easily generic that it feels almost like a joke. For this article, I will concentrate on the latter.
Most of this year’s crop falls into a few familiar and easily distinguishable sets of sub-genres. (Out of politeness, I will leave out the associated artist's names). There is some soft and wavy abstraction in tube colours; there is “Frankenstein” stuff (figures or body parts taken over by alien forms and hybridized like rabbits with SPV) [if you want to gear it to postcolonial marketing you call it “hybridization”]; there is some painting that looks like it came out of Juxtapoz twenty years ago; there’s some vaguely emo-expressionist painting; there’s the sad face in monochromes painting that used to be found in hair salons; there’s bad pottery with boring woodwork sculpture; appropriated industrial materials to conjure “liminal spaces” sculpture; chunky, orange-tinted banal character studies; biomorphic soft sculptures referencing 70s feminist sculpture; a histrionic appropriation of History painting to produce allegorical “alternative narratives”; badly rendered figurative work with confessional doodling about “political trauma”; and post-colonial pattern palettes juxtaposed with figures with “expressive” eyes.
If I don’t think highly of any of these sub-genres, I have seen comparatively competent iterations of each of them at some point. In this case, most of them are mediocre, which means that they read primarily as generic (another reason why associating them with proper names seems misguided). It nearly all looks and registers like the result of a text-to-image prompt in an AI using sub-genre clichés. While an exhibition in this form will almost inevitably introduce this possibility, even the past iterations of it at Art Mûr never seemed to make this the overwhelming tendency. There was always a little more to it than that, but this time around, it feels like there is less.
What separates this Art Mûr exhibition from the PFOAC one is that it does not degrade the visual to perfunctory demonstration and encode it in textual supplements. One can imagine that if many of these artists had solo or small group shows, the opposite would occur, and the visual slop factor would be compounded with a textual one that only serves to intensify this aspect. I am not arguing here whether this is a positive or negative trend, only that it is one and that the slop factor seems to be the normative definition of Contemporary Art.
*Photos my own.