Reviews: "Sixty Years Ago" at Château Dufresne; "Créer à rebours vers l’exposition" at Vox; "Street Actions" at Optica; "The Art Gallery Problem" at Dazibao

 

This review is a trifle long, but the four exhibitions I discuss seem to dovetail quite nicely into one another and, in context, perhaps illuminate some points better than they would if discussed in isolation. What follows is mostly about curation and only secondarily about the artworks themselves.

To start with an anecdote: I was touring MFA studios a few years ago (seven or eight, I think) and was told that one student was making art for wildlife, specifically, beavers. I naively assumed this must have meant they were doing wilderness installations intended solely for an animal audience to interact with. That sounded great. Unfortunately, that was just the “concept.” What they were actually doing was making underwhelming mixed-media sculptures that resembled discards from a costume shop if they’d fallen off a truck on the highway and then been stitched together.

The work was produced for the typical display spaces and leaning on the discursive norms of Contemporary Art. These norms, both in terms of space and discourse, have been severely historically contingent. Some of the major milestones of the city’s Contemporary Art as a genre in evolution were, to no minor degree, defined in precisely such terms. Institutional historiography has done this too. At least one official history of the normalization of Contemporary Art in the province was explicit in situating it as building upon an institution invented by Modernism. This, one could argue (if rather obviously), was also embodied in the early history of Montréal’s Musée d’art contemporain (MAC). 

The early history of that institution was the subject of a charming and small temporary exhibition which closed recently, Château Dufresne’s, Sixty Years Ago, the MAC at Château Dufresne 1965-1968. It dealt with the location’s history as the site of the MAC before the institution moved downtown. According to the press release, “In less than 4 years, over 300,000 visitors were drawn to the presentation of close to 70 exhibitions and to a slew of varied and recurring cultural activities.”

The location itself, in the words of Tourisme Montréal, is

…a voyage into the private world of a middle-class francophone family from the early 20th century, that of the brothers Oscar and Marius Dufresne. These two visionaries introduced the city of Maisonneuve to novelties in architecture and urban planning inspired by European and American models. The domestic interiors of the two separate houses they lived in reflect the appeal of monumental architecture in the Beaux-Arts style, as well as a taste for opulence and the latest styles. There, too, you will find the secular masterpieces of the Italian-born artist Guido Nincheri along with interior decoration and painted furniture by the Belgian painter Alfred Faniel.

Most of the preserved and restored rooms in this château are on the second floor. Half of them are barely furnished. One is left to wander the bright, empty rooms, which clash so harshly with the view of the considerably less opulent surroundings of Pie IX. The furnished rooms are densely so. There is a small but charming Orientalist room, and a substantial quantity of decorative work that takes Napoleon as its theme. If the bedroom is underwhelmingly decorated, at least it shares the general propensity for wonderful wall hangings and papers.

As with a handful of the city’s hotels, the space is oriented toward an image of luxury that was antiquating even as it was taking shape. If it was afflicted with trends, it was with trends that had come late. In location, it reads as a folly dedicated to a dream of nineteenth-century opulence that limped into the following century.

In all, there is a dark but warm quality to these spaces, a visual equivalent to an amber perfume. I note all of this as a matter of contrast to the space used for the exhibition. With its significantly lower ceilings and anemic lighting, it is more suggestive of the entrance exhibit at a living history museum, which, in a way, it is.

Occupying the largest downstairs room, the exhibition about the MAC was framed as much as an advertisement for the museum and its potential future as a reflection on its past. That these two directions scarcely communicate in any meaningful sense within the exhibition’s logic is an interesting point.

To stress its historical dimensions, the exhibition employed statements from academics. One, from Francine Couture, for example, rehearsed the basic argument she has been presenting on the emergence of the city’s Contemporary Art for decades. To wit, the 1960s saw the transformation of the artworld as the artist was effectively brought in from the cold. They lost their marginal and oppositional status and became part of the technocratic order instituted by the Quiet Revolution. No longer an outsider, the artist was a party to the negotiation of rights and recognition. Artists became not only welfare beneficiaries and emblems of the new morality, but their work would be integrated into the architectural environments being erected to house it. The founding of MAC was integral to legitimizing this. 

This framing was then taken up by the current leader of the MAC, Stephane La Roche, who stressed that the institution is building on this legacy and further rooting it in “the community.” La Roche continues:

The new MAC will be even more inclusive. All must feel welcome and at home. Involved in the community, the MAC will act as a transformative force, facilitating dialogue and exchange. […] The transformed MAC will write a unique chapter in its history, more in tune than ever with the evolution of art and society.

To its credit, at least one panel in the historical narrative hinted at the deep tensions that were at play during that early period around the museum, and the conflict between government bureaucrats, curators, artists, and artists’ groups over what the role of art in the city might or ought to be. This was probably best exemplified in the bitter public quarrel between Robert Roussil and MAC curator Guy Robert in the period the exhibition covered.

Curatorially speaking, the exhibition was an interesting example of what can be done with what were likely meager means. A video projection dealing with a happening and a couple of sculptures were included, but the exhibition consisted primarily of various texts on blocks of colour. These related a history of the space’s use, some very general contextual statements, and some future-directed platitudes offered by the MAC’s current leadership. The texts were mingled among numerous archival examples of installation shots, as well as some letters and pamphlets under glass.

The installation images were also blown up and placed on the walls, providing much of the visual focus. These images tended to do two things: one, they stressed a relation between the built environment and the art object; two, they often occluded the work with the presence of viewers. Both stressed scale and, aside from some of the sculptural works, the visual art tended to appear dwarfed, its prop quality apparent, and its general pretensions ironized as it got lost in the ephemeral crowds of history.

The blank exhibition walls that were once installed at Dufresne to obscure the ornamented space of the residence and provide a “neutral” ground, ironically, did the opposite. The space was clearly framed by elaborate decor, and the paintings would sit on an aggressive blankness that tended to make them appear comic in context. They provided an additional relief effect. Something similar was detectable at relatively recent exhibitions at Fondation Molinari, also dealing with exhibition history. The Fondation has made some admirable efforts in examining and historicizing exhibition practices, something that could have been fleshed out a little more at Dufresne, whether within the greater house itself, by photos, or diorama, etc. 

While the display of Contemporary Art in stately homes (decaying or maintained) has been an established practice since its early days, more recent instances tend to exploit the dichotomy between the old and new as a means to create relativizing and meta-critical tensions. The practice of display at Dufresne was more pragmatic than anything else, but as noted, it did have the effect of stressing the performatively anachronistic ludicrousness of Contemporary Art. The exhibition of exhibition practices does not really match up to this, but it does spatially operate as sort of post-it note.

This theme has, if not explicitly, occasionally popped up in exhibitions at the MAC in its location on St. Catherine. One instance of the Triennale, for example, made some play on this anachronistic aspect, something which was perhaps more suited to earlier large-scale exhibitions like Aurora Borealis. 

As it happens, that very exhibition is the subject of a “documentary” exhibition at Centre Vox. Curated by Geneviève Marcil and Claudine Roger, Créer à rebours vers l’exposition: Le cas du site specific à Montréal, “explor[es] the practice and history of exhibitions in Québec as well as their documentation–and the accompanying selective chronology chronicle the development of this phenomenon in the city from 1980 to 1989.”

Taking place in private apartments, abandoned sites and atypical spaces, the site-specific interventions catalogued here were different from public art or land art. Like those practices, however, they also stemmed from a desire to eschew the traditional circuits of art exhibition. As such, they differed from installations presented in ‘standard’ venues (museums, commercial galleries, etc.) and from certain in situ practices for which, as art historian Johanne Lamoureux has written, artists ‘merely designated a more-or-less anonymous space, insofar as it was targeted for its generic purpose and not its specific character.’

The curators at Vox deserve credit for finding a way to make it look interesting. The attempt to organize history as a kind of flattened diorama is a step up from what artexte usually resigns itself to doing or to the Réveiller l’Androgyne exhibition at Centre des arts actuels Skol, which blandly recycles the “bookstore” version of exhibition that was already severely overdone fifteen years ago. Instead, Vox goes the route of imagining Contemporary Art as something more like a dollhouse. The partial reconstruction and the maquette of exhibition spaces sit next to the collaging of exhibition documents (photos, videos, pamphlets). A quote from Betty Goodwin printed on the faux ribs of a recreated exhibition space peer down at the documentation (or float above it). The viewer is prodded to interact with the exhibition bent over. Across the space, there is a printed legend to explain what is on the ground.

The most obvious thing these aspects suggest asking is: why have they chosen this sort of spatialization for imagining the past? Presumably, it is to make you conscious of physically interacting with the piece, which was one of the big takeaways from Aurora Borealis if you read the reviews of the period. The narrowness of the Vox exhibit is arguably done to suit the space of display, but it does not have the forced intimacy with the space that site specific installations tended to boast. You could easily drop it in any manner of rooms. In fact, it seems to stress the standardization of display that in situ work was trying to avoid. In situ becomes a prop to be historicized, like the little model cabins or old knives you might see in a fur trade museum. If in situ work tended to “grow” out of (or into) space, the exhibition shrinks and packages this as institutionalized furniture.

Perhaps the most instructive aspect is the odd curatorial framing of this being part of a “chronology chronicle,” concentrating as it does on the temporal aspect of spatialization. The exhibition does not use duration in any substantive or distinctive way. A “chronicle,” of course, is one of those things that historiographers tend to recognize as something that is not quite history and not quite a grocery list, which would not be an inaccurate description of what the exhibition amounts to (to its credit). 

So, we have looked at two interesting, if not entirely successful, documentary exhibitions. Both highlighted the importance of spatialization. The first made evident that the inauguration of Contemporary Art was architecturally defined through the obfuscation of context to the point that the obfuscatory gesture obscured the ostensible content. The second relied on the objectification of architectural context, a gesture which has become memorialized as furniture. We now turn to two very different exhibitions. One continues the documentary exhibition element, and the other addresses the matter of space more directly.

Street Actions: Women Performing in Montréal and Toronto, 1970-1980 was curated by Didier Morelli and spans the two exhibition rooms at Optica. A collection of performance props, photos of performances and interventions, installation fragments, sketches, and audio and video recordings. These are all set up sparely in the two spaces with little textual supplementation. Artists include Elizabeth Chitty, Marie Décary, Johanna Householder, Kamissa Ma Koïta, Francine Larivée, Lise Nantel, and Bé van der Heide.

According to an official Instagram post

This exhibition looks at how women in the 1970s laid claim to cities through a variety of performances and performatively informed gestures and actions. Resisting urban functionalism and the gender-based rationale of public and private spaces, they imagined alternate modes of embodiment in Montreal and Toronto. At both ends of the cultural spectrum, linguistically divided yet united by other causes, these artists shaped second-wave feminist discourse and activism or moved in parallel to it with their overt gestures. [...] #artandcriticalthinking

The PR statement claims

At the apex of the Canadian women’s movement, Street Actions explores how issues like representation, reproductive rights, gender-based violence, and environmentalism contributed to and was amplified by artists performatively inhabiting the margins of the city. In all the works on display—fragments of a pavilion built to expose women’s condition, movement-based performances, colourful banners carried in feminist street protests, or playful pillow-like feet appended to public art. Artists across disciplines generated a kinaesthetic vocabulary that diverged from social codes, established modes of artistic production, utilitarian models of urban thinking, and gendered spatial-identities.

Morelli confuses me because his own art practice tends to rely on using space and setting up object relations in ways that are interesting. But his curating, which should ostensibly do many of these same things, is consistently flat. Maybe he is just being committed to raising historical objects to sacred cows; maybe there are severe legal limits on what he can do with these objects; or maybe he is just being lazy. If any of these applied, they could still be maximized and incorporated into presentation in a more effective manner. It is unclear to what degree the curation is thoughtful rather than borderline arbitrary. What is the action that transforms a “street action” into a gallery display? 

To pick up on the hashtag used to market the Street Actions exhibition, what is the “#criticalthinking” that is occurring here? It is not in the enframing, which is a largely ahistorical and misleading set of tropes strung together as lazily as the vague relational implications of the statements. What does the curating itself do? Is it thinking in its mode of presentation?

It would be difficult to find a more “utilitarian” form of exhibiting practice that does not “explore” much of anything while discursively leaning on shaggy premises like “society” to suggest what were already fairly badly conceptualized phenomena like “actions.” After all, it is not simply a re-presentation of the works, it is their remediation as part of the state ideological apparatus. Not that they were not this to begin with (they were), but their mythocratic form has been altered, and the fact that there is a jarring disjunction between what the works in their inaugural moment were and what they are now as remediated archives is not actually addressed. If the exhibition was supposed to investigate the actual political situation that the works purportedly addressed, it would have to perform an enormous amount of contextualizing work. The curious thing is that the opposite happens even as the PR statement alludes to rafts of archival materials to back up its claims while keeping them out of view.

Both rooms are prop rooms for minimalistic sketches that render the works (if we can call them that: they are fetishized fragments like martyrs' toes) iconic but deny them any historical depth. As the talking head droning from the video screen in the Toronto room says, it is not conventional theatre. It is an odd ensemble. Part of it is the flat laying out of institutional documents in glass vitrines that curators like so much, but which rarely accomplishes much of anything. In this case, we get numerous diagrams for what was or might have been. (They like that sort of thing at Optica.) Sketches for spatial concepts, but little else.

We also get disembodied clothing propped up and hollow, and figures isolated from their scenography. Fragments of Francine Larivée’s La Chambre nuptiale -- perhaps the most lionized feminist artwork produced in the province -- dominate the room for Montréal. Her actual installation was a good example of the subsumption of theatricality to performative functionalism. Here it is presented as a set of dehistoricized and mystified props that become fetish items for a cult of identity. As it is, it seems designed for projection. This would be appropriate given that I viewed the second space in the presence of a lanky Concordia student trying to impress his female companion by talking about the male gaze. I point to this not simply because it is humorous, but because there does not seem to be more to this sort of curatorial endeavour than parroting routines. 

Effectively, the exhibition is the presentation of a fantasy of the production of works of art. Ultimately, it is displayed as just a hodgepodge of stuff in a room. You could flip or reverse the positions of the objects and it would make little difference. It is all presented with generic etiquette to make it less visually demanding than looking at shoes at a friperie. If mummification -- voided of the depth of perfume and the durational performance of the sacrifice of slaves -- was the desire, this would be fine. It would explain the fairly corny mysticism with which the works are presented. If the point of the exhibition was the absurdity of “action” as a concept and a misunderstanding of the activity of art, it would also be fine. In fact, if these were the points, then it would be fairly subversive, but this is Optica, so this is likely not the case. 

Meanwhile, Dazibao is exhibiting, The Art Gallery Problem, a co-presentation with The Blackwood, University of Toronto Mississauga. Curated by Fraser McCallum, it features work by artists Kent Chan, Nikita Gale, Matt Nish-Lapidus, Anahita Norouzi, Karthik Pandian, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste.

According to the PR statement

The ‘art gallery problem’ is a well-known math problem with a simple premise: what is the minimum number of guards or surveillance cameras necessary to observe an entire gallery? Across different layouts and floorplans, the art gallery problem challenges math students to achieve full surveillance of a space using the minimum labour or technology. The problem is not put to use by major museums and galleries, despite replicating their standard practices for monitoring facilities. Even so, it remains a dominant understanding of art’s presentation.

This “problem” is used as a “framework” that incorporates half a dozen works to probe it from disparate directions. One work is a video that is sequestered in the screening room, while the others generally hug the walls of the gallery. Sharing a title with the exhibition, the Nish-Lapidus work displays a trio of vaguely anthropomorphic surveillance cameras on stands standing in for guards, their “heads” panning to survey the space before them, only what the curator terms “mutating renderings.” Triangulated, they mostly seem to survey each other but seem to see nothing that is there. It is a demonstrative joke of the essential framework and one which, deliberately or not, suggests there is no there there.

Most of the artworks in the exhibition are not bad. They also work well together, in no small part because they segregate the Pandian video, which is by far the weakest part of the exhibition. I will just bracket it off and say no more about this bad retread of late-1960s agitprop tics.

Probably the best piece is Nikita Gale’s “GRAVITY SOLO III (HYPERPERFORMANCE),” where stones sit on a keyboard, letting out a drone. Consisting of speakers and other electronics fastened to the wall and emitting bass frequencies, Toussaint-Baptiste’s works are clever and concise demonstrative pieces, but they do not meaningfully say anything about the basic curatorial concern. The curator suggests they are instances of “iconoclastic misuse,” but they are actually explicitly iconic (in multiple senses of the term) and are not misusing anything. The only thing being misused is the word “iconoclastic.” The registration of vibration around a monochrome, etc., only amplifies the staging environment as a support system for which the “artwork” is a tool for the highlighting of its presence. As with the Nish-Lapidus, this can readily be interpreted as implying the opposite of the connotations that the curator seemingly accords it. Both works stress the gallery as a spatializaton programme, but neither plausibly indicates much beyond this. If they indicate much, it may be that the space of art possesses precisely the autonomy that the enframing seems to object to.

Kent Chan’s new film addresses the norms of museum practice in the face of climate change and destruction. The Burning of a Museum draws parallels between a 2018 fire that destroyed the National Museum of Brazil and the continued deforestation of the Amazon. Chan proposes a paradigm shift that would reify the rainforest as a museum: rather than a dense, entropic territory, the film suggests that the tropical rainforest provides stable environmental conditions akin to climate control.

But this is not a particularly innovative premise. It is actually in keeping with claims about “landscapes” and the promotion of tourism that extend back centuries and which scholars have endlessly pointed out to be entirely co-extensive with colonial practices and with a fundamentally delusional set of anthropocentric fantasies about “nature.” Besides, why should it be the trees and not the fire that is preserved? Is the fire not both trees and museum, and also more than both? Beyond that, why use video to express this sentiment that the curator relays? Would simply setting specific instructions for how a room should be temperature controlled not be a far more substantive conceptual and formal accomplishment than what is put on the wall? 

Placing the Chan video piece across from Toussaint-Baptiste’s creates a visual echo that ends up equalizing them both. Even with the rumbling, they come off more as interior design choices than artworks, and their arrangement seems more like a choice made to suit a couch than a concept. Like the other works, it is so severely overdetermined and generic that the display choices read as a joke. This is especially the case in the context of Anahita Norouzi’s “The Weight of Distant Objects,” which hugs two walls. It rehearses the rote theme of appropriating and decontextualizing objects from their ostensible “cultures.” It presents both an image of an object and a kind of dummy object that mimics it, and is wrapped in newspapers for the performance of vague historicization. Both are set or framed in flat, unvarnished wood that looks like it could have come from any design shop.

What the artworks constitute together is less an examination or problematization of gallery practices than an awkward demonstration of fantasies about problematizing practices. There is a basic irony that the majority of the works exhibited clearly deflate not only the notion of art as the producer of meaning, value, or experience, but positively show the total absurdity of the mystique that the curator attempts to wrap it in.

It does not help matters that the curatorial guide is also littered with extraordinarily false statements that ignore almost the entire history of art (east and west) like, “If artworks are traditionally singular objects offered for visual consumption, artists resist this convention by making works that are multisensory or ineffable.” As a curator of Contemporary Art for the National Gallery once said to me (only half-jokingly), no one is more ignorant about the history of art before 1965 than Contemporary Art curators.

To pick up with a few more of the claims and suggestions made by the curator: “Through critical, poetic, and imaginative forms, artists reimagine exhibition practices through works that confront them.” Is re-imagining a “confrontation,” or something more like a conformation? Conformation is essentially a cognate for the contemporary (a codified and market-tested fantasy of “the present”); together, they amount to the endurance of form (basically the unintended theme of “street actions” and their ironic afterlife as display at Optica). Which brings us to another question the curator raises. “What are other ways for living with objects?” This is an odd question for an exhibition to ask since you “live” with the objects in it almost exactly as you would in any other exhibition. Nothing about how the exhibition is curated alters this. Besides that, running through the formal implications of most of the works is a suggestion that the viewer/visitor is a potential irrelevance. The art is clearly the space itself, with or without any “life” in its boundaries.

Durational work (such as, to varying degrees, that of Gale, Nish-Lapidus, and Toussaint-Baptiste) never strikes me as “challenging” the norms of gallery display since a drone is ultimately less of a challenge to the viewer than a piece of furniture or a painting, both of which are no less durational (they are unspectacular spectacles of decay) and not in ways that provide token, largely symbolic, acknowledgments of human “presence” to anywhere near the same sentimental degree. A chair or a teacup will always be more than a “life.” You could argue that the safeguarding of the museum and gallery norms is, quite unintentionally, a reminder of that and a deflation of the narcissism of “experience.” 

 

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You could argue that both exhibitions essentially mummify that which was trying to escape them. They are instances of institutional revenge, a kind of artistic lobotomy after which you place a bonnet on the patient. (Morelli’s work certainly comes off this way. If this is intentional, it’s clever but underbaked. If it’s not, it’s simply weak.)

This is a problem I have brought up numerous times over the past few years. The interventionist critiques of museums etc., do not work that well in Canada because the actual art history of the country (institutional and otherwise) is not seriously comparable to the European and American models that such critiques rely on. This was already obvious in the 1970s and early 80s when critics would point out how imported and readymade these things were. At this point, it is just a bit mortifying. This is not to say there are not many things to critique or mock about gallery and museum practices. That is basically what I do. But there is a real difference between performative criticism (which almost everything that Optica programs falls into) and actual criticality.

It is not clear, in terms of visual thinking, what “criticality” would look like. However, I am sure it would not look like this. I do not think it would be enslaved to textual supplements and talks -- two of the normative techniques that are the most fundamentally objectionable. Again, to its credit, Vox at least tends to historicize the entirely dubious claims of Contemporary Art and objectifies them as a clunky bit of furniture.

The irony of artspeak is that when its users mention “criticality” or “critical thought,” as the Optica exhibition employs in its marketing, they are referring solely to adhering to dogmatic foundational claims. When a curator employs the “critical,” you know they are almost inevitably reinforcing a taboo. McCallum, for instance, derides a museum guard’s memoir for lacking “an overtly critical appraisal of the profession.” More disturbingly, the curator’s performative “criticality” is uncritically wedded to explicit appeals to mystification.

McCallum’s concluding curatorial statement is a reification of the most rote cliches of Contemporary Art discourse promulgated by the culture industry: “Ultimately, The Art Gallery Problem strives to share epistemologies of art that elude ownership and permanence. Through their durational, temporary, or ineffable qualities, these works embody alternatives to the norms of museum practice. Against the logic of mathematically optimized surveillance that the art gallery problem entrenches, this exhibition echoes Pandian’s call “to loving destruction, to mourn, renew, and re-enchant the world; to turn away from the pedestal and towards one another.”

You could argue, perhaps too easily, that the curation does not treat any of the implications of its own problems seriously. It settles into regurgitating a series of obvious (and themselves long standardized) tropes, and uncritically takes for granted a fantasy of “hegemony” that is a moral fantasy, not a historical fact. Does this Dazibao exhibition really say anything about museums or galleries, or does it suggest far more about online shopping and extremely boring recent tendencies in interior design? I say “suggest” because it does not say much about these either (even Wayfair commercial dialogue has more substance than anything happening in the curatorial ambitions here).

To conclude with another anecdote: my favourite museum moment is that, when I was at the Art Institute of Chicago, I asked a guard which direction a specific wing was, and they responded, “How the fuck should I know?” 

* Lousy installation shots are mine.