Art in Montreal

  Miles Rufelds ' Palais des glaces at Centre Vox consists of a 55-minute video isolated in a small viewing room and an installation in the larger room. There’s also an accompanying essay, but as with most supplements at Vox, you are better off ignoring it. The installation is dark, dramatically lit by lightboards featuring small photos, texts, slides, and other accumulated “evidence” with scrawling and lines implying relations. It’s the sort of generic image of speculative relationships and possible acts that you commonly find in cop shows to illustrate how detectives piece things together. You get similar boards in depictions of schizophrenics, conspiratorialists, and so on. In academic social science research, you get a textual variation of it to make it look more intellectually sober. Perhaps most relevantly, you get something like this in the work of art historian Aby Warburg (who was also possibly a schizophrenic) and whose noble ambition was to create a form of art histor...

  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 reac...

If you have the misfortune of reading these posts regularly, you may have noticed the frequency with which I refer to propism , a term I do not think I have ever defined. The following is a deliberately crude and short essay that sets out to do so. As the “prop” in the term would indicate, this revolves around notions borrowed from the logic of the theatrical medium. Anthropomorphism Probably the most canonical discussion of theatricality in visual art comes from Michael Fried. 1967’s still highly controversial “Art and Objecthood” sought to delineate what he took to be two warring sensibilities, one that he associated with Modernist painting and sculpture and the other with the grey area between art and non-art that he associated with literalist (or more commonly termed Minimalist) art. He took literalism as defining itself as a position taken against Modernism. At bottom, this was a war of sensibilities and experience more than one of any deep ideological convictions. It was an op...

Occupying the gallery facing the street on the second floor of Art Mûr is Mohadese Movahed ’s Voices of Feathers, Voices of Daggers. The show consists of a series of paintings that focus primarily on walls of various kinds. Some are brick, some stone, some are barrier walls, some shops walls, house walls, and so on. These walls are typically framed by or juxtaposed with windows, doorways, and other architectural implements and elements. Occasionally, a fragmented or obscured body part will be seen, but most of the time the presence of the human figure comes in the form of shadows cast on the walls. Within the grids of the walls appear bits of graffiti, posters, and the occasional flower. According to the accompanying text by Sara Trapara , this work is rooted in the artist’s identity as an Iranian and relates the “psychological complexities of life under oppression.” This series explores how the built environment is altered by memories and experiences of trauma, oppression and vio...

  This week we deal with three shows that play with different types of fetish imagery. Unlike the more commonplace fetish imagery about “culture,” these are more overt in tackling eroticism. This is not to suggest that the culture fetish is not present, in fact, in two of the shows it is explicitly foregrounded. At Art Mûr is Diana Thorneycroft ’s exhibition of coloured drawings, Sing Into my Mouth . Thorneycroft has consistently changed strategies across her career. Her work divides easily into distinct directions and models that she has pursued for several years at a time. There have been thematic and stylistic consistencies within this. Her current drawings share something with her earlier ones depicting murdering one’s lovers and continue her interest in the perverse, whether that is taken as content or strategy. Throughout her career, there has also been a concern with either esoteric mythologies or more global ones subjected to various sorts of subversion. The more obviou...