Art in Montreal

Sophie Jodoin ’s d’un seul souffle exhibit is the product of a research residency at Artexte during which she examined the various documents collected under the names of female artists in the 410 sector of the institute. From them she photographed, scanned, and photocopied images and texts, integrating these into two works. One, a video, d’un seul souffle , and the other, a book. They occupy (more or less) separate spaces. The video has its own white room with a bench. The book sits on a shelf suspended from a brutalist surface. It can be flipped through. Facing it is a wall of names, arranged alphabetically like the dead at a cenotaph, of the artists that she examined. A book of her own, fastened so it cannot be leafed through, provides an additional joining point, sitting at the entrance to the video like a prop for a staged memorial.

Covering the “legendary period in Québec” of 1967 to 1977, Anithe de Carvalho’s Art rebelle et contre-culture (2015) seeks to “demystify” the myths around the Underground (or counterculture) and its role in the expanding apparatus of the Canadian government in the period. “I will try to demonstrate,” she writes, “Contrary to what some authors have claimed, that the politicised neo-avant-garde has not succeeded in its bet to remain on the fringe of the establishment and to work outside the system or the institutional field of art.” [9] Not only did it not succeed in staying “marginal,” but it has remained central to the state production of art since that period. She uses an array of works to examine the “de-compartmentalization [décloisonnement] of the paradigm of the democratization of culture and …the beginnings of the cultural democracy model.” [55] Among these is: Les Mécaniques, Les Mondes parallèles and Le Pavillon du synthétiseur ; Jean-Paul Mousseau’s Le Crash discotheque; Se

While catalogues like the two discussed here are not intended to be rigorous historical examinations or even polemics, they are useful as instances of institutional self-justification, which in both cases is fairly ambiguous. The institutions are largely placed in the background with the theatre of Contemporary Art happening before them or, it is intimated, behind closed doors somewhere. Published by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec with texts by Eve-Lyne Beaudry (conservatrice en art contemporain, MNBAQ) and Marie Fraser (professeure, département d'histoire de l'art, UQAM), Art contemporain du Québec: guide de collection (2016) contains a general essay which states the basic historiographic perspective of the institution and which is followed by nearly sixty two page profiles of specific artists (including duos and groups).

The jeremiads of unrecognized geniuses, the antics and grimaces of coterie, the boutique esotericism, the imitation of the extremist fashions of the great American neighbour, the intellectual mediocrity and inculture, the easy temptations of craftsmanship and "balanced" beauty, all these features of the Montréal 'art scene'... [105] Published in 1975, Laurent-Michel Vacher’s Pamphlet sur la situation des arts au Québec is a time capsule for a specific sort of marxisant discourse on art, one worth digging up for what it suggests about the early period of Contemporary Art in the province. Some of its polemical points are, if anything, more convincingly applied to artists working today than those he attacked half a century ago. But his pamphlet is also worth reading for how much it fails to actually construct a viable critique, or even simple description, of the situation of art in the province or predict where it was headed. Between the late 1960s and 1974, the shi

Art is free, or it is not. It invents, expresses itself and explores in all directions, or commits suicide by serving causes that are not its own. It is plural, diverse, crazy; or doctrinaire, intolerant and terribly serious. It asks questions to which we are fed answers everywhere. It stimulates the imagination, awakens utopias, and offers man the only game that rules do not hinder. And in this way, art energetically calls the whole environment into question. [29] Published in 1983, Guy Robert’s Art actuel au Québec: depuis 1970 provided an extensive survey of the art produced in the province in the 70s and early 80s (most of the art reproduced in the text is from 1980-1982.) It is a follow-up to his L'Art au Québec depuis 1940 of 1973 and examines what he takes to be the diversity of the plastic arts, under numerous names and tendencies, since the 1970s.  Robert insists on it as an essay or interrogation attentive to the role of the "socio-cultural" in art since t

Rose-Marie Arbour’s L’art qui nous est contemporain (1999) was one of the first extended attempts to conceptualize what the Contemporary Art that developed in Québec consisted of. In examining this issue, she set the province against models that had been established in the United States and Europe. {All quotations are my translation.} Arbour’s examination of Contemporary Art as it evolved in Québec is situated between two key statements. First: “This essay is rather an attempt to historically link artistic aims of the relatively recent past with others that are current, for the purpose of reflecting on the links that can be sketched that could mutually illuminate them.” [Arbour, 137] Second: “Today, the international is based in part on the local, contrary to what prevailed in the days of modernism when universal values were advocated in opposition to particularities and singularities. The contemporary is, in this respect, post-modern.” [Arbour, 138] These two contentions are c