Art in Montreal

With this year’s biennial coming up and almost everyone lazing for the holiday season, it seemed like a good time to recall the defunct version of the event, which expired in 2011 after which it was revived (twice) and hybridized. The first came as one of the peak achievements of the Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal (CIAC), which, far more than the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), seemed to take the premise that the city needed Contemporary Art seriously. The biennial is one of the most generic forms that Contemporary Art tends to be marketed in. It can have a national orientation, such as the Whitney, or an internationalist one, like the Venice. There are other variations and in Montréal it was a hodgepodge. A lot of ink has been spilled on the difference between these models of biennial and those that have been popping up in the “global south,” and that biennials, as associated as they may be with the “post-colonial turn” and/or with globalizing capital

If the various hazy streams of art in the city finally began to freeze into a more or less reductive vision of what constituted Contemporary Art around the Québec 75 exhibition , this gradual movement was further solidified a decade later with the inauguration of the Cent jours d’art contemporain, and its first exhibition Aurora Borealis , which ran in the summer of 1985. The media declared it “the biggest contemporary art event ever held in Canada, (in the Promenades de la Cité du Parc) [welcoming] some 15,000 visitors (including schools, colleges and universities who have booked a visit in the coming weeks).” [Jocelyne Lepage, “Aurora Borealis: 15 000 visiteurs et bonne presse,” La Presse , September 12, 1985, B1.] This was less than half of the attendance that had been projected, and, the journalist added, significantly less than the two blockbuster shows occurring simultaneous to it, Ramses II (500,000 visitors) and a Picasso show (300,000 visitors). But if it scarcely competed