Art in Montreal

  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. T...

  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...

It would not occur to us to demand a prescription for nostalgia. Yet in the seventeenth century, nostalgia was considered to be a curable disease, akin to the common cold. Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches and a journey to the Swiss Alps would take care of nostalgic symptoms. By the twenty-first century, the passing ailment turned into the incurable modern condition. The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. Optimistic belief in the future was discarded like an outmoded spaceship sometime in the 1960s. Nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes nostalgia is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. -- Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (2001) I will preface this with an obvious statement. When reviewing a biennial, one is not reviewing the works as they exist autonomously, but how they exist as part of a collective curation. Even with the demarcation by author...