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...

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...

The fall season is here and galleries are opening their doors again. The art spaces at the Gaspé relaunched last week with the halls including a poster declaring the ongoing panic about the decline of culture and its potential ruination. The point comes across with a certain degree of ambiguity in the wording and this provides a useful backdrop to what will be discussed in this article. This selection of reviews is organized in a more or less thematic manner. The theme is primarily monumentality and secondarily some other, maybe more interesting things. Monumentality is a pretty standard theme in art discourse, localized in discussions of its earliest iterations in religious art and territorial markings. Monuments are one clear way to leave a trace or mark-up a landscape. The term tends to conjure the sculptural but certainly is not limited to it. A monument often indicates and memorializes the passage of some historical event, standing in for it as a kind of presence that may cast a...