Art in Montreal

Sponsored by Caisse Desjardins and AC/E’s Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture, the VOX exhibition’s opening pedagogical text asserts that the works in L’imaginaire radical II: désœuvrer la valeur collectively propose to offer a set of hypothetical alternatives (which they identify as: “1) decolonize/ecologize; 2) measure; 3) organize; 4) speculate/fabulate”) to the “knowledge” offered by financial models, defined in terms of legibility and statistics. More fully: This exhibition and its accompanying events and texts speak to an attempt to produce “finance-proof” knowledge—that is to say, a space in which to consider the notion of value and its forms that is immune to the economic categorical imperative. That imperative, of course, is that of growth and profitability: the dominion of measurement, of the readability of indexes, of statistical commensurability. In the place of this, the curatorial position statement suggests, are a set of rival propositions or p...

Curated by Baruch Gottlieb, Feedback #6: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts at Fonderie Darling features a dozen artists (single and group) from four countries. It involves a dozen installations, mostly relying on sound and video, spread over two rooms at fair distances from one another. Texts from Marshall McLuhan's experimental publications are spread out in flat vitrines with a stress on his thinking about museums present in those texts that are easily legible, although the implications from this to the exhibition itself are not drawn out.  The artworks selected span from when he was alive until recent work and they tend to address technology in the most literal of ways. To put you into the appropriate mood, you are invited to plug into the droning monotone of Julia E. Dyck while staring at a hypnotic spinning disc as if you need therapeutic pseudo theory dripped into your ears like the nutrients of an IV.  One would expect that the choice to curate a show inspired by McLuhan w...

  Peinture fraiche et nouvelle construction 2022 at Art Mûr . For better and worse, kitsch abounds at the latest edition of Art Mûr’s annual showing of work plucked from university programmes across the country. Whether it is a sign of curatorial bias or the homogeneity of current academic art, this year’s exhibition felt much more cohesive than the past few. It was mostly nicely arranged and flowed well. While sculpture in the country may be reaching a new low, if this and the work I have seen from the biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine are any indications, some of the painting is at least likable. I’ll address the sculpture problem at some other date. While the non-representational work consists almost entirely of the uniformly forgettable glittery-blob-deformed-diacritic-with-some-scrawling stuff that has been popping up for years, the figurative work is more interesting. None of it is quite decorative, but it’s pretty close. The more striking thing was how dated...