Art in Montreal

  Stuck on the metro beside an anglophone with a manicured beard and beanie and a nondescript female companion, I listened as he bemoaned entering the “dark romantic era” of his life just as Gen Z was apparently abandoning their brief commitment to “new sincerity” and “post-irony” only to return to an irony that he pathologized as being a psychological defense mechanism to avoid dark thoughts.  This article is mostly about not understanding what people are referring to. Why bring this anecdote up? It seems vaguely relevant to the shows I saw before getting on the metro. Not that it strikes me as relevant to much of the work itself, none of which seemed especially ironic, post-ironic, sincere, or romantic, but these were things that some of the PR material around them marketed them as. The cruder and more relevant thing is that it is an example of someone constructing some narrative about their subjectivity (or someone else’s) and recognizing (at least performatively), that t...

  Last week we looked at two exhibitions that more or less dealt with the notion of “home.” In both instances, this was also inflected with the spectre of ruination. One did so in an overtly theatrical manner involving a lot of “meta-modernist” pastiche and “archaeological” stylization while the other concocted a self-destructive narrative of “displacement” that testified to the distance between art and the subjective fantasy of home. The notion of housing has also been cropping up a bit lately at Skol. They have had two group shows in the past few months dealing directly with it in a variety of guises lately. The currently on view Catalogue des ruines in certain respects was a logical follow-up to Mode d’emploi pour habitation invisible (User’s Manual for an Invisible Home) . If the latter relied on the idea of human structures as a basic model, the former relies on the notion of the world remade around the human in a far more extreme way. The exhibition’s text describes it...