Art in Montreal

Common Absurd is an exhibition of work by Adam Basanta at Oboro in the Salle Daniel-Dion et Su Schnee. The supplemental text by Neal Thomas frames it as a re-examination of the optimistic spin on the possibilities once posed by new technologies and networks. For the techno-optimists of the late 1960s, this burgeoning situation seemed to be paving a way to escaping from old dichotomies between users and use. As Neal relays it, “The user emerged as a catch-all referent for this new subjectivity, mixing consumer, creator, technician, actor, and audience member into a composite heroic position that anyone might plausibly occupy.” Yet, after more than half a century of this heroic posturing, the “‘creative user’ feels so much more like a mandated norm than an emancipatory possibility.” There are (at least) two different thematic directions from which you could approach the exhibition. One: as dealing with general concepts about the function of the user in the post-industrial era, how...

Kent Monkman: History Is Painted by the Victors is the latest large single-artist exhibition to open at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. A mid-career retrospective, it was organized in collaboration with the Denver Art Museum . John Lukavic, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum, co‑curated it with Léuli Eshrāghi, Curator of Indigenous Practices at the MMFA. As usual with such exhibitions, the press previews, notably from official broadcasters such as the English and French CBC, were effusive. Eshrāghi told Westmount Magazine that, “The stories Monkman tells offer crucial insights into contemporary realities for Indigenous peoples, while questioning dominant culture and society as a whole.”  A social media post from the institution markets it this way: ““My name is Miss Chief Eagle Testickle and I come from the stars.” [p] Meet Miss Chief Eagle Testickle (a play on the words mischief and egotistical), the fierce, time-traveling character cr...

If you take a survey course in the history of twentieth century art at most universities in this country, there is typically minimal, if any, substantial recognition of the art of totalitarian states. One exception I recall from my own art education was a survey course in the art of Asia in the past century, where it was unavoidable. But the generic line for most surveys of Modern to Contemporary Art follows different sorts of formalism into more thematic or identity-based art practices. Most textbooks on twentieth century art tend to be organized around these lines. Along the way, the two Futurisms (Fascist and Marxist) will pop up, Surrealism’s extremely dubious political implications may arise, the anarchistic aspects of Realism, Expressionism, or Dada may be mentioned, and so on. By the time you get to the 1960s, this more “activist” side then gets exploited as part of the genealogy that leads to the more seemingly overt political art that follows from the 1960s. The art of the Na...

  Thankfully, summer is ending, and the undeserved holiday season that galleries take is coming to a close. I review two current exhibitions below, but they come with a preamble. Prefacing that, I should say that I have little doubt that the tendencies discussed below would have emerged without AI; so, the suggestion is not that they share deep cultural continuity, but that they share incidental formal traits. I am on the fence about the likely implications of AI for art (it seems much clearer for other fields), but it annoys enough people that it is at least potentially interesting. Despite the “newness” that people associate with it, AI’s artistic potential seems to be entirely in step with the ambitions of significant aspects of the avant-garde from a hundred years ago. However, the dreams of an automatic, depersonalized art made by machines that would eliminate elitism — and which were central to many Modernist ambitions — seem entirely out of step with the reac...