Art in Montreal

I trip my fucking injectors in the heart of the System and feel that at the end of this mad satyriasis I have found again in the purity of its violence the language (désaintciboirisé) of my ancestors. The girls of good family (cock-teasers, every one) whom I pursued with incalculable assiduity, forced me to chasten my language (to castrate myself, that is) and deprive myself of my identity as a poor F.-C. condemned by two centuries of delirium to speak badly and without pleasure, and even to fornicate incestuously with my maternal tongue in a series of very lowlife sucking operations and lame bowings and scrapings, by turns fucking and being fucked: for the majestic and maternal tongue — it must be noted and said — has the status of a dead language! To speak it well is already a proof of necrophilia, or at best a morbid and regressive excess. [Hubert Aquin, Trou de mémoire , 1968] Johanne Lamoureux’s Profession, historienne de l’art (2009) was written for UdeM’s press as part of t...

The mayonnaise doesn’t take, all these beautiful people are just getting together to ape a culture, to pretend. We live, without suspecting it I suppose, in a simulation of culture, fundamentally unreal - the illusion is total, but we only have the empty appearance of things, never the reality. Laurent-Michel Vacher, Dialogues en ruine (1996) In Trou de mémoire (1968), Hubert Aquin has one of his characters write, “Québec is a poor troop of stuttering players afflicted with amnesia, who stare at each other with questioning looks.” This could be a description of the province’s Contemporary Art. It certainly seems like an apt description of how it was talked about by its apologists during the days of the doomed Triennales. Doom and horror tend to hover around a fair amount of the city’s Contemporary Art. It is usually marketed less crudely than this would suggest. Certainly, you could make a reasonable case for the rise of horror aesthetics and thematism in Contemporary Art, both ...