Art in Montreal

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...

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 ...