Art in Montreal

Following up on the previous two examinations ( I and II ) of the political economy of the local art world, this is a review of Simon Brault’s No Culture, No Future (2010). Originally published in French under the less apocalyptic title Le facteur C: l’avenir passe par la culture , I have used the English version here to respect the official translation. Brault is a bureaucrat and educator from the performing arts part of the cultural spectrum. His positions and much of the anecdotal information in his book are understandably focused there. Since that is usually much less relevant to our concerns, I have focused on the elements that are more generalizable or specific to the visual arts. As one of the country’s (and the province’s) leading cultural and educational bureaucrats, his book is worth reading for how much it says (or does not say) about what “culture” is or does. The book also provides one of the more thorough, if hardly rigorous, attempts to justify the existence of the

Last week, I discussed Delphine Huguet’s Les corps complexes at Projet Casa. Part of a feminist biennial, it thematically and structurally foregrounded censorship (or redaction) and confession as forms of created selfhood. This was given an additional (apparently unintentionally comic) dimension since the body of this presented self was depicted as a kind of (extremely familiar) alien object/commodity. These two aspects functioned together to create a mirage of performative depth (largely three-dimensional or durational work in a quasi-domestic space). This was doubled by a makeshift confessional where the participatory “confessions” would be redacted, the exhibitionistic display of their self-censorship an ironic recognition that the self is censorship. Visually this was conveyed by black blots and squares over words. The black square was even applied to an exit sign. Whether intended or not, this had the symbolic suggestion that the self, that repressive and obfuscatory function, b

When you enter Projet Casa , you are prompted to remove your footwear. Sitting by the door is a selection of slippers that you can put on. Given the theme of the exhibition, this would seem to suggest Hugh Hefner, minus smoking jacket and pipe. But it is not a gag. It is more like visiting a bowling alley and following the rigid signs of decorum and maintenance that oddly go along with it. Utilizing what the accompanying literature references as the domestic “bourgeois” space better than most of the installations that tend to be laid out in it, Delphine Huguet ’s Les corps complexes , curated by Mylène Lachance-Paquin , is part of the international Post-Invisibles : regard sur la place des femme biennial series of shows. Huguet is based in Montréal and France and Lachance-Paquin largely works developing corporate art “democratization” programming. The exhibition notes thank “the Canada Council for the arts for believing in me.” According to the curatorial statement : The exhibi

  Last week we looked at two shows that were prop-heavy. Whether painting or multi-media installation, the result was a stress on objectification that bypassed their literary inspiration. They ended up concentrating on props that were not reducible to theatricality. If anything, they foregrounded a kind of anti-theatricality, or a theatre in the absence of drama, a theatre of properties rather than performances. This week, we look at two shows where the use of the medium would also seem to suggest a prop quality, like steam-rolled dioramas. They also have something more closely approximating the documentary, and, notably, not the kind of documentary “ neoliberal ” aesthetic that tends to crop up. In these two shows, there is a stress, both thematic and formal, on localization and the sense in which the intensive quality of an aspect can be delineated by divergent rendering. They both frequently employ visual strategies that suggest cloisonné and are usefully seen as types of relief p

Last year, we detected a tendency toward literary adaptation in several shows that attempted to stage the literary work as a visual spectacle. This continues in two very different directions in a pair of shows on at the Belgo now. The first follows a loosely illustrative move and the second a more formally complex inter-textual one. They are thematically linked by being ostensibly concerned with identity, both in terms of their source material’s themes and their methodology, which introduces a relation between the material and the artist. This thematic concern tends to be overshadowed by the content of the works on display. According to the curatorial text for Marie-Danielle Duval ’s Emerald Room at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau: The exhibition presents a series of intimate paintings and drawings featuring black female figures inspired by Denver, a fictional character from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. These paintings offer narrative spaces conducive to reflection and repose for th

Occupying the top floor of Art Mûr, Éric Lamontagne’s La nature des choses muettes offers a selection of painted works. These are variations on the landscape genre. The spaces are presented, usually in a vertical format that suggests portraiture more than traditional landscape painting. Rather than suggesting the sublime, they tend toward the satiric, their images punctuated in an overtly literal way with butterflies cut out and extracted or discarded cigarettes and toilet paper seemingly rolled from the face of nature, leaving absences behind. Sometimes we can see that the image of nature has been rendered in ways that suggest digital pixelation and, in a few instances, the canvas is a wreck, either ruined by “nature” or dramatically embodying its destruction. The accompanying text spells out this reading as, “Here, the artist interjects into the landscape in a similar destructive manner that we as humans have intervened into the natural world.” But the logic of the works suggests

In the previous installment of this sketchy exploration of the political economy of Canada’s artworld, I dealt mostly with the specifics of Québec, notably with the corruption that some polemically suggested was central to how its art system functions. Here, I take a boarder view. In the background, more implied than argued here, is that Contemporary Art is a genre, at least if this term is understood in the way it has been employed by film theorists like Rick Altman and Steve Neale, to designate a heterogeneous matrix with consistent furniture, strategies of hybridization, and a clear pattern of industrial production that has to a substantial degree determined its formal qualities. As Altman has claimed, genres are best understood as “contraptions capable of performing multiple tasks” that allow for the general summing up of formula, structure, and expectation, providing a “conduit” for the flow of desires. [Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 14-15] T