Art in Montreal

With this year’s biennial coming up and almost everyone lazing for the holiday season, it seemed like a good time to recall the defunct version of the event, which expired in 2011 after which it was revived (twice) and hybridized. The first came as one of the peak achievements of the Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal (CIAC), which, far more than the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), seemed to take the premise that the city needed Contemporary Art seriously. The biennial is one of the most generic forms that Contemporary Art tends to be marketed in. It can have a national orientation, such as the Whitney, or an internationalist one, like the Venice. There are other variations and in Montréal it was a hodgepodge. A lot of ink has been spilled on the difference between these models of biennial and those that have been popping up in the “global south,” and that biennials, as associated as they may be with the “post-colonial turn” and/or with globalizing capital

Covering the “legendary period in Québec” of 1967 to 1977, Anithe de Carvalho’s Art rebelle et contre-culture (2015) seeks to “demystify” the myths around the Underground (or counterculture) and its role in the expanding apparatus of the Canadian government in the period. “I will try to demonstrate,” she writes, “Contrary to what some authors have claimed, that the politicised neo-avant-garde has not succeeded in its bet to remain on the fringe of the establishment and to work outside the system or the institutional field of art.” [9] Not only did it not succeed in staying “marginal,” but it has remained central to the state production of art since that period. She uses an array of works to examine the “de-compartmentalization [décloisonnement] of the paradigm of the democratization of culture and …the beginnings of the cultural democracy model.” [55] Among these is: Les Mécaniques, Les Mondes parallèles and Le Pavillon du synthétiseur ; Jean-Paul Mousseau’s Le Crash discotheque; Se

Québec 75 /Arts, Cinéma, Vidéo , organized by the l’Institut d’art contemporain de Montréal and curated by Normand Thériault, has come to be identified with the period and the relationship between the art and their cultural identity. It transformed the definition of Québec art from one that rested on language and its association with the francophone nation, to one defined by territory and residence. More importantly, it solidified Contemporary Art as one defined by institutionality and milieu. It can be seen an “inaugurating a new vision of Contemporary Art in Québec.” [Véronique Rodriguez, “Québec 75 /Arts, Cinéma, Vidéo: pour un nouvelle vision de l’art contemporain au Québec” in Ed. Francine Couture, Exposer l’art contemporain du Québec: discours d’intention et d’accompagnement (Montréal: Centre de diffusion 3D, 2003), 17]

The jeremiads of unrecognized geniuses, the antics and grimaces of coterie, the boutique esotericism, the imitation of the extremist fashions of the great American neighbour, the intellectual mediocrity and inculture, the easy temptations of craftsmanship and "balanced" beauty, all these features of the Montréal 'art scene'... [105] Published in 1975, Laurent-Michel Vacher’s Pamphlet sur la situation des arts au Québec is a time capsule for a specific sort of marxisant discourse on art, one worth digging up for what it suggests about the early period of Contemporary Art in the province. Some of its polemical points are, if anything, more convincingly applied to artists working today than those he attacked half a century ago. But his pamphlet is also worth reading for how much it fails to actually construct a viable critique, or even simple description, of the situation of art in the province or predict where it was headed. Between the late 1960s and 1974, the shi