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 ...
A critical revue of contemporary art in the city.