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...

  In the space at the back of Galerie Nicolas Robert is a series of works by Chris Kline . Untitled and unnumbered, they fall under the general exhibition title, La Manche. Central to the works is their history as a medium that indexes the shifts in his working space. According to the framing statement : Nearly ten years ago Chris Kline began a process of reconfiguring his paintings. By deposing finished canvases from their stretchers, interposing them between the walls and floor in his studio, interleaving them between sheets of glass, plywood, raw canvas, and layers of gesso, an image appeared in a matrix of indirect ‘brush-strokes’: traces of the geometries of the absented stretcher-frame; the factures of cut, stretched, primed, painted cloth; and the surfaces of concrete and gypsum-board. Reframed and repositioned inside the expanded perimeters of new supports, this image was submerged under applications of paint; the palimpsest of second-hand brush-work dissolved. Indica...

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.” -Franz Kafka You could fill a small library with books on every side of the “culture war” over the past fifty years, most of which are pretty depressing. I have never been sold on the term, but it generally has something to do with “values,” how these are expressed in works of art, and how these things are legislated and bureaucratically managed. That “culture” may be one of the most perniciously idiotic pseudo-concepts in intellectual history does not help any of this. To her credit, Isabelle Barbéris ' 2018 book L’Art du politiquement correct: Sur le nouvel académisme anticulturel does at least introduce some potentially productive directions in thinking through this. It is a book of two parts. The first sixty percent is a rather broad overview of the theme. The last chunk of it shifts around through a few more specific aesthetic issues. While the first aspect is pretty clear, the second is mo...

Arriving during the summer slump (festival season) for galleries is the 20th edition of Art Mûr’s annual survey of the work of (primarily) grad students from MFA programmes across the country. And it is interesting again because the survey form and its absence of supplementation largely removes any clear intentionality and whatever “meaning” there seems to be comes largely from coincidences of display. Aside from checking if they had websites, I have made no effort to discern the significance of the works involved beyond how they appear in this context. The exhibition Fresh Paint and New Construction, a not-to-be-missed annual event, celebrates its 20th edition this year. As every July at Art Mûr gallery, the works of students from twelve Canadian universities are brought together in a collective exhibition, offering a captivating immersion into new artistic approaches. This edition is no exception, with a selection of works highlighting the innovation and creativity of the next gen...