Art in Montreal

  Previously, I have discussed my reservations around the employment of the role of “narrative” in exhibitions. Specifically, this involves the lack of clarity in how this notion translates to the visual display of work and how interaction with the work actually operates. Unless you stretch the term to its breaking point, very little in the practical visual logic of most exhibitions has any strong narrative content. This just seems like an unnaturally appended term to appeal to concepts that can then (presumably) be projected onto the work when it is not clearly evident. As such, it allows for the set-up of a fantasy of relations that the material reality of the work demonstrates to be absent. As a strategy, it is a way of trying to smuggle things in without doing the work that would make them sensible as visual art (if they can even make sense that way). So, an appeal to narrative is primarily an authoritarian device of enframing, something that tends to be the reserve of curatin...

The Rustlings of the Group Are Invented as They Slip Away is an exhibition by UQAM graduate student Marie-Pier Vanchestein at Elektra. According to the accompanying text : This installation features robotic benches that move together in space, following rules inspired by swarm algorithms. Through their movements, both programmed and unpredictable, the benches seek, through a common movement, to escape the gallery. The hum of their motors accompanies this attempt at emancipation, creating a collective murmur. [p] By playing with diversion and the principle of emergence, the exhibition questions our relationship with the structures that surround us. Can these benches truly break free from the framework that defines them? Through this poetic staging, the artist invites us to rethink the connections that unite a collective and the spaces it inhabits. As is my habit, I did not read the accompanying text until I had spent some time in the exhibition. I assumed it was some kind of joki...

  Heart On is a retrospective of the work of Toronto artist Joyce Wieland. It was co-produced by Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Art Gallery of Ontario and is the first retrospective of the artist’s work in several decades. The last, nearly 40 years ago, contained much of the same work. The museum’s ad text (most of which is duplicated at the entrance to the exhibit) informs us that: This ambitious career retrospective … is also the most comprehensive, and positions Wieland as a critical international figure of 20th-century art and film. […] Spotlighting the concerns that informed Wieland’s creative output, namely her engagement with feminism, social justice and ecology, this exhibition explores her unique approach to art-making and the enduring relevance of her oeuvre to contemporary issues. The current retrospective cleverly opens with Wieland’s oil painting Time Machine Series (1961), which, typical for that period of her work, combines abstract imagery with vibr...

  Stuck on the metro beside an anglophone with a manicured beard and beanie and a nondescript female companion, I listened as he bemoaned entering the “dark romantic era” of his life just as Gen Z was apparently abandoning their brief commitment to “new sincerity” and “post-irony” only to return to an irony that he pathologized as being a psychological defense mechanism to avoid dark thoughts.  This article is mostly about not understanding what people are referring to. Why bring this anecdote up? It seems vaguely relevant to the shows I saw before getting on the metro. Not that it strikes me as relevant to much of the work itself, none of which seemed especially ironic, post-ironic, sincere, or romantic, but these were things that some of the PR material around them marketed them as. The cruder and more relevant thing is that it is an example of someone constructing some narrative about their subjectivity (or someone else’s) and recognizing (at least performatively), that t...