Art in Montreal

Rose-Marie Arbour’s L’art qui nous est contemporain (1999) was one of the first extended attempts to conceptualize what the Contemporary Art that developed in Québec consisted of. In examining this issue, she set the province against models that had been established in the United States and Europe. {All quotations are my translation.} Arbour’s examination of Contemporary Art as it evolved in Québec is situated between two key statements. First: “This essay is rather an attempt to historically link artistic aims of the relatively recent past with others that are current, for the purpose of reflecting on the links that can be sketched that could mutually illuminate them.” [Arbour, 137] Second: “Today, the international is based in part on the local, contrary to what prevailed in the days of modernism when universal values were advocated in opposition to particularities and singularities. The contemporary is, in this respect, post-modern.” [Arbour, 138] These two contentions are c

“Au Québec, le mot le plus souvent recherché sur Pornhub est… « Québec » !” It would be difficult to legitimately object to the premise that pornography has been one of the central and most important aspects of artistic production in Québec since la Révolution tranquille . It was the success of the films de cul of the 1960s and 70s that established a Québécois film market, both at home and internationally, as viable. And many of the province's most significant directors - Carle, Héroux, Arcand, Fournier among them - worked within and against this tendency. There was a wealth of erotic visual art and music also created in that period, providing one of the strongest and most intellectually complex counter-directions to the more generically internationalist art contemporain that attained institutional hegemony in the 1970s and 80s. The complexity and wealth of the erotic material created in those two decades petered out somewhat in those that followed, in no small part thanks

Curated by Baruch Gottlieb, Feedback #6: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts at Fonderie Darling features a dozen artists (single and group) from four countries. It involves a dozen installations, mostly relying on sound and video, spread over two rooms at fair distances from one another. Texts from Marshall McLuhan's experimental publications are spread out in flat vitrines with a stress on his thinking about museums present in those texts that are easily legible, although the implications from this to the exhibition itself are not drawn out.  The artworks selected span from when he was alive until recent work and they tend to address technology in the most literal of ways. To put you into the appropriate mood, you are invited to plug into the droning monotone of Julia E. Dyck while staring at a hypnotic spinning disc as if you need therapeutic pseudo theory dripped into your ears like the nutrients of an IV.  One would expect that the choice to curate a show inspired by McLuhan would

  Peinture fraiche et nouvelle construction 2022 at Art Mûr . For better and worse, kitsch abounds at the latest edition of Art Mûr’s annual showing of work plucked from university programmes across the country. Whether it is a sign of curatorial bias or the homogeneity of current academic art, this year’s exhibition felt much more cohesive than the past few. It was mostly nicely arranged and flowed well. While sculpture in the country may be reaching a new low, if this and the work I have seen from the biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine are any indications, some of the painting is at least likable. I’ll address the sculpture problem at some other date. While the non-representational work consists almost entirely of the uniformly forgettable glittery-blob-deformed-diacritic-with-some-scrawling stuff that has been popping up for years, the figurative work is more interesting. None of it is quite decorative, but it’s pretty close. The more striking thing was how dated (an