MONTRÉAL

Curators: Michèle Thériault and Vincent Bonin

INTRODUCTION

When conceptual art emerged in Montréal in the late 60s and early 70s, it had little impact and was not the subject of important public debate, remaining the domain of a counter-public of peers. Its various manifestations in Montréal cannot be dissociated from the political, social, and cultural turmoil of the time, marked by a modernization of state institutions, the democratization of culture, and francophone Québec’s project of emancipation, which led to the election of the Parti Québécois in 1976. The practice of conceptual art thus evolved within a complex and divisive context. On the one hand, linguistic polarization was charged and pervasive, and on the other, painting and the heritage of the automatistes (the group of artists who signed the Refus Global written by Paul-Émile Borduas in 1948) remained a reference point that was being challenged by the international formalist agenda of the néo-plasticiens.

The single most important conceptual art event was Bill Vazan, Arthur Bardo, and Gary Coward’s 45° 30’ N – 73° 36’ W show of American and Canadian artists at Sir George Williams University and the Saidye Bronfman Centre in 1971. Out of that event, and in response to institutional apathy, emerged Véhicule Art Inc., the artist-run organization that became a forum not only for conceptual practices, but a multidisciplinarity that further disturbed the hegemony of painting in Montréal. In the works and exhibitions one can define as conceptual in Montréal, a universalist stance was often adopted, or, one that addressed a larger, non-local artistic movement. Language, for instance, was often treated as a vector for pure information rather than for cultural self-affirmation (or isolation), as it overwhelmingly was in the Québécois literary field at the time. The mapping of geographic locations was practiced as an inscription within global networks rather than as a territorial claim. Not surprisingly, many of the most prominent practitioners of conceptual art belonged to the anglophone community (Bill Vazan, Suzy Lake, Tom Dean). However, many francophone artists such as Françoise Sullivan, Jean-Marie Delavalle, Raymond Gervais, Serge Tousignant, and Rober Racine were drawn to a dematerialized approach to art-making because it offered them the possibility of crossing media and disciplines and a freedom to experiment, which constituted another way for them to inscribe themselves in Québec’s project of cultural modernization.

The critical apparatus supporting conceptual practices in Montréal was scarce until the creation of Parachute [magazine] in 1975. However, the art critic and curator Normand Thériault, a central and controversial figure who, throughout the 70s, enabled artistic experimentation in Montréal across linguistic and disciplinary divides, was an important defender, recognizing early on its role in decompartmentalizing art-making and opening it up to international avant-gardes. In his writing and in the positions he adopted, Thériault epitomized, in many ways, the manner in which conceptual art interfaced with the political, aesthetic and linguistic debate in Québec at the time.

PAINTING AND CONCEPTUAL ART

The influence of Paul-Émile Borduas and the mouvement automatiste in the 1950s remained in great part a reference point around which Quebec’s project of emancipation evolved during the Quiet Revolution. In this context, painting stood less as a form of cultural inertia that had to be challenged and more as an indisputable marker of identity. As a result, the debate that polarized artistic circles was generally framed around an opposition between passing down such a painterly heritage or updating it by way of a formalist agenda advocated by abstract and hard-edge painters, such as Yves Gaucher, Jean McEwen, Guido Molinari, and Claude Tousignant. However, a number of artists working primarily in painting became interested in the crossover of medias, while others developed practices whose programmatic nature resonated with conceptual art.

INTERMEDIARIES

The reception and dissemination of conceptual art in Montreal was episodic and limited due, in part, to a fragmented artistic community that had different points of interest to defend. All of these concerns – the renewal of painting, experimentation in media, the appropriation and integration of popular culture, art as a tool for democratization – intersected with and were inflected to different degrees by the linguistic divide. In this context conceptual art never became the focus of important public debate; nevertheless it had protagonists of note who promoted it.

Bill Vazan was the most consistent and single-minded proponent of conceptual art in Montreal. Along with Arthur Bardo and Gary Coward, Vazan organized 45° 30’ North 73° 36’ West (1971), which was the most significant event to bring international conceptual practices to Montreal. Vazan, with his “line” projects which began in the late 60s, also maintained a continuous exchange with a network of Canadian artists and cultural officials. An American who settled in Montreal in the early 70s for a few years and wrote for both The Montreal Star and The Gazette, Bardo had known Lucy Lippard in New York and was attuned to and defended dematerialized practices. Suzy Lake, another American and a founder of Véhicule Art, was a catalyst, along with Tom Dean, who joined soon after its creation. Many of these figures were linked to Sir George Williams University, now Concordia University, as students or teachers.

As a critic at La Presse from 1968 to 1872, Normand Thériault was the first to acknowledge the significance of conceptual art in Montreal beyond the linguistic divide. He did not, however, privilege this approach over others in the milieu, but saw it as contributing to the ongoing fragmentation and overturning of the hierarchy of media. An active and influential figure throughout the 70s, Thériault integrated conceptual discourse in magazines he edited (Médiart and Tilt), organizations he directed (the Groupe de recherche en administration de l’art) and in exhibitions he curated, notably the controversial project Québec 75.

PERIODICALS

During the 1960s and 1970s, the publication of magazines on the fringe of the literary field such as Quartier Latin and Parti pris generated platforms of exchange among new left authors with a nationalistic agenda. Without leaving this political stance aside, magazines such as Mainmise, in which Buckminster Fuller’s texts appeared alongside articles on sexual emancipation and recreational drugs, followed the burgeoning of a local counter-culture tied to the North American hemisphere. Much like their peers in Toronto and Vancouver, Québécois visual artists were inspired by this emergence of small presses and thusly created their own periodicals. At the same time as the network of artist-run centres was consolidated, these publications played an important role in promoting conceptual art, encouraging artists to become critics and assess the work of their peers.

Composed of students who would become key art world protagonists in the 1980s – France Morin, Chantal Pontbriand, Claude Gosselin, René Blouin – the Groupe de recherche en administration de l’art launched Médiart. This magazine eschewed disciplinary boundaries as it reviewed current trends in Canadian and international art, and, like Mainmise, took stock of the rise of countercultural movements.

In contrast to General Idea’s FILE Megazine that acted as a trans-Canadian platform, Médiart’s readership was limited by its exclusively French content. Printed at Véhicule Art press in 1972, Tom Dean launched Beaux-arts as a local, English-language complement to FILE and Avalanche. Dean had already published a number of conceptual projects as printed matter such as Easy Cheap (1970), which gathered over 200 contributions. Beaux-arts had a short lifespan – the last issue appeared in 1973 – but retrospectively provided the evidence that a correspondence art scene existed in Montreal. Nevertheless, it was only with the appearance of Parachute, a bilingual magazine co-founded in 1975 by Chantal Pontbriand and France Morin, that a Montreal-based publication would be able to reach readers beyond the borders of Québec. Parachute soon became an indispensable platform for critical discourse on international contemporary art.

VÉHICULE ART

At the time of the 45° 30’ North 73° 36’ West show, certain artists began planning for the creation of the cooperative Véhicule Art, which was incorporated in 1972. Gary Coward, Tom Dean, Jean-Marie Delavalle, François Déry, Andrew Dutkewych, Suzy Lake, Dennis Lucas, Kelly Morgan, Gunter Nolte, Milly Ristvedt, Henry Saxe, Serge Tousignant and Bill Vazan were its founding members. In keeping with the title of the 1971 exhibition, the organization’s name was meant above all to define the space as a “neutral” dissemination tool circumscribed by its users. It thus acted as a catalyst for bilingualism and underlined the strategic apolitical stance of artists who lived in a city that was strongly divided along cultural lines. The members of Véhicule Art distanced themselves from the orthodoxy of conceptual art as they embraced the more inclusive programmes of post-minimalism and process art. For many, the concept of dematerialization was regarded as one aesthetic strategy among others that could be recycled depending on the nature of the project at hand.

DISCURSIVE CONSTELLATIONS

As they started working during the second half of the 1970s, Raymond Gervais, Rober Racine, David Tomas and Tim Clark were still informed by the critical project of early American and European conceptual art. However, their respective practices represented a shift toward other methodologies, as they sought to give tangible form to various overlapping historical or theoretical references. The strategy of quoting was played out differently in Irene F. Whittome’s work as she created linkages between elements of conceptual text-based practices and the cultural practices of Beuys and Arte Povera, as well as Harald Szeeman’s concept of “Individual Mythologies”.

ANTAGONISMS AND UTOPIA

Many conceptual artists regarded language as a heuristic tool capable of calling into question the very foundations of an ideology of medium specificity, as well as an apparently inalienable definition of artistic subjectivity. The artwork envisioned as an information carrier also linked their respective practices around a larger project of democratization. English was nevertheless the code most of them shared as a given community of speakers. For the Montreal section of Traffic, however, such discursive constellations had to be reappraised by taking into consideration the linguistic debate that dominated Québécois society throughout the latter part of the 1960s and 1970s. Forming a kind of meta-commentary in the exhibition, three instances are juxtaposed in which such antagonisms reveal themselves: Québec 75, Michèle Lalonde’s Speak White and Joyce Wieland’s Pierre Vallières.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Arbour, Rose-Marie et al. Déclics, art et société : le Québec des années 1960 et 1970. Montréal: Fides, 1999.

Charney, Melvin, ed. Montréal: plus ou moins? / Montréal: plus or minus? Montréal: Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, 1972.

Lalonde, Michèle. Défense et illustration de la langue québecoise : suivie de Prose et poèmes. Paris: Seghers / Laffont, 1979.

Mills, Sean. The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal. Montréal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010.

Pontbriand, Chantal, ed. Performance: text(e)s & documents. Montréal: Parachute, 1981.

Pontbriand, Chantal, France Morin, and Normand Thériault, eds. 03 23 03: Premières rencontres internationales d'art contemporain. Montréal: Médiart; Parachute, 1977.

Ross, Christine. Décades 1972-1992. Chronologie des expositions, index des artistes. Montréal: Optica, 1992.

Thériault, Michèle, and Vincent Bonin, eds. Documentary Protocols (1967-1975). Montréal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2010.

Thériault, Normand, ed. Québec 75. Montréal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1975.

Thériault, Normand, and Diana Nemiroff. Hier & Après / Yesterday & After. Montréal: Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, 1980.

Warren, Jean-Philippe. Une douce anarchie : les années 68 au Québec. Montréal: Boréal, 2008.

TORONTO + GUELPH + LONDON

Curator: Barbara Fischer

TORONTO

In the early 1960s, young artists would find the Toronto arts scene divided between the British modernism of Henry Moore on the one hand, and the fledgling group of abstractionists, Painters Eleven (whose work leaned heavily towards the influence of American critic Clement Greenberg) on the other. A counter tendency to these influences evolved in the experimental direction of Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland, whose interest in perceptual framing in painting moved towards a focus on structural works in sound, sculpture, film, and photo-based pieces from the mid 60s on. If Wieland’s peripatetic experimentations increasingly centered on a rising feminist, ecological and patriotic consciousness, Snow’s work maintained a strong self-reflective tendency—to explore through the means of a medium, the characteristics particular to it. His work shares with conceptual art the use of the camera as a ‘dumb’ recording device and the making of a work as per a predetermined course, an interest that would persist in Toronto throughout the 1970s and beyond, from the works of Robin McKenzie through to the photographic portrait sequences of Arnaud Maggs.

By the late 1960s, an ever greater number of artists, including war-resisters and draft-dodgers from the US, flocked to Toronto and its burgeoning, heady mix of countercultural constellations: Coach House Press, a bastion of the Canadian art/literary circuit from 1966 on; the University of Toronto’s Rochdale College, an experimental school cum co-op residence cum flophouse, which operated between 1968 and 1975; and most importantly, the buzz around the formation of General Idea and the establishment of its headquarters on Yonge Street in 1970, from which, as AA Bronson put it, “our Burroughsian dream of a transcanadian art scene” would find shape in a strategic sequence of concise endeavours: from the Miss General Idea Pageant, to FILE Megazine (1972-1989); the development of the artist-run archive and publishing house, Art Metropole (1973/74); and the conceptual architecture of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant Pavillion (1975) which sketches General Idea’s sustained reflection on the concept of art. These endeavours, and Les Levine’s Red Tape (1970) and Vera Frenkel’s String Games (1974), for instance, exemplified the pervasive desire to link geographically distant places, establish social networks, and develop artistic communities throughout the 1960s and 70s, while remarking upon the complexities of technological optimism and the conundrums of administrative realities.

Critically important for Toronto’s visual arts community, and its engagement with conceptual art, was the Nightingale Gallery (reconfigured in 1971 into the artist-run centre, A Space), which hosted Concept 70 (one of Toronto’s most overt engagements with conceptual art) and the early boundary-challenging, conceptual performance-based videos by Stephen Cruise, John McEwen, Robert Bowers, Lisa Steele, Tom Sherman, and Americans Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci. A Space became, for most of the 1970s, the focus for conceptual and experimental art and its critical exploration in Toronto. It also signalled the beginning of a particular preoccupation of Toronto-based conceptualism; a determined sense of disbelief and fundamental scepticism toward language and representation expressed in a sustained critique of ideologies of transparency. Evidence of this preoccupation can be found in the early video works of John Watt, Colin Campbell, and Lisa Steele and, from the early 1970s on, in the photo-text works by Ian Carr-Harris, Robin Collyer, Tom Sherman, Andy Patton, Gordon Lebredt, and others.

The dissatisfaction with the analytical trajectory of conceptual art, as exemplified by American artist Joseph Kosuth (who showed at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery), was declared by Toronto artists Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge who broke off their relationship with the New York Art & Language group of which Kosuth was a prominent member. Their contentious 1975 solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario sought to question and search for a new social and political role for art. It also marked the beginning of a splintering of the Toronto arts community, which became increasingly diversified along multiple and contesting lines of inquiry involving the institutional distinction between media, the body politic, the role of art vis-à-vis its publics and not least of all, cultural diversity. Intent on turning away from conceptual art proper, artists sought ‘something revolutionary’ in an enduring critical engagement with language and representation, not least of all through the means of narrative and fiction.

GUELPH

A small town in the late 1960s, renowned for a university specializing in environmental, agricultural and life sciences research, Guelph became an unexpected centre of experimental art when British artist Eric Cameron arrived to head up the art department in 1969. Cameron (who relocated to NSCAD in 1976) transformed both curriculum and pedagogy. Influenced by Sol Lewitt’s notion of conceptual art—the idea as the machine that makes the art—Cameron’s teaching departed from the traditional technical and skill-building foundation of art education, calling instead for collective projects in which teachers and students collaborated on material actions based on an initial set of instructions, then watched and debated their unexpected effects.

These experimental projects might involve collectively making a sculpture, drawing lines—suggestive of sections of meat—directly on a model’s body (which Cameron described as a pre-ardent feminist undertaking), or undertaking exercises involving perspectival or optical illusion between painting and its physical location in a given room.

Among Cameron’s most important initiatives was the introduction of video art into the curriculum. With artist Alan Lite from Detroit, and now-renowned Toronto-based video and installation artist Noel Harding in the role of technician, Cameron taught a video course without ever having held a video camera in his hands. The curriculum was developed by instructions that could be executed by anyone. The video program attracted visiting artists and curators, including Lisa Steele, General Idea, and Peggy Gale, and in 1974 and 1975, the art department hosted Video Circuits, consecutive exhibitions that included works by Peter Campus, Dan Graham, Nam June Paik, Colin Campbell, and others. These exhibitions led to the founding of Ed Video in 1976 by four students: Charlie Fox, Brad Brace, Marlene Hoff, and Greg Hill. As Noel Harding pointed out, the direction of video then moved more toward narrative than conceptual structure.

LONDON

London, which in 1961 had a population of less than 170,000, came to be one of the country’s most important and thriving artists’ communities from the early 1960s on—largely through the efforts of artists Jack Chambers (1931–1978) and Greg Curnoe (1936–1992), and their ever-widening circle of friends and peers.

Jack Chambers’ deeply consequential conviction that “there can never be a better spokesman for the artist than the artist himself,” led to the 1968 founding of Canadian Artist Representation (CAR), which fought to have artists’ copyright and labour recognized, but which also informed the underlying ethos of artist-run culture that engendered experimental and ‘underground’ art across the country.

Distinguished by a fervent regionalism, Curnoe founded Region Magazine in 1961, the cooperative Region Gallery in 1962, and the 20/20 Gallery in 1966, a prototype for artist-run centres and the first to pay artists’ exhibition fees. The Board of Directors of the gallery included the minimalist sculptors Royden and David Rabinowitch, conceptual painter Ron Martin, sculptor Murray Favro and performance artist Rae Davis, among others. If Curnoe’s regionalism entailed a strong anti-Americanism—close the Canada/US border even to birds, insects and germs—it did not foreclose his interest in artists from elsewhere, including American conceptual artist Bruce Nauman, whom he invited to do a sound project at 20/20 Gallery in 1970.

Curnoe’s concerns as an artist were autobiographical and firmly grounded in his experience of the immediate and the local; they also evolved from the anarchistic, antiestablishment, delinquent, and anti-bourgeois tendencies of Neo-Dada supported within the artistic circles surrounding Toronto art dealer Avrom Isaacs. By 1962, Curnoe was already making works consisting exclusively of text, creating inventories through impersonal, administrative measures that would come to preoccupy conceptual art, such as utilizing ink stamps or measuring devices to chronicle day-to-day routines. In 1973, the American critic John Chandler claimed that Curnoe had been making conceptual and process art before these terms were coined.

This interest in language and process-oriented work, as well as concerns with mapping and cultural geography, found tremendous resonance in conceptual art globally and continued to be a powerful trajectory in the work of artists associated with the London scene, including Ron Martin, Robert Fones, and Becky Singleton and in the political orientation of Ron Benner and Jamelie Hassan’s photo-text installations.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Bayer, Fern and Christina Ritchie. The search for the spiri : General Idea 1968-1975. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1997.

Bronson, AA, ed. From Sea to Shining Sea: Artist-Initiated Activity in Canada. Toronto: Power Plant, 1987.

Carmen Lamanna Gallery at the Owens Art Gallery. Toronto: Carmen Lamanna Art Gallery, 1974.

Fischer, Barbara. General Idea Editions, 1967-1995. Mississauga: Blackwood Gallery, 2003.

Gale, Peggy. Video by Artists. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1976.

Gale, Peggy, and Lisa Steele, eds. Video Re/View: the (best) source book for critical writings on Canadian artists' video. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1996.

Guest, Tim. Books by Artists. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1981.

Kerr, Richard, and Paul Blain. Practices in Isolation: Canadian Avant-Garde Cinema. Kitchener: Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, 1986.

Richard, Alain-Martin, and Clive Robertson, eds. Performance au Canada, 1970-1990 / Performance in Canada, 1970-1990. Québec: Éditions Intervention; Toronto: Coach House Press, 1991.

Scott, Kitty, and Jonathan Shaughnessy, eds. Art Metropole: The Top 100. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2006.

Shedden, Jim, ed. Presence and Absence: The Films of Michael Snow. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1995.

Théberge, Pierre. Greg Curnoe : rétrospective / Greg Curnoe: Retrospective. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1982.