Courtesy of the artist.
In the past 10 years there has been an unprecedented resurgence of the conceptual in art. It is not so much that it spells the triumph of Conceptual art (from the mid 1960s to the early to mid 1970s) over other art movements, for today’s exploded discourse of art’s relationship to life and the public sphere, intermingled with the ferocious and frenetic forces of the market, render such a proposition meaningless. Rather, it demonstrates both the resilience and versatility of Conceptualism’s tactics and its capacity for inhabiting (and being inhabited by) a diversity of artistic practices—some paradoxically ‘unconceptual’,—that incites one to return to and rethink the original instance and the work it produced. A number of critics and historians have done exactly this in books and commentaries that attempt to track its legacy and rethink its objectives. That so many artworks incorporate conceptualist elements and approaches today is somewhat paradoxical given the failure of some aspects of Conceptual art’s program, namely its inability to reach a wider lay audience and to effectively transform the institutional apparatus of art. Furthermore, many artists in the late 70s and early 80s turned their back on it because it did not open to them avenues of further artistic engagement. Canada’s Jeff Wall embraced monumental pictorialism, finding no possibility to pursue an investigation of the social subject in the Conceptual art of the late 60s and early70s claiming that it deadened language and that its chosen medium (cards, files, binders, etc) evoked a “mausoleum look.”1 Nevertheless, that form of art along with the more loosely constituted and immaterial activities of Fluxus in the 60s and 70s questioned the institutional apparatus of art in an unprecedented way and offered alternative structures for its existence in society. It also unsettled the hegemony of visuality opening up the field to non optical forms of art.
There are many reasons that can explain why so many artists are embracing Conceptualism today or at least some of its strategies. Among them is the indisputable criticality at the heart of Conceptual art. The demands it made on conventional notions of authorship, reception and objecthood have given it a particular status in the art world and caused many artists to want to work off it, to emulate it or work against it. Its use of information-based material before information technologies had totally permeated our lives has created a referential framework of great appeal to artists seeking ways to make ‘work’ in an economy of immaterial labor. Another, but by no means last point of interest, is its economy of means that has conferred upon it great adaptability—its ability through an apparently simple apparatus, process or action to unfold underlying complexities.
Of course, nothing comes back in the same form and Conceptualism is a much broader and varied category than the historical instance of Conceptual art. In fact, the inclusiveness of the former, inflected as it now is with feminism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, the relational, the new temporality of the cinematic and the sonorous has had a beneficial effect on the rethinking of the latter, opening up the borders of its exclusiveness. This opening also traverses all the pieces presented in Conceptual Filiations; all of which work ‘with’ Conceptualism. In many cases these artworks reference directly, in the form of an apparent remake (Clément / Michael Snow; Mastroiacovo / William Wegman, Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Mel Bochner; Olson / David Askevold; Stankievech / Bruce Nauman,) or indirectly (Pavlov / Nauman) or by quoting (Moppett / Michael Asher, Ed Ruscha) an earlier concept or process based work. Some have no such connections such as Olson, Stankievech and Wang but are nevertheless situated in that lineage. Finally, Moppett inserts direct quotes in an ensemble that appears to negate the basic principles that governed the quoted works’s realization.
The reinvestment, the quoting and the allusions that are taking place in Conceptual Filiations point to the enduring effectiveness of the conceptual mode in exposing basic problematics in art. But a closer look also reveals contradictions, deviations or mutations of the conceptual that form a basis for new critical possibilities.
– Michèle Thériault
1Jeff Wall, Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel (Toronto: Art Metropole,1991), p. 19.
Produced with the support of the Frederick and Mary Kay Lowy Art Education Fund.
Curator: Michèle Thériault
Exhibition produced by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
The Artists
Sophie Bélair Clément lives in Montréal. She holds a Master’s degree in arts visuels et médiatiques from UQÀM. Solo shows of her work have been presented in Québec since 2003, most recently at Espace d’art et d’essai Occurrence (2008). Her work has been included in video programs presented in Canada and in France, such as the Festival International du Film sur l’Art (curator : Nicole Gingras). Her work will be shown in upcoming exhibitions at Le Lobe (Chicoutimi) and also at Dazibao (Montréal) following a residency at PRIM.
In a performative body of work that is conveyed through video, sound, graphic and textual components, I isolate interferential elements that, while omnipresent, elude attention. I am interested in conditions of quasi-immobility and I attempt to create intersections between the gestures and voice of one body and those of its neighbors (human beings or machines). My work reveals the gaps and failures inherent to these tuning exercises. I am interested in the relationship that can be established between a cited author and what is either emphasized or ignored in studying their work. I foreground listening.
THE WORK
See you later / Au revoir: 17 minutes en temps réel, 2008, 18 min.
With the participation of David Jacques
Video projection, sound
The video being studied here is See you later / Au revoir (1990) by Michael Snow in which a 30 second pan shot of a man leaving his office was slowed down to 17 minutes. In a slow performance for the camera, the scene is reenacted in slowed down real time.
EXPLORE
- sound and its materiality;
- notions of duration, mobility, physicality, and theatricality and how they function and interact in this work.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- What role does the camera play in this reenactment of Michael Snow’s See you later / Au revoir?
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IN WHAT WAYS DO ELEMENTS OF TRANSLATION AND PRECISION COME INTO PLAY IN THIS WORK?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
LIAISON, revue interculturelle d’art et de littérature, automne. Brussels : La Lettre volée, 2006.
Charron, Marie-Ève. Concert tout en blanc. Le Devoir. 15-16 décembre. 2007: E6.
La Chance, Michaël and C. Dumais, eds. Os Brûlé, Chicoutimi : Éditions La Clignotante, 2006.
Thérèse Mastroiacovo is a visual artist. Her practice has embraced a variety of mediums including video, sound, installation, photography, sculpture, drawing, and performance. Thérèse teaches in both Computation Art and Studio Art Departments at Concordia University. She is presently on the boards of Optica, a centre for contemporary art, and Kore, an ensemble for experimental and contemporary music. She has exhibited her work locally and abroad. Most recently she has shown at Mercer Union (Toronto, 2007), Articule Gallery (Montréal, 2007) and has upcoming exhibitions at RMIT Gallery (Melbourne, 2008) and Cast (Hobart, Tasmania, 2008).
Thérèse Mastroiacovo’s work is about art itself as an idea, artistic process itself as methodology. It is about the precarious relationship art has to its own definition, open, half open, or slightly open for re-classification at any given time. The varying degrees of openness create space in-between, a space that gives way to meanderings, processes, and procedures. Her work is situated here, in a space of potential created in the middle of existing structures. It is this – this large, large thing stated so, so plainly – that makes her work both familiar and unknowable.
THE WORKS
Thérèse Mastroiacovo presents a collection of drawings, a video work, each piece re-working an artwork from the past. From this variety of disciplines emerges the commonality of looking from one perspective, the singular view of the document reactivated by a process of review. The view continues throughout the work, from the page to its edge, to the frame within frame, and to and from the positions of both artists.
Untitled (William Wegman), 2001, 58 sec.
Single channel video on monitor, sound
Reference : William Wegman Selected Works: Reel 1 (1970-72)
Viewing from a single vantage point is a series of conceptual artworks redrawn with the reference information that gives each its context. The drawings are created as art rather than as criticism, aesthetics or reportage even though they certainly contain something of the three.
Viewing from a single vantage point (Figure 108), 2007-2008
Graphite on paper
Reference : Sol LeWitt, Open Modular Cube, 1966
Viewing from a single vantage point (Figure 20), 2007-2008
Graphite on paper
Reference : Mel Bochner
Working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art, 1966
Viewing from a single vantage point (Figure 29), 2008
Graphite on paper
Reference : Dan Graham, Roll, Rehearsal, 1972
Viewing from a single vantage point (Figure 120), 2008
Graphite on paper
Reference: Jan Dibbets, Perspective Correction, 1969
EXPLORE
- the reactualization of conceptual works through labour-intensive graphite drawings;
- perspective or point of view and how this notion is explored in Mastroiacovo’s reworkings.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- What form does Mastroiacovo’s appropriation of existing artworks take and what effect does it have?
- How does the process of drawing redefine the artworks that Mastroiacovo has chosen to work with?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Arnold, Martin. Corrine Carlson: Record Jacket ; Thérèse Mastroiacovo: Art Now. Toronto: Mercer Union, 2007.
Ghaznavi, Corinna. hello fellow artists. Montreal: Optica, 2002.
Tousignant, Isa. Video Killed the Video Star. Hour, March 14 – March 20, 2002, p. 29.
Damian Moppett was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1969 and received his MFA from Concordia University in 1995. He currently lives and works in Vancouver. Moppett creates work that questions notions of “quality” and concepts of “mastery” in art by attempting to avoid traditional aesthetic and conceptual criteria by which artistic techniques and proficiency are judged. His unequal mastery of the different media underscores the fine line between artistic processes and finished products.
THE WORKS
In the works presented, Moppett uses drawing and watercolour not only to produce aesthetic objects, but also as a literal means to represent his cultural influences and to show how their subject matter has affected his artistic production.
Artforum with Mike Kelley’s ‘Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature’, 2003
Graphite on paper
Robert Rauschenberg (Goat), 2003
Graphite on paper
Cy Twombly, 2003
Graphite on paper
Hollis Frampton (self portrait as), 2004
Graphite on paper
Trailer (Denman Island), 2004
Graphite on paper
Hutchen’s Anagama Kiln on Denman Island #1, 2005
Watercolour on paper
Hutchen’s Anagama Kiln on Denman Island #2, 2005
Watercolour on paper
Hollis Frampton in his Wittgenstein T-shirt, 2005
Watercolour on paper
Sasquatch Symposium, 2005
Watercolour on paper
Collection of Pottery on Table, 2005
Watercolour on paper
Franz West’s Adaptive, Circa 1974, 2005
Watercolour on paper
The Lake Worth Monster as Photographed by Sallie Ann Clarke, 2005
Graphite on paper
Treehouse on Denman Island, 2006
Watercolour on paper
Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams (Royal Road Test), 2004
Graphite on paper
Michael Asher, Project in Munster, 2004
Graphite on paper
EXPLORE
- the idea of “mastery” in relation to identification as an interdisciplinary artist;
- the ways in which Moppett constructs a personal art history through selecting, re-imagining, and assembling historical moments, individuals, and artefacts.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- What is the effect of juxtaposition in the presentation of these works?
- How are notions of time, specifically the interaction of past and present, important in this presentation of these works?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
O’Brian, Melanie. Impure Systems and the Chaos of the Anti Urban. Mix 27.3 (2001/2002) : 24-27.
Olson, Christopher. Damian Moppett. Border Crossings 24.2 (2005) : 99-101.
Papararo, Jenifer, John Welchman, and Nathaniel Heisler. Damian Moppett : The Visible Work. Vancouver : Contemporary Art Gallery, 2005.
Born in California to Canadian parents in 1955, Daniel Olson completed degrees in mathematics and architecture before obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1986 from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Halifax) and a Master of Fine Arts in 1995 from York University (Toronto). Olson’s work – which includes sculpture, multiples, installation, photography, performance, audio, video and artist’s books – has been exhibited widely and is documented in several catalogues. Olson is represented by Birch Libralato in Toronto. He lives and works in Montreal.
I am a conceptually-based visual artist working in an experimental, interdisciplinary manner. My practice consists primarily of exploratory reactions to and manipulations of elements culled from a variety of sources: personal history, popular culture and daily life; the histories and technologies of art, film, photography and music; the fields of literature, philosophy, mathematics and language(s). These explorations feed the production of an eclectic, interconnected body of work, with projects manifested as installations, multiple and unique objects, artist’s books, photographs, video and audio works, and performances. As a rule I am guided by a desire to create simple works which suggest complex possibilities contained within ordinary materials or events.
THE WORKS
Rubber Ball[s], 2001, 40 min.
Single channel video on monitor, sound
Rubber Ball[s] is a video in which I sit at a desk with a ball made from elastic bands, which I dismantle one elastic at a time, simultaneously making a new ball with the elastics removed from the original one. This is essentially a futile task, as what I end up with is what I start with, although the newly constructed ball might be understood to be an “inside out” version of the original. The piece is dedicated to David Askevold, many of whose early film and video works depict him performing idiosyncratic actions in front of a stationary camera.
12!, 1996
Set of 12 plates from toy xylophones, box, printed card, foam
12! is a multiple consisting of twelve metal plates from toy xylophones, housed in a box with an accompanying text. The text introduces the mathematical concept of factorials – the factorial of a given integer n is 1 x 2 x 3 x . . . x n, written as n! – and gives the number of ways n things can be arranged in sequence. It then suggests that by throwing the twelve metal plates onto a hard surface one would play a twelve-note melody, and that according to the concept of factorials there are 12!, or 479,001,600 different possible melodies that can be played.
EXPLORE
- the ways in which Olson examines the suggestion of complex possibilities in his work
- the relationship between video camera, performer, and action
A FEW QUESTIONS
- How do silence and sound interact with each other in Olson’s work?
- Are time and space important elements in this work? If so, why and in what ways? If not, why not?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Dubé, Peter. Lumière spectrale propos sur les partialités de Daniel Olson. Spirale 210 (2006) : 12-13.
Hatt, Gordon, Martin Arnold, and Christina Ritchie. Small World. Lethbridge : Southern Alberta Art Gallery ; Cambridge : Cambridge Galleries ; Sackville : Owens Art Gallery, 2000.
Ritchie, Christina. Waste Management. Toronto : Art Gallery of Ontario, 1999.
Pavel Pavlov works with photographic and video installation. He holds Master’s degrees in both Economics and Visual and Media Arts. Since 2002, his work has been shown in Montréal, Québec, and Toronto. He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on outdoor conceptual photography of the 60s and 70s. He teaches at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques at UQÀM. Pavlov lives and works in Montréal.
Landscape is the central theme in my work. I am interested in the tension that exists between its layered contextual structure and its unity as an image delimited by a frame. My procedural approach is anchored in the legacy of minimalist conceptual practices of the 60s and 70s. Rather than producing unique images I produce series in which, similarly to assembly lines, each image exists in relation to both the previous one and the one that follows. I consider my visual propositions to be like machines that reconstitute real space through the simultaneous perception of multiple points of view.
THE WORK
Projet pour un panorama fragmenté de la Pointe Saint-Charles à Montréal, 2008
Two channel video installation, 8 min. loop.
The traditional panorama frequently commemorates an historic event by creating a 360 degree pictorial fiction. In Projet pour un panorama fragmenté de la Pointe Saint-Charles à Montréal (2008), two video cameras trace a geometric form that functions as a monument to an industrial site and its invisible history (in 1847, thousands of Irish immigrants infected with typhus were hospitalized and then buried here; in 1967, this was the site of the Expo 67 Autostade).
EXPLORE
- notions of economics, history, and framing in Pavlov’s depiction of landscape;
- the role of multiple points of view in the reconstruction of space.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- In what ways does this work examine notions of time and history through tensions that exist between past and present?
- This work is set in a very specific environment: the urban parking lot. Why is this an important factor in Pavlov’s work?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Lussier, Réal. Territoires urbains. Montréal : Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2005.
Paquet, Suzanne. La tyrannie paysagère. Ciel Variable 73 (2006) : 30-31.
Parking Lots. Mix Magazine 28.3 (2003) : 16.
Artist and author Charles Stankievech works in the constellation of art, architecture and sound. Balancing philosophical questioning with explorations of materiality, his work combines a subtle play between the history of ideas and the history of technologies. Recently, his work was presented in Leonardo (MIT Press), Xth Biennale of Architecture (Venice), Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff), Subtle Technologies (Toronto), Eyebeam (New York), and the Planetary Collegium (England). Stankievech holds a Master’s degree in Studio Arts from Concordia University and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English and Philosophy. He splits his time between Montreal and Dawson City, where he is currently developing the KIAC School of Visual Arts.
Now there’s a big white cloud, as on all these days, all this untellable time. What remains to be said is always a cloud, two clouds, or long hours of a sky perfectly clear, a very clean, clear rectangle tacked up with pins on the wall of my room. That was what I saw when I opened my eyes and dried them with my fingers: the clear sky, and then a cloud that drifted in from the left, passed gracefully and slowly across and disappeared on the right. And then another, and for a change sometimes, everything gets grey, all one enormous cloud, and suddenly the splotches of rain crackling down, for a long spell you can see it raining over the picture, like a spell of weeping reversed, and little by little, the frame becomes clear, perhaps the sun comes out, and again the clouds begin to come, two at a time, three at a time. And the pigeons once in a while, and a sparrow or two.
– Julio Cortazar
THE WORKS
Untitled (March 24th), 2008
Postcard, offset print on paper, edition of 1000
Untitled (March 24th) is an edition of 1000 postcards the visitor is free to take. On the back of the postcard is a web address where sound can be downloaded : www.stankievech.net/untitled
Get Out Of My Head. Get Out Of My Mind., 2008
Stereo audio for wireless headphones, 6 min. loop
I have re-performed Bruce Nauman’s Get Out Of My Mind. Get Out Of This Room. (1968) and re-mixed it for wireless headphones. Unlike the original, Get Out Of My Head. Get Out Of My Mind. (2008) denies architecture and explores the unique relation between virtual space and psychotopology.
EXPLORE
- the use of headphones and the specificity of the aural space or environment that they create;
- the juxtaposition of image and virtual sound and how this contributes to what is revealed and what is concealed.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- How is solitary activity addressed in this work and what is its importance?
- What kinds of tensions between materiality and immateriality exist in this work?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Charles Stankievech, official Web site http://www.stankievech.net/
Stankievech, Charles. Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity. Leonardo Music Journal 17 (2007) : 55-59.
Stankievech, Charles and Meredith Carruthers. Constellations. Montréal : Fonderie Darling, 2008.
Born in Taiwan, Chih-Chien Wang lives and works in Montreal. He studied cinema and theatre at the Chinese University in Taipei before moving to Canada. He holds an MFA in photography from Concordia University. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and he is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain.
My work focuses on the experience of daily life. I use video and photography to present the various textures of life, including concerns surrounding the urban environment and cultural difference. Initially, my practice was linked to food, its rituals, its temporality, and its importance to my life and identity as a person new to Canada.
THE WORK
100 Fights, 2008
C prints
Lying on the same bed, we cannot turn to each other. We avoid looking into each other’s eyes, we avoid smelling each other’s breath, and we avoid each other’s warmth. We keep looking at our wall, the wall in front of each one of us. The project consists of 200 hundred small photos of two walls, one hundred images for each wall. They are divided into two groups exhibited side by side.
EXPLORE
- notions of placement, surrounding, and repetition and how these are conveyed or depicted;
- the ways in which the personal, human contact, and human interaction are explored.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- How does the collecting or accumulation of images function in this work?
- Is there a relationship between the material, or the real, and the fictional, or the imaginary, in this work? If so, what is it and how does it contribute to our understanding of the work?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Dion, François. Combinaisons. Spirale 215 (2007) : 32-33.
Ming Wai Jim, Alice. Domestic Trajectories. Ciel Variable 71 (2006) : 13-14.
Wang, Chih-Chien. From Self-Portraits. Public 30 (2003) : 95-100.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Alberro, Alexander. Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity. Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press, 2003.
Alberro, Alexander and Sabeth Buchmann, eds. Art After Conceptual Art. Vienna : Generali Foundation, 2006.
Alberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson, eds. Conceptual Art : A Critical Anthology. Cambridge, Mass., and London : MIT Press, 1999.
Camnitzer, Luis, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds. Global conceptualism : points of origin 1950s-1980s. New York : Queens Museum of Art, 1999.
De Salvo, Donna, ed. Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970. London : Tate Publishing, 2005.
Gintz, Claude, et al. L’Art conceptuel, une perspective : 22 novembre 1989-18 février 1990. Paris : Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1989.
Goldstein, Ann and Anne Rorimer. Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975. Cambridge, Mass., and London : MIT Press; Los Angeles : The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996.
Morgan, Robert C. Art into Ideas : Essays on Conceptual Art. Cambridge : Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Newman, Michael and Jon Bird, eds. Rewriting Conceptual Art. London : Reaktion Books, 1999.
Schlatter, Christian. Art conceptuel, formes conceptuelles = Conceptual art, conceptual forms. Paris : Galerie 1900-2000; Galerie de Poche, 1990.