Curators: Michèle Thériault and Vincent Bonin

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 1972, 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.

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 spirit : 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.

Curator: Jayne Wark

The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax became a centre of international conceptual art activity circa 1969–1980. While there were also instances of conceptual art elsewhere in Atlantic Canada, such as the Acadian Shore travelogue book Exzéo (1975) by New Brunswick artists Sylvain Cousineau and Francis Coutellier as well as some exhibitions at the Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick under the directorship of Christopher Youngs (1970–76), its concentration at NSCAD resulted from administrative and pedagogical initiatives intended to bring students into contact with the most advanced work being done at the time—conceptual art. The main outcome of these initiatives was the establishment of innovative courses and programs such as artist and faculty member David Askevold’s Projects Class, the Lithography Workshop, The Press, and the Visitors Program, as well as the Anna Leonowens Gallery and the groundbreaking Mezzanine gallery run by Charlotte Townsend-Gault, now Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia. Although these were distinct entities, they often overlapped and fed into one another, thus providing a range of opportunities for international artists to visit, show and/or produce work at NSCAD. For example, an artist might visit the College to participate in the Projects Class, make a print with the Lithography Workshop and have an exhibition at the Mezzanine or Anna Leonowens Gallery.

The presence of these artists and their activities fostered a deep and enduring conceptual orientation at NSCAD from which the College as a whole, and the students in particular, benefited enormously. American artists Lawrence Weiner and Dan Graham, both relatively unknown at the time, had their first solo exhibitions at NSCAD in 1969 and 1970 respectively. During Graham’s numerous visits, he also took advantage of the College’s multi-media equipment to produce some of his earliest film and video performance works, including From Sunset to Sunrise and Two Correlated Rotations in 1969. Also in 1969, New York art critic Lucy Lippard participated in the Projects Class and delivered the lecture that would become the basis for her touchstone book on conceptual art, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Object from 1966 to 1972, while the following year Toronto’s Joyce Wieland produced her iconic lithograph, O Canada, with the Lithography Workshop.

This profusion of activity at NSCAD, which continued beyond the period covered by this exhibition, is largely attributable to the outlook and ideals shared by Garry Neill Kennedy, who became President in 1967, and key faculty members Gerald Ferguson and David Askevold, who envisioned the school as a place where art could be produced with complete disregard of all categories and distinctions.

NSCAD became a conceptual art hothouse remote from the art world’s main centres and yet it turned that remoteness to its advantage by providing an institutional context where the dematerialized and ephemeral practices of conceptual art could be carried out relatively unburdened by the art world’s usual market constraints. Ultimately, the confluence of its courses, programs, faculty, students and visitors made it a site of intensive research and development and a major contributor to the international discourse on conceptual art as a mode of inquiry. As Charlotte Townsend-Gault put it, when this mode of art as inquiry was good, “[it] could stand comparison with other established modes of inquiry, and could even make them think again” (Conceptual Art: The NSCAD Connection 1967–1973, p. 42).

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Barber, Bruce, ed. Conceptual Art: The NSCAD Connection 1967-1973. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2001.

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., ed. Dan Graham: Video, Architecture, Television: Writings on Video and Video Works, 1970-1978. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1979.

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., ed. Lawrence Weiner: Posters: November 1965 – April 1986. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Toronto: Art Metropole, 1986.

Budney, Jen. The Concept of Teaching. Siksi 13. 3-4(1998): 78-81.

Burnham, Jack. Nova Scotia: Answers for Academia. Arts Magazine 48.2 (1973): 55-57.

Burnham, Jack, Howard S. Becker, and John Walton. Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 works 1970-75. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975.

Cameron, Eric. NSCAD Prints. Studio International 188.972(1974): 245-8.

Ferguson, Gerald. The Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage Arranged by Word Length and Alphabetized Within Word Length. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1978.

Gale, Peggy, ed. Artists Talk: 1969-1977. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2004.

Greville, Bruce, and Stephen Horne. Territories. Halifax: Eye Level; Toronto: YYZ, 1985.

Judd, Donald. Donald Judd: Complete writings, 1959-1975: Gallery Reviews, Book Reviews, Articles, Letters to the Editor, Reports, Statements, Complaints. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975.

Kennedy, Garry N., ed. NSCAD: The Nova Scotia College of Art & Design: Prints and Books. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1982.

Kennedy, Garry N. Video at NSCAD. artscanada 30.4 (1973): 62-63.

Kit, Lori. Solid Citizens: NSCAD at 100. Arts Atlantic 8.2 (1988): 30-3.

Levine, Les. The Best Art School in North America? Art in America 61.4 (1973): 15.

Rainer, Yvonne. Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961-73. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1974.

Snow, Michael. Cover to Cover. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975.

Soucy, Donald, and Harold Pearse. The First Hundred Years: A History of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Fredericton: University of New Brunswick,1993.

Wark, Jayne. Conceptual Art in Canada: Capitals, Peripheries, and Capitalism. The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century. Eds. Anne Whitelaw, Brian Foss, and Sandra Paikowsky. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Curator: Catherine Crowston

WINNIPEG

Conceptual Art in Winnipeg grew from a distinctive mix of local art histories and the influence of international art movements such as Minimalism, Situationism, and Fluxus. Given Winnipeg’s relative geographical autonomy within Canada, and the absence of an overriding regional, economic or ideological imperative or ‘style,’ a heterogeneous and dynamic community constituted the art scene. New groups and organizations formed around interests in emerging media, experimentation and exchange. Winnipeg could be seen as a crossroads allowing artists investigating the possibilities of conceptualism (Max Dean, Jeff Funnell, Alex Poruchnyk, Milly Giesbrecht, Gordon Lebredt, and Aganetha Dyck) to take risks with supportive institutions and audiences.

Through the spirited directorship of Suzanne Gillies and Doug Sigurdson, Plug In, established in 1972, supported experimental and process-based approaches to art and art-making, presenting exhibitions in video, performance, music, installation, sound and mail art. Curiously, many of the ‘conceptual’ works at Plug In employed decidedly elemental building materials: concrete, lumber, drywall, glass, rebar, plaster and so on. Gordon Lebredt erected two opposing 12 foot high x 11 foot wide mirror templates and a metal mesh screen, creating a mise en abyme reflective of the gallery’s architecture for Loci (1977); Alex Poruchnyk constructed a concrete block for his 1978 performative piece, Work in Process (The Cube), and then spent twelve hours smashing it to bits; Jeff Funnell covered the floor of the gallery in plaster panels, cast from the tin ceiling tiles, for Sistine Tons (1980); and Rita McKeough (then living in Winnipeg) filled the gallery with a townsite of shingled houses and almost 1,000 square feet of concrete sidewalks for Sidestreet (1980). Plug In was also the site of countless sound, video and performance pieces including Linda Tooley and Reid Dickie’s Mechanical Bliss (1980) and Jon Tupper’s Fall (1980).

The University of Manitoba’s Gallery One One One, where painter/writer/ curator/thinker Kenneth Coutts-Smith was director throughout much of the 1970s, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) expanded upon the aesthetic, social, and political discourses of conceptual art through exhibitions featuring artists’ books and multiples, image/text works, installations and performances by local, national and international artists. Key WAG exhibitions/publications such as Artists’ Prints and Multiples (1977), and Form & Performance (1978), took up issues of authorial and institutional critique, presenting works that balanced aesthetics of negation with language play and performativity. In 1977 Max Dean performed Drawing Event, in which he and Dennis Evans, bound by a length of rope, dragged each other back and forth as they tried to execute a wall drawing. Dean also created a number of important works, including performance pieces, for the exhibition Sculpture on the Prairies (1977), curated by Bill Kirby. The following year, Gordon Lebredt installed Fence, a chain link barrier 14 feet high x 70 feet long that ran through the main exhibition space for The Winnipeg Perspective.

The arrival of WAG curators Millie McKibbon and Bill Kirby in the 1970s was critical to the growth of conceptual art in the city. Kirby’s receptivity to works by Dean, Lebredt and other conceptual artists (including Americans Dan Graham and Sol Lewitt) and McKibbon’s inclusion of both Dean and Lebredt in Form & Performance, sent a clear signal that conceptual art was no longer to be confined to alternative spaces or relegated to the fuzzy borders of mainstream curatorial practice.

Throughout the 1970s, artists whose practice included, but was not limited to, printmaking (General Idea, John Greer, Michael de Courcy, Gordon Lebredt, Richard Hrabec) pulled prints at The Grand Western Canadian Screen Shop. The huge de Courcy and Hrabec works that hung on the shop’s walls were evidence not only of owner/artist Bill Lobchuk’s unconventional approach to printmaking—concepts were encouraged—but to the connectivity of the Winnipeg art community and its engagement with the wider art world.

CALGARY

In 1971, the University of Calgary and the Alberta College of Art began hiring young American and British artists who embraced the ideas and values of a growing counterculture. Among those who migrated to the city that year were John Will, Paul Woodrow, Jeff Funnell, and Don Mabie. Of equal significance was the arrival of Clive Robertson in late 1971.

The work produced by these artists often took the form of performances, events and projects that were a confluence of happenings influenced by the Fluxus movement and experiments in new media. Many of the works were informed by an interdisciplinarity that emphasized process over product and examined the interstitial space between art and daily life. In June 1972, and December 1973, Robertson and Woodrow organized the World Festival of W.O.R.K.S. (an anagram for “we ourselves roughly know something”) and sent out a call for proposals to which artists from around the world responded with instructions for performances, happenings, and actions. Calgary artists placed considerable emphasis on embodying and manipulating mass communication systems, using television, radio, and magazine platforms to reach a wider, more dispersed audience. Radio Cora, an independent, artist-fueled program that featured live performances, alternative music, interviews with artists, and an open forum, began broadcasting in 1972. In 1974, Robertson founded Voicepondence, an audio magazine distributed on cassette tape.

The following year, Robertson, Woodrow, Mabie, and Marcella Bienvenue, a filmmaker and performance artist, founded the Parachute Center for Cultural Affairs with a national video festival and the publication of Centerfold, edited by Robertson and Bienvenue. Similar parodic enactments of corporate culture can be seen in Brian Dyson’s SPacific company and Don Mabie’s Chuck Stake Enterprizes. Clouds ‘n’ Water Gallery, which would later become Off Centre Centre, was also founded in 1975. In 1977, the Parachute Center was renamed Arton’s (which referenced Eatons, much as General Idea’s FILE played off LIFE magazine) and expanded its visiting artists program. Ron Moppett and Brian Dyson also ran a successful visiting artists program at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery as did Jeffrey Spalding and Peter White at the Glenbow Museum.

1978 marked a year of transition for the Calgary art community; Arton’s relocated to Toronto and an influx of new people from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) began arriving. Jeffrey Spalding moved to the city that year followed by Mary Scott and Rita McKeough in 1980. These artists brought with them conceptually driven art-making strategies and helped to further define the Calgary art community as it exists today.

EDMONTON + THE ARCTIC

On September 24, 1969, The Edmonton Art Gallery (EAG) opened its first exhibition of conceptual art, Place and Process, organized by the American curator Willoughby Sharp. Under the directorship of William (Bill) Kirby, the gallery, which had moved to its new building earlier that year, was eager to engage the city with innovative, non-material, process-based art. With Place and Process it succeeded.

The exhibition took place in six outdoor sites around the city. Robert Morris rode 12 successive horses back and forth over a white chalk line until either he or the horse tired, while Dennis Oppenheim ran across Sir Winston Churchill Square then cast the resulting footprints in plaster for his work, 220 Yard Dash, Condensed. These two performance pieces were similar in their emphasis on measured distance, duration, and physical endurance. John Van Saun’s Flour Drop, in which the artist used a 2″ x 4″ board to strike (or drop) 500 one-pound bags of flour and Les Levine’s Cornflakes, which consisted of 250 jumbo boxes of corn flakes being tossed in the air, emphasized action, chance, and the use of simple, quotidian materials.

Hans Haacke’s work, in which plastic bottles containing messages were released into the North Saskatchewan River to float downstream, invited those who found them to record the time and place of discovery and report back to the gallery, thus engaging this ‘found’ audience in the piece itself. When their original plan to exhibit a herd of sheep went awry, Vancouver’s N.E. Thing Co. (Iain and Ingrid Baxter) substituted The Nothing Project (a tree spray painted green) and a performance by Ingrid (wearing an inflatable dress) that took place in the EAG theatre.

Following the opening of Place and Process at the EAG, American artist Lawrence Weiner and art critic Lucy Lippard flew from Edmonton to Inuvik to execute Weiner’s piece, An abridgement of an abutment to or near or about the Arctic Circle. Accompanied by N.E. Thing Co., Edmonton artist Harry Savage, arts writer Virgil G. Hammock, and Bill Kirby, the Arctic trip was made under the auspices of the EAG as a complement to the Place and Process exhibition. Over the course of three days, the artists created work that engaged with the specific environs of the arctic, with geography, mapping, intervention and communication, using found objects, natural materials and electronic technologies.

Concurrent with Place and Process, the exhibition AIR ART (September 4 – 28 1969), which was also curated by Willoughby Sharp, featured inflatable, intangible works by the Architectural Association Group, Hans Haacke, Akira Kanayama, Les Levine, David Medalla, Robert Morris, Preston McClanahan, Marcello Salvadori, Graham Stevens, John Van Saun, and Andy Warhol. AIR ART traveled throughout the U.S. but The EAG was its only Canadian venue.

These two projects were the first of their kind in Canada. In an article published in the Edmonton Journal on September 5, 1969, Virgil G. Hammock wrote, “this exhibition is not only a first for Edmonton but a first for Canada. Because of our gallery’s daring, Edmonton is becoming known throughout Canada as a centre for Avant Garde (sic) art exhibitions.” This thought was echoed in Studio International magazine, which stated in its November 1969 issue that The Edmonton Art Gallery was “rapidly becoming a major international art institution.”

The EAG also participated in Montreal artist Bill Vazan’s Cross Canada Tapeline (January 1970) and hosted a second solo exhibition of the N.E. Thing Co. (January 1971). These exhibitions, presented in the short span between 1969 and 1971, marked a unique time in the history of the gallery—a time when its exhibitions of conceptually-based works were at the defining edge of the international art world—and of Edmonton itself.

In July 1971, Bill Kirby left the EAG and the institution underwent significant staff changes over the next year. Under the new leadership the gallery re-aligned its exhibition mandate to focus on abstract painting and sculpture produced by American and Western-Canadian artists working within the tenets of formalism as defined by the influential American art critic Clement Greenberg. This shift had a profound and lasting impact on the visual art community in Edmonton over the next two decades.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Baxter, Iain. Ever Ready. Lethbridge: Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 1979.

Baxter, Iain. Reflections: Lethbridge. Lethbridge: Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 1979.

Baxter, Iain. Thrown Camera Photographs. Lethbridge: Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 1979.

Beveridge, Karl. Artexts by Kenneth Coutts-Smith: A Retrospective. Winnipeg: Plug-In Inc., 1982.

Bronson, AA, and Peggy Gale. Performance by Artists. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1979.

Edmonton Art Gallery. Calgary Printmakers. Edmonton: Edmonton Art Gallery, 1974.

Gibson, Lin, ed. Gordon Lebredt: Nonworks, 1975-2008. Winnipeg: Plug In Editions, 2011.

Glenbow Art Gallery. Jeff and Suzanne Funnell. Calgary: Glenbow Art Gallery, 1973.

Mabie, Don, ed. The First Ten, 1975-1985. Calgary: Off Centre Centre, 1985.

Peter Whyte Gallery. Sensitivity Information Research by the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. On Snow, Ice, Water, the General Phenomenon of Winter. Banff: Peter Whyte Gallery, 1974.

Spalding, Jeffrey. Exhibition Statement. Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1976.

Winnipeg Art Gallery. Artists’ Prints and Multiples. Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1977.

Winnipeg Art Gallery. Form & Performance. Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1978.

Winnipeg Art Gallery. The Winnipeg Perspective, 1978. Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1978.

W.O.R.K.S. Clive Robertson: A Conceptographic Reading of Our World Thermometer. Calgary: Alberta College of Art, 1973.

W.O.R.K.S. Clive Robertson: Television, Adjusting the Hold. Calgary: Alberta College of Art, 1977.

W.O.R.K.S. Paul Woodrow: Bureau of Imaginary Exchange. Calgary: Alberta College of Art, 1977.

Curator: Grant Arnold

Conceptual art surfaced in Vancouver during the mid 1960s and played a key role in drawing international attention to the city’s art scene during the late 60s and early 70s. Its legacy—its challenge to the autonomy of the art object and the truth value of images—continues to inform the work of many of the city’s most widely known artists. However, if Vancouver has come to be closely associated with conceptual art, its development in the city did not follow a clearly defined path, but grew out of a complex and multifaceted milieu that contained different, sometimes antagonistic, aesthetic programs.

The 1960s counterculture resonated with a particular intensity in Vancouver. The anarchic character of this environment spurred attitudes in which tradition was to be challenged and the culture of the commodity was to be overturned. The most emblematic manifestation of this scenario was the formation in 1967 of Intermedia, an artist-run organization that fostered collaborative approaches to art-making and challenged the traditional classification of art according to media. Although disbanded in 1972, Intermedia laid the groundwork for subsequent artist-run organizations, including the Western Front and Satellite Video Exchange/Video Inn.

Art practices that favoured process over the completed object also found support in venues such as the University of British Columbia’s Fine Arts Gallery and SUB Gallery, Douglas Christmas’ Ace Gallery, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, these galleries presented exhibitions that included seminal work by Vancouver-based artists such as the N.E. Thing Co., Michael Morris and Roy Kiyooka, as well as American artists including Robert Smithson and Carl Andre. One of the most important and influential exhibitions to be mounted during this era was 955,000 curated by American critic and theorist Lucy Lippard. The exhibition, which opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery in January 1970, comprised works of conceptual art by some 60 artists from Europe and North America, including Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Michael Asher, Hanne Darboven, Christos Dikeakos, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Duane Lunden, Bruce Nauman, the N.E. Thing Co., Adrian Piper, Robert Smithson, Jeff Wall, and Lawrence Weiner.

Conceptual art was particularly viable for Vancouver-based artists as it allowed their work to evade a “provincial” condition. The ideas and photographic documents that were central to conceptual art could be easily transmitted, allowing the work of artists from isolated locations such as Vancouver to be positioned within the art world’s most current developments.

From the late 1960s on, conceptual art in Vancouver operated between two poles. Artists such as Image Bank (Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov), Michael de Courcy, and Roy Kiyooka developed approaches that sought to break down the boundaries between art and life. Their strategies paralleled that of the Fluxus movement (which had originated in Europe almost a decade earlier), in their emphasis on play, pleasure, and humour as well as their rejection of purely utilitarian modes of communication. These artists tended to avoid the traditional preciousness of the art object by making work that was dispersed in its form or by producing multiples rather than singular artefacts. For some, the development of alternate networks for communication, such as correspondence art, also allowed for the articulation of sexual identity.

While artists such as Christos Dikeakos, Robert Kleyn, Jeff Wall, and Ian Wallace also avoided any sense of preciousness in their work, they dispensed with lyricism or visual pleasure in their pursuit of art-making strategies that addressed the abstract systems of capitalism as manifested in urban space. Drawing upon an aesthetic of negation, they sought to undermine the false consciousness that pervades contemporary culture and enact a critical position from which the contradictions of capitalist culture could be perceived.

By the late 1970s, a number of the artists represented in this exhibition had consciously shifted away from the paradigms of conceptual art in an attempt to revitalize the pictorial traditions of western modernism, while the neo-expressionist work of younger artists contributed to the widespread resurgence of interest in painting. This is not to suggest that conceptual art disappeared from the city, however, it took different forms and temporarily occupied a less prominent position in the work that was produced and exhibited over the following decade.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties Web site:
www.vancouverartinthesixties.com

Arnold, Grant, ed. Robert Smithson in Vancouver: A Fragment of a Greater Fragmentation. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2003.

Conley, Christine. Theodore Wan. Halifax: Dalhousie Art Gallery, 2003.

Image Bank. Image Bank Postcard Show. Vancouver: Image Bank, 1977.

Lewis, Glenn. New Media: Artwork from the 60s and 70s in Vancouver. Burnaby: Visual Arts Burnaby, 2002.

Lippard, Lucy. 955,000: An Exhibition Organized by Lucy R. Lippard at the Vancouver Art Gallery, January 13 to February 8, 1970. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1970.

Mastai, Judith, ed. An Evening Forum at the Vancouver Art Gallery with Terry Atkinson, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace and Lawrence Weiner, February 1990. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1992.

Morris, Michael. Michael Morris: Photographies. Montréal: Musée d’art contemporain, 1980.

National Film Board of Canada. B.C. Almanac / Almanach C.B.. Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1970.

Pender Street Gallery. Mowry Baden, Roland Brener, Christos Dikeakos, Fred Douglas, Dean Ellis, Rodney Graham, Tod Greenaway, Ian Wallace. Vancouver: Pender Street Gallery, 1977.

Théberge, Pierre. Look at the N.E. Thing Company. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1969.

Wall, Jeff. Installation of faking death, 1977, The destroyed room, 1978, Young workers, 1978, Picture for women, 1979. Victoria: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1979.

Wallace, Ian. Ian Wallace: Work 1979. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1979.

Walter Phillips Gallery. Berliner Aufzeichnungen / Berlin Notes. Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery, 1985.

Western Front. Art & Correspondence: From the Western Front. Vancouver: Western Front, 1979.

Winnipeg Art Gallery. West Coast Waves: Michael de Courcy, Dean Ellis, Gathie Falk, Sherry Grauer, Bill Jones, Glenn Lewis, Allan McWilliams, Liz Magor, N.E. Thing Co., Richard Prince, Dennis Vance. Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1976.