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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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 Paterson Ewen, Northern Lights, 1973 (taken from AGO website) | "According to Paterson Ewen only one of his paintings comes from a direct experience -- that of seeing the aurora borealis while snoeshowing in Algonquin Park. And yet that painting, Northern Lights, with the earth seen from space and the land mass of Canada occupying a disproportionate area of the globe, can hardly be said to be a painting of direct experience." - Philip Monk, Phenomena: Paterson Ewen Paintings 1971-19987, exhibition catalogue, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1988), p. 22 |
| Puttering around through old magazines at the library, I found a hard-copy thread of 80s art criticism, controversy and intrigue. Here's the short version: Philip Monk curated a show by Canadian artist Paterson Ewen in 1988, and wrote a catalogue essay that focussed on the semiotic and material aspects of Ewen's work, referring to a number of American artists such as Robert Smithson, Jackson Pollock, Richard Serra and Robert Morris. Canadian artists Greg Curnoe and Andy Patton took great offense to Monk's approach and wrote scathing responses that were printed together in Parachute, summer of 1989. Curnoe accused Monk of "sanitized and a-historical writing," which held Paterson Ewen up to "imagined international criteria," neglecting the "real context of his work and ideas." Patton suggested that Monk was "groping for coherence and literacy at the expense of one of Canada's major painters." Monk responded in the following issue of Parachute, "...I feel that this demand for history and context, rather than letting the work stand in its own right, is an unconsciously envious attempt by Curnoe and Patton to diminish the achievements of Ewen's art." Pretty darn shirty all round! Yet I am really very curious about the larger context. As LM mentioned recently in another thread, the 80s were full of "tyrannical art ideologies." But despite all the emotional lashing out, each piece contains great historical detail and/or art insights. All three of these guys were confident, smart, and engaged. Why do they seem to feel so threatened? Here's a few quick thoughts: Point for PM: The Canadian art world was so clique-dependent, that for a critic to suggest one particular artist's work might participate in a discourse beyond the borders was to threaten the entire, small-stakes art economy at home. Point for GC and AP: The Canadian art world was very poor at recognising it's own excellence, and critics were required who demonstrate the value of great works in context of Canadian regional cultural influences. Point for PM: Post-modern, semiotic discourse created a shared social sphere for discussing visual art, adopting a language that was universally applicable and not dependent on insider knowledge of the artist's personal biography or intentions. Point for GC and AP: Post-modern, semiotic discourse stripped vital artworks of their specific, local socio-political function, and applied a layer of seemingly alien abstraction in its place. I wish I could post the essay and articles in their entirety. Here instead are quotes representing three of my favourite bits from each participant: Philip Monk: "If alienation from the natural world was something Ewen was trying to overcome and, as Robert Morris emphasizes, it is the turn to the natural world that is concomitant to working in material, then it is the material form of working that overcomes that alienation, rather than the fact of depicting, or representing nature itself..." From Phenomena: Paterson Ewen Paintings 1971-1987, exhibition catalogue, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1988), p. 26 Greg Curnoe: "Surrealism had an early influence in London [Ontario] dating from Selwyn and Irene Dewdney's friendship with Lionel Penrose wo worked in London from 1938 to 1945; he was the brother of Roland Penrose and a friend of Alix and James Strachey, translators of the Standard Edition of Freud's writings. Irene Dewdney has said recently that surrealism was a consuming interest for both her and her husband, and coincided with the first publication of Freud in English: this interest carried forward into their pioneering work with art therapy in the late forties at Westminster Hospital, the same veteran's hospital where Paterson Ewen stayed when he first arrived in London." From "Paterson Ewen: Phenomena Paintings 1971-1987, Monk's Dream," in Parachute (July-September 1989) p. 61 Andy Patton: "What Ewen did [in leaving Montréal for London] was to leave the city of Borduas and Molinari for the city of Curnoe and Chambers. It is always difficult to generalize about an art community as surprising and complex as London's but I want to point out certain emphases there that may have pushed the transformation of Ewen's work. The most obvious difference between the London and Montréal scenes at that time was that leading artists in London were by and large far more interested in the possibilities of representational work. And certainly the London community was much more strongly oriented toward recording the influence and events of daily life. From the international standpoint of the time, Montréal's concentration on abstract painting was much more advanced. What London offered Ewen were, from that standpoint, ways of working which were officially more retrograde since representation had been superseded in some way that was permanent. From our present perspective, artists in London were maintaining certain possibilities which were in disrepute and which would only later become relevant again. From "History Evaporates: Philip Monk and Paterson Ewen," in Parachute (July-September 1989) p. 65 Final (for now) Note: Canadian artist Ian Carr-Harris, much much more favourably disposed, also addressed Monk's take on Paterson Ewen in an in-depth (and interesting) article in Vanguard: "The obvious problem which emerges, and the one we face in this country, is a crisis arising from the failure of a local middle class to understand the importance of self-validation, or when it settles for validation from elsewhere, becomes colonial or branch-plant. Abdication of cultural self-interest always has the same consequences -- invalidation of the culture and voice of the class it represents. It is, in fact, a self-betrayal. In Canada, this betrayal has been fairly genial, and disguised by the difficulties of disentangling the cultural and political concerns that distinguish an evolving culture from its British and American colonial attachments. But geniality cannot disguise the confusion that results within our society, and the barely concealed contempt -- expressed as patronizing ignorance -- that others reveal towards that confusion. The consequence is further erosion of energetic action within our culture. This is tragic." From "Standing on the Mezzanine: Ewen, Wiitasalo, Monk, and the AGO" in Vanguard (December 1988 - January 1989) p. 10 | |
Artist Tom Moody, of Digital Media Tree art blog fame, has also been making some fun music. He did the excellent soundtrack for my Robot Landscapes installation in the spring. Tom has posted all his mp3s. Take a listen. I am partial to "Phil's Revenge" myself.
...[Philip] Monk proposed that, for the new art in Toronto at least, while representation can lead to action rather than to the mere contemplation allowed by formalist modernism, it is nevertheless only women artists who, in Monk's estimation, have shown a genuine and authoritative acquisition of representation and all that this slippery term means. [...] "The lines of difference," Monk wrote, "…are really between a passive resignation and melancholy despair, pessimism, nihilism and decadence on the one hand and the sense of the possibility of action on the other." Men, Monk insists, have given themselves over to a romantic yearning for aesthetic unity, to dreams of a fallen wholeness, to a longing for heroism; men he says, are basically expressionists. It is women who hold sway over meaningful representation." ...from "Reading Philip Monk: Analysing a complex and controversial theory about Canadian art and artists," by Gary Michael Dault in Canadian Art, Winter/December 1984, Volume 1, Number 2, p.70-73. To read the whole article, go to the Canadian Art websiteWow...cool, eh? So controversial. I wonder, is this when Philip Monk allegedly jumped the shark? I applaud Canadian Art for putting up these old articles, very helpful to anyone like me obsessed with recent Canadian art history. I spent the 2nd half of the 80s in art school in Nova Scotia. I remember Philip Monk came to give a lecture and showed slides of paintings by Joanne Tod. I liked them. I was painting at the time, and being told by staff and fellow students in no uncertain terms that I (in my self-referrential irony) was making "boy" art, and that I had to "realise that women make a different kind of work." I can still feel the flush of weird inarticulated frustration that came over me in the face of these statements. And it was kind of true, at least in the context of the painting department at my school. The only people who related to my projects were guys: faculty like Gary Neil Kenedy, who was supportive and bemused, and fellow students who were themselves tied up in knots about the impossiblity of meaning, the death of painting, and such spirals of despair. Monk's statement (as filtered through Dault) sounds preposterous, but I feel like I know something of what he meant. While venturing into ironic or self-referential territory got me slaps on the wrist from other females (the laden scrawl, "Clever girl" written in the comment book of my graduating show still stings), I was still less boxed in, and had more generative scope to play with signs and signifiers than my male fellows.
I just realised this blog is over one year old! I've changed the header image in celebration. Here's a link to my first ever post (Nov. 18, 2003).
François Lachapelle of the Canada Council has posted an open letter to Instant Coffee's email listings that responds to protest against the C.C.'s proposed changes. This quote jumps out: "The Council has lost its capacity to be generous and is therefore less able to support the 'development of the practice', the purpose of the current program as stated 40 years ago." (I've reposted the whole letter in comments below)
To over simplifiy, the Canada Council was the result of two things: the Massey Report in 1951, and six years later the deus-ex-machina-type appearance of a $53 million endowment from the Killam and Dunn estates. A great source for this history (besides [plug!] Andrew Paterson's thorough timeline in Money Value Art) is George Woodcock's Strange Bedfellows, The State and the Arts in Canada, published in 1985 by Douglas and MacIntyre. Below are some quotes from Woodcock that provide context for the issue at hand.
When the Massey Commission began its enquiries in the spring of 1946, there was no world of Canadian arts and letters of the kind that existed in European Countries and the United States, or, for that matter, of the kind that has since developed in Canada. [...] The situation was partly due to the lack of interest on the part of most Canadians , still barely out of the pioneer age, in art. But even more it was due to the lack of the kind of infrastructure which transforms a scattering of people working in virtual isolation into a really functioning artistic and literary world that reaches out to audiences both urban and rural and in all regions. (p. 46-47)
In 1949 the average budget which the National Gallery could devote to purchases of all kinds, of which the work of living Canadian artists was only a part, was a mere $32,000, and other public galleries were faced by similar limitations of scope. At the same time there existed only a rudimentary network of private galleries, and by no means did all of these attempt to sell the works of living painters. (p. 49)
[The Massey Report] showed genuine wisdom in its assessment of the great cultural lacks of Canada in the late 1940s, and the scanty resources that existed to meet them. What impressed me perhaps more than anything else was the way the commission created its own bow wave of interest, not only looking into the needs, but making people think of them, so that by the time of the report's publication the idea that the community had a responsibility towards its arts and artists was accepted without serious opposition. (p. 50)
I have often heard it said that Vincent Massey was an elitist, and that the report was an elitist document. And so, if you think in such barren terms, it probably was. But in the cultural desert of Canada at that time a group of men and women was needed who could act the elitist role and decide what seemed to be good for the arts and suggest what was good for the arts was good for the country. (p. 51)
The upsurge in the arts that characterized the later 1950s was already beginning to stir, and it ran parallel to a postwar economic resurgence which made Canadians look more confidently and more adventurously on the future than they had done at any time since the 1880s, when the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway symbolized the emergence of a pan-Canadian economy which, then also, was accompanied by modest but genuine upsurges in poetry and the visual arts [...] There is no doubt that the success of the Arts Council in Britain encouraged not only the artists but also the politicians, who saw a lively artistic community as a national ornament...(p. 54)
In the speech to the throne on 8 January 1957, the establishment of the Canada Council was first proposed to Parliament, and shortly afterward St. Laurent himself introduced the bill establishing it, and in doing so laid down a principle that, despite the manoeuvres of later Liberal politicians, has mainly guided the council's actions, though lately with dwindling confidence. "Government should, I feel, support the cultural development of the nation, but not attemp to control it." [...] The council, formalized when royal assent was given to the Canada Council Act on 28 March, 1957, was established to "foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in the arts, humanities, and social sciences," and a measure of independence was guaranteed. The council was to set its own policies and make its own decisions within the terms of the act, reporting to Parliament through an appropriate minister... (p. 56)
The history of the Canada Council has been one of finding its way through a changing artistic situation, which has involved over the decades a moving away from imperial models, and a need to cope with the kinds of pressures, often indirectly applied but not for that reason any less irksome, that emerge when politicians confuse art with politics and talk of the democratization of culture, or when bureaucrats attempt to impose on the arts the attitudes of the marketplace and to treat the arts as "cultural industries." (p. 57)