Newsletter
EDITO
On Artistic Sabotage
Sylvette Babin
SABOTAGE
Joker – Methodical Sabotage
Where a working method was once a part of what motivated the creative act, inscribing it in an affirmative, confident, and often progressive process, methods employed by current visual artists are open to what had once been fought and rejected: powerlessness, doubt, vulnerability, dissatisfaction. This methodological sabotage, analyzed, presented, and supported here through the figure of the Joker, reveals weaknesses by which we may exit the spectacle of consumerist alienation that affects our existences and the art world alike. This non-confidence is the defining characteristic of mutant approaches founded on states of mind and processes that degrade the aesthetic aura.
Thibault Carles
Gianni Motti – The Great Menace
This text, devoted to artist Gianni Motti, attempts to draw a parallel between his work and terrorist action, in particular with the tactical advantages—minus the deaths—of the car bomb. Through his claims of responsibility for natural disasters or his appearances in at the UN assembly, where he spoke while passing himself off for the Indonesian delegate, the author shows how he operates outside the world of art, in the very heart of the social and political system, by adopting an ambiguous relationship with a reality imbued with spectacle and pretence. He also describes how Motti offloads the production of artwork onto the media, bypassing the laws of the art market as much as possible and forgoing the image in favour of urban legend and rumour.
Raphaël Brunel
Notes on the Potential and Limits of Embedded Insurrection
“Notes on the potential and limits of embedded insurrection” proposes a dialogic exercise in articulation and intensification with the ideas of two cultural products: The Coming Insurrection by the Comité invisible (2007) and the forthcoming book byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices (2009), with the collaboration of its editor Marisa Jahn. By virtue of their differential objectives, The Coming Insurrection and byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices treat the idea of sabotage in vastly different yet parallel ways. Difference is inherently productive. But let us see of what. Let us figure out a “by-product.”
Sophie Le-Phat Ho
Of Sabotage in Architecture: Didier Faustino’s Anti-projects
Since the busted up instruments on the rock stages of the 1960s, sabotage has spread to other areas of artistic creation. Even in architecture, a field that is usually structured by the strict legal and administrative constraints of the construction industry, saboteurs, such as Didier Faustino and the Bureau des Mésarchitectures, operate successfully. How do they go about it? By calling competition conditions into question and in reformulating sponsors’ and clients’ demands. How far do they go? To the point of advocating illegality. They thus reveal the pernicious violence with which architecture is often complicit.
Vanessa Morisset
On the Attack: The Cultural Guerrilla of Cinéma abattoir
In the very consensually driven Québécois film world Cinéma abattoir has the profile of a cultural guerrilla. Far from being a simple poetic formula, this expression is a perfect fit for the actions carried out by Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt over the past years under the Cinéma abattoir label. In fact, he dedicates a good part of his creative energy to developing this editorial platform that allows those who join it, be it just for one evening, to engage in a form of cultural resistance to consumerist society and its practices. Cinéma abattoir, which is an alternative cinema dissemination structure, spreads its actions through the organization of screening evenings and the publication of a DVD collection.
Pierre Rannou
Explosive Works: A conversation with Ilya Kabakov
The point of reference for this text is Damien Hirst’s sensationalist (due to its scope and ambition) exposé at Gagosian Gallery (New York City, fall 2000). Titled “Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings,” it became a topic of conversation with the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov—a trialogue that was recorded in early December of 2000. In this trialogue, Kabakov characterized the situation of today as “a blow, like being hit over the head with a bag.” He places the blame for this shock on several artists of the new generation, on museum directors, and on institutions whose actions, in his view, are transforming art culture into a global spectacle. In order to record this new phenomenon, Kabakov employs such terms as “carpet bombing” and “carpet Apocalypse.”
Victor Tupitsyn & Margarita Tupitsyn
PORTFOLIOS
Marc Séguin
Thierry Marceau
Alain Declercq
ARTICLES
Persistance : la performance comme action pure chez Yang Zhichao et He Yunchang
La radicalisation de l’art performatif en Chine durant les années 1990 semble refléter la disparition progressive de la possibilité d’agir en tant que sujet symbolique dans l’espace public chinois à la suite des événements de Tiananmen. Cette hypothèse vaut particulièrement pour les performances impliquant le corps-soi, c’est-à-dire celles où le corps est volontairement soumis à des sévices extrêmes, et dont la valeur consiste dans la capacité à supporter la souffrance auto-infligée, comme chez Yang Zhichao et He Yunchang, performeurs sur lesquels nous nous pencherons dans le cadre de cet article.
Erik Bordeleau
Art Metropole. Le top 100 L’objet d’un art qui n’en voulait pas
L’exposition Art Metropole: le top 100 présentée à la galerie de l’Université Sherbrooke à l’hiver 2009, offrait une sélection de cent objets tirés de la collection Art Metropole. Ces objets sont en fait la documentation, sous plusieurs formes, de différentes pratiques et démarches artistiques d’avant-garde s’inscrivant dans le social. Livres d’artistes, photographies, disques vinyle, témoignent de la difficile rupture entre les pratiques dites conceptuelles et la création d’objet. En effet, l’artefact documentant l’action éphémère est ce qui reste d’accessible au musée lorsque l’idée prend le pas sur l’objet. Le document devient l’art lui-même sans être l’œuvre. Comment ne pas voir, de cette façon, la collection Art Metropole comme une œuvre d’art ?
Sophie Drouin
Dancing with the Berdashe by Kent Monkman:
How to Dance Differently
How to Dance Differently
Dancing with the Berdashe by Kent Monkman: How to Dance Differently sets out to underline the deconstruction of colonial imagery carried out by the Toronto-based artist of mixed ancestry Kent Monkman. In analyzing the works Trappers of Men (2006) and Dance to the Berdashe (2008) and focusing on the figure of the Berdashe, the text explores how the artist evokes sexual and racial oppression of First Nations in his creations and how—with a pinch of humour—he calls for a total emancipation (and sexual liberation).
Ariane De Blois
Sculpting Thoughts: An Interview with Erwin Wurm
The interview with the Austrian sculptor was conducted on the occasion of his Canadian premiere exhibition Désespéré/Desperate held at the Galerie de l’UQAM in the fall of 2008. Given that the organizing principle of the exhibition is based on the presence of philosophy in Erwin Wurm’s work, the conversation revolves on a discussion of this discipline and how it pertains to the field of art. The artist talks about the importance of philosophy in his everyday life, shares his thoughts on philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Adorno and Deleuze, and reveals why he chose to depict these towering figures in irreverent yet telling sculptural poses.
Bernard A. Schütze
Sonic Memorials:
Strategies of Memory, Resistance, and Rupture in Virutorium
Strategies of Memory, Resistance, and Rupture in Virutorium
KIT Collaboration and Robert Saucier’s Virutorium, a memorial of several urns containing digital ash to remember lost computer viruses, engages the sonic as a unique form of cultural memory. Playing ironic eulogies, the viewer is confronted with the cluttered logic of late capital, preventing the development of memory politics. Engaging in metaphors of the cemetery and the hospital, Virutorium links the viral threat between the digital and body. Using computer keys as digital ash that spill out during the exhibition, clutter becomes not only the marker of loss but also a metaphor of new ways of reading memory in digital culture.
Andrew Hennlich
The Reign of Gnomic Truths
Universal Code, a 2009 group exhibition at The Power Plant in Toronto, seemed set to raise troubling questions about the ideological function of “universality.” The stakes are clarified through an examination of Roland Barthes's dismantling of The Great Family of Man photography exhibition by Edward Steichen. The notion of “shared humanity” or “universal truth,” Barthes shows, masks the reality of history with an empty “poetic' gesture”—hence “the reign of gnomic truths.” But a closer look at the works in Universal Code reveals a more complex truth.
Mark Kingwell
CONCOURS JEUNES CRITIQUES
Michael Rakowitz
Projets récents sur Bagdad et Montréal : petite et grande histoire de nos cultures matérielles
Projets récents sur Bagdad et Montréal : petite et grande histoire de nos cultures matérielles
Avec l’exposition Michael Rakowitz. Projets récents sur Bagdad et Montréal, le commissaire Jean Gagnon offre une sélection inédite d’œuvres de cet artiste américain dont la pratique, empreinte de préoccupations sociales et politiques, réunit la sculpture, le dessin et la performance. Les œuvres présentées à la galerie SBC, à la fois séduisantes par leur caractère ludique et leur qualité plastique, interpellantes par leur force conceptuelle et leur portée sociale, questionnent les liens unissant la culture matérielle, l’identité culturelle et la mémoire collective.
Andréanne Roy
AFFAIRE DE ZOUAVE
Amas Gâchydermique
Michel F. Côté
EXHIBITIONS
Toronto – Narwhal Art Projects – Gabrielle Moser
Vancouver – Contemporary Art Gallery – Kathleen Ritter
London – Tate Modern Oil Tanks – Alice Motard
Istanbul – Foundation for Culture and Arts – Kathleen Ritter
Montréal – Galerie B-312 – Vivian Ralickas
Toronto – Mercer Union – Gabrielle Moser
Paris – Kamel Mennour – Nathalie Desmet
PUBLICATIONS
Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture – McGill-Queen’s University Press
Katrie Chagnon
Jean-Pierre Latour, critique d’art. Voir et comprendre – Centre de diffusion 3D
Patrice Loubier
