“The Québec Triennial 2011”

This, the second Québec Triennial exhibition held at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, casts a loose net with a sampling of artistic production trawled in by the curatorial team of Marie Fraser, Lesley Johnstone, Mark Lanctôt, François LeTourneux and Louise Simard under the rubric of contemporary art in Quebec. Perhaps most important is the work this curatorial team has done in visiting studios and developing a working rapport with artists, manifested not only in the exhibition but in a 500-page catalogue with essays from the curators and outside writers. Framing the exhibition to direct the curatorial focus regionally marks the Triennial as an important exploration into the development of art in a global context. Such is “le travail qui nous attend,” and in keeping with this, the curators have avoided the established “stars” as well as repeating inclusions from the previous Triennial.

The title is appropriate as many of the more than 50 artists included in this exhibition pursue the avant-garde project of reconnecting art and life, albeit within the context of quotationist practices. The theme of everyday life looms large in the academy these days, and it is reflected in a survey like this in which many of the participants are recent graduates.

Raising the issue of the avant-garde also presents the question of our relationship to Modernism; this is addressed by curator Mark Lanctôt’s essay. As a general introduction to this exhibition we could say that most of the works present are configured around a questioning of experience, of any sort of immediacy, and a contradictory love/hate relationship with constructivist art in general and minimalist art in particular.

In an explicit use of repetition, Montreal-based Sophie Bélair Clément has staged a reconstruction of the Eindhoven, Netherlands Van Abbemuseum’s 1965 reconstruction of a 1923 piece by Russian constructivist artist El Lissitzky. Her interpretive reproduction of the museum’s rebuilding includes our relationship as an aspect of the work’s performance, one that we enact as viewers. The installation occurs in a particular place yet also happens elsewhere in space and in time. The piece, in this way, is not a static thing but is rendered in its “becoming,” and by this attitude the dominance of “here and now” opens toward a future that remains unforeseeable.

As examples of works that embrace contingency and indeter-minacy over Modernist immediacy there are the sound/audio works of Magali Babin and Steve Bates. Each has arranged situations that invite audiences into the participatory relationship of listening, of tuning in, situating us in an intimate relationship with familiar environmental sounds, both natural and technical. Steve Bates’s installations combine overlapping fragments from ostensibly divergent contexts such as music and the military, setting up rolls of “concertina” barbed wire to function as an antenna to relay radio signals to a pair of FM radios.

Eve K. Tremblay and Lorna Bauer’s photographs and installations consist in the actions of reference; appropriations from the literary realm and, in Tremblay’s case, a Proustian scenario of remembrance. In Bauer’s work the literary dimension rests in her appeal to the counter culture context of the ’50s and ’60s; the marginality of artists such as William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker. Simultaneously Bauer’s photographs often quote moments of medium-specificity and self- referentiality but here newly dispersed through quotation and displacement. Photo artist Jessica Eaton frequently presents quotations from high points in Modernist painting, returned paradoxically as photographs. In a more documentary use of photography’s factual dimension Thomas Kneubühler describes the intrusion of big industry’s technology into what were once wilderness environments.

Chris Kline, Lynne Marsh, Miriam Yates, Stéphane La Rue and Jake Moore have all approached the subject of architectural space, the place of designing in Modernist building, and the space of the human body. Chris Kline’s refined and sparsely pure paintings emphasize the materiality of painting contrasted with the rule of measure. His use of nearly transparent cotton in place of canvas allows his stretchers to intrude a ghostly framework into his near empty but geometrically taut compositions. The video installations of Lynne Marsh respond to the discontinuities that follow from media’s divergent places of production and reception. Another ambitious video installation, 2287 Hz, by Nelson Henricks, is presented in two rooms, first a looped film of a dancer in close-up, and in the second room, versions of experience and perception as ordered by the inscription that is the recording process.

Thérèse Mastroiacovo’s “Art Now” pencil drawings of book covers are what we see as we walk into the first foyer of the exhibition space. This labour intensive but apparently conceptually obvious work may be more complex than initially supposed, and perhaps, like the paintings of Kline, intrudes a ghostly dimension into our perceptions.

The exhibition title is a phrase quoted and translated from a 1920 essay “The Work Ahead of Us” by the avant-garde artist Vladimir Tatlin. The title is a work of precision, aligning accurately with the drift of the exhibition itself. As a quotation it repeats and displaces a prior moment, causing trouble for the traditional conception of the here and now. It reconfigures how we conceive time and history by asking us to rethink concepts such as origin, originality, aura, genius and especially the order of priority given in binary oppositions such as presence and absence or original and copy. The original and unique, as staged by quotation, provide a place from which to work that is neither a beginning nor an ending.

As a quotation, the title’s phrase is “working while we wait,” and is a statement removed from a particular context, of which both the specificity and the context function in a newly specific way by displacement and re-contextualization. The key concepts operative in this new contextualization are contingency and incompletion, key because of their place in claiming to disrupt the (en)closure of Modernist self-referentiality and also the claim that art be defined as aesthetic experience. For better or worse, current work strikes a blow at both aesthetic experience as well as the humanistic conception of experience.

Curator Lesley Johnstone’s text notes that the current attitude “…displays none of the reliance on theory and text so characteristic of that particular (critical postmodern) moment.” While this may be true, we can detect the outlines of a current orthodoxy, one that replaces the previous one of “installation art.” What gives this exhibition’s title and concept an interesting edge is an awareness that occurs when we see just how inadequate is the postmodern perception that the avant-garde is now only of historical interest. It was the French theorist Jean-François Lyotard who, in a 1979 essay commissioned by the Conseil des universités du Québec, argued that the ambition of the postmodern was to liquidate the avant-garde impulse. In a later essay he continued this point, saying that in order to radicalize the critique of Modernity, “study of the avant-gardes is imperative.” For him, the emergence of the postmodern as a new eclecticism, with its aesthetic of money, was an unacceptable alternative.

Using Tatlin’s quotation invites us to consider avant-garde activity and, in particular, to think about current positioning of the avant-garde with respect to the time to which contemporary art belongs. Now, 20 or 30 years after the rise of quotationist practice, has its centrality become a contradiction?

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the projects included in this Triennial is the widespread choice of dispersal, disposability and failure as subjects. Are we now contemplating these artists’ interest in quotidian life as constructive attempts at reconfiguring the art/life dichotomy, or is this state of suspension the post post-modern orthodoxy? ❚

“The Québec Triennial 2011: The Work Ahead of Us” was exhibited at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from October 7, 2011 to January 3, 2012.

Stephen Horne lives in Montreal and France.