1982—A Year in Pictures (2019)
Between the beginning of 2019 and the end of 2024, I wrote a 185,000 word book on Toronto discourse from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, but decided not to publish it. Here is one of the early chapters written beginning of 2019. As I was an art critic on the Queen Street scene at the time, I have referred to myself in the third person here.
1982: A Year in Pictures
Not much was happening in Toronto in the summer of 1982. Glenn Gould died in August. The Hummer Sisters were preparing their cheeky mayoralty run for the fall. Canada was in a deep recession, again. In the outside world, the short Falkland War was ending and the long Lebanon War was just beginning.
Nothing new was on the horizon, art-wise, either. Or so it seemed. Galleries were quiet; some were shut for the summer; others had group shows of their stable. The fall season opened, though, with a phalanx of artist-run galleries collaborating on a sprawling group exhibition called Monumenta. It appeared without fanfare. So no one was prepared for its “blockbuster” success, least of all its curators David Clarkson, Bernie Miller, and Stan Denniston—artists and YYZ board members—who organized the show for A Space, ChromaZone, Gallery 76, and YYZ. The title was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Rudi Fuchs’s Documenta 7 then taking place in Kassel, West Germany (June 19 – October 28,1982). Huge Documenta was not yet the influence it is today; but Fuchs’s iteration was to change this and immediately to inflect critical and curatorial discourse in unexpected ways.[1] Monumenta didn’t take its cues from Fuchs’s aesthetic exercise. A more likely precedent, if one was needed, was the Times Square Show (June 1980), with its artist-organized DIY ethos, sense of inclusiveness, and introduction of a new generation of young artists.[2]
There was nothing remarkable then, or now, about the works in Monumenta. “In actual fact, the first ‘curated’ overview of representational art practice in Toronto was short on judgement, long on participation, and hardly clear-cut in direction,” Barbara Fischer judged ten years later.[3] What was remarkable was the response to the exhibition. It took off with the public and press. What was remarkable was that the event became, unexpectedly, well, an event.[4] It was disputed whether the exhibition was thrown together in a couple weeks, or whether this was a joke the curators told journalists that stuck and went on to characterize perception of its presentation.[5] “And although some invited artists obviously took it all very seriously, others seem to have thrown in whatever happened to be left over from their last show. One imagines that minutes before the doors opened on Saturday, artists were still ransacking closets for something to put on the walls. It’s a hasty, uneven exhibition.”[6] For some reviewers, the confused state of installation matched the confused state of the work, but all the same for many the exhibition was a stimulating clarion call for change.
It was an exhibition of the new trend of representation in current art. “Responding to the clearest signals of recent seasons, the organizers have proclaimed their show ‘representational in the broadest sense’. The old Toronto experimental formalism is passing away at last, says Stan Denniston. ‘We are right on the cusp of a pretty strong change in attitudes about making art. We wanted to develop a new forum for issues of representation and meaning—an art that is not about itself, but about the world’.”[7]
Representation was never defined but it was sensed to be opposed to abstraction. “Representational art back with vengeance: Group show torpedoes the good ship Abstract,” dramatically declaimed the headline of Christopher Hume’s Toronto Star review.[8] If abstraction was the universal condition opposed, in Toronto it was recognized that it also was the previous generation’s seeming bias toward video, performance, and conceptual art that was being rejected. As a consequence, Monumenta stood for “the end of intelligent art,” as Victor Coleman titled his sardonic review.[9] But at the dawn of this new thing called postmodernism, and the undefined license it unleashed, Modernism in general was really the focus of the attack.[10] For the real world was opposed to the art world. John Bentley Mays claimed that the exhibiting artists “all share at least one interest: how art can be used as a vehicle for talking about things and people in the real world. (As opposed to talking all the time about art and art history, a.k.a. Modernism.)”[11]
The curators recognized that the gathering weight of this expression, though most was little exposed, was of its moment—part of the zeitgeist. It served a need, both for artists and viewers. What that need was was not necessarily the needs of history. Certainly not the needs of Toronto. The most obvious needs, those closest at hand, those of the moment, the zeitgeist, in fact, you can count on journalists simplistically to articulate. So, Christopher Hume explained that “The circumstances leading up to this wholesale desertion of the good ship Abstract are several. First among them must be the fact that in New York—art fashion capital of the Western world—image painting has become the thing. (In Europe, on the other hand, artists have never abandoned representational art. But that doesn’t carry much weight here in Toronto.)”[12] The latter comment is astounding, given that John Mays recognized what everyone else knew but would not openly admit: “It is disturbing to find that a number of the anti-abstract, pro-real works in this show are nothing more than attempts to earn a cheap seat on the giant neo-Expressionist Italian and German bandwagons now rumbling around the international art world, making money and headlines as nothing has since Abstract Expressionism itself. What no one seems to notice is the ominous repetition of Toronto art history in all this.”[13] But who, in Toronto, needs rote history lessons when rebellion was at hand? So Hume went on: “The second reason related to the desire many students feel to rebel against the teachings of their elders.” Rebellion fuelled much of the works’ content: “Defining that sensibility, however, isn’t easy. It appears to be a combination of many things including nostalgia, anger, youth, rebelliousness and confusion…. And because they take much of their imagery from popular culture—magazines, comics and television—they make their work more accessible to larger public.” (Needless to say, popular culture was the subject of much Toronto performance and video art.) Yet, in the end, rebellion, too, needed permission. True to Toronto’s colonial mindset, Hume wrote: “Once New York gave its blessing to representational art, the floodgates were flung wide open and suddenly neo-expressionists, new-image painters and the like popped up everywhere. The new breed of realists is young, tough and ready for action.”[14] But not ready for adverse criticism.
Broaching the topic a third time in the pages of The Globe and Mail, John Mays worryingly, and finally, asked, “What does the sudden re-emergence of the recognizable figure in Canadian painting and sculpture actually mean?”[15] There, we finally find that the issue was about the figure, not representation, or that the debate was highjacked to lend support to the return to figuration in painting. Indeed, did artists really care what representation actually meant? Part of the problem was not just the question of what representation was but also what its privileged medium was? Some (most?) took it to be painting. “‘Representation’ hadn’t simply meant ‘picture painting’, yet it seemed certain people really wished it did,” Jeanne Randolph, looking back at Monumenta, slyly reproached.[16] “Picture painting” was the position noisily advocated by the ChromaZone collective.[17]
Despite what some newspapers made it out to be, Toronto was not a critical vacuum—it was not all passive reception. John Mays could still write, “Where in Monumenta is evidence of careful dialogue and critical engagement with the not very attractive story of recent Toronto art?”—by which he meant the Toronto tendency historically to import artistic styles from New York.[18] In Parachute, Tim Guest, however, recognized the opportunity for critical debate: “Although it was not the express intention of the organizers, Monumenta was the first major showing of Toronto ‘new painting’ and has engendered the expected war of the forms between infatuated young painters and arch post-minimalist theorists. Indeed, bringing this critical debate to Toronto has been the tacit desire of a great many local writers and artists.”[19] Perhaps too tacit a desire, because in the flush of attention, artists did not want debate. It was enough to bring this type of work to Toronto; artists did not want to bring along the criticism, too—surprising, given that fall 1982 and winter 1983 was the birth of critical discourse in the Toronto art community.[20] When a critical analysis around the work Monumenta validated was taken up just over a year-and-a-half later, when the exhibition was all but forgotten, it led to a crisis.
A discourse on representation, but not the return of figuration, had already arisen in Toronto, shortly before Monumenta and perhaps influencing to a degree the framing of its topic, though not its outcome. It was not as ecumenical as the exhibition but its elements, initially, might be seen to lead to categorical confusion. It was an attempt to assemble the concepts of representation, reference, and the real into some sort of agency. Adam Lauder understands that the logic of this attempt had its origins in “a politically charged theory of spectatorship grounded in contingent ‘speech acts’.”[21] It had been developing for a number of years in Philip Monk’s writing before he published the text “Language and Representation” in summer 1982 in a catalogue of the same name documenting an exhibition series he had curated earlier for A Space.[22]
This title, “Language and Representation,” might make one think that the discourse was not yet image oriented in terms of painting per se—and, in fact, there were no paintings in Monk’s exhibition. But neither was it conceptual. “Representation” was still a discredited term that he wanted to rehabilitate and revalidate for the developing forms Toronto artists were then using that were not abstract but not mimetic either. This work was post-abstract, post-conceptual, and post-postminimalist, and, perhaps, postmodernist, too. “Having espoused, in turn, both the Marxist critic’s Utopian desire for socially ameliorative action and the contemporary French structuralist’s fascination with linguistic models by which both art and action might be parsed like a sentence, Monk has come recently, out of the synthesis of both these backgrounds, to an important way station,” Gary Michael Dault wrote in his 1984 Canadian Art article “Reading Philip Monk.”[xxiii] That way station was an articulated hinge: the representational artwork itself. Dault pointed out that it was the potential of the double meaning of representation’s “standing for” that underpinned Monk’s theory.[24] Monk himself claimed that “a representational work is doubly directed: the reference towards its referent (the social real) and the representation towards its audience.”[25] The latter added an ethical dimension to the work’s epistemological aesthetics. Yet, the ethical demands Monk put on an artwork may have been too challenging for infatuated young painters, nonetheless “Language and Representation” and Monumenta implicitly set the oppositions of the next couple years.
Nor would local journalists take their cues from theoretical texts such as “Language and Representation.” Although they were looking at the same things, newspaper reviewers and art scene critics were different in their responses. Their respective situations made a difference. For journalists, Monumenta was an event. For artworld critics, it was a problem. It was already old news, though still worrisome. Journalists, however, had to explain the event as something new. What did it mean? Was it a “good thing”? There was only one question that could be answered: “The YYZ Monumenta group show … has been an unprecedented, opulent concentration of artifacts and instances of raw data. But it was assembled neither to raise questions nor to answer them—though it did settle one question once and for all. Whatever the wobblings and stylistic waverings of art in the seventies, advanced Toronto art in the eighties is, and will continue to be, representational.”[26] In effect, this was true. On the basis of this exhibition, both Mays and Hume made bold statements, Hume stating that “these are the artists we will be living with for decades to come,” with Mays adding, “Like it or not—and for better or worse—among these 75 names are the top Toronto artists of that year 2000.”[27] History has not proven them right. Already by the end of the 1980s, Mays named the exhibition amongst the “Worst of the Decade.”[28] For critical observers who were not journalists, it was not a question of what it all means, but what were the effects of this return to representation or, rather, figuration? Moreover, what was this event symptomatic of? In its querying, the second question would even include all these journalistic responses swelling the exhibition into an event. Indeed, artworld critics generally believed Monumenta was not a good thing.
Back in the trenches of the artworld, Monumenta marked the opening gambit in Toronto’s “war of forms,” as Tim Guest put it. Discord was about to become discursive. Some young critics, like Guest, could admit what young painters wouldn’t:
Conscious of the critical recognition and hot-house (commercial) atmosphere of “new painting” in New York, Italy and Germany, it has caught on in Toronto after the fact. To conjecture further, the “new painting” has surfaced here as a kind of false movement. Given the high degree of mediocrity demonstrated in current work and the few number of artists who are actually evolving through painting, there doesn’t appear to be any critical basis to promote the rebirth of painting in Toronto. What has happened is that some Toronto artists (and critics) have responded to an influential movement in a wholly provincial manner—asserting that our town is just as advanced as the rest by heavy-handedly imposing the style and rhetoric developed in the art capitals.[29]
He then adds, “This certainly does not reflect a healthy attitude … such provinciality is disappointing.”
Nonetheless, this work was now here, whatever its quality, out in the open, validated, at least through exhibition in Monumenta, ChromaZone, and elsewhere. Was there consensus, too, that debate was wanted? Guest claims that it was “the tacit desire of a great many local writers and artists” to bring it to Toronto. So, “one of the purposes of the show was to gauge the effects of the ‘new painting’, fueling speculation and debate both for and against.”[30] For or against, two sides lined up: “infatuated young painters and arch post-minimalist theorists.” Here too Guest was bringing an antagonism to Toronto. “Tacit” meant that the issue was bandied about in studios and bars; it was not yet in print in town. Who were the “arch post-minimalist theorists”? Philip Monk might have been one. And the “infatuated young painters”? ChromaZone’s Andy Fabo would become one of painting’s main ideologues. The two would have a testy relationship.
The discourse was in print elsewhere, notably New York. In print in New York meant that it was read in Toronto. Had it not been for the provocations of Monumenta, would this discourse have been imported, too? Then written in response to Toronto’s mediocre painting. Compared to the import, was this mimicking local criticism, like the painting supposedly it was arguing against, mediocre as well? Or was there a nascent native discourse developing?
NOTES
[1] One of Documenta’s curatorial team, Germano Celant, lectured at the Ontario College of Art, co-sponsored by A Space, on November 18.
[2] Another New York precedent was Diego Cortez’s curation of New York/New Wave at P. S. 1 in February 1981.
[3] Barbara Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” Decalog (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1992), 14.
[4] It took an event to catch the attention of uptown. Because of this exhibition, many uptown patrons ventured for their first time to the downtown art enclave: “Although these galleries seldom appeal to what can be called the Yorkville crowd, their showing of Monumenta attracted an unprecedented number of professional people. Perhaps more than any other single event, Monumenta succeeded in mixing pinstripes with the punk crowd which usually hangs out around Queen Street.” Lisa Balfour Bowen, “The writing on the gallery wall,” The Globe and Mail, October 9, 1982: F1. During 1982, a significant number of commercial galleries relocated to the Queen/Spadina area.
[5] It seems that John Mays started it: “Monumenta organizers … got on the phone to their friends at YYZ, and the friends of the friends, and pulled together this show in 2 weeks. It looks it.” John Bentley Mays, “Monumenta: promising but haunted,” The Globe and Mail, September 11, 1982, E11. Earlier in a preview, he wrote that the curators “hatched the idea in July” for the exhibition that opened September 3. John Bentley Mays, “Drawing Notice to New Art,” The Globe and Mail, September 3, 1982, E5. Victor Coleman repeated the two-week claim in his Vanguard review.
[6] Mays, “Monumenta: promising but haunted,” E11. Likewise, Tim Guest noted, “Organized on short notice, most artists responded to the exhibition by simply carting their latest pieces out of the studio.” Tim Guest, “Monumenta,” Parachute 29 (December, January, February 1982–1983): 36.
[7] Mays, “Drawing Notice to New Art,” E5.
[8] Christopher Hume, “Representational Art Back with a Vengeance,” Toronto Star, September 4, 1982, H5.
[9] Coleman was generally dismissive: “If Monumenta signals a movement, it is truly retrograde…. Most of the work in Monumenta exemplifies a sales orientation.” But by the end of his article he was won over by the exhibitions democratic spirit: “The artists were real participants in a collective statement about the state of current Toronto art.” Victor Coleman, “The End of Intelligent Art: The 1st Monumenta,” Vanguard 11: 9–10 (December 1982–January 1983): 17.
Earlier in the year, Clive Robertson had already rained on the parade of the artists who were soon to exhibit in Monumenta with his FUSE editorial “‘Dumb’ and ‘Retrochic’ Art: two sides of the same coin,” where he writes, “In Canadian terms, Toronto is aptly the retail centre for this dumb art as can be witnessed in artist-spaces, public galleries, commercial galleries and waterfront show-places. Tired of being penniless and forgotten, Toronto artists have been pressing to influence the style of certain consumer habits and goods without unfortunately pocketing any tangible or exchangeable rewards. Dumb art says nothing about anything to anybody. What it does, with clumsiness and inexactitude, is to reproduce or manner the dominant values of the society in which it is produced. It is not heroic, it is too middle-class to be decadent, it is simply dumb! … ‘Retrochic’ is not a style (though it is often associated with ‘punk art’). It is a subtle current of reactionary content filtering through various artforms. Its danger lies not so much in its direct effect as in its acceptance in the artworld.” Clive Robertson, “‘Dumb’ and ‘Retrochic’ Art: two sides of the same coin,” FUSE V:10 (February/March 1982): 290. Robertson’s point was that artists “who choose not to ‘encumber’ their work with any specific political analysis” were deluded in thinking that it had no reactionary political function.
[10] Jennifer Oille, writing in Canadian Forum, was the only writer to broach the topic of postmodernism (although Coleman called the artists “second generation post-moderns” [17]), while also making a number of interesting and provocative suggestions: “Monumenta, once and for all, meant to still hearsay and satiate curiosity, uncover the studio shift from ‘modernism’, lay out the evidence on so-called ‘post-modernism’… Denniston, Clarkson, Miller, Andy Fabo [of ChromaZone] and Doug Walker [of Gallery 76] divvied the material so as to disperse expectations of trends and blur social boundaries, for example, a YYZ ‘school’. (Inadvertently, or intentionally, YYZ, the progenitor of the exercise, and as a result of it, supplanting A Space, as ‘the’ artist-run centre).” She dismissed the show, though, as “Very trendy. Very passing fancy.” Jennifer Oille, “Video Video and Monumenta,” Canadian Forum 62 (December/January 1982–83): 48–9. She mentions that “Video was the one art (with performance) to be figurative during the swansong of modernist abstraction.”
[11] Mays, “Monumenta: promising but haunted,” E11.
[12] Hume, “Representational Art Back with a Vengeance,” H5.
[13] Mays, “Monumenta: promising but haunted,” E11.
[14] Hume, “Representational Art Back with a Vengeance,” H5. Robin Hardy had another word for the painting phenomena: inflation. “But there are those who wonder if representational work is simply a reactionary response to inflation and other contemporary economic realities…. How much is representational painting simply a saleable response to tough economic conditions—in other words a commercial ploy? … If the turn to representational painting is to some extent a by-product of the inflationary spiral, it has also produced an inflation of its own—more artists.” Robin Hardy, “A Queen Street Editorial,” Parallelogramme 8:3 (February–March 1983): 8.
[15] John Bentley Mays, “The wobbles are out and recognition returns,” The Globe and Mail, September 25, 1982, E13.
[16] Jeanne Randolph, Psychoanalysis & Synchronized Swimming (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1991), 20. Stan Douglas suggests that the curators’ original aims were discriminative: “The project was, in part, intended to demonstrate the diversity of figurative art being produced in Toronto as opposed to the perception of a preponderance of young neo-expressionist, or, more precisely, painterly painters in the city (a good number of exhibiting artists were not painters, and others who did not presume to find an expressive character in their materials). Nevertheless, the show came to symbolize Toronto’s participation in the international return to painting and the vernacular of neo-expressionism identified with the ChromaZone collective.” Stan Douglas, “Joanne Tod and the Final Girl,” Joanne Tod (Saskatoon: The Mendel Art Gallery; Toronto: The Power Plant, 1991), 36.
[17] The YYZ curators were not receptive to the type of painting promoted by ChromaZone. “Rather than excluding ChromaZone’s neo-expressionist painterly painting, my co-curators and I agreed on a foolproof strategy. We would put them in the show, thinking: if ChromaZone’s new brushy bombasticism was presented in a context of photographic conceptualism and appropriation art, people would sensibly judge it lacking and that would be the end of it. Of course in the end, this new-old style of painting was judged fabulously hip and got a lot of attention.” David Clarkson, “A Momenta Memoir,” available online: http://dupontprojects.com/static/text/Monumenta.pdf?h=f9f619ed . This memoir was written for an exhibition at Richard Rhodes’s Dupont Projects in 2016.
[18] Mays, “Monumenta: promising but haunted,” E11. “How long has it been—10 years? 15 at the most?—since Toronto, like small towns everywhere on earth, was teeming with artists earnestly making things that looked just like the Ab-Ex paintings they saw reproduced in the New York art magazines?” Guest made a similar point of making art from received illustrations: “most artists seemed to be following a formula gleaned from the murky illustrations in international art magazines—a slice of ‘dumb’ art here, a slash of neo-expressionism there.”
[19] Guest, “Monumenta,” 36. Zeitgeist harbingers, General Idea had announced the issue and debate a year before in the shorthand form of their editorial to the “Re-materialization of the Art Object” issue of FILE 5:2, Fall 1981: 17.
[20] One could point to Benjamin Buchloh’s early intervention in the debate, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” published in October 16 (Spring 1981); or those taking place concurrently in New York, represented, for instance, in Art in America’s special issue on Expressionism (January 1983) with its critiques “The Short Life of the Sincere Stroke,” by Carter Ratcliff, “The Expressive Fallacy,” by Hal Foster, and “Honor, Power, and the Love of Women,” by Craig Owens.
[21] Lauder writes, “The shift in Monk’s writing away from a politically charged theory of spectatorship grounded in contingent ‘speech acts’ toward an engagement with the image as a vehicle of ideology mirrored the increasingly representational orientation of younger Toronto artists in the early 1980s. This sea change was reflected in the critic-curator’s catalogue essays for his exhibitions Language and Representation (A Space, 1982) and Subjects in Pictures (YYZ, 1984).” In his essay, Lauder wanted to make “sense of Monk’s puzzling search for the ‘real’ in his reading of Toronto artists’ strategies of ‘reference’ in these years. ‘I thought of reference’, writes Monk in an early essay on Ian Carr-Harris, ‘as the possibility of a vehicle, a relay or tie to the real’.” Adam Lauder, “‘The Ambiguities’: Toronto’s Picture Generation,” YYZ Blog Archive (2014), (http://www.yyzartistsoutlet.org/2014/01/the-ambiguities-torontos-pictures-generation-by-adam-lauder/)
[22] Language and Representation was a series of exhibitions, installations, films, and performances that took place between A Space and the Funnel Experimental Film Theatre, November 17, 1981 to February 24,1982. Philip Monk, Language and Representation, Toronto: A Space, 1982; reprinted in Struggles with the Image: Essays in Art Criticism, Toronto: YYZ Books, 1988.
[23] Gary Michael Dault, “Reading Philip Monk,” Canadian Art 1:2 (Winter 1984): 70.
[24] “We take advantage of the double sense of representation’s ‘standing for’. Art and politics meet in the word ‘representation’; and every artistic production contains a representation of the viewer on the model of political representation. As well, the artist must position himself or herself in relation to what is represented (its choice as subject, the referent and social real), but not authoritatively as the representative spokesman; and he or she must bring that representation about by the relations of the codes of representation among themselves in the work and to the viewer.” Monk, Language and Representation, 6 (86).
[25] Monk, Language and Representation, 6 (86).
[26] Mays, “The wobbles are out,” E13.
[27] Hume, “Representational art back with a vengeance,” H5. Mays, “Drawing Notice to New Art,” E5. Mays added, “Monumenta’s second draw is going to be the evidence it provides for what Canadian art of the twenty-first century will and won’t look like.”
[28] “Worst of the Decade: … Monumenta and New City of Sculpture, etc.—all the undiscriminating uncritical Toronto shows of the early eighties, designed to promote the new painting and sculpture.” John Bentley Mays, “Booms, busts, blockbusters and a bizarre bent for buying,” The Globe and Mail, December 30, 1989), C15.
[29] Guest, “Monumenta,” Parachute, 36.
[30] Guest, “Monumenta,” Parachute, 36.