Axes of Difference (2019)
This text is from a book on Toronto discourse I have decided not to publish. It was written in 2019. Since I am the subject, I have written about myself in the third person.
“Axes of Difference” was delivered as a lecture at the Rivoli, 12 February 1984, then published as an article in Vanguard, 13:4 (May 1984), 10-14. (Reprinted in Struggles with the Image: Essays in Art Criticism, Toronto: YYZ Books, 1988.) The lecture divided the Toronto art community and was blamed for its destruction.
Axes of Difference
Maybe 1984 was a dread year after all. “That’s [when] Philip Monk had read his harrowing paper ‘Axes of Difference’,” Jeanne Randolph notes.[1] At the time, harrowing for some. In the end, maybe harrowing for all. It was a little bit stealth; no one suspected it. Monk had proposed and organized a symposium for YYZ, titled “The Practice of Pictures.” It took place February 12, 1984, at the Rivoli but popular imagination has displaced it to February 14 as if it was Toronto’s Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.[2] “Pictures” was the mode of the moment so it followed from what was of interest to the community, luring in its unsuspecting audience. But when Monk’s analysis dropped “the immediate response,” Stan Douglas writes, “was one of stunned surprise.”[3]
Monk’s premise was that Canada was a culture of reception, and at the moment that a local discourse was developing in Toronto, once again a legitimating discourse was being imported from elsewhere in order to validate only some of the art being produced in the city.[4] What were the consequences of the semiotic conditions of a culture of reception? According to Monk, receptivity led to passivity. Reception had consequences in the motivations, form, and content of artworks. What would that passivity look like in the image-based products Toronto artists made? In opposing “the possibility of action” to “passive resignation,” Monk initiated a fateful distinction in Toronto art, which was mistakenly taken to be simply an opposition between men and women:
We seem to witness an access to power by women accompanied by a sense of loss of power by men in an inverse proportion, marked by a confidence and a withdrawal respectively. This access and confidence lead women to deal with representational practices, as instituted by modern forms of communication and reproduction; the sense of loss of power and withdrawal by men lead to a retreat to art history and tradition. Thus the referents for subject matter and practice are located in the real for women and the gallery and art world for men.[5]
The response to “Axes of Difference” was a mass of misunderstandings. Primarily, this is because, beyond any argument, it was seen as a betrayal of community—that is, of the idea that Toronto had of itself as a community. To be a participant in that community meant being amicable and amenable, not critical or oppositional. Barbara Fischer suggests that earlier talks had “demonstrated a generally amicable, ‘collegial’ relation between criticism and art practice, a symbiosis or parallelism of needs and demands,” but that “this relation was challenged, in a radical way, during a symposium organized by Philip Monk in February of 1984.”[6] Maybe Monk was the problem. After all, his lecture on General Idea in YYZ’s lecture series was anything but amicable. But neither was Tim Guest amicable in Talking—A Habit, or Clive Robertson in response, for that matter. In his lecture, Guest had complained of “all the in-house hate and petty fights in the art scene,”[7] so “community” perhaps meant what clique one belonged to. YYZ was one of these cliques but it took itself to be dominant—and thus implicitly to be the community. After Monk’s “Axes of Difference” lecture, the community was outraged.
Perhaps the problem stems from this expectation of “a symbiosis or parallelism of needs and demands” between criticism and art practice. But who decides the boundaries of the relationship? How does a community implicitly regulate them and then decide when someone has gone too far? Wasn’t criticism itself a regulative discourse? Could Toronto accept this role for criticism, though? Never accepted as independent and thought rather as usurpation over artists, here, it seems, criticism was to be regulated from outside itself. For it seems strange that criticism necessarily must be collegial. Was the lesson of all this that there was no place for independent art criticism in Toronto?[8] But what’s a critic for? Critics owe an allegiance primarily to a discipline and not a community, but they operate within a community that is the source and reference of their acts. What was bothering Philip Monk about this community, a community that he had committed himself to? And was his lecture “a bit out of the blue,” as Fischer contends, “referencing no other writing, particularly none by feminists,” let alone his own?[9] The signs were already there in his own writing for why Monk felt he needed to intervene in the discourse of the moment.
Yet, we should start with the “stunned surprise,” because that surprise voided remembrance of the first half of the lecture that discussed the problems of a culture of reception. Thereafter, the lecture was characterized by half its argument (the second half of Monk’s lecture) and a caricature at that. Surprise came in part, not only because of Monk’s analysis, but his naming of names, Stan Douglas wrote. “It was perhaps the first commentary on the community, coming from within that segment of the community, which named names in its polemic: up until this point writing tended to be abstractly theoretical or in the promotional idiom of the review-article. And once ‘Axes’ was published in the May issue of Vanguard, it received in the following issue five long letters to the editor, all negative, ranging from ad hominem accusations of homophobia to declarations of betrayal and appeals for reconciliation.”[10]
It was “a piece of criticism so foul that it puts a critic of his stature to shame,” one of the letter writers, artist Andy Fabo, claimed.[11]
The problem was the oppositions Monk employed, primarily, it was seen, with the aim of setting men against women: of “creating false dichotomies between the sexes” (Elizabeth MacKenzie); of “using a feminist critique to his own ends” (Fabo) in “the fabrication of a new critical method of art evaluation based on gender prejudice” (Will Gorlitz); but this “more or less total discrediting of the men and their work is, oddly enough, part and parcel of the article’s phallocentrism” (Andy Patton).[12]
The problem, it was said, was the classifications he used and their seemingly shifting terms that suited his argument as needed: “Monk gets away with this nightmare world of constantly shifting meanings by never clearly defining his terms for his readers, therefore many of the crucial words seem to mean whatever he needs them to mean at any given time” (Fabo).[13]
The problem was that “‘Axes of Difference’ was nevertheless the most significant articulation of the appropriation idea as a token of Toronto’s aspirations for theoretical legitimacy,” and that that legitimacy was being denied to some.[14] “Put on the defensive, artists and writers scrambled to come to terms with what had just happened, producing articles, numerous letters to the editor of Vanguard, and countless counter-accusations. If some sought to rescue Monk’s rejected terms by explaining that melancholy was the prevailing, historically logical condition of current Toronto art by men and women alike, others attempted to claim the positive terms as their own, or question the very assumption of the notion of an ‘authentic’ local, and real, in the age of mediation.”[15]
The lecture and article continued to haunt into the 1990s, not necessarily always with any hindsight. Bruce Grenville called Monk’s oppositions arbitrary and restrictive (1990); Andy Fabo called the lecture an “extremely damaging polemics” (1991).[16] But they also elicited some careful considerations from Stan Douglas (1991) and Barbara Fischer (1992). Both Douglas and Fischer, though, were troubled by the lack of mention of feminism or the use of its texts.[17] But this address to the Toronto art community was neither a feminist analysis nor an academic text with footnotes. Its presentation could be faulted for its oppositional character, which hardly was feminist in its ethos, but the oppositions ultimately were not personal. Were these “oppositions” merely observations as Monk intended—empirical (that there were basically two types of work in Toronto), sociological (these works seem to divide between men and women), and aesthetic (that there were consequences to form)—they would still have been taken as categorical and not provisional, localized to the situation in Toronto. One wonders if the article had left off half-way, after the analysis of reception, or then included the long section on women and excluding that on men, whether there would have been the same reaction or miscomprehension that followed from the naming and shaming of male artists. But could the argument about the perils of a culture of reception be received without this shock of recognition? This seems Monk’s strategy in writing and his tactic in presentation.
Was his “sudden sort of turn” to women’s practice a bit of a ruse?[18] Barbara Fischer thought so. “In that it came a bit out of the blue, referencing no other writing, particularly none by feminists, one might see here another, different tactic from those of male artists: to avoid the threat posed by women acceding to power and confidence Monk’s strategy seems to have been to assimilate and claim, as opposed to ‘simulating’, that is, feigning, ‘mastery’.”[19] In this double feint, Monk was not advocating for one over the other but vying for mastery over both male and female artists!
Monk’s diagnosis failed to take because it couldn’t be recognized for what it was: a critique of a culture of reception in which everyone participated, men and women, artists and writers alike. People instead got hung up on the gender opposition. “While Monk’s argument was the most important critical interpretation that current local practice had yet received, his discussion, in the end, won its importance and notoriety not on objective grounds, in terms of its use-value as a theory of the moment, but rather, on account of its very real, lasting subjective effects within Toronto’s avant-garde.”[20] In the end, though, perhaps Monk’s analysis was predictive: that the “lasting subjective effects” were, as he argued, a consequence of the form artworks took and not a wound to the egos of male artists inflicted by a mere lecture. The “collapse” of the Toronto art community, blamed on this lecture, rather must be found in the works that artists themselves produced—what was fundamental to them and symptomatic of them—and not in what a critic said about them.
Far from being only “a theory of the moment,” although that function was important for a critic to elaborate, Monk’s lecture gambled on what he thought was at stake in Toronto. He thought it necessary to be oppositional in this case. But might other forms of classification be more productive readings of the current scene and, thus, ultimately more effective in gaining adherents? Ironically, part of the effect of his lecture, in the “scrambl[ing] to come to terms with what had just happened,” was that it set off a plethora of new classifications.[21] Initially this was a critical jockeying back and forth for a rejigging of Monk’s oppositions: accordingly, some women fit into the men’s category and some men fit into the women’s, many complained. Other names could be added, too. But this response initially was more resentment at inclusion or exclusion than an invention of classification itself.
Invention was left to the most fantastic response—a fiction by John Mays embellished with sidebar commentaries on Richard Rhodes’s 80/1/2/3/4: Toronto Content/Context, on the one hand, and his own configurations of alliances, counter to Monk’s, on the other. His need to answer was pressing, it seems, as the article appeared right away in the summer 1984 edition of C magazine.[22] What it exposed was complex.
For Mays, it was a plague on both your genders. In the sidebar to the article, Mays wrote “Monk argued that one can read new Toronto art as a symmetry of motives, dividing along lines of gender…. Philip Monk’s argument was presented (inappropriately, to my mind) as synchronic survey of artistic practices, with virtually no reference to the recent history of popular imagery, desire and cultural determination in Toronto. Having considered some aspects of that history, I am inclined to believe Monk was being quite optimistic about Toronto women artists, without justification” (38). For Mays, the conflict was not gender based but generational. In the text proper, he pursued a fiction, writing an allegory or perhaps a roman à clef where the narrator speaks of his mentor, the critic Steinway, who sounds as if he spent many an evening at A Space. “Steinway recalled the heyday of that joyful blasphemy against Olympian abstract authority, recalling the spectacles of self-disclosure and self-analysis in the mortal and carnal art of performance, in the spectral, staring examinations of video, and in extravagant deeds of means mixed and impure…. And he remembered with special pleasure the wit of those days before the closing years of the 1970s, before the change that took place then, when artists stopped deploying the complex strategies of parody, perversity and appropriation as means of ripping away the veil from established power’s absurdity—when artists, sadly, stopped resisting power’s presumptions to total, inevitable reality” (39–40).[23] Steinway dated this change to around 1978, when a new generation of artists had started to create its own artist-run centres (actually this was 1979), when he “observed a pattern of solemn reversions…. The artists in those days put aside the previous outrage and valour of sexual artistic, intellectual parody, preferring instead to mimic the powerful, uniform conservatism of father, policeman, capitalist, and academic artist.” Steinway noted “the striking of the new apolitical, passive stances” and a “shift from audacity to melancholy in Toronto’s art” (40). Steinway’s observations of art in 1984 do not differ so much from Philip Monk’s—and, in fact, at this point of Mays’s story, he is espousing Monk’s view in “Axes of Difference”—of artists’ reversion, passivity, and melancholy—though applying Monk’s condemnation now to both genders.[24]
What happened in 1977 that divided two generations from each other? Then led to a “period of inward immigration, painful solitudes, [that replaced] a period of centrifugal sexualities, sociabilities, and desires” (40)? It was not an art event at all but the “notorious murder” of twelve-year old shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques, “a child of impoverished Portuguese immigrants from the Azores,” by three gay men on the Yonge Street sleaze strip. For Mays, Jaques’ death was an emblem of dramatic social changes in art, sexuality, and culture. But more than that, his death “was also a rite replayed again and again in the production of art, as artists, the first artists to have come of age after the myth’s genesis, continually performed in their work the transformations of the boy’s last hours” (47).
This is an extraordinary diagnosis of the collective psychological state of young Toronto artists, turning an event into an ongoing rite and claiming it totally determinant of the art they made. Responding right after the publication of Monk’s article, Mays’s text was pertinent; but it seems to have been ignored. Was it the opacity of his fiction or the fact that Mays was even more devastating in his condemnation of a whole generation of Toronto artists, male and female alike?
Barbara Fischer retrospectively lamented that another imaginative and serviceable theory of the moment was overshadowed; and yet, coincidentally, it was presented that same day and place as Monk’s lecture.[25] “Randolph’s proposal—had it been given thought at the time—might have offered another point of reference, just as it still may provoke a more rigorous debate on the question of effects and action (in the politics) of ‘The Practice of Pictures’. If Jeanne Randolph’s exhibition of sculpture in ‘Influencing Machines’ could be seen as an indication, art, and the practice of representation in Toronto, was already more complex than Monk’s binary axis allowed.”[26] Yet Randolph’s catalogue essay itself mentioned no artists nor their Toronto context.
One can understand the appeal of Randolph’s lecture and essay because they redeem in advance the work Monk was criticizing. Randolph called these works “amenable objects,” whose “malleable, revisable, unfinished” character implied a “reparative impulse.”[27] Plenty of such broken-down sculpture would be in evidence that fall in The New City of Sculpture. The change of media in that exhibition, from painting to sculpture, however, did not close the argument on representation; it merely extended the reach of Monk’s critique. Nonetheless, Randolph’s essay could be seen to correct what was in excess in Monk’s text and perhaps ultimately contradictory: his demand that representation lead to action. Following Randolph’s argument, one could say that Monk’s demand partook of the means-end ratio of technical thinking, whose “utilitarian view” condemns art that “does not achieve material or political change directly,” and puts it “under pressure to function in a technically correct way.” Instead, Randolph maintained that “states of being are as real as taking action.”[28] This does not so much discredit Monk’s overall analysis but rather removes what is extraneous to it: the demand for an extra-aesthetic effect, which in the end is a moral and political judgement. Art’s (subjective) effects remained within its representations, a condition that does not change what is symptomatic about it, though, including what any sense of powerlessness pertains to, to which Randolph lends a positive virtue.[29] Randolph and Monk agree on the symptom but give opposite values to it.
In the end, Monk’s argument could be rejected, his motivations questioned, but could his position be assailed?
The most prescient, and entertaining, critique of “Axes of Difference” appeared in a review of Subjects in Pictures, one of Dot Tuer’s first published reviews—although she discusses neither the exhibition itself nor the artists in it. Seeing the exhibition in relation to the controversy set off by Monk’s earlier lecture, she got to the crux of the matter. Perhaps it was the crux of another axis, the point of which was a dilemma—or aporia—that Monk could not foresee since it applied to himself alone. He was blind to the spot from which he spoke.
One might be forgiven for initially mistaking Tuer for a Lacanian, especially when she insists, what no one else but Lacan said, that the subject is structured by language, but you would be wrong.[30] Rather, she speaks to what is beyond both men and psychoanalysis, one and the same to her: “this ‘other’ pleasure, feminine jouissance, in excess and unmediated by the phallus, threatens the inscription of sexual identity which upholds this order. Hence, it is unrepresentable, unspeakable in a masculine economy of desire.” Be that as it may, she plays her own game of fort-da, reeling in psychoanalytical sources when she needs them to construct her discourse, throwing them back when they are found to be by men. So Philip Monk joins “ladies man” Jacques Lacan and protective “devoted brother” Stephen Heath as “the con man, selling little old ladies in midwestern towns, representations of life insurance, selling us a phallic mis-representation of our difference.” For he foolishly and presumptuously “would speak about women and their representation … in his desire to curate a ‘women’s’ show.” As Lacan did of Freud, Tuer might have asked, what was Monk’s desire in all this?
For it seems it was his presumptive position, not his analysis, that was at stake. “But Monk, like the male artists he chides for their appropriation of a discourse from elsewhere, has too much invested in the form of reception, our reception of his work as non-phallic, neutral, a deveiling of the patriarchal order.” So Subjects in Pictures, rather, is “a phallic encore in which all difference is erased.” Tuer doesn’t mean the difference between men and women, or the differential opposition Monk asserted, but what women in themselves propose, if they were feminist enough.[31] But if the con man critic and curator can be criticized, so, too, the women in his exhibition can be lectured for being dupes, like Monk himself, of a phallic trap: “As artists these women may be conscious enough to recognize their subjection in representation, but they do not seem to recognize their subjection to a critical authority who trades and exchanges their merchandise of difference for a name. As curatorial objects, they are not masters of, but subjects to the ‘look’ which Monk fails to delineate as the masculine gaze, commodities which maintain Monk’s status as the post-modernist critic who defines the conditions of ‘changing representation’. Like Monk, they are neither among the women nor beside them, not pricks, not feminists, but floundering in the masculine territory of the critic’s voice.”[32]
This contradiction was consequential. Tuer concludes: “And as for Monk, the axes he grinds of difference are sharpened in an imaginary site of reception. For no one is listening. Women do not hear him, deep in their labyrinth which Monk dares not, perhaps, cannot enter, and the men refuse to hear him and his denunciation of their failures. In a symbolic order of subjects constructed as sexual identities through language and representation, it seems that Monk is the only one left without a gender.” Whether or not this possibly ever could be the case, or was as rhetorical as the oppositions Monk provisionally proposed, the zero degree of genderlessness was not a position of freedom from which to manoeuvre. Rather, Tuer’s suggestion was a predicament Monk faced as a critic. If it was true, according to Tuer, that he had no quarter with women, and with the alliance with men being lost, where did he belong? As a critic, one writes not only from an intellectual or theoretical position but also from within a specific social milieu. If he could no longer operate within this milieu, he could always shift its terrain. He did. He withdrew from the field and became a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He “abdicated” his power, his supposed power over men and women, and took exile in an institution.[33]
If the unintended consequence of his lecture was Philip Monk’s demise as a critic, one would think this a salutary effect for the art community. Why, then, did some see his text as leading inexorably to the community’s destruction? If, as Barbara Fischer implies, the art scene “was already more complex than Monk’s binary axis allowed,” surely the art community could absorb this disturbance to its equilibrium. And if, as Fischer further says, “local ‘differences”’ are stitched into oppositions evident ‘elsewhere’,” one wonders why those other communities were not likewise thrown into crisis by similar critiques.[34] What was so uniquely constituted and fragile about Toronto?
NOTES
[1] Jeanne Randolph, Psychoanalysis & Synchronized Swimming (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1991), 36. Philip Monk proposed the event to YYZ in October 1983. The Practice of Pictures: Representation in Toronto Art was comprised of three afternoon lectures by Jeanne Randolph, Richard Rhodes, and Philip Monk and two evening panels: “Expressionism versus Mediation: Representation in and Across Media” (with Andy Fabo, Oliver Girling, Janice Gurney, and Andy Patton) and “Power of the Image: Politics of the Image” (with Anna Gronau, Tim Guest, Nancy Johnson, Jeanne Randolph, and Lisa Steele). His proposal to YYZ stated, “The purpose is to draw together the community and to elicit discussion of specific issues within it. It will try to bring together two of last years events into conjunction—Monumenta and A Critical Structuring, although it will not be a discussion of those events. Discussion will be on current practice and talking about that practice…. The evening panels would be composed of those lecturers and artists in the community who have focused on these practices: e.g., YYZ and Chromazone members with crossover into feminist/media community.” See “Initial Notes on a Proposal to YYZ,” October 11, 1983 in the Philip Monk Fonds of the National Gallery of Canada.
[2] The discrepant date perhaps has its origins in From Sea to Shining Sea, ed. AA Bronson (Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987), 143. But the date is incorrect even in Monk’s book Struggles with the Image.
[3] Stan Douglas, “Joanne Tod and the Final Girl,” Joanne Tod (Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery; Toronto: The Power Plant, 1991), 45. Writing after the fact, Douglas himself was not at the lecture.
[4] “Toronto is neither New York nor Germany, let alone Italy. Yet there is a desire to institute a discourse in Toronto on the order of elsewhere—on the authority of that production, legitimation and history. Differences immediately arise in that history and culture we share but on our part cannot naturally inhabit, and in the power of legitimation we both command. Theirs is the power to originate and legitimate; ours is the power, really a lack of power, to receive and repeat. This desire to institute a discourse from elsewhere to support a local practice has to order its form—and thus its content as well—as reception. This form, the form of reception, is the condition of our art here. It is a semiotic strategy on the same order as advertising. That is, it puts itself into place and maintains itself as a manipulation of signs within an already determined system. This system comes from elsewhere, and it is disseminated under the conditions of semiosis itself. The consequences: semiotics replaces history; simulation replaces action.” Philip Monk, “Axes of Difference,” Vanguard 13:4 (May 1984): 10; reprinted in Struggles with the Image, 185.
[5] Monk, “Axes of Difference,” 12. The lecture and article discussed the works of Shelagh Alexander, Janice Gurney, Joanne Tod, Shirley Wiitasalo, David Clarkson, Marc de Guerre, Andy Patton, and John Scott.
[6] Barbara Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” Decalog (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1992), 16. “The amicable relation was as much apparent in Artists’ Review as perhaps in the early days of C Magazine’s mandate, which was ‘to show a partnership between art and criticism, [and] to give room for original art to live alongside interpretive art writing.’” Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” 30, note 95.
[7] Tim Guest, “Intolerance (The Problem with Social Realism),” Parallelogramme 8:1 (October–November 1982): 15.
[8] The art community was not about to give critics a regulative role, which is the opposite side of the coin of Clive Robertson’s complaint of “self-appointed” critics and curators who were “responsible to no-one in particular.” Clive Robertson, “Publishers Note: The A Space ‘Takeover’,” FUSE 6:5 (January/February 1983): 228. Andy Patton might as well have been writing about Philip Monk rather than Benjamin Buchloh when he complained of the seemingly new power of the critic: “Any monolithic representation of history will efface the actual practices and the actual commitments of many artists: it is one of the moments in which artists experience the critic as a power set over us, legislating history rather than recognizing it as complex, discontinuous, conflictual, disorganizing...”Andy Patton, “Buchloh’s History,” C 5 (Spring 1985): 29.
[9] Barbara Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” 30, note 100.
[10] Douglas, “Joanne Tod and the Final Girl,” 45–46.
[11] Andy Fabo, “Letters,” Vanguard 13:7 (September 1984): 50. Philip Monk replies: “My labelling of the work, which people find so contentious, as ‘romantic idealism, private subjectivism, sentimental humanism or nihilistic expressionism’ is tame, nearly ‘responsible’, next to Gorlitz’s accusations or Andy Fabo’s characterization of me as ‘the white heterosexist male’ critic. The connotations of racism and homophobia are of a completely different order than the claims I registered against these artists’ works. This is the unfortunate fate of the critic in whom artists project and invest so much authority: that I am to be condemned for everything that I have not written about. Fabo’s statement is nothing other than a desire to be visible ‘before the white heterosexist male gaze’ a desire to be written about by that figure of authority.” “Philip Monk Responds,” in “Letters,” Vanguard 13:7 (September 1984): 51–52.
The artist Will Gorlitz agreed with Fabo: “Fortunately, the self-serving opportunism of Monk’s critique is so evidently transparent that it has rendered itself irrelevant and ineffectual. His partisanship in this fiction in any case casts doubt on his status as a commentator on art in Toronto.” Gorlitz, “Letters,” 51. Monk replies to Gorlitz: “If the ‘blatant malice’ and ‘contrived insincerity’ of my ‘diatribe’ based on ‘inaccuracies’, ‘insupportable simplification’ and ‘subjective evaluations’, which, however, are the ‘privilege’ of my ‘self-serving opportunism’ and ‘partisanship’, produces a ‘fiction’ which is not only ‘thoroughly unprofessional’ but ‘irrelevant and ineffectual’ as well, and further lead Gorlitz to ‘doubt’ my ‘status as a commentator on art in Toronto’, I can only think that some truth, or threat, is contained in an article that could provoke such excessive abuse. Otherwise the ‘fiction’ would cancel itself in the reading and the response would not be so invested by hostility.” “Philip Monk Responds,” 51.
[12] “Letters,” 50–51. Monk replies: “The gross distortions of the letters start by privileging an opposition between men and women. No one has gone beyond that misrepresentation of the article to its obvious intent: namely a statement of the consequences of artistic form, of which I opposed ‘representation’ and ‘expression’. The contrasting of the work by men and women was at a third remove from that primary opposition.” “Philip Monk Responds,” 51. In his lecture and article, Monk had clarified that “The lines of difference are not so much those between expression and mediation, men and women; they are really between a passive resignation and melancholic despair, pessimism, nihilism and decadence on the one had and a sense of the possibility of action on the other. In other words it is what the works lead to that is the important question.” Monk, “Axes of Difference,” 12.
On his “phallocentrism,” Monk replies: “Far from abandoning these ‘phallocentric values’, given the response to this article, I am free to be a ‘prick’. However, given that my critical terms are already being appropriated by and for the very work I was criticizing, perhaps my value has expired for this self-serving axis of painters (I can return the phrase to this newly emerged ‘status quo’) that can absorb any challenge to its self-esteem.” “Philip Monk Responds,” 52.
[13] Monk replies: “Fabo might not find the ‘shifting meanings’ of my text so nightmarish if he understood this as a process of definition. Please grant me one of the disputed virtues of ‘patriarchal language’—that of logic.” “Philip Monk Responds,” 52. The “confusion” stemmed from Monk discriminating his terms, initially opposing “expression” and “mediation” or “appropriation,” as some may have thought the opposition, but then deciding that expression and appropriation both “project ideal subjects,” he opted instead for the opposition “expression” and “representation.” Monk, “Axes of Difference,” 11. Andy Patton continues this misrepresentation: “As I recall, Philip’s argument was often confusing expression, representation, and mediation, and sort of moving the terms around so that it would suit the artist whose work he liked as opposed to making a clear argument.” Andy Patton interviewed by Peter Joch November 16, 2012 for Representations: YYZ in the 80s, http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/sgc-cms/histoires_de_chez_nous-community_stories/pm_v2.php?id=story_line&lg=English&fl=0&ex=842&sl=9543&pos=1&pf=1)
[14] Douglas, “Joanne Tod and the Final Girl,” 46.
[15] Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” 17. She refers in particular to John Bentley Mays, “Miracles of Emanuel Jaques,” C 2 (Summer 1984): 38–47, and Andy Fabo, “Nationalism/Internationalism/Regionalism,” C 3 (Fall 1984): 71–73.
[16] Bruce Grenville, “The Construction of the Social: Speculations on Post-modernism in Toronto, 1980-1990,” S. L. Simpson Gallery: 1980 – 1990 (Toronto: S. L. Simpson Galley, 1990), 23. Andy Fabo, “Dead Centre: Views on the Curatorial Arena in Toronto,” M5V 3 (Spring 1992): 4. Fabo reinforced this comment later in his presentation and article, reading back into “Axes of Difference” another lecture by Monk (“Decapitation, Criticism and Terror,” 1989), and calling it “an allegory for the bloodletting that was released by the definitively polemical text of the early eighties—Monk’s Axes of Difference.” Fabo, “Dead Centre,” 7.
[17] “There is a familiar ring to this distinction [of activity and passivity], and it reminds one of an absent word and critical methodology in ‘Axes’. Specifically, the word feminism and the critical methods associated with it, which seem to be forever on the horizon of Monk’s argument, though never enunciated or enacted.” Douglas, “Joanne Tod and the Final Girl,” 46–47. Douglas, and others, failed to see Monk’s distinction as a deconstructive reversal.
[18] “If his 1981–82 exhibition ‘Language and Representation’ and his 1983 polemical history of Canadian art, ‘Colony, Commodity, and Copyright: Reference and Self-Reference in Canadian Art’ (published in Vanguard), had posed the question of reference through the work of male artists, then both reference and ‘a critical realist model of representation’ were to be found, in 1984, in a sudden sort of turn, in women’s art practice.” Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” 16–17. Actually, Fischer failed to note that Judith Doyle and Lily Eng were part of Monk’s Language and Representation exhibition, and, although it may not have been articulated clearly enough there, that his “Colony, Commodity, and Copyright” article was a critique not a positive accounting and elevation of a male pantheon into a canon.
[19] Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” note 100, 30. Feigning mastery, it seems, the implication here is that he yet has to borrow from others elsewhere. Barbara Fischer writes, “Local ‘differences’ here are stitched into oppositions evident ‘elsewhere’. For example, Monk’s arguments echo those of New York critic Craig Owens.” Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” note 98, 30. Just as Toronto at the time had a parallel not derivative relation to New York, so Monk had a parallel not derivative relation to Craig Owens. It seems, however, that only writers in centres of power enjoy the privilege of not having an “elsewhere.” The actual article of influence would have been Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: The Return of Representation in European Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 39–68. Fischer was looking back retrospectively from Subjects in Pictures, which was still a half-year away, allying it parenthetically to Monk’s lecture, whereas Monk was continuing to employ and develop themes he had advocated since beginning writing, all set within an oppositional framework: of a material versus a romantic subjectivity (“Structures for Behaviour,” “The Death of Structure”), of the semiotic conditions of reception (“Editorials: General Idea and the Myth of Inhabitation”), etc.
[20] Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” 17. Had the ChromaZone collective not usurped the discourse and turned it into one of painting alone and then distorted the collective’s role in Toronto’s recent history, would Monk have made his intervention? Monk’s lecture discussion of ChromaZone’s tactics was not included in the ensuing article.
[21] See Mays, “Miracles of Emanuel Jaques.” Any of the exhibitions that came after perhaps could be considered so, such as Tim Guest’s Late Capitalism (January 1985), even Bruce Grenville’s exhibitions of generally Toronto art that took place elsewhere, such as The Allegorical Image in Recent Canadian Painting (June 1985), Territories (November 1985), and Mapping the Surface: The Process of Recent Toronto Sculpture (October 1986).
[22] Mays, “Miracles of Emanuel Jaques.” Concurrently, he wrote in The Globe and Mail, “But since the beginning of this year, the spark of political discussion has once again been fanned almost into flame at the centre of Toronto’s art scene. In mid-February, during a conference held at the Rivoli, Toronto critic Philip Monk opened the current controversy by proposing a distinction between the passive, romantic and melancholy art of some Toronto men in the downtown art scene, and the art of some Toronto women, which Monk saw as at least tending to encourage action and awareness. This argument, which is novel in raising such issues in the Toronto art world, has since been published in Vanguard, and continues to provoke comment.” John Bentley Mays, “Politics fuels the flames of controversy,” The Globe and Mail” June 9, 1984, E15.
[23] Compare performance artist Randy Gledhill’s utopian vision of the 1970s downtown Toronto art scene: “In this time, there existed in Toronto a Kingdom. Actually more a dystopic Republic. Everyone was beautiful, luminous, fearless and very, very smart, reveling in the glow of irreverent collective intelligence. A smorgasbord of style and artifice. The stars shone brightly through the smog. Everyone partied together. Endlessly. Banquet years. … Alas, Icarus was too quickly approaching the sun. The planets were moving out of alignment. The blush was fading from any glimmer of hope. There was trouble on every horizon. Continuing to fiddle while the postmodern Rome ignited, the kingdom was cast adrift. The age of rationality was upon us. Randy Gledhill, “The Time Before the Time Before the End of Time,” Ironic to Iconic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars, ed. Paul Couillard (Toronto: Fado Performance Inc., 2008), 153–154. One has to wonder, was the first generation of Toronto artists heroic and the second diminished? Or was this nostalgic self-promotion. Nonetheless, Toronto’s performance artists of the first generation preserved some of this utopian ethos, moreso than the art market rationality evinced by the painters, sculptors, and photo-constructionist of Queen Street West.
[24] Mays contrasted these two generations of Toronto artists: “The naked maker of the early 1970s, given to disclosure and the construction of a truth of the radically local, re-clothed himself in art’s traditional stuff of history and general, moralizing stories. The sublime mortal technologies of performance and video were exchanged for the history-laden beaux-arts media of painting and sculpture, now being summoned from their graves.” Mays, “Miracles of Emanuel Jaques,” 40.
[25] “Preempting constructive debate, the event also, ironically, overshadowed the contribution of a Toronto woman writer, Jeanne Randolph, who spoke during that same symposium. Having passed virtually unnoticed in the discussions at the time, Randolph’s lecture, and its realization in an exhibition [Influencing Machines], may be understood in retrospect as a counter-proposal (though it was neither announced nor likely intended as such).” Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” 17. The two-part exhibition took place at YYZ May 7–26 and May 29–June 16, 1984. The catalogue essay was reprinted in Jeanne Randolph, “Ambiguity and the Technical Object,” Vanguard 13:7 (September 1984): 24–27, and somewhat amended in Jeanne Randolph, “Influencing Machines: The Relationship between Art and Technology,” Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming—and Other Writings on Art, (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1991).
[26] Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” 18.
[27] Randolph, “Influencing Machines,” 52, 47. Randolph had earlier delivered “The Amenable Object” as a lecture in the YYZ series A Critical Structure(ing), published it in Vanguard (Summer 1983) then in Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming.
[28] Randolph, “Influencing Machines,” 37, 50, 51.
[29] Not surprisingly, Randolph and Monk differed even on the relation of artwork and viewer, which for Randolph was a “collegial interaction” (52) while Monk’s theory of spectatorship originally was based on mimetic rivalry.
[30] “For within Lacan’s psychoanalytical description of the symbolic order, we are all, men and women, socially constructed through language and representation as divided (sexed) subjects that privilege the phallus.” Dot Tuer, “Subjects in Pictures,” Vanguard 13:10 (December 1984): 48. All further quotations are from this page. For the context of Tuer’s discussion, see Jane Gallop’s The Father’s Seduction to which Tuer owes her opinions of Lacan and Heath even to the language describing them. Jane Gallop, The Father’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982).
[31] It was not necessarily that Subjects in Pictures was “a ‘women’s’ show” by a man, Tuer equally condemned women in the women’s curated Alter Eros exhibition (February 28 – April 14, 1984, at A Space, Gallery 76, and Gallery 940). “Much of the art in these shows encourages a masculine activity of voyeurism. The art becomes an object to be looked at and consumed, mirroring the larger consumption of women as erotic objects and images in a male dominated society…. As an exposé of a masculine process which silences women, mystifying and hiding their own potential for eros, these pieces could be considered valuable. But without any accompanying analysis, placed in the context of a gallery devoted to alter eros, they can only serve to reinforce the masculine prerogative of looking, and further obscure the possibility of formulating a specifically feminine desire.” Dot Tuer, “Alter Eros,” Vanguard 13:6 (Summer 1984): 47.
[32] The “gaze” was a term loosely used, and taken usually as shorthand for the male gaze, famously as in Barbara Kruger’s Your gaze hits the side of my face (1981). When Tuer writes in her “Alter Eros” review, “Lacan, by rereading Freud in the light of linguistic development, discovered that the subject is constituted sexually by a language that is constructed through the primary signifier of the phallus and maintained by the male gaze of the Other,” she is wrong about the gaze. According to Lacan, both men and women are subject to the gaze, which is not at all human. Colloquially, of course, one knows what the “male gaze” means. Here is what Monk writes about the “look” in regard to the work in Subjects in Pictures: “A work cannot be critical that does not account for its attraction or for its own apparatus of power. Just as work cannot be critical that does not account for its own complicity in commodity exchange through the production and dissemination of images. The commodity form is implicated in the look. The look invests in the image of depiction, but also in the ‘look’ and image of the work itself—its form of appearance, which is its commodity status. Since this particular object (the artwork) carries all these investments, the structure of the look is also the site of a potential critique. The critique maintains itself within the same structure as the look, as a critique of the pleasure or dominance of the look, its investment in and as ideological figures.” Philip Monk, Subjects in Pictures (Toronto: YYZ Artists’ Outlet), 1984, 11, reprinted as “Subjects in Pictures” in Struggles with the Image: Essays in Art Criticism (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1988), 212–213.
[33] It could be argued that Monk merely gave up one position of power for another, but, at the same time, to do so he gave up his profession and identity as a critic. One aggrieved artist, though, thought the decision strategic, rather than adventitious, and as advantageous to Monk. David Clarkson recalling Monk’s lecture and article has written, “In our naivety, Philip seized an opportunity. Cleaving along lines of gender, he used an iconographic schema to outline certain political tendencies he perceived in others and me. ‘Axes’ clobbered my youthful ideal of an idiosyncratic, anarchistic Toronto art scene. Women were set against men, photographers against painters, conceptualists against expressionists, and friends against friends. The co-operative collaboration and community I imagined was chopped into a hierarchy, a new arrangement of authority that would benefit Philip over the next two decades in his work as curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Powerplant.” David Clarkson, “A Monumenta Memoir,” http://dupontprojects.com/static/text/monumenta.pdf?h=f9f619ed]
“David Clarkson: Remotes,” Richard Rhodes Dupont Projects, May 14 – June 4, 2016
[34] Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” 18, note 98, 30. Perhaps to make amends for his lecture, Philip Monk together with Shelagh Alexander, and enlisting other members of the art community such as Tanya Mars, started up The Talk Exchange beginning May 6, 1984. The poster read: “It has become apparent from the overwhelming attendance at formal panel discussions that artists in Toronto want to talk. But what has yet to be found is a situation where artists can direct the talk. What is needed is a forum in which we can set the agenda according to our own concerns. You are invited to participate in a bi-weekly, informal, open discussion on work and issues at hand in the Toronto cultural community. As participants, the audience will direct the discussion. It is hoped that a local critical analysis will develop pertinent to the conditions and production here. This constructive critical analysis, which is participatory and non-confrontational, can bridge communities and articulate common positions and differences. The audience will set the agenda for each session on current topics, events and issues.” Lack of interest led to its dissolution after only a few sessions, by which time, “Axes of Difference” had been published as an article, igniting the controversy again.