First Histories (2024)

This is the concluding chapter to a book on Toronto discourse that I have decided not to publish. It is somewhat laconic since the reader would be familiar with the issues from the preceding twenty chapters. It summarizes the first histories of the downtown Toronto art community between 1983 and 1992.

I am appending one chapter (“Whatever Happened to Queen Street West?) to which the text refers. Click here.

First Histories

Though the art community seemed to resist histories being written about it, witness the debacle around Toronto: A Play of History, they were being written, one way or another, throughout.

There were histories before the fact, so to speak, histories that were intended to call the scene into being, such as AA Bronson’s 1983 “Humiliation of the Bureaucrat.” These could be called performative histories. Bronson’s text, though, disguised that there was a transition from one generation to another taking place, so two scenes arose at once seemingly under the same impetus. “Humiliation of the Bureaucrat” is a founding history, yet one that was blindsided by the so-called FUSE takeover of A Space November 1982 that deviated the scene radically from Bronson’s optimistic narrative and set a discordant opposition in place.

There were histories based on the idea of the lack of a written history, or the problem of a history in perpetual arrears, consequent on the fact of colonial Canada “having passed from pre-modernism to so-called post-modernism without a history of modernism” that would have put one in place.[1] For Philip Monk, writing in 1983 and 1984, Toronto was a culture of reception, where “semiotics replaces history; simulation replaces action.”[2] Through participating derivatively within the international artworld, reception reinforced this structure of lack, while an embrace of postmodernism disguised semiosis as “the highest form of capitalism.”[3] Yet, recognizing these conditions—registering this lack rather than mimicking free-floating images from afar—turned them to advantage in constructing a realistic local history.[4]

There were histories that arose during crises, such as Rosemary Donegan’s 1986 “Whatever Happened to Queen Street West?” Her history was adduced not so much to explain the present as to warn it by example—of prior communities that became “history” because they were displaced. She set the category of “community” as determinant, and, in this divide from a “scene,” she asked artists to decide between two histories, two histories to be, consequent on adherence to the idea either of “scene” or “community.” The question of wither Queen Street is just as much a sociological examination as a history. Any such examination of Toronto’s art community must begin with Donegan’s study. But her study was only possible because the Toronto art community itself had reached a critical mass to enable such an examination, even in its falling asunder.

There were polemical histories such as Dot Tuer’s 1986 “The CEAC was Banned in Canada” that were interventions in the amnesiac complacency of the art community. Tuer suggested that “Perhaps it is not history we lack, but an acknowledgment of and interest in the history of art practices and politics that stray too far from the cultural mandate of the status quo.”[5] Even the radical downtown art scene apparently had its status quo. So polemical histories were political histories, too. Tuer, thus, attempted to recover the already forgotten, or was it repressed, history of the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication, but only by, initially, setting it against rivals General Idea, for whom, Tuer suggests, “It would seem that the construction of a local art history in Toronto is slim in substance and big on self-promotion…. it is a history which evokes a dominant ideology as ‘the’ ideology; a history whose subjective mythology gives rise to fiction,” the fiction of General Idea itself.[6] In perpetuating internecine polemics between faux Marxists and mock capitalists, Tuer was suggesting that the Toronto art community, despite its amnesia, was at perpetual war with itself, that its history was an ideological battlefield.[7]

There were histories that tried to insinuate themselves through feigned play, such as The Power Plant’s 1987 exhibition Toronto: A Play of History. The Power Plant attempted to institute a history while rooting itself in Toronto at the same time. Its performance was submitted to the art community as the new gallery’s inaugural exhibition but received no standing ovation. The premise of the play was flawed. As Jeanne Randolph complained of these curatorial interlopers, “You might say that the history is pretty well us.” The problem was, well, that Randolph herself, besides being this history, chose not to write one. Even a provisional one. But then, even a provisional history, any play with history, was just as problematic as an “authoritative” one for Toronto’s art community.

 There were histories that came about through commissions, such as Stan Douglas’s 1991 essay “Joanne Tod and the Final Girl” or Barbara Fischer’s 1992 essay “YYZ—An Anniversary,” both necessarily limited, the one based on an individual artist, the other filtered through the view of YYZ’s centrality. Yet, they were the first histories fully on the side of a second generation deemed worthy of examination beyond their inheritance of an already established system their elders had created. With the penetrating gaze of an intelligent outsider, Douglas examined Tod’s painting within the critical milieu of the 1980s Queen Street scene, its talks, its theories, its international artworld derivations.[8] Focused on YYZ, Fischer, nonetheless, began by linking the gallery to its predecessors as a crisis of the “alternative” that defined artist-run centres collective history, “a part of the condition of their possibility.”[9] YYZ was a link in a chain of succession backwards and forwards. Yet, it, too, was subject to ossification as one-time alternatives became gatekeepers in the face of the democratic demands of a younger generation.

And then there were histories that were pure fantasy such as Bruce Grenville’s “The Construction of the Social: Speculations on Post-modernism in Toronto, 1980 – 1990.” Could you even write a history if you believed in an “appropriation [that] actually collapses the traditional notion of history onto a surface of undifferentiated or more accurately, unvaluated [sic] events,” as he believes distinguished Toronto’s postmodernist artists, leading to “a complete disregard for historical difference,” as he writes in particular of David Clarkson’s sculpture?[10] Grenville’s history hinges on a “post” marked purely by a rupture between two imported intellectual movements. History was an abstract transition between two instances of theory, no matter the materiality of the artistic practice. Those Toronto modernists, or structuralists he implies, of the 1960s and 1970s were idealized subjects of centred meaning; postmodernists artists of the 1980s were decentred subjects of dispersed meaning.[11] Artistic practice in Toronto, it seems, was fully determined by French theory, despite what Grenville himself had earlier written.[12] He claims that “the decade 1980 – 1990 marks the rise and subsequent fall of a post-modern practice in Toronto art,” but his arbitrary generational divide avoids any real historical analysis as does the mere mention of a “subsequent fall.”[13] What historical factors caused this rise and fall? What were the dissensions between generations pursuant on inherited conditions?

Fischer’s was an essential history, Grenville’s was not. What made hers pertinent was a careful examination of documents and events that gave evidence of the “rise and subsequent fall” of an art scene without suggesting its end. This entailed an understanding of the fissures internal to the community not arbitrarily imported into it. What was “structurally at odds” within the origins of the scene accounted for the conflicts of its subsequent history.[14] In fact, these contradictions moved its discourse forward. Discourse, or at least its discord, was wholly governed by its localized structural and social conditions not by any import. The contrariness of its contradictions was predetermined by what initially set up the community.

NOTES 

[1] Philip Monk, “Colony, Commodity and Copyright: Reference and Self-reference in Canadian Art,” Vanguard 12: 5/6 (June 1983): 14.

[2] Philip Monk, “Axes of Difference,” Vanguard 13:4 (May 1984): 10.

[3] Philip Monk, “Editorials: General Idea and the Myth of Inhabitation,” Parachute 33 (December 1983 – February 1984), 21. “The dependency on semiotics has consequences. Just as imperialism is ‘the highest stage of capitalism,’ so perhaps semiotics is capitalism’s most thoroughly developed cultural form, capitalism at its most rationalized” (14–15).

[4] “‘Crisis’ operated as a code word to indicate a lack: the lack of a history of contemporary Canadian art. As a recurring structure, this lack was to be articulated in the very real terms of crises of socio-economic cycles (Mandelian and Innisian) in which Canada was very particularly set. A local history was to be constructed, but it could be constructed only under certain constraints which were the conditions of our history. I labelled these conditions the ‘semiotics of reception.’ … While being a culture of reception, Canada was so positioned historically that the negative features of reception allowed a positive comprehension of the economic conditions of late capitalism and the semiotic conditions of postmodernism. We could treat both a logic and a history; but since this history is a lack, semiotics partakes of a symptomology. This lack is registered through its symptoms: its images.” Philip Monk, “Introduction,” Struggles with the Image: Essays in Art Criticism (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1988), 16–17. See also Philip Monk, “In Retrospect: Presenting Events,” Parachute 46 (March – May 1987), 11–13, and “Thinking through Curating,” M5V 3 (1992), 42–47.

[5] Dot Tuer, The CEAC was Banned in Canada,” Mining the Media Archive: Essays on Art, Technology, and Cultural Resistance (Toronto: YYZ Books, 2006), 56; slightly revised from “The CEAC was Banned in Canada,” C 11 (Fall 1986). Had Philip Monk capitalized “history,” meaning a written history, as he meant, when he wrote that we suffer from a “lack of a history; and so we repeat one from elsewhere,” he would have been spared the misunderstandings such as Tuer’s here when she writes, referring to Monk’s statement, that “it seems improbable that we suffer from a ‘lack of history’. Perhaps, instead, we suffer from a lack of articulated histories.” Tuer, The CEAC was Banned in Canada,” 24.

[6] Tuer, “The CEAC was Banned in Canada,” 24. “Just as Philip Monk can argue continuity as lack of history, I find within these archival documents evidence of a very specific local history—a history linked to artists’ political and social ideals and practices that were realized/unrealized/subverted by a very local context: the relation of production to a state-funded cultural bureaucracy and to political ideals. For, in researching CEAC, I had the impression that I was excavating only one layer of an alternative perspective, a perspective which sought to situate art as a marginal and social practice. The early years of A Space, The Body Politic, Centrefold, are also part of this perspective. And, although it is beyond the scope of this article to trace the interconnections and divergences, I invite the reader to bring his/her knowledge of Toronto's history to bear.upon my descriptions, impressions, and speculations of CEAC. History as personal memory, as collective amnesia, as constructed ideology, as sexual politics, as fiction, as myth, as self-preservation, as rumour, as fact, as eternal return: take your pick.”

[7] On the rivalry between CEAC and General Idea, see Philip Monk, “Battle Stances: General Idea, CEAC, and the Struggle for Ideological Dominance in Toronto, 1976–78,” Fillip 20 (Fall 2015), 14–27, 151–154. Reprinted in Institutions by Artists (Vancouver: Fillip, 2021). Also see the chapters “A Fashion for Politics” and “Antagonistic Couples” in Philip Monk, Is Toronto Burning?: Three Years in the Making (and Unmaking) of the Toronto Art Scene, (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016), 77–135, 139–153.

 [8] Stan Douglas, “Joanne Tod and the Final Girl,” Joanne Tod (Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery; Toronto: The Power Plant, 1991). An edited version appeared in Parachute 65 (January February March 1991), 11–17.

[9] Barbara Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” Decalog (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1992), 6.

 [10] 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 Gallery, 1990), 22–23.

[11] Without any evidence, Grenville claims that Toronto artists of the late 1960s and 1970s were “informed by structuralist theory…. In very general terms these artists sought to examine the underlying rules by which a subject was able to produce meaning or was given meaning. They rejected the traditional tendencies in art toward the biographical or anecdotal description of a subject, inviting us instead to consider how that subject produced meaning. In so doing, they proposed the existence of an ideal subject, a subject that could; at some point deep within its structure, be defined by a general theory or law. It was the role of the artist to reveal that deep structure and to define the ideal subject.” (Grenville is internally contradictory here.) Did these “ideal subjects” know this was what they were doing? And, of course, according to Grenville, the next generation pursued the contrary: “The post-structuralist artist is most clearly distinguished by the desire to question the possibility of a unified signifying process and to critique the universalizing tendencies of structuralism.” Ditto. (Grenville, “The Construction of the Social,” 13–14.) Who was the ideal subject here?

[12] This seems to contradict Grenville’s earlier statement on Toronto sculpture that “the influence of Barthes or, for that matter, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze, etc. is not important, for the question is both greater and lesser than that of the influence of French theory).” Bruce Grenville, “The New City of Sculpture,” C, 3 (Fall 1984), 81.

[13] Grenville “The Construction of the Social,” 13.

[14] Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” 7. What was structurally at odds, as Fischer points out, was the scene’s contradictory origins in the notion of the “alternative”—on the one hand, countercultural sociality linked to the aesthetics and antics of the historical avant-garde; and, on the other hand, the “organizational structure of artist-run spaces,” counter-institutions that were institutional all the same, though artist-run, parallel to mainstream institutions.