Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years
Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years, insert in C international contemporary art 59 (September - November 1998)
Or scroll to text below
Design: 4dT, Sean Gaherty
Toronto Life ran an article of images from the exhibition with an introductory text by Deanne Taylor. Click here to see.
Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years
We all arrive in the middle of things. Toronto’s art scene has attracted waves of artists and art-school graduates from across the country—from Winnipeg, Vancouver, Halifax and elsewhere. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the name of the area that attracted them was Queen Street.
Today in Toronto, the designation “Queen Street” is shorthand for the downtown entertainment and shopping district. Twenty years ago, before it gained currency in the media, the name offhandedly referred to an energetic art community that lived, worked and played in the neighbourhood. The current boom in administered loft-living trades on the imagined lifestyle of the artists who for the most part no longer live there and who, in fact, started to depart in the mid-1980s in the first wave of suburban discovery and commercial gentrification. This is no lament or accusation; art communities dissolve, as Toronto’s of that time did. Some deconstruct due to internally motivated ideological disputes; others collapse with the departure of the generation that created the scene; all respond, inventively or disastrously, to the boom and bust of economic cycles.
Art scenes achieve a critical density by their ability to attract others—by the images of them that are produced, as well as by what is said and written. Artists create works of art and the context for their making. We call this context the art community. This scene has a social side that cannot be pictured merely through displaying its art works. Some may think the social side inconsequential to the meaning of works of art, but its dynamic can affect their creation. Other images, which tend to be those that an art community makes for itself, and then disseminates more widely, play an active role in the scene’s self-realization. Theatrical, ironic, sometimes frivolous and often ephemeral, these self-fashioning images make an art scene self-conscious; but over time they are forgotten. They are left behind in the community’s continuing development and consequent reorganizations, or they lose their visibility in favour of images that stabilize as collectable works of art—entering public collections and thus becoming the subject of art history. Since so many of the images from that time were published originally in magazines produced by Toronto artists, we have borrowed the magazine format here to document this Power Plant exhibition.
The first writing on this community qua community actually appeared, not coincidentally, at the moment that the art scene was imperceptibly dissolving, although a “crack-up” would not be so obvious until the recession of the late 1980s. The ensuing collapse of the art market and the structural realignments necessitated by a changing political climate only further disheartened an untethered, almost unfocused scene. A number of articles, published in Fuse and C in 1986, assumed an evolution in the art community towards some form of social responsibility— “Higher Social Work” Globe and Mail critic John Mays facetiously called it. In an article—worryingly and prophetically titled, “What Ever Happened to Queen St. West?” —cultural historian Rosemary Donegan wrote:
With the coming of age of the Queen St. West scene, Toronto of the 1980’s appears to have developed its own official ‘art scene,’ full of budding potential and style. The scene not only focuses on music and the visual arts, but is also associated with theatre, design, fashion, and the perennial favorites—eating, drinking, and dancing. In recent years, the community has also developed a consciousness of black, feminist, gay, and lesbian issues.
Fuse, Fall 1986
At the same time, Clive Robertson retrospectively wrote of the Clichettes’ first lip-sync performance of Leslie Gore’s pop hit, You Don’t Own Me:
Looking back, it can be argued that the birth of the Clichettes coincided with the birth, or public emergence of Toronto’s recent progressive cultural scene. For 1978– 79 was the year when the gay community would look for and receive cross-community support in the first court battle of The Body Politic. And 1978 was also the year when Immican, the Regent’s Park Caribbean community organization, emerged publicly as the generator of dub poetry and reggae music. At the same time, the decade-old downtown artist community was about to make a tentative leap into the larger cultural milieu, aided by external allegiances of gender, sexuality and class politics.
Fuse, Dec/Jan 1986
In 1978, as the Clichettes’ performance proved, cultural criticism could be fun, too, rather than earnestly moralistic, and control of the means of representation could mean a playful engagement with the “oppressor.” In 1986, however, the model for the art community to which these writers adhered seemed to demand responsible forms of organization and the delegation of representation away from self-fashioning images and toward inclusion of the practices of others (those believed, traditionally, to be marginalized by art communities, even ones in formation). Especially frivolous images are disdained in the subtle iconoclasm that bureaucratic organization breeds. Such attitudes, implicit in the above articles, are sharply delineated in Dot Tuer’s 1986 article on the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC), where she counterposed General Idea’s ironic semiotics to CEAC’s Marxist political agenda. CEAC’s “political and social ideals,” rather than any body of images, is the basis on which a Toronto history should be written, Tuer contends.
General Idea’s image manipulation - whereby, in their own words, “We moved in on history and occupied images, emptying them of meaning, reducing them to shells. We then filled these shells with glamour, the creampuff innocence of idiots, the naughty silence of sharkfins slicing oily water” —was dismissed by Tuer (and others, including myself) as a capitalist model.
At the risk of contradicting my own past by a similar flirtation with “the naughty silence of sharkfins slicing oily water,” I am re-presenting such dismissed images, whose production coincided with the period of the Toronto art community’s self-creation during the 1970s and early 1980s, and suggesting that they are implicated in that self-creation. Even if they had to be unearthed from archives or dislodged, as if from memory, from artists’ studios, they are essentially affiliated with the lasting artifacts of that period. Together, they offer a unique portrayal of a period when the art community in Toronto improvised itself. While there has been a tendency in Canada, perhaps rightly so, to fetishize the image of production and distribution in the mantra of the “artist-run,” you will not find here images, archival or otherwise, of production (whether studio or artists’ collective) or of bureaucratic organization (whether display or dissemination). Contrary to such dour self-effacement, this exhibition brings forth the shining images—if sometimes disheveled or decadent—of the people—practitioners and habitués—and places that made this scene.
Portraits
Under the rubric of portraiture, “Picturing the Toronto Art Community” combines art works and archival material of varying status to create an image, but not scrapbook or photo-album, of the scene. By not distinguishing between these images in terms of status, we begin to see how the images may have functioned for that scene in picturing itself. Portraiture is the common element among the diverse material of magazines, book covers, ads, posters, artworks, studio portraits, film, video-tapes, performance documentation and “snapshots” of the scene. All use photographic images of members of the art community, much like advertising, as the vehicle for their statements or promotion.
These images might be real portraits, as in the typologies of Arnaud Maggs and the three-minute super-8 portrait-films by Eldon Garnet (1976–86), or invented, as in Lamonte Del Monte’s fictitious family (made up of art-community members) in David Buchan’s Roots. The works might involve the artists themselves, as in GI’s self-portraits, or others, as a loose ensemble of players, in various artists’ videotapes.
Photographers create portraits of their social scenes or cliques and they also contribute to the making of others’ works, as the captions for many of the images here show.
Spaces
In lazy, sunny days of distant origin, at a time when living was easy, Queen Street was a string of hippie haunts, wino flops, greasy spoons and after-hours booze cans. Artists lived there in apartments converted to studios and in lofts, as they had in the Queen & Spadina area for years. “Queen Street” took shape as existing artist-run institutions moved to the area at the end of the 1970s—the Music Gallery, CEAC, Art Metropole, A Space—and new spaces opened up—YYZ, Mercer Union, the Cabana Room.
Much of the energy of the times was liberated by two spectacular blowups in 1978. First, federal and provincial funding for CEAC was cut off that summer in response to its leftist (some said infantile) posturing in support of the Italian Red Brigades by advocating art-world knee-capping. Then, at its annual general meeting that September, A Space’s board was dissolved (along with its previous orientation) and Toronto’s oldest artist-run centre was refitted for a move to Queen Street the following year.
With their focus on international avant-gardism, both A Space and CEAC were seen by younger Toronto artists and by those working in more traditional media to be exclusive, self-serving and unresponsive. The blowups functioned to fragment and to expand the art scene, creating ambitious new spaces and venues for all forms of art. Significantly, some of the video and performance programming joined music in bars—first, at the Cabana Room (co-founded in July 1979 by Susan Britton and Robin Wall), and then at the Cameron Public House and in the back room of the Rivoli, spaces that became the main hang-outs for the art community.
The boundaries of this new community were created by participants and onlookers travelling from performances at the Music Gallery or A Space to events at 31 Mercer Street or the Cabana Room (and later the Spadina Hotel’s Subway Room), from openings at Mercer Union, YYZ and commercial galleries—such as the Ydessa Gallery (above the Rivoli) and the S.L. Simpson Gallery (just west from the Cameron) —to nightly beer, theory and gossip at the Cameron.