Whatever Happened to Queen Street West? (2023-24)

Written 2023 - 24, this text is part of a book on Toronto discourse I have decided not to publish. The title is taken from a 1986 FUSE magazine article by Rosemary Donegan.

What Ever Happened to Queen Street West?

Boho or social? One had to make a choice, it seems, to belong to the downtown Toronto art community. One could either belong to the bohemian art scene or to the socially responsible art community. Community and scene apparently were two different things, although their adherents lived together, mixed together in the same places, talked together, and sometimes exhibited together, because they belonged to the same … what: scene/community? What came first: the scene or the community?

The scene is what attracts; the community is what makes you stay. Unless you were there already. Referring in 1986 to the well-established Queen Street West art community, Rosemary Donegan writes that the “idea of community exists in the local historical mythology, although it is dependent upon who you talk to, and when they arrived in the area.”[1] She had already stated that “there is an implicit unspoken understanding of a community and its meaning” (11) and that “To recognize the phenomena of a community or a scene externally, neces­sitates an ability to ‘read’ its signs, codes and meanings. It requires a certain amount of specific information and/or preconceived assumptions of who’s who—what’s where—and what the inter­relationships are” (13). Cracking these codes might have unfortunate consequences as the reading of the “signs” of a scene potentially undermines the “meaning” of community—and not only the meaning, but the  fabric of its existence. “Queen St. is a potential victim of its own success” (21), Donegan laments; “it is the very success of the Queen St. scene that may have already trans­formed Queen St. into a caricature of itself, another conventional ‘lifestyle’ commercial venture” (10). Caricature was a superficial reading of the signs of a scene. Through its media dissemination, caricature was supplanting the real thing. It was the caricatures that were ruining Queen Street, both scene and community.

Donegan’s article “What Ever Happened to Queen St. West?”—subtitled “A History of Art Scenes & Communities in Toronto”—is a careful examination of the differences between “scene” and “community” as they pertain to her unique case study of Toronto’s Queen Street West during the 1980s. It is also an important history of the succession of Toronto art communities from late nineteenth century to the 1980s, each one displacing its predecessor in a different location. This useful history is really a reminder that art communities come and go. Of the dynamic Gerrard Street Village, which lasted from the forties through the fifties, nothing remained. “The greatest tragedy of the Village is not that it died—because it lives on in other forms—but that it was demolished to be replaced by two monster concrete towers and parking lots—a very prosaic end for a neighbourhood and community that had been creative and productive” (21). Queen Street was under other pressures that the art scene itself had created and the media compounded.

Donegan’s article itself rose out of these conditions, at the time specifically expressed as a housing crisis. Artists were being displaced by the very success they had created. Hardly had they moved into the Queen Street area in the late 1970s that a density (the conditions of a community/scene: artist studios, artist-run galleries, production houses, bars and restaurants) was rapidly achieved, so much so that artists themselves began to market the neighbourhood: see the centerspread maps that both Only Paper Today and FILE began to publish in fall 1979. Already alarm bells were being sounded in a 1980 study commissioned by the Association of National Non-Profit Artists Centres (ANNPAC) and written by Betty Ann Jordan, entitled An Investigation into the Nature of the Toronto Arts Community’s Contribution to the Cultural and Commercial Growth of the Queen St. West Area: The Queen West “Phenomenon” (1980). It was argued there that the direct and indirect financial contribution to the economy was counteracted by the deteriorating conditions of the art community’s existence. Then by 1985, the housing/studio crisis was full-blown with the daily newspapers reporting on city efforts to address the problem, although “Alderman Jack Layton said the city can do little to stop new developments and the higher rents that accompany them.”[2] But it was not just the artists but their institutions, too, that were threatened. In 1984 CITY TV took over the massive Ryerson Building at Queen and John and evicted A Space and Trinity Square Video, among others. By 1987 many of the artists had already left the neighbourhood, when YYZ also moved from its Spadina Avenue location far from the downtown core along Queen Street West at Dovercourt Road.[3]

In the case of the Gerrard Street Village, it was the hospitals that foreclosed the community, evicting tenants wholesale, and bulldozing blocks of buildings. In the case of Queen Street West, it was as if the artists conspired against themselves, or at least one part against another: scene against community. Donegan was an advocate for community, not the scene. Were scene and community so necessarily opposed? Was it always fated for a scene to be a parasite that destroys its host, the community? One of the main purposes of Donegan’s article was “to examine the reality and difference between an ‘arts community’: which is a process and product of people, work and ideas; and an ‘arts scene’: which is a phenomena engendered by the media, the art market and the real­-estate boom” (12). The division between the two depended, it seems, on whether one was a primary producer or not. Here is Donegan’s description:

Obviously, the essential element within the “arts community” is the pro­ducers—the visual artists, musicians, designers, and artisans. This is over-laid with the inter-related services. On the one hand, there is the intellectual and economic infrastructure of the art world: the curators, critics, dealers, magazines, and managers. On the other hand, there are the technical services: the copy shops, hardware stores, film laboratories, sound studios, the stat house, typesetters and printers. Finally there is a whole range of associated bookstores, antique shops, street pedlars, second-hand clothing stores, design shops, restaurants and bars. All of these elements together form a geographic locale identifiable as an art scene (13).

Between the one hand and the other, between the underlying and the overlaid, there is a certain amount of categorical slippage as to what constitutes the difference, where community ends and scene begins. Critics and curators were a test case. Where did they belong: scene or community? Were they on the side of the artist-run or on that of the media and art market? And commercial dealers? They only compounded the problem: “It was with the arrival of the commer­cial galleries that the area took on official status as the art ‘scene’” (18).

For Donegan, community came first. It was what was essential, the core around which the scene was an artificial excrescence and superfluous addition. Subtract the scene and its media accretions and you were left with community.[4] Donegan’s advocacy for community meant the denigration of the notion of an art scene. It was a replay of the old (artist-run) distinction between producers and non-producers, a division even as old as the antique philosophers’ condemnation of fallen speech (i.e., writing) only recently deconstructed by Jacques Derrida.

AA Bronson thought differently about scene and community. In a Nietzschean reversal of values, scene took precedence over community, the latter now relegated to a dream: “the Canadian dream of one community, that is a network of communities, sea to sea, in that reticent evocation of collective consciousness which seems our national destiny.”[5] That was all Bronson had to say about community in his foundational 1983 essay, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-run Centres as Museums by Artists.” The Canadian quest for community, it seems, was belied, or perhaps underlain, by an individual quest for a scene, but the latter could only be achieved collectively.

Bronson opened this essay, written for the 1983 Art Metropole publication and exhibition, Museums by Artists, with this extraordinary paragraph, in the process proposing a diagnostic of a historical problem:

As an artist writing about museums by artists, about my own history, which is a story beginning in 1968, a Canadian story with elaborately Canadian characters dreaming the Canadian dream of one community, that is a network of communities, sea to sea, in that reticent evocation of collective consciousness which seems our national destiny; as a Canadian artist then, wanting a Canadian art scene just like in New York, or London, or Paris in the thirties; as a Canadian artist typically unable to picture the reality of a Canadian art scene except as a dream projected upon the national landscape as a sea-to-shining-sea connective tissue; that is as a dream community connected by and reflected by the media; that is, authenticated by its own reflection in the media; as such a Canadian artist desiring to see not necessarily himself, but the picture of his art scene pictured on TV; and knowing the impossibility of an art scene without real museums (the Art Gallery of Ontario was not a real museum for us), without real art magazines (and artscanada was not a real art magazine for us), without real artists (no, Harold Town was not a real artist for us, and we forgot that we ourselves were real artists, because we had not seen ourselves in the media—real artists, like Frank Stella, appeared in Artforum magazine), as such an artist desiring such a picture of such a scene, such a reality from sea-to-shining-sea, then, it was natural to call upon our national attributes—the bureaucratic tendency and the protestant work ethic—and working together, and working sometimes not together we laboured to structure, or rather to untangle from the messy post-Sixties spaghetti of our minds, artist-run galleries, artists’ video, and artist-run magazines. And that allowed us to allow ourselves to see ourselves as an art scene. And we did. (29–30)

Contradicting Rosemary Donegan avant la lettre, Bronson continued with his main contention, “Yes, the media is a means of fabricating a tissue, if not of actual activity (as in the physicality of the New York art scene) at least as a sort of sketch of an art scene—an abstraction, a gesture, a configuration.” He threw down a gauntlet: the media rather was the event, the advent, of a scene. With this difference, it was a fiction controlled by artists whereby communication formats were taken over in an ironizing of media formats. (FILE was an example, General Idea’s videos another.) Donegan proposed that “It is through the media process that the Queen St. artists and musicians have be­come a marketable product—a commo­dity.”[6] Bronson insisted instead that it transformed them into personalities. He corrected the assumption that FILE magazine was set up only as a device to circulate the obsessions of Image Bank requests: “This is not to say that FILE was a form of artists’ communication. No, rather a means to see oneself as a part of this configuration of personalities, that is, as a component of a ‘scene’” (34). Products of the art scene, artists’ magazines and artists’ video allowed “us to see ourselves as existing, as an existing art scene with real artists you could take pictures of” (34). They were vehicles for collective self-fashioning. Fiction became reality, proving that an art scene indeed existed. The rest is history.

As if a story written by Gertrude Stein, Bronson was telling of the origins of the artist-run system, a prodigious creation of his generation, telling his own history, too. He was able to isolate a characteristic of this system, taking inspiration from a long epigraph from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, where Nietzsche claims “idealization does not, as is generally thought, consist in leaving out, a subtraction of the insignificant, the incidental. What is decisive, rather, is a tremendous exaggeration of the main features, before which those others disappear” (39). The characteristic “untangle[d] from the messy post-Sixties spaghetti of our minds” was the prosaic form of bureaucracy that laboriously built and diligently ran the artist-run system. Yet, wasn’t idealization also the exaggeration of glam and camp, too, so that the collective activity of this generation (Bronson is talking of ANNPAC here) “stands at the intersection where two worlds meet, forming a bevelled edge: on the one hand, poetic aspiration and the idealisation of the obsessed, on the other, empirical reality and the anti-poetic per se” (36).

In the intoxicated state of obsessive idealization, one did not make choices—between scene and community, for instance. Rather intoxication was the ability to sustain contradictions between scene and community or between bureaucracy and poetry, and to act on the beveled edge between them. Bronson could. On what side of the coin did Donegan land?

Donegan proceeds by subtraction: subtract the scene and one is left with community. It’s a choice that predetermines belonging and divides insiders from outsiders, artists from scenesters, producers from parasites, pure from the impure. It is a division with a value judgement attached. It’s the no growth option that eschews complexity. Bronson, on the other hand, chose complexity. He proceeds by addition, even when it was fractious. “Toronto is the only Canadian city in which the art scene is continually fracturing, and thrives by that fracturing,” he wrote a few years later in 1987.[7] Intoxication was contagious: media-disseminated images of the scene attracted others from afar and led to a migration of artists from across Canada to Toronto for a few short years.

The division between these two approaches proves that history is not just a bureaucratic obligation of dutiful inscription of past events but an imaginative act. So sometimes it is not a matter of linking art communities one to another (as Donegan does from the late nineteenth-century Bohemia through to Yorkville) but of delinking them from the “was not.” Bronson wrote that the “Art Gallery of Ontario was not a real museum for us, … artscanada was not a real art magazine for us, … no, Harold Town was not a real artist for us.” The invention of a radically new art scene meant the invention of a new type of history: a glam history that was performative, a story that was prescriptive. “Someone sometime must write a really good history of Canadian art in the Sixties and Seventies” (33), Bronson urged without saying that he was accomplishing it himself here.

Since Museums by Artists opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario April 2, 1983, presumably the publication was there at hand. This meant that Bronson probably wrote his essay in the summer or fall of 1982, well before the FUSE takeover of November 24, which put an end to the regime he himself had put in place at A Space in 1978. Perhaps he wrote it during the clamour surrounding Monumenta, the exhibition that hoisted the banner of a new generation of artists.[8] At any rate, he wrote there of his own generation of transcanada artists, who were about to be succeeded at home by a younger one. In his essay Bronson had periodized this history, beginning with the “summer of love” of 1967 and ending it with the formation of ANNPAC in 1976. Between 1976 and 1978, when the double crisis of the CEAC kneecapping debacle and the palace coup at A Space ended it, was the high moment of its expression in Toronto.[9] Then a fallow period followed; scene and community quietly co-existed. A Space pursued its new mandate; YYZ and Mercer Union started up; but the artist-run/postminimal/conceptual/performance/video art paradigm seemed to remain in place, undynamic but unchallenged. Sometime in 1982, though, something began to stir; Monumenta and two concurrent lecture series were its outcome. So began a new history by a new generation of artists on the scene, but what would its contribution to the idea of community be?

If the previous generation had created the artist-run system from untangling the messy state of their minds, what analogously had the second generation created? They added to the number of artist-run galleries but did not invent the phenomenon; they published no new magazines until C in 1984;[10] they also flocked to the commercial galleries moving into the neighbourhood. All they did, it seems, was embrace a new aesthetic paradigm, presiding over the postmodern turn in the arts. What form of community could be unentangled here? Representation itself, it seems. Representation was not only the content of the work or its means of depiction; it was the form that the community now took, or, at least, the idea that it had of itself. According to Stan Denniston, a co-curator of Monumenta, that exhibition was not “a curatorial statement but a community statement.”[11] Looking back from the vantage point of 1996, Tom Folland went farther, writing that “Monumenta, Chromaliving and The New City of Sculpture … were attempts to forge a sense of an artistic community with a shared formal language. It was a politics of community that was more about communal structure than critical content.”[12] Within two years of Monumenta that communal structure would be shaken.

 NOTES

[1] Rosemary Donegan, “What Ever Happened to Queen St. West?” FUSE [42] X:3 (Fall 1986), 12. Subsequent mentions in the text.

[2] Chris Weiner, “Queen St. W. soon another Yorkville?” Toronto Star, February 20, 1985. To appease the posh residents of Yorkville, which had a noisy nightclub operating there, then city Alderman Jack Layton arranged zoning changes to allow big-box nightclubs to operated south of Queen Street West in the heart of the artist community, meanwhile designating it the Entertainment District, a curse on the neighbourhood from the mid 1980s on as it attracted even more tourists and suburbanites, which was deleterious to the livability of the neighbourhood. Supposedly, no one lived there as they did in Yorkville, which was a mistaken assumption—only a different class worked and resided there. The district was further undone later by the dot.com boom until it went bust, but by that time, and before the ensuing condo boom, the artists were all gone. While the image of art scene helped media gentrify Queen Street, the artists did not. As Donegan writes, “Artists and musicians were originally able to enter the area on their own terms. In the somewhat anonymous quality of the area they didn’t create much of a stir. They rarely displaced the former residents as they tended to occupy non-residential space.” Donegan, “What Ever Happened to Queen St. West,” 14.

[3] CITY TV bought the building in 1984 and began the process of eviction. A Space moved to 204 Spadina Avenue that year. “The community is defined by its own institutions, fragile as they may be. The importance of these parallel galleries and production houses should not be under­-estimated. They were the essential ele­ment in creating the artists community in terms of geographical and political focus. They are integral and critical to the community as they provide access to production and distribution of art and they are the sites for its public iden­tity. If they were to leave, either volun­tarily or through economic pressures, the entire community would fragment.” Donegan, “What Ever Happened to Queen St. West?” 21.

[4] “However, it is the individual and collective work of the artists and musicians and the labour of the galleries, studios, production co-ops, magazines and collectives that are the basic infrastructure of the ‘community’…. The essential elements of the Queen St. community, then, are the infrastructure of artist-run spaces, the mixture of small scale commercial operations, and low-cost residential accommodations.” Donegan, “What Ever Happened to Queen St. West?” 20, 22.

[5] AA Bronson, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-run Centres as Museums by Artists,” Museums by Artists, eds. AA Bronson and Peggy Gale (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983), 29. Reprinted in From Sea to Shining Sea: Artist-Initiated Activity in Canada (Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987), 164–169, and National Gallery of Canada Review (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2021), 9–14. Subsequent mentions in the text.

[6] “This packaging and self-conscious selling of the artists within the media is a recognition, albeit a very limited recog­nition, of the artist’s power as a cultural and intellectual sign-post.” Donegan, “What Ever Happened to Queen St. West?” 15.

[7] AA Bronson, “Artist-initiated Activity in Canada,” From Sea to Shining Sea: Artist-Initiated Activity in Canada (Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987), 12.

[8] “Queen St. is also going through a shift determined by the generational aspect of the community, rather than by the crass economics of the real-estate world. The present community could be loosely categorized into three generations, dif­fering in artistic baggage, politics and priorities. The first arrived on Queen St. in the 1960s, a second group in the mid­ to late 70s who are now in their 30s, and then a 3rd generation of young artists and students of the 1980s.” Donegan, “What Ever Happened to Queen St. West?” 11.

[9] See Philip Monk, Is Toronto Burning?: Three Years in the Making (and Unmaking) of the Toronto Art Scene, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016.

 [10] The editorial collective of INCITE, taken over from Image Nation, made the magazine seem like a FUSE offshoot. It lasted only four issues between 1983–1984.

[11] Christopher Hume, “Representational Art Back with a Vengeance,” Toronto Star, September 4, 1982, H5.

[12] Tom Folland, “Reviews 2: A Project Room series: The Monumental New City: Art and Community (1980 – 1985)” took place at Mercer Union, January 11, 1996 – February 17, 1996. https://www.mercerunion.org/exhibitions/the-monumental-new-city-art-and-community-1980-1985