Art Criticism after Conceptual Art (2026)

I wrote this for the Vancouver book launch of Genres High and Low that took place at The Polygon Gallery October 8, 2026. Talking about conceptual art in Vancouver was a little like taking coals to Newcastle, but the period I am talking about of experimental art writing in Toronto, my practice in particular, between 1978 and 1982 coincides with the first attention to the Vancouver School in the works of Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace.

Unpublished.

Art Criticism after Conceptual Art

Is it folly to be an art writer today, in an era of the end of book publishing, the end of literacy, certainly the end of art magazines? Or was it always a folly? I look here at the moment I decided to become an art critic. I title my presentation:

“Art Criticism after Conceptual Art”

It’s 1975 and New York City is bankrupt. “Ford to City: Drop Dead—Vows He’ll Veto any Bail-Out” read the famous Daily News October 30, 1975, half-page headline. So is its art scene, bankrupt, that is, what it calls the art world, presuming on its imperial privilege as the centre of that world, which had suddenly shrunk to a locale: Soho. It was the end of a world, at least the end of modernism, the avant-garde, and the notion of the progressive development of art. For what had issued in the mid 1970s as the detritus of this development—post-painterly abstraction, colour field painting, heavens, pattern painting—was vapid, hardly compelling, just decoration for living rooms and bank lobbies. Suddenly gone, too, was the authority—the moral authority—of its critics, Clement Greenberg and Michel Fried in particular.

And so what remained for the future of art movements? Post-movement art, it seems, as the title of a 1977 New York publication claimed! The last art movement before this historical heave-ho, already was the end of art: conceptual art, which by 1975 had transformed itself into Marxist politics, represented by the New York journal The FOX. Think Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, who brought this politics to Toronto when they moved back from New York in 1977, after exhibiting the year before their controversial It’s Still Privileged Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

In 1977, the Montreal magazine Vie des art published a special issue on Toronto art, edited by AGO Chief Curator Roald Nasgaard, with articles on painting and sculpture, remarkably on video art and women’s performance, but equally remarkably nothing on photography. Nor on Conceptual Art, although the latter is not surprising given the phenomenological bias of Toronto’s critics and curators to anything that might be language based. The absence of photography is odd, at the moment it was going big, size-wise, but it might not be surprising in Toronto given the frivolous use it was put towards there: camp. Was it ignored because it was frivolous or because language had attached itself to images—and were they one and the same, language and frivolity?

But what of Conceptual Art: Was there none in Toronto? If there was it would likely be found at A Space, Canada’s premiere artist-run centre. In an April 13, 1978, letter, one of the original founders of A Space, the sculptor and draft-dodger Robert Bowers, wrote: “Conceptual art (a notion of art-making in which the critical basis of a work is established by the artist in a conscious and rigorous manner rather than awaiting the efforts of a critic) was central to the first principles of A Space.” Later in 1980, he added: “There are no formulas for conceptual art. We were trying to codify that kind of art.” The only formula apparently was, no critics!

What would a young man, who decided to become an art critic in 1976 and published his first article in Parachute in 1977, make of this resistance to his newly chosen profession? Who was intrigued by conceptual art on seeing a large gathering of it in 1973 at the 8th Paris Biennale after travelling the continent that year looking at Renaissance painting and modernist art in preparation for post-graduate studies in art history? And who by then (1976 on, ready to abandon his academic studies) was reading widely in linguistics, semiotics, and philosophy of language exactly in order to think about this art movement? Well, for one thing, he eventually defined Toronto conceptual art as something perhaps Robert Bowers never thought it could be, lacking rigour. In my 2016 book Is Toronto Burning?, I wrote, because I was that young man, “Toronto’s conceptual art was embodied, gendered, and dealt with codes—social and otherwise—and the transgressing of them.” In fact, “what united queer and straight art in Toronto [in the period Bowers made his statement] was [what I termed] a camp conceptualism,” a “conceptualism” that also had its origins in a lost history of women’s performance. This conceptual art was not reductive, but excessive, not analytically pure, but talkative, indeed theatrical. Language here was what I called “Toronto talk.” It was performative. Performances talked, photographs talked, indeed, criticism talked, but not in ways expected. It was bitchy, like the art, darling.

If a writer could account differently for what was conceptual art in Toronto, might writing, too, the writing of a critic, have become a form of conceptual art?

But before we go there, what was it like in this period of hiatus, in a moment without authority or the guidance from past art movements to the next?

In our own way, we all said, “New York, drop dead.” For what this vacancy in New York in the mid-1970s allowed was the opening up of other art scenes, which could operate locally without the authority of New York hanging over them. And they did. Toronto, for instance, Vancouver, too. It was the period I entered the Toronto art scene: 1977 – 78. This was a period in flux, although at the same time it seemed nothing was happening; yet it was a period of crises in Toronto: the knee-capping debacle of the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC), which led to its loss of funding, the “palace coup” at A Space, which changed its direction. It was a period hardly of formalist concerns but of transgressions, the thinking of codes not coloured surfaces, the détourne of technology, and the insinuating, quasi-criminal theft and takeover of communication systems just before the moment digital was to become real. All this was elaborated first in writing. It was also a period when there were, remarkably, eleven artist-run magazines in Toronto, where a young art critic astutely might publish his own allegories of art criticism when criticism itself was so resisted in Toronto. It was a quiet interim when thinking could be done and theories inventively worked out beyond any thought of consensus.

What else that happened, though, was not local. It was the importation, a publication tsunami really, a wild capture of imagination by what has been called French theory. I’m talking of myself here as it pertains to art criticism in English Canada at least, because I seemed to be alone, at that moment French philosopher François Cusset in his 2003 book French Theory later called the “crazy 1970s” that miraculously produced what he described as “the carefree anarcho-poetic textualism of the seventies.” I say alone, but there was the artist AA Bronson, writing both under his own name and anonymously for FILE magazine, who was incomparable, although I only understood that later. Cusset identified that “the diffusion of what was not yet called French theory occurred on the edges of the countercultural space, on the still blurry dividing line between the campuses and sites of dissidence.” In Toronto, it latched itself onto an art scene, which was forever detached from the academic world of universities, and where artist magazines instead played this important countercultural role. I speculate that it was these artist magazines where an expanded notion of what was possible for conceptual art was pursued as a writing practice. I refer to what was happening in Impulse, FILE, Centerfold, and Only Paper Today.

All of a sudden during the second half of 1970s, a mass of translations was available, not just French theory, but the Frankfurt School, too, all out of order of their original publication and context, which led to strange, sometimes contradictory, mixtures here. It was a free period of invention, where conceptual art, for instance, could be aligned with imported theory that was linguistically and semiologically based, too, but that escaped conceptual art’s sometimes tautological, essentializing, formalizing, and purist orientation to language. Instead, this invention oriented itself neither to a work’s internal conditions, nor to its conditions of production, but to its reception, by paying attention rather to another aspect of language: its performative enunciations.

Conceptual art was varied in its strategies: declarative: “this is art, if I say so”; tautological: “art is art”; instructional or behavioural; or, contextual, where the context—the gallery in particular, the art system in general—was revealed as determinant. These determinations—declaration, tautology, context— were always pregiven. There was little place for an outcome beyond the work’s fulfillment of its idea, unless it, too, was programmed. What was lacking was attention to a user. There were some exceptions, Lawrence Weiner, for one, or the dialogical art of Stanley Brouwn, whom I wrote about in 1980. It seems that, not only critics, but audiences, too, generally were unnecessary for conceptual art. (According to Joseph Kosuth, the audience for Conceptual Art was only other artists; the rest of us were superfluous.)

I began to think about spectators, critics too, as being mutually excluded from the experience of artworks, and what that meant. So under the influence of Roland Barthes’s drift, George Bataille’s excess, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri’s machinic setups, Jean-François Lyotard’s dispositive impulses, and Jacques Derrida’s grammatology, I began to develop a libidinal economy of content that prioritized the relationship of critics and viewers. I got to the heart of the matter, when in my 1979 Parachute article “The Death of Structure” I wrote, “What is wrong, it seems is the way we stand in front of a work of art, the way we allow ourselves to stand in front of art, an act which creates an identity and constitutes a subject.” Strange for an art critic so to pronounce, unless this critic was perverse or unhinged—or maybe deconstructivist. But perhaps a painting—to speak of this prototypical example of “standing in front of”—could be disrupted, and from whose disarticulated structure, from its fissure of form and content would issue a loss that was asignifying and aformal. What I called “content” issued from the artwork as a loss in front of it. Criticism no longer was a search for meaning or intention (that is, a content internal to the artwork or behind it, i.e., an artist’s intentions) but allied itself to radical interpretative acts on viewers’ part. “Interpretation (not signification) is the force (or a difference in forces, which also may be the force of a loss) that a spectator brings to the work, in relation to it,” very Nietzschean that, I wrote in “Stanley Brouwn and the Zero Machine.”

I’m going to let the preface to my 1979 pamphlet Peripheral Drift: A Vocabulary of Theoretical Criticism, published by Rumour Publications and made in an edition barely of 100, but most of these still unstapled, on the cheapest photocopier in downtown Toronto, stand in for what I was getting at. Excuse the language of the period: “jouissance” or “bliss,” for instance.

Criticism is in a state of drift, out of control. Its loss, however, is willed; its drifting theoretical. Initially the question is: How is criticism presently adequate to its object? Criticism as theory frees itself from its traditional object—the work of art; it is responsible—in its theoretical irresponsibility, i.e., in not answering, [not] responding to the work of art—for its excess and loss. But in exceeding the object and losing it, is not this excess and loss, for itself, jouissance, its own bliss? Desire has no object—it is outside use, want and demand; and theory similarly no longer finds its impulses in the work of art, in an object, formerly its own object. It can still nominate a work of art and say, “That's it for me,” as part of the binary “That's it” / ”So what”; but usually it says, “What's in it for me?”, or “How can I use this?”

[And here we get to the nub of the issue:]

Theory no longer assumes a subservience to its object in a presumed secondariness of non-presence to the full presence of the work of art and the artist, the guarantor of that presence. Theory now, in a sense, is fictive. Nevertheless, as its own object, theory is not a metalanguage, which would return it to the formal, as a formal language. It is a drift. This drift is atopic, without a site: theory does not take itself to be central but peripheral (not centered in meaning, in society). Theory's displacement is the movement of its desire, the loss of its privileged site and meaning, its prescriptive and normative authority.

Starting in 1979, and continuing for a few years, I wrote a series of ficto-criticisms published in artist magazines, preceded by theoretical articles published in Parachute. The latter included “The Death of Structure” in fall 1979, “Stanley Brouwn and the Zero Machine” in spring 1980, and finally “Coming to Speech: The Role of the Viewer in Performance,” for an October 1980 Parachute Symposium. Coming to speech now was no longer a dissolute issue in front of the work of art, but a performative enunciation that led away from it, hopefully to the social realm. My ficto-critical texts were allegories of standing in front of the artwork, although initially they might not have seemed that, the first, “Exits,” published in Impulse summer 1980, dealing, after all, with writings, those of the authors Roland Barthes and Georges Bataille. Composed as an homage to Roland Barthes just weeks after he had died, I wrote, “So it is with the text. It only ‘speaks’ to me in my desire if it undoes me, decomposes me in my reading. I perform the text in my desire: the text makes me a dissolute reader.” “Breach of Promise,” appearing in FILE spring 1982, pursued similar issues but in the visual, not literary, realm. Other thematically related texts were about different ways of thinking about images in a “society of the spectacle”—the public realm of images, not just private artworks. “Violence and Representation,” published again in Impulse in fall 1980, argued that dissolute images of violence and hieratic images of icons were related by a mimetic rivalry enacted in front of them, the theory of mimetic rivalry deriving from René Girard. In fact, violence inscribed representation. Facing, furthermore, could be scaled up from individual to collective acts of iconoclasm: in riots, revolutions, and assassinations. Iconoclasm was a class war of images, I wrote in “Notes on the Sumptuary Destruction of Leaders,” published in London,’s ZG  in 1982.  A like article, “Image of the Leader, Function of the Widow,” appeared in the inaugural issue of C Magazine a year later.

Okay. Was this conceptual art? Not really; it never intended to be. Yet, writing participated in the dematerialization of the art object; how could it not? It took dematerialization as a license to leave, as the last undermining of what remained unspoken: the structure of participation, of looking on itself by an excluded outsider. By the mid-1970s conceptual art had become diffused from its earlier analytical days. It was no longer just concepts, and the rules they generated, but an image-text relation that counted. And the image no longer, as before, was non-descript, but staged; text was no longer merely informational, but fictional or theatrical. So there’s an affinity between what conceptual art was to become in the mid-1970s and the experimental art writing concurrent with it that performatively invented new strategies for itself—at least in Toronto.

This period ended in Toronto in 1982 with the exhibition Monumenta, with the return to figuration of neo-expressionist painting, with the regressions of postmodernism, and the return to the market, which Conceptual Art, of course, was meant to do away with. Not a proselytizer for postmodernism, Lyotard wrote in 1983, “This is a period of slackening—I refer to the color of the times. From every direction we are being urged to put an end to experimentation, in the arts and elsewhere.” So too ended this period of experimentation in art criticism, swept away by these conservative returns, which in their false embrace were in turn to dismantle the Toronto art community.

Yet, this writing was essential for what was to come, but it only could have been realized through a departure, for instance, that Peripheral/Drift represented, which was derived, nonetheless, from what was concurrent with and adjacent to the art practices of the late 1970s but not, significantly, pace Robert Bowers, within their ken, at least in Toronto.