Introduction: Toronto Discourse/Toronto Discord (2024)
Those were halcyon days in summer 1982 when Tom Dean permanently installed his mural This is Paradise in the parlour of The Cameron Public House at Queen and Cameron, just off Spadina Avenue, a bar in the heart of the new Toronto art community. Paradise, of course, is a place where nothing ever happens, at least in the 1979 Talking Heads song. It was still that way for the old draft-drinking regulars in permanent dozy daytime attendance there. Seemingly, it was still that way that summer for the art community, too. But come the fall, this was to change. No one realized that change was at hand.
Fall 1982 marks a moment of transition in the Toronto art community. Three events transformed the dynamics of the art scene: the return to representation evidenced by the multi-venue exhibition Monumenta; parallel lecture series devoted, mainly, to Toronto writers and critics, Talking—a Habit and A Critical Structure(ing); and the so-called “FUSE takeover” of A Space, Toronto’s premier artist-run gallery. Behind the scenes, a fourth event was being planned, a feminist festival organized by the Women’s Cultural Building collective taking place in March and April of the next year that would galvanize feminist art practice.
Generations
The downtown Toronto art community was created by two generations of artists and then transformed by a demand for diversity that issued from both feminists and a generation of artists of colour who were excluded by and from the white art community. The first generation created the artist-run system; the second, inheriting its values, expanded it; the third group, not a new generation but a combination of the two, transformed the system in changing its values.
In the history of the downtown art community, there is a privilege accorded to the first generation, the first-born, so to speak. Art world generations are about six years apart, so between the first two there is a degree of sibling rivalry. But 1982 marks a passage to the second generation’s own contributions, institutionally and aesthetically. The second generation did not overtly oppose the first and then supplant it; the two ran in parallel. In fact, the so-called “FUSE takeover,” which would change the art scene so dramatically, was orchestrated by a cohort of the first generation.
Baby boomers both, their expectations were formed differently, however. The first generation was at the tail-end of the long post-war economic expansion and immense technological advancement, notably in communications. It was the most privileged generation in the history of the world, but it rejected the technocratic, bureaucratic capitalism of its parents. They were Hippies. Their artist-run spaces were enabled by their own hard work but also significantly by funding from Local Initiatives Programs (LIP) and Opportunities for Youth (OFY) grants, established by the federal government in 1971 to stem youth dissent and the threat of Quebec separation, and once established carried on, perhaps grudgingly, by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Even their postmodernism was different. It was the fifties and sixties American version, which was mainly literary in origin, not the one we know from the 1980s. In retrospect, though, we see how much it informed, for instance, A Space’s interdisciplinary aesthetics and that of the generation of artists who created it: the narrative commonplaces of Gertrude Stein, Black Mountain College aesthetics (Charles Olson’s poetics, John Cage’s experimental compositions, Robert Rauschenberg’s flatbed procedures, and Buckminster Fuller’s architectural utopias), as well as William Burroughs’s viral cut-ups, the polymorphous perversities of Norman O. Brown’s neo-Freudianism, Marcuse’s neo-Marxist escape from capitalism’s repressive desublimations, and on our side of the border Marshall McLuhan’s wide mediumistic impact on artistic innovation.
“Kill all hippies,” the late seventies slogan went. Punks and New Wavers, the second generation was in art school during the severe economic repercussions of the 1970s.[1] Almost the whole decade was recessionary with the worst economic downturn since the depression lasting between July 1981 and November 1982. When they walked out of art school, these young artists were confronted by a degraded economic environment as well as the fiscal and political fiascos created by their seniors. Back to the land was replaced by dark and dirty urban back alleys. So, too, their postmodernism was not expansive, but restrictive—as much as it opened the way to an excess of bad painting. Post-emancipatory, a society of control was the end of social experimentation. Behind the society of the spectacle, finance capitalism ruled. The only thing free, it seems, was capital, which became the model for deterritorialized cultural flows. It was a period of retrenchment and retreat, at least politically but so too perhaps culturally. Jean-François Lyotard referred to this “slackening” as a demand “to put an end to experimentation.”[2]
Conflict and Resistance
Because of my own background, this book in part examines the emergence of art criticism within the formation of the downtown Toronto art community. It is thus circumscribed in space and time: Toronto in the late 1970s to early 1990s, with the most active period for criticism in the early 1980s. This, however, privileges my discourse, or rather that of the art community, when of equal importance, at the beginning, was the concurrent emergence of feminist theory, which struggled to be heard there. But it is not these stories alone, but rather that, as well, of the discourses that evolved from the community itself becoming more complex as new institutions arrived over the years to complement those of the original artist-run system. Critical and institutional discourses ran in parallel.
Given the robust ecology of Toronto’s art scene, today some might be surprised to learn of the resistances to its growth. Not only critics and curators were resisted, but theory, postmodernism, too, as well as commercial galleries and public ones—even some artists themselves, if they were not for collective self-determination but were bohemian types—which was much of the art community. The scene was not without its conflicts. Discourse was driven by divisions.
Periodizing Toronto Art
Historical insight always comes too late: that is, when it is all over. The owl of Minerva flies at dusk. But some recognize change before anyone else—before anyone else believes it’s over. For Globe and Mail art critic John Bentley Mays, Queen Street was long over by 1987. It was already over, it seems, before it began, in 1984. “Toronto’s once-sparky Queen Street art scene ended its notable day, not with a slowly gathering dusk, but in a series of spectacular sunsets,” Mays counter-intuitively wrote in March 1987.
The huge 1982 Monumenta group show of new expressive painting, installed in galleries across the western downtown core, will probably be remembered as the first of these finales. In the next year came the ChromaZone group’s ChromaLiving mixed-media extravaganza—furniture, design, art and fashion tumbled into a disused Yorkville clothing emporium.
And in 1984, there were the last flashes of daylight in the downtown sky—Richard Rhodes’ provocative Toronto 1980/1/2/3/4 group show; painter Rae Johnson’s Beyond the Zone, an array of funky, hot canvases by young artists; the New Work Show of recent Toronto video art, and the sprawling New City of Sculpture, a volcanic outpouring of new, post-formalist objects and installations from downtown Toronto studios.
With these notable summings-up, organized by downtown critics and artists to showcase the art they liked and made, the ambitions and energies of Queen Street peaked, and the scene at last entered the twilight of its extraordinary career.[3]
How do you periodize an art scene? And what purpose does it serve, for instance, in John Mays’s rapid summary: here, then gone. Their lives are short. Sometimes a decade makes sense. Between 1975 and 1984, two generations of artists constructed Toronto’s downtown art scene, which was then differently extended it into the “multicultural” nineties. This book considers a like span of just over a decade, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. It contends that the second-generation art scene effectively was over by the mid-1980s. Then after a few difficult years the community regenerated itself in a postcolonial turn that ushered in an identity politics that legitimately was the genesis of the scene we know today, although it took a while to get there. So perhaps a couple years, a preposterously short time, could serve to periodize the active moment of Toronto’s early eighties art scene after all—and justify John Mays’s statements above, while we might dissent from them at the same time. Mays’s radical proposition suggests that Toronto’s second generation flourished for two years only, between the large-scale group exhibitions Monumenta (September 4–25, 1982) and The New City of Sculpture (August 27–September 15, 1984). Consider, too, that the new phenomena of Toronto talking about itself, the moment of its discourse, also transpired during the same period. A Space’s Talking—A Habit and YYZ’s A Critical Structure(ing) lecture series began within a month of each other in September and October 1982. Within this framework, some take Philip Monk’s “Axes of Difference” lecture, its own spectacle, delivered February 12, 1984, during The Practice of Pictures symposium, to mark the end of the city’s experiment with discourse and the beginning of the end of the eighties art community itself.
Perhaps a discourse on artworks can trace the rise and fall of an art community more subtly than John Mays spectacularizing of events based on exhibitions. But at the same time as the elaboration of a discourse on art, institutions were being constructed that themselves were fought over in the same way writing was. Much of the discourse of the period was about the values of these institutions and thus, in any discussion of the scene, cannot be separated from the art criticism, even though their cycles of periodization diverged. Institutions persisted while discourse did not.
One should not think that an art community begins and ends with oneself, that periodization discloses and completes itself when one’s own contribution is over—or has been displaced. Coincidentally, the year Mays writes from, in 1987, of the end of the Toronto art scene in 1984, could be seen to be a beginning again, only this new periodization would start from another set of documents, from other discourses that came from outside the art community, since they were repressed, silenced, there. This year saw publications that would have profound consequences although at the time they were ignored, maligned, or resisted. Think, for instance, of NourbeSe Philip’s “The ‘Multicultural’ Whitewash: Racism in Ontario’s Arts Funding System,” amongst other of her writings, and a couple of years later of Joane Cardinal Schubert’s polemic on cultural appropriation, “In the Red,” both published in FUSE. These articles would close the decade in a very different way from which it opened.
Archives
Criticism is evidence of an art scene, or more specifically, the event of an art scene. But it, too, has not been evaluated, thought merely to be ephemera that accompanies art production, its monthly or quarterly reviews and articles fit only for recycling as so much paper detritus or at best merely maintaining a shadow existence bound in volumes and shelved in libraries and archives, distant from any living discourse. A document is evidence of something having taken place; but can a collection of documents be evidence of a continuing discourse? Was there a critical discourse in Toronto specific to the art of this place? Or were both, art and writing, derivative of elsewhere, its documents, thus, not worth securing.
This story is told through documents. Each chapter concentrates chronologically on a particular document or a series of them: an article, a lecture series, a panel, or symposium—or the milieu of critical and curatorial practices, magazines, and exhibition publications. An event may result in a document, or a set of them: Monumenta for instance. Or a document may provoke an event that produces other texts: “Axes of Difference” for example. Most of the original documents were of collective address or are evidence of what took place in public forums. As the decade advanced and public panels and lectures subsided, larger, transformative issues were addressed mainly through magazines, such as those of appropriation and sovereignty or race and white supremacy in the Toronto art world. Documents evoke the rise, demise, and renewal of the Toronto art community.
Eliciting a history of discourse in Toronto, these documents also reawaken the discord that dispelled the art scene’s halcyon days. Sometimes this is reproduced artificially through a clash of documents brought together by this book, but this is a narrative strategy to enliven them, to make them function actively as interventions, the way they did decades ago before they became forgotten, dusty artifacts. Yet, the conflicts were real: primary producers against parasitic critics, feminists against the art scene, community artists against “market” artists, etc., but not, interestingly, critic against critic. Discord propelled discourse, more so than critics’ contributions amplifying a common discourse among writers, one text consciously linking onto another, which is one of the reasons why people think that there was no original discourse in Toronto.
As the analysis here is dependent solely on documents, there is no discussion, therefore, of postmodernism in general or feminism in general, for example, or for that matter, October, the postmodern museum, and the Pictures Generation in New York City, etc. Only what appeared in print in Toronto is examined. What appears to be Toronto’s discourse is given only by these documents per se. They are primary evidence of what was said and thought in the art community and not derived from elsewhere. Toronto’s discourse was not derived, no more so than any other place, though there were, of course, derivative artists and derivative writers active in the community.
The obvious question is: Why a book on discourse and not on Toronto art itself? Why redeem writing when the Toronto art of the period, the 1980s, is little in evidence, hardly ever displayed in public collections. For years, if not decades, hardly an artist of the period, except for General Idea, has been the subject of an exhibition in a public gallery. And when curators have evaluated the art that galvanized the Queen Street art community, once again it slips into oblivion, unable to be sustained in Canadian history or museum collections.[4] The period has virtually disappeared. Doesn’t the writing on this long-forgotten art, the remainder of a residue, its secondary derivativeness, doubly deserve to be forgotten, too?
It would be ironic, then, if this writerly residue redeemed the period, perhaps not its art but the milieu of its production: the art scene. Writing is part of a complexity that the privileging of primary production obscures. That this privileging was at the origins of the downtown Toronto art scene points to some of the resistances critics had to overcome—the resistance to criticism itself, for example. But at a moment in the early 1980s, both art and criticism had a dynamic role in inaugurating a new art scene that had the promise of putting Toronto on the map.
Beginnings
Only started on their careers, younger artists may have been shocked by John Mays’s pronouncement of the twilight of their art scene, but then we must remember that for Mays these artists represented the decadence before the decline. They signified the failure of the ambitions of the first generation, to which he belonged, that had engendered the glories of A Space and its polymorphous promiscuities. When Mays wrote about recent Toronto art in 1984 what he saw “was only one more example of a profound, international revulsion by the young against the previous artistic episode of material and formal experiment, risk and permission in art. An era of scarce resources had succeeded an era of ample ones. A period of inward immigration, painful solitudes, had replaced a period of centrifugal sexualities, sociabilities, and desires.”[5]
Having established their own artist-run centres, for instance, YYZ in 1979, younger artists begged to differ. For this second generation, Monumenta was the beginning, not the beginning of the end. They could trace their origins back to the crises the elder generation had created in the late 1970s. When in 1978 John Mays, then a novelist, had rhetorically asked of A Space (at the beginning of its existential dilemma, eight years after its origins as Canada’s first and most influential artist-run gallery), “Should Karen Ann Quinlan be Allowed to Die?,” young artists in Toronto answered, maybe.[6] Karen Ann Quinlan, you may remember, was famously vegetative—an American twenty-one year old who in 1975 had mixed drink and drugs and whose comatose body was fought over in a real-time soap opera as her parents, through legal suit, sought her right to die. It was an apt naming of A Space in the throes of an intramural, internecine, and seemingly interminable battle for the neutral body of its space.
In on someone else’s soap opera was not what young artists wanted. “No matter how exciting it was, we were in on someone else’s show,” complained Kim Todd early in 1979 in a letter published in Only Paper Today.[7] She was acting for a group of nine young artists, including herself, who were opening a new artist-run space on Queen Street West tentatively called Contact Artists Outlet but soon renamed YYZ Artists Outlet. They were witness to the debacles the year before of the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC) and A Space, but they were “connected to the various artists’ spaces only in a secondary sense since they have not participated in their evolution.” While acknowledging that the elder generation of artists, having just torn their institutions apart, were “responsible for the creation of a network of artist-run spaces across Canada and for many of the changes that young artists are now able to take for granted—things like support of ‘non-commercial art’ through government funding,” these younger artists were “attempting to take the issue into our own hands” by starting up their own second-generation artist-run galleries.
Later that year, the artists starting up Mercer Union and the Cabana Room followed suit, taking the issue into their own hands, however radically differently: for instance, the Cabana Room opened in the old Spadina Hotel “as a nightclub/lounge providing entertainment to Toronto’s art community.”[8] It was a small room for a still small downtown art scene. AA Bronson recalled that “a premiere of a new Colin Campbell tape at the Cabana Room was a little like attending the Academy Awards.”[9] Everyone was there. But however small the art scene, by 1979 its fledging institutions, artist studios, and bars had already claimed territory to a wide swath of the slightly degraded and lightly inhabited downtown basically between University and Spadina Avenues, Queen and King Streets, but pushing at its edges, too, along Queen Street towards Bathurst Street and beyond.
Even though “Toronto is the only Canadian city in which the art scene is continually fracturing and thrives by that fracturing,” the artists from what would later become YYZ took their first name from “the need for contact.”[10] Perhaps this need was conditioned by the fractious events of the year before. Then, it was a case, as AA Bronson said, of artists “talking to each other and then not talking to each other.”[11] But now, Todd wrote, “We don’t want to take on someone else’s history,” especially one that was so fractious. Instead, as a new decade beckoned, what artists sought was a fresh start from the destructive divisiveness of their elder siblings.
So began the halcyon days of a new downtown art community, operating under the radar right in the core of the city. Perhaps not “luxe, calme, et volupté” for everyone in the studios of Queen Street and Spadina Avenue, but the art community for a few brief years went about its business without political intrigue or disruption. Not that it was not a political period: with the rise of neo-conservatism marked by the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, soon to transform the world with their punitive neo-liberal economic policies, the renewed threat of nuclear war (Reagan’s “Star Wars”), CIA-sponsored civil wars in Central America, dictatorships still in South America, South African apartheid, neo-Nazi skinheads in Britain and rioting in Brixton, the threat to abortion rights, Anita Bryant’s attacks on gays, and the prevailing shadow of AIDS, not to mention Toronto’s bath raids and police raids on magazines like The Body Politic. The art community took all this on. That it was a recessionary period only added to the malaise but also to the opportunities. The recession had gone on for so long that it seemed like normal. The benefits were cheap rents, cheap living, and a downtown scene relatively undisturbed by the rest of the city.
In 1979, the opening of YYZ (February) and Mercer Union (July), the relocation of A Space (March), the cohabitation of Rumour Publications, Permanent Press, and Only Paper Today (the latter having split off from A Space) in a building next to Mercer Union (June), the arrival of the Cabana Room (July), joining Art Metropole, having relocated in 1978 and housed in a warehouse building that also included ANNPAC (publisher of Parallelogramme) and Artons (publisher of Centerfold, later to become FUSE), radically redefined what was happening in Toronto, creating a downtown art scene separate and distinct from the commercial zone uptown. Here was the mecca that soon would draw artists from across the country. It turns out that the “palace coup” at A Space was necessary for the downtown art community to be born.[12]
And critics? A critical discourse that did not exist before in Toronto was born with this second generation of artist-run galleries. It was born within the art community, where these critics lived, and where they were equally supported and resisted. For some of these critics, it seems that experimenting with one’s discipline was only possible there, within the fluidity and freedoms offered by the Queen Street art scene.
So let’s go back to the beginning, or the beginning again, to 1982, in happier days, to a very different place, to the double inauguration of the Toronto art community by artists and critics.
NOTES
[1] “The latest rebellious form for Toronto’s youth scene is the rave of crash ’n burn punk rock groups…. The punk rock scene in Toronto is considerably different from that in Britain, where the youth are the victims of working class conditions. The Canadians, instead, exist on the edge of a capitalist surplus, having grown up in homogeneous suburban settings.” “Spanking Punk,” Art Communication Edition 6 (July 1977): 21.
[2] “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.” “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” trans. Régis Durand, in Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
[3] John Bentley Mays, “Gems amid the ruins of Queen Street scene,” The Globe and Mail, March 14, 1987, E17. Yet by the end of the decade, Mays reviled these exhibitions, naming Monumenta and New City of Sculpture amongst the “worst of the decade,” which makes us wonder what they temporally mark. John Bentley Mays, “Booms, busts, blockbusters and a bizarre bent for buying,” The Globe and Mail (December 30, 1989), C15. [delete?: The coincidence of Mays’s “last flashes” and Philip Monk’s lecture and article “Axes of Difference” is striking, since many take Monk’s lecture and article as leading to the demise of the Toronto art community, which proves, at least, that 1984 is a pivotal date.]
[4] See the exhibitions and publications by Luis Jacob, Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto at University of Toronto Art Museum (2016); Wanda Nanibush, Tributes + Tributaries, 1971 – 1989 at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2016); Philip Monk, Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years at The Power Plant (1998) and Is Toronto Burning?: 1977, 1978, 1979—Three Years in the Making (and Unmaking) of the Toronto Art Scene at the Art Gallery of York University (2014); Rae Johnson and Herb Tookey, This is Paradise / Place as a State of Mind: The Cameron Public House and 1980’s Toronto at The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (2011), preceded by Rae Johnson and Herb Tookey, This is Paradise: Cameron Culture at Gallery 101, Ottawa (1987); as well as the Review exhibition series by Tom Folland and Natalie Olanick at Mercer Union (1995–1996). This seems like an extraordinary amount of attention, but these efforts have not entrenched the period in an historical discourse and its artworks, themselves, are relatively absent on display in museum collections.
[5] John Bentley Mays, “Miracles of Emanuel Jaques,” C 2 (Summer 1984): 40. Here I am making John Mays speak through his fictional counterpart, the critic Steinway.
[6] John Bentley Mays, “Should Karen Ann Quinlan be Allowed to Die?,” Only Paper Today 5:1 (February 1978), 18–19. Mays, along with Marien Lewis and Victor Coleman, was then a board director of A Space.
[7] Kim Todd, “Letter to the Editor,” Only Paper Today 6:1 (January–February 1979): 2.
[8] Robin Wall September 7, 1980, press release. The Cabana Room, started by Wall and video artist Susan Briton, eschewed government funding: “The Cabana Room is not and never will be government-supported.” YYZ initially was to shun funding, too: “We don’t plan to apply to art funding bodies for grants to cover the cost of operating the space—again, because of the tendency of that kind of support to demand ‘administration’ and because it appears to be a good ides right now for artists to avoid dependency on the Canada Council.” Todd, “Letter to the Editor,” 2. Also see Susan Britton’s June 24, 1979, resignation letter as a curator to A Space, reproduced by Judith Doyle in Judith Doyle, “Cold City/Public Access: Toronto Art Distribution Tactics,” Parallelogramme 12:4 (April–May 1987): 37.
[9] AA Bronson, “Artist-initiated Activity in Canada,” From Sea to Shining Sea, ed. AA Bronson (Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987), 12.
[10] Bronson, “Artist-initiated Activity in Canada,” 12. “But the prime reason for our existence as a group is our need for contact.” Todd, “Letter to the Editor,” 2.
[11] AA Bronson, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-run Spaces as Museums by Artists,” in Museums by Artists, eds. AA Bronson and Peggy Gale (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983), 29–30; reprinted in From Sea to Shining Sea, ed. AA Bronson (Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987), 168.
[12] As Barbara Fischer writes, “Rather than narrowing the field for art practice, the divisions, breakups, and closures of the older centres produced a multiplication (and pluralization) of new centres: older groups divided and teamed up with younger artists, and younger artists teamed up with artists moving into the city from elsewhere, setting in motion a succession of splitting and consolidating entities. All these off-shoots and rhizomes would come to root along Queen Street West.” Barbara Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” Decalog (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1992), 11.