Preface: Mea Culpa (2019/2024)

For the 1984 lecture and article “Axes of Difference” referred to below in the first paragraph, click here to read.

For my 2019 evaluation of the controversy, click here.

Preface: Mea Culpa

It’s true. I confess. I destroyed the Toronto art community. Singlehandedly. I know that this is hard to believe, but it is true. Or, at least, so complained a Toronto artist in 1991. He was speaking in public at a one-day conference on curating that the short-lived Toronto magazine M5V had organized.[1] He was on one panel, I was on the other. But it was during a question period that the accusation was made. Not at all on point, for it was not a curatorial question but about my role years earlier as a critic in Toronto and the effect of a lecture I had delivered and then published, the infamous “Axes of Difference.” That 1984 lecture and article, he claimed, not only divided the Toronto art community but also inexorably led to its destruction.

It is only now that I appreciate the irony of being made a scapegoat for the demise of the eighties Toronto art community. For didn’t I model my early performative criticism on the sacrificial violence deriving from mimetic rivalry?[2] And here I was now the sacrificial victim of the violence artists would accuse me of inflicting on them, on their community![3] The question from the audience, however, was proof perhaps that this mimetic rivalry had not yet played itself out. But it was also confirmation of the “lasting subjective effects within Toronto’s avant-garde” of my earlier critical intervention.[4]

This accusation was a heavy burden for an individual to bear. Could one individual be so responsible for the demise of an entire art community or was it a set of conditions that saw it unravel? To the chagrin of an art scene that once had drawn others from across Canada to it, Toronto’s Globe and Mail art critic, John Bentley Mays, wrote a few months later that “Today, as in the early 1970s, Toronto is a minor fact in Canada’s culture—a town with a few good artists and a poor audience for art, more intellectual pretensions than artistic product, and with much less right to the title of Canada’s art mecca than either Montreal or Vancouver.”[5] At the time there was a very real sense that something had changed, that the promise of the first half of the 1980s had evaporated. How to account for it? Who was to blame?

 Well, for one, the artists themselves were to blame. They were unable to translate local success into international exposure.[6] You can’t blame others elsewhere for this lack of interest, but it had repercussions at home that failure commonly brings about. Who here could we blame for lack of attention elsewhere?[7] Add to this: the gentrification of Queen Street West and consequent dispersion of the village; a severe recession in the late 1980s; Federal election victories for the Conservatives in 1984 and 1988, with their threat to funding structures; loss of collector confidence; closure of prominent galleries committed to the new scene; the alienation of younger artists who felt themselves excluded from the artist-run system; and the virtual disappearance of many of the practicing art critics, who themselves had grown up professionally in the eighties Toronto scene.[8] With the disappearance of critics, so went organized talks, so voluble in the early 1980s at a time when the art scene seemed to desire—focused as it was on itself—to organize its practice around discourse. In retrospect this sudden lack of talk was deafening.[9] Could it be that there were structural, rather than individual, reasons for the fraying of the art community?

How does an art scene fall apart anyway? Look around you. Doesn’t an art community still exist in Toronto—with its artist-run centres, public art galleries (with two devoted to contemporary art), museums, commercial galleries, magazines, art fair and biennial, artists, dealers, collectors, collectives, curators, philanthropists, and writers? Something, though, in the way that it is presently constituted is different. Nothing could make the art community today fall apart because nothing holds it together. It is so routinized that nothing could tear it apart. Open, public, passionate debate is inconceivable. There’s no setting the cat amongst the pigeons anymore.[10]

(This statement was written a year before the widespread critiques enabled by Black Lives Matter and, in particular, the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020—and also long before Gaza and the “dismissal” of Wanda Nanibush from the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2023. All these events had a profound effect on the Toronto art community, the difference being that they were social manifestations not internal critical disputes as in past days.)

Back in the 1980s, in its healthy, halcyon days what of the community was so fragile that “Axes of Difference” sent it into a crisis?

Personally, I doubted whether I could ever write a book on Toronto in the 1980s. How could I, a “player” on the scene, be historically objective? Then again, how could I write a history, presumably a history of art works, when I opposed so many of them—witness “Axes of Difference”? I skirted that problem in 1998 when I curated the exhibition Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years, which instituted an archive of images of a very particular sort.[11] These were images (and not necessarily artworks) by which the art scene communicated to itself the fiction that there was a downtown art community. And then there was.

This exhibition accepted that, between 1975 and the mid-1980s, two generations made the Toronto downtown art community. They made it to serve their purposes, creating the institutions they needed to practice as artists, and creating a dynamic social scene around them at the same time. We forget how remarkable this was—in Toronto! But in 2015 writing my book Is Toronto Burning?: 1977, 1978, 1979—Three Years in the Making (and Unmaking) of the Toronto Art Scene, I realized the constitutive difference between these two generations. Each made the art scene as a reflection of how they saw their “roles” as artists within it. But it was really a question by what necessity these roles were adopted and, importantly, how artists reacted and adapted to crises. None of this necessarily was intentional or even conscious.

Each generation had its own crises to deal with. Crises would test their mettle. When the crises came, the outcomes, however, were different. For the first generation, more was at stake since the scene was fledging and its institutions few. The first crises hit hard its two leading institutions: the fall 1978 “palace coup” at A Space and concurrent Red Brigade kneecapping scandal and consequent defunding debacle at The Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC), which led to the latter’s demise. Following these shocks, instead of collective confusion and dissolution, the art community showed its resiliency by actually expanding. YYZ and Mercer Union were direct outcomes, both starting up in 1979, and A Space, once the only game in town, transformed itself in a new location on Queen Street. After a few years of productive quiescence in which the downtown art scene had become “the Queen Street art community” and attracted artists from across Canada to it, the second generation was not spared its crises. But exactly what were they? Was it the second coup at A Space, the so-called “FUSE takeover,” in late 1982? Was this history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce? Not really, though in retrospect it seems like round two of the earlier struggle for control of the institution. But apart from some diehards nostalgic for A Space’s old vanguardism, the scene had already moved on and the now new socially-inclined A Space just became part of the greater ecology. Was it the day on May 31, 1984, when two members of the provincial censorship squad seized video equipment from A Space, which had been flouting censorship submission requirements? No, the broader community rallied and showed its political resiliency a year later with its refusenik Six Days of Resistance.

Perhaps after all, as was claimed, “Axes of Difference” was the crisis—although nothing structurally changed or seemingly was at risk. One critic doing his job could so shatter a community’s confidence that you wonder, what was wrong with this community? Was it that the lecture “came a bit out of the blue, referencing no other writing,” an odd criterion for the urgency of the lecture and its pertinence to this place Toronto?[12] Was it that, as a community, artists felt exempt from critique—especially coming from within? Or was it that they felt exempt from the effects of a discourse they had so recently embraced? In 1992, Barbara Fischer wrote that “While Monk’s argument was the most important critical interpretation that current local practice had yet received, his discussion, in the end, won its importance and notoriety not on objective grounds, in terms of its use-value as a theory of the moment, but rather, on account of its very real, lasting subjective effects within Toronto’s avant-garde.”[13] In the end, perhaps this discrimination between objective use-value and subjective effect rather reveals the inability of the community either to register the critique or to dismiss it. To do either might have led to different consequences than the so-called “destruction” of the Toronto art community.

But so, supposedly, it was destroyed. The question therefore remains: Why could one crisis lead to expansion of the art scene, another to its dissolution? What can account for the way two generations responded? Yet rather than set one generation against the other we should look deeper into the genesis of the art scene. In the genesis is its sustenance. There we find the roots of the ideological continuities of an art scene composed between generations. To ally one generation’s crises to another would serve to depersonalize the debate (blaming “Axes of Difference,” for instance) in order to search out the structural faults that united both. Rather than the personal, this research would operate on institutional and discursive levels. Here is the framework of this book.

What follows, you could say, is a critical memoir disguised as a history book—certainly for the first half. It plays itself out initially between two institutions: that of art criticism (during a historically determined period of this discipline: the years of French theory’s influence) inscribed within that of the establishment of the downtown Toronto art scene, the Queen Street art community as it came to be known. The first was my practice, the second my context. It was a propitious time with both criticism and community creating themselves, sometimes at cross purposes. The arc of my writing is considered within that of my colleagues. Only they did not end up burdened with the question I need address here as well: Did I destroy the Toronto art community? This question is as traumatic for me now as it was for the art community then. Of “Philip Monk, the author of ‘Axes of Difference’,” I prefer to speak, in this book, in the third person. I need a distancing device. Je est un autre.[14]

“Axes of Difference,” however, was not the end but a midpoint in Toronto’s developing discourse, that is, as it developed otherwise. My career as a critic ended mid-decade with its publication, though apparently the effects of its writing carried on. By the end of the decade, neither writing nor the community were the same. Another discourse was preparing itself that eventually transformed the art community. But that would take time. And, initially, this discourse, too, was resisted. If the decade opened on the issues of poststructuralism and postmodernism, it closed on that of postcolonialism and “multiculturalism.” This was an implicated discourse that, in turn, implicated the whole Toronto art community in a consideration of race.

And Philip Monk? He found out that the book he started writing in 2019 could not be continued in 2020 now that he realized that he was part of the problem. Not just a player, a problem: first as a critic then as a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In order to move forward, the discourses of the past must be evaluated not only for what they said but left out, too. Some would say that discourse lacunae and the art world exclusions were one and the same.

2019/2024

NOTES

[1] “The Curatorial Question,” was organized by M5V (by M5V executive editor David Clarkson et al) and took place at the Euclid Theatre April 28, 1991. It was billed as “a conference to further the discussion of local curatorial practice in the visual arts.” Papers and a transcript of questions appeared in the spring 1992 issue of M5V, its third and last issue. Gordon Lebredt was the editor of the issue.

[2] See for instance, Philip Monk, “Exits,” Impulse 8:3 (Summer 1980): 29–31; “Violence and Representation,” Impulse 8:4 (Autumn 1980): 34–35, reprinted in ZG (London, Eng.), no. 2 (1981): 3; “Breach of Promise,” File 5:3 (Spring 1982): 36–37 [all reprinted in Philip Monk, Struggles with the Image: Essays in Art Criticism (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1988)]; “Notes on the Sumptuary Destruction of Leaders,” ZG (London, Eng.), no. 8 (1982): n.p.; “Image of the Leader, Function of the Widow,” C Magazine 1 (Winter 1983–1984): 40–45, with extensive erratum, number 2 (Summer 1984): 59.

[3] Barbara Fischer referred to “criticism and its violence, as it had been played out in and around YYZ,” in her important 1992 essay, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” commissioned to discuss the first ten years of YYZ. See Decalog (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1992), 19.

[4] Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” Decalog, 17.

[5] John Bentley Mays, “For many a Toronto artist, it all started at A Space,” The Globe and Mail, September 7, 1991, C12. In his Euclid Theatre lecture, “Dead Centre,” Andy Fabo had already lamented this demotion and asked, “How has this come to be?” Andy Fabo, “Dead Centre: Views on the Curatorial Arena in Toronto,” M5V 3 (Spring 1992): 4.

[6] International exposure was the issue of the moment in the early 1980s. “International Exposure” was also the name of a May 1983 conference organized by Visual Arts Ontario.

[7] Fabo answered his own question of “How has this come to be?” with the statement: “This prevailing perception of Toronto has nothing to do with the amount of production or its lack of quality and everything to do with what is permitted to enter into the central arena of discourse, what is disseminated nationally and internationally.” Fabo, “Dead Center,” 4. It would seem that lack of international exposure was one perceived reason for the failure of the Toronto art community. Critics were to blame—one in particular.

[8] So much an impact when it moved to Queen Street West in 1982, the Ydessa Gallery closed in 1988. At Carmen Lamanna’s death in 1991, his legendary, pioneering gallery, the Carmen Lamanna Gallery, closed. (The S. L. Simpson Gallery closed in 1998.)

Richard Rhodes started C Magazine at the beginning of 1984 and then became a curator at the Power Plant late in 1990. Philip Monk became a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario in January 1985. Tim Guest left for New York later I the decade. Bruce Grenville did most of his guest curating at institutions out of town and then became curator at the Mendel Art Gallery in 1989.

[9] “The Curatorial Question,” along with YYZ’s concurrent “Towards the Slaughterhouse of History” lecture series (May 1991), was one of the few public events that assembled the art community after the May 1987 panel organized for the opening exhibition of the Power Plant, Toronto: A Play of History—perhaps because the latter panel effectively sealed off any institutional conversation about the history of contemporary Toronto art for years.

[10] Maybe this is a good thing. The founding gestures of the avant-garde breed dissension, argument, opposition, aggression, and combativeness.

[11] See Philip Monk, Picturing the Toronto Art Community, insert in C international contemporary art 59 (September–November 1998): insert.

 [12] Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,” note 100, 30.

 [13] Fischer, “YYZ—An Anniversary,”17. The objective-subjective dichotomy of “Axes” argument was carried out even here in a retrospective analysis.

[14] The phrase “Je est un autre,” (“I is an other”) is from a May 1871 letter by the young French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud.