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REVIEWS: A Project Room series curated by Tom Folland and Natalie Olanick What is the Difference Between Alienated and Collective Cultures? Artists' Political Action Collective (APAC) Nether Mind Place & Show Spontaneous Combustion April 4 - May 15, 1996 Reviews is a series of four project room exhibitions which re-situate some of the last 20 years in the Toronto art scene. Reviewing not only individual works but also the critical context in which the work was produced, this series attempts to expand upon ideas of local art history. This fourth exhibition in the series presents four collectives asked to create projects that either represent who they are as a collective or what collectivity means to them in relation to contemporary art. brochure essay by Tom Folland: |
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Tom Dean, writing in the exhibition catalogue "White Lily Presents," (The Project Room, Mercer Union 1995) suggested that all contemporary art suffers from a profound sense of alienation and loss of meaning. "Maybe there was a time when art was complicit with the state," he writes, "or the church, or whatever the power at hand. But in the twentieth century art has traditionally detached itself from the status quo and entrenched itself in alienation. We're not a collaborator in our culture..." But artists are collaborators with culture at large; public funded art institutions, corporate sponsored exhibitions, large-scale public art works, commissioned works and works that provide political commentary or function critically in relation to site all testify to that fact. Alienation may be a self-induced myth - a modernist hangover - that sustains the fiction that art has no social role. Artists may indeed embrace alienation as a subject of their work, but it hard to argue a role for art as primarily one of detachment from society. Artists' Political Action Collective (APAC), for example, a recently formed collective, sees its role in explicitly social terms: "APAC was formed as a bridge between our work as artists and activists. Our aim is to address our concerns as artists, workers and members of this community and to use our work to do so." (APAC mandate/statement). In 1991 Place & Show, a collective that began in 1990, organized "HOMEFRONT: Current Issues in Interior Decorating," in collaboration with StreetCity, a warehouse project converted into living space for street people. Place & Show overturned the historically avant-garde argument about the separation of art and life with a defacto simplicity: art was created in cooperation with the residents of StreetCity and integrated into their environment. |
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For the final exhibition in the Project Room series we have asked four collectives, Artists' Political Action Collective (APAC), Nether Mind, Place & Show and Spontaneous Combustion to create projects that either represent who they are as a collective or what collectivity means in relation to contemporary art. The title of the exhibition, "What is the Difference Between Alienated and Collective Cultures?," is taken from a Centre For Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC) poster that asked the question and answered it by contrasting two images and text: one of Marx and an accompanying description of Marx's ideal society and one of God with an accompanying description of religious mysticism. For CEAC, who appeared in the first Project Room Series of Reviews, the function of collectives was to overcome the alienation and class division in contemporary capitalist cultures. Culture would resist commodification and isolation by integrating culture, collectively, into the praxis of everyday life. Whereas APAC may be more in line with CEAC's stance on culture - their project for this exhibition parodies the Bank of Montreal Ads currently everywhere in Toronto and underscores the relationship between Ontario Premier Mike Harris's conservative policies and Big Business - Nether Mind, Place & Show and Spontaneous Combustion present a much more complicated notion of how artists' collectives currently function in relation to traditionally understood notions of collectivity. Whereas Place & Show's installation Show and Tell documents and re-presents past projects through photographs, video and pubications, Spontaneous Combustion's installation Retelling, a light box display of members' work from 1989 to the present, works against interpretation. Instead, Retelling attempts to "demonstrate the impossibility of translating our past and present experiences." (from proposal). |
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With the exception of APAC, all the collectives on exhibit are interested in presenting individual work within a collective context thereby adhering more to mainstream models of art practice than as collectives functioning in critical resistance to gallery/museum categories of art practice. Nether Mind, an aggregate of eleven artists who exhibit independently as well as collectively, find a space once a year or so where they create site-related works, linked by, as their press release states, "a shared affinity with the physical." Nether Mind's contribution to the exhibition indexes most directly the economic reality and imperative behind most contemporary collectives: a catalogue from their most recent exhibition is placed on a plinth and copies are for sale for five dollars each. |
| The impulse in collective organizing which began with much of the work documented in the first Project Room exhibition of "Reviews" series was against an entrenched status quo of commercial galleries and museums who exhibited little contemporary experimental art. Wanting to traverse boundaries that propped up divisions between cultural practices, collectives like CEAC or the American collective Group Material sought also to maintain a critical function of art against a benign notion of "mass entertainment." Ironically - the best example being the reaction to YYZ Artists' Outlet's 1989 selected survey of Round-Up, a cross-city non-juried, open studio exhibition which wanted to resist the increasing institutionalization of artist-run centres - the status quo for contemporary collectives now seems to be the very structures out of which they are generated.
Tom Folland Mercer Union publications are available for purchase. The other three exhibitions in the reviews series can be linked to here: Experimental: Art and Ideas November 9-December 23, 1995 The Monumental New City: Art and Community January 11-February 17, 1996 Mass Media: Art and Culture February 22-March 30, 1996 Images: Nether Mind, 1996; 1. John Dickson, detail from Vertigo, 1995, photo the artist. 2. Mary Catherine Newcomb, Untitled, 1995, photo Lyla Rye. 3. Max Streicher, Balancing act with Dragon, 1995, photo Lyla Rye. 4. Catherine Heard, installation detail of Untitled, 1995, photo Simon Glass. 5. Place & Show, 1990, poster from first exhibition at the Embassy Cultural House in London, Ontario, Canada. 6. Artists' Political Action Collective (APAC), Special Interest Groups, 1996, black and white poster. |