METRO BORDUAS
By Tammer El-Sheikh
Introduction
Paul-Émile Borduas’ influence in the history of Canadian art is pervasive. His exhibition at the Théâtre L’Ermitage of 45 groundbreaking gouaches in 1942 constituted, by most estimates, the seminal avant-garde gesture in Canada’s written art history. These first experiments in a plastic, non-figurative visual vocabulary in Québec would mark a decisive break with the orthodoxy of academic painting that had characterized Montréal’s artistic production in the inter-war period, and establish a place for the Montréal Automatistes on the post-war art historical map. As François-Marc Gagnon notes, Borduas set himself the task of reaching the widest possible audience by “shifting his centres of diffusion” and extending the range of his influence in “ever-widening concentric circles”.(1) By 1960, the year of Borduas’ death, the ripple effects of his 1942 provocation to the art enterprise were everywhere to be felt. In these 18 short years, the Surrealist-inspired revolution of “sensibility” declared in the Borduas group’s Refus global manifesto of 1948 would transform the Canadian art annals into a narrative of political and aesthetic struggle. Borduas’ historic push toward a psychically charged, non-representational art and the output of the Automatiste group that formed in its wake would prepare the way for a new generation of artists eager to develop, modify and contest the articulated goals of Refus global. Borduas’ Automatistes would forcefully write, paint, sculpt and dance the history of the post-war avant-garde in Montréal and establish a powerful precedent for the socially engaged art practices of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. It is this social history of art practices, movements and communities within Borduas’ political and aesthetic orbit that we wish to trace.
Borduas figures in each chapter of this history as a central character, though not always as a protagonist. We have attempted to represent both the academic work from which the Automatistes sought a departure, as well as the development of a “hard edge” style that Borduas in many ways pre-figured, but nevertheless objected to. Jean Paul Lemieux’s Le soleil dans capricorne (1965) and Claude Tousignant’s Cercle Latin (1969) represent, respectively, these opposed academic and hard-edge tendencies. Even after Borduas’ death, the aesthetic debates that he instigated and continuously engaged raged on. Several groups would lay claim to the mantle of the Montréal avant-garde following the publication of Refus global and the subsequent dissolution of the Automatiste group. But Borduas’ mark on this development is apparent even in the next wave’s many self-descriptions: the “Rebels,” “The Association of Non-Figurative Artists” and the “Plasticiens.” Borduas’ break from the constraints of representational art and the provocative spirit of Refus global’s collective declaration generate an illuminating subtext for these episodes in Montréal’s contemporary art history. The work in the exhibition by members of both the original Automatistes and these splinter groups attests to the profound formal influence of Borduas’ 45 gouaches. A reading of Rita Letendre’s Twilight Phase III (1972) and Marcel Barbeau’s Rétine prétentieuse (1965) through Borduas’ Arlequin (1942) and La Pâque nouvelle (1948) suggests the extent to which the experiments of the Forties with a non-representational vocabulary would shape and preoccupy the Montréal art scene for decades to come. Barbeau’s work recalls Borduas’ hopes for an art of the subconscious. Its optical composition and perceptual slipperiness footnote the two-toned ambiguity of the psychoanalyst’s Rorschach test. Letendre’s hard-edged play on Cézanne’s “spatial line” points to Borduas’ own experiments with the figure/ground dynamic.
The responses to Borduas’ plastic revolution were clearly varied and not always in harmony with his own aesthetic program. Indeed, Borduas’ adversaries often outnumbered his disciples while he was alive. By the 1960s, Serge Lemoyne had historicized Borduas’ contribution with a cheeky counterpoint to the battle cry of Refus global: “after total refusal, total art.” But the work exhibited illustrates how the formal possibilities implied by Borduas’ visual language would be exploited for generations to come.
The Métro: Underground and Avant-Garde
In addition to these plastic innovations, Borduas’ legacy owes its coherence and strength to the city in which it was nurtured. We have organized the work in the show to underscore the importance of its context in Montréal, and the way in which Borduas’ project of what Ray Ellenwood calls a “living art” was played out on the city’s public stage in his time and long after.(2) In order to situate and “map” this legacy, we will signpost our selections with métro stops that call up significant associations. Borduas’ legacy will be presented organically in this exhibition as an internationally inspired, but regionally generated phenomenon, conditioned by institutional and social forces that shaped the entire city in the post-war years. Like the Montréal métro, the work of Borduas and his group was an expression of the emerging international status of the city. We do not propose a causal connection between the métro and Borduas’ legacy, but rather a symbolic and historiographic one. The interpretive frame of the métro renders our present-day perspective transparently. We filter our retrospective gaze on this chapter in Montréal’s cultural history through the lens of the métro as a multivalent symbol of the cosmopolitan. Our installation of the works in groupings that correspond with particular stops on the métro line will point to the particular historical conditions of their production and presentation, and also to locations of special significance in the lives and careers of the artists concerned, but always by way of this familiar frame. The métro is a taken-for-granted aspect of our present-day experience. In this regard, it serves as an experiential conduit through which this remote period in Montréal’s cultural history may be brought to bare viscerally on our lives. Though the artwork on display constitutes the main part of Borduas’ legacy, we make the point that it is, and has always been, a thoroughly located legacy. In 2006, the work presents traces of a time during which the city moved in stride, though often reluctantly, with its artists toward its present-day status as a first-rate international cultural centre.
Under our selected métro stops, we plot the key moments in the conflict-ridden history of the group and its legacy, along with the works to contextualize them socially and politically. In many cases, the details of this history predate the construction of the métro. It is thus a narrative that will serve metaphorically as a kind of temporal sediment upon which the city’s cultural “tracks” were laid. We propose an almost site-specific reading of the work on display, and certainly of the work installed in the métro itself, in order to unearth the traces of a time in this city’s cultural evolution when the foundation of our relatively de-centred and inclusive art enterprise was laid.
We highlight the stops in which the work of Jean-Paul Mousseau and of other abstract artists may be found, as well as landmarks and key locations in the written history of the Automatiste movement and its legacy. Métro Guy-Concordia marks the site of both our presentation of the Borduas legacy in Métro Borduas and the vicinity of the aforementioned Théâtre L’Ermitage. The historical narrative begins and ends at Guy-Concordia. Arlequin (1942), one of Borduas’ 45 groundbreaking gouaches, will serve as an anchor for a group of works by Paterson Ewen, Ferdinand Leduc, Rita Letendre and Françoise Sullivan. The Exposition des rebelles of 1950 held nearby, at 2035 Mansfield Street, figures as an additional historical association for this stop, as will two important exhibitions at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts: the Spring Show, which provoked the Rebels to mount their exhibition, and Espace 55, where Letendre and Leduc, among others, presented the hard-edged works that famously met with Borduas’ disapproval. Distinguished faculty of the past and present will also be called to mind at this métro stop. Françoise Sullivan’s sculpture Untitled (Spiral) of 1973 will appear to honour this most important Refus global signatory’s continuing tenure at Concordia University’s Fine Arts Department. In addition, Guido Molinari’s central role in the development of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia over a 20-year period (from 1977 to 1997) is another proud historical note to which we pay tribute at this stop.
Another key métro stop represented in the exhibition is Place des Arts. Once again, a work by Borduas entitled La Pâque nouvelle, created in 1948, is featured prominently. The station represents the artist’s close relationship with the Librairie Tranquille bookstore, where Refus global was first made available, and where both the Automatistes and the Plasticiens showed their work several times—above the shelves! But this location is also tremendously important as the site of the Place des Artistes exhibition, where Guido Molinari first showed his bold, abstract canvases painted in the dark, and of the École du meuble, where Borduas taught until shortly after the publication of the manifesto (he was fired in August 1948). Finally, in this section, the work of Claude Tousignant commemorates his historic opening of Galerie L’Actuelle with Guido Molinari, arguably the country’s first artist-run centre.
These two stations and the artists represented under their banners figure centrally in the installation plan. They are sites of key significance in the story of Borduas’ legacy, but they are also symbols of the main forces at work in the art enterprise at the time of the Automatistes and long after. The academy and the museum system on the one hand, and the artist-run initiative and its network of grass-roots participants on the other, have structured the debates in Montréal’s cultural milieu since the Théâtre L’Ermitage exhibition of 1942. The Automatistes’ mandate to find venues for the exhibition of their own work outside the institutional context provided a blueprint for the critical practices of the Sixties and Seventies. The groups and individuals that sustained this revolutionary spirit long after Borduas’ death provided a productive irritation to the art enterprise in Montréal that would establish the city as an internationally recognized centre for socially engaged contemporary art. Indeed, the métro itself was the site of a historic debate concerning the public role of art in general and the non-figurative art of the Automatistes in particular. Under the direction of Robert Lapalme, the public-art program in the Montréal métro privileged figurative and representational works dealing with narrative and historical themes, i.e. those thought to be most accessible and edifying. But Jean-Paul Mousseau and Marcelle Ferron rallied the support of the city of Montréal and eventually succeeded in widening the scope of the métro’s public-art program to include non-representational works. By 1972, Mousseau had replaced Lapalme as artistic director and a changing of the cultural guard was set in motion. This administrative struggle in the directorial ranks of the Montréal métro to include the abstract works of Ferron and Mousseau, among others, in public displays stands as a historical reminder that the city’s cultural producers have claimed their rightful place in the municipal discourse. Similarly, the Corridart installation recalls the Borduas group’s initiative to bring art into a meaningful relationship with the wider public. As a result, today Québec is home to the largest number of artist-run centres in the country; the very name of Tousignant and Molinari’s paradigmatic Galerie L’Actuelle announces this fate for Québec on the national artistic scene. In addition, the “living art” that the Borduas group fought for is registered in Québec’s strong tradition of “art actuel,” a category that is peculiar to the French-Canadian art-world lexicon. The objective of such an art, as the term implies, is to manifest itself as part of a social reality, as an “actuality.” This is precisely the legacy of Borduas and his group; a tradition not just of new art, or “art contemporain,” but of engaged art that acts on and from the community in which it is produced. The implication here is that Borduas recognized, harnessed and transformed Montréal’s potential avant-garde into a revolutionary force for real social and creative progress, and this force has at last carved out a space for its experimentation and discourse in the wider culture.
The métro also functions as a trope or metaphor for the group's central interest in the experiments of André Breton and the Surrealists, and the psychoanalytic procedures of Sigmund Freud. The "living art" that was sought by Borduas and his group was thought to reside in the treasure trove of the subconscious. The group's experiments with an art of the subconscious were pursued in hopes of overturning the academic conventions that had seized the imaginations and dominated the pedagogy of the art institutions with which Borduas and his contemporaries struggled. In an effort to represent the Automatistes’ faith in this line of inquiry, the métro is inscribed in our exhibition as a symbol of the “surrational” drives that were thought to have generated and nurtured this artistic and political project. The theme of the surrational was also developed in the poetics of Claude Gauvreau, one of the key thinkers behind the Automatistes’ revolutionary aims. For Gauvreau, language, like visual art, announces a powerfully transformative potential. Every brushstroke is a plastic manifestation of a spontaneous feeling, and every word is a "vibration" that is synchronized with an interior impulse.(3) A reading of Gauvreau’s poetry will be projected in the gallery’s “Black Box” screening room to stage a confrontation with this crucial member of the Borduas group and his rare art of the subconscious. Aptly named for the present purpose, the “Black Box” facilitates a journey for a contemporary audience into the headspace of Gauvreau’s experiments of the Forties and Fifties with the “poetic image.” The subterranean yet strictly public space of the métro in our exhibition is a short-hand finally for the collective dimension of this creative appropriation of the psychoanalytic tradition. Visitors will embark on a journey that will ultimately lead them from the institutional setting of the gallery into the public space of the city by way of a directed tour of the métro.
In the post-war climate of the Forties and Fifties, the subversive spirit of the Borduas group and the collective proclamation of Refus global were readily interpreted as expressions of sympathy with the Communist or Marxist ideology. The journalist and critic Gilles Hénault, for example, interviewed Borduas in an issue of the socialist magazine "Combat" in hopes of claiming a new revolutionary recruit. But it is clear in both Borduas’ responses to Hénault and his political ambivalence in the pages of Refus global that the movement regarded itself as an unaffiliated group of artists with strong political convictions, but an equally strong distaste for political stripes. Borduas' cynical estimate of the inevitable course of political, even socialist revolution, towards either world wars or an exploitative dictatorship of the proletariat, forced a firm belief in the transformative power of art.(4) The aesthetic revolution for the Borduas group was simultaneously a political revolution.
In 1968, on the anniversary of Refus global,Serge Lemoyne orchestrated the controversial Opération Déclic event at the Bibliothèque Nationale to renew and qualify the spirit of the Borduas group’s struggle for a “living art.” Slogans from Refus global were circulated on pamphlets and a public case for the democratization of art was boldly made. This event coincided roughly with the emergence of Lucy Lippard’s conceptualist rhetoric of the “de-materialization of the art object” and its strong tone of institutional critique.(5) Borduas’ message had retained its relevance for a new generation of critical practices. Lemoyne’s Opération Déclic was an aspect of such a critical practice that utilized everyday materials from the built environment in a sculptural and playfully referential manner. Our presentation includes his Pointe d’étoile (1972) as an example of work that absorbed the abstract vocabulary of the Plasticiens, but with an eye to accessibility—the palette is lifted from the Montréal Canadiens’ team jerseys. For Lemoyne, the many iterations of the Borduas group’s fight for a revolutionary, “authentic” art had progressively strayed from the sphere of the “real,” heading in the direction of a hermetic universalism. The Opération Déclic event and Lemoyne’s programmatically low-brow art practice were intended to re-inscribe the Borduas group’s original argument for an art cut loose from institutional fetters.
Just as Lemoyne brought his argument to the doorstep of the academy near Berri-UQAM, we intend to represent the bold spirit of Borduas’ legacy of critical art practices from within the institutional setting. In Métro Borduas, Berri-UQAM signals both the site of the 1968 demonstration and the re-location of the École du Meuble, where Borduas once taught and inspired his first followers. As both the site of Lemoyne’s demonstration and an emblem of the institutional system that first supported and then resisted Borduas’ project, Berri-UQAM is a fraught yet relevant symbol. The institutional force that alternately nurtured and challenged Borduas and the artists in his sphere of influence is very much a part of the present-day art enterprise’s mechanism of education, production and presentation. This exhibition positions Borduas’ work and its rich legacy on a threshold between the institutional structures of the academic art system and the public space of the city to which the artwork on display consistently refers. From the institutional context of the FOFA Gallery, Métro Borduas bridges this gap by suggesting ways in which a legacy of socially engaged art may nevertheless function meaningfully from within such a context.
ENDNOTES
1. François-Marc Gagnon,Paul-Émile Borduas, (Montréal: The Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, 1988) 19.
2. Ray Ellenwood, Egregore: A History of the Montréal Automatist Movement, (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1992) 32.
3. Ray Ellenwood, Egregore: A History of the Montréal Automatist Movement, (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1992) 202.
4. Paul-Émile Borduas, et al., Total Refusal: The Complete Manifesto of the Montréal Automatists, Trans. Ray Ellenwood, (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1985) 39-41.
5. Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art.” Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999) 46.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borduas, Paul-Émile et al., Total Refusal: The Complete Manifesto of the Montréal Automatists, Trans. Ray Ellenwood. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1985.
Ellenwood, Ray. Egregore: A History of the Montréal Automatist Movement. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1992.
Gagnon, François-Marc. Paul-Émile Borduas. Montréal: The Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, 1988.
Lippard, Lucy R., and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art.” Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999.
|
|
