Tag Archives: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Play Recent

Shock & Awe

François Le Roux, Le Bal masqué and L’Histoire du Soldat, Bourgie Hall, 18 April 2024

François Le Roux performs at Bourgie Hall. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Reuters News Agency photographer Mohammed Salem this week won the World Press Photo award for his snapshot of a Palestinian woman, Inas Abu Maamar, cradling the lifeless corpse of her 5-year-old niece, Saly, who reportedly was killed in an Israeli airstrike at Nasser hospital in Southern Gaza last October.

On the surface, it’s an aesthetically appealing image.

The cold and rigid textures of white marble and yellow sandstone behind the pair of women contrast their bodily figures, draped in blue, brown, and white textiles.

And yet another feature strikes the viewer on a more subliminal level: there is very little humanity to this photographic record of apparently human suffering.

The only hint we get of the subjects’ earthy identity is a snatch of Maamar’s hand emerging from her sleeve, gently caressing Saly’s enshrouded head. Otherwise, there is nearly no humanness evident in any recognizable corporeal features — an inverse, say, of the iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning image that The Associated Press photographer Nick Ut captured of Phan Thi Kim Phúc running naked and screaming down Route 1 near Trang Bang immediately following an American napalm attack on South Vietnam in 1972.

In Ut’s historic image, the horrors of war were laid bare in black and white, visceral, and unmistakable. With Salem’s more current photo, everything that’s terrible about genocide is concealed, abstracted, wrapped up literally as if mummified. It’s an image sanitized of pain that invites viewers at once to look and to not really see.

During the Vietnam War, it was customary in the U.S. not to show dead soldiers’ bodies in the media. Visible suffering was a duty for the other side to bear.

But through the proliferation of shocking media images amidst wars in Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Syria, the west no doubt fell victim to what the cultural theorist Susan Sontag in her book Regarding the Pain of Others defined “desensitizing horror.”

We’re frankly exhausted with looking at destruction and death. When there’s nothing else to look at, an image as enigmatic as Maamar’s requires an act of interpretation, forcing viewers to participate in discerning its true meaning.

Ensemble Urbain, Créations, Collectif MTL, 14 April 2024

Anita Pari and Joshua Morris perform at Collectif MTL. Photographed for NicheMTL.

How we signify internal pain entails a more symbolic vocabulary of representation. At a recent post-classical recital hosted by Ensemble Urbain, the composer and doctoral candidate Anita Pari chose to translate her own lived experience with mental health through music.

In a piece called “Escape for Cello and Piano,” Pari and accompanist Joshua Morris communicated sonically the experience of “persistent intrusive thoughts” — a phenomenon that everybody can experience, regardless of medical diagnosis or clinical disorder.

Ordering sound is one way to restructure any situation in which we find ourselves out of control. That’s why music — and art, more broadly — is such a successful therapeutic form, which we should consider before reaching for pharmaceuticals or other easy fixes.

Pari’s composition didn’t come off too conceptual, either; it wasn’t, so to speak, just a “one-note” performance. I found myself both aesthetically pleased as a listener, and emotionally moved as a person empathetic to those who find this life a struggle. What a wonderful place to put disordered energy.

Anybody who attempts to bring order into this world is going to scrape up against chaos. Anyone who tries to shine a light through darkness will inevitably cast a shadow.

Nary a Fang with Elizabeth Lima, No Hay Banda & Innovations en concert, La Sala Rossa, 15 April 2024

Jennifer Thiessen performs with Nary a Fang at La Sala Rossa. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Not to disparage “one-note” performances, the experimental quartet Nary a Fang delivered a transcendent concert at La Sala Rossa last Monday, revolving around miniscule microtonal variations on a single frequency. Like listening to a piano being tuned, it becomes evident that an infinite number of notes exist between notes — that one is many, and many is one.

With this realization, it’s impossible not to be fulfilled by a drone that ostensibly never changes. When we find whatever it is we’re looking for — in sound as in life — there is no more “more” to find.

The Spanish kabbalist Shem Țob ibn Shem Țob wrote in his Sermon on Wa-Yeħi in the 1480s:

“Those who love money can never have enough of it. But the reward that comes to those who engage in Torah and commandments will fully satisfy them, for this goodness spreads like the water of a brook. Just as the sunlight can illuminate the entire world without diminishing, so the goodness of the world to come will not diminish, no matter how many share in it.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra, Maison Symphonique, 19 April 2024

Yannick Nézet-Seguin conducts The Philadelphia Orchestra. François Goupil for the Orchestre Métropolitain.

A good conductor takes command of an orchestra, which is prerequisite. A great conductor can regulate the crowd with a wave of his hand.

While directing The Philadelphia Orchestra, his American charge, Yannick Nézet-Séguin after the first movement of Florence Price’s 4th Symphony on Friday night at Maison Symphonique gently and successfully instructed the sold-out audience to kindly hold their applause until the end of the piece.

It was a simple gesture, a subtle manual motion made without even turning around. But subtlety is most effective in a righteous demand for respect.

Is it possible that force isn’t the best way to overcome an army?

Wanda Koop, Who Owns the Moon, Musée des beaux-arts, until 4 August 2024

Left: Wanda Koop, Objects of Interest — Panel 4, 2023 and Objects of Interest — Panel 2, 2023. Right: a patron inspects Black Sea Portal — Luminous Silver, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. ©️ Wanda Koop. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In preparation for painting, Wanda Koop lies on her back with eyes closed, often for hours, envisioning what each new piece should look like. Before a brush touches canvas, she has already formed a clear mental image of what the work will be.

“I love feeling that I’m always seeing everything in technicolour,” Koop told me at the press conference for her Musée des beaux-arts exhibition.

“It’s one of those shows where you should come by yourself and be quiet — like looking at the moon,” Koop suggests. “The eclipse is something that I speak to in my work. It’s something bigger than us.”◼︎

Cover image: Wanda Koop, Ukrainian Quartet — Power Plant, 2023, Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. ©️ Wanda Koop. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Standard
999 Words

The Orchid Thief

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. ­–Psalm 104:24

All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. –Isaiah 40:6

There is a scene in Spike Jonze’s 2002 film Adaptation in which Nicolas Cage — who plays real-life screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his fictional twin brother, Donald — classifies a roomful of women at an orchid convention like the various blossoming species they are there to admire.

“One looks like a schoolteacher; one looks like a gymnast; one looks like a Midwestern beauty queen,” Cage observes.

“One has eyes that dance; one has eyes that contain the sadness of the world.”

Adaptation is among the quintessential “meta” texts of the early 21st century, a story within a story, a film that ingeniously incorporates its own author, in the tradition of Federico Fellini’s 8½, or Seinfeld.

As the name suggests, it adapts for the screen the 1998 novel, The Orchid Thief, which the journalist Susan Orlean herself adapted from her own article for The New Yorker, entitled Orchid Fever, about John Laroche, an American horticulturalist who was prosecuted for illegally removing endangered wild orchids from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in Florida.

Layers of fiction and fact intertwine across an enchanting narrative about Kaufman struggling to transform Orlean’s prose into a brilliant script, wanting to do justice to her freewheeling style while living up to the cult success of his breakthrough 1999 hit, Being John Malkovich, and ultimately choosing to weave in himself and his own frustrations as a vehicle to bring Orlean and Laroche to life.

The movie version of Kaufman declares that he wants to “create a story where nothing much happens, where people don’t change, they don’t have any epiphanies,” he says. “More a reflection of the real world.”

There are many fine books written about them both, no doubt, but I don’t know much about Georgia O’Keeffe, and even less about Henry Moore. I know that they both created artistic works that drew heavily upon natural forms: stones, bones, and especially orchids.

I also know that the shapes O’Keeffe and Moore created tend to look a lot like pornography, a connection they both apparently denied. Nonetheless, it is there, and their respective eroticized mythologies endure as a part of popular culture. “Not surprisingly,” Orlean writes in Orchid Fever, “orchids have all sorts of sexual associations […] even other creatures find orchids alluring.”

The thing about orchids, and in fact all living things, is that they do change. They may not have epiphanies as such, but orchids have a very short window of remaining alluring. Many of them appear unremarkable, even ugly, when not in bloom.

And they die. Eventually, a flower’s sensual petals and stems wither away into dust. Surely, that is why O’Keeffe and Moore found purpose reproducing through painting and sculpture these fleeting and mortal structures — to preserve them for posterity, to transfigure their earthly beauty into some more durable state.

During a recent visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, I found myself attempting to take some original photographs of O’Keeffe’s and Moore’s works. But it was a Friday afternoon, and the gallery was quite busy, meaning that other people were getting in the way. Many of them were themselves attempting to snap the perfect picture, presumably, to share elsewhere. I decided to lean into the obstacle, realizing at once that the people were just as interesting to look at as the artworks were.

One looked like a Tiger orchid; one looked like a Lily of the Valley; one looked like milk thistle growing between the cracks of the pavement.

I began to notice that there is a certain way that people look at art, a kind of awe in a moment of repose that occurs naturally and cannot be helped. You see the subtle transformation in people’s posture, their composure, an instant of awareness, of recognition and insight.

That instant is as ephemeral as an orchid’s flowering phase. It’s there and then it’s gone.

I continued through the rest of the gallery more content to look at people looking at things than at the things the people were looking at. Their subtle transformations changed me, too, and reminded me that I was a part of this blossoming and annihilating cycle. Like an orchid and its pollinating insect, custom-built to attract an analogous companion, the museum’s patrons appeared to be reflected in the artworks.

Human beings are very adaptable — that’s one of our greatest strengths as a species. We can learn and grow and adjust to extremes. We can adapt our environments to suit our needs and desires. We can learn new languages and ways of doing things and establish new networks of survival. We can even produce artificial climates called greenhouses, and others called museums.

More perilously, we can also adapt to stasis, the reiteration of regression. Over the past two years, we have become accustomed to hearing about battlefield deaths in two spiralling global conflicts. Two years before that, we were constantly adapting to the new normal of pandemic-era restrictions. Two decades before that, at the turn of the millennium, we adjusted to an ambient environment of global terror and surveillance the likes of which put George Orwell to shame.

Change is not a choice that we humans can make. “If you begin collecting living things,” Orlean writes in her New Yorker piece, “you are pursuing something imperfectible, and even if you manage to find them and then possess them, there is no guarantee they won’t die or change […] To desire orchids is to have a desire that can never be fully requited.”

To want to preserve something — a flower, a language, an entire nation — is strictly vanity. If you love something, you have to let it go. Not because it will ever come back to you in some idealized form, but because at some point, everything must go.◼︎

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art continues through June 2nd 2024 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1380 Sherbrooke Street West.

Standard
Play Recent

This Is Fine

ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT, 8 February 2024, La Sala Rossa

All Hands_Make Light photographed for NicheMTL.

Fire is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, fire illuminates. On the other, it destroys.

You can’t fight fire with fire. Because then all you have is orders, powers, magnitudes of destruction.

But if what you are attempting is to enlighten, starting multiple fires is integral, beneficial, vital.

La Reine-garçon, Opéra de Montréal, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 3 February 2024

French is the world’s fifth most frequently spoken language. By comparison, English is first, with roughly three to four times as many habitual speakers. (Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish sit between.)

67 countries around the world list English as one of their official languages, as opposed to only 29 that name French. It is safe to say that France is no longer conducting much colonial expansion these days — no one is, really, except of course for Russia — meaning that it is unlikely that any new countries will become French-speaking nations for the foreseeable future.

With regard to language, I wrote a book called Mad Skills once upon a time, about the history of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, otherwise known as MIDI. MIDI is a computer “language” — and a robust and long-standing one at that.

Even though they were marketplace competitors, synthesizer companies in the early 1980s agreed that creating a standard control protocol would be advantageous to growing their trades manufacturing and selling musical instruments. If you could plug a Yamaha into a Roland and make them work together, the theory went, musicians would buy more Yamahas and Rolands.

It was especially the Japanese CEOs — who had themselves learned to speak decent English — that pushed for what was initially called UMI, pronounced you-me — a Universal Musical Interface.

UMI eventually morphed into MIDI, and the rest morphed into music history. Artists from Depeche Mode to Devo to Run DMC adopted MIDI and ran with it. Today, everyone except for Jack White has a MIDI-enabled instrument somewhere in their collection, and Roger Waters would never have been able to mount The Wall singlehandedly and interminably without it.

More than 40 years on, MIDI is still far and away the most commonly used “language” with which digital musical instruments “communicate.” And though other machine control protocols still survive, MIDI became the de facto industry syntax, and a lot of wonderful music ensued.

Imagine if a standard musical language never existed, what kind of noise people would have made.

Hell is Paradise, 5 February 2024, Quai des Brumes

Hell is Paradise photographed for NicheMTL.

There is no sound out in space. Because sound requires air as a medium to vibrate through, the sounds that we hear are very much unique to this world. Therefore, language — or the vocal, audible form of communication that most people and cultures across the globe and even many animal species use — is a place-dependent phenomenon.

That place is Planet Earth. And depending upon the location, the people and cultures of this planet inhabit variously configured bodies and correspond through diverse and ever-evolving languages.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou wrote that there are only bodies and languages. Except that there are also truths. One truth, though, is that there are only bodies and languages here.

Bodies and languages don’t matter much if they’re relieved of their earthbound gravitas.

India Gailey, No Hay Banda, La Sala Rossa, 4 February 2024

India Gailey photographed for NicheMTL.

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. —Genesis 2:19

It is noteworthy that according to Judeo-Christian tradition, language is man’s creation, not God’s. God made the animals and gave Adam the privilege of naming them. Which begs the question: what language does God speak? Is there such a thing as Divine Language?

The American ethnobotanist Terence McKenna described his transcendent experiences with N, N-Dimethyltryptamine, commonly abbreviated as DMT, in illuminating and often hilarious terms. On a collaborative 1993 spoken-word album made with the electronic musician Jonah Sharp, otherwise known as Spacetime Continuum, McKenna recounts hallucinating under the drug’s influence a race of interdimensional angelic beings that he called “self-transforming machine elves,” which communicated in delightful utterances that McKenna imitated.

These beings instructed McKenna to talk as they did — “do it, use your voice to make an object,” they told him — forming lexical blocks out of word units constituting a simultaneously novel and ancient language.

Suddenly, from McKenna’s body, as if ex nihilo, foreign yet familiar tongues emerged. “Meaning and language are two different things,” observes McKenna. There is no inherent reason why we call a table a table. It’s not as if you slap your palm down on a table and it sounds like “table.”

Reality itself is constructed upon a series of reiterative symbolic systems, language being one of them. Language only means something because we repeat its words. The more times we repeat the language’s words, the more pregnant with meaning they become.

Until they cease to lose all meaning. If you have ever repeated the same word over and over in your mind, you will have experienced the uncanny sensation of language unfastening itself from sense-making.

Language is like the fruit of a tree. It can nourish or it can poison, depending upon the nature of the tree. No good fruit can come of an evil tree, and a good tree cannot produce evil fruit.

“The world is made of words,” McKenna astutely concludes, “and if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art, 8 February 2024, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore vernissage at the MMFA photographed for NicheMTL.

I treasure going to openings. It is one of the perks of writing — being invited to an exclusive opening.

The last exclusive opening I will ever attend will be that of my own casket. Unfortunately, the show will close the same day.◼︎

Cover image: patrons inspect Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Grey Cross on Blue” (1929) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, photographed for NicheMTL.

Standard
Play Recent

Now And Then

Françoise Sullivan, I let rhythms flow, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1 November 2023 – 18 February 2024.

When I first moved to Montreal nearly 20 years ago, I felt like an immigrant. Coming from Edmonton — a “city,” in the loosest sense of that designation; a big small town — Montreal was larger and metropolitan and had its own distinct culture that I loved and wanted to be a part of in every way. But I never dared say that I was “from Montreal.” At first, I just lived here.

Relocating to Montreal to attend university meant being accepted and rejected all at once: accepted by the institution to study, yet rejected by the government and society at large to qualify as a Quebecker. Hailing from Alberta doubled the difficulty — I was not only an out-of-province student, but also from the dreaded nemesis. “Bizarro Quebec,” as I like to call it.

I converted to Quebec like an anti-capitalist American defecting to the Soviet Union. In doing so, I accepted a second-tier societal position. I accepted the existence of a glass ceiling. I accepted most of all that I would never become a part of the ruling class. But over the past two decades, I have watched as that class has deteriorated and failed, betraying itself and the Quebec I loved.

A student protest took place in 2004. Another one in 2012 brought Jean Charest down and catapulted Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois into politics. Montreal’s students have always been at the avant-garde of progressive social change. And Quebec’s French students are smart enough to understand the current government’s ruse. (They’re also smart enough to be bilingual.)

I have lived in Montreal longer than anyone who was born here who is 20 years old or younger, regardless of their language or culture. And I know more about Quebec’s history and society than most pure laine Quebecois folks. What I know is that Quebec is not a place. It’s an idea. I have a pretty good idea of what this place is. Dare I now say that I am from Montreal?

Jo Compadre, So Soulful (featuring Jadakiss) (produced by Anthony Bailey)

“Not America.”

That is always how Canada has traditionally defined itself — in its antithetical opposition to our nearest neighbour. America has a definite identity, exemplified by Apple Pie and Norman Rockwell paintings and an an air of undeserved superiority. Canada doesn’t. We’re supposed to be polite. But we’re not even known as being that anymore. “Used to be polite” isn’t an identity.

America was a melting pot; Canada became a mosaic. In the 1970s, Trudeau Sr. entrenched Canadian policies of bilingualism and multiculturalism, and Trudeau the Younger has welcomed immigrants to Canada in numbers never before seen — 985,000 over the next two years.

Quebec will accept 60,000 newcomers by 2027. But Montreal isn’t Quebec. And Quebec isn’t Canada. Without some strong sense of national identity, I wonder what sort of city, what kind of province, which country, and whose culture new immigrants feel like they’re arriving to today?

Tomoko Sauvage with Diego Bermudez Chamberland and Nicola Ratti, Festival Akousma, Usine C, 19 October 2023

It has been one year since I launched NicheMTL. In that year, Niche has posted more than one interview per month, and more than one article per week. We have had the honour of publishing writing by young new writers and photos by up-and-coming photographers. NicheMTL has expanded into a real publication. And why not? Check the credits, both street and academic.

There are only two levels of notoriety in this city. Because Montreal is not New York. It’s not Berlin. It’s not Paris, either. In Montreal, you either have cult status, or you’re more niche.

Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, La persistance, l’éphémère, Édifice Wilder, 16 October 2023

I wrote a book on MIDI, which is an acronym for the Musical Instrument Digital Interface. MIDI is a standard computer protocol that enables devices of different manufacturers, and even different eras, to work together. A Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer made in 1984 can be plugged into a MIDI patch bay and function perfectly well with 2023 technology.

As standards go, MIDI is an anomaly because of its longevity. Most standards become obsolete after a few years. (Remember SCSI?) MIDI celebrated its 40th birthday in 2023, and it is still the technical standard used in every music studio, in every music school, on stage, on screen, and in every mobile phone the world over.

As I have often overstated, it is impossible to overstate MIDI’s importance to music. If there were no standard musical interface, Yamahas would only work with other Yamahas. Korgs would only work with other Korgs. And there would be no “Get Ur Freak On” ringtone.

MIDI was never perfect. It was a compromise — the least worst option that every digital music company in 1983 could agree upon, at a time when digital technology was still in its infancy. This kind of cooperation is practically unheard of in other industries. Imagine if oil companies had united on infrastructure at the precise moment the internal combustion engine was invented. Or if movie studios collectively developed a streaming service.

It seems counterintuitive for competitors to cooperate. But that’s what digital musical instrument manufacturers did in 1983, and their efforts not only produced fortunes for each of them, but also gifted the world with amazing music that may have still been possible without MIDI, but a lot less intuitive to make.

The reason I bring up MIDI is because it is like a language. MIDI is a standard computer grammar that, individually, nobody really loved, but that, collectively, everyone liked enough to adopt for creative advancement’s sake. Kind of like how the business world has more-or-less adopted English. They speak English in Japan. They speak English in Germany. Hell, they speak English in France. Quebec missed the standard memo.

Testament (2023) dir. Denys Arcand, Cinéma Cineplex Forum, 10 October 2023

They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.◼︎

Cover image: Françoise Sullivan photographed for NicheMTL.

Standard
All Dressed

Natural Born Curator: in conversation with Mary-Dailey Desmarais

If collage was the defining artform of the 20th century, then curation surely must be the quintessential artistic mode proper to the 21st.

Festivals of music and film in the new millennium routinely invite celebrities to curate their annual programmes. Popular media services like Spotify and Letterboxd encourage everyday users to curate playlists and collections of their favourite songs and movies. Increasingly, people’s identities and values are defined and reflected in their collections of things more than by traditional doctrine or philosophy.

So, museum curation today may just be an essential kind of contemporary art: using works of art across genre, format, and history, as spectacular objects, as well as the medium of creation itself — painting with paintings, sculpting with sculpture, pushing the limits of exhibition through avant-garde technology and new media.

Still, Mary-Dailey Desmarais, chief curator at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is not above (or below) sneaker collecting, a guilty-pleasure.

“I really don’t like wearing high heels, so I wear sneakers all the time,” Desmarais says of her funky blue and orange kicks as we chat in a quiet meeting room overlooking Sherbrooke Street on a bustling Tuesday afternoon. “I feel like I can go faster, get more stuff done.”

“Museums have always been a place where I’ve felt at peace.” Thomas Hawes for NicheMTL.

Taking care of business is exactly what Desmarais has been doing since a rocky transition into her chief role in 2020, which the media widely reported. Without delay, a series of Desmarais’s triumphant shows, including “How long does it take for one voice to reach another?” in Autumn-Winter ‘21-‘22, and “Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music,” which ran from October, 2022, until February, 2023, returned the right kind of spotlight to the museum.

Now, there is an undeniable feeling of fresh optimism about the place. It’s clear that Desmarais not only hit the ground running, but did so with grace. And though she ultimately determines the museum’s direction, Desmarais is quick to share the credit when and where it’s due.

“I want the museum and the people here to feel that, collectively, we have been able to make this museum into a real hub of community and conversation that, through art, inspires new ideas — about humanity, about the world, about human creativity,” Desmarais says. “I really feel that that’s something that is achieved collectively.”

An exhibition of Pop Art culled from the museum’s permanent collection, entitled “The Pop of Life,” curated by Iris Amizlev, accompanies a major retrospective opening in October of Marisol Escobar, the Paris-born Venezuelan-American artist who was a singular and indefinable force working concurrent to the Pop movement in the United States. Marisol famously appeared in several of Andy Warhol’s films. But her diverse oeuvre owes as much to Pre-Columbian and even Classical Greek sculpture as to her contemporaries’ work, which embraced a particularly American brand of popular culture.

Desmarais speaks enthusiastically about the Marisol showcase, and a piece in particular that will serve as the entire exhibition’s anchor. “One of the great sculptures we have in the show is called ‘The Fishman,’ which is half-man, half-fish,” Desmarais reveals. “Marisol was very invested in exploring the relationship between humans and animals — particularly underwater sea creatures. In fact, she was more interested in the relationship between humans and animals, and humans and the environment, and the interconnectedness of all things. You can see that in her practice.”

The Fishman, wood, plaster, paint, acrylic, and glass eyes, 68 1/4 x 28 x 33 1/4 inches. Collection of The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, photographed for NicheMTL.

Another collection of Marisol’s sculptures represents a group of larger-than-life-sized aquatic creatures, with a satirical suggestion that reflects on her contemporary moment, and particularly, on women’s roles in society, including herself. “Although she was this major star of her generation — people were lining up around the block to go see her shows, even in galleries,” Desmarais explains, “she has been somewhat overlooked by history.”

Overlooked no more, Montreal’s Marisol retrospective, presented in connection with the AKG Museum of Buffalo, NY, is by far the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work. “I’m so excited about this show,” Desmarais beams. “I think it will really be a discovery for people.”

There is always a delicate balance to be struck in curation, to challenge audiences with art they may never have seen — and to re-examine familiar artworks in new ways — yet still remain appealing to a museum’s core mass audience, some of whom may be dabblers and novices.

“It’s not always obvious,” says Desmarais, “between exhibitions that deal with known subjects — subjects that might be more familiar to people — and those exhibitions that are bringing something new to light. For me, an exhibition, regardless of how many people it brings in the door, which is not really the critical factor of success, is that people come away having learned something new, and being inspired to engage differently with the world around them.”

Coming of age in New York City in the 1990s, Desmarais, for lack of a better explanation, seems to have been born gratia artis. “Museums have always been a place where I’ve felt at peace,” Desmarais recalls of her foundational artistic encounters. “As a kid, I remember specifically walking through the Met and stopping in front of this painting by Claude Monet. It’s a snow scene — it’s one of his haystacks in the snow at sunset — and it is this beautiful, glowing, almost ghostly scene. And I remember just stopping dead in front of this thing. And I can say now, in retrospect, that that painting was a kind of signpost for me.”

Desmarais eventually pursued a doctorate in Art History at Yale, writing her thesis on those very Monets which strayed from the sunny Impressionist paradigm. “I’d always believed that there was something kind of darker in these paintings because I remember feeling quite moved and sad in front of this thing,” she explains. “It was a constant feeling that being in the presence of works of art could transport me to a different place.”

“In the same way that writing is an artform, when you’re curating an exhibition,” says Desmarais, “what you’re doing is telling a story.” Thomas Hawes for NicheMTL.

The path to becoming a curator is neither prescribed nor impossible, though, and Desmarais had to pay her dues, too. “You have to have rigorous training in the practice of looking at art when you’re looking from a professional standpoint,” Desmarais recommends. “I know it sounds silly, but internships are important — they really were to me. I interned at the MOMA. I worked at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Musée Rodin in Paris, and the New York Historical Society. Those can be very formative experiences,” Desmarais suggests, “and they help you understand what museum work is.”

I propose to Desmarais my theory of curation as the 21st century’s artistic zeitgeist. “In a way, it is an artform,” she agrees, “but I don’t think of myself as an artist. In the same way that writing is an artform, when you’re curating an exhibition, what you’re doing is telling a story. You need to put it together in the same way you’d be writing a text. You’re making it digestible for people and helping people to feel something, see something,” Desmarais says. “That’s important.”

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is fortunate to boast a chief curator with such admirable credentials, intuitive tastes, a sense of humility, and something everyone chez nous respects: an enviable sneaker collection.

Desmarais feels just as pleased to be an adopted Montrealer.

“Montreal is a niche city,” she observes, “but with this great admiration around the world. Everywhere I go, people say, ‘Oh, you live in Montreal, what an awesome city!’ And it is. That multiplicity of cultural richness in this city needs to be reflected in the museum.”◼︎

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Mrs. Desmarais interned at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her internship was at Musée Rodin.

Standard
How Do You Spell Holiday?

Le Temps Qui Passe: notes on The Pop of Life!

In February of 1969, then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau reached out to the People’s Republic of China’s leadership in hopes of forging formal diplomatic relations.

There was a general forbidden sense about the East at that time. Aside from the Soviet Union, China’s was the world’s most opaque Communist national government, shrouded in mythology and mystery. The United States, our closest neighbour and ideological ally, was still operating under the Formosan policy formulated during the mid-1950s by the Eisenhower Administration to protect independent Taiwan’s sovereignty against Red Chinese encroachment.

Taiwan had continued to function under the aegis of the American-allied Republic of China after the Chinese Communist Party triumphed in 1949, putting an end to the Chinese Civil War. Communist China’s price for friendship was the condition that Canada endorse its intention to imminently take Taiwan back — by force, if necessary. On October 10th, 1970, Ottawa issued a statement reaffirming the PRC’s Taiwan position, and diplomacy with Beijing was established that very day.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Mao, 1972. MMFA purchase, William Gillman Cheney Bequest. ©️ The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / ARS/ CARCC 2023. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Trudeau Sr.’s cavalier approach to countries the West viewed as potentially perilous rankled conservatives who questioned the Canadian leader’s allegiances. The Prime Minister was a noted friend of the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, too, and would entertain the rock-and-roll stars/anti-war activists John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Parliament Hill that December.

During the 1960s, Trudeau’s home province was undergoing its most total shift in generations. Jean Lesage’s Liberal Party upset the 1960 provincial election and initiated the overarching societal changes associated with the Quiet Revolution, in which Quebec moved further away from the Roman Catholic Church’s influence and towards a more secular, Americanized model.

Just as Castro was kicking out the Yanks, Quebec was flirting simultaneously with a form of economic socialism borrowed from the Pinkos, and an increasingly consumerist capitalism taken from America’s playbook. In Havana, Coca-Cola was on its way out. In Quebec, Coke was it.

Consumer products’ arbitrary placement in media — a barrage of ads sitting right next to the day’s news on TV and in print — reflected Pop culture’s ambivalence as both low culture and high art. In a proto-culture-jamming gesture, American contemporary artists like Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann in the 1960s and ‘70s incorporated these apparently absurd industrial-age incongruities directly into their works. Reproducing images that were themselves mass-produced seemed to serve as an ironic and radically post-modern artistic critique of mass-reproduction. Capitalist touchstones like Coca-Cola suddenly became iconic and iconoclastic in equal measure.

Michel Leclair (born in 1948), Fries with Gravy, and a Coke! 1974. MMFA purchase, Saidye and Samuel Bronfman Collection of Canadian Art. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Quebec artist Edmund Alleyn rose to prominence in the mid-1950s, receiving a grant from The Royal Society and Quebec’s prestigious Grand Prix aux Concours artistiques for his early Abstract Expressionist paintings. Alleyn relocated to France in 1955, representing Canada’s art scene from abroad, and came home to Quebec in 1970 to experience the cacophonous transformations abruptly wrought by the so-called Quiet Revolution. Those experiences shocked Alleyn into producing some of his most profound and popular works.

Immediately, Alleyn altered his style and media and created a striking cycle of photorealistic installations on Plexiglass that depict a culture foreign to its own land, bewildered tourists, as if returning home after a war. These monumental works in retrospect revealed the artist himself as a tourist, remastering his command of genre and artistic form while acquainting himself with a new Quebecois culture that had rapidly turned more American. If there was one thing France in the ‘60s was not, it was American.

Pop Art produced by the kaleidoscopic Quebec lens refracts American capitalist realism through the residual shards of traditional French-Canadian culture. Artists like Alleyn — and Pierre Ayot, whose prints and sculptures of the 1970s indicated capitalism’s sly colonization of the quotidian — were also showing their audiences the broken promise of consumerism as an organizing social force. Objects, regardless of their symbolic value, are void of any spiritual essence and ultimately leave their owners bereft of meaning. These artists adeptly anticipated today’s ennui.

Edmund Alleyn (1931-2004), Étude photographique pour Iceberg Blues, MMFA Collection, gift of Jennifer Alleyn, inv. 2016.399.

Quebec in the 21st century continues to cling to some of the cruellest aspects of our patriarchal French Catholic history while having embraced enthusiastically and unconditionally a specifically American brand of hyper-capitalism. Quebec, for instance, seeks culturally to shore up the mother tongue in part by remaking bad American reality TV in French. We enjoy the dual pleasure of conformist homogeneity and the smug superiority of singularity — a distinctly mimetic culture.

Pop Art works on the subconscious, whereas memes work on affect. So the Quebec of the new millennium offers a whole nother order of Pop sardonicism, more Jung than Freud.

It’s cliché to say that history repeats itself. Nevertheless, Taiwan is once again among the sovereign nations under threat of armed invasion by old foes; we have another Trudeau in Ottawa who appears to conservatives to be soft on Chinese capital; we have advanced secularism, and linguistic nationalism; and we have an art world awash in copies of copies of copies of artworks that were never intended to convey originality.

Pierre Ayot (1943-1995), Madame Blancheville Rides Again, 1974. MMFA Collection, gift of Madeline Forcier. ©️ Estate of Pierre Ayot / CARCC 2023. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts possesses a curatorial team capable of conjuring the complexity and also the unique curiosity of a Pop Art chez nous, recreating in fine detail the historical period in which Quebec was not-so-quietly redefining itself in wonderful and horrible ways, a revolution reverberating for decades.

The Pop of Life! reactivates a collection of artworks by unexpectedly juxtaposing them against each other, as well as opposite this moment in time. Warhol’s Mao portrait means so much more today than it did in 1972.

Another sort of patina has accumulated upon these alternately groovy, vulgar, plastic, and timeless masterpieces of Pop Art: a patina of meaning, laid on thick like layers of forever chemicals. We may see the works for what they are, or we might step further back and see ourselves seeing them.

Like Edmund Alleyn, we can journey to another place in time with a touristic fascination of discovery, tasting something familiar yet strange, Coca-Cola from another country, or Moscow’s McDonalds, a franchise still pulsing with semiotic vitality.◼︎

The Pop of Life!: Pop Art in the Collection of the MMFA continues through 24 March 2024 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Cover image: Edmund Alleyn (1931-2004), Iceberg Blues, 1973-1975, MMFA Collection, photographed for NicheMTL.

Standard
Play Recent

The Schwartz

Charles Richard-Hamelin with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, Prokofiev’s Concerto no. 2, Maison Symphonique, 13 May 2023

Ambivalence characterizes everyone who’s ever managed to leave a cult. Nobody just quits. Everyone hems and haws and deliberates. There are reasons to join, after all. The sense of belonging. The us-versus-them mentality. The Kool-Aid.

But really, when it comes right down to it, cults are a bit silly. They often have arbitrary and opaque rules, their members always reveal themselves to be individually weak, and their leaders never possess the qualities their followers attribute to them. Jesus Christ probably couldn’t really turn water into wine. Not after 3am anyway. And if Charles Manson’s singing voice was any indication, his leadership and management skills likely left a lot to be desired.

There is strength in numbers — I supposed that’s why gangs and armies are such a thing, never mind cults. And yet one person can change the world. Look at Einstein, or Putin, or Jim Balsillie. Cults naturally form around great people. Great people don’t go out there trying to start cults.

If you’re going to give your life over to crazy ideas, why would you decide to adopt someone else’s crazy ideas? It just seems nuts to join any fringe movement when you can be your very own fringe movement. That is why I don’t want to be a cult member. What happens if their crazy ideas are wrong? Or worse, what happens if they’re right? No cultist really wants to lead; it’s much easier putting the entire cult in charge.

One problem with leaving a cult is that former members often struggle to find their own identity again, to remember who they are independent of the cult. It is important to nurture and encourage these people, to remind them that they are special and unique individuals capable of thriving and flourishing on their own. Being gentle helps.

The Orchestra Symphonique de Montreal’s Season Finale concerts run 31 May, 2 June, and 3 June at Maison Symphonique.

Wolves: The Art of Dempsey Bob, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 16 May 2023

“Art is what makes us human. Art is what makes us civilized. Art is the glue that holds us together. Art is a record of our cultures. Art gives us identity, gives us meaning.”

Listening to Dempsey Bob speak these simple, true words restored, if only for a moment, my faith in people and art. I suppose that faith has faltered of late. Because we still live in a world where cultural genocide is tolerated, even encouraged. Ukrainians are Indigenous people of Ukraine. In that genocide, I fear the worst is still to come. My hope, though, is that after the worst, it won’t take another century to make minefields and mass graves permanent history.

Wolves: The Art of Dempsey Bob runs through 10 September 2023 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Rhinoceros in Love, Dir. Huirui Zhang, Mainline Theatre, 16 May 2023

Love is impossible to define. But everyone knows exactly what love is. And things done for love are defined comparatively easily. Their traces, their consequences, are real.

I don’t think I’ve ever really been in love. Certainly not enough to kidnap a person — that seems unlovable. You can’t make someone love you. Nor can you make yourself love someone else.

My views on love are inspired by late-1990s Robert De Niro movies: never get too attached to anything you cannot walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner. Maybe it’s climate change, but every corner seems like a hot corner these days.

The Montreal Fringe Festival runs 29 May to 18 June 2023.

Schwartz’s Deli, immediately afterwards

I had never been to Schwartz’s Deli. In 20 years of living in this city, I had never actually set foot inside nor even slowed down when walking past the place. Ever since I’ve been here, Schwartz’s is where tourists with too much money and too much time line up for a smoked meat sandwich, which is literally meat in bread. It’s not complicated. Smoked meat is available all over Montreal, and there are a number of places that do it very well indeed. I didn’t go to The Main, either (I was a Ben’s man) but I never felt required to give Schwartz’s my money, or feed the mythology.

But as I walked past immediately following “Rhinoceros in Love” and noted with curiosity that there was no lineup, and hardly anyone inside, I finally decided to see what all the fuss was about. A few tables were occupied with a few regulars; I surmised this because they bantered familiarly with the nighttime staff. Two guys behind the counter were ready to take my order. I didn’t want to sit. I wanted a smoked meat kit to construct at home. So I ordered 300 grams of meat with a bit of fat and a loaf of rye bread, to go.

A sturdy woman behind the register rang me through cheerfully. I mentioned that I had never previously eaten there and she looked at me and said, unselfconsciously, “you’ll be back.” When I put together my home version of this classic Montreal sandwich, a mountain of meat wedged between two slices of soft bread slathered in yellow mustard, I knew what she’d meant. The stuff’s addictive. Use the Schwartz responsibly.

Folk Noir, Collectif9, Bain Mathieu, 20 May 2023

Nicole Lizée’s compositions are so completely of their time. Like the music of Philip Glass, which celebrated our previous generation’s fascination with machinic perfection, Lizée’s pieces — when performed properly, mind you — stutter like CDs skipping, stretch out, contract, trip, glide, jump forward, stop, start again, and loop back like a facsimile curling into itself. In the best possible way. They mimic the cacophony of an era awash in digital noise, competing platforms, broken links, incomplete transmissions, routed through various channels, those channels being human beings making sound with archaic musical instruments. In music as in life, harmonies are obscure, elusive, and ephemeral.

It’s impossible to say what this or that Romantic or Baroque-era composer would be writing today, and it is equally impossible to imagine Lizée in another musical moment than this one. By capturing the present, this music becomes timeless.◼︎

Cover image: Dempsey Bob, Transformation, 2011, Yellow Cedar, 51.5 x 38.5 x 12.9 cm, Collection of Cheryl Gottselig QC and Yves Trépanier, Calgary.

Standard