The Ecology of an Art Scene—the Canadian Art Foundation’s two-part symposium bringing together art experts from Paris and Toronto—kicked off last Friday evening at Harbourfront Centre. Titled “Community: Un Préambule,” the first part of the event was moderated by Misha Glouberman and held speed-dating style: each participant or collective was offered the floor for just two minutes. Saturday’s second part, “Ecology: The Conversations,” was held in Toronto City Council Chambers with more extended time for presentations and discussion. The sheer number of participants (the event included 21 speakers, plus moderators and audience members) and intersecting practices made for a revealing dialogue. Here are a few of the major takeaways.
1) Artist-run initiatives are key to healthy art scenes.
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery curator Barbara Fischer’s quick but extensive 40-year recap of the Toronto art scene argued that the city is remarkable for its artist-run initiatives. Mélanie Bouteloup noted a parallel in Paris, explaining that the independent exhibition space she directs, Bétonsalon, was started partly due to a lack of artist-run spaces in Paris. We heard from various artist-run initiatives throughout the symposium, making it clear that artist-run culture is a vital undercurrent of a healthy scene. The AGO’s Andrew Hunter (who until recently was an independent curator and artist) spoke about representing a major institution while negotiating his own set of interests, problems and perspectives. Employing the analogy of a murmur of starlings, Hunter hinted that communities of many kinds are often collectively led.
2) Sometimes crisis can be an opportunity to grow.
Isabelle Alfonsi of Galerie Marcelle Alix noted she opened her commercial gallery in 2009, after several others had closed in Paris saying she felt like it was a time when anything could happen. Alfonsi tied the growth of the French art scene beyond its national borders to a decrease in secure economic prospects for artists. Prior to 1990, she argued, French artists had no reason to extend themselves beyond the country because funding and exhibition space was readily available. Later generations, however, have found they need to look further afield. Later in the day, Maiko Tanaka and Chris Lee of Gendai Gallery returned to the notion of crisis. By challenging the positivist spin on the crisis state as one of opportunity, they drew attention to the pressing inequalities within the arts. Vincent Gonzalvez, in his talk on the Institut français, also asked how we might mobilize art culture across international boundaries, while responding to financial austerity. He concluded that more emphasis on artistic research could help to build mutually beneficial partnerships, share resources and welcome visitors.
3) Both the centre and the so-called periphery are important spaces.
The theme of working at the periphery ran throughout the two days of discussions. Isabelle Alfonsi described the productivity of opening an art gallery in Belleville, at the eastern edge of Paris, while Mathilde Villeneuve of the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (just beyond the city proper) said the success her work has had in public engagement is partly thanks to the freedom that comes with that just-slightly-outside space. Janine Marschessault spoke briefly about her recent project Land|Slide, which took place in the Markham Historical Museum. She emphasized the importance of artistic practice in engaging debates about urban and suburban growth and renewal, and in creating community dialogue between the two. Artist Abbas Akhavan also noticed how damaging it can be to a community to persistently consider themselves regional or peripheral, noting that as art centres move and re-establish themselves the binary between inside and out becomes increasingly ambiguous.
4) Romantic ideas about residencies aren’t always accurate.
Abbas Akhavan explained that the appeal of international residencies sometimes reflects economic need rather than artistic inspiration. An artist can get a paid apartment in Toulouse for five weeks plus an exhibition space when it may be challenging for them to afford rent in their home city. (Also, he noted, no one talks about the times you show up and the apartment where you are supposed to stay in has bedbugs.) He characterized the connections and communities made during residences as manifold, but not often deep. Nonetheless, Akhavan finds international residences are still the best place for him to make his ephemeral works on the theme of guest and host. Diane Borsato described the luxury of staying home when she spoke of a surprise invitation to be artist-in-residence at the AGO. The position granted her latitude in her approach as well as a healthy stipend. She presented this example of Toronto treating its local artists as well as it treats international ones, and encouraged this behaviour on a larger scale.
5) The gallery can be a social space, but community or social engagement doesn’t necessarily come out of an intention to build an audience.
“We started this gallery because there was no Feminist Art Gallery, and we wanted there to be one,” stated Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell. Since founding the gallery, which reflects bell hooks’ concept of radical openness, an active queer and feminist community has become associated with the gallery. Rather than create a celebratory party space, desirable to many major institutions, they strove to provide a space for art practice that had been previously neglected. Conversely, for Francois Aubart, the publication ∆⅄⚙ began within a social space—drinking, sharing lists of artists, films, books and ideas with his co-editor friends—and became a sustained engagement with several topics which roles out over several journal issues. Rather than organizing around thematic topics and creating the impression a discussion is over after a single journal’s issue, Aubart sees his work as a continuing conversation, both in social and public spaces.
6) Community centres are sometimes a good place for art, and sometimes not.
Gaëtane Verna noted that the Power Plant is developing a program where artists will engage youth at Toronto community centres for 15-week periods. This will take the program of the gallery—and awareness of its existence—out to communities that may not usually interact with it. David Liss recounted how one project at MOCCA was critiqued for making the gallery “like a community centre.” He wondered out loud what the problem was, explaining most institutions should strive to be that. However, some initiatives are not good fits within community centre spaces. Maiko Tanaka noted that Gendai Gallery decided to move out of a free space at the Japanese Cultural Centre in part because the gallery was interested in exhibiting not only traditional Japanese artistic practices but a range of artists and approaches (some of them oppositional, critical and otherwise challenging).
7) Keep the conversation going, even when there are disagreements.
Numerous panellists, including Corrin Gerber, Mélanie Bouteloup and Janine Marchessault, called for an embrace of difference, conflict, competing opinions and agendas when thinking about the role of communities. Gaëtane Verna of the Power Plant reflected on her responsibilities to artists, art audiences and another public that rarely, if ever, congregates in the gallery. Su-Ying Lee elaborated on this, noting that the institutional model of “outreach” is specifically designed to push beyond the galleries typical reach and connect with new audiences. David Liss invited us to consider how we belong to various communities through our clubs, schools, workplaces and also our neighbourhoods, cities and countries, our politics, races and genders, and sexual orientations.
8) Big public institutions can offer important support, but it can make sense to go your own way, too.
Jessica Bradley described the ways her previous practice as a curator at major public galleries enabled her to become a rigorous and well-connected private gallerist. Mélanie Bouteloup emphasized the benefits of sharing physical space and research with a university, without being reliant on the university’s institutional support or mandate. And Vincent Honoré, working at the David Roberts Art Foundation, a private art venture, described the freedom his position offered, something that neither public curating nor independent work could provide him.
9) A stealth storefront approach can provide vitality for projects stifled in the white cube.
Suzanne Carte and Su-Ying Lee of Under New Management noted in their talk, their video store project, in which empty storefronts became home to a store of art films rented on a barter basis, lost much of its vitality and visitor engagement when it was exhibited in art galleries. Institutional spaces limited both visitor engagement and contextual cues about the project, and it shifted the expectations participants brought to it. For both Carte and Lee, the work came out of their experience with outreach and programming, and an honest acknowledgement that communities can be fractured while being simultaneously curious, hesitant and enthusiastic.
10) Conversations about art and community can be productively frustrating.
With much talking at cross-purposes, half the participants grappling with the language barrier, and the strange institutional aura of the city council chambers, artists projects which disrupted the flow of the symposium structure were a welcome break. Highlights from the Saturday session included a music-video manifesto by the FAG, Guillaume Leblon’s slideshow of images from his hard drive, and French artists Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet’s performative description of their whimsical research practice. At the end of the two-day symposium, in all its experimental fraughtness, we were left to wonder about how the success of all the initiatives we encountered could be measured. This thread was taken up late in the Saturday panels by Christof Migone who noted that assessing the impact of the Blackwood Gallery‘s Door to Door project on the Mississauga public was almost impossible, since by its very definition, the project engaged with people outside the gallery. Apparently “immeasurable” was not a satisfactory tally for granting purposes. Closing the discussion of the last panel, Maiko Tanaka questioned whether or not the “public” an institution dreams of actually exists, and hoped that finding the places where artists and arts workers already intersect with communities could be a promising alternative.
With files from Leah Sandals and Christine Shaw. Videos of the Ecology of an Art Scene panels will be posted on our website soon. For more information about the symposium, please visit canadianart.ca/paristoronto.
