Québec Gold

Much of the discussion around art, if one sets aside work whose ­principal concerns are formalist in nature, has tended to circulate around ­concerns that could be characterized as “context.” Such notions have been ­widespread since the triumph of the Duchampian (and let’s be frank, it’s been a while) and underpin many of the derivative discursive products of contemporary art: “the dematerialization of the art object,” “site-specificity” and various forms of “genealogy,” to cite just a few of the commonplaces that pop up in art writing time and again. All of these are, to one extent or another, ways of talking about the position of an object in time, or space, or the history of ideas. Given this ubiquity, one feels compelled to underline how much these ideas occupy a peculiarly ­narrow stretch of intellectual ground. More rare are analyses of ­political and social context, or economic position, outside the inevitable, and ­inward-looking, condemnations (or celebrations, in some quarters) of the “art market.” And, of course, all of this chatter frequently shunts aside a direct consideration of the object itself, the occasion of the writing, this thing before us.

That said, it is such an enlarged notion of “context” that offers us a particularly interesting entry to the recent exhibition Québec Gold, because one of the things that exhibition sets out to do, among, admittedly, many others, is provide some sense of the situation of contemporary art in Quebec right now. The show was a group exhibition held in connection with the 400th anniversary of Quebec City and presented at two venues in Reims, France: the Palais de Tau and the Ancien Collège des Jésuites. Curators André-Louis Paré, Jean-Michel Ross and Élisabeth Pawlowski brought together the work of seventeen artists (or artists’ collectives)¹ 1 - The invited artists were: Jean-Pierre Aubé, Mathieu Beauséjour, BGL, Sylvain Bouthillette, Cooke-Sasseville, Michel de Broin, Doyon-Rivest, Jérôme Fortin, Dominique Gaucher, Pascal Grandmaison, Isabelle Hayeur, Guillaume Lachapelle, Emanuelle Léonard, Yann Pocreau, Yannick Pouliot, Michael A. Robinson and Ève K. Tremblay. for the exhibition.