\u201cWho are museums really for?\u201d is a question that has been on many lips of late, and the MAC Montr\u00e9al is one among many museums to stage a recent survey exhibition of artists from their local area, marking a heightened attention to immediate communities rather than a global or touris\u00adtic public. However, due to both design and circumstance, La machine\u2026 was hardly a definitive or authoritative portrait of art practice in Montr\u00e9al.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Firstly, this was because curators Mark Lanct\u00f4t and Fran\u00e7ois LeTourneux avoided a strong thematic or interpretive lens in favour of a broad and inclusive approach and an extensive selection of supplementary projects\u200a\u2014\u200ain addition to the exhibited artists, the show also included an online film program curated by Ronald Rose-Antoinette in collaboration with the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA), a podcast series produced by guest curator Daisy Desrosiers, and a hefty publication with inserts of writing by a varied slate of local authors including Nicole Brossard, Rawi Hage, Madeleine Thien, Maude Veilleux, and Jacob Wren, plus scholars such as Joana Joachim, Krista Lynes, and Michael Nardone. This catalogue also came with a reader of texts on anthropology and colonialism edited by Raymond Boisjoly. Such a wealth of ancillary material bolstered the sense of the exhibition as a biennial-type event, but also came in handy when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the show\u2019s viewing, keeping audiences at home, only able to access the MAC Montr\u00e9al via print media and web-based offerings. (La machine\u2026<\/em> was installed a full two months before visitors were actually allowed to see it.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once it finally opened, the exhibition offered an abundance of rewarding works, but without imposing artificial cohesion on a selection of artists with often dramatically varied concerns and sensibilities. In a personal conversation, Mark Lanct\u00f4t told me they wanted a rubric that would allow connections between a diverse roster of artists with\u00adout making shared identities the focus. The device they settled on to orient their inquiry, curiously enough, was an artifact from the eighteenth century: the serinette, a type of small, crank-operated barrel organ that was first popularized among the European aristocracy as a way to teach songs to their caged birds. A historical print in the museum\u2019s collection depicts this instrument in the hands of an impoverished street performer, a sign of its transit from high to low society. What interested the curators about the serinette was its association with the popularity, in its time, of automatons, and its relationship to debates on the nature of humans, animals, and machines at a moment when industrial capitalist modernity (fuelled by violent globalization through colonization) was just beginning to take shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From this antique novelty, the curators extrapolated a theme that brings together a constellation of ideas around bodies, technology, materiality, and language; about transmission and translation, craft and mechanization\u200a\u2014\u200ahow language, embodied in objects, can define borders and enforce power (or undermine it); and how technology mediates and dematerializes bodies. Though tantalizing in its potential, this abstract, even abstruse thematic was articulated somewhat differently every time it was encountered. Broad and slippery, it imparted a diffuse shape to the exhibition, but its ambiguity often resulted in awkward juxtapositions between works whose languages remained untranslatable to each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The closest thing to a perceptible \u201cMontr\u00e9al scene\u201d in the exhibition was the handful of artists whose work has circulated in the network of DIY project spaces in Montr\u00e9al, across Canada, and abroad. For example, artists Simon Belleau, Kristan Horton, Marlon Kroll, Nicholas Lachance, J\u00e9r\u00f4me Nadeau, and Thea Yabut all participated in the Episode Laurier event, a 2018 micro-fair involving small galleries, project spaces, and independent curators. Those artists all work, to a greater or lesser extent, in a vernacular of material\u00adist formalism that chimes with the framework of this exhibition and is echoed in the work of other included artists like Trevor Baird and Anne Low.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first large exhibition space, where all of the works were connected by the medium of textiles, illustrates some of the challenges of the exhibition. Guillaume Adjutor Provost\u2019s video installation queering historical zoot suit culture in Montr\u00e9al, Rosika Desnoyers conceptual research into needle\u00adpoint, Carla Hemlock\u2019s defiantly \u201ccrafty\u201d integration of Indigenous tattoo motifs into her monumental protest quilt, Anne Low\u2019s mattress-like bundles, and Nicholas Lachance\u2019s sombre series of prints of medieval plague imagery were all compelling in their own way, but they seemed to be speak\u00ading past each other rather than entering into a dialogue. The same difficulty applied in the following gallery, where Isuma\u2019s feature-length film (about translation and power in an encounter between a government official and an Inuit elder), J\u00e9r\u00f4me Nadeau\u2019s hybrid photo-painting abstractions, Karen Kraven\u2019s elegantly tough fabric sculptures (referencing her family history in the garment industry), and Vikky Alexander\u2019s conceptual photo-environments all seemed to lose rather than gain impact by their association.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The curators\u2019 impulse to avoid a definitive regional survey is no doubt a productive one; aside from being inevitably exclusionary, such an attempt could only ring false. That said, if their task was still to make current practices more visible, legible, and comprehensible, it is hard to view La machine\u2026 as an unqualified success. Part of this response may stem from a simple lack of appetite, in the present climate, for biennial-style exhibitions of any kind, coupled with a pervasive uncertainty\u200a\u2014\u200aafter the political and epidemiological upheavals of the last several years\u200a\u2014\u200aabout what matters in art now, and indeed how much art matters at all. If this exhibition\u2019s picture of the present was indistinct, it may be because the curators chose an oblique approach when the pressing questions of the day demand to be tackled head-on.![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/103-CR3-IMG2-IM_Twerdy_MAC-Nadeau_CMYK.jpg\")
The Crawler,<\/em> 2019 (left) and Less Lost<\/em>, 2019 (right).
Photo : Guy L\u2019Heureux, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/103-CR3-IMG3-IM_Twerdy_MAC-Alexander_CMYK.jpg\")
Green Leaf Ceiling<\/em>, 2020.
Photo : Guy L\u2019Heureux, courtesy of the artist & Tr\u00e9panierBaer Gallery, Calgary<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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