Is Toronto Burning? Is Toronto Burning? Is the Story of the Rise of the Downtown Toronto Art Scene in the Late 1970S
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Is Toronto Burning? Is Toronto Is Toronto Burning? is the story of the rise of the downtown Toronto art scene in the late 1970s. If the mid-1970s was a formless period, and if there was no dominant art movement, out of what disintegrated elements did new formations arise? Liberated from the influence of New York and embedding themselves in the decaying and unregulated edges of downtowns, artists created new scenes for themselves. Such was the case in Toronto, one of the last—and lost—avant-gardes of the 1970s. In the midst of the economic and social crises of the 1970s, Toronto was pretty vacant—but out of these conditions its artists crafted something unique, sometimes taking the fiction of a scene for the subject of their art. It was not all posturing. Performative frivolity and political earnestness were at odds with each other, but in the end their mutual conviviality and contestation fashioned an original art scene. This was a moment when an underground art scene could emerge as its own subcultural form, with its own rites of belonging and forms of transgression. It was a moment of cross-cultural contamination as the alternative music scene found its locale in the art world. Mirroring the widespread destruction of buildings around them, punk’s demolition was instrumental in artists remaking themselves, transitioning from hippie sentimentality to new wave irony. Then the police came. As an art critic in Toronto from 1977 to 1984, Philip Monk was ideally placed to observe the origins of its downtown art scene. Subsequently, he was a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario Philip Monk and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, and currently is Director of the Art Gallery of York University. He has written monographs on Is Toronto Burning? Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, and Fiona Tan, among others, including Glamour is Theft: A User’s Guide to General Idea. Three Years in the Making (and Unmaking) £29.95 | $39.95 of the Toronto Art Scene Philip Monk Is Toronto Burning? Three Years in the Making (and Unmaking) of the Toronto Art Scene Philip Monk Contents 1977 7 Was Toronto Burning? 11 Posturing 25 A Penchant for Posing 29 A Fashion for Politics 77 Antipathies and Sympathies 137 Antagonistic Couples 139 Allegories of an Art Scene 157 Desiring Machines 183 House Punk 185 Tele-Transgression 215 Index 248 Image Credits 254 Acknowledgements 255 1977 Toronto in the late 1970s was one of the last avant-gardes. In the internet era and age of social media, the conditions for the underground seem no longer possible. Instant availability and constant communication of cultural products, uploaded and downloaded by the democratic mob, are not receptive to singular events that need be sustained in settings of quasi- secrecy in small rooms on side streets. Truly, it is no analogous coincidence how well Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, published in 1980, marks the division between the “that has been” of the analogue print and our digital age. The turn of the decade, 1980, that’s really the end of my story. From the perspective of here and now, this “that has been” is no lament for a lost art scene that formed in a few short years in Toronto in the 1970s, then dissolved. But in a sense, you had to be there to recognise how analogue our experience of it was. You had to walk the mean streets of Toronto’s abandoned warehouse district on nights of its heat-blasted summers and dread winters on your way to a performance or video screening to feel how real it was, how material the feel of the buildings and streets. Looking back on archival photographs of downtown Toronto streetscapes then (in a bleak economic period, moreover), you realise how dour and grey it was. And so too was the art, shades of grey and black—all those video and photographs that render this scene, not to be contradictory, vivid for us today, definitely not dour. They were, place and product, a dialogue. The art scene was a precinct, a place you had to enter, but not be policed. But an underground would not be a scene unless it disseminated itself through these very images of itself. Disseminated itself and was received from afar. And drew people to it. This is also the story of the Toronto art community. In a sense, what follows is a story, a story with a cast of characters. These characters are pictured in video, photography, and print—not necessarily as portraits but rather as performers. The cast repeats, almost as if in a soap opera, with name and identity changes. Artists reappear performing in FILE, autumn 1977, back cover 8 Is Toronto Burning? their own work and acting in others. This is a thing that makes Toronto distinctive, not just this co-operative production or staging (that also existed behind the scenes in artists shooting friends’ works, for instance), but also the fictional image artists sustained of an art scene before it was recognised as one—and that helped usher it in. To be more exact, the reason it came into being, performatively. In this ‘fiction’ we discover a collective portrait of an art scene and also an image of its making. Some would contend that it is not the performances of this fiction but the places of primary production that Toronto artists collectively constructed—the so-called artist-run system—that is the real story. Construction not construal. Certainly, artists would say this. “We, the producers, are the ones to write this history, not those, secondary to the scene, who call themselves writers.” This ethos of primary production, unfortunately, has not issued in a history—and this is a problem that writers have to take up. As important as the artist-run system was, my aim is not to document it. If at times I err on the side of ironic ambiguity over political earnestness, by which you could sometimes identify these opposing sides—fictional performance and primary production, respectively—I would only be intervening historically in the conflicted real-time ‘soap opera’ of that past scene. For given Toronto’s resistance to history, to the writing of its history, it is necessary to first mythologise a scene before you can write a history of it. We need to make a moment iconic as much as its individuals. So Is Toronto Burning? deals with this collective moment when the Toronto art scene imagined and created itself. There would be no invention without contention. Here the title resonates. For in these three short years—1977, 1978, 1979—Toronto would make, then unmake, and remake itself again. A penchant for posing was countered by a fashion for politics, the posturing of which was at times volatile and factional. Performativity and politics, in their mutual conviviality and contestation, together the two would fashion an art scene. Strike 2, May 1978, back cover 10 Is Toronto Burning? Was Toronto Burning? Late in 1977, an important part of Toronto real estate burned down. During rehearsal for General Idea’s periodic Pageant, The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion housing it caught fire. It turns out, strangely, that the match was lit by General Idea, the artists themselves, who then strategically fanned the flames. In Toronto, 1977 was the summer of punk and perhaps General Idea caught its incendiary impulse from that provocative populist conflagration. General Idea always had its collective finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, here perhaps on its fuse. For Toronto was to burn. Not literally—just as General Idea did not literally destroy their Pavillion, which, of course, was only a fictional construction. The Pavillion’s destruction was a response, though. Its destruction was symptomatic of profound changes in the Toronto art scene when “the sentimentalism of late 60s early 70s essentially surrealistic aesthetic [had] been replaced by a certain pragmatic anarchy”.1 Whether or not aesthetics, pragmatically, had been replaced by anarchy, General Idea was on the mark: sentimentalism definitely had been supplanted by politics. Sentimentalism, you could say, infected the early years of the artist- run system Canada became famous for, instituted as it was in the early 1970s, at least in Toronto, by a bunch of hippies and draft dodgers. They took advantage of federal youth employment programmes (established to defuse youth unrest in the wake of high unemployment and the threat of armed insurrection by the flq, the Front libération du Québec) to set up an ideal framework of artist-initiated and artist-controlled activity. A few years later, with the encouragement and funding of the Canada Council for the Arts, it was consolidated into a national system—the Association of National Non-Profit Artists’ Centres (annpac)—but which some General Idea, “Destruction”: artists still preferred to call, using Robert Filliou’s elevating and inclusive The Ruins of the 1984 nomenclature, the eternal network. Miss General Idea Pavillion, 1977 12 Is Toronto Burning? Was Toronto Burning? 13 But already the recently instituted artist-run system was in turmoil, at were vehicles for the dissemination of its ideology. Both the institution least in Toronto.2 A Space, the queen bee of the artist-run system, billing and its contents were political and tightly controlled by a directorship itself the first and foremost of the national organisation, had its funding that was self-appointed not elected. suspended by the Canada Council in 1978. But before even the Council- Politics were doubly articulated in Toronto art in the late 1970s. funded advisory committee report for restructuring had been accepted at Here then were the political parameters of the Toronto downtown art the annual meeting, a ‘coup’ occurred that radically changed the gallery’s scene: on the one hand, there was the art politics of palace coups; on direction and, in reaction, set off a slew of artist-initiated initiatives the other hand, there was the politics of art.