STATUS,

POWER AND as the marketplace, collectors, and museums. With Everything must go/Liquidation totale, Provost fits into this long-standing tradition by exploring the phenomenon of the commodification of art and artist through product-making. Further, she self- reflectively situates her experience as an artist within the critique by way of a liqui- dated assemblage of her own artwork. Provost’s wryly crafted installation achieves its particular brand of institutional critique by drawing from “Canadian-content” art history, marrying this content to commercial and populist design practice, and figuring herself as a practising artist within the hypothetical (yet very real) art world of her own THE ARTIST subversive installation. What is this “art world” and where did it come from? Fraser pinpoints the late 1960s as THE INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE the time when an idea of a social-structure that included the museum, artist, administra- tor, art studio, art magazines, and collectors, or, as she put it, “the entire field of art as a OF MICHÈLE PROVOST social universe” developed.5 Along with this model emerged a recognition of an insider/ outsider status, highlighted by the performative work and conceptual projects by New York City artists such as Daniel Buren, Michael Asher and German artist Hans Haacke. For example, in 1970, Haacke polled visitors to the MOMA as to their political opinion of Catherine Sinclair Norman Rockefeller, who sat on the museum’s Board of Directors, thereby calling into question the activities and direction of the organization.6 In Canada of 1969, conceptual In 2006, Bristol-based street artist Banksy, famous for his anonymity and critical graf- artists Iain and Ingrid Baxter, as N.E. Thing Co. (NETCO), installed a production and fiti art, issued a series of silkscreens entitled “Morons” in which he depicts the scene of sales office for a generic corporation in the lobby of the National Gallery of Canada. an art auction. The animated auctioneer stands next to an ornate frame encompassing Administrative activities of the company linked art to the everyday corporate world, a few censorious words that are especially effective for their simplicity: “I can’t believe such as daily fax transmissions of work to the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. In the you morons actually buy this shit.” Condemning the capitalist impulses of the art world 1980s these practises continued in Canada with the likes of the Toronto-based collec- 1 Murray Whyte, “Toronto’s massive Banksy show misses the point,” Toronto Star (Wed., June 13, 2018). is one of Banksy’s signature moves; his self-imposed low profile defies the publicity tive General Idea and in the United States with such figures as Andrea Fraser herself. Fraser’s work Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989) had her impersonate a gallery Retrieved August 13, 2018 https://www.thestar. sought after by self-fashioned celebrity artists, just as his public street art — free and com/entertainment/visualarts/review/2018/06/ accessible to all passers-by — evades commodification and institutionalized practises. docent using the worst art-speak she could muster, and culminated in her eloquent 13/taking-the-art-of-banksy-all-the-way-to-the- Or at least, that’s the idea. Despite his intentions, Banksy’s success has led to some praise of a functional water fountain. While these works addressed mechanisms such bank.html as the boutique, office, board structure or the art-speak of docents, what of the artists? ironic twists, not least of which is the star status he bears (borne in part by the intrigue 2 Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions of his anonymity) and evidenced by the circulation of an unauthorized retrospective to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum 44 (Sept. exhibition of his art,1 as well as a seemingly unstoppable market-value for his work. Artists have just as much effect on this art world as they are affected by it, according 2005), 278 – 286. Retrieved online August 13, 2018. to some. In 1974, Haacke characterized the role of artists as active participants within https://www.artforum.com/print/200507/from- this system when he wrote: the-critique-of-institutions-to-an-institution-of- Contrary to what the art world might like to think of itself (if it had a collective brain), critique-9407 it is not void of the “product making” that is the basis of our capitalist society. That ARTISTS, AS MUCH AS THEIR SUPPORTERS AND THEIR ENEMIES, NO MATTER 3 Ibid product can be the art itself or a composite of art and artist. As is the case with OF WHAT IDEOLOGICAL COLORATION, ARE UNWITTING PARTNERS... THEY Banksy, the personality of the artist can add market value to the art object. What 4 PARTICIPATE JOINTLY IN THE MAINTENANCE AND/OR DEVELOPMENT OF Randy Kennedy, “Michael Asher, Conceptual Artist, is uniquely two-faced about the art world’s engagement in this capitalist system, Dies at 69,” The New York Times (Oct. 17, 2012). however, is that it purports to offer us meaning and criticality while simultaneous- THE IDEOLOGICAL MAKE-UP OF THEIR SOCIETY. THEY WORK WITHIN THAT Retrieved online August 13, 2018. https://www.ny FRAME, SET THE FRAME AND ARE BEING FRAMED.9 times.com/2012/10/18arts/design/michael-asher- ly asking us to buy into these offerings, whether they are an artist, artwork, or gift artist-dies-at-69.html shop umbrella bearing a reproduction. Historically, and presently, the art world has had a contentious relationship to commercialism, oscillating between the desire to Fraser agrees, explaining that artists have their own interest in maintaining the existing 5 Fraser remain both distant from commerce yet innately tied to it. In a 2005 Art Forum essay, frame of the art world: 6 Helen Armitage, “Andrea Fraser: Too Shocking for performance artist and critical writer Andrea Fraser characterized the contempo- EVERY TIME WE SPEAK OF THE “INSTITUTION” AS OTHER THAN “US,” a US Retrospective,” Culture Trip (11 January 2017). rary art world as an era of “mega-museums and the 24-hour global art market” that Retrieved August 13, 2018. https://theculturetrip. celebrates corporate collections, charges high admission fees, and swallows up WE DISAVOW OUR ROLE IN THE CREATION AND PERPETUATION OF ITS com/north-america/usa/california/articles/andrea- CONDITIONS. WE AVOID RESPONSIBILITY FOR, OR ACTION AGAINST, THE fraser-too-shocking-for-a-us-retrospective/ critical practices. She names the players in this game and includes on the roster artists, collectors, patrons, cultural workers, and critics.2 The place of the artist within EVERYDAY COMPLICITIES, COMPROMISES, AND CENSORSHIP — ABOVE 7 Sandra Dyck, “Toys are us,” Michèle Provost: Selling this system, whether deliberate or inadvertent, is explored by Gatineau-based artist ALL, SELF-CENSORSHIP — WHICH ARE DRIVEN BY OUR OWN INTERESTS Out (Ottawa, ON: Carleton University Art Gallery, Michèle Provost in her new installation Everything must go/Liquidation totale. 10 2010), 23. IN THE FIELD AND THE BENEFITS WE DERIVE FROM IT. 8 Armitage Artists have engaged in what has been coined “institutional critique”3 since the Both Haacke and Fraser point to the same conflict: on the one hand, an artist de- 9 late 1960s and the rise of Pop Art. Institutional critique is a type of performance or sires to remain independent of the influences of the perceived social structure and Hans Haacke, “All the Art That’s Fit to Show,” in Museums by Artists, 152, quoted in Fraser. installation art that focuses on “the web of underlying and often hidden conventions commercial entrapments of the art world, and on the other hand, the artist inevitably that surrounded art and how art [is] viewed, valued and used in society,”4 such contributes to it. The fabrication of the art object itself is inevitably effected by factors 10 Fraser 6 7 that the artists must contend with, operating as they do within the art world. It is this Gauloises Bleues unfiltered into the great hotels of New-York.] The deliberately unref- often contradictory place for both artist and artwork that Provost explores through erenced quotes are combined with found images from Provost’s obsessive collection of her practice. illustrated and antique books from which she clips and borrows regularly. The pairings of found word and text are presented in stacks of picture frames as stock images as Provost has critically deconstructed the art world throughout her two-decade-long would be found in Ikea’s marketplace (and their mass-reproduction status compro- career. Her exhibition Selling Out (2008) also addressed the role of personality within mised by the fact that each one is drawn by hand). The pairings are also used in two the art market. Using her signature multi-media, handmade technique as a counterbal- framed mock graphic novel pages, and two extensive biographical volumes, hand- ance to mass-production, this series consisted of a large collection of cult-personality stitched, collaged and digitized for easy reading, to tell his story. collector cards of artists such as Daniel Buren, Cindy Sherman, Rembrandt van Rijn and Pablo Picasso. There were also toy action figures (complete in plastic packaging) of Removed from their contexts, the quotes reveal the biases and labels stemming marketable elements of their art, for example a tiny hand-made version of Jeff Koons’ from the two countries the icon called home. For example, the title of Provost’s French iconic stainless steel sculpture Rabbit (1986). biographical volume bears the title “La vie colorée du trappeur supérieur,” the Canadiana name given to him within the French art world by the famous Surrealist French poet, Such appropriation has held an important place within practices of institutional cri- André Breton. This myth-making of art history books is a key part of Provost’s institu- tique. When Duchamp added a moustache to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and tional critique. The books themselves reveal such tendencies, as found in another stock called it “LHOOQ” (1919), the letters of which sound out a cheeky “she has a hot frame, where she quotes “Art history tends to reduce the work of artists to that mo- arse” as it is pronounced in French, he pointed to Sigmund Freud’s interpretation ment when their path meets a particular chapter in the great narrative of the evolution of Leonardo Da Vinci’s inability to come to terms with his sexuality, making visible of artistic trends.” Her installation questions this reduction in the life of one artist and the male form that Da Vinci saw in all his subjects.11 Duchamp thus repurposed the tests it to see how it would appear if played out to its maximum commercial potential. image, rendering it in a different context, making it a new creation. Art became self- Within her installation, the personality is enshrined in items that reference what the referential. Fast-forward to the 1980s to Sherry Levine’s reproductions of classic pho- icon was most known for, such as a Bugatti car collection and the ubiquitous Gauloises tographic images by artists like Walker Evans and we find another good example of Caporal cigarettes. The Bugatti becomes a collection of model cars, the cigarette com- appropriation and re-contextualization. Levine dismissed conventional notions of au- pany’s logo is hand-stitched onto throw pillows and adorns the faces of clocks. WHAT BECOMES A LEGEND MOST? POSTER, 2018, DIGITAL PRINT ON GLOSSY PAPER AFFICHE thorship in favour of highlighting the status of Evans’ photographs as mass repro- “WHAT BECOMES A LEGEND MOST?”, 2018, duced commodities.12 The icon’s signature style, the wedge, achieved with a palette-knife as the colour was IMPRESSION NUMÉRIQUE SUR PAPIER GLACÉ scraped onto the canvas, is referenced throughout: knitted together for the bedspread; More lately, American artist Richard Prince has controversially made the news. He patch-worked together to make a rug; hand-embroidered onto an entire love seat and appropriates marketing photographs that reinforce cultural clichés such as the lone armchair; molded from Plasticine onto the top of a coffee table; and colourfully washi- cowboy, and re-presents them stripped of their context, thereby exposing the bi- taped onto glowing lampshades. One of the icon’s major works, on permanent view in ases they promote.13 The canonical writer on appropriation art, Benjamin Buchloh, the National Gallery of Canada, is here partly reconstituted as a wall installation made described in 1983, “In contemporary paintings the ultimate subject is always a central- of paint chips promoting decorative colour for your walls, thus ironically pointing out ized author, whereas in contemporary montage procedures the subject is the reader/ the status of painting itself within the art world. This wedge is the symbol by which this viewer.”14 The viewer thus completes the analysis through seeing the original piece icon’s paintings are recognized and his style defined, and in this installation it becomes outside of its initial context. the brand. 11 Jonathan Jones, “L.H.O.O.Q., Marcel Duchamp, In keeping with such appropriative liberties, Everything must go/Liquidation totale Geese, owls, and other birds are another recognizable motif adorning the icon’s work 1919,” The Guardian (Saturday, May 26, 2001). began with Michèle Provost’s creation of an entire mock line of handmade home décor over the years, especially later print work. Provost adopts one such creature, an owl Retrieved online August 13, 2018, https://www. from the 1970s, within posters and pictures destined for the teen’s bedroom. In these theguardian.com/culture/2001/may/26/art. items and goods, aesthetically based on the legacy — both real and imagined — of one iconic Canadian artist of the twentieth century. Canada does not have many “art stars” wall-works, the owl’s face pasted over photographs of famous artists from Alberto 12 Benjamin Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: in the vein of the household names like Pablo Picasso of Spain or Jackson Pollock Giacometti to Paul-Émile Borduas, become masked stand-ins for the icon. This mask- Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary of the United States. Her subject was a key member of the Automatistes, the famed ing is deliberate. Within one of the stock frames, Provost quotes from an art history Art,” Art Forum (September, 1982), 43-56, at 46 revolutionary artist group based in Montreal in the mid-twentieth century. Due to book, “Unfortunately, the artist’s self-imposed rural isolation limited the influence of 13 Andrew R. Chow, “Copyright Case over Richard 15 PAVANE WARDROBE, 2018, FOUND OBJECT, splitting his time between France and Canada, this “icon” became somewhat of a his last works.” Prevalent in the later works, the owl thus references a time when the Prince Instagram Show to Go Forward,” The New CARPET UNDERLAY, GLASS PAINT ARMOIRE personality. Books were written about him in both countries that created myths of his icon was withdrawing from his fame. The anonymous figures give him the chance to York Times (July 20, 2017). Retrieved September PAVANE, 2018, OBJET TROUVÉ, MORCEAUX life, legacy, influences, and interests. hide from the mythological personality that he became in those years of publicity. 24, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/ DE SOUSTAPIS, PEINTURE POUR VERRE arts/design/richard-prince-instagram-copy-right- lawsuit.html Provost’s installation proposed to pay homage to this person whilst playing with the Yet through the owl, Provost also explores the maximum potential that his fame 14 idea that he so easily could have been prey to the current system that will capitalize could have allowed him to attain. To this end, using the owl, she anonymously Buchloh, 46

on any marketable person or item. What if this mythology was not only perpetuated, includes him within a mock-poster of the Blackglama ad campaign, “the world’s fin- 15 The anonymity in which the direct reference to but also turned into commodified goods? As an answer to this, Provost’s tongue-in- est ranch-raised black mink” fur company. Running from 1968 to 1994, the campaign, this figure is couched within this essay is not by cheek “products” (that are not actually for sale) make reference to the current craze for “What becomes a Legend most?” paired the glamour of “universally recognized and choice as with Bansky. Instead, it is due to the home décor; the famous aesthetic and public persona of the icon are incorporated in the admired” stars, such as Cher and Brigitte Bardot, with the simple beauty of their fact that in preparation for Provost’s exhibition 16 at the Ottawa Art Gallery, the cooperation of the design of these furnishings for a bedroom and a living room. coats in black and white photographs accompanied by their famous tag-line. Provost estate of the proposed subject was not granted. adds the icon to their ranks. Yet with the owl in place of his face, it allows the viewer Instead this figure will opaquely be referred to as The story of the icon’s life is told through a collage of clippings pieced together from to question whether the icon himself would want to be there. “the icon”; fitting as this person is an example of someone whose personality became as iconic as French and English art history books and biographies, produced both in Canada and the paintings produced. France, more prevalently illustrating the myth-making of the persona rather than The decision to comply with the invocation of privacy rights left Provost unable to ref- reality. These “found quotes” illustrate the impressions of art historians, such as erence the icon’s name or image in the work and necessitated a complete reworking of 16 “The Back Story: What Becomes a Legend the exhibition with little time to spare. The artist thus added a further layer of critique Most,” Blackglama Now Exclusively by NAFA “Peu de personnes l’ont vu peindre” [not many people ever saw him paint], as officialebsite. w Retrieved online September 15, well as those put forth by the icon himself, “C’est moi qui ai introduit les Gauloises to the objects of her installation by submitting them to a process of “liquidation.” This 2018. http://www.blackglama.com/campaigns- Bleues sans filtre dans les grands hôtels de New York” [I’m the one who introduced turn-of-events had the effect of accentuating the contrast evident between the fame main/ 8 9 ARTIST’S achieved by the icon, and Provost’s lesser- known artistic status; a reality anthropolog- ically interesting to the artist in relation to her meticulous studies of social hierarchy in the art world. And so, moving away from the neatly installed collector cards and action figures of her previous exhibitionSelling Out, here we are presented with a liquidation sale of her own creations. This required adjustment at once comments on the status to which the icon’s art was raised, and contrasts it with the way in which her creations that deigned to explore this were viewed. Yet, the relevance of Provost’s comment PROFILE that the icon’s art became so well-known that it could have been made into a line of products, has been reconfirmed again and again. During the preparation for her show, which already included hand-embroidered Converse shoes, Vans and the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam announced their partnership in the creation of a line of apparel adorned with works such as the famous Starry Night (1889).17 The diamet- rically opposed approaches to the hand-made production of her work, and the mass- production of Vans is notable, and illustrates her point perfectly. Thank you, universe.

The Automatistes were on the forefront of abstraction in Canada. Its leaders, such as Born in Montreal, Michèle Provost is a long-time resident of the Ottawa-Gatineau area, Paul-Émile Borduas, represented the rebel in the face of conservativism and a changing where she first studied and worked as a parliamentary translator before digressing Quebec society. Borduas gathered a gaggle of artists around him, and they were deter- into visual arts. She began her artistic training in Norwich, UK in 1994-95, and earned mined to bring European abstraction into practice in Quebec. They travelled between a Diploma in Visual Arts from the Ottawa School of Art in 2000. Since then, she has Paris, Montreal, and New York, applying principles of American Abstract Expression- been featured in solo exhibitions abroad in Italy and also in Canada, such as Selling ism and French Surrealism in the vein of André Breton and automatic painting. They Out, organized by Carleton University Art Gallery in 2008 and subsequently toured were young. They were free. They signed a manifesto. But this romanticism became to Maison de la culture (Pointe-aux-Trembles, QC), the Dunlop Gallery (Regina, SK), the established mode in their eventual representation of Quebec modern art. Provost and the Art Gallery of Sudbury (Sudbury, ON). Her work has been included in group imagines that this entrenchment is taken a step further. Not only is the “new” form of exhibitions at the Ottawa Art Gallery (2011), the Textile Museum of Canada and the abstraction now not so new, and the sexy, rebellious personalities of these figures, not Dalhousie Art Gallery (2008), as well as the Art Gallery of Peterborough (2005), to so sexy anymore, they are bottled and sold. They are a brand, like everything else that name a few. She has received travel and production grants from the Canada Council once meant something in this ever-plasticized world of commerce. Everything has a for the Arts, production grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Conseil des arts market value. Everything can be mass-produced. et des lettres du Québec. She was awarded the Mid-Career Achievement Award from the Council for the Arts in Ottawa (2010) and the Prix du Conseil des arts et lettres 17 “Vans Partners with the Van Gogh Museum Provost’s installation points to a degradation in value. When critical ideas are reject- du Québec pour la création artistique (Région de l’Outaouais) (2009). She has partic- Amsterdam,” Vans “Off the Wall” official website. ed as they have no commercial value, then she will liquidate them. A fire sale is only ipated in many artist residencies including at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture Retrieved online October 19, 2018. https://www. (YT, 2017), Le Lieu Unique (Nantes, France, 2016), Aberystwyth Arts Centre (Wales, vans.com/article_detail/vans-van-gogh-museum. ever put into place when everything must go at whatever cost; it is the last chance to html. recoup some value. In its vulnerable liquidated state, this body of work questions the UK, 2015), the Bytown Museum (2012), and the Banff Centre for the performing arts place of star power and the power of legacy — not only of the artists’ perception of (2010) among others. Her work is included in both private and public collections, themselves, but also of their art-making. including Loto Québec, the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau, Canada Council Art Bank, Carleton University Art Gallery, and the Ottawa Art Gallery.

CATHERINE SINCLAIR is Senior Curator at the Even the artists of early institutional critique became part of the establishment, with Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG). She holds an MA in the major museums they criticized hosting their retrospective exhibitions in later days. micheleprovost.ca Canadian Art History from Carleton University (2006). Is the conclusion that there is no escaping the art world, even by such a self-described With more than thirteen years at the OAG, she has movement? Ironically, any attempt to keep the art world in check is thwarted due to its curated over forty exhibitions including We’ll all be come stories: A Survey of Art in the Ottawa-Gatineau subjectivity to its own restrictions and existence within the global marketplace. While Region (2018, co-curated) and Alma: The Life and Art the icon insisted he was apolitical, as documented in the art history books about him, of Alma Duncan (1917-2004) (2014-16). She has pre- France saw him as a symbol of Canada, Canada saw him as a symbol of international- sented her work at national forums including the University Art Association Conference (UAAC) and the ism, and Québec saw him as a symbol of nationalism. Like Banksy, his persona became Canadian Women Artists History Initiative Conference a thing in and of itself, both despite and because of him. Installed in an institution of (CWAHI), and published in the Journal of Curatorial art, Provost’s work also sits on this threshold — this place between dependence on, Studies (2018, co-author). In 2017, she was a recipient and criticism of, the institution that makes up the art world — and she literally liquidates of the Association of Art Museum Curators’ (AAMC) Foundation Engagement Program for International herself in one sacrificial sweep, yet with no liquidation of meaning. If it is all gone, she Curators. asks, is the escape finally achieved?

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