Christopher Regimbal’s Top 5 Canadian curated moments

[This list is part of an informal archive of Canadian curated moments put together by Canadian curators from across the country. Christopher Régimbal is an art historian and curator based out of Toronto, Canada. He is Curatorial Assistant at the Justina M. Barnicke gallery, University of Toronto and his criticism has appeared in Fuse Magazine, Art Papers and on 89.5FM CIUT.  His next exhibition is Bruce Nauman: Audio/Video Piece for London, Ontario at the Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario.]

Conditions to dictate my list:

A – All exhibitions have to be exhibitions that I did NOT see.  I have only been seeing exhibitions for about five years now and it can take longer than that to establish the value of something.  Plus, I think that I can consider these exhibitions legendary, and what good is a legend if you have seen it.

B – This list highlights five Canadian curated exhibitions from the last thirty years that have enabled curatorial practice as we know it today.

C – I will pay particular heed to exhibitions that I consider influential on my own practice as a curator, particularly exhibitions that I read or learned about during my studies, or that I would like to emulate in my practice.

D – Since we are trying to propose a history of exhibition making, my list will deal with exhibitions initiated by Canadian institutions.  The exhibitions do not have to focus exclusively on Canadian artists.

The List:

1. Aurora Borealis: Les cents jours d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1985

Curated by René Blouin, Claude Gosselin and Normand Thériault

Artists: Robert Adrian, Jocelyn Alloucherie, Geneviève Cadieux, Ian Carr-Harris, Melvin Charney, Robin Collyer, Tom Dean, Pierre Dorion, Andrew Dutkewych, Gathie Falk, Michael Fernandes, Vera Frenkel, General Idea, Raymond Gervais, Betty Goodwin, Pierre Granche, Noel Harding, Liz Magor, John Massey, John McEwen, Allan McWilliams, Claude Mongrain, Rober Racine, Henry Saxe, Michael Snow, David Tomas, Renee Van Halm, Jeff Wall, Irene F. Whittome and Kryztof Wodiczko.

This year I curated three independent projects in Parkdale as part of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche and was therefore forced to consider how to be a curator in public space.  For the most part, curators are trained in universities to curate in museums and from collections. Time and time again, curators and artists who try to bring museum practices to public space, fail.  Curating festival-scale art calls for a new mindset, if not a completely new set of rules, and when it is done right, it can offer so many new ways to engage with audiences.  Organized by three giants of curating in Quebec, Aurora Borealis was incredibly successful in its day, I think, because Blouin, Gosselin, and Thériault recognized the possibilities of this new format that has since come to pervade the public’s expectation of contemporary art.  Revisiting this exhibition is a must-do for curators who are increasingly called on to be purveyors of public spectacle.

2. Ian Carr-Harris 1971-1977, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1988

Curated by Philip Monk

Artist: Ian Carr-Harris

I have had a long-standing fascination with this show because it perfectly reveals Philip Monk’s interest in exhibition making as a craft.  The project revisited five exhibitions by Ian Carr-Harris held at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery between 1971 and 1977, ten years after the fact.  I can’t think of another major museum exhibition that has taken this format, which was reprised by Monk in 2009 with the The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion exhibition at AGYU.  To me, Ian Carr-Harris 1971-1977 revolutionized how a curator can represent art history by paying particular attention to how it was shaped by exhibitions.  Now, with a glut of curatorial restaging projects in the works, we can look back and say that Monk did it before any of us.  I am confident that I will be thinking about this exhibition for a long time to come.

3. Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada, National Gallery of Canada, 1992

Curated by Dianna Nemiroff, Robert Houle and Charlotte Townsend-Gault

Artists: Carl Beam, Rebecca Belmore, Dempsey Bob, Domingo Cisneros, Robert Davidson, Jimmie Durham, Dorothy Grant, Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, Faye HeavyShield, Alex Janvier, Zacharias Kunuk, James Lavadour, Truman Lowe, James Luna, Teresa Marshall, Alanis Obomsawin, Kay WalkingStick, and Lawrence Yuxweluptun

When I was an undergraduate student I studied Anthropology and Art History. I was made quickly aware of how much these two disciplines are trying to shake a tradition of colonialism that is at both of their cores.  It is shocking to think that it was only in 1986 that the National Gallery of Canada formally recognized contemporary Inuit and First Nations art in its collection policy with Carl Beam’s epic The North American Iceberg.  1992 was the symbolic 500-year anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to North America.  That year, two exhibitions (Land, Spirit, Power at the National Gallery of Canada and Indegena at the Nationial Museum of Civilization) symbolized the first steps of the Canadian museums establishment towards recognizing the plurality of voices that make up this country.  This fight is definitely not over as the recent controversy over Director Marc Mayer’s vision of “excellence” at the National Gallery shows. Nevertheless Nemiroff, Houle, and Townsend-Gault were part of a seismic shift of priorities in Canadian curatorial practice that resonates to this day.

4. Love Gasoline, Mercer Union, 1996

Curated by Barbara Fischer

Artists: Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Jacki Apple, Lynda Benglis, Chris Burden, Colin Campbell, Ian Carr-Harris, Mary Beth Edelson, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, Suzy Lake, Rita Myers, Tania Mouraud, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Snow, Lisa Steele, Colette Whiten, Hannah Wilke, Martha Wilson.

When I was in graduate school, I saw Barbara Fischer give a lecture where she framed her approach to curating by discussing the artist Michael Asher’s seminal George Washington piece at the Art Institute of Chicago (1979).  For the 73^rd American Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Asher moved Jean Antoine Houdon’s bronze sculpture of George Washington (1788) from the main entrance of the museum to the eighteenth-century, French decorative arts room.  Fischer has a long-standing commitment to understanding how the art of the 1960s and 1970s changed how we think and talk about contemporary art today.  Not only can you see the genesis of Fischer’s most important exhibitions of the 2000s in Love Gasoline, but the exhibition predicted the return of conceptual practice in this last decade.

5. 6: New Vancouver Modern, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1998

Curated by Scott Watson

Artists: Geoffrey Farmer, Myfanwy MacLeod, Damian Moppett, Steven Shearer, Ron Terada, and Kelly Wood

I’ve never lived West of London, Ontario and most of my influences as a curator are from central Canada.  From my vantage point in Toronto, trying to understand the recent history of art in Vancouver can be pretty overwhelming.  Some people in this city suffer from a Toronto/Vancouver neurosis (you know the one, every time you see a plane flying over Toronto, there is another international curator heading to Vancouver to do studio visits), that causes them to discount the work of Vancouver artists as all hype and no substance.  I am more interested in considering how curators like Scott Watson have played a key role in shaping how the outside world views Vancouver artists (and presumably, how Vancouver artists view themselves).  Bold statements like those made in “New Vancouver Modern” and “Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists” are something that we haven’t seen in Toronto in a very long time.  These exhibitions aren’t (and shouldn’t be) without their discontents, but they are something that we can learn from in a city that is always trying to define itself.