Propaganda ends where dialogue begins

The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.” — Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage. (Toronto : Bantam Books, 1967), 142

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Paintings in their ‘spare’ time

In the 18th and 19th century Canada, and in the United States, much of art was seen as ‘women’s work’ . Men it seems, were much too busy with business or making a mark on the new land to bother with culture… By the end of the 19th century cities in eastern North America enjoyed [...]

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Material façades

The idea of merging culture with the economy isn’t new, but the recent discourse surrounding it is… Increase innovation and creativity, the argument goes and the profits will follow… Culture, as collapsed into the creative industries means ‘not the traditional fine arts, nor the modernist cultural industries like cinema and radio, but instead the newly [...]

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Some details of craft-technique

…arts may have an allotted span of life and may be attached as forms of self-expression to particular regions and particular types of mankind, and that therefore the total history of an art may be merely an additive compilation of separate developments, of special arts, with no bond of union save the name and some [...]

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The Colonial Project

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Relations des Jésuites

Ce lieu-là surpasse encore tous les autres en beauté : car les isles qui se rencontrent dans l’emboucheure de ces deux fleuves (le St-Laurent et la Rivière des Prairie), sont autant de grandes et de belles prairies, les unes en long, les autres en rond, ou autant de jardins faits à plaisir, tant pour les [...]

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Nonlinear expenditures of time and resources

Art production and acts of generosity are fundamentally generative, but nonlinear, expenditures of time and resources. In this way they contradict the accepted functions of production and utility that are associated with meeting societies basic needs, or the process of its expansion. Each could therefore be seen as potential processes of liberation from the inevitable [...]

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Les cahiers d’esquisse de Elizabeth Simcoe

Cahiers d’esquisse de Elizabeth Simcoe, 1792-1796. Bibliothèque David M Stewart. Fonds Simcoe. J’ai visité la bibliothèque David M. Stewart au musée Stewart situé sur l’Ile St-Hélène. Les éléments de la collection de cette bibliothèque privée ont été rassemblés afin de refléter les intérêts littéraires du gentilhomme typique du XVIIIe siècle. La collection inclue quelques journaux [...]

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The antithesis of neighbourhood

Under capitalism, all is spectacle. Branding is the antithesis of neighbourhood. How can the symbolic language inherent to branding adjust to a process that includes the local community: the residents who study and work in a neighbourhood, plus the daily flux of permanent and temporary occupants.” — dAb Collective, “Urbanism versus Branding for Montréal’s Quartier [...]

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And if traditional tropes continue to persist…

Why did discussions around landscape in Canada before the 1960s tend to champion national difference and distinctiveness, often under the banner of exceptionalism, while more recent debates have focused on issues of colonial power and dispossession, transnational crossovers, and regional idiosyncrasy? What relevance do traditional landscape tropes have in a world of vastly altered political, [...]

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Explication : non sans humeur, en toute modestie…

“Non sans humeur, en toute modestie, la Montréalaise a voulu tester notre soif pour la possession, jouant sur les apparences, se payant même la tête de l’histoire officielle. Sur son chevalet, devant ce paysage de Charlevoix peint et repeint depuis deux siècles…

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La politique des objets

Si on choisit d’échanger des biens matériels, objets ou services, plûtot que des valeurs mésurées monétairement, c’est bien que l’on compte sur les objets pour subvertir ou contourner une économie officielle et les normes du marché. Posons-nous la question de ce que l’on attend des objets, de ce qu’on leur attribu comme pouvoir, de ce [...]

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Permissions

I was sketching at the pier on my day off from the Symposium. From afar I noticed a landscape painter with her easel set up facing towards Baie-Saint-Paul. I thought it might be interesting to reverse roles and to talk with her. She was an artist from Ottawa who has visited the region regularly for [...]

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A wordless unease

But this is not why she bought the pictures, way back then. She bought them because she wanted them. She wanted something that was in them, although she could not have said at the time what it was. It was not peace : she does not find them peaceful in the least. Looking at them [...]

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Qu’entendons-nous par l’Art?

Primo, l’expression de nos émotions, fussent-elles bonnes ou mauvaises, devient une œuvre d’art sensée ou insensée, belle ou imparfaite, selon que sa forme est parfaite ou rudimentaire. Secundo, qu’une œuvre est grande en raison du degré de Vérité, de Bonté, et de Beauté qu’elle atteint dans le jugement des gens qui pensent clairement. Tertio, que [...]

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Le choix du peuple

Canada’s Most Wanted and Most Unwanted Colours Les couleurs les plus et les moins désirées par les Canadiens Blue / Bleu 30% Green / Vert 18% Beige 8% Maroon / Bordeaux 6% Yellow / Jaune 5% Purple / Violet 5% Teal /Sarcelle 5% Peach / Pêche 4% Pink / Rose 4% Red / Rouge 3% [...]

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Cette nouvelle condition territoriale

L’histoire des paysages en Occident illustre bien la dynamique opérant entre lieux et non-lieux. Cette histoire pourrait en effet être abordée comme une conquête sensible des non-lieux, conquête d’espaces réputés « affreux » ou inhabitables, qui seront progressivement approivisés, investis de valorisations culturelles, transformés en lieux et en paysages. L’art a joué et joue toujours [...]

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L’interstice est un espace de relations humaines

…il est important de réconsidérer la place des oeuvres dans le système global de l’économie, symbolique ou matérielle, qui régit la société contemporaine : pour nous, au-delà de son charactère marchand ou de sa valeur sémantique, l’oeuvre d’art représent un interstice social. Ce terme d’interstice fut utilisé par Karl Marx pour qualifier des communautés d’échanges [...]

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A deeply felt desire for trancendance

The Western idea of the autonomous ‘figure in the landscape’ is no longer accepted in critical discourse, yet it remains a pervasive myth in general culture, one that answers to a deeply felt desire for trancendance.” — Petra Halkes, Aspiring to the Landscape : On painting and the Subject of Nature (Toronto : University of [...]

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The space between the words public and art

Is “public” a qualifying description of place, ownership or access? Is it a subject, or a characteristic of the particular audience? Does it explain the intentions of the artist or the interests of the audience? The inclusion of the public connects theories of art to the broader population: what exists in the space between the [...]

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En plein air

The artist with his easel set up in the countryside, painting the scene before his eys, is one of our stock cultural stereotypes. Most people would be surprised to learn how recently this conception has developed – the major movement to outdoor painting having come only with the impressionists at the end of the nineteenth [...]

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The creation of national identities

What might appear as contradictory, that is, the fact that economic globalization seems to be accompanied by an increase of cultural divisions, is only so on the surface. It is a fact that, in a world where exchanges of goods and ideas are more and more frequent on an international level, people are increasingly aware [...]

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Economic laws appear to be like natural laws

Economic laws appear “to be like natural laws, that they are not made by man to regulate free acts of exchange but are functions of the productive conditions of society as a whole where all activities are leveled down to the human body’s metabolism with nature and where no exchange exists but only consumption” — [...]

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The romantic inclination of English gentlemen

The topographical views of military officers were in fact simply one manifestation of the romantic inclination of English gentlemen of the later eighteenth century to delight in the splendours of natural scenery or anything they found in their travels that was charmingly primitive, rough, quaint, or exotic — in a word picturesque. — Dennis Reid. [...]

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La beauté des paysages de Charlevoix

A vrai dire la beauté des paysages de Charlevoix n’est perçu que par les premiers visiteurs anglophones vers le milieu du XIXe siècle… Quand, à partir de 1844, un service de vapeurs permet d’amener tous les jeudis les voyageurs de la ville de Québec… Charlevoix change de vocation. Le comté devient un haut lieu touristique, [...]

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Seeing the world in terms of ourselves

When I was a child, I knew no more about nature than a squirrel. If someone had asked me what nature was, I would probably have said that it was my family’s farm, the woods especially and the creek that flooded every spring. Nature was space and the wild things in it, like the geese [...]

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The imaginary and the symbolic

“Landscape does not exist in nature without the eye which grasps an expanse of land as a landscape. Climate’s existence is similar…

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