I don't know if anyone ever sets out to be an art critic. For me, it happened by chance. In a way, I have been talking about art to people since I was a child. My mother, Elizabeth Nichol, was an art collector and later, the founder of Equinox Gallery in Vancouver. When I was growing up, our house was full of the evidence of her adventures in the art world.
My mum was a colour junkie, an addiction I have inherited from her. Jim Dine hearts were a favorite. She loved Robert Rauschenberg and David Hockney. I remember the Andy Warhol print we had over the fireplace, a bilious green face of Richard Nixon against an emergency-orange background with the words "Vote McGovern" scrawled underneath. It was a real conversation-stopper, and when my friends came over to play, I was asked to explain it to them. I enjoyed it.
Though my mother's example was profound, it never occurred to me to look for a job in the art world. I was all set for a career as an English teacher when my husband Tom and I came by chance to spend a year in Halifax in 1982. There, I quickly came to realize that the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design was the place to be, a gold mine of ideas.
At NSCAD, I was lucky enough to find myself in Jan Peacock's Intermedia class. With Jan, we made videos, but mostly I remember absorbing her rigorous approach to evaluating art. In a medium riddled, even then, with gimmickry, she was always asking, "Where's the idea?" Looking cool was not enough. Vito Acconci's Red Tapes, a zero-budget production made in the studio, bristled with intensity, notwithstanding its Spartan means of production. It was our Bible.
It was also in Halifax that I wrote my first piece about art, reviewing an exhibition of paintings by Paraskeva Clark for The Canadian Forum. As far as I knew, historical Canadian art was all about landscape. And it was all done by men. Clark was evidence of how wrong I was on both counts. Her social-realist canvases of the urban poor in Toronto were a revelation, her lack of gentility about social inequity radical and passionate.
Shortly after we moved to Toronto in 1984, I saw a notice in this newspaper of a new magazine, Canadian Art, which would be aimed at the general reader. The writer of the piece, art critic John Bentley Mays, did not sound convinced, but I was intrigued. Approaching Susan Walker, the magazine's founding editor, in the hopes of landing a writing assignment, I was instead hired as assistant editor. And there, the learning began in earnest. Walker was an icebreaker, plowing her way through a Northwest Passage of art-world cynicism about our populist intentions. Did it degrade art to write about it in plain language, and to answer the obvious questions? Was it trivializing to describe the life of the artist, even to talk about what art costs to buy? Susan thought that if you had the information, you should share it, and do so in language people could understand. Pretension was anathema to her.
My years at Canadian Art, in various capacities from 1984 and as the editor from 1991 to 1996, gave me the opportunity to see many masters at work. Walker and her successor, Jocelyn Lawrence, a brilliant editor with a nose for what was sexy and smart, brought on board writers who were an inspiration.
One thing is for sure; these writers all worked from an absolute conviction of the right of the visual arts to sit at the big table of national debate. In the spectrum from entertainment to education that is the critic's territory, they all were firmly pinned in the latter zone, understanding that to deserve a bigger platform you must anchor art in everybody's lived experience. They knew the "I" must not be left out, that stories that talk solely about art in relation to the history of other works of art, or in relation to the history of ideas, will sink like a stone. You have to fight to be heard.
But the fight calls for some refinements. If I, as a critic, want you to see My Heroes in the Street, the exhibition of 1980s photographic works by Ian Wallace currently showing at the Catriona Jefferies Gallery in Vancouver, I can choose different strategies. I could tell you that Wallace's work is a contemporary meditation on the legacy of modernism, that it positions itself as being in a dialogue with contemporary heavweights such as Dan Graham and Robert Ryman, that it relies heavily on the Frankfurt school of philosophy. While this approach is scholarly and entirely valid for some audiences, I suspect this isn't going to get you up off the couch.
The second approach, which is informative but calls for less prior knowledge of the history of art, would be to tell you that Wallace was the catalyst for the wave of photo-based art that for years now has made Vancouver the talk of the international art world. I could tell you, moreover, that he was Jeff Wall's teacher at art school and that he has had a legendary impact on countless other Vancouver artists, and that this show gains its poignancy from his early ability to imagine Vancouver as an international art centre. (His "heroes," pictured in this series, include the young Ken Lum, Roy Arden and Stan Douglas, all of whom, like him, have gone on to have international careers.) This is more interesting, a little nugget of cultural history. You're learning something.
The third option would be to tell you that Wallace is a snappy dresser who drives around town in a shiny red vintage MG, is a notorious one for the ladies, and divides his time between Vancouver and Valencia (and the rest of Europe) -- the Canadian art world's international man of mystery. Now I have your undivided attention (this is all true, by the way), but unfortunately, you're not learning anything that helps you look at the work more intelligently. The ethics of how you bait the hook can be delicate indeed.
Me? I would go for the middle path, with a little dash of red MG and a soupçon of philosopher Walter Benjamin thrown in to spice things up. The critic, I think, has to give readers enough information that they can formulate some ideas of their own while they read. Also, they must be given a sense of what the work looks like. It's astonishing how often this gets left out of art reviews. It is in describing that you often come face to face with how you really feel about an object. It can be surprising. Take the example of Ian Wallace. If I say that the surfaces of these photographic works have the dry look of old Social Studies textbook illustrations, blown up and flanked by monochromatic painting, I will have identified their peculiar flavour, but also their weakness as works of art. For all their importance, they often seem to hold back in delivering pleasure.
In recent years, some catalogue projects have come my way, but none so engrossing as writing the life of Greg Curnoe for the book accompanying the current exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Poring through his archive last winter in the basement of the AGO was a heavenly interlude, the opportunity to immerse myself in the mind of this ferociously independent thinker who had a profound sense of the role of art in society. Art-making, for Curnoe, was a kind of act of vigilance, a way to keep everyone accountable for their assumptions and their positions.
Curnoe had a passionate sense of responsibility for the legacy of Canadian art. For him, sloppiness in art criticism was indicative of the prevailing Canadian apathy about our own cultural achievements. In an article in the mid-1990s titled "This is about being marginal and being obscure in Canada," Curnoe wrote, "It is a lamentable fact that the very value of cultural expression in Canada is constantly questioned. Not only that, but there is also a substantial body of influential opinion that believes that valid, innovative cultural expression always originates elsewhere."
The art critic was in a position to do something about such misapprehensions, but was usually seen to be coming up short. Curnoe was right to be so scrupulous. In a country like Canada, whatever you write can turn out to be one of the few existing accounts of an artist. And as a witness, it's important to preserve not just the facts, but also the nature of the debate and dissent that surrounds an artist's work. The critical function lies not just in deciding where to turn your attention, but also in choosing whom to tangle with.
There's another thing about Curnoe worth mentioning. His last great campaign, before his untimely death, was against academic art criticism or "critical discourse," a term that has about as much sex appeal as artificial insemination. Curnoe, perhaps with a hint of paranoia, took the proliferation of this writing in the 1970s and 1980s as an attempt by the art-world powers-that-be to unseat the artist as intellectual wellspring, and reduce him or her to the role of illustrator of cultural theory. First comes the argument, then the art.
His indignation at this turn of events was intense, and he railed against the elitism of what he called "abstractitis." First comes the art, he would have said, then the argument, but only after we've had a chance to really look. I met Curnoe a few times before he died in 1992, but I never really got to know him until last year. It's too bad. I think we would have gotten along fine.