It has been a long and lazy summer darlings, with relatively few events, of which even fewer were worth paying attention to. As we could scarcely drum up the interest to actually think about these shows for any great length of time, we decided to take the summer off, and resume our affairs when the rest of the city decided to follow suit. We did spend an unusual amount of time beyond the city limits, although not too far afield (mostly at exquisite cottages by crystalline lakes).

We managed to get in a brief saunter to La Belle Province only to find that Toronto the Good had followed us there. With one rather large exception (more of which later), we managed a little inadvertent Toronto get-together. Galerie La Centrale was showing the darling work of G.B. Jones (all of which we’d seen and enjoyed before, and it’s always nice to have much-loved company in strange environs), and Articule was screening Tony Romano’s film The Last Act, in which familiar faces re-enact the non-pornographic scenes from the skin flick of the same name.

A magnetic Amy Bowles interprets the part of Terri, a young lady with a casually libertine attitude to all things rutting, Lydia Klenck is her beleaguered but concerned gal pal Jane, Rayne Baron shows up (in a fabulous pink raincoat) for some cuddles and dirty talk. The whole affair is flirtatious, teasingly chaste, and oddly suspenseful, as if the event of on-screen sex breaking out is a threat that hovers over the proceedings. Ms Bowles really does run away with the show, entrancing the camera with her alluring intimacy, effortlessly graceful demeanour and purring sibilance.

The artist’s statement was a bit hard to swallow, engorged as it was on claims to the deconstruction of the complexity of love and human relationships and inventing new strategies and we had to stifle a yawn. The film suffices as a light divertissement, but for the love of heaven, don’t demand theoretic acrobatics of a porn film without the porn. Mr. Romano coasts nicely and evenly on the script left behind by The Last Act’s original director Fred Lincoln, which, robbed of its prurient ends, has roughly the same narrative heft as a commercial for lubricant. Granted, it is noteworthy that in excising the sex, Mr. Romano has effectively (and literally) emasculated the original film – robbed of their recreational duties, the men don’t seem to have much to do in the plot-only version. That men do all the doing in hetero porn is no great revelation, and certainly not enough to turn this conceptual cocktail wiener into a thick, juicy sausage.

Mr. Romano should not insist on the interpretive aspect, especially as he has not made any significant additions or intrusions of his own. This being the case, one might ask why he spent so much of his and others’ money, time and energies on what amounts to a cute little thing – beautifully shot (thanks to photographer Michel LeBlanc) and beautifully made, but nevertheless, still a little thing. This is not for us to answer, nor do we especially care. All of this is merely to point out that these graduate school-approved chat-up lines, like all overheated claims, only magnify the shallowness and relative triviality of the goods they are meant to advertise.

The Quebec Triennial, as one might deduce, was decidedly not a Toronto affair. It was hosted by the Musée d’Art Contemporain. It was a strange beast indeed, and we’re still not entirely sure what to make of it, although we applaud its intention. It seems like the latest in a long string of –ennials (we thought everyone had given up after the Istanbul Biennial), and thus, perhaps unfashionably late in catching up to a faddish mode of exhibition. Nevertheless, Canadian versions of these kinds of events make a great deal of sense. Someone remarked to us once that the Whitney Biennial is always a bit of a bust because it’s unnecessary: what with the never-ending parade of art fairs, everyone already knows the latest trends and styles of the art world. This seems right enough and true, but only if one is American or European. Few Canadian galleries attend the American (let alone the European) art fairs, and thus the currency of new, young Canadian art on the international viewing circuit is very rare indeed. Furthermore, there is no Canadian viewing circuit, and as such, most Canadians aren’t up to date on what Canadians are doing: the cost of travel from one end of the country to the other is rather prohibitive (unlike Europe, where one can go from Germany to Spain and back for the price of an expensive meal). Thus, the left coast of our country doesn’t really know what the right coast is doing, and everyone assumes that the poor souls in the middle will just pick a coast and migrate. All the more reason for something like the Quebec Triennial. We have not entered a show atwitter with a sense of discovery or the anticipation of novelty in quite some time.

Of course it was a hodgepodge. One can’t please all of the people all of the time. Still, the curators should be applauded for two things: first, having a curatorial premise that was treated as if it actually meant something. The title of the exhibit is “Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme,” which, for our unilingual readers, translates to “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.” Thus, the theme of the show was transformation. Granted, this is as wide a berth as they come, but the curators made something of it; whatever our taste may have appreciated or rejected, we could not argue that one or another thing did not belong. Parenthetically, we would also like to point out that Quebec’s historical fight to have itself recognized as a distinct culture has always translated into a concrete sense of collective self; thus, no one for a moment stopped to fret over how diverse and un-sum-uppable they were. The statement rang loud and clear: This Is Representative of What Quebec Art Is Like Now. This kind of pride and optimism is bracing, to say the least.

The second thing to applaud the curators for is their excellent sense of showmanship; the triennial was arranged like a Broadway musical: a big, loud, attention-getting opening number, a boisterous affair at the end of the first act, and a dramatic finish (more about all of these later). It was light on didactic panels, and while the latter half of the show felt more crowded than the first, each artist had plenty of space to breathe, and we consistently felt as if we were moving along at a brisk pace. More often than not, we felt engaged with, and thus entertained. Again, our thoughts of certain individual pieces aside, we could not help but admire this flair; it bespoke a certain pride: it is always lovely to watch others take joy in their good deeds.

And the art itself? Ah well, that is another matter entirely. Perhaps a list might be appropriate. The highlights, then:

After Gwenaël Bélanger’s worm’s-eye-view video projection of a mirror crashing against a concrete floor jarred us into alertness, we rounded the corner only to be faced with two of David Altmejd’s sculpted giants. We must confess that, so far, this man can do no wrong in our eyes. His work is a marvel of ingenuity, at once sublime, grandiose, and homespun (the French word for which we reach, and for which there is no English equivalent, is ‘polyvalente’). Photographs of his work rarely do it justice, as reproduction tends to render it more slick and illusionistic than it actually is. His modelling is noticeably hand-done, in garishly painted modelling clay. His edges (when edges are present) are never exactly crisp. It is never either anaesthetically cold nor alienatingly technical. Even his work with mirrors is tactile, and all this makes his works immensely empathetic. There is a marvellous perversity here: one of the giants at the Triennial is just such a creature, one made entirely of mirrors, its pristine planes punctuated by small hammered holes, in which Altmejd has placed shark’s teeth. Despite its somewhat obvious Freudian references, we found the visual fact of this assemblage jarring, genuinely shocking.

A parenthetical whine: as much as we relish the opportunity of consuming an Altmejd, any Altmejd, we take slight issue with his presence here. It is , to our mind, the only instance of curatorial insecurity, as if his inclusion were a stab at a more international pedigree. We are well aware of his deep roots in Quebec; he grew up there, was educated there, showed there briefly, and the Université de Quebec à Montréal Art Gallery curator Louise Déry (who took him to the Venice Bienalle) remains one of his great champions. We would merely like to point out that, no sooner had he finished his undergraduate degree than he set up camp in New York, which is where he made his reputation, where he is represented, and where he still lives (when he isn’t in his other home in the UK). Make of that what you will.

Adad Hannah is in that same first room, represented by some photos and videos, which mirror each other. For instance: there is a photo of a man and a woman, eyes closed, languorously leaning in to kiss each side of a double-headed statue. And then there is a video, on loop, of the same statue, with the same man doing his level best to hold his kissing pose, as the stress of immobility becomes more and more visible (the woman has her own video, as well). There is another such photo/video repetition, a cluster of folk engaged in a loose reconstitution of Velasquez’ Las Meninas. We found the videos rather redundant, and a bit literal. The photos are expertly constructed, and so do enough on their own to suggest the stillness and the passage of time that the videos illustrate so pedantically.

Bettina Hoffman’s videos succeed where Mr. Hannah’s videos do not. She arranges groups of people in small rooms, and has the camera circle the periphery of her live tableau. While we are not willing to go to bat for their theoretical richness, they are quite beautiful, simultaneously evoking languor and threat, as if the viewer had awkwardly and rudely interrupted some kind of heated narrative.

Julie Doucet and David Armstrong Six shared the last room of the first half of the exhibition. We have always enjoyed Ms Doucet’s comic book diaries, and her zine excerpts here were similarly engaging, using magazine cut-outs to address personal insecurity, and the selling of sexuality. This is dangerously trite territory, and while Ms Doucet doesn’t strike any new or especially perspicacious blows for the sisterhood, her assemblages are nimble, light-hearted and still needling and discontented. Mr. Armstrong Six constructs…well, we’re not really sure what to call it. The installed sculpture to which we refer is an extended wooden platform of sorts, that looks rickety and decrepit. Of course, the horror-movie feeling is only abetted by the gaping hole in the middle of the surface, under which some kind of geyser furiously bubbles, toils and troubles away. Not the most prosaic of work, but viscerally engaging, and enjoyably theatrical.

If its treatment in the Triennial is any indication, then painting is a bit of a troubled issue in Quebec these days. There was not much of it, and what was there was all corralled together, sequestered in two adjoining rooms. Furthermore, we found much of it cold. Michael Merrill’s small paintings of international exhibition spaces, for instance, are technically quite accomplished, but his schematic, paint-by-numbers approach anaesthetizes his surfaces, leaving merely the flatly rendered content to engage with. On the other hand, Etienne Zack’s paintings, great big deconstructed and fragmented architectural spaces, were colourful and bombastic, but heavily derivative: someone needs to confiscate Mr. Zack’s Neo Rauch catalogues, so that Mr. Zack might better be able to get on with his own work.

And while we’re in a complaining mode, our lowlights:

The artist-duo Cooke Sasseville were responsible for the largest installation in the show, and perhaps not coincidentally, the largest waste of space in the show. The installation was comprised of two life-sized dioramas of domestic spaces, arranged in hues of grey and white, in which variously aged and gendered mannequins with giant red cylinders for heads went about their domestic duties: playing with blocks, changing light-bulbs. Each diorama was the flip-side of the other: if one’s kitchen is on the top floor, the other’s is on the bottom floor, if one mannequin is male, its counterpart on the other side of the room is female, if one changes a light bulb on the top floor (and, believe it or not, in this resides the great punch, or perhaps we should say punch-line, of the work), the other changes a light bulb on the bottom floor. This latter pairing is arranged so that one mannequin, in doing his light-bulb duties, has his hand inadvertently placed up his counterpart’s…um…parts. Really? This needs an entire room? Ladies and gentlemen, this must surely be a new low in art production: this elaborate installation fails even to attain the height of a dirty joke.

Carlos and Jason Sanchez are represented by two photographs, one of a man looking intensely into a mirror (apparently, this is the fellow who wishes to be known as JonBenet Ramsey’s murderer), the other of two wounded soldiers holding each other in the fading sunset. We were not impressed by the former photograph’s lurching stab at topical controversy, nor were we won over by the limp, nauseatingly ironic pathos of the latter. We complained elsewhere of artists who create merely product, who confuse razzle-dazzle for substance. The Sanchez brothers are not the worst of these kinds of practitioners, but they certainly fall on that wavelength. We are terribly familiar with their work, and after much viewing, we could not tell you at all what their practice consists of, but we can tell you immediately what it looks like: shiny, slick, attractive – pure product.

Doyon-Rivest’s photographs of themselves as a life-sized corporate puppet conjoined at the head struck us as an eye-rolling foray into a particularly lazy brand of trite lefty anti-corporatism. Corporate branding and advertising is bland and unintelligent? Who knew?

Speaking of trite forays into anti-corporatism, we had heard that Patrick Bernatchez’ videos were the highlight of the Triennial. To be sure, they are operatically portentous, and thus situated by the curators to be a big finish to the show, but they highlight nothing more than their creator’s dearth of originality. The first video, of an office space slowly filling up with blowing snow, is neat, although we tend to disagree with the didactic panel’s interpretation of random chaos in a lifeless space. It seemed to us more along the lines of a technical parlour trick usually found in a gimmicky music video. Mr. Bernatchez’ second entry was, in fact, entirely a gimmicky music video. It consists of a Ronald McDonald clown smoking in his dirty car in a dimly lit parking garage. The camera does a slow circle around said automobile as it slowly fills with water, eventually completely submerging ol’ Ronald in a sea of watery detritus. All this is to the sturm-und-drang strains of the Wagnerian indie-cult band Godspeed You Black Emperor!. Poor Ronald.

Aside from Mr. Bernatchez’ painfully clichéd juxtapositions (violent circumstance + children’s clown = disturbing, only if you’ve never before heard of a little known author named Stephen King), his very aesthetic does him wrong. As if the video’s high-budget slickness and soundbyte-simple content were not enough, the choice of rock music for the soundtrack sinks it, finally and utterly. For finally and utterly, it is a rock video, whose visuals and “concept” (we refuse to use that word unqualified in relation to this video) are entirely subordinate to the pounding histrionics of the music.

We feel it slightly irresponsible to end on a dour note. After all, we did not expect to like everything that we saw in the Triennial, and our dislikes did nothing to ruin our experience of it. The curation was decisive and coherent, unafraid to impose a point of view on what amounts to a very general synopsis of provincial output. It was, when all is said, done and accounted for, a dynamic show, brimming with excitement, pride and a healthy amount of self-congratulation. It remains to be seen whether or not this kind of well-executed boosterism will do anything to revivify Quebec’s ailing and long-comatose art market. If it does, it will be an interesting phenomenon to follow. But, if there is one thing to be gleaned from the Triennial, it is precisely that the cities and provinces of our country are positively fermenting with energetic and ambitious art. More the fools we, if we are failing to demonstrate this to the world and to each other.

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