This article first appeared in 1991's Theory Rules (YYZ Books) and is reproduced here with permission from the author, courtesy of Goodreads.ca
This article first appeared in 1991's Theory Rules (YYZ Books) and is reproduced here with permission from the author, courtesy of Goodreads.ca
Education is the progressive development of the individual in all his faculties, physical and intellectual, aesthetic and moral. As a result of the disciplined growth of the entire personality, the educated man shows a balanced development of all his powers; he has fully realized his human possibilities. (The Report of the Massey-Lévesque Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1951)
Given these goals, my initial efforts were directed at determining the total number of writers who have used some aspect of Foucault's work in their own writing. Any use, however slight or marginal, was of interest. I arrived at an initial list of thirty authors. In letters to these authors, I asked for interviews. Fourteen replied positively to my request, while one author, whom I could not talk to, responded to my questions by letter. From among these fourteen, I have selected certain cases for a more detailed examination.
Regarding my methodology, I might add that this paper is not concerned exclusively with art criticism in its traditional and limited sense of positive and negative evaluations of works of art. Writing on the visual arts must, I decided, include all forms of writing within the field.
In determining the actual scope of the primary source material, I had to choose from an extensive range of serials, catalogues, and monographs published in Canada from the late 1960s through to the 1990s. However, in order to limit this large body of publications, I excluded writing related to the disciplines of archaeology, art education, art therapy, museology, and those publications that dealt exclusively with the visual arts of film, video, and architecture. If articles that covered these particular visual arts did appear within the scope of publications which I examined, I did deal with them. The same also applies to all serials that only occasionally published work on the visual arts, or, in which this material would only form a very small percentage of the various types of articles published.
For a variety of reasons I concentrate on the work of anglophone writers. In my preliminary research I looked at French and English source materials which predictably confirmed an obvious fact about the Canadian cultural scene: only a very small proportion of English writers have published work in both French and English, while a much higher proportion of French writers have been published in both languages.
The concentration on anglophone writers was the result, in part, of significant differences in the reception of Foucault by the francophone and anglophone communities. One difference resulted from the time-lag between the initial reception of Foucault's work by anglophone writers, like myself, who had to rely on translations of his work. From this research, it becomes clear that the dissemination of these translations was consequential to a number of the writers I contacted. (1) As Philip Monk remarked during his interview:
I was both the beneficiary and victim during the late 1970s when a lot of other work started to come forward in translation-so it was this material being delivered all at once outside of its historical context. It was also a very fertile period when a lot of source material became available-it was not just the French work but also the German material of Adorno and that whole series of writers. (2)James Patton stated:
Madness and Civilization-I don't know when it came out in paperback but, that had something to do with it. When these things come out in paperback...I mean they were immediately available. Also the same people were reading October magazine and looking at those authors...we were enjoying Foucault's text in an anti-establishment way... we saw it as perverse in a fine way. (3)If Foucault's work does play a major role in the evolution of Canadian writing, where and when did the writings of the authors examined here appear? Where did these writers first hear or read of Foucault's work, and, when and under what circumstances did this occur? Moreover, why is there a gap of several years between the period when thirteen of the English-Canadian writers first began to read Foucault in English, and the time when his most important early work first appeared in translation? Finally, what were the consequences of this introduction? Once these questions have been addressed, it will be possible to respond to the question -why use Foucault's work?
In order to answer these questions, I have divided the work of the authors studied into two subgroups. The first of these is composed of articles by Walter Klepac, Philip Monk, and Heather Dawkins. Klepac's article points to some of the changes within Canadian writing resulting from the disemination of work like Foucault's in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dawkins's and Monk's texts represent the ways that the second subgroup uses Foucault's work. Rather than analyse the writing of the second subgroup, I will draw upon material from their interviews.
Twentieth-century modernist art has always been a self-conscious enterprise in one way or another Within the decade of the 1960s alone, however, the focus of this self-consciousness shifted significantly: what was once a matter of questioning a given work's status as an art object turned into a question about its status as an object in the world. That is, the art of the 'anxious' or problematic art object gave way to an art in which the object was conceived of as a vehicle for investigating and revealing the fundamental episteme of the artist/viewer- the assumptions, cognitive habits and network of associations upon which the artist's and viewer's conception of the world is based. (4)Here, Walter Klepac proposes a critique of some post-modernist readings of contemporary art. These premises are, he argued, 'rooted in...the writings of a group of predominantly French intellectuals referred to as the Structuralists.' (5) In particular, he attempts to provide alternative theoretical and historical readings of certain events revolving around late modernism and the complex developments of the 1960s and 1970s-objectives that are reflected in the title of the article, itself an ironic restatement of the title of Michel Foucault's 1966 masterpiece, 'Les mots et les choses.'
Klepac wrote this article thirteen years after he had been the art reviewer for the Toronto underground newspaper Guerrilla in 1971. While completing his BA, which included a double major in English literature and philosophy at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, in 1969, he had studied and written some literary criticism at university. He did not write professionally until his work for Guerrilla. Writing, to Klepac, was a way of pursuing those interests he had developed in university inasmuch as 'some of the philosophical issues dealt within analytical philosophy seemed to be more fully engaged in the work of art, particularly the work I saw at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery which had just started up at that time.' In particular, the work of Ron Martin, the Rabinowitch brothers, and Michael Snow (who, at the time, was with the Isaacs Gallery), 'dealt with those problems of epistemology and perception that seemed to parallel issues being raised in analytical philosophy.'
While Klepac expressed a liking for Foucault's and Derrida's work because of the case it 'presented against the fundamental assumptions of the Western episteme,' his article actually demonstrates a much deeper philosophical apprehension over the nature of their arguments. Moreover, it is clear that his greatest concern was the uncritical and highly rhetorical use of their work by Canadians writing on the visual arts. Consequently, though the article takes to task the critical project of the French structuralists and their American counterparts, one of the main critical goals was the targeting of those Canadian writers who were presumably working from the same set of structuralist premises as the Americans:
What got me reading representative works of the postmodern and poststructural enterprise [for example, Klepac did not read Foucault's The Order of Things until he was researching for his article] was that it was so antithetical to the fundamental principles of the most exciting and original work being produced in Canada at the time. In the hands of Canadian writers it became so widespread that it was quite devastating to a number of artists, like Roland Poulin and Ron Martin, whom I talked to ... they felt like the world had turned around. (6)The 1984 publication of Klepac's article falls between 1977 and 1989, when twenty-eight of the thirty authors who had used Foucault, as well as the works of other structuralists, first began to write and publish. More important, this article appeared in C magazine, a later but nonetheless significant partner to Parachute and Vanguard - important both for their writing on the visual arts and for the propagation of postwar international and regional modernism in Canada. The connection between these publications and writers goes beyond the simple fact of providing a venue for publication, since Bruce Grenville, Robert Graham, Lesley Johnstone, Russell Keziere, and Philip Monk have all had some form of professional relationship with at least one of the three periodicals. (7)
There are, moreover, other important factors that must be taken into account when considering the time frame within which these serials were founded, and into which all of the thirty writers I interviewed emerged. For instance, their appearance, starting in the late 1970s and running into the late 1980s, reflects a much larger transformation of the economic and socio-institutional framework of the Canadian art world. Between 1965 and 1990, there is a 1110 per cent increase in the number of serials that provide publication venues for texts on the fine arts. Most important, from 1965 to 1975, a period I consider most significant to the transformation of this art world, there is a 350 per cent increase in the number of publications dealing with the arts. Other important venues for the public dissemination of texts are institutions such as museums, galleries, and artist-run spaces. Here again, there was a significant increase in the number of exhibition spaces that could support the publication of catalogues. For example, Diana Nemiroff, in her study on the emergence of artist-run spaces in Canada, notes that the number of these spaces rose from one in 1967 to over ninety in 1985. (8) Max Brice notes in his 1979 study of the postwar growth of museums in Canada, that of the 575 museums Statistics Canada listed as existing as of 1976, 56 per cent appeared between 1967 and 1976. In other words, 322 museums began to operate at this time. (9) It is significant that the budget of the Canada Council-the single most important funding agency for the arts to emerge during this period-rose between 1965 and 1975, from $3.5 million to $24 million-an increase of 686 per cent! At the provincial government level, the budgets for the Ministère des Affaires Culturelles in Québec and the Ontario Arts Council (the largest funding agencies outside of the Canada Council) increased by 391 per cent in Quebec -from $4.5 million to $17.6 million-and in Ontario by 190 per cent-from $5 million to $9.5 million. (10)
Finally, as Joan Horseman has noted, there is also a rapid expansion of secondary and postsecondary education in the arts, which, from the mid-1960s onwards, can in part be seen as a consequence of the recommendations put forward in the Report of the Massey-Lévesque Commission. (11) In the booklet The Arts and Education, Horseman describes the commission's attempt to resolve a potential jurisdictional conflict between the federal and provincial governments over who controls the formation and implementation of education policies:
At the time the Commission was conducting its investigation on ways in which the federal government could promote opportunities in the arts, many argued that the arts were a matter of educational concern. Since education was the exclusive domain of the provinces, the federal government was impinging on provincial powers. The Commission agreed that the arts were prime instruments to achieve humanistic aims of education. However, it was adamant that the federal government had the right to make such contributions to the cause of education as lay within its means.The Commission believed that the conflict arose from a mis-understanding of the kinds and methods of education. Two approaches were possible. One approach was to provide opportunities for formal education in schools and universities; a second method was to provide opportunities for general non-academic education through books, periodicals, radio, films, museums, art galleries and so on. As argued by the Commission, the arts were a part of formal education when they were included within schools and universities, but they were more generally the means by which people gained educational opportunities after completing formal education [emphasis added]. (12)
Scott Watson taught part-time at the University of British Columbia while pursuing an MA in art history, which he completed in 1977. After graduating, he worked as a registrar at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 1978 to 1980. In 1978, the director of the gallery, Lue Rombout, encouraged him to write catalogue essays for a forthcoming exhibition of minor French Impressionist paintings. Rombout showed it to Russell Keziere, who encouraged Watson to submit it for publication in a 1979 issue of Vanguard (whose offices were then housed at the Vancouver Art Gallery).
Watson first read Foucault's The Order of Things in the early 1970s, as a consequence of his friendship with the Vancouver poet Robin Blazer, whose familiarity with Foucault was the result of his 'concern with the state of subjectivity in twentieth-century poetics.' The historical background to Foucault's transmission in this case was provided by the Black Mountain School of poetics, which 'was very big in Vancouver given that all the members of the school, including, most prominently, Charles Olson, had come out here in the 1960s.' Blazer had been a friend of Olson's, and 'his reading of Foucault was tempered by his relation to this poet.' (13) During the early 1950s, Olson had formulated a strikingly similar usage of the concept of archaeology, at least in its anti-humanistic aspects, as found in Foucault's work. However, Watson, like Klepac, did not start to deploy Foucault's work in his own critical writings until 1983, when he began to search for a more theoretically informed, alternative mode of historical analysis. He stated that he subsequently found his first 1978 catalogue essay 'embarrassing' because of its reliance upon connoisseurship practices.
We find a different trajectory in the case of Robert Graham. He finished his BA at McGill in 1973, where he had also studied some art history. Although he entered the MA program in communications, he left the program, returning to complete his MA by 1989. As in Watson's case, Graham's first published text appeared after he completed his undergraduate degree, in a 1980 issue of Parachute magazine. Graham read Foucault's The Order of Things after completing his BA but before starting his MA. During his MA in communication studies, his exposure to Foucault's work increased. He had also heard Foucault, who had been invited to Montreal by the Université de Montréal, lecture at McGill on Manet's painting. In addition, he had taken a communications seminar directed by the American Foucault scholar Donald Bouchard. As for Graham's undergraduate study of art history, we can see, through his elaboration of his experiences, a common pattern of institutional resistance to, or lack of interest in, other theoretical and methodological frameworks not normally available within the departments in which a number of the writers were working.
While at McGill when I did take art history classes, I attempted to introduce material from outside the discipline...they looked at me as if I had just pissed on the floor.Marnie Fleming completed her MA in art history at the University of British Columbia in 1980, and, in 1981, while working at the Vancouver Art Gallery, she was encouraged by Russell Keziere to write her first article for Vanguard. Contact with Foucault's work occurred when she was studying with Professor David Solkin, who was teaching in the art history department. Fleming's situation is similar to Graham's and Watson's in that her first published work appeared around the time that she had completed her MA. With the exception of Solkin's support (as had been Graham's experience at McGill), the art history department showed little interest in the type of research methodologies of someone like Foucault. Like a number of the other writers, as Fleming pointed out, she was interested in theoretical and methodological frameworks that were opposed to positions such as formalism and connoisseurship.I did not spend a lot of time there, it was not my formative area...the Communications department was most important... a department that was itself not as strongly developed...it could accept Foucault fairly easily and what Foucault was trying to do was considered acceptable and welcome. Meanwhile, I still had this are interest...I was learning from communications, including Foucault, and I continued to think and talk about art with those tools, and I brought them to the art world.
Now my experience was that this was welcome in the art world ... I had a good reception with this material. I didn't have to do battle with anyone. (14)
My interest in Foucault was generated by Professor David Solkin, then at the University of British Columbia. I was introduced to Foucault in 1978 when I was preparing my MA thesis on Canadian artist William G.R. Hind. My other professors there were connoisseurs who viewed art and politics as separate spheres with intentions that were diametrically opposed; art to them transcended the matters of political debate...the writings of Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, James Clifford, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Griselda Pollock interested me. (15)Trevor Gould's academic and publishing history reveals some parallels with the previous writers. There is, however, one major difference insofar as he never mentioned during his interview any instances of institutional resistance to his theoretical interests. Gould finished his MA in Canadian studies at Carleton University in 1987. His first published work appeared in Parachute in 1981, two years after he finished his undergraduate degree. In the early 1980s there was a shortage of people writing on the visual arts in Ottawa, and Chantal Pontbriand, editor of Parachute, had asked him to write because Philip Fry, a regular contributor to the magazine and a teacher at the University of Ottawa, had recommended him to her. Philip Fry introduced him to Foucault's work for the first time, though Gould had heard Foucault's name mentioned while he was studying sociology in South Africa. As a consequence, Gould read Foucault against the background of his previous research in sociology -a sociology that was itself grounded in a phenomenological and hermeneutic approach. He favoured this approach because he realized that 'traditional art history and aesthetics were very limiting... [because] they never really supplied answers to crucial questions I had. I found their answers too reliant on a formalism that was typified by Michael Fried ... I sought answers through social theory and literary criticism.' (16)
Bruce Grenville completed his MA in art history at Queen's University in 1984. His first article appeared in 1982 in Vanguard magazine. Grenville started writing because there was no one writing about contemporary art in Kingston. He first came across Foucault's The Order of Things while in graduate school when he was doing research for a 1983 catalogue essay on John Clark's work. It was also around this time that he came into contact with French theory when he read Parachute magazine's 1981 anthology, Performance Text(e)s & Documents. It was one text from this anthology, Craig Owen's 'The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism,' which proved to be 'an eye opener, and [which led me to] read everything that was cited in the bibliography.' As in the case of other writers of his generation, Grenville looked outside his department at Queen's because it did not provide the type of theoretical and methodological grounding he wanted nor did it offer courses dedicated to the contemporary work that he wished to write about. According to Grenville:
Queen's was very conservative...I was reading material in art magazines that was an entirely different way of writing about, say, Monet than the professors. Art history there was founded on a type of connoisseurship that came out of the professors who were trained at the Courtauld Institute. There was little interest in contemporary art. As for Foucault, I started with the chapter on 'Las Meninas' in The Order of Things - it stunned me as a means for analysing work.' (17)James Patton obtained his MA in art history from McGill University in 1990. His first article was published three years earlier in Études des Arts. Patton first read Foucault outside of his undergraduate art history studies at the University of Toronto. As in the case of a number of the other Canadian writers working in the late 1970s and 1980s, this shift to the outside was due in large part to the conservative nature of the art history being taught in the department at the time.
The University of Toronto was very conservative with a traditional art historical formulation...a self-reflexive methodology was used to refer to an internal system within the evolution of art practices. Paintings only refer back to other paintings, therefore, they do not refer to broader social or political issues.Carol Williams's educational background, though similar in certain respects to those of the other writers, followed a somewhat different path of development, which led her to complete an MA in the social history of art at the University of Leeds in 1988. She published her first article in Issue approximately two years after completing her undergraduate degree. The completion of her MA was the culmination of a long period of self-initiated research by Williams. It began as a consequence of her hearing Martha Rosler speak at the Banff Centre, where Williams was enrolled in the winter studio program. Hearing Rosler, as well as reading works like Griselda Pollock's 1981 Block article, 'Vision, Voice and Power,' sparked her desire to pursue research into critical feminist writings (a project that was combined with her earlier grass-roots involvement in the women's movement). After Banff, she continued this research while enrolled in the fine arts program at Simon Fraser University. Here, once again, her reading of Marxist-feminist materials was self-initiated, since these materials were not available in the studio arts program of the school at the time. This situation also led her to attend a film studies seminar with the American film theorist and feminist Kaja Silverman. She also took the occasional women's studies course available in other departments because, as she stated, the 'politically engaged material that I was interested in-issues concerning power, the body, and knowledge -was suppressed in the school.' (19) Her first contact with Foucault's work, The Order of Things was by way of her partner Don Gill, who, while studying communications at Simon Fraser University in 1982-83, was reading Foucault. Russell Keziere has, like Carol Williams and others, followed an eccentric path of development that has also included frustration with aspects of his university education. He started an honours BA in English literature at the University of Victoria, completing it in 1975 at the University of Massachusetts. This was followed in 1976 by a one-year period of independent studies in metaphysics at the Seminary of Christ the King in British Columbia. While at university, Keziere pursued minors in art history (medieval art and architecture) and philosophy. However, it was not long before he too became disenchanted with how these disciplines were being practised and taught. Keziere's first published article appeared in a spring 1978 issue of Criteria magazine.At the same time, I was influenced by some friends outside the university context who were reading other things-like Foucault. These friends were outside of the university context in that they had finished their BA's and were working in the subcultural milieu of Queen Street West. Books were being passed around-Foucault was really big-everyone was reading Madness and Civilization. While I was being exposed to this kind of material, I was also reading Parachute... I noticed in the footnotes that people were referring to various authors whose names were coming up...I mean I was not aware of them, but I noticed that similar names were coming up all the time. Reading Foucault and related authors has allowed me to go into other areas of research... my main area of interest being Feminism. (18)
I was in a Benedictine monastery for about a year after graduating from university where I was studying philosophy. I was dissatisfied with the philosophical rigor that I received at university and with the inability of people to take ideas and make them become real in some way. At that time I had been interested in contemporary art which seemed to be a place where one could discuss ideas concerning spirituality and politics-it was a place where ideas could become real and that was probably the reason I became interested in art. It was, in fact, reading an article in Parachute no. 2 on Joseph Beuys. The text made me firstly interested in the artist and, secondly in his mixture of politics, spirituality, and political interventionism. This experience, combined with my personal relations with artists, encouraged me to start writing about art.His first contact with Foucault's work occurred while he was editor of Vanguard magazine: 'I first met Foucault through my writers.... There was a number of people using Foucault around 1979--80-81.' (21)I was looking for a community where people believed what they said seriously enough for it to change their lives. There was something about their model of life - the way an artist does, or the way a poet does - of integrity. I just didn't see it in the people that were teaching philosophy and art history at school. Foucault's work is to engage - he follows in that existentialist model of John Paul Sartre - the political French intellectual. This was something that I did not have at university. This being the model of the integrated intellectual. (20)
Philip Monk completed a BA at the University of Manitoba in 1972, after which he obtained an MA in art history at the University of Toronto in 1978. His first published article, on David Rabinowitch, appeared in a 1977 issue of Parachute magazine. As in the case of some of the other writers, he became dissatisfied with the traditional discipline of art history, especially with regard to contemporary art and the conservative way that art history was approached in general. Monk said:
Before I finished the MA, I became dissatisfied with the conservative nature of the way art history was approached at the university. My interest in contemporary art was always there - it was then that I decided that I did not want to continue on in art history and I started to write on art.Monk is not certain about the exact time when he first read Foucault's work, although it may have developed in the context of an emerging 'general interest in all the new critical material [French writing],' which he became aware of after he left the University of Manitoba in 1974. While he may or may not have read his work at this time, there is more certainty about the context in which his interest in Foucault would have begun to develop since, as he pointed out, 'it emerged in the context of a lot of other things.'I was interested in contemporary art for a long time before grad school which had submerged that interest-there were no contemporary courses there.
At that time I decided that I was most interested in writing. I say writing - not necessarily criticism - as just another outcome of thinking about art. It was more a way to continue to think about art. (22)
For instance, when all the other critical theories were being published or translated. So if it started about the time when in becoming dissatisfied with the program at university, then would have been around the time of the mid 1970s-certainly by 1977 I would have been interested in him. (23)Heather Dawkins completed a BFA at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in 1980, followed by an MA in the social-history of art from the University of Leeds in 1984, and a PhD at Leeds in art history in 1990. Her first published works appeared in a 1983 issue of Parachute magazine, in student art magazines, and in a local feminist newspaper in Halifax, Women's Words. Her first contact with Foucault's writings came at NSCAD, where 'most everyone was reading him.' However, her interest in his work was a result of her involvement in producing a performance with another person on sexuality in 1981-82: 'I was interested in Foucault because of gay and lesbian politics.' (24)
Philip Fry, is the only major exception to the above pattern, since his first contact with Foucault's work did not occur within the Canadian context. He completed his doctorate at the Université de Paris (Sorbonne) in the philosophy of art in 1968, under the direction of Jean Grenier. For Fry, 'the central issue has always been, and still remains, the question of the limits of rational thought and the function of poetic expression.' This was a question that was the conclusion of a difficult process of personal evolution that started when, as a Catholic priest, Fry came into direct conflict with ecclesiastical authority. According to Fry:
The overriding thing was that I ran into the problem of authority directly head on and had to try and deal with ecclesiastiacal authority as being an official interpreter of a certain kind of word. The work that I had been doing with biblical hermeneutics inside the church led me to understand that there was a kind of fluidity to this type of language. It led me to believe that biblical texts are poetic texts. (25)Outside of the primary importance of this early work in biblical hermeneutics and his interest in Roman Jakobson and John Cohen, Fry stressed the importance of Foucault for his work, and the assistance that it provided to early structuralism in its attempt to rethink semiological/structural analysis.
We were stuck in first generation structuralism. It was a plodding, mechanical type. We had to find a way of carrying on with a rational investigation of sign-systems, but be able to do it in such a way that we would seat it somewhere other than for example in the problematics of the double articulation. Then Foucault comes out with a way of reading different disciplines and their manner of functioning and the text. The Archaeology of Knowledge, it was something that fit because it helped me to assess one of my main problematics-the problem of space- why spaces have values. I was more and more convinced that objects and space relate to each other-they generate their own shapes in regard to each other. (26)If we separate the questions of when, and under what conditions, these writers first read Foucault's work from when each writer first started to write outside the university, then, I would argue, the institutional context of the university provides two possible answers as to why there is a time differential between the first appearance of a number of Foucault's most important early writings in translation, and that period in which most of these writers began to publish work on the visual arts. First, there is, for a number of the writers, the lack of any early exposure to Foucault's work within their respective art history departments. Second, the year 1977 marks the beginning of the time period during which (with the exception of Fry and Klepac) Philip Monk, Russell Keziere, and Scott Watson began to publish. The other writers within my sample began to publish during the 1980s. Therefore, 1977 to 1987 is a significant period- it is when these writers were finishing their university studies. At the most obvious level of analysis, in passing through a particular system of university education, all the writers had to have spent time digesting and reacting to the intellectual material to which they had been exposed, and the institutional settings in which they worked. Furthermore, with the exception of those individuals who had to leave and return at a later date to complete their degrees, this time period would also have been a direct function of the minimum and maximum time required to complete undergraduate and graduate degrees. Virtually all of the writers that I examined published their first article somewhere near the date of completion of their undergraduate or graduate degrees.
There is, however, another significant reason for this time-lag, and this is, of course, the perceived lack of publishing venues for the sort of material that these writers were interested in. Only Paper Today (originally Proof Only, which was published by A Space, Toronto's first parallel gallery) and Artist's Review were founded in 1973-74 and 1977 respectively, while Criteria emerged initially as an insert in the Vancouver Art Gallery newsletter Vanguard in 1974. Vanguard became a separate national art magazine as of February 1979, while Parachute began in 1975. I use the term 'perceived' here because, as Klepac has noted, before the appearance of serials like Parachute, or Artist's Review, there were few existing venues for the types of material that some writers wished to publish. Of those that did exist, one of the most important was Arts Canada, and it posed problems for some writers who were interested in specific kinds of contemporary art:
In the early 1970s a number of us [writers] were interested in art, and this interest eventually led to the emergence of Only Paper Today. We were looking for a place to publish. This short lived publication, along with Artist's Review, was important to a number of new writers. One of the most profound publishing events in this context was the emergence of Parachute, in particular the difference between issue one, and issue two.As for Arts Canada, it was still a place where you could for taken seriously ... the catch was you couldn't do what you wanted to do. You were given assignments-when I asked to write about certain people, I was not allowed to do them. (For instance, in the case of a lot, though not all of the people associated with Carmen Lamanna's gallery and Isaacs.) The editorial attitude at Arts Canada was very limiting. It was a situation that everyone was aware of. Consequently, when Parachute appeared, it was like a thaw. I had my reservations about Parachute but it opened things up a lot. (27)
Why engage in an anti-phenomenological enterprise, especially when phenomenological processes must be used to deconstruct themselves? Because of the limitations and questionability of phenomenology some of the problems of which Michel Foucault has outlined: 'If there is one approach that I do reject, however, it is that (one might call it, broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity - which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness.' (28)In Heather Dawkins's 1986 article 'Paul Kane and the Eye of Power: Racism in Canadian Art History,' there is a broader use of Foucault's work. This is closer to a genealogically grounded historical analysis, which, in examining selected aspects of Paul Kane's work, is actually directed at the then current institutional and educational context of Canadian art history. This article was a product of her participation in two conferences held in 1985, the 'Feminism and Art Symposium' held in Toronto and the conference of the University Art Association of Canada. In it she argues that issues of racism, sexism, and cultural imperialism cannot be dealt with adequately, if at all, until the current institutional framework for the training of art historians and the methodological norms that underwrite that training are changed, since such norms reflect 'its universalizing, ahistorical, conflict-free, and object-privileging assumptions.' (29)
Foucault's work is deployed extensively in the course of her argument when, for example, Dawkins remarks that the archive that is represented by Kane's visual and written production forms neither a realist document nor a subjective perception of Indian culture, inasmuch as it is 'implicated in, and constitutive of power.' According to Dawkins, Kane's work can be better understood against the historical background of the shift in power relations that commenced during the early eighteenth century, when monarchic power gave way to a highly decentralized, rationalized form of power relations instantiated within the discursive and institutional practices of 'surveillance, discipline and the production of knowledge.' The critical heart of her examination of Kane's work is clearly outlined in the last paragraph of the article, where, in a classically Foucauldian manner, she argues that
To write this history does not retrieve a nineteenth-century other but it refuses the benevolence customarily accorded to Kane's work in Canadian art history.... That work, of changing social relations and changing knowledges, is crucial to the disruption and transformation of the concepts and the languages of racism in this culture. As the symposium recognised, such questions should not be seen as a healthy alternative that merely revitalizes art history. Rather, they are of central importance in art history as a political practice, as part of the transformation of knowledge and behaviours that is cultural politics. (30)However, beyond these more obvious theoretical and argumentative functions, there is another perspective from which we can examine Monk's and Dawkins's use of Foucault's work. Both writers were educated within an Anglo-American university system. As we all know, the use of selected quotations to bolster arguments is a practice typical of academic writing, where the citation of sources and the use of supporting material like direct quotes are an accepted methodological and argumentative component of the writing of research papers. Furthermore, this merely reflects the deeper discursive-institutional practice of reasoned argumentation, where one draws upon, critiques, and rereads sections from other discourses as one attempts to construct background sets of theoretical premises that ground each writer's arguments. Consequently, their citations may have as much to do with the academic practice of critical-analytical writing as with their interest in the research activity that is represented by Foucault's own critical writing. This point may also be extended to the other writers, given that in this group eleven completed their MAs, two their PhDs, one her MFA, and two their BAs.
This relationship between Monk's and Dawkins's educational background, academic writing practices, and work is important. The concept of 'work' (31) refers, on the one hand, to a much broader socio-institutional context that is connected to the availability of options, inasmuch as each writer may have had to, at some time, perform teaching, curatorial, editorial, art critical, or art historical roles for a wide range of institutions on either a part-time, freelance, or full-time basis. As a consequence, each writer's ability to practise is a function of her or his respective teleological interests and the work he or she could obtain. On the other hand, there is the disciplinary-academic component. Traditionally the typical sociological model of 'professions' ('occupational groups') has had four formal characteristics: '1) a body of esoteric knowledge...2) monopoly- that is, recognition of the exclusive competence...in the domain to which the body of knowledge refers; 3) autonomy or control by the profession over its work, including who can legitimately do that work and how that work should be done; 4) a service ideal.' (32) When examining the social actions of Canadian writers, the interrelation between education, work, and the issues of knowledge, monopoly, and autonomy or control by the profession must be taken into account because these relations provide one of the major structural contexts that frame their decisions and actions. The career development of each writer was circumscribed by various socio-institutional contexts where, depending on the nature of these contexts, the disciplinary-academic component could have been important insofar as 'a body of esoteric knowledge' is of primary significance with regard to this component. I would suggest that each writer would have had to control a development process with respect to their careers that required them to negotiate paths of accommodation and 'resistance' (33) as they attempted to locate themselves within the Canadian art world. The work of Michel Foucault, or (in the case of Carol Williams) Martha Rosler and Griselda Pollock, provided other critical positions and bodies 'of esoteric knowledge' that would have set in motion the constitutive transformation of localized settings in that art world when the teleological interests of someone like Williams intersect with the work of a Foucault or a Pollock.
While this paper has concentrated on the work of Foucault and the type of 'esoteric knowledge' represented by that work, it is also obvious that Foucault's role is often matched, or surpassed, by the role of authors such as Benjamin, Rosler, Adorno, Derrida, and Owen. This situation is demonstrated, in part, by the presence of an extremely number of citations of non-Canadian authors in the works of all fifteen Canadian writers. (34) More significantly, when Canadian writers are cited, they typically function as secondary sources citing the work of the non-Canadian writers. When viewed against the background of the overlapping socio-institutional contexts of resistances and careers, this pattern points to an interesting historical situation. I would suggest that these non-Canadian authors helped to provide a number of Canadian writers with differing argumentive frameworks whereby these Canadians could intellectually and socially integrate into the Canadian art world.
The help provided by the translations of the work of these authors only accounts, however, for one major aspect of this process of integration. At exactly the same time as this material appeared on the market, there also occurred a massive and very rapid expansion of the institutional structures of the art world. Consequently, when each writer left school, or was nearing completion of his or her studies, there was either already in place, or being developed, a number of new alternative, or revised, institutional work venues. It is one of the central arguments of this paper that this development was, along with other factors, a function of the Massey-Lévesque commission's 'two approaches' counter-proposal concerning education. This led, on the one hand, to the huge increase in exhibition and writing venues, and, on the other hand, to the concurrent increase in secondary and post-secondary education venues. Furthermore, as a consequence of these increases, the commission's report also helped to bring about the transformation of writing in Canada on the visual arts, insofar as its ideological support of the humanistic-academic concept of education contained in its proposal helped to foster both the professionalization and 'academic' restructuring of that writing.
Notes
1. The importance of translations cannot be underestimated
insofar as all the anglophone writers, with the exception of one,
relied exclusively on translations of Foucault's work. Moreover,
during my research I found that translations of the work of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Barthes, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Lacan,
and Kristeva, the writers most commonly cited by those Canadian
writers using Foucault's work, all began to appear in print from
the-middle 1960s on. This, as we shall see, precisely parallels what
I consider to be the most important time period for English-Canadian writers reading Foucault's work- 1965--75.
2. Interview with Philip Monk by Tim Clark, 1991.
3. Interview with James Patton by Tim Clark, 1991.
4. Walter Klepac, "The Order of Words The Order of Things: Deconstruction in Contemporary Art," C Magazine (Fall 1984): 42.
5. Ibid., 43.
6 Interview with Walter Klepac by Tim Clark, 1990.
7. The importance of these serials is further supported by the
fact that of the 390 texts published in periodicals by the thirty
authors using Foucault's work, I found that 36 per cent of them
appeared in Vanguard, 26 per cent in Parachute, and 10 per cent in C Magazine.
8. Diana P.C. Nemiroff, A History of Artist-Run Spaces in
Canada, with Particular Reference to Vehicule, A Space and the
Western Front (masters thesis, Concordia University, 1985), 6.
9. Mar O, Brice, A Profile of the Museum Sector in Canada
(Ottawa: Research and Statistics Directorate, Arts and Culture
Branch, Secretary of State, 1979), 9.
10. Paul D. Schafer, Aspects of Canadian Cultural Policy (Paris:
UNESCO, 1976), 49.
11. Joan Horseman, The Arts and Education (Toronto: Canadian Conference of the Arts, 1975), 6.
12. Ibid., 2, 3.
13. Interview with Scott Watson by Tim Clark, 1990.
14. Interview with Robert Graham by Tim Clark, 1990.
15. Interview with Marnie Fleming by Tim Clark, 1990.
16. Interview with Trevor Gould by Tim Clark, 1990.
17. Interview with Bruce Grenville by Tim Clark, 1990.
18. Interview with James Patton by Tim Clark, 1990.
19. Interview with Carol Williams by Tim Clark, 1990.
20. Interview with Russett keziere by Tim Clark, 1991
21. Ibid.
22. Interview with Philip Monk by Tim Clark, 1991
23. Ibid.
24. Interview with Heather Dawkins by Tim Clark, 1991.
25. Interview with Philip Pry by Tim Clark, 1990.
26. Ibid.
27. Interview with Walter Klepac by Tim Clark, 1991
28. Philip Monk, "Structures for Behavior," Parachute, 12
(Autumn 1978): 21, 25.
29. Heather Dawkins, "Paul Kane and the Eys of Power:
Racism in Canadian Art History," Vanguard, 15, me. 4 (September
1988); 24.
30.1bid., 27.
31. Jan Goldstein, "Foucault among the Sociologists: The 'Disciplines' and the History of the Professions," History and Theory, 23 (1981): 175.
32. Ibid.
33. Interview with Heather Dawkins by Tim Clark, 1991.
34. In a citation analysis of work by Canadian writers who reference Foucault, I calculated the percentage of non-Canadian to
Canadian authors cited ten or more times out of a total of 1208
eitations. Of that total the following non-Canadians were cited
(37%) 442 times: Foucault, Barthes, Benjamin, Derrida, Lacan,
Baudrillard, Krauss, Lyotard, Crimp, Buchloh, Deleuze, Kristeva,
Adorno, Guattari, Jakobson, Marx and Bataille. The following
Canadian writers were cited (3%) 42 times: Monk, Wallace and
Payant.