Last March, Ydessa Hendeles gave this presentation to a symposium on Canadian Art History, which was broadcast on CBC’s Artstoday, and from which Sally McKay got an audio file, which she posted on her blog at the time. I got this transcription done over the past couple of days. – Timothy

The questions started with ‘does contemporary Canadian art have a history?’ Everything has a history, every object, every creature, every place, every discourse. The questions are, ‘who knows about it?’ and ‘who has the power to affect it?’

Art history is a conglomerate of narratives, from many places with many players. There are leaders and followers and an audience. Who watches from close up and who from farther away also matters. The question I believe this panel will address is, ‘who validates our several Canadian histories’, since there is no one clear national identity. There’s a different dialogue in every city, every province, and every part of the country. Regardless, as these histories unfold, a market, primary and secondary, fair or unfair, plays a critical and powerful position in proposing and conferring status on art, which affects how our history is assessed here and elsewhere.

Is it a Canadian history or a subset of international art history?
Some areas of Canadian art are rooted in magazine reproductions of art and read that way as derivative, but the most consequential Canadian art provides a rich and formative history, indeed, several definitive histories across the land including a special and unique aboriginal history. Regrettably these are not histories that are known much outside the country, they have yet to be mined.

There have been exhibitions of Canadian art in Europe, but these early exposures did not yield much fruit, as prominent prosperous dealers in America or Europe did not respond and take up the causes of these artists. More widely visible is the reverse. Canadian museum acknowledgements of the action of the art world across the Atlantic, most notably in the exhibition, The European Ice Berg presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1985. But the cost traumatized the institution. When I approached the curator of this extravaganza, Germano Celant, a decade later and asked if he’d be willing to come up again and do something that would integrate Canadian art, he replied without missing a beat, “Sure, I’ll call it the Canadian Ice Cube”.

Canadian artists who have achieved superstar status internationally are a relatively new phenomenon. There has been the occasional Canadian artist who has succeeded globally while still living in Canada, but these cases are mainly rare. Even though resident Canadian artists have not often succeeded internationally, times are changing. It is not only possible, but critical for Canadians to make an effort to build relationships with artists and curators outside our national borders. It is the nature of expression to have urgency and seek out as large an audience as possible. There is an instinctually driven, naturally generated curiosity for dialogue. I don’t mean that artists should look for their audience in a careerist, strategic way, as has been the root taken by some artists who have developed career skills and have modest successes resulting from their manipulations. Relationships work best when works are authentic expressions that are not made for strategic purposes of capitalizing upon already existing subjects of discourse. Connections come out of spontaneous desire by two parties to connect, to learn about each other in some depth. Networking opens doors, but should not determine the content of the art. To me some of its originality is compromised if it serves a purpose to please. The best of work creates a desire rather than fulfils one.

Is international the measure of achievement for Canadian art?
An art work certainly acquires an added layer of seductive appeal and prestige in any country when supported outside its national borders. Americans wooed Europeans and vice-versa to their mutual benefit. The larger an audience for work, the greater the impact that work can have on culture. But internationalism as a measure of achievement for Canadian art is only one denominator of success. It’s not the ultimate assessment of the merit of a body of work, because so much of success during an artist’s lifetime both, locally and internationally, comes from luck, in connections, timing, and promotion. These factors matter hugely in what gets seen, and supported inside and outside the country. International visibility is like a Rubic’s cube. All the components have to fit together in just the right way.

If internationalism is important, what role do our institutions play in supporting Canadian art at home?
Museums are by definition conservative. They conserve, mindful of their responsibility as authenticators and keepers of history. This challenges their role at the forefront of contributions to culture because it is difficult and risky to separate what is new and interesting at any one moment from what might ultimately be influential over the long term. While museums are participants in making history by validating art, they have to maintain their position of authority by resisting minor trends and instead choose works that relate to both the individual regional vision of their collections and support works that their curators determine will ultimately affect the course of international visual history from their particular perspective. Museums in each country should not all have the same art in them. Because of the many variables that determine what enters a public collection, it is therefore not easy to define how early museums should support contemporary art. Wealth is a very critical factor in exhibitions and acquisitions. Museums mostly miss out on purchasing seminal works because financial restraints withhold them from responding when they might like to. Some collecting museums, to resolve the issue of timeliness have resorted to showing prominent private collections but this has recently backfired. Indeed, the collecting museum’s authority can easily be corrupted by the market place.

For example, the display of the Saatchi collection in the show Sensation resulted in a scandal at the Brooklyn Museum. Apart from the vitriolic objections to the content by then Mayor Rudi Guilani, who threatened to cut off the museum’s funding because of the use of elephant dung as a material component with glitters on it in a portrait of the Madonna, the persistent controversial issue is the commercial gain later won by the collector as his works were subsequently put up for sale and made huge profits. The trustees of the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Gallery, both major collecting museums, responded by taking the position that they will not show a private collector’s art collection.

So with that form of display now off limits the context in which contemporary art is shown in further narrowed. Like the separation of Church and State, there is and should be, a boundary between commerce and art. Neither a collector nor a corporation should be able to capitalize financially from the sale of a collection that comes directly from being promoted by a public museum. There are other issues of conflict of interest that impede artists works from being exhibited in collecting institutions. Over time, with decreased funding, the museums had to function as much like a business as an educational, insightful venue for scholarship, leading to an increase in shows on design, some featuring motorcycles and celebrating fashion magnates. As well as a new breed of collectors with more dynamic social skills than art historical knowledge to enable exhibitions to be funded, further lowering the standard of insightful exhibitions. As displays of easy entertainment help the coffers of collecting museums, these then provide additional competition for serious shows of contemporary art, which is yet another compromise to the focus on the newest and most influential, provocative, and rigorous of visual artworks. This tighter financial climate makes visibility harder for artists everywhere.

Is contemporary Canadian art only for Canadians?
Regardless of the challenge of changing economics, contemporary Canadian art provides a valuable heritage that provides a resource of insight into the course the country has traveled in its relatively short history. Though more submerged in the international dialog then would be preferred, it is there, and still gives those of us who seek it out a perspective on what it means to be here and indeed, where is here, an especially difficult notion to identify besides the behemoth below the border. The good news is that our history is becoming known internationally, as more and more people from here are interacting with there and sharing what has and is happening here. It is no longer necessary for artists to flee to reside in a major art centre outside the country to be visible and join into the dialogue. It is now appreciated that one can live in Canada and still be on the world’s stage, one can finally function from here. I think it is important to add to the fabric of the art world, expanding its realm, to radiate from the historical global centres. It is this that I have chosen to do.