There are many reasons why the Canadian Government’s proposed anti-pornography legislation, as tabled in Bill C-54, will make for bad law. In attempting to do too much at once, and to satisfy simultaneously too many constituencies, the government is creating for itself new powers in the control of discourse which are not only potentially abusive, but even as presently composed and intended contain reprehensible notions of state authority.
The cultural support organizations established in Canada since the Second World War have reached a stage of maturity which makes them now available for historical analysis.
The art publication artscanada (1943-1982) is identified, in this work, as an institution whose origin and development can be viewed as illuminating the terms of formation and operation which have shaped national arts organizations and the policies which brought them into being and to which they remain related.
As a professional group, landscape architects and designers are among the most conservative and least expected to display in their work that potential for critical thought which aids the negotiation of history. An archaic interest in gardening or non-agricultural cultivation represents a quietist or reclusive urge — “tending to your own garden” is the very motto of a retiring privatism, while Nietzche identified and posited the garden as a social space antinomous to the flux and chaos of the market place.
As is now well known, when the Canadian government originally announced its intention to abandon and effectively destroy the activities and collection of the Stills division of the National Film Board, the ensuing protest of the photographic community was sufficient to cause the authorities to reconsider.
In a decade of photographic art activity, Sorel Cohen has produced a body of work which displays an uncommonly clear logic of development and consistency, concentrated in only a few separate project series, and culminating in the presentation of the current exhibition. During this same decade, feminist art (as a category, purpose and orientation) has become accepted, and accepted in the same way that feminism (in all its variety) itself has been – not as a fulfilled program, but as an irrevocable dimension of any discussion of social relations.
It shows great wit that the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, a young institution descendant of the National Film Board and its documentary tradition, should sponsor the exhibition of a photographer whose work stands apart from and questions that tradition. Serving as a challenge, a critique and a correction, Donigan Cumming’s Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography appears at a time of epistemological anxiety when representations are viewed as the arbitrary tokens and worthless baubles of communicative exchange.
As has been said of the pyramids, that their construction is as much a monument to Egyptian administration as a triumph of ancient engineering, so does this show present both visual delight and a model of organizational innovation.
The problem of the counterfeit (and of fashion) was born with the Renais sance, with the dé structuration of the feudal order and the emergence of open competition at the level of distinctive signs… With the end of the bound sign, the reign of the
Over the last two decades, both installation and contemporary photography were empowered by a suspicion of the cult of the marketable art object — specifically, the commodity fetish. Yet, while historically contiguous, and often sharing a common audience, the strategies of the two modes are completely different.
The exhibition of collections differs from other exhibitions in that rather than being organized by unities of origin — individuals, schools, periods, nations, etc. — a collection forms a group of works defined by their destination : the location of their arrival and reception. Collections of contemporary art differ, again, from those of past art by reason of the coextensivity of creation and receipt.