0 good, 0 Montreal ARTS
BRYAN ROBERTSON
An artist called Jean Louis makes from plastic, in shallow relief on the wall, large cloud-like shapes, softly rounded in contour, which appear to swell up from a curved stick: this burgeon- ing apparition wholly in mildly reflective, polished red with a pale yellow silhouette. After a time it no longer looks like a bent cigarette with smoke, all in one form, but orchidaceous—and zing, it's a flower. On the floor, by the same man, is a sprawlingly solid shape in emerald green, quite big, fairly deep; around its sides, its depth, is a meandering wide blue edge, blazing blue because it suddenly lights up at the same moment as the circum- scribed green area—an island, which crystal- lises with its glow of concealed illumination all the magical isolation of islands and their secrets: Robinson Crusoe, Long John Silver . . . blue-green, sea and scrub, map-making: aerial vistas.
Another artist, Kiyooka, has made a triptych sixteen feet long, five feet high, the three panels equal in width: all suffused in smoky lilac- blue light radiating from the painted surface which is matt, exactly even in density. But after a while a number of sharp, thinly edged oval shapes, not quite perfect ovals, detach themselves like eggs from that vaporous blue space, registered only by the just-perceptibly agitated dry texture of their paint which separates itself from the more smoothly painted surrounding areas. Variations in natural light throw the surface into scarcely accented relief. At each vertical end of the long painting the receding sides are pure, thin vermilion: the same high-pitched red is narrowly, barely, reflected within the slight gaps marking the two intersections between the three panels. At each of the twelve corners of this floating, shimmer- ing triptych is a curving arch of pale 'green, hardly there, like an after-image, but gravely, ceremoniously precise in delineation and work- ing splendidly with the blues and red. This huge painting is Japanese all right, though called Homage to Ben Nicholson. The maestro would welcome such a salute, one feels, so discreet in modulation, so reticent in the mur- muring interplay between the two blues, different only through calm as opposed to more animated surfaces. . . . Those ovals moving across the surface, as well as vertically and diagonally, scarcely disturb the atmosphere, though the deliberation of their placement evokes a more than visual response.
Elsewhere, an eighteen-feet-tall, slim white cylindrical column rears up from the ground and suddenly swells out, two thirds of the way up, into narrow spiralling bands which then re-enter the column and disappear into its suave vertical progress: Hugh Leroy made this one and it's great, a fair but independent match for Phillip King. Near by, twice man- sized, transparent round columns and square or rectangular tanks in asymmetrically related positions are exactly trapped between a white platform and a white ceiling: the whole like a maharajah's dais, but rectangular. The columns and tanks, of varying proportions, narrow or broad, suddenly begin to fill with violet, orange, blue, green, red and yellow
fluids: some descending, others ascending, rising or flooding down at varying speeds, quick or fast. The levels change continuously, extending the abstract formality of the con- cept: a roar of irregular, staccato or con- tinuous sound rushes out, human voices, natural sounds—the white platform and ceiling come alight, the coloured liquids themselves also light up, some begin to bubble, others flow evenly. Michael Hayden's Intersystems made this one.
Well, we are not at the Bangkok inter- national Biennale but in Canada, and this is some idea of what hits the unsuspecting visitor on his first steps inside the art world. I was there recently and could not have been more surprised at the innate sophistication, invention and sheer poetry of the best Canadian art. Forebodings of provincialism or worthy dull- ness are instantly dispatched. We'd better for- get, quickly, the old adage frequently levelled at Canada about a lack of national identity: there's a Canadian style, all right, which at its strongest and purest makes much present American art look distinctly folksy, or at least arch, like us advertising.
Asked to form a collection of contemporary Canadian art for the Ontario part of the Centennial for $100,000 (imagine us inviting an ignorant foreigner over here to make a similar gesture), I found it a pleasure. Expo 67, for one thing, was a visual knockout, marking the artistic and technological com- ing-of-age of Canadians. It marked also what I honestly thought I'd never live to see: the real vindication and triumph of modern art, so often accused of remoteness or unreality. The rubbish bins, for instance, would have delighted Brancusi. The rooftops at the funfair were made of multicoloured, iridescent plexiglass and aluminium in abstract shapes: stunning, and enough to send any avant-garde young sculptor, anywhere, hurtling back to his studio to pull down the blinds and lock the doors.
So what's on the go, as they say, what's it all about? There is the obvious fact that Canadian artists are part of an expanding society with some kind of a believable, and optimistic, future to work towards. There is also the fact that Canadians are still idealistic, uncorrupted by that surfeit of achievement and cultural or technical glamour which is making the Americans these days so blasé— and self-defensively insular in their standards. If the actual number of Canadian artists mak- ing original or remarkable objects is modest, it's still a high percentage for that small population: in its national entirety slightly less than London's. On the other hand, the general level of authenticity is high. Canadian art is now something to reckon with.
Tonic as it is to find these unexpected dis- closures, and on such a scale, I'm bothered in case the situation, at present innocent and isolated, should be undermined in the same way that Australian_ art was a decade ago. Canadian artists and their commercial or official sponsors would be well advised to be highly selective in dealing with overtures from this country: exploitation could spoil the chances.– of acceptance here, though I don't believe this will come from their side so much as ours. Critics, dealers and officials here and else- where are just beginning to be alive to the strange scene in Canada and to its possibilities. I'm greatly encouraged by the fact that their equivalents to our Arts Council or _British Council personnel are mostly exceptionally young, direct in perception, well informed and very able to steer a course. They're also used to lavish expenditure on the most radical pro- jects conceivable; they like their official oppo- site numbers here, but think them rather conservative in what they back and support. As art comes under education in Canada, with the next fiscal year yielding several billions of dollars for Ontario alone (yes), they've got the laugh on us in other ways as well. With youth at the helm and all that money, my concern is probably misplaced. Our own official art- compass is twenty years behind theirs; most of us at work in the art field here panic at the itbought of any sum over f50—I hope they can hear this, through their fur caps, in Whitehall and St James's Square.
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