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Framing the year in art >> From the streets of Soho to the world of video by KEITH MARCHAND As a shiny new year beckons to us like some sort of shiny, new, beckoning thing, we must pause briefly to reflect on the year in art. For starters, Montreal held its first Biennale, a couple of new galleries opened, and the Belgo and the 460 buildings on Ste-Catherine continued to flourish. Our non-commercial/parallel galleries are still some of the best run on the continent and our Maisons de la culture program is still going full bore. The following is a compendium of some interesting moments in galleryland for the Year of our Lord, 1998. However, due to the restrictive nature of this sort of shortlisting, this is by no means an exhaustive account of the year in art. Keith Haring
Artifice 98: Contemporary Visual Arts Montreal Mounted by the Saidye Bronfman Centre during the summer, this was the follow up to the Artifice show held two years ago that attracted 22,000 visitors--a staggering number for a contemporary art exhibition. This second edition of Artifice was presented on an even larger scale with 50 artists selected from Montreal, Toronto, Quebec City and Ottawa. Placed in highly accessible areas--vacant retail spaces in the downtown area such Ste-Catherine and the Cours Mont-Royal--the curators once again reached an audience who would not normally get to see cutting-edge contemporary art. The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life This year the Canadian Centre for Architecture hosted a long-running exhibition that looked into North America's obsession with the manicured lawn. The American Lawn examined the incredible and slightly terrifying impact the lawn has had on our lives and culture. Featured was just about anything to do with lawn care and accessories. Objects were presented like exhibits in a natural history museum: visitors could examine an assortment of lawn-mowers, cleated sport shoes, sample swatches of natural and artificial turf accompanied by their particular patents and a peppering of excellent photographs by the likes of Cindy Sherman, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand. There was also a room with a constant screening of film excerpts by David Lynch, Atom Egoyan and John Carpenter. Miss Lonelyhearts: Brigitte Radecki Running until early September at Concordia's Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery was a witty and well-presented exhibition by Montreal-based artist Brigitte Radecki. The show featured 15 paintings by the artist, paired with verse scrawled directly onto the walls of the gallery. The text itself was based upon Nathanael West's satirical novel, Miss Lonelyhearts; the canvases were loosely based on the art of the Modernist painters. By using Modernist painting and displaying it alongside West's text, Radecki forced narrative onto a traditionally non-narrative element--exposing the limited capacity, of both text and painting, to communicate. Gary Hill
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Although his neon-coloured images on Soho T-shirts became the '80s symbol of the goofy tourist, Keith Haring's influence on art and art-marketing cannot be denied. Continuing until January 10 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art is a retrospective which includes more than 140 works taken from his early career up to his death from AIDS at the age of 31. Haring became famous by the age of 25, mostly through his obsessive graffiti around New York; he was one of the true artstars of the 1980s and few have ever achieved the universal recognition that he maintains. The circumstances of Haring's life and career just about sum up the '80s art scene in New York.
Reflecting Montreal's fascination with technology and art was an exhibition by one of the best installation artists in the business. The work of American video/installation artist Gary Hill was presented in the spring at the Musée d'art contemporain. Composed of six video installations and a selection of videos, the exhibition summarized the last 10 years of his remarkable career. Hill differs from many video artists in the relative simplicity of his work. Using media such as strobe lights, mirrors and video projectors, Hill toys with reality--both virtual and physical. Gary Hill remains one of the few tech-related artists who is more interested with the final product than electronic navel-gazing.