Fillip

Upon Further Reflection
Michael Turner and Reid Shier

Michael Turner – At the beginning of his essay Artist-Run Centres in Vancouver: A Reflection on Three Texts, Keith Wallace reminds us of the historic inadequacies of Vancouver’s public and private art institutions in order to discuss artist-run centres (ARCs) as “alternative” structures that “represented resistance to commercialism,” where “art function[ed] as a philosophical or political enterprise, a practice.”1 Further on he tells us that “it was not really anticipated that those ARCs would still be functioning today [forty years later],” an assertion that gave me pause for thought, particularly in light of Vancouver writers and artists such as Deanna Ferguson, Keith Higgins, Laiwan, and Phil McCrum who, as ARC builders, believed in the enduring potential of these institutions, and perhaps still do. Because you were exhibiting at ARCs back then (in the ’80s and ’90s), and because these artists are your contemporaries, I was wondering if you share Wallace’s perspective that ARCs and artists were but ships passing in the night?

Reid Shier – Few of the first generation of artists exhibiting in ARCs, or indeed those artists among them responsible for setting them up, were, to my knowledge, as interested in creating alternatives to the commercial art system as they were simply in making space. Weren’t most ARCs initiated primarily because no other spaces were showing the kind of critically oriented or experimental work that younger artists were engaging at the time? In the late 1970s through the mid 1980s, when the vast majority of established ARCs began, and as Wallace rightly points out, there were few commercial or public spaces showing contemporary work. I would argue that just because ARCs were a vehicle for “alternative” practices doesn’t mean they were spaces where alterity was developed, or, by extension, were vehicles of “resistance.” That discourse may have taken place within their walls, but I think ARCs were, and remain, primarily exhibition spaces, or in the case of a space like Vancouver’s grunt gallery—which more presciently than any other ARC inhabits a role as a community hub—an entrepreneurial social enterprise. Given the choice today, most artists wouldn’t prioritize showing in an ARC over a commercial space. Had they the same option thirty years ago, would anything be different?

Turner – Wallace was active in the Vancouver art 
scene thirty years ago. Which is why his comment (“It was not really anticipated that those ARCs would still be functioning today.”) is puzzling. In all my early-1990s conversations with 
the artist-founder-landlords of the Western Front 
(a Fluxus-influenced, multidisciplinary art centre in Vancouver) not once did I get the impression that they saw the ARC era ending. Nor during 
my conversations with Laiwan, founder of the 
Or Gallery, whose characterization of ARCs as an alternative or parallel structure echoes Wallace’s. Nor with Deanna Ferguson and Phil McCrum, who once told me how fellow Kootenay School of Writing (KSW) members Jeff Derksen and Nancy Shaw maintained that the KSW and their visual art affiliate, Artspeak gallery, provided their members with a cultural alternative to academia, only to announce in the mid ’90s that they were leaving town to do their PhDs. Nor with Keith Higgins, who in 2000 asked his fellow Artspeak board members (of which I was one), “Do we need to keep growing for growth’s sake?”


These are not speculations but instances where certain artists saw ARCs as philosophical spaces, and I believe they believe(d) in their political and economic autonomy, just as I believe that as time unfolded—“time” as measured by the ongoing informal conversation that is art in Vancouver—they recognized the limitations of these beliefs, as well as the ARCs’ willingness to engage with public and private galleries. Wallace says as much at the end of his introductory remarks in Fillip 12 with a comment on Vancouver ARCs showing eastern Canadian artists “represented by private galleries in Toronto...a convergence that brought into question the ARC claim of representing an alternative.”2 From there, he turns to a reading of our essays in Vancouver Art and Economies.3

Leaving aside for a moment your own speculation that artists today do not distinguish between a commercial space and an ARC (and, as you said earlier, “Had they the option thirty years ago, would things be any different?”), I would like to address what you said regarding Wallace’s point about ARCs as sites where “alterity was developed.” This is something that comes up early in his reading of our essays, which he has reduced to two points: first, that the distinction between public and private galleries and ARCs has become “increasingly ambiguous;” and second, that “curatorial practices, formerly the specialized domain of museums and public galleries, have become increasingly entrenched within both ARCs and private galleries.”4 The operative word here is “increasingly,” as if ARCs have mutated from a pure form (the perfect “other?”) into something corrupted by market forces, as indeed 
I make clear in my essay that what is happening today was happening in Vancouver’s private galleries forty-five years ago, beginning with the transition of Alvin Balkind and Abe Rogatnick’s New Design Gallery (1955­–66) into a not-for-profit “arts club,” before the gallery’s subsequent amalgamation into Doug Christmas’s Douglas Gallery (later Ace Gallery) (1966–), a situation that had local artists such as Iain Baxter, Glenn Lewis, and Michael Morris bringing artists such as Deborah Hay, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Yvonne Rainer into Christmas’s Denman Street space. The same could be said of the curatorial ambitions of Nova Gallery’s (1976–82) Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft, not to mention Bill Jeffries’s Coburg Gallery (1983–87)—Beck has a graduate degree in art history and Jeffries a studio education. That Rogatnick and Gruft were practicing architects is evidence of the artist-practitioner running or operating private galleries, which were not ARCs but nonetheless artist-run. To your point about artists not distinguishing—or not caring to distinguish—between public and private galleries, there is evidence of that, some of which was supplied by Wallace himself when he spoke of eastern Canadian artists represented by private Toronto galleries showing at Vancouver ARCs. So if Wallace’s first point (“It was not really anticipated that those ARCs would still be functioning today”) gave me pause for thought, it was his selective reading of our essays that has given me cause for further concern.

Shier – I think you raise issues that have become a bit of a Gordian knot, most of which spiral out of the question of what kind of utopian potential ARCs might have had as “alternative” spaces and, if so, alternative to what?

ARCs have always maintained a fraught relationship with the commercial art world. In the instance of ARCs here in Vancouver, as it is I think in many geographically isolated cities when groups of good, young artists begin to mature, the origins of exhibition spaces are marked by a desire to see work by one’s peers and work of artists you admire. For example, in the early ’80s, when Ken Lum was simultaneously completing his MFA and running the Or, he was showing friends as well as people like Barbara Kruger and Thomas Lawson, fairly well-known, commercially represented, international artists who had never been seen in local galleries. Wallace also acknowledges this in his 1991 essay in Vancouver Anthology, when he states that what may be “commercial art in Toronto or Cologne is read as alternative art in Vancouver.”5 Here, Wallace begins to catalogue what he perceives as a breakdown of hierarchies between commercial and non-commercial spaces. Twenty years on, if one looks at the accomplishments and achievements of local artists who began careers at ARCs and who have gone on to subsequent commercial success and broader recognition, can we see any substantive or ongoing significance to where their works were first exhibited? I mention this because I think it adds colour to Wallace’s subsequent claim in this earlier essay, that “if museums, commercial galleries, and artist-run centres are all interchangeable in terms of the art they exhibit, then artist-run centres no longer really exist by virtue of their ‘challenge to the established art systems.’”6


If this challenge (which at the conclusion of his Anthology essay, Wallace suggests has failed) comes in the form of a system that resists the dominant/commercial system, how would this be enacted? What is a “philosophical or political enterprise” that counters commercialism now, or indeed, twenty or even forty years ago? Is there nostalgia here for something that never existed? Take for example the KSW, which, as you point out, was not imagined as a temporary endeavour. It was initiated by necessity as a place where a group of students could self-organize and be self-taught in the aftermath of the closing of their “regular” school, the David Thomson University Centre in Nelson, British Columbia. Fast forward a decade to the early 1990s and to a moment when the initial KSW community began to fracture, and the question arises whether this was coincidental with a time when a larger educational system was (again) beginning to construct dialogue with the interests of the KSW. Was there a betrayal of an original utopian vision, or had some of the motivations for the school’s existence simply run their course?


Turning back to the visual arts, I would go further to say that the “increasing entrenchment” of curatorial modes as a source of corruption is one of the ARC’s principal mythologies. I’ve argued in other texts against the idea that there was ever a pre-curatorial golden era when, for example, the selection of an exhibition was driven by anything other than a purely “curatorial” desire (as we now see it) to enact something interesting, whether the choice is by committee, by single artist, or, as is increasingly prevalent, by a professional(izing) art history or curatorial studies graduate. I see no difference between inviting your friend to hang his or her work in a rented space, selecting an exhibition out of a group of submissions, or mounting a “curated” group show as your grad project, except perhaps that the first and last methods will likely be more interesting because they are done by someone who is more invested and has a more immediate care for the work. I think self-interest, either of an individual or a group, artist or professional museum director, empowers the person responsible for choosing an artist and inviting that artist to make an exhibition. This is as nuanced in an artist-run centre as it is in a large museum, and was as operative in places like the Or Gallery or Artspeak when they were first initiated in the 1980s, as it is now as Jonathan Middleton expands the Or into Berlin or Artspeak moves to sell its Gastown space because they have “outgrown it.” What might be important to speak about here is the often hidden question around how a curator or exhibition committee is entrusted with their roles as “collaborators,” “facilitators,” or “gatekeepers,” a topic Wallace and many others have addressed.



Turner – The argument that has the ARC as an entry point for an artist’s career (and, as you said, a point of pride for certain artists) is a staple of the ARC success narrative. Another argument—one that Wallace conveniently elides—concerns those artists who entered the international art conversation while maintaining relationships with local ARCs, an example being Stan Douglas’s participation in the Or’s 1997 group show Rough Bush. Yet the commitment doesn’t stop there, for many of these artists continue to donate work to ARCs for sale, thereby aiding further exhibitions while 
at the same time further complicating ARC alterity. As for KSW members, although they did not produce the kinds of objects people paid dearly for at art auctions, they did (albeit slyly) enter the market with a fundraising product of their own: KSW graduate degrees, something for which they were chastised by the University of British Columbia, who issued a cease and desist order against them.


I want to continue on the topic of the KSW, but it should be said that Vancouver’s first ARC, Intermedia, began not with a collection of artists looking for exhibition space but with (public) money: a then-massive grant ($40,000) from the Canada Council, negotiated by the city’s senior artists, curators, and architects in 1966. This is a story that has for too long served as Vancouver’s ARC creation myth, but is, in fact, its opposite: an attempted infanticide driven by paternalism and fear, not unlike the story of Kronos and his children. 


Briefly then, after a couple of years of institutionally unaffiliated artistic activity by Vancouver’s younger artists, led by pioneers such as Helen Goodwin and Sam Perry, the McLuhan-curious art establishment, terrified that these emerging interdisciplinarians might usher in Adorno’s erasure of Art as we know it, summoned Canada Council arts officer David Silcox (now head of the Sotheby’s Canada auction house) to Vancouver so that he might give these younger artists money. Ostensibly a supportive gesture, the idea was to seduce these younger artists into a recognizable form of responsibility, whereby, once compromised, they would settle into the prison house of Art and return to object production. The result was a multi-level studio in the Downtown Eastside (500 block of Beatty Street), some video equipment, a mimeograph machine, and, once established, an invitation to provide programming at the Vancouver Art Gallery a couple of years later. 


Intermedia and the KSW are a study in contrasts. While Intermedia was born into riches, encouraged by the city’s leading art institutions, and lived a short life (1967–72), the KSW began with nothing, was derided by the literary establishment, and is still alive at twenty-five. As to the quality of that life, that would depend on who you talk to. But if the goals were communal education and the (poetic) critique of an ideologically saturated language machine—those would be called into question when, in the mid 1990s, two of the collective’s most visible members, Jeff Derksen and Nancy Shaw, left town to pursue their PhDs. Did this coincide with universities opening up a dialogue with the KSW? There had always been some local support amongst poet-scholars in the English departments at nearby Simon Fraser University and Capilano College, as well as among established local publishers Talon Books and Arsenal Pulp Press, but not at the University of British Columbia (apart from scholar Peter Quartermain), nor at the city’s larger presses (Douglas and McIntrye), nor at the Vancouver Writers Festival. So, small potatoes locally—but small potatoes everywhere. One had to move about to remain active in the contemporary poetics conversation. Buffalo was one place, as were New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC; another was the University of Calgary, whose English department allowed graduate students to pursue “creative writing” projects within a more traditional theory- and research-based program. That’s where Derksen went, to Calgary. As for Shaw, she enrolled at McGill in Montreal, where she did her PhD in communications. 


Despite the KSW’s non-hierarchal self-conception, some collective members were more active than others in bringing writers to town, editing the house organ (Writing magazine), and getting invited to centres where “language-based” writing was supported. I think this is endemic in any radical formation, where the more ambitious participants take up the most room, particularly when their thoughts, ideas, and actions are perceived to speak for the whole. This was also the case at Intermedia, though the more ambitious came and went before 1970, leaving the place to what one of its initial advocates, Alvin Balkind, referred to in his “Living Art Performance Festival” essay (published in 1979 by the Western Front) as “Mickey Mouse artists and axe-grinding dialecticians.”


The departure of Derksen and Shaw created more space at the KSW, but no one dared fill it—until Victor Coleman came to town. A poet of the Intermedia generation, Coleman arrived from Toronto and lobbied for the non-existent position of KSW “artistic director.” This was a bizarre moment in the collective’s history, one that resulted in poet Lisa Robertson’s attempt to resign from the board in protest, then collapsing at the AGM while Victor whispered, “Let it go, Lisa. It’s over.” Rebuffed, Victor moved on and things returned to “normal,” as it were, with the collective rethinking the school’s programs—as a result de-emphasizing the autocratic author reading in favour of a seminar-style approach to the poetic text, one that had audience participation based on the text’s prior consumption. I should add that there was a more committee-driven approach to the school’s activities, led as much by scholars as poets, and nothing like the professionalization of curation Wallace brings up when reviewing your essay in his. The KSW was expert at not appearing professional.


This might seem like a roundabout way of addressing your question of the curatorial role—whether led by an artist-curator or a curatorial program graduate—but one I feel compelled to make. Although the KSW is a writing-based collective, it did help with the formation of Artspeak. A better example of the artist-curator relationship might begin with Wallace’s suggestion that the artist-curator relationship became more collaborative through ARCs and from there “made its way into larger public institutions, where artists now wield considerably more power than they did in the past”7—an argument that does not hold if one considers it was Vancouver Art Gallery curator Doris Shadbolt who entrusted artist Michael Morris to organize a Ralph Ortiz “destruction art” exhibition in 1968. Shadbolt’s achievement here is her recognition of an artist’s art including the curation of another artist’s exhibition. I doubt she needed Intermedia to tell her that. Indeed, this was something she might have learned while working with First Nations communities for the VAG’s 1967 Arts of the Raven show.


With respect to Wallace’s comment about (outside) curation and private galleries, I believe I alluded to that earlier when mentioning the influence of Baxter, Lewis, and Morris on gallerist Doug Christmas back in the 1960s. As for relationships between ARCs and private galleries, Wallace gives the example of Myfanwy MacLeod’s concurrent exhibitions at the Or and Catriona Jeffries Gallery, which, if I am not mistaken, began with the Or offering Myfanwy a show first, thereby calling into question Wallace’s claim that the Or “abdicated its alterity,” unless association is abdication’s default setting. I will say that the two shows were linked thematically, and that if they differed, they did so in that the larger element went into the larger (ARC) space. Finally, on the topic of Geoffrey Farmer’s and Germaine Koh’s exhibitions at Catriona Jeffries, Wallace expresses incredulity that the gallery would show work that has “seemingly...little commercial potential,” when in fact the gallerist is committed to practices that entail aspects that are difficult to market, which does not preclude her from selling more commercially viable art objects backstage. But seriously—site-specific and ephemeral installations, when successful, only add to an artist’s cultural capital, thereby increasing interest in his or her work, and Wallace knows this.


Something else worth discussing, something else Wallace made no mention of, is the ARCs’ relationship to real estate. You touched on this earlier when you mentioned Artspeak and grunt gallery, which are the only two ARCs in Vancouver that own their buildings. Perhaps you could elaborate on this.



Shier – Before I do, I’d like to say that I’m not sure I read Wallace’s comment about Germaine’s and Geoffrey’s shows as “incredulity,” although his discussion of them is surprisingly paradoxical. He expresses curiosity about Jeffries’s motivation in showing work with such little commercial appeal and extends this argument with the example of Kelly Wood’s exhibition at the Western Front in 2004, where the venue was “far more appropriate...than the elite South Granville location of Catriona Jeffries Gallery, her gallery at the time, where the content of the installation would create a different resonance.”8 The implicit correlation here is between the space of commercialism and a kind of necessary uncriticality (or perhaps lack of “difficulty”), made explicit when he describes Jeffries’s move to a more commercially camouflaged light-industrial area and a “larger and more flexible space...[that is] more able to accommodate such projects.” 


Is Wallace arguing that there is a particular type of work suited for private galleries and another type of work for ARCs? Certainly his plea for the continuing validity of ARCs as experimental spaces in relation to the commercial gallery system partly rests in their potential to showcase less commercially viable work, though I wonder if we can call such work experimental, let alone radical, anymore. Nevertheless, I don’t think Wallace would argue that commercially viable work is less critical. What we are left with, and what I see as his central argument, is that ARCs, by their nature, are spaces that provide for a critical reception in ways that other spaces don’t.


But why? Not just because they are non-commercial. Presumably what we are after is some articulation of the permissions ARCs provide outside the strictures of making “saleable” work. However, I think there’s a real unexplored complexity around this question because non-profit doesn’t mean “non-commerce.” ARCs have to make money, and today this comes increasingly through the dictates of “earned revenue,” whereas twenty years ago there were similar hand-wringing discussions cloaked in terms of grant writing and the dangers of bureaucratization. My point is that if we spend time asking questions about the type of art commercial spaces privilege, then we should ask the corollary: What kind of work are ARCs fostering? And if we do, then the relationship to real estate, and by extension, a kind of long-term vision, not just vis-à-vis survival but also regarding stability and growth, begins to colour how some ARCs see themselves and what they are doing.


I mentioned earlier the “prescience” of the grunt gallery. One of the reasons is how, very early on, the gallery began to take itself seriously as an enterprise, not by privileging an exhibition program (the least important criteria for most government and corporate funding opportunities), but by prioritizing an already strong philosophical bent toward community activation. In 1995 the grunt was the first institution (as opposed to a group of artists) to leverage its annual government grants into a mortgage (later cannily refinanced to obtain matching endowment funds from the Vancouver Foundation). The mortgage idea was quickly mimicked by the board of Artspeak, who in 1999 bought a space previously occupied by the (commercial) Monte Clark Gallery in the 200 block of Carrall Street. In doing this, both ARCs signalled not only a long-term vision of continuity, but an ambition to think about their funding in ways no one had hitherto imagined. 


What I find particularly interesting about these gestures is how they reflect on the staff that enacted them. The figure of Glenn Alteen—who with now over twenty-five years at the helm of the grunt has the experience to imagine a wide set of possibilities—may also have been critical to the financiers, who might have appreciated the security signalled by his tenure. Speculation aside, there’s been a slow but steady transformation over the past three decades in the role of the people heading up most ARCs, and most organizations appear to be looking for greater continuity, if not “professionalization,” whatever this term means. The Or has recently revised the terms of its mandate to hire a new director every few years, and one senses this has something to do with its physical permanence as much as its professional development. It also returns us to our earlier comments about whether ARCs were imagined as temporary or long-term endeavours. Interestingly, Wallace concludes his rebuttal of our texts in ways similar to his 1991 Vancouver Anthology essay by valourizing ephemeral artist initiatives (including Gareth Moore and Jacob Gleeson’s St. George Marsh) that have “no anticipation of a twenty or thirty year existence.” 
I just wonder if this correlation between ephemerality and criticality is a red herring. 



Turner – I have always been uncomfortable drawing lines where the prospects for convergence could be (further) explored. That said, I am equally aware of how the language of the market has leached into the public conversation, to the point where artists are said to be naive if they refuse to think (and speak) of themselves as entrepreneurs. In reading Wallace’s essay to its conclusion, I was hoping to find more than his recognition of new and emerging independent art sites and spaces, something that spoke to the paradox you just mentioned: an unravelling of these correlations, a new way of thinking about ARCs in light of what he refers to as their “important contribution to Vancouver’s visual art evolution.”9


The question of whether Wallace is, as I recall you saying, “arguing that there is a particular type of work suited to private galleries and another type of work for ARCs” allows me to go out on a limb and ask whether the ARC has become a medium in itself. I think this could be said of the grunt gallery, of the incredible institutional journey its director Glenn Alteen has taken us on. The same goes for Western Front building co-owner and former board member Hank Bull, who, when asked to define his art practice back in the 1990s, told me it was “the Western Front” (recall Dan Graham’s definition of conceptual art as “Vietnam”). And now again with artist-cum-director Jonathan Middleton, who presided over the reassignment of a fundamental tenet of the Or mandate, one that distinguished it from other Vancouver ARCs, and that is the limited term for directors. Which leads me to wonder if the new Or directorial model will one day resemble that of the grunt’s, where the director has been in place some twenty years now. That we remain in the midst of the “relational” moment provides the context.


So if the ARC is a medium, what next? Will the focus be on (a) those ARCs who own their spaces (i.e., grunt gallery, Artspeak) or (b) those who rent (Access Gallery, Helen Pitt Gallery, the Or). Or is that yet another false distinction? Maybe what we should be watching for is something more molten—a “pop-up” gallery one month, a site-specific engagement the next, a magazine—but always an editorial body engaged in the ongoing conversation that is its membership. Will the state support such ARCs? They continued to support the Helen Pitt Gallery Artist Run Centre when it was temporarily out of a home. Of course, another emergent entity is cultural brokerage houses such as Cause + Affect, the Cheaper Show, and Revised, some of whom, like Cause + Affect, are artist businesses staffed with architects and designers, brokers who do everything from real estate marketing to museum consultation, who call themselves curators, and who draw on public funds. This is a whole other conversation, a phenomenon in need of addressing. 



Shier – The Pitt is an important example and raises two key points. The first is that any hope for increased government money for new ARCs dried up decades ago, so fresh artist initiatives are launched in a climate that necessarily dictates a set of unequal, or perhaps now just distinct, conditions. The second is that the Canada Council through its support of a homeless Pitt signalled that having a physical space is largely irrelevant to its status as a funded client, and that what is vital is program continuity. Tacitly, the suggestion that attaches itself to this sidelong wink is that if the Pitt’s funding were withdrawn, it would never return, not only to the institution but to the city as a whole, and this would be a net loss for Vancouver. The funds would return to a common, circumscribed, national pot and the other funded organizations across the country would, somewhat cannibalistically, divide the spoils. 


To take a cynical view, the core-funded Canadian ARCs are like first-born baby boomers: they get the breaks while the kids born later suffer the consequences. Which is why I find no convincing reason why ARCs should still label themselves “artist-run”—not that few are actually run by artists, but because the name carries a connotation of organizations that arise out of freshly propagated conversations by artists. The established Canadian ARC movement, at least as we know it right now, produces the merest trickle of newly funded institutions, just enough to sustain the impression of possibility. But even these organizations—thinking, for example, of Vancouver’s Access Gallery—are not “new” centres, but ones that have been around for decades, all the while dutifully applying to the Canada Council before finally, almost punishingly, earning a dribble of core funding. 
I think we have to acknowledge that as a generative project, the ARC movement in Canada is effectively over and has been for years. This isn’t to say there isn’t an imperative for the existing ARCs to be maintained and reinvented, but quite the opposite: only that the conversations that may have once come together to set up an artist-run centre have by necessity moved on, both within and without the system, to the production of new spaces and objects.



Turner – And what might those objects be? For Artspeak and grunt gallery, this appears to be real estate, owning your own space, with the space being the “material.” These might well be the ARC “objects” of the future, since “the future” and “real estate” walk hand-in-hand in a city like Vancouver. With respect to the lease-holding Or Gallery, which is reissuing Stan Douglas’s Vancouver Anthology (the predecessor to Artspeak’s Vancouver Art and Economies), and the Pitt, which, through Publication Studio, is mining its archives to produce bookworks comprising historic ephemera (such as its recent collection of past event posters, Exhibition to Be Destroyed), those objects would represent the past. 



Shier – One could view this as evidence of nostalgia for a time when the potential of ARCs was unresolved and there was immediacy to the conversations around what ARCs were trying to become. But we should remember this desire to take stock, to historicize and anthologize, has been endemic across the Canadian ARC system over the past two decades as institutions reached the twenty-, twenty-five-, and thirty-year mark. It was like a series of high school reunions, and not wholly unwarranted when one looks at the accomplishments that were being celebrated.


But yes, what of the future? I do think this moment of looking in the rearview mirror is a necessary part of a process of assessment. Perhaps the question it sets up is how current Canadian ARCs move forward without an illusion that there will be other institutions like them ever again.