D’Arts: Vancouver School Dust-Up

I love a good rant as much as the next guy, but a national art critic really hit a nerve with the Vancouver School (VS) recently. The facts: This summer, Canadian Art (CA) magazine ran a feature about an exhibit held in Antwerp, Belgium, titled Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists, featuring—among others—works by VS artists and associated old boys such as Stan Douglas, Roy Arden, Rodney Graham, et al. The cover headline announced: “Antwerp Diary: RM Vaughn on Vancouver’s Hot Art!” False advertising, as it turned out: Vaughn simply seemed keen to issue undercooked public broadsides against the work of said establishment darlings of photoconceptualism, and took the opportunity to refer to the show’s co-curator Scott Watson as an “art baronet” who was “likely on holiday...taking pictures of soiled plastic chairs in Cuban resorts.”

As a cover feature, the piece was oversold, lacked cohesion, and spent far too much time grinding personal axes against pretty much anyone who has ever found beauty or meaning in the everyday. The article barely touched on a sort of thesis: that Antwerpers (and by extension, Europeans) are so burdened by history that they revel in a romantic view of North American “nothingness,” as exemplified by Lotusland’s endless supply of young male artists attempting to establish lucrative careers by teaming with critics to find deep meaning in images of alleyways and detritus. If that had been explored, fair enough. But Vaughn was not up to the task.

What was intriguing about the article were extensive direct quotes from the Antwerp curator, Dieter Roelstraete, as he indulged in an on-the-record “ironic” slagfest about the art during a walkabout with the already antithetical Vaughn. “Here we have the usual Arden stuff—garbage, rubbish, scraps—very boring of course,” he says at one point, before moving right along. Later, Roelstraete backpedalled during a follow-up email to Vaughn, but the writer didn’t buy it, going on to declare that “ugly is ugly, garbage is garbage and no amount of semiotic solipsism will convince me otherwise.” Well, maybe not, but a basic course in art history might.

The original article was perhaps a good example of the detrimental effect that blog culture has had on arts writing. It was worth a chuckle, but the ensuing reaction on the West Coast was far more entertaining and, ultimately, thought-provoking. Of course, the article’s publication elicited a barrage of emails between the wounded parties and CA editor Richard Rhodes, who defended the piece and the magazine’s policy not to run letters to the editor. In this way, a series of semi-open letters ended up circulating in the local art community and found their way to Vancouver Review’s inbox.

Arden, who hit send on the first protest to Rhodes, called Vaughn’s effort “twittish, hack writing,” which was right on the money. Other VSers and curators weighed in—some using pseudonyms gleaned from Deadwood characters—about how to dispatch “slapskull” and “wannabe flâneur” Vaughn’s reputation while bemoaning the lack of venues to do so. Besides Arden, Ian Wallace, Scott Watson, Jeff Wall and others fired missives back and forth, some obviously for publication, some...who knows? I’m told it was all available online for a spell.

To his credit, Rhodes retorted in jaunty fashion, swearing by the article’s provocative qualities and calling Arden’s initial response “wounded and rash.” Well, given Arden’s comparison of Vaughn’s comments to those of Hitler, he had a point. Later, after referring to Rhodes’ “autocratic, untouchable style of damage control,” Arden decided that he didn’t want his letters printed in CA after all, calling for a kind of communication boycott. Good god! One could just feel the walls of the sandbox caving in.

Notable among the letters was quite a bit of sneering around the very idea of journalistic writing about art. That’s a shame, because it’s up to good journalism to open the door for intelligent non-specialists who might not otherwise delve into the language and referencesphere™ of contemporary art. One is tempted to view such comments as the ego-salving of a tight group of artists and curators; in fact, the letters do occasionally read like those of a gang which feels that its self-evident genius should only be commented on by anointed critics—those who are “on-side.” But they also show signs of openness to critical challenge.

Academic writing about art puts most people off. I’m interested in the ideas contained in the work of Wall, Arden, et al., and find some of their art engaging and gorgeous. But much of the writing about it, at least in the past, has been excruciatingly dry and pretentious. Vaughn’s comment about “semiotic solipsism” might better have been directed at the art world’s acceptance of obfuscating language. Watson still seemed to be smarting from once being told by Rhodes, when he was submitting some writing to the magazine, not to use the word “dialectical.”

Granted, one can go too far in the opposite direction. I guess CA wants a readership beyond academe and is now keen to replicate the style of British pop-music journalism to do so. If anyone has a problem with that, the magazine could at least allow dialogue about it in its pages. In any case, while Arden mourned the descent of art criticism, pining for the glory days of Art Forum and Vanguard, UBC’s John O’Brian chipped in with another letter to Rhodes, opining that there never was a “golden age” of Canadian art criticism to live up to in the first place. Oh my!

When someone takes a seemingly casual kick at the foundations of one’s art and career, one is going to want satisfaction. It took Wall to offer the most calm, succinct and comprehensive letter of the lot. “You let a writer express a prejudice against a certain kind of art,” he wrote to Rhodes, “and [didn’t] expect him to justify his views.” By doing so, he added, the magazine essentially concurred with, magnified and justified those prejudices. However, Wall also acknowledged that Vaughn had explained himself previously on the same subject—however inadequately—in the National Post.

A readable critical assessment of the VS may be long overdue, but its members (and all of us) deserve a reasoned critique rather than a bitchy snipe. So why did the whole affair have to unfold like this? Because, at this juncture in history, the general public doesn’t give a fuck about art, the art and artists don’t give a fuck about the general public, and the mainstream media doesn’t give a fuck about anything that doesn’t reek of instant lucre. And so all parties grow apart, indifferent, resentful, and counterproductive on all fronts.

My advice would be that Canadian Art run a regular letters section (at press time we heard the magazine intends to run a selection of Intertidal-related letters in the fall issue), the Vancouver School lighten up just a titch, and the media and general public smarten up and make some effort. But I won’t hold my breath on any count.

—E. B. Farnum