I Am Still the Boss Here
Marcel Brisebois has given Canada a secure foothold on the international exhibition scene
By the time you read this, the Reverend Marcel Brisebois will be cleaning out his desk and preparing to vacate forever the director's office at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MACM). It may not happen one minute past midnight on New Year's Day, 2004, as currently expected. The long-serving director has agreed to stay on a few months beyond the end of his contract, he told me, "just to ensure the transition." But as this story goes to press—and despite an autumn flurry of art-world rumours to the contrary—Marcel Brisebois expects to be out the door and embarked on new projects very soon.
But whenever that transition takes place, it will be no ordinary changing of the guard. Now 70, Brisebois will be the museum's last director to come of age with contemporary art itself in Quebec, during the critical, uncertain hours of the Quiet Revolution. His unnamed successor will be, as Brisebois is not, an ex-combatant in the vivid culture wars of the sixties and seventies of the last century. He or she will probably not be a Christian, and certainly not a man rooted in mid-century Catholic humanism.
But in neither of my two interviews with Brisebois in Montreal—last spring, and again in high summer—did I find him ready to give way cheerfully to any successor, just yet.
"Until the 31st of December I am still the boss here, and everybody knows that," the diplomat, cleric and arts administrator told me in his sparsely furnished corner office at the museum. "It would be ridiculous to say I'm happy, I'm thrilled. It's my baby! After 18 years, the board thinks new blood would be necessary. I imagine my last Friday will be difficult, but life will go on."
At the times we talked, a few post-museum possibilities were taking shape. He might return to television broadcasting, which (along with college teaching) he did for years before coming to the MACM in 1985. Or he might go into private consulting. He will surely find time to take in much baroque opera, which he adores, and to make the annual pilgrimage to the Richard Wagner festival in Bayreuth, Germany (for which tickets come through his friend, the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez). And he will go on ministering as a Catholic priest in the Quebec town of Valleyfield. Whatever Marcel Brisebois finds to do in the New Year, however, it probably won't be as colourful as his long war of liberation from meddlesome bureaucrats.
Founded in 1964, the museum was chartered as a crown corporation in 1983, two years before Brisebois' arrival. "If the intention of the law was to give more freedom to the institution, progressively the civil servants in Quebec wanted to recuperate more and more power...The Quebec government has been more and more centralized. I was fighting not for the independence of Quebec but for the independence of the museum."
The active interference has been at a very petty administrative level, for the most part—stationery styles, corporate logo, things like that. The MACM's curatorial and intellectual freedom has never been seriously contested. Asked if Quebec had ever ordered anyone at the museum to change course, he insisted: "I was never, never, never told, 'Don't do that,' or 'You should do that.'"
The more urgent problem is the provincial government's stinginess, which has left the institution scrambling for money to keep the doors open.
"Collection makes the identity of the museum. We wanted to buy strong pieces, but we could not invest as much as I would have liked. The acquisitions budget should be at least ten per cent of the operating budget. We had a $9.2-million operating budget this year. A million dollars for acquisitions would be just normal. Instead, it was about $300,000. We are not competing any more. We have to think realistically that there is a competition among the museums. We don't have the money to buy the really strong pieces in order to become fitter as an international institution. We bought a Louise Bourgeois, and I know a lot of artists are angry about that. But we don't want to be a parochial museum."
As if penny-pinching politicians weren't bad enough—the museum's current annual budget is roughly what it was ten years ago—local artists have long complained about what they believe to be the MACM's distance from Montreal's creative community. One sign, in their opinion: the purchase of works by high-profile international artists, including Bourgeois. These criticisms, Brisebois maintains, have been less offensive to him than the busybodiness of Quebec's cultural bureaucrats.
In any case, the most outstanding fact of his long tenure as director has not been, in his opinion, the climate of criticism, but the advance of his museum's role and status in the cultural life of the city. The clarity and rigour of its programming in contemporary international and Canadian art has brought it admiring attention far beyond Montreal. Under the leadership of curator Paulette Gagnon, the MACM has sharply intensified the exhibition of outstanding women artists from home and abroad. "Everybody, at least in Montreal, considers that the museum is not only a showplace but a learning centre, where we can learn what it means to live in the 21st century through the arts. It is a museum, it is a place where we are collecting and showing, but always in the light of being a learning centre."
The MACM's roots as an educational institution run deep, both in the modern history of Quebec and in Marcel Brisebois' personal history as a teacher and lifelong connoisseur of music, literature and visual art.
"You know, in the sixties here in Montreal many artists, after all those cultural revolutions—Refus global, and so on—said there was no official room for their work. The Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal was not interested in contemporary art or local artists...This changed when [director Pierre] Théberge arrived, but until the sixties the trustees were more interested in classical art, the Dutch 17th century. They were not even so fond of Impressionism, and don't even talk about Picasso! We had no window, no exposure..."
The prospects for contemporary visual art, along with all else in Montreal's cultural life, underwent profound change during the Liberal government of Jean Lesage, from 1960 to 1966. Suddenly, there was political will in Quebec to match the longing of French-Canadian artists for opportunities to understand and celebrate their cultural heritage. The first opportunity to pitch its tent came after Expo 67, when the MACM was offered a pavilion on the fairgrounds for art exhibition. The early dream of a permanent home for the museum was to await fulfilment for almost 30 more years.
The establishment of a board for the museum in 1983 was a first step in that direction. Within only a few months of gaining its independence, the MACM board launched its campaign to bring the institution to a notable building at Place des Arts with an international competition headed by celebrated European architect Gae Aulenti. The winning design was submitted by the Montreal firm of JLP (Jodoin, Lamarre, Pratt) & Associés.
It was around this time that Brisebois—then director of a CEGEP in his hometown of Valleyfield, a popular television broadcaster and a trustee of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal—was contacted by businessman and MACM chair Raymond J. V. Cyr. Questions and answers were traded for a couple of weeks in the autumn of 1985.
The priest and teacher Cyr had drawn a bead on was an offspring of the burning cultural and intellectual ferment that suffused the arch-conservative Roman Catholic Church in the final decades before the Second Vatican Council. He was, in many ways, a typical product of a Catholic education far from unique at mid-century: the erudite amateur, the humane connoisseur, less busily avant-garde than respectably Modern.
"In Valleyfield, students were not only studying Latin and mathematics, they were also studying art, music—piano, violin, the flute. Everyone had to read musical scores, and there were lessons in visual arts. It started there. When I moved to France, I very, very early got involved with a circle of literary persons. I got close to Jean Paulhan, who was editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française and Gallimard...So I was not a hero or crusader of contemporary art, though I was always surrounded by it, and in touch with artists. I was not involved in a crusade for this or that. I am not a crusader for any cause...I was more a literary person than an artistic person, but the world I was living in was surrounded by art, not only by literature but also by contemporary music."
In the middle years of the 1980s, there was still room, as there is not nowadays, for a cultivated generalist in the world of museum administration, and a casualness about snaring such a person that is surely out of step with headhunter culture.
"Suddenly, it was the end of October, the 23rd, and I received a call from Cyr to meet at Dorval. He invited me to be director of the museum. I said no, I have my own career. On the 25th, there was a meeting of the executive committee of the Musée des beaux-arts, and Bernard Lamarre said after the meeting he wanted to speak to me. He said: 'I heard you refused!' He said it was my duty. Go there!
"I agreed to go for two years. I planned a program that was very much criticized by everybody—those interested in architecture, in museums, everyone. I did not realize it would be a problem...There was a suite of seven rooms for the director. Imagine! For a museum of contemporary art! A fabulous stairway and no storage room! It was ridiculous. I studied the construction and wrote to the board saying they had to stop."
While Brisebois' criticisms did not cause construction to grind to an abrupt halt, the grandiose staircase was deleted and the director's office simplified during a serious bureaucratic bog-down that delayed completion of the Place des Arts location until 1993, some five years behind schedule. (Though certain changes were made in the plan, the director is still not satisfied with the outcome. "I would have liked the building not here, but at Sherbrooke and St-Urbain. But this is the way we did it.") The man who instructed Brisebois to take the MACM director's job was rarely off the map of Quebec art during the 1980s and beyond, and was never more central to the art world's political culture than in 1991, when his company, Lavalin Industries, went bankrupt.
"Everybody was complaining that Lavalin was doing what the museum was not doing. The artists and artistic world were considering it a catastrophe. Bernard Lamarre had done a great job for Montreal, with Leo Rosshandler advising him. At the time, there was the fear of an auction." In a move that did the museum, dealers and artists a favour, the MACM stopped a potential flood of artworks from coming abruptly on the market by picking up the large but artistically indifferent corporate collection for the fire-sale price of $5.4 million. This acquisition of 1,300 artworks instantly upped the MACM's permanent collection by 25 per cent. At the same time, however, it made the collection heavy with pieces by such Canadian art-historical fixtures as Borduas and Pellan and Riopelle—artists who do not fit Brisebois' idea of what the MACM should be doing.
"Thomas Struth, yes! Riopelle, no! We have bought a lot of video...Going to the international shows, going to the fairs, it's obvious we would like to buy more video and photography. Drawing is more and more relevant. I had a conversation with an artist who said it's easy to make video. It's much more difficult to be in front of a white surface, to take out part of one's self and put it there. We have plans for many exhibitions of paintings."
I press Brisebois for details. He fumbles for an exhibition schedule to clarify his fuzziness about upcoming exhibitions and programs. He seems distracted; his usual ease disappears. His idea of a contemporary painter is the senior German artist Anselm Kiefer, whose massive and artistically powerful bookworks the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal will show (after a 2003 postponement) in the autumn of 2004. His replies to my questions about programming are diplomatic, not provocative or particularly informative.
Then I catch myself thinking: why on earth shouldn't this man be emotionally and intellectually disengaging from a job he wants to continue doing, but won't be? And why shouldn't he be moving in the direction of old admirations? He speaks dutifully about Jana Sterbak's Canadian pavilion show, which the MACM organized, at the 2003 Venice Biennale. In a classic display of polite equivocation, he speaks of the Venice piece as "not the best of Jana Sterbak's work, but for me still good work."
But the indifference fades when he speaks of things near his heart. The warmest moment in either of our two conversations surely occurred when we were talking about opera, which we both love. He recalls seeing a production of Wagner's Lohengrin, designed by New York artist Robert Wilson, with Ben Heppner in the title role—and the air around him glows, as it rarely does when he is talking about contemporary visual art.
Unless, of course, the art under discussion gives him a chance to talk about the common ground he sees in art and his deeply idealized Christianity.
"The first connection is openness, and the second would be sensitivity to questions. I am Christian first, a Catholic second, a priest third—but I'm not a Monsignor or canon! For me, Christ was sensitive to people, to their questions and sufferings, and he wanted to bring peace within persons and between persons. He was fighting against priests, and priests condemned him. He wanted people to be honest. And I think all those aspects are close to contemporary art, which does not want to be divisive. It wants to open your heart, to bring you the truth about yourself."
In his experience, the contemporary Catholic Church is remarkably closed to the good news he sees so abundantly displayed in the best contemporary art. It is clearly a matter of deep personal disappointment. "I am involved in the cultural world. For the program I was making for the CBC, I was interviewing novelists, thinkers, philosophers, theologians. But I have never been asked anything by the bishops—never, never, never." Like many Catholic intellectuals who were brought to vivid life by the Second Vatican Council, then later caught in the internal backlash against the Council's profoundly humane initiatives, Father Brisebois believes "the church lost a great opportunity to make a real revolution. It is becoming more and more hierarchical, and less and less Christian."
When the conversation turns to contemporary capitalist society as a whole, he is barely less scathing.
"The complicity and the silence! A good friend of mine who lives in France, who is Jewish, says that now she can understand what was happening in Germany in the thirties. The same silence. The same complicity. Are we interested in knowing the truth? Do we ask our leaders to be responsible? We don't care. We have our country house, we cruise to the Bahamas next winter. We are not interested in the real thing, the common good."
While art cannot save humankind from folly, artists can, in Father Brisebois' opinion, bear witness to the same radical openness affirmed by his Christianity, at its best moments. "Not that we have the answers. We are saying to artists: 'What are your questions? How can we share your questions?' Artists are open to quiet things."
Winter 2003
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