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Leah Sandals’ Top 3: The Institution, Reframed

1. Some Downward Pressure on Public-Museum Admission Fees

This year, I completed a rather unexciting transition—from being a writer whose main concern is art to being a writer whose main concern is art’s institutions, in particular our large, publicly funded museums and galleries. Over the past decade—despite museum policies that mandate as much equitable access as possible to their publicly held collections—major museums and galleries in Canada have tended to eliminate free access to such collections, at the same time implementing admission-fee hikes that well outpace inflation. In 2011, for whatever reason, that trend has, thankfully, started to stall (and even reverse somewhat). On October 27, the Royal Ontario Museum—until that point in time, by my calculation, the most expensive museum to visit in Canada—announced it was lowering its admission fees from $24 per adult to $15 per adult. On November 16, during a public talk in Toronto, National Gallery of Canada director Marc Mayer said he wanted to restore free permanent-collection access at the nation’s largest art museum. And on November 22, the Power Plant announced that admission would be free for one year beginning in March 2012 in honour of its 25th anniversary. None of these actions can come close to mending wholesale the relationship between public art institutions and the constituencies for which they were ostensibly founded. (And in highlighting these few nominal improvements, I recognize that I’m failing to cheerlead for the museums and galleries that have bothered to maintain free public-collection access and other free access over the years, from the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal to the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and beyond.) But it’s a small start to what I hope will be a more equitable and people-friendly art world of 2012.

General Idea The Armoury from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion 1985–90 Installation view Courtesy the Estate of General Idea © Art Gallery of Ontario 2011

2. More Space for Ontario-Connected Artists at the Art Gallery of Ontario

Sometimes I wonder why I keep expecting some degree of congruence from our large public museums and galleries. After all, these institutions are dealing with a number of competing stakeholders and influences, the most squeaky-wheelish of which tend to be on the turnstile-revving, revenue-amplification side, and the most siren-callish of which tend to be of the mega-reputation international art star variety. So there was some part of me that really didn’t want to even bother feeling annoyed when the Art Gallery of Ontario, in early 2010, responded to calls for more local content by creating a regionally dedicated exhibition space in a back corner of its freakin’ restaurant. (Talk about damning with faint praise.) This year, to my relief, the AGO has rededicated itself to the regional part of its mandate, offering large, high-quality marquee spaces to Ontario-connected artists—often with impressive results. The General Idea show, up to January 1, is a huge, wonderful, edifying journey stretching over two massive floors. The Jack Chambers show, also currently on, is getting rave reviews. The Kathleen Munn show, though small, was a revelation for many viewers, even those supposedly in the know. And David Blackwood (who, though best known for works dealing with the lore of his native Newfoundland, lives in Port Hope) rightfully wowed crowds with his perennially masterful printmaking this spring. You know, all the flash and dash of the international art world to the contrary, there’s actually nothing wrong with holding up a mirror to the artists, scenes and lives in one’s own modestly Canadian midst—doing so can even reach towards one of the loftier, oft-quoted aims of public museums, which is (gasp!) to do a real service to the community. I sincerely hope the AGO continues to remember this as it bravely soldiers on into 2012 and beyond.

Grier Edmundson’s installation at the Quebec Triennial Courtesy Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

3. The Quebec Triennial at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

As acknowledged previously, I’m aware that in critiquing aspects of certain museums, I often fail to cheerlead for the institutions that are getting some things right. So here’s my chance to pull out the pom-poms! The Quebec Triennial doesn’t just offer me an opportunity to view the kind of spectacular or wry work I love so well—stuff like, in this year’s outing, Dean Baldwin’s listing, drunken, and-the-band-played-on sailboat Ship in a Bottle, Thérèse Mastriacovo’s pathetically appealing, institutionally pointed and human-frailty-evoking Art Now drawings, Séripop’s in-yo-face floor-to-ceiling screenprint romp Dis-donc à la grosse de se tasser, or Grier Edmundson’s imposing installational exercise in irony. The triennial also provides one of those (gasp again!) real services to the community around it, sorting through hundreds, if not thousands, of active regional artists and winnowing them down to a select few of promising lights to watch. Sure, only time will tell with a lot of these artists whether that promise will be borne out. And there’s always a lot of worthy (or yet-to-peak) talents who get left by the wayside. But soaring well beyond the weaknesses of the exhibition proper, for me, is the fact that it happens at all, and on such a scale—each artist (by Toronto standards) has a pretty good-sized space allotted to their work, and the exhibition fills the upper level of the museum, along with a few public spaces besides. I know there’s other regional biennials and triennials out there—hello Alberta and Southern Ontario, you’re wonderful too!—but this is the one I saw this year, and damned if I’m not going to take the opportunity, just for the principle of it, to say that we need even more Canadian art institutions to commit to projects like this. That is, after all, the kind of writer I now am.

Leah Sandals is associate online editor of Canadian Art.

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