Throwback: AGO Modern & Contemporary

When it was recently announced that, due to a significant shortfall in funding, the new Vancouver Art Gallery, a multi-storey showpiece promising a bold upward thrust in visual arts culture, would not, for the foreseeable future, be going forward and that the collections would remain camped and cramped in their current location, the news came as a major disappointment to those who sustain serious consideration of the vital aesthetic and historical roles a major gallery plays in the nourishment of a city’s esprit. We on the wet coast can thus only look again with envy to Toronto – that capital of capital a certain coterie of locals make it their métier to deride –  as the Art Gallery of Ontario pursues yet another expansion, its seventh since its inception, to house a vast collection of 20th and 21st century works in the one hundred million dollar five storey Dani Reiss Modern & Contemporary wing.

That the AGO has little room to expand outward, bound as it is in each direction by Dundas, McCaul, Beverley and Grange Park, is self-evident, yet the gallery easily proclaims it is both pragmatic and ambitious as it plans to construct the extension in the airspace above the gallery’s loading dock. Principal benefactor and CEO of Canada Goose, Dani Reiss, also ambitious, pragmatic and concerned with the self-evident, opines of his future namesake, “Contemporary art is an observation of our time; the conversations, issues and triumphs of our generation – a reflection of humanity. Toronto is a world-class city, and this new gallery further establishes Toronto and Canada as a leader in celebrating modern & contemporary art.” His assertion is amplified by AGO chief executive Stephan Jobst, who also knows the measure of a world-class city:  “It will also add 40 000 sq. ft. to the gallery’s current 120 000. That’s way bigger than the Whitney”. Jobst goes on, clarifying a deeper ambition: “[The 20 000+ Modern and Contemporary works] signal a pivotal change in our focus to reach broader audiences and expand the narratives we have presented over the past several decades,” he asserts. “We are encouraged by these works to consider the future of the Gallery which must continue to represent the ever changing silhouette of Toronto and Canada at large.” Reiss wholly endorses this renovation of silhouettes: “I’m proud to support the AGO in their purpose to bring people together through art, especially art that inherently inspires such important discussion.”

To offer a glimpse of this vast catalogue, the AGO has published, via Goose Lane Editions, Modern and Contemporary, a glossy yet demure sampler of the Gallery’s 20th and 21st Century holdings. Within we find a number of expected, by now comfortable representatives: the eminences grises of European Modernism, Canadian interwar classics, core members of North American Abstract Expressionism, the celebrity pop artists of the post-war American scene, and key figures in Canadian Indigenous Modern among many others. These once radical works now seem like an eccentric but harmless uncle rendered benign through familiarity, their Modern edge tamed by time into near archetypes: they serve this volume well as a palatable set up for the more recent creations among which we find that push toward ever changing silhouettes warranting important discussion.

What follows are those coy, referential works dating from the 1980s on, once so freely dropped into the taxonomy as post-Modern: Jeff Wall’s enormous staged and backlit photographs, General Idea’s AIDS riff on Robert Indiana’s LOVE and Wolfgang Tillmas’ riff on General Idea’s riff on Robert Indiana, Sarinder Dhailwal’s Hey Hey Paula, and still later works: Edward Burtynsky’s photographic proposal of ecological devastation as perverse environmental art, Maori artist Lisa Reihana’s post-Colonial in Pursuit of Venus [infected] and Ken Monkman’s provocative but dogmatic The Academy balanced by Cameroonian artist Marc Padeu’s intimate and painterly The Thankful Poor.  And there is Arc by Denyse Thomasos, who has posthumously come to the fore in Canada through a recent national tour of her work. Her majestic canvases, simultaneously atavistic and prognosticatory, evoke architectural renderings  melded with Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione while pinching our embodied imagery of cargo containers and favelas. These domineering impressions of the provisional communities catalyzed by systemic poverty in the global south are at once coolly intellectual and persistently visceral.

If one is attuned to the idea of art as the most human of habits and humane of pursuits, then one cannot fail to engage with this handsome yet tantalizingly slim volume produced with Goose Lane’s usual attention to the printed book as a tactile, aesthetic object. Works are not crammed two or three to a page for, despite Jobst’s penchant for superlatives, this a demonstration of quality rather than quantity: each artwork is a stately ambassador presented on a richly printed full colour plate. Whether the patron’s attitudes are progressive or traditional about the condition of art and the agenda of its organization by the public gallery today, AGO Modern and Contemporary gives a tempting taste of what is to be found in the gallery’s chambers and what more is to be seen when the new wing opens in 2027.

¹ AGO press information web page, March 2, 2023

² Ibid.; the New York gallery has 50,000 sq. ft of indoor space

³ The Art Newspaper web page, March 2, 2023

⁴ AGO: Modern and Contemporary, pg. 7

⁵ AGO press information web page, March 2, 2023

M. Seán Kershaw

M. Seán Kershaw is a writer, critic, cinéaste, cultural historian, educator, and practitioner of interdisciplinary performing arts. He lives in Vancouver.