The National Gallery of Canada

Like all e-flux subscribers, I receive the usual three e-flux announcements a day, sometimes with an art-agenda announcement riding shotgun, other times with an e-flux Architecture doing the same. As an aspiring reader I have learned to distinguish between the three, and that those labelled e-flux generally announce an exhibition, not stand on the other side of it going, See! See!

So what to make of yesterday's announcement, whose subject line reads: "Geoffrey Farmer's A way out of the mirror, a success at the Venice Biennale 2017"?

Clicking on the message I see that it was issued by the sponsoring institution -- the National Gallery of Canada -- whose immediate measure of "success" is derived from a "Global Art Market Newswire" article. Are there not more thoughtful sources to cite? Why cite a market publication when you can cite a source that places criticism before publicity? I ask because there are many. Why not shine a light on Momus? Or is it too Canadian?

Following the announcement's opening quote comes a recognition of the artist who, we are told, played a "large part" in making "Canada's participation at the 57th Venice Biennale...one of the most successful since its inaugural exhibition in 1952." This "large part" includes the work itself ("laboriously crafted projects of epic proportions," the NGC tells us in the following paragraph), but also the potential humiliation of the artist who has no choice but to suffer an infamously capricious director and a curator whose inability to shepherd the project can be measured in part by an inability to prevent quotes like the following from being issued:

“In A way out of the mirror, Geoffrey Farmer imagined belonging to the nation-state, in terms at once celebratory and mournful; not as a well-bounded or monolithic identity but as fluidity and loss. Transforming the pavilion into an open-air stage for his fountains, he also opened a space for renewal and reflection that literally exploded the intersections of personal and national histories.”

I mean, forget the grammatical train wrecks here (I am guilty of them too) -- it is this very conflation of "personal and national histories" that had the artist called out by indigenous communities for whom "intergenerational trauma" is non-transferable to those whose privilege both created its conditions and protected those same privileged people from its residential schools. And yes, this too is something the curator should have foreseen and dealt with in consultation with the artist. Is there not a way for the NGC to "choose" the artist and the curator together, as opposed to this more recent habit of having the artist choose the curator? Having the artist and curator on equal footing would allow for a more balanced relationship, no?

The announcement ends with the NGC announcing that Canada's 2019 Venice entry will be announced next month. Which means the NGC and its consultants are currently sitting around the table trying to agree on who this artist and curator might be -- and whether or not they say yes. Let's hope that in choosing the artist and curator the artist and curator can find a way to work together that benefits not just the both of them, but also improves the institution that brought them together to so proudly share with us their work.