After 20 years at the helm, Michèle Thériault leaves the Leonard and BinaEllen gallery — located at Concordia University — after having secured an impressive reputation. With, among others, Louise Déry at the Galerie de l’UQAM, Barbara Fischer at the University of Toronto Art Museum, Thériault was one of the major players in this extraordinary structure of university galleries. A network which, more than ever, is one of the pillars of the art world in the country. A network that the media and even our art world do not celebrate enough, more often busy glorifying an often superficial stardom than highlighting those who carry out in-depth work…
Contemporary art in its history
“I never wanted to compromise…” This is how Thériault begins our meeting. A sentence which seems to us to be emblematic of the position she occupies in her environment.
“My first position, in 1990, was at the Art Gallery of Ontario, as an assistant curator, hired by Philip Monk. I stayed there for seven years. It was extraordinary to work with him. I was in charge of a series called Perspectivewhere I introduced Micah Lexier, Lee Dickson, Mona Hatoum, Barbara Steinman and Irene Whittome, allowing the latter to recreate her Museum of traces. In 1997, I returned to Montreal and gave courses, especially at the University of Ottawa. And in 2003, I obtained this position of director at the Leonard and Bina Ellen gallery, a position which had been posted throughout Canada, even in the Globe and Mail… »
Remarkable publications
University centers have done considerable research on the history of contemporary Canadian and Quebec art. Why is this historical aspect so important? “I don’t think we can make or exhibit contemporary art without going back to its history, that of the 1960s and 1970s among others. For example, to better understand current performance, we need to go back to its origins, to those of 40, 50 or 60 years ago. »
For Thériault, contemporary art must also be contextualized with the issues of its time, by making links with other disciplines. “ Time length, in 2004, the first exhibition in my program, made links with what certain French theorists called exhibition cinema, the projections that even filmmakers made in galleries, cinematographic installations…” An exhibition which included artists like Michael Snow, Pascal Grandmaison, Jocelyn Robert, Jeroen De Rijke and Willem De Rooij. “From the beginning, I wanted to address the context and the “apparatus” surrounding an exhibition, the reception system, how the visitor experiences art, apprehends art in a particular place. The Leonard and Bina Ellen gallery is in a university building where there is a library, different departments, including the humanities… Art always exists in a context. »
A freer context
So art is not just an object? Is this era over? “No more… It’s still omnipresent in the art market. It’s inevitable. But if I approached this, it was in a critical way. We have not worked with major collectors, as museums do, collectors who are part of the boards of directors, in a problematic overlap. Conflicts of interest may often be present. I wanted to stay away from that. University galleries often do work that museums do not do or no longer do. They are not doing their job of highlighting our own history. This does not mean that we must present a retrospective of all the artists. There are ways to mount exhibitions on forgotten artists. We should, for example, look again at the work of Raymond Gervais. And there are many other artists who deserve our remembrance. In Quebec, we tend to refer to painting, which is still and always there reference. But many artists have produced outside of this model. Let us think, among others, of conceptual artists. But we have difficulty promoting a more cerebral, more complex art… Of course, it must be said that museums are in crisis and that they are trying to survive. Especially since the pandemic, they have lost a lot of revenue and have deficits. From this point of view, university galleries are freer. We don’t have this pressure in relation to the number of entries… We don’t have to think about our exhibitions by pretending to know what the public wants to see and know. » In the same breath, Thériault adds: “But do we really know how the public will react to our exhibition choices? »
While many museums and cultural institutions use tiny presentation texts, Thériault opted for long explanatory texts and developed a comprehensive website including an original section entitled Ideas for reflection. Why this choice ? “I believe that the public is capable of appreciating and understanding many more things than we think. We can offer him many avenues for reading. It is not a question of explaining the works, but of enriching links. We often tend to want to close a work on a simple meaning. The cultural industry often gives people that, easily digestible art. Performing art. I did not do this. Granted, what we did wasn’t forever for everyone. But we cannot always know what will fascinate the visitor. And a marketing team can’t tell us what will work with the public. Fortunately, we often have surprises. »
It should be noted that Michèle Thériault continues her activities. She is already preparing a new exhibition and directs the Periculum Foundation in honor of David Tomas, who died in 2019.