The exhibitions pass, but the books remain. Here are five exhibition catalogs among the best of the year. Jérôme Delgado’s list.
Evergon. Intimate theaters
National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, 236 pages, $59.95. On sale online and at the museum’s bookshop-boutique.
Beneath the purple case-bound cover, the contents reveal themselves only to attentive eyes, like the artist’s name, barely legible. Relaying the current retrospective until April, the book covers fifty years of photographing and dramatizing a “non-hetero-normative” life. Queer, militant, inventive, Evergon has paved the way, challenged modernity or offered, as Mark Clintberg writes, “rare breaths of fresh air”. The six texts, between which the themes of the exhibition are interspersed, salute a “work of queerization of image and history” (Anne-Marie Dubois).
General-Idea
National Gallery of Canada, 756 pages, $100. On sale online and at the museum’s bookshop-boutique.
Playing on the size of the characters and the paragraphs, the preface, signed AA Bronson, sole survivor of General Idea, reflects well what did this pioneering group of conceptual art in Canada and famous for its work centered on the media and the society. It’s an acknowledgment, sarcastic, and sincere preface that says a lot about the all-encompassing nature of General Idea. The following pages include an interview with Bronson, 500 illustrations and, among other things, an essay on HIV and infection in art (the issue of copyright). Published in separate English-French editions.
Of the [ré]animation
By Manon Labrecque. Salle Alfred-Pellan, at the Maison des arts de Laval, unpaginated, $10. On sale in bookstores and at Salle Alfred-Pellan.
This is the book a little apart. By its low price, but also by its fragmented nature. Small in size, and to be read vertically, it is no less rich and unique. It must be said that the exhibition, which brought together recent kinetic installations, was not a retrospective. The publication is intended as a creative addition in red hues, drawings, photos and, above all, words. “I’m not a person of words”, yet immediately warns the artist, interviewed here by Nicole Gingras.
Marie-France Briere
Plein sud edition, 288 pages, $60. On sale online and in bookstores.
Not linked to an exhibition, but… to several, the book flies over a dozen public art sculptures. However, Marie-France Brière did not just do that. The monograph does useful work and returns in images and texts to her exhibitions since 1988. In “Beyond material de-coherence”, Sylvie Parent theorizes on a work of matter, materials (marble, granite, ceramic, brick , glass, steel…), while Pamela Bianchi reflects on “a transitional space” which is expressed between forms, materials, states, “between presence and absence, between container and content”.
Raymond April. Crossing
Le 1700 La Poste, 180 pages, $80. On sale at 1700 La Poste.
Like some museums (not all), Le 1700 La Poste has made a habit of accompanying its exhibitions with publications. The one devoted to Raymonde April is not only among the most relevant, it is also among the most fascinating. Already, the sequence of images makes it possible to relive the autumn exhibition, and the text by Charles Guilbert is a little gem. Audacious, the author (and long-time friend of the photographer) has put himself in April’s shoes and proposes, in the manner of his work, to interweave real life and “necessarily imaginary, multiple and unfinished”.