For Stanley February, if tangible signs testify to the opening of museums to underrepresented practices, coming from the Latin American and Caribbean diasporas, First Nations and women, to name only these groups, much remains to be done. His Contemporary Art Museum/Department of Invisibles (MAADI), inaugurated at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), is a demanding demonstration of this. It is only one step in an ambitious process that the Haitian-born artist began in 2015.
University studies first revealed to him the flagrant absence of some of these groups in museum collections, starting with that of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Like the Guerilla Girls, this feminist collective formed in New York which, several years ago already, unveiled with crushing statistics the obliteration of women from places of artistic legitimization, it has quantified an embarrassing imbalance that it is busy since then to correct by means of an activist practice, tinged by his college training in social work.
” The MAADI reveals these forms of institutional practices which, by their structures, make groups of individuals invisible. That’s why we don’t find them in their collections [des musées] nor in positions of power. So, I gave myself the power to be the general manager of my project. It could never have happened otherwise,” explains the To have to the one who recently became one of the few chosen artists. One of his works joined the MMFA collection, giving impetus to in-house curator Iris Amizlev to initiate this extraordinary collaboration in which the “Museum welcomes and participates in this questioning”.
Institutional criticism
In its concrete form, the work MAADI is presented as a group exhibition. She is much more than that. It is an installation that follows in the wake of institutional criticism, an artistic practice which, since the 1970s, has revealed the hidden workings of power in museum institutions and art galleries, following the example of the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers and his fictional Modern Art Museum. Eagles Department (1968-1972). In the United States, the actions of Bronx artist Fred Wilson in museum collections shed light on their colonialist and racist biases. Other, smaller examples abound.
Both conceptual and performative, institutional criticism takes the museum and its functions as its subject, including the architectural envelope, following the notorious writings of the artist Daniel Buren, an essential theoretician of the matter. The triumphal staircase of the Michal and Renata Hornstein pavilion of the MMFA which frames the press conference also gives the artist a prestige of circumstance. As the conductor that he is, February knowingly uses this lever of authority to “do work” with a view to “sharing power” in the service of others.
I gave myself the power to be the general manager of my project. It could never have happened otherwise.
“If I hadn’t taken this kind of posture, these artists would never have been here”, continues the one who has just been named finalist for the important Sobey prize for the arts 2022, an honor he welcomes with surprise and in which he sees a symbol: “All artists who have been working alone for years and who are trying to make themselves heard or to show their works must continue to work and believe in what they are doing. Be determined and stubborn. In my case, that’s what happened. It means that I was right to continue to work hard and still. That’s what I believe, I believe in work. »
The past two years have indeed proven to be busy [voir encadré] for him, a recognition that brings its share of stress, he admits, but without disorienting him from his goals. “If it’s now that people see that I exist and that my work is important, so much the better for them. But I’ve been writing, saying and doing the same thing for a long time, ”says the artist, convinced that the post-COVID period is raising more awareness about his practice. “We have to help, to listen more. »
At the bottom of the stairs
Concern for others and the desire to connect and change things where injustices perpetuate suffering are the predominant drivers of her practice. “People think I denounce. I do not denounce, I expose realities”, corrects the one whose outspokenness contrasts with the ambient political correctness.
In passing, he scratches the MMFA with its collection of arts from all over the world. “It is still colonial practice to show trophies, to show everything we have acquired, to exhibit conquests. […] It’s a shame for the Museum to have that while advocating living together, while advocating the place of the other”, affirms the one who is wary of labels which, while giving symbolic capital to the institutions displaying them , confine the marginalized to their place. ” Diversity is a white word says the words of Tania Cañas on one of the bags for sale in the merchandising shop integrated with irony at the end of the exhibition.
This includes the work of 25 usually excluded artists, “not only racialized”, but whose practices do not fit with the institution. He gives the example of Claudia Bernal and José Dupuis, who accumulate years of experience that do not correspond to the categories in place. Thematic groupings — mourning, memory, the sacred, oblivion… — judiciously orient the reception of works that are certainly fascinating, but which struggle to breathe as they are piled up.
It is the choice of Stanley February and his close accomplice, the guest curator and museologist Laura Delfino, who, thus, in the second degree, force the conclusion: how have these works not been seen here before and why are they relegated to the background, in a side space at the foot of the famous staircase that leads to the exhibition of a consecrated international figure? Conceptual, this thoughtful posture also expresses a cry from the heart, a visceral cry.
“Fanon used to say: ‘What do you teach the nigger? We teach him to stand in a corner and be quiet.” They thought I was that type of nigger. I’m not,” says February, who adds that he wants to “mobilize the community”.
This is what he intends to do during the exhibition by inviting people of power, whom he has not yet named, to discuss the “real things”, the necessary ones that can create dissension. He wants to follow up on the many negotiations carried out with the Museum, this long work with profound and unsuspected ramifications. “They have a responsibility now. There, they have no choice but to act”, sums up the artist, who also wants the public to see “other realities than those they have always been shown and ask for something other than an art which is there to entertain or show that everything is fine by telling yourself that it will be fine”.
Menm vye tintin [Même criss’ d’affaire]