“Créer à rebours vers l’exposition”
The case of site-specific interventions in Montréal

Montréal-based artists of the 1980s took a particular interest in installations, bringing into play the architecture of the spaces for which they were specially designed. Their interest in these practices was mainly informed by two currents of the 1960s and 1970s: the in situ works of French artist Daniel Buren and, on this side of the Atlantic, the ambitious architectural interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark and other artists invited to create at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York.

Taking place in private apartments, abandoned sites and atypical spaces, the site-specific interventions catalogued here were different from public art or land art. Like those practices, however, they also stemmed from a desire to eschew the traditional circuits of art exhibition. As such, they differed from installations presented in “standard” venues (museums, commercial galleries, etc.) and from certain in situ practices for which, as art historian Johanne Lamoureux has written, artists “merely designated a more-or-less anonymous space, insofar as it was targeted for its generic purpose and not its specific character¹.

This documentary exhibition–part of the ongoing research project Créer à rebours vers l’exposition exploring the practice and history of exhibitions in Québec as well as their documentation–and the accompanying selective chronology chronicle the development of this phenomenon in the city from 1980 to 1989.

VOX wishes to thank for their invaluable contributions Raymonde April, Céline Baril, Sylvie Bouchard, Eva Brandl, Johanne Chagnon, Tim Clark, Pierre Dorion, Irene F. Whittome, Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, Angela Grauerholz, Lesley Johnstone, Martine Meilleur, Dominique Mousseau, Yves O’Reilly, Alain Paiement, Suzanne Paquet, Andrea Szilasi, Martha Townsend et Richard-Max Tremblay as well as Artexte, the Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Centre de documentation Yvan Boulerice, the Estate of Betty Goodwin - Gaétan Charbonneau and the Estate of David Tomas - Michèle Thériault.