Toronto’s “Exotic Modernism” (1980)

A letter to the editor of Vanguard magazine (April 1981, p. 33) in response to Donald Kuspit’s article on Toronto painting (“Exotic Modernism,” Vanguard, November 1980).

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Dear Editor:

Twenty-three years after Clement Greenberg’s modernist-making trip to Toronto (history repeats itself as farce, Marx wrote; and Greenberg is Kuspit’s return of the repressed) and one hundred sixteen years after Baudelaire’s ill-fated lecture tour of Brussels, Donald Kuspit offers his lecture notes on Toronto painting, complete with asides (Donald B. Kuspit, “Exotic Modernism: Toronto, Vanguard, November 1980).

After paraphrasing Baudelaire’s few moments with the work, Kuspit turns his “inner eye” to find les correspondances in Toronto painting, or at least the correspondences to his “fiction that can manufacture fact.” As with Baudelaire, the European Orientalists, the first and second generation Romantics and Symbolists, “The Toronto painters were exotics, their abstractions at once an exotic manifestation in an unexotic environment and an exotic means to an alternative mentality.” Not only “exotically expressionistic,” the “achieved exoticism” of the works of these painters expressed an “exotically utopian passion.” That is, the paintings are a unique hot-house breed in a cool intellectual, cultural and physical climate of “exotic emblematic modernism.”

Modernist they may claim to be; Kuspit claims not only that “Toronto reveals itself as a stronghold of advanced modernist purity”; but more: the work “once it could be detached from its New York modernist dimension, that it had all the makings of a major independent modernism.”

Not wishing to be an apologist for Toronto painting, and not wishing to have a “major independent modernism” thrust upon me unaware, I can’t help but question, on the one hand, Kuspit’s insight into the utopian passion and exotic yearnings of those around me, and, on the other, his knowledge of the history and conditions of modernism in Toronto (he refers to James Purdie and Art News). The first might be readily dismissed if it did not bear upon the second; that is, if exotic trappings had not already forestalled the arrival of modernism in its proper time; and if it did not bear upon the auratic market objet d’art—for Kuspit is promoting a certain consciousness with ideological consequences.

I might give exegetical attention to the blinding constellation of terms—“exotic,” “emblematic,” “modernism”—if that exercise did not obscure or delay attention to the facts, history and intentions of the paintings. Any work would fit into Kuspit’s schema if “it was exotic enough in context.” The only term we can pursue with any rigour is “modernism”; but Toronto, unlike Montreal, for instance, has no history of reception of modernism, until very recently. The “exotically expressionistic” Gordon Rayner with his “Persian sensuality,” for example, was one of a group of painters who operated out of a misunderstanding of modernism, as still do many of the uptown gallery painters Ron Martin, perhaps the most modernist of all, is dismissed by Kuspit under Greenberg’s rubric “Novelty Art.” Giving credence to this term, which with its introduction displayed the bankruptcy and inflexibility of modernist criticism, explains why Kuspit can look at little else but painting. Meanwhile Martin, although a disguised minimalist according to Kuspit, is “exoticized by way of his abundant paint.”

What we are witnessing is another resurrecting job on modernism disguised under the corrupting fantasy of an “independent modernism.” Periodically modernism, like capitalism, redefines its limits and gathers its exclusions in order to maintain its legitimacy. But each time it sends its representatives to the provinces to look for gallery fodder, the “ethical” tragedy of modernism returns as farce. The extension of the precepts of modernism to include figure-ground and value structure, to prevent modernism running aground in the seventies, washed up Jack Bush among other minor painters.

Now, “generation of the metaphoric from a strict modernism” is promoted as “exactly what the modernist emblematic is about.” This new, and what should be, self-conscious condition of modernism is seen by Kuspit “as motivating, wittingly or unwittingly, the best Toronto painters.” But the “sense of subliminal metaphorical potential” is more emblematic of Kuspit’s desire or practice as a critic—however self-conscious a strategy that is, as he moves from “cosmetic transcendentalism” to “exotic modernism.” The final joke for us is the return that this signals, on another level, of the transcendental symbolism of the “exotic” Group of Seven.

Sincerely,

Philip Monk

Toronto