Andy Patton Interview

by Peter Joch

Peter Joch: You served on the YYZ board from 1983-1988, but it seems like your involvement with YYZ started much earlier when you wrote a review of Joanne Tod's 1981 exhibition Replications (dark haired girls) for Parachute magazine.

Andy Patton: That was really an interesting exhibition actually because, if I recall correctly, she would put in one of these portraits from a photographic source that she'd taken, and then the other half of the painting was copied from the first half of the painting. So, it was very YYZ in being mediated and something like pictures, which was taking place in the States, but not many people knew about it because it wasn't big yet. YYZ was at that point already much more, not exactly post-media, but it showed all kinds of different media, which was unusual at that time, and it was already much more mediated especially through the camera or through videotape.

So that review was your first involvement with YYZ?

Well, that would be the first formal involvement, but really I guess I became interested in it just because it was one of the very few galleries that showed what then seemed like interesting art. So, both Janice [Gurney] and I went to YYZ a lot, and saw a series of really interesting shows. Like Ron Benner's Anthro-Apologies, David Merritt did an interesting show … Basically almost everything YYZ showed was really fascinating at that point, and there were very few other places like that. Carmen Lamanna's gallery was really interesting, and A Space was usually interesting, but most of the commercial galleries were just dreadful. It was all mainly Greenberg-type work or Painters 11-type work.

In the late 1970s and early 80s?

Yeah, it was pretty dreadful.

The 1980s are classified as a return to representation, a return to content, and YYZ certainly seemed to show photo or photo-mediated work that interrogated representation. This seemed to culminate in 1982's Monumenta. Can you talk a little about this return to content in Toronto, and what distinguished it from what was happening in New York?

In my view, I know what you're saying about the 80s, and it makes sense looking at things in a general way. If you were in Toronto in 1980, you'd see that there was a lot of abstract Clement Greenberg-type painting going on in the commercial galleries. As far as the return to content, it was already there actually primarily through videotape. The video artists were very interested in representation obviously because they couldn't get away from it. Performance art and the beginnings of photographic art was nowhere near as big as it was later, but there was a real difference between photography, like "real photographers," who were pretty well uninteresting, and just worried about grey scales, and good prints, and things like that, and more conceptual uses of photography. So, I think it was already there, it's just that it really was buried under a landslide of pretty dreadful painting. So, YYZ was a little different though in that it was content-oriented, but it was also unafraid of traditional media, but it had really no interest in what medium you used. So, it could be a show of paintings like Joanne's, or they could be photographs like Stan Denniston's Reminders, or it could be a performance. It was really ecumenical in that way. There is a term that people talked about-"media fascism," which referred to things like we show only videotape or we show only painting. You know, that sort of nonsense. YYZ never had any interest in that, and that's partly what led to YYZ on Queen Street being either the first or one of the first galleries to program video exhibitions, and give it exactly the same amount of time, and importance, and advertising as an exhibition of painting or sculpture or traditional medium. The issue of what medium you used was left up to the artist. There was no assumption that because you used a certain medium that that was inherently good or inherently bad. Lots of people believed in the death of painting by the late 70s, and YYZ had no real interest in that, but unlike Chromazone, it wasn't celebrating painting either. It was only what the outcome of the work was. YYZ tried to show interesting work, and didn't really care if it was painting, photography, video, or performance. It was what you now describe as cross-platform.

As far as the difference between Toronto and New York, Janice Gurney would be useful to talk about that because, amongst other things, she just finished her PhD, and, amongst other things, was looking at that. I can summarize it though. In her view, and I think she's right, American appropriation tended to be more focused on the "Death of the Author." So, it was original by being unoriginal. If you think of Sherrie Levine say, it's the exemplar in that way. But, Canadian appropriation tended to have the trail of history along behind it. If you look at Janice's work, Joanne's work, even my work, Judith Doyle, who did a really interesting performance called Transcript, which was, amongst other things, about emigration. You'll see a lot more references to history. Like in Joanne's [Tod] work, there are references to, for instance, changing immigration patterns in Toronto, or the colonial history, and the first people that were here. In Janice's [Gurney] work you see a lot of things about being a product of the British Empire. Those things seem to be cut away in the States, and what the reason is we'll never know exactly, but it might be that America went through a revolution so they pride themselves, at least unconsciously, on having severed themselves of history, whereas Canada has a much more gradual history.

I can also remember that there were some drawings by David Clarkson where he roamed around the city, and drew from observation different public sculpture, but he'd fragment them, and sort of stick them all together so you'd get a senseless agglomeration of different sections of public sculptures all forming some supposed sort of new public sculpture. So, you'd see there something like the wreckage of history or the amalgamation of history into something grotesque, and that again is very different from the Americans. You probably could have shown those drawings with Robert Longo's drawings of Men in the Cities, but one looked punchy, striking, and iconic, and the other looked redolent of history, and perhaps, was saying that history was there but lay in pieces. So, they are very different mentalities. I think the work done in Canada, and the work done in the States really were very different, and if you call them by the same name like appropriation or something that only gets at the technical means, so it would be like saying Kiefer is a painter, and David Reed is a painter. It's technically true, but it doesn't really tell you anything.

That's interesting. In Seven Types of Appropriation, David Evans names "Death of the Author" as one theory that the appropriationists took up, and that the other theory is "Mythologies." If the "Death of the Author" theory was taken up by Americans, would "Mythologies" be more influential in Canada?

"Mythologies" was probably stronger here. General Idea really took that up as their bible. "Death of the Author" seemed to be big in the States, and it was always being used to promote or discuss the work of "Pictures" artists down there, but it really wasn't big here at all. Amongst other things, it always looked like it was nonsense because after the "Death of the Author," authors became even bigger as a function.

There might be another way of looking at it though, which would be that you have to choose between the "Death of the Author," and Foucault's "What is an Author?" In one, the author is being eclipsed, and not in the other-it's simply a function that can be reworked, and redistributed. I think, though I don't recall any of us reading that at the time, clearly the thinking up here was much more like Foucault's than it was like Barthes'.

By the way, one more thing I should mention too is that everything is much more theoretical now. Almost all of this was done intuitively. We didn't know what we were doing. Philip Monk was reading Barthes. I can recall other people reading Barthes, and it was Mythologies and Writing Degree Zero.

That's interesting because Mark Lewis mentioned that all of the French theorists were heavily read, and the work that he's done in the 80s is basically just based on the theory that he's read.

That may be true of him but he's a little later, and probably more influenced by Vancouver too. Vancouver was heavily theorized, but again that's a little later. The people that I knew, for instance Lisa Steele who was a real exemplar of the generation before, a lot of her work was almost like ordinary language philosophy. Just thinking out, "Could I do this?" and then if she did that-carried out some task like, I'll examine my scars-then she would examine the outcome, and ask herself, has art occurred? So, a lot of times, none of us were really setting out to make art since most of the art that we saw we hated, and that accounts for what art stood for. So we did things that we wanted to do. I don't recall there being really any theoretical support for what all kinds of people were doing until three or four years later. I think it's often that way that something gets done, and then the theoretical apparatus gets built around it to promote it or to explicate it, and then it begins to look like the theory was there before the art, but if you actually look at the translation dates for all kinds of things like Walter Benjamin, say, was translated much later than you'd imagine. So, they simply weren't there, and now Benjamin and Barthes are everywhere. Pages, by the way, the bookstore that no longer exists, used to be the outpost for critical theory, and so it really functioned as a way of promulgating theory. That was in the mid-80s, before it really gets going.

So, YYZ would now appear to be "improperly theorized." It was a bunch of people doing things, and thinking about them as carefully as they could. It's like garage bands. They didn't have great equipment. That's what YYZ was. It was a hell of a great garage band.

Were you on the board at the time of Monumenta?

No. I think Janice and I joined shortly after that. We were both in the exhibition.

Do you remember what you showed in Monumenta?

Yeah, I showed what are not very well known works, and I just showed one. It was a painting based on a painting by Federico Barocci. So, I copied that painting, but repainted it with Carolyn Simmons' head instead of the head of the saint. Then I took it off the stretcher, and crumpled it up, and I photographed it crumpled, and then I repainted the whole painting with the crumples interacting with the depicted space, so it has this depicted space versus real space issue going on. Janice showed this piece called Portrait of me as my Grandmother's Faults, which used a photographic element and a painted element.

It was a show that was really influential, but I think its influence was probably not what was intended, because it really got celebrated as a return to painting. YYZ's interest, as I recall, and I'm pretty sure that one of the organizers David Clarkson's interest, was a return to representation and/or a return to content. He had really no interest in it being any one particular media, but it got taken up as being a return to painting.

The way you describe your work in Monumenta brings me to your first solo show of paintings at YYZ in 1983. I read a review by John Bentley Mays who described the work as "concerned with the personal effects and appropriations of cultural imagery." Was this an accurate description of the exhibition, and can you talk a little about appropriation in your work?

I think it's accurate enough. There was something else that John wrote about the same time about both Oliver Girling and myself. He said that these are the kind of artists who in an earlier generation wouldn't have been painting, and that both of us were very literate. I think that was true too.

About appropriation in those paintings, it really came out of a long process of things. I started as a poet, and I did a series of poems that were quotations. I just took things from novels, and stitched them together to make poems. Then, I eventually wound up doing a show at the Funnel of these things that just started out as a joke where I cut up comics. Both, ones that you could buy in comic book form or things that appeared in a Saturday newspaper, and I stitched them together to form different narratives that I thought were hilarious. I thought I was getting at the unconscious of the comic. That started to give me the structure that you now recognize as appropriation. Later, I think in 1980, I did these light boxes, and those images too were appropriated, and the texts came from these comic books. So, I was in the habit of not making up imagery. There wasn't really a word for it. I think the word appropriation didn't start to get around until 1982 or something. I'm still not sure that it's the best term, but there are a lot of people (a small number of people seems like a lot in our crowd) working with found imagery. As I recall, the most important thing to me at that point was to make work from the side of reception rather than the side of production. I was one of several people that were thinking about this, and, in some sense, realized that we didn't want to take some final step, and become "artists." You know, like producing and inventing imagery-that we were happier as viewers of art. We'd grown up that way, so we've seen art, and we've seen TV shows, and we'd grown up admiring different people. We wanted to make work from that position that was previous to art as a status of art. I actually thought at the time that it was inherently political. The recycling of images, and the kind of alienation that resulted from it, was always going to be at odds with the status quo, but I remember by 1985 seeing a show of paintings based on appropriation, and thinking, "oh it's totally over!" I was dead wrong. It still had a long, long time to run as a kind of market strategy. I just thought it was completely bankrupt by that point.

I really liked the alienation of it. I liked the being distanced from an image. I liked the way that if you used a found image it didn't disclose things about you, because it wasn't your intention. It wasn't expressionist in any of the older, standard ways. You could interpret an image that way. You could say, why is so and so using this image?-and that's a legitimate question-but you couldn't say, wow he's so inventive, I've never would have thought of making an image like that, because a lot of the images I've used were common-place, like one was Rodin's The Kiss. I didn't make that up. It's been around about a century and a bit. Another one that's in that same painting is The Master Carver of Strasbourg Cathedral, presumed to be a self-portrait. That's been around for centuries and centuries. They are not painting, they're sculpture. Just like I made paintings from photographs, I like to make paintings from photographs that were of sculptures in some cases. It was hybrid. People didn't use the word "hybrid" at the time, but it was, in many quarters among painters, regarded illegal to use slide projection to trace an image, which I did. Or to use found imagery, and not invent your own, but I really liked that. I hadn't set out to be a painter, I just wanted to make an artwork in the strongest way that I could. I was also floating around in a sea of imagery because I was working at the Metro Reference Library, and I was shelving magazines and newspapers from all over the world, and so you'd come across images, say of a disaster in Bhopal, India, and the kind of imagery that was used was different in an Indian magazine than in a European magazine, and they were both different from what would appear in an American magazine. That really interested me a lot.

I want to talk about your experience as a board member at YYZ. The one issue that comes up in the YYZ publication, Decalog, is the issue of YYZ being a "service organization" as in YYZ being an alternative space, which is, at the same time, being funded by the government. Keeping this in mind, how alternative was YYZ?

Well, that kind of argument, and even that term only started to come up in the late 80s, because earlier, the government, the Canada Council rather, was really funding very alternative spaces like the Albert Street Gallery that eventually became Plug In in Winnipeg, which was really quite avant-garde. I was still living in Winnipeg when it was running, and looking back, it was a remarkable gallery. It was like having the John Weber Gallery move from New York to Winnipeg. So, it had a very avant-garde and tiny audience. A Space was like that too. But, as the institutions got larger, and got bigger budgets, they either felt or were required to start serving larger communities. I think you have to remember too that in, say 1981, there was no community interested in the avant-garde except for the tiny membership that you could call the avant-garde. I remember seeing General Idea debut their colour bar videotape at Carmen Lamanna's gallery, and everybody was there. If a bomb had dropped on the gallery, you would have eliminated the Toronto avant-garde, and it was all fitting in one tiny little space. So, I'm not sure that the total audience for A Space, and YYZ, and ACT all put together was more than a hundred. It certainly wasn't crowded at an opening, and even at commercial galleries, you could drop in and talk to the dealers. You can't do that today; everybody is far too busy. So, it was a very different milieu.

As far as the conscious direction of it goes, I can recall David Clarkson, who for me was the real power and direction at YYZ in the early days, reminding us over and over and over again saying, let's not get big, and let's do the best work we can possibly do, and let's not worry about representing the whole range of art, let's be focused, let's be intense. He really carried the day with his argument. It was much more exciting than saying, well, it's time for us to show one of these. I think if YYZ had been much more representational, much more of a service organization early on, it would have been a disaster, or at least it would have been so watered down that it wouldn't amount to anything.

In 1986, you co-curated The Interpretation of Architecture exhibition.

Oh yeah, Janice and I, and Alan Tregebov did that.

Basically, in that show, architecture was positioned on the same level as visual art, and the exhibition was in several galleries much like Monumenta.

It was that model. The idea that we could do really major shows if we could gather together several spaces, and sometimes that would mean, for instance, when Mercer Union took part in The Interpretation of Architecture, they also kicked in the amount of artists' fees they would have been paying in that slot. So, that also allowed us to do more.

When I was reading about the show in the catalogue, the placement of architecture and visual art on the same level reminded me of Boris Groys. In Politics of Installation, he elevates design, as in architecture, and advertising, etc., higher than visual art. What is your position on that?

But again, the situation now, and the situation then are very different. I don't know if I would do the show now. Actually, I really dislike the equating of, for instance, art and design. I think now, where that once was radical, and let's think of, let's say the Bauhaus was really quite daring, and very different thought in Germany at that point in time. Now, I think it simply become a way of showing that art status is simply that of a consumer item. I find that appalling, and am completely opposed to it.

When we were doing the architecture show, it came about because architecture wasn't then the kind of public issue it is now where you see it discussed in newspapers, and there are architecture critics, say in the Globe, or you hear it debated on Matt Galloway's show on CBC. There was no public discussion that I can recall at all, and Toronto was pretty backward. At the same time, quite a number of quite young architects, many of whom were in that show, and many of them are now well established, were just starting to emerge. We weren't explicit about this but as I recall the discussions about it, I think we saw architecture as more resistant at that point than it would be seen now. So, in that way, it contributed to something in the public realm, unlike art, which had some of the qualities of resistant aesthetics that we saw in avant-garde art. Though I wouldn't say they were the same, the idea of putting them on the same platform was really interesting. We'd noticed through the submissions that came in that there were a lot of artists dealing with architecture. I think at the time, this was a gesture towards some kind of publicness, or some sort of ethical quality that these artists or the artworks themselves seemed to feel necessary to take up. So, I think we were trying to bring out these two allied but different aspects where art was looking for some kind of ethical, civic role that it didn't really have at the time, and architecture was looking for something that was like avant-garde art in being somewhat resistant, and really articulate visually. I'm not sure if they shared a common goal, but they were striving for aligned purposes I think.

Now, I think good design, for instance, is visually articulate, whereas bad or lesser design is visually generic. There is, if not an aesthetic issue there, one of visuality. I think that good design, and the public fascination for it, has become something like the requirement that everyone has an active, and voluptuous sex life. It seems like a good thing, but I'm really dubious about it because the outcome is simply the law that you must buy more.

So, I could easily imagine this show existing now, and I'd probably be opposed to it. If I were on the board I'd say, let's not do it or let's do the inverse of the show. YYZ was always quite oppositional actually.

You were also a member of the panel for The Practices of Pictures: Representation in Toronto Art, which was in response to the Philip Monk-curated Subjects in Pictures. I don't have a lot of information on this in the archive. Can you share what you remember about this panel?

I'm not sure that any of the position papers on this ever got published. As I recall, the panel itself wasn't very clear. I don't think I was very clear on it either, so I probably contributed to it. As I recall, Philip's argument was often confusing expression, representation, and mediation, and sort of moving the terms around so that it would suit the artist whose work he liked as opposed to making a clear argument. Often, you believe you're in favour of, let's say, mediation is always better than expression, but there may be some artists who fall on the other side of the ledger, and, nonetheless, you have to admit their work seems very compelling. So, it puts pressure on the logical argument. I don't think we've reached that point, at least not on that panel or in Philip's allied papers at the time, which still to me look quite confused.

The value of what Philip was doing was that he raised these things as issues. He was a really important critic in that time period. In fact, I can't think of anyone, either previous to that or after that, who was equivalent at all. For instance, when he wrote an article, it was required reading. Everybody knew they had to read it, think about it, and have an opinion about it. So, it clarified a lot of people's thinking, and pushed people's positions in all kinds of different positions. It wasn't merely the consumption of theory like the latest hot thinker-everybody reads Zizek or something like that.

Can you talk a little about your other YYZ group shows, the first one being YYZ World Tour 86 at Embassy Cultural House in London? Elizabeth MacKenzie was another artist in that show.

Yeah, she had a work that is part of the show, which she drew directly onto the wall of the gallery. It was a gallery café, and it survived that show, and it was up for many years. In fact, I think it was just destroyed recently when the embassy burned down. Anyway, it was quite a famous piece in London, and it was a piece you could return to, so you could take it up in very different time periods as things changed.

The so-called World Tour, which is still an amazing name since it only went to one place, was really an expression of interest in YYZ by the Embassy Cultural House, which was a tiny little space in London on the east side. Its influence was quite out of proportion to its size or its budget, which was virtually non-existent. Many people were quite interested in the embassy, and would go out at different times to see exhibitions there. So, when they approached us, everyone simply wanted to do the show, but it was one of those ragbag things where there are so many artists involved, you can't show very large works, and you can't really focus on anything other than where YYZ was as a group. So, it was a bit amorphous, and a bit dilute. The only piece that I would really remember from it was Elizabeth's, and that's partly because I got to see it over a longer period of time.

The second show was in 1987, in Buffalo, and was called 12 Toronto Artists. It seems that YYZ became interested in showing outside Toronto. Was this the purpose of these shows?

I can tell you a little bit about the interest that some people had in Buffalo. There was a book called A Concrete Atlantis, which is about the influence on Gropius and the Bauhaus architects of the concrete daylight factories and big silos in Buffalo, which were misinterpreted in Europe. It's a fascinating book. So a group of us including Kim Adams, Sheila Ayearst, myself, and a few other people drove down there about that time period, and broke into a lot of those buildings to look at them. Anyway, because of that we were really fascinated with Buffalo, and went down many different times just to explore the city, which was really decayed at that point.

By this time, too people knew about Hallwalls, which, of course, in the late 70s was nothing but literally a hall. There had been earlier connections. Mike Snow had done a show in Buffalo, I think at CEPA in 1970, and there was a lot of experimental photography in Buffalo some of which would get shown here. I believe Suzy Lake went down there to do an artist's talk. So, there was actually from the mid 70s to at least 1990 not a strong connection, but an intermittent and steady connection with Buffalo back and forth. Generally, it was more Toronto people going to Buffalo than vice-versa, but Buffalo was quite interesting, and it was also still clearly an industrial city whereas Toronto wasn't. It was deindustrializing, so the urban fabric was completely different. So, that was really interesting.

Buffalo and the Embassy are the counterpoint to what YYZ was trying to do, which was trying to open up more and more, and find interesting things that were at distances. For instance, we showed Berit Jensen in 1985, who lived in Copenhagen, and I believe we were the first to give Stan Douglas a solo show certainly in Toronto and that was long before he was a superstar. He had to build his own wall, and that sort of thing. So, it was just that reaching out through the grapevine to hear who's interesting, and ask what have you heard, and finding out about that work, and if it sounded great than show it.

November 16, 2012