NetherMind is an artist collective
that organized four annual exhibitions in Toronto from 1991 through 1995. The
collective’s members shared an interest in sculptural approaches to surrealism
and produced sprawling exhibitions in rough, dark warehouses and industrial
spaces. Following their fourth exhibition in 1995, the collective took a 17-year
hiatus and pursued individual exhibition careers. They re-emerged in October 2012
with an exhibition that took place in St. Anne’s Anglican Church in Toronto. Today
the collective is comprised of the artists Tom Dean, John Dickson, Catherine
Heard, Greg Hefford, Mary Catherine Newcomb, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Lyla Rye,
and Max Streicher. Other artists also associated with NetherMind in the nineties
were Miki McCarty, Carl Skelton, Anastasia Tzekas, and Manrico Venere.
The term “artist collective” sometimes
refers to two or more artists working together to produce and exhibit a body of
work. Of that type of artist collective, the N.E. Thing Company may be the
original Canadian manifestation, and General Idea the most notable over the
last 50 years. The NetherMind collective model refers quite simply to a group
of artists who come together to “put on a show.” The ChromaZone group of
painters active in Toronto in the 1980s is perhaps the best-known Canadian art
collective of this type.[1]
Money is raised, a suitable exhibition space is acquired, and each artist
contributes work to the exhibition.
Gary Michael Dault noted the proliferation
of this latter type of artist collective in Canada in the 1990s was a product
of the period’s economic and cultural context.[2]
Just as the great post-war expansion of university and visual art education had
begun to produce new artists in record numbers, the Canadian economy entered
its second major contraction in a decade. The small and shrinking trade in Canadian
fine art had neither the capacity to absorb the production of this new
generation of artists nor the ability to represent installation, new media and
time-based art forms. The educational sector, traditionally an important
support structure for the art community, had stopped growing. Victims of a boom
and bust economy, artists with graduate degrees took on odd jobs – a career
path more exceptional at the time, but which today has become a commonly
accepted career path for MFA grads.
Against the backdrop of today’s
massive redevelopment of Toronto’s downtown, it’s hard to picture the community
25 years ago. The garment industry’s move out of lower Spadina in the seventies
(the parts of the city now called the Fashion and the Entertainment districts),
manufacturing’s exit from Liberty Village in the eighties, and Parkdale’s
post-war economic decline created inexpensive working class neighbourhoods and decaying
commercial districts with large chunks of cheap industrial space.[3]
[4]
Warehouse spaces were converted into clubs, lofts, live/work arrangements,
galleries and studios supporting a low-rent economy of both established and
emerging artists, musicians and people just wanting to be part of the
alternative downtown community. It was a distinct sub-culture, supporting a
mythic narrative of urban pioneering and social belonging, and defining itself
in opposition to the dominant Canadian mass culture.
The process was of course not unique
to Toronto. An artistic and urban counter-cultural movement of squatting in
vacant buildings took root across the UK and Western Europe in the sixties. Galleries
in converted storefronts, warehouse spaces, and factory
lofts, began to emerge in London and New York.[5]
These new alternative exhibition spaces addressed two issues: They were a
creative response to economic and cultural exclusion from institutionalized
spaces and they were part of the emergence of minimalist, conceptualist and
performance-based art – a reaction against the neutrality
of the “white cube” gallery space.[6]
The “white cube,” the clinically white painted four walls of the gallery space
was however, still the dominant paradigm for exhibitions, and through much of the
eighties, the first thing the new artist tenants did was to put up drywall and
paint it white.
Painters typically wanted as little visual
activity as possible in the surrounding environment to suppress possible
distractions from the surfaces of their work. But sculpture is inherently more
engaged in the surrounding space and framing a three-dimensional work against a
white wall only works from a single point of view.[7]
Limited ambient lighting and focused spots, after all, may be all that is
needed to bring sculpture into dramatic relief. Initial discussions among the NetherMind
artists focused on the treatment of the rough industrial space and what degree
of preparation it might need. The question of whether the floor should be swept
or left as it was engaged the idea of the space as a found object in the
exhibition.
The character of the “found object
space” and the low-level ambient light became it’s own event in the NetherMind
exhibitions of the early 90s. It contrasted sharply with the dominant modernist
showroom aesthetic characteristic of the department store and the futurist,
antiseptic minimalism associated with science fiction set decoration in films
like THX 1138.[8]
The dominant contemporary architectural aesthetic of the recently constructed art
schools that many of the artists had attended as students, featuring glass
walls and studios bathed in sunlight, was nowhere to be found in the NetherMind
exhibitions.[9]
The darkened exhibition space may
have reflected another characteristic of the time – the profound pessimism and
communal despair that accompanied the ongoing crisis of the AIDS epidemic. The
documentation of death had become a recurrent subject in the contemporary art of
the early 90s, prompting Adam Gopnik, writing about the 1993 Venice Biennale, to
identify this work as part of a new “Morbid Manner,” in tune with what he saw as
an obsession with “the display of images of death, decay,
and violence,” a tendency he attributed to the influence of the work of Bruce
Nauman:
The immediate model for almost
all the grimmest work – for the macabre fragment, the tortured videos, the
cryptic neon signs, even the simple idea of assembling a lot of morbid bits and
pieces in a darkened room – is the art of the American Bruce Nauman . . . It is
Nauman’s mood – the sense of building
memorials-in-advance to an apocalypse whose causes are ill defined but whose
inevitability is grimly certain that dominates the exhibition.[10]
These influences certainly exist, but it would be
wrong to suggest the NetherMind exhibitions were a downer. They weren’t. If the
exhibitions existed against the background of social and economic crisis, the installations
by contrast communicated energy and vitality. The NetherMind collective emerged
at a time when the prospects for individual artists were few and the
institutions of contemporary art were being assaulted on all sides. As for many
Canadian artists in the 90s, banding together in a collective made sense as a
mechanism of survival. But more than that, the NetherMind members deftly
negotiated a middle space for the collaboration of emerging and established
artists, and for collective action and individual art practice. The collective
produced a series of exhibitions that had a distinctly “NetherMind” feel, style
and energy that did not describe a grimly certain apocalypse, but an
alternative way of making and exhibiting art. Where Gopnik saw a sterile
Mannerist, fin-de-siècle end game at
work, NetherMind and similar artist collectives in Canada were exploring
alternative spaces, extending the possible resonances in their work and
initiating new conversations within the community they called home.[11]
[1] Andy Fabo, Sybil Goldstein, “ChromaZone /
Chromatique: A Brief History 1981-1986,” November 2009, CCCA Canadian Art
Database: http://ccca.concordia.ca/chromazone/chromazone_history.html.
[2] “Toronto artists, brought into
contact through university friendships and certain congruencies of sensibility,
began to band together into groups: groups in search of their own funding,
their own exhibition spaces, their own promotion, their own curating, their own
documentation. Untethered, as Fabo puts it, to real estate, which none of them
could have afforded anyhow, these new collectives set about exploring the city
for suitable sites to bend to their temporary purposes: vacant warehouse
spaces, ghostly abandoned industrial basements, empty storefronts (the
advertisements for recession), rooftops, hallways, the walls of the pubs where
they drank beer and doodled their next procedural moves on wet cocktail
napkins.” Gary Michael Dault,
“Amid the rubble of the recession, a new generation of inner-city Toronto
artists is blooming,” Canadian Art, Vol. 11 #4, December 1994.
[3] During the late 1970s and early 1980s,
manufacturing operations within Liberty Village began to decline due to a shift
from rail to road shipping, the need for larger manufacturing facilities, and
lower manufacturing costs in suburban or offshore locations. In 1990, the
Toronto Carpet Manufacturing plant on Liberty Street shut down, and the Inglis
plant (owned by Whirlpool since 1985) ceased operations in 1991. The Inglis
factory and Massey-Harris factory (with the exception of 947 King St. West)
were demolished. Decreased industrial activity and lower property values caused
many Liberty Village buildings to fall into neglect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Village
[4] Tom Slater, Toronto’s South Parkdale
Neighbourhood A Brief History of Development, Disinvestment, and
Gentrification, UrbanStudies, University of Bristol, U.K., Excerpted,
condensed, and updated from an article in The Canadian Geographer, Fall 2004, titled
“Municipally Managed Gentrification in South Parkdale, Toronto.” http://www.urbancentre.utoronto.ca/pdfs/researchbulletins/CUCS-RB-28-/lm’Slater-Parkd.pdf
[5] See Sandy Nairne, “The Institutionalization
of Dissent,” pp. 387 -410, Thinking About
Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, Sandy Nairne,
Routledge: New York, 1996.
[6] Brian Doherty analyzed the politics of
representation with the white space in Inside
the White Cube - The Ideology of the Gallery Space, The Lapis Press: Santa
Monica/San Francisco, 1976.
[7] Formalist aesthetics in the sixties had
argued for the expansion of the field of art from the surface of objects to
include the surrounding space. See Grégoire
Mueller, The New Avant-Garde, New
York: Praeger, 1972, and Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October, Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979), pp.
30-44.
[8] THX
1138 (1971), Dir. George Lucas, 86 min., (USA).
[9] The new architecture of art schools
emphasized the brightly lit white cube. See Raymond Moriyama’s airy glass, brick and concrete York
University Fine Arts Phase II building in suburban Toronto built in 1973 and
the Glyde Hall studios at the Banff Centre, 1976.
[10] Adam Gopnik, “Death in Venice,” New Yorker, 2 Aug. 1993, pp. 67-73.
[11] An early example of exhibitions in
alternative spaces in Canada would include the Embassy Cultural House in in
London, Ontario. See Christopher Régimbal, “Institutions
of Regionalism: Artist Collectivism in London, Ontario, 1960–1990,” ArcPost Online Space for Artist-Run Culture,
<http://arcpost.ca/articles/institutions-of-regionalism> and Christopher Régimbal, “A Fire at the Embassy
Hotel,” FUSE Magazine, Summer 2010,
12–15. 51. <http://fusemagazine.org/2010/09/a-fire-at-the-embassy-hotel-2>. Other examples of intervention and
site specific collective projects in the 90s include the 23rd Room collective
that produced the Duke-U-Menta exhibition at the Duke of Connaught hotel in
Toronto, 1994, < http://www.myrectumisnotagrave.com/writing/dukeumenta.html>; the Farrago collective’s “The House
Project, a site specific exhibition,” Toronto, 1994, and Eileen Sommerman’s
exhibition “In Lieu: Installations in Public Washrooms,” 1998.
