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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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...[Philip] Monk proposed that, for the new art in Toronto at least, while representation can lead to action rather than to the mere contemplation allowed by formalist modernism, it is nevertheless only women artists who, in Monk's estimation, have shown a genuine and authoritative acquisition of representation and all that this slippery term means. [...] "The lines of difference," Monk wrote, "…are really between a passive resignation and melancholy despair, pessimism, nihilism and decadence on the one hand and the sense of the possibility of action on the other." Men, Monk insists, have given themselves over to a romantic yearning for aesthetic unity, to dreams of a fallen wholeness, to a longing for heroism; men he says, are basically expressionists. It is women who hold sway over meaningful representation." ...from "Reading Philip Monk: Analysing a complex and controversial theory about Canadian art and artists," by Gary Michael Dault in Canadian Art, Winter/December 1984, Volume 1, Number 2, p.70-73. To read the whole article, go to the Canadian Art websiteWow...cool, eh? So controversial. I wonder, is this when Philip Monk allegedly jumped the shark? I applaud Canadian Art for putting up these old articles, very helpful to anyone like me obsessed with recent Canadian art history. I spent the 2nd half of the 80s in art school in Nova Scotia. I remember Philip Monk came to give a lecture and showed slides of paintings by Joanne Tod. I liked them. I was painting at the time, and being told by staff and fellow students in no uncertain terms that I (in my self-referrential irony) was making "boy" art, and that I had to "realise that women make a different kind of work." I can still feel the flush of weird inarticulated frustration that came over me in the face of these statements. And it was kind of true, at least in the context of the painting department at my school. The only people who related to my projects were guys: faculty like Gary Neil Kenedy, who was supportive and bemused, and fellow students who were themselves tied up in knots about the impossiblity of meaning, the death of painting, and such spirals of despair. Monk's statement (as filtered through Dault) sounds preposterous, but I feel like I know something of what he meant. While venturing into ironic or self-referential territory got me slaps on the wrist from other females (the laden scrawl, "Clever girl" written in the comment book of my graduating show still stings), I was still less boxed in, and had more generative scope to play with signs and signifiers than my male fellows.