Lecture - Conceptual Art Meets Urban Attitude: Melvin Charney and the 1972 Exhibition Montréal Plus ou Moins?

IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE EXHIBITION TRAFFIC : CONCEPTUAL ART IN CANADA 1965-1980

Lecture by Johanne Sloan
CONCEPTUAL ART MEETS URBAN ATTITUDE: MELVIN CHARNEY AND THE 1972 EXHIBITION MONTRÉAL PLUS OU MOINS?
Wednesday January 25 at 6 pm
At the Gallery
FREE ADMISSION
    
This talk considers the intersection of conceptual art strategies and urban activism in Montreal during the 1970s, focusing on the exhibition Montréal plus ou moins? / Montreal plus or minus? held at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts in 1972. Only a few years after Expo 67, the world's fair which proposed a technologized, future-oriented cityscape, some of Montreal's artists would set out to unravel this urban paradigm. The organizer of the exhibition, the artist-architect Melvin Charney, drew a range of artists, activists, and community workers into the orbit of the museum, to reflect on the city's social and material transformation. Montréal plus ou moins? addressed the city through a sequence of politicized conceptual-art gestures, and this distinctive form of cultural intervention would get taken up again a few years later, when Charney organized the infamous Corridart exhibition along Sherbrooke Street in 1976.

Johanne Sloan is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Art History, Concordia University. Her writings include the essays Conceptual Landscape Art: Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow (2007), Bill Vazan's Urban Coordinates (2009), and Everyday Objects, enigmatic Materials for the Quebec Triennale 2011 catalogue. She is also the co-editor of Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, a collection of essays published by University of Toronto Press in 2010.

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Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
Concordia University
1400, Boul. De Maisonneuve Ouest, LB 165
Montreal, Quebec

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