Impulse Archaeology (review)

Impulse Archaeology is a large-format, handsome celebration of twenty years of Impulse magazine (1971–90), and its fifty-two separate issues. The first eight were edited by writer Peter Such, who founded the magazine as a literary venture, but who then handed it on to international multidisciplinary artist and underground impresario Eldon Garnet, who edited the magazine until 1990, when he in turn passed it on to Peter Day, who prepared only one issue before his own death.

Impulse Archaeology is a collection set up like a magazine, with a masthead, an editor, a managing editor, an art director, and various design assistants. At the beginning of the volume are nine brief essays on the nature and importance of the magazine, followed by ninety-one samplings from its years of publication, and finally a chronology which describes each number. However, this is not just a history of a magazine, but also a record of a particular time in the arts in Canada and in western culture.

No quantitative description can give a sense of the importance of Impulse as a vanguard cultural repository, with its contributions from leading-edge art practitioners and theoreticians. In fact, in the pages of Impulse the line between art practice and art theory is broken down completely. After Garnet took over, each issue was designed as a collaboration between the editor and the art director, so that each issue was conceived as a work of art, with its own aesthetic practice. Some issues were dedicated to one artist – for example to John Scott, or to Nancy Johnson – while others were multi-level collaborations.

The history of early twentieth-century art is a history of the avant-garde. As Ezra Pound had it, modernism's avowal to ' make it new' moved art to develop alternative modes of production, alternative presses, fringe theatres, experimental new forms in musical composition and dance. Such innovations continued to some degree into the later part of the century, and the founding of Impulse at the beginning of the 1970s coincided as well with the growth of Canadian nationalism, which led to the flourishing of a national literature and art practice, which was in some interesting ways a parallel to the Irish Renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century. Politics and the arts came together in Canada in the growth of a self-conscious and self-confident national culture. This growth of the sense of identity then became a reaching out of provincialism to an international context, a breaking down of perceived boundaries.

Many cultural ventures came into being in this period alongside Impulse, including Descant, Exile, Porcupine's Quill, Oberon, Guernica, Talon Books, Theatre Passe Muraille, Tarragon Theatre, Tish, Anything Company, and Factory Theatre. So often their very names are indicative of this reaching out or beyond.

In Impulse Archaeology, the essays which precede the excerpts resemble the shape-shifting nature of the magazine itself, the ways in which it is both product and reflection, a part of the culture of the times and a mirror of it. The essayists include Garnet, art critic Gary Michael Dault, and philosopher Mark Kingwell, each bringing a distinct perspective to the analysis of what Impulse was. At the time it was produced there was perhaps no sense of its importance except as an activity. Like any magazine, it was collected by some and thrown away by others. Now, looking over the descriptions of each issue and reading the samples from its pages, one can see, without any nostalgia for its demise, its magnificent achievement. Irregular, erratic, but never without interest, Impulse took the pulse of several generations, and its contributors included William Burroughs, Joyce Wieland, Joel-Peter Witkin, Michel Foucault, Angela Carter, John Bentley Mays, Jenny Holzer, Jean Baudrillard, Matt Cohen, Marguerite Duras, Nicole Brossard, and many more. The excerpts are uniformly well chosen, reflecting its virtues and liveliness.

Although it is not stated in the volume, Impulse Archaeology's publication seems to have been timed to coincide with a panel discussion at the Drake Hotel in Toronto, and...