Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada

Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge: A Living Culture Needs a Living Wage

75 Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge: A Living Culture Needs a Living Wage KIRSTY ROBERTSON AND J. KERI CRONIN Union busting, the demise of public health care, the privatization of public services, gender politics, nuclear power, the failure of the North Atlantic fisheries, environmental threats to fresh water, protest and the media, jobs, and the environment—these are just some of the many issues dealt with in the portfolio of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, whose collective work spans more than thirty years of artistic and activist engagement in Canada and elsewhere. Ranging from collaborative projects with labour unions to front-line advocacy for working artists, the photo-collage work of Condé and Beveridge is central to discussions of political art in Canada. In January 1976, shortly before their return to Canada from New York, an exhibition of Condé and Beveridge’s work titled It’s Still Privileged Art, opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario. As Dot Tuer describes, the show was expected to contain the kind of minimalist and conceptual art then popular in the United States. “Their homecoming,” she writes, “was expected to bring local veneration for art work already validated (in that inevitably Canadian way) elsewhere.”1 Instead, notes Jan Allen, the exhibition was “a convulsive rejection of formal aesthetics and the art market of the day.”2 Where hard-edge minimalist paintings were expected, instead there were banners emblazoned with slogans such as “ART MUST BECOME RESPONSIBLE FOR ITS POLITICS” and “CULTURE HAS REPLACED BRUTALITY AS A MEANS OF MAINTAINING THE STATUS QUO.” Instead of a catalogue , there was a bookwork in the style of a Chinese socialist comic, and instead of minimalist sculpture, throughout the exhibition were silkscreened posters of the two artists in poses borrowed from Chinese and Soviet propaganda.3 As Tuer notes, while Condé and Beveridge expected the exhibition to raise some feelings of discomfort and possibly dismissal, both underestimated the ire with which It’s Still Privileged Art was received. “It was one thing to be an artist with politics,” writes Tuer, “it was another matter altogether to incorporate a call to social revolution as the transparent theme of an exhibition.”4 She continues, “Condé and Beveridge’s insistence that a radicalism of ideas without a radicalism of society ended up reinforcing rather than disrupting a cultural status quo was interpreted as a betrayal by those artists who viewed participation in the art world as subversive rather than complicit.”5 Imagining Resistance 76 Thus began an effort to break through the barriers of the art world and to make work that was not only about social movements or the struggles between capital and labour but that also specifically took place in the uncomfortable spaces between the art world and the working world. As Tuer notes, “Condé and Beveridge came to New York in order to achieve recognition as ‘international’ and ‘avant-garde’ artists and were radicalized by the process of confronting this mythology.”6 They came away influenced by Marxist debates and anti-Vietnam activism, and with a clear understanding of the gender politics of the art world, filtered through the growing second-wave feminist movement, as reflected in the Women Artists’ Committee (in which Condé was involved).7 They also became increasingly aware of their own compromised position within this system and of the way that Western culture tended to position the artist within a theoretically inspired socialism that harshly contrasted with the bourgeois reality of many working artists (even those scraping together a living).8 It won’t come as a shock then that Condé and Beveridge’s work is characterized not just by a sustained partnership, but by collaboration and community building at all levels. As their practice moved from the studio and into union offices, factories , and elsewhere, the stories of workers were turned into photo collages and staged settings, layered and built through specific input from the workers themselves. The process of collaboration came with difficulties, the consultations often tripping on the idea of art as privileged and on a hesitancy to embrace that which appeared to belong to a group of people far removed from the shop floors. This is not to suggest that the work of Fig. 6.1 Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge, detail from Theatre of Operations (1997). Image reproduced with permission from Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge. Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge: A Living Culture Needs a Living...