Genres High and Low
Writings on Art
Drawing on Philip Monk’s extensive writing history, Genres High and Low includes essays from the mid-1990s to the present on Canadian and international artists; on the American avant-garde and underground culture of the 1960s and 1970s; on the origins of the downtown Toronto art scene in the late 1970s into the 1980s; and on new ways of thinking about history, archives, and curating.
During his career, Monk worked as a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and was director of the Art Gallery of York University. But Monk is best known for leading with his writing. He was Toronto’s first independent art critic, an example others followed. He introduced French theory to English Canadian art writing and combined it with literary invention. His writing is both philosophical and performative: he extended his writing into atypical territory through his experiments with genre, rule-based writing, pseudonyms, and unusual subject matter. He uncovered and then mimicked the operational strategies of the artists he was considering, adopting an analytical style and a narrative form unique to the matter at hand.Genres High and Low shows an understanding of art writing not as secondary or derivative but as an inventive practice in its own right.
Available format(s)
Philip Monk, former Director of the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto, has written fourteen books over his career, as well as scores of articles, reviews, and essays, plus dozens of catalogues on international and Canadian artists. Dedicated to setting in place the theoretical conditions for writing the history of contemporary Canadian Art, and of Toronto in particular, Monk’s writing set the terms of debate on art in Canada for decades. His most recent book, Is Toronto Burning? is a history of the conflicted creation of Toronto’s downtown art scene in the late 1970s.
