Ian Carr-Harris, Tracings: Writing Art 1975-2020. Concordia University Press. 424 pages.

Ian Carr Harris is a practicing artist and a critic. He received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2007 and is an emeritus professor at OCAD University. He also just happens to live in the County, with his partner, the artist Yvonne Lammerich.

Tracings is a collection spanning five decades of Carr-Harris’s clear critical engagement with the contemporary Canadian art scene, in essays, notes, and commentaries. It is the sixth volume of Concordia’s Text/Context series, which publishes the writings of Canadian artists on art as “compelling primary sources that illuminate artistic practice.”

It is not often, in other words, that visual artists are also writers. I picked up this volume feeling intense curiosity about its subject: contemporary Canadian art, which can be indecipherable to an outsider. If, like me, you could use a guide, here is one.

These essays canvas the art worlds of Toronto, where the author taught at OCAD over a career spanning 40 years, and Canada, and they are full of moments of acute perception and connection, contextualized with detailed information about the where and the when, the who and the what under his scrutiny, and, of course, why.

Each essay situates their reader in a distinct place and time, part of Carr-Harris’s dedication to history, his attention to art as at once an intervention and a continuation of its historical moment.

In “How We See/What We Say,” for example, an essay originally published in the catalogue to a 1986 Toronto Art Gallery at Harbourfront exhibition, he writes, “it must be pointed out that this printed text is really a transcript to accompany the audio catalogue. My emphasis is important. The spoken word is richer in nuance and direction than the written, and therefore closer to my purpose, which is to demonstrate that artworks are conversational, and that ideas are passionate.”

It is but one arresting moment in a series of them in a collection dedicated to the arts of perception.

An artist and curator here draws the reader’s attention to the audio version of the exhibition catalogue he is writing. The essay is illustrated with a photograph of the written catalogue and an accompanying CD case, the recording of the catalogue. I was struck by the assertion, within a collection of writings, that “the spoken word is richer in nuance and direction than the written,” and that “artworks are conversational.”

In Carr-Harris’s words, artworks come to life. The delight of this collection is the way it takes on the here and the now, in its place and time. It insists on full presence: attending to ideas in their moment.  It is a collection of texts written to be read aloud, to living people, at conferences and openings and launches and pop-up galleries. 

Full disclosure, I am an English professor. I not only read for a living, but, like Carr-Harris, speak for a living. Yet I have never once considered that, “the spoken word is richer in nuance and direction than the written.” I always, perhaps unthinkingly, considered the opposite to be the case: the written word is reflective, it can take its time, be revised, over and over again if need be, even here in this newspaper. Never mind in the hands of the great literary writers, poets, and essayists, whose voices are so alive, they echo across the centuries.

The greatest writers, from Milton to Nabokov, saw writing as the only way to achieve lasting fame, the kind that outlives you. For the sublime egotists of the high western canon, the only kind worth having.

The real delight of this collection is the way it takes on the here and the now, in its place and time. It insists on full presence: attending to ideas in their moment. That the spoken word is privileged makes this book fun to read. It is a collection of texts written to be read aloud, to living people, at conferences and openings and launches and pop-up galleries. In Carr-Harris’s words, artworks come to life.

The book moves from discussion of the art world to lucid engagements with individual works of art and curated collections, where individual artworks are put in conversation with one another.

The voice is clear and firm. It engages on ethical grounds, which are offered as the terrain of a shared conversation.

In the 2005 “Report from Toronto,” presented at the Comox Valley Art Gallery Conference, “Reports from Canada: Practice and Place,” Carr-Harris considers the idea of authenticity through the idea of place. In our time, he notes, a place is no longer its own thing; a place, any place, is always mediated; not so much a place as an intersection, for competing images and ideas.

“Destination cities like London or New York have long been manufactured signs, but to anyone in the developed West, the lowliest village is merely quotable, a conflation of any number of other places.”

Through this deft summoning of the Postmodern dismissal of any kind of authenticity, or genuine sense of place, in a welter of overlapping images, like an Instagram scroll that renders everything and anything inauthentic, a copy of a copy, Carr-Harris moves into a Jorge Luis Borges short story.

“Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote” tells of an artist, Pierre Menard, confronting the problem of originality. “He did not want to compose another Don Quixote — which would be easy — but the Don Quixote.” 

It summons the problem of any artist, in any time or place, who wants not just authenticity, but originality, which may or may not be the same thing.

It’s easy to lose one’s footing in our complex culture of copies and fakes. But Carr-Harris rescues his subject every time. The seer, the speaker, the artist, or, really, anyone worth attending to, is “the moral or responsible —accountable — subject.” With this redeemed subject, Carr-Harris rescues a clear concept of reality: fantasy and artificiality are “untestable experiences.” Those that matter create “contact and equivalency.”

These essays, on the most complex of our contemporary questions, offer perceptions worth attending to. In the attention they offer, they evoke what matters. They turn the reader into a listener, with thoughts of their own. 

The book’s County launch is Saturday 4 January at 3pm at Oeno Gallery. All Welcome.