Did I choose the artist or did the art choose me? Could I know that the work revealed me as much as I uncovered its hidden mechanisms? Not yet. Where writing leads cannot be anticipated. The great lesson of writing, children, is abandonment. No theory, no thesis comes into play beforehand. The writer looks on while writing takes place. —PM

Genres High and Low is not just a collection of essays; it is a book about writing on art. It follows art writing into atypical territory in experiments with genre, fiction, rule-based writing, pseudonyms, and unusual subject matter, such as dissemblance and deception. The book includes in-depth essays from the 1990s to the present on Canadian and international artists, on American underground culture of the 1960s and 1970s, on the origins of the downtown Toronto art scene in the late 1970s and 1980s, and on new ways of thinking about history, archives, and curating.

6:30 - Doors
7:00 - Presentation from Philip Monk
7:30 - Conversation with Michael Turner

Book signing to follow

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About Philip Monk
From 1977 – 1984, Philip Monk was a writer, and in the early 1980s a free-lance curator as well. From 2003 to the end of 2017, he was Director of the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto. Previously he was a senior curator at The Power Plant (1994 – 2003) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (1985 – 1994). He has written fifteen books, including Genres High and Low: Writings on Art (2026), Is Toronto Burning?: Three Years in the Making (and Unmaking) of the Toronto Art Scene (2016), and Glamour is Theft: A User’s Guide to General Idea (2012). As well as scores of articles, reviews, and book essays, he has written dozens of catalogues on international and Canadian artists. In 2009, he was the inaugural recipient of the Ontario Association of Art Galleries Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2011 he received the Hnatyshyn Award for Curatorial Excellence. In 2017, he won the Outstanding Contribution Award in the Governor General's Awards for Visual and Media Arts.

About Michael Turner
Michael Turner is a writer of variegated settler ancestry living on unceded Coast Salish territory. Critical writings have appeared in Art 21 (online), Art Papers, Art on Paper, Border Crossings, Canadian Art, Duchamp’s Socks, Modern Painters, Mousse … in addition to catalogues essays on Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Kasper Feyrer, Brian Jungen, Ken Lum … Curatorial projects include “to show, to give, to make it be there”: Expanded Literary Practices in Vancouver: 1954-1969 (SFU Galleries, 2010); Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry (Belkin Gallery, 2012), with Scott Watson; and Mainstreeters: Taking Advantage, 1972-1982 (grunt gallery/ Polygon Gallery, 2015), with Allison Collins.