Non-Social Art

I attended the opening ceremonies for an art exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in which Toronto artists of the seventies and eighties were mixed in a well-curated group show. Many of my contemporaries were juxtaposed with First Nations and Afro-Canadian artists who have long felt excluded from the Art Gallery of Ontario and similar institutions. Some contemporaries were grousing about not being included in the show; and somebody asked me if I had work in it, which I don’t. And I don’t feel treated unjustly or omitted…most of what these artists and their work share in common is sociality. I have a taste for anti- or non-social art, myself. This is art that is not representing a community or a politic... yes, if this makes me an apolitical bourgeois individual, so be it. A friend once asked me who is the ‘other’ in my work. I dodged the question, but I should have answered “oh, I don’t really know. Probably myself”. How modernist, and so on and so on et cetera.