Garry Neill Kennedy
Photo: Jeff Thomas

Rien de personnel 2003 Photo: Maryse Jeanguyot.

Untitled 1977 Photo: Carlo Catenazzi /Art Gallery of Ontario

The Middle East (and Beyond) 1992 Photo: Gary Castle

Artist project 1972

An American History Painting (The Complete List of Pittsburgh Paints Historic Color Series) 1996 Photo: National Gallery of Canada

Click here for more details on the works.

Garry Neill Kennedy’s career can hardly be called exemplary, since to set out with the intention of emulating it would be lunatic. As president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design for 23 years, he utterly transfigured it from a small, conservative art school to an internationally renowned institution able to attract top-flight faculty and visiting artists from all over the world. As an artist before, during and since his tenure at NSCAD, he has charted a unique course, creating a large, varied and influential body of work in which he progressively uses painting as a wedge into the world we live in, a way of gaining insight into the nature of a place and how it shapes us. His contribution to Canadian art in this dual capacity is, and will almost certainly remain, unparalleled.

When Kennedy was hired as NSCAD’s president in 1967, his only administrative experience was acquired immediately after his studies, during two years as chair of an art department with only two other faculty members. Thus he came to NSCAD with no entrenched beliefs about the role of a college president. He approached the position more as artist than as administrator, operating from “the simple notion that the College should facilitate and build upon encounters between students and the most interesting artists possible.... The ideas would come first and the structure would follow.”1

During his first several years at NSCAD, the College was the main object of Kennedy’s creative energies. His thinking was both visionary and remarkably effective: he secured a tremendous amount of capital, made wide-reaching personnel decisions and facilitated the relocation of NSCAD to the Halifax waterfront, securing the future of a major historic site. He also initiated NSCAD’s accreditation as the first degree-granting art college in Canada.

These activities were aimed at promoting new art production and providing students with stimulating experiences. Kennedy pursued these aims not by enforcing a particular educational model, but by bringing people together and creating possibilities. By instituting a lithography workshop, the NSCAD Press and multiple gallery spaces, Kennedy provided opportunities for visiting artists to make and exhibit new work at little expense. He invited artists, often young and unknown, who were making exciting new work; and the artists accepted, travelling to Halifax to teach classes, participate in conferences, make work and meet with students. Kennedy’s instincts were borne out as great artworks were created, including John Baldessari’s I will not make any more boring art; Joyce Wieland’s O Canada, for which she touched her lipsticked lips to the lithography stone as they formed each syllable of the anthem; and one of Joseph Beuys’s blackboards, created in 1976 when he made a second visit to NSCAD to receive an honorary doctorate. Others who visited or taught at NSCAD included the Canadian artists David Askevold, Paterson Ewen, Vera Frenkel, Betty Goodwin, Roy Kiyooka, N.E. Thing Co. (Iain and Elaine Baxter), Michael Snow, Jeff Wall and Gerald Ferguson, who was, with Kennedy, a central force in NSCAD’s remaking; as well as a spectacular roster of international artists including Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Dara Birnbaum, Daniel Buren, Eric Fischl, Philip Glass, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Kasper König, Joseph Kosuth, June Leaf, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Reich, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, Emmett Williams and, finally, Robert Frank, whose visits promoted the development of a strong film and video tradition in Halifax.

Kennedy’s presidency was punctuated by artistic projects, including a work for the art journal Studio International in which he listed “the facts” about NSCAD, ranging from the collective weight of its student body to a list of artists who had exhibited there. But it took an absence of two academic terms, during a 1974-75 visiting professorship at the California Institute of the Arts, to get Kennedy back into the studio in a sustained way. He began to examine the materials of art elementally, as though he had never before seen pencils and paper, canvas and paint. He created drawings in which he simply allowed a pencil to run along the threads of a stretched canvas, exposing its structure, and made a painting on paper using only water. He turned to paint itself with a spirit both scientific and quixotic, making paintings in which he would, for example, cover every bit of the canvas except a single thread with enough layers of white paint to eradicate any trace of the canvas’s texture. This exploration culminated in Untitled (1977), for which Kennedy worked outward from a single, unpainted diagonal thread, building up a layer of paint for each thread to the right of the initial thread, so that the finished painting contained, in the area to the left of the thread and in the far right corner, almost 800 layers. Produced according to a strict system, and making use only of quite basic elements of line, colour and form, the work manifests a strange and luscious aesthetic such as has rarely resulted from process-based conceptual work.

From here Kennedy began to expand his focus to include the conditions not only of the making of art but of its presentation. For an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Kennedy performed an “analysis” of works on view in the AGO’s collection of contemporary Canadian art, calculating their average size and average colour (a muddy, brownish grey). For Recent Paintings at Optica, a Montreal artist-run centre, he had the curator outline in pencil the paintings composing the exhibition prior to his; for Kennedy’s exhibition, a sign painter filled the outlines in yellow oxide. With a 1980 work for the Pluralities exhibition at the National Gallery, Kennedy explicitly scrutinized the power relations governing the art institution. His two initial proposals, both of which involved re-hanging landscapes in the Gallery’s collection to align their horizons at Kennedy’s eye level, were rejected, since they required space that “was additional to the space which was allocated to this exhibition.” In response, Kennedy produced Allocations, explained in the handout distributed in the exhibition space:
“As an alternative to the rejected proposal, my work for Pluralities 1980 consists of all the space allocated to the exhibition which, by the time of the opening of the exhibition, has not been allocated to other participants.”
By turning the viewer’s attention to the processes by which exhibition space is allotted, Kennedy exposed the structures of authority that control both what and how the viewer sees.

Increasingly, Kennedy’s work was revealing the ways in which the creation and reception of art are conditioned by the site, whether construed narrowly as a canvas or more broadly as a gallery or institution. In the late 1980s and 1990s he extended his understanding of artistic sites still further, to include the society which supplies a context for the activities of making and understanding art. For his series An American History Painting (1996) and The Middle East (and Beyond) (2003), Kennedy began from the observation that the names of household paints are used to market appearance and identity through the exaltation of a shared heritage or the construction of exotic difference. An American History Painting presents a list of all the names in the Pittsburgh Paints Historic Color Series, ordered by length; Gunstock, the colour with the shortest name, serves as the work’s background, with the suggestion that the history of the United States is, from its founding, one of violence. The Middle East (and Beyond), an installation composed of works created between 1992 and 1996, unites paintings made from paints with Middle East-inspired names with paintings of the medal ribbons awarded to troops who participated in U.S. and Canadian operations during the first Gulf War. One implication, especially timely given recent events, is that of a connection between the ideologies that allow us to appropriate Arabian Beige or Kurdistan to decorate our living rooms and those that have our leaders extending their reach into the region to shape events and nations to their liking. But Kennedy does not supply us with a polemical treatise; he simply positions the elements within our sightline and enables us to find our own meanings within them.

In Kennedy’s most recent work, the project of examining and commenting on the site is extended to its logical conclusion, taking into account the world we inhabit. Rien de personnel (2003) combines a wall painting of its title in Kennedy’s signature font, Superstar Shadow, with 20 round rugs purchased at IKEA, placed throughout the exhibition space. The mass-produced round rugs show the continents of the world on a pale blue background; however, their arrangement is random. The work points to the fact that, while our treatment of our world, in both the environmental and social senses, may be cavalier, we hold ourselves blameless by noting that it’s nothing personal; we are simply living our lives in the way that seems most reasonable and comfortable. Yet Kennedy leaves it up to us whether we will engage with this message or focus on the work’s colourful, playful form, which can easily seem to be that of an abstract painting.

Since the early stages of his artistic practice, Garry Neill Kennedy has used painting as a way of probing into the nature of a site and how we occupy it. But he does this without making a claim to special authority: his project is to place things before us, to pre-sent aspects of the world as he sees it, and thereby allow us to look for ourselves. Whether as administrator, educator or artist, Kennedy has been and remains a creator of opportunities. Those he has created for students, artists and viewers have had a revolutionary impact on the world of Canadian art.

Sherri Irvin is a philosophy professor at the University of Ottawa, specializing in the philosophy of art. She has a Ph.D. from Princeton University. She has written art criticism for C Magazine and Canadian Art.

1. Garry Neill Kennedy, “NSCAD and the Sixties”, in Conceptual Art: The NSCAD Connection 1967-1973, ed. Bruce Barber (Halifax: Anna Leonowens Gallery, 2001).

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