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.