James Oscar series

Oscar revisits a recent article on the work of Catherine Morin, featured in the artist’s 2022 exhibition catalogue at Wishbone Gallery in Montréal; one of his earliest interviews with the hip hop group Digable Planets, published in the 1994 issue of Fuse magazine; and a 2010 article titled Each Revolution Has Its Methods—Poems, Fragments, Aphorisms and Tauts, which appeared in the journal The Mock and Other Superstitions. Together, these essays offer deeper insight into Oscar’s thirty-one-year journey in art criticism and his ongoing commitment to the field.

Printed copies of these essays, as well as the original articles discussed, are available in James Oscar’s writer file at Artexte, alongside further material and documentation on the author.

A digital issue of Fuse magazine is also available on e-artexte (interview: pp. 38-42)

These three essays, of which I comfortably can say I am proud in terms of how they sit along the line of my writing trajectory—in these essays, as in others, I dive into cultural objects (visual arts, sculpture, or performance) that render affect with a certain opaque approach. The first essay is the inaugural text accompanying the opening of my eponymous “James Oscar” writer file at Artexte. In this first instalment, after many years, I return to where I began, with my earliest informal and undeveloped interests in art’s rapports with ritual culture and its forms of producing/disseminating other forms of knowledge. It is ultimately now, thirty-one years later, that I comfortably turn, as I first wished to—but now with the bulwark stare of an experienced visual thinker—to how I relished being in the work of Catherine Morin—to “the diviner’s stare being not direct, oblique, askew in the sense of not looking directly into but rather being that of a looking into an oblique form that mediates that initial stare and then turns it into something else.” These glorious thirty-one years of writing have led me to this “something else”!

– James Oscar

Article 1: Intercessioner

Article 2: Early and Recent Refutations of Space and Time

Article 3: Shadow and Act

James Oscar is a writer, art critic, curator, and anthropological researcher. He studied closely under the direction of poet Édouard Glissant at CUNY Graduate Center. He is presently researching the sociology and anthropology of art at Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique. He has been on the curatorial advisory team at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts “From Africa to the Americas: Face-to-Face Picasso, Past and Present.” He has recently been a curator at the Moment Biennale de la Photo (Fall 2021). He is a regular public lecturer and moderator of panel discussions, most recently at the Canadian Museum Association (AGO) Art Gallery of Ontario, Institute of Australian Geographers & New Zealand Geographical Society, MOMUS Magazine, The Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art, The Power Plant, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He was named Curator in Residence for 2022 at La Fonderie Darling. Developed under the title “The New Region of the World,” his residency contends with how we deal with current discussions of the re-mapping of art history. His latest publications appear in Morin: Préternatuel (Wishbone Gallery Montreal August 2022), “Miles Greenberg’s Late October” in ESPACE Magazine (April 2022), Rashid Johnson: Anxious Audience (Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, 2021). He acts as a regular consultant to cultural institutions and governmental agencies regarding issues of racial inequity in the cultural sphere. His work was featured prominently in North America’s first public consultation on racism with the City of Montreal- Office de Consultation Publique de Montréal.

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