private and public identities. Bonin’s relentlessly materialist reading of the postal system responds to Bronson’s representation of NETCo and other artists’ inhabitation of communications systems as “a very Canadian thing.”68 Bonin agrees with Lum in reading this McLuhanesque vision of Canadian identity (a cultural “mosaic”69 welded together by technology) as a creation of federal policy. Bonin and Lum alike attribute the emergence of a “nationwide network of art collectivities” in Canada, not to any inherent property of media (as Bronson does), but rather, to policies instituted by the Trudeau government.70 Lum identifies the 1971 Multiculturalism Policy as the defining document of the cultural infrastructure, the bureaucratic logic of which became insinuated into the affairs of artist-run centres. Bonin’s narrative, on the other hand, hinges on the creation of cultural programs in response to the specter of popular unrest that accompanied record youth unemployment in the early 1970s. Programs such as the 1970 Opportunities for Youth (OFY), the 1971 Local Initiatives Program (LIP), and the 1973 Explorations Program, crystallized what Bonin terms the “‘cybernetic’ social democracy” of the Trudeau era.71 This carefully argued narrative about the decentralization of federal programs in response to an expanding service sector represents Bonin’s original contribution to the unfolding narrative of artist-initiated activity in Canada. “Documentary Protocols” underlines tensions between the emancipatory rhetoric of Liberal politicians, such as Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier, and “the control mechanisms looming under the guise of this utopia,”72 without ever losing sight of the non-capitalist potential latent within an administrative paradigm of self-determination. The resolutely economic focus of Bonin’s reading of government policy and its impact on artists’ groups is derived from American histories of Conceptual art—notably the work of Helen Molesworth—that explore the entanglement of poststudio strategies adopted by 1960s artists and the rise of postindustrial labour during the same period. To this narrative Bonin adds an emphasis on the role played by government agencies in responding to the effects of an emergent cognitive economy in Canada. But Bonin rejects Buchloh’s analysis of bureaucracy as a mere symptom of capitalism: he recognizes that administrative structures could be other/wise. Although Bonin’s text echoes Robertson’s recuperation of the non-capitalist potential of selfadministered structures, it de-emphasizes comparisons between artist-initiated groups and social movements advanced by Robertson and Ault, without losing sight of the close relationship between the peer networks sustained by those groups and the emergence of counterpublics. Yet, for Bonin, it was precisely the critique of
artist-run structures mounted by feminists (who noted that women, for the most part, continued to perform subaltern functions even within alternative spaces) that spelled the end of utopia in the mid-1970s. In Bonin’s narrative, the emergence of social movements, beginning with feminism, shattered the cybernetic “dream of a transcanada art scene” articulated by Bronson.73 Different forms of self-governance appeared in the wake of these critiques—configurations that fall outside the scope of Bonin’s project and await adequate study elsewhere.
The Political Economy of Documents A second thematic constellation that emerges from the margins of Bonin’s text engages an interdisciplinary literature on the political economy of information. Bonin frames his chosen period of study as “a parenthesis of sorts,”74 one marked by the convergence of an expanded tertiary sector and a re-skilling of the artist in response to rising levels of post-secondary education and the introduction of automation into industrial production processes. This framework echoes Helen Molesworth’s 2003 exhibition, Work Ethic, which proposed that the appearance of ideational practices mimicking managerial labour in the mid-1960s coincided with the transition from a manufacturing-based economy to one grounded in dematerialized services. Vincent Mosco has argued that the services which drive postindustrial societies are shaped by the “use of information as a commodity.”75 The appearance of “information [as] a new form of capital”76 in the 1970s short-circuited the dream world of information that fuelled earlier conceptual projects, which “attributed an intrinsic social value to the concept of information.”77 Bonin summarizes this process, with reference to the work of Ève Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, as the appropriation of artistic critique by the discourse of human resources management.78 However, it is not the tertiary sector’s co-optation of Conceptual art that interests Bonin, so much as the initial process of acculturation that transpired in the contact zone between artists and government in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bonin’s sociological approach to the archival economy of documents answers Robertson’s proposition that, “research that participates in a sociology of culture is useful for an art history that wishes to map the ‘question of culture and democracy as a factor influencing the development and rationalization of artistic practice.”79 By way of introducing 57