Whispered Art History: Twenty Years at the Western Front

Peter Roberts is a former Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union and
author of George Costakis: A Russian Life in Art.

In the early 1970s, Canadian visual artists, fed up with their inability
to crack the complacency of the mainstream galleries and institutions,
started setting up their own artist-run galleries, in which they
exhibited kinds of art not found in establishment galleries. Public
response to this small revolution was (and still is) one of near-total
indifference. To its great credit, the Canada Council has found money to
support artist-run galleries.

Pre-eminent among the artist-run centres, and one of the first (1973),
was Western Front, located in the east end of Vancouver. This book,
beautifully produced with the help of the Canada Council and the B.C.
government, is the history of Western Front’s first 20 years. If you
discount the title page, which features a photograph of 14 stark-naked
young people staring straight at you, the book is a sober, detailed, and
most interesting account of how this remarkable enterprise got started
and kept going, and what it achieved year by year, show by show. Western
Front is an important Canadian institution built on nothing but the
determination of radical artists to practise their art. Not a book for
every shelf (there is too much detail), but a book for the record.