Artists Union Rally, March 16, 1985
Clive Robertson (Canada, 1985, 14:10)
To celebrate May Day, and to put the focus on the pressurized situation in the arts, Vtape will be featuring Clive Robertson’s Artists Union Rally, March 16, 1985 as our May Video of the Month. This tape is a condensed document of the 1985 rally that took place in Toronto: the Independent Artists’ Union (IAU) responded to cultural funding cuts to the Canada Council and the CBC, which were handed down by the then newly elected Progressive Conservative Party, in particular Marcel Masse from the Department of Communications. The rally included a march through the streets by over 800 artists and cultural supporters and concluded with speeches and presentations at the St. Lawrence Centre. The IAU was active from 1984 to 1989 with 700 members at its peak, transforming artists’ living conditions through advocacy for a living wage.
With the arts under increasing pressure from funding cuts, censorship, right-wing cultural backlash, and techno-cultural fragmentation, we recognize that this is nothing new. We have faced these conditions before and by organizing and working together, have been able to carry on doing the critical and fundamental work of independent art-making.
If you are in Regina, you can still see works by Clive Robertson and other 2025 Governor Generals Award winners, on display at the Mackenzie Art Gallery until May 3rd!
Working as an artist, curator, critic and artist historian since 1972, Clive Robertson attended art colleges in Plymouth, Liverpool and Cardiff before receiving an MFA (Performance Art Studies) from the University of Reading (UK) in 1971, and a doctorate in Communication Studies, Concordia, 2006. As an emerging artist, curator and publisher he worked with Fluxus artists Joseph Beuys, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles while curating a number of defining Canadian and international performance and video festivals in the 1970s, and media arts exhibitions and events in the 1980s and 1990s. His performance, video and audio works have been seen and heard in North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan and Australia. THEN + THEN AGAIN: Practices Within An Artist-Run Culture, 1969-2006 was a national touring archival retrospective exhibition (2007-11) of his individual and collaborative art, curatorial and publishing projects. His work was also featured in the Canadian touring exhibition TRAFFIC: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980.
Prior to teaching art history and cultural studies at Queen’s, for 30 years Clive worked as a media artist, theorist, practitioner and national policy spokesperson within the artist-run centre movement directing interdisciplinary production and display spaces in Calgary, Toronto and Ottawa. An exemplar of multi-format publishing, Clive is a founding editor/publisher of Voicespondence Audio Art Publishing, Arton’s Video Publishing and Centerfold/ FUSE magazines. His writings on art and culture have appeared in Art & Artists, artsCanada, Parachute, FILE, FUSE, La Mamelle, High Performance, Parallélogramme, C Magazine, Public, Inter, Akimbo and RACAR, with many book chapters published on performance, media arts, cultural politics and policy.
Image Credits: Artists Union Rally, March 16, 1985 (1985) by Clive Robertson