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LETTER FROM CHANTAL PONTBRIANDTime for a halt at PARACHUTE Some say that with time and patience, a mountain stone becomes a precious stone. When I founded PARACHUTE in 1974, it was my fifth magazine experience. My first, dating from when I was nine years old, the age of innocence, was a school notebook copied over and over in lead pencil and distributed to classmates. It contained short stores, anecdotes, bits of life imagined and yet already experienced, offered for the sake of sharing at this young age. I was living amongst strangers, which was not such a common thing in my Quebec childhood. Children of immigrants who had come to my village from Russia, Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia; great-grandchildren of Irish and Scottish colonists who had gone from soldier to farmer and were by then cultivating the surrounding farms in the countryside. The beloved countryside where my father, an opera singer in a former life in Europe and the United States, had also settled, working day and night, winter and summer to develop a garden city full of hope, of the urge to go beyond oneself and the desire for a better life for all. He thus also ventured into politics, the kind which would eventually lead to the Quiet Revolution. A life of socialistic ideals mixed with entrepreneurship, of sharing resources and know-how, qualities I learned to cherish also. Still, I myself felt like a stranger in this distant countryside full of foreigners, a little French-speaking girl born of rather urban parents, being educated in an English milieu, which back then was more welcoming (or assimilating? Here as elsewhere in the world, history holds the burden of a verdict . . .) of foreigners in "la Belle Province," the Quebec of the day. My second magazine, at age fourteen, called the Apprenti-griffon, was a joint effort of the students at the all girls' school I attended, where we developed our future interests in adult and social life. The blue-ink copies were copied on a Roneo duplicating machine and distributed once more amongst the girls, acting as both a chronicle of everyday life and an expression of our aspirations. The third came out of a research group at the university I enrolled in, UQAM. Médiart attracted me because it was an activist journal, opening people's eyes in a Quebec not yet inclined to contemporary art and its issues. We wanted to change all that. This magazine helped me to understand quickly the main issues in the milieu in which I was to work, with both its strong points and its deficiencies. And then I became an art critic. Still today, despite the various activities and positions I have held over the years as museum curator, festival director and symposium organizer, when asked I always declare—when crossing borders, for example—that this is my profession. It has the advantage of being a space where one can think and speak, think about the world and life through its most sensitive, concrete, realistic and philosophical expressions. So as an art critic, I started contributing to Vie des Arts and Artscanada, the main Canadian magazines of the time. There too I learned a great deal: as much about limitations as about possibilities, among them the borders of Canada, mine and ours, and the borders of artistic disciplines. . . . What a tragedy, this constant confinement! Then came a job at Multimédia, the magazine of the research section of the Quebec Education Department in the early 1970s. An obligatory reckoning with social and media trends. The issues were interesting because the underlying idea was to take the nation further quickly by incorporating the resources of the modern world, which was soon to become postmodern. I did not stay very long. I most probably felt too removed from my true self and my true goal: the art of our times, about which it was important to reflect diligently and with relevance. And so along came PARACHUTE. Like all my other adventures, this one sprang from a singular context and from encounters with other people with similar goals and above all a passion for contemporary art. Initially I joined up with René Blouin to conceive of the magazine and then France Morin and I directed it together for a couple of years. It became the first international and transdisciplinary journal in Canada. My own journey had already led me to meet great artists of the vibrant art, experimental film, new music and dance milieu of the period in North America and Europe. I was feverishly meeting up with Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, Laurence Weiner, Marina Abramovic, Philip Glass, Simone Forti, Michael Snow and General Idea, among others. On the Montreal scene, I had already met most of the leading figures and was avidly following the typically heated debates on the local front around questions of identity and difference, as well as form and innovative art practices. Video, installation, performance and conceptual art were all major issues, as far as I was concerned, and it was a must to take them seriously and develop a critical language that could be specific to them, nourished by the ideas of the times we were living in. The ideas put forth by Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida and Lacan were coming to maturity. Anglo-American formalism, British as well as American, was knocking at our door, begging to be challenged at the insistent demand of new theoretical and practical approaches in art. Montreal, a bilingual city, the second-largest French-speaking city in the world, nestled in the English-speaking sea that is North America, was in this sense a privileged place to be. PARACHUTE was born out of these issues, and others besides. The crux of the matter was to get off our island, away from our linguistic and cultural isolation, to open ourselves to the world and organize a back-and-forth movement between ideas and continents. Thirty years later, the issues are similar, the struggles also: the change of format and formula in the magazine in 2000 underlined the urgency to change when the world requires it. Institutions—a magazine becomes one after twenty-five years, even though it lacks the financial stability and underpinnings—must question themselves and re-envision ways of working to merit their relevance and respect their own fundamental purpose. Today's PARACHUTE respects the same objectives of rigour and creative and intellectual flexibility that it set out with: to change the status quo, to develop a new form of art criticism, to meet emerging practices head-on, to work apart from dogmas and commonplaces, to support creativity and innovation. Nevertheless, today's PARACHUTE could not exist without today's ideas and technology: the acceleration of information, international displacements and migrations, networking, the web, all of which contribute to a diversity of perspectives in art theory and practice. Our willingness to change has led to astonishing results: twenty-five recent issues dealing with major concerns in today's world as well as in art, a forging of new global links and interactions across several continents, a growth in sales of more than two hundred percent over just a few years. A great program! Great results! But this in spite of reduced means, spread thin over thirty years of existence. PARACHUTE is present in some forty countries, even though its print run is limited to four or five thousand copies. The magazine has been read and appreciated for a long time now, which contributes to its exceptional outreach. It belongs to the world of references most international and local protagonists in the art world use. However, when the bell tolls, the adventure should come to a stop, at least in the way it has been led until now. The economic structure needed to pursue this passionate venture linking actors from around the world is gravely lacking at this point. The situation was never comfortable, but the continuing withdrawal of government funding for innovation in the arts, the need to cultivate ever-more private funding in a country where sponsorship of contemporary art is underdeveloped, where few art galleries in the field exist, does not help our effort to raise funds and be self-sustaining. After huge efforts to cut costs and to increase fundraising in the private sector in the hope of counteracting a too fragile economic situation, our endeavour must come to a halt while we reconsider the situation and find other ways of doing what we do. Personnally, I do not wish to stop, being convinced of the need for the magazine. "Yes, that is possible, but not without some wounds and blues in the soul." CHANTAL PONTBRIAND / DIRECTOR PARACHUTE's board of directors and director would like to extend their warm thanks to all those who contributed to the journal's great success over the years: its founding members, its staff and board members over the years, its readers, authors, artists, editors, correspondents, graphic artists, copy editors, proofreaders, translators, printers, subscribers, advertisers, distributors, donors, collectors and federal, provincial, municipal and foreign funding agencies.
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