Centre for Experimental Art and Communication
[1] The centre engaged with artists, musicians, and activists from across North America through organized exhibitions, in addition to hosting video production facilities, workshops, screening, and performance series'.
[1] In the early 1970s, Jearld Moldenhauer moved into Marras and Corley's apartment at 65 Kendal Avenue - this address served as the official home for Glad Day Books and The Body Politic.
[1] The centre's large, four-storey building in the light-manufacturing in the area south west of Queen Street and University Avenue, now known as the Entertainment District, where it became an instrumental hub for Toronto's creative cultural scene.
The collective was born out a concept of "hybrid telemedia", whereby independent video production would intersect with television's mass communication systems; emphasizing broadcast quality and colour technology.
[9] The publication Art Communication Edition was reinvented as STRIKE due to a desire to "merge with the social stance with consumerist tactics, the antithetical position".
[11] The controversial issue included an excerpt from a 1937 work by Mao Tse-tung: “To still maintain tolerance towards the servants of the State is to preserve the status quo of Liberalism.
[13] Following nearly immediate loss of funding in June and July 1978 following the controversial May article, CEAC was forced to close its doors, unable to meet mortgage payments on the 15 Duncan Street location.
[1] In the spring of 1977, the Toronto underground scene saw an explosion of local bands adopting the style and counterculture ethos of the New York and British punk movements.
The music on the record was scattered among droning statements by Marras and Eves from the Behavioural Manifestos of CEAC and Reindeer Werk (performance-duo of Tom Puckey & Dirk Larsen).
Heralded by Marras as the instrument to produce the “great awakening in the brain-washed television public”,[19] Raw/War blended highly sophisticated rhetoric with the raw sound of hard-core punk.
[1] It established a platform for performance and non-objective art, which countered present strategies of appropriation and parody then promoted by the art-collective General Idea, also operating in Toronto during that time.
Featured artists included: Wendy Knox-Leet, Ron Gillespie, Heather MacDonald, Darryl Tonkin, Blast-Bloom, Bruce Eves, Andy Fabo and Paul Dempsey[1] CEAC began to promote art in New York and on the European continent in 1976.
CEAC highlighted the work of the Missing Associates, Ron Gillespie, and made their initial connections with the Polish contextual artists, the “action” school of performance, and Reindeer Werk.
[1] Throughout its few years of operation, CEAC collaborated and exhibited with a multitude of artists, such as Sarah Charlesworth, Joseph Kosuth, Anthony McCall, Dennis Oppenheim, Martha Rosler, Carolee Schneeman, and Lawrence Weiner, and had organized concerts by Philip Glass and Steve Reich.
