Borderline Research: Histories of Art between Canada and the United States, c. 1965–1975
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Taking General Idea’s “Borderline Research” request, which appeared in the first issue of FILE Megazine (1972), as a model, this dissertation presents a composite set of histories. Through a comparative case approach, I present eight scenes which register and enact larger political, social, and aesthetic tendencies in art between Canada and the United States from 1965 to 1975. These cases include Jack Bush’s relationship with the critic Clement Greenberg; Brydon Smith’s first decade as curator at the National Gallery of Canada (1967–1975); the exhibition New York 13 (1969) at the Vancouver Art Gallery; Greg Curnoe’s debt to New York Neo-dada; Joyce Wieland living in New York and making work for exhibition in Toronto (1962–1972); Barry Lord and Gail Dexter’s involvement with the Canadian Liberation Movement (1970–1975); the use of surrogates and copies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1967–1972); and the Eternal Network performance event, Decca Dance, in Los Angeles (1974). Relying heavily on my work in institutional archives, artists’ fonds, and research interviews, I establish chronologies and describe events. By the close of my study, in the mid-1970s, the movement of art and ideas was eased between Canada and the United States, anticipating the advent of a globalized art world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.061 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".