The Brooklyn Rail

A malapropism is defined as the amusing, and often accidental, substitution of a word for a similar-sounding equivalent with an entirely different meaning. Like the playful—and perhaps less psychologically loaded—cousin of the Freudian slip, a malaprop can nonetheless provide a window into the associative mind of its speaker. (Upon googling examples, my favorite was “monogamous/monotonous.”) Andrew James Paterson’s publication Never Enough Night (2024), released in conjunction with his exhibition of the same name at the plumb in Toronto, delights in the musicality and textures of these word games, and expands upon the artist’s significant career with a new collection of poems, commissioned essays, and archival material from Paterson’s decades-long commitment to Toronto’s artist-run scenes. As Paterson writes in the final lines of “Plumb Poem,” a short verse that opens the catalogue and honors the artists’ space that developed the exhibition: “Plum appointment / Plum anointment / Plum royalty / Plum cacophony / Plum ecstasy / Rum pum pum plumb.”

As the catalogue repeatedly attests, Paterson is a difficult figure to define. He is known throughout Toronto both for his creative practice—performative essay films and media artworks; concrete poetry; and post-punk bands, like The Government from the 1970s—and for his significant and undeterred sociality: Andy, as he is known by many, is someone that shows up. Now in his seventies (an exemplary queer elder), Paterson is a consistent presence at artist-run exhibitions, screenings, and performances throughout the city, seemingly always prepared with a wry observation or tidbit of institutional gossip. Contextualizing this community activity—that is, articulating it within the fabric of Paterson’s art practice—is a central priority for the authors and editors of Never Enough Night. “Andy inhaled the city’s paradoxes, contradictions, and euphemisms/dysphemisms,” artist Vera Frenkel writes, describing Paterson as a skilled witness and anthropologist, an embodiment of Toronto and its shifting dynamics. Moreover, independent curator Parker Kay frames Paterson’s capacity to pay attention as an alternative form of currency, a distribution of wealth: “This social orientation amounts to a form of investment in those around him that explicitly exists outside of a capitalist paradigm. Perhaps the reason Andy’s ability to appear socially omnipresent stands out so remarkably is that it is, in fact, a radical gesture.”

Put another way, in Paterson’s own characteristically irreverent tone, “For better or worse, my dear, I remember the darndest crap.” Just as Frenkel and Kay describe Paterson’s expansive network, Never Enough Night, as a book project, reenacts it. For instance, the volume was co-published by the plumb and Art Metropole, two institutions representative of this unique intergenerational reach: the former, a recent project space grounded in a collective DIY ethos, and the latter, one of the city’s legacy artist-run centers, with a fifty-year history of distributing artists’ books and multiples. The project was edited by the exhibition’s three co-curators—Laura Carusi, Anthony Cooper, and Kate Whiteway, with publication designer Rowan Lynch—all arts workers decades younger than Paterson himself, another signal to the artist’s enduring role as a connective thread in the city.

But the relationship between Paterson’s considerable community memory and his practice is perhaps best embodied in “Andrew & Johnny Write a Song…,” a collaborative contribution by Paterson and filmmaker John Greyson, which flows across multiple pages as an unruly, undifferentiated text exchange, peppered with art-world recollections, observations about the exhibition, and wordplay galore. (“And And And And (rew) He’s such a formalist / An optimist, a pessimist, ventriloquist / Declaring war on normalists.”) The conversation also includes a URL to a short video produced by both artists for the publication, a cheeky Amy Winehouse cover that animates some of the malapropisms—or as they say, “Fraudian” slips—of their dialogue.

For Paterson, this playfully queer approach to language is in service of his larger project: mapping the city’s arts communities across decades, as they negotiate with the imposed values of a changing urban and economic landscape, from the insidious bureaucracies of state arts funding to the less-subtle greed of real estate development. In the publication’s “Rhizomatic Poems,” wordplay becomes a technique through which Paterson can trace these difficult histories, where “institution” in a poem’s opening lines slowly transmogrifies—via chains of association like “house family dynasty bloodline” and “purge sanitize disinfect clean”—to “malignancy lethality fatality death” at its conclusion; or in another poem, “spirit” similarly shifts to “absence of government.” (Lest things seem too heavy, “Rhizomatic Drinking” follows a tighter linguistic loop, from “drink” to “drunk.”) In these poems, his broader art practice in video and performance, and throughout the publication at large, Paterson’s own role as a malaprop for the city becomes clear. Across generations and mediums and scenes, between gossip and rhyme and urgent critique, Andy makes connections.