Colonizer Privilege and The Myths of Creativity

Today we had a slightly saturated class. We didn't really know where to start, actually. Or rather, we didn't really want to. What was there left to say about Emily Carr, after last week's presentations, the loaded discussions that ensued and the four readings for this week? One thing is certain: To all of us now, Emily Carr and her work are multi-dimentional entities.

I'd like to wrap things up with Carr and her work, to summarize what I've learnt alongside contemporary and historical analysis of her phenomenon. Mostly I think that Carr herself was soaked in colonial thought, perhaps most importantly in the discourse that "Indians" were a dying people, instead of a culture in which a lot of people were dying. This approach should come as no surprise however, given the clearly articulated intentions of British government officials to make Natives "disappear". This should, put into modern daylight, serve in no way to justify racist implications by Carr. These are history lessons, but it is while evaluating tough topics like these that we tie the past into a broader picture. Why re-evaluate past icons under a contemporary light? Why criticize today what people yesteryear had no way of understanding? The answer lies in the future. We are re-evaluating them because they have been woven into our euro-centric popular culture's fabric, and in so being are a part of our individual fabric without us even knowing. I became incredibly frustrated with the setting. While criticizing the dominance of white British colonizers, here we were, in great majority white anglo-saxons (if not in totality), sitting comfortably at Mount Allison University, which upholds the most expensive undergraduate tuition in Canada. Despite student debts, most of us are middle to upper-middle class. A university degree will open administrative and socio-economic doors for us. And we are discussing Native issues in the absence of people who define themselves as Aboriginal.

Many things have happened, but not that much has changed. This makes me uncomfortable.

But I am glad. I am glad to have been given this opportunity. I am glad to have been shown things in my own cultural fabric that are not pretty. I just wish we were hearing the Aboriginal's take on all of this. Why not? Is there something uncivilized in the way they say it? Is it not academic enough, not annotated enough? What are the hoops that aren't getting jumped through? What is going on today and where do they want to be tomorrow?

Nothing in this issue is simple, and in my mid-term crunch, this issue is a doozy. But I have been finding time and effort to discuss it, to address it with friends in order to hear opinions. Honestly, to not do so for me would probably take even more effort!

 Saturday four of us went to Amherst, stopping at a Mom and Pop restaurant for dinner. Miriam, of African descent, has been studying the decolonization of African countries. All of us were interested in the appropriation and sharing of ideas, of information, of images. Open-access, patents. Apparently, 97% of the human body's chemical compounds are now patented for creation in the lab. In agriculture, crop seeds are biologically engineered and sold to live for one season only, obligating farmers to buy again, maximizing profits and enforcing market monopoly. The issue of Native image appropriation by modern-day and Carr-day colonizers, in many ways, is not so much an issue or a problem in itself. To steal, modify, and re-combine elements is natural, human, healthy and indeed the only way creativity works. The isolated, uninfluenced genius with his flash of lightening "aha!" moment is a myth. Artists and creators of all types brew, meddle, borrow. The problem, as it is, is that one group is still oppressed and that another is still oppressing. In a playground, if an older kid asks you nicely for your lunch while waving around a heavy club, you give him your lunch. In many ways, that still seems to be the situation today, that club being privilege (including institution) and the sandwich being native culture (including imagery). When two socially and economically equal parties exchange information, there is no issue. Unless you're Steve Jobs.

Watch "Everything Is A Remix"on Vimeo, previewed above in Ferguson's TedTalk,

a fantastic four-part documentary on creativity as copying, combining, and transforming.

Artist Gushing

From the way that we talked about Frederick Varley in class, I took a liking to him. Every now and then there's an artist who does that to me, seducing me by what I imagine them to be like.

He loved to live. He loved people, he loved to drink, he loved women. He sounded like a lot of fun. It all makes for a compelling tale, which really, is all that he is to me. His portraits are beautifully charismatic, his use of colour is lush and emotional. He made mistakes, he was depressive, struggled with alcoholism and entertained a mistress later in life. But all in all, he seems very human to me and I relate to him.

Cheesy music aside, here's an interesting film on Varley by the National Film Board.

Self-Portrait (1919) by Varley

Out of The Woods

"There's been enough said and written about the Group of Seven to last us all a lifetime", begins the journalist. I agree. For Tuesday's class, I won't add much more for you in words. Listen instead with Rheostatics:

Happy For The (Not So) Ridiculous

Things are getting crazy, but here goes another blog entry.

The Group of Seven. Still the Group of Seven. Thursday's class revolved around the panel discussions, with Sally, Alex and Emma presenting, in order, on recent Group of Seven publicity and controversy, on how the Group of Seven became landscape painters, and on the early departure of Frank Johnston from the group.

The class discussion that ensued was mainly on artist autonomy and whether it is harder today to be an artist than it was back then. Topics explored included technology and the dissemination of information (including images), modern expectations of the artist including individuality and originality, and market-place competition of professional artist creations with the industrially-produced and the unprofessionally-produced.

I was very interested in people's answers when asked if they thought it was harder to be an individual artist today compared to during Frank Johnston's time. I had never given it much thought before, and the opinions and observations on the matter varied greatly. Personally, I did think it was easier today than yesteryear, based on the fact of being a woman and given the type of art I like to make and want to make (many of which are conceptual works and performances). Placed in a different time and place, I do not know if I would have the same interests, but certainly I would not have been given the same opportunities and been exposed to the same influences. I am very glad to be here, now.

A good example of artistic work characteristic of our time that would tip the Group of Seven's entourage's definition of art is a current exhibition at the Owens Art Gallery. Conceptual dutch artist William Engelen, as part of the John Cage festival, made work reacting visually and auditorily to white noises at the gallery. One of the results, perhaps ridiculous to lovers of "beautiful" art, is a person-sized styrofoam and dust mobile, twirling softly to the amplified sounds of the ventilation system. The dust, the artist precised verbally to me, was locally harvested at the Owen's Art Gallery.

Yet this kind of art is beautiful for many, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Here, beauty (if we must insist on it being found at all) is found in the idea itself, and in the material dedication of the artist to it. Although the visual result may leave the viewer ho-hum (I heard a nervous attendee, swishing his cup of raisin juice, give the artist a searched and staccato-ed compliment about the work's mobility), the ideas of art in the legacy of the Dada are not far behind those of the popular impressionists. In both, it is something within, something deeper than what meets the eye that is being expressed. In this way, the mystical art of the Group of Seven is also no different than Engelen's dust mobile, although I'd be surprised if Frank Johnston agreed.

And now for something completely unrelated.

Native Issues Forshadowed

Thursday's class directed the discussion to two articles read about the Group of Seven: Art for a Nation? by Lynda Jessup and Wild Art History by John O'Brian. In Art for a Nation?, Jessup questions the authority with which the National Gallery of Canada asserted that the Group of Seven was impartiality and accessible to all Canadians as an icon of our identity.

The discrimination in representation, she advances, is one of class, gender and ethnicity. Ethnicity, it so happens, is a main issue in our next readings and will be a recurrent theme of my panel presentation, so please allow me to get ahead of myself.

Emily Carr was a painter of a silenced minority in early 20th century Canada: The Aboriginal.

I don't even know where to start.

My personal experience with native issues doesn't extend very far, but has a few landmarks nonetheless. Growing up, I heard of Native issues between the cracks of adult conversations: My Acadian family is tied by its roots to the lobster fishery and would talk of what I later learnt as being the Burnt Church Crisis. Despite this, my direct parents still had good things to say about the native community, saying that "Acadians and Natives had always gotten along" and that the Aboriginal had helped us hide in the forests during the Great Upheaval of 1755. I was told I also probably had Mi'kmaq blood running through my veins through my paternal grandfather's grandmother, which means he could have gotten his status card had he wanted to. I found this all a little magical and, with no living relative, part of some other world.

I grew up. After being flagrantly disillusioned by the pre-medical program at Université de Moncton, I enrolled at the NB College of Craft and Design in my hometown of Fredericton. The program was great and my class varied in age, gender and (more than before) in ethnicity. At the end of the year, two mature Native students blew our minds with the subject of their final presentations: The story of their lives and of their childhoods through residential schools.

I had never heard of the Canadian Indian residential school system before. If you haven't, look it up, read about it, and then talk about it. It is one of the greatest travesties in Canadian history. The last one, Gordon Residential School, was closed in 1996.


I was shocked, deeply moved and speechless by my classmate's accounts. What they shared was raw, thorough, unashamed, and honest. They spoke of child mortality and physical and sexual abuse in the schools. They spoke of families being ripped apart. They spoke of losses of identity and of belonging to what were thousands of years of culture, arts, language and traditions. They spoke of living in a society that abided to different social rules and laws than those they lived. One went to jail, arrested by an officer that was convinced he was doing something wrong and convicted by a no lesser racist jury. The things they spoke about. The presentation went on for four times the time allotted and past break time, but none of us cared.

What to say? What to say when someone has poured out their heart to you? Especially if you, like me, happen to symbolically be the descendant of the oppressor, of the fortunate, of the privileged? I don't really think you say anything. You listen. Well. And you say thank you.

I am so glad to be holding these conversations and seeing in this institution even only the tip of this iceberg. I don't really know what the answers are, but the questions keep an exchange going, and I feel that this is incredibly important. Canada needs to be careful, because a lot of its inhabitants have been hurt very deeply. Lastly, I just want to say that I really hope this will be a century of healing; celebrating a culture that is not and never has been dead.

I only really meant to show you the website of this artist, but I guess I had to get there first:

Hunter Whitefeather, regardless of any of the above, is an accomplished contemporary artist and ex-executive director of the Charlotte Street Art Centre in Fredericton, NB, amongst many other things. She is currently based in Montreal, and she happens to be Aboriginal. Her performance "Fixation Station" is one of my all-time favorites. Check her out, she's an art bomb.

The Mystical North

The Group of Seven (1920-1933), consisting of painters J.E.H. MacDonald, Lawren Harris, Franz Johnson, Arthur Lismer, Frank Carmicheal, F.H. Varley and A.Y. Jackson, went a longway to promote the Canadian landscape into an icon of national identity. Within this tradition, they and other artists such as Maurice Cullen coined the mystical north much in the same way as the scadinavian painters showing work in the U.S.

Mount Robson from the Northeast by Lawren Harris

Most of the Group of Seven's activity happened in the Toronto region in Ontario. Just a smidge earlier in Quebec, another mystical north phenomenon took place, this one litterary.

The novel Maria Chapdelaine (published in 1916 in Montreal) would define Quebec Litterature for decades to come, and still has a very real impact today. It tells the story of a young French Canadian girl from a family lodged deep in the woods who has to chose her fate by chosing a husband. After the death of her love François Paradis (represented below) in a snowstorm and that of her mother by illness, she chooses Eutrope Gagnon, a typical tough land-working Quebecer over Lorrenzo Suprenant, a material-man from the metropolitan United States.

François Paradis in the Blizzard by Clarence Gagnon

Both the Group of Seven and Maria Chapdelaine, as you can see, embody the robust idea of the mystical north. French and English Canada, although far from reconciled at this point, were artistically speaking the same language. And that's kind of nice.

The Value of Things

It was brought to our attention that the Canadian painter Robert Harris (1849-1919) had a few of his works of art made into stamps.

Harris' "The Fathers of Confederation" made into an engraving on a stamp. The original painting was later lost in a fire.

Following this, we were told to think of what images made it unto stamps, coins and bills, and to think of what that symbolized. What did it take for an image to "make it" onto one of these? And how funny it was, really, to have these objects represent value, the state, our economy.

This reminded me of my visit last year to the British Museum in London, England. While there, I saw an exhibition on money throughout the ages. Like this video explains, it only takes for something to be considered of value and for someone to trust this value in order for that specific something to become money.

A Brief History of Money

This has wonderful results. All the things below are or were considered money now or years ago (sometimes lots and lots of years ago). To me it all goes to prove the importance and strength of an object's concept over its materiality, of mind over matter if you will.

With electronic money being all the rage, we can go days without seeing a bill or coin.

Paper money (including stamps, contracts and cheques) can be beautifully intricate and embellished, such as on this Icelandic kronur.

Feather money."This currency, known as tevau, is formed as coils resembling long belts." (bit.ly/JajPtQ)

Metal bracelets worn in certain African societies and used as currency. This one dates from the mid 19th century. 

"A coin minted in Thurium, a Greek city in modern day Italy, in the 4th century BC." detecting.org.uk

Strength in Numbers

Talking about the creation of William Notman's photo studio in Montreal, about the Art Association of Montreal (1860), and about the Ontario Society of Artists (1872) made me think about the rest of the Canadian artist organizations, and especially of ones in Montreal and here at home.

I've grown to know some of the ones in this neck of the woods well, and am some happy that they exist. On the artist-run centre front, there are 15 distributed in Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Nova-Scotia. Click here for the complete list of artist-run centres in the region by the Association of Artist Run Centres from the Atlantic website (AARCA).

Artist-run centres are exhibition spaces run by artists for artists, and are non-profit in philosophy and practice. The idea is to provide a fertile place for experimental art-making, involving artist members to democratically determine the subjects taken on by the centres. Also, they serve as grounding points for festivals, workshops, artist talks, the a fore-mentionned exhibitions, artist residencies and more.

As for Quebec, the region is more than well-served on the artist-run centre front. In Montreal alone, there are 28 centres, including the Centre des Arts Actuels SKOL, Dare-Dare, and the Centre d'Exposition CIRCA. Click here for the complete list of Montreal artist-run centres on the RCAAQ's website (Regroupement des Centres d'Artistes Auto-Gérés du Québec).

Happy art network exploring.