Yearning for the days back when salons were de rigueur? Us too. Thankfully, our current writer-in-residence Anne Pasek has stepped to the fore and is happy to announce Theory For Dinner, a bi-weekly evening full of conversation about art theory and ideas coupled with a potluck meal of great eats. To find out more, I interviewed Anne last week about her plans for the upcoming series. | Interview by Alyssa Kuhnert
AK: First things first, how would you describe Theory For Dinner in a nutshell?
AP: My friends and I have been describing it as an “art-nerd book club”, though that’s not totally accurate. It’s a discussion group, open to anyone, that centers on a short piece of writing (about art or art theory), usually no more than 10 pages. Theory For Dinner is for people who would like to do a bit of thinking and mull over ideas in the company of good food and good people.
AK: Sounds like a great idea. Opening up the discussion to anyone who’s interested. Where did the idea for the series first present itself?
AP: I was talking with the previous writer in residence, Carolyn Jervis, who was lamenting how hard it is to make time to read up on philosophical issues once you’re out of university. And, in conversations with my friends who are practising artists, it became clear that there are many people who are interested in theoretical ideas, and in fact work through them in their practice, but for whom reading a scholarly book is no easy task.
So, it’s a project to bring theory out of academia in an accessible way, mix it with artists and community members, and see what comes out.
As it turns out, many of the ideas in these theoretical texts are terribly practical, and can be explored in many different ways as artists and citizens. No need for a PhD and a dictionary to make sense of the world.
AK: Do you have any ideas of what kind of material you’d like to cover during the series? Perhaps you have a dream piece of theory be to cover for the kick off of Theory For Dinner?
AP: Well, I was thinking on Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces”. I’ve used it previously in my writing for Latitude 53 when discussion heterotopias, and it seemed to hit a chord. But ultimately, I want Theory For Dinner to be more of a circle of equals and explorers rather than a group that I lecture at. I’d like to meet with people, learn about their interests, and pick things together.
As the Writer in Residence, one of the biggest perks of the job has been strangers emailing me interesting bits of writing and philosophy. Everyone out there seems to have discovered these interesting pieces of larger ideas. With the series I’d like to mix, stir, and simmer them all together.
AK: Where did your own interests in theory come from? You’ve written on the blog that you possess “a near evangelical love” for it, especially in regards to art.
AP: Well, a lot of the work I’ve done in my academic career has been the bridging of theory and art. I find that quite often art and theory present novel and complementary ways of working through problems, making issues visible, and explaining our interrelations to one another.
So, by reading theory and working with art, a myriad of connections, ideas, and modes of being are exposed.
By bringing the two together, one can explore something I might call “the artistic mode of living”, where almost everything can have the weight of an important philosophical idea, or an artistic accent. And that gets me really excited, I love sharing the ideas and perspectives that come out of this intermingling.
AK: Well I am definitely excited to see how the series unfolds. On a more pragmatic note, when will Theory For Dinner happen? Also, dinner’s mentioned in the title—will actual food be involved?
AP: The plan is to hold biweekly meetings—every other Wednesday—though as we get to know each other as a group we may want to collectively change that. And yes! Even if you’re apprehensive about theory, come for the meal! It’s a potluck style gathering, so bring a contribution and an appetite. And, not to get too carried away with myself, but I am a great cook. My share will be delicious and vegan friendly.
There’s something very epicurean about sharing ideas over a meal that I think will set and excellent tone for discussion.
AK: Sounds delicious. When is the projected kick off date for the series?
AP: Wednesday July 27th. Mark it in your calendars!
Thanks very much to Anne for her time and excellent interview, as well as her great idea for Theory For Dinner. Stay in touch to find out upcoming details about the series here on the blog and on our website .
(So, here I am, talking about sound on an art blog. Alright, I know, I know; it’s Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture, but I hope you’ll hear me out. I don’t presume art to be purely visual anymore, and this fits into what we might call the artistic practice of our everyday lives.)
Lately I’ve been very interested in the idea that architecture has an aural as well as a visual dimension. Beyond the scientific measurement of acoustics, I’m interested in how the sound space of our environment can intersect with out cultural practices and psychology or even be considered an artistic medium in itself. Aural architecture invites an understanding of our environment as an embodied space. We may not always be conscious of its actions, but we very much depend upon perceiving the world through sound as well as vision.
Sound can make space audible. Though not as adept as bats or dolphins, humans can extract a great deal of information about our environments purely through listening to the variations in reflected sound. Imagine walking towards a wall; as you get closer there are shorter and shorter gaps between the initial sound propagated by your footsteps and the echo returned by that sound bouncing off the flat surface before you. Most people, when blindfolded, can walk up to a wall and stop short of touching it, using sound alone. You can probably tell something about the quality of that wall as well. The larger the wall is, the greater intensity its reverberations will be. The material and shape of the wall will splash or muffle its echo back at you. Angles and curves can dissipate or concentrate sound and the hum of ambient noise sources can provide signposts to help map out the parameters of a sonic space. If the acoustics are good, you should be able to close your eyes, clap, and “see” the space illuminated in your ears.
Just like any other sense, sound can take on aesthetic dimensions. This is quite obvious when we think of music, but might also refine our understanding of the artistic qualities we ascribe to certain architectural spatialities. Think of the long, weighty reverb time of a cathedral where everyday speech takes on an otherworldly dimension and the sound seems to linger with a presence all of its own. Imagine biking on the 109th street bridge where the sound of cars seems to flicker back and forth as the steel girders between the road and the bike path cast the aural equivalent of the blinds in a film noir movie.
Sound spaces can be designed, accidental, or organic. They can be physical or virtual thanks to the advent of refined audio technologies. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller provided an excellent example of how to construct an aural environment in their installation The Murder of Crows.
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller The Murder of Crows 2008. Installation view from Art Gallery of Alberta, 2010.
Speakers flock around the gallery and sound moves between them. It becomes very difficult not to stare at the location of sounds, as if sure in the knowledge that you will be able to see the door that is creaking open behind you. You are enfolded in the steps and voices of soldiers as they march around you singing a Soviet battle hymn. The sound of a saw blade passing over your body almost pains you.
Aural architecture can also effect our relations with other people. Think of the forced intimacy of a club where the music is too loud for most forms of verbal communication. The body becomes a tool for expression in ways that are rarely explored outside of dance. Any words that are exchanged with friends and strangers circumnavigate the regular arenas of polite physical distance. In order to tell a stranger your name, you must lean in, hold your mouth close to her ear like a lover, and yet yell as if enraged. Alternatively, think about the thick silence of an academic library- how the nervous concentration of scholars is palpable in the air. Your body is made clumsy in a space where it cannot sound, and each brush of fabric and squeak of your shoe seems to be as transgressive as some of the more common sins. Conversation seems amoral in such a place, and yet it persists in the form of furtive whispers shared intimately in an empty hall.
Aural architecture, more often than not, needs to be experienced to be understood, and to that end I’ve created a forum for exchange. I’ve started to map out a few of my favourite aural architectural features around town and I hope that you’ll join me in sharing any hidden niches or public junctions that strike you not just for their visual appeal, but for the sonic experience they offer. I’m interested in the good, the bad and the ugly and I know that Edmonton has these features in abundance, even if it only reveals its secrets to a few people at a time. By sharing these stories and visiting these places I hope that we will all become more aware of the sound spaces around us and how we might find and engineer a better Edmonton. Please join me in exploring our city’s aural architecture.
Our writer-in-residence and friend Anne Pasek is currently collecting submissions for an exhibition that will take place this October and November at the U of A’s Faculty of Extension galleries in Enterprise Square.
Of the project, she writes:
Artists and community members are invited to submit artwork to a forthcoming exhibition addressing the legacy and future inheritance of eugenic ideas in Alberta. Exploring forgotten narratives, lost histories, and contemporary anxieties, The Collective Memory Project will investigate and make visible the process through which personhood is unequally distributed in society.
Eugenics- the policies, practices and attitudes that seek to foster or deter certain human traits in a population- typically don’t enter into how we collectively construct Canadian history and national identity. And yet, eugenic values were widely accepted in our past, and continue in many subtle ways into our future. Between 1929-1972, 2834 individuals were sterilized in Alberta, often without consent, to prevent ‘feeble-mindedness’: a legacy that is still largely unaddressed. Today, Canada’s immigration policies actively screen out the disabled while institutions are used in part to quarantine those deemed ‘unfit’ from the rest of the social body.
To make an appeal to collective memory, the Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada is organizing an exhibition of contemporary art and archival images in an attempt to make these histories and ideologies visible. Visual artists and community members are encouraged to submit work that explores the trajectory of eugenic thought, issues of memory, and the ethics of biotechnology.
Find out more on the project and how to submit here or contact Anne at pasek@ualberta.ca.
Sometimes events seem to line up with a perfect synchronicity.
For example, it is very appropriate that on the eve of the Marshall McLuhan centenary the Art Gallery of Alberta is host to the exhibition Andy Warhol: Manufactured. Warhol, the infamous pop artist, was not only a contemporary of McLuhan, he was in many ways a similarly pivotal media critic of the 1960s and beyond. McLuhan was to Warhol an “honorary muse” and the Andy’s often repeated phrase, that “in the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” is actually borrowed from our dear Marshall.
Both Warhol and McLuhan were avid in their study of advertising, incorporating snappy slogans and iconic images into their public portfolios and personas. This layer of flattened, easy to consume wit often belies a far more complex and analytic substructure at the heart of both figures’ work. Beneath the gloss, I am convinced that Warhol and McLuhan engaged in a complementary examination of the effects of media on identity.
McLuhan, as I’ve mentioned in previousposts, suggested that the ‘cool effect’ of TV involved its viewers in an unprecedented kind of collectivity. The medium’s “simultaneous sharing of experiences as in a village or tribe,” McLuhan claimed, “creates a village or tribal outlook and puts a premium on togetherness… and mediocrity as a means of achieving togetherness.”
Compare McLuhan’s statement with Warhol’s:
“You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
Could it be that in Andy Warhol we find the early iteration of McLuhan’s television tribalism?
What is it about TV that seems to flattens our identities, and perhaps engenders the embrace of mediocrity? What sort of critical lens might Warhol have to bring, not just communities of consumption, but to the media that structure them?
Herein lies ground that Andy Warhol is not often credited with breaking. In his life outside of pop art paintings, Warhol was also an experimental video and film maker. One piece in particular, Outer and Inner Space, is a surprisingly complex and nuanced examination of the differences between media and their identity effects. It should come as no surprise, then, that McLuhan’s theories are perfectly adaptable to thinking through this film.
Firstly, the mechanics of this piece require a bit of explanation. Two films are being projected simultaneous onto two screens (although the film reels have been digitized in this work’s incarnation in Andy Warhol: Manufactured). Each screen features two images of Edie Sedgwick: the actress who was Warhol’s temporary obsession in the 1960s. One set of Edies consists of pre-recorded video, played back on a grainy TV on the left of the two screens. The other Edies on the right were recorded on film in front of the television. The film Sedgwick, beautifully rendered in a smooth silver greyscale, seems quite at odds with her TV counterpart with her posterized, generic face.
The film Sedgwick and the TV Sedgwick seem to alternate between pointedly ignoring each other and engaging in a kind of dislocated conversation. The audio in the piece is incomprehensible; we hear only loud prelinguistic noise from Sedgwick’s lips. Here McLuhan’s point that the medium is the message may be true in a very literal way.
Our engagement with both portraits is quite distinct. The televised Sedgwick is reduced to flat anonymity- an easy bearer of the look the audience casts on her. The filmic Sedgwick, conversely, frequently exchanges gazes with the audience, who is made more acutely aware of her discomfort in proximity to her double, and her increasingly desperate search for cues from the off-screen Warhol. In McLuhan’s parlance, one Sedgwick is hot and one Sedgwick is cold. One is an individual, and one is a repository for a tribal identity. One is inner and one is outer. One is wine and one is coke. By butting the two together in the same, doubled frames, Warhol sets up the conditions in which to examine our different engagements with radically diametric media.
However, I’ve only scratched the surface on this piece. I’m hoping that we can have something of a collaborative (but not necessarily tribal) discussion in the comments section of this blog. Have you seen this piece? What were your thoughts? What kind of work do you think is being done here with identity, and how might that play into McLuhan’s theories of hot and cold media or Warhol’s fascination with celebrity consumption and collectivity? Alternatively, maybe neither approach appeals to you and you think about this piece in an entirely different frame. Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
If, at the end of the day, there are still many lingering questions (and I do hope this is the case), University of Alberta professor Marco Adria will be giving a free lecture at the AGA on July 20th concerning the relation between McLuhan and Warhol. We can lay all the hard questions on him.
A video clip of Outer and Inner Space is available here.
Andy Warhol: Manufactured is at the Art Gallery of Alberta until August 21st.
Last week I published the first part of my primer on McLuhan, and some really interesting debate came out of it. I hope you’ll join me at the end of this article to hash out any lingering thoughts about the man. And trust me, this is a man who lingers.
Continuing on with the work of Marshall McLuhan, let’s jump into his most famous of slogans:
The Medium Is The Message
McLuhan took the somewhat controversial opinion that the content of media was quite irrelevant. He thought the concern for violence in television programming was misguided and stubbornly refused to analyze the policy points of political TV debates. Content, he famously said, “is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” The real important effect, the stuff worth studying, was the cognitive structuring of hot and cold media.
Content, to McLuhan, was merely the form of a previous medium. The content of print is speech; the content of film is theatre. Others, like television, weave together multiple kinds of previous media content. Alternatively, some media, like a light bulb, are content-free and are therefore pure message (the message again being the phenomenological effect- how having instant access to light at all hours of the day may have primed us to think and act).
When this kind of thinking is applied to art it gets pretty easy to compare McLuhan’s media supremacy to Clement Greenberg’s vision of Modernism. If the medium is the message, then the message of painting is painting itself. Cubism was one of McLuhan’s favourite examples of a medium, freed from its obligation to content by the invention of other media (like film and photography), finally able to announce itself as the true message. A cubist work announces itself as painting, revealing the mechanics of the medium.
McLuhan Today
This structuring of art and media has increasingly proven to be undesirable to artists and theorists as time goes on. While the cognitive effects of media continue to be a fruitful vein of enquiry, it certainly isn’t the only way to study communications and technology. Art quite evidently has more to say than just to emphasize its construction as a medium. Its content, after all, may not be so easily dismissed as McLuhan would seem to suggest.
Likewise, certain passages of his works haven’t aged well. Occasional asides about the passing phenomenon of speed reading seem somewhat misguided or, when women or minorities are discussed (which is seldom) there is a cringe-inducing hint of essentialism. Also troubling is the lack of consideration given to how media are imbricated in larger relations of power. Media monopolies, spectacle punditry, and the low-level of public discourse beg questions that we aren’t likely to answer through McLuhan. Finally, the reoccurring humanist tinge to his characterization of technology has also been challenged, as media theorists such as Jussi Parikka increasingly adopt a posthumanist lens to media scholarship. This is to say, media may not necessarily be the extensions of man, but rather suggest a different, more insectile intelligence.
Media have also grown up since the 1960s. HD TV rejects the suggestion of television as a cold medium, but perhaps the internet has taken its place. The low definition video streams, fragmented webspeak, and 2.0 collectivities of the contemporary digital world may be the most fruitful place to apply McLuhan’s theories.
Art and McLuhan
Any review of McLuhan would be incomplete if it were to limit itself to just the man. His ideas were immensely influential on the youth of the 1960s, sometimes to the puzzlement of their elders.
Alan Dunn, 1966, The New Yorker.
The impact his thinking had in the video art of the 1960s is quite significant. Nam June Paik, for instance, can be seen to reflect several McLuhanist themes in his work. Electronic Opera #1 cheekily asks the viewers of “participation TV” to turn off their television sets. Electronic Superhighway suggests the regional tribalism that McLuhan foresaw, depicting all the states of the USA through neon tubes and video loops (Idaho unfortunately is reduced to a clip of potatoes arranged in a grocery store). This idea is writ on a global scale in Megaton/Matrix, which rather slyly suggests that the body has been excluded from all these discussions of media. So, through Paik there’s a translation of McLuhan’s ideas, but also something of a critique.
Nam June Paik, TV Magnet, 1965.
McLuhan and Art
Paik’s critical appraisal of media actually fits into McLuhan’s larger assessment of the role of art in society. Seen as a kind of radar or ‘early warning system’, McLuhan believed that art empowers us “to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them.”
I quite like this metaphor of radar; it invites the image of art being fired as probes in every direction, occasionally being pinged back when it hits something. Art in this schema is both predictive and inquisitive and demands our attention with the same gravity as science journals or political punditry. Rather than divorcing art from the world, as High Modernism seems to do, radar art remains deeply attuned to the wide-reaching shifts of the present in order to meet the future with some cognisance. “Art as a radar environment,” McLuhan states, “takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training rather than the role of a privileged diet for the elite.” Well said, Marshall.
So, as we gear up for Marshall McLuhan Day on July 21st and the series of very promising gallery shows and lectures, take some time to give this Canadian intellectual giant one more spin. The first chapter of Understanding Media and his 1969 interview for playboy (!) are both excellent reads. If McLuhan himself is like a radar machine we can expect some hits and some misses, but also, hopefully, we’ll discover an image of the path ahead.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about SlutWalk.
It began with a comment from a Toronto police officer who said, “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized,” but it’s not really about that one comment.
It encompasses an effort to reclaim ‘slut’, but its not really about that one word.
It’s an opportunity for people to meet wearing their most ostentatious outfits, but it’s not really about the clothes.
It wouldn’t be enough to take back a word, or to confront people with bare legs. Resoundingly, at its core, it’s about the discourse of victim-blaming and how we “manage” sexual assault by disciplining select behaviours, primarily that of women.
It is an expression of outrage at the neo-liberal self-management of our bodies that is so deeply woven into our system of policing sexual assault.
It is an assertion of keeping sexuality alive and free in the face of narratives that seek to keep women afraid- discourses which code certain spaces, acts and behaviours as self-violating.
Marshall McLuhan was, to say the least, kind of a big deal. Best known for his snappy slogans and critical study of the medium of television, McLuhan was the popular intellectual of the 1960s and 70s. He was a literary scholar, a futurist, pretty damn funny and one of the rare academics who embraced public life and intellectual spectacle in equal measure. He’s the one who told us “the medium is the message,” that we live in a “global village,” and that the “Electric Age of Information” was going to require an all together different approach from the norms of the mechanical-literary West.
What’s more, he’s one of ours. Born in Edmonton in 1911, Marshall McLuhan will soon be celebrated on the centenary of his birth. Latitude 53, the Art Gallery of Alberta, the University of Alberta and others are assembling an array of events, lectures, and art work in June and July around this man and his ideas. You can expect to see and hear a lot about McLuhan in the coming months and yet, for many, this will be an introduction rather than a revisiting.
The final lecture of the Art Gallery of Alberta’s Aboriginal Art programming took place last Thursday with the distinguished professor Charlotte Townsend-Gault givng a talk entitled “National Spirit: The Haunting of Art in Canada.” I don’t envy the challenge she faced. Weaving together the disparate subject positions and representational strategies of Canadian art with Aboriginal content (from Emily Carr to Brian Jungen and Walter Phillips to Robert Davidson) is certainly a difficult undertaking. Given that the breadth of these artworks encompass radically different political engagements and historical outlooks it is not surprising that what emerged from her survey was somewhat inchoate. I think, on some level, this was in fact part of her larger point. Townsend-Gault’s reluctance to construct rigid narratives and regimes of meaning to Aboriginal forms and content goes beyond the post-modern critique of history and suggests a new paradigm for engaging with the Aboriginal Other that is predicated on respectful indeterminacy.
This notion is quite a radical one, running against the modernist privileging of the accumulation of knowledge and perhaps even the post-colonial desire to speak back to empire. Both strategies have, at their core, the assumption that representation can lead more or less unproblematically to knowledge and that knowledge is the foundation for a more enlightened way of interacting with the colonial Other. In this way, a lack of understanding is understood to correspond to a lack of sufficient representation, or to the lack of representation of a particular group in a particular way.
This is clearly a heady and on-going debate that I about to wade into, and I don’t want to be swept away by the current, so I’ll begin by saying that I certainly won’t be concluding things definitively, or illuminating all the possible ways to answer this question. My task at hand is merely sketch out three dominant models of what makes art artful, and suggest one of many intriguing alternatives. Clearly, there are many ways to answer the provocative question: What is art?
Firstly, to some, art consists of harmony and sensory pleasure. The Humanist school of thought sets up camp here, arguing that art is the highest order of the “human condition” (an ever nebulous and lofty term). Surprisingly, this is also where scientific research takes us. It seems that evolution has cognitively wired our brains to aesthetically appreciate visual information favourable to survival in the Pleistocene era. Art, in this view, is the pleasurable expression of a visual ideal. Art intrigues the senses and explores a kind of human universality.
Representation is a curious thing. For the longest time we have been satisfied by pictures of a subject, rather than pictures about that subject or pictures through that subject. We ask for metonymy rather than interpretation, particularly in terms of the works we lift up as our national icons. In order to build an identity and a visual culture, any nation needs a mirroring of itself, and as such, we somewhat desperately cling to the few works that seek to represent Canada. Perhaps, as a young country, we are too easily flattered by the attention of artists.
In this respect, the Group of Seven has served us well. Their paintings of folksy settlements and vast wilderness, read through the vocabulary of European modernism, present exactly the sort of reflection we have always wanted to see. Both new and old, heroic and dynamic, their Canada cannot help but flatter. It is no wonder, therefore, that we have lifted these images up as patriotic symbols, even though these misrepresentations of emptiness may ultimately do us a disservice.
Emily Carr, Big Raven, 1931.
Emily Carr in many ways did even better, painting mysterious totems and First Nations sculptures that not only gave us an identity, but borrowed a history. Her works are steeped in unknown myths, mystery, and elemental power while also serving to introduce aboriginal representations into the larger narrative of Canadian identity. Some eighty years later, however, we may want to re-evaluate our criteria and demands for national self-representation.
In the past, artists and anthropologists have been keen to claim aboriginal art, particularly that of the Pacific Northwest, as Canadian and as part of our collective heritage and visual culture. Marius Barbeau in particular was instrumental in organizing artistic expeditions that sent members of the Group of Seven into Gitxsan territory to incorporate totem poles into their representations of Canada. These paintings, made in ignorance to indigenous beliefs and omitting every trace of their contemporary existence, are only representations of an imagined pre-history. Part of the pleasure in these works is the sense of not knowing, of preserving the mystery, and in turn, clearing the past of ownership so that these powerful objects can be represented as our own. This national appropriation is inevitably tinged with a distinctly colonial mentality.
Emily Carr, Big Eagle, Skidegate BC, c. 1930.
Emily Carr, compared to the Group of Seven, at least seems to be full of good intentions. She was less of a tourist and more of a scholar, gaining some standing in the communities in which she painted. Contemporary native peoples appear in her works far more than those of her peers, and her depictions of the totem forms are respectfully accurate. And yet, we are left with a representation of an object of which we have very little understanding. Detached from history and culture, the totems are floating signifiers, all the more open to appropriation.
And appropriate we have. I remember going to school at Ross Sheppard High, home of the Thunderbirds. There’s a totem pole rather innocuously placed in the front of the school, transplanted from the Pacific to the prairies. It’s rooted in concrete now, after a rival school tried to chop it down (or so the story goes). The history of the pole never surfaced while I was a student there, so I guess it meant whatever we wanted it to convey: school spirit, academics, athletics, or personal growth- all things that never belonged to the Thunderbird’s mythology, I’m sure. My first art class took place there. We sat on the grass and timidly copied the pole’s ovoid faces and shapes, unknowingly following Carr’s dubious precedent.
I think, in some subtle way, Ross Sheppard’s appropriation of the totem pole was made possible by the celebration of Emily Carr’s misinformed depictions. Mere representation, it seems, all too often escapes accountability. When we raised her work to the level of national symbol, we invested the landscapes and objects she depicted with a significance that diverges from their original function. What is reflected back to us in this effigy of Canada is a doctored image rather than a candid self-portrait. If Carr paints nothing more than the mere representation of a totem then we are far too keen to supply meaning that contributes to a self-serving national myth.
In order to resist this appropriation I firmly believe that art must provide its own conceptual content rather than representing a vacuous subject. Art that interprets instead of merely presenting its content can differ meaning and complicate the trajectory of our patriotic narratives. We are far more involved, far more aware of our complicity in the production of meaning, when art stands as a challenge rather than decoration. One contemporary artist who does this with style is, of course, Brian Jungen.
Brian Jungen, Prototypes for New Understanding [excerpt], 1998-2005.
Jungen’s sculptural re-interpretations of aboriginal objects remade through sports equipment may be the perfect antidote to Carr. Masks are fashioned out of Nike Air Jordan sneakers while golf bags form the shapes of totem poles. These works are formally representative of their aboriginal referents, and yet in order to view them one must read this representation through their discordant materials.
Brian Jungen, Untitled, 2007.
Ironically, these works are themselves appropriations. While using Haida forms, Jugen’s heritage is Swiss and Dane-zaa First Nation. Like Emily Carr or my highschool classmates and I, he exists outside Haida culture, looking in. And yet, due to our poor understanding of the diversity of aboriginal cultures, he is often mistaken as ‘authentic’ (this itself being an immensely problematic term). The joke continues when he is called upon to represent Canada internationally, at the Weiner Secession, Sydney Biennial, and in our social studies textbooks.
Nevertheless, the Prototypes go beyond the representation of objects, and enter into the realm of representation through and representation about their subjects. By using Western status symbols such as Nike sneakers and golf bags Jungen quite powerfully makes visible the commodification of aboriginal motifs for the sake of a cultural ‘cool’. His work suggests the lust for identity rather than a stable depiction of that identity itself. Abandoning secondary accounts of a primary artifact, Jungen instead makes visible our tertiary manipulations in the name of appropriated symbols. As Cuauhtémoc Medina puts it, “If they want masks, why not sell them their own reflection?” If we are surprised at what we see, it is because we have not really been looking.
This kind of art, art beyond representation, serves Canada better than images which only provide a backdrop to our desires and ambitions. Art as a corrective measure and a continued negotiation of identity can challenge our self-image rather than affirm our destructive fantasies. The utility of this kind of practice, I think, should not be overestimated, and yet it is often difficult to engage in this kind of work when a banal, self-congratulatory representations more often takes centre stage. I hope that, as we continue to place new demands on what constitutes our national myths and iconic artworks, we call for more than mere representation, decorated in whatever style is fashionable in the art world at the time. There are more interesting narratives to build and tensions to induce than to reduce art to representation of a thing or a place, catalogued neatly into an order of unchanging sentiment.
Alan Dunn, 1966, The New Yorker.
Nam June Paik, TV Magnet, 1965.
Emily Carr, Big Raven, 1931.
