In Search of Expo 67 9780228013754

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In Search of Expo 67

In Search of

Monika Kin Gagnon and Lesley Johnstone

Edited by

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

ISBN 978-0-2280-0114-0 (paper) Legal deposit third quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from Concordia University’s Aid to Research-Related Events program, administered by the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Graduate Studies.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

ii: Cheryl Sim, Un jour, One Day, 2017.

Title: In search of Expo 67 / edited by Monika Kin Gagnon and Lesley Johnstone. Names: Gagnon, Monika Kin, 1961- editor. | Johnstone, Lesley, editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20200211587 | ISBN 9780228001140 (paper) Subjects: LCSH: Expo (International Exhibitions Bureau) (1967 : Montréal, Québec) | LCSH: Art, Canadian—20th century—Exhibitions. | LCSH: Artists—Canada. Classification: LCC N4752 .I5 2020 | DDC 709.71074/71428—dc23

Contents

vii Acknowledgments

National Identities: The Canada Pavilion

3 Introduction

monika kin gagnon and lesley johnstone

80 L’arbre est dans ses feuilles

althea thauberger 89 Panning for Gold / Walking You Through It

Materialities and Temporalities

leisure (meredith carruthers and susannah wesley)

34 As Sovereign as Love

david k. ross

96 Of Our Lands / De nos terres / Nunanni

geronimo inutiq 39 Le Chemin de l’énigme

marie-claire blais and pascal grandmaison

National Identities: The Indians of Canada Pavilion

43 Un jour, One Day

cheryl sim

106 Earth Mother Hair, Indian Hair, and Earth

Mother Eyes, Indian Eyes, Animal Eyes

duane linklater 47 Trophées (Montréal, 1967–2017)

simon boudvin

112 Indian Momento

krista belle stewart 52 Until Finally O Became Just a Dot

charles stankievech

117 Untitled

mark ruwedel 60 Greg Curnoe’s “Dorval Mural” as a

Critical Response to Expo 67

johanne sloan

122 The Indians of Canada Pavilion

guy sioui durand

135 From Indian to Indigenous: Temporary

188 Spectacles of the World: Expo 67 as an

Pavilion to Sovereign Display Territories

Optical Amusement Park

david garneau

caroline martel, in collaboration with mathieu bouchard-malo

Digital Reimaginings 148 Kaléidoscope II

jean-pierre aubé

194 Expo 67 and the Missing Archive, the

Anarchive, and the Counter-Archive

janine marchessault

154 N-Polytope: Behaviors in Light

and Sound after Iannis Xenakis –

204 Original Films from Expo 67

MAC Version

chris salter 217 List of Works 160 Montréal délire

stéphane gilot 223 Biographies 165 Le Huitième Jour, 1967–2017

emmanuelle léonard

Archival Remixes 170 Reprise

dave ritter and kathleen ritter 178 By the Time We Got to Expo

philip hoffman and eva kolcze 182 1967: A People Kind of Place

jacqueline hoàng nguyê˜n

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Acknowledgments

In Search of Expo 67, the original 2017 exhibition upon which this book is based, had its inception in 2013 when we first began speaking with potential artists. There are a great many people to thank. Our gratitude extends first and foremost to the artists who contributed to the exhibition and book, for your immense creativity, enthusiasm, beautiful artworks, and patience on this journey. We also thank the authors who have contributed their essays to this collection and their expertise on Expo 67: David Garneau, Janine Marchessault, Guy Sioui Durand, and Johanne Sloan. Undertaking an exhibition such as In Search of Expo 67 required the support and collaboration of many people at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. We thank John Zeppetelli, director and chief curator; Yves Théoret, deputy director; Luc Perron, Maryse Elias, and Nathalie Dupuis in Administration; Marjolaine Labelle, Geneviève Senécal, Hélène Cantin, and Marie-Renée Vial on the curatorial team; Anne-Marie Zeppetelli, collections manager, and Eve Katinouglou, registrar; Carl Solari, Denis Labelle, Josée St-Louis, and the entire installation team; Anne-Marie Barnard and the team in Communications; Chantal Charbonneau in Publications; and the photographers of the exhibition, Guy L’Heureux and Richard-Max Tremblay. At Concordia University, we are grateful for the financial support extended by the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Graduate Studies, particularly Rebecca Duclos, Justin Powlowski, and Lynn Hughes for their support for the project; as well, funding was provided through Aid to Research-Related Events and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. Thank you to then-provost, now president, Graham Carr for his interest and support. As well, thank you Shelley Sitahal, director, Research Partnerships and Innovation. At University Communication Services,

we are grateful to Philippe Beauregard, as well as Johanne Pelletier, Salvatore Barrera, and their team for the wonderful podcasts produced for Expo 67: Thinking Out Loud. From the Post-Image cluster at Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia we thank Marisa Portolese and Raymonde April, as well as graduate students Matthew Brooks and Steven Smith Simard, who worked with Leisure (Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley) and Althea Thauberger. The Hexagram network also provided support for artists. At the National Gallery of Canada, we thank Andrea Kunard, associate curator, Anne Eschapasse, then deputy director, Exhibitions and Outreach, and Josée Drouin-Brisebois, senior curator of contemporary art, for their support of Althea Thauberger’s project. We thank Clothilde Cardinal, director of programming at Place des Arts, who facilitated the presentation of Caroline Martel’s work in the Espace culturel Georges-Émile-Lapalme. The Expanding Cinema film program presented by cinemaexpo67 was made possible by the filmmakers Graeme Ferguson, Munro Ferguson, and Morley Markson, the families of Vincent Vaitiekunas and Nick and Anne Chaparos, and Anouk Brault. We are grateful for the technical support received from Denis Labelle and Donald Dolan, and for the realization of the Kaleidoscope vr prototype, we thank Pascal Pelletier and Productions Figure 55. At the Cinémathèque québécoise, we thank Jean-Baptiste Combette, Stéphanie Côté, Jean Gagnon, and Guillaume Lafleur. At the National Film Board of Canada, we thank René Chenier, Benoît Forté, and Karine Lanoie-Brien. As always, we thank Paul Gordon of Library and Archives Canada, who provided ongoing expertise on the films and formats of Expo 67. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided initial funding for the research phases of the project through the Archiving Future Cinemas research grant. For their ongoing expertise and insights into Expo 67, we thank Roger La Roche and the late William Kretzel, whose expansive knowledge and resources on the Expo 67 films (as well as imax) will be dearly missed. We thank the translators Nathalie de Blois, Peter Feldstein, Denis Lessard, Judith Terry, and Colette Tougas, and the editors and copy-editors Dimitri Pascal Bossut, Susan Le Pan, Ian MacKenzie, Olivier Reguin, and Colette Tougas. We also extend our appreciation to Chantal Charbonneau, editor at the mac, for her assistance throughout the production of this publication. viii

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Over the years, this project has received assistance from a great many students, whom we thank: Marie Bernard-Brind’Amour, Matthew Brooks, Cecelia Chen, Elise Cotter, Gabrielle Doiron, Jaelle Dutremble-Rivet, Danica Evering, Delphine Larose, Tiffany Le, Daniela Machado, Caroline Martel, Tyler Morgenstern, Bradley Peppinck, Stephen Sherman, Steven Smith Simard, and Leticia Trandafir. We are grateful to Jonathan Crago and Kathleen Fraser at McGill-Queen’s University Press, as well as the graphic designer David Leblanc, for helping us transform this complex project into this beautiful publication. Monika Kin Gagnon thanks Scott Toguri McFarlane and Olivia Michiko Gagnon for their ongoing enthusiasm. Lesley Johnstone thanks all her colleagues at the mac who have contributed to the realization of the exhibition and publication over the past seven years, and finally Gilbert Turp, who accompanied us on this adventure. Monika Kin Gagnon and Lesley Johnstone

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In Search of Expo 67

Charles Stankievech, Until Finally O Became Just a Dot, 2017, view of installation.

Introduction Monika Kin Gagnon and Lesley Johnstone

The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal’s group exhibition In Search of Expo 67 bears its name well. It grew out of an initial awareness that there were many unexplored (hi)stories to be told about Expo 67, an event that continues to loom large in our collective cultural memories but remains fragmentary, dispersed, and partial. The history of world exhibitions that commences with London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851 – a legacy to which Expo 67 contributes – reminds us that these international events are rife with fascinating tensions and contradictions that evade any easy comprehension or recollection. As Expo 67’s fiftieth anniversary in 2017 converged with Canada’s sesquicentennial of Confederation of 1867, and Montreal’s 375th birthday of colonial settlement by de Maisonneuve and Jesuit missionaries, we are reminded of the public function of commemorations and birthdays. Art historian Ruth B. Phillips has characterized them as “show times,” which she demonstrates also become “protest times,” met with the resistances of un-birthdays, de-celebrating, de-colonizing.1 These new “show times” resulted in no fewer than seven major museum exhibitions in Montreal that took Expo 67 as its focus, as well as other smaller exhibitions, film screenings, symposiums, and events.2 All, one might say, engaged a particular version of history: Expo 67 as a moment to revisit, a nostalgic return to the originary event through artifacts, archival retrievals, oral histories, and interviews with those who were there. Our exhibition, In Search of Expo 67, developed out of an intuition that artists’ engagement would open up new avenues of exploration within this context of “celebration,” and the resulting works by nineteen contemporary artists remind us that the complexities and tensions so visible in 2017 were equally present back in 1967. We succumb, as other scholars of world exhibitions have, to the complexities

View of the exhibition, Althea Thauberger, L’arbre est dans ses feuilles, 2017.

of Expo 67 as an event that is impossible to understand as a totality and affirm that multiple ways of knowing Expo 67 is most illuminating. We maintain that these original artworks produce significant new knowledge in creative, enriching ways that extend history’s traditional impulse toward accurate recollection, and thereby make a valuable contribution to understanding Expo 67’s legacies fifty years later. In Search of Expo 67 joins the substantive body of art, exhibitions, and curatorial scholarship that has explored the interconnections between archives and cultural memory, and artworks premised on artists’ creative and critical approaches to the archive.3 While artists have always delved into the past for inspiration, art critic and historian Hal Foster’s critical essay “The Archival Impulse” (2004) details the specifically archival turn in contemporary art, while Charles Merewether’s anthology, The Archive (2006), assembles a significant combination of artist and theorists’ (abbreviated) texts since the 1960s.4 Numerous exhibitions have extensively featured artists who work with archives conceptually and materially, including the late curator Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 (2002), and later Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (2008), as well as Carolyn ChristovBakargiev’s Documenta 13 (2012), and others.5 As the many exhibitions and scholarship demonstrate, the centring of archival documents and artifacts constitutes one artistic approach, while the archive as a theme, which features the museum itself as an institutional site of collecting, is another, going so far as the creation of imaginary archives. Curator Dieter Roelstraete has compellingly developed the notion of the archaeological imaginary in art, initially in a text for e-flux and then in the exhibition The Way of the Shovel at the Museum of Contemporary Chicago in 2013. Identifying a historiographic turn, Roelstraete brought together artists who study the past through its material traces. The historiographic mode, in his words, “is a methodological complex that includes the historical account, the archive, the document, the act of excavating and unearthing, the memorial, the art of reconstruction and re-enactment, the testimony.”6 The rise of the internet and the multiplying functions of digitization have equally challenged the conventional roles of the archive, in arguably democratizing and expanding access to archival artifacts and facilitating their circulation. If the essence or ontology of traditional archives was the original artifact guarded in an institutional place, contemporary artistic practices illuminate the dramatic transformation and far-reaching effects of archives in the twenty-first century.7 The Expo 67 archives provided raw material from which the artists created new articulations of the functioning and performance of cultural memory, in some 4

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instances, bringing forth new information about some of the lesser known projects and pavilions. Each artwork conveys unique facets of how Expo 67 is remembered and continues to reverberate in today’s collective imagination. The selection of artists developed out of a series of conversations with artists we felt, as a result of their practices, may be inspired by Expo 67. Others we knew had begun developing projects and took this opportunity to complete them, while still others were invited to participate because of their familiarity with the specific year, 1967, including Krista Belle Stewart’s Seraphine, Seraphine (2015), and Geronimo Inutiq’s arcticnoise (2015). Some works by Mark Ruwedel, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyê˜n, Eva Kolcze, and Philip Hoffman were incorporated with ease. All were inspired by Expo’s extraordinary cultural conditions: the scale and ambition of almost 100 epic national and private pavilions, as well as the creative freedom given to filmmakers, architects, and artists to wildly experiment. In retrospect, one of the striking aspects of the exhibition was the diverse relationships the artists established with their subjects of exploration, and how the sixteen artists who created new works conceived their research-based projects, making archival materials visually compelling, and performing distinct modes of history-telling. Some artists adopted a forensic approach to the archives to engage more literally and materially with Expo 67. They return to Expo 67’s islands and its traces, explore the original creator-participants, or unpack the complexities and dynamics of the original pavilions. These forensic explorations remained closely aligned with the materiality and conceptual concerns of the originals and maintained direct lines, and in some cases even re-exhibition of original archival artifacts. For Althea Thauberger, Leisure (Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley), Charles Stankievech, Duane Linklater, Chris Salter, Stéphane Gilot, Dave and Kathleen Ritter, and Caroline Martel it seemed significant that their artworks directly reference the “subjects” of their engagement, to, in a sense, tell their stories and explore how Expo’s resonances extend today. Other artists used the archives as “sparks” or catalysts for poetic, personal, or evocative interpretations in which the final artworks do not specifically offer “information” about the original pavilions or even Expo 67 itself. Projects by David K. Ross, Marie-Claire Blais and Pascal Grandmaison, Cheryl Sim, Geronimo Inutiq, Jean-Pierre Aubé, Emmanuelle Léonard, and Krista Belle Stewart reflect this approach. All ensuing new artworks were the outcome of two-year-long dialogues with the artists, as well as research processes that were able to accelerate artists’ access to archives, provide more in-depth research assistance and extensive pages of texts, documents, and audiovisual materials, as well as contacts with archivists themselves. We hope that the 5

Introduction

excitement and richness of these creative engagements and their assembly in the museum spaces of the exhibition is conveyed in these pages.

This book’s foundation is the 2017 exhibition but it is structured around thematics that cluster the artworks in a different manner than the exhibit. “Materialities and Temporalities” brings together artists who began from the constructed physicality of the Expo islands, observed their ageing over time, and highlighted remaining 6

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View of the exhibition, David K. Ross, As Sovereign as Love, 2017 (left), and Cheryl Sim, Un jour, One Day, 2017.

features that one might still encounter while ambling through the terrain today. “National Identities” foregrounds the Canada Pavilion and the Indians of Canada Pavilion and suggests the significance of archival documents to render them in the present. The artworks assembled in “Digital Reimaginings” employ contemporary digital media and tools to revisit and explore the primary foci of particular pavilions. Finally, “Archival Remixes” brings together four film and sound installations that have directly employed archival cinematic and audio artifacts from 1967. As exhibition co-curators, we introduce the artworks as an ensemble and explore 7

Introduction

the connections between archives, creative processes, and cultural memory. The individual artist pages document their respective artworks and include brief texts that address their archival research, as well as key images that were salient to their processes. Four substantive essays have been commissioned to offer insight into other facets of Expo 67: Johanne Sloane’s research of lesser-known cultural resistances, ongoing revisitations of the Indians of Canada Pavilion by Guy Sioui Durand and David Garneau, and a discussion of Expo’s cinematic archives and artists’ remediations by Janine Marchessault. Throughout we have supplemented archival documentation that renders further insight into the respective themes and individual artworks. The book concludes with documentation of six original multi-screen large-format films from Expo 67 that were restored and presented during the four months of the exhibition: Polar Life; Motion; Conflict; Canada Is My Plano; Earth Is Man’s Home; and Kaleidoscope.

Materialities and Temporalities Expo 67’s organizers designed the world exhibition on a series of constructed or expanded islands – Sainte-Hélène, Notre-Dame, and Cité du Havre – requiring some form of transportation to be accessed – train, boat, or the newly constructed Métro. Far from the realities of the city of Montreal, this isolation contributed markedly to Expo’s popular success and to the sense of it being in a world wholly unto its own. Going to Expo was for many akin to going on an otherwise unattainable world tour. David K. Ross, Marie-Claire Blais and Pascal Grandmaison, Cheryl Sim, Charles Stankievech, Mark Ruwedel, and Simon Boudvin all explore this off-sitedness of the islands, their condition and state today, and the traces of the original exhibition’s past in the city, on the islands, and in the memories of its visitors. In grounding their explorations in the tangible materiality and earthly traces of Expo, they also introduce a sense of the islands’ entropy and its mixed temporalities. Based on research in the archives of the Ville de Montréal, As Sovereign as Love by Ross departs from the topological maps of the world exhibition’s site-planning. Created with a drone-mounted camera that traverses the islands on the original and precise paths of the Minirail, the image floats at a slow, even pace that reveals the current state and deteriorating remains of 1967 – waterways, pavilions, vegetation – as well as the palimpsestic transformations of the site over the last fifty years. These include the 1980 Floralies international horticultural fair and the 8

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Grand Prix Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve, as well as music festivals such as Osheaga and Piknic Électronik. Renovations and construction continue today. Narrated excerpts from French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1939 memoir Terre des hommes provide a historical, literary anchoring, the words of this poetic inspiration for Expo 67’s global theme, Man and His World, uncannily echoing scenes in the film. Blais and Grandmaison’s Le Chemin de l’énigme single-channel projection was filmed entirely on the shoreline, where the St Lawrence Seaway laps at the edges of the constructed islands. Enhanced by repeated jump cuts, a woman’s hands obsessively displace wet rocks, incessantly building up and dismantling mounds into ephemeral sculptural forms, evoking the myth of Sisyphus; the sounds of moving water and pounding rocks reverberate, and an electronic composition that includes the signal still heard as the doors close on Montreal metros. A short history of the islands’ making is evoked in this performative piece, from the original rock formations and the enlargement of Île Sainte-Hélène to the fabrication of Île Notre-Dame from the construction detritus of Montreal’s urban infrastructures in the 1960s, from the planned obsolescence of the pavilions to the current largescale renovations. In both films the camera momentarily veers off the islands to reveal Montreal’s contemporary urban skyline, anchoring the films in the present, while immersing viewers in the “texture of futurity” that media theorist André Jansson has described as “a hitherto never seen panorama of Montreal … from a space that was entirely new in itself.”8 Despite the artificial, constructed qualities of the site, both films demonstrate how nature continues to reassert itself in the form of trees, plants, flowers, river water, ducks, and blue skies. Sim’s three-channel video installation Un jour, One Day, presented in the same space as Ross’s large-scale projection, also offers spectacular views of the islands. Sim promenades about the landscape wearing a hostess uniform redesigned as a pantsuit, thus updating the uniform with feminist flair. With her parents’ scrapbook in hand, a souvenir of when they honeymooned at Expo 67, Sim searches for traces of the public sculptures still present on the site, or metaphorically, for the utopian promises for the future that Expo 67 represented. We see Alexander Calder’s giant sculpture L’Homme looming over Sim’s small body, as well as lesserknown artworks, such as Yves Trudeau’s Phare du cosmos (which sent electronic sound messages to the universe), Raoul Hunter’s Iris, Robert Roussil’s Migration, and Signe solaire by Jean leFébure. Her wistful, slow rendition of the originally upbeat theme song by Stéphane Venne, Un jour, un jour, heightens a reflective quality as she sings in close-up and leafs through snapshots of her mother, 9

Introduction

fashionably dressed and posing in front of the Israel, Great Britain, ussr, and Man and His Health Pavilions, as well as Habitat 67. Each of these three works evokes the past reality of the site through a close attention to the landscape, simultaneously combined with audio that creates temporal counterpoints with its contemporary treatment. One of the most popular and iconic pavilions at Expo 67, the usa Pavilion – to this day the largest existing geodesic dome in the world – is still standing majestically and ethereally on the Expo islands. Its somewhat dilapidated state and disincarnated function, as an Environment Museum run by the Canadian federal government, is also testimony to the passage of time and a certain historical amnesia. But it also represents, along with Habitat, the most enduring example of the architectural innovations that marked Expo 67. Charles Stankievech has had a long-standing interest in Buckminster Fuller, the pavilion architect, who was also a systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor. Within the space of Stankievech’s installation, customdesigned acrylic shelving displayed an array of archival documents, publications, texts, vinyl records, photographs, and audiovisual excerpts that attest to Fuller’s overlapping interests in space, radio, the environment, the military, and the Canadian Arctic. In the centre of the space a copper geodesic dome enclosed a Solair chair, radio transmitter, and headphones, while on a nearby bench visitors were invited to listen to a curated radio program of texts as diverse as the first sound recordings of a heartbeat, Charles De Gaulle’s “Vive le Québec libre!” pronounced in Montreal in 1967, Marshall McLuhan, Pink Floyd, Karl Marx, and Glenn Gould. Looming large over the space was a wall-sized photograph from 1976 documenting the burning of the acrylic exterior shell of the dome from an aerial perspective, which took but ten minutes and permanently exposed its trussed structure. One of the most iconic photographs of the dome, it dramatically highlights the end of an era. As a further extension of the piece, and in the hopes of encouraging visitors to make their way to Île Sainte-Hélène, Stankievech transformed Fuller’s dome into a radio transmitter, and visitors could listen to the same program if they tuned in to fm 88.5 while within a one-kilometre radius of the dome. Two photo-based contributions engage with the material traces of Expo 67 at distinct historical moments. Mark Ruwedel’s ten silver gelatin photographs of the islands dating from 1988–91 capture a halfway point anticipating 1992 and Expo 67’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Already displaying wear-and-tear and abandonment over time, Ruwedel’s images show several pavilions and traces of what remained twenty-five years ago. In his photographic project, Simon Boudvin provides an

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inventory of echoes of the world exhibition on the streets of Montreal today, which he has juxtaposed with quotations gleaned from a variety of official Expo 67 documents. Many of these urban structures are familiar to Montrealers, and their reference back to the pavilions of 1967 underscores the time that has passed, but also highlights the under-recognized, subtle visual impact on our urban landscape of the modern architectural vocabulary that was so present at Expo. The section concludes with Johanne Sloane’s playful essay “Greg Curnoe’s ‘Dorval Mural’ as a Critical Response to Expo 67,” which explores the aesthetics and countercultural politics of the 1960s that would leave a lasting trace on Montreal.

National Identities: The Canada and Indians of Canada Pavilions Archives, in their earliest inceptions, were instrumental in constructing and maintaining forms of state authority and power by enshrining documentation of institutions, events, legislation, and individuals. The contributions of these functions to national formations and maintenance of national identities are not totalizing so much as revelatory. World exhibitions are especially salient to understanding how nations construct and export their particular identities on a global stage at specific historical moments, as imaginary expressions of social and political ideals. Several artists in the exhibition explore the cluster of structures that comprised the Canada Pavilion (Althea Thauberger, Leisure, and Geronimo Inutiq). Projects by Indigenous artists Duane Linklater and Krista Belle Stewart that engage the complexities of the Indians of Canada Pavilion are followed by Guy Sioui Durand’s “The Indians of Canada Pavilion,” and David Garneau’s “From Indian to Indigenous: Temporary Pavilion to Sovereign Display Territories” (both Durand and Garneau have made presentations on their ongoing research into the pavilion at Aboriginal Curatorial Collective conferences over the last decade). The combined focus on the Indians of Canada Pavilion represents the histories of resistance by Indigenous artists to dominant representations of Canadian identity-formation and history-making at the centennial celebrations of 1967 (another “show time” in Philips’s parlance), and again during the sesquicentennial in 2017. Also reproduced in this section is Untitled (1990) by Mark Ruwedel, which depicts Kwakwaka'wakw artists Tony and Henry Hunt’s totem pole created for the exterior of the pavilion, one of the few remaining elements from the original pavilions that continues to grace Île Notre-Dame.

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Introduction

View of children playing with logs, Leisure, Panning for Gold / Walking You Through It, 2017.

The Canada Pavilion consisted of independent structures that together intended to give Expo 67 visitors a sense of the geography, economy, and culture of the host nation. Katimavik was the main building, a nine-storey inverted pyramid that had a sloping terrace at the top featuring giant sculptures (see pages 101, 103), several linked pyramids with exhibitions, and the rotating Carousel Theatre (featuring five films, comprising The Growth of Canada). Adjacent to Katimavik was the People Tree, a sixty-foot, tree-shaped structure that held thousands of photographs of Canadians printed on orange and red nylon sheets (see pages 101–2). In the shadows of the pyramid was the Children’s Creative Centre and a restaurant, La Toundra, which exists to this day and includes plaster engravings by two Inuit stone carvers, Kumukluk Saggiak and Elijah Pudlat, from Cape Dorset.9 Althea Thauberger investigates in narrative form the complexities of the People Tree, a social documentary photography project that was conceived by Lorraine Althea Monk for the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of 12

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Canada. Designed to promote a vision of Canadian identity, its bright orange dome was composed of individual “leaves” that featured portraits of Canadians from all walks of life, commissioned from photographers across the country. In this remarkably rich two-channel video installation, Thauberger loosely performs the persona of Monk, who is depicted examining hundreds of 8 x 10-inch pale green archive cards, referencing the photographic images from the archive dating from 1963 to 1966 that have been conserved at the National Gallery of Canada. Quoting from interviews with Monk, internal correspondence from the Still Photography Division, as well as filmed commentary by curator Andrea Kunard and photography historian Carol Payne, Thauberger recounts the making of the project.10 Just as Monk had done in the related publications Call Them Canadians and Ces visages qui sont un pays, Thauberger invited four emerging Montreal poets – Danica Evering, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, Kama La Mackerel, and Chloé Savoie-Bernard – who offer their often searingly critical compositions. Together, the spoken texts by all women offer commentary, description, and poetry, providing glimpses into that history while inscribing a level of critical commentary on the underlying premises of the project and its attempt to “depict” a nation. As Thauberger states, “The images combined to represent an idealized self-portrait of the nation at a time when Canada was trying to ‘posit new models of normative citizenry’ in opposition to British imperialism. However, alongside their utopian ambitions, these projects reinforced an aggressive and assimilative form of government-sanctioned multiculturalism that, as many Canadian cultural theorists would posit, worked to maintain a white, middle-class centre. So that, in effect, by engaging the concept of ‘mosaic,’ the images worked hand-in-hand with the state to conceal real practices of discrimination and bias across race, culture, and socio-economic difference.”11 Canada is a very different place in 2017 than it was in 1967, and Thauberger subtly signals that distance in her gestures and facial expressions, at times overtly self-conscious and comical. Just as Thauberger signals the important work of Lorraine Monk, Leisure’s installation Panning for Gold / Walking You Through It pays homage to another iconic woman in Canadian history, the pioneering landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander (born in 1921 and still living and working in Vancouver), who radically challenged conventional notions of children’s play in her unique Environment for Creative Play and Learning. Amid the technology-driven, futuristic visions that were so characteristic of the pavilions at Expo, this modest, ordinary looking plot offered children infinite possibilities for play, with its natural environment (including dirt mounds and running water), and what Oberlander 13

Introduction

View of the exhibition (foreground), Leisure, Panning for Gold / Walking You Through It, 2017; (background), Duane Linklater, Earth Mother Hair, Indian Hair, and Earth Mother Eyes, Indian Eyes, Animal Eyes, 2017; and (side walls) Mark Ruwedel, Untitled, 1988–91.

theorized as “loose parts.” The result of detailed on-site and archival research by the artists, as well as interviews with Oberlander herself, Leisure’s installation included large hand-tinted digital prints based on archival photographs of the garden, and custom-built notched logs that could be manipulated by museum visitors. Leisure attests to Oberlander’s determination and analytical acumen by including the (archival) letter with project director Polly Hill, that reveals Oberlander’s “manifesto-like” vision expressed in her own words. Inspired by the word Katimavik, meaning “meeting place” in Inuktitut, Inuit artist Geronimo Inutiq’s installation interprets the abstract forms, images, symbols, and languages of the pavilion. Operating a visual juxtaposition/overlaying of extracts of 16 mm promotional films of 1967, which he has digitally manipulated and fragmented, and close-up colour photographs of plants and lichen from his territory in Iqaluit (Nunavut), he effectively integrated two distant worlds into a single visual field. He was particularly intrigued by the anachronistic selection of sculptures, sundials, hourglasses, and Haida masks that the organizers had installed on the decidedly modern sloping walls of the open rooftop (see page 103). The conflation of distinct historical moments brought together in a single visual and architectural field is referenced by Inutiq through the use of a wide range of analog and digital technologies to create optical and sonic effects: a crystallization and fragmentation of moving images; serially generated waveforms and magnetic tape recordings; and manipulation of printed images. The vinyl floor treatment and a sound work that is based on the original composition by German composer Otto Joachim evoke the architecture and sparse atmosphere of the original pavilion in a contemporary iteration. These allowed him to inscribe a critical perspective on 1967 as, in his words, “a pinnacle of the possibilities of futurism and the potentiality of the nation state as an agent of new-fangled corporate and technological breakthroughs.” The Indians of Canada Pavilion has been of pivotal importance to the history of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada, as witnessed by a critical mass of Indigenous writers and artists who have noted its significance.12 It was especially salient in the sesquicentennial year of Confederation, as issues of decolonization came to the fore in public discourse in Canada. Developed by a group of Indigenous leaders and artists from across the country, the pavilion was based on responses that the organizers received to their question “What do you want to tell the people of Canada and the world when they come to Expo 67?”13 The rhetoric and perspective of the pavilion’s historical narrative dramatically

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challenged settler colonial tropes that position Indigenous people and culture in the remote past (see pages 118–21). Omaskêko Cree artist Duane Linklater and Krista Belle Stewart, of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation, were both invited to produce works on the Indians of Canada Pavilion, as we felt that this particular pavilion should have a strong presence in the exhibition because of its enduring contribution to Indigenous contemporary art and curating. It was also one of the few pavilions, along with the Christian Pavilion conceived by Charles Gagnon, and the Cuba Pavilion with its exhibition on the Cuban Revolution, that tackled contemporary social and political issues head-on (see Johanne Sloan’s chapter in this collection). Linklater’s wall-sized mural Earth Mother Hair, Indian Hair, and Earth Mother Eyes, Indian Eyes, Animal Eyes comprises a series of paintings of eyes and hair drawn from a photograph of Norval Morrisseau’s mural Earth Mother with Her Children (1967), one of six large-scale works painted by prominent Indigenous artists onto the exterior of the pavilion. In its final rendition, Morrisseau’s mural was altered – or censored – upon request by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (diand), who insisted that an “appropriate” distance be kept between the breasts of Mother Earth and her nursing children. While we know that Morrisseau commissioned Carl Ray to execute the mural on his behalf, the precise reasons why he did so remain unclear.14 Morrisseau’s absence is echoed in Linklater’s own contracting of Montreal muralist Julie Ouellet to execute his interpretation of the hair and eyes on the walls of the mac. Linklater’s mural reminds us of the colonial legacies that were represented in the original pavilion, and as he states, “which we are still experiencing, witnessing and making our way through today.” He problematizes Morrisseau’s absence, steadfastly remaining outside the mac through the installation process and indeed throughout the full run of the exhibition. Linklater’s oversized eyes loomed large over the exhibition spaces, effectively implicating both visitors and the institution itself in critical reflection on the presence of Indigenous artists in its collections and programming. Just as the muralists in 1967 were aware of the role they were asked to play in the articulation of a vision of Canada that diand wanted to present to the world, so Linklater questions the fraught relationships between Indigenous artists and art institutions in this country. Krista Belle Stewart’s engagement with the pavilion was more personal, initiating as it did a search for a photograph of her mother that she anticipated might be amongst the hundreds presented in the Indians of Canada Pavilion. Her piece,

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entitled Indian Momento, took the form of a vinyl installation inserted into the windows of an exterior wall of the museum. The freeze frame upon which her vinyl installation is based appears in a 1967 nfb documentary on the pavilion entitled Indian Memento, one of the few existing moving image documents of the pavilion’s interior. Her mother’s portrait appears on the ceiling at the top of the photo arches. Barely discernible in the documentary, it depicts a young nursing student in her uniform, who later became the first Indigenous public health nurse in British Columbia. Rendered almost illegible in the installation, the black abstract masses printed on red vinyl cast an ever-changing red shadow into the exhibition space as the sun moved across the sky, evoking the stained-glass windows of a church. Interestingly both Linklater and Stewart integrated their works directly into/onto the architecture of the museum, and their works’ presences could be felt beyond the confines of their allotted spaces. In Stewart’s case, the ephemeral red light that changed throughout the day, cast its red glow over the walls of Ross’s projection and into the exhibition spaces of Linklater’s and the Ritters’ works.

Digital Reimaginings “Digital Reimaginings” assembles the works of four artists who have employed digital media to revisit and reimagine several iconic pavilions: Jean-Pierre Aubé, Chris Salter, and Emmanuelle Léonard have respectively highlighted Kaleidoscope, the France Pavilion, and the ecumenical Christian Pavilion, each investigating the affordances of current digital media, in a manner that extends the ontological experimentations of the original 1967 moments. Additionally, though not departing from a singular pavilion, Stéphane Gilot customized the animated video game Minecraft, inviting visitors to create new pavilions on a virtual Expo 67 site, exploring the affordances of gameplay for crowdsourcing the participation and imagination of exhibition visitors. If these original pavilions represented the cutting edge of experimentation in the 1960s, these artists’ works employ contemporary digital technologies to explore the state of contemporary media culture in the twenty-first century through video games, networks, and various software applications. Jean-Pierre Aubé has had a long-standing interest in rendering visible electromagnetic phenomena, shortwave radio frequencies, telecommunications, and surveillance technologies. The “spark” or inspiration for his installation is two key pieces of information about the pavilion Kaleidoscope, originally commissioned 18

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by six Canadian chemical companies and featured as “presenting Man and Colour – an adventure in colour, motion and sound.” The exterior of the pavilion was a cylindrical carousel of 112 vertical fins that formed a three-dimensional colour wheel, while the interior consisted of three mirrored chambers within which an experimental electronic soundtrack by composer R. Murray Schafer accompanied designer Morley Markson’s films that refracted and covered the theatre’s surfaces.15 For his installation, Aubé purchased an array of chemicals through the deep web, filmed them through a modified microscope, then transformed the resulting images with off-the-shelf facial recognition software to create twelve short films that reveal the crystallization of the chemicals transformed into a kaleidoscope of ever-changing colours. The dynamic result is a phantasmagoria of projected colour forms, which echoes the original Kaleidoscope of 1967, offering visitors to the mac a window into one of the more spectacular and still elusive pavilions of Expo 67. Other artists were deeply steeped in working with new media, or modifying existing technologies in the creation of their works. Chris Salter’s revisitation of the French-Greek composer, architect, and engineer Iannis Xenakis’s radical polytopes of the 1960s and 1970s is a case in point. He and his team closely researched the methods and structures of Xenakis’s work, which originally filled the atrium of the France Pavilion, to develop not a recreation, but rather an interpretation of that pioneering work using new media. Reconfigured for the rotunda of the mac, the installation consisted of powerful leds and tiny speakers suspended throughout the space on a geometrically “ruled surface” constructed from thin aircraft cable, creating a light and sound environment that vacillates between order and disorder, echoing Xenakis’s original fascination with the behaviour of natural systems. N-Polytope explores how Xenakis’s interest in probabilistic (“stochastic”) systems can be made sense of and kept alive today using new technologies that were unavailable to the composer during his lifetime. Salter and his team have presented the work in numerous international venues, within exhibition and festival contexts, and in each case the work is adapted for the particular architecture and sound qualities of the space. At the mac, N-Polytope was the first installation that visitors encountered at the entrance of the museum with its gentle electronic composition resounding through the space, while twice daily a more intense, twelve-minute performance version could be heard throughout the museum. Emmanuelle Léonard undertook untold hours of surfing the internet in search of images of conflicts dating from 1967 to 2017 in order to “update” Charles Gagnon’s film The Eighth Day (1967). Opting to focus on the men and women on 19

Introduction

View of the exhibition, Dave Ritter and Kathleen Ritter, Reprise, 2017. Opposite View of Caroline Martel, Spectacles du monde, 2017, in l’Espace culturel GeorgesÉmile-Lapalme, Place des Arts, Montreal.

the ground rather than on the war machine, she offers a perspective that is different from Gagnon’s more politically charged film that was presented in the ecumenical Christian Pavilion. While Gagnon had relied on film newsreel agencies to source his imagery of specific historical events, Léonard had access through the web to an unlimited supply of clips produced not only by official news sources, but also by soldiers, protagonists, and other witnesses in conflict and war. We see excerpts taken by digital technologies adapted for the military – drone cameras, infrared detectors, etc. – but also grainy, barely legible images taken by cell phones and analogue cameras. In her single-channel video projection Léonard alternates between single images and the juxtaposition of paired images from different sources. She retains the format of the original source material in order to signal their diverse origins, thus underscoring the currently widespread circulation of images of conflict, as technologies are – perhaps more democratically – placed in the hands of the men, women, and children who are most present and immediately affected. Stéphane Gilot’s Montréal délire takes a playful and futuristic approach to the islands, creating a virtual rendering of the Expo site using Minecraft, the construction game platform that features the same vectoral forms given prominence at Expo 67 – the cube, the triangle, and their many combinations. Especially popular with younger audiences familiar with the game, visitors were invited to move 20

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through and participate in the construction of the virtual world. The installation also included a custom-designed pentagonal table referencing Robert Altman’s film Quintet (1979), water colours, and a video projection, offering more dystopian views and reflecting on the evacuation of many utopian promises of Expo 67.16 This is most significantly symbolized by the transformation of the France and Quebec Pavilions into the present-day Casino de Montréal, now administered by Loto-Québec.

Archival Remixes Expo 67 marked a fascinating moment in the history of media, harkening back to a transition from analogue to digital technologies, which included sound, film, and video. Expo enabled creative innovations in cinema (most spectacularly in the multi-screen 35 and 70 mm film projections) while musicians and composers were also experimenting with new digital and electronic technologies.17 As we have seen, a number of artists in the exhibition signalled this moment of transition, some deploying new media technologies and software applications (such as

Ross’s drone-mounted camera, Aubé’s use of facial recognition software to edit in real time, Gilot’s use of Minecraft, Salter’s custom-made hardware and software), others employing analogue technologies that reference 1967, such as Inutiq’s use of magnetic tape recordings and a tube amplifier, and Stankievech’s shortwave radio transmissions. “Archival Remixes” brings together works by artists who drew directly from original moving image and sound archives, undertaking a form of remix or collage, that brings this old imagery into the present in different configurations and lending new insights. Projects by Dave Ritter and Kathleen Ritter, Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyê˜n, and Caroline Martel are paired with scholar Janine Marchessault’s “Expo 67 and the Missing Archive, the Anarchive, and the Counter-Archive,” which considers Expo 67’s film archives as sources of originary documentation but also of complex creative reimaginings and experimentation. The sounds of Expo 67 resonated and echoed throughout the exhibition with interpretations of the electronic compositions of Iannis Xenakis, Gilles Tremblay, Otto Joachim, and R. Murray Schafer, Stéphane Venne’s theme song, and in phrases from Saint-Exupéry’s novel. Delving into a wide diversity of sound archives, Dave Ritter and Kathleen Ritter created Reprise, a vinyl-pressed record – a residual media form that is now making a comeback – devoted specifically to the year 1967. A manual turntable could be manipulated by the visitor, located in a small square room that they transformed into a colourful geometrically patterned listening space, complete with orange beanbag seating. Meticulously researched and compiled, the A and B sides of the vinyl record bring together almost fifty clips seamlessly mixed together to form ten tracks bearing such titles as “In the Dimension of Sound,” “Islands in the Mind,” “Un battement de cœur,” or “Voltage Control.” Citing 1967 as the year in which electronic music took solid shape, and referencing hip hop, dj culture, and remix, as well as music sampling, seriality, and repetition, Reprise included excerpts from some of the more recognizable sounds of Expo 67, compositions by pioneering electronic composers, and pop songs. Also included were the famous words of Charles De Gaulle, Marshall McLuhan, and Guy Debord.18 Like Inutiq’s use of the Prelinger archives, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyê˜n, and Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze rework archival (and necessarily analogue) film footage using multiple digital techniques to create decidedly contemporary interpretations of their materials. In both single-channel films, Nguyê˜n and Hoffman/Kolcze

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radically transform found film footage from Expo 67, wrenching it from its indexical documentary status into experimental forms. Through films from Library and Archives Canada and personal collections, Nguyê˜n’s 1967: A People Kind of Place brilliantly untangles the true story of the world’s first ufo Landing Pad, built in St Paul, Alberta, to celebrate the Canadian centennial. Signalling this event, which metaphorically welcomed all peoples, including aliens, Nguyê˜n, explores notions of hospitality, diversity, and official immigration in 1967. Hoffman and Kolcze’s By the Time We Got to Expo similarly disrupts the original documentary status of an 8 mm souvenir film produced by Castle Films, and William Brind’s nfb film Impressions of Expo 67 (1967). Expo’s material traces and textural forms disintegrate as the iconic architectures of Katimavik and Fuller’s geodesic dome degenerate, as do its mnemonic effects and cultural significations. For Caroline Martel the challenge was to transform excerpts from seven original films created in 1967 for a mosaic of thirty-five flat screen monitors in a public space in Place des Arts. There were over three thousand films presented at Expo 67, and the spectacular large-format and multi-screen films were some of the most radical and innovative works of their time. Martel and her collaborator Mathieu Bouchard-Malo selected seven of both the lesser-known and more iconic films to signal the high level of innovation and experimentation of the cinematographic productions of fifty years ago. Offering a dramatic presence outside the mac’s walls in Montreal’s public underground city beneath the Quartier des spectacles, the deployment of excerpts from each of the seven films over thirty-five digital screens revealed the exceptional graphic quality of many of the original films, as well as their diverse visual materiality and narrative structures. It is a testimony to the richness of the original films that they functioned so well in a format so different from the ones they were originally created for. The final section in this book is devoted to six original multi-screen largeformat films from Expo 67 that were presented during the four months of the exhibition in the Musée’s black box: Polar Life, Motion, Conflict, and Canada Is My Piano from the Canada Pavilion, Earth Is Man’s Home and Man and Colour from Kaleidoscope. The original, restored films were presented by the research group cinemaexpo67, who have undertaken the complex research, restoration, and presentation of these films over the last decade. In collaboration with the Cinémathèque québécoise de Montréal (from the Ville de Montréal’s archival film deposits), and the National Film Board of Canada, they gave visitors the opportunity to view rarely seen films in presentation formats striving to approximate and simulate the

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original screenings in their large, multi-screen form. The last of these, Kaleidoscope’s Man and Colour, is a virtual reality prototype created with the Montreal multimedia company Productions Figure 55, based on architectural plans and created from the original films and sound. Presenting these original films gives a vivid sense of the aesthetics and vernaculars of this particular conjuncture. From the outset of this three-year project, we as curators, as well as the artists, were well aware of the potential pitfalls of a nostalgic return to the past. We all acknowledged the need for a critical distance from some of the underlying precepts of Expo 67 – the utopian visions of the future, unquestioned beliefs in technological, economic, and social progress, and the explicit desire to keep the complexities of the outside world at bay. The year 1967 was, after all, a year also marked by civil rights activism, decolonization and resistance movements (such as the Black Power and American Indian Movements), and the controversial Six-Day War in the Middle East, among numerous social and political upheavals taking place around the world. And 1968 – considered to be “the year that changed history” – was only months away. And yet as our project developed, we could also not deny the fascination and admiration we felt for the ambition, technological know-how, innovation, and creativity of the architects, filmmakers, artists, and designers who contributed to making Expo 67 the event that it was. Specific explorations such as the creative labour and contributions of women at Expo 67 are especially rich. Thauberger’s research into Lorraine Monk’s the People Tree explores a project that remained marginalized within the National Film Board of Canada, the institution that also funded the $4.5 million, large-format, multi-screen film and pavilion Labyrinth, and untold documentary films for and on the event. Oberlander is one of the most respected and distinguished landscape architects in Canada, and Leisure’s exploration of her humble playground located in the shadows of the Canada Pavilion brings to light not only a lesser-known project, but also brings focus to Oberlander’s commitment to research into early childhood development and social engagement.19 The dynamic role played by the hostesses as interlocutors and interpreters is personified by Sim’s wearing of the pale blue hostess uniform transformed into a pantsuit.20 Dave Ritter and Kathleen Ritter’s inclusion of the remarkable but little-known pioneer electronic sound composers Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram points to other marginalized histories begging to be explored. In Search of Expo 67 hopes to offer significant pathways for future engagements. We are invited backstage to the “messiness” of the creative processes behind the production of individual pavilions and their formations. The remarkable achieve24

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ments of individuals such as Buckminster Fuller, Lorraine Monk, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Norval Morrisseau, Charles Gagnon, Morley Markson, along with the composers R. Murray Schafer, Iannis Xenakis, Otto Joachim, and Gilles Tremblay are revealed. Chris Salter’s ongoing reinterpretations of Xenakis’s prescient work in the integration of architecture, mathematics, and music not only introduces new audiences to the composer’s pioneering role, but also demonstrates how new media technologies can be used to further his research. A similar gesture is present in Gilot’s use of Minecraft to re-actualize and crowdsource the architectural vocabularies of Expo 67 in a popular video game. Duane Linklater and Krista Belle Stewart’s reanimation of the archives on the Indians of Canada Pavilion contribute to a growing body of critical and curatorial scholarship on what may be one of the most historically enduring pavilions at Expo 67. The projects by Ross, Blais and Grandmaison, Ruwedel, and Boudvin signal a level of political amnesia and ineffectiveness, which has seen the continuing deterioration, repurposing, and transformation of the Expo site with little concern for its history or geographical specificities. The animation of archives through artistic practices offers unique lenses for revisitation that activate history and cultural memory and offer significant ways of re-knowing Expo 67. At its simplest, this animation shifts nostalgic returns to the past into more present engagements with what has changed and what has remained the same, as the artists contributing to In Search of Expo 67 do in a multitude of ways. Once the specialized purview of archivists and historians, archives now offer epistemological approaches, or ways of knowing, that are material sources of imaginings for a vaster constellation of creative and amateur users.21

Notes

1 Ruth B. Phillips, “Show Times: De-celebrating the Canadian Nation, De-colonising the Canadian Museum, 1967–92,” in Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa, ed. Annie E. Coombes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 121. 2 The Expo 67–related exhibitions included specialized ones, such as the Centre de design’s focus on the architecture of Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic dome; Montréal et le rêve géodésique and Habitat 67 vers l’avenir, on Moshe Safdie’s Habitat’s experiments for future living. More expansive accounts that involved individual recollections included Centre d’histoire de Montréal’s Explosion 67; and Terre des jeunes, based on oral histories and forty-six recorded interviews with then-Montreal youth, integrating them into a multimedia exhibition that included an animated virtual reality journey on the Minirail on Île Notre-Dame. The McCord Museum worked from the fashion and costume holdings in

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3

4

5

6

7

8 9

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their collection, displaying original Expo 67 hostess uniforms as well as other facets of sixties fashion, notably the miniskirt. The Macdonald Stewart Museum presented audiovisual materials and other artifacts of material culture, such as passports and memorabilia. In addition to exhibitions mentioned below, this lineage includes a previous exhibition held at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (mac) in 2010, Yesterday’s Tomorrows, which brought together ten contemporary artists who established discursive dialogues with modernist designers or monuments. The earlier exhibition’s title implied a looking into both the past and the future from the vantage point of the present. Lesley Johnstone, Les Lendemains d’hier (Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2010). Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Autumn 2004): 3–22; and also his earlier “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century, 171–203 (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1996); and Charles Merewether, The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2006). See Okwui Enwezor (curator), documenta11_Platform 5: Exhibition (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002); and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (curator), documenta (13): The Book of Books (Osfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012); Okwui Enwezor (curator), Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (Göttingen: Steidl Publishers, 2008). See also Lisa Darms, “Exhibition Review, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art,” American Archivist 72 (spring/summer 2009): 253–7. Dieter Roelstraete, “The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art,” e-flux, no. 4 (March 2009). An expanded version of the text is also published in The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art, ed. Dieter Roelstraete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). In addition to the exhibitions and scholars cited above, Ernst Van Alphen’s Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media (London: Reaktion Books, 2014) undertakes a compelling art historical survey of artworks and approaches beginning in the 1930s. In Quebec, Anne Bénichou has written extensively on artist’s archives in the context of exhibitions. See, amongst others, Anne Bénichou, ed., Ouvrir le document. Enjeux et pratiques de la documentation dans les arts visuels contemporains (Dijon: Presses du réel, 2010); and Anne Bénichou, Un imaginaire institutionnel. Musées, collections et archives d’artistes (Paris: L’Harmattan, Coll. Esthétiques, 2013). André Jansson, “Encapsulations: The Production of a Future Gaze at Montreal’s Expo 67,” Space and Culture 10 (2007): 424. The creation of this mural can be seen in the National Film Board of Canada’s documentary Akin’name (On the Wall) (1968), David Millar, dir., 22 minutes, colour, https://www. nfb.ca/film/aki_name/. See also Monika Kin Gagnon, Rethinking Expo 67 (Kelowna: ubco Summer Indigenous Intensive/cicac Press, 2018), for a discussion of the artworks on the Canada and Indians of Canada Pavilion in In Search of Expo 67. Andrea Kunard is curator of photography at the National Gallery of Canada where the archives of the National Film Board of Canada (nfb) Still Division are now held. Carol Payne is author of a scholarly study on the nfb’s Still Photography Division, The Official Picture: The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), and formerly of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa.

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11 Press release for Althea Lorraine, an exhibition by Althea Thauberger held at the Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto, February 2018. 12 Ruth B. Phillips and Sherry Brydon’s chapter remains a comprehensive written account of the pavilion’s architecture, art, and interior installations, based extensively on Sherry Brydon’s 1991 text, “The Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67: The First National and International Forum for Native Nations”; see Phillips and Brydon, “‘Arrow of Truth’: The Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 29. Several conference panels have discussed the pavilion, two of which form the basis for the essays by Guy Sioui Durand and David Garneau: “Revisioning the Indians of Canada Pavilion: Ahzhekewada (Let Us Look Back),” organized by ocad University and the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, Toronto, 15–16 October 2011; and opening homages at Iakwéia:re’ / I remember / Je me souviens organized by the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, Montreal, 16– 18 October 2014. Heather Igloliorte, John Moses, and Linda Grussani presented “Curatorial Legacy of the Expo 67 Indians of Canada Pavilion and the Future of Indigenous Museum Practice,” at the Council for Museum Anthropology conference entitled Museum Anthropology Futures, Montreal, 27 May 2017. Igloliorte and Moses further discuss the significance of the pavilion on “More Than a Pavilion,” part of a podcast series on Expo 67 by Concordia University’s Thinking Out Loud series, https://www.concordia.ca/events/ conversation-series/thinking-out-loud/expo67/more-than-a-pavilion.html. 13 Phillips and Brydon, “‘Arrow of Truth,’” 38. 14 Curator and art historian Carmen Robertson discusses the creation of Morrisseau’s mural through her research on several newspaper articles from 1967 and the years leading up to it, in Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau: Art and the Colonial Narrative in the Canadian Media (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016), 77–81. 15 See Monika Kin Gagnon, “Kaleidoscope,” in Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67, ed. Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 55. 16 Quintet (1979) is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction film, directed by Robert Altman starring Paul Newman, Brigitte Foissey, and Bibi Andersson that was filmed in mid-winter in the tetrahydron structures of the Canadian theme pavilions on Expo 67 islands. 17 See Gagnon and Marchessault, Reimagining Cinema. 18 For the complete references and notes for all of the excerpts see the record’s liner notes reproduced on pages 176–7 of this volume. 19 Oberlander contributed landscape designs to such high-profile buildings as the Robson Square and Law Complex in Vancouver, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Canadian Chancery in Washington, dc , and the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. 20 Cheryl Sim’s interview in Thinking Out Loud’s Expo 67 series discusses the significant role of hostesses; see https://www.concordia.ca/events/conversation-series/thinkingout-loud/expo67/un-jour-say-friend.html. 21 Montrealer Roger La Roche has created numerous detailed documents on Expo 67 pavilions on his Expo 67 blog and website, Terre des hommes (1967–84), http://www.villesephemeres.org/, and is a veritable living archive of information on the original event and its archival repositories.

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Materialities and Temporalities

Opposite Aerial view of Île Sainte-Hélène during construction of the Expo 67 site. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM94-EX005-002. Above Aerial view of Île Sainte-Hélène and Île Notre-Dame, 1967. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM94-EX266-200. Left Expo 67 site during construction. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM94-EX001-016.

Opposite top Aerial view of the Expo 67 site with Katimavik in the background, 1967. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Vieux-Montréal, Fonds Antoine Desilets, P697, S1, SS1, SSS13, D4_321. Photo: Antoine Desilets. Opposite bottom View of Minirail and France and Quebec Pavilions. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM94-EX136-257. Below Expo 67 hostesses. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM94-EX137-0201.

As Sovereign as Love David K. Ross

As Sovereign as Love is a guided cinematic tour of Montreal’s Parc Jean-Drapeau, the former site of Expo 67. In the film a camera glides over landscapes shaped by fifty years of post-Expo activity as the voice of a female narrator annotates the unfolding vistas. The script for this tour is drawn from Antoine de SaintExupéry’s 1939 memoir, Terre des hommes, the same text that gave the Montreal exposition its subtitle “Man and His World.” Footage for the film is gathered by a camera-mounted drone following the original path of the now-demolished Minirail, an elevated monorail line that moved visitors over and through the 364 hectares (900 acres) of pavilions, exhibitions, and events that made up the exposition. As it glides over ponds, gardens, roads, and residual architectures of the exposition, the drone’s movements precisely mimic what would have been the monorail’s original route. Technical and geological data extracted from engineering drawings for Expo 67 at the Archives de Montréal enable an accurate retracing of the train’s path across the park’s two islands, although the growth of trees, electronic interference from cellular telephone towers, and security regulations at the park cause frequent breaks in what should be an uninterrupted flight. These disruptions result in de facto stopping points for the drone. The park itself, working in conjunction with the passage of time, becomes the co-editor of the film. As Sovereign as Love depicts the former world’s exhibition site as it existed in 2017, long denuded of its ebullient technological proclamations, robbed of the elevated rail line, emptied of the throngs, and lacking its many architecturally innovative pavilions. The drone captures a landscape filled not with fifty million visitors, but with trees that are fifty years older. It documents a space dominated

Opposite David K. Ross, As Sovereign as Love, 2017, video projection.

Opposite David K. Ross, As Sovereign as Love, 2017, film stills. Above Schematic for Minirail track elevations and column placements, used by Ross to determine flight path and altitude of the drone-mounted camera. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, P067-4_09-bobine32-U-59.

not by avant-garde architecture, but by empty grandstands and portable storage sheds. It portrays a topography not animated by scientific advances but with algae-filled ponds and the occasional birder. Set alongside these less than exhilarating views of what the future became is the sound design of Douglas Moffat. We hear a careful interweaving of three distinct acoustic elements: the audio for the film comprises a score by Keiko Devaux, field recordings made in Parc Jean-Drapeau, and, most predominantly, voice-over excerpts from Terre des hommes.1 Saint-Exupéry was among the first pilots to work for France’s famed Aeropostale airmail service during the interwar period. Flying long-distance routes between Toulouse and Dakar, and eventually across large swaths of South America, 37

As Sovereign as Love

Saint-Exupéry often wrote during his protracted solo flights. With North African deserts and desolate Patagonian mountain ranges passing below him, words filled countless notebooks perched in the pilot/author’s lap. Now relieved from their original role as an aspirational text for Expo 67’s euphoric declarations, SaintExupéry’s narratives serve here as an uncanny accompaniment to aerial footage of the park’s island setting. In this regard, the film is constructed around two historical axes: SaintExupéry’s lyrical in-flight meditations composed in the 1930s, and the original route taken by the Minirail in 1967. And so two independent, though overlapping views of the exposition’s site are generated for this project: the first, loaned to us by Saint Exupéry’s prescient and poetic prose, gestures to an ambitious and optimistic past; the second, evident in the prosaic portrayal of the park, returns us to our decidedly more sombre and anxious present. Somewhere between these two temporalities As Sovereign as Love becomes an exhale, be it a last breath, or a wistful sigh, the corollary to the first gasp of awe and wonder inhaled fifty years ago by so many visitors to Expo 67.

Note

1 Recording audio during drone flights is not possible due to the volume of the drone itself, so all location sound was recorded independently of filming. Critical sonic events (e.g., the sound of waterfalls, the particular sonic signature of an aquatic weed harvester) were also crafted in post-production by Moffat.

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Le Chemin de l’énigme (The Path of Enigma) Marie-Claire Blais and Pascal Grandmaison

The lack of material evidence left behind by Expo 67 is staggering – so remarkable, in fact, that we felt compelled to explore the site of the world’s exhibition in detail, searching for clues that throw light on its past – a kind of material archaeology in the manner of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who sought in materiality the remnants and rejects, the traces of an ancient history that might reverberate down to the present. In an effort to grasp the scope of this particular history, we looked at the origins of the Expo 67 site, at the phenomena of presence and erasure that shaped it, paying particular attention to the many shifts of material that have led to the present morphology of the islands of Sainte-Hélène and Notre-Dame. The radical transformation of the shape of Île Sainte-Hélène, the dissolution of its former configuration and its current vacuity seemed to us revealing in relation to the ideals propagated during Expo 67. It was on the contradictory pathways that are still being reflected in our perception of progress that we focused our attention. The emergence of Île Sainte-Hélène from the waters of the St Lawrence River was the result of the gradual accumulation of calcareous material, sediment transported over the ages by the river’s flow. This geological history would be dramatically altered when the site was chosen for the futuristic visions of 1967. The process of enlarging the island began with the construction of a dam at the outer edge of the zone where ice habitually formed, built up along the shore by the current. This rocky dike encircling the island’s natural shoreline, which obliterated its original connection to the river almost completely, is an important relic of the foundation of Expo 67: a ring surrounding the utopias of the day. It is composed of the material remains of two small islands (Île Ronde and Île aux Fraises), which were joined to the dike with earth excavated during the construction of Montreal’s Metro and the St Lawrence Seaway.

Above Marie-Claire Blais and Pascal Grandmaison, Le Chemin de l’énigme, 2017, film still. Opposite Marie-Claire Blais and Pascal Grandmaison, Le Chemin de l’énigme, 2017, video projection.

Between the seaway and the original shoreline, hidden by the new earthwork, is this event-related platform, given over to parking lots and temporary uses, or left vacant – a modern optimization of space and humanization of nature where the detritus of our civilization collects: chunks of concrete, sidewalk fragments, parking pay stations, stone blocks. This artificial construction of the island reveals conceptually the mechanism of modernity: the obliteration of the past and its rearrangement in a controlled gesture of appearance – a temporal sequence of voids and masses that we have transposed by invoking a succession of displacements of material, of additions and extractions. Facing the river, on the shoreline, a woman paces the bank. She scans, searches, digs, and piles, echoing the movements of filling and excavation that preceded Expo 67. It is a performative action and its opposite, translated by the editor. An energetic camera follows the figure closely, tracking her movements and the stone constructions she attempts to create. It shows us the figure in motion and, in a more abstract and pictorial manner, the product of her actions.

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Le Chemin de l’énigme

Marie-Claire Blais and Pascal Grandmaison, Le Chemin de l’énigme, 2017, film stills.

The reciprocity of the dialogue between spontaneity and gesture and the agitation of the framing create a feeling of urgency – the quest for an answer on a precarious foundation. “It is not enough that everything begin, everything must begin again once the cycle of possible combinations has come to completion.”1

Note

1 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2004), 13.

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M A R I E - C L A I R E B L A I S A N D PA S C A L G R A N D M A I S O N

Un jour, One Day Cheryl Sim

My parents were married in Hamilton, Ontario, on 2 September 1967. For part of their honeymoon, they visited Expo 67. My father documented their trip in photos, postcards, wedding cards, and other ephemera. Afterwards, these were carefully assembled in a scrapbook and I can see all the hope, promise, and optimism that emanated from the city of Montreal during Expo 67 reflected on my mother’s face. The book is a precious record taking on a mythical status because it pays tribute to a time before my sister and me – a time of innocence and excitement about the future. The scrapbook is a central component to this work and operates as a conduit through which the character in the video communes with the site of Expo 67. While thinking about how music might have been employed to underscore the interests of Expo 67, I discovered its official theme song “Un jour, un jour / Hey Friend, Say Friend,” written in both English and French by Stéphane Venne. Venne’s song was selected from over 2,200 entries from thirty-four countries through a contest organized by the Expo 67 Corporation and Jacqueline Vézina, head of what became the “Gala de l’adisq.” Venne had been inspired by an artist’s rendering of the Expo site printed in La Presse in 1966. What he saw were “the islands, the water, the colours, at once inside the city and just outside the city. The shapes, the dream, the future.”1 For this project, I chose to cover the French version of his song, as the meanings of the lyrics and the sound of the words corresponded well with the overall tone and feel I had in mind. The underlying discourse of Expo 67 around ideas of the “future” and “modernity” influenced the approach to production, as the music was generated through digital and analogue means but with an electronic aesthetic. However, in contrast to the fully orchestrated and exuberant production of the original song that reflects the spirit of the time, this version is meant to incite reflection and interrogation.

Gender and fashion are two other highly significant lenses through which to view the discourses of Expo 67. In “Girl Watching at Expo 67,” Aurora Wallace explains how the event exhibited “a new cosmopolitanism, largely symbolized by its most visible icon, the Expo hostess.” A nationwide search was conducted to find women who would embody the values of “modernity, nobility and democracy.”2 These women were hired to carry out a complex role: part diplomat, part guide, and part eye candy. During the time, the discussion of inequality between the sexes was still nascent, and being an Expo 67 hostess provided a socially acceptable way for women to transcend their subjugated status, provided that they fit the criteria. In this way, women were instrumentalized as “soft power” within the confines of a heterosexist society.3 The official hostess uniform also played a paramount role in conveying a sense of authority combined with sex appeal through style. Montreal designer Michel Robichaud was invited by Mayor Jean Drapeau to create the outfits for the Expo 67 hostesses. The ensemble he created was consistent with sixties street fashion trends, although the tricolour hat was more of a practical element, designed to make the hostesses easy to spot in a crowd. For this work, I was interested in bringing the jacket and skirt uniform into dialogue with another 1960s iconic garment of the future: the jumpsuit.

Opposite and this page Cheryl Sim, Un jour, One Day, 2017, three-channel video installation.

The one-piece jumpsuit was first designed as functional clothing for parachutists and skydivers and was subsequently adopted for use by race-car drivers, mechanics, and eventually women who entered the work force during the Second World War. By the 1960s the jumpsuit became a fetish garment for designers, coinciding with a new obsession in the West – outer space. The jumpsuit would soon find its way into the media as the quintessential clothing item of the future. Charged with utopian values, the jumpsuit would be the great equalizer, transcending gender, race, and class. My adaptation of the original Expo 67 uniform plays with this retro-popular speculation concerning “clothing of the future” and its connection with the idealism of the 1960s. Throughout the creation of this work, my engagement with Expo 67 made me consider how the past, present, and future could overlap and prompted contemplation on the notion of progress. Examined from a critical, feminist perspective, 45

Un jour, One Day

Expo 67 hostesses, 1965. Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds, Library and Archives Canada, e000990867. Photographer unknown.

and against the situation of the world today, how far have we really come as a society? What have we learned? Have the dynamics of power that impinge on our city as well as our own agency within it evolved over the last fifty years? What importance does the promotion of national identity now hold in Canada? “Un jour, un jour / Hey Friend, Say Friend” is a reflection of the optimism that abounded at the time of Expo 67, but today it speaks to the profound necessity of maintaining hope. One day …

Notes

1 See Michele Richard, “The Story behind the Expo 67 Theme Song,” Expo Lounge, 4 August 2012, http://expolounge.blogspot.ca/search?q=un+jour+un+jour. 2 Aurora Wallace, “Girl Watching at Expo 67,” in Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, ed. Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 14. 3 Wallace, “Girl Watching at Expo 67.”

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Trophées (Montréal, 1967-2017) (Trophies [Montreal 1967–2017]) Simon Boudvin

When the lights go out for the last time, when the crowds have left the pavilions and the avenues, a World Exhibition begins a new life. Less glittering but more profound, this new life is nourished in the souls of those who visited the Exhibition, and it will blossom into a legend for generations to come.1 Each time a resident, passerby or citizen moves around in an urban context they should be bathed in an atmosphere that provokes a particular sense of well-being, resulting from the massive presence of aesthetic products in the environment. Every ensemble built, structured, organized and programmed in the service of human beings should generate aesthetic sensations.… There will be fixed ensembles, places designed to be both vivid, permanent signals and distributors of aesthetic products on a monumental scale. These will be constructions of the “cybernetic light-tower” type, with a very definite tendency to produce effects going far beyond the object.2

The totemic structure of steel and aluminum outside 999 Robert-Bourassa Boulevard rises skyward. Pierced and hollowed out like a pylon, its body is composed of five vertical stanchions of galvanized steel, solidly anchored in the ground. Increasing in height towards the rear, these poles create a dynamic that defines the figure’s elevation. Five: one at the rear, one on each side, and two in front. Unlike a column, a totem pole is oriented – it has a front and a back. The two front stanchions support the facade, which consists of mauve-tinted glass, divided into three panels. A pattern of seven pale blue discs ranges over the panels – three, three, and then one at the top. They vary appreciably in size. Supported at the back of the structure, two large mirrors reflect light against and through the stained glass. The only horizontal elements uniting the ensemble (stanchions, mirrors, glass panels)

Simon Boudvin, Trophées (Montréal 1967–2017), 2017, view of installation. Opposite and following pages Simon Boudvin, Trophées (Montréal 1967–2017), 2017, ink-jet prints.

are the six aluminum rings that tilt at different angles. Their inclines create a lively chaos in an otherwise very regular construction. The sculpture has no plinth – its foundation is buried. But its elements come together scarcely a metre from the ground, leaving its five bare legs exposed at the base. The permanent materials employed are taken from the catalogue of contemporary engineers and from the classical palette of the fine arts. Reconciling art and technology, tradition and innovation, is the speciality of postmodern creators. At first glance, the abstract forms might conjure an autonomous cosmogony: the blue circles as planets, the metal rings as their orbits. Or the ensemble could seem to resemble an enlarged model of dna. But the device remains open to the world, designed – through its transparencies and reflections – both to capture and to emit waves and light. Its dimensions, somewhere between those of ordinary

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objects and the surrounding buildings, match the urban environment. The city, perceiving the sculpture as an aesthetic adornment, wears it like a jewel. Just as the excitement of Coney Island seeped into the Manhattan grid, so has the “show of the century” filtered into the neighbourhoods of Montreal. In its streets, sculptural elements stand out. Architectural details, public statues, and technical installations seem to belong to the same category of monument, employing the same materials and the same language. The legacy of Expo 67, evident in the never-ending flow of festivals, is also fossilized in these urban totems – some with volumes and geometry of meticulous design, others that are catafalques of gratuitous and ostentatious technological innovation. An age of aluminum has dawned, with its new catalogue of neo-kinetic sculptures outside banks, awnings crowning skyscrapers, colossal techno-sheaths, designer streetlamps, high-tech bouquets of fanciful but tatty sophistication, pantomimes of bent and perforated metal dotted with led lights – all part of the collection that has made Montreal architecture the backdrop for a new decorative arts genre.

Notes

1 Pierre Dupuy, “Préface,” in Expo 67, L’album-mémorial (Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1968), 7. 2 Nicolas Schöffer, La Ville cybernétique (Paris: Éditions Tchou, 1969), 83.

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Trophées (Montréal, 1967–2017)

Until Finally O Became Just a Dot Charles Stankievech

Expo 67’s United States of America Pavilion – most famously remembered by its spherical architecture designed by Buckminster Fuller – is the world’s most iconic geodesic dome and a lasting symbol of the utopian dreams of the 1960s. The fundamentally innovative engineering principle of the geodesic is its balance of tension versus compression forces creating a robust network that results in a strong but light structure. This contradictory set of vectors is not only a design principle but also present within the conceptual framing of the exhibition housed inside the dome. Within a single exhibition architecture were two fundamentally opposed ideologies: the Apollo space missions as American cultural warfare at the peak of the globally divisive Cold War, and the burgeoning environmental movement as espoused by Fuller’s concept “Spaceship Earth.” While Fuller’s legacy today gravitates towards his optimistic designs for a green and egalitarian world, Until Finally O Became Just a Dot locates Fuller’s usa Pavilion as the popular moment within his long history of techno-utopian production entangled with American imperial military logistics. The project encapsulates two elements: within the museum, a curatorial constellation of artifacts, documents, and media organized within a custom-designed 3D printed exhibition display system based on Fuller’s spaceframe patent; and on site at the original usa Pavilion, the electrifying of the entire 250-foot steel frame geodesic dome in order to turn the spherical architecture into a massive radio antenna broadcasting a playlist of archival sound recordings.

Opposite and following page Charles Stankievech, Until Finally O Became Just a Dot, 2017, views of installation.

Museum Installation Nine nodes connect the museum display along a historical axis: 1 Patents 2 dew Line 3 Dark Side of Apollo 4 Bubbles 5 McLuhan’s Galaxies 6 The Idea of North 7 The World Game 8 Communities of Tomorrow 9 Inner Space / Outer Space Patents 1 R. Buckminster Fuller 4D Tower, mural, 1927–28 2 Alexander Graham Bell Dome #5, photograph, 1909 3 Zeiss Zeiss Planetarium Construction and Dome, Patent, images in book, 1922–25 4 United States Marine Corps A Study of Logistical Shelters, printed matter, 1954–55 5 Buckminster Fuller Architecture out of the Laboratory in University of Michigan Student Publication, printed matter, 1955 6 Alexander Graham Bell Aerial Vehicle or Other Structure, Patent #770,626, printed matter, 1902–04 7 Buckminster Fuller Cartography, Patent #2, 393,676, printed matter, 1944–46 55

Until Finally O Became Just a Dot

8 Buckminster Fuller, Building Construction, Patent #2, 682,235, printed matter, 1951–54 9 Buckminster Fuller, Octet Truss, Patent #2, 986,241, printed matter, 1956–61 10 Shoji Sadao and Buckminster Fuller, Hexa-Pent, Patent #3, 810,336, book, 1970–83 DEW Line 11 Queen’s University Press, Relative Danger during an Air Raid, printed matter, ca 1940 12 International Business Machines (ibm), 5081 Punch Card from usaf Base Thule, ca 1960 13 mit Lincoln Laboratory and Buckminster Fuller 31-Foot Diameter Rigid Space-Frame Radome Prototype, 1954 14 Western Electric (Bell Systems) dew Line Story, film transfer to video, 28 minutes, 1958 15 International Business Machines (ibm) sage Computer Advertisement, film transfer to video, 3 minutes, ca 1960 16 life Here the US Fights the Coldest War, magazine 17 United States Air Force Thule Air Base, Greenland: Military Challenge Coin, object, date unknown

18 Royal Canadian Air Force cfs Alert Military Challenge Coin, object, date unknown 19 United States Air Force (usaf) dew Line, Project 572, Prefab Module, Radar Unit #6, plan, 1956 Dark Side of Apollo 20 North American Space Agency Debrief: Apollo 8 (with Pink Floyd, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, synched soundtrack), film transfer to video, 27 minutes, 1969 21 Stewart Brand Whole Earth Catalog (Fall 1969), book, 1969 22 Soviet Central Design Bureau of Experimental Machine Building (t skbem) Dark Side of the Moon by Luna-3 Orbitor, photograph, 1959 23 United States Air Force Whole Earth Image from Dodge Satellite, August 1967, photograph, 1967 24 North American Space Agency Whole Earth Image from ast-3 Satellite November 1967, photograph, 1967 25 Meteorite (impact date: June 1967, Seymchan, ussr), object, 1967 Bubbles 26 Yves Klein and Werner Ruhnau Project of an Air Architecture, text and image in book, 1961

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27 Office of the United States Commissioner General American Painting Now press release, printed matter, 1967 28 Harald Szeemann Science Fiction, broadsheet, 1967 29 Lucy Lippard 557,087 Index Cards (with N.E. Thing Co., Lawrence Weiner, R. Barthelme, Mel Bochner), printed matter, 1969 McLuhan’s Galaxies 30 Marshall McLuhan Distant Early Warning Playing Cards, printed matter 31 Marshall McLuhan The Medium Is the Massage, book, 1967 32 Marshall McLuhan The Medium Is the Massage, vinyl record with cover, 1967 33 Marshall McLuhan Letter to Buckminster Fuller: September 17, 1964, book, 1964 The Idea of North 34 Glenn Gould Idea of North, poster 35 Glenn Gould, Idea of North, sketch The World Game 36 Buckminster Fuller How Little I Know, printed matter, 1966

37 Buckminster Fuller and Guy Mercier Buckminster Fuller and the World Game, printed matter, 1971 38 Buckminster Fuller and Gene Youngblood The World Game, printed matter, ca 1970 39 Buckminster Fuller Nine Chains to the Moon, extract, broadsheet, 1938/1974 40 Buckminster Fuller The Age of Astro-Architecture, printed matter, 1968 Communities of Tomorrow 41 Walt Disney Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (epcot), film transfer to video, 25 minutes, 1966 42 David Jacobs An Expo Named Buckminster Fuller, printed matter, 1967 43 ussr Chamber of Commerce, Moscow Guide to the Soviet Union Pavilion, printed matter, 1967 44 Expo 67 Official Guide, book, 1967 45 I. Kalin Survey of Building Materials, Systems, and Techniques, book, 1967 46 Expo 67 Adult Passport, printed matter, 1967 47 Expo 67 Youth Passport, printed matter, 1967

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48 Royal Canadian Mint Canadian Centennial Medallion, object, 1967 49 Albert Hofman Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (lsd) – 25, object, 1938 50 Graeme Ferguson Omnimax Plans for Biosphere [Plan View], drawing, 1978 51 Graeme Ferguson Omnimax Plans for Biosphere [Cross-Section View], drawing, 1978 52 Doug Lehman usa Pavilion Geodesic Dome on Fire, mural, 1976 Inner Space / Outer Space 53 Fabio Fabiano and Michelange Panzini Solair Chair, metal and plastic, 1972 54 Charles Stankievech Geodesic Transmission [The Model], copper, fm transmitter and audio player, 2017

United States of America Pavilion 55 Charles Stankievech Geodesic Transmission (usa Pavilion), Expo 67 United States of America Pavilion Architecture, copper wire, fm transmitter and audio player, 2017

Geodesic Transmission Playlist 56 Aricebo Radio Telescope Pulsar Recordings, 1967–68 57 3M Normal First and Second Heart Sounds Recordings, date unknown 58 cbc Expo 67’s Indians of Canada, 1967 59 Expo 67 Sounds of Expo, 1967 60 Marshall McLuhan The Medium Is the Massage lp, 1967 61 Glenn Gould Idea of North, 1967 62 Karl Marx Das Capital, 1867 63 Timothy Leary Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, 1967

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64 Pink Floyd The Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, 1967 65 Buckminster Fuller Everything I Know, 1975 66 Mike Nichols The Graduate: “One Word: Plastics,” 1967 67 ussr Sputnik, 1957 68 Alvin Lucier Sferics, 1967–81 69 nasa Space Sounds Collection, ca 1970 70 Charles de Gaulle Vive le Québec libre!, 1967 71 cbc Marshall McLuhan, Around the World, 1967

Charles Stankievech, Geodesic Transmission [USA Pavilion], 2017, photograph. Photo: Charles Stankievech.

Greg Curnoe, Homage to the R-34, 1968. Detail. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Transfer from Transport Canada, 1998. Photo: NGC.

Greg Curnoe’s “Dorval Mural” as a Critical Response to Expo 67 Johanne Sloan

Expo 67 was just wrapping up in October when Greg Curnoe was asked to paint a mural for a new international-arrivals corridor at Dorval Airport in Montreal. Curnoe’s monumental, thirty-metre long painting, titled Homage to the R-34 (1968) but often referred to as the “Dorval mural,” depicts one of the first dirigible airships to complete a return journey across the Atlantic Ocean in 1919. The passengers aboard this vehicle would be mostly Curnoe’s friends and family, along with a few historical figures, while the mural’s pockets of dense, multicoloured text shift between historical and contemporary references. In some ways this artwork embodied the spirit of Expo 67 – in its bold configurations of image and text, its sixties pop/psychedelic exuberance, and because Curnoe’s mural proposed a narrative about international encounters, as had Montreal’s world exhibition. However, the mural also undermined Expo 67’s vision of global unity and transnational harmony. Despite its candy-coloured visual appeal, the mural was concerned with social dissent, the historical recurrence of geopolitical conflict, and the horrors of war. Curnoe’s mural can be compared to specific artworks and displays at Expo 67, most notably a sculptural assemblage in the Youth Pavilion that epitomized the Ti-Pop movement. In fact, Curnoe inscribed the word Ti-Pop directly onto the mural’s painted surface, and I want to propose that the theory of cultural transformation offered by this Quebec movement was inspiring to the London-based artist as he confronted the contradictions of local experience versus global politics, present-day realities versus historical events. His mural can indeed be considered as a homage to the Ti-Pop phenomenon, with its distinctive fusion of art and politics. The mural would barely see the light of day, in the end, because days after its installation in March 1968, Curnoe’s artwork was censored by the federal Ministry of Transportation, taken down, and put into storage at the National Gallery of Canada, where it has remained for fifty years. This monumental artwork has been the object of serious scholarly attention on only a few

Greg Curnoe, Homage to the R-34, 1967–68, enamel paint on plywood and steel, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Transfer from Transport Canada, 1998. Photo: NGC.

occasions in the intervening years, while the focus has tended to be on the circumstances and arguments surrounding the censorship itself.1 This article sets out to overtly connect Curnoe’s Homage to the R-34 to Expo 67; I address the mural as a critical reflection on Montreal’s world exhibition and argue that the artwork proposed a corrective to its brand of humanistic rhetoric through a refusal to camouflage the ongoing trauma of war and militarism, and because the mural incorporates the protesting voices of countercultural, left-nationalist, and antiwar social actors, circa 1967–68. If the group of artists who participated in the 2017 Musée d’art contemporain exhibition were clearly revisiting and reinterpreting Expo 67, then Greg Curnoe’s 1968 mural is valuable in genealogical terms, as an early example of how an artist could develop a critical perspective on this event. Expo 67 was a dazzling spectacle and a relentlessly upbeat celebration of Canadian nationhood and global citizenship, but it is important to remember that there were internal fractures and points of friction in its vision of a peacefully united planet. For instance, the pavilions of Algeria, Cuba, and Indians of Canada all displayed evidence of political struggle and/or hard-won social justice. Algeria, after 130 years as a French colony and following a brutal war of liberation that ended only a few years earlier, was participating in a world exhibition as an autonomous state for the first time.2 Cuba lured people into its lively restaurant with music and tropical drinks, but the pavilion’s presentation of the Cuban Revolution made clear that its newfound socialism was built on the ruins of an exploitative capitalist regime. The Indians of Canada Pavilion featured gorgeous paintings by Alex Janvier, Norval Morrisseau, and other contemporary 62

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artists, but large textual panels written by the Indigenous organizers gave visitors a sharply worded education in how Native lands were stolen and their cultures systematically attacked.3 These pavilions thus provided moments of ideological friction at Expo 67, which can be regarded in a positive sense as object lessons in how progress, peace, and justice can be attained. It must be noted too that the world exhibition was not universally acclaimed by all citizens of Canada and Quebec. For instance, a critical view was expressed in the pages of the left-wing, Montreal-based journal Parti Pris (which is where the theoretical underpinnings of Ti-Pop were laid out, as will be seen): speaking on behalf of a FrenchCanadian population intent on collective emancipation, the editorial for the summer 1967 issue avows, “The foul mystification offered by Expo 67 reminds us … of the dispossession which is our daily reality.”4 Turning to the visual arts more specifically, two remarkable projects by Montreal artists on display at Expo 67 echo the concerns of Greg Curnoe’s airport mural. The Christian Pavilion at Expo 67 featured The Eighth Day, an experimental film made by Charles Gagnon, a protean artist whose practice included painting, photography, film, and design, and whose design firm was in fact responsible for the pavilion’s entire exhibition design. The film is a fast-moving montage of found-footage material that represents diverse peoples and cultures, building towards increased violence. There is no overt religious content at all – unless one counts the footage of a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire in protest over the Vietnam War. Monika Kin Gagnon remarks that the “cycles of violence and destruction enacted through war … lack any inherent ethical evaluation in 63

Curnoe’s “Dorval Mural” as a Critical Response

André Montpetit and Marc-Antoine Nadeau. Le permier sous-marin atomique de la force de frappe québécoise at the Youth Pavilion, Expo 67, 1967. Picture reproduced from Yves Robillard, Québec Underground 1962–1972, Tome 1 (Montreal: Éditions Médiart, 1973), 241.

themselves, but it is their accumulation and repetition that becomes oppressive.”5 In this way The Eighth Day made clear that the spectre of war and destruction loomed over the idealistic, futuristic, and humanistic project of Expo 67. It was another artwork that had more profound affinities with Curnoe’s mural, though: situated in the Youth Pavilion, this was an assemblage by André Montpetit and Marc-Antoine Nadeau, called Le premier sous-marin atomique de la force de frappe québécoise, which can be translated as “The first atomic submarine of Quebec’s striking power.”6 64

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Article by Ellen Roseman in McGill Daily newspaper, 25 September 1967. The photo illustrating the article shows the “Vietnam Pavilion” as a coffin carried by anti-war protesters.

While no colour photos of the work have survived, its bright yellow would have rhymed with adjacent buildings in the La Ronde section of Expo 67. This work exemplifies the Ti-Pop aesthetic because its juxtaposition of cultural elements spoke to how questions of identity and modernity were being shaken up by the youth of Quebec. This latter artwork can be compared to Curnoe’s mural for several reasons – not only because this word appears on the mural, as mentioned above. While both these artworks engage with a pop art vocabulary, they have more in common with European and South American incarnations of pop art, 65

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which tended to be more overtly politicized than the US version – examples of which were on display in the usa pavilion.7 And then there are the vessels themselves: Curnoe’s mural introduced a historical airship as a central thematic motif while the Montpetit and Nadeau assemblage proposed an up-to-date nuclear submarine, but in both cases the artworks enact a détournement of the ships’ normalized military usage. It can be said that both the airship and the submarine were transformed into countercultural war machines. The idea of Ti-Pop was introduced, theorized, and celebrated in the pages of Parti Pris, an extremely important if short-lived publication (1963–68) whose avowed mission was to accelerate the transition from a historically sedimented and conservative French-Canadian identity to a new Quebec that would be independent, socialist, and secular. Alongside the analysis of ideology, political discourse, and economic structures, the journal was deeply invested in the arts (literature, theatre, music, visual art), acknowledging that this momentous historic change must tap into imagination, desire, and cultural memory. This was Pierre Maheu’s explanation: “A new civilization creates an art, a form of consciousness, a style. To adopt a Tipopist attitude is to become conscious of this process, to make deliberate use of it. Traditional French-Canada is transformed into an aesthetic object, and the collapse of those traditions provides the very structure of the work of art.”8 Ti-Pop is thus understood as a way of negotiating one’s relationship to the past: a truly modern and emancipated identity would come about not by entirely rejecting or destroying the traditional, pious, parochial FrenchCanadian culture, even if those values did need to be overturned. Ti-Pop proposed that artists could instead salvage these historical fragments and subject them to a process of cultural transmutation – by giving them a pop-art treatment. A number of people were involved in defining and promoting the Ti-Pop idea. One was the young National Gallery of Canada curator Pierre Théberge, who not coincidentally was a strong supporter and friend of Greg Curnoe’s. However, it was Maheu, in a series of articles written for Parti Pris around 1964–65, who did most to define Ti-Pop as a sophisticated theory of cultural transmission and historical change. The prefix ti has been commonly used in colloquial Québécois French as a playful diminutive of the word petit – somewhat akin to how an abbreviated form of little can result in Li’l Abner or Lil’ Kim in the United States. Maheu wrote, “Just what is ti-pop? Well, the ti is Quebec itself, as in ‘Chez Ti-Jean Snack Bar’… or as in ‘Allo ti-cul.’ And the pop can be regarded as Pop Art, although this isn’t necessarily about art.”9 This sense of two distinct elements, conjoined but also separated by the hyphen, is key: Ti-Pop stages an encounter, 66

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which could be more accurately described as a collision or clash, between traditional French-Canadian culture and an up-to-date American-style pop culture. It was out of this encounter that a new Québécois identity would emerge. The author Claude de Guise had written (also in the pages of Parti Pris), “Ti-Pop is a race to the antique shops (in search of) crucifixes, medals, saintly images,”10 the implication being that this Catholic paraphernalia was no longer a meaningful presence in the everyday lives of French Canadians but had been relegated to the past, to “antique shops.” The Catholic Church was such a target for the 1960s generation because of the institution’s long history of establishing a firewall between French Canadians and a bigger world – by censoring both high and low culture, whether that meant interrupting the broadcast of an interview with the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, or forbidding jazz music and Hollywood films. It wasn’t only religious iconography that Ti-Pop targeted, moreover, but also lingering traces of the right-wing demagogue Maurice Duplessis, folkloric or stereotypical images, or joual, the everyday spoken French largely associated with working-class people. This cultural clash was fully evident in Montpetit and Nadeau’s assemblage at the Youth Pavilion. The “atomic submarine” in question was in material terms mostly a yellow-painted kayak, but every young person entering the Youth Pavilion in the summer of 1967 would have known that Yellow Submarine was the title of a Beatles’ hit from the year before. This pieced-together submarine, with its homemade periscope and toilet-seat porthole cover, also sported rosaries and a papal decree, while the figures on a plaster pietà were positioned as if they were operating the submarine’s weapon. For a time the artwork was taken down and tampered with, i.e., stripped of its religious paraphernalia, when someone deemed it blasphemous. Montpetit, writing as the “captain” of the submarine, published a satirical account of this censorship in the inaugural issue of Logos – Montreal’s first bona fide countercultural magazine. “Our ship has been visited by some brigands who, we are told, roam the islands disguised as members of the militia.”11 This article also provides one of only two (black-and-white) extant photographs of the work, this one providing proof of the censorship. The artwork’s Ti-Pop logic was exemplary – the submarine’s allegorical “striking power” would come about through a fusion of different kinds of power: antiquated religious power would be diverted, frightening atomic power would be neutralized, and the explosive power of pop culture would be channelled, resulting in just the right kind of fuel necessary to propel the vessel forward, with the youth of Quebec aboard.12 The title also confirms that the submarine was headed for the future, 67

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because using the word Québécois in 1967 was to gesture towards a future cultural condition. Montpetit and Nadeau were of the generation in Quebec that began organizing collectively to achieve their artistic and social goals. They were in fact affiliated with three important Montreal groups: the artists’ collective Fusion des arts, responsible for the main artworks on display in the Youth Pavilion; l’Atelier libre de recherche graphique, a key site for the development of posters, lithography, and other reproducible forms of print culture that opened in 1964; and then, shortly after Expo 67 they would join forces with two others (artist Michel Fortier and poet Claude Haeffely) to form the mythic comics collective Chiendent.13 When considering their yellow submarine in the context of all these initiatives, it becomes evident that they were committed to a kind of liberation that was artistic, personal, and libidinal as much as it was political, and that the politics in question would be both local and international. This is to say that they were embedded in the counterculture. Jean-Philippe Warren and Andrée Fortin have argued persuasively that the counterculture and Quebec’s nationalist idealism must be regarded as deeply interpenetrated cultural impulses. “In the 1960s and 70s, the determination to be master of one’s destiny, to decolonize consciousness, to free oneself of old institutional constraints, to be part of a cultural revolution, to be open to the world, or to challenge established powers – would be part of the countercultural discourse as well as that of militant nationalists.”14 The 1960s counterculture asked individuals (whether situated in Montreal, in London, Ontario, or elsewhere) to join a global, dispersed network, through which ideas, values, lifestyles, music, fashion, images, etc. could be shared. And if members of the counterculture could at times be turned on/tuned out in their own psychedelic bubble, they could also be politically conscious and globally aware and have their feet firmly planted on the ground – literally so, when young people around the world walked the streets in anti–Vietnam War demonstrations. It is hard to overestimate the powerful revulsion against war expressed by this generation; if earlier twentieth-century wars could seem justifiable and just, the Vietnam War was morally corrupt and indefensible. (By the end of 1967, 500,000 US soldiers had been sent to this small Southeast Asian country and Vietnamese civilians were dying in large numbers, while the American arsenal included chemical weapons such as Agent Orange and napalm.) Protests against the war did indeed take place in Montreal and at Expo 67, during the officially sanctioned “Youth Day,” held at the Youth Pavilion, when the planned celebrations turned into a serious anti-war protest.15 Coinciding with the world exhibition’s opening 68

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André Montpetit, Le Chien américain, 1967. Poster, silkscreen on paper. La Guilde Graphique.

ceremonies on 28 April, the Living Theatre of Montreal organized a march from downtown to the Expo site, featuring signs such as “L’Homme le destructeur” (Man the Destroyer, riffing off Expo 67’s thematic pavilions such as Man the Explorer), and carrying a miniature “Vietnam Pavilion” (no such building existed at Expo 67) adorned with disturbing photographs of mangled bodies in the war-torn country.16 This fictional pavilion was supposed to be deposited in front of the usa Pavilion.17 This performative protest can be considered part of the unofficial history of Expo 67. 69

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During the year of Expo 67, André Montpetit, who was a remarkable artist in his own right, produced a poster, Le Chien américain, that took the form of a ninepanel comic strip.18 The patriotic dog in question is white and law-abiding, and even though his limbs are blasted off after he is sent to Vietnam, the last panel asserts, “He is proud to be American.” It is significant that this was one of a series of freely distributed, politically oriented posters that Montpetit and Richard Lacroix made in 1967 (through l’Atelier libre de recherche graphique), as a way to call attention to the unrealized potential of the poster form.19 Returning to the connotations of the artists’ “atomic submarine,” it is important to note that nuclear submarines were showcased in the “Man and the Polar Regions” section of Expo 67, as “the tool par excellence of Cold War polarisation of the North,” as Inderbir Riar has noted.20 Nor was it any secret that comparable submarines were at that very moment being deployed in Vietnam. Montpetit and Nadeau undoubtedly took a stance against the repression enforced by the church in Quebec, but clearly their work was also positioned against imperialism and militaristic patriotism. Meanwhile, back in London, Ontario, ca 1967, Greg Curnoe was embedded in a local art scene that he was largely responsible for forging, while his art was committed to representing his everyday environment and referring to experiences that were immediate, embodied, and domestic. In a sense, he and his Ti-Pop counterparts in Montreal were part of a surging “neo-avant-garde” of the 1960s, intent on revitalizing one of the most fundamental avant-garde imperatives – to pull art and aesthetic experience out of a rarefied realm and instead embed it in everyday life. Other artists in English Canada were doing something comparable; for instance, N.E. Thing Co. in Vancouver and Joyce Wieland in Toronto were each in their own way exploring the everyday while drawing on aspects of pop art. It is Curnoe’s interest in a productive tension between local identity, historical memory, and global politics that makes his artistic project comparable to the Ti-Pop artists, while he too was drawn to pop culture, folklore, and kitsch. It should be mentioned that Curnoe’s mural included two excerpts from a song, “Toujours L’R-100,” performed by the French-Canadian star La Bolduc, which was about another airship (the R-100) that touched down in Quebec in 1930; the lyrics to this song humorously deploy the Ti prefix. These lyrics had been transcribed for Curnoe by his Montreal friend Mitsu Daudelin, whose name appears on the mural; she was herself a printmaker, working with the Atelier libre de recherche graphique alongside Montpetit and Nadeau.21 Of course, the Tipopistes in Quebec were caught up in the revolutionary swell of the “national project,” while Curnoe was not a nationalist of any stripe, but like his Québécois counterparts he conducted himself 70

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as a locally rooted citizen of the world, while it can be said that all of them contributed to a youthful, countercultural, and genuinely utopian energy reverberating through the Western world. If Curnoe has often been described as a regionalist, what makes Homage to the R-34 compelling is how local and personal concerns are enmeshed with an awareness of international politics. (Nor was this ambition evident only in the Dorval mural; the Painting in Canada exhibition in Expo 67’s Canada Pavilion included Curnoe’s For Ben Bella [1965], which was dedicated to the socialist president of Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella, while including a range of personal references as well.) Homage to the R-34, painted on twenty-six panels and assembled on-site, depicts two airship gondolas, while the people, places, and events referenced in the mural are various. Passengers include historical figures such as two First World War dirigible pilots – one German and one British, and the Métis hero Louis Riel, as well as a number of the artist’s friends and their children. The places either directly named or alluded to include Montreal, Saint-Hubert, Ottawa, the United States, Germany, Greece, Vietnam, London (England), and London (Ontario). Where is this airship, we might ask? It metaphorically hovers over all these places, although the confluence of the two Londons is particularly important, because Curnoe and his friends (including fellow-artists Jack Chambers, Robert Fones, and Tony Urquhart) occupy the mid-century, provincial city of London, while military conflict is being waged in the air above the London metropolis fifty years earlier, during the First World War. The most disturbing textual component of Curnoe’s mural is a gruesome eyewitness account of a (German) bomb dropped on a London school in 1917, killing and maiming children. Two other wars are alluded to: there is a description of a Second World War battleground in Greece, while the present-day war in Vietnam is invoked through another textual fragment, an excerpt from the British anarchist newspaper Freedom, reporting on the African-American boxer Muhammad Ali refusing to be drafted into the US Army.22 Ali had eloquently defended his decision, saying he did not want to kill anyone, and pointing out that the Vietnamese were also people of colour, who had never harmed or offended him. Stripped of his title and unable to participate in his sport, Ali was at the time of the mural’s creation and installation (1967–68) traveling from one university campus to another across the United States, having been invited to speak by anti-war students’ groups. The Ali text-fragment was a major point of contention as the process of censorship unfolded, and the federal authorities tried to convince Curnoe to “replace the wording with more cheerful texts in keeping with the gay and colourful design.”23 The mural also features a 71

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full-length, silhouetted male figure whose bloodied hand is caught in one of the aircraft’s propellers; despite Curnoe’s identification of this figure as Jack Kelly from his hometown, it became known that this man resembled then US president Lyndon Johnson. It is significant that Curnoe painted so many children (five) into the mural, and that each one is named. His own son, Owen, stands with a beaming smile in the ship’s cockpit, alongside the German pilot Mathy, who stretches out an arm to protectively embrace the boy. Eva-Marie Kroller has commented on the important role played by children in the articulation of Curnoe’s anti-war position: “The child’s image is deeply ambiguous, even sinister, in such an environment, for he may be avenger of his parent’s faults, future participant in similar raids, and projection of his father’s fears all at once.”24 Curnoe himself had this to say: “It hit me with full force when I put my own son in the cockpit … Every country has its heroes … but these heroes are forced to kill and that’s bad. What I tried to convey is that I am against violence. I hate killing people. Who can quarrel with that?”25 By combining references to war with images of innocent children, the mural seems to ask its viewers: Where can you/we imagine ourselves – victoriously riding the military machines that drop the bombs or as hapless victims at ground level? And are these really the only choices we have? Curnoe surely knew that the Canadian government would challenge the mural’s polyvocal political stance. His friend George Bowering recounts that, right as the mural was being censored, “Greg managed to persuade me about the true relationship between Washington and Ottawa.”26 The Dorval mural’s status as pop art was taken for granted at the time, and indeed, Curnoe’s contract with the Ministry of Transportation described the “production and installation of Pop Art representing gondolas of an airship.”27 Curnoe did not always self-identify as a pop artist, but he clearly had much in common with a generation of artists who set out to borrow the pictorial language of advertising, billboards, comics, Hollywood movies, and other aspects of pop culture.28 There is strong evidence that Homage to the R-34 was at least partly inspired by James Rosenquist’s monumental painting F-111 (1965); Curnoe was visiting New York City in April 1965 when the work was exhibited at the Castelli Gallery. The F-111 was a new bomber airplane deployed by the United States in Vietnam, and in Rosenquist’s artwork it becomes one motif in a work that “combines the visual rhetoric of the military-industrial complex with consumer commodity advertising imagery.”29 Curnoe’s blocs of pulsating colour and text are very different from Rosenquist’s collage-like assembly of photo-realistic fragments, but he must have 72

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been impressed by the New York artist’s ability to make an oversized, visually appealing, and graphically bold artwork that called into question the glorification of war machines. At the same time, it is important to note that Rosenquist’s work was originally shown in pieces, wrapped around a gallery space, and that it was not explicitly made as a mural, to occupy public space. Otherwise, both the Curnoe mural and the Montpetit and Nadeau assemblage can be compared to contemporaneous work by Martha Rosler (United States), Bernard Rancillac (France) and Erró (Iceland), because all of these artists juxtaposed the cheerfulness of commodified pop culture with strong anti-war imagery. What is distinctive about these Canadian and Québécois artists, and the reason it makes sense to align Curnoe with Ti-Pop instead of with other currents of pop art, is the possibility that these aesthetic and political concerns could also be rooted in specific locations, histories, communities, and cultural environments. The specific contexts that the Dorval mural was embedded in were multiple, as has been suggested. There was Curnoe’s immediate family and extended community in London, Ontario, and a global network of leftist and anti-war countercultural activity. And then the artwork was rooted in Montreal, insofar as it referenced the transformative cultural strategies of Québécois artists in the 1960s, as embodied by Ti-Pop, as well as being a thoughtful, complex engagement with the ideas and visual culture of Expo 67. I began this chapter by suggesting that Curnoe’s mural entailed a critique of the Expo 67 project. The internationalist meta-narrative of Expo 67, which it shared with world exhibitions more generally, construed the notion of a unified global community in entirely positive terms, as an assertion of commonly-held values and goals. The motto chosen for Expo 67, “Terre des hommes / Man and His World,” reinforced that universalizing discourse. It can be said that Curnoe’s mural genuinely extended this desire for international dialogue; certainly his countercultural consciousness expanded beyond the borders of nation-states. On the other hand the mural questioned the ideological basis of this internationalism: Why was the world exhibition insisting on a vision of global harmony, when the Cold War was firmly in place, real wars were raging in Vietnam, the Middle East, and elsewhere, nuclear weapons were being tested, and colonial or neo-colonial exploitation was ongoing? What could be learnt from this denial of geopolitical conflict? The student journalist Ellen Roseman eloquently explored this line of questioning as she described the anti-war protests that occurred in and around Expo 67 during the summer of 1967. In a September 1967 issue of the McGill Daily newspaper, she expressed her frustration with the world’s exhibition model: “If Man and His World does not face up to the decisive forces at work in the world 73

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rather than repress them, Expo cannot and will not make any significant contribution to world peace.”30 Here Roseman expressed the radical dreams of the countercultural youth movement, by urging that Expo 67 not “repress” the conflicts dividing the planet, and by demanding that the world’s exhibition make the attainment of “world peace” its overt goal. In the same spirit, Curnoe’s Dorval mural insists that we must confront the horrors of war, because if we do not then Expo 67’s message of global unity remains empty rhetoric. Terre des hommes had been the title of a book by the French author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who looked down at the surface of the planet from his airplane and experienced a humanist epiphany. Curnoe’s vision of being aloft in an aircraft was much darker, because the world he depicts (an amalgam of different places and historical moments) is a world at war. Twentieth-century war means that the machines traversing the skies are potentially dangerous: in the First World War an airborne bomb could destroy a school full of children, while in 1967–68 airplanes sent chemical weapons raining down on Vietnamese children.31 The Canadian powers-that-be clearly did not think that this serious critique of war was appropriate for the airport’s international arrivals corridor, even if it is questionable whether travellers whizzing by would have taken the time to read the troubling, multicoloured texts. Another artwork commissioned for the airport at the same time as Curnoe’s shows what was deemed acceptable: Ronald Bloore’s monochromatic abstraction – which interestingly included ghostly traces of Expo 67 in the form of Fulleresque geodesic shapes – was entirely non-controversial. In retrospect, Curnoe’s confrontational, censored mural would seem to correspond perfectly to 1968, that year of tumultuous youthful protest, rather than to the giddy pleasures associated with 1967’s “Summer of Love.” This 1967 versus 1968 opposition is rather too simplistic, as there was state violence against AfricanAmerican protesters in cities such as Newark and Detroit during the summer of 1967, and the anti-war movement was staging massive public demonstrations throughout the year. There was certainly important countercultural activity and political activism in Montreal, before, during, and after Expo 67. Still, in the context of Montreal it makes sense to talk about a kind of post-Expo reckoning, as the spectacular world exhibition would be the catalyst for further reflection on urban life, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and any number of other issues, including the role of youth as a social constituency. If it seemed that the countercultural energies of the 1960s generation could be more or less accommodated at Expo 67, by 1968 seething student movements could not be contained. Local examples include

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students at Université du Québec à Montréal taking over the École des beaux-arts campus in 1968, and the anti-racist protests at Sir George Williams University in 1969 (known as the “Sir George Williams Affair” or sometimes as the “Computer Riots”), led by Black students, that eventually led to the occupation of university buildings and a sustained challenge to institutional power. Curnoe’s Homage to the R-34 should not be regarded only as a form of negative critique. This is because the everyday lives, intimate desires, and beliefs of individuals, rooted in particular circumstances, are presented as the bedrock of resistance to pop culture’s endless parade of commodified imagery, as well as to a barrage of ideological messages and figures. If Expo 67 offered glittering visions of future architecture, cities, and technologies, Curnoe’s futurity is more matter-of-factly attached to the group of children looking out the windows of the airship. It can also be argued that the passenger Louis Riel, who might seem to stand out as an anomalous figure in the narrative configuration, plays a crucial role because while he is a historical personage, his heroic role as an Indigenous leader is part of a past that flares up in order to be redeemed. The silhouetted figures, geometric shapes, and stripes of text, in pinks, oranges, blues, and violets, are hardly naturalistic, and while this certainly can be described as pop, because of a pronounced resemblance to comic books and advertising, this wild coloration gives the artwork a psychedelic edge. The pulsating colour and forms of the mural convey an excess of imaginative and libidinal energy, and the exuberant colour is a promise of pleasure – should one decide to come onboard. Just as Montpetit and Nadeau’s yellow submarine became a conceptual vessel, with the possibility of an imaginary voyage, so too might the fantastical Curnoe airship change course. Greg Curnoe’s Homage to the R-34 can be considered a homage to Ti-Pop, as suggested earlier, because Quebec’s artists had demonstrated how historical fragments could be recuperated and made to collide with contemporary pop culture – the hybrid cultural objects that resulted from this encounter becoming part of an emancipatory social project. Instead of remaining ideologically fixed in their identity as war machines, a submarine or an airship could be propelled by countercultural and anti-war energies, proposing alternative forms of global citizenship and alternate futures.

Notes

1 See Charles Hill, “Greg Curnoe’s Homage to the R34,” National Gallery of Canada Review 4 (2003): 84–99. Considering the mural’s inaccessibility, Hill’s article has been especially important for its meticulous identification of the figures in the painting, as well as the written sections of the mural.

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2 See Magali Deleuze, “Le Maghreb à l’Expo 67 (Tunisie, Maroc, Algérie),” Bulletin d’Histoire Politique 17, no. 1 (autumn 2008): 49–61. 3 For a discussion of the pavilion, see Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller, “‘It’s Our Country’: First Nations’ Participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 17, no. 2 (2006): 148–73. Some journalists and commentators appeared unwilling to learn from the Indians of Canada Pavilion, but for others the message came across loud and clear. The art critic Claude Jasmin titled his review of the pavilion “J’ai vu l’illustration d’un génocide” (I saw a picture of genocide), Sept-Jours, 12 August 1967, 43. 4 Luc Racine, “Dépossession et domination,” Parti Pris 4, no. 9–12 (mai–août 1967): 7. My translation. Original French: “L’immonde mystification qui représente l’Expo 67 est là pour ramener à notre mémoire … toute la dépossession qui est notre lot le plus quotidien.” 5 Monika Kin Gagnon, “The Christian Pavilion at Expo 67: Notes from Charles Gagnon’s Archive,” in Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, ed. Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 156. 6 There is some ambiguity surrounding the title, which sometimes has the word jaune (yellow). I am relying on the artists’ press release, reprinted in Québec Underground 1962–1972, vol. 1, ed. Yves Robillard (Montreal: Éditions Mediart, 1973), 240. 7 See, for example, Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri, eds, The World Goes Pop (London: Tate Publishing, 2015). 8 Pierre Maheu, “Patricia et Ti-Pop,” in Québec Underground, vol. 1, 113. My translation. The original French: “Une nouvelle civilisation crée un art, une conscience, un style. Prendre l’attitude tipopiste, c’est assumer consciemment ce processus, et tenter de s’en servir. Faire du Canada français traditionnel un objet esthétique, faire de son effouèrement la structure même de l’œuvre d’art.” 9 Pierre Maheu, “Laïcité 1966,” Parti Pris 4, no. 1 (1966): 73, my translation. Original French: “Qu’est-ce donc que Ti-Pop? Eh bien, le Ti, c’est le Québec, comme dans ‘Chez Ti-Jean Snack Bar’… (ou) dans ‘Allo, ti-cul.’ Et le Pop, c’est si on veut le Pop Art. Mais il ne s’agit pas spécialement d’art.” 10 Claude de Guise, “Moi j’aime le sacré-coeur,” in Québec Underground, vol. 1, 102. My translation. Original French: “Ti-Pop c’est la course chez les antiquaires – crucifix, médailles, images saintes.” 11 André Montpetit, “Voyage into Absurdity,” Logos 1 (October 1967): 14. 12 The yellow submarine became an icon that was deployed elsewhere too as a form of protest: “The not necessarily psychedelic branch of the New Left is initiating a revolutionary change in the nature and style of protest by launching a yellow submarine in the Hudson River.” Paul Krassner, “The Yellow Submarine,” Ramparts (January 1967): 18. 13 See Sylvain Lemay, Du Chiendent dans le printemps: Une saison dans la bande dessinée québécoise (Montreal: memoire, 2016). 14 “Dans les années 1960 et 1970, la volonté d’être maîtres chez soi, de décoloniser les consciences, de s’émanciper des vieux carcans institutionnels, de vivre une révolution culturelle, de s’ouvrir au monde ou de contester les pouvoirs établis se niche aussi bien dans le discours des partisans de la contreculture que dans celui des militants nationalistes” (my translation from French to English). Jean-Philippe Warren and Andrée Fortin, Pratique et Discours de la Contreculture au Québec (Quebec: Septentrion, 2015), 11.

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15 The press reported on this in different ways: “Youth Day … turned into an impressive demonstration against the American war in Vietnam,” Sept-Jours, August 1967. Or more snidely, “An endless series of harangues about the war in Vietnam.” Nika Rylski, “The Expo Love-In,” Ottawa Journal, 18 August 1967. 16 See Paul Tagney, “Living Theatre in Montreal” (original 1967), in English Poems and Writings (Houston: Strategic Book Publishing, 2014). Tagney writes, “The first performance by Living Theatre in Montreal was entitled ‘Homage to U.S. Day at Expo.’ The play focused around a black casket which actors carried from Dominion Square to the Expo grounds. The casket bore pictures of burning Vietnamese villages, dead and crippled children, and U.S. soldiers.” n.p. 17 See Ellen Roseman, “Protesters Have Record Summer,” McGill Daily, 25 September 1967, 12. These tactics are also discussed in Rob Kelder, “Notes on Radical Theatre,” Logos 1, no. 1 (10 October 1967): 12. Both articles include photos of the “Vietnam Pavilion,” although it is not clear whether the protesters were permitted to enter the Expo grounds with their anti-war props. 18 “A l’automne 1967, Montpetit et Lacroix publient une série d’affiches qui furent distribuées gratuitement…” (includes Le Chien américain), Yves Robillard, Québec Underground, vol. 1, 242. 19 Robillard, Québec Underground, vol. 1, 242. 20 Inderbir Singh Riar, “Expo 67, or the Architecture of Late Modernity” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014), 154. 21 Daudelin later became a filmmaker, but her involvement with l’Atelier libre de recherche graphique from 1965 to 1968 is part of her biography, on the Cinémathèque québécoise website: http://collections.cinematheque.qc.ca/en/articles/48-realisatrices/. 22 The entire text-fragment related to Ali reads: “Mr Mohammed Ali … declined to take an oath for the American Army. The American World Boxing Association stripped him of his title. It is not known on what grounds since his U.S. Government sponsored fight is not being fought in a ring with gloves for any purse or under any rules, Queensbury or otherwise.” Freedom Anarchist Weekly. 23 Emile Daoust, chief of the Construction and Engineering Branch, quoted in Hill, “Greg Curnoe’s Homage to the R34,” 93. 24 Eva-Marie Kroller, “Fear of Flying? The Myth of Daedalus and Icarus in Canadian Culture,” Journal of Canadian Studies 8, no. 4. (Winter 1993–94): 108. 25 Curnoe, cited in Hill, “Greg Curnoe’s Homage to the R34,” 94. 26 The poet George Bowering was a close friend of Curnoe’s, and he hosted the artist’s family in Montreal when they visited Expo 67. George Bowering, The Moustache: Memories of Greg Curnoe (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1993). http://ccca.concordia.ca/c/writing/b/ bowering/bow001t.html. 27 Curnoe, quoted in Hill, “Greg Curnoe’s Homage to the R34,” 85. 28 Was Curnoe anti-American or anti–New York? “He got incensed when his work was called Pop Art, because Pop Art was a USAmerican [sic] fashion trend.” George Bowering, Left Hook: A Sideways Look at Canadian Writing (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2005), 218. However, the artist Art Green “recalls that celebrated Canadian artist Greg Curnoe tried to bring an exhibition of Chicago Imagist work to his hometown of London in the 1960s.”

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Robert Reid, “1960s Chicago Art Movement Has Links to Waterloo,” Guelph Mercury Tribune, 6 June 2014, https://www.guelphmercury.com/whatson-story/4562395-1960schicago-art-movement-has-links-to-waterloo. 29 Michael Lobel, James Rosenquist: Pop Art, Politics, and History in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 127. 30 Ellen Roseman, “Protesters Have Record Summer,” McGill Daily, 25 September 1967, 12. 31 The Curnoe fonds at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, includes the March 1968 issue of Freedom, the anarchist newspaper, which featured multiple articles on US deployment of napalm in Vietnam.

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National Identities: The Canada Pavilion

L’arbre est dans ses feuilles (The Tree Is in Its Leaves) Althea Thauberger

althea thauberger: Good afternoon. My name is Althea Rae Thauberger. I am the instigator, and producer, and co-director of this project. This project is about an archive. It is the archive that belonged to the former Still Image Division of the National Film Board of Canada. Specifically, we are looking at a selection of photographs that date from 1963 to 1966, and these are images that would have been considered for, or, some, used in two centennial projects that were overseen by the division: the People Tree (see pages 101–2) of Expo 67 and the two photo publications Call Them Canadians and Ces visages qui sont un pays. I’m now positing myself as a kind of stand-in for a historical figure. That figure is Lorraine Althea Monk, circa 1967. She was the executive producer of the Still Image Division at that time, and it was under her direction that these projects were executed. lorraine monk: I wanted a project with which we could stand and say, “Look, we exist.”1 andrea kunard: I think that it’s very interesting for people to have those very difficult images in front of them and to have to learn how to deal with that history, because it’s their history. It’s who they are too. They are not going to escape it. It’s who I am. These categorizations that are filed away on these little index cards are very much circulating in our society today. We have to know how to deal with that in ourselves and learn from ourselves and our own reaction, and that archive allows us to do that.2 kama la mackerel: The ghosts demand that we sit with truth, that we sit with truth.3

Opposite and following pages Althea Thauberger, L’arbre est dans ses feuilles, 2017, two-channel video installation.

lorraine monk: La photo ne disait pas la vérité; elle était trompeuse, mensongère, et elle le sera toujours. Elle dit toujours quelque chose du regard de celui qui la prend.4 carol payne: I do think it’s convincing that during the 1960s the Still Photography Division, led by Lorraine Monk …5 althea thauberger: Regard. carol payne: … was interested in more creative responses; less the kind of staid documentary … althea thauberger: Qui est-ce que tu regardes? carol payne: … propaganda of the 1940s and 1950s and more photography as an expressive form. althea thauberger: Il s’agit, en gros, de poésie. carol payne: And my sense has always been, although I never found this explicitly in the archive, that using expressive writing with photography would enhance the idea that this was a creative archive – a creative department … althea thauberger: Respiration. carol payne: …that was about expressive activities, not about creating, supposedly, visual facts. althea thauberger: L’amour est dans le cœur Le cœur est dans l’oiseau L’oiseau est dans l’œuf est dans le nid Le nid est dans le trou Le trou est dans le nœud Le nœud est dans la branche La branche est dans l’arbre6

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lorraine monk: He went back to the press club and said, “This dame who calls herself monkey was a real monkey, and predicted great disasters.”7 chloé savoie-bernard: on a pris leurs voix tandis que d’autres mains que les leurs ont griffonné leurs descriptions raturées et traduites — révisées et effacées cherchant à extraire leur substantifique moelle ne manque que leurs noms j’ai avalé leurs images à défaut de les ordonner mon corps travaille à leur digestion mais rétives elles résistent en grimaçant de joie repues de leur persistance bientôt tu n’auras même plus besoin de m’ouvrir pour les apercevoir ne me faites pas accroire que l’instrument n’est pas rouillé que l’histoire n’est pas pourrite se fertilise d’elle-même et recommence la scission nette échoue à n’en plus finir elle écoute la gangrène accourir avec la placidité de celle qui sait — aujourd’hui c’est notre cinquième date nous la passons à manger l’anatomie des autres

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nous avons très faim nous avons très soif je croque dans ces femmes avec une avidité qui t’étonne8 lorraine monk: Exhibit Description The People Area of the Canadian Government Pavilion will attempt to depict, as much as possible, the Canadian people as they are today. This depiction will be in the form of a fabricated, stylized maple tree, which will symbolize the Canadian people. This “tree” is to be formed of parts common to all trees: leaves, trunk, roots, and soil. The Leaves Canadian people follow diverse personal, occupational, and recreational activities. The people, both male and female, are of various ages and reside in the various regions of Canada.9 kama la mackerel: stretch your arms stretch your arms towards the sky oil your skin, shiny and taught offer your heartbeat to the sun you are the tree that provides shade to travellers you are the tree that offers fruit to children you are the tree that gives flowers to brides of all genders you are the tree whose shadow chases away the evil eye you are the tree whose roots cure indigestion you are the tree whose leaves sing in unknown tongues and you are the tree of knowledge, you are the tree of knowledge you are the tree that knows all the stories – the stories told, the untold the stories that cannot be told.10 carol payne: The People Tree was in the Canadian precinct of Expo 67. It was completed with hundreds of panels. Some of them were orange and red, and some of them were photographic panels. And the people photographed were meant to be life-sized so there was the sense that you were wandering among a tree with 86

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these people in it. It was a fanciful invention and meant to create in the viewer a sense of belonging to the portrait of Canadian nationhood. So, in a sense, when we think about things like images, photographs, films, we also think about how they construct their audiences, and the People Tree really did that in quite, I think, a forceful way. danica evering: Our arm holds our right hand man which is attached to another and another of our hands You are often thrown to the ground bodies face different directions heads turn together we are back here again we are still here The crushpushclutterclustertogether. Do we feel alone, or all at once? 11 natasha kanapé fontaine: Combien d’années il faut le dire encore Que je ne veux pas mourir Que je ne veux pas mourir Que je ne veux pas mourir Je ne veux pas mourir de pitié Je ne veux pas mourir de honte Je ne veux pas mourir de mépris Je ne veux pas mourir de mes morts Je ne veux pas mourir de mes corps Je ne veux plus mourir Je ne veux plus mourir Je ne veux plus mourir Je ne veux plus mourir Je ne veux plus mourir 87

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Je veux apporter la lumière au monde Je veux apporter la parole de mes ancêtres Jusqu’au bout de mes bras Jusqu’au bout de la terre … Et la faire tourner.12

Notes

1 Lorraine Monk, interview by Lilly Koltun, October, December 1976, cd-r, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa. 2 Andrea Kunard, interview by Alexis O’Hara, Montreal, May 2017. 3 Excerpt from Kama La Makerel, “The People Tree,” 2017. 4 Lorraine Monk, trans. Éric Lamoureux. Interviews by Lilly Koltun. cd-r. lac, Ottawa. October, December 1976. 5 Carol Payne, interview by Alexis O’Hara, Montreal, May 2017. All subsequent quotes are from the same source. 6 Zachary Richard, “L’arbre est dans ses feuilles,” 1978 7 Lorraine Monk, interviews by Lilly Koltun. cd-r. lac, Ottawa. October, December 1976. 8 Excerpt from Chloé Savoie-Bernard, “ce qu’on mange.” 2017 9 Memo, Canadian Government Participation, “The People: General Concept, Exhibit Description and Thematic Outline,” 4–5. 28 July 1965, People Tree files, nfb spd Archive, ngc Library. 10 Excerpt from Kama La Mackerel, “The People Tree,” 2017. 11 Excerpt from Danica Evering, “Agree or Disagree.” 2017. 12 Excerpt from Natasha Kanapé Fontaine. “Pour que nous puissons vivre.” 2017.

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Panning for Gold / Walking You Through It Leisure (Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley)

While the majority of pavilions at Expo 67 revelled in progress and innovation, projecting a slick technology-driven view of the future, the Environment for Creative Play and Learning in the Children’s Creative Centre, designed by Canadian landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, proposed a different kind of future. Set amongst a glittering sphere, an inverted pyramid, and a grid of stone monoliths, the “Environment” was a modest plot the size of a typical urban pocket-park. To adult eyes, this “pavilion” might have seemed disappointingly immaterial, but to children, this stretch of mounds, sand, and water presented near-infinite possibilities. In our project, Panning for Gold / Walking You Through It, we elaborate on three concepts of the Environment for Creative Play and Learning: the idea of “walking you through it,” which for us involves a collaborative methodology of communication and imaginative leaps; a non-hierarchical definition of “creative power,” which opens up possibilities for new forms of agency; and the idea of “panning for gold,” which we took to represent a transformation through acute attention, sifting, and selection. In a letter introducing her playground design for Expo 67 to Polly Hill, the project director of the Children’s Creative Centre, Oberlander described the yetto-be constructed park with textured dimension: it was for her “not a piece of abstract design,” but instead a complex environment, as though “part of nature.”1 She walks us through it, imaginatively describing the playground through the mind’s eye of a child, naming all the choices that might be encountered – climbing on bark, digging in the sand, panning for gold, or crawling through a log. After receiving Oberlander’s instructions and designs, Hill strongly advocated for the unconventional project. In Hill’s final report on the project she states, “Children have creative power, we know it, we talk about it, know all too well how to stifle it.”2 She goes on to explain the ways children were encouraged “to do,”

Opposite Leisure, Panning for Gold / Walking You Through It, 2017, views of installation. Above Leisure, Panning for Gold / Walking You Through It, 2017, detail.

“fully participate,” and “create” within the “Environment.” She focuses on the imaginative possibilities presented in the garden-like adventure playground, while also calling to action “tidy-minded adults,” to make even greater leaps towards “delightfully messy” and challenging play. Our own conversations with Oberlander impressed upon on us how playground design allowed her to balance the expectations of 1950s stay-at-home motherhood with a professional practice in her chosen field.3 As a result of her training, Oberlander envisioned space as both a framed experience (passive and active factors placed in sequence by a designer) and a communicative path through these things (interrelated variables placed in dialogue with participation).4 The time she spent caring for her children propelled this way of thinking in new directions. Observing their paths – the movements, desires, textures, and shapes that guided them through their free-form play – opened up a way of thinking 91

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Opposite Landscape plan for the Children’s Creative Centre Playground, Canada Pavilion, Expo 67, ca 1967. Diazotype on paper with ink, graphite, and coloured paper collaged elements, 92 x 88 cm. ARCH280457. Cornelia Hahn Oberlander fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture. Gift of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. © Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. Above Perspective view of Children’s Creative Centre Playground, Canada Pavilion, Expo 67, 1967. Dry transfer on negative photostat printed on cardboard, 91 x 114 cm. ARCH252723. Cornelia Hahn Oberlander fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Gift of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. © Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.

about creative agency in the world. She quietly but methodically transformed her observations into design strategies, which could then be tried and tested by her children on site. As artists and parents ourselves, we were captivated by this practical and intimate collaboration between the designer and her children. In what ways might we also open our way of working to active collaboration? How might we create a set of “sculptures” or “paintings” within a museum setting that could represent an active path, or could even be imaginatively reorganized by visitors?

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Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, landscape architect. H.D Bancroft, photographer. View of Children’s Creative Centre Playground, Canada Pavilion, Expo 67, 1967. Gelatin silver print, 20 x 25 cm. ARCH280292. Cornelia Hahn Oberlander fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Gift of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.

In meeting Cornelia and, vicariously through the letter, Polly, we folded their efforts into our own understanding of how to forge a path through our life, creativity, and the spaces in which they reside. Our own installation is not a reconstruction of their exceptional efforts, but rather, it is part of a new experimental garden. As a place, the gallery offers an exceptional spatial and conceptual configuration. You can move through it, but you can also watch the movement; you can engage through participation, or analyse the work. In Panning for Gold / Walking You Through It we have selected, recreated, or transformed elements from our research and engaged them in a new dialogue. Gathered in the gallery, the resulting basket of smocks, piles of notched logs, image fragments of sand, pine boughs, and water represent an exploratory and collaborative understanding of the relationship between creative life, work, and play. 94

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Notes

1 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander to Polly Hill, 15 September 1965, Library and Archives Canada (lac), Ottawa. 2 Polly Hill, résumé of Workshop on Children’s Creative Centre, 12 June 1967, lac. 3 In February 2014 we interviewed Cornelia Hahn Oberlander over a period of days at her home in Vancouver. Our aim was to discuss her letter to Polly Hill and inquire after further details, to know more about her spatial thinking and her practice in playground design and specifically her experience designing for Expo 67. 4 See Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925; London: Faber and Faber, 1973).

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Above and following pages Geronimo Inutiq, Ensemble / Encore, Together / Again, Katimakainnarivugut, 2017, views of installation.

Of Our Lands / De nos terres / Nunanni Geronimo Inutiq

Ensemble / Encore, Together / Again, Katimakainnarivugut is an audiovisual exploration inspired by the Katimavik Pavilion and other architectural structures at Expo 67. The work comprises vinyl appliqué on the floor, digital image prints, an accompanying asynchronous electronic soundtrack, two video projections, and a colour television program. This text provides more information on the elements and considerations involved in the conception of the installation. Upon entering Katimavik, visitors were confronted with the inner walls of the pavilion’s inverted pyramid. Visitors could also climb to the top edge of the roof to overlook the rest of the site. The use of space within the installation is a reflection and abstract interpretation of that same experience. The pavilion’s rooftop exhibited sculptures, sundials, hourglasses, and Kyogen and Haida masks (see page 103). I allude to these representations of humanity, time, and time-measuring instruments in my Ensemble / Encore installation. In the language of the Indigenous people of the Arctic, Katimavik means “meeting or gathering place.” Within my work, the phrase is repeated in French, English, and Inuktitut and intentionally delivered in an instructional tone. The language arrangement represents my aesthetic interpretation of the pavilion’s themes. The use of these languages represents the juncture between our understanding and relationships to the land and between cultures in the Canadian collective. The passage of time is expressed by the figurative representations of the changing land, sky, and water. Humans as actors among the elements are reflected in the digital image prints and television visuals. The video projections are from 16 mm films sourced from the open access Prelinger Archives. The contrasting shapes in the surrounding frames are the result of applying crystallizing filters to the same geometric pattern that can be found on the installation floor. A mirroring filter was then applied to this combination, to accentuate the shapes of the scenes and create a kaleidoscope effect.

The floor of the installation represents an abstraction of the Katimavik Pavilion’s inverted pyramid design. The installation’s audio work was inspired by and responds to Otto Joachim’s composition “Katimavik.” The audio was produced using a seminal synthesizer and audio-tap manipulation techniques that were also used by Joachim. The early uses of synthesizers created an avant-garde aesthetic that was abstract in tonality when compared to the popular music of the time. Part of the audio within my installation also employs techniques of serialism, generated waveforms, and magnetic tape recording and editing in reference to Joachim’s original work. To many, 1967 remains a pinnacle year of innovation, possibilities, technological advancement, and futurism within Canada. With Expo 67, the goal was to innovate and push the envelope in design and technology in ways that were intended 98

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to signify parallel developments in social and cultural integration. However, there is almost nothing left of the world exhibition’s architecture, which boasted of hyper-accelerated progress, because it was taken down after the event, although some significant landmarks remain. The opportunity to look back and reflect on the ephemeral experience that was Expo 67, “Terre des Hommes” (Inuit Nunanga), and “Katimavik” enables us to examine the progress we have made as a collectivity but also allows us re-evaluate social tendencies in how we have exploited and continue to exploit resources for profit, public pleasure, and benefit. Between the time of Expo 67 and now, we might evaluate how that culture of impermanence has shaped our lives and how normalized and integral its novelty has become to us. The objects and structures we build on the lands we inhabit shape not only the context of our lives, but the meanings of our stories. Now is a time to think about our collective responsibilities to the land and each other as resource-based. Each of us is a collaborator, agent, and actor in the constructions of our realities and our fantastical interpretations of them.

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Above View of Katimavik and the People Tree, 1967. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM94-EX136-040. Left View of Katimavik and the People Tree, 1967. CMCP Fonds, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: Chris Lund.

Opposite top The People Tree, 1967. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM97-Y_3P196. Opposite bottom Interior view of guests visiting the National Film Board of Canada’s the People Tree, 1967. CMCP Fonds, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: Ted Grant. Above View of the interior of Katimavik, Canada Pavilion, Expo 67, 1967. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Gift of May Cutler. Left Elevation drawing of the Canada Pavilion, Expo 67, architectural drawing. Item 47. © Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of Library and Archives Canada (2019). Source: Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/ RG71M 88922.

National Identities: The Indians of Canada Pavilion

Earth Mother Hair, Indian Hair, and Earth Mother Eyes, Indian Eyes, Animal Eyes Duane Linklater

Norval Morrisseau is the sole author of Earth Mother with Her Children, 1967, at the Indians of Canada Pavilion. I have read that he was unable to attend, or unavailable to paint the work, and that instead his assistant, artist Carl Ray, was asked to execute and complete the work on behalf of Morrisseau. The explanations for his absence are myriad but involve rumours and innuendo that I do not feel comfortable repeating because I simply do not know if they are true or not. In any case, Morrisseau’s absence is generative. I wonder whether Morrisseau’s decision to resist a physical presence at the pavilion was a deliberate act of agency to complicate his artwork and the activities at the Indians of Canada Pavilion. Was it a form of protest? What would his presence have meant if he did attend? In addition to the absence of Morrisseau, another actor forcefully interceded in the making of Earth Mother with Her Children. The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (diand) wanted to articulate a polished narrative of Indian–Canadian relationships at the pavilion, which ultimately affected the final version of Morrisseau’s Earth Mother with Her Children (see page 120). Apparently the “original” version of Earth Mother with Her Children was considered too explicit for the organizers of the pavilion, and the diand asked for the work to be changed – seeing human and animal representations suckling on the breasts of a representation of Mother Earth would have been too much to bear for the visitors of Expo 67. The work was changed, censored, and a distance was created between the children of Mother Earth and her breasts. There is a resonance in this distance. In 1967 Canada was in the throes of celebration, a hundredyear anniversary across the fledgling country. During this national celebration, the Indian residential school system was still in full operation, and thousands Opposite Duane Linklater, Earth Mother Hair, Indian Hair, and Earth Mother Eyes, Indian Eyes, Animal Eyes, 2017, detail.

Duane Linklater, Earth Mother Hair, Indian Hair, and Earth Mother Eyes, Indian Eyes, Animal Eyes, 2017, view of installation.

Duane Linklater, Earth Mother Hair, Indian Hair, and Earth Mother Eyes, Indian Eyes, Animal Eyes, 2017, detail.

of children were violently removed from their families to attend schools where they were subjected to many forms of violence by those running the schools. Many children did not return home and were buried near school grounds, while some were not given the dignity of a proper burial at all. Some children, including my own family members, survived this monstrosity. The decision to intercede and create a distance in the painting speaks to the real violence and deliberate attempts by the state to disconnect and remove Indigenous children from their rightful place in their families and communities. We are still experiencing, witnessing, and making our way through this legacy today. So what was the material of Morrisseau’s work? Of course it was paint, that was applied to the wood panel exterior of the Indians of Canada Pavilion, as well as the original drawing by Morrisseau. Beyond the obvious, the question is how and where to position the absence of Morrisseau in relation to the materiality of this work, which remains elusive. It seems important to articulate this absence somehow. This material of absence rests somewhere in the doing of the work itself; it rests somewhere in the transmission of the drawing from Morrisseau through the ears and eyes, into the mind and out of the hands of Carl Ray. In lieu of the multiple actors and their effects on this work of art, I propose this list of materials in the speculative description of Mother Earth with Her Children.

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Earth Mother with Her Children Paint on wood-panelled exterior of the Indians of Canada Pavilion from the original drawing by Norval Morrisseau, interpretation by Carl Ray, censorship by diand, the absence of Norval Morrisseau. Dimensions variable 1967 Courtesy of the artist “Right now, I am in my studio, painting eyes and painting hair. I have not painted anything in years. I thought I left it behind. I thought that painting was not for me, and perhaps painting isn’t for me in the long run. We shall see. But this is where I find myself right now, painting eyes that will see you all, and painting hair that will feel you all.” This artwork is called Earth Mother Hair, Indian Hair, and Earth Mother Eyes, Indian Eyes, Animal Eyes Paint on interior wall of Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal derived from a series of small paintings of eyes and hair from a photo of Norval Morrisseau’s Earth Mother with Her Children, 1967, painting labour by Julie Ouellet, the absence of artist. Dimensions variable. 2017 Courtesy of the artist

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Indian Momento Krista Belle StewartRuwedel

A memento is an object that is emblematic of a person, or a reminder of a past event. Indian Memento is a short nfb documentary made by Michel Régnier that complements the Indians of Canada Pavilion during Expo 67, portraying Indigenous life as if it were a memento. It begins with life on a reservation – knitting, laundry, picking berries, playing, working – depicting an idyllic overview in the landscape and at home. Shifting from a girl riding her horse to her position in regalia guiding tourists at the pavilion, the documentary then proceeds to walk the viewer through the exhibition, highlighting texts, objects, and images throughout. At precisely 12:49 the tour is within a space depicting “Work Life,” showcasing a crowded array of archival images and stills, lining the walls in an uneven grid. At the apex of the room’s arch is a still image of my mother, Seraphine Stewart (see page 121). Having heard a rumour of the presence of her image within this room I undertook a frame-by-frame search until it appeared. The photograph was taken from a cbc docudrama that charts my mother’s life as a younger woman on Douglas Lake Reservation, moving to Victoria where she became the first Indigenous public health nurse in British Columbia. The image is a profile of her wearing a nurse cap and garb, which can be seen starkly contrasted in red against black in my installation Indian Momento. Using the gridded windowpane within the exhibition provides a framework to consider the liminal space between the interior and exterior, creating a tension between the institution and outside world. In Western art history the grid has become emblematic of modernism and is a reoccurring trope in my work. The grid in Indian Momento is formed by the geometrical intersections of the window mullions. Simulating the glow from a stained-glass window, as seen in a church, there

Opposite and following page Krista Belle Stewart, Indian Momento, 2017, views of installation.

is a direct reference to Catholicism and residential schools. The red light illuminating the space denotes bloodline and the violence that took place. Depending on the time of day, this red glow shifts through a chromatic array of purples, pinks, and reds, casting subtle variations as it infiltrates other rooms within the exhibition. The aesthetic of the image also references another point in the documentary, where text, pictographs taken from an anthropologist’s journal, and woodcuts incorporate the duotone that influenced its graphic quality. Representation and iteration are important to my practice and a constant point of reference is the role photography plays in mediating histories, narratives, and spaces. Just as the process of relaying history is understood through multiple mediations – whether vocalized or through photography, film, or text – my process re-articulates the source image through various technologies and, as such, translations. In this case the still image was first captured, then desaturated with heightened contrast and given a red overlay. It was then printed onto vinyl for its installation on each windowpane. The moment that has been captured is barely discernible, emphasizing the inherent problem of images to portray a history or narrative, given the subjective 114

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Above and right Krista Belle Stewart, Indian Momento, 2017, details.

framing chosen by the photographer and its reception. An image can relay only so much information, while indeterminate details may be completed through assumption or false information. The graphic portrayal of the image lends a flatness that causes the visitors of the gallery to blend into the images lining the walls and ceiling. The interplay of figures in the space, the viewers moving in the documentary, and the portraits they are looking at become enmeshed within the same time frame, confusing the reality of representation. This imposition of figures flattens a sense of reality, just as a memory leaves only an impression of what has been. Indian Momento draws attention towards what is deeply personal while bringing the broader social context of representation and the residential school system to the fore. The cbc docudrama of my mother, Seraphine: Her Own Story (1967), 115

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and Indian Memento (1967) are both from fifty years ago. The significance of capturing the moment where a still of my mother appears in Régnier’s documentary addresses what is both personal and political and the complexities inherent in the iterative aspects of narrative. The repetition of the image on sixteen windowpanes, of what is called a classic colonial grid, recalls photography’s reproducibility and the process of retelling cultural histories through an intervention that casts a light on the complexities and process of decolonialization.

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Untitled Mark Ruwedel

Mark Ruwedel, Untitled, 1990, gelatin silver print, showing the totem pole by Henry Hunt and Tony Hunt. CMCP Collection, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased in 1992.

Aerial view of the Indians of Canada Pavilion, the United Nations Pavilion and the Atlantic Provinces Pavilion at Expo 67, 1967. Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds, Library and Archives Canada, e000990836. Photographer unknown.

George Clutesi (left), Noel Wuttunee (right), and totem pole by Henry Hunt and Tony Hunt, Indians of Canada Pavilion, 1967. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM97-Y_1P208.

Norval Morrisseau, Earth Mother with Her Children, 1967, exterior of the Indians of Canada Pavilion. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Gift of May Cutler.

Interior of the Indians of Canada Pavilion showing Seraphine Stewart (centre top). Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds, Library and Archives Canada, PA-177766.

The Indians of Canada Pavilion Guy Sioui Durand

The theme Man and His World / Terre des Hommes gave a humanistic aura to Expo 67, and the spirit of ecumenism inseparable from this theme (taken from the title of a classic work by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) shares much with the holistic perspective of the world’s Indigenous peoples. In our languages, the words ohtehra’, potlatch, makusham, or yanonchia’ denote great feasts and gatherings of the onkwe’hon:wei (original peoples) that are akin, in microcosm, to world’s exhibitions. This point of view, shared by my people, the Wendat, has grounded my research in the art of the Indians of Canada Pavilion. I visited Expo 67 at age fifteen, and it was the start of a long voyage, with many portages. Since those days, there has been a revival of interest in the Indians of Canada Pavilion. In particular, the project of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (mac), held in conjunction with the festivities surrounding the 375th anniversary of the founding of Montreal and the 150th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, has extended the artistic resonances of that earlier event. I will begin this chapter by discussing the correspondences between the context, the container, and the contents of the pavilion, and more specifically the symbolic and political expressiveness of its architecture, its thematic organization, and the works presented. I will go on to discuss the multimedia artistic resonances of this Indigenous adventure, of which the pavilion itself remains a historic milestone.

In Search of the Indians of Canada Pavilion The 1967 World’s Exhibition unveiled the contemporary realities of Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), Kébeq (Quebec), and Kanata’ (Canada)1 on a “magic island,” as per the lyrics of the theme song “Un jour, un jour” (reinterpreted by Cheryl Sim in her work Un jour, One Day and partially reconstructed by Marie-Claire Blais and

Pascal Grandmaison in their short film Le Chemin de l’énigme, both presented as part of the In Search of Expo 67 exhibition). The island in question, Île SainteHélène – the site of this great planetary urban celebration – is situated on Kanien’kehá:ka territory; it symbolizes Yandiawish, the Great Turtle, and the figure of the Earth Mother in our founding myths. As such it was fertile ground for Indigenous creators from the outset. It was a time of great societal change, with Montreal celebrating the 325th anniversary of French settlement and building modern urban infrastructure, including skyscrapers, superhighways, and a metro system. Expo 67 was a bridge to the rest of the world. The choice of Kébeq to host the event signified a consummation of the “Quiet Revolution” whereby the French Canadians, lofted by the winds of nationalism, had begun to call themselves Québécois. All across Kanata’, the red and white maple leaf flew in commemoration of the centenary of Canadian Confederation. Man and His World was a festive event in a long line of similar exhibitions that had been held in the colonialist, hegemonic, and imperialist countries. Nevertheless, there was a sense that the scientific, intellectual, and artistic worlds had achieved some kind of balance as the decade passed its midpoint. Utopias coexisted. On the one hand, the notion of progress fostered flights of technological prowess such as the imminent conquest of the moon; on the other, cultural tendencies such as the European avant-gardes (e.g., the Situationist International) and the hippie movement in California advocated for experimentation. The “small is beautiful” ideal of land-based communities became the counterculture. At the same time, this period was marked by decolonization movements whose origins could be traced to the 1940s. Indigenous peoples (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) were making their reappearance in North American society, taking their place within its social and artistic history. On 1 July 1967 in Vancouver, Chief Dan George stirred up a crowd of 32,000 Canadians with his “Lament for Confederation,” and in December the cover of Life magazine announced the “Return of the Red Man.” And all the action was taking place in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal)! An isosceles triangle–shaped architectural structure rose up on the site of Expo 67 amid other pavilions in the form of domes, cubes, parallelograms, half-moons, and inverted pyramids, all connected by the Minirail threading among them. This was the Indians of Canada Pavilion, and it represented an autonomous presence of the Indigenous people of Canada at Expo, outside of the provincial and national pavilions. The bold architectural, artistic, and thematic design of this building was created by a group of people I refer to as the new “hunters, shamans, and warriors” of the art world.2 The pavilion’s autonomous existence played a key 123

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role in making visible the concept of “Americity,”3 which I distinguish from mere Americanness. The government of Canada had originally planned for an Indigenous presence in its own building, but changed its approach with the advent of the new Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (diand) and in response to pressure from the National Indian Council. diand supervised the architecture, while the First Nations decided on the themes and chose the works to be displayed. The building itself was interesting in that its Indigenous character coalesced out of a set of strong identity symbols, enhanced by an original architectural concept, an exhibition of major works that contrasted with descriptions of the harsh reality of living conditions on the reserves inside. The structure’s originality derived from a stylized blending of two traditional features: the teepee and the teueikan (drum). The modules containing the exhibition rooms were arranged in an octagonal configuration resembling a traditional drum. Within this was a large tent from which long posts protruded, evoking the teepees of the Saulteaux-Cree and Lakota Sioux of the Great Plains. The teepee is an undeniably archetypal, near-universal symbol of the North American Indians, found for over a century in photographs, serials, comic books, stage shows, and “Cowboys and Indians” Westerns; still, an alternative might have been to base the architecture on the yanonchia’ – the longhouses of the Iroquois in the east and other peoples in the west – or the shapatuan, the classic Innu tent. The large works adorning the building’s exterior reinforced its visual impact. In fact, this incorporation of Indigenous artwork into the architecture corresponded to the government’s nascent policy of subsidizing the integration of art with architecture, known as the “one per cent program.”4 At the request of diand, Denesuline painter Alex Janvier invited a talented group of artists from all across the country to create works that would be both contemporary and rooted in customs and tradition. The artists representing the Pacific Coast “People of the Salmon” were Tseshaht painter George Clutesi, Kwakwaka’wakw totem pole sculptors Henry Hunt and his son Tony, Salish sculptor Simon Charlie (Hwunumetse’), and Haida/Tlingit abstract painter Robert Davidson. The “People of the Bison,” or First Nations of the Great Plains, were represented by Alex Janvier, Cree artists Noel Wuttunee and Jackson Beardy, and Blackfoot painter Gerald Tailfeathers. From the woodland territory ranging from Hudson’s Bay down to the Great Lakes, called Ontarïo’ in the Wendat language, came Seneca Six Nations (Haudenosaunee) engraver and sculptor Tom Hill and

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the supernaturally gifted Norval Morrisseau (ᐅᓴᐘᐱᑯᐱᓀᓯ, Copper Thunderbird), along with Ojibwa painters Francis Kagige, Ross Wood, and Carl Ray and poet Duke Redbird. From Magtagöek, the Mi’kmaq word for the “great walking river” also known as the St Lawrence, which traverses Kébeq on its way to the Atlantic Ocean, came Huron-Wendat ceramic artist Jean-Marie Gros-Louis. The great totem pole produced by Henry and Tony Hunt is impressive not only for its height but also for the spirit of animism by which it is inhabited. From bottom to top, the figures represented are those of a chief wearing a beaver headdress; an orca devouring a seal; a mythological beast known as the sisiutl; a grizzly bear; and a Great Raven perching on his head. The steely eye of this topmost creature looked out over the 3 million visitors from around the world who beat a path to the entrance of the Indians of Canada Pavilion. Forty years later, in 2007, Henry’s son Stanley and grandson Jason, both also renowned sculptors, were commissioned by the city of Montreal to restore the great work. Another masterwork on display was Norval Morrisseau’s fresco Earth Mother with Her Children. The work shown to the public differed from the artist’s initial conception, in which Earth Mother took the form of a wild-haired, heavybreasted grandmother feeding bear cubs, as in our founding myths. Perhaps this was Morrisseau’s Indigenous attempt to engage with the mythical story of the founding of Rome, in which a mother wolf nurses the twins Romulus and Remus; be that as it may, the authorities were uncomfortable with this iconography and Morrisseau withdrew. He let his friend and assistant Carl Ray produce a different version in which a single bear and a pair of human figures turn their gaze toward three moons or suns. Albeit impressive, this version of the mural, the one seen by the public, looks rather more like an Indigenized representation of the Holy Family. This strategy of delegation would be revisited by Ojibwa artist Duane Linklater for the In Search of Expo 67 exhibition.5 Another work with political overtones also drew objections from the authorities: Alex Janvier’s The Unpredictable East, which he signed with his band number. He was made to change the name of the work to Beaver Crossing Indian Colours and it was moved to the rear facade of the pavilion. A work titled Tree of Peace was the outcome of a collaboration between Tom Hill and Jean-Marie GrosLouis, nicknamed “He Who Knows Good Clay.” The work draws on the spirit of the great wampum belts to evoke the historic peace between the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee. Although minimalist in conception, the work bears witness to the political ferment of the era in its indirect evocation of the windigo, an

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evil forest creature derived from Algonquian mythology and a metaphor for the political struggles lying ahead. With this ceramic work affixed to an outside wall of the pavilion – a giant political button of sorts – the artists gave visibility to the renewed alliance between the Wendat and Haudenosaunee Confederacies and attested to their shared heritage, including their founding myths, rites, customs, and linguistic origins, their protocols surrounding wampum belts, and their longhouse-based social structures. Inside the pavilion, a portrait of Canada’s Native peoples as they existed in 1967 was presented through interpretive text, photographs, and artifacts laid out in ten rooms as though forming a large wampum belt. Guided by a team of Indigenous tour guides wearing a costume of dubiously authentic design, visitors were led on a tour with a distinctly political message. Topics covered included the consequences of the creation of the reserves; encroachment on Indigenous territory under the pretence of treaties, many of which would be ignored; prohibitions on Indigenous ceremonies and rituals; denial of suffrage (until 1969); repression of languages and customs; harsh living conditions on the reserves; forced Christianization; and the residential schools, those nefarious (and then still-operating) enclosures designed to assimilate children torn from their families. In short, the hardships of life on the reserves were presented for all to see. The rooms devoted to religious education and the residential schools presented incisive texts that would shock many Canadians – so much so that more than a few turned around and left. This denialism would persist until the un Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007; the royal commissions of inquiry, most notably the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, whose report was tabled in 2015; and the 2019 Final Report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which termed the phenomenon a “cultural genocide.” Also shown in this pavilion was an Indigenous rereading of historical and geopolitical events, including a wall-sized photo reproduction of the treaty signed at the Great Peace of Montreal (1701), a historical milestone that would not be commemorated by the Québécois until 2001. The tour concluded around a symbolic fire in the hall, a symbolic place of peace where visitors could gather in quiet reflection. This, unfortunately, was not enough to prevent the provincial and national press from complaining about what they perceived as an attitude of recrimination by the “Indians.”6

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A Turning Point My people shall sleep for a hundred years, and when they awake again, it will be the artists who give them back their spirit. Did Expo 67 fulfil this prophecy, attributed to Métis chief Louis Riel, who was hanged for rebellion in 1885?7 It can be said that 1967 was the year when a long period of resilience in the face of attempts at assimilation and cultural genocide gave way to a movement for decolonization and reappropriation.8 Ethnologist Sherry Brydon writes that Expo 67 was more than just a celebration,9 and Kanien’kehá:ka artist Steven Loft echoes this sentiment when he stresses the role that artists played in the event.10 The Indians of Canada Pavilion channelled an important moment in the relationship between art and society in North America. I use the term glocal Americity 11 to encapsulate such situations, in which all components of the Indigenous world are put into play in a “glocal” manner – i.e., one that ties local micro-relations to global issues, in the spirit of the potlatch and the makusham – and I think it properly applies to this pavilion. It might be said that the pavilion envisioned a whole set of then non-existent infrastructures as a hybrid whole, and that some components thereof would be brought into being over the next half-century. The Indians of Canada Pavilion played multiple roles and did so in exemplary fashion. It served as a museum of Indigenous political activism over the centuries; a museum of Indigenous civilizations independent of colonial ethnography; a museum of Indigenous art highlighting the ways in which traditionalist knowledge, know-how, and savoir-vivre are merged with contemporary creative elements; a cultural centre; an Indigenous artist-run centre; and a public art symposium housing bold works. All these functions, which would today be subsumed under the concept of “Indigeneity,” were fulfilled in front of an audience composed largely of urbanites from Canada and other countries. The advent of an art with a much stronger collective awareness of how its own identity has persisted and thrived throughout history – a politically active community committed to changing power relations around the definition of “Indianness”12 – was to have enduring resonance.

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Artistic Reverberations Half a century has elapsed since Expo 67. To mark the occasion, the mac held an exhibition titled In Search of Expo 67 and invited a number of artists to revisit the event. In this spirit, the time is right to reflect on the influence of the Indians of Canada Pavilion within the expanded scope of art today. While Expo 67 was followed by sporadic infrastructure projects on the reserves and did open the doors of some museums and universities, it is largely in the sphere of artistic practice that the adventure has continued. Local traditional art, as knowledge and know-how, has been revived as a source of inspiration for hybrid, transcultural, interdisciplinary, intercommunity, and inter-nation art forms in an urban setting occupied by artists from many backgrounds and has been the theme of exhibitions and events. In most such initiatives, a convergence of two tendencies can be noted. On the one hand, there has been a process of “re-Indigenization” (réensauvagement),13 with works increasingly being rooted in intact cultures and communities; on the other, there has been a renewal of relationships with the non-Indigenous worlds of ideas, technology, and other ways of life spurred on by continual interaction between city and reserve. In short, it is the Indigenous artists and intellectuals who have “resonated with” the pioneers at the Indians of Canada Pavilion. It is they who have rekindled activist flames of re-appropriation, contestation, and affirmation out of the embers of dispossession that had lain smouldering since 1867. These contemporary “hunters, shamans, and warriors” of the art world have carried on the spirit of Zacharie Vincent (Tehariolin)14 and the struggles of Jules Sioui, Origène Sioui, and William Commanda, who were supported in their day by the Automatistes of Refus Global.15

History and Its Writers This renewed consciousness, this re-appropriation, began to take shape in the second half of the 1960s and has prospered ever since. We have seen the beginnings of a rereading of history in which Indigenous peoples write their own history instead of, or as an alternative to, being written into (or out of) a shared one. There has been an insistence on forms of orality, and especially on the increasingly vibrant practices and manifestations of Indigenous art. Canada’s Indigenous people moved from resilient endurance and expectancy to a historic collective coming 128

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to awareness in the 1960s and 1970s; from then on, our self-affirmation has burgeoned, with peoples’ heritage being integrated into creation and new approaches to art history. The 2000s have witnessed a growing trend towards an Indigenous historiography in which the terms are set by Indigenous people themselves, alongside their inclusion in a broader rereading of art history in Kanata’ and Kébeq. While such recent reworkings of non-Indigenous historiography are to be commended, it is important to highlight the contributions of lesser-known actors and institutions that have been working to bring an Indigenous-written history of art into being. Notable in Kébeq are the Musée de Wendake – with exhibitions such as The Indian Act Revisited (2009) and Mirror of a People: The Works and Legacy of Zacharie Vincent (2016) – and Kiuna College (est. 2011), which offers a two-year program devoted to Indigenous education in Quebec. Particular mention must be made of the work of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (acc). Founded in 2006, the acc has carved out a reputation by holding major gatherings and symposia, such as “Revisioning the Indians of Canada Pavilion: Ahzhekewada (Let Us Look Back),” held in Toronto in 2011 with several of the original artists of the pavilion in attendance. Three years later in Montreal, the acc held the well-named event Iakwéia:re’ / I remember / Je me souviens (McCord Museum and Concordia University), which began by paying homage: the cinematographic work of Alanis Obomsawin of Odanak was celebrated, and Tom Hill read a poignant testimonial to Jean-Marie Gros-Louis, who had died the year before. Finally, in the autumn of 2016, the acc paid tribute to the elders of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation at the Kwän Mày Dáyè Dàátth i / Sit by the Fire with Us / Ensemble autour du feu gathering held in Whitehorse, Yukon. The aesthetic stance of Clutesi, Hunt, Morrisseau, Hill, Gros-Louis, and the others, who saw themselves as “walking in the ancestors’ shoes,” partook of that vision of “circular time,” which structures our ancestral memory and its modes of transmission – orally and through empirical proximity. This stance represented a new historic awareness and an emerging “art history” that had yet to be told. In the ensuing decades, Indigenous creators have essayed an array of art forms derived from oral tradition. Figures of genius such as Tomson Highway and Joséphine Bacon, working in the fields of literature, poetry, legends, and storytelling, inspired a new generation of writers. Indigenous dramaturgy found a home at Margo Kane’s Spirit Song Native Theatre School in Vancouver, Gary Farmer’s and Graham Greene’s Centre for Indigenous Theatre in Toronto, and Yves Sioui Durand’s Ondinnok in Tiohtià:ke, making new careers in the performing arts possible. 129

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The expanded scope of Indigenous visual arts, encompassing performance art, multimedia, and interdisciplinarity, led to an explosion of exhibitions and events. In Kébeq alone there have been over 700 exhibitions with Indigenous involvement since 1967!16 This proliferation is due to museums and cultural institutions in Indigenous communities, assistance from a network of artist-run centres in every region, the support of arts journals, and the existence of groups and organizations like the acc. Since Zacharie Vincent (Tehariolin) in the nineteenth century, the circle of artists around Norval Morrisseau at Expo 67, and artists such as Daphne Odjig, Bill Reed, Mathewsie Iyaituk, Indigenous artists have been innovating and changing the course of art. Each generation brings forth new artists: Domingo Cisneros, Zacharias Kunuk, Nadia Myre, Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau, Sonia Robertson, Skawennati, Caroline Monnet, Jacques Newashish, Eruoma Awashish, and Ludovic Boney, to name just a few of the ones active today in Kébec.

Images in Movement Filmmaking (documentaries, fiction, animation, web art) is another field that has helped keep the memory of the Indians of Canada Pavilion alive, with a notable example to be found in Indian Momento, an installation by Krista Belle Stewart. This consists of a modified and coloured still image, taken from the nfb short film Indian Memento (1967) by French filmmaker Michel Régnier.17 Against a soundtrack composed of voice, harmonica, accordion, and percussion, Régnier’s camera followed an Indigenous woman as she moved from reserve to city to become a hostess at the pavilion, her costume indicative of an uneasy cultural passage. Régnier’s images limned certain political messages, but also presented the Indigenous people of the day going about their daily lives. Amid documentation of the pavilion, Stewart found a photo of her mother, taken from a cbc docudrama aired the same year about the older woman’s career as the first Indigenous public health nurse in British Columbia. Stewart reproduced the photograph in red vinyl, which, when fixed to the windows of the mac, simulated the glow of stained glass. The work has affinities with Giniigaaniimenaaning / Looking Ahead (2012), a stained-glass piece by Métis artist Christi Belcourt recalling the painful aftermath of the residential schools, which is on display at the Parliament of Canada.

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Inuit artist Geronimo Inutiq’s Ensemble / Encore, Together / Again, Katimakainnarivugut (2017) revisits Graeme Ferguson’s forward-looking film Polar Life, a prototype for the imax technology that was shown at the Man the Explorer Pavilion of Expo 67.18 The Inuit were then widely known outside of their community as “Eskimos,” and Ferguson’s film used this word. Inutiq, working with video, digital printing, and electro-acoustic music remixed from audio archives, re-appropriates the Inuktitut word katimavik (“gathering place”), which was the name given to the giant inverted pyramid atop the Canada Pavilion. These examples from the mac exhibition are part of a broader cinematographic context over the last half-century, ranging from rare documentaries filmed in conjunction with the Indians of Canada Pavilion to recent reinterpretations on online platforms. On the one hand, the nfb, as evidenced by its filmography and its web offering of over 250 films, has been the primary producer and repository of tv series, ethnographic documentaries, animations, and fiction films about Indigenous people since the 1960s; the legendary César’s Bark Canoe19 and the canonical Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance come to mind.20 In 2015, as part of the nfb’s “Souvenir” project, Caroline Monnet, an Algonquin multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker from Kitigan Zibi, was invited to revisit the institution’s filmic archives in the company of Jeff Barnaby, Kent Monkman, and Michelle Latimer. This led her to create the award-winning short film Mobiliser / Mobilize,21 containing sequences from Indian Memento. On the other hand, independent productions across the decades have followed similar lines. Gilles Carle’s 1970 film Red 22 depicts a character of mixed ancestry from Kahnawake who is having difficulty adapting to city life. This popular film is imbued with the same epochal spirit that animated Man and His World. Claude Fournier’s Alien Thunder (1974; US title, Dan Candy’s Law),23 starring Chief Dan George and Donald Sutherland, is based on the Battle of Duck Lake, Saskatchewan (1885), when Cree chiefs Pitikwahanapiwiyin (Poundmaker) and Mistahimaskwa (Big Bear) refused to take up arms even though they supported the aims of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont’s North-West Rebellion – to repel the Canadian Pacific Railway, the colonists, and the militias from their land. The 2000s saw a burgeoning of Indigenous-directed documentaries, such as Red Power Awakening24 and Reel Injun,25 as well as fiction films such as Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner,26 Mesnak,27 and Rhymes for Young Ghouls.28 The adventure of Wapikoni Mobile, founded in 2003, which allows Indigenous youth from the communities to make short films, now has a following outside of Kébeq. This is also true of the web

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series Time Traveller by the Mohawk artist Skawennati, presented at the Biennale de Montréal in 2014. Her process consists of forward and backward time travel into different cultural and historical situations, interactively immersing the viewer in places such as the Kanehsatake pine grove in 1990, or – why not? – the exhibition rooms of the Indians of Canada Pavilion in 1967. These are some of the current resonances of the re-Indigenization of art, springing from the contemporary artistic spirit that took over the Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67.

Towards 2067 Land claims, the revitalization of Indigenous languages, the interest of our Indigenous youth in discovering the authentic foundations of our cultures: these phenomena are setting two different dynamics in motion for the future. One is the path of re-Indigenization, the movement for the transmission of knowledge through connection to the ancestors, the elders, and the generations broken by the residential schools. The other is the updating of our identity through art. While there is no longer any strict divide between traditional and contemporary art, we are witnessing a proliferation of explorations, collaborations, and hybridizations, including the adoption of technological influences. The increased presence of Indigenous artists and intellectuals in urban settings, their higher levels of education, and their vibrant participation in all art scenes make them the ambassadors of new transcultural relations with non-Indigenous people. Will their continually enhanced presence on the national and international art scenes lead to the emergence of a new tribe, as Gerald McMaster posits in The New Tribe (1999), or to more exhibitions such as Reservation X (1998), Remix (2009), and Beat Nation (2013)? Or, paradoxically, will we see urban neighbourhoods emerge as new reserves, as suggested by Kent Monkman in his exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience (2017)? Is it true, as Alfred Taiaiake posits, that the integrity of cultures and communities is being reinforced and their intellectual development stimulated,29 or are we witnessing the erosion of these things? Will an Indigenous institute of research and creation one day see the light of day? An Indigenous university? Or why not a major Indigenous museum in a large city?30 The back-and-forth between communities and urban environments is eminently desirable. And if our Indigenous artists – women, men, and agokwe (twospirited people) – living in Kébeq and Kanata’ persist in moving into all areas of 132

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art, in melding Indigeneity with their new relationships, perhaps 2067 will see the fulfilment of Chief Dan George’s wish, expressed in his 1967 speech in Vancouver, to see “the next hundred years be the greatest in the proud history of our tribes and nations.” Tiawenhk chia’ Eskwanien! Tsei8ei 8enho8en

Notes

1 In the Iroquoian languages, Wendat, and Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk), the word Tiohtià:ke designates Montreal. Its origin is in the Wendat verb gentia ge, meaning “to portage between two watercourses” – plausibly a reference to the Lachine Rapids. Some of the words used in this chapter are from Wendat or other languages, such as Innu-aimun. This is a conscious effort on my part to participate in the ongoing revitalization of our Indigenous languages. Among other things, I have used the words Kébeq for Quebec and Kanata’ for Canada. 2 Guy Sioui Durand, “Jouer à l’Indien est une chose, être un Amérindien en est une autre,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 33, no. 3 (2003): 23–36. 3 Georges E. Sioui, “1992: The Discovery of Americity,” in Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives in Canadian Art, ed. Gerald McMaster and Lee-Ann Martin, 59–70 (Toronto: Craftsman House, 1992), 59–70. 4 The term refers to the 1 per cent of the construction or renovation budget for a building or public project that is allocated to commissioning works of art. 5 Working from archival photographs, Linklater produced a series of small paintings incorporating Morrisseau’s characteristic treatment of hair and eyes, associated with the Woodland School, then entrusted his assistant Julie Ouellet with producing the full-scale work in his absence. 6 Roger La Roche, “Expo 67: Pavillon des Indiens du Canada,” Villes-éphémères – Terre des Hommes (Expo 67-1984), 2013, http://www.villes-ephemeres.org/. 7 James W. Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2014). 8 Jean-Jacques Simard, La réduction: L’autochtone inventé et les Amérindiens aujourd’hui (Quebec: Septentrion, 2003). 9 Sherry Brydon, “The Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67,” American Indian Art 22, no. 3 (1997): 54–63. 10 Steven Loft, “Reflections on 20 Years of Aboriginal Art,” Trudeau Foundation Papers 4, no. 1 (2012): 13–33. 11 Guy Sioui Durand, “L’Onderha,” Inter Art Actuel 122 (2016): 4–19. 12 Bruno Cornellier, La chose indienne: Cinéma et politiques de la représentation autochtone au Québec et au Canada (Montreal: Nota Bene, 2015). 13 Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, 2nd ed. (Oxford:

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14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

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Oxford University Press, 2009); Guy Sioui Durand, “L’Onderha,” Inter Art Actuel 122 (2016): 4–19. Louis-Karl Picard Sioui and Guy Sioui Durand, Mirror of a People: The Works and Legacy of Zacharie Vincent (Wendake: Musée Huron-Wendat, 2016); Louise Vigneault, Zacharie Vincent: Une autohistoire artistique (Wendake: Éditions Hannenorak, 2016). François-Marc Gagnon, Chronique du mouvement automatiste québécois, 1941–1954 (Montreal: Lanctôt Éditeur, 1998), 574–6. Pricile De Lacroix, “Exposer, diffuser, faire entendre sa voix: Présence de l’art contemporain autochtone au Québec entre 1967 et 2013” (ma thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2016). Michel Régnier (dir.), Indian Memento, National Film Board of Canada, 1967, 18 minutes, https://www.nfb.ca/film/indian_memento/. Graeme Ferguson (dir.), Polar Life, 1967, 18 minutes. Bernard Gosselin (dir.), César’s Bark Canoe, National Film Board of Canada, 1971, 57 minutes. Alanis Obomsawin (dir.), Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, National Film Board of Canada, 1992, 119 minutes. Caroline Monnet (dir.), Mobiliser / Mobilize, National Film Board of Canada, 2015, 3 minutes, https://www.onf.ca/film/mobiliser/. Gilles Carle (dir.), Red, Onyx Films, 1970, 103 minutes. Claude Fournier (dir.), Alien Thunder, Scorpion Releasing, 2011 [1974], 92 minutes. René Labelle Sioui (dir.), L’Éveil du pouvoir, Productions Tshinanu, 2009, 48 minutes. Neil Diamond (dir.), Reel Injun, National Film Board of Canada, 2010, 88 minutes. Zacharias Kunuk (dir.), Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Odeon Films, 2001, 172 minutes. Yves Sioui Durand (dir.), Mesnak, K-Films Amérique, 2012, 96 minutes. Jeff Barnaby (dir.), Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Seville Pictures, 2013, 88 minutes. Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Guy Sioui Durand, “Expositions ‘sous réserves’: les avancées à Wendake et à Mashteuiatsh,” Inter 104 (Winter 2009–10): 42–7; David Garneau, “Indigenous Art: From Appreciation to Art Criticism,” in Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Contemporary Art, ed. Ian McLean, 311–26 (Newcastle upon Tyne, uk: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

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From Indian to Indigenous: Temporary Pavilion to Sovereign Display Territories David Garneau

Expo 67: I was five years old, conscious of the hoopla, but we lived far from Montreal and could not afford the fare.1 The world exhibition came to the prairies mostly in black and white, on television and in the newspaper. The coincidental Canadian Centennial celebrations were more accessible. On the eve of Dominion Day, the “pied piper of Canada” arrived in Edmonton.2 Bobby Gimby was a middle-aged white man who played a faux jewelled trumpet and wore a cape. A square flirting with hippyness but hedging his bets with a crew cut, Buddy Holly glasses, and a business suit, he embodied the ambivalent times. My sister and I were in the kid’s choir at city hall singing along with Gimby to his popular “Ca-Na-Da” song. As a nod to francophones the montage includes a slice of “Frère Jacques,” and ‘Indians,’ of a sort, were evoked by the melody “One little, two little, three Canadians.”3 I assume the “pied piper” was unaware that the original lyrics celebrate Native American genocide.4 Little Métis me sang along, an equally unconscious participant in the Indigenous haunting of Canada’s Centennial. Looking back, the Native presence thoughtlessly summoned and displaced by “Ca-Na-Da” seems an artifact of a world view in partial eclipse. The Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67 appears as a beacon, a flash of creative sovereignty that countered settler colonial narratives with Indigenous truths. This chapter describes the use of First Peoples as foils of progress in world exhibitions, and how the pavilion disrupted this narrative in ways that Indigenous artists and curators continue to mature. Expo 67 was an international and universal exposition. This category of world exhibition, paradoxically, showcases a host nation while overwhelming it with post-nationalist futurisms. International and universal, they oscillate celebrations of difference (international) with expressions of desire for a unified transcendence (universal). While founded on patriotism and competition, international exhibitions also demonstrate the advantage of sharing knowledge. They often present near-socialist visions of co-operative globalism that exceed nation-states. This

performative dissonance is engineered to upset settled subjects and catalyse unpredictable novelty. World exhibitions are temporary no-places, neutral grounds onto which are gathered imaginative threads from every other place. These lines are woven into the site’s narrative. While subplots are multiple, central to every exposition’s story is progress, things get better. Universal expositions from 1939 onward encouraged visitors to identify with a transpersonal identity located in the future. The slogan of the 1939 Exposition was “Building the World of Tomorrow.” In 1958 it was “Universal Balance for a More Human World”; in 1962, “Man in the Space Age”; and in 1964, “Peace through Understanding: Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe.” In 1967, the theme was “Man and His World.” Uplifting ideas, unless you are designated the foil of “Man.” As proof of his reaching the “new world” in the fifteenth century, Christopher Columbus returned to Spain with “savages” who entertained the court. These private shows of wealth and power continued for centuries; however, from 1870 to 1930 they became a public and lucrative industry. According to genocide scholar Kurt Jonassohn, facing a steep decline in visitors, zoological gardens and circuses began exporting “exotic” humans to augment their animal displays.5 Attendance soared. Europeans were fascinated by the range of newly “discovered,” conquered, and colonized peoples, and Americans wanted to glimpse real live Natives before they vanished. Human zoos were also part of world fairs of that era. The 1889 Paris World Exposition, for example, in addition to a “negro village,” had 400 Indigenous people in various “authentic” settings. Beginning as curiosities, human exhibits were soon after retooled as educational ethnographic displays. In fact, they were more about empire than empiricism. They advocated racialist pseudoscience ontologies inspired by Darwin. Some even had enclosures of apes followed by cages with nude or semi-nude Brown or Black people gazed upon by white audiences – the purpose being not just to show difference, but to demonstrate white superiority. Human zoos did not end as the result of moral outrage, but because of the economic crash of the Great Depression. While the Brussels World Exposition of 1958 had a Congolese village, such displays were infrequently revived. There was less appetite for human zoos once film and radio documentaries could bring a semblance of the distant close, and improved travel enabled more colonists to tour the colonies.6 Displays of the ethnic and “primitive” at world exhibitions are essential foils, or contrasts, to dramatically heighten displays of new technology and modes of being. The decontextualized staging of traditional cultures are meant to demonstrate where “Man” has come from, show folks what life was like before they were 136

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Man. Adjacent examples of state-of-the-art technology reveal where the best of us currently are. Exhibitions of speculative fiction also offer previews of the “World of Tomorrow,” where those of us who can achieve Man-ness will one day live. “Man” is an aspirational identity. Visitors wander between bewildering, rough otherness and ecstatic, smooth oneness. In the (Platonic) Republic of World Exhibitions, the Indigenous is exotic, decorative, multiple, static, anachronistic, while “Man” – the result of enlightened rationalism, intuitive play, competition, and technology – is unified, simplified, and transcendent. Called to mind are Expo 67 hostesses in their jet-setting, stewardess-like uniforms, the “space-age” furniture, streamlined fixtures, and futuristic buildings, especially Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome for the usa Pavilion. Will visitors choose regressive romanticism or the shape of things to come? What was once a foregone conclusion during the “Summer of Love” and Timothy Leary’s famous phrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” became an open debate. The subject of Expo 67: Man and His World is “Man” – a post-race unity of beings (Man) with dominion over the planet (His World). “Man” is not only the old stand-in for “human” but is, in this context, an expression of what Michael Leja calls “Modern Man discourse” – a discussion that flourished in academic and popular literature in Europe and the United States following the “War to End All Wars.”7 It reached a peak during the existential crisis that followed the Second World War, the collapse of colonial empires, and the birth of the United Nations. Arguably it died with Expo 67. There are two strains. In the optimistic version, the one that postwar exhibitions up to and including Expo 67 are premised on, “Modern Man” are people (but nearly always figured as male) conceived as sharing a common humanity rather than being members of a race, nation, tribe, or any other sort of division. Modern Man is a being-toward utopia who struggles to free himself from irrationality, thought to be the cause of wars, poverty, and injustice. He endeavours, through goodwill and technology, to transcend nature – his own base instincts and the environment that fuels his future. The competing, darker version of “Man” is fascinated with his own irrational nature, is pessimistic about mastering his passions, and is unsure if that is such a good idea anyway, since mastery of nature appears to lead to global catastrophe. He has lost faith in the belief that better technology necessarily leads to better civilization. According to an early entry in the genre, Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), man was in crisis because technology was advancing far ahead of his still primitive psychology’s ability to adapt. Science had outstripped ethical and political development, producing nuclear-powered apes. 137

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The architects of utopia design within the boundaries of their world view and as a means to advance the privilege of their kind. Their plans emerge from and reinforce their temperamental preferences, and preserve and support their race, gender, and class assumptions. While claiming to represent humanity, this “Man” usually meant white men. From an Indigenous perspective, Man-based utopias emerge from the minds of people who have divorced themselves from their original cultures, people who are free-floating signifiers untethered to their land, community, and traditional knowledge. Utopic thinking that privileges patriarchy, technology, materialism, and dominance over the environment and other people is antithetical to Indigenous ways of knowing and being. A being-toward utopia that is not established on humility and stewardship, not premised on sustainable relations among all beings, but instead centres on humans, hoarding, and hierarchies is disastrous for both environments and people. Such thinking, especially when expressed as universal, is a totalizing attitude that arises when a society mistakes technological advancement for moral superiority. Material success backed by a self-affirming ideology can lead people to believe that they transcend selfinterestedness and know what is best for others. In this narrative, those who know who they are, who value land-based ways of knowing and being and want to sustain their territories, are seen as obstacles on the road to self-improvement and a collective utopia. In the Canadian context, Modern Man is post-Indian. Natives are lacks to be filled, fixed, or displaced by those with more complete and streamlined selves. If this sounds familiar, you might be recalling the words of Richard H. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle boarding school, “Kill the Indian and save the Man.”8 Utopia is a worthy destination for those who design it, but the road there is crowded with suffering Indigenous people whose arrival is perpetually deferred. Indigenous people are almost non-existent in the official Expo brochures, posters, and other print media. This is unusual. The image of the Great White North projected to Europe from the 1870s through to the 1920s was of verdant availability; cleared of Indians and ready for use and occupation by hard-working, fair-skinned people. However, following the flood of European economic migrants, the country, looking to settle into itself, rediscovered First Peoples as a means to distinguish itself from Europe. Romanticized, pre-Treaty ‘Indians’ and their art – totem poles, Inuit carvings, and tipis – became integral to the nation’s visual identity. The grafting of the Canadian sapling to Native roots helped the adolescent country seem more mature. The decline of ‘Indians’ as a cultural marker of Canada could be read as a desire to repress images associated with the old Dominion of Canada brand and introduce a new, improved, and post-Indian 138

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Canada. However, given the renewed efforts to assimilate ‘Indians’ at that time, this absence seems more like a reissue of the terra nullius theme. More generously, perhaps it was simply a failure of imagination at a moment of crisis. Expo copywriters and editors appear perplexed about how to represent Natives who were transforming from subjects to agents, from ‘Indians’ to Indigenous. They seem unsure about how to spin Indigenous resistance into a Canadian nationalist narrative. Many of the Indians of Canada Pavilion displays perpetuated a paternalistic and colonial attitude toward First Peoples. As Randal Rogers points out, in a pamphlet explaining one of the displays, an anonymous author wrote, “Trees, shrubs, plants and rocks symbolize the Indian’s harmony with nature … With him it is the sun and the moon, which regulate the passing of time. Any clock-regulated timetable is repugnant to him. The school bell startles him.”9 The text constructs Native people as outside of not only contemporaneity but also modernity. They cannot adapt to technology. This ‘Indian’ is a monolithic representation designed to contain people from many First Nations into a comprehensive, yet incomprehensible, anti-modern “him.” He is not Man; he is the reverse of Man, what Man must overcome. Indians are not “Man” but part of “His World,” part of the environment Man dominates. The Indians of Canada Pavilion was the first national Native exhibition produced by First Nations people. While not free from government interference, colonial display, or gender conventions, it had enough sovereign Native management, content, and innovation that Indigenous curators claim it as the birth of Indigenous curation. While a colonial gaze might see the pavilion as ‘Indians’ learning to play the white man’s curatorial game, an Indigenous perspective recognizes the gathering as a continuation of Native display culture, and as a political intervention announcing the stirrings of a collective new identity. Original inhabitants of Turtle Island held inter-national exhibitions of art, culture, technology, trade, power, and status long before contact. The potlatch ban (1884) and the Indian Act’s (1876) prohibitions on ‘Indian’ dances and gatherings, including pow-wow, were lifted only sixteen years before Expo in 1951. While these activities persisted in secret, they were difficult to revive in public, given decades of criminalization and the shame instilled in children in church-run residential schools. Nevertheless, by the mid1960s, pow-wow resurged. The Indians of Canada Pavilion was part of this revival. It gathered Native people – artists, curators, and hostesses – from many First Nations to share their cultures, publicly embody their difference from Canada, and renew and create relationships and knowledge among themselves. 139

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The term Indigenous has recently emerged as the preferred term for the original inhabitants of a territory. The word is not just a polite synonym for previous labels but signals a new type of consciousness, person, and collective. Indigenous refers to First Peoples from around the globe who recognize they have greater sympathy with each other than they do with their colonizers. While ‘Indian’ and ‘Aboriginal’ were imperial impositions, Indigenous, though also a product of occupation, is authored by contemporary First Peoples. Indigenous is an international set of relationships and discourses that includes but exceeds local, tribal affiliation. Indigenous people know about Native cultures beyond their own; they read books and articles and watch shows about other Indigenous peoples; they travel to those territories and confer with their knowledge keepers; they produce art and ideas that, while inspired by their local cultures, are not confined by them. Indigenous includes mobile, discursive, and display spaces that are a part of and apart from dominant and local cultures. The Indians of Canada Pavilion is Indigenous because it is contemporary. By contemporary I mean not just existing at the moment but also engaged in ideas and activities that are part of a shared international discourse that is related to, but different from customary culture. Natives who are contemporary are Indigenous. Indigenous refers not to past peoples but to current states of Native political and creative consciousness and action. While the Indians of Canada Pavilion continued First Nations display traditions and showed customary culture from numerous northern Turtle Island nations, there were sections that expressed a common Indigeneity; contemporary, political, and collective consciousness. Numerous text and image panels showed how First Nations people (Inuit and Métis were not included) lived and suffered under colonization and broken treaty promises. The exhibition displaced the ‘disappearing Indian’ narrative with proof of persistence. It also showed that Native lives were often miserable as the result of systematic oppression. If the dominant narrative of the time was “Native destruction followed by assimilation,” the pavilion’s counter-narrative was a separatist story of Native endurance despite Canada. As one of the pavilion’s curators, Tom Hill (Seneca), explained in 1976, “The government really wanted a positive image in that pavilion and what they got was the truth. That’s what really shocked them the most.”10 Although it was called “Canada’s Indian Pavilion,” it was in fact a private pavilion, a temporary sovereign display territory.11 In Expo 67, an account of the exhibition written a year later, an anonymous author reflects on the Indians of Canada Pavilion: “The 65-foot totem pole is not the only thing that makes the visitor feel small. If he is a ‘paleface,’ the tour of the 140

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pavilion is akin to running the gantlet. The documents, drawings, works of art, and photographs of contemporary conditions are accompanied by unkind comments about what the white man has done to the original Canadians.”12 That the author does not dispute the presented facts but instead focuses on his abused feelings indicates the affective power of the exhibit. It was designed to educate but also to reshape attendees’ experiential subject position. The narrator feels compelled to forego neutrality. In that space, he reckons himself not just as a viewer but a “white man.” He is aware, too, that there are other than white ways to experience the pavilion, but he cannot express them. Unlike a report, book, or article that is read in private by an unseen body, the body in this pavilion was made a visible, implicated participant. A section representing “Work Life” was formed as a barrel vault highlighting photographic portraits of people at work. In that chamber, settlers become visible to themselves and others as white and a minority. By calling himself a “pale face,” the writer positions himself within the “cowboys and Indians” narrative of the time, and critiques it – insofar as he registers his discomfort at being typecast in a binary that feels absurd now that he is its subject rather than author. Further discomfort comes from being subjected to the Indigenous gazes that surrounded him. He feels “small.” He experiences the pressure of the display’s specific address. He is exactly the sort of person the texts call into being: Canadian, which is not-Native. You can imagine how white Canadians might have felt in that space. They would have been subject to the gaze of people from other countries. Perhaps they would have felt a sense of responsibility, the need to compose a response – voiced or not – to explain their relation to the exhibit, to the continued colonial occupation of Native territories and inhumane treatment of First Nations people. For most Canadians, the Indians of Canada Pavilion would have been their first exposure to an exhibit about First Peoples authored by First Peoples. That ‘Indians’ were in bad shape was not news. That “they” did not consider themselves responsible for their plight and were not grateful for the gift of “civilization,” but in fact held Canada responsible for the loss of their land and culture and for their degraded state, must have jolted many. That Canada’s ‘Indians’ aired the country’s dirty laundry at an international showcase embarrassed some. That ‘Indians’ not only had this sanctioned platform to prove their case to the world, but that they designed it so eloquently and convincingly, must also have had an impact. People must have rethought their assumptions about ‘Indian’ intelligence, complacency, and capabilities, and settler colonial benevolence. The pavilion was a wake-up call to settler complicity and responsibility.13 141

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While the printed manual for Expo’s Canadian hostesses shows only Caucasian women, there were fourteen Indigenous hostesses, and an unknown number of black hostesses, and hostesses of colour.14 The physical fact of these confident young Indigenous women – and the many black women, and women of colour in other pavilions, as well as the numerous other-than-white visitors – must have encouraged many to widen their imaginary concerning the hue and shade range of humanity.15 Perhaps a few minoritized Canadians also recognized themselves in the living mosaic. According to the Canadian imaginary of 1967, the country consisted of two founding nations (Britain and France) newly reconciling. Rather than recognize the participation of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis to the past, present, and future of these territories – as Canada is just now beginning to do – Expo instead offered a test drive of multiculturalism. In the centennial year, the conceptual cement bonding the tiles of the Canadian cultural mosaic to these territories had yet to set. And attempts to pave Natives into or under this matrix were met with resistance. The mosaic was not just a metaphor but was soon to be a federal policy. From an Indigenous point of view, official multiculturalism seemed like an attempt to erase the special status of First Peoples, to replace Indigenous rights and sovereignty with a status as just one minority culture among others. Multiculturalism wished us into history rather than futurity. It celebrated ‘Indian’ culture as a screen to hide Third World living conditions of the folks who produced the culture. The Hawthorn-Tremblay report (1967) laid bare the depth of the deprivation.16 Natives were at the bottom of every measure of well-being. Church-run residential schools still existed in 1967; the 60s Scoop – the removal of children from their families and (dis)placing them with non-Indigenous families – flourished; Métis were not yet recognized by the Constitution; Canada granted status ‘Indians’ the right to vote just seven years earlier, and Quebec was a year from doing so. People still spoke of the ‘Indian problem’ and were composing a solution. The Trudeau/Chrétien White Paper (1969) proposed to dissolve the treaties, the Indian Act, and all previous legal relations between Canada and Indigenous peoples. It was met with strong opposition and helped spur increased Indigenous rights activism. This was the unsettled ground over which the mosaic was being laid. Myra Rutherford and Jim Millar argue that there is “little evidence that the Indian Pavilion, whatever succès de scandale it enjoyed, had a lasting impact on public opinion or policymakers.”17 This seems a strange assessment. Expo logged 50 million visits, and many Canadians who did not see the pavilion first hand learned about it through the media. Clearly, it was an essential part of a larger 142

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rise in consciousness regarding First Nations, Inuit, and later, Métis, peoples. Proof of its radicalism is the intensity of subsequent containment. Rogers explains that no subsequent world exhibitions offered Native people such a relatively unfettered platform.18 When it comes to representations of Indigenous people, Canadian involvement in world exhibitions has returned to apolitical, exotic, and celebratory displays. Rutherford and Millar, however, suggest that the pavilion did have an impact on Natives. This is difficult to measure. There is no account of how many Indigenous people attended, but the numbers are unlikely to be high. Outside of interested artists, curators, and historians, the story of the Indians of Canada Pavilion was virtually unknown by Aboriginal people. And it is only recently, with the rise of Indigenous curators, studio professors, art historians, and critical writers, that Indigenous artists are entering public consciousness, collections, and the canon.19 The Indians of Canada Pavilion was a beautiful wound, a display of Canada’s irreconcilable Indigenous (dis)contents and some of their potential remedies. Its radical meanings, once buried by neglect, are being re-storied by contemporary Indigenous curators, art historians, and critical writers as a first step toward sovereign Indigenous display territories within colonial institutions. Sovereign Indigenous display territories are exhibition spaces managed by Indigenous people. The most separatist forms are ceremonies held in a Native language, enacted by Native people on their territory. Indigenous means being engaged in contemporary discourses with other Native people and with non-Native ideas and forms. Sovereign Indigenous display territories can, therefore, occur as interventions in colonial institutions. Significantly, even in so thoroughly colonial a world fair as Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which celebrated the landing of Christopher Columbus, there were moments of Native agency, intervention, and resistance. Just outside the exposition walls, for example, some Inuit set up an “Esquimaux Village,” “and won a lawsuit against their previous exposition for unfair labor treatment.”20 Emily Sanders explains: “Native Americans also used the World’s Exposition as an opportunity to push back against inauthentic portrayals and to represent themselves. Simon Pokagon recited his speech at the Exposition entitled Red Man’s Greeting, condemning the malicious treatment and wrongful perceptions of American Indians. Pokagon later formed a relationship with the mayor of Chicago, who helped him to lobby in Washington D.C. for compensation of misappropriated lands.”21 The term Indigenous designates First Peoples everywhere as a self-conscious collective made possible by rapid and relatively inexpensive travel and electronic media, and the desire among Native elites to understand their construction under 143

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colonialism by comparing notes with similarly positioned peoples. An Indigenous person recognizes that First Peoples are united by mutual negative formation under homologous colonial conditions, and positively by sharing similar relationships to land and each other. Indigeneity is the activity of awakening to these facts and their deep meanings. Indigeneity is collectively imagining futures that include us as central characters, rather than as part of the landscape. I conclude with a caution. If the meanings of Indigenous being and production circulate primarily in the dominant, non-Indigenous circuit, “Indigenous” is in danger of becoming a species of ideology of “Man” for Aboriginal folks. “Indigenous” is an abstraction, a meta-fiction, that if taken too seriously in one direction leads to cosmopolitanism – that is, the feeling of being at home everywhere, rather than the fact of being at home anywhere. Cosmopolitanism really means feeling at home only in the insulated bubbles reserved for similar meta-people: hotels, airports, galleries, museums, universities, conferences, the space of the “professional,” even the space of the flâneur plugged into an iPod while walking through Paris; the readers of the New Yorker or Flash Art – the bubble of English spoken in a non-English land. A danger for Aboriginal folks is if they begin to identify with this mobile invention, the Indigenous elite, and perform as one, they may weaken their base identity, affiliations, and meanings. The Indigenous artist or curator is Indigenous only because he or she is first Native, of a specific people and place. If a First Nations, Inuit, or Métis artist or curator were to be assimilated into the art world-Indigenous, the cosmopolitan Indigenous – rather than the Indigenous possibility produced by Indigenous discourse – one would surely feel a sense of elation that comes from being a free radical, a small, mobile, and intelligent unit flowing through an insulated circuit. Such a person plays with Indigenous signifiers but is unplugged from their symbolic, living, and informing source: the people and places that generate their non-ironic heart. The contemporary art world is a complex system fuelled by capital and novelty, among other forces. Its agendas and meanings are rarely compatible with traditional Indigenous world views; however, in this cacophonous cultural moment, nearly every expression, including Indigenous ones, is permitted and can find a space (as long as someone is willing to pay for it). However, Indigenous presence in the current system is contingent not sovereign. First Nations, Inuit, and Métis artists and curators need to be wary that they are not swept into the art world as a momentary novel particle easily carried along, then replaced by the next novel particle. Another path for “Indigenous” is not like “discourse of Man” in that it is not primarily a subject

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of a globalized power system. While we are all contained within these larger systems, our consciousness can align itself with alternative ones. Such knowing leads to action and to creating alternative space for being otherwise.

Notes

1 An earlier version of this chapter was delivered at “Revisioning the Indians of Canada Pavilion: Ahzhekewada (Let Us Look Back),” a conference for Indigenous curators, artists, critics, historians, and scholars. It was co-produced by ocad University and the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, Toronto, 15–16 October 2011. 2 Dominion Day, 1 July, was renamed Canada Day in 1982. 3 The song was sung to the tune of American folk song “One Little Two Little Three Little Indians,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18-oRTLIe3I. A note regarding terminology: in 1967, the word Indian signified what we now call First Nations people in the northern territories of Turtle Island (Canada). It was sometimes used more generically to include Inuit people. I use it in single quotations when referencing how the word was used at the time. I otherwise try to be more specific and indicate whether First Nations, Inuit, and/or Métis are the subject or if the subject is more generally Indigenous. 4 Julianne Jennings, “The History of ‘Ten Little Indians’: How Did the Genocidal Nursery Rhyme Come About?” Indian Country Today, 11 October 2012, https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/culture/social-issues/the-history-of-ten-little-indians/ (site discontinued). 5 Kurt Jonassohn, “On a Neglected Aspect of Western Racism,” Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, 2000, https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/979954/1/ A-MIGS__Occasional_Paper_Series__On_A_Neglected_Aspect_Of_Western_Racism.pdf. 6 Jonassohn, “On a Neglected Aspect of Western Racism.” 7 Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1993). 8 Richard H. Pratt, Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” in Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–71. 9 Randal Arthur Rogers, “Man and His World: An Indian, a Secretary and a Queer Child: Expo 67 and the Nation in Canada” (ma thesis, Concordia University, 1999), 28. 10 Ruth Phillips with Sherry Brydon, “‘Arrow of Truth’: The Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, 27–47 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). 11 Rogers, Man and His World, 21. 12 Expo 67 (Toronto: T. Nelson, 1968), 118, cited in Jim Millar and Myra Rutherford, “‘It’s Our Country’: First Nations’ Participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada 17, no. 2 (2006): 160. 13 Millar and Rutherford review both Indigenous and mainstream reception at Expo 67. 14 Rarely noted is that there were at least two Indigenous male hosts. Additionally, Rosemary

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Speirs counted fourteen Native hostesses: “Indians Migrating to Expo Pavilion,” Canadian Press, 9 August 1967, http://expo67.ncf.ca/expo_67_news_p31.html. Official multiculturalism was federal policy in 1971. Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, “A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada Economic, Political, Educational Needs and Policies: Part 2 (The Hawthorn Report, October 1967),” Government of Canada (October 1967). It is in this report that the concept of ‘Indians’ as having equal and additional rights as settler Canadian (“citizens plus”) is established. https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1291832488245/1291832647702. Millar and Rutherford, “‘It’s Our Country,’” 148. The author in conversation with Randal Arthur Rogers, September 2011. For example, in the 2000s, the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s nationally touring exhibition 7: Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. (curated by Michelle LaVallee,); LeeAnne Martin’s Bob Boyer retrospective; and the National Gallery of Canada’s Daphne Odjig, Norval Morisseau, Carl Beam, and Alex Janvier retrospectives make history by making history. Emily Sanders, “The Chicago World’s Fair and American Indian Agency,” Cultural Survival, 11 February 2015, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/1893-chicago-worlds-fair-andamerican-indian-agency. Sanders, “Chicago World’s Fair and American Indian Agency.”

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Digital Reimaginings

Kaléidoscope II Jean-Pierre Aubé

I drew inspiration from the Kaleidoscope Pavilion, an adventure in colour, motion, and sound on the theme “Man and Colour.” Sponsored by six Canadian chemical companies (including Chelem Limited, Cyanamid of Canada Limited, Shawinigan Chemicals Limited, and Union Carbide Canada Limited), the pavilion aimed to offer spectators an abstract experience inspired by psychedelic art and electroacoustic music. The mandate of its creators was to show how colour enhances our lives and how advances in the chemical industry have led to a broadening of the colour spectrum. In the Expo 67 program the creators declared, “Before the chemical era, the world tended to be grey and colourless. Now, thanks to new molecules, we live in a multicoloured world: supermarket shelves are enlivened by all the colours of the visible spectrum – and more.” Kaléidoscope II is a video installation made using products purchased through the deep web, the dark side of the internet – chemicals of various kinds, illegal drugs, and counterfeit pharmacological molecules that I used to conduct experiments in crystallization. Over a period of several months, I made chemical solutions, mixing and dissolving different products and filming them during their transformation. In order to film the crystals, I modified a microscope by adding filters and a camera. I used a technique employed in science to make the structure of crystals visible, which involves photographing crystal cultures using polarized light. Since polarized light travels in a straight line, it renders visible colours that are not normally perceptible to the human eye. With this type of lighting, every facet of a crystal takes on a vivid colour that alters, depending on the angle and composition of the light. By analyzing the myriad colours produced by diffractions of light, scientists are able to determine the inner structure and material composition of crystals. Opposite Jean-Pierre Aubé, Kaléidoscope II, 2017, video installation.

Top Jean-Pierre Aubé, Kaléidoscope II, 2017, view of installation showing modified microscope. Bottom Jean-Pierre Aubé, Kaléidoscope II, 2017, view of installation showing computers and modular synthesiser. Opposite Jean-Pierre Aubé, Kaléidoscope II, 2017, film stills.

I conducted hundreds of crystallization experiments, some lasting several hours, some only a few minutes. The installation is composed of sixteen clips of shots of crystals lasting a total of thirty-five minutes. Each of the clips – which vary in length and are shown in random order – illustrates the formation of different types of material. After being enlarged (between 40 and 100 times), the crystal images were sectioned and reassembled by a computer program to create a kaleidoscope. The videos are analyzed in real time by a facial recognition algorithm, a modern technology used by security services and social network marketing. The colour, luminosity, and distribution of the crystals are analyzed by the interface, and the resulting data are then transmitted to a network of analog synthesizers whose parameters are adjusted in accordance with the image’s properties. At Expo 67 the soundtrack of the Kaleidoscope Pavilion was by R. Murray Schafer, a composer and environmentalist known for having coined the term soundscape. I opted for a dystopic phase in the history of avant-garde music: thrash metal. In the tradition of electroacoustic music, I modified and distorted the title track of the Quebec band Voivod’s 1987 album Killing Technology, using musical transcription and my computer interface to reproduce its rhythms, notes, and chords as a sound backdrop.

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Opposite View of Kaleidoscope Pavilion, 1967. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM97-Y_4P215. Above Morley Markson, Man and Colour, theatre 3, Kaleidoscope Pavilion, 1967. Photo: Geoffrey Winningham. Courtesy of Gerald O’Grady.

N-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis – MAC Version Chris Salter

N-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis is a dramatic lightand-sound environment combining cutting-edge lighting, sound, sensing, and machine-learning technologies. The installation is a tribute to the Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis’s radical 1960s–1970s Polytopes (from the Greek poly [many] and topos [space], the first of which premiered at Expo 67 in the France Pavilion in Montreal. They were large-scale, immersive, architectural environments that made the indeterminate patterns and behaviour of natural phenomena experiential through the temporal dynamics of light and the spatial dynamics of sound. The polytopes are relatively unknown still to this day but were far ahead of their time: a major landmark in the history of the audiovisual arts and performative architectural practice. Originally developed as a commission for the laboral Center for Art and Industrial Creation in Gijon, Spain, in 2012, this newly revised version for In Search of Expo 67 consists of 150 ten-watt leds and many tiny speakers. In the exhibition space, these elements are suspended on a geometric “ruled surface” constructed of thin aircraft cable, creating a light-and-sound environment that continually swings between order and disorder, akin to Xenakis’s original fascination with the behaviours of natural systems. The installation is steered through a sensor network utilizing innovative ai technologies: machine-learning techniques that “learn” different rhythmic and temporal patterns produced by the light and sound, and influence the overall compositional action over time. These computer algorithms are similar to what runs Google searches, robots, or self-driving cars. Termed “reinforcement learning,” they involve software-based “agents” that interact with their environment

Opposite Chris Salter, N-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis – MAC Version, 2017, view of installation.

Chris Salter, N-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis – MAC Version, 2017, detail. Opposite France Pavilion, 1967. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Vieux-Montréal, Fonds Antoine Desilets, P697, S1, SS1, SSS13, D4_019. Photo: Antoine Desilets.

in order to achieve some kind of goal and are then numerically “rewarded” either positively or negatively. The agent’s actions thus influence not only the state of the environment in the present but also can affect it in the future. In N-Polytope, the agents receive sensor-actuator information from the environment (the brightness of an led or the amplitude of a sound, for example) and can perform simple actions. However, the environment around the agent (and the sensor) is continually changing, so it is hard to determine what steps the agent will take and what they will result in. In this way, the performance is evolutionary, because each action the agent takes may be different from the last. Creating bursts of light as well as evolving patterns through these machinelearning techniques, the self-organizing behaviour of the leds suggests Xenakis’s fascination with cosmological events, like the explosion of stars and supernovas. Counterpointing the pointillist visual scenography, multi-channel audio from the 156

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small speakers as well as the larger environment fills the space, shifting between sparse natural and dense electronic textures. Across the architectural structure, the network of tiny speakers produces the behaviours of mass sonic structures made up of many small elements (sonic grains) creating swarms of tiny sounds that resemble a field of cicadas or masses of insects. Termed an “electronic sculpture combining light, music and structures,” the original Polytope de Montréal for Expo 67 emerged from a commission by Robert Bordaz, the curator of the France Pavilion. Proposing a performative event consisting of an “interplay between light and sound through the available space and automated by computers,” Xenakis’s installation consisted of a Naum Gabo– inspired “transparent architecture” constructed from 200 gigantic steel cables, in lengths ranging from twenty-one to thirty metres and stretched through the inner atrium of the France Pavilion. Divided into five groups, each bundle of cables was instrumented with what Xenakis called “thousands of light sources” split in a corresponding set of five families of colour: white, blue, red, green, and yellow. 157

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Iannis Xenakis, Polytopes de Montréal, interior of France Pavilion, 1967. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM94-EX233-055 Opposite top Iannis Xenakis, scale drawing of the Polytope de Montréal, signed IX, dated (19)67. Reproduced with permission from Pendragon Press. Opposite bottom Excerpt from Iannis Xenakis’s light score of Polytope de Montréal, coloured pencils and pen, undated. Reproduced with permission from Pendragon Press.

Accompanying the installation was a six-minute orchestral composition diffused over four channels in the space. N-Polytope is by no means a recreation of Xenakis’s Polytopes, but rather a re-imagining that explores how Xenakis’s interest in probabilistic (“stochastic”) systems can be made sense of and kept alive today using new technologies that were unavailable to the composer during his lifetime. N-Polytope is thus an artistic response in grasping how Xenakis’s interest from more than fifty years ago in modelling the behaviour and patterns of nature and the cosmos in their exquisite fluctuations between order and disorder still powerfully resonates within our own historical moment of extreme instability in natural and artificial systems.

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Montréal délire (Delirious Montreal) Stéphane Gilot

According to [Robert] Altman, the film [Quintet] is set “probably in the future, or else in the present in a parallel world. It’s as if there were a mirror planet to ours – one in which life developed in a way roughly similar to ours. It is of no known culture.”1

Expo 67: More than a Semiotic Phantom For the exhibition In Search of Expo 67, I produced a work that operates like a small-scale pavilion: a studio and its practice program; a temporary microcommunity that presents the 1967 world exhibition as an “alternate existent.” This parallel and heterogeneous world, this laboratory of ideas, was unfortunately not “exported” to the city of Montreal. More than a semiotic phantom, Expo 67, with its huge potential for alternative forms and approaches, has been re-explored via the platform of the construction video game Minecraft. There were several reasons for this choice: the game’s geometry (cube and vector), its freedom of shareable creation (open source code), and its concept of “resources” (limited or unlimited). The pavilion is composed of several elements: three computer stations giving access to a server with a reconstruction of Expo 67 built using the medium of Minecraft (with its plastic constraints); a video projection showing images shot in this virtual Expo 67; a pentagonal table (a reference to the film Quintet); and a series of drawings.

Opposite top Stéphane Gilot, Montréal délire, 2017, view of installation. Opposite bottom Stéphane Gilot, Montréal délire (L’Écume des îles), 2017.

Video Projection The video projection combines a recording of a virtual rendering of the Expo 67 site with archival images that highlight the omnipresence of the cube and the grid in the original exposition installations. In the Minecraft sequences, viewers can follow a figure dressed in a yellow jumpsuit that references my video diptych composed of 3 Frontières (2006) and Dernier Baiser (2008), which feature a character wearing a space suit whose mission is to explore heritage sites – sites of creation and knowledge sharing. In the Minecraft reconstruction of Expo 67, the figure flies over the reconstructed islands of Notre-Dame and Sainte-Hélène, takes a ride on the Minirail, and ends up wandering through Buckminster Fuller’s dome. The soundtrack is composed of noises produced by the functioning monorail and musical extracts of works by composers Iannis Xenakis and Gilles Tremblay, who created pieces for the France and Quebec Pavilions. Quintet The 1979 film Quintet, by Robert Altman – which was filmed on the Expo 67 site – is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which social order is maintained by a game based on the pentagon, a central control mechanism established by the casinogovernment (echoing Jorge Louis Borges’s short story “The Lottery in Babylon”). The connection to the fate of the Quebec Pavilion is striking: its original high quality imbued it with a political and ethical significance that is still pertinent, owing principally to the architectural and functional disfigurement resulting from its subsequent transformation into a casino. Drawings The images produced for the exhibition are part of a series of drawings and watercolours that invoke forms of modelization, including the imaginary aerial views of Renaissance painting, the architectural prophecies of twentieth-century avantgarde movements, and online virtual spaces. Within my practice, different groups of drawings and watercolours have also enabled me to explore other thematic territories related mainly to visions of various kinds (hallucinations, altered states of consciousness, dreams, futurist urbanism, etc.), to theories and technologies that have become obsolete (optography and spirit photography, for example), and to mnemonic reconstructions (memory, déjà-vu, etc.). Underlying the pleasure I take in drawing is a desire to examine the relationships between representations of the world and the belief structures that shape our societies.

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Top and bottom Stéphane Gilot, Montréal délire, 2017, details, Minecraft video game platform.

Geometry I am fascinated by two formal approaches evident in the Expo 67 documents: triangulated architecture (similar to vectorial design) and the omnipresence of the cube (principally in screen devices, but also in the spatial organization of certain public areas and exhibitions). The most remarkable example of the latter is the organizational and programmatic concept of the Quebec Pavilion, which was based entirely on a use of two-foot-square cubes. The main elements of the decor, which highlighted ways of controlling the territory, such as “the mine,” “the tree,” and “water,” are disturbingly reminiscent of the aesthetic of the Minecraft video game. Cubes and Resources The Minecraft game features a self-generated and virtually infinite world based on sharing and development by the players (open source code). By adopting the cube as its basic “cell,” the game enables players to construct and deconstruct ad infinitum. In its own way the game reflects the dominant ideology of endless surplus value, the “empty world” fate of a planet on the point of exhaustion, the virtualization of commerce and overconsumption, and the flagrant increase in inequalities. The Paradox of the Cube In the mid-1980s, as video games developed, the pixel replaced the vector, although the latter was more elegant and formally richer. One paradoxical challenge of this project is that it promotes the vectorial forms of architecture so evident at Expo 67 (triangulations, steel spatial structures, etc.) by using the game Minecraft, which exploits the aesthetic and deliberately simplified structure of the cube. “‘The future’ does not exist, but futures insist; these are the futures of the past, retro-futures. Formed by other times than ours, they reach all the way to us like banks of mist, haunting our projects and our dreams, leading a muted but effective life in the heart of the present as it comes about. Yes, the true futures are these virtual futures.”2

Notes

1 Charles Mechner, Robert Altman: Interviews, ed. David Sterritt (Jackson, ms: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 2. 2 Alain Bublex and Elie During, The Future Does Not Exist: Retrotypes (Paris: Éditions B42, 2014).

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Le Huitième Jour, 1967-2017 (The Eighth Day, 1967–2017) Emmanuelle Léonard

Expo 67 was held in Montreal in 1967. Composed of national and thematic pavilions, the event was the setting for innovations in the realms of technology, aeronautics, and multi-screen cinema. Among the three religious pavilions was the Christian Pavilion, conceived by Quebec artist Charles Gagnon. The eight different denominations that sponsored the pavilion (Catholic, Anglican, Greek Orthodox, etc.) arrived at a consensus that avoided proselytism and classical religious images. Gagnon presented photographs and a thirteen-minute film, The Eighth Day, which used images from state and media archives to sketch a portrait of the century through the prism of developments in warfare technologies. My project involved the creation of a video installation composed of two sideby-side projections of archival material showing armed conflicts from 1967 to 2017. The documents come from different sources available on the internet: television, state and military archives, self-promotional recordings by guerrillas or accounts of their actions, propaganda from various camps. I concentrated on daily activities – people marching, making forays into the jungle, waiting around in makeshift camps, stepping over dead bodies. I included less well-known conflicts (not exclusively), which often reveal the precariousness of the everyday lives of soldiers making do with unsophisticated methods. The narrative follows the technological development of the image rather than of arms. So it moves from analogue to video, from hd digital to images captured by cell phone. It also reveals the emergence of new points of view opened up by drones, infrared detectors, nocturnal shooting, and cameras attached to soldiers’ helmets. The quality of the images reflects the path they have travelled, whether re-recorded many times, posted online amateurishly, or processed skilfully by professionals. The links between the two screens are established by repetitions, echoes, and contrasts that are reinforced by the soundtrack. The dual projection also allows

Above Emmanuelle Léonard, Le Huitième Jour, 1967-2017, 2017, video projection, showing Republic of Iraq, 2010s.

for simultaneous views – as in the war in Yugoslavia, which is documented by the different camps, including un soldiers in the role of stationary witnesses. The verbal accounts given by protagonists who address the camera directly are translated (from Armenian, Chechen, Afrikaans, Hmong, and Spanish). The internet has provided a platform for these sequences and their multiple authors – witnesses, partisans, fighters, or soldiers. The simplicity and accessibility of the new recording mechanisms has given rise to a plethora of images. This evolution of the image is not limited to technological questions but involves new authors and new spectators. In Charles Gagnon’s time, sources were identifiable and relatively few: does their current proliferation mean that armed conflicts are easier to understand? The actors behind the different views – whether an exhausted combatant or a drone – have become directors, but the story they tell is not the same. 166

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Locations of conflicts, in order of appearance Republic of Iraq, 2008 Republic of Iraq, 2010s Republic of Iraq, 2000s Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, 2009 Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, 2013 Republic of Iraq, 2014 Republic of Armenia and Republic of Azerbaijan, 2000s Republic of Armenia and Republic of Azerbaijan, 1994 Republic of Tajikistan, 1990s Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, 1990s Republic of Chechnya, 1999 Lao People’s Democratic Republic, 2000s Republic of India, 2000s Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, 2004 Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992 Republic of Chechnya, 1995

Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1995 Republic of Peru and Republic of Ecuador, 1995 Republic of Peru, 1990s Republic of El Salvador, 1980s Republic of Nicaragua, 1979 Republic of South Africa and Republic of Angola, 1988 Republic of Chad and and State of Libya, 1970s and 1980s Democratic Republic of Congo, 2014 Republic of Uganda, 1980s Republic of Angola, 1975 Republic of Uganda and United Republic of Tanzania, 1978 State of Israel and Arab Republic of Egypt, 1967 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1990 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1967 Province of Quebec, 1967

Previous page Emmanuelle Léonard, Le Huitième Jour, 1967-2017, 2017, film stills showing top to bottom: Republic of Nicaragua, 1979; Republic of Chad and State of Libya, 1970s and 1980s; and Democratic Republic of Congo, 2014; Lao People’s Democratic Republic, 2000s.

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Archival Remixes

Reprise Dave Ritter and Kathleen Ritter

A ditto, ditto device. '' '' '' '' A ditto, ditto device. '' '' '' '' A ditto, ditto device.1 '' '' '' ''

Our parents met in 1967 and got married that same year. We weren’t born until well into the next decade. We learned that they never went to Expo 67, but surely they would have been listening. We imagine them listening to many of these sounds, over the airwaves at that time. The spirit of Expo 67 – both a speculative futurism and a creeping dread inspired by new technology – came to their ears in a variety of ways, from experimental electronic music to reggae and lounge music recordings. Expo occasioned an explosion of auditory cultural output that was impossible to ignore. By the late 1960s, the massive upheavals in social and political relations were mirrored in the divergent forms of music that emerged. In the realm of electronic music in particular, new approaches to composition, both structured and conceptual, as well as aleatoric and drug-inspired, were fuelled by a growing fascination with the use of technology to produce sound. John Cage’s famous words, “Everything we do is music,” became a mantra for a generation of composers and musicians. Radical experimentation was the norm, and the limits of what was considered “music” were expanded to include, well, everything.

Opposite Dave Ritter and Kathleen Ritter, Reprise, 2017, views of installation.

Dave Ritter and Kathleen Ritter, Reprise, 2017, detail.

Our research began broadly by first looking at the shape electronic music took in the late 1960s, as it was a foundational decade that anticipated the rise of the remix, techno, hip hop, and DJ culture. We were struck by how enthusiastic musicians were to introduce new techniques like sampling and new instruments like the synthesizer to popular audiences. Some notable examples include Delia Derbyshire’s conceptual approaches to electronic sound, Steve Reich’s use of recorded speech, phasing patterns, and repetition, Daphne Oram’s instrumentalization of film and tape loops, and Glenn Gould’s use of overlapping voices. Alongside these experimentations, the commercial availability of instruments that manipulate electricity to produce sound, like the theremin, early analogue samplers, like the Mellotron, and modular synthesizers, such as those produced by Moog, fed the demand for a distinctive soundtrack that reflected the widespread obsession with new technologies, alternative realities, space travel, and the future. A number of important events took place specifically in 1967. That year saw the Mellotron come to prominence in recorded popular music with the Beatles’ release of Strawberry Fields Forever. In the same year, Steve Reich recorded Piano Phase, a conceptual piece in which two pianists repeat a twelve-note melodic figure that falls in and out of sync, similar to his previous sound experiments employing phasing patterns of appropriated speech. It was also the year in which 172

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Glenn Gould produced The Idea of North, an hour-long audio work for radio that employed Gould’s unusual technique of playing the voices of two or more people simultaneously, something he called “contrapuntal” radio.2 It was also the year that Marshall McLuhan published The Medium Is the Massage, a book co-created with Quentin Fiore that featured McLuhan’s signature aphorisms and repetition alongside appropriated images as a form of literary “sampling,” akin to the kind of sampling that was happening in experimental cinema and music. This list could go on; however, 1967 was invariably the year in which electronic music – as we know it today – took shape. By the time Expo opened in Montreal that summer, the islands were audibly electric. Gilles Tremblay’s electroacoustic Centre Élan, with recordings of sounds collected from across the province, was the music featured in the Quebec Pavilion. The sculptural sound compositions of the collective Fusion des Arts, including a mechanical music program, Les Mécaniques, was featured in the Youth Pavilion. In the Jeunesses Musicales Pavilion, Hugh Le Caine was demonstrating his Serial Sound Structure Generator, a forerunner of the modern sequencer. Otto Joachim’s

View of research material for Reprise, 2017.

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Cover and back cover of Reprise vinyl record.

composition, Katimavik, an experimental work on four-track tape, was commissioned by the Canada Pavilion. Off the islands, an entire cottage industry sprouted up around Expo 67, with souvenir records like Sounds of Expo 67, novelty singles like Pierre Lalonde’s Quand tu viendras à Montréal, and radio hits like Stéphane Venne’s “Un jour, un jour” broadcasting the spirit of Expo out into the world. These works captured the new sound of an era, one that was distinctively plugged-in. Listening to them again, fifty years later, gave us a moment to reflect. Throughout the music and cinema at Expo 67, the collage of visual and auditory elements from widely different sources in many ways anticipated the internet in its farreaching, encyclopedic, and global ambition. The internet was a source for much of our research. Our process was simple: we started collaborating by collecting material and sharing it with each other. We talked about what we were listening 174

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to. We took samples from the sources we found and organized them into musical arrangements, sending them back and forth until we felt that our compositions playfully captured the auditory effect of Expo 67 at a faster pace and with more layered density. This album is the result of this collaborative process – a reprise – of electronic music circa 1967. Notes

1 Marshall McLuhan with Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 123. 2 The term contrapuntal normally applies to music in which independent melody lines play simultaneously; this type of music, exemplified by J.S. Bach, was the major part of Gould’s repertoire.

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Above and opposite Liner notes of Reprise.

By the Time We Got to Expo Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze

By the Time We Got to Expo is a kinetic journey through Expo 67, revisiting Canada’s centennial through the symbols, choreographies, and built environments of the world exhibition and its construction of (inter)nationalism. By reworking archival footage, the film creates vibrant collisions of textures and forms in order to explore the surfaces, ideologies, and implications of the “meeting place” that was Expo 67. The film is a contemporary examination of past performances and rituals of nationalism. The official slogan of Expo 67 was “Man and His World,” an appropriately dominant and forceful message. The smooth tracking motion of the Minirail gives us views of, and from, the train. The viewer is led on a “Tour through a World Wonderland,” reminding us of how the train and the camera have worked together throughout film history to extend the tourist’s gaze. Expo 67 was a celebration of Canada’s Confederation, when the individual British colonies (now provinces) united as one country. A central part of the Canada Pavilion was named “Katimavik,” the Inuit word for “gathering place”; architect Rod Robbie drew inspiration for its inverted pyramid design from a glass ashtray he found in his office. During the same decade as Expo 67 a number of atrocities were being committed against Indigenous peoples, including the Sixties Scoop, where an estimated 20,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were removed from their families and put up for adoption or placed in foster care. The two vintage films that were used as source material for By the Time We Got to Expo (Expo 67 by Castle Films and Impressions of Expo 67 produced by the National Film Board of Canada) contain an overarching sense of optimism and a tone of excitement. Shot in bright colours, Impressions of Expo 67 takes us on a journey through Expo on the Minirail, exploring the different pavilions, each one Opposite Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze, By the Time We Got to Expo, 2015, video projection.

Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze, By the Time We Got to Expo, 2015, film still.

a carefully crafted geometric structure. At Expo 67 we see the entire world distilled into a miniature playground that all but ignores all political implications, conflicts, and tensions. Through photochemical and digital manipulation of the images from the two films and Josh Bonnetta’s otherworldly analogue soundtrack, crafted from optical elements of the original archival films, we attempt to make “the familiar strange,” while bringing these fifty-year-old images into the present. Using techniques of repetition and remediation, the film uncovers what has been hidden amidst the fray of pomp and ceremony. The images were transformed through re-photography onto black-and-white hand-processed film. By inverting the colours and rendering the image in negative, people become ghostly figures, forms, and masses. Black-and-white images were washed with solid colours. Sections of footage were tinted red, blue, and yellow. Hand-colouring the footage allows us to transform its original meaning and context while creating dimensions and textures.

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Cover of the box of the Castle Films 8-mm souvenir film of Expo 67.

In the final section of the film, footage of the pavilions is degraded using the mordançage process. Treated with photochemical bleach, the emulsion peels away and bubbles up. The now familiar images of Expo 67 become fluid and unstable. As the emulsion pulls away, folds in upon itself, and comes untethered from the filmstrip, we are reminded of the artifice of world exhibitions’ pageantry and how these ideas can be viewed through a contemporary lens.

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Above and following pages Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyê˜n, 1967: A People Kind of Place, 2012, video projection.

1967: A People Kind of Place Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyê˜n

On 3 June 1967, the world’s first unidentified flying object landing pad was inaugurated in St Paul. The small Albertan town was then baptized “The Centennial Star” for the quantity, quality, and originality of its activities by the Centennial Committee in Ottawa. The disembarking station was built as a symbol of keeping space free from human warfare. Next to the pad, the sign still reads today: “The area under the World’s First ufo Landing Pad was designated international by the Town of St Paul as a symbol of our faith that mankind will maintain the outer universe free from national wars and strife. That future travel in space will be safe for all intergalactic beings, all visitors from earth or otherwise are welcome to this territory and to the Town of St Paul.” Paul Hellyer, former minister of national defence, officially unveiled the monument, and his speech for the inauguration can be found in the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. During the making of Space Fiction & the Archives – including the film 1967: A People Kind of Place – I conducted three field trips to St Paul. The two initial trips took place in the summer of 2010 and the third one in the winter of 2011. They allowed me to establish initial contacts with the key actors behind the building of the ufo landing pad. I interviewed local residents to collect multiple, conflicting, and subjective voices. I had the invaluable opportunity to speak with a variety of individuals: Roland Rocque, former member of the Chamber of Commerce of St Paul, who kindly shared with me his personal archives, which included scrapbooks, photo albums, and Super 8 mm film reels related to the local activities of the era; Jim Moroney, founder of the Alberta ufo group, who was able to confirm that no sightings had been recorded in the area during the years prior the Centennial celebrations; Margo Lagasse, who initiated the project when the idea arose late one evening while having dinner with her husband John Lagasse, member of the Chamber of Commerce, and his colleagues; and Fernand Belzil, a local expert on cattle mutilation.

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyê˜n, 1967: A People Kind of Place, 2012, film still.

In addition, I thoroughly researched the archives housed at the St Paul Historical Museum where I could find, amongst many other things, the St Paul Journal, a weekly newspaper that has recorded the life of the community since 1924. I also conducted research at the William C. Wonders Map Collection of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s archives in Toronto, and the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal. The town of St Paul, formerly known as Saint-Paul-des-Métis, was founded by Father Albert Lacombe in 1895. Encouraged by the federal government to establish an agricultural colony for the Métis people, this strategic placement of Roman Catholic presence in the region was a hindrance for the increasing number of Protestant settlers. Quickly thereafter, the “planned failure” to create an Aboriginal community in the area was opened for homesteads, particularly for the FrenchCanadian settlers. Today, St Paul is a bilingual town and includes the presence of 186

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Aboriginal communities, although they are located mostly on the margins of the town’s civic life. The presence of Métis in the town’s name was dropped, as were the Métis people. One of my interviewees, Melanie Desjardins (née Janvier), a survivor of the residential school Blue Quills in St Paul, generously shared her experience of the centenary celebrations. She recalls students needing to perform a play titled Hello World, whose script was written by the priests and nuns of the school. Desjardins says the students “had to depict the different nationalities [in St Paul]. There was a French group, a Ukrainian group, and there was even an Irish group. I think we were perhaps Mexicans. Aboriginals? No, and I don’t remember anything about the Métis.” This was illustrative of how Canada’s 100th anniversary may feel, for some, to be a celebration of erasure rather than of unity. In this work, both immigration policy and architectural modernism are cast through an analytic prism offered by the cultural and technological advances of the space age. By bringing together these disparate terrains, my project suggests a nuanced understanding of policy-making, unconditional hospitality, and the Other, i.e., the alien approaching for its landing. In other words, the ufo landing pad is a conceptual vessel for offering an analysis of the emergence of multiculturalism as state policy. However, there remains the question of whom multiculturalism should serve so that it does not perpetuate a colonial history. And can the ufo landing pad help us to think about diversity differently?

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Top Caroline Martel, Spectacles du monde, 2017, thirty-five-channel video installation, showing KinoAutomat. Bottom Caroline Martel, Spectacles du monde, 2017, thirty-five-channel video installation, showing We Are Young!

Spectacles of the World: Expo 67 as an Optical Amusement Park Caroline Martel, in collaboration with Mathieu Bouchard-Malo

The installation Spectacles du monde was an opportunity to transpose my documentary art practice onto a radical multi-screen configuration. An application of in-depth research into the expanded film works created for Expo 67, it also allowed me to explore editing techniques for a platform that was in itself spectacular: the thirty-five screens of the busy public area in the Espace culturel Georges-Émile-Lapalme at the Place des Arts. An installation composed entirely of archival material was new to the screen mosaic, and in order to take full possession of it, my editor-collaborator Mathieu Bouchard-Malo and I eventually realized that we had to try to make the images work on a primary graphic level. It was the first time I was integrating historical images into a digital interface whose parameters were extremely strict but whose possibilities were, at the same time, infinite. As a documentary artist, my strategy is to explore existing subjects or objects by finding ways to reveal them – through my approach and my handling of the medium – that are inspired by, and that remain, in some way, true to them. This involves an initial research stage and a period during which I familiarize myself with the material. In contrast to a researcher who enters keywords into a database in order to find, I sought instead to understand how Expo 67 had been seen, documented and archived. Trawling through thousands of archival records one by one, I tried to remain in search mode. For Spectacles du monde, I consulted close to 4,000 records at Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Library and Archives Canada, the Centre d’histoire de Montréal, and the Société RadioCanada; this meant many days of viewing during which (pardon the cliché) I had the feeling I was travelling back in time. The longer I steeped myself in images of Montreal’s universal exposition, the more I felt that they were anything but passé. Rather than appearing nostalgic or kitsch, they seemed excitingly modern.

Caroline Martel, Spectacles du monde, 2017. View of the installation showing La Création du monde. Opposite Caroline Martel, Spectacles du monde, 2017. View of the installation showing The Eighth Day.

The multi-screen, multimedia, montage, and cinematic installation works that we revisited guided us in creating the installation. The artists we cited had done extraordinary things with linear analogue techniques by paying particular attention to the spirit behind the images they were employing, the role they were assigning to spectators, and the experiential spaces they would create. These audiovisual and media-based works encouraged us to revisit Expo 67 as if it were an “optical amusement park.”1 From the outset, it was also my aim to make the spectator aware of how the very structure of the Place des Arts mosaic had its source in the innovations of the Montreal world exhibition. The directions our reflection took were the result of a constant confrontation with the multi-screen installation form. There were many questions: How should we divide directing and editing – concretely, in our work method, but also in considering who, ultimately, would be the author? How could we develop a visual choreography that would allow our mosaic to attract attention from a distance and transform passersby into spectators? In the many windows of our installation, 190

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Caroline Martel, Spectacles du monde, 2017. View of the installation showing La Création du monde.

how could we show films already created in the multi-screen format? How could we “re-mediate” them while at the same time historicizing them? Since my artistic approach is closer to the documentary than to the various forms of appropriation montage (remix, mash-up, sampling, etc.), the fundamental question governing our choices was this: What can the mosaic device add to the rediscovery of the revisited works? The fact that the majority were created in situ and/or designed for unique and temporary arrangements of screens meant that it would be impossible to reconstruct the original experience in most cases. Then how could the mosaic interface be used as a revealer? Just what kind of rereading is generated by thirty-five screens? Spectacles du monde became a prism, a kind of kaleidoscope that multiplied and diffracted the images. Soon enough, though, because it was conceived specifically for the multi-screen interface at the Place des Arts, it itself became an ephemeral work that was never seen again in its initial form. 192

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In the archival material from half a century ago, it is envisaged how spectators will be able to involve themselves more deeply in the images of the future by either influencing the order of sequences or editing, in their mind’s eye, the images of multiple screens. This documentation also made us realize the degree to which, ultimately, the era’s new relationship to the image was shaped by the growing role people were playing in multiplying Spectacles du monde by means of the lightweight cameras that had recently become available. New narrative forms, interactivity, immersive environments, an abundance of photographic and moving images … are we talking about 1967? I hope the people passing through the Place des Arts took pleasure in immersing themselves in our installation and conjugating, in past, present, and future tenses, its multiple and multiplied images. The seven works of expanded cinema and cinematic installations revisited in Spectacles du monde are: The Creation of the World, the Diapolyecran by Josef Svoboda, presented with its 15,000 slides at the Czechoslovakia Pavilion; Ripples, an experimental short film by Jim Henson whose multiplied images were screened to a soundtrack by Raymond Scott. It was entered in the Man and His World competition organized by the Montreal World Film Festival at the Expo-Théâtre; The Eighth Day, a montage film by Charles Gagnon daringly conceived for the Christian Pavilion; KinoAutomat, an interactive film and theatrico-technical performance by Radúz Cˇincˇera, which was a major success at the “very audiovisual” Czechoslovakia Pavilion; We Are Young!, an impressive multiscreen work by Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid, shown at the Canadian Pacific Railway-Cominco Pavilion; Percorso / Plurimo / Luce, a mysterious cinematic installation by Emilio Vedova shown with a soundtrack of original music by Marino Zuccheri, at the Italy Pavilion; and Citérama, a groundbreaking multimedia installation by Jacques Languirand and his collaborators shown at the thematic Man in the Community Pavilion.

Note

1 Judith Shatnoff, “Expo 67: A Multiple Vision,” Film Quarterly 21, no. 1 (autumn 1967): 2, quoted in Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan, eds, Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 14n31.

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Spectacles of the World

Expo 67 and the Missing Archive, the Anarchive, and the Counter-Archive Janine Marchessault

What do we make of the fact that many of Canada’s more daring film and media experiments were lost when Expo 67, which is often characterized as a celebration of media, concluded on 29 October 1967?1 It is important to remember that the archive is also an archive of ways of thinking in particular eras, as Michel Foucault has underlined – it is a record of what can be said and thought in certain places and times.2 To some degree the disappearance of films and media from Montreal’s world exhibition is a product of a particular way of thinking about media in 1967. Many of the films, especially the multi-screen films, were never properly archived. Many of the most exciting film experiments ever created in Canada were lost, and some of the most significant titles are still missing. Labyrinth’s three-chamber filmic event is still missing two 55 mm films from chamber one. Other films that have been found were digitally restored and screened at In Search of Expo 67. Jacques Languirand (director of Citérama) recalls going for a job interview at an advertising agency a few months after Expo 67 closed and the president of the company had a piece of the Citérama installation (a glass brick) on his desk. Languirand referred to the end of Expo 67 as a depression (after the euphoria that some artists felt working during the exhibition) and a disorganized dispersion of materials.3 One institution that might have helped to organize the dispersion of Expo materials was the Public Archives of Canada (pac) in Ottawa.4 The year of Montreal’s world exhibition was both a fantastic and a difficult year for pac. On the one hand, there was a new $13 million building close to Parliament Hill and the Supreme Court of Canada, which first opened its doors on 20 June 1967. There were also some showcase projects that were intended to be completed for the Centenary celebrations at pac. Canadian archivist Jay Atherton published an article in the American Archivist describing efforts to create one of the first auto-

mated finding aids in the world for the Sir John A. Macdonald Papers as well as other collections. At that time, the projects were far behind schedule and indeed, not completed in time for the celebrations. In Atherton’s opinion, automation, which was a “dirty” word to many of his colleagues at pac, would one day transform the very nature of archives. But in 1967 it was slow going.5 To be sure there was no one archivist equipped to handle the experimental film and media produced for Expo 67 – media that relied upon the very viewing situation (the new expanded screens and theatres) to be experienced, let alone preserved.6 One historical incident in 1967 could have affected the possible collection of Expo’s film materials. In July a devastating nitrate fire broke out in a storage facility near Montreal under the care of the National Film Board of Canada (nfb). The fire destroyed a significant portion of Canada’s film history, destroying films produced from the beginnings of cinema up to the 1950s. While this fire spurred the government to give pac permission to create a national film acquisition program in 1969, it would be another seven years before the National Film and Television Archives was properly established in 1976. This is years after the editor of the Canadian Film Weekly, Hye Bossin, wrote an impassioned manifesto for a film archive in 1949.7 Thus there was no one physical place to deposit or collect the Expo 67 media materials. I would like to briefly consider another possible reason for the failure to archive Expo 67’s film experiments. Leaving aside the fact that any archive would have been ill equipped to collect and catalogue the complex media experiments of the event, we need to ask why there was no “legacy plan” for Expo 67.8 Perhaps it was because Montreal’s world exhibition needed to come together in an unprecedented short period of time, as documented in Expo 67 Mission Impossible (2017), the extraordinary documentary by Guylaine Maroist, Michel Barbeau, and Eric Ruel made possible by a collaboration between Productions de la Ruelle and Library and Archives Canada. The documentary revisits the military precision of the immense project to design and construct the Expo 67 site. Moreover, it also foregrounds the role that marketing and advertising played in supporting the future-oriented vision of Yves Jasmin (head of advertising) and Harvard-trained MBA Philippe de Gaspé Beaubien that made Expo 67 a popular success. Such a vision coincided with Marshall McLuhan’s “global village,” or, as he preferred to call it, the “global theatre,” described in his widely read Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) as an effect of the electric media that contracts the globe into a new intimate space of instantaneous communication.9 The ongoing nature

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of the film events, their often seamless integration with the architecture, that sense of “the enduring ephemeral,” as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has described the conflation of storage and memory, would certainly have worked against any thought to archive these new forms of media.10 There were at least two contradictory and interrelated experiences of media at Expo: the highly specialized architectonics of cinema spectatorship, and amateur media-making, especially photography and filmmaking. There was, on the one hand, a celebration of the new performative, multi-sensory aspects of the projected image onto a diversity of large screens and in particular the multi-screen films. The new multi-screen film was seen as a medium that would reshape the human sensorium. As Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid, the makers of the six-screen film We Are Young, put it in their 1966 pamphlet Expanding Cinema, The use of multiple screen opens up responses in ways formally restricted to sculpture and painting … The multiple screen operates in two basic ways: 1) enlargement of a single panoramic picture area to more nearly envelop the audience, thereby causing them to share almost physically the world through which the film moves and unfolds its story; 2) projecting different images side by side in carefully worked out juxtapositions to produce a variety of results, such as revealing human universality beneath superficial cultural differences.11 This universality is based on making cinema tactile (connecting it to sculpture and painting) and creating a spectatorial experience that is embodied and pluralistic. This may, however, seem to be at odds with the new forms of do-it-yourself culture, which opened up the participatory spaces of conviviality and spontaneous expression that modern urban planners and architects had been advocating since the 1940s. Indeed, another story could be told about Expo 67’s smaller screens, which, like the enormous multi-screen installations, broke down the division between production and consumption. A random sampling of these films is available on YouTube, many of which were shot on Super 8, the automatic-load camera that had replaced regular 8 mm as the first affordable recording technology of choice in 1965. At Expo, Kodak Canada advertised the new Super-8 camera with an elaborate water screen through which “pictures [appeared to] grow … out of nowhere” and offered to teach people how to shoot the exhibition in a professional manner, which means making the filmmaker invisible. This might explain why so many of these films tend to look alike, simply because they share a certain 196

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visual professional technique as anonymous documentations of buildings, views, and crowds without the expressive intimacy or focus on the family that would give them a distinguishing mark. It is also the architecture and the overall design of the site that invites and constructs the views built to be photographed. Arguably, the answer for the lack of any official moving image archive is connected to something McLuhan said about Expo when he was interviewed on the cbc for bbc’s world’s first satellite broadcast Our World – the experiment that linked five continents by satellite. For McLuhan the multi-screen events and smaller forms of recording at Expo represented a new participatory way of engaging with the world: “an X-ray through the cultural mosaic in which everyone can contribute not as spectators but as participants.” The X-ray is how McLuhan described television – the a-visuality of the X-ray is all part of an auditory space, a characteristic of the “centre without margins” mediated North America of 1950s television that Expo dramatized.12 How would one go about archiving such a world or such an event? But most importantly, why would one need to, since the mediated looped world of Expo appeared endless and all inclusive – and, according to McLuhan, totally participatory.13 Indeed, we could argue that Expo 67’s zeitgeist is to be found in the process aesthetics of live television, as many writers have argued – especially, Gene Youngblood in his Expo 67–inspired book Expanded Cinema.14 According to Herbert Zettle’s famous account of the difference between film and television, “The filmic event is largely medium dependent, while television in its essence (live) is largely event dependent.”15 By this logic, such an emphasis on event rather than medium means that in its essence we might understand Expo 67 as an event that is anarchival.

The Anarchive and the Counter-Archive While the official national archive of Expo 67 did not succeed in capturing the event, an informal Expo 67 anarchive has continued to grow and change since it was seeded on the internet, encouraged by sites that invite people to post and remediate their memories of Expo 67, their photographs, and films. Certainly the internet is not an archive in the traditional sense. Wolfgang Ernst has argued that the internet is an anarchive and possibly a library: it is “a distributed system” he says, “of more or less connected collections … in fact the catalogue of this dynalibrary changes with its referential contents in real-time.”16 It is accessible from 197

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many different places, making it contrary to the classical powers of the arcanum, and radically differs in its qualities from the traditional nature of the archive, which is to safeguard, to store and set apart. Search engines of the internet create collections anew without regard for the genealogical contexts of documents. Ernst tells us that the internet is rather “a performance theatre of regenerative e-poetry based on what Walter Ong called Secondary Orality.”17 This reference to Ong’s work on orality as an intrinsic aspect of electronic cultures, while certainly not without problems, does represent some of the more recent work on cultures of the internet in new kinds of remediation and performance. 18 The anarchival for Ernst is a creative methodology that serves “as a form of counter-knowledge production, as a dynamic that unlocks, liberates the archive.”19 This connects nicely to Expo 67 as an ongoing, never-ending research project in the sense of its being an active searching, opening up the archives.20 Ong was a student of McLuhan’s, and his work references a new kind of acoustic space that McLuhan and the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter spent many years trying to understand. They sought to describe some of the post-war media cultures of the 1950s in their Explorations seminar at the University of Toronto; media cultures were redefining quotidian experiences around the globe, which they believed came together at Expo.21 In this sense, the internet is the most appropriate archive for the processoriented acoustic energies that we find expressed in Expo’s presentness. For Ernst the so-called internet archive is “hypertemporal” rather than “hyperspatial, based on the aesthetic of immediate feedback, recycling and refreshing rather than on the ideal of the locked-away storage for eternity.”22 The Expo 67 online archive is perhaps a “total archive” in the Canadian archival tradition of heterogeneous materials, which are always in flux. This is what distinguishes Canada’s unique approach to archives, the mixing of media, textual and different archival elements.23 Yet the internet archive, if it remains open to the present as art, might enable what the former National archivist of Canada Jean-Pierre Wallot argued was the ultimate goal of archivists: to “build a living memory for the history of our present.” I want to turn now to several of the film and media works found in In Search of Expo 67. The Internet as a generative archive is seen most pointedly in Philip Hoffman, Eva Kolcze, and Josh Bonetta’s film, By the Time We Got to Expo, based entirely on fragments of two films (one an nfb film, Impressions of Expo 67 by William Brind, and the other an educational, souvenir film) from the internet, which they reshot off a digital screen on 16 mm film and hand-processed, tinted, toned, and chemi198

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cally manipulated to create a sense of decay and temporal instability – but also renewal. Chemicals – in particular mordançage and the bleach bath – were used to peel and bend the emulsion, unfixing the gelatin, making it malleable, moving it off its stable anchorage in its mylar base. On film, the work of By the Time We Got to Expo is released to the elements – air, humidity, light, dust, and fluids, and thus a process of temporal decay, which reveals layers of newly generated meanings as the image is etched away – it moves into the realm of animation and almost seems to breathe as it shudders awake. The sound is likewise subjected to analog remediation, remediated as feedback loop using analog sound – loud hums, scratches, and recording the sound of film emulsion through the 16 mm film projector. Thus the film returns to analog but with a difference – its previous representational framework is peeled away to reveal an abstraction of the past – of what came before as an image of the past – causing a vortex to open up between past and future. As Wyndham Lewis said of the Vortex,24 The chemistry of the Present is different to that of the Past. With this different chemistry we produce a New Living Abstraction…. We wish the Past and Future with us, the Past to mop up our melancholy, the Future to absorb our troublesome optimism. With our Vortex the Present is the only active thing. Life is the Past and the Future. The Present is Art. A temporal vortex is precisely what Indigenous artist Geronimo Inutiq produces in his installation Ensemble / Encore, Together / Again, Katimakainnarivugut, which brings together two video projections, a colour tv program devoted to Katimavik, prints, a dance floor infused with Katimavik graphics, and an electroacoustic soundtrack. Located at the Canada Pavilion, Katimavik, which in the language of the Inuit of the arctic means “meeting” or “gathering place,” was a highly iconic inverted pyramid that stood nine storeys tall (see pages 102–3). Inutiq’s installation represents a remediation of the architecture – processed and dematerialized into barely recognizable forms to create an embodied visceral engagement with the idea of meeting place and Canadian nationalism. The video projections display images sourced from the Prelinger archive available online for download and remediation. The different shapes in the projections are processed through crystallizing and mirroring filters to create dispersions and disorienting loops. These generate highly technologized and disembodied kaleidoscopic abstractions 199

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in which the architecture is barely recognizable, replaced instead with a machinic representation of “togetherness” enforced by an abstract processor. The installation’s audio work is inspired by Otto Joachim’s highly experimental synthesizer compositions created for Katimavik. Joachim, one of the early innovators in electroacoustic and aleatory composition, created tonal abstractions that stood in stark contrast to the popular music of 1967. Inutiq (previously also known as dj madeskimo) refashions several of the avant-garde techniques that Joachim innovated and multiplies them using similar technologies and audio treatments. Inutiq’s installation remediates the media materials of Katimavik to position them in a new historical configuration. Remediation takes the form of the re-recording of fragments or whole works of audiovisual materials to represent them in a new context that generates perceptual modalities that invite dialogue. This is what another archival project that grew out of Expo 67’s “archive” seeks to create as well. Space Fiction & the Archives comprises the film 1967: A People Kind of Place and an installation of archival materials from Canada’s centenary by Vietnamese-Québécoise artist Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyê˜n. The artist happened upon a story about immigration and Expo 67, which resulted in the creation of her own physical archive. The film and exhibition explore the story of the small Alberta town of St Paul, which erected the world’s first “ufo Landing Pad,” which was declared a “symbol of Western hospitality” by Paul Hellyer, then minister of national defence, who gave a speech at its inauguration. The idea of alien hospitality attracted Nguyê˜n because it reflected significant changes in Canada’s immigration policies and the introduction of a point system, along with the blueprints for Canadian multiculturalism. Nguyê˜n created a subsequent project after doing research on Canada’s archives around multiculturalism and found them to be sorely lacking in materials by Canada’s post-1967 immigrant communities. This inspired her to create her own archive and invite immigrant communities to upload their archives. This is an ongoing participatory community project with Gendai Gallery in Toronto and most recently Grunt Gallery in Vancouver called The Making of an Archive; it is an experiment that may offer new forms of interculturalism rather than multiculturalism. Such projects are counter-archival engagements with official archives. As Ernst describes, they liberate the archive and they create new archives and discursive spaces that bring in diverse points of view. Rather than working with archival material as an object, so many of the installations and films in In Search of Expo 67 foreground the work of history as one of remediation of the experience of media. This is true in the archive-infused installations of Dave Ritter and Kathleen 200

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Ritter and Caroline Martel. In the Ritters’ lively installation Reprise, a colourful space surrounded with abstract geometrical shapes and bean bag seating very much in the spirit of Expo’s design aesthetic invites viewers to play the vinyl record the team composed. The vinyl record was created by remediating some of the most iconic and lasting electro-acoustic experiments and sounds produced for Expo. The room itself invites listeners to lose themselves in sound, in the auditory space eerily between past and present. In Martel’s work, Spectacles du monde, seven original multi-screen films from Expo were reinterpreted across a thirty-five monitor videowall at the Espace culturel Georges-Émile-Lapalme of the Place des Arts. This project remediated the affective experiences created by the original films by carefully re-editing the films to accommodate the expanded space. Martel did extensive historical and archival research for the project, and her installation preserves the intentionality of the original films even as it remediates them across the twenty-first-century media landscape of the videowall. The multiplied screens of Spectacles du monde are ephemeral in a profound way. It forges fleeting aesthetic and philosophical conversations with its source materials that reflect on the complex sensory experience of simultaneity that came into being with live television. Counter-archives are generative. As Brett Kashmere has argued, “An incomplete and unstable repository, an entity to be contested and expanded through clandestine acts, a space of impermanence and play,” the counter-archive “entails mischief and imagination, challenging the record of official history.” As an aesthetic tactic, counter-archiving “pushes our archival impulse into new territories, encouraging critique and material alteration/fabrication…. To counter-archive is to counteract, to rewrite, to animate over … a take-and-give thing … a negotiation.”25 Nguyê˜n’s archives seek to historicize differently, to disrupt conventional national narratives, to write difference into public accounts. They are also responsive and responsible to particular communities; in other words, they provide alternative models and participatory vortices of engaged archiving practice, where access is a priority. Thus as archives are opened up and augmented, they teach us something, they adapt and grow in response to community as they create it. Leah Lievrouw suggests that remediation “borrows, modifies, samples, and remixes existing content, forms and expressions to create new works, relationships, interactions and meanings.”26 Remediation is also a creative strategy based on the work of memory. The archive here becomes a method, a medium, and a deeply relational practice that opens dialogue to create a grammar and aesthetic experience from the material detritus of history. 201

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Notes

1 While the Expo site continued to operate for several more years after the conclusion of the world exhibition, most of the original multi-screen events did not continue to run. 2 Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). 3 Interview with Jacques Languirand, Montreal (4 June 2010 – author with Seth Feldman). For more on Citérama see my “Citérama: Expo as Media City,” in Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67, ed. Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault, 79–104 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 79–104. 4 The Public Archives of Canada was renamed the National Archives of Canada in 1987, and subsequently merged with the National Library of Canada and renamed Library and Archives Canada in 2004. 5 Jay Atherton, “Mechanization of the Manuscript Catalogue at the Public Archives of Canada,” American Archivist 30, no. 2 (April 1967): 303–9. 6 Take Labyrinth’s three chambers – like so many of the multi-screen film events at Expo 67, it was a film project that could not exist separately from the building and technologies that supported its projection. In other words, even if the films are lost, they arguably were lost once the event was completed because they offered unique experiences tied to the phenomenologies of the event. This is the case with many expanded cinema experiments where the original experience of the film cannot be recaptured, but only approximated in later years. 7 Hye Bossin, “A Plea for a Canadian Film Archive (1949),” in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures, ed. Scott MacKenzie, 533–4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 8 Media art installations working with technologies that are quickly obsolete continue to present a problem for archives today. See Jean Gagnon’s project Documentation and Conservation of the Media Arts Heritage, http://www.docam.ca/en/conservation-guide.html. 9 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Berkeley: Gingko, 2003), 6. 10 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (Autumn 2008), 148–71. 11 This was a pamphlet produced to accompany the screening in 1967, n.p. 12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIvphI8aCwE, accessed 25 July 2017. 13 That McLuhan enjoins “backwards people” to join the revolution and get “into the picture” underscores the deep-seated colonial aspects of the technological humanism that accompanies the global village discourse of Expo, often dubbed McLuhan’s Fair. 14 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970). 15 Herbert Zettle, “The Rare Case of Television Aesthetics,” Journal of the University Film Association 30, no. 2 (1978): 3–8 (emphasis in original text). 16 Wolfgang Ernst, “Cultural Archive versus Technomathematical Storage,” in The Archive of Motion, ed. Eivind Røssaak (Olso: Novus, 2010), 64. 17 Ernst, “Cultural Archive,” 67–8. 18 See Jonathan Sterne, “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality,” Canadian Journal of Communication 36, no. 2 (2011): 207–25. 19 Wolfgang Ernst, “From the Archive to the Anarchival Impulse and Back Again,” Mnemoscape 1, https://www.mnemoscape.org/single-post/2014/09/04/Between-the-Archive-andthe-Anarchivable-by-Wolfgang-Ernst. 202

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20 CINEMAexpo67.ca, which is the work of archivists, curators, and media scholars, is a good example of the open-ended nature of such research. 21 Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault, Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 6–12. 22 Darroch and Marchessault, Cartographies of Place, 68. 23 Archives conceived as a dynamic continuum tied to actions (rather than disconnected and sealed off from the world) reflects a defining characteristic of Canadian archivists’ contribution to archival theory and practice, which was since the very beginning of Canadian archival practice tied to the “Total Archives” approach. For an in-depth discussion of the history of Total Archives in Canada, see Laura Millar, “Discharging Our Debt: The Evolution of the Total Archives Concept in English Canada,” Archivaria 46 (Fall 1998): 103–39. 24 Wyndham Lewis, Blast (London, June 1914). 25 Brett Kashmere, “Introduction, Counter-Archive,” incite Journal of Experimental Media 2 (2010). 26 Leah A. Lievrouw, “Oppositional New Media, Ownership, and Access: From Consumption to Reconfiguration and Remediation,” in Media Ownership: Research and Regulation, ed. Ronald E. Rice, 391–416 (Cresskill, nj: Hampton, 2008).

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Graeme Ferguson, Polar Life, 1967, view of the three-channel video installation at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2017.

Original Films from Expo 67

Motion, 1967. Directed by Vincent Vaitiekunas. Poster designed by Associés libres. Opposite Motion, 1967. Directed by Vincent Vaitiekunas. Screen shot. Courtesy of Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal.

Conflict, 1967. Directed by Michel Brault. Poster designed by Associés libres. Opposite Conflict, 1967. Directed by Michel Brault. Screen shot. Courtesy of Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal.

Canada Is My Piano, 1967. Directed by George Dunning, Bill Sewell, and Alan Ball. Poster designed by Associés libres. Opposite Canada Is My Piano, 1967. Directed by George Dunning, Bill Sewell, and Alan Ball. Screen shot. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.

The Earth Is Man’s Home, 1967. Directed by Nick and Ann Chaparos. Poster designed by Associés libres. Opposite The Earth Is Man’s Home, 1967. Directed by Nick and Ann Chaparos. Screen shot. Courtesy of Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal.

Earth Is Man’s Home, 1967. Directed by Nick and Ann Chaparos. Screen shots. Courtesy of Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal. Opposite Kaleidoscope at Expo 67. Poster designed by Associés libres.

Cover of American Cinematographer, special issue “Films at the Canadian World’s Fair,” August 1967. Reproduced with the permission of American Cinematographer.

List of Works

Unless otherwise noted, the works are in the collection of the artists jean-pierre aubé Kaléidoscope II, 2017 Video installation: four randomly sequenced videos, thirty-four minutes, sound; two computers, modular synthesizer, modified microscope, microcontroller marie-claire blais and pascal grandmaison Le Chemin de l’énigme, 2017 hd video projection, thirteen minutes, sound simon boudvin Trophées (Montréal 1967–2017), 2017 Eighteen ink-jet prints, 91 x 61 cm each stéphane gilot Montréal délire, 2017 Installation 2067 – Cour internationale de Justice. Siège des crimes écologiques de Montréal, two drawings: lead pencil, coloured pencil, watercolour on paper; Quintet, drawing: lead pencil, coloured pencil, watercolour, and collage on paper; L’Écume des îles, drawing: lead pencil, coloured pencil, watercolour, and collage on paper; Minecraft video game platform; table, wood and metal; computers. Video projection, twelve minutes, forty-five seconds, sound

jacqueline hoàng nguyê˜n 1967: A People Kind of Place, 2012 Super 8-mm, 16-mm, and 35-mm film transferred to sd video, twenty minutes, sound philip hoffman and eva kolcze By the Time We Got to Expo, 2015 Hand-processed 16-mm and Super 8-mm film, and digital video, nine minutes, six seconds, sound geronimo inutiq Ensemble / Encore, Together / Again, Katimakainnarivugut, 2017 Installation Videos: ensemblevideo1, ten minutes, ensemblevideo2, twenty-three minutes, forty-seven seconds, ensemblevideotv, three minutes Soundtrack: encore, sixteen minutes Digital prints on aluminum: wolfalert, 61 x 81 cm, caribougradient, 81 x 81 cm Digital image prints on photoboard: lichen on rock, arctic ground shrub, underwater bike and antlers, lichen on rock2, 40.5 x 61 cm each leisure (meredith carruthers and susannah wesley) Panning for Gold / Walking You Through It, 2017 Digital prints on canvas with ink wash, Pan Abode cedar logs, silkscreened nylon vests, typed letter from Cornelia Hahn Oberlander to Polly Hill outlining her project description for the Environment for Creative Play and Learning, typed summary of workshop on Children’s Creative Centre by Polly Hill. emmanuelle léonard Le Huitième Jour, 1967-2017, 2017 Video projection, thirteen minutes, sound duane linklater Earth Mother Hair, Indian Hair, and Earth Mother Eyes, Indian Eyes, Animal Eyes, 2017 Paint on interior wall of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, from a series of small paintings of eyes and hair based on a photo of Norval Morrisseau’s

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Earth Mother with Her Children (1967), painting labour by Julie Ouellet, absence of the artist. From Earth Mother with Her Children, 1967 Paint on wood panel exterior of the Indians of Canada Pavilion, from original drawing, interpretation by Carl Ray, censorship by diand, absence of Norval Morrisseau. caroline martel Spectacles du monde, 2017 Thirty-five-channel video installation: television film, and audio archives transferred to digital media, thirty-five screens, seventy-eight VersaTube steel members, seven minutes, forty-five seconds, sound dave ritter and kathleen ritter Reprise, 2017 Sound installation, turntable, vinyl record, wall mural, cushions david k. ross As Sovereign as Love, 2017 Video projection, twelve minutes, sound Collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal mark ruwedel Untitled, 1991 Untitled, 1990 Untitled, 1988 Untitled, 1990 Untitled, Île Sainte-Hélène, 1989 Untitled, 1990 Untitled, 1989 Untitled, 1989 Untitled, 1990 Ten silver gelatin prints, 20 x 25 cm each National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased in 1992

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chris salter N-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis – mac Version, 2017 Steel cables, microelectronics, leds, speakers, software Developed in collaboration with Sofian Audry, Adam Basanta, Marije Baalman, Elio Bidinost, and Thomas Spier cheryl sim Un jour, One Day, 2017 Three-channel video installation, five minutes, twenty-seven seconds, sound charles stankievech Until Finally O Became Just a Dot, 2017 Installation krista belle stewart Indian Momento, 2017 Vinyl althea thauberger L’arbre est dans ses feuilles, 2017 Two-channel video installation, thirty minutes, sound Featuring poems by Danica Evering, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, Kama La Mackerel, and Chloé Savoie-Bernard original films from expo 67 Presented by cinemaexpo67 Polar Life, 1967 Directed by Graeme Ferguson Three-channel video installation from a 35-mm digital transfer, originally presented on eleven screens, eighteen minutes, sound Originally presented in the Man the Explorer Pavilion Screened courtesy of the Cinémathèque québécoise, Archives de la Ville de Montréal and the National Film Board of Canada Motion, 1967 Directed by Vincent Vaitiekunas 70-mm digital transfer, fourteen minutes, sound 220

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Originally presented in the cn Pavilion Screened courtesy of the Cinémathèque québécoise, Archives de la Ville de Montréal, and the Vaitiekunas family Conflict, 1967 Directed by Michel Brault 35-mm digital transfer originally presented on two screens, five minutes, fifteen seconds, sound Originally presented in the Carousel Theatre at the Canada Pavilion Screened courtesy of the Cinémathèque québécoise, Archives de la Ville de Montréal and Anouk Brault Canada Is My Piano, 1967 Directed by George Dunning, Bill Sewell, and Alan Ball 35-mm digital transfer originally presented on three screens, four minutes, thirty seconds, sound Originally presented in the Carousel Theatre at the Canada Pavilion Screened courtesy of Library and Archives Canada The Earth Is Man’s Home, 1967 Directed by Nick and Ann Chaparos 70-mm digital transfer originally presented on a vertical screen, ten minutes, sound Originally presented in the Man the Explorer Pavilion Screened courtesy of the Cinémathéque québécoise, Archives de la Ville de Montréal and the Chaparos family Kaleidoscope at Expo 67, 2017 Virtual reality prototype created by Productions Figure 55 and cinemaexpo67 Original theatre design and production of Man and Colour by Morley Markson; music by R. Murray Schafer 35-mm digital transfer originally presented on three screens, fifteen minutes, sound Originally presented in the Kaleidoscope Pavilion Created from the archives of the Cinémathéque québécoise (courtesy of Archives de la Ville de Montréal) and Library and Archives Canada (Schafer soundtrack) Screened with the collaboration of Morley Markson

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Biographies

jean-pierre aubé was born in Kapuskasing, Ontario, in 1969 and lives and works in Montreal. His interdisciplinary practice (sound performance, media arts, installation, and photography) draws on scientific data-retrieval methodologies. He has participated in many exhibitions, performance festivals, and artistic events in Canada and in over fifteen countries, including Making Real, Ottawa (2007), Dataesthetics, Croatia (2006), and Signal Festival, Prague (2017). In 2015, in addition to a solo exhibition at RadioArteMobile, Rome, Aubé performed at the Venice Biennale at the invitation of the Galerie de l’uqam and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. marie-claire blais was born in Lévis, Quebec, in 1974 and lives and works in Montreal. Blais studied architecture at the Université de Montréal before concentrating full-time on her visual arts practice. Her work in a range of media focuses on experiences of moving through space and the perception of those encounters in memory. She has exhibited work in exhibitions in Canada and internationally, including at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg (2019), the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris (2017), the British School in Rome (2018), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2012, 2017), Galerie René Blouin, Montreal, and Diaz Contemporary, Toronto. simon boudvin was born in 1979 in Le Mans, France, and studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris and at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris-Malaquais. He is teaching at the l’École nationale supérieure du paysage de Versailles. Boudvin’s work emerges from both architecture and the visual arts. He investigates the city and its strange constructions, sometimes preparing a detailed statement, sometimes reconstituting, describing, or photographing specific elements. His works have regularly been presented by art centres in France: shed, Rouen (2019); Les Capucins, Embrun (2018); mrac, Sérignan (2016); crac Alsace, Altkirch (2016); credac, Ivry (2012); and elsewhere in Europe: Fondation Eugenio Almeida, Évora, Portugal (2017); Kunstraum, Düsseldorf, Germany (2016); Extra City, Antwerp, Belgium (2016); Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Ireland (2015); and Form Content, London, UK (2008). International residency programs have led him to work in New York, Seoul, Hanoi, and Montreal.

A Huron-Wendat, guy sioui durand is a sociologist (PhD), theorist, independent curator, and art critic. As a public speaker, his performances express First Nations orality. His book L’art comme alternative: Réseaux et pratiques d’art parallèle au Québec (1997) is a key reference in the field. He has also published Jean Paul Riopelle, l’art d’un trappeur supérieur: indianité (2003) and L’esprit des objets (2013), and has contributed to three issues on the evolution of Indigenous art in Kébeq and Kanata: “Amérindie” (esse arts+opinions, 2002), “Indiens, Indians, Indios” (Inter, 2010), and “Affirmation Autochtone” (Inter, 2016). In 2016–17, he was co-curator of the exhibition Mirror of a People: The Work and the Legacy of Zacharie Vincent (Musée huron-wendat and Musée d’Abénakis). In 2016 he curated Wâpou’och i’skwa’och/Ie’io: kas / La puissance du regard des femmes (Maison de la culture Frontenac) and Affirmations Autochtones (cégep du Vieux-Montréal), and in 2019 De tabac et de foin d’odeur: Là ou sont nos rêves (Musée d’art de Joliette). Sioui Durand teaches the unique course on Indigenous art at Kiuna Institution, which offers post-secondary education for First Nations. He is president of Éditions Intervention and a member of Canada’s Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (acc/cca). monika kin gagnon is professor of communication studies at Concordia University. She is co-curator of the exhibition In Search of Expo 67 with Lesley Johnstone. She has published widely on cultural politics and the visual and media arts since the 1980s, including Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2000), 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002) with Richard Fung, and Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (2014) with Janine Marchessault. In 2009 she undertook the dvd catalogue and restoration Charles Gagnon: 4 Films, on her late father’s experimental 1960s films, and the related interactive database Korsakow film, Archiving R69 (2011). Her current research is on cultural memory, creative archiving, and experimental media arts, and includes curating as well as creative solutions to conventional archiving of experimental media. She curated Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Immatériel in 2015 at dhc-Art and the Phi Centre. She is co-director of cinemaexpo67. david garneau (Métis) is associate professor of visual arts at the University of Regina. His practice includes painting, curation, and critical writing. He recently co-curated (with Michelle LaVallee) Moving Forward, Never Forgetting, an exhibition concerning the legacies of Indian Residential Schools and other forms of aggressive assimilation, at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, and With Secrecy and Despatch (with Tess Allas) for the Campbelltown Art Centre in Sydney, Australia. Garneau is working on curatorial projects in New York and South Africa and is part of a five-year, sshrc-funded, curatorial research project, “Creative Conciliation.” His paintings are in numerous collections. stéphane gilot was born in Belgium in 1969 and lives and works in Montreal. His multidisciplinary practice combines drawing, maquettes, architectural installations, and performance. His approach to sculpture is often developed according to the context of presentation, and he transforms the space in relationship to its architectural and ideological characteristics, while also interrogating the metaphorical terrain of art and its public. Among his recent projects are a major solo exhibition at La Comète, Espace 251 Nord, Liège, Belgium (2019), the Musée d’art de Joliette (2016), and exhibitions at the 12th Havana Biennale, Cuba (2015), 224

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Galerie de l’uqam (2012), and Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (2010). He has also shown his works at Art Toronto, in the Québec Triennial 2008, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and in Smile Machine, Transmediale, Berlin, 2006. pascal grandmaison, born in 1975, lives and works in Montreal. His photo, film, and video works offer poetic meditations on subjects ranging from portraiture traditions to modernist architecture, while also demonstrating a critical awareness of the mediated nature of representation. Using an analytical perspective and a minimal aesthetic, Grandmaison has made works on a variety of scales. Since his first major solo survey at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2006, which toured to the National Gallery of Canada in 2007, Grandmaison’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, at Casino Luxembourg (2011), the Art Gallery of Hamilton (2008), and the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris (2017), among others. His videos have been presented at Haus der Kulturen des Welt in Berlin and the Edinburgh Art Festival. A graduate of uqam, Grandmaison was shortlisted for the 2013 Sobey Art Award. jacqueline hoàng nguyê˜n was born in Montreal in 1979 and is a research-based artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. Nguyê˜n is a PhD candidate in the Art, Technology, and Design Program at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts, and Design and kth Royal Institute of Technology. In 2011 she completed the Whitney’s Independent Study Program, having obtained her mfa and a postgraduate diploma in critical studies from the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, in 2005, and a bfa from Concordia University, Montreal, in 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include cample line, Thornhill, Scotland (2019); Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Philadelphia (2018); MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2017); Mercer Union, Toronto (2015); and Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany (2013). She participated in the Biennale de Montréal (2014) and in other group exhibitions in galleries such as at the Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2018); mama, Rotterdam (2018); savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2017); and efa Project Space, New York (2016). philip hoffman was born in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, in 1955 and first became intrigued by questions of reality in photography and later in cinema. He has been honoured with more than a dozen retrospectives of his work. In 2001 Landscape with Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman was released comprising some twenty-five essays. He has received numerous awards, including the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Award and the Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Gus Van Sant Award. Hoffman teaches at York University, in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts, and since 1994 has been the artistic director of the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm). In 2016 Hoffman received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. geronimo inutiq, of Aboriginal and Québécois ancestry, was born in 1978 in Iqaluit, Nunavut. He is an accomplished artist in electronic music composition, multimedia, and video installations. His work reflects on popular and underground electronic music currents. It weaves multiple cultural threads and gives space for organic imagery as well as delving into 225

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more synthetic sources. Inutiq explores digital video and images, treating archival film in the context of museum and art gallery exhibits, alongside his work in electronic music performance, composition, and DJing. His work has been featured in the exhibition Beat Nation that toured across Canada (2013–14), and he performed at the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City, Transmediale and Club Transmediale in Berlin (2009), and the imaginenative Film & Media Arts Festival (2015). lesley johnstone is a curator and head of exhibitions and education at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. She is co-curator of In Search of Expo 67, with Monika Kin Gagnon. She was co-curator of the Montreal Biennale L’Avenir (Looking Forward), 2014, and the Québec Triennial 2011, as well as curator of solo exhibitions by such artists as Valérie Blass, Luanne Martineau, Patrick Bernatchez, Lynne Marsh, Francine Savard, Tino Sehgal, Eve Sussman, and Liz Magor. Johnstone was artistic director of the International Garden Festival at the Jardins de Métis from 2003 to 2007, and head of publications at the Canadian Centre for Architecture from 1998 to 2003. Long associated with Artexte, Johnstone has written many catalogue essays and has edited anthologies, exhibition catalogues, and monographs on contemporary Canadian art. eva kolcze, born in Toronto in 1981, is a Toronto-based artist who creates films and installations based on themes of landscape, architecture, and the body. Her work has screened at venues including moca, Toronto (2019), the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2016); Gardiner Museum, Toronto (2016); Cinémathèque québécoise, Montréal (2016); Birch Contemporary (Toronto, 2015); Anthology Film Archives, New York City (2013); as well as in many festivals: International Rotterdam Film Festival, Netherlands (2014–16); Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany (2015); and the Images Festival, Toronto (2015–16). She holds a bfa from ocad University and an mfa from York University. leisure (meredith carruthers, born in 1975, and susannah wesley, born in 1976) is a conceptual collaborative art practice based in Montreal. Working together under the name “Leisure” since 2004, Carruthers and Wesley engage with cultural historical narratives through research, conversation, published texts, and art production. Panning For Gold / Walking You Through It, which they developed for In Search of Expo 67, is part of Leisure’s ongoing project entitled You Must Do the Moving, exploring ideas around mid-century women and creative production – specifically spatialized movement, gesture, and the use of alternative methodological approaches. This project includes Dualité / Dualité, Artexte, Montreal (2015), Panorama de la Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille (2016), Conversations with Magic Stones, presented at efa, New York (2016), and Vu, Quebec City (2017) Leisure has produced exhibitions and special projects in Canada and abroad and participated in residencies in Banff, Dawson City, St John’s, and Vienna. emmanuelle léonard was born in Montreal 1971, where she lives and works. Her work has been presented in many group and solo exhibitions in Canada and Europe. She participated in the Québec Triennial 2011 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and in the Montreal 226

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Biennale L’Avenir (Looking Forward), 2014. Léonard received the Prix Pierre-Ayot in 2005 and the Grange Prize in 2012, and was a finalist for the first Contemporary Art Award of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in 2013 and the Prix Louis-Comtois in 2014. duane linklater, born in 1976, is an Omaskêko Cree, from Moose Cree First Nation in Northern Ontario, and is based in North Bay, Ontario. He was educated at the University of Alberta, where he earned a bachelor of native studies and a bachelor of fine arts. Linklater attended the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College in upstate New York, completing his mfa in film and video. Linklater has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2015), 80 wse Gallery (2017), and The High Line (2018), New York City, SeMa Biennale, Seoul, South Korea (2016), Liverpool Biennale (2018), Taipei Biennale (2019), and Documenta 13 (2012), to name a few. Linklater has also received several prizes, including the 2013 Sobey Art Award and the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2016. janine marchessault is professor of cinema and media at York University. She is a founder of the Future Cinema Lab and the 2014–16 inaugural director of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts Research at York. In 2012 she was awarded a Trudeau Fellowship to pursue her curatorial and public art research. She is the author of Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias and Ecologies (mit, 2017); Cosmic Media: Marshall McLuhan (Sage, 2005); and co-editor of numerous collections including 3D Cinema and Beyond (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2013); Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 with Monika Kin Gagnon (mqup, 2014); and Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban (mqup, 2014). She is a past president of the Film Studies Association of Canada, has held faculty positions at McGill University and Ryerson University, and has taught at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y tv in Havana, Cuba. She is co-director of the research group cinemaexpo67. caroline martel was born in 1973, in Montreal. She is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, artist, and researcher. She has a special interest in archives, invisible histories, and audiovisual technologies and heritage. Her films The Phantom of the Operator (2004) and Wavemakers (2012) have been presented to critical acclaim internationally, and Industry/ Cinema (2012), a solo video installation was shown at the Museum of the Moving Image (New York). Martel was a featured guest at the 57th Robert Flaherty Seminar and the 2014 Global Visiting Scholar at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts (Richmond, va). She is doing archival and oral history research for her PhD on cinema at Expo 67. dave ritter (born in 1979 in Oshawa, Ontario) and kathleen ritter (born in 1974 in Oshawa, Ontario) are siblings who work collaboratively on projects related to sound, music, and their histories. Dave is an academic and a musician. In 2008 he co-founded the alternative country band the Strumbellas, who won a Juno award in 2013 for Best Roots & Traditional Album of the Year. The band has received numerous recording and video grants. Kathleen is an artist and a writer. Working with sound, photography, video, and text, she explores alternative histories, especially in relation to systems of power, language, and technology. 227

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david k. ross was born in 1966 in Weston, Ontario. Ross’s work is concerned with the processes and activities that enable cultural activities, infrastructural monuments, and architectural structures to exist. His works have been exhibited in major institutions in North America and Europe and are included in private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. His films and video installations have been featured at CineMarfa (2012), Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (2013), the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (2014), and the Toronto International Film Festival Wavelengths program (2015). mark ruwedel was born in 1954 in Pennsylvania and lives in Long Beach, California. He received his mfa from Concordia University in Montreal and taught there from 1984 to 2001; he is professor emeritus at California State University. Ruwedel is represented in museums throughout the world, including the J. Paul Getty Museum; Los Angeles County Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Yale Art Gallery; National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He was included in the National Gallery of Canada’s Biennial in 2012. Ruwedel’s work was the subject of an Artist Room at Tate Modern in 2018. In 2014 he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Scotiabank Photography Award and has been short-listed for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for 2019. chris salter was born in 1967 in Beaumont, Texas. He is full professor of computation arts at Concordia University and co-director of the Hexagram Network for Research-Creation in Media Arts, Design, Technology, and Digital Culture in Montreal. He studied philosophy and economics at Emory University, Atlanta, and completed a PhD in directing/dramatic criticism at Stanford University, where he also researched and studied at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. His work has been seen all over the world at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Barbican Centre, Berliner Festpield, Chronus Art Center Shanghai, Vitra Design Museum, bian 2014 in Montreal, LABoral, Lille 3000, National Art Museum of China, Ars Electronica, Villette Numérique, exit Festival (Maison des Arts, Créteil-Paris), and many others. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (2010) and Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (2015) both mit Press. cheryl sim, born in 1971 in Hamilton, Ontario, is a media artist, curator, and musician. In her artistic production of single-channel videos and media installations she investigates subjects tied to the formation of identity and power relations. She received her PhD in 2015 from uqam, where she undertook a research-creation thesis entitled “The Fitting Room: The Cheongsam and Canadian Women of Chinese Heritage in Installation.” She performed The Thomas Wang Project at Oboro in the Festival Accès Asie in 2015. johanne sloan has a bfa from Concordia University, an ma from the Université de Montréal, and a PhD in the history and theory of art from the University of Kent, England (1998). Her book on Joyce Wieland’s 1976 feature film The Far Shore is the culmination of a major 228

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research project on the artist and concerns the question of how landscape was both critiqued and reinvented by this generation of Canadian artists. Other publications address the artwork of Roni Horn, Mark Dion, Bill Vazan, Ron Terada, Lynne Marsh, Jack Chambers, Janet Werner, and Althea Thauberger, among others. She is also interested in broader categories of visual culture and the urban environment; these issues converged in the multi-authored book of essays about the world’s exhibition held in Montreal during the summer of 1967: Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir (University of Toronto Press, 2010). charles stankievech, born in 1978 in Okotoks, Alberta, is a Canadian artist whose research has explored issues such as the notion of “fieldwork” in the embedded landscape, the military-industrial complex, and the history of technology. His diverse body of work has been shown internationally at the Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; mass m oca, Massachusetts; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Venice Architecture and site Santa Fe biennales. His lectures for Documenta 13 and the Eighth Berlin Biennale were as much performance as pedagogy, while his writing has been published by mit and Princeton Architectural Press. krista belle stewart, born in 1979, is an artist and member of the Syilx Nation based on unceded Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam and Sḵwxwú7mesh territories (Vancouver, bc). Stewart holds an mfa from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, New York. Stewart works with video, land, performance, photography, textiles, and sound, drawing out personal and political narratives inherent in archival materials while questioning their articulation in institutional histories. Since 2017 her work has been exhibited at the sfu Teck Gallery, Vancouver; yyz Artist Outlet, Toronto; Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal; Musee d’art contemporain Montréal; Independent Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; Plug In ica, Winnipeg; and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Stewart is the recipient of the 2019 viva Award. althea thauberger, born in 1970 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, is an artist based in Vancouver. Her work typically involves interactions with a group or community and provocative reflections of social, political, institutional, and aesthetic power relations. Her film and video installations are often the result of long-term negotiations and collaborations with those depicted. These have included the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital in Prague; the Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan; the 200 block of Carrall Street in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside; and the Haskell Opera House on the Quebec/Vermont border. Thauberger’s exhibitions and screenings venues include the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, ubc, Vancouver; the Audain Gallery, Vancouver; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the 2012 Liverpool Biennial; The Power Plant, Toronto; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; and the Guangong Museum of Art, Guangzhou. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia.

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Photo credits, unless noted in captions Jean-Pierre Aubé: 150 (top) Guy L’Heureux: 1, 12, 34 (top), 44, 45 (top), 52, 54, 80, 83, 84, 90 (bottom), 91, 96, 98, 99 (top), 106, 108–10, 114, 148 (top), 154, 156, 160, 167 (top and middle), 170, 172, 188, 190, 191, 204–5, 215 (bottom) Caroline Martel: 192 Kathleen Ritter: 173 Sébastien Roy: 2, 20 (top) Richard-Max Tremblay: cover and 6–7, 14–15, 20 (bottom), 34 (bottom), 40 (bottom), 45 (bottom), 48, 90 (top), 99 (bottom), 112, 115, 148 (bottom), 150 (bottom), 166, 167 (bottom), 178, 182, 184–5, 215 (top) Translation Judith Terry: texts by artists Peter Feldstein: Guy Sioui Durand

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