Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada 9780773596375

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Negotiations in a Vacant Lot

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McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History

Martha Langford and Sandra Paikowsky, series editors Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peerreviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered.

The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin

Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin

Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay

The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an Introduction by Francois-Marc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet

The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard

Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy

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Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Peter Feldstein

On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher Armstrong Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson

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Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada

Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 ISBN 978-0-7735-4410-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-4411-6 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-9637-5 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-9638-2 (ePUB) Legal deposit third quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been provided by the Dean’s Travel Fund at Western University, the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick, the Faculty of Arts Busteed Publication Fund at the University of New Brunswick, the Office of Research Services at Queen’s University, and the Society of Graduate and Professional Students at Queen’s University. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Negotiations in a vacant lot : studying the visual in Canada / edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson. (McGill-Queen's/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4410-9 (bound).–ISBN 978-0-7735-4411-6 (pbk.).– ISBN 978-0-7735-9637-5 (ePDF).–ISBN 978-0-7735-9638-2 (ePUB) 1. Art and society–Canada. 2. Art–Canada–History. 3. Art, Canadian. 4. Canada–Cultural policy. I. Jessup, Lynda, 1956–, editor II. Morton, Erin, 1981–, editor III. Robertson, Kirsty, 1976–, editor IV. Series: McGill-Queen’s/ Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history N72.S6N44 2014

701'.030971

C2014-903875-5 C2014-903876-3

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Contents

Illustrations | ix Acknowledgments | xiii Preface | xv Colour plates to follow pages 46 and 204 Introduction: Rethinking Relevance: Studying the Visual in Canada

| 3

LYNDA JESSUP, ERIN MORTON, AND KIRSTY ROBERTSON

PART ONE PREPOSTEROUS HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT

| 21

ERIN MORTON

1

Struck by Likening: Homer Watson, Jack Chambers, Gerhard Richter, and the Force of Art World Analogies | 31 MARK A. CHEETHAM

2

Feminist Art History in Canada: A “Limited Pursuit”?

| 47

KRISTY A. HOLMES

3

Dealing with Chiastic Perspectives: Global Art Histories in Canada ALICE MING WAI JIM

4

The Location of / The Conditions for Art: On-Site Specifics and Site Adjustments | 91 ANNIE GÉRIN

| 66

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PART TWO OUT WITH THE NEW

| 107

IMRE SZEMAN

5

National Cultural Policy and the International Liberal Order

| 114

BARBARA JENKINS

6

Visualizing the “New” North American Landscape

| 130

SARAH E.K. SMITH

7

Arctic Culture/Global Indigeneity

| 150

HEATHER IGLOLIORTE

viii

8

The Vacant Lot: Who’s Buying It?

| 171

RICHARD WILLIAM HILL

PART THREE DISCONTIGUOUS DEPENDENCIES

| 179

KIRSTY ROBERTSON

9

The Aesthetics of the Territory-Nation-State and the “Canadian Problematique” ROB SHIELDS

10

Our Vacant Lot Is a Trailer Park: Why English Canada’s Perpetual Threat of Disappearing Keeps Film and Television Alive | 201 JENNIFER VANDERBURGH

11

The Art of Conflict: Liberal Development after Neo-liberalism

| 217

SUSAN CAHILL

12

Considering Sovereignty and Neo-liberalism within Indeterminate States and Self-Determined Spaces | 236 PETER CONLIN

Bibliography Contributors Index | 279

Contents

| 253 | 275

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Illustrations

0.1 Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, The Coureur de Bois, 1907. Oil on canvas. 97.5 × 131.2 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Purchased 1983. Accession no. 28179. | 7 0.2 Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Settlement on the Hillside, 1909. Oil on canvas. 58.4 × 73 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Purchased 1909. Accession no. 127. | 8 0.3 Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Winter Landscape, 1909. Oil on canvas. 72.2 × 94.4 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Gift of Arthur S. Hardy, Ottawa, 1943. Accession no. 4574. | 10 0.4 A.Y. Jackson, Red Maple, 1914. Oil on canvas. 82 × 99.5 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Purchased 1914. Accession no. 1038. | 10 0.5 Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996, printed 1998. Dye couple print (Ektacolor). 102 × 155.5 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Gift of the artist. Accession no. 39977. | 15 1.1 Homer Watson, The Pioneer Mill, 1890. Etching in dark brown and wove paper, 33.4 × 44.5 cm, plate 30.1 × 41 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Purchased 1993. Photographed by National Gallery of Canada. Accession no. 37239r. | 33 1.2 Homer Watson, The Flood Gate, 1900–01. Oil on canvas mounted on plywood. 86.9 × 121.8 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Purchased 1925. Accession no. 3343. | 35 1.3 Homer Watson, detail of frieze in his home studio, 1893. Photo: Mark A. Cheetham, August 2006. | 36 1.4 Jack Chambers, Olga Visiting Graham, 1964. Oil on plywood. 102 × 178 cm. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Purchased with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program. Acquisition no. vag 64.21. Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery | 37 1.5 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Shepherd’s Song. 1891. Oil on canvas. 104.5 × 109.9 cm. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchased by the Rogers Fund, 1906. Acquisition no. 06.177. | 37

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1.6 Gerhard Richter, Lillies, 2000. Oil on canvas. 68 × 80 × 3.1 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 2002. Acquisition no. 40967. | 40 1.7 Jack Chambers, Diego Reading, 1976. Oil on wood. 91.4 × 91.4 cm. Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. | 41 1.8 Jack Chambers, photographic study related to C.C.C.I., ca 1970. Jack Chambers Fonds, Art Gallery of Ontario. | 42

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2.1 Joyce Wieland, Pierre Théberge, and Michael Snow, 1971. Photo: Arnold Matthews. | 49 2.2 Joyce Wieland, O Canada Animation, 1970. Embroidery on cloth. 107 × 114 cm. Collection of Edie and Morden Yolles, Toronto. Photo: Jade Rude. | 55 2.3 Joyce Wieland, Reason over Passion, 1968. Quilted cloth assemblage. 256.5 × 302.3 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Purchased 1970. Accession no. 15924. | 56 2.4 Joyce Wieland, Cooling Room II, 1964. Metal toy airplane, cloth, wire and metal, plastic boat, paper collage, ceramic cups with lipstick, and spoon, mounted in painted wooden case. 111.4 × 94 × 18.3 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Purchased 1971. Accession no. 16706. | 58 2.5 Joyce Wieland, Time Machine Series, 1961. Oil on canvas. 203.2 × 269.9 cm. Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift from the McLean Foundation, 1966. | 59 3.1 Geoffrey Farmer, The Last Two Million Years, 2007. Foamcore plinths, perspex frames, and cut-outs from selected pages of the history book The Last Two Million Years. Image: Catriona Jeffries Gallery. | 68 3.2 Geoffrey Farmer, The Last Two Million Years, 2007. Image: Catriona Jeffries Gallery. | 68 3.3 Geoffrey Farmer, The Last Two Million Years, 2007. Image: Catriona Jeffries Gallery. | 69 3.4 Geoffrey Farmer, The Last Two Million Years, 2007. Image: Catriona Jeffries Gallery. | 69 3.5 Geoffrey Farmer, The Last Two Million Years, 2007. Image: Catriona Jeffries Gallery. | 69 3.6 Geoffrey Farmer, The Last Two Million Years, 2007. Image: Catriona Jeffries Gallery. | 69 3.7 Shié Kasai, Survival Japanese Cooking, 2008. Gallery installation at mai (Montréal arts interculturels) showing “make your own sushi” posters. Inkjet print. 60.96 × 91.44 cm. Paper model sushi. Created by participants on the plinths. Image: Shié Kasai. | 83 3.8 Shié Kasai, Lafleur Hotdog, 2008. Chromogenic print. 60.96 × 76.2 cm. Image: Shié Kasai. | 83 3.9 Shié Kasai, Cabane à sucre, 2008. Chromogenic print. 60.96 × 76.2 cm. Image: Shié Kasai. | 83

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3.10 Shié Kasai, Everybody’s Favourite Restaurant Is Indian and Then Japanese or Thai, 2008. Chromogenic print. 60.96 × 76.2 cm. Image: Shié Kasai. | 84 3.11 Shié Kasai, Tim’s, 2008. Chromogenic print. 60.96 × 76.2 cm. Image: Shié Kasai. | 84 3.12 Shié Kasai, Québec vs Canada, 2008. Chromogenic print. 60.96 × 76.2 cm. Image: Shié Kasai. | 84 4.1 Robert Watson, Urban Drawing, Version 1, 2005. Image courtesy of the artist. | 93 4.2 David McCallum, Warbike, 2005–07. David McCallum photographed on Warbike by Risa Horowitz, 2007. Image courtesy of the artist and photographer. | 94 4.3 Stéphanie Brodeur and Darsha Hewitt, The Personal Soundtrack Emitter, 2006. Image courtesy of the artists. | 95 4.4 Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981; vue N°35 Planche contact 2-hd, 1985. Photo: Anne Chauvet. | 99 5.1 John Grierson and Ralph Foster, 1944. Photo: Library and Archives Canada. Acquisition no. pa-179108. | 121 5.2 Exterior of Massey-Harris Company, Brantford, Ontario. Photo: Brant County Museum and Archives. | 122 5.3 Augustus John, Portrait of Vincent Massey, 1938. Oil on canvas. 61.8 × 51.6 cm. National Gallery of Canada. Purchased 1951. Acquisition no. 5774. | 122 5.4 Lawren Harris, Isolation Peak, 1930. Oil on canvas. 107 × 128 cm. Hart House Permanent Collection, University of Toronto. Purchased by the Hart House Art Committee with income from the Harold and Murray Wrong Memorial Fund, 1946. Acquisition no. 1946.01. Photo: Hart House Permanent Collection. | 125 6.1 Leaflet. Promotional tools for the exhibition Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950, held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 4 November 1999 to 6 February 2000. Photographed by mmfa. | 137 6.2 Liberté yogurt lid. Promotional tools for the exhibition Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950, held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 4 November 1999 to 6 February 2000. Photographed by mmfa. | 138 6.3 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts opening invitation cards (front). Promotional tools for the exhibition Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950, held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 4 November 1999 to 6 February 2000. Photographed by mmfa. | 138 6.4 Canadian Heritage Minister Shelia Copps and Mexican Ambassador Ezequiel Padilla, 25 February 2000. Photo: John Major/Ottawa Citizen. Reprinted with permission. | 139 7.1 Statistics Canada, Map of Inuit Regions, 2006.

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7.2 Kanaginak Pootoogook, The First Tourist, 1992. Lithograph on wove paper. 57.3 × 71 cm. Copyright the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, purchased 1995. Accession no. 37712. | 163 7.3 Michael Massie, uni-tea, 2000. Silver and ebony. 32.2 × 22.9 × 9.5 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, purchased 2004. Accession no. 41312. | 164 7.4 On set of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, dir. Zacharias Kunuk, 2009. Image: Igloolik Isuma Productions. | 166 10.1 Production photo from Life Classes (William D. MacGillivray, 1987) of Earl’s truck bringing pirate satellite tv to Cape Breton. Courtesy of Picture Plant Ltd. Photo: Eric Walker | 212

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11.1 Afghan war rug, 2001–07. Wool, knotted pile; plain woven; fringed. 88 × 63 cm. From the collection of Max Allen. Accession no. l2008.216. Photo: Maciek Linowski, courtesy of the Textile Museum of Canada. | 219 11.2 Afghan war rug, early twenty-first century. Wool, knotted pile. 83 × 63 cm. From the collection of Max Allen. Accession no. l2008.315. Photo: Maciek Linowski, courtesy of the Textile Museum of Canada. | 220 11.3 Military patch, usa, 2001. Cotton, rayon, schiffli machine-embroidered. From the collection of Max Allen. Accession no. l2008.b01. Photo: Maciek Linowski. Courtesy of the Textile Museum of Canada. | 223 11.4 Afghan war rug, ca 1990–2007. Wool, cotton. 72 × 96 cm. Collection of the Textile Museum of Canada. t2008.1.56. Image courtesy of the Textile Museum of Canada. | 225 11.5 Afghan war rug, early twenty-first century. Wool. 63 × 90 cm. Collection of the Textile Museum of Canada. t2008.1.69. Image courtesy of the Textile Museum of Canada. | 225 12.1 Reece Terris, Western Front Front: Another False Front (an architectural intervention/installation), 2010. | 237 12.2 Temporary School of Thought, event poster, 2009. | 238 12.3 16 Beaver, International Lunch Summit, 2003. | 242 12.4 Detail of a Canadian passport. | 243 12.5 Oubliette Arthouse, London, 2009. Photo: Lee Osborne. | 249 12.6 An activist community space in a former employment centre in southeast London (uk), 2011. Photo: Peter Conlin. | 250

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their enthusiasm and dedication to this project. Its success as a series of conversations and now as a book is largely dependent on these participants, whose intellect and efforts pushed our initial questions far beyond what we had originally envisioned. Like all editorial exercises, this collection has been improved by several readings, including the contributors’, and those of anonymous readers, whose careful and conscientious feedback helped to strengthen its content and to refine its scope. We are thankful to our research assistants, Michelle Bauldic and Stephanie Radu, for their help in arranging the two days of conversation that preceded the publication of this book, and to Kelly Flinn and Eric Greisinger for organizing and collating the book manuscript at various stages. We would also like to thank Timothy Pearson for his editorial assistance. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, we are grateful to Philip Cercone and Jessica Perreault-Howarth for guiding us through the editorial and publishing process. Finally, we acknowledge and appreciate the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Queen’s University, the University of New Brunswick, and Western University, Canada, in the development and completion of this book.

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Preface

With this collection we hope to further discussion about the possible futures of Canadian art history. At a moment in which the discipline of Canadian art history seems to be in flux, and in which the study of visual culture produced in Canada is gaining traction in a number of interdisciplinary venues outside of art history departments, we ask: what is at stake in the creation, replication, and dissemination of a Canadian art history? With this question at hand, a group of scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds gathered together for a workshop.1 The workshop was organized around a series of questions and readings, given to participants in advance.2 The questions were as follows: 1 Is “Canada” (or, for that matter, any other nation) still relevant as a category of inquiry – as a site for knowledge production – now that we face neo-liberalism, corporate globalization, and what has been described as a “post-national” landscape? 2 What happens to the project of Canadian visual history if we begin with the premise that Canada, as essence, place, nation, or ideal, does not exist? Is there a place for writing (visual) histories of nation in an age of “global analyses”? If so, what is it? If not, what should be the project now? 3 The argument that culture is increasingly used as an economic and socio-political “resource” resonates strongly with the popular strategies of “urban gurus” such as Richard Florida, and increasingly with municipal, provincial, and occasionally federal government policy. Such strategies both contrast with but also speak to traditions of Canadian state support for culture that also filter strongly into the shaping of the national(ist) discipline of Canadian art history. At the multiple points where national culture and globalization collide, what are some of the questions that we might ask ourselves as scholars of these complex times? This collection of essays gathers together some of the responses to these questions in the hope of stimulating further considerations. Throughout, participants were encouraged to avoid setting out a list of reasons for studying (or not studying) visual culture

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produced in Canada and instead to deal with the larger issues subtending the very asking of these questions. In short, we asked, if “nation” is a category, just as “art” or “craft” is, what is the ongoing relevance of Canadian art history as a disciplinary project?3 In proposing this project as ongoing, we want to remain aware of the established discussions of nation, nationality, and nationalism that have taken place across the humanities and social sciences, particularly in fields that are less premised on the national/ ist rubric.4 In short, our goal is not to diminish what has come before in the field of Canadian art history, but rather to do no less than change the framework. In other words, we ask: What should be the project now? The essays brought together in Negotiations in a Vacant Lot suggest that the project now requires much more than shifting our ideas about Canadian art history towards the study of the visual in Canada. This is another reason why we see our work here as an initial and unfinished undertaking – the beginning of the conversation. By rethinking the notion of “Canada” as a concept, and the project of its visual history as an application of that concept, we hope to suggest that there is much innovative research to be done that would redefine the study of the visual in Canada as a site for intense inquiry. Following this preface, readers will find an introductory chapter that examines the complex relationship among nation building, liberalism, and the formation of the nationbased discipline of Canadian art history. From there, the book is divided into three sections, each prefaced with a foreword that introduces, unifies, and develops the intersections between the essays, while also providing further thought and discussion. Topics considered in the essays cross a wide range of issues, from case studies of museum exhibitions and artists to theoretical inquiries into the role of national/ist articulations of culture in maintaining or resisting state sovereignty, to considerations of neo-liberalism and globalization on the current shaping of the discipline of art history worldwide. Negotiations in a Vacant Lot thus brings together the work of a number of scholars who draw on different experiences and represent diverse disciplinary backgrounds. The end result is a series of essays that unsettles the ways in which “nation” has been used as a construct in a variety of situations and undertakings pertinent to the study of art and culture. While the initial aim of the workshop from which these essays emerged was to examine the links between Canada as a liberal-order project and Canadian art history as a manifestation of that project, what resulted was something that is much more expansive but nevertheless suggests numerous possible directions for future research, conversation, and debate. We see Negotiations in a Vacant Lot as an intervention into the study of the visual in Canada, which offers its readers a number of avenues through which to approach this object of analysis. Rather than predetermine where these avenues should lead by looking to familiar art historical paths such as aesthetics, period, geography, or institution, we have instead turned to our contributors to tell us where they would like to enter into the conversation and from what perspective they wish to do so. Readers will note that, as a result of this collaborative strategy, the essays that follow range in subject matter and in methodological and theoretical approach.

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We view this eclecticism to be part of the volume’s strength, in that its essays illustrate the study of the visual in Canada in ways that fit into broader trends in current interdisciplinary scholarship on art and culture. That is, they suggest ways of approaching familiar territories of inquiry – among them world economic systems, trajectories of artistic expression, and histories of discrimination and privilege – that remain cognizant of their historical underpinnings without reinforcing conventional ways of thinking about them. Read together, the chapters in this volume suggest that academic investigation of the visual in Canada is decidedly contested in ways that cannot be contained by the arbitrary borders of a fractious and fictitious nation-state. Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson

notes 1 The workshop was generously supported by a sshrc Aid to Research Workshops and Conferences grant. It was organized by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson and hosted by University College at the University of Toronto. 2 Participants were assigned five readings in advance. These included: M. Denning, “Globalization and Culture”; I. McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework”; I. Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader; Rogoff, “What Is a Theorist?” in Was Ist ein Kunstler?; and G. Yúdice, “The Expediency of Culture,” in The Expediency of Culture. 3 In their seminal introduction to Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner articulate the intersection of the discourses surrounding the object categories “art,” “artifact,” and “commodity” (4). Phillips and Steiner point out that these “three parallel discourses of objects” emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century and arose from “(1) the art-historical classification system of fine and applied arts, (2) anthropological theories

of the evolution and origins of art, and (3) Victorian responses to industrial production and commoditization of art” (5–6). In short, their argument suggests that it is no longer viable to treat objects within these three categories, since “the art-artifact-commodity triad must now be merged into a single domain where the categories are seen to inform one another rather than compete in their claims for social primacy and cultural value” (16). For more on the history of formalizing object categories, see also J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; C.B. Steiner, African Art in Transit; G.E. Marcus and F. Myers, eds, The Traffic in Culture; C.B. Steiner, “Can the Canon Burst?” S. Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress; R.B. Phillips, Trading Identities; L. Jessup, ed., Antimodernism and Artistic Expression; Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places; and R.B. Phillips, Museum Pieces. 4 The development of cultural studies is one example of how fields have been established outside of the national/ist model of disciplinary formation. Regarding cultural studies in particular, Will Straw argues that the field

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dropped its national/ist modifier (British) by the 1980s. Cultural studies thus became a field that represented a turn within the humanities in general, rather than one that categorized and reorganized itself in terms of nation. In Canada, Straw writes that those communities that took up cultural studies in the 1990s “have been marked by contradictions between an avowed, even platitudinous, commitment to the local and a

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cosmopolitan investment in criteria of authentication and expertise elaborated elsewhere.” Straw, “Shifting Boundaries, Lines of Descent,” in Relocating Cultural Studies, 92–3. They have, in other words, been committed to critical analysis in and of Canada in conjunction with knowledge formation elsewhere, without conflating the “local” with the “national.” See also Kristy A. Holmes’s chapter in this volume.

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Negotiations in a Vacant Lot

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Introduction What Would Hold Us to This “Vacant Lot”? At the turn of the millennium, Canadian historian Ian McKay questioned the ongoing relevance of Canadian history as a disciplinary project. As he put it,

Rethinking Relevance: Studying the Visual in Canada

Lynda Jessup, Why have a field of Canadian history if even the most powerful and far-reaching methodologies often treat Erin Morton, Canada as a “stage” on which universal processes and formations interact? If Canada is more or less just a and Kirsty Robertson “vacant lot,” one more (relatively minor) place where class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on, interact – as they do everywhere on the planet – why not go to where the action really is, to the United States, to Europe, or “global” analyses? What, besides narrow horizons, arbitrary and dated disciplinary boundaries, or sheer timidity, would hold us to this “vacant lot”?1 McKay’s question was rhetorical; his goal was not to encourage a defence of the “vacant lot,” or an “essentialist rethinking of Canada,” but rather to try to “map the Canadian state as a project of liberal rule in North America.”2 As he puts it: “the category ‘Canada’ should henceforth denote a historically specific project of rule, rather than either an essence we must defend or an empty homogeneous space we must possess.”3 Further, he suggests Canada-as-project can be studied not as a static entity but according to the way that a certain politico-economic logic – liberalism – shaped and reshaped Canada through a set of premises: individualism, belief in progress, utilitarianism, property rights. Nineteenth-century liberalism was fundamentally tied up in the project of nation building and hence in the construction of nation-based disciplines (for example, Canadian history). In essence, this volume explores these questions cognizant of the national/ist rubric imposed by the formation of the larger discipline of art history in the nineteenth century. At that time, the modern, European nation-state emerged as a means of articulating the

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geopolitical landscape across which liberalism, and its attendant expressions in capitalism and modernity, would be advanced.4 This articulation of knowledge in national/ist terms shaped disciplines across the board in terms of nation.5 It was, as McKay points out, part of the process of constructing nations.6 It deeply affected the models through which the visual could be studied, and hence the project of Canadian art history, which like other national/ist narratives has been carried into the new millennium as the naturalized site of revisionist strategies unthinkingly premised on its continued relevance. And so, what happens now, as these formations become more apparent as such – less a seemingly “natural” way of organizing knowledge, of knowledge production, of thinking? Is “Canada” (or, for that matter, any other nation) still relevant as a category of inquiry – as a site for knowledge production – now that we find ourselves in the midst of the neo-liberal economic logic of corporate globalization and what has been described as a “post-national” landscape?7 Bringing these questions to the domain of art historical and visual culture studies as they pertain to the contested terrain, “Canada,” acknowledges that they have been at the forefront of scholarship for some time. By the late 1990s, scholars such as Arjun Appadurai, Michael Hardt, David Harvey, Antonio Negri, Saskia Sassen, Yasemin Soysal, and others had diagnosed what was apparently the end of the Westphalian nation-state through mass immigration and exodus, transnational economic agreements, and the removal of boundaries to the global flow of goods.8 Though there remains an important debate over the extent of this disintegration, the fact that the perception of the nationstate has changed in an era of Internet communications and transnational economic, cultural, and political agreements is incontrovertible. And yet, the muted response to such changes on the part of scholars studying in fields constructed in terms of national contexts and structures, among them art history, suggests that an opportunity to rethink such structures has been missed. Critiques of “the national” within fields that were formed in ways that make them dependent on “the nation” itself (meaning that each is still bound to national/ist configurations at its core) can only fall short of productive intervention. Further, if by the 1990s, the changing importance of the nation-state under neo-liberal globalization suggested a need for new questions and new analyses, by the second decade of the twenty-first century it also hinted at the emptiness at the core of an art historical project centred on defining and articulating the nation-state. The crux of the issue is this: if, as McKay suggests, Canada is less a sovereign entity than a political solution to the problem of synthesizing many competing interests into a homogeneous whole, then the project of Canadian art history has played a significant role in bolstering that synthesis. The development of a Canadian art history in the late nineteenth century cannot be separated from the expansion of the settler nation of Canada atop existing patterns of Indigenous settlement.9 The writing of Canadian art history has, in this sense, always been a cover-up. In other words, the trotting-out of artists in linear chronologies of influence or the imagining of Canada through the pristine and spare landscapes of the Group of Seven works to visually extend and enhance the scaffolding through which Canada could (and can) be defined as a nation. If Canada is a “vacant lot,” then it is one heavily defended and heavily armed with the seeming naturalness of a quest to define what exactly constitutes the nation.

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Thus, more recently, as the more parochial narratives of nation building have drawn critical interest, we are faced with something of an impasse. The answer of recent art histories has been to expand the framework – that is, to frame the issue in terms of a “politics of inclusion” in the Canadian art narrative.10 However, to expand the framework to include those people who were left out of the nineteenth-century project of nation building (for example, women or Indigenous peoples) and the objects they produced (historically situated for the most part in the “inferior” categories of craft, or applied art) is simply to shore up the shaky foundations of the nation itself, and so to privilege the very interests tied up in the interrelated projects of defining Canada and “Canadian art.”11 If this newly reconfigured narrative is itself premised on rethinking the same Canada, then what emerges is not a new framework but merely an ontology of nationhood. In other words, while such projects aim to critique exclusion, they ultimately serve to concretize the inequalities that led to exclusion in the first place. Moreover, the answer to exclusivity isn’t necessarily inclusivity, if the rules of engagement remain such that inclusion is always determined on the grounds of exclusion. Thus, while recent case studies correcting historical exclusions by advocating an inclusive approach contribute to the ability to study and teach a Canadian Art cum Visual History, the national/ist category itself remains largely understudied, and, indeed, the theoretical principles that define the field’s boundaries are largely ignored. Even the most critical interventions rely on deeply held notions of a sovereign “Canada” against which to offer dissent that potentially reifies the very boundaries the intervention seeks to challenge. The same kind of limits faced this project in the use of the term “vacant lot.” In 1922, Prime Minister Mackenzie King wrote of Canadian participation in the British Empire Exhibition: “It is an imperialist scheme, but of the ‘safe’ variety, the antithesis of war – the outlay is large, but we cannot afford to be represented by a vacant lot.”12 Mackenzie King’s statement speaks to the way in which the vacant lot tends conventionally to be understood as an actual empty space deserving of “filling,” and requiring vigorous debate as to whether or not Canada is, in fact, a vacant lot. It is precisely these kinds of debates that this volume seeks to avoid. Instead we read the crisis over a perceived lack, a “vacant lot,” as part of the same issue – the point is that Canada is not a vacant lot. It is a liberal hegemony; to study it is to recognize its historical establishment as such and its history as a record of the ongoing process of renegotiation that sustains that hegemony. Thus, what would it mean to study the visual in Canada once the modifier “Canadian” had been denaturalized? How might we unpack the ways in which the modifier has historically functioned to Canadianize the art object itself (or, for that matter, the art institution or state cultural policy), and what would studying the visual in Canada look like if we eliminated “Canadian” altogether? How might one map the degree of membership in the nation (that is, one’s place on the hierarchy of citizenship, or one’s degree of “selfpossession” in the liberal order) onto a hierarchy of objects (possessions) through which key values of liberalism are communicated? For McKay, answering such questions requires a reconnaissance of Canadian history that identifies the installation of a liberal order in everything from John A. Macdonald’s 1879 National Policy, a federal tariff that was intended to nationalize the base of the Canadian economy, to the seemingly arcane location of a farmer’s fence post. The linking

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element between the two is the way in which both tariff and fence post create the liberal individual through the right of private property – a right that begins with possession of the self. As McKay puts it, One can read as much “liberal ordering” into inheritance patterns, or the conception of the household as a “private sphere” ruled by an authorized free-standing individual patriarch, or even in the location of a particular fence post, as one can read into the National Policy. What connects the farmer’s fence with Macdonald’s tariff is a common respect for private property and the propertied individual as the foundation of a sociopolitical order ultimately defended by the state’s legitimate violence … With regard to these fundamental questions of property, the farmer’s fence post and the prime minister’s tariff policy share a common universe of assumptions and values.13

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In the case of Canadian art history, those engaged in the discipline might perhaps read “liberal ordering” more obviously into the formation of such hegemonic cultural institutions as the National Gallery of Canada than into painter Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté’s brush strokes. And yet, the farmer’s combination of fence posts to form a perimeter of arable land and the artist’s combination of brush strokes to form the illusion of light bouncing off snow and ice, as in Suzor-Coté’s 1907 The Coureur de Bois (fig. 0.1), can each be interpreted as individual gestures under a liberal epistemology and ontology. It is, in other words, the centrality of the propertied liberal individual enacting his (and to a lesser extent her) right to plot land and paint canvas that unites them epistemologically, through the naturalization of freedom of expression, consciousness, and work as ways of thinking, and ontologically, through the naturalization of selfpossession as a way of being. To put it another way, reading liberal order into a Suzor-Coté brush stroke allows us to question the ways in which the historical implanting of a national/ist art history in Canada now seems commonsensical, as “the way it has always been” or as “the natural development of art in Canada.” Moreover, it allows us to make the case that the project of Canadian art history as a national/ist art history, one that is normally understood as a commonsensical, or hegemonic enterprise, is not the same thing as the formation of disciplinary art history around national schools of art. In northern North America, the disciplinary project of art history became a national/ist art history through the historical success of liberalization. It is in this sense that both the project-of-Canada and the projectof-Canadian-art-history are interrelated yet distinct exercises in liberal hegemony making. That Canadian art history has always been a national/ist art history is proof of the success of the implantation of liberalism across this now sovereign state territory. Consider, for example, a 1910 essay in Canadian Courier, in which St George Burgoyne, referring to Suzor-Coté, writes, “A distinctive, national art, the product of slow, evolutionary growth, has not yet come to Canada … As yet the influence of the Continental schools must in the main be reflected in the viewpoint and technique of Canadian artists. At the same time there are those who possess marked individuality, and more particularly is this evidenced in landscape work.”14 Suzor-Coté thereby represents the pro-

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Figure 0.1 Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, The Coureur de Bois, 1907.

gression of individual artistic genius in Canadian art circles, making his work significant to critics such as Burgoyne because he can easily read the transplanting of European techniques onto localized subject matter – more often than not, the fields and farms of SuzorCoté’s native Arthabaska, Quebec – through a careful formal analysis of the artist’s individualized gesture. As Burgoyne writes of the painting Settlement on the Hillside, which shows houses in the distance, scattered across a winter landscape, (fig. 0.2), “Mr. Suzor-Cote [sic] depicts the texture of snow with the touch which denotes long study and faithful observation. Painted with vigour and directness there is still the suggestion of fleeciness – snow instead of whitewash.”15 Once established, the narrative of the individual artist-genius constituting artistic innovation is difficult to shake off, even if it is now clear that the construction of liberal individualism creates a national/ist art history in the first place. J. Russell Harper reinforces

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Figure 0.2 Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Settlement on the Hillside, 1909.

this way of thinking in his 1966 Painting in Canada, in which he asserts the significance of Suzor-Coté as an individual artist who imported the French impressionist technique to Canada: Suzor-Coté … painted winter snows on his return to Canada [from France in 1908] and introduced Impressionism to the French-speaking community. He preferred open streams whose blue water contrasted with the vari-hued snow on the bank. His small, directly painted landscapes are superb. Larger canvases may lack the same individual character, for sometimes when the subject is not uniquely Canadian he forgot the crisp Canadian air and gave an overlay of French haze, as for example, when farmers plough in Quebec just as the artists had seen farmers ploughing overseas.16 It is perhaps quite easy to read into this passage the unfolding of a national/ist narrative through Suzor-Coté’s aesthetic and the ways in which Harper points to the limits of this aesthetic’s usefulness in constituting a national/ist school of art. Less obvious, perhaps, is the manner in which “an overlay of French haze” troubles Suzor-Coté’s “individual character,” which we might understand as part of the construction of the liberal individual itself as opposed to a roadblock in achieving a national/ist art. The “individual” is not a real person here, but rather an abstract principle that the political philosophy of liber-

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alism has intellectually advanced in the same way that the discipline of art history has intellectually advanced the category of the “artist-genius.” Indeed, one category cannot be understood in historiographic context without the other. In a follow-up essay to his 2000 “The Liberal Order Framework,” McKay writes: “One important answer to the puzzle of Canada, according to the liberal order framework, lies in the category that lies at the heart of an entire paradigm: ‘the individual.’ The ‘individual’ was both a foundational category of analysis and a vivid ideal.”17 Once again, the Suzor-Coté example can be used to provide insight here. In 1978, Jean-René Ostiguy’s exhibition catalogue, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté: Paysage d’hiver/Winter Landscape, described two of the artist’s 1907 paintings as follows: Two major works, Dinner Is Served, Sir (1907; destroyed by fire in 1966 and previously in the Musée de Québec) and Fig Trees (1907; Mrs. Marc Saint-Jean, Montreal) illustrate Suzor-Coté’s development at the time of his return to Montreal. Dinner Is Served, Sir, like several previous still-lifes by the artist, is reminiscent of the works of Charles Cottet (1863–1924), despite Suzor-Coté’s stronger preference for thick, glowing impastos. Fig Trees reveals a new aspect of the artist: a strange implication of an anguish stronger than the sweet melancholy present in the works of [French painter Henri] Harpignies [Suzor-Coté’s instructor]. It is possible that Suzor-Coté had unconsciously discovered that his portrayal of nature’s beauty revealed a deeper meaning.18 Art historians often consider Suzor-Coté’s use of grainy impasto, which created the effect of light bouncing off water, snow, and ice in the artist’s winter landscapes, to be stylistically original because it combined the aesthetic formula of French impressionism with a painterly treatment of what is framed as distinctively Canadian subject matter.19 Ostiguy writes of the painting from which he derived the title of the exhibition: “When we look to Canadian content as well as to stylistic innovations, we must consider Winter Landscape (fig. 0.3) as we do A.Y. Jackson’s Terre Sauvage (1913; National Gallery of Canada) or his Red Maple (fig. 0.4). It is difficult to explain why these works were better received for so many years than Suzor-Coté’s landscapes, including his Winter Landscape of 1909.”20 In fact, it is not difficult to explain why Suzor-Coté was not as well received as A.Y. Jackson. The answer lies in the fact that art institutions and art critics did not consider all artists to be equally marked by individual genius, much as liberals did not always grant the status of individual to all people (women, Indigenous people, and workers prominent among them in Canada).21 One could of course argue the opposite here, to suggest that the National Gallery was simply recognizing Jackson’s greater artistic value in a field of cultural production defined by artists of varying talent and ability. Yet as Lynda Jessup has argued elsewhere, there is a contradiction in the narrative of struggle and starvation as social markers of artistic integrity. In Canada, as elsewhere, an artist who was deemed, for example, “too commercial” has historically been understood as lacking artistic integrity and, therefore, as lacking artistic value. In the case of A.Y. Jackson and his fellow members of the Group of Seven, Jessup explains:

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Figure 0.3 Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Winter Landscape, 1909.

Figure 0.4 A.Y. Jackson, Red Maple, 1914.

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That the artists enjoyed the overwhelming support of the National Gallery of Canada and the then Art Gallery of Toronto has always been part of the story as well, the inherent contradiction between their status as struggling artists and the aggressive purchase and exhibition of their work by the two major cultural institutions having been recast by the National Gallery from the outside as evidence of its willingness to assertively exercise its mandate to mean the support of a nationalist and, as such, “Canadian” art.22 What this means is that there remains a difference between those who are considered to be liberal individuals or individual artists-geniuses and those who are not (or are less so), between “those who may take advantage of the rights provided by the liberal order and those who may not.”23 That there remain categories of non-individuals indicates that an additive Canadian art history does nothing to challenge the modifier “Canadian” in the first place, because it does nothing to challenge the primacy of the self-possessed individual. We might therefore consider reframing our line of questioning. “Why not Suzor-Coté” and “why A.Y. Jackson” might be more productively reframed to ask “why did one artist meet the standards for inclusion in the early-twentieth-century narrative of Canadian art and not the other?” To answer this question one must locate the boundaries of the liberal hegemony of Canadian art at this time, which ultimately policed which artists could advance the national/ist story, and thereby be included – without actually disrupting the basis of the narrative itself. One could also point here to the way in which the very notion or presence of Canada-as-nation has tended to obfuscate any idea that there might be other competing notions of nationality within its borders: in the example of Suzor-Coté, a history of francophone Quebec remains at odds with the liberal anglophone nation of Canada; in other examples, narratives of Indigenous sovereignties challenge the unity of a single national entity. Yet, the liberal order’s incorporation of Quebec, for example, was essential to its success and dependent on what McKay calls “carefully articulated politics of elite accommodation and cultural compromise, which have gone on to become misleadingly mythologized as defining features of Canada itself.”24 Suzor-Coté has thus historically presented a means to fold Quebec into the narrative of Canadian art without actually challenging its liberal order.25 To further probe such issues, we might also ask ourselves why scholars of the visual have not typically used the process of liberal expansion as the historical context for unpacking art historical models. There could be several reasons for this tendency, chief among them perhaps the fact that art historians have tended to explore objects of art and culture through the lens of the cultural experience of the capitalist revolution, modernity, rather than its political iteration, liberalism. Yet it seems to us that, since liberal capitalist modernity comprises three intertwined political, economic, and cultural tendencies that together form the lived experience of the last century and a half, any study of the objects, movements, and institutions it produces requires an underlying examination of polity, economy, and culture. The point here is not to lambaste art historical scholarship any more than other disciplinary tendencies. (It could be argued, for example, that history, political science, and sociology circles tend to favour political economy to the extent

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that culture becomes an afterthought.) Rather, we simply seek to raise the argument that the framing of art historical models has been as dependent on the political philosophy of liberalism as it has on the cultural experience of modernity, even if art historians themselves have not acknowledged the liberal order as a determining construct in their discipline. We do so here to suggest that any rethinking of the visual in Canada requires at its base an acknowledgment of this position.

What Should the Project Be Now?

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As liberalism has grown into the hyper-individualism of neo-liberalism, the questions raised in the previous section become even more resonant. At the beginning of this chapter, we asked: what happens now to the project of Canadian art history? If our answer and call for new strategies presumes a certain periodizing and post-disciplinary logic, it does so within a contemporaneous milieu that is characterized by a crisis in the humanities, a turn away from historical research, a search for explanatory models that can account for the absorption and depoliticization of identity politics into post-Fordist capitalism, and a changing landscape “after globalization.”26 The latter has seen not only the fallout of the financial crisis of 2008, but also the apparent re-emergence of the nation-state as a potent symbolic entity, coupled with a deep swing to the right (in Canada and elsewhere) and a growing anti-intellectualism. So what does this political and scholarly atmosphere mean for a project that unravels both the discipline of art history and the naturalized category of nation? And what does it mean for a counter-position that would operate against the one we are suggesting in this introduction? At the 2011 College Art Association (caa) conference, it meant attendees packing a room for a panel entitled “Crisis in Art History.” Panellists noted the changing focus of art history dissertations, pointing out that eight out of ten North American students were now writing on contemporary topics.27 The concern (always just below the surface) was that contemporary topics tended to avoid disciplinary rigour and might lead to the production of scholars able to spout the logic required by creative cities agendas (which often are quite disconnected from culture, creativity, or the study of the visual), but who would have little connection to or understanding of art history. Such observations often lead to strong arguments for the discipline, to advocacy for art history as a place in which to study an “art” defined as disinterested in and distanced from mass culture.28 While in some ways these sentiments echo a tired debate that has characterized the study of the visual since the 1960s, one that tends to separate conservative connoisseurs advocating for the transcendence of art from left-wing liberal scholars advocating the embeddedness of visual culture in everyday social, political, and economic life, the political intent of this panel was markedly different. Specifically, the panel suggested that art history as a historical discipline should be actively preserved as a radical act. To take this observation to its end point, perhaps the most radical gesture is for art history to carve out a disciplinary space on the margins that would actively resist incorporation into neo-liberal politics through a focus on art as disinterested, as apolitical, and as decoupled from economic interest. To do otherwise

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would lead inevitably toward the further erosion not only of art history, but also of the humanities. In short, the caa panel suggested that the translation of art historical scholarship into visual cultural studies, the growing focus on contemporary art, and the disintegration of the critical project of the 1990s, all were leading inexorably to the evolution of art history into a professionalizing training program. Many of our questions in this introduction echo those of the “Crisis in Art History” presenters, and yet the solutions we propose here are entirely different. Rather than arguing that art needs to be understood as disinterested, apolitical, and decoupled from economic interest, we are arguing for the opposite – namely, that these frameworks are precisely those within which the study of the visual needs to be articulated. And while the standing-room-only attendance at the panel suggests, at the very least, a widespread interest in redefining the boundaries of art history itself, our question – what should the project be now? – requires thinking beyond the limits of a disciplinary defence strategy. We might agree with the panellists that the historical position can be a political position, but in our view this position constitutes a historical understanding of liberalism and art history as mutually constituting intellectual projects. A new approach might be simply to acknowledge the implication of art and disciplinary art history in liberalism and then to study this implication – how it functions now and how it has functioned in the past. It is, in short, an illusion to think that art can stand outside its historical conditions of production. That art history is perceived to be in crisis at a time when visual study is dispersing across other disciplines, not just in the humanities, but also in business, the sciences, the social sciences, and so on, helps to solidify our point, not to work against it. The image is ubiquitous, but the strategies through which images are analyzed or the ways in which images themselves are used as tools for analysis owes little to the critical studies that resisted and undermined parochial art history from the 1970s to the 1990s.29 What has emerged is a decoupling of the image from the disciplinary formation of art history and, in answer, a rush to defend the discipline. One is reminded of Irit Rogoff’s comments with regards to the apparent “xenophilia” in current-day museums that attempt to redress their exclusionary pasts through models of compensatory visibility. She notes: “Contrary to its own self-perception as revisionary, this infinitely expanding inclusiveness practiced by so many exhibiting institutions is actually grounded in an unrevised notion of the museum’s untroubled ability simply to add others without losing a bit of the self.”30 What occurs is actually a reification of the discipline or institution that, in Rogoff’s words, “assumes the possibility of change without loss.”31 Rogoff instead calls for loss or lack to become a central organizational principle of museums. In doing so, the museum would “spur the centre into critically rethinking itself,” unsettling the order in which objects have been used to support institutional narratives, but also the way in which those institutional narratives draw from, are constituted by, and produce wider framing devices – in this case, the process of liberal expansion inherent to nation building.32 What happens if we bring together the worries outlined at the caa panel on the growing contemporary focus of current art historical scholarship and Rogoff’s comments on the unwillingness of institutions to question themselves? Artists and cultural workers

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(including those studying visual cultures) have certainly and obviously been used as model citizens and culturepreneurs in the economization of culture.33 Despite this image, careers in the arts are immensely precarious, often characterized less by entrepreneurial success than by low wages, contingency, and ever-expanding working hours. While panellists at the caa were concerned that they were merely training marketers and fundraisers, something that they associated with the study of contemporary topics, a more accurate assessment might be to also acknowledge the lack of jobs at the end of the degree – a situation created by the same economic circumstances that bring into being discourses of immaterial labour and culturepreneurialism. Thus, how does one create a critical project about the visual that does not become critically, economically, or disciplinarily expedient? How to move beyond the idea that to study the visual requires a discipline, or that the study of the visual in Canada requires a Canadian art history? And how does one create a critical project with an urgent currency that does not lop off or ignore its historical roots? The point here is that lamentations about the contemporary focus of current art historical scholarship do nothing to displace or unsettle the disciplinary strategies of art history. Thus, while the examination of Suzor-Coté’s impasto and the way in which it demarcates the individual gesture of genius may be lamented as a lost practice for a generation of art history students, today, one might find a parallel in, for example, an eco-commentary that focuses on Edward Burtynsky’s photographs by highlighting the “lurid orange” colour of run-off from a nickel mine, as in Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario (fig. 0.5).34 Each is an exercise in formal analysis from a political perspective, and so the result is the same: a new incarnation of pure formalism. Is this less an exercise in the expansion of liberal hegemony? Such analyses are still based in a contextualized treatment of individualized object analysis, guided by the foundational disciplinary principle that “an artwork is reflective, emblematic, or generally representative of its original time, place, and circumstances of production,” to borrow Donald Preziosi’s phrase.35 Even if the language of theory has changed over the past century, as the epistemology of object-bound representation gives way to the ontology of non-objectified performance and now to the phenomenology of what is unbound and affective, the connection to liberal hegemony remains. What the impasto and the framing of the nickel tailings have in common, we are suggesting, is that they are each conventionally thought to reflect their time, place, and context as individualized gestures of artistic expression according to the art historical model. Playing this out in terms of the example in the previous section, we might point out that a Suzor-Coté retrospective at the National Gallery does nothing to challenge the primacy of A.Y. Jackson, just as Griselda Pollock pointed out decades ago that adding women artists to the canon of Western art history does nothing to challenge its patriarchal formation.36 In each case, the rethinking of the current formation still reifies the primacy of the individual, which means that this category cannot effectively be displaced. To put this even more bluntly, one might think about the difference between adding traditional and contemporary Indigenous art to the National Gallery of Canada’s historical Canadian wing and imagining the entire gallery curated from an Indigenous

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Figure 0.5 Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996, printed 1998.

perspective of what a “National Gallery of Canada” might mean.37 Put slightly differently, the project of Indigenous representation in the gallery in Canada has been defined as “bringing aboriginal art in to the history of Canadian art” rather than of incorporating settler history into the history of Aboriginal art.38 Would such reimaginings mean, for example, a move away from the primacy of a liberal politic and of the artist genius as a cultural application of that politic? Doubtless it would, were it not that the museum, whether singly or as a system, works to preclude such a reimagining as it advances the ongoing renegotiation of the liberal hegemony and its narratives. In short, defining art as an expression of liberalism means that it cannot stand apart from its conditions of production in a liberal society. Turning to the nation-state as a project of liberalism allows for thinking through the history of art in terms of nation-states as economies rather than as national collectivities. Capitalist states can be seen less as unified groups of people than as economies dealing with one another. If the discipline of history has long looked at the historical conditions of production in state, civil, and corporate contexts, art historians have not looked at liberalism in terms of these conditions,

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if they have considered the operation of liberalism at all. And, as stated in the previous section, we do not necessarily mean this as a critique of a discipline that has been more concerned with modernity as the cultural expression of liberalism than with liberalism itself, but rather as a simple statement of this as a disciplinary tendency. But the importance of considering art history in relation to the expansion of liberalism in northern North America lies in its potential to resist the exceptionalization of Canadian culture, to posit that it is something different than national cultures elsewhere or something worthy of study precisely because it fills that vacant lot. Instead, it allows visual culture produced in Canada to be studied as always already symptomatic of and always already productive of the kinds of political-cultural-economic aggregates that define the latest version of liberalism. This kind of analysis encompasses the historical and the contemporary in that it unsettles the traditional narratives of “Canadian” art history and creates a trajectory from the brush strokes in the Suzor-Coté painting to the conditions of graduate and contingent labour in the present. What is of import here is not that there is an unchanging discipline, or an unchanging nation-state; what changes is our way of seeing, understanding, labelling, and describing it. As Eric Cadzyn and Imre Szeman have recently written of globalization, globalization actually doesn’t exist because it is not an entity but simply a new way of describing and obscuring capitalism.39 To conclude with another example, in 1994, Robert Nelson wrote about the classifications that underlie the organization of art history. He writes of library classification systems that the “impact of nationalism can be observed throughout the bibliographic geography of the lc [Library of Congress] scheme.”40 Nelson notes that in the library classification system, art history is organized by nation, despite the contingency present in this system of organization (for example, the breakup of the former Yugoslavia involved new lc numbers in the catalogue).41 As noted here, it is not just that disciplines and fields within those disciplines are organized by nation – Canadian Art History, Italian Renaissance, Chinese Art – but that the system of classification on which the objects of study are organized echo those organizations. Writing in 1994, Nelson already foresaw the potential of digital databases and search engines to unsettle the strict delineation of library shelves. And indeed, a physical stroll through the library has largely been replaced by keyword and subject searches that are not nationally defined. Where the digital intervenes into the disciplinary the lines of national organization are particularly weak. But where the secondary level of our argument in terms of economics comes in, one might look solely to the proprietary software, intellectual property, and copyright restrictions currently underlying almost all search engines of visual material used in the research and teaching of visual material. Such proprietary norms are almost never controlled by the kinds of geographic boundaries that might define that nation-state and as such can be seen as indicative of new formations of both potential scholarship and potential resistance.

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notes 1 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 617–18. 2 Ibid., 617. 3 Ibid., 619. 4 In many ways, our inquiry in this volume depends on the groundwork that McKay outlines in “The Liberal Order Framework.” This essay has been innovative in unpacking this historical process of liberalization in relation to disciplinary Canadian history. McKay begins with the premise that at the turn of the millennium, Canadian history was in the midst of a crisis, spurred by the important advancements of social and cultural history in the 1960s that, despite their necessity of relocating the histories of marginalized persons, resulted in fragmenting the discipline at its core. Michel Ducharme and Jean-François Constant summarize McKay’s proposal for a way of moving beyond this impasse: “Unlike Jack Granastein and Michael Bliss, McKay does not advocate a return to nationalist historical syntheses or to epic political narratives. He does not suggest that we should blindly celebrate Canada, or the political processes that led to its birth, nor that we should reject certain methodological approaches in favour of a return to more traditional models of political or social history. Rather, McKay believes that we should integrate the recent discoveries of social and cultural history into a new analytical framework inspired by the latest developments in Canadian intellectual, political, and legal history. He suggests that we should move towards a true reconnaissance, that we should revisit the history of Canada by studying what he calls ‘the Canadian Liberal Revolution,’ a phrase he uses to describe the gradual deployment of a liberal order in the British colonies of North America, and later within the Canadian federa-

5 6

7

8

9

tion, between 1840 and 1940” (3–4). For more on the impact of McKay’s article on Canadian history, see Ducharme and Constant, “Introduction: A Project of Rule Called Canada,” in Liberalism and Hegemony, 3–32. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 11–12. As McKay suggests in “The Liberal Order Framework,” for example, liberalism is not “something to be ‘exposed,’ and whose secret already lies in an underlying economic reality. Rather, politics is something to be ‘explored,’ a terrain in which people became aware of their interests and struggled, politically, to fight for them. In the case of the liberal order, the new framework had to be constructed against or alongside radically different ways of conceptualizing human beings and societies” (629). This argument suggests that the process of building liberal nations such as Canada can only be understood as a process of building a liberal hegemony – “defined as an attempt to plant and nurture, in somewhat unlikely soil, the philosophical assumptions, and the related political and economic practices, of a liberal order” (623). The term post-national is used in a variety of ways, but it generally refers to the superseding of the nation-state by supranational entities such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, or the United Nations. See especially A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large; M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire; D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-liberalism; S. Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights; and Y. Soysal, Limits of Citizenship. By this we mean that there was a consciousness of a larger, namely European, art scene within which Canadian artists were situating themselves as early as the late nineteenth

Introduction

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century. One could argue that the historicizing of Canadian art is a product of the twentieth century. 10 These include the recent survey texts: J. O’Brian and P. White, eds, Beyond Wilderness; and A. Whitelaw, B. Foss, and S. Paikowsky, eds, The Visual Arts in Canada. Certainly, as Clive Robertson points out in a recent review of The Visual Arts in Canada, those who participate in these types of survey projects are aware of their recurring challenge, namely, “the messiness and tensions of a historiography that treads in and out of a space of post-representational politics” (68). While we agree with Robertson’s assessment here that these books both contribute to and summarize important research on the visual in Canada, we see them as engaging in a much different, albeit parallel, task to the one we are suggesting here. We are, in other words, seeking to think beyond the “survey” model that Canadian art history has depended on up to this point, in order to concentrate on some of the significant “debates and dust-ups” that, as Robertson notes, are generally relegated to the footnotes of such texts. See Robertson, “Review of Anne Whitelaw, Brian Foss, and Sandra Paikowsky, eds, The Visual Arts in Canada,” 68–70. 11 McKay outlines the history of liberalization in, first, the British colonies and, second, a sovereign Canadian state by making clear that this process of building a liberal hegemony was achieved “simultaneously as an extensive projection of liberal rule across a large territory and an intensive process of subjectification, whereby liberal assumptions are internalized and normalized within the dominion’s subjects” (“The Liberal Order Framework,” 623). Accordingly, this liberalization was always accomplished according to liberalism’s three central values: liberty, equality, and property. Yet these values are also hierarchical ones, with “liberty” at the

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13 14

15

apex because of its advancement of “ontological and epistemological status to ‘the individual’ – the human being who is the ‘proprietor’ of him – or herself, and whose freedom should be limited only by voluntary obligations to others or to God, and by the rules necessary to obtain the equal freedom of other individuals” (623). Property, at least in the post-classical liberal model, is second to liberty in that it defines the liberal individual through the right to own it. Equality also remains subordinate to liberty, since it is a right that can only be assigned to the liberal individual in the first place. While our discussion here is heavily dependent on McKay’s, for more on the history of liberalism McKay cites É. Halévy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism; C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism; A. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism; F. Roy, Progrès, harmonie, liberté; and D.F. Ericson, The Shaping of American Liberalism. See also Erin Morton’s essay in this volume. MacKenzie King on the British Empire Exhibition, Mackenzie King papers, Library and Archives Canada, mg 26 j13, Diary, 12 October 1922, f. 108. As cited in C. Tait, “Brushes, Budgets, and Butter,” in Canada and the British World, 237. McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 641. St G. Burgoyne, “A Painter of Winter Landscape,” Canadian Courier (19 February 1910), 14. Ibid. It should be noted that although Burgoyne entitles this painting A Winter Landscape in his article, the reproduced image therein is of the painting Settlement on the Hillside, to use the National Gallery of Canada’s title. The National Gallery assigns the title Winter Landscape to another 1909 Suzor-Coté painting, accession no. 4575, illustrated here in figure 0.3.

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16 J.R. Harper, Painting in Canada, 235. 17 I. McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution,” in Liberalism and Hegemony, 350. 18 J.-R. Ostiguy, Marc-Aurèle de Foy SuzorCoté, 12. 19 As Laurier Lacroix and others have pointed out, Suzor-Coté did not use what would be considered a standard French impressionist brush stroke. Suzor-Coté was known for employing a technique called “scumbling,” a process in which the artist lets the painted canvas dry slightly before dragging the brush over the surface to create a pronounced texture. For more on this distinction in painterly technique, see Lacroix, Ozias Leduc, 186; Lacroix, Suzor-Coté, 170–2; and B. Foss, “Into the New Century,” in The Visual Arts in Canada, 28. 20 Ostiguy, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, 22. 21 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 626. 22 L. Jessup, “The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada,” 146. 23 Ducharme and Constant, “Introduction,” 8. 24 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 636. 25 This is an issue reflected both in Alice Ming Wai Jim’s contribution to this volume, in which she tackles histories of art in Quebec from the perspective of world and global art histories, and in the relatively minor presence of art in Quebec as a conventional geography of distinction from art in Canada, discussed in the accompanying chapters. It is worth noting here that Dominic Hardy and Lucie Robert at the Université de Québec à Montréal have initiated a sshrc-funded project to investigate the historiography of art in Quebec, entitled “Interdisciplinarité, multidisciplinarité et transdiscursivité dans la vie artistique au Québec (1895–1948),” which will no doubt enhance our collective understanding of the artistic trajectory of francophone Quebec.

26 E. Cazdyn and I. Szeman, After Globalization. 27 S. Thornton, “Search Party.” 28 Ibid. 29 See, for example, Susan Buck-Morss, “Visual Studies and Global Imagination,” a talk presented at the Tate Modern, June 2004. 30 I. Rogoff, “Hit and Run,” 66. Will Straw writes similarly of academic disciplines and university departments: “By invoking their past importance and power to justify the urgency and prioritizing of their own projects of internal transformation [they] are often able to maintain their institutional privilege.” Straw, “Shifting Boundaries, Lines of Descent,” in Relocating Cultural Studies, 90. 31 Rogoff, “Hit and Run,” 66. 32 Ibid., 69. 33 See, for example, A. McRobbie, “‘Everyone Is Creative,’” in Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life. 34 C. Pearson and J. Nasby, The Cultivated Landscape, 147. 35 D. Preziosi, “Art History: Making the Visible Legible,” in The Art of Art History, 7. 36 G. Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 120. 37 A. Whitelaw, “Placing Aboriginal Art,” 197–216. 38 L. Jessup, “Landscapes of Sport, Landscape of Exclusion,” 109–10. 39 Cazdyn and Szeman, After Globalization, 20. 40 R. Nelson, “The Map of Art History,” 32. 41 Ibid. Ruth Phillips makes a similar point with regard to museums, suggesting that objects were historically sorted into various “disciplinary museums” (art, anthropological, natural history/science, ethnographic etc.) and that digitalization could potentially reorder the objects. Phillips, “How Museums Marginalize,” 6–10.

Introduction

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PART ONE PREPOSTEROUS HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT Erin Morton

This book is concerned with investigating the history and politics of writing about the visual in Canada in the present, by illuminating how the process of conceptualizing, speaking of, writing about, and understanding this object of study also effectively serves to constitute it.1 The essays gathered here are therefore decided interventions into the discourse of the study of the visual, in terms of the ways in which scholars have thought about its past, and in turn how this past either speaks back, fails to speak, or is prohibited from speaking in our current moment.2 The visual is, in this regard, both the source of documentary evidence that the contributors to and editors of this volume are compelled to write about here, and also a lens through which to account for how the scholarly writing about its possible objects (images, materials, and experiences) in the past has taken us up to the present moment. In the Preface and Introduction to this volume, the editors begin to take account of this historiographic inquiry by offering up Ian McKay’s intervention into a parallel discipline – Canadian history – and reflecting on its conditions of possibility for our consideration of the study of the visual in Canada. Just as historians such as McKay are interested in the relationship between the documentary evidence of words and the impact that they have on the events, people, structures, and processes of the past, we are interested in the relationship between the possible objects of the study of the visual and its potential for the shaping and reshaping of what Hayden White has called “the phenomena that manifest the existence of ‘a past’” from the perspective of the present.3 Examining the condition and future tasks of historiography of the visual in Canada thus requires an acknowledgment that our presentist consciousness as scholars of this object of study shapes the ways in which we look at its past and also forms our assessment of its relevance in the present. This book is therefore not an exercise in the search for what White calls “the practical past,” which asserts that “the past be studied … ‘for itself alone’ or as ‘a thing in itself,’ without any ulterior motive other than a desire for the

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truth (of fact, to be sure, rather than doctrine) about the past and without any inclination to draw lessons from the study of the past and import them into the present in order to justify actions or programmes for the future.”4 Instead, it is deeply concerned with the uses of the past in the service of the present. It therefore seeks to purge itself from the practical, the dealing of things “as they are” or “as they have been,” and instead approaches the preposterous, the encounter of the historical (pre) from the position of the present (post). In essence, this book’s challenge to its readers is to comprehend the contemporary world from the perspective of a conventional framework such as Canadian art history. This challenge might be read at once as a provocation to understand the interrelation of the historical and the contemporary as lenses of inquiry to the study of the visual in Canada and as an articulation of an impasse that those invested in such study are grappling with from their various presentist perspectives. The events leading up to this examination and to the question that we as editors pose in the final section of our Introduction (what should the project be now?) are therefore as important as searching for its answer. In order to explore the trajectory of the question that inspires this collection of essays, I will begin my preparatory remarks on this section of the book by examining a series of conference panels that have helped to shape the search for its answer. I see this as an important exercise in tracing the conversation that emerges in the pages that follow and as part of the necessary work that comes with the politics of criticality. I will then briefly highlight some broader intellectual debates pertaining to the challenge of historicism in the contemporary moment by drawing them out in relation to the four essays in this section by Mark A. Cheetham, Kristy A. Holmes, Alice Ming Wai Jim, and Annie Gérin. In doing so, I will suggest that the participation in debates over the discourse of Canadian art (historical and contemporary) must be understood in relation to what literary theorist Lauren Berlant has more recently described as “the institutions, events, and norms that are already deemed history’s proper evidence, especially when that history is the history of the present.”5 This process of narrating the past from the historical present, a moment that is always in the process of becoming the past, therefore serves to shape the historical work itself. As we illustrate in our preface, the premise for this collection of essays began at the “Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada” workshop held at the University of Toronto in August 2009. Yet this was only one moment in a longer public dialogue that has taken place between the participants in this book and participants outside of it about the ongoing relevance of Canadian art history as a disciplinary formation. Many of these debates were previously thought out by organizers, speakers, and audience members at a series of panels at the annual Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC ) and College Art Association (CAA ) conferences, the national associations for university and college faculty, independent scholars, and art professionals working in the fields of art history and visual culture and in art production in Canada and the United States, respectively. The first took place at UAAC in November 2006 in Halifax, on a panel entitled “Cultural Properties: Economies of Knowledge in the Post-National Landscape.” Here panellists sought to explore the globalizing Canadian context of what Jeremy Rifkin calls “cultural capitalism,” which resulted in papers that considered the changing global positioning of museums, contemporary and/or activist art movements, cultural events

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and experiences, and other instances tied up in the broader constellation of discourses of neo-liberalism and globalization.6 They were also cognizant of the fact that any examination of the locus of such discourses in and about Canada necessitated expanding into other locales and situations – in ways that spoke to the need to unsettle the apparently seamless move of national culture industries into global economies. What became clear in the audience discussion following the panel, however, was that for some there remained an investment in finding a way to narrate “Canada” from the perspective of cultural or artistic experience. Often, the premise of history was called upon to justify or to challenge the presentist perspectives raised on the panel – to suggest, for example, that globalization was not actually new or that historical anachronism was all that would come from narrating the visual from the contemporary moment alone. What emerged from the 2006 UAAC panel was, in other words, a debate about the extent to which discourses of neo-liberalism and globalization had actually reshaped the ways in which cultural experience could be articulated along nationalist lines. With this debate in mind, a second session called “Whither Canadian Art History?” took place at the 2007 UAAC conference in Toronto in order to consider why the national/ist determination of this discipline was so contested for some and so defended by others. Perhaps because the papers presented various perspectives between these two extremes (the defence of the national on the one hand but also the outright rejection of its usefulness on the other), the audience response to this panel suggested the need to foster two ongoing but interrelated discussions. One of these discussions ultimately took the form of the “Negotiations in a Vacant Lot” workshop by considering the connection between the geopolitical landscape across which liberal capitalist modernity has advanced and the articulation of knowledge through the formation of academic disciplines – among the most relevant being, for our purposes, Canadian art history. This was a process that began to elucidate the difficulty of moving through a historical impasse such as globalization through a conventional framework such as the dominant narrative of Canadian art. In this respect, a second discussion was necessary since while many of the issues at hand found ground in debates about Canadian art history, others also extended far beyond this disciplinary formation and thus could not be effectively explored by using its case as a starting point. The beginnings of this second discussion were explored at a panel entitled “Historicizing Globalization: Studying the Visual in the Age of Three Worlds” at the 2010 CAA conference in Chicago. The goal at CAA was to begin the necessary work of periodizing the discourse of globalization as it pertained to the cultural turn of the humanities and social sciences in general and to the study of the visual in particular. The panel articulated some historical touchstones for understanding the transition in, around, and beyond the age when culture was more or less understood in relation to nationalist projects and the moment ideas about “international” cultural exchanges shifted toward theorizing culture in terms of its global circulation: •

The shift from Adorno’s critique of the modern “culture industry” in the first half of the twentieth century towards global understandings of the so-called “creative industries” under the economic conditions of late capitalism.

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•

•

•

•

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The legacies of nineteenth-century national/ist art historical frameworks when it comes to studying the visual under the historical conditions of modernity and globalization. The impact of disciplinary cultural studies and the cultural turn in the second half of the twentieth century on the development of visual studies and the visual turn in the first decade of the twenty-first. The role of culture in the transition from an industrial, production-based economy to the post-industrial, service-based “new economy” fostered by neo-liberal globalization. The importance of vision and visuality to historical studies of globalization and resistance, particularly in relation to the so-called “anti-globalization” (or, more accurately, alter-globalization) movement. The perception of culture as an underlying explanation and resource for fostering global development, social justice, and democracy, especially as it relates to the experienced historical realities of people living under the processes of colonization and decolonization.

While participants on this panel did not pretend to be the first to consider such transitions in the study of the visual, they did see a need to foster an increased historicization. In 2011, a new iteration of these conversations took the query of periodization back to the Canadian case paying particular attention to the role of historicism, this time posing the question “Is the Study of Canadian Historical Art Moribund?” at a UAAC roundtable in Ottawa that Lynda Jessup co-organized with Dennis Reid, professor of Canadian art history at the University of Toronto. The roundtable proposed to investigate Canadian historical art as a field of study by asking, in Jessup and Reid’s words: “As a site of art historical inquiry, is the field in decline? Is it lacking critical and theoretical urgency, creative energy – and the ‘effectiveness’ – that other areas of study, among them Canadian contemporary art, possess? Is study of the historical preoccupied with a narrow set of questions, outdated methodologies, tired narratives, too-familiar faces and the usual suspects?”7 Among the most interesting trajectories from this conversation was the articulation of a transition over long careers of teaching and researching historical Canadian art in which a marked shift emerged in the ways in which students responded to the dominant discourses of the subject. This conversation pointed to the fact that students were no longer invested in the project of Canadian art history (or, at least, historical Canadian art), because they could not see the discourse’s relationship to their present and, more importantly perhaps, to their futures. A discussion around this point emerged to suggest that students were disassociating themselves from this narrative because many of them were now too distanced in space and time from its historical formations and therefore had difficulty investing in them in the present. These events in the public conversation on Canadian art history, to which many of the contributors to this volume were privy and also helped to shape, have led me to consider them alongside broader debates on issues of historicism and the role of the present in looking at the past. When it comes to researching and writing histories, there

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has long been agreement among those invested in historical disciplines that the present experience cannot be a guide to understanding the past.8 Yet what mapping the short trajectory of these four conference panels and the workshop that preceded this volume demonstrates is not simply that historical inquiry is inherently anachronistic because it is conjured up from the perspective of the present, but also that the sense of history that scholars provide, and their representation of historical figures and events, makes them “feel responsive to and shaped by something historical in an atmosphere that they’ve lived,” as Berlant suggests.9 This is because history is one among many conventional frameworks that scholars use to comprehend what often seems to be a preposterous experience of the contemporary world. The contemporary, the moment that we inhabit that is constantly in the process of passing, always has the possibility of providing a new point of entry for looking at history and for understanding the motifs and experiences of historical actors. Read together, what the limited reach of these panels (art historical audiences in North America) points to is the fact that the historical is often used in the service of the contemporary in order to grapple with the conception of the present as impasse.10 This impasse is, in Berlant’s articulation, “a space of time lived without a narrative genre … An impasse is a holding station that doesn’t hold securely but opens out into anxiety, that dogpaddling around a space whose contours remain obscure. An impasse is decompositional – in the unbound temporality of the stretch of time, it marks a delay that demands activity.”11 Indeed, both the conference panels I have summarized and the essays that follow my remarks here have dealt with the present as impasse, one that our former theoretical and methodological tools might not be equipped to tackle. How, for example, can scholars of the visual in Canada approach this field in a way that does not pit historicism against contemporary theory? Beginning this work might necessitate acknowledging that what Berlant calls “the historical present” has not been valued as a lived experience.12 The fallacy of temporal distance that historical disciplines cling to, which suggests that historical subjects are incapable of knowing their own presents and that the alterity between historians and that which they study generates clarity of understanding, must first be challenged. Mark A. Cheetham’s chapter, “Struck by Likening: Homer Watson, Jack Chambers, Gerhard Richter and the Force of Art World Analogies,” suggests one methodological approach with which to do this. Cheetham’s essay is a nuanced comparison of comparisons which critically investigates the process of “likening” in art historical criticism, as he puts it, “of artist ‘X’ into the artist ‘Y’ of his or her country” (31). In particular, Cheetham focuses on the ways in which late-Romantic painter Homer Watson and modern painter and filmmaker Jack Chambers became lauded as “the Canadian Constable” and “the Canadian Puvis de Chavannes,” respectively. What does it mean, Cheetham interrogates, that the decidedly international careers of each artist had their achievements filtered “through the vehicle of international analogy” (32)? This question might lead us to a couple of levels of analysis beyond what Cheetham calls “the force of art world analogies,” which enact the disciplinary structure that advances “the Canadian Constable” over its opposite “likening,” “the English Homer Watson,” in the first place. What, we might ask regarding this particular example, does the modifier “Canadian” signify, if not

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the work of an artist whose European peers perceived him to be a colonial – a less sophisticated version of English Romantic painter John Constable? Cheetham’s paper suggests that these are not preposterous comparisons, despite the fact that they could at first seem like a “compression of chronologies and a wanton levelling of differences.” Rather, he suggests, examining the contemporary from the perspective of the historical, and vice versa, can help “free us to think beyond the usual art historical paradigms,” especially those based on “causal relationships” and “within the bounds of national schools” (38). This historiographic inquiry into the disciplinary tendencies of art history is in this regard an ideal starting point for this volume. Drawing on the work of both Patricia Parker and Mieke Bal, Cheetham points to the fact that the “preposterous” – that is, the reversal of the “pre” behind the “post” – is “productively disruptive” (44) because it allows for the possibility of anti-hierarchical examinations. If anything, this argument suggests a way out of the impasse articulated through the work of Ian McKay in the introduction to this volume: namely, drawing “innovatively on international theory and historiography” by reperiodizing Canadian art history through the examination of broad ideological, aesthetic, and conceptual patterns.13 The importance of reperiodizing such patterns is also clearly demonstrated in Kristy A. Holmes’s chapter, “Feminist Art History in Canada: A ‘Limited Pursuit’?” According to Holmes, unpacking the ideological bend of feminist art history in Canada is to discover the interrelation of patriarchy and liberal capitalism, particularly when one considers the expansion of the colony-to-nation narrative to include select women artists on particular grounds. This indicates what McKay has argued for some time: liberalism is a totalizing philosophy, to the extent that not immediately seeing its connection to Canadian art history is in and of itself a demonstration of its ideological success. The fact that liberalism appears commonsensical, in other words, means that this ideological formation is sometimes not even obvious as one. This is what connects the more familiar pursuit of disciplinary art history in Canada, which is namely to examine art according to the historical conditions of its production, to the process of what McKay describes as extending “across time and space a belief in the epistemological and ontological primacy of the category ‘individual.’”14 In Holmes’s case, this implies that bringing a white woman artist such as Joyce Wieland into the dominant narrative of Canadian art is part of the larger process of liberalizing white women artists in order to deepen their identification with the liberal project of Canadian art history itself. As Holmes argues, Wieland provides the perfect starting point with which to begin this mission, since Wieland’s inclusion is highly dependent on the “ways in which her work is constructed as embodying politically conservative Canadian cultural nationalism, by the very fact that her work depicts nationalist signifiers, [which] are the terms by which her art production is included and which deny the inherent feminist politics of her work” (56). Wieland was thereby the ideal white woman artist to fold into the liberal hegemony of Canadian art history in the 1960s and 1970s, in that she provided a means to include and advance a formerly marginalized liberal subject without fundamentally altering the narrative. In turn, as Holmes argues, Wieland “is used to strengthen the conceptualization of the visual arts during the 1960s as part of the process of Canadianization” (60).

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There was, in other words, a fit or an appropriateness between Wieland and the liberal hegemony of Canadian art history at this particular historical moment, which would have perhaps made her inclusion in the narrative previously impossible. The importance of reperiodizing this process, however, from a contemporary moment that is still feeling its effects demonstrates the potential in Cheetham’s notion of preposterous comparison. At the same time that Wieland realized the then-radical possibility of white women’s inclusion, for example, the work of Indigenous and non-white artists remained outside the fold of liberal common sense. This is a position that Alice Ming Wai Jim hints at in her essay, “Dealing with Chiastic Perspective: Global Art Histories in Canada,” which reflects on “the apparent impasse posed by the notion of what is euphemistically called ‘ethnocultural art’ in this country” (66). The impasse, as Jim sees it, is who gets to decide what is categorized as “ethnocultural art,” as opposed to or in relation to “global art,” for what purposes, and why? She goes on to outline the trajectory of teaching ethnocultural and global art histories in Canada and Quebec since the 1980s, which she understands as arriving “in recognition of, on one hand, formerly marginalized artistic production by racialized communities in European and American art history departments and, on the other, the demands of the contemporary art world and the pressures of globalization” (73). Jim’s case study also demonstrates the ways in which the liberal capital politics of inclusion have functioned historically in institutional contexts up to the present to bring formerly marginalized people or politics into the fold of the liberal rationale. Why did white women such as Wieland attain the full status of the liberal individual across earlytwentieth-century North America, including the right to vote and own property, we might posit, in order to arrive at the answer that those at the helm of liberal capitalist industry advanced this inclusion for the benefit of the market?15 This is not to minimize the material benefits of such advances in civil rights for those who have gained them in the past, but simply to read the politics of inclusion in tandem with the liberal capitalist agents that dictate the ongoing grounds of such inclusion in the first place. It is in this sense that we might read the folding of “non-Western” art histories into the “Western” art historical narratives as essentially a process of including “non-liberal” peoples into the liberal fray. As McKay suggests, for example, when “confronted with a serious quasirevolutionary challenge to its hegemony, the liberal state execute[s] far-ranging changes in its social and political project to ‘include’ some of those previously excluded, with the quid pro quo that they divest themselves of the most radical aspects of their oppositional programs (such as demands for a comprehensive change in political relations or in the nature and function of political ‘representation’).”16 Moreover, Jim’s essay stretches expectations of what undertaking a study of art in Quebec means in the context of the unfolding of a liberal order. While the need to reexamine Québécois experiences of liberalization in relation to general experiences of liberalization in Canada as a whole remains, some historians of Quebec have suggested that the historical hegemony of the Catholic Church might have helped to establish a less individualized expression of liberalism there.17 Historically, the making of the liberal order in Quebec required compromises on the grounds of nationality and religion that were not necessarily present in the same way outside of it.18 More recently, however, the

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geographical limits of a Québécois nation-state are as apparent as those of a Canadian nation-state, meaning that each context requires further investigation of the evolution of liberal order in northern North American in and beyond these two national constructs.19 What this means is that liberalization is an ongoing process in which the terms of inclusion get renegotiated at particular historical moments, but always in accordance with liberalism’s three hierarchical core elements: liberty (which includes the liberal individual’s right to “free labour,” “free speech,” and so on); equality (which is secondary to liberty, since it gets interpreted in ways, as McKay puts it, “that render ‘commonsensical’ the particular inequalities stemming from the exercise of the individual’s liberty”);20 and property (which is primary above liberty in that it defines the self-possessed liberal individual in the first place through the right of ownership).21 Accordingly, then, projects of liberal hegemony such as Canadian art history are inherently bound to a hierarchical set of principles that define the limits of inclusion. “Ethnocultural art” is arguably only now an acceptable category because it gets incorporated into the liberal narrative of Canadian art without fundamentally challenging the hegemony at its core. This process, as Jim puts it in a nutshell, “implies an obligation to … put into contention the traditional Eurocentric focus on Western art-historical canons formed during colonialism” (86, note 1) – and, I would add, to question the way in which this focus is dependent on people with the hegemonic authority to determine who gets included in liberal common sense, at what moment, and why. As Jim persuasively demonstrates, taking the liberal project of inclusion to one of its most instituted cases – the undergraduate survey course on so-called ethnocultural art history – points to the fact that such inclusion is “already at an impasse before it began” (86). This might lead us to question the current project of Canadian art history in terms of what the new grounds for inclusion might be and the extent to which such inclusion would have been impossible only decades previous. How might we tackle the ideological construction of liberalism’s three core elements (liberty, equality, and property) as they are advanced through disciplinary art history in the historical present? We might, for example, attempt to narrate the historical present by following up on a line of inquiry that McKay only begins in his article: “How (or if) neo-liberals will attempt to ‘Canadianize’ themselves is an intriguing mystery. True believers in unfettered individualism and global markets, these exponents of the hegemonic ideology presently lack any persuasive justification for Canada in the reductionist market terms in which they seek to cast social and political questions. Most of the neo-liberals’ grand economic objectives would, in fact, be better realized without a separate Canadian state in northern North America – and they know it.”22 Part of solving this “intriguing mystery” will be to bring the analysis of liberalism and Canadian art history down to the microlevel of local cultural politics, in order to follow Annie Gérin’s cogent suggestion to remain “vigilantly skeptical” (96) of ideas of placelessness that so permeate the rhetoric of neo-liberal globalization. In “The Location of/The Conditions for Art: On-Site Specifics and Site Adjustments,” Gérin probes the art historical concept of site-specificity, by suggesting that the material consequences of globalization make it increasingly difficult to read cultural production in situ. Since Gérin argues that the characteristics of so-called “non-places” in articulations of a post-

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national, global landscape are “still bound to very specific yet under-recognized features of place” (96), this helps us to acknowledge that the rhetoric of a worldwide circulation of global commodity flows does nothing to account for the ways concrete material inequalities take place on the ground. “While art historians often consider a place’s specific geological, historical, and national features in examining … [works of art],” Gérin reminds us that “more subtle contributions that are also very important in the shaping of culture routinely go unnoticed: climate, traffic density, pollution, safety, concentration of certain groups of users, and so on” (96). Gérin’s is an important argument with which to conclude because it suggests that liberal capitalism is both the decisive vehicle with which Canadian art history has been historically produced and the political economic process that might determine its continued significance. This is not meant to argue against decades of cultural studies scholarship by insisting that the liberal capitalist market is the only factor we need consider here, or for that matter that political economy determines cultural life and not the other way around. What I mean to suggest is that studying the visual in Canada into the twentyfirst century necessitates understanding the liberal capitalist connection to cultural production. This requires an argument that goes beyond acknowledging that art objects are capitalist commodities and have always been so under modernity. It requires careful consideration of liberalism, which McKay describes as “one bounded ideology among other ideologies,” in this case, one that advances such abstract notions as “the individual” and “property” in ways that cancel out or transform other competing ideologies – Indigenous, matriarchal, and homonormative world views to name just a few.23 The folding in of these competing visions has been as much a part of the history of liberalization as the cancelling out of more radical factions that could have irreversibly damaged the liberal order. And rather than lamenting for a Canadian art history that will be acceptable to all those who remain invested in that particular project of liberal hegemony, we might find instead some comfort in keeping “our own more disabling fears of nihilism at bay.”24 Those of us less invested in this project might find reassurance in letting go of a disciplinary project that remains steeped in a national/ist colonial way of thinking, if we haven’t already done so. Either way, letting go of the avowal to determine the outcome of the story should not produce what McKay calls a “panic-stricken polemical extravagance – the end is nigh! there is a corpse on the floor!”25 It should provide us with a way to move beyond the disciplinary impasse that has now been on the table for years, a way of rethinking the plight from the perspective that the present is the only grounds from which we can examine the past. To think otherwise is to disavow the importance of the feeling of being historical in the negotiation of the ongoing moment.26

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notes

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1 The framing of this introductory section references Hayden White’s influential reflections on the process of writing and theorizing disciplinary history, part of which he usefully reflects upon in his foreword, “Rancière’s Revisionism,” to Jacques Rancière’s The Names of History, vii–xix. 2 Ibid., vii. 3 Ibid., viii. 4 White, “The Practical Past,” 14. 5 L. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 54. 6 See J. Rifkin, The Age of Access. 7 L. Jessup and D. Reid, “Is the Study of Canadian Historical Art Moribund?” Universities Art Association of Canada panel description, 2011. 8 B. Attwood, D. Chakrabarty, and C. Lomnitz, “The Public Life of History,” 2. 9 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 66. 10 Ibid., 199. 11 Ibid.

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12 Ibid., 67. 13 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 619. 14 Ibid., 623. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 624. 17 J.-M. Fecteau, Un nouvel ordre des choses, as cited in Ducharme and Constant, “Introduction,” 14. 18 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 635. 19 Ducharme and Constant, “Introduction,” 14. 20 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 624. 21 Ibid., 623. 22 Ibid., 645. 23 Ibid., 624–5. 24 Ibid., 618. 25 Ibid. 26 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 199.

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1 The use of the nation as an organizing rubric in Canadian Struck by Likening: visual culture can be brought into focus by examining the Homer Watson, Jack familiar pattern of often hyperbolic textual analogizing that makes artist “X” into the artist “Y” of his or her country. Chambers, Gerhard While we find such comparisons in everyday parlance and in many disciplines, rarely do these “likenings” seem accurate or Richter, and the Force useful. But like other clichés, they prosper. Thus Sir Francis Bacon was “the Plato of England,” John Singer Sargent was of Art World Analogies the “Velazquez of America,” and Samuel Palmer was the “English van Gogh.” Likenings are a form of analogy, a Mark A. Cheetham translation term1 defined by Kaja Silverman as “a special kind of relationship [that] brings two or more things together on the basis of their lesser or greater resemblance.”2 Likenings make connections by compressing time and place. Flattery is involved, at least initially, because unequal partners are linked. It is a transformative process: being “struck by likening” can turn a rube into a citizen of the world. At the same time, the “home” artist is often put in her or his place. Why use such seemingly inadequate shortcuts? What does this practice tell us about our habitual recourse to the category of the nation when we discuss visual culture? To illuminate and ground the theoretical implications of art world analogies – which by their nature are frequently inter-national – I will examine initially two important likenings involving Canadian artists: Homer Watson a century ago, and Jack Chambers more recently. Oscar Wilde’s much quoted opinion that Homer Watson (1855–1936) was “the Canadian Constable” dogged the painter for his entire illustrious career. Ironies concerning the nation abound in this unbidden relationship. On the one hand, Watson came close to expatriate status, spending many productive years in England. On the other, while he vigorously promoted the artists of his own country and eventually settled in his hometown of Doon, Ontario, he wrote in a letter to Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer that “I never thought about Canadian Art. Myself being so much Canadian, why should I think of trying to be Canadian?”3 By deflecting the limitations of nationalism in his work,

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he was free to follow “nature” in the way he most appreciated it, “where cultivation went on to furnish a living to men who came out of the pioneer stage to a more refined rural life.”4 Ironically, given the apparent disparity in their personal achievements and relative status of their home countries in the art world, this path made the analogy to Constable apt, given that the English artist famously painted close to his home in rural Suffolk. Jack Chambers (1931–1978) might seem to present a very different case. His sensibility is modern where Watson’s was late Romantic. Chambers was rigorously trained in Spain; Watson learned through practice. Chambers was not primarily a landscape painter. Yet while comparing him with Watson is unconventional within the linear imperative typical of art history’s disciplinary protocols, analogical thinking makes such a leap possible and can reveal much about the performance of the national in this country and elsewhere. In his lifetime if less frequently in recent decades, Chambers was, like Watson, seen as an international artist not through comparisons with contemporary European or us American practice but through parallels with past masters. In an exhibition review in 1965, Anne Hoene called Chambers “the Canadian Puvis de Chavannes.”5 Chambers’s considerable reputation as a filmmaker and painter rests largely on his regional attachments to the environs of London, Ontario, and southwestern Ontario, affinities that kept him there after his return from Spain in 1961. Watson returned from England to nearby Doon, Ontario, because of his sympathy for landscapes not far geographically from that depicted in Chambers’s iconic The 401 towards London No. 1 of 1968–69. Chambers was, like Watson, also a builder of national art institutions.6 In both men’s cases, then, achievement was measured in regional and national terms through the vehicle of international analogy; both Chambers and Watson did indeed “go to where the action really is, to the United States, to Europe,” as Ian McKay phrases this common practice.7 For both men too, “Canada” was a category that was replete with meaning and possessed a magnetic force. But to say this is not enough to embark successfully on rethinking the project of Canadian art history as posed by the editors of this volume. To think about what makes such national and international analogies possible and to learn about the nation as a player in the “game” of art history, we need to look at such examples in detail and thus to initiate the now-radical work of thinking about the limits of Canadian art history as a discipline, given its inherently nationalist enterprise.

“The Canadian Constable” When Oscar Wilde was on a North American speaking tour in the spring of 1882, he was treated to a viewing of the Ontario Society of Artists Spring Exhibition in Toronto. Pausing in front of an oil painting by Homer Watson called Flitting Shadows, now lost, he exclaimed to the large crowd in attendance (no doubt to catch sight of the famous literary figure), “the Canadian Constable! Where is the artist? I must know that man!”8 Wilde was sincere in his praise. He applauded Watson again in a lecture the same evening and further in a later appearance in Boston. Wilde visited Watson’s studio in Doon, Ontario,9 commissioned and received paintings from the painter, encouraged Watson to visit London, and there, in 1887, introduced him to James McNeill Whistler, among other

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Figure 1.1 Homer Watson, The Pioneer Mill, 1890.

luminaries. To Whistler, Wilde is reported to have said “This is my find in America. Mr. Watson is the Canadian Constable, and Barbizon without ever having seen Barbizon.”10 Certainly Watson had never seen France or England nor, at this time, work by the famous artists in whose company Wilde generously included him. At twenty-seven in 1882, Watson was unworldly. Born and raised in the village of Doon, the painter was from pioneer stock and, as he liked to put it, not far removed from the pioneering existence himself. Even when he did devote himself to art, quitting a job in a brickyard that he had begun at age ten, he remained largely self-taught. Remarkably, he learned perspective from a reproduction of Hogarth’s jocular Parody on Perspective published in the London Penny Magazine.11 Yet when he first received Wilde’s accolade, Watson was neither a naïf nor undiscovered. Well before Wilde saw his work, Watson had sought professional advice from the acclaimed painter Thomas Mower Martin (1838–1934), Wilde’s guide around the Toronto exhibition. He had copied copies of Old Masters at the Normal School in Toronto, worked for the Notman-Fraser photographic company, met and received approbation from Lucius O’Brien (1832–99), subsequently the first President of the Royal Canadian Academy, and journeyed to New York City, where he may have visited the studio of George Inness. On his return journey to Ontario, he sketched at the sites made famous by the Hudson River artists.12 His first major recognition came in 1879, when he won first

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place in a competition at the Toronto Industrial Exhibition, a colonial event if there ever was one. The governor general of Canada from 1878 to 1883, the Marquis of Lorne, and his wife, Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria, saw and admired Watson’s achievement. Encouraged, Watson sent another work, The Pioneer Mill (1879) (fig. 1.1) to the inaugural exhibition of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in March 1880. This painting was purchased by the governor general for the queen and hung in Windsor Castle. Lorne subsequently purchased two additional pictures by Watson for Queen Victoria, which remain in the royal collection.13 By 1882, Watson was ready to be discovered by Wilde and to have his work seen more widely in Britain. If royal patronage set Watson on a secure professional footing, it was Wilde’s likening of him to Constable that raised the question of the artist’s international merit and, at the same time, worried him at home. Watson and his wife Roxa first arrived in England in the summer of 1887. They did not return to Doon until 1890. Watson’s reputation preceded him: in 1886 he had been awarded the bronze medal for painting at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, South Kensington, London, an exhibition at which work from settler-colonial countries was featured. While Watson had good reason to expect immediate commercial success, he was disappointed by the cool reception he received from London’s major art dealers, Agnew, Tooth, and Goupil.14 Not only was he a provincial, but his technique was too meticulous and highly finished for current English tastes. Watson realized that he would have to generalize his brush strokes to catch the English and French atmosphere, both meteorological and commercial. He was successful, at least on the surface. Reviewing Watson’s exhibition at the Dowdeswell Galleries in the summer of 1889, early in Watson’s time in England, R.A.M. Stevenson offered praise by likening him to the Barbizon painters – not to Constable, who was not the epitome of progressive painting in England at this time, despite Wilde’s remarks. “Mr. Watson might have been at Barbizon, to judge from his love of broad effects … but he was never there … never, indeed, knew of their works until he had acquired his own much less cultured style.” Thus while Watson may have been “more original than most followers of the French school,” he could not help but express himself “more rudely and provincially than he would have done under the influence of Barbizon.”15 That Stevenson’s superior Englishness takes the form of identifying the most progressive painting of the time as French does not disrupt the triangulations of Englishness and empire into which Watson stepped. While Watson could never quite shake the tag of colonial while in England, Goupil later represented him commercially with the help of the Marquis of Lorne.16 The painter returned to England in 1891, 1897, 1901, 1902, 1910, and 1912. His landscapes were a commercial and critical triumph in England and in Scotland well into the twentieth century. What was acclaimed in Watson’s paintings in England led initially to recriminations about his new style in Canada, and not only because the settler-colonial artists were “behind” in stylistic development. His main dealer and supporter in Toronto, James Spooner, counselled Watson to remain himself when, during Watson’s first domicile in England, he couldn’t sell any paintings in Canada because of a rumour that the artist was selling out to foreign tastes. Another Canadian backer, John Payne, sympathized with Watson’s position as a colonial caught between countries and expectations: “I can well understand the many troubles and difficulties you have had to encounter in England …

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Figure 1.2 Homer Watson, The Flood Gate, 1900–01.

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but their criticism has helped you … Your work is better when you have no one around you to upset your ideas of what you intend painting.”17 Watson seemed to take this advice to heart by consolidating his activities in Doon. Though constantly entreated to do so by artist friends in England, he resisted a permanent relocation. The likening to Constable that struck Watson early never left his mind. To Lismer he writes frankly, “I have had some knocks as to … being a follower of Constable. I never was this … excepting once.” “After I saw the ‘Lock’ of Constable, I said ‘hang it, I will paint a subject Constable would have delighted to paint, and that is my grandfather’s Mill Pond.’”18 The result was Watson’s most famous and acclaimed work, The Flood Gate (1901) (fig. 1.2). Without immodestly calling Constable “the English Homer Watson,” we need to notice that Watson in this letter did self-consciously reverse the formula: The Flood Gate “is a deliberate trying to get the spirit of Constable into Canada. Just some fun for me … for calling me a follower of Constable. I thought let ‘em have it, for I felt in my heart I need follow no man.”19 More than amusing, though, this escapade on Watson’s part sheds light on the ongoing definition of nationality in both Britain and Canada during the later years of the British Empire. Watson did not receive a formal, academic art education. He learned by observing nature and by emulating those landscape painters in whom he found inspiration. So open was he about these debts that one must think they were indeed only aids in his (very Constable-like) quest to find and depict the truths of nature. As a painted frieze in the new studio he added to his Doon home shows (fig. 1.3), Watson recorded not only the names of his mentors but also small pastiches of their styles. It was a long list: Ruisdael, Turner, Constable, Daubigny, Diaz, Gainsborough, Rosa, Rousseau, Corot, Millet, and Lepage. For Watson, a believer in spirits and spirit photography, they were benevolent ghosts as well as active inspirations. Building this studio at home betokened his decision to remain

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Figure 1.3 Homer Watson, detail of frieze in his home studio, 1893.

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Canadian, but he did so by naturalizing his European and British muses. He was, finally, “the Canadian Constable,” an artist who cultivated landscapes of the local with such potency that they became national icons. To view Jack Chambers as “the Canadian Puvis de Chanvannes” might seem to be more of a stretch than Wilde’s comparison. But in the space of a very short notice about Chambers’s first exhibition at the Forum Gallery in New York in 1965, Anne Hoene explained her analogy: “The nostalgia for a lost era, the veiled colors, the licked surfaces are all there. Figure fragments float over lone mediators in sunset autumnal landscapes or hover over pairs of gossiping women. They’re images recollected in tranquility.”20 Deploying likening because of its economy, she understands Chambers’s work with reference to a respected artist whose paintings were familiar to her New York audience, given that works by Puvis were displayed in the Metropolitan Museum. Her evocative description refers to Chambers’s Olga Visiting Graham (1964) (fig. 1.4) and similar works in this show, but it describes Puvis’s The Shepherd’s Song (1891) (fig. 1.5) in the Met equally well. Likening is shorthand for assumptions about aesthetic value. Given his European training and disregard in this exhibition for anything that related to contemporary art in New York, Hoene was right to reach back for a point of reference. If the qualities she notes suggest “classicism,” a tag readily applied to Puvis’s paintings, then she was prescient about Chambers, and the association with Puvis de Chavannes becomes instructive. Hoene’s likening pointed to classicism as the shibboleth for Chambers, who wrote that “the recurrent blooms of [the art] organism to which I am attracted are the emergence of the forms of classicism and any art which advances these forms.”21 Chambers has largely been construed as a London, Ontario, artist. Today his work is not known outside Canadian circles. The “classical” in art was international, indeed universal. It was a look and set of values that had “a certain steel quality to it that you can’t mistake,” Chambers believed, and it contrasted with “modernism,” which for him was all too recent and insubstantial. “That’s the kind of thing I seek … that thing that’s passed through fire.”22 Chambers looked back into art history for models from which to extend what he saw as the classical tradition. He learned its history and painstaking techniques through rigorous,

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Figure 1.4 Jack Chambers, Olga Visiting Graham, 1964.

Figure 1.5 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Shepherd’s Song, 1891.

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traditional training at the Escuela Central de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid (1953–59). It was what he took from his favourite old masters, Zubaràn, Ingres, and Cézanne, among others, whom he discusses in interviews. For Chambers, the techniques of the classical – the mastery that could deliver stillness, profundity, and staying power – came from Europe. He wrote in his autobiography that most art of the recent past fell short of the standard of Europe’s traditions. Andrew Wyeth didn’t measure up, for example, “nor did the realism of the sixties show any signs of … classicism. Except for my own work, the influence of classicism in painting was non-existent in Canada.”23 As he explained in his 1969 manifesto “Perceptual Realism,” however, the authenticity he needed for this work could come only from home, where he could plumb the deep perception of reality acquired only there.24 What can we say generally about analogies in the visual arts by drawing from these examples? Likening is an apparently casual expedient that runs the gamut from flippant to enlightening; it is easy to dismiss it as lacking seriousness and rigour. Yet thinking of Watson and Chambers in terms of European affinities is more appropriate than we might at first imagine. What can seem like a preposterous compression of chronologies and a wanton levelling of differences can in both instances also free us to think beyond the usual art historical paradigms. Chambers never mentions Puvis de Chavannes, and there is no reason to believe that he knew this body of work. But comparisons should not be based only on causal relationships or remain within the bounds of national schools. The default hierarchy of nations still found in international art history – where work from Europe and the us are unquestionably superior – is gradually breaking down. We can entertain the idea that Chambers, as a Canadian, really was a classicist in ways that bear comparison with a famous French artist. The inter-national and intergenerational pairings that I have considered also give us permission to put Watson and Chambers, artists separated by aesthetic sensibility as well as time but also linked in their commitment to the same region over and against their European experience, side by side. Barbara Maria Stafford is the most avid and persuasive proponent of the importance of analogy in visual culture circles today. She insists that “analogy is the vision of ordered relationships articulated as similarity-in-difference,”25 a potent process of linkage rather than of disarticulation. What international likenings display is the mechanism of disciplinary discernment that allows us to assess whether or not the balance of similarity and difference in the given comparison is acceptable. We do not have recourse to a body of immutable external facts to aid in this judgment but only to our collective way of doing things in the given context. Perhaps the affinities between Watson and Chambers are so limited that the analogy is ruled out, which is to say that it is held not to be useful for the purposes at hand. Perhaps the historical dimensions that shaped their respective work are too divergent. Or maybe there is a sufficient degree of connection between the two – say on the question of regional affinity – for us to make an argument about regionalism, for example, or about the unwitting assertion of Canadianess in the face of European practices, to return to our context of the nation as a category in the reckonings of visual culture. We can learn more about likening by further stretching the limits of tolerance for its use. Let me assert that Jack Chambers was the Gerhard Richter of Canada. Within normal

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disciplinary parameters, Chambers and Richter would be seen to be incommensurate. Richter is after all one of a handful of widely acknowledged leaders of contemporary art worldwide, whereas Chambers’s reputation as an extraordinarily probing painter and filmmaker is largely limited to the Canadian context. Art history often depends on the demonstration of influence in artistic relationships. Chambers did not know about Richter, whose work only came to prominence in North America in the 1970s, and Richter would not likely have heard of Chambers, thanks to the London artist’s limited international exposure.26 In this hypothetical relationship, there is no influence, no quotation, no causal intertextuality. Given this lack of contact, it is futile to invoke the biographical information that, as a dimension of the focus on individualism in art history discussed in the editors’ Introduction to this volume, freights the interpretation of Chambers’s work as it does that of most artists. Similarly, there can be no intentionalism, no homage or acknowledgment. But embracing Stafford’s and Silverman’s argument for the connectivity of analogy rather than the divisiveness of competing modes of understanding, let us bracket the manifest differences between these artists as well as commonplace art historical priorities and ask what their provisional likening might tell us. Moving from broad to more specific similarities, we can note that Richter (b. 1932) and Chambers (b. 1931) enjoy the same art world birth order, a factor of some import when one looks at general cultural trends that are bound to have some effect on an artist’s interests. Both artists dedicated themselves to painting in the 1960s and 1970s when this medium was increasingly under attack.27 Both absorbed elements of a pop art mentality, borrowing images from magazines for example, in the manner of Warhol, Rauschenberg, Hamilton, and other prominent artists of the time. Richter and Chambers are both of a generation of artist-writers who seek to theorize their work.28 Like Chambers, Richter (surprisingly, given the radicalism of much of his work) sees himself as traditional and even a proponent of classicism. Most importantly, from the mid-1960s on, both Richter and Chambers experimented with photographs as source images for their paintings and both articulated from this basis theories of perception and the intrigue of representation. Gerhard Richter’s masterly “photo paintings,” oil-painted renderings of photographs, have been renowned since the 1960s for their profound explorations of both media.29 Richter explains that “I blur things to make everything look equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsman like but technological … I also blur out the excess of unimportant information” (fig. 1.6).30 The usual critical response to these works is to see the blurring as a reference to accidental effects in amateur photography, to the artlessness and thus authenticity of such “mistakes.” Hawker eloquently explains why Richter’s translation from photo to paint is significant: At the same time that the blur is able to evoke the medium of photography so effectively and economically, in using it as a sign of photography’s idiom, Richter fastens upon something incidental to and quite apart from the medium’s central unifying characteristics (whatever these might be). It is the double duty that the blur does for Richter – its ability to be incidental to photography at the same time as central to painting – that makes it such a powerfully affecting device in his painting.31

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Figure 1.6 Gerhard Richter, Lillies, 2000.

I would add that we see Richter’s photo paintings not only and immediately as paintings but simultaneously and necessarily as paintings of photographs. I would say the same about much of Chambers’s painting. An unexpected feature of many of Chambers’s paintings and parts of his films is their frequent obstruction of direct visual access. This technique places a mist, a screen, a blur, or a wash of pigment between the viewer and subject. It is concentrated in paintings and drawings from 1964–65 such as Daffs, just before the “silver” paintings, which themselves radically block access by changing as one walks past them, and 1975–76, such as Violets No. 1 and Lilacs No. 1 and No. 2, works from the apex of perceptual realism. Details in Diego Reading deliquesce into the light-saturated interior (1976) (fig. 1.7). An analogous effect can be experienced in the sensory blurring that we find in his experiments with positive and negative film stock and undulating sound in Hart of London (1970).

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Figure 1.7 Jack Chambers, Diego Reading, 1976.

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Even more dramatically, in what is identified in Chambers’s 1972 essay “Perceptualism, Painting and Cinema” as a still from his never released and apparently unfinished film C . C . C . I .,32 we see Chambers’s sons playing in the living room of their home (fig. 1.8). One stands in front of the picture window, holding a large, translucent scrim of paper33 against his body while he looks towards the camera. What we glimpse is the profound retreat of seeing: the child stands against the window, the source of light, whose prospect he nonetheless blocks from our view with the sheet. His torso appears like an X-ray, a silhouetted imprint on the paper. His back is reflected in the nearby tv screen. Such barriers mitigate superficial readings of the works, prevent us from simply seeing through them to the objects they nominally depict or the stories they might seem to tell, as we habitually do with photographs or movies. For Chambers, following the tenets of phenomenology, perceptual realism is pre-verbal, pre-conceptual. It flashes into our consciousness as an essence at the moment just before conventional articulation in the form of language takes over and rationalizes the situation into normalcy. Thus blurring or bleaching makes quotidian seeing difficult and deeper “vision” possible.

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Figure 1.8 Jack Chambers, photographic study related to C.C.C.I., ca 1970.

Chambers argues that the photograph obviates style via its peerless ability to set down what is “seen” according to a certain code or set of symbols. Like many of the American photorealists in the 1960s and 1970s, he used grids to transfer his photo imagery to his painting surface. But he did not project the image onto his painting surface and copy it; he did not change its internal scale. Where Richter claims to remain neutral in front of the plethora of photographic data collected in his ongoing Atlas project, for example, Chambers is dedicated to a “vision” that occurs before he takes the photograph. The perceptual realist painting – not the photograph as mnemonic – is what realizes that initial “wow” of experience. Unlike Richter, for Chambers content is crucial, but with Richter, he insists on the translation from photo to painting. The real “is never … visualized in an articulate sort of way until it’s painted out,” he claimed.34 The import of the Chambers–Richter analogy is that both artists frequently obscure their paintings’ surfaces as a way to make reference to – but also to impede – our habit of reading back to their photographic sources instrumentally, of seeing them only as the objects or people that they picture. More than a surface similarity, these parallels extend to these artists’ ideas on art. “My concern is never art, but always what art can be used for,” Richter wrote in 1962.35 Chambers claimed in “Perceptual Realism” that his work is about life, not art. Like Chambers, Richter dismisses the superficial effects of photorealism.36 Richter hopes to obviate style by using the photograph and holds that “I’m

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increasingly in favour of the official, the classic, the universal.”37 Chambers similarly used photographs – his own and those he borrowed from the media and other amateur photographers – to avoid style, the self-indulgence of the aesthetic: “Before the camera was invented painters developed a painting style to compensate for the lack of visual information available to them … where style deteriorated into mannerism painting derived from the lyrical ego and the mind-aesthetic rather than embodying the primary impact.”38 Most surprisingly when we acknowledge the ambiguity of his paintings and recall his frequent dismissals of meaning in his work, Richter has also claimed that his art is one of “redemption. Or hope – the hope that I can after all effect something through painting.”39 Chambers also declared that in art we “may redeem our experience of reality.” “That is what perception does; that is what perceptualism intends to do.”40 While Richter is an agnostic when it comes to discovering reality and Chambers by contrast was on a spiritual mission, both evolve a role for photography in painting that explores and presents the given. In words that could have been spoken by Chambers, Richter made it clear in a 1970 interview that analogy is the heart of this quest: 43

I would like to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy. When I make a representation of something, this too is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it. I prefer to steer clear of anything aesthetic, so as not to set obstacles in my own way and not to have the problem of people saying: “Ah, yes, that’s how he sees the world, that’s his interpretation.”41 Likening makes it possible for paintings to outlive their authors and for unlikely conversations to take place. Unexpected fellow travellers in exploring the perception possible in painting that uses photographs, Chambers and Richter have much to say to one another. Watson – Constable, Chambers – Puvis de Chavannes, Watson – Chambers, Chambers – Richter: the bidirectional likenings that I have examined configure three different relationships between the visual arts and the category of the nation. John Constable – whose depictions of rustic life in the Suffolk countryside were the epitome of nostalgic Englishness in the later Victorian period – was imported by Oscar Wilde to colonial Canada in the person of Homer Watson. Complicating this migration, however, was Watson’s considerable presence and success in the United Kingdom. Collected at the very apex of society by Queen Victoria herself were images of the pioneer existence in the Empire, that is, what we might call the export version of Englishness. In works such as the Pioneer Mill, Victoria and her class saw what they believed England had given to its possessions, the civilizing of the former wilderness. The formation of a colonial sense of nationhood remains critical to our understanding of Watson. A comparison of Watson with Chambers, by contrast, breaks down in the details because most of what supports the analogy is the mere accident of nationality. Both were Canadians dedicated to the foundation of important national art institutions. Both chose to shift their gaze to the landscapes of southwestern Ontario in favour of European views, whether of England or of Spain. While they might fruitfully be compared in a course or book on the history of Canadian art or that of their common region, for example, in both

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cases, international contexts are more revealing about the priorities and stature of these artists. Nationality is not at issue in the Chambers – Puvis de Chavannes relationship, except to the extent that the French connection aggrandizes Chambers. Thus inter-national likenings can lead us to ask whether the category of the nation is itself functional, or more precisely when we consider historical examples, when, where, and to what purposes did it function? My most preposterous parallel, that between Chambers and Richter, can lead us further into this issue. Both Patricia Parker and Mieke Bal have theorized the notion of the “preposterous” in ways that can help us think through art world analogies. As Parker claims, “Preposterous … connotes a reversal of ‘post’ for ‘pre,’ behind for before, back for front, second for first, end or sequel for beginning … The preposterous also disrupts the linear orders of succession and following.”42 In Bal’s extended usage, it is an activity that yields a preposterous art history, one keenly aware of its own historicality in the present. Likening Chambers to Richter is productively disruptive in these ways. For Richter, photographs and paintings of photographs are co-analogues, analogues of one another, without hierarchy. In this manner, I have associated Chambers with Richter in terms of their mutual exploration and presentation of the photograph in relation to painting. I have also emphasized that according to regnant art historical norms, this comparison could easily be ruled out before it begins because of the perceived incommensurability of these two artists’ achievements and their countries of origin as plotted on an imaginary map of achievement in the visual arts. I am not for a moment arguing that the two artists are equal or that Chambers is so important that we should think of him in Richter’s company generally. My claim is that they may be compared validly and constructively if we circumvent the usual priorities of the nation (for example, the view that Germany is more important culturally than Canada according to particular lines of thinking that art historical scholarship has long advanced). If we insist on this sort of irregular art world analogy within the discipline of art history, it is possible to weaken the grip of the nation as a fundamental of categorization and evaluation in the field. On the one hand, Richter’s photo paintings can cause us to look at Chambers’s source photos more carefully and to recognize – very much against the grain of Chambers’s reputation – that he was indeed interested in imagery that did not partake of his own domesticity. Looking at Richter via Chambers, we can rightly emphasize the classicism of the German artist’s work and acknowledge what is ignored in much of the voluminous writing on his work, that he does want to find out more about reality through painting. If we include the inter-national comparator “of Canada” in the Chambers – Richter analogy, we risk invoking the everyday sense of the preposterous as the almost unthinkable. But we can begin here, as in the other likenings under consideration, and then move to think more radically about the positive implications of the displacements of the preposterous and about dropping the need for a national context in the analogy. In a limited but not insignificant sense, Chambers is like Richter and vice versa; each helps us to understand the work of the other.

Mark A. Cheetham

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notes 1 See E.T. Bannet, “Analogy as Translation.” 2 K. Silverman, “Photography by Other Means,” in The Painting of Modern Life, 20. 3 J.R. Harper, Homer Watson, n.p. 4 Ibid., n.p. 5 A. Hoene, “Jack Chambers,” 60. 6 Watson was dedicated to the emerging official institutions of Canadian art, the Canadian Art Club, of which he was founding president (1907–11), and the Royal Canadian Academy, for which he served as president from 1918 to 1921. Chambers co-founded the Canadian Artists’ Representation. 7 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 618. 8 K. O’Brien, Oscar Wilde in Canada, 103. 9 As implied in a letter of ca 1930 from Watson to Arthur Lismer, reproduced in Harper, Homer Watson, n.p. Wilde and Watson also exchanged letters, many of which are now lost or in private hands. 10 O’Brien, Oscar Wilde in Canada, 105. For a full account of Wilde’s interactions with Whistler, see A. Bruder, “Constructing Artist and Critic,” 161. 11 M. Miller, Homer Watson, 25. On Watson’s early success with The Pioneer Mill, see B. Foss, “Homer Watson and The Pioneer Mill,” 47–82, and R.L. Tovell, “Homer Watson’s The Pioneer Mill,” 12–39. My thanks to Brian Foss for sharing his article prior to its publication. 12 Harper, Homer Watson, n.p. 13 Miller, Homer Watson, 39. 14 Ibid., 44. 15 R.A.M. Stevenson, “London July Exhibitions,” 287. 16 Miller, Homer Watson, 51. 17 Harper, Homer Watson, n.p. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.

20 A. Hoene, “Jack Chambers,” 60. 21 J. Chambers, “Perceptual Realism,” 7. 22 Avis Lang, “Interview with Jack Chambers, 19 October 1972,” 7. My sincere thanks to Avis Lang for permission to quote from these interviews. 23 J. Chambers, Jack Chambers, 122. 24 Chambers, “Perceptual Realism,” 7. 25 B.M. Stafford, Visual Analogy, 9. 26 A selection of his late paintings was seen in London, England, and in Paris in 1980: Canada House Gallery, London, 9 January– 13 February 1980 (“Reflexion sur un sentiment rural,” Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris, 1980). During Chambers’s lifetime, there were occasional notices in the international press, most notably, R. Woodman, “The Realism of John [sic] Chambers,” in Art International, and a review of his 1970 Canadian retrospective by M. Amaya (a former chief curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario), “Canada: Jack Chambers,” in Art in America, 118–21. 27 On medium specificity and the supposed eclipse of painting as these themes pertain to Richter, see R. Hawker, “Idiom Postmedium,” 267. She argues that “medium has come to mean something quite different from what it meant for theorists of Modernism” a conclusion that pertains to Chambers as well as to Richter. 28 For example, Robert Smithson (1938–73), Donald Judd (1928–94), Robert Morris (1931–), Michael Snow (1929–). 29 P. Moorhouse, Gerhard Richter Portraits. 30 G. Richter, Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961–2007, 33. 31 Hawker, “Idiom Post-medium,” 267. 32 Nearly identical still photographs are to be found in Jack Chambers Fonds, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, ca otag sc055, series 20.

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33 The paper looks very much like that used for drawing in Chambers’s contemporary lithograph, Diego Drawing, 1971, making this even more of a meta-image about representation. 34 L. Carney, “Jack Chambers Interview, London, Ontario, 26 October 1977,” 2. I am grateful to Professor Carney for permission to cite this extraordinary interview. 35 Richter, Gerhard Richter, 15.

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36 37 38 39 40

Ibid., 80. Ibid., 299. Chambers, “Perceptual Realism,” 8. Richter, Gerhard Richter, 181. Avis Lang, “A Correspondence with Jack Chambers,” 18. 41 Richter, Gerhard Richter, 55. 42 P. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 21. See also Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio.

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Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Settlement on the Hillside, 1909.

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Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Winter Landscape, 1909.

A.Y. Jackson, Red Maple, 1914.

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Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996, printed 1998.

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Homer Watson, The Pioneer Mill, 1890.

Homer Watson, The Flood Gate, 1900–01.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Shepherd’s Song, 1891.

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Gerhard Richter, Lillies, 2000.

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Jack Chambers, photographic study related to C.C.C.I., ca 1970.

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Joyce Wieland, Reason over Passion, 1968.

Joyce Wieland, Time Machine Series, 1961.

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2 Within the last forty years, the discipline of art history has been Feminist Art History transformed by feminist politics. During that rather short in Canada: time span, feminist art history has shifted from a project of recovery and recuperation – one of finding so-called lost women A “Limited Pursuit”? artists and adding them into the dominant narrative of Western art – to one that questions and critiques patriarchy Kristy A. Holmes as one of the foundational ideologies of disciplinary art history. Within Canada, however, I would argue that while these critical discussions have generated a fair amount of work on specific women artists and on the various complex relationships they have had with the art institution, much of it has not been critical. Moreover, there has been little, if any, impact on the dominant narrative of Canadian art. Art historians interested in critically examining the development of feminist art practices in Canada are consequently faced with a dilemma: is it necessary to create alternative critical frameworks in order to examine the cultural production of women artists? If so, what would these frameworks look like? If not, how do we write, discuss, and teach feminist art production created in Canada? This is a dilemma that has preoccupied me for a long time. Initially, it was the idea that informed my doctoral research as I set out to re-examine the work of the Canadian artist and filmmaker Joyce Wieland in relation to the feminist, political, social, and cultural contexts of Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s.1 Having decided to focus on one of the few female artists included within the dominant narrative of Canadian art, one afforded iconic status within academic literature, the popular press, and the art institution, I was interested in exploring the terms of Wieland’s inclusion and what they might tell us about the ideological basis of the dominant narrative (fig. 2.1). In other words, why was Wieland “in” when so many other women artists were not? Even now her work continues to be part of dominant narrative discourse evident, for example, in her presence in the recently published survey text Beyond Wilderness, smaller exhibitions such as Magnetic Norths and Documentary Protocols I at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery in Montreal

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in 2010 and 2007 respectively, and blockbuster exhibitions such as The Sixties in Canada, at the National Gallery of Canada in 2005, and Global Village: The 60s, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2003/2004.2 I was inspired to think critically about whether alternative understandings of Wieland’s art production might be possible after reading a statement by Kass Banning in her 1987 essay, “The Mummification of Mommy: Joyce Wieland as the ago’s First Living Other.”3 Framing her discussion around the 1987 retrospective of Wieland’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Banning was particularly critical of the exhibition catalogue essays, which were written by us art historian Lucy Lippard and us film historian Lauren Rabinovitz. Specifically, Banning suggests that Lippard and Rabinovitz “colonized” Wieland’s work by drawing on us American feminist theory in order to analyze it.4 As Banning put it, “this particular brand of American feminism, with its affirmative rhetoric, is not problematic in and of itself. It becomes something else once transposed to a Canadian context and displaced onto Wieland.”5 The broader issue that Banning is at pains to make clear, however, is that the reason us American feminist scholarship was employed at all is because “there is no tradition of either critical or feminist writing to draw from in this country [Canada].”6 By focusing her criticism on the “Americanness” of Lippard and Rabinovitz and the theoretical frameworks they employ, Banning identifies their scholarship as irrelevant and inadequate to the examination of Canadian feminist art. It is a framework that Banning constructs as international (or what we might call cosmopolitan), consequently locating the local in nationalist terms – as “Canadian.” Her argument articulates a sense of fear over a perceived us American academic imperialism and the need for Canadian scholars to step up to the (academic) plate. The use of theoretical and conceptual frameworks developed elsewhere, and in other social contexts, for the study of Canada is something that Will Straw addressed a number of years ago in relation to the emergence of cultural studies in Canadian academia.7 In 1993, Straw pointed out that there has been a “long-standing suspicion” in Canada that fields of study – cultural studies among them – are “ultimately validated within centres of power and legitimation located somewhere else.”8 He argued that while “intellectual cosmopolitanism” may appear an inadequate critical outlook to adopt, it is, in fact, a very productive position to take. Some of the most advanced work in cultural studies has used the example of Canada, Straw suggested, to engage in larger debates about cultural globalization and postmodernism.9 Implied in Straw’s argument is the idea that it is possible, and arguably even necessary, to critically discuss local (or Canadian) contexts without situating those discussions within a national/ist framework – in short, “local” does not have to imply “national.” This is precisely what makes Canadian cultural studies “Canadianized” as it is a project that insists, in Straw’s words, on “insinuat[ing] … Canadian preoccupations and theoretical insights into the larger agenda of cultural studies internationally.”10 Using examples from Canada to explore broader critical shifts in thinking and scholarship is something that disciplinary art history in Canada has not done well, since it has insisted on understandings of art production rooted within a nationalist framework. The focus on “individual trajectories” as they intersect with larger, more cosmopolitan pursuits is one of the ways we might distinguish the project of cultural studies in Canada from that of the more nationalistic project of Canadian art history.11

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Figure 2.1 Joyce Wieland with Pierre Théberge (Director of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), left, and her artist and filmmaker husband Michael Snow, right, at Wieland’s True Patriot Love exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, 1971.

We might also look to such a model as a productive way of rethinking the ongoing usefulness of disciplinary art history in Canada. Debates over the relevance and limitations of pursuing a national/ist agenda have not, of course, been confined to the disciplines of art history and cultural studies. These discussions have been going on for a long time in the field of Canadian history, to name one significant example that the editors of this volume pick up on in their introduction. I wanted to pay homage to this by playing on the title of historian Jeffrey D. Brison’s 1997 essay, “A New National History: A ‘Limited Pursuit?’”12 Written in the wake of Canada’s “constitutional crisis,” Brison draws on historian J.M.S. Careless’s foundational 1969 essay, “‘Limited Identities’ in Canada,” which critiqued the focus historians had placed on writing a Canadian history rooted in national/ist narratives, in order to question the direction Canadian history should take from that point onward.13 Careless’s essay was a call to Canadian historians to get over their “h[a]ng up” on the “plot of nationbuilding” and begin to think about those identities that had received “limited” discussion within Canadian historical discourse, such as those informed by region, culture, and class.14 Brison not only positions his argument in relation to Careless’s earlier call, but also

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situates it in immediate response to historian Michael Bliss’s 1991 critique of “limited identities” and Bliss’s desire to return to the national narratives that had guided the ideological foundations of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Canadian historical discourse.15 Brison saw 1997 as a moment when nationalist narratives, in light of the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty, might appear tempting. However, he is quick to point out that the task of the historian is not to argue that all is “well and good [with] the nation” but, rather, to write history that will “help Canadians reconceptualize the nation and help people gain an understanding of how and why the nation has come into being, how it has evolved, and what forces have come into play in its making or unmaking over time.”16 Although he is discussing the writing of Canadian history, these are exactly the sorts of questions that art historians should be asking of the dominant narrative of Canadian art. To do so would be to answer Careless’s and Brison’s call for (art) histories that explore “limited identities” without reifying nationalist narratives. Both Straw’s and Brison’s essays can help us think more critically about the hesitations art historians continue to have in questioning the dominant narrative of Canadian art. More than this, their arguments can help us think through how we might examine “local” and “limited identities” in terms of feminist art production without falling into the nationalist trap. I want to come back to Banning’s statement that there is no tradition of critical feminist writing to draw from in Canada in light of the arguments put forth by Straw and Brison. When I began my doctoral thesis, my initial thought was to do what Banning suggested – to create and use a critical feminist framework that was particular to the context of Canada in order to examine Wieland’s art production. This, however, presumes that there is something unique about the context of Canada that no other framework or theory can adequately address. Banning, for example, suggests that both Lippard and Rabinovitz are inherently unable to recognize the importance of the “local” (Canadian) in Wieland’s work simply because they are from the us.17 Thus, her concomitant identification of a lack of critical and/or feminist scholarship in Canada is apparently premised on the belief that there is an essential “Canadianness” that is not only relevant but also necessary to understandings of Canadian art production. I have since come to see Banning’s desire to afford “specificity” to analyses and understandings of feminist art production in Canada as a well-intentioned aspiration that had already lost its radicality before it could begin. In other words, we never got around to taking Banning up on her suggestion, and now, twenty-seven years later, we have to ask new questions. We can draw from the arguments raised by Straw and Brison and think about what is at stake in the maintenance of the dominant narrative of Canadian art (via textbooks, exhibitions, university curricula, etc.), whose interests and agendas are served best by it, and whose are not served at all. To Banning’s credit, however, I am not sure that in 1987, when she published her essay, we, as scholars of the visual in Canada, were prepared to deal with the task of deconstructing the underlying ideologies and discourses inherent in the dominant narrative of Canadian art. It is now possible to see the larger connections between the development of academic disciplines in the nineteenth century, such as art history, and the parallel development of the modern nation-state. In our current neo-liberal and globalized

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moment – a moment when the nation-state no longer appears to be a necessary or even valid way of engaging in a world where borders seem to matter less and less – we now have to ask why we are holding on to an increasingly outmoded and exclusionary narrative.18 If, however, we rethink our notion of Canada – if we refuse to see it as “an essence we must defend or an empty homogeneous space we must possess,” as historian Ian McKay has argued – then, perhaps, we can begin to analyze the discursive underpinnings of the dominant narrative of Canadian art and think about how our understandings of feminist art practices shift and change as a result.19 I want to explore, from a more speculative point of view, what is at stake when we ask whether or not “Canada” matters as a relevant category of inquiry. In short, I want to insist that we now ask whether the “Canada” of Canadian feminist art history matters or whether Canadian feminist art history is a pointless, irrelevant, or limited pursuit. Before we speculate further on whether or not “Canada” matters, it is important to understand how the dominant narrative of Canadian art is connected to nation building and the rhetoric of nationalism. From the early to mid-twentieth century, the publication of several surveys helped to consolidate the history of Canadian art as a field of study.20 Texts by Newton MacTavish, William Colgate, Graham McInnes, and Donald Buchanan, among others, established a narrative that linked the development of visual art with that of the colony-to-nation narrative of traditional Canadian history.21 Chapters in these surveys, for example, are organized around periods constructed as key nation-building moments such as the arrival of French and English explorers, Confederation, and the World Wars. Implicit in these texts is the idea that cultural production, and specifically the visual arts, is an integral aspect of a nation’s identity. There is particular importance placed on the notion that Canada, as a colonial nation, cannot claim Indigenous artists or a national “manner,” a situation that renders the mobilization of the visual arts for nation-building purposes that much more challenging while simultaneously erasing First Nations cultural production from the story. Surveys published in the second half of the twentieth century continue the nationbuilding narrative of these earlier texts. In 1966, J. Russell Harper published Painting in Canada, which established, as Anne Whitelaw argues, the “narrative and analytical framework that would set the standard for the study of Canadian artistic production for decades to come.”22 In the preface, Harper’s allegiance to the colony-to-nation narrative is clearly evident, as he writes, “This country’s art also takes on more meaning when examined as an integral part of the life of an expanding nation.”23 Following a similar ideological trajectory to that of Harper, in 1973 Dennis Reid published A Concise History of Canadian Painting, now regarded as the standard survey text dealing with the history of Canadian painting.24 In the preface he writes: “This guide to looking at the work of Canadian painters was written in the belief that of all the arts in Canada, painting is the one that most directly presents the Canadian experience. Painters in Canada have consistently reflected the moulding sensibility of the age: a history of their activities inevitably describes the essence of our cultural evolution.”25 Reid constructs the history of Canadian art as a cultural practice that embodies the so-called “essence” of Canadian identity, reinforcing the romantic, modernist notion that artists, and the

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work they create, exist outside of the social, political, economic, and cultural realities of their historical moment. While both Reid’s and Harper’s texts employ similar colony-to-nation narratives as those of early-twentieth century surveys, they also include work from the 1960s – Harper’s being the first text to do so. Examining the ways in which the visual arts from the 1960s have been discussed within surveys reveals the challenge contemporary art production posed to a dominant narrative linked so intimately to nation building. Harper, for example, did not see any unifying subject matter or style that is particularly Canadian in works of art from the early 1960s. He characterizes the period from 1945 to 1966 as “turbulent” and argues that “no national style has emerged out of this seething activity.”26 He laments that “artists of revolutionary ways have lost interest in the Canadian landscape and in man at work and play. This is, instead, art which is a play of aesthetics; it deals entirely with the emotions, the subjective emotions of both the artist and viewer.”27 Reid is similarly reluctant to historicize and categorize works from the early 1960s, and while he suggests that artists working during this period can be seen as part of a “continuing Canadian tradition,” he is unable to assess the impact of this work on the field of Canadian art.28 It is not until the second edition of his text, published in 1988, that Reid places work from the 1960s within the context of the dominant art historical narrative although he still retains the colony-to-nation narrative and formalist analyses. Despite the difficulty that art production from the 1960s posed to some scholars, such as Harper and Reid, others idealized it as a moment of cultural rebirth. Many academics, curators, and art critics writing in the early 1970s embraced 1960s art production in Canada as a pivotal moment in cultural nationalism. This is not surprising considering the ways in which culture was being mobilized by the federal government during that period for nation-building purposes.29 Scholars writing about the visual arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s were clearly aware of this new-found government support and saw their historical moment as one of revitalization. William Townsend, for example, writing in the 1970 text Canadian Art Today, notes that the art scene in Canada was seen as a “backwater” until the 1949–51 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (more commonly known as the Massey Commission), Expo 67 and Centennial year, and the National Gallery’s 1968 exhibition of contemporary Canadian art, Canada: Art d’Aujourd’hui, which travelled to several major cities in Europe.30 Writing in 1972, William Withrow makes a connection between nationalism, the 1960s, and the visual arts: The excitement and achievement of the sixties reached its peak in centennial year. The national consciousness, the new sense of national identity and purpose with which Canada had emerged from the Second World War, had been growing quietly, steadily. Now it exploded in joyous celebration. And, for the first time, the Canadian public visibly shared the excitement and pride in their nation’s creative achievement that had hitherto seemed the private experience of only a few professionals and collectors.31

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It is clear that for some scholars, art production in Canada during the 1960s is difficult to reconcile with the historical construction of Canadian art as the visual output of nationalism, while for others, this was a moment when the visual arts became integral to defining cultural nationalism in a new, exciting, and, arguably, necessary way. The dominant narrative of art in Canada, with its links to nation building and emphasis on formalist analyses, makes it difficult to examine art practices that are concerned with gender, female subjectivity, and feminism.32 That is not to say, however, that such analyses are completely absent from art historical discourse. In 1987, for example, Monika Kin Gagnon mapped out a preliminary history of feminist art practices in Canada by discussing some of the first all-women art exhibitions and the relationship between women artists, the art institution, and government granting agencies.33 Such relationships, she goes on to argue, promote or maintain hegemonic art historical ideologies and art practices that marginalize women artists.34 In her 1998 essay “A Tale of Three Women,” Joyce Zemans built on Gagnon’s discussion by using the work of Kathleen Munn, Vera Frenkel, and Wieland to examine how museum practices and the policies of granting agencies discriminate against women artists.35 In the second half of the essay, Zemans examines the history of institutional support for women artists in general by looking at the collecting policies of major museums and the success rates of women artists competing for grants. Gagnon’s and Zemans’s essays both examine larger institutional structures that women artists in Canada have had to negotiate in order to participate in mainstream cultural endeavours such as art exhibitions. While their analyses still remain groundbreaking, they focus almost exclusively on the relationship between institutional support and the art produced by women. By Zemans’s own admission her essay does not offer a broader feminist framework that might help to provide a critical position from which to examine how patriarchal (not to mention colonialist, racist, and classist) ideologies have informed, and continue to inform, the discourse surrounding the visual arts and cultural production in Canada. While Gagnon and Zemans attempt an intervention into the dominant narrative, an intervention, by its very nature, still keeps intact the foundational structure of the narrative itself. In order to move beyond an intervention, as well as the colony-to-nation narrative structure, the question we have to ask now is: what might happen to our understandings of Canadian art and art historical discourse if we remove the national/ist framework that created and sustained it? Ian McKay has suggested that if scholarship on Canada (he is referring to history in particular) is going to continue as a viable mode of inquiry into the twenty-first century, then we need to entirely rethink what Canada is. He suggests that a productive, and critical, way of doing this is to see Canada as a process rather than a given place or a tangible thing.36 In his words, “Canada is best grasped, not as a place, an essence, a nation or a transcendental ideal, but as a process unfolding in time and space.”37 With this in mind, McKay goes on to say that Canadian history is no longer “all that happened that was important to the inhabitants in northern North America,” but “what happened as part of the hegemonic process through which a ‘Canada’ came into being and became a state in northern North America.”38 This process to which McKay

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refers effected the “implantation and expansion over a heterogeneous terrain of a certain politico-economic logic – to wit, liberalism.”39 He uses the term “liberal order” to refer to this reconceptualization of Canada as a process of implementing and maintaining liberalism – in other words, of making liberalism hegemonic. McKay suggests that liberalism in Canada has been hegemonic since the nineteenth century and that during the mid-twentieth century it was used to transform nineteenth-century subjects into latetwentieth-century citizens.40 It was in the 1960s, McKay notes, that “most of what we now take for granted about ‘Canada’ – its bilingualism, its flag, its democracy, its limited social egalitarianism – was constructed.”41 These nationalist constructions can be seen as a process of “Canadianization,” a process through which Canada attempted to rebrand itself as a nation, rather than a British colony or us American appendage, through cultural means. McKay’s characterization of Canada as the name for a process of installing a liberal order or as a solution to the problem of integrating competing sovereignist interests into a stable, unified whole allows us to move beyond romanticized and essentialist notions of so-called Canadian identity and nationalism. With McKay’s notion of “Canada” in mind, I want to return to the question that I began with: whether the “Canada” to which Canadian feminist art history refers is relevant. I think that what McKay argues is of value to those of us who want to critically situate feminist art production in Canada. The first task, one that has already started, is to expose the dominant narrative of Canadian art as one that has been profoundly shaped by the discourse of the nation-state.42 It is important to then pay particular attention to the ways in which the dominant narrative has shaped understandings of the lives of women artists and the production and reception of their work. If the visual arts in Canada can be thought of as part of the process of installing liberalism in order to establish a homogeneous and unified notion of nation-state – of which capitalism and patriarchy are intimately a part – then perhaps we should be examining the ways in which women had to consistently negotiate their position in relation to liberalism, capitalism, and patriarchy. Thinking in this way might constitute the second phase – the “doing” part. I want to think through these ideas more fully by providing an example of how a female artist, in this case Wieland, was included within the dominant art historical narrative on certain (nationalist) terms and how, when we reconceptualize Canada as “Canada” (as a process of installing a liberal order), it allows for new understandings of her art production that are rooted outside of the colony-to-nation narrative and within what we might call a critical feminist framework. Despite the fact that few works by women artists are included in twentieth-century surveys of the visual arts in Canada, the work of Wieland figures prominently. I would argue that this is due, in part, to the ways in which art production from the 1960s has been constructed within the literature as both lacking an authentic Canadian subject matter and being a moment of cultural rebirth and revitalization. A formal and visual analysis of Wieland’s work, with its explicit nationalist imagery (the Canadian flag, the maple leaf, the national anthem, political slogans, the beaver, etc.) (fig. 2.2), as well as her use of the conventionally “feminine” and accessible medium of craft (quilting, embroidery, knitting and rug-hooking) (fig. 2.3) is, I would argue, integral to her inclusion within the dominant narrative of Canadian art. The ways in which her work is constructed as

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Figure 2.2 Joyce Wieland, O Canada Animation, 1970.

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Figure 2.3 Joyce Wieland, Reason over Passion, 1968.

embodying politically conservative cultural nationalism, by the very fact that her work depicts nationalist signifiers, are the terms by which her artistic production is included and which denies the inherent feminist politics of her work. Within the dominant narrative Wieland’s work is positioned as important because it is constructed as embodying politically conservative Canadian cultural nationalism. Wieland’s 1964 work Cooling Room II (fig. 2.4), for example, was included in the Expo 67 production Great Canadian Painting: A Century of Art.43 The inclusion of her work in this study is significant because it situates her within the historical development of the visual arts in Canada and it was published on the occasion of a significant national event. Dennis Reid was the first to include work by Wieland within the context of a survey, and he situates her, together with Dennis Burton, Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe, Robert

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Markle, and Michael Snow, at the centre of a new artistic avant-garde that revolved around the Isaacs Gallery, a commercial gallery in Toronto.44 Reid’s analysis of Wieland’s works is couched in formalism. In his words, Wieland’s 1961 work Time Machine Series (fig. 2.5) is “a great round shape – suggestive of an open vagina as well as of a fleshy clock – [that] floats in a sea of ethereal blue.”45 While Reid does not discuss Wieland’s works that engage in the subject matter of the Canadian nation, his inclusion of her work within the context of a revival of artistic avant-gardism in Canada constructs her work as important to the development of the visual arts in Canada and, consequently, to the maintenance of cultural nationalism. Even in essays written in the late 1970s, Wieland’s work continues to be viewed as important because of its perceived celebration of the Canadian nation. Writing on nationalism and Canadian art in artscanada in 1979, Michael Greenwood states of Wieland’s work that it “constitutes a sustained love affair with her notion of and hope for Canada, a condensation of possessive and erotic feelings into epitomes of what to her is essentially a benevolent Motherland whose actual awe-inspiring grandeur is tenderly domesticated in quilted images, appliquéd or silk-screened, of lake and mountain, indigenous beasts and flora.”46 Perhaps one of the most evident indications that Wieland’s work had come to be seen as embodying Canadian cultural nationalism is the critique of her art production by Barry Lord. In 1974, Lord published The History of Painting in Canada, which took a Marxist/ new nationalist approach to the dominant narrative of Canadian art.47 In his introduction, he positions the visual arts in Canada as an integral component in the fight against British and us American cultural imperialism. His text is significant because it is one of the first to provide an extensive discussion of Wieland’s work and to place such a discussion within the history and development of Canadian art. His approach is critical of Canadian cultural nationalism; among other things, he sees it as unable to address political issues stemming from us American imperialism. He also argues that “the artist who has taken this cultural nationalism farthest is Joyce Wieland.”48 Lord criticizes Wieland for living in New York City and selling out to a us American system that he sees as imperialist and oppressive, especially in relation to Canada and Canadian cultural autonomy. Lord consequently argues that the work from Wieland’s 1971 retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada is really “a slap in the face to patriotic Canadians. It was actually U.S. pop art using Canadian symbols as mass-marketed ‘images.’”49 His lengthy critique of Wieland’s work as “cosmetic nationalism” suggests the extent to which understandings of her art production were intimately linked with Canadian cultural nationalism. While Wieland’s work has been afforded a prominent place within the dominant narrative, the terms by which she is often introduced into discussion are those of wife (of artist Michael Snow) or eccentric. Both Reid and Lord introduce Wieland as Snow’s wife, while other scholars pronounce on her physical appearance or personality. In his 1972 study Four Decades: The Canadian Group of Painters and Their Contemporaries, 1930– 1970, Paul Duval introduces Wieland by describing her as “feminine to the fingertips” and her art production as “belong[ing] in a singular Wieland-created world. As an artist, she is a loner who has created works that are at once irreverent, sensuous and happy.”50 William Withrow introduces Wieland into his book as follows: “A short, plump woman,

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Figure 2.4 Joyce Wieland, Cooling Room II, 1964.

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Figure 2.5 Joyce Wieland, Time Machine Series, 1961.

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unmindful of her appearance, Joyce Wieland was born in Toronto, elder daughter of British immigrants.”51 The characterization of Wieland as a wife, an eccentric, a loner, or “wild” in appearance reinforces the idea that, while she is included within the dominant narrative, she continues to operate outside of it and especially outside the modernist notion of the artist, with its defining qualities of genius, originality, and masculinity. This construction of Wieland as eccentric and, consequently, non-threatening is then transferred onto an understanding of her art production as anti-intellectual and untheoretical – an understanding that draws from both institutional literature as well as the popular press.52 The Wieland that emerges within dominant narrative discourse is one that signifies a politically conservative cultural nationalism that is used to strengthen the conceptualization of the visual arts during the 1960s as part of the process of Canadianization. Such a conceptualization denies alternative readings of her work as informed by, among other things, her female subjectivity or feminist politics. It is also worth noting that this is a subject position and a politics that, not coincidentally, exist outside of the modern, liberal construction of the individual and citizen – integral aspects of the nation-state. The sexist comments that scholars make in reference to Wieland and her works of art work to subvert any perceived power that she may symbolically hold within the dominant narrative by reinforcing her position as ideologically incompatible with the ideal (national/ist) artist. If we shift understandings of Wieland and her work away from that of conservative cultural nationalism, how might we analyze her artistic production and what new understandings would emerge? With McKay’s concept of Canada as a process of installing a liberal order, we might think about how Wieland’s works from the late 1960s and early 1970s employ craft, feminine, and nationalistic signifiers in order to destabilize, rather than celebrate or nostalgicize, the construction of the reasoned liberal individual as a homogeneous and patriarchal category, and as the basis for citizenship within the liberal nation-state. We might also ask how Wieland negotiated both the Canadianization of culture by the Trudeau government in the late 1960s and the reconceptualization of women as citizens. The late 1960s and early 1970s in Canada can be understood as a period when the achievement of gender equality was promoted by the federal government as something that could be attained only within a unified, liberal nation-state. Federal government initiatives that assessed perceived barriers to equality for women, such the 1971 Royal Commission on the Status of Women (rcsw), gave the impression that second-wave feminist concerns were not only taken seriously by the Trudeau government, but that they were also integral to the development of federalism. The construction of women as citizens within the Canadian nation was dependent on positioning them as liberal, rights-bearing individuals, and as equal members of the modern Canadian nation-state. The effort to reconceptualize women as citizens might help to explain why the idea of the Canadian nation became an important subject matter in Wieland’s work from the late 1960s and early 1970s and what led her to famously proclaim, “I think of Canada as female.”53 Wieland’s 1968 quilt Reason over Passion (fig. 2.3), exemplifies the complex relationship that developed between cultural production, women, and the Canadianization of

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the nation during the Trudeau administration. A critical examination of this work reveals how we might begin to understand it outside of a nation-building narrative and as a response to the liberal order. Although she lived in New York City from 1962 to 1971, Wieland was acutely aware of the changing political and cultural milieu in Canada which was fuelled largely by Trudeauvian liberalism, the rise of New Left nationalism, First Nations activism, Québécois sovereignty, and second-wave feminism.54 In an interview with Lauren Rabinovitz, for example, Wieland stated: “By 1967, I was reading a lot of Canadian history and following books and pamphlets coming out by Canadian nationalist economists. Politically involved friends were writing things, and they started to get absorbed in a sense of responsibility toward Canada through art. I wanted to help the situation in Canada.”55 Although it was perhaps an overly optimistic outlook to take, Wieland believed that art could, even should, effect social and political change, and she positioned herself as an artist whose job it was to do this.56 Considering Wieland’s interest in Canadian politics, it is not surprising that in April 1968 she flew to Ottawa to attend the convention where Pierre Trudeau became leader of the Liberal party. Wieland recalls: “my friend Mary [Mitchell] and I had been reading about Trudeau; the New York Times, the Canadian papers, everybody was talking about him … I got the idea for the quilts and what the film would be on the way back reading Trudeau being quoted in the paper: ‘Reason over passion, that is the theme of all my writings.’ I made the film Reason over Passion and the two quilts … from that.”57 Wieland created an eighty-minute experimental film entitled Reason over Passion featuring footage of Trudeau from the convention, as well as two quilted works, Reason over Passion and La raison avant la passion. These large, brightly coloured works spell out Trudeau’s political philosophy and are dotted with small stuffed and appliquéd hearts. In May 1968, Wieland hosted a “quilt-in” at her New York City loft and invited friends, including Canadian expatriates, to help sew La raison avant la passion as a gift for Trudeau.58 The following year, she hosted a huge party attended by Canadian expatriates, various New York artists and writers, and Trudeau himself. Throughout the late 1960s, Wieland had both an artistic and personal relationship with Trudeau. This was unusual because very few artists, if any, had such a close relationship with the prime minister and because what appears to be Wieland’s fascination with Trudeau was, I would argue, far more complex than simple adoration. It seems clear that Wieland had initially been both fascinated by Trudeau-the-person and supportive of his campaign for Liberal leader. She formed a group in New York City, for example, called Canadians Abroad for Trudeau, and, in a 1986 interview, she told Barbara Stevenson that she had initially supported his leadership campaign.59 After Trudeau became prime minister in 1968, however, Wieland’s opinion shifted as she increasingly expressed skepticism towards him and his governing philosophy to the point that, by 1986, she referred to him as a “psychopath.”60 Wieland’s skepticism is evident, for example, in notes which appear to be a speech that accompanied a screening of Reason over Passion. She writes that she had “fantasies of being a government propagandist” and imagined herself as Leni Riefenstahl (Adolf Hitler’s filmmaker), yet also wonders, “would he be a good leader?”61 In interviews, Wieland was very clear that she intended the quilts to be satirical, telling Kay Armatage

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in 1971 that she was “putting him [Trudeau] on for his statement” and, in another interview, that they were “strictly a send-up,” but that, “Trudeau never saw this as a joke on him, though. The English quilt – he just took it straight, as a compliment.”62 For Wieland, Trudeau’s supposed inability to see the quilt as a critique of his governing philosophy no doubt made the work even funnier. Wieland’s use of humour in the quilted medium not only was intentional, but was also a strategic method of addressing contentious issues in an alternative way. She was conscious of using humour in her works in order to draw viewers in. “It worked,” she told Rabinovitz. “The humor worked with a lot of the art … Humor got people interested, and being radical isn’t enough either. Humor has to exist in everything I do.”63 While the quilts employ humour and satire in order to critique reason over passion as the guiding ideology of Trudeauvian liberalism, they also draw on Wieland’s feminist politics. The fact that Reason over Passion is quilted is a key aspect of Wieland’s critique as she purposefully uses the medium to connote the traditional associations that craft has with the feminine, domestic, “private realm.” The juxtaposition of the rational message with the quilted medium destabilizes the power and authoritative demeanour of the statement. Reason over Passion intervenes into the “public realm” of politics, culture, and the avant-garde, and, in doing so, rearticulates viewers’ relationship to this realm. In particular, it questions how female subjectivity is both defined and constituted by the reasoned, liberal individual, a concept that lay at the heart of Trudeau’s governing ideology. Drawing on her own subject position, Wieland humorously, satirically, and astutely complexified what national belonging meant in a moment when majority-culture women were being envisioned as integral to the modern Canadian nation. Wieland consistently used this strategy in many of her works from the late 1960s and early 1970s. O Canada Animation (fig. 2.2), for example, features embroidered red lips on white cloth that each form a syllable of the Canadian national anthem.64 Like Reason Over Passion, O Canada Animation reconceptualizes the relationship between viewers and the nation. The anthem is, as the title suggests, animated by Wieland using disembodied lips – a corporeal, even sexual signifier – that evokes an intimacy with the work/ anthem that is not normally experienced when just reading or singing the words. Wieland instead offers viewers an alternative relationship to the anthem that is both intimate and affective. I think it is important to pay attention not only to the historical context in which Wieland was working, but, with McKay’s ideas in mind, also to the ways in which we can think about the deployment of liberalism, capitalism, and patriarchy in a particular moment and the ways women artists had to negotiate those discursive constructs. I think McKay’s reconceptualization of Canada can help us move beyond the limited and rigid boundaries of the colony-to-nation narrative. If “Canada” is going to remain part of Canadian feminist art history, it must do so only insofar as it signals to us that we must consider the ways in which women’s art production has had to contend with the larger realities of the liberal order – liberalism, patriarchy, capitalism, and colonization. Those histories affected women artists in different and unequal ways, and it is important to pay attention to the specifics of why and how that happened. My intention is to use Wieland

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as a case study to show how understandings of her works are limited if they are confined to the dominant narrative. It is no longer a matter of expanding that narrative to slot in those previously marginalized, but of creating new ways of understanding that can account for the realities of the process called “Canada.” If we can do this, then feminist art history in Canada could serve as a model for how one might create new and exciting meanings for cultural production as a result of the demise of the Westphalian nation-state and the rise of neo-liberal globalization.

notes 1 Holmes, “Negotiating the Nation.” 2 J. O’Brian and P. White, eds, Beyond Wilderness. 3 K. Banning, “The Mummification of Mommy,” in The Films of Joyce Wieland, 29–43. 4 Ibid., 37–41. 5 Ibid., 41. 6 Ibid., 37. 7 Straw, “Shifting Boundaries, Lines of Descent,” in Relocating Cultural Studies, 86–102. 8 Ibid., 93. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 J.D. Brison, “A New National History,” in Alternative Frontiers, 77–86. 13 J.M.S. Careless, “‘Limited Identities’ in Canada,” 1–10. For another excellent discussion of Careless’s essay in relation to Canadian art history, see A. Whitelaw, “To Better Know Ourselves,” 21–2. 14 Ibid., 1, 3. 15 M. Bliss, “Privatizing the Mind,” 5–17. 16 Brison, “A New National History,” 84. 17 Banning, “The Mummification of Mommy,” 37–8. 18 For such discussions see Appadurai, Modernity at Large; and Hardt and Negri, Empire. 19 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 621.

20 See N. MacTavish, The Fine Arts in Canada; G. McInnes, A Short History of Canadian Art; W. Colgate, Canadian Art; D. Buchanan, Canadian Painters; G. McInnes, Canadian Art; R.H. Hubbard, ed., An Anthology of Canadian Art; Hubbard, The Development of Canadian Art; and Hubbard, Three Hundred Years of Canadian Art. 21 See, for example, D. Creighton, Dominion of the North; Creighton, Story of Canada; H. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada; A.R.M. Lower, Colony to Nation; and Lower, Canada: A Nation and How It Came to Be. 22 A. Whitelaw, “To Better Know Ourselves,” 11. 23 J.R. Harper, Painting in Canada, vii. 24 D. Reid, A Concise History. 25 Ibid., 7. My italics. 26 Harper, Painting in Canada, 383. 27 Ibid., 414. 28 Reid, A Concise History, 264; 305. 29 Ryan Edwardson argues that under the administration of Pierre Trudeau (1968–79), the Canadian state fundamentally altered its relationship with, and governance over, culture. Mounting threats to national unity from Québécois separatists and the leftist “new nationalist” intelligentsia meant that Trudeau’s federalism was in serious jeopardy of failing. With the state seemingly in crisis, the Trudeau administration viewed cultural activities as one of the only ways in which

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they could support their federalist desire for national unity. Trudeau’s 1968 Arts and Cultural Policy consequently democratized culture, by redefining what constituted national culture, and decentralized it, by making cultural institutions and activities more diverse and representative of the various regions within the nation. See Edwardson, Canadian Content, 185–219. W. Townsend, ed., Canadian Art Today, 5. W. Withrow, Contemporary Canadian Painting, 14. More recently several exhibition catalogues, articles, and books have addressed specific women artists working in Canada, but they do not provide broader conceptual feminist frameworks. See J. Zemans, E. Burrell, and E. Hunter, New Perspectives on Modernism in Canada; J. Mastai, “The Anorexic Body,” in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts; L. McTavish, “Body Narratives in Canada, 1968–99”; and T. Mars and J. Householder, eds, Caught in the Act. M.K. Gagnon, “Work in Progress,” in Work in Progress, 101–27. Ibid., 113–14. J. Zemans, “A Tale of Three Women, ” 103–22. See McKay, The Challenge of Modernity; McKay, “After Canada”; McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework”; McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals. McKay, “After Canada,” 86. McKay’s italics. Ibid. McKay’s italics. McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 621. McKay, “After Canada,” 87, and “The Liberal Order Framework,” 641. McKay, “After Canada,” 87. See, for example, L. Jessup, “Prospectors, Bushwhackers, Painters”; Jessup, “Landscapes of Sport, Landscapes of Exclusion”; L. McTavish, “Beyond the Margins”; and J. Zemans, “Establishing the Canon.”

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43 Elizabeth Kilbourn, Great Canadian Painting: A Century of Art, 113. Wieland had also created the quilted work Confedspread (1967) for the Canadian Government Pavilion at Expo 67. 44 Reid, A Concise History, 293. 45 Ibid., 294. 46 M. Greenwood, “Some Nationalist Facets of Canadian Art,” 71. 47 B. Lord, The History of Painting in Canada. 48 Ibid., 214. 49 Ibid. 50 P. Duval, Four Decades, 180. 51 Withrow, Contemporary Canadian Painting, 122. 52 For popular press accounts of Wieland and her work see S. Crean, “Two Decades of Cultural Nationalism and the Arts in Canada”; Crean, “Notes from the Language of Emotion”; Crean, “Standing Up for Canada”; H. McPherson, “Wieland: An Epiphany of North”; and J. Scott, “Full Circle.” 53 K. Armatage, “Kay Armatage Interviews Joyce Wieland,” 24. 54 For discussions of Wieland’s works in relation to these ideas see C. Conley, “True Patriot Love”; J. Sloan, “Joyce Wieland at the Border”; K. Holmes, “Negotiating the Nation: ‘Expanding’ the Work of Joyce Wieland”; K. Holmes, “Negotiating Citizenship”; K. Holmes, “Joyce Wieland as Cultural Worker”; K. Holmes, “Imagining and Visualizing ‘Indianness’”; and K. Armatage, “Fluidity.” 55 L. Rabinovitz, “An Interview with Joyce Wieland,” 10. 56 Wieland articulates this position very clearly in an interview conducted on the occasion of her 1971 exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada which was included as part of the exhibition catalogue/artist book. See True Patriot Love. 57 L. Rabinovitz, “An Interview with Joyce Wieland,” 10.

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58 See press release titled “‘Quilt-In’ for Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” Joyce Wieland fonds, ctasc, 1992-018/004, file 42. 59 David Stein, “Trudeau’s Got Friends in New York,” Toronto Daily Star, undated, found in Joyce Wieland fonds, ctasc, 2001058/003, file 8, and 1999-003/005, file 5, 10. 60 Joyce Wieland fonds, ctasc, 1999-003/005, file 5.

61 Joyce Wieland fonds, ctasc, 1993-009/010, file 120. 62 Armatage, “Kay Armatage Interviews Joyce Wieland,” 25, and Joyce Wieland fonds, ctasc, 1999-003/005, file 5. 63 L. Rabinovitz, “An Interview with Joyce Wieland,” 10. 64 For a discussion of lips in Wieland’s work see John O’Brian, “Anthem Lip-Sync,” 140–51.

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3 Introduction

Dealing with

Chiastic Perspectives: This chapter offers some preliminary thoughts on the current pedagogical direction of what I propose to call “global art Global Art Histories histories” in Canada by addressing the apparent impasse posed by the notion of what is euphemistically called “ethin Canada nocultural art” in this country. It examines different interpretations of the latter chiefly through a survey of course titles Alice Ming Wai Jim from art history programs in Canada and a course on the subject that I teach at Concordia University in Montreal. In the second part, I reflect on some aspects of Quebec’s internal dynamics concerning nationalism and ethnocultural diversity that have affected the course of ethnocultural art histories in the province. I argue that the Eurocentric hegemonic hold of ethno-nationalist discourses on art and art history can be seen with particular clarity in the contexts discussed. Moreover, I suggest that these discourses have hindered not only the awareness and study of art by so-called culturally diverse communities but also efforts to offer a more global, transnational, and heterogeneous (or chiastic) sense of the histories from which this art emerges. Within the discussion, I incorporate analyses of artworks by two Canadian artists – Geoffrey Farmer from Vancouver and Shié Kasai from Montreal – as examples of the reverse parallelism that chiastic perspectives on the historiography of contemporary art may entail. More broadly speaking, this chapter begins to answer the question raised by the editors of this volume: What should be the project of the study of the visual in Canada at this juncture? These comments are speculative and meant to bring together different critical vocabularies in the consideration of implications of the global and ethnic turns in art and art history for the understanding of the other. My concern in this chapter is not to go back over the prospects and limits of the rapprochement between world art history and the more recently proposed world art studies and global art history, the latter of which brack-

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ets art produced in the last two decades or so.1 The recent global turn in contemporary art has produced a quickly growing body of scholarship primarily in us and European contexts that focuses specifically on “globalism” in the field, to use art historian James Elkins’s terms, and involves the worldwide conditions and prospects of art history brought about by global migrations, diasporas, and capitalisms.2 Instead, I seek to engage in an aspect less covered in the literature, namely the ways in which the mutual and dialectical relation between “cultural identity,” better described as a “localized sense of belonging,”3 and the contingency of place may shape, resist, or undermine the introduction of world or global art historical approaches in specific national institutional sites. I argue a more attentive politics of engagement is required within this pedagogical rapprochement to address how histories not only of so-called non-Western art but also diasporic and Indigenous art are transferred holistically as knowledge, if the objective is to shift understandings of the other by emphasizing points of practice in art history as a field, rather than simply the cultural productions themselves. As such, I propose the term “global art histories” as a provisional rubric that slants the study of globalism in art history to more explicitly include these kinds of located intercultural negotiations. Globalization, of the arts and in general, has not rendered indeterminate notions such as national sovereignty, cultural identity, and state power; to account for the complex histories of art by those considered Europe’s others is to interrogate claims as such. In this regard, this chapter is sympathetic to Ian McKay’s call for a new thinking of “Canadaas-project” through the liberal order framework, acknowledging that the nation, whether as fiction or in material form, remains a significant presence in art history.4 Surely it could not be said that post-national citizenship or post-national multiculturalism is now de facto (it is not); nor can it be said the political governance of cultural diversity is divorceable from “centrally managed and well-disciplined nation-building political narratives.”5 As citizenship education studies professor George Richardson writes, “even when regional or national curriculums do make the attempt to tie global identity and citizenship together, the relationship is typically framed as an extension of national self-interest and almost exclusively tied to the existing civic structures of the nation-state.”6 How then might one approach a history of global art?

The Last Two Million Years Vancouver artist Geoffrey Farmer’s The Last Two Million Years (fig. 3.1) was presented in June 2007 at The Drawing Room in London and then again the following year at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal as part of his first survey exhibition. Finding a 1970s illustrated encyclopaedia, The Last Two Million Years, published by Reader’s Digest, lying on a patch of grass, Farmer thought: “It was a conceptual proposition in itself, and I knew in some sense that I was going to destroy it” (fig. 3.2).7 In a manner of speaking, he did destroy it, taking apart and emptying the contents of the gold-embossed title to create a three-dimensional spread mocking the hubris of a picture book purporting to tell the history of human civilization in 500 pages. With the caveat of making

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This page and opposite page Figures 3.1–3.6 Geoffrey Farmer, The Last Two Million Years, 2007.

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beforehand the marble copy also on display (fig. 3.3), according to Farmer, “the whole book is there, just reconfigured.”8 The end result is a miniature paper menagerie of figures, objects, flora, and fauna scrappily cut out from the original book’s pages and visibly Scotch-taped to foam core plinths of different sizes (fig. 3.4). Sometimes the cut-outs are in groups (fig. 3.5), other times in single-file lines (fig. 3.6), as in the long catwalk plinth leading up to the main assemblage; but all have been placed, it seems, with no regard to the chronology of the master narrative from whence they came.9 Annotations written by Farmer for a hundred of these specimens are provided on photocopies; but these entries of different lengths and by turns deadpan, declarative, or simply clever are highly personalized and shed little light on the reordered chaos presented. Their purpose is less in regard to canonicity than as quips and jabs to “the agonistic relationship among archive, source and the interpretation of history,” as one critic put it.10 Hieronymus Bosch standing next to a flea and the sordid revolutionary tale of the Death of Marat portrayed by Jacques-Louis David are annotated as such. But tellingly, annotation number 31 simply points out: “How I organized these, some by size, somewhat random, but pleasing to me.” As subterfuge, the visual allegory of The Last Two Million Years encapsulates without totalizing the many ironies associated with what world art history, as it has come down to us, attempts to do – that is, to condense meanings of the world’s art into a digestible number of formal images.11 The artist’s interest in the work of iconologist Aby Warburg is apparent; The Last Two Million Years’ eccentrically annotated “visual clusters” amount to a seriously playful riff on Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, that early-nineteenth-century image archive described by Georges Didi-Huberman as a “knowledge-montage.”12 Farmer’s “mock-grandly titled” installation13 seems to ask as did the title of his earlier “homemade” artist’s book: How Is It Possible for a Series of Images to Present a Story which Is However Minimally but Always Narrated? Farmer’s installation raises many complex questions about taxonomical tensions in the field of art history. How might a work such as this by a white, gay, male Canadian artist constitute an appropriate object of study for “world art history” in the sense of world art heritage, notwithstanding that, in this case, the object is a study on the subject? Does it fill in the gaps or does it even fit? Some might like to see Farmer’s reputation as having outgrown the supposed confines of a distinctively “Canadian” art. In parallel, this particular work unquestionably falls out of the purview of so-called ethnocultural art (to be further elaborated on shortly, but the shorthand for which is often “art by people who are not of European ancestry”). Thus is it simpler to think of The Last Two Million Years as working towards a research agenda for its own inscription into what art historian Hans Belting proposes to distinguish as “global art history”?14 Finally, shown in the only museum in Canada dedicated to contemporary art and funded notably by the Ministère de la Culture, des Communications et de la condition féminine du Québec (Quebec Ministry of Culture, Communications and the Status of Women) to showcase Quebec art and international art trends, to which cultural majority does this sprawling universal human history speak? The impetus to examine ways in which such works, for all intents and purposes categorized as “global art,” are exhibited, interpreted, and eventually taught and learned in contrast to “ethnocultural art,” came directly from these kinds of questions. These

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questions turned out to be relevant for my own recent exercise in cultural and pedagogical inquiry based on participant observation as well as for an undergraduate course titled “Ethnocultural Art Histories,” which I taught for the first time in 2007, and subsequently for a graduate seminar on “Global Art Histories” (both to date the only courses in the country with these titles). The following sections therefore attempt to make sense of the meaning of these rubrics first more generally within Canada and then within the Quebec context.

Towards a Research Agenda Ethnocultural art histories, as I have come to understand them, attempt to shift the classification of art according to particular geographic areas to consider a myriad of issues in the visual field predicated on local senses of belonging shaped by migration histories and “first” contacts. As such, ethnocultural art histories call attention to, but not exclusively, the art of various diasporic becomings. Although it is something I try to avoid, a course on the subject often tends to concentrate on the cultural production of visible minorities or ethnocultural groups. Obviously there exist at least several understandings of what is meant by ethnocultural interpretation in the arts, as is the case in other fields.15 The controversy and debates over comments made in 2010 by the director of the National Gallery of Canada on a national news program concerning the under-representation in the arts by culturally diverse communities based on the criteria of excellence,16 however, made it quite clear that “ethnocultural art” refers to something quite specific, namely lesser art by people in Canada who are not of European ancestry – the “perpetual immigrant” or the “foreigner-within.”17 If the Canada Council Art Bank’s targeted acquisition in 2009 of work by artists from diverse cultural backgrounds and of mixed racial heritage in an effort to increase awareness of art by this increasing demographic in Canada were not indication enough, the following statement in the media reporting on the controversy may be more telling of how ethnocultural arts are perceived: “The [National Gallery of Canada] had been slow to accept aboriginal art as ‘fine art’ and not as some second-class ‘ethno-cultural art.’”18 This statement contains in condensed form the issue at the heart of this discussion: What exactly in the Canadian cultural imagination sets the term “ethnocultural art” apart from, for example, First Nations art, art by culturally diverse communities, or art by nonEuropeans, non-Canadians, non-Québécois, and non-Westerners – if and when it is not used to refer to one or more of the above? Generally speaking, the term “ethnocultural art” refers to what is more commonly understood as “ethnic minority arts” in the ostensibly more derisive discourses on Canadian multiculturalism and cultural diversity. The addition of the term “culture” emphasizes the voluntary self-definition involved in ethnic identification and makes the distinction with “racial minorities.” “Ethnocultural communities,” along with the moniker “cultural communities” (or “culturally diverse” communities), however, is still often understood to refer to immigrants (whether recent or long-standing), members of racialized minorities, and even First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.

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Parenthetically, the term “racial minorities” has been replaced in Canada by the term “visible minorities” since 1981, due fundamentally to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. “Visible minorities” are defined by the 1995 Canadian Employment Equity Act as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples (persons who are Indians, Inuit or Métis), who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour,” which arguably retains the former term’s white supremacist belief system, if only to meet the stated objectives of countering race-based social inequities. In contrast, “ethnic origin” is defined in the census as the ethnic or cultural group or groups to which the respondent’s ancestors belong and is not to be confused with citizenship or nationality, although this last point is arguable given the emergence of the reporting of a national ethnic ancestry. In 1996, the category “Canadian” was listed in the census as an example of an ethnic group and “Québécois” was moved from “French origins” (French, Acadian) to the “Other origins” category.19 The 2006 census asked respondents to specify up to six ethnic origins as applicable. The largest national ethnic ancestry group enumerated was Canadian, either alone (5.7 million) or with other origins (4.3 million), reflecting the increasing diversity of the population of approximately 31.5 million. In Quebec, where I was teaching my classes on ethnocultural and global art histories, 60.2 per cent of the province’s population reported Canadian as their ethnic origin, alone or with other origins; 28.9 per cent reported French origin; and 1.9 per cent reported Québécois origins, of which one-third, almost 50,000, reported other origins.20 Because of the many changes in the census question concerning ethnic origins over the years, however, comparisons of the extent of ethnic diversity, national or otherwise, from census to census has been a problem, especially in Quebec, where, as sociologist Victor Piché indicates, “ethnic categorization increasingly gives way to linguistic categorization, not only because ethnic statistics have become inoperative, but also because it corresponds to Quebec’s language and immigration policies that define integration as a function of language criteria and not as a function of the ethnic ones.”21 The implementation of the separatist Parti Québécois’s centre-left Charter of the French Language in 1977 (Bill 101, which defines French as the only official language of Quebec) successfully raised the status and extended the use of French in Quebec with an unintended consequence of greatly advancing multilingualism in the province and creating a new ethnic diversity within the sociological majority of Franco-Québécois and French-speaking multi-ethnic groups, which researchers have been calling the New French Fact.22 The cultural majority, however, is assumed to be homogeneously Franco-Québécois. With regard to visible minorities in Canada, the release of a 2005 Statistics Canada study on the projected ethnocultural diversity of the Canadian population made headlines across the country: “Roughly one out of every five people in Canada, or between 19 per cent and 23 per cent of the nation’s population, could be a member of a visible minority by 2017 when Canada celebrates its 150th anniversary.”23 According to the study, the overall number and proportion of visible minorities are expected to double by 2017 and form more than half the population in Greater Toronto (Canada’s most multicultural city) and Vancouver, resulting for the first time in a “visible majority” in these two cities. By 2017, it is projected that almost 75 per cent of visible minorities will live in Canada’s three largest cities: Toronto (45 per cent), Vancouver (18 per cent) and Montreal (11 per cent).24

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If ethnocultural art – as an ideological category and descriptor for art by minority communities or, more generally speaking, art by Europe’s others – is seen in a negative light, or not seen at all in Canada (“Where are they? We don’t see them, we’re looking for excellence”),25 I think it fair to ask how knowledge about the cultural production of minority or non-Western artists is being disseminated across cultural and educational sectors within prevailing ethno-national/ist discourses, particularly given the projected ethnocultural portrait of this country, and when, as sociologist Rhoda Howard-Hassmann argues, “there is such a thing as an ethnic Canadian identity.”26 In more practical terms, this raises the questions of what material an ethnocultural art histories course is expected to cover, the ways in which this material is covered, and in what courses it should be taught at other universities in Quebec and Canada.

Studying Ethnocultural Art Histories: What Is It Good For? What exactly are ethnocultural art histories? What purpose do they serve? According to the undergraduate course calendar at Concordia University, the course entitled “Issues in Ethnocultural Art Histories” addresses “the concerns of ethnic and cultural identity in art and art history” and is listed under the Theory and Criticism section, which includes its sister course, “Post-colonial Theory in Art History.” After more than a decade of identity politics, the ethnocultural art histories course was introduced at Concordia in the 1990s, along with courses on “Post-colonial Theory in Art History” and “Topics in Amerindian and Inuit Art” (listed, tellingly, under the Art in Canada section, subsuming ethnicity under nationalism as it were). These course additions were in recognition of formerly marginalized artistic production by racialized communities in European and North American art history departments as well as demands on the part of the contemporary art world and the pressures of globalization. When the undergraduate curriculum was redesigned in the mid-1980s, upper-level survey courses were largely abandoned and course titles for so-called non-Western art history no longer appeared, except for one anachronism which remained listed in the Period Studies section called “Studies in Near Eastern Art and Architecture” (no other non-European region is so indicated), a residual of the “Studies in … [e.g., Near Eastern/ Asian/African] Art” type of courses previously offered. Commenting on art historical narratives and canons, Charlotte Bydler notes: “Non-Western art history courses in the Western academy tend to focus on art and cultures from Asia, Latin America and Africa – before modernization and industrialization, and untouched by European colonization.”27 This framework does not remain unchallenged in current art history pedagogy and institutional practices, but non-Western art history courses nevertheless are characteristically offered in art history programs in the West that focus on European art from their inception, Canadian institutions and Concordia being no exceptions. One may take these gradual changes in art history curricula as a sign that “Canadian universities have made some progress in the last two decades in moderating their traditional Eurocentrism.”28 However, most art history programs in Canada continue to focus largely on teaching the Western canon. In the case of ethnocultural art histories, no other

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university apart from Concordia lists a course with this title. Yet, notably, across the curricula there are a handful of courses, under unspecific titles and rarely on offer, that are considered to be of this type (for example, those focusing on diasporic art productions, art and critical race theory, ethnic and touristic arts, and, less often explicitly, First Nations art curricula, ergo literally race courses). Of interest here is how the generally uneven or sporadic inclusion of these so-called “critical race” courses has paralleled the paradoxical simultaneous phasing out of non-Western art curricula and, significantly, its odd phasing back in (for example, in the strategic hiring of modernists whose expertise is able to cover non-European contexts, or, dare I say, world art). This gradual but concurrent development in curricula begs the question of the nature of the relationship between the circular logic of world art historical approaches and the neo-liberal politics of inclusion putatively exemplified by “ethnocultural” types of art history courses. Here my aim is not to take away from the potential of the ethnocultural art history course to provide more integrative analyses of art concerned with issues of ethnocultural identities than courses siphoned off for the study of non-Western art and culture; the former structurally attends much more directly to the ongoing need in the arts for the politics of inclusion, recognition, and reclamation. Rather, I propose to be continually mindful of the ways in which such courses and those like it are no less ambivalently reductive and recuperative an academic measure on many cultural, socio-political, economic, and pedagogical levels. Despite the internal struggles to negotiate diverse terms of cultural engagement, the problem is that these types of courses more often than not emerge as a misfired offshoot of the more common academic offering of the non-Western art history course, which, as at Concordia, they seem to have replaced even though technically they do not address the same things. As is typical of calendar listings, the description for the Concordia course is intended to be open and flexible enough to accommodate the wide range of topics that potentially can be taught under the title depending on enrolment, instructor availability, and research interests; for example, it does not specify whose ethnicities are of what concern nor where they are located. With art and its histories ideologically bonded to cultural identity formation in some way or other, this course is charged with broaching special topics ranging from “Primitivism in Western Art” about representations of the “savage” in European art, to “Islamic Art” from the seventh to fifteenth centuries, to “Race, Citizenship and Art in Canada” from circa 1867 to present. The last, my course of three editions to date, examined the politics of representation, redress, and recognition in so-called Canadian and Quebec art by focusing on “Canadian” art’s engagement with a very different group of “sevens.” Instead of perpetuating the “authentic” national branding of the Group of Seven, the course turned to a series of key dates in the history of immigration policies in Canada and its settler colonial legacy that have deeply shaped the formation of ethno-national/ist discourse in “The Great White North.” From the vantage point of the United Nation’s Third International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism (2011–20), the last decade witnessed a host of significant anniversaries, including the twentieth anniversary of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 2008, the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 2007, the one hundredth anniversary of the 1907 Vancouver Anti-Asian Riots,

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the sixtieth anniversary of the 1947 Canadian Citizenship Act, and the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 Canadian Immigration Act. Incisively complicating the understanding of a national art and the construction of “Canadian-ness,” these moments constituted the “Race, Citizenship and Art in Canada” course’s historical framework for examining contemporary praxis by artists of (not exclusively) Asian and African descent based in Canada. In content, the course topics ranged from Emily Carr’s paintings of Native totem poles and her approach to representing Chinese immigrants and bc’s Native peoples, to Africville in Halifax, to Québécois journalist and writer Pierre Vallières’s controversial book Nègres blancs d’Amérique,29 to Joanne Tod’s paintings of black and South Asian women. In other words, while the course content might have been categorized as ethnocultural, to my mind it also encompassed global art histories.

Global Art Histories in Canada The wider context for this discussion, and the impetus for the course, is a so-called postcolonial space named Canada where areas of study and artistic creation exist, obviously some more securely than others, that explore the complexities and contradictions of nonWestern, diasporic, and Indigenous art histories. Indeed these activities are part of a larger undertaking to “make Western art history global,” a process that begins by “raceing art history” in light of dominant knowledge systems and the white supremacy of Euro-American art.30 The processes of place-identity formations and the concomitant agency of these culturally interrelated nodes of activity and action are contingent on particular dealings – past and present and in and across national, provincial, and regional scales – with official multiculturalism policy, colonization, and specific immigration, racialization, and transcultural practices.31 The relatively small number of works produced by culturally diverse and Aboriginal communities in national/ist art institutions further presents obstacles for establishing localized senses of belonging. Much might be gained from a site-based reading of how all of the above complicate the establishment of world art studies and other art histories within Canadian universities. How is the study of world or global art generally reflected in Canadian curricula at present? From the outset, it must be stated that there is relatively little indication in the Canadian academy of the possibility that world art history will become a recognized discipline in Canada, never mind its reframing through any of its corollary terms such as global art histories.32 To date, no formal programs exist and there have been no major conferences devoted to the question, although there are a number of scholars, graduate students, interdisciplinary instructional units, and isolated curricular offerings whose research concerns involve the approach.33 In order to ascertain, therefore, how knowledge of world art and global art is being incorporated into the curriculum of fine art faculties and departments in Canadian universities, the first task is to review undergraduate art history course titles that reflect to some degree a pedagogical responsiveness to the challenges of post-colonial perspectives and the globalization of the arts.34 A benchmark would be to focus on offerings since 2001, the year of unesco’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity.

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Of the over ninety universities in Canada about a quarter of them offer degree programs in art history at the undergraduate level and higher. Courses with applicable titles generally fall under six main categories: non-Western art; post-colonial perspectives on art; ethnic/diasporic art or art by minority/racialized communities; Indigenous/First Nations art; national/regional art (where it is assumed issues of place-based identity are addressed); and art from an international/global perspective.35 Technically, many of the applicable titles, including ethnocultural art histories, could fall under any or all of these categories. A basic enumeration of art history course titles offers little insight, however, into the actual transference of knowledge about these subjects through curricula (“hidden” or otherwise) of other departments, through faculties or university-affiliated research centres and activities, or through fields of study (such as ethnic studies, literary studies, l’ecriture migrante [migrant literature], communication and media studies, and other interdisciplinary fields). This is not to say that cross-cultural comparisons are not conducted in mainstream course content – the notion of Western art is predicated on the existence of art by the rest of the world, but even the best of cross-cultural surveys unavoidably involves a measure of tokenism. And as art historian Joanne Sowell puts it, echoing a view shared by critical pedagogy scholars: “Adding multicultural content is not a sufficient response to the growing diversity of our population. Pedagogy must also become multicultural.”36 Nor can a tally address ways in which lack of expertise may be affected by lack of resources or whether concerns of racialization in the field motivate curriculum development; this is an area that urgently requires further study, with multifocal methodologies and more resources.37 The politics of counting aside, the categories in themselves are telling, and at least three observations can be quickly surmised. First, the appearance of courses offered within the framework of post-colonial studies, although by no means a consistent offering across universities, marks a fundamental attempt and shift in the discipline to deal with the crisis of cultural representation of a multicultural, multi-ethnic society with meanings of nationalisms and identity increasingly particular to local constituencies. Mainstay courses on national art reflect sustained tensions between the long-standing preoccupation of defining a distinctly contested concept of “Canadian” art and art history and the representation of cultural and regional diversity. Further, Canadian art history has also had to continually negotiate its disciplinary boundaries vis-à-vis the historical dominance of imperial Britain and the proximal, dominant us American academy in more recent decades. Second is the unspoken perception underlying course offerings on ethnocultural art histories that the Canadian post-colonial university, unlike its us counterpart, is already inclusive of curricula informed by critical race pedagogy in art and visual culture from a critical and historical perspective as well as by the emerging field of critical race art history that deals with authenticity, diversity, and multiculturalism.38 What this assumption does is pre-empt inquiry into the complex ways Canadian and Quebec institutions are actually addressing and at the same time retaining the internal hierarchies of power based on cultural, linguistic, and racial factors within the discipline of art history and by extension their attendant curricula. For example, the few course titles specifically using the terms “ethnicity,” “race,” or diaspora, and especially the term “ethnocultural,” suggest either an admission that the hierarchies have been retained or an associated reluctant

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politicization of “academicized” subject matter through straying into “worldly matters.”39 On the other hand, such course titles belie an avoidance of the charge of ethnic determinism embodied by the tenets of multiculturalism which treat ethnocultural differences as a cause for celebrating – that ethnoculturalism in its most reductive version divides all art, artists, and art histories into one or another ethnic category and, in its valorization of ethnic ties, impedes the full participation of these subjects in nation building via, say, Canadian art. Third, if no two scholars can agree on what “Canadian” (“neither American nor Quebec,” as Elke Winter puts it) or, more contentiously, “post-colonial” means, both these notions as enabling terms of inquiry are even more questionable in the case of Quebec, where postcolonial criticism is practically absent.40 For Quebec nationalists, Canada represents the dominant significant other because it refuses to recognize the territory of the province as Quebec’s national territory.41 It is generally recognized that the major manifestations of the colonial oppression of historically disadvantaged Québécois – denounced by twentieth-century Franco-Québécois intellectuals and politicians in the sixties through an identification of Quebec with the position of the colonized in relation to English Canada – have, by and large, disappeared.42 In addition, sentiments of being colonized are also weakening. Both these developments occurred thanks to the province’s economic success and above all the new French fact beginning with Bill 101, both of which have fundamentally altered the political and cultural landscape over the past forty years. However, economic viability and a francophone majority have not reduced debates concerning hierarchies of oppression; in fact they have intensified them. In recent decades, as ethnic studies scholar Marie McAndrew writes, Quebecers are certainly sophisticated enough to see that some new arrivals experience economic difficulties and also that this inequality touches groups that are largely integrated into the French community linguistically, culturally and, in many instances, politically. But, in a process well documented by social psychologists, people often resolve the cognitive dissonance between the value they place on their past victim status and their knowledge of their actual power by negating the current reality and taking refuge in the past … Whenever the issue of racism or ethnic inequality is put forward, someone will almost inevitably cite the adoption of English by newcomers and their refusal to integrate, however outdated and clichéd this observation may be … [Quebec] politicians and policy-makers … have clearly not helped enough francophone Quebecers to come to terms with their new majority status and the obligations that it entails, especially during the last 15 years when, due to the change in ethnic stratification, they should have done so.43 Questions of contested territory are reflected in Quebec educational institutions as a key sector in nation building. In art history, this is especially evident in the existence of course titles with the term post-colonial in the anglophone universities and its absence in the francophone ones. Of the four universities in the Montreal area which offer undergraduate degree programs in art history, the two francophone universities (Université de Montréal and Université du Québec à Montréal) offer courses on “Latin American Art,”

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“Asian Arts and Civilizations,” “Art and Anthropology, First Nations Art,” “Quebec Art, Culture and Identity before and after 1867,” “Amerindian Art,” and “Aspects of Art of Non-Western Culture.” The two anglophone universities (Concordia and McGill) each have a faculty position in Canadian Art History, the former with a position in First Nations/Aboriginal Art History; in addition to courses on Quebec art, both have course offerings similar to the breakdown of English-speaking universities outside of the province.44 In short, the offering is fairly limited and understandably makes a claim for Quebec art if only to balance studies in Canadian art. The differences between art history course offerings at anglophone and francophone universities are usually explained based on two assumptions. The first possibility is that the division of the Quebec education system along linguistic lines would affect the formations and boundaries of art historical practice in Quebec universities relative to the availability in varying degrees of French-language literature (published in Quebec and France, for example) and sources vis-à-vis those in English. The other, more complicated and more probable, assumption is that Quebec’s past and present internal dynamics concerning nationalism, cultural majority and minority relations, and resistance to the domination of art histories from English-speaking Canada and its attendant neglect of art from Quebec would have art history programs as secluded enclaves battling it out to their own linguistic ends with arguably little interaction between them. Like other studies that work with units of geographical and cultural analysis, art history is unavoidably subject to the disciplinary pitfalls of methodological nationalism. However ethnocultural art histories, in content and epistemologically, make ideal stomping grounds for post-ethnic and post-national discourses on the one hand, while, on the other, remaining under the stranglehold, given the impact of increasing ethnocultural diversification, of persistent ethno-national/ist discourses on the subject. In the following section, I turn to a more personal reflection on the situation in Montreal, where many of these activities attend to the representation of socio-cultural diversity in an intercultural Quebec.

The Ethnic Turn: An Ethnocultural Portrait When I was younger, I thought the “ethnic turn” referred to how Premier Jacques Parizeau blamed the loss of the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum on money and ethnic votes (“Par l’argent puis des votes ethniques, essentiellement”).45 Since then the cultural diversity of Quebec and Montreal has changed drastically with recent debates centring on how to redefine Quebec identity in light of the new ethnic diversity and drawing comparisons between Canadian multiculturalism and Quebec interculturalism. Individuals of ethnic origin other than Canadian, British, French, or Aboriginal account for over 15 per cent of Quebec’s population of 7 million people, with ethnic diversity very much concentrated in Montreal at 34 per cent of the population.46 Although francophone Québécois have become a sociological majority in recent decades (75 per cent of the population of Quebec), questions that turn on ethnicity persist, as with the ongoing identity debates around not only management of cultural diversity but also the issue of

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whether contemporary Quebec nationalism is still “ethnic” (albeit under a different set of pretences towards the new ethnic diversity) or now “territorial” or more “civicbased.”47 These debates have been going on since the decade of the Quiet Revolution that started in 1960, not coincidently the same year the Canadian Bill of Rights recognized the diversity of the Canadian population in the creation of a non-discriminatory immigration system. Of the more recent ethnic conflicts and crises, the heated and highly sensationalized debate over the issues of “reasonable accommodation” and Quebec citizenship in the fall of 2007 was a particularly instructive, if not harrowing, event in the context of my discussion. The debates broke out in the middle of the same term I was teaching the “Race, Citizenship and Art in Canada” course for the first time. The province-wide debates on reasonable accommodation were catalyzed by the eight-week tour of public consultations conducted by the state-appointed Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences under the direction of separatist historian and sociologist Gérard Bouchard and renowned federalist philosopher Charles Taylor.48 Their task was to consult with the Quebec population on how religious and ethnic minorities should be treated. Anti-racist organizing by community and social justice groups denounced the Commission for fanning the flames of racism, sexism, and Islamophobia by offering a platform to people with extremist negative views towards minorities.49 In the midst of the consultations, the idea of an ethnically defined Quebec citizenship was introduced in Quebec’s Identity Act in the Quebec National Assembly by the Parti Québécois followed a month later by the introduction of the “new” Quebec constitution to ensure the protection and promotion of Quebec culture and the French language. The aim of the proposed Bill 195 (Loi sur l’identité québécoise, or Identity Act) was to provide for the subsequent drafting of the constitution to create Quebec citizenship based on linguistic criteria, the French language being the privileged marker of ethnic difference.50 The legitimacy for the recognition of Franco-Québécois culture is evident. What can be singled out in these events is the manner in which the civic rhetoric compelled public opinion to choose between protecting Québécois culture and safeguarding the minority rights of immigrants, while shoring up how Aboriginal rights are not part of the ongoing biculturalism debate between Quebec’s French-speaking majority and the rest of English Canada. The final Commission report launched in May 2008 basically concluded that “no information allows us to confirm that discrimination is more prevalent in Quebec than elsewhere” and that when it comes to reasonable accommodation, “old-stock or newcomers, everyone in Quebec” should use balance and commonsense.51 Fourth in the report’s thirty-seven recommendations was that Quebec should continue to support interculturalism, with its emphasis on integration through francization, in the spirit of equality and reciprocity and inspired by negotiation and compromise, and should make it an official policy. Interculturalism as a model for Quebec society is stated in the third principle of the “moral contract” proposed in the 1990 White Paper by the Ministry of Cultural Communities and Immigration and recognizes the pluralistic character of Quebec society “within the limit imposed by the respect for fundamental democratic values and the need for intergroup exchanges.”52 Since then, the state’s attitude to diversity has been to engage

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ethnocultural minorities in a “moral contract” – a civic and political allegiance – regulated by the fundamental liberal-democratic values that define Quebec’s general common public culture; the particularities of cultural communities are added and integrated over time. Until the late 1990s the state used the term “cultural communities” to designate those whose ancestry was neither French nor English. At that time, in efforts to deethnicize its approach to establishing Quebec’s sense of nationhood – critiqued for being geared only to Québécois de souche (that is, those self-identifying as non-immigrant, non-Aboriginal, and non-anglophone) – the state asserted that all Quebec residents were bound through citizenship regardless of social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds or historical enracinement (“roots”). This shifted references to ethnocultural communities merely in terms of social and administrative categories to “incorporating their difference in the very makeup of Quebec’s sense of citizenship.”53 Although arguably no less a dualist model (between Québécois and cultural communities, shutting out of the debate First Nations, whose eleven nations in the province are recognized by the Quebec constitution), the intercultural model is seen in contrast to the Canadian model of multiculturalism in which each cultural community maintains more or less its independent way of life in conformity with a common juridical framework. Quebec interculturalism’s commitment to equal opportunity is not in dispute but, as McAndrews notes, “political recognition of the existence of ethnic inequalities and racism is still in its infancy, and public debate has not yet begun. There is also an extremely strong tendency to restate socioeconomic issues as cultural ones. The evolution of the concept of citizenship provides a good example of this trend.”54 Indeed, the “hijacking,” as McAndrew puts it, “of the Quebec agenda by those with linguistic and cultural concerns has left very little room for public discussion of inequalities.”55 While much is made about the linguistic and ethnic diversity of Quebec’s normative pluralism, the proportion of visible ethnic minorities in the arts, particularly in the visual arts, is reportedly negligible, with visible minorities less likely to possess degrees in the arts and the gap particularly acute among younger members.56 In terms of cultural institutional practices, there is a marked discrepancy between government motivations and policy. On the one hand, the state has attempted to enhance public awareness of Quebec’s constitutive ethnocultural diversity within the arts through regular state sponsorship of ethnocultural art events such as Citizenship Week, Action Week against Racism, Black History Month Round Table, Accès Asie (Montreal’s Asian Heritage Month), and the creation of organizations such as Diversité artistique Montréal (dam) initiated by the Montreal Arts Council (cam) in 2003. On the other hand, Quebec’s cultural policy refers to artists (painters, writers, poets, and actors) as exclusively composed of Franco-Québécois conceived of as a culturally homogeneous majority that sets diversity aside in terms of minorities in recognition of the idealized nationalist identity.57 According to Linda Pietrantonio’s study of documents pertaining to cultural policy issued by the Quebec Ministry of Culture between 1961 and 2000, “diversity is referred to … as concerning only minorities and the expressions of their culture, never the ‘Québécois’ category … [The] relation to diversity is one of proximity but not of identification.

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Nowhere do we find diversity incorporated into the history (core) that is used to justify cultural policy. Diversity is not constitutive of Quebec’s culture in these documents, but is only an accretion. As such, it appears as peripheral to Quebec culture.”58 Teaching a course on race, citizenship, and art during the reasonable accommodation debates and the rekindled multicultural/intercultural discussions thus only emphasized how ethnocultural art histories may still promise fresh possibilities for mobilizing the study of art produced by ethnic minorities and to reverse the traditional exclusion of work by artists of colour from art history. But the current course of ethnocultural art histories especially in the context of Quebec must first deal with a diverse student body coming to terms with internalized ideas about how the cultural majority’s perception of issues of accommodating ethnocultural diversity has come to shape their own world views of the Other. Take, for example, my typical undergraduate classroom, where 30 to 50 per cent of the students may be francophone. During the fall 2007 Ethnocultural Art Histories course, tensions ran high in debates over competing racial oppressions between the handful of students of colour and Aboriginal students, and those self-identifying as Quebécois de souche – the latter of whom were flummoxed to learn of their newly conferred status as “invisible ethnic minorities” as far as national/ist rhetoric was concerned. These perceptions may or may not be based on historical knowledge, such as that concerning, as Will Kymlicka outlines in three discrete “silos” embodied in different legislation: the cases of Aboriginal peoples and the Indian Act, 1985; francophone Quebecers and the Official Languages Act, 1969; and immigrant/ethnic groups and the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 1988.59 No one would deny that critically addressing reasons behind the volatility of these kinds of classroom tensions is worthwhile, even necessary, to any program of study that claims to deal with issues of representation, in this province or anywhere else. The issue here is that the under-represented course offerings in university programs and the agendas of Canadian multiculturalism and Quebec interculturalism are riskily complicitous in the context of neo-liberalism. Thus the research and pedagogical embrace of cross-talk about race and ethnicity (cross-talk describing those ambivalences that arise precisely because of contrasting assumptions, experiences, and understandings of cultural identity) especially in the classroom is crucial for confronting the ideological violence of reflexive racism characteristic of neo-liberalism, that is, the attribution, from a universalist position that conveniently maintains neutrality, of a second-order racism to supposedly recalcitrant Others who refuse to be assimilated (be they immigrants or French Canadian). With the United Nations’ observance of 2008 as the Year of Languages and the alreadymentioned Second International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism (2001–10) and unesco’s 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, this internal discrepancy concerning the biases of managing “ethnocultural diversity”60 became all the more ironic in my classroom. To broach ethnocultural art histories in Quebec is to become unavoidably engrossed in what seem conflicted and conflicting internal agendas on a number of levels: for example, the political terrain of the “No One Is Illegal” campaigns, Black History Month, and Asian Heritage Month, and relations between the Parti Québécois and Ottawa. All the while the potential benefits of considering the international dimensions of regional activities are increasingly raising the stakes of the cultural debates.

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How Sushi Went Global

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Montreal artist Shié Kasai’s Survival Japanese Cooking exemplifies the cornucopia of possibilities of intercultural practices while remaining skeptical about their palatability (fig. 3.7). First conceived in 2006 during her artist residency in Rotterdam, Kasai’s Montreal version of Survival Japanese Cooking exhibited at mai (Montréal, arts interculturels) in fall 2008 is self-described as “a site-specific performance/installation project, which ends up as a cross-cultural culinary experimentation.”61 Within the surprising proliferation of fast-food ethnic restaurants in Quebec, where, according to ethnologists Laurier Turgeon and Madeleine Pastinelli, “strong nationalist sentiment has long been nourished by the revitalization of traditional culture,”62 Kasai’s project serves up Canadian/Quebec sushi inspired by what 154 interviewed Montrealers perceive to be “authentic Canadian food.” The results of the artist-as-anthropologist’s survey on local eating habits complicate any clear definition of what that might be. The top three still seem to be maple syrup, poutine, and hot dogs based on their prominence in the photographic series (fig. 3.8). Consisting only of Canadian and Québécois products from a local supermarket, “a typical Canadian breakfast becomes ham-wrapped maki and bacon-wrapped rice, topped with eggs and beans” (fig. 3.9), rice-stuffed samosas (fig. 3.10) are served with a side of fries, Tim Horton’s doughnuts made of rice are accompanied by cut-outs of hockey players (fig. 3.11), and here and there the red, white, and blue colours of the Canadian and Quebec flags are thrown in to mess with the national/ist iconography (fig. 3.12).63 In the end, notions of cultural authenticity, hybridity, orientalism, and nationalisms, and processes of ethnicization and de-ethnicization are all rolled into one, in effect becoming the “entrée of the citizen.”64 As one critic opined: “No it’s not another episode of Take that Herouxville, and no, it’s not Trudeau’s idea of multiculturalism. If it’s accommodement raisonnable, then we’re in trouble.”65 This quotation refers back to the fear that Québécois traditional culture would disappear and, with it, Québécois identity in the face of the province’s new ethnic diversity. And yet, at the same time, the ideals of liberty (blue), equality (white), and fraternity (red) running through Kasai’s Survival Japanese Cooking muster a reluctant alliance with the everyday operational face of the liberalorder model from corporatism to cultural property rights.

Opposite Figure 3.7 Top Shié Kasai, Survival Japanese Cooking, 2008.

Figure 3.8 Below left Shié Kasai, Lafleur Hotdog, 2008.

Figure 3.9 Below right Shié Kasai, Cabane à sucre, 2008.

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Clockwise Figure 3.10 Shié Kasai, Everybody’s Favourite Restaurant Is Indian and Then Japanese or Thai, 2008. Figure 3.11 Shié Kasai, Tim’s, 2008. Figure 3.12 Shié Kasai, Québec vs Canada, 2008.

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Beyond Ethnocultural Art Histories? Beyond is a double signifier, a trope that at once signals an impasse … and a desire, a willingness, to move away from such deadlocks. Beyond, then, signifies process, but its directionality, though indeterminate, activates a progressivist logic. There may be no specific telos inscribed in the beyond, but, as soon as we become engaged in its troping, we run the risk of adopting the fallacy of emancipation, a progress away from what lies before it.66

Geoffrey Farmer’s The Last Two Million Years and Shié Kasai’s Survival Japanese Cooking make appropriate bookends for this discussion because they stand as two contrasting allegories for the aporia of global art histories and more generally of art history and its global provinces when it comes to integration. This chapter has focused less on whether works such as Farmer’s and Kasai’s should be taught as part of Canadian, Quebec, ethnocultural, or world/global art history courses and under which overriding (if often implicit) themes of authenticity, representation or subjecthood, and more on art history’s investment in such claims. In this case, exploring a specific national/cultural site reveals the varying degrees to which conceptions of culture, ethnicity, and nationalism are subject to consumptive predilections and practices. There are, for example, huge, complex differences between exhibiting at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the mai in terms of access, encounter, and exchange (not to mention the linguistic and ethnic rapprochements), among them the difference between high culture appreciation and what Turgeon and Pastinelli call “deterritorialized ‘ethnosites’” in the form of Quebec’s ethnic restaurants.67 The task that lies ahead is to be more attentive to the ways in which the international relevance of ethnocultural art produced in Canada and Quebec has become susceptible to political and social priorities within these loci. To borrow from Kamobourelli’s formulation, the point here is not to move beyond ethnocultural art histories, because the beyond suggests an impasse (a point undeniably already reached) and it risks suggesting that this impasse has already been dealt with through, for example, the cultural productions created within the changes in ethnic stratification in the Quebec context over the past fifteen years or so (when clearly negotiations are ongoing). In Quebec, where it is improbable that the turn to ethnicity, diaspora, Indigeneity, and other postcolonial themes more familiar in Anglo-Canadian/us theoretical perspectives will deliver a practicable framework for the study of ethnocultural art histories in any specifically global or transnational way any time soon or at least until the shift from intercultural education to citizenship education includes a sense of global citizenship, provincializing tendencies in the arts are generating new centres and margins as elsewhere that demand rigorous interrogations. This chapter recognizes the impossibility of arriving at a single solution and thus aims to inspire debate and discussion. The politics of managing ethnocultural diversity in an intercultural Quebec has by no means detracted from the international outlook of the arts in the province (although interestingly the international Montreal Biennale now has

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a healthy local contender in the Quebec Triennial inaugurated in 2008). However it must be said culture constitutes a key political terrain on which national sentiments and intercultural and ethnic diversity are being waged locally. Further, there is no guarantee that art or curriculum development coming out of ethnic conflicts and crises has connections to transnational networks, reactionary or otherwise, as in some imagined community, or if and when it does that it necessarily contributes to fighting against inter-ethnic inequalities. Confronted with charges of anachronistic provincialism (and from which it in large part was derived) not unlike those faced by world art history, the course of ethnocultural art histories was already at an impasse before it began, shy of the resistances and controversies it raises. One of the fundamental challenges of the ethnic, diasporic, or postcolonial turn in art history has been to expose the ways in which, as Belting notes, world art demands a “common model of memory” that neither exists or is possible,68 and sets ethnocultural art as its opposite. “Believing that it is possible to move beyond impasse, however, is no small accomplishment.”69 I hope that this chapter has contributed in its own way to a more nuanced understanding of the “big picture” that will always encompass more than can be said in a five-hundred-page art history survey, much less in a twenty-six-hour course.

notes 1 This chapter uses Hans Belting’s distinction between world art “as synonymous with the art heritage of others … on a universal scale … encompass[ing] most cultures beyond the West whose heritages were preserved in empire type museums,” and global art as “always created as art to begin with, and that is synonymous with contemporary art.” Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” in The Global Art World, 44. Importantly, “world art history” is further distinguished from “World Art Studies” (coined by John Onians in 1992), an approach to art from a global perspective that transcends chronology and geography by studying it from all relevant disciplinary viewpoints imaginable ranging from visual culture, cultural studies, and anthropology to neuroscience and philosophy. John Onians, “World Art Studies,” 206–9. This “new,” growing field (with its corollary terms such as “global art history” and “comparative art histories”) implies an obligation to understand how art and its

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discourses are increasingly global and interdisciplinary; acknowledge ways in which the application of Western interpretative methodologies to non-Western art is not only inadequate but untenable; and put into contention the traditional Eurocentric focus on Western art-historical canons formed during colonialism. J. Elkins, “Can We Invent a World Art Studies?” in World Art Studies, 107. For preliminary surveys of literature, see also Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? and Belting and Buddensieg, eds, The Global Art World. A. Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in Counterworks, 204–25. McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 617–18. Ibid. G. Richardson, “Caught between Imaginaries,” in Educating for Human Rights and Global Citizenship, 57. Interview with the artist, Banff, ab, 9 August 2012.

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8 Farmer, quoted in L. Sandals, “Deconstruction Junction.” 9 In fact, the paper diorama is reconfigured with each new installation. 10 M. Clintberg, “Geoffrey Farmer,” 94. 11 This was Anton Springer’s approach in the mid-nineteenth century to the art history survey text. “The formal images contained within the global history, he implied, will speak the meaning of the history of world art themselves. Illustrations from this point on, and not conceptual arguments, would constitute the structure of the art history survey text.” M. Schwarzer, “Origins of the Art History Survey Text,” 24–34. 12 Georges Didi-Huberman, cited in S. Watson, “Ghost/Face,” in Geoffrey Farmer, 104. 13 H. Lehmann, “History Shown as Montage, and as Rigidly Linear.” 14 Belting, “Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age.” 15 On the term “ethnocultural interpretation,” see R.P. Formisano, “The Invention of the Ethnocultural Interpretation.” 16 “We’re only interested in excellence, so we put what we find in the Canadian art scene that is excellent and we’re blind to colour or ethnic background or even whether you were born in Canada … we don’t care. [Interviewer: … why are there so few people of diversity making it as artists?] The reason is they can’t make a living doing it, so they’d be crazy to. Certainly if they’re just starting out, here in a new country.” Director Marc Mayer’s comments during an interview by Jelena Adzic, as part of “Diaspora Art” aired on cbc’s The National, 2 February 2010. The segment profiled artists participating in the diasporart exhibition at Rideau Hall of recently acquired works by diasporic artists in the collection of the Canada Council Art Bank. For community response a month later, see Emily Falvey and Milena Placentile, “An Open Letter to Marc Mayer, Director, Na-

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tional Gallery of Canada.” For Mayer’s response, see “It’s Absurd to Call National Gallery ‘Racist,’” Ottawa Citizen, 15 March 2010. Apart from the seeming disavowal of over thirty years of cultural diversity campaigns and anti-racist activism in the arts, the main issue of contention had to do with the notion of excellence (“whose excellence?”). L. Lowe’s terms in Immigrant Acts, 5–6. Paul Gessell, “The Trouble with ‘Excellence.’” A similar targeted major acquisition of “Canadian Aboriginal art” was made by the Canada Council Art Bank in 2003. The move led many in Quebec to charge Ottawa with trying to quash the province’s nationalist aspirations (“nous voulons être un pays comme les autres”/”We want to be a country like the others” – Pierre Bourgault, President of Le Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale [rin] from 1964 to 1968) by equating Québécois identity with “other” ethnic groups in Canada. Statistics Canada, Canada’s Ethnocultural Mosaic, 2006 Census, “Findings, Quebec: Black and Arab, the two largest visible minority groups.” V. Piché, “Immigration, Diversity and Ethnic Relations in Quebec,” 16. D. Meintel and S. Fortin, “The New French Fact in Montreal,” 1–4. Statistics Canada, “Study: Canada’s Visible Minority Population.” Montreal’s visible minority population (16.5 per cent) would still be quite different than that of Toronto or Vancouver because of the high proportion of blacks (third-largest visible-minority population in Canada, largest in Quebec) and Arabs (second largest in Quebec). By 2017, blacks could represent 27 per cent of Montreal’s visible-minority population and Arabs 19 per cent. In 2006, visible minorities accounted for 8.8 per cent of Quebec’s population, up from 7.0 per cent in 2001 and 6.2 per cent in 1996. Ibid.

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25 Mayer, “Diaspora Art.” 26 R.E. Howard-Hassmann, “‘Canadian’ as an Ethnic Category,” 523–37. 27 C. Bydler, The Global Art World, Inc., 171. 28 L. Findlay, “Always Indigenize!” 408. 29 The original French-language edition was translated into English in 1971 with the title White Niggers of America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Quebec “Terrorist.” Vallières’s essay was taken up by the Front de libération du Québec (flq) as a manifesto leading up to the October crisis of 1970. 30 Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” 45; K.N. Pinder, Race-ing Art History. 31 J. Burman, “Diasporic Pasts and Futures,” 7. 32 The following draws from my research-inprogress, Global Art Histories (gah Project). Funding for Phase I (Montreal) was provided by Concordia University’s Aid for Scholarly Activities Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc). The gah project has similar concerns and aims as the glaadh Project (Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History), an initiative run in 2001–3 by the University of Sussex, the Open University, and Middlesex University to encourage art history departments in the uk to broaden their curriculum and incorporate global perspectives. 33 It is hoped, for example, that the well-attended panel I co-chaired with Annette Bhagwati, “Global Art Histories in Canada,” at the Universities Art Association of Canada (uaac) annual conference in October 2011 at Carleton University, Ottawa, spurred wider discussion and concern in the Canadian context. Programs in the us and Europe are emerging, and a number of major conferences on the topic have been organized elsewhere in the past five years, including notably: the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Conferences in Williamstown, Massachusetts (“Compression vs Expression:

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Containing and Explaining the World’s Art,” 6–8 April 2000, and “In the Wake of the ‘Global Turn’: Propositions for an Exploded Art History without Borders,” 4–5 November 2011); the Global Art Symposium at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Austria, 29–30 July 2011; the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (ciha), “Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence,” 13–15 January 2008 at the University of Melbourne, Australia; and of course Elkins’s Art Seminar roundtable “Is Art History Global?” in spring 2005, from which a book by the same title was published in 2007. The following data analysis focuses on course offerings via their titles rather than on pedagogy or content, which are considerably more difficult to assess (or, to be more precise, difficult to obtain, not so much because of debated ownership rights to syllabi but because one depends on a university’s administrative resources to record or archive them). Observations are based on a comparison of course titles and available course outlines, any of which may suggest encompassing concerns and issues ranging from multiculturalism, interculturalism, cultural imperialism, and emergent nationalisms to decolonization, hierarchies of oppression, religious and racialized minorities, appropriation of voice, canon revision, and Indigenous arts. J.E. Sowell, “A Cross-Cultural Approach,” 72. Not many universities in Canada are equipped to accommodate the interdisciplinary needs of such a broad-based humanities program as World Art Studies. In addition to the financial issues involved, providing adequate advanced comprehensive studies in the art and material cultures of non-Western civilizations would require in-house experts

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in fields including art history, cultural anthropology, languages and cultural studies of non-Western regions. Some issues are discussed in L. Moss, ed., Is Canada Postcolonial? S. Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time. V. Desroches, “En quoi la littérature québécoise est-elle postcoloniale?” 3. E. Winter, “Neither ‘America’ nor ‘Québec,’” 481–503; D. Juteau, “The Citizen Makes an Entrée,” 441–58. Desroches, “En quoi la littérature québécoise est-elle postcoloniale?” 4. Post-colonial critique in Quebec has concerned mainly migrant literatures and the formation of Quebec identity. M. McAndrew, “Quebec’s Interculturalism Policy,” in The Art of the State – III, 149. Since its inception in 1976, Concordia’s art history program has had a strong emphasis on Canadian content and was one of the first departments to teach First Nations art in the mid-nineties. The ma program was dedicated exclusively to the art and architecture of Canada but in recent years has expanded “to encompass the place of the arts in Canada within a variety of transnational contexts, and also to encourage research on unexplored dimensions of the arts of other North American countries, including Mexico and Caribbean nations.” Department of Art History website, Concordia University, http://art-history.concordia.ca/ (accessed 17 June 2010). “Money and the ethnic votes essentially.” I was born and grew up in Montreal and my mother tongue (langue maternelle) is English. Of Chinese descent, I am a visible ethnic minority as defined in Canada’s legal documents. In the 2006 census, more than 200 different ethnic origins were reported by residents of the census metropolitan area of Montreal. Canadian (1.7 million) and French (937,000)

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were the two most common ethnic ancestries reported either alone or in combination with other origins. http://www12.statcan.ca/ census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-562/ p19-eng.cfm. Piché, “Immigration, Diversity and Ethnic Relations in Quebec,” 21. “Reasonable accommodation” is a term used in Canada to refer to the theory that equality rights set out in section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms demands that accommodation be made to various ethnic minorities. The concept is especially applied with reference to the antidiscrimination laws in Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. For perspectives on reasonable accommodation before the Bouchard and Tayler commission, see M. Jézéquel, ed., Les accommodements raisonnables. J. Heinrich, “Few Racial Slurs at Quebec Accommodation Hearings.” In practical terms, new immigrants are automatically ineligible for Quebec citizenship unless they pass a language test certifying an “appropriate knowledge of French.” The rights of Quebec’s English-speaking minority are protected by the Canadian Constitution. Quebec’s legislation that stipulated French as the only official language in the province started much earlier with Bill 101 (La charte de la langue française) in 1977. That bill expanded upon the 1974 Loi sur la langue officielle (Bill 22). Bills 195 and 196 were advocated in the 2001 report of the Commission des États généraux sur la situation et l’avenir de la langue française au Québec, a government commission mandated to examine the use of French in Quebec and created by the government of Quebec to address the question “Is French threatened in Quebec?” in light of the new ethnic diversity. N. Wiseman, “In Search of a Quebec Constitution,” 147.

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51 “The Bottom Line: Use Common Sense,” Montreal Gazette, 23 May 2008. 52 Québec, mcci, Au Québec pour bâtir ensemble. 53 This shift was marked by the modification in 1996 of the name and structure of the Ministry of International Affairs, Immigration and Cultural Communities, to create the Ministry of Relations with Citizens and Immigration. D. Salée, “The Quebec State,” in The Art of the State – III, 109. 54 McAndrew, “Quebec’s Interculturalism Policy,” 147. 55 Ibid. 56 For example, Montreal stands apart from other large urban centres in Canada because of the cultural plurality of its allophone population (47 per cent of Quebec allophones are trilingual, compared with only 5 percent for the rest of Canada). Piché, “Immigration, Diversity and Ethnic Relations in Quebec,” 15. Jack Jedwab, “Arts and Diversity in Arts.” 57 L. Pietrantonio, “Who Is ‘We’?” 151. McAndrew, “Quebec’s Interculturalism Policy,” 147. 58 Pietrantonio, “Who Is ‘We’?” 151. “Other branches of the Quebec government, notably the ministère de l’Immigration (currently le ministère des Relations avec les citoyens et de l’Immigration), as well as the ministère de l’Éducation, are far more likely to recognize diversity in Quebec over the last four decades than is the ministère de la Culture.” Pietrantonio also notes: “The content of cultural policy in Quebec is bound up with eth-

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nic relations between the Franco-Québécois and Anglo-Canadians. This was the case when the ministry was instituted in 1961, and continues through the recent, 2002 cultural policy statement. This nationalist orientation is not only true of Quebec’s cultural policies … it is also the basis of Canadian cultural policy vis-à-vis the United States” (146). W. Kymlicka, “Ethnocultural Diversity in a Liberal State,” in The Art of the State – III, 40. Salée, “The Quebec State,” 105–42. For details on Kasai’s exhibition, see Z. Chan, ed., Shié Kasai. L. Turgeon and M. Pastinelli, “‘Eat the World,’” 247–68. Fadden, “Survival Japanese Cooking.” I borrow from Juteau’s article title, “The Citizen Makes an Entrée.” M. Connors, “Sushi Heart Attack.” Herouxville is a small town in central Quebec that has a zero immigrant population but set up a code of conduct for one anyways, which sparked the debates on reasonable accommodation. S. Kamboureli, “The Politics of the Beyond,” in Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, 47. Turgeon and Pastinelli, “‘Eat the World,’” 251. Belting, Art History after Modernism, 66. E. Ty and C. Verduyn, “Introduction,” in Asian Canadian Writing beyond Autoethnography 22.

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4 Everywhere throughout the world, one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminium atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda, etc. It seems as if mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en masse at a subcultural level.1 To “rethink” Canada does not mean to synthesize and integrate all Canadian experience into an account that, in the best of worlds, would be acceptable to everyone. It would entail, rather, probing the Canadian state’s logical and historical conditions of possibility as a specific project in a particular time and place.2

The Location of/ The Conditions for Art: On-Site Specifics and Site Adjustments Annie Gérin

The following reflection on urban art in the Canadian context developed from an incident that occurred several years ago. While humorous, it was certainly thought provoking and it expanded my understanding of the art historical concept of site specificity. It also made me wonder how it can be operationalized today to discuss urban artistic practices.

Perambulations In May 2006 I organized a small exhibition of contemporary art, Perambulations: Art of Motion and the Streets of Ottawa,3 as a contribution to a colloquium titled Cultures in Transit: Cultural Mobility in Brazil and Canada.4 The colloquium brought together Brazilian and Canadian scholars to discuss how sustained mobility, which has become a hallmark of culture under conditions of globalization, has taken form in two different contexts. The speakers discussed inflows and outflows of increased human migrations, the

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distance-shrinking effects of telecommunication technologies, and the instrumentalization of culture (as well as resistance to this phenomenon) in the contemporary world. In organizing the exhibition, I was mainly concerned with how contemporary artists use the city as a complex and dynamic material in urban interventions and not as a simple backdrop or emplacement. I therefore chose to work with a small group of emerging local artists whose works address mobility according to what can be understood as an “ecosophical logic.”5 The neologism “ecosophical,” coined by Félix Guattari, refers to practices that are grounded in notions of globalism and worldwide interdependency. It seeks to articulate human activities at the nexus of, and encompassing, the environmental, the social, and the subjective, each conceived as a broad ecological system. This concept, I believed, would permit me to bridge the gap between different approaches to urban art practices by reflecting at once on contemporary art, spatial imagination, and the materiality of urban centres in the global era. What these artists – Adrian Göllner, Thomas Grondin, David McCallum, Robert Watson, and the duo Stéphanie Brodeur and Darsha Hewitt – had in common was a keen interest in urban mobility (their works all required some kind of perambulation as part of the production process or as part of the experience of the viewer) and a reliance on new technologies. Three works in particular stood out with regards to their engagement with both mobility and technology: Urban Drawing, Version 1 by Robert Watson, Warbike by David McCallum, and The Personal Soundtrack Emitter by Stéphanie Brodeur and Darsha Hewitt. Equipped with a surveillance camera fixed to his chest and a viewable lcd screen strapped to his back, Watson had walked through Ottawa’s bustling tourism district, the Byward Market. The technology transformed, in real-time, the cityscape he encountered into black and white digital sketches. On the wide sidewalks and in the busy pedestrian mall, passers-by leisurely following the performance of Urban Drawing, Version 1 experienced a mediated rendering of what the artist saw, as if they were looking through his body. After the initial curiosity faded, the mediation permitted viewers a greater awareness of their relation to their environment and other bodies sharing their space (fig. 4.1). In the gallery, the performance was accessible through artifacts and documentation, but it could not be relived. The cumbersome equipment – camera, lcd screen, battery packs, cables, and straps – hung next to monitors that displayed documentary footage of Watson’s perambulations. This strategy rendered visible the technological apparatus the work depends on, as well as the reliance of Urban Drawing, Version 1 on an actual city, which becomes integrated in the work. The gallery installation, which also included an urban soundtrack, offered a powerful metaphor for how users of a city appropriate a space by walking through it. Instead of showcasing an earlier experience in the gallery, Warbike by David McCallum and The Personal Soundtrack Emitter by Stéphanie Brodeur and Darsha Hewitt sent users to the streets. They transformed either inaudible phenomena such as WiFi networks or usually unnoticed urban sounds such as highway noises, rustling leaves, or footsteps on the pavement into an unexpectedly rich sonic atmosphere. Both devices were meant to reorder the user’s audible environment into an intimate soundtrack that evolved as users criss-crossed the city on bicycle or on foot (figs 4.2 and 4.3). During gallery hours,

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visitors could borrow the devices by providing some form of identification: a passport, a student id, a credit card. They could also borrow a bicycle (available at the gallery for that single purpose) or go for a walk, equipped with a map highlighting some of the area’s local features that offered particularly interesting sonic properties: the banks of the Rideau Canal, an underpass providing ideal conditions for echo, a stone path on campus, a busy Waller Street bus stop, a raucous construction site on Rideau Street, among others. By doing so, users were exposed – and made more sensitive – to Ottawa’s specific sounds, but also its climate, smells, traffic flow, safe zones, and so forth. The Brazilian guests invited to participate in the conference were at once charmed and perplexed by the media works. They were stunned by the laxity of our lending policy and by the fact that artists and viewers could walk around the downtown core of a capital city such as Ottawa, clutching loosely hundreds of dollars of audio-visual technology and not get run over or mugged. In other words, they were surprised that a North American capital could afford the necessary conditions to create and enjoy these artworks. During her first visit to the show, a Brazilian art historian exclaimed with a mixture of disbelief and glee that the works proposed a model of mobility and sociability that would be impossible to fathom in a city such as Brasília, where car traffic is extraordinarily dense, where in some neighbourhoods few people are to be found on sidewalks, and where in other neighbourhoods poverty-driven criminality is very high. The works showcased in Perambulations, she argued, clearly emerged from an urban imagination conditioned by relative wealth, public hygiene, and security – that of so-called first world

Figure 4.1 Robert Watson,, Urban Drawing, Version 1, 2005.

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capitals. She explained that her own urban imagination encompassed much less attractive features of urban life, such as extreme pollution, unbridgeable income gaps, severe criminality problems, social dislocation, overdensity and slums. The thought that there might be such a local resonance to these works hadn’t crossed our (the artists’ and my) minds. Our daily urban experience had led us to lose track of its specificity and take it for granted. This testimony – which was in fact an amused critique – provoked a reconsideration of the works presented in Perambulations. They had not, so far, been understood in terms of locality, and they had certainly not been framed by the discourse of site specificity implied by this viewer’s reaction. They had been thought of in terms of transnational urban issues, deployed in a vaguely localized version of globalism; Ottawa’s downtown core

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Opposite Figure 4.2 David McCallum, Warbike, 2005–07. A sample of Warbike audio can be heard at http://sintheta.org/projects/warbike.html.

Figure 4.3 Stéphanie Brodeur and Darsha Hewitt,, The Personal Soundtrack Emitter, 2006.

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was here considered as a more or less generic place where, as Paul Ricoeur would say, “one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminium atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda”6 as everywhere else. What came out of several hours of lively discussion with colleagues from Brazil was that very specific conditions of possibility that rooted them in the Canadian (and more specifically Ottawan) context were at play in the works I had selected. What this further demonstrated is that, in spite of globalization processes that seem to constitute a subtle erasure of difference and the specificity of places and cultures, one must remain vigilantly skeptical of what is so often referred to as “the ubiquitous placelessness of our modern environment.”7 While art historians often consider a place’s specific geological, historic, and national features in examining a work of urban art, more subtle contributions that are also very important in the shaping of culture routinely go unnoticed: climate, traffic density, pollution, safety, concentration of certain groups of users, and so on. Even what Marc Augé terms “non-places,” the generic spaces of postmodern travel and consumption (airports, highways, and malls), respond to local conditions of possibility.8 And even if we are convinced by Augé’s claims that generica is made usable by signage that has evolved over years to become readable to diverse, global publics,9 the characteristics of these sites are still bound to very specific yet under-recognized features of place. Certain airports, like Cuba’s Jose Marti International Airport for example, with their open windows and doors, tropical smells and lizards skittering across the floor, could never be mistaken for a North American or European airport. In spite of their inclusion in global networks, they are also conditioned by the specificity of the site where they were built and which they serve. George Yúdice interprets the persistence of difference in transnational cultural phenomena – which impacts as much cultural production as the performance of culture by its users – as the result of differently structured fields of force that shape the meaning of any phenomenon, from a pop song to environmental and antiracist activism, [that] are functional to global trade and global activism … [They] are performative injunctions relating to the interactional pacts, interpretive frameworks, and institutional conditions of comportment and knowledge production. The synergy produced by the relations among the institutions of the state and civil society, the judiciary, the police, schools and universities, the media, and consumer markets, shapes understanding and behaviour.10 But for scholars, reverting to crude understandings of the local and of site specificity is definitely not the answer. For Canadian researchers specifically, the essential difficulty lies in the often too easy slippage between locality, authenticity, and essentialized understandings of place, such as nationalism. Particularly in Canadian art historical writing, as Erin Manning points out, ideals of an “authentic” Canada continue “to be an essential proponent in the nationalising attempts to relegate the discourse of ‘Canadian identity’

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to notions of vastness and emptiness, where the nation represents the ideal image of an ordered universe, its limits fixed and identities secured. ‘Canadian identity’ emerges within this discourse as the glue that is called upon to paste together the disparaging inconsistencies of a land that never quite succeeds in representing itself as homogeneous.”11 Indeed, to paraphrase Ian McKay, cited in the second epigraph of this essay, to “rethink” Canadian art historical and critical understandings of the local does not mean to synthesize and integrate all Canadian art into a homogenizing account. It would rather entail probing art’s conditions of possibility in a particular time and place. Following this line of inquiry, this paper will revisit the concept of “site specificity.” It will shift its understanding in the art historical framework towards “conditions of possibility” and “affordances.” It will then attempt to recognize the ways in which site specificity can be revitalized in Canadian art history by replacing concepts such as place-nation, nationalism, and cultural authenticity by interpretations of community as manifestations of “being together” in the context of global cultures. 97

Site Specificity The much-commented controversy around Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (installed in New York in 1981 only to be removed less than a decade later in 1989) (fig. 4.4) is understood as the cauldron from which art historians pulled out the concept of site specificity.12 Adversaries of the work (in particular William Diamond, regional administrator for the General Services Administration [gsa]) mounted a wide-ranging campaign aimed at dismantling the work, removing it from New York City’s Federal Plaza and relocating it to an undetermined site. In a series of conferences, interviews, and public hearings organized by the National Endowment for the Arts (nea), Richard Serra and many others who opposed the relocation of the work made a particularly convincing argument, which nevertheless did not manage to stop the dismantling. They argued that, since the work had been commissioned specifically for Federal Plaza and designed with regards to the properties of the site, it could not be moved without destroying its artistic integrity and intent. Serra further elaborated his position in 1989: As I pointed out, Tilted Arc was conceived from the start as a site-specific sculpture and was not meant to be “site-adjusted” or … “relocated.” Site-specific works deal with the environmental components of given places. The scale, size, and location of site-specific works are determined by the topography of the site, whether it be urban or landscape or architectural enclosure. The works become part of the site and restructure both conceptually and perceptually the organization of the site.13 This concept of site specificity, which now became a legal argument, had roots in 1970s art practices, particularly in the work of artists who sought alternatives to “object art,” which was increasingly perceived as unable to escape the commodity market. This approach, Harriet Senie argues, “governed both the land art of Robert Smithson (and

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others working in remote regions of [the] country) and an increasing number of gallery installations concerned with the creation of an interior environment rather than the display of independent art objects.”14 In the first chapter of One Place after Another, Miwon Kwon traces the genealogy of site specificity.15 Here, she highlights how initially the concept implied “presence,” actual location, and a unique combination of physical elements, “something grounded, bound by the laws of physics … adamant about immobility, even in the face of disappearance and destruction.”16 Over the past few decades, however, site specificity has experienced a series of speculative transformations as the concepts of space, place, and site themselves have been redefined by cultural geographers, critical theorists, philosophers, and art historians.17 Building on this more recent scholarship, Kwon moves away from original understandings of site specificity. She opens the concept to broader interpretations of “place” which underpin a variety of works by artists such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Suzanne Lacy, Mark Dion, and Gabriel Orozco. Instead of focusing on the physical or phenomenological character of a site (as Serra did), these artists understand place as being constituted through social, institutional, economic, and political processes. They create works that are specific to a site’s history, its function, the communities that inhabit it, the position it holds in popular imagination, or the public discourses that circulate therein. Taken to its logical conclusion, the broadening of the concept of site specificity allows it to describe works that exalt mobility and increasing rootlessness, due to tourism, globalized economies, and nomadic displays of knowledge and expertise. Often referring back to the work of Deleuze and Guattari on nomadism and deterritorialization, this more recent understanding of site specificity implies a renunciation of the phenomenological and physical parameters of space, while it embraces the idea that (discursive) sites, meanings, and practices are as fluid as identities. Kwon argues: “It seems historically inevitable that we will leave behind the nostalgic notion of a site and identity as essentially bound to the physical actualities of a place. Such a notion, if not ideologically suspect, is at least out of sync with the prevalent description of contemporary life as a network of unanchored flows.”18 But the example of Perambulations calls for a definite amount of skepticism visà-vis this radical rootlessness. Kwon herself acknowledges that “a certain romanticism has accrued around the image of the cultural worker on the go.”19 In contrast with this interpretation of site specificity that focuses on globalization and deterritorialization, in Canadian art historical and critical writing, a cultural – even national – understanding of the concept seems to prevail. Here, site specificity relates most often to the historical practices that have shaped Canada’s history. While it has allowed discussion of artistic practices as diverse as those of AA Bronson, Mark Lewis, Edward Poitras, Michel Goulet, and Jin-me Yoon, site specificity nevertheless risks becoming critically limiting when it equates territory and identity (even plural or contested identities). This constitutes a conceptual mistake that, as Ian McKay and Erin Manning point out, is often made in Canadian historiography and art writing. In “i am canadian: Identity, Territory and the Canadian National Landscape,” Manning astutely remarks that “in

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Figure 4.4 Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981.

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Canada, the investment in the concept of territory has long been accepted as a window into national identity, where the national is conceived on the basis of a homogeneous notion of culture and belonging.”20 With all this in mind, how can we now write about Canadian art in the global era while being on the one hand skeptical of overdetermined narratives of place (in particular those of authenticity and nationalism), and on the other hand being aware that culture and meaning don’t travel as well as one would assume along international highways?21 If we are fairly conscious of the crucial need for linguistic proficiency when it comes to language-based art, we often forget that translation may also be needed for visual arts – which are too often assumed to speak a sort of cultural Esperanto. Furthermore, how do we acknowledge idiosyncrasies that are shared between groups, that go beyond identities and subjectivities, and that serve as the basis for making critical artworks? In other words, how can we recognize the conditions of possibility of who we are and what we do, even perhaps the conditions of our estrangement? 100

Conditions of Possibility Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of conditions of possibility in the context of linguistic exchange may shed a partial light on this issue.22 Bourdieu refuses the abstraction of concepts such as “linguistic competence,” which for him is meaningless if the nature of the exchange, as well as the relationship of participants in a given conversation, have not been properly examined. Through his argument a series of conditions of possibility for linguistic exchange are revealed. They have to do with location, circumstances, age, gender, proficiency, or even mastery of a given language, position of authority, and, of course, habitus.23 All these are then filtered through the subjectivity of the speaker and her intent. But what is particularly enlightening is that the notion of conditions of possibility applies not only to the emission of speech; it extends to its reception by a particular listener. For the conversation to be properly understood, the conditions of possibility of production as well as reception of speech must be critically assessed. Bourdieu offers the example of an interaction observed in a Béarn market town. In his account, an old woman at one moment used “provincialized French” to address a shopkeeper’s wife, a young woman originating from another large market town in Béarn (who might not know Béarnais or could pretend not to); the next moment, she spoke in Béarnais to a woman who lived in the town but was originally from the hamlets and more or less of her own age; then she used a French that if not “correct” was at least strongly “corrected” to address a minor official in town; and finally she spoke in Béarnais to a roadmender in the town, originally from the hamlets, aged about fifty.24 From this example – which could easily have been transposed into the Canadian context by having the protagonist shift between English and French (as I do on a daily basis),

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or a variety of other languages, and various levels of speech – it follows that language is not an “all-purpose relationship,” but rather a concrete relationship, different each time, marked by conditions and competences, specific needs and goals for communication, and the participants’ position in society as well as in time and space. Bourdieu’s example of the Béarn conversations could also be transposed into the art world. Artists, especially those working with the public, whether they be involved in performative work or work erected in public spaces, adapt from one site to another the forms, references, and levels of complexity that will allow for a productive exchange with an actual (or at least an imagined) public in a particular time and place. “In practice, production is always embedded in the field of reception … Understanding is not a matter of recognising an invariable meaning, but of grasping the singularity of a form, which only exists in a particular context.”25 If the artists who participated in Perambulations did not attempt in any overt way to adapt their work to a specific public, they nevertheless did so to a certain degree. They worked from the perspective of a particular habitus and directed their art to those whom they share it with. The reaction of the Brazilian art historian hence revealed a slight mismatch in positionality. To paraphrase Bourdieu, the form and content of the art that can and is produced depends on the relationship between an art habitus and what its public is able and willing to view/understand. But what is still missing from this discussion of conditions of possibility is the materiality of the work of art and of the space it inhabits. In order to expand and clarify discussions about spatial practices, ecological psychologist James Gibson introduces the key concept of “affordances,” which he defines as properties of an environment that structure the behaviours and interactions possible in a given place.26 While they are products of nature or human activities, affordances are also constitutive of individual and collective knowledge, and shape potential actions. As Gibson explains, affordances are not overdetermined scripts, but meaningful and/or useful features of an environment that afford their users certain possibilities: Roughly, the affordances of things are what they furnish, for good or ill, that is, what they afford the observer … The meaning or value of anything consists of what it affords an observer, or a species of observer. But what it affords the observer is determined by its material substance and its shape, size, rigidity, motion, etc. What it means and what it is are not separate, as we have been led to believe. And the observer who perceives the substance and the surfaces of anything has thereby perceived what it affords.27 Affordances come in many shapes and sizes, and listing them would always result in a partial outcome. The following examples might, however, clarify the possible range of affordances: spectacular environmental features will facilitate the development of tourism industries; certain types of housing or businesses will attract particular populations to a given neighbourhood; agricultural or fisheries resources may give rise to regional cuisines; climatic conditions will allow or preclude activities during a given season.28 In this sense, affordances are concrete aspects of ecological, economic, and social spatialization which constitute a basic infrastructure for potential cultural development. Barely acknowledged

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in most instances, affordances are nevertheless crucial factors in understanding the production and endurance of traditions, activities, cultures, and subcultures. In “Toward a Critical Regionalism,” Kenneth Frampton adopts a similar view of what shapes culture. He writes: It is possible to argue that … the specific culture of the region – that is to say, its history in both a geological and agricultural sense – becomes inscribed into the form and the realization of the work. This inscription … has many levels of significance, for it has the capacity to embody, in built form, the prehistory of the place, its archaeological past and its subsequent cultivation and transformation across time. Through this layering into the site the idiosyncrasies of place find their expression without falling into sentimentality.29

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Frampton further explains that what is evident in the impact of topography on the shaping of culture can also be applied to an existing urban fabric. From this it follows that the contingencies of scale, material, but also temperature, quality of light, pollution levels, traffic, security, and so forth all shape the work of urban art, and how publics interact with it. This focus on idiosyncrasies rather than imagined communities and narrations of the nation30 accentuates difference, practice, and the various forms of “being together” that are far more complex than the shorthand term of nationalism. But in spite of the potential promised by this approach, Kenneth Frampton alerts scholars to the necessity to “distinguish between critical regionalism and simple-minded attempts to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular.”31 George Yúdice adds another warning that must be considered here: the need to be wary of the mechanisms that capitalize on so-called specificity and make “culture as a resource circulate globally, with increased velocity.”32 Moving from site specificity to more penetrating assessments of conditions of possibility and affordances should lead us to refuse the “taken-for-grantedness” of sites and circumstances. And putting these ideas into practice in scholarship could provide interesting strategies for art historians discussing art localized in Canada, while refusing to appose the reductive label “Made in Canada.” But because, as Frampton argues, “the fundamental strategy of critical regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place, [i]t is clear … that critical regionalism depends upon maintaining a high level of critical self-consciousness.”33

Being Together Shifting the focus from site specificity to conditions of possibility constitutes only a very subtle realignment. It is nevertheless one that can be particularly fertile for the discussion of urban art, especially when this art participates in what Nicolas Bourriaud recognizes as “relational aesthetics,” that is to say works that “take as their theoretical and practi-

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cal point of departure the whole of human relations and their social contexts, rather than an independent and private space.”34 For Bourriaud the term relational describes practices that are not object-based, but rather understand themselves as experimental productions of new social bonds and communal experiences. Drawing from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Bourriaud sees community as “being in common,” rather than conceiving of groups of people as bound to territory or narratives of collective identity and nation. In a nutshell, Bourriaud advocates for the contemporary tendency represented by artists who emphasize process, performativity, openness, social contexts, transitivity, and the production of dialogue over the closure of traditional modernist objecthood, visuality, and predetermined narratives. Several authors have criticized Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics.35 They first point to the risks involved in gathering diverse practices under this new umbrella term of “relational art.” Indeed, when one brings together the work of artists as diverse as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, and Vanessa Beecroft, we are no doubt lost in rhetorical reduction. The experiments in forms and models of sociability described by Bourriaud are further criticized as reproducing class, political, and cultural inequality and even discrimination by creating an alternative space where change seems possible, but by opening it only to a small public of converts and art lovers. But in spite of the critique, the conception of art as a principled response to “real social misery and alienation,” characterized as “learning to inhabit the world in a better way,”36 remains useful for our exploration of art through its conditions of possibility. Indeed, Bourriaud’s position has much proximity to that of Kwon, who, in the conclusion to One Place after Another, attempts “a provocation to imagine ‘collective artistic praxis.’”37 Here, she criticizes the concept of community for too often being understood as a homogenized whole, especially when it comes to urban art. She argues that “the isolation of a single point of commonality to define a community – whether a genetic trait, a set of social concerns, or a geographical territory”38 regularly serves as shorthand to describe urban art practices in crude and reductive ways. She goes on to quote Jean Luc Nancy: “There is no communion, there is no common being, but there is being in common … the question should be the community of being and not the being of community.”39 Community is then conceived as being a problematic concept constantly in need of redefinition and renegotiation. This “being together,” to borrow Hanna Arendt’s term,40 means refusing to take for granted the structures and labels usually apposed to community (such as nationalism, ethnicity, authenticity, etc.). But most interestingly, it is also the recognition that there is a whole system that allows being together, a system structured by affordances: laws and economy, forms of language and communication, relationships to others and to nature, and so on. This constellation is not marked by unity, but rather by plurality, a plurality that cannot be described by state, but only in temporary forms and conditions for being together. This commonality, liberated from boundaries imposed by concepts such as placenation, nationalism, and cultural authenticity is flexible enough to describe at once local and global cultures or trends that coexist in time and place, as well as the influence they have on each other.

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The notion of being together brings us back to Bourdieu’s understanding of the conditions of possibility for dialogue. For Bourdieu, the practical competence required in communication is learned in situation, in practice, in being together with other speakers. From this it follows that plurality is always a critical component in verbal interaction: plurality of expression, plurality of context, plurality of meanings grasped by a plurality of interlocutors. When we move from conceptions of community as a unified group towards plurality, being together allows us to conceive of “an ethical rather than a political conception of community.”41 If we now look again at the works presented in Perambulations, a series of conditions of possibility for artistic exchange are obliquely revealed. They have to do with location, circumstances, age, gender, health, knowledge and appreciation of contemporary art, relationship to the city and to nature, and, of course, habitus. The works also indirectly call attention to ways of being together in a specific moment in history – Spring 2006 – and in a particular downtown area that happens to be in Canada’s capital. We now see how Watson’s Urban Drawing, Version 1 depended on conditions of sociability and mobility that emerged in the early nineties from a drive to revitalize Ottawa’s core through tourism and gentrification. More specifically, Urban Drawing, Version 1 made us aware that the safety we enjoy in tourist areas such as the Byward Market is afforded, in part, by discrete surveillance, and sanitary and policing measures. It also revealed how a narrowing range of what is considered acceptable behaviour in Canadian public spaces has transformed former conceptions of downtowns as spaces for passing through to places where one lingers, hangs out, and enjoys people-watching. Similarly, McCallum’s Warbike was the product of and made visible imperceptible forms of sociability that only started to appear over the past two decades and take shape in broadband networks and virtual co-presence. But Warbike also testified to the possibility of cycling in a downtown where the proliferation of one-way streets and much restrictive signage has rendered the roads less practicable for urban traffic. Finally, for those who followed the map produced by the artists, The Personal Soundtrack Emitter by Hewitt and Brodeur created an awareness of weather, of the relative cleanliness and greenness of this urban centre, offset by traffic nodes and dusty construction sites. It highlighted as well how a space’s affordances shape the possibilities of movements and interactions between its users. The three projects used mobile technologies to encourage users to pay attention to and to better understand the complexity of the sensuous geography of the locations they moved through. While none overtly addressed the specificity of Ottawa, they certainly depended on it and obliquely revealed it. They relied on a set of local and global conditions that are not exclusive to Ottawa but that are nevertheless not to be found in most world capitals and are organized here in a particular constellation. As we can appreciate from this second glance at Perambulations, the potential for unearthing rich and layered readings of Canadian art promised by a conceptual shift from site specificity to conditions of possibility, from community to being together, is exciting. Further interpretations of Perambulations and of several other instances of urban art will be greatly enriched by such a perspective. I believe that those that will be most rewarding will be examinations of art that draws on human relations or that uses language, parody,

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irony, and modes of relating that are overtly contextual and always dependent on the cultural proficiencies of their publics. But here again we must maintain a high level of critical self-consciousness. And we must be vigilant in our attentiveness to details. We must, most of all, beware not to fall into the pattern that overran the empire described by Jorge Luis Borges in “Of Exactitude in Science.” There, “the craft of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province covered the space of an entire city, and the map of the empire itself an entire province.”42

notes 1 P. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 276. 2 I. McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 620. 3 Perambulations: Art and Motion in the Streets of Ottawa, Gallery 115, University of Ottawa, 1–5 May 2006. 4 Cultures in Transit: Cultural Mobility in Brazil and Canada, organized by Walter Moser and Pascal Gin, University of Ottawa, 4–6 May 2006. 5 F. Guattari, Les trois écologies, 12. 6 Ricoeur, History and Truth, 276. 7 K. Frampton, “Toward a Critical Regionalism,” 24. 8 M. Augé, Non-Places. 9 Urban signalization is a rather recent invention, the development of which is associated with the beginning of the expansion of road traffic. Jean Bernard Tarbé de Vauxclair, engineer and vice-president of the French departments of bridges, highways, and roads at the beginning of the nineteenth century is credited for conceiving the concept of modern signalization, couching his ideas on paper in 1835. But it was not until 1909 that a first international treaty was signed in Paris. This agreement, uniting nine European countries, ratified the use of a restricted number of pictograms, which are still in use today. In 1927, the League of Nations recommended the international recognition of an even larger number of pictograms to facilitate transnational transport and to increase

10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21

road safety. For a history of signalization, see R. Abdullah and R. Hübner, Pictograms, Icons & Signs. G. Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 4. E. Manning, “i am canadian: Identity, Territory and the Canadian National Landscape,” 12. The controversy is described in detail in H. Senie, “Richard Serra’s ‘Tilted Arc,’” 289–302. R. Serra, “Tilted Arc Destroyed,” 41. Senie, “Richard Serra’s ‘Tilted Arc,’” 300. M. Kwon, One Place after Another. Ibid., 11. See, for example, Yi-Tu Fuan, Space and Place; H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space; D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity; E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies; R. Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics; and many others. Kwon, One Place after Another, 164. Ibid., 160. Manning, “i am canadian: Identity, Territory and the Canadian National Landscape,” 11. As case in point, Sherry Simon, in Translating Montreal makes a fascinating account of spatial and cultural translations of Michel Tremblay’s play Les belles soeurs. She clearly illustrates how conditions of possibilities rooted in cities, or communities (their possibilities for interpretation), have either transformed the signification of the work or have

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called for surprising adaptations (in Glaswegian Scots, for example) of the work to approximate reception in a different context. Simon, Translating Montreal, 106–10. P. Bourdieu, “The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges,” 645–68. For Bourdieu, the term habitus can be defined as a network of “dispositions” that influence a person’s perceptions, actions, and thoughts. These dispositions are developed in response to the structures that form one’s social and cultural environment, such as class, family, education, field of work, etc. Bourdieu, “The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges,” 657. Ibid., 647. J. Gibson, “Notes on Affordances,” in Reasons for Realism, 401–18. Ibid., 403, 410. For Gibson, affordances are varied and always relative. “I assume that affordances are not simply phenomenal qualities of subjective experience (tertiary qualities, dynamic and physiognomic properties, etc.). I also assume that they are not simply the physical properties of things as now conceived by physical science. Instead, they are ecological, in the sense that they are properties of the environment relative to an animal.” Ibid., 404. Frampton, “Toward a Critical Regionalism,” 26. I here refer to Benedict Anderson and Homi K. Bhabha, for whom nations are narrative (imagined) constructs that lose their origin in reducing, homogenizing scripts or myths. See

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31 32 33 34 35

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Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Bhabha, Nation and Narration. Frampton, “Toward a Critical Regionalism,” 21. Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 4. Frampton, “Toward a Critical Regionalism,” 21. N. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 113. For a critique of relational aesthetics, see T. Trémeau, “Post-post politique?” 39–41; C. Bishop, “The Social Turn,” 179–85; G. Kester, Conversation Pieces; and Radical Culture Research Collective (rcrc), “A Very Short Critique of Relational Aesthetics.” Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 13. Kwon, One Place after Another, 7. Ibid., 151. J.-L. Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common,” 4. In The Human Condition, in particular, Arendt proposes that there is no human nature, but only conditions that allow being together. She explains that there is no single humanity that occupies the world, but rather a plurality of men, women, and children. It is from this plurality that in some circumstances community (and humanity) arises. But because plurality is necessary for humanity the philosopher urges her readers to respect and cherish it and recognize the processes that allow being together. H. Arendt, The Human Condition. J. Rancière and P. Hallward, “Politics and Aesthetics: An Interview,” 194–209. J.L. Borges, “Of Exactitude in Science,” in A Universal History of Infamy, 131.

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PART TWO OUT WITH THE NEW Imre Szeman

Whenever one speaks about neo-liberalism the first danger to be avoided is reducing the term from the analytic to the normative – that is, from a descriptor of the ways things are organized and arranged at the present moment to a claim about whether this arrangement is a good one or not. Yet it is in the normative register that neo-liberalism is most often invoked. Some two decades after the temporal split of 1989 (i.e., the beginning of the “end of history” that accompanied the end of the Cold War) that we can’t help sticking squarely in the middle of our sense of the before and after through which we are living, the now suddenly old word for the present – globalization – has become the accepted taxonomic term, with neo-liberalism coming to name one’s attitude towards the developments of globalization. To say neo-liberalism is to say that globalization is bad. This is unproductive. But if neo-liberalism is substituted as an analytic term for the various phenomena all too easily collapsed into the concept of globalization, then we’re getting somewhere. Globalization as simply the name for everything happening at the present – and happening, in a sense, naturally, the latest step in the upward progression of human societies from the darkness and cold of nation-based Fordism to the light of worldwide creative economies. This was an assertion and a belief that has been continuously challenged by scholars and activists on the left. Neo-liberalism better names the ideological dynamics of geopolitical manoeuvring over the past several decades, exposing in a flash the ideological function played by the concept of globalization all along. Globalization as neoliberalism was not characterized fundamentally by the shift of all manner of relations to a global scale, the increasing presence of communications technologies in the everyday, a change in human consciousness about space, or some new awareness about the international character of late-twentieth-century life – or any of the other developments typically connected with it. The fascination with geography, technology, or cosmopolitan affect that has constituted much of scholarly and popular engagements with the

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global tended until recently to miss a more fundamental development: a violent redistribution of wealth and consolidation of the power of the Global North by means of the ferocious extension and dissemination of market values to every social institution and activity. As Wendy Brown puts it, neo-liberalism means that human beings are “configured exhaustively as homo oeconomicus, [and] all dimensions of human life are cast in terms of a market rationality.”1 Neo-liberalism grows out of the core logic of capitalism. The drama of scale and planetary fantasies of globalization made homo oeconomicus appear to be inevitable fate of Homo sapiens instead of the product of determinate choices and political struggles won and lost. In First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek writes that “[Francis] Fukuyama’s utopia of the 1990s had to die twice, since the collapse of the liberal-democratic political utopia on 9/11 did not affect the economic utopia of global market capitalism; if the 2008 financial meltdown has a historical meaning then, it is as a sign of the end of the economic face of Fukuyama’s dream.”2 Though some might have hoped that the financial crisis would have brought an end to neo-liberalism’s dominant and defining political rationality, this hasn’t been the case. One need only look to the lack of widespread protests by citizens at the actions of their governments to shore up the financial system (with France being a notable exception), or at the decisions made – or not made – by governments to try to address fiscal deficits: it is apparently now impossible to ever again increase taxes, so the only actions which can be taken are to cut or restrict services, sometimes severely (the direction taken by David Cameron’s UK government and the driving imperative of the US Tea Party). What has come to an end, however, is the ideological productivity and function of globalization as a justification and smoke screen for government decision making. Žižek isn’t the only one proclaiming the definitive conclusion of the fantasy of the end of history. No less a figure than Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, columnist for the Washington Post, and a member of the State Department during Ronald Reagan’s second term in office, has declared (with explicit reference to Fukuyama) that history has returned and that, accordingly, a new way of thinking about the world has become necessary. According to Kagan, after the Cold War we imagined that we had entered a “new kind of international order, with nation-states growing together or disappearing, ideological conflicts melting away, cultures intermingling, and increasing free commerce and communications.”3 Today, however, “the world’s democracies need to begin thinking about how they can protect their interests and defend their principles in a world in which these are once again powerfully challenged.”4 But this is less of a change that one might think: the nation-state is still figured as the primary agent of politics, and the interests and principles to which Kagan points are none other than those of market fundamentalism, which once again have to be fought for rather than merely taken as a given as they were during the two decades of globalization. What does culture or art have to do with all of this? If neo-liberalism means the spread of the rationality of the market to everything, then a great deal. Art was once defined by its opposition to the market – constitutively so, as an ontological category, whether or not it participated in a market of its own (as it surely does), and even if specific art forms and practices hesitated to be explicitly anti-capitalist in their aims or in-

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tentions. One of the signal developments of neo-liberalism was to produce a situation in which it appeared that art and life had been folded together, if in a very different fashion than that imagined by the historical avant-garde. Work became the (supposed) site of self-transformation, freedom, and creativity (as celebrated par excellence in the writings of Richard Florida), expanding to fill a day that no longer needed to be separated into times of labour and leisure, while art was now added to the bottom line, generating ideas necessary for a global economy newly fuelled by design, innovation, and tourism. It is this always-already faux utopia of late capitalist labour that comes to an end with the emptying out of the apparent necessity of neo-liberal discourse. Which is to say: we may well be entering an intriguing new moment in which the political has re-emerged from the economic, and the social and cultural can once again breathe free of a means– ends rationality that has demanded economic accountability and determinate outcomes from artistic practices while leaving artists as prone as ever to financial precariousness, if not outright destitution. And if the opportunity has not yet been seized in public discourse, art practices might well have the power to activate deadened sensibilities and faded political will by reminding publics that social life is something to be created and celebrated rather than feared or endured. The return of the nation (out of the fiction of its dissolution in the waves of globalization) that Kagan points to above is another matter. One of the productive developments of the past two decades of global-speak has been a protracted challenge to what Ulrich Beck has termed “methodological nationalism”:5 the assumption that of necessity one has to interpret all manner of phenomena, from electoral patterns to developments in the contemporary visual arts, through the frame of the nation. If we want to understand the role played by the visual arts and culture in the drama of globalization and neo-liberalism, the nation limits our understanding more than expands it, breaking up larger-scale analyses or sending them in the wrong direction – for example, towards an interest in border crossings and transnational flows, when the emphases should be on the social logics and imaginaries that generate borders in the first place. One needs to be careful, of course. Even if the nation is a social and political fiction that has to be repeatedly and forcefully imagined into being, it is a fiction that has taken material form, most prominently in that entity called the nation-state. Borders, police, controls over movement and access to resources, social institutions, funding agencies, all manner of material histories and social lineages – these are but some of the structures that have come into existence via a national imaginary. When Kagan returns to the nation in the aftermath of globalization, he does so without thought, retreating to the comforts of methodological nationalism and the project of Western geopolitics intent on making a world of multiplicity into a singularity shaped to its own ends and purposes. One should not assert the necessity of national difference in order to challenge this project, but rather should pose serious questions about the ease with which, even now, even after globalization, the nation is invoked as a container of social difference and as an explanatory model for the way in which the world works. The four essays in this section interrogate the uses of the nation as method in the study of visual art and culture in Canada, while also raising the kinds of questions about the script of globalization that I have outlined above. Barbara Jenkins’s “National Cultural

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Policy and the International Liberal Order” presents a nuanced and sophisticated framework for the analysis of Canadian culture in the changing field of political relations mapped out by the national and international. Jenkins insists on the need to view Canada as a part of an interlinked global liberal-political economy with a much longer history than that of the small sliver of time named “post-1989”; for her, we need to view the practice of art and culture as having a specific role in producing a shared cosmopolitan world view for a transnational bourgeoisie. Building on critical histories of museums and art movements in Britain, France, and the US , Jenkins argues for the need to examine the ways in which Canadian cultural institutions were created to enable local elites to participate in those art discourses which defined their membership in a transatlantic capitalist class. There is a specificity to Canadian art and culture, but it emerges not from shared national values or an ethos emerging from a common geography, so much as from the status of Canadian elites and the national economy within a larger capitalist geopolitical system. To exemplify her point, Jenkins highlights the degree to which Vincent Massey was intent on making use of Canadian culture – shaping and defining it – to position himself as part of an international capitalist class. She points to a continuation of this elite imperative at the present moment in the construction of all manner of new cultural buildings in Canadian cities, whose social necessity is framed, at least in part, as maintaining Canada’s international prestige (which is to say: to keep our elites in the ever-evolving game of global cultural distinction). Jenkins’s approach to art and culture in the context of globalization generates a productive redefinition of how to approach the study of visual arts and culture in Canada. “Regarding Canadian cultural policy as part of a transnational cultural movement not only reveals the importance of understanding national cultural institutions or national schools of art from a transnational perspective,” she writes, “but also underlines the importance of looking at culture in the context of political economic explanations of the liberal international order” (126). Though some might see a tendency in her analysis to too quickly reduce the function of art to a practice that does little else but define and reinforce class divisions, I believe Jenkins’s insistence on the politics of class and economics in a transnational frame offers a much-needed push to think about Canadian art and national culture in a more critically and materially astute manner. Sarah E.K. Smith’s essay, “Visualizing the ‘New’ North American Landscape,” investigates the political function of art in our neo-liberal present. Like Jenkins, she insists on the need to see the mobilization of the nation in relation to art as a problematic project. If art and culture had a function at an earlier time of legitimating the participation of specific national elites in global capitalist economies, today these elites are prepared to mobilize national discourses in order to generate the larger frameworks of belonging necessary for them to function effectively and competitively in the global system. Smith explores the role played by art in promoting new ideas regarding the relationship between Mexico, the US , and Canada. Examining two art exhibitions in Canada at end of the last century – Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950 and the online exhibit Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art – Smith probes the narratives of belonging and connection these shows were designed to highlight. She argues that these exhibitions put art to use to invent a new North American identity that would legitimate and justify the

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North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA ). Smith views the nation-state as the key actor in the process of mobilizing the visual arts for economic purposes. In a manner that is in general accord with the dynamics of art and political economy outlined by Jenkins, the state’s promotion of a mode of national identity that fits the economic circumstances of the contemporary moment benefits elites in Canada whose commitments are to their international brethren more than to those populations with whom they formally share citizenship. Smith, too, draws important lessons from her example of art under NAFTA about the manner in which one thinks about an object like Canadian art, prompting us to consider the nation as an ever-shifting elite project within economic logics that occur at a global or international scale. The contributions by Richard Hill and Heather Igloliorte explore the circumstances of Indigenous art and culture in relation to discourses of nationalism and internationalism. The study of visual art and culture in Canada to date may have largely failed to critically view Canada as a project, despite the fact that it has nakedly been so throughout its existence, with the state and elites trying desperately to produce narratives that might bind blood to soil (e.g., via transportation and telecommunication infrastructure; discourses of biculturalism, the welfare state, and multiculturalism; state institutions emerging out of the Massey Commission; the legal structure of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; and so on). In this regard, Indigenous communities and artists have the least to unlearn, having either been positioned by the state as outside of these national narratives from the outset, or because they have been rightly suspicious of their blunt, incorporating, and de-differentiating function (e.g., a state multiculturalism designed as a singular national narrative rather than the inclusive one it pretends to be). These two contributors present starkly different views of the circumstances of Native communities in Canada and the role that art and cultural criticism may play within them. Igloliorte proposes that Inuit visual culture should be understood not through the framework of the Canadian nation, but within the emerging zone (cultural, political, social, and economic) of Inuit sovereignty. Smith and Jenkins trouble the function of art in producing and legitimating sovereignty; Igloliorte embraces it, arguing that Inuit art production helps to support Inuit culture and so participates in the broader politics in which contemporary Inuit society is engaged. She offers a sense of how cultural practices can support sovereignty by describing critical museum practices carried out in recent exhibits of Inuit art and by adapting aesthetic principles outlined by Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesva to the case of the Inuit. For some, this appeal to sovereignty might come across as a misstep – a political response to colonialism that adopts a form similar to the one it rejects, and in doing so produces a people with a self-certainty about customs, traditions, and ways of being that sounds potentially like a dangerous form of populism, if not a structure akin to the nation-state form it rejects. But Igloliorte has something different in mind than a mode of sovereignty practised under the sign of Carl Schmitt’s definition made famous by Giorgio Agamben: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”6 Rather, the case of the Inuit shows that one has to recognize that there are multiple ideas of self-determination that operate differentially based on the status of a people and their specific history. Though she does not draw out this point in her essay, Igloliorte points to the form of non-national belonging

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that is characteristic of Indigeneity – not just the internationalism of the Inuit in particular (who are spread across the circumpolar regions of the planet), but what Richard Hill finds in the work of Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham: “It is less a being-herefirstness that unites us [Indigenous people] than a resistance, whether conscious or structural, to incorporation into the structure of the modern nation-state” (177). Hill offers a pointed critique of the nation-state and its historical impact on Indigenous communities around the world. As an artist and critic, he ignores the nation-state as a frame of reference; he also knows, however, that while the nation might well be an ideological fiction, it is one with real consequences, and a political form we are unlikely to move past anytime soon. Because “nation statehood is the only game in town for those of us not in control of capital,” Hill writes, the issue “is always about how Indigenous nations can achieve sovereignty” (177). This is not something he himself supports; it represents, rather, a blockage that he wishes it would be possible to somehow move beyond. In Durham’s relentless artistic critique of even the weakest forms of nationalism, Hill locates a model for a form of critical, intellectual work that endeavours to “put some grit in the gears without getting ground up” (178). This seems to me the perfect description of the imperative that should drive the study of visual culture and art forward. Getting beyond the mode of methodological nationalism that Ian McKay points to doesn’t mean abandoning the nation altogether. It means to think it better – more historically, structurally, and materially, not as fixed site but as ideological-political project in process. This project is a social invention, but this is not the same as saying that it has no reality or effect, or that we are not all its subjects (or citizens), whether we want to be or not: one is a national-subject at the moment of birth, before one has had the opportunity to be anything else. Those engaged in the project of reorienting visual cultural studies in Canada have to be careful not to see art and other visual practices as either so fully reduced to the politics of nations or so fully free of them to treat them either as pure ideology or pure subversion. Art and culture have always been part of the political project of Canada, and continue to be. But this political project can take multiple forms, from reinforcing the sovereignty of the nationstate (as Jenkins and Smith show us) to deliberately attempting to undo it in order to generate new modes and forms of belonging (as Igloliorte and Hill remind us). “Politics is aesthetic in that it makes visible what has been excluded from a perceptual field, and that it makes audible what had been inaudible.”7 It is for this reason that the visual arts have been so close to politics, and still have the potential to make visible and audible what the political as it is now constituted has a hard time grasping at all. These essays are important contributions to the project of Canadian visual studies after globalization, in a century yet to be shaped by governing fictions and one in which everything is at stake.

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notes 1 W. Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” para. 9. 2 S. Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 5. 3 R. Kagan, The Return of History, 3. 4 Ibid., 97.

5 U. Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision. 6 C. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. 7 J. Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 226.

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5 It can be argued that, as the international point of view gains strength in the world, as we hope and believe it will, it is less and less appropriate that the work of artists should emphasize national colour and this is a plausible thesis. But it surely requires little argument to refute that cosmopolitanism which regards nationality as an evil, and to demonstrate that the world has never suffered from this principle, but rather from its abuse. Nationality rightly understood surely provides the very pillars on which a sound internationalism can rest.1

National Cultural Policy and the International Liberal Order Barbara Jenkins

So we arrive at the paradox which some of us have known all our lives, that internationalism begins in the nations, and for many of our immediate tasks, it begins at home.2 Creative life commences to stir because of the stimulus of the total environment, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual … Here we may find the solution to the seemingly opposing statements that “there is no such thing as a national art” and on the other hand that all manifestations in art are of time, place and people. Both are true, for a paradox is not a contradiction.3

I begin this chapter with three quotations intended as a response to a question posed by Ian McKay in the concluding paragraphs of his essay “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History.” How, he asks, can contemporary neo-liberals attempt to “Canadianize” themselves when their reductionist market ideology lacks any justification for Canada to exist at all? Wouldn’t it be easier for neo-liberals if Canada simply and naturally dissolved into the continental political economy it appears destined to be consumed by?4 This question parallels one of the queries that motivates our

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larger study in this volume. If Canada, like other nations, faces the disintegration of its boundaries, eroded by the incessant flows of globalization, how do we understand Canadian art and culture in the context of this contemporary transnational political economy, or what McKay refers to as the liberal international order? This question is particularly relevant with regard to cultural policy, which in the Canadian case has been such a prominent aspect of national identity. In the quotations above, Massey, Grierson, and Harris respond to this question by pointing to an apparent paradox: the international is inherently based on the national, which in Massey’s words provides the very pillars on which the global rests. I would like to rephrase this point slightly by arguing that the global fundamentally rests on the pillars of the political, but otherwise heartily endorse the general sentiment of their remarks. Insofar as the political has a national component, the national is essential to the maintenance of the transnational. For the transnational must be as arduously imagined and constructed via state interventions, class alliances, and the development of policies and institutions as the national is. National elites with internationalist visions – such as Massey, Grierson, and Harris – are critical to this transnational project. As intellectuals firmly ensconced in international humanist values, they saw that for Canada to participate fully in the transnational project, its citizens must be imbued with appropriate cultural codes. In this sense, to paraphrase the editors of this volume, Canadian cultural policy is “always already” constituted by liberal internationalist principles. Conversely, for an international liberal economic order to exist, intellectuals with a national base, but internationalist aspirations, are key to the negotiations that construct and maintain global legitimacy. Until such time as a single, global political authority surpasses the authority of individual states, this will continue to be the case. For global order to exist, compatible national orders must exist too. This remains as true today as it did in the 1920s to 1950s when these three men made their observations. As they clearly understood, culture as constructed in Canada may be nationally based, but it is also sympathetic to liberal internationalist principles. This seems paradoxical, especially when one considers the centrality of culture in discourses of Canadian national identity. In the Canadian case, cultural policy and support for cultural industries have been a keystone of domestic and foreign policy since the mid-twentieth century, and have been considered a bulwark against the encroaching imperialism of American culture and the very soul of the nation’s spirit. As Harris points out, however, a paradox is not a contradiction. A central goal of my argument here is to emphasize, as others have, that cultural policy in Canada has always been constituted in a transnational context.5 Canadian cultural policy is not, and never has been, focused solely on Canadian identity. It reflects a cosmopolitan, aesthetic world view directed toward the achievement and defence of the amorphous concept known as “civilization.” This cosmopolitan world view, in turn, is integral to transatlantic and continental alliances implicated in what Gramsci and others characterize as a “historic bloc” made up of a transnational bourgeoisie, transnational institutions, transnational ideologies, and, key to this discussion, transnational culture.6 In the spirit of McKay’s quest to understand Canada as a historically specific project of rule, I will show how Canadian cultural policy can be understood in this context. Culture is part of the construction of “Canada” as a politically and imaginatively conceived

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entity, but it also has played a key role in bourgeois and national identity in three states whose cultural trajectories have strongly influenced Canada’s: France, Britain, and the United States. I propose a methodology for studying Canadian cultural policy from a comparative perspective that references and contrasts the Canadian cultural policy experience both as part of a transatlantic project of liberal internationalism and as a manifestation of unique social and historical configurations. This methodology situates Canada in an international context, drawing on the example of critical histories of the museum and arts movements in Britain, France, and the United States to place Canadian cultural politics in a comparative context, as part of a larger transnational cultural discourse of cosmopolitanism, class politics, and social control. It emphasizes the role of Canadian cultural intellectuals, of which Massey, Grierson, and Harris are prominent examples, and their attempts to create in Canada a cultural project worthy of membership in the transnational cultural order. In fact, it may be more interesting to flip the question asked by McKay and the editors of this volume from a focus on how the “vacant lot” of Canada should be studied to an investigation into how Canada as a historic bloc contributed to, and continues to participate in, the creation of the transnational (or at minimum, the transatlantic) liberal order. In what follows, I will draw on some ideas from both art history and international political economy to explain more fully what I mean by this. I will then trace the implications of this insight for the study of Canadian cultural policy. Since this volume focuses on studying visual culture in Canada, much of my argument will centre on the role of the art museum in the context of cultural policy.

Creating an International Liberal Economic Order Karl Polanyi’s distinction between economic liberalism and laissez-faire is a fruitful place to begin a discussion of transnational liberalism. Using McKay’s definition of liberalism as an ideology that privileges the individual’s natural right to liberty, equality, and property, we can extrapolate a definition for international economic liberalism as: (1) emphasizing the right to own private property regardless of its location (i.e., outside of national borders); (2) equality of opportunity in investment and trade (again, regardless of nationality); and (3), related to this, an abstinence from state intervention in the market to ensure the primacy of the individual (including that most elusive of legal individuals, the corporation). Polanyi exposed the hypocrisy of liberal calls for laissez-faire implicit in this third assumption by showing it was impossible to create and maintain capitalist markets without extensive state involvement. Although he conceded that liberal markets may be relatively self-regulating once established, in the process of building a market economy, liberals must and will call for the intervention of the state to ensure its smooth operation. “The accusation of interventionism on the part of liberal writers is thus an empty slogan … The only principle economic liberals can maintain without inconsistency is that of the self-regulating market, whether it involves them in interventions or not.”7 This point is all too familiar to analysts of Canadian political economy, where the importance of the state in creating the transportation and communication networks neces-

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sary for a national economy (and identity) goes without saying. A variety of class conflicts and alliances, institutional innovations, and policy debates surrounded the political construction of a Canadian market, reinforcing Polanyi’s emphasis on the political nature of liberal market operations. Polanyi extended this central insight to the creation of a transnational liberal economy in the nineteenth century, arguing that the harshness of the liberal economic standards of the time led to spontaneous protectionist reactions that were necessary if the market itself was to survive, but at times (as in the case of fascism) desperately challenged the credibility and legitimacy of the liberal order. As fundamental as Polanyi’s contribution was in terms of illuminating the widespread intervention of the state in liberal capitalist markets, it lacked a detailed political analysis of the political creation of the international liberal economic order itself. Global markets not only rely on national state intervention, they also contain a whole transnational politics of their own that is central to their quasi-self-regulating nature. The emphasis on laissez-faire free trade and deregulation since the 1980s, for example, is paradoxically based on scrupulously negotiated interventions by numerous states to write new sets of neo-liberal rules for regulating the flow of international finance and goods (and to bail out those corporations who avail themselves of these new freedoms too liberally). These state actions, in turn, were based on the direct lobbying, and indirect academic theorizing, of economic, intellectual, and government elites in each state who saw their interests changing with the development of new methods of production and novel opportunities for trade and investment.8 These changing political interests eventually became codified in international agreements and institutions such as nafta, the wto, and various other regional trade and investment agreements. This explanation begins to sound like an instrumentalist class conspiracy until one complicates this story with Gramsci’s notion of consent and Foucauldian notions of individual self-regulation. Although I make no attempt to make these two very different approaches compatible, I will make use of them both in the sections that follow to explain how national cultural policies are inextricably wound up in transnational order. I begin with the Gramscian approach, as presented in the work of the international political economists Robert Cox and Stephen Gill. Gill focuses on the creation of hegemony and consent in what he calls the postwar liberalizing international economic order (lieo). As opposed to neo-realist understandings of hegemony, which portray “hegemony” as the dominance of one state over another, Gill explains the lieo in the context of a Gramscian hegemony in which domination and consent are the result of a congruence or “fit” of social forces such as interstate relations, institutions, ideas, and material capabilities – what Gramsci referred to as a “historic bloc.” Gill draws on the work of Cox, who argued that Gramsci’s ideas could be applied to the international as well as the national realm. In this context, the lieo is an example of a transnational historic bloc, a unique configuration of ideas, institutions, and material capabilities that perpetuates the system of capitalism and economic liberalism, even when the dominant hegemonic power is in a process of material decline (first Britain, then the United States). Consent and legitimation are critical to the stability of this hegemony, in particular, consent and agreement between dominant class factions and state elites in North America,

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Japan, and Europe. As in Gramsci’s discussions of historic blocs on the national level, “organic” intellectuals are key to the organization and legitimation of transnational hegemony. Gill distinguishes between a “transnational class alliance,” which would involve the members of a single class, and a transnational historic bloc, which involves negotiations between a number of classes and countries of varying strength (not just the strongest state, or hegemon) and is based on material capabilities as well as on a common world view. Organic intellectuals are key to organizing this transnational historic bloc, theorizing the ways that hegemony may be established and maintained. Such intellectuals may be involved in political parties, but they can also be associated with private associations, universities, and, importantly for my purposes, cultural institutions. Gill uses the Trilateral Commission as an example of a transnational institution useful in creating consensus on economic and foreign policy issues between transnational elites, but Cox also views institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and organizations such as the oecd as critical in creating economic orthodoxies and in training national elites in these orthodoxies, which in turn serves to enhance international order and consensus.9 Although they recognize there is a role for culture and cultural institutions in this order, however, there is no explicit discussion of the importance of culture in maintaining and creating this transnational historic bloc. It is time for this oversight to be remedied. Just as art history must consider historical conditions of production in its purview, so must political economy consider art, culture, and cultural institutions as constitutive of the liberal international economic order.

The International Liberal Cultural Order Culture, cultural institutions, and cultural intellectuals can be more explicitly incorporated into the analysis of the international liberal order when we examine the role they play in constituting a transnational bourgeoisie with a cosmopolitan world view. Although the study of international cultural organizations such as unesco or of cultural policies debates in the wto is important, I am thinking more along the lines of historically specific studies of the evolution of national cultural institutions and policies in a transnational context. This approach, I believe, outlines more clearly the complexities of national and international cultural discourses. It also reveals how the spread of a cosmopolitan understanding of culture imbued with European values occurs – a central yet absent element in international political economy explanations of the international liberal order. An example of how this might be done is Duncan’s work on the spread of art museums from France, to Britain, and then to the United States. Duncan’s methodology, which focuses explicitly on the art museum, is useful in outlining the spread of a cultural consciousness that contributes to the creation of a transnational bourgeoisie with a common internationalist world view. Duncan views the Louvre museum in Paris as the original source of the “museum envy” phenomenon that continues to this day. The Louvre served as a model of urbanity and culture that others around the world aspired to emulate and recreate on national soil. More specifically, she argues, the public art museum as exemplified by the Louvre sym-

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bolized bourgeois class identity and citizenship. In a national context, the Louvre represented the victory of the bourgeoisie over aristocratic power. Internationally, it became a symbol of bourgeois cultural refinement. Bourdieu’s concept of culture as a form of class “distinction” is as pertinent at the international level as it is in a national context. By the end of the nineteenth century, a country, and its constituent bourgeoisie, could hardly be taken seriously culturally if it lacked Louvre-like institutions. The British found the Louvre’s assertion of French cultural superiority particularly galling, although it took thirty years for them to establish a similar institution, the National Gallery, in London. The desire to emulate the Louvre spread across Europe and across the Atlantic, first to the United States, then to Canada. By the end of the nineteenth century, every Western nation had at least one important art museum. Not surprisingly, the Louvre became an international training ground for the first museum directors and curators, serving as a model for curatorial and administrative standards.10 Duncan emphasizes that the unique, historically specific conditions of a country are key to understanding how museums become part of the cultural fabric. France, with its revolutionary history, simply seized the king’s art collection and declared the previous royal Louvre palace a public institution in 1793, open to the public free of charge. Established and run by the state, the museum became a concrete symbol of the new political order. Within the museum walls, the new practice of hanging paintings according to art historical standards of progress addressed the visitor as a bourgeois citizen entering the museum in search of enlightenment. In this quest, he was joined by his fellow citizens, constituting himself as a member of both a class and a nation.11 In Britain, where the auctioning off of Charles I’s collection of art meant there was no extensive royal art collection to turn over to the public, the creation of a national gallery took a different path. Although there had been various attempts to create a national gallery in England prior to the creation of the Louvre, a comparable British gallery did not appear until 1824. According to Duncan, the enduring dominance of aristocratic privilege accounts for the time lag between the creation of national galleries in France and Britain. Art collecting was seen as a gentleman’s undertaking, and the art exhibited on the walls of a gentleman’s home in turn indicated his superior taste and social refinement. Handing it over to a public gallery would hardly be in line with this sense of social privilege. It was only with the death of the nouveau-riche, self-made millionaire John Julius Angerstein (a Russian-born Jew with no formal education) that a large and impressive art collection became available for state purchase, with the National Gallery eventually opening in Angerstein’s house in Pall Mall. Although state financial support and the political willpower to create such a museum were also essential in the British case, the new museum marked a significant transition in cultural capital from the aristocracy to the new middle class.12 In the United States, the absence of an aristocracy and a royal collection, combined with an abundance of self-made millionaires and robber barons anxious to improve their public image, meant that the formation of art galleries was largely a private, bourgeois affair. In the us context, the new art galleries not only served to emulate western European art traditions and thus confer cultural prestige; they also worked as a social emollient and beacon of civilization in the face of the vast waves of immigrants that flooded

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the country. In a context where most wealthy us Americans had visited Europe and were aware of the lack of culture in their own country, art museums became part of a larger agenda to civilize and improve us cities and us American culture.13 Viewed in light of Cox’s and Gill’s ideas on transnational historic blocs, Duncan’s account points to the importance of museums not only in creating a transnational bourgeoisie with similar tastes and aspirations, but also in developing a common transatlantic cultural outlook centred on the unique and restorative role of art and culture in “improving” individuals and society. With respect to the former, the museum became a confirmation of bourgeois class identity, serving as a symbol of social superiority. Donating to, or campaigning to establish, art galleries and museums provided nouveau-riche bourgeois citizens with cultural capital in Bourdieu’s sense; attending art exhibits served a similar outcome. Internationally, art galleries and museums became status symbols indicating the maturity and depth of a nation’s culture, a process that continues at an even more frenzied pace today.14 A Canadian chapter for Duncan’s book begs to be written. A historical, political economy account of the creation of Canada’s National Gallery and other art museums would make an important contribution to the broader understanding of Canada’s cultural institutions in an international context. In particular, it would help to illustrate the importance of culture in the constitution of a Canadian transnational bourgeoisie and the desire of Canadian intellectuals to confirm their membership in this international social class. It would also reveal the inextricable ties between national policy and the international liberal order. The three men I quoted at the start of this chapter are Canadian members of this transnational elite. Grierson was a British citizen, a Scottish filmmaker imported to establish the new National Film Board, who also worked in the United States and for unesco in Paris (fig. 5.1). As members of the founding families of one of Canada’s first multinational companies, the Massey-Harris Corporation (fig. 5.2), Vincent Massey (fig. 5.3), and Lawren Harris lived in an environment that confirmed their membership as citizens of the world. Both spent time in European educational institutions, and both lived abroad for prolonged periods of time: Harris went to school in Germany and taught in the United States, while Massey studied at Oxford and spent time as Canada’s high commissioner to both London and the United States. Massey, in particular, personifies the notion of the transnational bourgeois citizen. He had close personal ties with numerous international cultural elites. In England, his social circle included economist John Maynard Keynes, Kenneth Clark (the director of Britain’s National Gallery), and entrepreneur and philanthropist Samuel Courtauld. While serving as high commissioner in London, he sat on the board of directors of the National Gallery with Keynes and Courtauld, as well as on the board of the Tate Gallery.15 In a classic internationalist statement he argued, “The great function of museums is surely to give us a sense of oneness; to make us think, not nationally nor hemispherically, but spherically. It helps us to gain a correct perspective when we see the pattern of civilization as a whole.”16 Massey also had direct connections with us American philanthropic foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. George Vincent, a cousin, was a director of the Rockefeller Foundation. Massey was frequently consulted by the

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Figure 5.1 John Grierson (left), chairman of the Wartime Information Board, meeting with Ralph Foster, head of graphics, NFB , to examine a series of posters produced by the NFB of Canada, 1944.

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Figure 5.2 Exterior of Massey-Harris Company, Brantford, Ontario.

Figure 5.3 Augustus John, Portrait of Vincent Massey, 1938.

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Carnegie Corporation regarding Canadian cultural matters and was instrumental in obtaining Canadian grants for Canadian cultural organizations and cultural events.17 Much is made of the anti-us bent of the Massey Commission report and the Masseys’ own feelings of revulsion toward us American culture. This contempt was directed at us American commercial culture, however, ensconced in a critique of the mind-numbing impact of the popular culture emanating from the south.18 Massey felt a strong affiliation with us cultural elites such as Frederick Keppel of the Carnegie Corporation, who despised the commercialism of us American culture as much as Massey did. Both Carnegie and the Rockefeller Foundation participated actively in funding “high culture” institutions in both the United States and Canada, intent on the goal of spreading cosmopolitan western European culture. Indeed, these men saw it as their duty to support the spread of “high culture” as extensively throughout North America. As Brison notes: To preserve traditions of Western culture, the [Carnegie] Corporation should, in Keppel’s view, support the reinfusion of elements of a classical liberal education, including fine art, music, literature, and poetry into American culture. It was the Corporation’s duty, Keppel believed, to act as a custodian of national culture and to empower a group of like-minded cultural leaders. In this respect, his concerns resembled those of such Rockefeller Foundation officers as David Stevens and John Marshall – and Canadians such as Vincent Massey. They all would agree that, in the aftermath of the First World War, their leadership was as necessary in cultural affairs as in business and science.19 What was the justification for such intense concern with supporting culture and empowering national cultural elites? Skimming the statements of these elites, one sees numerous references to the need to support the amorphous ideal known as “civilization” – a transnational cultural construction based on western European traditions, but open to the inclusion of anyone amenable to its internationalist perspective. As the Massey Commission report clearly stated, for example, what its members proposed defending was not merely Canada as an entity, but “civilization, our share of it, our contribution to it.”20 Rather than deconstructing the obviously Eurocentric bias of this term, I want to emphasize the cultural ideology or world view that supports the idea of “civilization,” linking it to the creation and maintenance of the international liberal order. The idea of using culture as an international ideology is not new. In the critical art history literature, there has been considerable interest in the role of culture as a form of ideological warfare, particularly during the Cold War period. For example, studies have revealed the implication of art movements such as abstract expressionism in us efforts to win the hearts and minds of communist-sympathizing Europeans and South Americans.21 These studies expose the direct connections between museum directors and curators, the foundations that financially support museums, and the cia. What I mean by a transnational cultural ideology is much more indirect, focusing less on the use of art as an instrumentalist quest for hegemonic dominance. Rather than being used as propaganda, art and culture are seen as part of the process of creating transnational cultural consensus.

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Transnational cultural ideology is very close to a world view characterized in much contemporary literature as “cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitanism has been defined as “a reflective distance from one’s original or primary cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and customs, and a belief in universal humanity.”22 It consists of the ability to stand back and evaluate various cultures, choosing the best aspects of each and using them to enhance one’s own cultural repertoire. In the words of George Eliot’s hero in Daniel Deronda, “I want to be an Englishman, but I also want to understand other points of view. I want to get rid of a merely English attitude in studies.”23 In the Canadian case, the culture that the Massey Report promoted was not uniquely Canadian, but an aesthetic internationalism based on the art traditions of Western Europe.24 This aesthetic internationalism provided Canadians with an image of themselves as part of civilization. As internationalist as this cultivated distance, or detachment, may sound, it does not preclude nationalist sentiments. As Stacy Sloboda argues, cosmopolitanism does not demand a wholesale critique or rejection of national culture. On the contrary, it involves using an international world view and knowledge of other cultures in order to improve the standards of one’s own culture.25 Cosmopolitanism links national culture to the transnational, providing the conduit through which national intellectuals situate their cultural affiliations. The part cannot be understood without reference to the whole. Understanding this cosmopolitan world view is the key that unlocks the paradox running throughout this essay: that the national and international do not contradict, but are predicated upon, each other. The cosmopolitan world view is a central component of Canada’s perception of itself nationally and in the context of the international liberal order. On a national level, cosmopolitanism is evident in the domestic policy of multiculturalism and in attitudes toward the art of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. The overarching, curatorial gaze of cosmopolitanism identifies and collects what is civilized, defines it as “art” or “culture,” and displays it for the edification and social cohesion of the nation. In an international context, Canadian cultural policy can in part be read as an effort on the part of a group of organic intellectuals who subscribe to this cosmopolitan world view to transform Canadian cultural philistinism into a more “civilized” form.26 Unless it wanted to continue being regarded as a friendly, but inferior, colonial backwater, the Canadian state had to make serious efforts to live up to “Louvresque” standards of culture. Frequently, when the state was not prepared to step in and do so, Massey ensured progress toward this goal by obtaining funding for cultural projects through the Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Foundation, or the British Council.27 If Canada wanted to be part of a transatlantic elite culture, it had to act like it belonged, as did the individuals who advocated its membership in this culture. This meant not only the establishment of national cultural institutions of an international standard, but the encouragement of national art practices that resonated in a cosmopolitan context. Witness, for example, the Massey Commission’s urging that “modern Canadian painting can no longer exploit the novelty of the Canadian landscape. Our young abstract painters are being judged in exactly the same footing as are the abstract painters of other countries”28 (fig. 5.4). Canadian cultural elites understood that Canada

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needed cosmopolitan cultural institutions and a cosmopolitan cultural consciousness (close to what Bourdieu defined as “habitus,” or an innate understanding of a sociocultural milieu) in order to be considered a mature member of the liberal international order. The cosmopolitan principles that imbued these national institutions and cultural ideologies, in turn, consolidate the transnational consensus central to the maintenance of the international liberal order. Hearkening back to Massey’s introductory quote, they provide “the very pillars on which a sound internationalism can rest.” This Canadian desire to be a full-fledged member of transnational cosmopolitan culture continues to this day. The contemporary global museum-building extravaganza, and Canada’s contributions to it, can be explained in this context. Littered throughout the municipal, provincial, and federal government discourses supporting the museum building spree in Toronto, for example, are references to the need for Toronto to act like a global

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Figure 5.4 Lawren Harris, Isolation Peak, 1930.

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city and to recognize itself as an equal to other global cities. It is no longer curatorial standards that set the bar for civilized culture, however; in fact, the content of exhibitions is almost irrelevant. Instead, the architecture (and just as importantly, the architect who designed the building) are the beacons of cosmopolitan transnationalism today. Although the role of culture in improving economic competitiveness is a central component of these discourses, an emphasis on the international prestige and cultural capital associated with the building of these museums was especially important in municipal and federal policy papers.29 Notable in a Canadian context, a us-style private fundraising campaign accompanied Toronto’s cultural renaissance, in which individual private donors gave millions of dollars to see their city’s, and country’s, cultural aspirations achieved. This outpouring of bourgeois giving, much of it by members of first- or second-generation immigrant families, awaits careful study as a source of cultural capital not just for Canada, but for these individual donors. In sum, regarding Canadian cultural policy as part of a transnational cultural movement not only reveals the importance of understanding national cultural institutions or national schools of art from a transnational perspective, but also underlines the importance of looking at culture in the context of political economy explanations of the liberal international order. Economic transactions are a central but only partial component of the raison d’être of this order. Rather than looking at art and culture as a kind of emollient that serves to prop up the international economic order, or as a part of a means to a global capitalist economic end, culture must be considered as an end in itself. In other words, perhaps we need to take more seriously the claims of the Massey Commission that “civilization” is the ultimate goal of this order. Obviously, capitalist markets are a key aspect of Western “civilization” and the economic and cultural are inextricably intertwined in this regard. Rather than being assumed in political economy explanations of transnational liberalism or “globalization,” transnational culture must be considered as something that is as ardently, and coherently defended as transnational markets are.

Museums and the Transnational Historic Bloc To this point, I have focused on the importance of culture in cementing the identity of a transnational bourgeoisie. As Gill noted, however, the creation of a transnational historic bloc involves more than a single class alliance. The creation of consensus involves a much broader project that draws in labour and those citizens who do not necessarily subscribe to cosmopolitan ideologies. As central as the art museum is to transnational bourgeois identity, historically it has also played an important role in instilling self-regulatory discourses of citizenship, taste, and cultural belonging. Foucauldian-inspired studies, exemplified by Bennett’s work on the “exhibitionary complex,” have been important in revealing the discourses implicit in the politics of display and spectacle inherent in museum technologies. Numerous studies have built on this perspective to link art, museums, and design to international competitiveness, nationalism, and class politics. In addition to examining the role of both the state and the domestic bourgeoisie in arts reform initiatives,

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some of these studies focus on the use of art and design in improving the morality and taste of national producers and consumers and in addressing working-class labour.30 These studies have been important in revealing the use of culture as a form of social governance, but they also illustrate how art and museums are linked to transnational concerns such as international competitiveness. For Britain to be competitive and productive, it was necessary for society as a whole to buy into this mission. A great deal of fruitful research has focused on the importance of drawing and design in these efforts. For example, Britain’s Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures established in 1835 focused on the use of art and design in improving Britain’s international competitiveness. It was influential in the creation of various art and design schools in Britain, as well as Henry Cole’s South Kensington Museum (currently the Victoria and Albert Museum). In the British case, for example, a perceived inferiority relative to French design in textiles, furniture, and porcelain served as a major impetus for efforts to improve national design, a mission undertaken by the Select Committee of 1835. The Great Exhibition of 1851 served to deepen Britain’s feelings of design inferiority, spurring an intensive effort spearheaded by Henry Cole and Prince Albert to provide a series of museums (culminating in the current V&A Museum) dedicated to educating consumers in the true and false principles of design. In the face of working-class political upheaval, the grinding poverty of industrial Britain, and expanding waves of immigration, museum discourses expanded from improving national competitiveness to educating and “civilizing” London’s working-class population. Debates over the location of museums, opening hours, and the price of admission ensued in an attempt to make museums more accessible to the working class. As Kriegel notes, working-class people took advantage of these efforts to gain access to educational resources and to redefine themselves in terms of social class. Men who worked in the furniture and decorative arts industries referred to themselves as “artisans” and campaigned actively to bring museums into their neighbourhoods or to extend public transportation to suburban institutions such as the South Kensington museum.31 Historical studies of this kind would provide an invaluable contribution to the understanding of the relationship of Canadian arts and culture policy not only in terms of national efforts to encourage self-regulatory behaviour on the part of its populace, but also in terms of national competitiveness in the international liberal order. The discourses of improvement and self-regulation were as explicit in Canadian museum-building efforts as they were in Britain. In the words of the National Gallery’s first curator Eric Brown, “there never was a great nation that had not a great art … Art is one of the most spontaneous forms of individual or national idealism which exists. Money spent wisely on it returns a thousandfold in the education of public taste and elevation of national character.”32 Although there are some useful twentieth-century studies of this nature, more work on nineteenth-century and pre–Second World War state involvement to encourage the improvement of citizens and national competitiveness through design and art would be helpful.33 Comparative studies with a Canadian focus would provide invaluable insights into the use of art, culture, and museums as sources of national competitiveness, working-class identity, and educational reform. While providing a transnational perspective,

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they could also emphasize the national specificities of the Canadian case, examining how the legacies of colonialism, religion, immigration, class, and divisions on linguistic and ethnic grounds have affected policy trajectories.

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The study of art and art institutions as a national project remains relevant even in today’s globalized political economy. Canadian art must be studied in a transnational context, but the national remains as relevant to the construction of the transnational as does the reverse relationship. What would a transnational study of Canadian art and museums look like? It would examine the development of Canadian cultural institutions in the context of a transnational cultural milieu based on cosmopolitan values, examining the use of Canadian art and culture as a means to integrate Canada into the liberal international order. It would trace the actions of both state and non-state actors in the formation of such institutions, examining their roles not only in terms of bourgeois class identity, but also with regard to the discourses of education and “improvement” that so consistently accompany debates surrounding the creation and reform of cultural venues. It would include efforts to contest such discourses and class politics, examining how responses on the part of those who are inevitably “othered” by discourses of art and culture affect the course of policy efforts, or attempt to use these policies and discourses to their advantage. It would analyze these distinctly Canadian phenomena comparatively, relating the development of art discourses and institutions to similar historical processes in countries such as France, England, and the United States. Finally, it would focus on the interaction between art and design, nationalism and international competitiveness, examining how they are used to enhance Canada’s performance in the liberal international economic order. Above all, it would play on the paradox of these interactions: that an apparently global economic and cultural liberalism remains fundamentally tied to the efforts of national actors.

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notes 1 Vincent Massey, “Address,” 22 May 1930, cited in K. Finlay, The Force of Culture, 120. 2 J. Grierson, “The Film and Primitive Peoples,” in The Film and Colonial Development, 11, cited in Z. Druick, “International Cultural Relations,” 189. 3 L. Harris, “Creative Art and Canada,” in Yearbook of the Arts in Canada, 1928–29, 179–80. 4 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 638. 5 See for example Z. Druick, “International Cultural Relations”; Druick, Projecting Canada; A. Upchurch, “Vincent Massey.” 6 R. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order; S. Gill, “Hegemony, Consensus and Trilateralism,” 205–21. 7 K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 149. 8 B. Jenkins, The Paradox of Continental Production. 9 Cox, Production, Power, and World Order; Gill, “Hegemony, Consensus and Trilateralism,” 210–11. 10 C. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 21. 11 Ibid., 21–6. 12 Ibid., 37–42. 13 Ibid., 55; P. Dimaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston,” 33–50. 14 Jenkins, “Toronto’s Cultural Renaissance,” 169–86. 15 Upchurch, “Vincent Massey.” 16 K. Finlay, The Force of Culture, 202. 17 Ibid.; J. Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada.

18 P. Litt, The Muses. 19 Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Canada, 122. 20 V. Massey et al., Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, 74. 21 E. Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism,” 43– 54; S. Guilbault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art; C. Sylvester, “Picturing the Cold War,” 393–418. 22 A. Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 63. See also U. Beck and E. Grand, Cosmopolitan Europe. 23 K.A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xviii. 24 K. Dowler, “Early Innis,” in Harold Innis in the New Century, 352. 25 S. Sloboda, “The Grammar of Ornament,” 223–36. 26 P. Massolin, Canadian Intellectuals. 27 Finlay, The Force of Culture; Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Canada. 28 Dowler, “Early Innis,” 352. 29 Jenkins, “Toronto’s Cultural Renaissance.” 30 T. Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 73–102; D.J. Sherman and I. Rogoff, Museum Culture; L. Kriegel, Grand Designs; M. Craske, “Plan and Control”; T. Barringer, Men at Work; D. Cohen, Household Gods. 31 Kriegel, Grand Designs. 32 Brown, quoted in Finlay, The Force of Culture, 148. 33 See, for example, J. Parr, Domestic Goods; and Jeff Webb, “Max Jules Gottschalk and Godes Design.”

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6 Nationness is not disappearing if what is obliging us to shape our work around the increasing fluidity of national borders is itself a nation – the very nation that cradles our institutions in its ever-increasing complexity, transformation, and juridical decentering.1 The category “Canada” should henceforth denote a historically specific project of rule, rather than either an essence we must defend or an empty homogeneous space we must possess.2

Visualizing the “New” North American Landscape Sarah E.K. Smith

Both the rhetoric and reality of neo-liberal globalization have large implications for scholarship, from the macro-level of disciplines (structured historically by the nation) to the micro-level of the objects and processes of study (the nation itself or aspects organized and categorized within the construct of the nation).3 Ian McKay has recognized such issues in the field of Canadian history, arguing that a strategy of reconnaissance is necessary to overcome the treatment of Canada as a site for universal actions, rather than a specific, historically constituted formation of liberalism.4 These same concerns are equally applicable to the field of Canadian visual history and are important to address in light of the historic connections of art to the state, notably the use of visual and material culture as the basis for national/ist projects such as disciplinary Canadian art history.5 To bridge these problems within such national/ist disciplines, McKay suggests a new understanding of the Canadian state, which he terms “Canada-as-project,” acknowledging the nation as a product of liberal rule, one which has been continually shaped and reshaped temporally and geographically.6 Continuing from McKay’s work, we might ask how is it possible to rethink the study of the visual in Canada, without treating the nation as a starting premise and central actor? In fact, should this be the goal? While the state has undoubtedly been reconfigured

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by neo-liberal globalization, it has retained its importance and agency throughout this transition. Clearly, the nation is still where much of the action lies and where we scholars might be tempted to focus our attention. However, this action does not occur within the static space of the state; instead the action is the transformation and continual recreation of the state itself. Employing McKay directly, I suggest that we need to examine Canada-as-project as a product of the historical advancement of liberalism, which allows us to trace the transformations and developments of the nation–as-project in the contemporary moment of neo-liberalism; such a study could not be considered when the nation is understood as a given naturalized category. I suggest that we might now also question how neo-liberalism, a political and economic reformulation of the classical liberal model, which David Harvey has termed “embedded liberalism,”7 has transformed Canada-as-project after the 1970s. As Harvey summarizes, since the 1970s, neoliberalism has become the central guiding principle of economic thought and management … Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is [now] to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.8 And so, we might ask, why do we continue to advance seemingly paradoxical configurations of national/ist projects in neo-liberal contexts, among them Canadian art history, given that the role of the state is no longer to advance and maintain a classical liberal project along national lines, but to maintain a neo-liberal order in global capitalism? I propose that a way to bridge these questions is to extend McKay’s premise of Canada-as-project, which he analyzed in the context of a late-nineteenth-century and early- to mid-twentieth-century liberalism, by expanding this historical context to the current moment of neo-liberalism – in the case of this chapter, by examining the role of visual and material culture in maintaining a neo-liberal order in northern North America.9 As George Yúdice has pointed out, culture’s expediency – that is, culture’s enmeshment within global economic and political systems such as neo-liberal globalization – is a powerful lens through which to examine the contemporary political economy, since culture is among the most authoritative resources with which to preserve neo-liberal economies.10 Acknowledging that culture is deeply embedded in neo-liberalism, we need to turn our attention to the ways in which states have employed visual and material culture to continually reconstitute the nation at various historical moments. Such avenues of inquiry will also illuminate the changes that the nation-state as a hegemonic structure and ideological concept has undergone historically and in turn reveal new ways of understanding processes of neo-liberal globalization as it pertains to visual cultural studies. A key concern for such studies is how Canada-as-project fits into larger, ever-changing, transnational framings of “Canadian” visual culture. The study of visual culture in Canada, and of subjects within the constructed boundaries of the nation, can no longer

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justify an approach based on the rubric “Canadian.” Thus, scholars of visual and material culture in northern North America need to prioritize examinations of transnational cultural exchange that have shaped the current global order. This means proceeding from an understanding of Canada-as-project as a part of an increasingly integrated North American continent by the end of the twentieth century, a premise that is central to comprehending how cultural resources currently mobilize neo-liberal economies. This history is quite extensive, as Canada has been a part of numerous bilateral and regional free trade agreements over the last two decades, and the Canadian state continues to negotiate new agreements to this day.11 Ricardo Grinspun and Yasmine Shamsie describe the process of North American integration as a “slippery slope,” in which “one step towards integration” served to “generate pressure for further steps.”12 This cascading effect is perhaps best understood against the longer history of these neo-liberal trade agreements, which have increased in range and scope to include the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt), which was signed in 1947; the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement (fta), implemented in 1989; nafta, implemented in 1994; and the World Trade Organization (wto), which came into being in 1995.13 Focusing on my own research in this era, I would like to suggest the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), implemented on 1 January 1994, as an important event in this mobilization, since nafta can be understood as a significant political and economic marker in the Canadian state’s use of culture to advance neo-liberal policy.14 nafta is commonly understood as the most important neo-liberal policy to advance economic integration in North America, although, as Claire F. Fox points out, it is “only a recent step in a three-decade-long process of continental economic integration.”15 fta and nafta are the only trade agreements specific to North America, serving to legislate what Duncan Cameron sees as Canada’s adoption of “continental economic integration as its principal economic strategy.”16 fta, a precursor to nafta, was a bilateral trade agreement implemented on 1 January 1989. When nafta replaced fta in 1994, the agreement expanded trilaterally to include Mexico. Grinspun and Shamsie explain that these agreements facilitate the prioritization of us American objectives, stating, “The likely outcome of deeper integration in North America is not the downsizing or disappearance of the Canadian state but, rather, its transformation into an economic and strategic appendage of a North American corporate class and broader us global interests.”17 During the period in which fta and nafta were consolidated, trade agreements with a larger mandate to foster hemispheric economic integration were also in development. Almost a year after nafta was implemented, trade negotiations at the Summit of the Americas held in Miami focused on the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa), with the goal of implementing an expansive free trade zone across the entire American hemisphere.18 Subsequently, on 1 January 1995, the wto came into being as the successor to the gatt, which had regulated world trade since 1948.19 Locating my study within this history of North American integration, in the following discussion I question how the rules of cultural negotiation have changed under neoliberalism. Specifically, I consider the ways in which visual culture continues to play a substantial role in naturalizing new formations for state identity projects. Having established the need for a new approach to the study of visual cultural history in Canada, I

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hope to contribute some ideas towards studying the visual in Canada, given that the concept of “Canada” itself is no longer an adequate ideological basis for such inquiry. To this end, I examine exhibitions of modern art in Canada, Mexico, and the United States in the era following nafta. Broadly, I am interested in the three North American states’ abilities to use culture – specifically, art exhibitions – to represent new formations of national identity during a period of increased North American economic and political integration. In this chapter, I will establish nafta as a significant moment from which to argue for a reconsideration of Canada-as-project in relation to the role it plays at the cultural level in advancing a neo-liberal, North American economy. Here, I draw on Yúdice’s theory of transnational cultural brokering as a relevant framework with which to understand how the state employs formerly national/ist cultural projects, such as the narrative of Canadian art, in transnational economic policy formation.20 I then discuss trends in exhibiting Mexican art in Canada at the turn of the millennium, focusing on the exhibition Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950 as one example of transnational cultural brokering in this context. Following this, I examine the Canadian state’s construction and use of an integrated North American identity and its relationship to Canadian art history in the online exhibition Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art. These two case studies are examined to illuminate the state’s continued employment of Canadian art history in locating the nation after neo-liberalism, but more broadly I use them to highlight new avenues through which to study Canada-as-project from a visual cultural studies perspective.

Mexican Art in Canada The examination of the three North American states under neo-liberal globalization reveals many distinct (re)configurations of each state’s construction in specific historical and geographic contexts. My research examines specific constructions of Mexico created for display in Canada in order to chart such (re)configurations, acknowledging that these transformations are key to understanding the visual histories of both states. As such, in this chapter I point to the importance of examining the stories that states tell about themselves through the employment of visual and material culture, in particular, through largescale, state-sponsored art exhibitions. It is imperative to understand these dominant narratives, which Michael Denning identifies as “tall tales,”21 in order to determine how the nation-state is being created and promoted at a given historical moment and, in turn, what counter-narratives are excluded from the dominant account. Visual and material culture has always been integral to telling such national/ist tales, a selective curatorial process that Brian Wallis explains as one of omission and concealment.22 These representations are important carriers of dominant national narratives and are of vital importance to symbolize and sustain national/ist projects by actively reflecting and reconfiguring existing formations. More importantly, they are also capable of producing new structures. As Wallis explains, “Such representations are not just reactive (that is, depictions of an existing state of being), they are also purposefully creative and they can generate new social and political formations.”23

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In an attempt to trace changes in these national/ist projects against the larger historical context of North American integration, one might point to the extensive exhibition history of Mexican art in Canada.24 Notably, at the turn of the millennium, there was a proliferation of large blockbuster exhibitions in Canada that featured Mexican art, including Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950, shown in 1999 and 2000; Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art, an online exhibition that opened in 2001; Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own, which toured Canada and the United States in 2001 and 2002; and Perspectives: Women Artists in North America, another online exhibition which launched in 2002.25 This flurry of exhibitions of Mexican art was significant because, previously, scant attention had been paid to this topic by Canada’s largest museums. In fact, there were only two major exhibitions of Mexican art in Canada prior to the 1990s.26 These occurred in 1943 and 1961 and were entitled, respectively, Mexican Art Today and Mexican Art from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present Day. I argue that such exhibitions, organized at the turn of the millennium, were all conspicuously similar in their alignment of the three North American nation-states and in their promotion of an integrated North American cultural identity. However, the idea of cultural parity took different forms in each exhibition. Upon examination of these exhibitions and the countries involved in funding, staging, and supporting them, the most obvious, but unstated, connection between them was that the countries involved (Canada, Mexico, and at times the United States) were linked by free trade agreements, most recently in the form of nafta.27 Here it must be acknowledged that nafta marks neither the beginning nor the end of North American integration, which has much earlier beginnings dating back to the late nineteenth century.28 Likewise, nafta’s implementation in 1994 does not signify the conclusion of North America’s integrated economic policy, judging by the post-nafta Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas and the more recent security concerns regarding North American borders after 9/11 – both instances that raise the spectre of a retreat from continental integration. Nonetheless, I would suggest that we view nafta as both a symptom and sign of North American integration, what Fox calls a “signpost in an ongoing historical process.”29 Since it was a significant agreement in its linking of three North American state economies, nafta fostered a new geographical context in which to understand the three countries. nafta also exemplifies how the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States each used transnational trade liberalization to bolster domestic economies, this despite calls against the uneven distribution of each state’s profit on traded resources. Thus, this period is integral to discussions of national/ist projects such as Canadian art history. However, apart from Fox and Yúdice’s work, little scholarly attention has been paid to North American integration as it pertains to culture, and there are even fewer studies which take into account all three North American states. Moreover, existing studies of visual and material culture, including Fox’s, focus almost exclusively on the separate relationships between the United States and Mexico and the United States and Canada. Notably, scant consideration has been paid to the relationship between Canada and Mexico. The advent of continental integration and free trade agreements, beginning at the end of the twentieth century, should be of importance to scholars of visual culture

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in Canada, because this transition has brought about noticeable changes in cultural policies and formations of national and continental representation. I see these changes specifically manifest in representations of so-called national identity in Canada and Mexico, both peripheral players in continental negotiations that were largely led by the United States. Furthermore, I contend that visual histories have been integral to facilitating this North American integration and the entrenchment of neo-liberal economic policy, a process that can be examined according to the state brokering of national identities within transnational spheres. The need for Canada–Mexico cultural diplomacy initiatives, such as the large-scale exhibitions of Mexican art in Canada post-nafta, can be understood when seen in the historical context of Canadian–Mexican relations. Scholar Maria Teresa Gutiérrez Háces argues, “towards the end of 1990, when Mexico and Canada decided to negotiate a trilateral free trade agreement with the United States, they suddenly had to confront an undeniable fact: during the past fifty years, neither one had advanced in its knowledge of the other.”30 Arguably, the relationship between Canada and Mexico dates to the end of the nineteenth century, even though official diplomatic relations have only existed between Canada and Mexico since 1944.31 At the time nafta was being negotiated, however, both Mexico and Canada were more focused on trade with the United States than trade with each other.32 The distance between Mexico and Canada was even greater when contemporary notions of North America were taken into account. Stephen J. Randall and Herman W. Konrad explain that prior to nafta, “Mexico [had] traditionally not considered itself to be part of North America,” a perception evidenced by the Mexican’s use of norteamericano (North American), as a term to refer “exclusively [to] citizens of the United States.”33 Randall and Konrad argue that a transformation of national identity was necessary: “Becoming part of the nafta equation, as seen in cultural and academic events,” they state, “has necessitated a re-evaluation of identity for Mexicans.”34 Building from this argument, a corresponding re-evaluation of the national identity that Mexico promoted among trading partners such as Canada was required. This necessitated cultural projects spearheaded by both the Canadian and Mexican governments to foster this transition and form new alliances between Canada and Mexico. Exhibitions of Mexican art in Canada at the turn of the millennium can be read as “medium[s] of negotiation,”35 both illustrative of and part of reconstituting transnational relationships in the neo-liberal era. One notable example of transnational cultural brokering is the blockbuster exhibition, Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950, which was displayed at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and then in Ottawa at the National Gallery of Canada from 1999 to 2000. Heavily promoted as the largest collection of modern art of this type to be shown outside of Mexico, the show included approximately 280 pieces surveying a fifty-year period of artistic development. Guest curator LuisMartín Lozano stated in the catalogue that his “ultimate aim” was “to elucidate Mexico’s true contribution to the history of world art” through the exhibition.36 Featured in this exhibition were works by such renowned modern artists as Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, Maria Izquierdo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros. Mexican Modern Art is worthy of critical attention because it was the first, and largest, of several exhibitions of Mexican art displayed in Canada post-nafta. I contend

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that the exhibition reflects its political and economic circumstances, as gallery officials recognized an opportunity to respond to a Canadian public curious about the culture of its newest trade partner. Significantly, Mexican Modern Art emphasized cultural parity, playing up connections between Mexican artists and their North American counterparts. For instance, the curator Lozano cautioned against only seeing “Mexican artistic achievement as home-grown,” emphasizing that the exhibition would show Mexican artists in relation to their global contemporaries – influential Western artists.37 This cultural parity was exemplified by the curatorial strategy Lozano employed, a conventional survey format focused on charting a traditional Western art historical narrative. The exhibition was structured around the concept of the Mexican Renaissance, a model critiqued for its imprecise portrayal of a simply defined, unified Mexican culture, often reliant on early-twentieth-century artworks and iconic artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco.38 This framework has also been critiqued for its political appeal as the Mexican government has supported the circulation of many exhibitions of this type in foreign countries.39 Mexican Modern Art also introduced a conservative element as it depoliticized this conventional narrative by suppressing the prominence normally given in discussion of the Mexican muralists to radical revolutionary politics. In the exhibition, the work of the Mexican muralists was marginalized, with their work represented only through some drawings and preparatory sketches and a video entitled The Mexican Muralists. The drawings were no replacement for the impact and presence of the original mural works and also served to focus the viewer’s attention on formal and structural aspects of the mural work, diminishing the larger political conditions of their production. Similarly, the video mentioned the Mexican Revolution only superficially, neglecting to clearly situate the murals in their familiar political context. At the same time as the exhibition promoted cultural parity, it positioned Mexico as exoticized, echoing the Mexican state’s desire to encourage recreational and cultural tourism. Take, for example, the marketing of the exhibition in Canada. Mexican Modern Art was advertised through separate campaigns at each venue, and both centred on a tagline that reflected exoticism, “Pasión” (Passion) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art and “Sol y Vida” (Sun and Life) at the National Gallery of Canada. Examination of the Montreal print campaign, based on a self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (fig. 6.1), also reveals a similar emphasis as this imagery plays into the larger project of the artist’s celebrity, neglecting historical details and in turn depriving Kahlo of her politics.40 For example, several advertisements and gallery promotional materials from the Montreal campaign focus on a cropped motif from the self-portrait, Kahlo’s large, deepred lips (figs 6.2 and 6.3). Paired with the term “pasión” this advertisement emphasizes an overtly sexualized, exotic form of Mexico. Text for other advertisements in the Montreal campaign similarly emphasize qualities of exoticism, such as the “vibrancy” of Mexico’s colour. The paradoxical way in which Mexico is treated in Mexican Modern Art is striking. Mexico is positioned here as similar to its Canadian trading partner, but at the same time a specific form of difference – exoticism – is emphasized, thereby allowing Mexico to retain this sensibility so essential to tourism. The art history advanced in the exhibition

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Figure 6.1 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts advertisement for Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950. This design was used for in-gallery promotions such as the museum banner and visitors’ guides, as well as in external publications to promote the show.

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Figure 6.2 Above Liberté yogurt lid promoting Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950.

Figure 6.3 Right Montreal Museum of Fine Arts opening invitation cards (front) for Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950.

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Figure 6.4 Canadian Heritage Minister Shelia Copps and Mexican Ambassador Ezequiel Padilla, exhibition opening Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950, National Gallery of Canada, 25 February 2000.

is one that is friendly to neo-liberal continental restructuring, since Mexican Modern Art was framed to visually express a post-nafta North America, even as it rendered this position invisible to most viewers. From the advertising campaigns used to promote the show, which emphasized cultural exoticism, to the message of cultural parity and political neutralization, which was conveyed through the conservative curatorial approach employed, Mexican Modern Art operated as a subtle means of promoting bilateral cultural relations between nafta partners Canada and Mexico. To this effect, the exhibition, including the opening events, media coverage (fig. 6.4), and adjunct public programming, became a staging ground for political manoeuvring. In approaching the study of Canada within its recent history of increased North American integration, the examination of national/ist projects such as Canadian art history and, more importantly, the circulation of such projects across state lines become central areas of consideration. I contend that despite the current rhetoric of “post-nationalism” in scholarly circles, constructions of national/ist culture still play an important role as cultural products that are produced, represented, and consumed globally. In fact, the global distribution of national/ist culture is integral to the neo-liberal reorganization of the world economy. Under neo-liberal globalization, formerly dominant understandings of culture have changed due to increased transnational migration and communication among previously separated or dissimilar constituencies. This transformation of culture

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has affected its function and definition, and, according to Yúdice, “the role of culture has expanded in an unprecedented way into the political and economic … at the same time that conventional notions of culture largely have been emptied out.”41 Furthermore, he suggests that culture is now widely positioned as a tool, “increasingly wielded as a resource for both sociopolitical and economic amelioration.”42 Yúdice advances a concept of transnational cultural brokering, which is integral to reframing the study of national visual histories in the current moment. Grounded in his understanding of culture as expedient (inseparable from political and economic systems), Yúdice explains the process of transnational cultural brokering as the “negotiation of culture in relation to national expression in an international arena.”43 Other scholars, including Judith Huggins Balfe, have advanced similar arguments about the use of culture internationally. Balfe suggests that visual art can convey new meanings distinct from the aesthetic qualities associated with each piece. She states that artworks function as “symbolic carriers, as mediators of politics and as propaganda for secular and religious ideologies,” a historical phenomenon that continues to this day.44 However, what is central to Yúdice’s concept of transnational cultural brokering is its “transnational” component, which is linked to processes of neo-liberal globalization. Thus, Yúdice emphasizes the recent occurrence of this phenomenon as distinct from, but not unrelated to, the historical use of art to further state diplomacy.45 In this way Yúdice builds on Balfe’s arguments to provide an explanation of cultural negotiation suitable for the current world order. The most obvious instance of Mexican Modern Art as a vehicle of transnational cultural brokering was its importance as part of a reciprocal exchange of Canadian cultural patrimony, the exhibition Terre Sauvage: Canadian Landscape Painting and the Group of Seven, an exhibition of Canadian art shown in Mexico City in 1999.46 The use of Mexican Modern Art as part of an exchange of Mexican-Canadian cultural patrimony highlights the larger need for a reconsideration of how artworks are employed globally and in transnational contexts, as they are “increasingly sent traveling to help to ‘normalize’ political relations, as bona fides of trust precisely because of their fragility and pricelessness – as in an exchange of hostages.”47

The “New” North American Landscape In accordance with increased North American integration, the current study of Canadian visual histories must take into consideration the creation and promotion, by the three North American states, of a new North American identity. Through a brief discussion of the exhibition Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art,48 I hope to demonstrate the ways in which visual and material culture has been used to create and promote a new North American identity, in turn resulting in a new understanding of the North American landscape in art. Notably, national/ist projects have been carefully managed and negotiated in relation to this new continental identity. Panoramas was an online exhibition dating to 2001 based in the Virtual Museum of Canada, organized in tandem with the ftaa negotiations that took place at the Summit of the Americas (and which ultimately failed to implement complete hemispheric trade

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liberalization).49 Freely available to the public in English, French, and Spanish, this exhibition boasted the benefit of a virtual venue; it was maintained and accessible for over a decade. Created out of transnational political impetus, Panoramas was an ongoing trilateral project involving the three North American states. The exhibition took a celebratory approach, drawing parallels between various artists’ depictions of the North American landscape with the aim of promoting cultural understanding of the continent globally. Panoramas was an extremely large and ambitious project, featuring over three hundred artworks, primarily paintings, by artists from Canada, Mexico, and the United States. More than one hundred works represented the efforts of Canadian artists.50 The chosen artworks surveyed an extremely large historical period, ranging from 1800 to 2000. In a brochure designed by the Smithsonian American Art Museum to publicize Panoramas, the exhibition and the international partners supporting it were lauded as “breaking new ground in cultural diplomacy.” Fittingly, research into the origins of this exhibition reveals a history of government involvement.51 Here, it is important to take account of the additional ways in which the exhibition narrative was promoted, for example through advertisements and public programming. In the case of Panoramas, the exhibition was used as a public relations tool by politicians in Canada, Mexico, and the United States anxious to promote North American trade relationships before it was even completed. Notably, Secretary of State Madeline K. Albright of the United States, Foreign Secretary Rosario Green of Mexico, and Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy of Canada officially announced their governments’ sponsorship of the exhibition, then titled Pan-American Perspectives: The Land in Art, at the third annual Trilateral Ministerial Meeting, which took place on 11–12 August 2000 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.52 At this event, the exhibition’s upcoming winter launch date in 2001 was publicized, and the project was held up as evidence of increasing North American connections in the areas of culture and education.53 The Trilateral Ministerial Meeting was an important event in terms of North American economic integration, as the relationship between the three states was discussed and continental integration upheld and promoted as a benefit to the citizens of North America. A press release summarizing the meeting notes that “the ministers … stated their conviction that the three North American nations should deepen and widen their relationship, and should seek to play a constructive international role, particularly within the Hemisphere.”54 This reference to hemispheric unity is especially pertinent because at this moment the North American states were involved in ftaa negotiations with the aim to ensure hemispheric co-operation through neo-liberal economic strategy, and at the time, this proposed agreement was on track for successful implementation.55 In this way Panoramas was heralded as an “example of successful trilateral cooperation between the three countries” and as a vehicle through which to promote the values of trade liberalization under the guise of a common North American “civil society.”56 The contemporary political approach of the three North American state governments is of particular relevance to the concept of transnational cultural brokering. Yúdice discusses the impact of neo-liberalism on culture, specifically referencing neo-liberal policies the Mexican government has employed since the 1980s. He explains that the ways in which the Mexican state communicated its national/ist agenda to its inhabitants have

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been altered since that time to emphasize cultural diplomacy in the global sphere. Thus, he states, “the cultural difference expressed by means of art was no longer used to take a nationalist, defensive position vis-à-vis the dominant models of western modernity (as in the case of the [Mexican] muralists), particularly the United States, but for staging showcases demonstrating that Mexico was the civilizational par of its trading partner to the north.”57 Building upon Yúdice’s arguments, I suggest that a similar transition occurred in Canada, in which works by Mexican modernists previously displayed in Canada during the mid-twentieth century to exemplify a distinctly Mexican national culture, were used at the turn of the millennium, in contrast, to introduce the Canadian public to its new southern trading partner as a state on a par with and similar to Canada. Panoramas also had a multi-faceted pedagogical agenda, which was clearly established from the outset. An online “Education” section was developed to augment the exhibition, including activities aimed at students to encourage them to think further about issues, from the influence of land forms on human occupancy to the diversity of North American cultures, and the site suggested activities and lists of additional textual resources through which to do so.58 This section of the exhibition placed emphasis on landscape as symbolic of greater social issues, rather than limiting discussion to aesthetic considerations. As the website read, “When you stop to think, you realize that landscapes are not just pretty pictures – there is more to it!”59 Education was also emphasized generally throughout the online exhibition; the splash page, for instance, presented the exhibition as a means to “promote greater cultural understanding among our nations.”60 After Panoramas was launched in 2001, the Smithsonian American Art Museum developed an education program entitled the “Panoramas Education Project.” With this emphasis on education well established, it is possible to suggest that Panoramas performed the additional task of conveying the new position of the politically sovereign nation-state within a united North American economy. Examination of the curatorial approach taken in Panoramas reveals how the artworks conveyed a specific message of cultural parity – a unified North American identity in accordance with neo-liberal trade agreements such as nafta. The curatorial team who produced the show displayed a unified approach that prioritized the creation of a new North American cultural landscape, stemming from the predetermined theme, the “social interpretation of landscape art.”61 The artworks in this exhibition were previously categorized by nation and thought to symbolize and convey a distinct national identity. Conversely, in Panoramas they were repositioned as significant on a global level, mirroring the change in government policy towards greater North American integration and free trade. This promotion of a common North American identity was prominent in the exhibition, introduced directly via the curatorial statement on the home page. Seen together, it stated, the works in Panoramas “suggest the common human condition present in even the most diverse of landscapes.”62 The positioning of art in the show reinforced this statement, as it represented unity among the inhabitants of North America. The text that accompanied the artworks in this exhibition reinforced this vision of a common North American identity, calling attention to the idea that national boundaries were imposed upon this once-unified land. It states, “Long before the creation of Canada,

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Mexico and the United States, there was the land. The very earth of North America, its diverse beauty, majestic mountains, vast plains, and sparkling waters, moved its inhabitants to define their developing nations in part through love of land and awe of nature.”63 In doing so, the exhibition proclaimed the primacy of the land as a basis from which all North American inhabitants draw their identity. The celebratory language used to refer to the North American landscape, emphasizing the “diverse beauty” of the continent, also propagated the idea that it is an uninhabited wilderness devoid of development and Indigenous inhabitants. North American identity is also reinforced as the exhibition text identified certain values, specifically “power” and “spirit,” as commonly “North American,” and thus as the basis for continental unity. In the Evolving Landscape section of the show, under the sub-heading Diverse Geographies, the text read, “While geography is diverse, the artists’ intentions show similarities: in each country we will find the same spirit driving humankind at each different moment to become acquainted with, to observe and to make use of nature.”64 Essentializing the North American experience to a set of general values that cannot be debated, yet which do not uniquely belong to North American inhabitants, this statement exemplified the constructed nature of the message conveyed in the exhibition. However, at the same time as it constructed a vision of a new, unified North America, Panoramas also reproduced ontologies of nation. Pointedly, each artwork in the exhibition was labelled with a small flag indicating the artist’s country of origin. Additionally, each artwork had a hyperlink that opened a new browser window showing a map of North America to provide viewers with a detailed map of the particular geographical area associated with the artwork. This hyperlink was in the form of a numerical and alphabetical grid numbering system, which allowed viewers to locate the specific region or city of production corresponding to each artwork. These two features emphasized the distinct national identity of each artwork while at the same time linking that identity to a larger North American integration project. The latter goal was subtly reinforced, for example, in the way all of the maps featured the North American continent in addition to the specific country or area of origin of the artwork. These maps allowed the viewer to relate the location of the artwork to the North American continent as a whole, expanding viewers’ geographical knowledge of the continent. Similarly, the national flags beside each work served to reinforce the fact that these works originated from all three North American states, but this nationalism was abated by the fact that the works were all grouped together under four main themes, unified by their connection to the North American landscape. These two competing processes – liberal nationalism and neo-liberal globalization – were skilfully managed within Panoramas. Notably, the exhibition did not dismiss national/ist sentiment. Rather, it allowed nationalism to function within the larger structure of the project in order to support the priority of North American cultural unity in the global economy. This dual message can also be seen in the treatment of artworks by artists conventionally heralded as national icons. It is interesting to note that many pieces of art featured in Panoramas were created by artists upheld as national treasures by their respective countries of origin, an approach that seems at odds with the priority of promoting a unique

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North American identity. Such artists include us Americans Winslow Homer and Georgia O’Keefe; Canadians Tom Thomson, Edwin Holgate, and Alex Colville; and Mexicans Frida Kahlo, David Alfaro Siquerios, and Diego Rivera. Pictures by these artists are clearly identified with their country of origin. At the same time, however, they were grouped together, symbolic of a larger North American identity. Panoramas created and reinforced a unified North American identity, premised upon a rereading of the historic cultural works included in this exhibition. By repositioning artworks that were formerly sources of national/ist pride, the exhibition promoted cultural parity between the three North American states, a position clearly related to current free trade agreements. I argue that at the same time neo-liberal globalization was promoted in Panoramas, the exhibition also reinscribed national/ist projects on several levels. Importantly, nationalism was carefully managed to support this larger project of North America identity. Ultimately, Panoramas illustrated Wallis’s claim that “national culture does not exist apart from its social construction; there is no national essence, no distinctive Americanness or Mexicanness [or for that matter Canadianness], apart from that determined by specific political circumstances.”65 With the implementation of nafta, there was acknowledgment in scholarly circles that the national identities of Canada, Mexico, and the United States would undergo change. Randall and Konrad predicted this shortly after the agreement was implemented. “For all three countries,” they wrote, “[nafta] will force a re-examination of national identity as the continental economic restructuring process evolves.”66 I contend that Panoramas is evidence of the North American governments’ attempts to manage this transition through construction and promotion of a strong North American cultural identity. Endorsed by all three North American states, Panoramas served to convey to the public a vision of a unified continent, providing a historic cultural basis upon which to link the three nations. By fostering a sense of unity between the countries linked under nafta, the exhibition was a means to educate the public and promote the acceptance of North American integration. Before this turn to increased North American economic and, within the context of exhibitions such as Panoramas, cultural integration, nations were historically competing entities. Benedict Anderson explains this structure, writing, “The internal logic of a world of nations, understood at one level as a world of fundamentally similar, co-operating and rivalrous entities, also meant that nation-states were required to display, for one another, their parallel differences.”67 With the political and economic shift led by the neo-liberal restructuring of the role of the state, North American countries transitioned from highlighting their national identities, which were premised upon cultural difference, to showcasing their broad similarities. Such are the real effects of the rhetoric of economic and cultural globalization. In the case of Panoramas, national difference was seen to have developed in a similar trajectory in all three countries, establishing a historically grounded parallel cultural heritage for the entire continent. Of particular importance for our current inquiry into how scholars might study the visual in Canada, I see a noticeable departure from the traditional art historical method of organizing and categorizing art by nation in Panoramas. Throughout the exhibition, the curatorial lens repositioned the painted landscape in terms of its formerly national/ist

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social and cultural associations. Consequently, this allowed for new readings of the landscape, among them an understanding of the continent based on a geographical positioning that goes from east to west. These new readings of the continent have their basis in scholarly discussions that have sought to explain the “new,” neo-liberal North America. Richard Florida, for example, has recently advanced the concept of economic megaregions, promoting “Tor-Buff-Chester” as a “clunky moniker for the economic powerhouse region stretching from [Florida’s] new hometown [Toronto] to Buffalo and Rochester.”68 He suggests that “mega-regions have replaced the nation-state as the economic drivers of the global economy.”69 While Florida’s understandings of this continental shift clearly remain open to debate, what is interesting in his discussion is how we might read Panoramas as functioning to encourage such new readings of the landscape – readings that were then reinforced through viewer interaction with the exhibition, which featured search functions to enable visitors to relate works to one another in myriad new cultural and geographic contexts. On a broader scale, I contend that nafta’s creation of a supposedly borderless continental free trade zone is echoed by the depiction of the North American landscape in Panoramas, one that defined the “new” North America as an entity without borders. I see Panoramas as reflecting new curatorial trends that might be read against such established national/ist projects as Canadian art history, specifically since this exhibition’s dual message managed the nation under the larger umbrella of neo-liberal economic integration in the form of an interrelated North American cultural identity. In so doing, the exhibition supported contemporary neo-liberal economic policy at the same time that it inventively established a new cultural language of symbols through which to visualize the “new” North American landscape. On the one hand, Panoramas can be seen as a way of coping with the new world order at the cultural level. On the other, it can be understood as a way of supporting and disseminating a larger economic agenda through the implementation of culture-as-resource.

Studying North American Visual Histories after NAFTA As I have argued throughout this chapter, exhibitions such as Mexican Modern Art and Panoramas might be read as reconfiguring formerly national/ist treatments of art in the current context of neo-liberal North American integration. Mexican Modern Art, an institutionally sponsored exhibition, evidenced a construction of Mexican national identity for consumption by Canadian audiences that reflected political and economic changes under nafta. Conversely, Panoramas was a state-sponsored exhibition that showed how governments used artwork as a resource to educate its online audience about thenincreasing North American integration. These two case studies provide a means to illuminate the importance of reading cultural representations of Canada and North America against the history of neo-liberal economic policy. These two case studies are important not only because they shed light on formerly dominant national/ist narratives, such as Canadian art history, but also because they help to mediate the present, by naturalizing contemporary economic restructuring at the

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cultural level. Mexican Modern Art and Panoramas might therefore be seen as two significant examples of transnational cultural brokering in Canada which demonstrate how culture serves to sustain the new role of the state under neo-liberalism. Critically examining such exhibitions is ultimately necessary because they are not immediately discernible as sophisticated political platforms from which to make neo-liberal economic policy tangible to both domestic and global audiences. Rather, the exhibitions’ success relies on the familiar use of artworks to achieve political expediency under the veil of neutrality and objectivity.70 Ultimately, Yúdice’s framework provides a means through which to understand the current use of culture globally as a conduit for political messages; that is, he points to culture’s economic value and situates this use within global processes of neo-liberalism. Transnational cultural brokering is applicable to current studies of the visual in Canada, as this theory accounts for the transnational use of culture as a medium to create, circulate, and negotiate a state’s cultural identity against other states’, negotiations that are also continually in transition. Importantly, this understanding of the use of culture foregrounds the power relations inherent in managing so-called global cultural flows.71 Scholarly understandings of the role of culture in reconstituting national/ist narratives under neoliberalism are vital, since this current iteration of Canada-as-project can tell us a great deal about the liberal order’s historical legacy in northern North America. To be sure, it can also tell us a great deal about the importance of studying the visual in Canada in the contemporary moment. Returning to the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter, it is my hope that those who study Canadian visual histories will continue to build upon McKay’s understanding of Canada-as-project. Scholars of the visual in Canada must contend with the numerous constituencies who affect the role of the state under neo-liberalism, including national governments, transnational corporations, and supranational economic policies. Central to assessing visual histories of Canada is understanding the ways in which Canadaas-project has been shaped by these constituencies in various historical moments. At this moment, scholars need to pay attention to the tensions and contradictions of North American integration and how national/ist identities are reformed, advanced, and subsumed into new geopolitical formations. I would like to conclude by stressing the importance of re-examining the use of artworks to achieve political and economic goals on an ongoing basis, since geopolitics are always in transition. Recently, there has been a movement away from North American integration due to us-initiated, post-9/11 security concerns. As Phoebe S. Kropp and Michael Dear explain, “nafta is supposed to encourage a greater integration of the regional economy across the border, yet the border itself becomes more clearly and lethally defined. How can we have a borderless economy with a barricaded border?”72 Factors influencing the current situation include the possibility of renegotiating nafta and concerns with immigration, illegal migration, “terrorism,” and border security – all of which affect current North American trilateral relationships and hint towards further restructuring of the North American identity when it comes to culture.

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notes 1 C. Good, “Introduction,” in The Effects of the Nation, 5. 2 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 620–1. 3 I employ “neo-liberal globalization” in this paper as a term that reflects the economic strategy of neo-liberalism, often characterized by privatization, liberalization, and deregulation. This is inherently tied to the concept of liberalism, an ideology that prioritizes the individual and their freedoms. Neoliberal globalization is the implementation of neo-liberal principles on a global scale (though this is not a unified or equal process), exemplified by policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta). Notably, such policies result in economic and spatial reorganization, in the case of nafta one in which the primacy of the nation-state as a means of organization was superseded by a policy demarcating a new order based on the continent, with this new structure in place for the express purpose of increasing trade and augmenting capital. See J.A. Scholte, The Sources of Neo-liberal Globalization. For information on liberalism consult McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework.” David Harvey provides a thorough examination of neo-liberalism in A Brief History of Neo-liberalism. For further information on contemporary globalization as it relates to neo-liberalism, capitalism, and geographical development see Harvey, Spaces of Hope. 4 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 620. 5 In using the term “national/ist” I am signifying the constructed nature of such projects. 6 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 620–1. 7 Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-liberalism, 12.

8 Ibid., 2. My emphasis. 9 McKay only briefly discusses globalization and neo-liberalism in the twentieth century in “The Liberal Order Framework,” 650. 10 G. Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 9. 11 R. Grinspun and Y. Shamsie, “Canada, Free Trade, and ‘Deep Integration’ in North America,” in Whose Canada? 3; Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, “Negotiations and Agreements.” 12 Grinspun and Shamsie, “Canada, Free Trade, and ‘Deep Integration’ in North America,” 3. 13 World Trade Organization, “wto news: 1997 Press Releases, Press 81, 27 October 1997, Fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the general agreement on tariffs and trade.” 14 C.F. Fox, The Fence and the River; Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture. 15 Fox, The Fence and the River, 136. 16 D. Cameron, “Free Trade Allies,” in Whose Canada? 63. 17 Grinspun and Shamsie, “Canada, Free Trade, and ‘Deep Integration’ in North America,” 3–4. 18 Free Trade Area of the Americas, “Antecedents of the ftaa Process”; Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, “Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa): About the ftaa.” 19 The wto unites 152 member nations and additional observer nations through its mandate to advance the liberalization of trade on a multilateral level. In addition to providing trade rules, the wto is a forum in which member governments can mediate trade disputes and create new trade agreements. See World Trade Organization, “What Is the World Trade Organization?”; World Trade Organization, “The gatt Years: From Havana to Marrakesh”; World Trade Organization, “Members and Observers.”

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20 Yúdice introduces this concept in “Transnational Cultural Brokering of Art” in Beyond the Fantastic, expanding upon it in his book The Expediency of Culture. 21 M. Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 23. 22 B. Wallis, “Selling Nations,” in Museum Culture, 266. 23 Ibid., 266. 24 In my research on the history of exhibiting Mexican art in Canada, I have focused on exhibitions of Mexican art associated with larger Canadian museums, specifically the National Gallery of Canada. I have not yet considered smaller exhibitions shown in private galleries, smaller regional museums, and artist-run centres. 25 I explore these issues in my larger research project. For further information see Sarah E.K. Smith, “Art and the Invention of North America, 1985–2012.” 26 There were also several very small exhibitions of Mexican art, including one held in department stores across Canada. 27 Along with the marked increase of exhibitions of Mexican art in Canada at the turn of the millennium, it is interesting to note that there was a similar boom of exhibitions of Mexican art in the United States during the 1980s. Notably, there was no corresponding increase in Canadian–us American exhibitions during this time period. 28 H.W. Konrad, “North American Continental Relationships,” in NAFTA in Transition, 15. 29 Fox, The Fence and the River, 18. 30 M.T. Gutiérrez Háces, “Canada-Mexico,” in NAFTA in Transition, 57. 31 Ibid., 60; S.J. Randall and H.W. Konrad, “Introduction,” in NAFTA in Transition, 7. 32 Gutiérrez Háces, “Canada-Mexico,” 58. 33 Randall and Konrad, “Introduction,” 7. 34 Ibid., 7. 35 Yúdice, “Transnational Cultural Brokering of Art,” 207.

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36 L.-M. Lozano, “Mexican Modern Art,” in Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950, 27. 37 Ibid., 12. 38 O. Debroise, “Mexican Art on Display,” in The Effects of the Nation, 21; National Gallery of Canada Archives, National Gallery of Canada Fonds, Exhibitions – Mexican Modern Art, 1998, 7398-008-19, vol. 1, “Clippings,” José M. Springer, “A Tale of Cultural Exchange,” n.d. 39 Debroise, “Mexican Art on Display,” 21. 40 M.A. Lindauer, Devouring Frida, xi; 1; 12; ncgc, Exhibitions – Mexican Modern Art, 1998, “Clippings,” Springer, “A Tale of Cultural Exchange,” n.d. 41 Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 9. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 239. 44 J.H. Balfe, “Artworks as Symbols,” 195. 45 Yúdice, “Transnational Cultural Brokering of Art,” 199. 46 National Gallery of Canada, “Terre Sauvage.” 47 Balfe, “Artworks as Symbols,” 213. 48 All subsequent description of Panoramas is taken from the online exhibition itself. Virtual Museum of Canada, Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art, http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/ Landscapes/home-e.html (accessed 9 June 2008). 49 K.M. Robertson, “Tear-gas Epiphanies,” 102, 110. 50 Virtual Museum of Canada, “Launching of the Virtual Exhibit Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art,” http://www. virtualmuseum.ca/English/Pressroom/p-0401-1.html (accessed 9 June 2008). 51 Further analysis of the development of Panoramas reveals that it was politically driven by senior politicians in Canada and the us. For further information see S.E.K. Smith, “Cross-Border Identifications and Dislocations,” in Parallel Encounters.

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52 Canadian Heritage (cha), Virtual Museum of Canada (vmc), Executive Produced Exhibitions, “Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art,” 80 b 4220-p1, vol. 2, Cara Ross to Danielle Boily et al., 15 August 2000. The title of the exhibition was later changed to Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art. 53 cha, vmc, Executive Produced Exhibitions – “Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art,” Ross to Boily et al., 15 August 2000. 54 Ibid. 55 In February 2004 ftaa negotiations were suspended. In subsequent years many countries have expressed a desire to restart negotiations. However, to date, formal ftaa negotiations have not been resumed. Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, “Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa): About the ftaa”; Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, “Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa): Current Status.” 56 cha, vmc, Executive Produced Exhibitions – “Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art,” 80 b 4220-p1, vol. 1, Memorandum to Madame Eileen Sarkar, Canada-us-Mexico Trilateral Landscape Exhibit, n.d. 57 Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 93. 58 Virtual Museum of Canada, “Education,” http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/ Landscapes/edu-e.html (accessed 9 June 2008). 59 Ibid.

60 Virtual Museum of Canada, “Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art,” http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/ Landscapes/index.html (accessed 9 June 2008). 61 cha, vmc, Executive Produced Exhibitions, “Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art,” “Trilateral Senior Officials Meeting,” 14 July 2000. 62 Virtual Museum of Canada, Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art, http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/ Landscapes/home-e.html (accessed 9 June 2008). 63 Virtual Museum of Canada, “The Mythic Landscape,” http://www.virtualmuseum. ca/Exhibitions/Landscapes/m-e.html (accessed 9 June 2008). 64 Virtual Museum of Canada, “The Evolving Landscape – Diverse Geographies,” http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/ Landscapes/e-a-e.php3 (accessed 9 June 2008). 65 Wallis, “Selling Nations,” 266. 66 Randall and Konrad, “Introduction,” 8. 67 B. Anderson, “Introduction,” in Antimodernism and the Artistic Experience, 98. 68 Richard Florida, “The Buffalo Mega-Region: Bigger Than We Know,” Buffalo News, 15 June 2008. 69 Ibid. 70 Wallis, “Selling Nations,” 272. 71 A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. 72 P.S. Kropp and M. Dear, “Peopling Alta California,” in Post Border City, 79.

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7 Sovereign Nations: Canada and the Inuit of Northern North America

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The historical relationship between Canada and the Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic is complex, convoluted, and Heather Igloliorte fraught with contradiction. The contemporary Inuit arts industry, for example, provides a cogent illustration of the paradox that characterizes the relationship between the Canadian state and the Inuit who live within the Canadian Arctic borders. Since the beginning of prolonged contact with the inhabitants of the north around the mid-twentieth century, the government of Canada has actively sought to suppress, dismantle, and eradicate the entire pre-contact Inuit way of life through the assimilative policies of colonization. Concurrent with this period of devastating cultural imperialism, this same government actively collected, promoted, and celebrated Inuit art, both domestically and abroad, as a quintessential Canadian art form. How is it that Inuit art came to be coopted as a worldwide symbol of the Canadian nation, even while the Inuit themselves were being oppressed by Canadian state policies? And how can and should we now study Inuit visual culture in what has been called the “post-national” landscape? In order to answer the latter question, we must first address the former. We might do so by using Ian McKay’s articulation of the liberal order framework as a point of departure to examine the complex and nuanced history of transcultural contact between the Inuit and the Canadian state.1 In The Challenge of Modernity (1992), “The Liberal Order Framework” (2000), and, most recently, his chapter contribution to Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (2009), McKay proposes that scholars need to rethink “Canada” as a process of liberal state formation, in which liberalism became the dominant lens through which law and order, culture, and social life were developed and thought about in the newly formed Dominion. In answering McKay’s call for scholars to critically re-examine Canada through the liberal order framework, this

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chapter will consider Inuit visual culture in Canada by evaluating the ways in which the Canadian state advanced Inuit art as a national/ist symbol in the mid-twentieth century, and what impact this appropriation has had on Canada as a historical project of liberal rule. This approach does not mean, in McKay’s words, “to synthesize and integrate all Canadian experience into an account that, in the best of worlds, would be acceptable to everyone. It would entail, rather, probing the Canadian state’s logical and historical conditions of possibility as a specific project in a particular place and time.”2 McKay’s call to establish a new paradigm for the study of Canadian history is also one we might bring to the study of Inuit visual arts in Canada. It is one that should respond to, intervene with, and resist the colonial and liberal rhetoric of nationalism, aligning itself instead with the emergent framework of Inuit cultural, political, social, and economic sovereignty. By “Arctic sovereignty,” I do not mean merely the maintenance of Canadian Arctic borders, although certainly Inuit have been in large part responsible for maintaining Canadian national sovereignty over one of the richest and vastest territories on the planet. Rather, I am referring to the project of Inuit sovereignty within Canada – the Canadian state’s recognition that the Inuit were a sovereign people at the time of the formation of the Dominion, and that we have the legal and ethical right to both autonomous nationhood and self-determination over our lives, lands, and natural resources. In this formation, it is important to remember that the concept of “sovereignty” in Indigenous societies like the Inuit of the territories of Canada is a fundamentally different formation than the idea of nationhood within the liberal order project. Inuit epistemology and ontology are best understood through the clarifying lens of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit3 (aggregate Inuit knowledge, values, customs, and lifeways), the governing principles of which emphasize several key distinctions from the values of capitalist liberalism. One of the most central of these is piliriqatigiingniq, the overriding concept of collective purpose that stresses the importance of the group over the individual and pervades all aspects of our teachings. The principles of piliriqatigiingniq are reflected in the practices of working for the common good, collaboration, shared leadership, and volunteerism, and underlines the related aspect of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, aajiiqatigiingniq, or the principles of consensus, community-based decision making, and the sharing of resources. Pijitsirarniq, the interrelated concept of serving, is also crucial to the understanding of how “success” is measured within Inuit communities; contributions to the common good are considered the highest form of leadership, as well as the measure of the achievement, maturity, and wisdom of an Inuk. Lest I give the impression that these values are traditional, and therefore somehow antithetical to Inuit contemporary life, it should be noted that Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit has been referred to by Inuit elders as a “living technology” of knowledge, embedded in practice, which directly translates to “that which Inuit have always known to be true,” referring not only to the past but also the present and future.4 Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit is not the ancient belief system of a communal people without relevance or application in modern society. Rather, contemporary Inuit polities such as the Government of Nunavut have formally adopted the conceptual philosophy of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, mandating that governmental departments incorporate IQ into departmental policies and the delivery of services and programs.5 It would be naive to suggest that the Inuit way of

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Figure 7.1 Statistics Canada, Map of Inuit Regions, 2006.

life has not been infiltrated by the pervasive influence of liberalism in the contemporary era – certainly those values were forced upon Inuit by the residential school system, the aggressive introduction of the trapping economy, and other colonial practices which are discussed later in this chapter – but I would argue that we must see the official mandating of these values in modern-day Inuit government as a form of resistance to the imposition of the liberal order framework and as an assertion that another form of sovereignty is possible outside of it. I cannot overstate the significance of the project of Inuit sovereignty in Canada. Canadian Inuit have recently entered a critical new era in which we are returning to a state of socio-economic, political, and cultural sovereignty and reclaiming our rights to selfdetermination. Fulfilling our goals towards sovereignty and self-determination is now more urgent than ever, as even in this era of “globalization” and the so-called “postnational” Canadian nation-state, we still live in what is best described as a neo-colonial society, which was formerly maintained through the ideology of nationalism and currently perpetuated through the liberal and neo-liberal rhetoric of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. Moreover, the Inuit’s idea about themselves as a sovereign people within the Canadian state has never changed. In fact, the Inuit of Canada have already begun the

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process of reclaiming what was diminished during the colonization of the Arctic through the settlement of all four territorial land claims and the institution of new forms of governance; Nunavut and Nunavik have public government, the Inuvialuit have formed the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation to manage their lands and resources, and Nunatsiavut is the first self-governing territory (fig. 7.1). Collectively, we now exercise significant control over our natural resources and industries, and through our agreements with the Canadian federal government we have established our inherent right to many other entitlements and authorities. Despite this, however, complete sovereignty eludes us, because the social and economic situation for many Inuit has not kept pace with our other advances; nor have the health and well-being of our communities significantly improved. If we are going to achieve Inuit sovereignty within Canada, we need to regain our cultural sovereignty. We need to preserve and fortify our Inuit languages, traditions, and cultural practices in order to strengthen our communities and cultivate our cultural resilience. The arts can play a determining role in this effort to reassert the cultural sovereignty of the Inuit, by affirming our long-standing traditions, highlighting our cultural continuities, and drawing our attention to the ways in which we have been vulnerable to the realities of colonization and the rhetoric of liberalism in contemporary life. In cultural theory, a critical strategy for advancing this Indigenous sovereignty through the arts and “thinking Canada” in a different way manifests itself in the critical theorization of Indigenous visual culture. As Irit Rogoff has proposed, In a critical culture in which we have been trying to wrest representation away from the dominance of patriarchal, Eurocentric and hetero-sexist normativization, visual culture provides immense opportunities for rewriting culture through our concerns and journeys. The emergence of visual culture as a transdisciplinary and cross-methodological field of inquiry means nothing less and nothing more than an opportunity to reconsider some of the present culture’s thorniest problems from yet another angle.6 Following Rogoff’s suggestion, the critical study of Inuit visual culture might effectively draw on an interdisciplinary framework of post-colonial studies and such interrelated fields of anthropology, sociology, and ethnohistory to re-evaluate outmoded ideas, embrace critiques of colonization, and demonstrate the ways in which we might reframe Inuit art. The critical rethinking of Canada as a liberal project of rule presents such an opportunity to unframe the ways that we discuss Inuit art within its most conventional and Eurocentric art historical contexts: as a symbol of Canadian nationalism or as an example of modernist primitivism, or as a combination of the two, since one no doubt informs the other.7 Inuit art might, for example, provide a compelling case study for investigating the ways in which distinct Indigeneities preserve and maintain their sovereignty within the specific contexts of their settler–colonial relations. I would argue that Inuit art in Canada provides an excellent case study for understanding Indigenous sovereignty on a global scale because of the unique position that Inuit occupy within Canada and on an international level.

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Within Canada, Inuit are a small population who have managed to adapt and thrive in one of the harshest climates on earth, and in doing so have created some of the world’s most ingenious and resourceful technologies, among them, the kayak and the igloo. They have never had treaties, but they have still managed, in recent decades, to ratify all their land claims agreements with the federal government. Paradoxically, the Inuit have also been responsible for maintaining Canadian national sovereignty over one of the most vast territories on the planet. And most significantly, the Inuit have enjoyed a privileged and singular position in the Canadian arts industry, envied by many global Indigenous arts and crafts producers for the valorization of their arts on a national stage. This unusual and idiosyncratic history deserves to be unpacked and examined in all its complexity and nuance. For these reasons, the study of Inuit visual culture in Canada can make a significant contribution to our understanding of the formulation of cultural sovereignty through art by globally dispersed Indigeneities. The new paradigm for examining Inuit visual culture should endeavour to elucidate the ways in which Inuit artists have engaged with the lingering colonial legacies of the national/ist project of Canada; to balance the great disparity between Qallunaat (Europeans and Euro-Canadians) and self-representations of Inuit through an emic approach to the writing and research of Inuit visual culture; to determine what strategies the artists have used to challenge, disrupt, and dismantle the liberal order framework; and to question what limitations liberalism and the political project of Canada have historically imposed on Inuit artists. By undertaking these interrelated projects, we can create a space for the development and implementation of culturally specific methodologies for art making, critical museology, and curatorial practice. We can also draw on the study of Inuit arts to foster and support the project of decolonization, and to advance the desired outcomes of self-determination and sovereignty. Tuscarora Scholar Jolene Rickard underscores this project in a statement in Vision, Space, Desire: Global Perspectives and Cultural Hybridity (2006), in which she states Indigenous art should “articulate local knowledge globally.” As Rickard elaborates: “I argue that indigenous people globally do have something very important to contribute on the cusp of the twenty-first century. We have densely packed cultural survival kits that transfer knowledge from one generation to the next, despite unremitting attempts at genocide, culturalcide, and other forms of political and philosophical erasure. Native communities or nations have something the world needs to know about: the insight of continuity.”8 In order to sketch the contours of what this new, locally articulated, and globally oriented study of Inuit visual culture might look like, and to appreciate the ways in which this new critical approach might be considered alongside other far-reaching Indigeneities or drawn upon to establish and underline Inuit cultural sovereignty, it is necessary that we first understand the historical relationship between Canada and the Inuit. This historical trajectory will elucidate how and why Inuit art came to be co-opted as a national/ist Canadian symbol at home and abroad in the mid-twentieth century. This history will also enable us to contextualize Inuit art and artists as they fit within the national/ist liberal discourses of the last century, which saw increased contact between Inuit and Qallunaat.

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Inuit Art, Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, and Liberalism Before contact with outsiders, for centuries the Inuit of northern North America were a sovereign people who governed themselves according to the laws of Inuit traditional knowledge, societal values, and collective social memory, Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, which dictated the ways in which Inuit could harmoniously coexist with each other across the vast Arctic terrain. Throughout the last three centuries of gradually increasing crosscultural encounter, and even while during the same period First Nations and Métis peoples faced numerous threats to their societies and sovereignty in southern Canada, in the north this Inuit epistemology and way of life remained relatively unaffected and inviolate.9 It was not until nearly the midpoint of the twentieth century that the Inuit way of life was wholly and rapidly impacted by the onslaught of Qallunaat culture in the north. Within a few short decades, massive changes swept across the Arctic, threatening to permanently alter the centuries-old Inuit way of life. Preceding the introduction of what McKay calls the “totalizing philosophy” of liberalism, which dictated that Inuit follow a Qallunaat epistemology and way of life, was the rapid and wholesale proselytizing of the Arctic, which led to the near complete northern conversion from Inuit to Christian belief systems in the span of just a few short decades. Christian missionaries had been dispatched across the Arctic and Subarctic in the late nineteenth century, and much earlier in Nunatsiavut, but it was not until the 1910s and 1920s that great numbers of Inuit converts were made.10 It could be argued that the liberal-capitalist way of life actually invaded the north in advance of the federal government, brought in by the Hudson’s Bay Company and others who taught the Inuit to trap for financial gain rather than to hunt for food. This lifestyle shift encouraged the Inuit to settle in communities around posts, which often led to the over-hunting of wildlife in the immediate area and an increasing dependence upon preserved food and packaged goods imported from the south.11 The decreasing white fox population, coupled with the economic downturn in the years between the two world wars, strained relations between the Inuit trappers and the European traders with whom they had previously had a mutually beneficial relationship.12 These new settlements also became breeding grounds for foreign disease, such as smallpox and tuberculosis, which spread quickly throughout the newly settled Inuit population.13 Following the 1935 census, all Inuit were forced to identify themselves to the government according to their “Eskimo Identification” tag serial numbers (also known as “E7” numbers), rather than their names, and this demeaning colonial practice continued until the advent of Project Surname in 1969.14 In Nunavik and Nunatsiavut, several Inuit communities were entirely relocated to fulfill various government objectives, which had devastating consequences for those relocated populations.15 It has also been alleged that the Canadian state used the rcmp to orchestrate the slaughter of thousands of sled dogs across the Arctic to force Inuit to stay in their new communities, a tragic story that was recently investigated by the Qikiqtani Truth Commission. The loss of sled dogs had an immense impact on Inuit life and was arguably a strategic act to facilitate forced assimilation of Inuit people to liberal settler-colonial ways.

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The most deleterious impact, however, was the residential school system, which was introduced across the north in the midst of this cultural turmoil in the 1950s. Although the Department of Indian Affairs had been administrating a residential school system in the south since 1879, there had been little interest in providing a formal education to Inuit until the federal government was compelled to do so; the government policy towards Inuit until that point had been “keeping the Native Native.”16 As John Milloy explains in A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879–1986, the role of these residential schools was to “civilize” the Native population and prepare them to participate in the Euro-Canadian economy, indoctrinating the Inuit into believing in the tenets of liberalism. It was thought that this could best be accomplished by removing Aboriginal children to schools far from their homes and introducing them to a completely foreign way of life.17 In tragic contrast to these idealistic goals, the disastrous legacy of the residential school system is most often a story about loss, neglect, and mistreatment. Living conditions in the boarding schools were usually deplorable, as chronic underfunding and gross mismanagement of resources and staff compounded the problems of overcrowding, inferior foodstuffs, and the unchecked spread of disease. In many schools children were forbidden from speaking their language or practising their culture, and these offences were often met with harsh punishments.18 Many children suffered physical, mental, and sexual abuses, and that trauma has been passed on through generations from parent to child.19 The devastating legacies of these combined efforts to eradicate Inuit culture and lifeways – including the long-term impacts of religious proselytizing, cultural imperialism, and colonization – continue to resonate in Inuit communities today. From the perspective of the liberal state, Canada’s interest in the Arctic has ebbed and flowed since the beginning of the twentieth century. The federal government in the newly formed Dominion of Canada had taken a decidedly laissez-faire approach to governing the Inuit and was initially more interested in asserting the sovereignty of its national borders than it was in dealing with the Inuit who lived within them. Concerns over Arctic sovereignty had prompted the Canadian government to install Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in the north as early as 1903, and yet the Indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic went largely ignored over the next three decades.20 As long as the Christian missionaries and Hudson’s Bay Company traders were willing to assume responsibility for the welfare of the Inuit, the Canadian government was content to leave the Inuit in their care. While the Department of Indian Affairs had been unofficially supporting northern missionary education and health programs since about 1880, it was only in 1924 that an amendment was made to the Indian Act to include “Eskimo affairs” under the jurisdiction of the Department of Indian Affairs, a responsibility that was later transferred to Northwest Territories Administration.21 Even so, it was not until the 1930s that the federal government shifted its policy of parsimony towards the Inuit to one of welfare and support, and only then because the province of Quebec sued the federal government over responsibility for the Inuit within their borders; in 1939 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the Inuit, like their southern First Nations counterparts, definitely came under federal jurisdiction.22 With this, and in some places in advance of the court decision, came

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the responsibility to provide welfare and social services to the Inuit of the north, who by this time were in very dire straits. Around this time, and perhaps in reaction to the newfound burgeoning responsibility, some members of various government departments and agencies began to consider arts production as a viable means for the Inuit to regain self-sufficiency. Handicrafts, as an industry that required little machinery or overhead, seemed to be well suited to remote areas of the north, and in the 1927–28 Annual Report of the Department of the Interior it was reported that Inuit crafts production was also viewed by the government as an industry “for which nature has fitted them.”23 As early as 1923 a government collection of Inuit carvings had been on display at the offices of the Northwest Territories Branch, demonstrating that there was some prior knowledge and appreciation of Inuit works in the department. In 1938 some work collected by the Eastern Arctic Patrol ships was included in the National Gallery of Canada’s display at the New York World’s Fair, which introduced the public to Indian and Eskimo crafts of the Yukon and Northwest Territories.24 It was hoped that a market could be found for a small Inuit handicrafts and carvings industry, especially as make-work for the sick, elderly, and orphaned Inuit residents of two church-run industrial homes in the north.25 While these limited initiatives undertaken by the federal government did not do much to foster an Arctic arts industry in the period between the two wars, there had been some efforts by members of the Indian and Eskimo Committee of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, as well as by a number of trading post clerks of the Hudson’s Bay Company, to stimulate the production of crafts and carvings prior to the Second World War. During the war, an influx of us American military personnel in the Arctic created a brief but inflated demand for Inuit souvenir ivory carvings, which the Hudson’s Bay Company met by freighting hundreds of pounds of raw ivory into Kimmirut (Lake Harbour), and the thousands of dollars this short-lived industry generated demonstrated the potential of the carving industry, even though there was still very little interest in Inuit crafts and carvings in the south.26 With the onset of the Second World War government handicrafts programs had been severely curtailed, but upon the conclusion of the war the three key organizations – the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the federal government – began to collaborate in earnest in order to establish a handicrafts and carving industry throughout the north. The subsequent story of “how it all began” in 1948 is such a legendary bit of Canadiana that it hardly needs repeating here; in brief, the proposed handicrafts industry blossomed into a new, modern art form under the guidance of artist-adventurer and cultural broker James Houston, who “discovered” Inuit art in Inukjuak and spent the rest of his life promoting Inuit art to the world.27 Combined with the efforts of many Qallunaat arts instructors, gallery owners, dealers, anthropologists, and others, Houston, the Guild, the Company clerks, and public servants brought Inuit art to both the Canadian public and the global art market. When Inuit art appeared on the international art scene in the mid-twentieth century, it played a crucial role in the construction of a national identity distinct from the us and Britain in the period following the Second World War. In his short but seminal article on the subject, “Inuit Art and Canadian Nationalism” (1986), Nelson Graburn argued that

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the federal government’s support and promotion of Inuit art were predicated on Canada’s desire to eke out a national identity separate from both the mother country and the neighbouring us in the postwar era:

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For an ex-colonial nation such as Canada, there are special difficulties in establishing a national identity and in promoting the symbols to convey it. To succeed, the nation must differentiate itself first from the mother country and, secondly, from any neighbouring countries having a common background. Where the majority of ethnic stocks of such nations are similarly constituted, obvious attributes such as language, dress and artistic tradition do not provide a distinctiveness sufficient for this purpose. Identity and iconic differentiation have to be derived from elsewhere – from nature or from history. Sharing a common past with England and the United States, Canada had to look beyond the cultural heritage of its immigrant populations for a source of national identity. For Canada, the domain with the greatest potential was the natural landscape and the native peoples, both of which have figured prominently in Canadian art history.28 Elaborating on this theory, Graburn cites, on the one hand, the Group of Seven, whose paintings were instrumental in establishing a national character in Canadian art after the First World War through their representations of the northern natural landscape, and on the other hand, Inuit art, which, as the product of a distinctly northern “primitive people,” was particularly well suited to the needs of developing a national/ist discourse after the Second World War.29 As we have seen, prior to this period Canada had had little motivation to recognize the Inuit as either sovereign or citizens, but the onset of the Cold War began to shift this perspective from obfuscation to celebration and support. Graburn recalls the debate surrounding the promotion of Inuit art during the onset of the Cold War era, noting that “the Cold War was at that time heating up, and one sub-cabinet level discussion in Ottawa was ended positively by the argument that, with the u.s.s.r. and the u.s.a. encroaching on the Arctic, and the dew-line stations going up on Canadian soil, the promotion and visibility of this new and uniquely Canadian Inuit art would show the world that Canada was indeed a ‘Great Northern power.’”30 To foster this perception of Canada as a major northern power on a par with the ussr and the us, Inuit art was promoted abroad as a symbol of Canadian sovereignty through internationally touring exhibitions, consisting primarily of Arctic sculptures. Meanwhile, within Canada, the federal government successfully established Inuit art as a national Canadian art form through numerous development strategies, marketing initiatives, and collecting practices, which satisfied both political and economic motivations. The international promotion and circulation of Inuit art were discussed in Norman Vorano’s unpublished dissertation, “Inuit Art in a Qallunaat World: Modernisms, Museums, and the Popular Imaginary, 1949–1962” (2007), which examined “how Inuit art was central to the rise of post World War II modernism in Canada, and how it contributed to the establishment and promotion of a Canadian ‘national culture’ during the Cold War.”31 This was accomplished in large part through the exhibition Canadian Eskimo Art, which visited numerous cities in over a dozen European countries between 1955 and 1962,

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including The Hague, Brussels, Paris, Munich, Milan, Stockholm, London, Copenhagen, Bristol, Dublin and Madrid,32 as well as the travelling exhibit Eskimo Art, which under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, dc, toured the United States between 1953 and 1955. In its two iterations it visited twenty-five different American institutions.33 At home, government offices and the private sector alike avidly collected Inuit art. In the essay “Why Do They Buy It?” Reissa Schrager observes, “why do they collect Inuit art? For one reason, because it is perceived as being uniquely ‘Canadian,’ and helps to project a Canadian corporate image.”34 The Canadian public was equally enamoured: Marie Routledge and Ingo Hessel argue in “Contemporary Inuit Sculpture: An Approach to the Medium, the Artists, and Their Work” that the Canadian public reacted to the “Eskimo-ness” of these new carvings, and therein lay the aesthetic and symbolic appeal of Inuit art.35 As Routledge and Hessel explain, not only did the Arctic animals and traditional life scenes appeal to the Canadian audience, but so too did the aesthetics of the carvings, which conveyed a sense of the primitive to the buyer through the use of rounded, reductive, and simplified forms. Facilitating these fantasies of Inuit life, the dramatic fictional accounts of the north by authors such as Farley Mowat reinforced this primitive imaginary in the minds of the southern public. Moreover, the close association with primitivism made these new stone carvings highly appealing to the Western art market, as since the 1940s primitive art had begun to be closely associated with modernism and modern art of the European avant-garde.36 In this way, Inuit arts and culture became both claimed and acclaimed as a distinctly Canadian artistic tradition from a uniquely Canadian primitive people.37 Without a settler identity separate from the us or Great Britain, or a long history on which to rely, Canada turned to the northernmost Indigenous population of North America to provide a national identity that differentiated it from the two liberal powers and provided a history that long preceded the Dominion. The act of appropriation provided the dominant culture with a necessary sense of belonging and the subordinate culture with national and international recognition. Yet while the appropriation of Inuit arts under a national/ist rubric might have in some ways venerated the people and culture, as we have seen, the antithesis of this was also true, in that Inuit culture was at the same time being actively dominated and oppressed by the nation-state on numerous colonial fronts. The critical theorization of the liberal order explains that threats to its hegemony, however small, must be extinguished. As Susan Hiller observed in The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (1991), “Modern nations, particularly former colonies, use the myth of primitivism whenever they display the arts of their decimated, indigenous minorities as symbols of national identity … In the Americas, each large nation has taken the arts of its suppressed original inhabitants and displayed them as symbols of nationality.”38 The conditions of the liberal order framework necessitate the complete conquest of sovereign “aliberal” peoples such as the Inuit, who threaten the project of liberal capitalist modernity through the maintenance of completely disparate ideas about property, politics, and the individual. For the triumph of the liberal order, which was in direct competition with these long-established and sonorous ideologies of Aboriginal cultures, it was imperative that the state impose an intensive program of subjectification, whereby liberal

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epistemologies and the ontological primacy of the category of “individual” be internalized and normalized within the Dominion’s subjects.39 This, as we have seen, was attempted through colonial practices of identification, indoctrination, coercion and oppression. And yet, even though the power of the dominant Canadian state far surpassed that of the subjugated Inuit, the inevitable outcome of liberalism and the triumph of the Western world did not come to pass. As Thomas McEvilley has described in Art and Otherness (1995):

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Colonialism was justified as a means to drag the supposedly ahistorical into history – at which point non-European peoples were supposed to gradually become like European peoples or, more recently, European Americans. The otherness of the non-white would supposedly go away by being assimilated, as when Native Americans sported bowler hats and monocles in 18th century American paintings. But this whitening of the world was not to be. Instead, the white Westerner has been revealed as just another Other, with no special claim to being the self against which all are delineated or the standard to which it is the destiny of all to assimilate. Increasingly, it has become clear that in the emerging global scenario no one cultural form will be enforced on all. Instead, it will be one culture made of many cultures, one history made of many histories – a whole made of disunited fragments with no imperative to unite them.40 As we enter the post-national landscape, transforming this historical relationship of dominant-subordinate, or colonizer-colonized, into one of mutual respect and dignity will require a fundamental reimagining of the lingering liberalist policies that continue to impact Indigenous people. In northern Canada Indigenous populations have been quietly devising their own forms of governance for several decades, and as Frances Abele et al., indicated in Northern Exposure: Peoples, Power and Prospects in Canada’s North (2009), the vast array of governing styles across the north alone reveals how ingenious Canadian Aboriginal groups have managed to work within Canada’s democratic system, sharing power with the colonial state while still protecting their constitutional rights as Aboriginal peoples.41 Nonetheless, as the authors are quick to point out, these arrangements are not yet entirely satisfactory or complete. Rather, I would argue, they need to be viewed as necessary first steps in the process of decolonization. Now that we have ratified our land claims agreements and have, in some cases, developed our own forms of self-governance, establishing our political and economic sovereignty, we must turn our attention to addressing the underlying issues of cultural sovereignty to support the health and well-being of our communities and the preservation of our languages and traditions. The new paradigm for understanding Inuit visual culture should endeavour to enhance our understanding of past successes so that we can build for the future. It should also advance new strategies for the fortification of cultural sovereignty through the development of Inuitspecific methodologies for the creation of art, the institution of Inuit-specific museological and exhibition practices, and the writing of Inuit art history.

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Inuit Art, Inuit Sovereignty: Case Studies for a New Paradigm of Inuit Visual Culture The first palpable strides towards the decolonization of Canadian visual culture and the assertion of Indigenous sovereignty within the field of Canadian Aboriginal art have been observed in both the fields of critical museology and the practices of individual Indigenous artists. These efforts are a part of the ongoing process to both critique the dual impacts of nationalism and modernity in Canada and find new ways of representing global Indigeneities through exhibition and arts practices. In Inuit visual culture, these processes and practices have manifested themselves in very specific ways, and are framed by our distinct history and culture. What follows is an overview of two case studies that examine how Inuit arts and curatorial practice have engaged, resisted, and critiqued the processes of modernity and hegemonic Canadian nationalism through the employment of Inuit-specific strategies. These two abbreviated examples, of an exhibition and an artwork, are meant to illuminate how we can theorize Inuit visual culture within Canada. While my analysis is necessarily brief, these two instances in the development of a critical museology and a new system of Inuit aesthetics should serve to highlight the potential for future research and suggest the depth and breadth of possibility inherent in this re-visioning of the study of Inuit art. The first case study, an exhibition of Inuit art from the early 1990s, came about during a period of intense critical and self-reflexive examination of museums in Canada. The first major shift in Canadian visual culture that engendered a dialogue on Indigenous arts and practice was sparked by the controversial 1988 exhibition The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First Peoples. Just as a global conversation on art museums and Indigenous peoples was generated by the controversy arising from such international exhibitions as Primitivism in 20th Century Art in New York in 1984 and Magiciens de la Terre in Paris in 1989, in Canada, The Spirit Sings fostered a critical dialogue between ethnographic museums and their multiple audiences of Euro-Canadian and AboriginalCanadian publics; Aboriginal curators, artists, and activists; and the Canadian art historical and anthropological communities.42 Since then, Canadian institutions have in many ways been world leaders in the decolonization of the museum space, led by both conflict and collaboration with Indigenous peoples. In 1992, in reaction to The Spirit Sings controversy, a task force jointly sponsored by the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian Museums Association consisting of over twenty-five individuals from both the Aboriginal and museum communities published Turning the Page: Forging New Partnerships between Museums and First Peoples. This task force report resulted in the establishment of an ethical framework for Aboriginal communities and cultural institutions to work together on a wide variety of concerns, focusing on, among other issues, the inclusion of Aboriginal peoples in the interpretation of their own culture, access to collections, repatriation of human remains, training of Native staff, and support for Indigenous cultural institutions.42 While the task force report was not necessarily a solution unto itself, and unfortunately only constituted “principles and recommendations” rather than officially mandated policies, it nonetheless presented a major opportunity for Native and non-Native practitioners of the arts to come together as a

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working group and form a dialogue, and it has since had a great and resonating impact on Canadian museological practice.43 Following the recommendations of Turning the Page, and in the effort to open up the museum space beyond the modernist and nationalist metanarratives of the past, new models of exhibitionary practice began to emerge in the early 1990s. Many of these new models involve an unprecedented level of engagement and power sharing between originating community members and the exhibiting institutions.44 In the field of Inuit art, one of the most significant exhibitions to expound the philosophies of the decolonization of the museum space was exhibited just two years after the publication of Turning the Page. This exhibition not only is an exemplary model of power sharing and collaboration between the artists and curatorial team, but it also represents a significant achievement in the development of Inuit-specific museological practices, with an emphasis on including the principles of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, focusing on the oral tradition, and highlighting the importance of community and consensus in Inuit culture. In 1994 the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull mounted the groundbreaking exhibition Isumavut: The Artistic Expression of Nine Cape Dorset Women, timed simultaneously with the release of Inuit Women Artists: Voices from Cape Dorset, an illustrated text which provided full-colour plates of the artwork complete with autobiographical statements from the nine artists featured in the show, and the personal accounts of the three co-authors and co-curators: French-Canadian lead writer and curator Odette Leroux; Anglo-American adviser and contributor Marion E. Jackson; and Inuk translator, contributor, and consultant Minnie Aodla Freeman. What made the book and exhibition so pioneering was the novel inclusion of the first-person perspective of the artists themselves, achieved through the artists’ involvement in the selection of the works to be displayed, consultation on the curatorial process, their presence at the exhibition during the opening week, and, most importantly, their oral and written accounts of the meaning of the artworks, as highlighted in both the catalogue text and didactic exhibition labels.45 The exhibition thus represented more than the token involvement of a peripheral culture in its own representation, but an actual shift in power away from the singular dominant curatorial voice and toward a model of collective decision making in exhibition practice. In this multi-vocal curatorial experiment Leroux, as representative of the museum, relinquished her authority, instead allowing the artists to chose their own pieces based on an Inuit system of aesthetics. The curatorial team and artists together defined and agreed upon what the parameters and message of the exhibition would be. In her contributing essay, Marion Jackson notes that although in the past museum and gallery institutions have represented Aboriginal peoples in artistic and ethnographic contexts from one authoritative position, “no longer do principal museums turn exclusively to non-Inuit professionals for interpretation of the lives and art of Inuit artists. An alternative model is emerging which acknowledges that understanding is enriched by an awareness of the values and intentions of the artists.”46 Curator and art historian Ruth Phillips, who was involved in the creation of both The Spirit Sings and Turning the Page, notes that in this new model the curator is “a facilitator who puts his or her disciplinary and museological expertise at the service of the community members so that their message can be disseminated as clearly and effectively as

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possible.”47 Isumavut therefore stands out in the history of exhibition practices of major Canadian museums, as it marks a significant moment where Inuit artists had the opportunity to self-represent in a museological context, which until this time was a rare occurrence for not just Inuit but all Canadian Indigenous artists. The exhibition also provides an early indication of how Inuit-specific values such as consensus and collective decision making can be folded into Western curatorial practices. While Isumavut is conspicuously alone in much of the recent history of exhibiting Inuit art, it seems likely that as the field of Inuit visual culture expands, Inuit museological and curatorial practice will also develop, providing its practitioners the opportunity to explore new ways of incorporating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit into both theory and praxis. Inuit-specific methodologies for museological practice may be slow to develop, and yet today many Inuit artists are creating challenging and provocative works of art – works which critique, protest, and engage the legacies of the Canadian national/ist rhetoric and the legacies of colonization; which celebrate and express Inuit cultural sovereignty and the right to self-definition; and which defy our preconceptions of what Inuit art is supposed to look like. For over three decades we have been watching this new Inuit art develop. In Kinngait (Cape Dorset), for example, graphic artists have risen to widespread critical acclaim in recent years with their bold new hybrid forms and transcultural subject matter. The trend towards depicting the intercultural encounter famously began with Pudlo Pudlat, who used his whimsical style to illustrate the exciting introduction of new technologies from the south and the changing Arctic landscape in the face of colonial expansion. Following suit, artists such as Kanaginak Pootoogook and Napatchie Pootoogook poignantly chronicled the incursion of Qallunaat culture in the north, often peppering their acute observations of southern culture with humour and self-reflection (fig. 7.2).

Figure 7.2 Kanaginak Pootoogook, The First Tourist, 1992.

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As two of the successors to this innovative artistic legacy, cousins Annie Pootoogook and Shuvinai Ashoona have garnered international attention for their graphic works as well: Pootoogook for her frank and unromanticized portrayals of contemporary Inuit life and her examination of such colonial influences as daytime television and video games; Ashoona for her dynamic use of perspective, unique aesthetic voice, and fantastic works of imagination. Inuvialuit pioneers in the critique of the impacts of colonization and cultural imperialism, siblings Abraham Anghik Ruben and David Ruben Piqtoukun were the first Inuit to make art about their experiences in the draconian residential school system. These daring works, created in the early 1990s, revealed with great sensitivity the full complexity of the lifelong impacts that the residential schools had on some children. Other artists such as Floyd Kuptana of Paulatuk and Labradorimiut artists Shirley Moorhouse and Mike Massie assert their right to self-define and self-represent through the arts by fearlessly drawing on non-traditional methods and materials, challenging their audience to deny that these hybridized works are authentically Inuit (fig. 7.3). 164

Figure 7.3 Michael Massie, uni-tea, 2000.

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All of these artists and many more of the Inuit avant-garde would make excellent case studies in the new critical theorization of Inuit visual culture, but in the spirit of interdisciplinarity I have focused my second case study on an examination of an Inuit featurelength film. For this case study I have drawn upon what Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesva has defined in his essay “Indigenous Experimentalism” as an Indigenous aesthetic, which represents both a desired outcome and a methodological strategy for the expression of Inuit cultural sovereignty in the arts.48 Masayesva has outlined several key aspects of his Indigenous aesthetic, and each of these elements is exceptionally represented in the recent feature film by Isuma Productions, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006). Following the critical analysis of curator and scholar Candice Hopkins, who first explored the relationship of Masayesva’s scholarship on Indigenous aesthetics to Isuma’s 2001 film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) and to director Zacharias Kunuk’s earlier Nunavut: Our Land (1995) television series, I will discuss the film in relation to the specific requirements of an Inuit artistic aesthetic as outlined by Masayesva’s comprehensive definition, in the process highlighting how Inuit artists such as the creators of The Journals have already embarked on the critical theorization of Inuit visual culture.49 These artists are participating in the formation of an Inuit-specific framework for the creation and appreciation of artwork that resists and subverts the legacies of colonization and, in doing so, supports Inuit cultural sovereignty. Masayesva’s first condition for an Indigenous aesthetic is that the artwork must express the continuities of the past within the contemporary moment, through the implementation of Indigenous narrative structures such as cyclical storytelling and immersive, experiential delivery.50 In the creation of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk and his producing partner Norman Cohn adapted the screenplay from the historical written account by the Danish anthropologist Rasmussen, but the filmmakers recontextualized his highly ethnographic writings so as to tell the story from the Inuit perspective. Even though the storyline itself focuses on one of the greatest changes to take place across the Arctic in the 1920s, the conversion to Christianity as it happened near Kunuk’s home community of Igloolik, the director brilliantly locates the story within traditional Inuit storytelling structures, drawing out the storyline according to the slow conveyance of oral tradition and immersing the audience in an Inuit world. What is more, the continuities in the retelling of this community history are exceptionally exacting; some of the actors in the film even play their own ancestors and relatives as recorded in Rasmussen’s original journals, and all the costuming of traditional dress is made by women and elders in the community of Igloolik, who also provided the food, consulted on the authenticity of details, and worked on and in the film (fig. 7.4). Second, Masayesva’s framework requires that artists who employ an Indigenous aesthetic are “knowledgeable about and committed to working from within the structures and conventions of traditional expression, including the use of the mother tongue as the narrative voice.”51 In The Journals of Knud Rasmussen it is apparent from the very first scene of several Inuit singing ajaja songs (songs from and about personal experiences) that Isuma Productions holds itself accountable to a strict code of Inuit aesthetics, by foregrounding the oral tradition and using Inuktitut within the film’s production. Hopkins has argued in Transference, Tradition, Technology that in other video works by Isuma

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Figure 7.4 On set of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, 2009.

the presence of the oral tradition in the arts is exceedingly important to the maintenance of an Inuit aesthetic, because the oral tradition and the continuance of our oral history is central to our definition of Inuit culture.52 It is how Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit has been transmitted across generational and geographical divides. Any critical theorization of Inuit visual culture must take into account the mutually constitutive relationship between language, artworks, and objects of material culture in the form of stories, songs, and performances that give meaning to aesthetic forms. Lastly, Masayesva’s third condition places emphasis on the thematic engagement with “the larger issue facing Native people: dispossession.”53 Dispossession refers to processes of colonialism that have marginalized, disenfranchised, and indoctrinated Indigenous peoples within their home territories by the dominant colonial or settler populations. In the broadest sense of the term, Indigeneity is defined by the relationship of a people to a specific place and to their displacement within that space, as the minority inhabitants surviving in post-invasion and neo-colonial societies. However, they are also significantly characterized by their determination to preserve, develop, and transmit their territories and cultural identity to future generations. The quality of being Indigenous, then, is not simply a connection to a place; it is a responsibility, an inherited and intergenerational accountability to the land and (to borrow a phrase from Canadian First Nations) to all our relations.

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Artists who explore this last area of the Indigenous aesthetic are those who participate in the processes of decolonization. In other words, the final component of Masayesva’s “Indigenous aesthetic” is the artists’ inclusion of and reference to political voices that are incorporated into his or her artistic practice as a tool for the decolonization of Indigenous peoples’ cultures, knowledge, and lands, and the reclamation of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. The combination of these processes, as argued by Masayesva, constitutes an engagement with the adaptation and restoration of traditional communities and the establishment and maintenance of Indigenous sovereignty through art.54 Kunuk has been outspoken and active on both of these fronts, explaining that what he creates directly resists and combats the onslaught of Qallunaat culture in the form of television and movies. Kunuk decries: “Four thousand years of oral history silenced by fifty years of priests, schools, and cable tv? The death of history is happening in my lifetime.”55 In the north, the colonizing influence of television has been swift and corrosive. Kunuk’s other project, the televised Nunavut series, which documented all aspects of traditional life, was also aimed at counteracting the injurious effects of southern media in the north. Resisting the colonization of the Arctic by preserving tradition in a high-tech medium has been Kunuk’s life’s work. This final case study illustrates the way in which we can engage historical processes and contemporary practices meaningfully in the formation of Inuit visual culture.

Conclusion: Locally Articulated, Globally Oriented Since the late twentieth century the Inuit have been moving slowly yet steadily towards the re-establishment of political, economic, and cultural sovereignty, and the revitalization of Inuit arts and culture is contributing significantly to this process. In recent years, Inuit artists have resisted and critiqued the manipulation and representation of Inuit art as either emblem of nationalist discourse or subject of modernist rhetoric and, in doing so, have played a determining role in asserting the Inuit right to self-definition and cultural sovereignty. Moreover, just as museums have been moving away from their earlier role as institutions that represented univocal, nationalistic, and Eurocentric ideologies, exhibition practices which privilege multivocality, power sharing, and Indigenous inclusion have been developing as well. Although these practices by artists, individuals, and institutions have unfolded at different stages and in different manifestations everywhere, the converging efforts of Indigenous curators and artists with arts professionals, scholars, and institutions from across disciplines have been able to reconstruct Inuit art as a site for the dynamic production of a framework of post-colonial, post-national Inuit visual culture. This essay has provided only a brief overview of some of the practices that have resisted the project of Canada, and only a handful of case studies that illustrate the potential for sovereignty and self-determination through art, but I believe there is great potential in the retheorization of Inuit visual culture on a global scale. The uniqueness of our history of colonization and transculturation in the Arctic, and our subsequent development of an expanse of critical strategies to critique, appropriate, and grapple with that legacy, can be

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usefully articulated globally to provide the impetus and inspiration for other far-flung Indigeneities, on a national scale as a comparative framework for post-nationalist Canadian scholars, and, most significantly, by the Inuit, to close the circle on our continuing efforts to return to self-determination and sovereignty.

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1 McKay, The Challenge of Modernity, ix. 2 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 617. 3 All Inuktitut words in this chapter are in the Nunavut dialect unless otherwise specified, although it should be noted that the concepts herein are manifest across the contemporary Canadian Arctic territories (with some variation) and in many cases throughout the Inuit circumpolar world as well. 4 S. Tagalik, “Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit,” Child and Youth Health, 1–2. 5 For an example of how these interrelated concepts are incorporated into the policies and practices of the Nunavut government, see “Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit,” Department of Human Resources. 6 I. Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader, 16. 7 For a discussion of Inuit art and modernist primitivism, see K. Potter, “James Houston, Armchair Tourism, and the Marketing of Inuit Art,” in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century. 8 J. Rickard, “The Local and the Global,” in Vision, Space, Desire, 66. 9 For a detailed pre- and early contact period history see R. Fosett, In Order to Live Untroubled. 10 Conversion was usually through the Catholic or Anglican faiths and sometimes was even undertaken by other Inuit in advance of missionary involvement. For more on the evangelization of the Arctic, see V. Tungilik and R. Uyarasuk, “The Transition to Christianity,” in Inuit Perspectives.

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11 M. Mitchell, “Social, Economic, and Political Transformation,” in In the Shadow of the Sun, 336. 12 H. Innis, The Fur-Trade in Canada, 49. 13 In “The Colonization of the Arctic,” artist and author Alootook Ipellie indicates that “between 1956 and 1961, one in seven Inuit were in various southern sanitoriums receiving treatment for tuberculosis. The incidence of otitis and meningitis in Iqaluit were above the national average.” Ipellie, “The Colonization of the Arctic,” in Indigena, 51. 14 J.C. Scott, J. Tehranian, and J. Mathias, “Government Surnames and Legal Identities,” in National Identification Systems, 34–8. 15 For more information on the forcible relocation of Inuit settlements from Nunavik and Nunatsiavut see F.J. Tester and P. Kulchyski, Tammarniit (Mistakes); R. Dussault and G. Erasmus, The High Arctic Relocation; and C. Brice-Bennett, Reconciling with Memories/Ikkaumajânnik Piusivinnik. 16 R. Diubaldo, The Government of Canada and the Inuit, 49. 17 J. Milloy, A National Crime, 26. 18 The government of Canada apologized to survivors of the Canadian residential school system in 2008. For a complete transcript of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology and all the federal government apologies made on 11 June 2008, see “Appendix Two: Canada’s Statements of Apology” in G. Younging, J. Dewar, and M. Degagné, eds, Response, Responsibility, and Renewal, 357–71.

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19 As defined by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, “Intergenerational or multi-generational trauma happens when the effects of trauma are not resolved in one generation. When trauma is ignored and there is no support for dealing with it, the trauma will be passed from one generation to the next. What we learn to see as ‘normal’ when we are children, we pass on to our own children … The unhealthy ways of behaving that people use to protect themselves can be passed on to children, without them even knowing they are doing so. This is the legacy of physical and sexual abuse in residential schools.” Aboriginal Healing Foundation, Aboriginal Healing Foundation Program Handbook, A5. 20 As Richard Diubaldo explains in The Government of Canada and the Inuit, 1900– 1967, the rcmp were mainly concerned with keeping out foreign whalers and explorers and maintaining Canada’s hold over part of the Arctic, and so they generally left the fate of the Inuit to the missionaries and traders. During the boom in the white fox trapping industry in the 1910s and 1920s, this arrangement worked well, but during the cyclical decline of the white fox and corresponding Great Depression, fur prices sank and the Inuit became increasingly dependent on welfare (14). 21 Ibid., 36. 22 Ibid. 23 Ottawa, Department of the Interior, Annual Report. 24 H. Goetz, The Development of Inuit Art, 7. 25 One program specifically mentioned that a government grant to the industrial homes had been provided under the agreement that ailing or aging Inuit who became a burden on hunters in the camps would be admitted and instructed in handicrafts. Unfortunately, little is known about the outcome of this venture, as it appears that the government

26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41

42

did not monitor or administer the program after the grant was given. Goetz, The Development of Inuit Art, 32. Goetz, “Inuit Art,” in In the Shadow of the Sun, 359. For more on the “discovery” of contemporary Inuit art, see N. Graburn, “The Discovery of Inuit Art”; and V. Watt, “The Beginning,” in Canadian Guild of Crafts. N. Graburn, “Inuit Art and Canadian Nationalism,” 5. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 6. N. Vorano, “Inuit Art in a Qallunaat World,” 13. Ibid., 565–7. Ibid., 568–9. R. Schrager, “Why Do They Buy It?” 1. M. Routledge and I. Hessel, “Contemporary Inuit Sculpture,” in In the Shadow of the Sun, 447. J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 242. Any understanding of the invention of Canadian Inuit art within the framework of nationalism builds on the work of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), which traces the foundations of nationalism through collective fictions; Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s edited volume The Invention of Tradition (1992), which demonstrates how such invented traditions become naturalized through nationalist rhetoric; and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), which reveals the colonial dimensions inherent in the creation of a collective imaginary. Susan Hiller, Editor’s introduction to Part iv in The Myth of Primitivism, 283. McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 622. T. McEvilley, Art and Otherness, 131–2. F. Abele, T.J. Courchene, F.L. Seidle, and F. St-Hilaire, “Introduction and Overview,” in Northern Exposure, 3. The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of

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Canada’s First Peoples opened at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, as the highlight of the Arts Festival of the 1988 Winter Olympics. Instead, The Spirit Sings became a platform for Lubicon Lake Cree to expose their exploitation by the federal and provincial governments in collusion with oil corporations, as well as a forum for other Aboriginal peoples to finally voice their protest over their historic colonial misrepresentation in anthropological institutions. The lending museums were charged with not honouring their custodianship of the Aboriginal heritage in their trust, and the items included in the exhibition highlighted the still-ruling discourse of the salvage paradigm as evidenced by the presented works. While in the text panels and accompanying exhibition catalogue efforts had been made to draw continuities to the present, the museum audiences perceived little connection between the historical content and the living First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people in Canada, drawing sharp criticism from Aboriginal groups who had long been ignored in other such exhibitions or marginalized by ethnographic museums. 43 Assembly of First Nations, Canadian Museums Association, Turning the Page, 8–9. 44 For example, under pressure from a number of sources including academics and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists following the publication of Turning the Page (1992), the National Gallery of Canada – under the curatorial leadership of Denise Leclerc – con-

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46 47 48

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50 51 52 53 54 55

vened a working group to help design a curatorial program that would enable the integration of Aboriginal objects into the display of Canadian art. The result was Art of This Land, the permanent exhibition launched in 2003 in the newly renamed Galleries of Canadian and Aboriginal Art, which rotates objects of significance from Indigenous communities into the exhibition space alongside French and English settler objects. Isumavut loosely translates as “our thoughts,” which foregrounds the role of Inuit artists in interpreting their artwork in this exhibition. O. Leroux, M.E. Jackson, and M.A. Freeman, Inuit Women Artists, 38. R.B. Phillips, “Introduction,” in Museums and Source Communities, 163. V. Masayesva, “Indigenous Experimentalism,” in Transference, Tradition, Technology, 170. C. Hopkins, “Interventions in Digital Territories,” in Transference, Tradition, Technology, 126–37. Masayesva, “Indigenous Experimentalism,” 175. Ibid., 174. Hopkins, “Interventions in Digital Territories,” 126–37. Masayesva, “Indigenous Experimentalism,” 176. Ibid. Z. Kunuk, “I First Heard the Story of Atanarjuat from My Mother,” in Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, 13.

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8 Michael Snow: Don’t you think … it’s good to be nationalistic if you’re a weak country but it’s bad if you’re powerful? Joyce Wieland: Yeah, because most forms of nationalism are awful. Canada has a different nationalism!1

The Vacant Lot: Who’s Buying It? Richard William Hill

Introduction: Working Around Nations I suppose it is an indication of the extent to which the study of Canada’s visual history has been explicitly a nation-building undertaking that we are obliged to acknowledge a crisis in the field when the traditional foundations of nationalism are called into question. After all, one need not normally have faith in or accept the subject of one’s research on its own terms: you needn’t be a Christian to study cathedrals or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or a communist to study socialist realism. The fear seems to be, as the quote from which the title of this symposium was extracted suggests, that without a nation-building project to oblige us to be interested in what has gone on here, research will naturally move to more interesting events elsewhere. In the face of a loss of faith in the nation as such, we therefore have several (possibly intractable) problems to sort out. We need a way to think of our practices as artists and art historians as international both despite the ongoing reality of nations and against the predatory, homogenizing internationalism of globalization. We need our progressive internationalism to challenge the notions of margin and centre that exclude the many kinds of experience which have been repressed both through processes of colonization and neo-liberalism. And we need to be able to articulate local experience, cultural difference, and notions of ethnicity and cultural heritage without “nationalizing” them into rigid identity politics. What we also urgently need to stop doing is imagining ourselves as agents of the state busy with the project of building the nation and, more subtly, stop thinking

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of Canadian nationalism as a strategic essentialism – a reasonable defence against other nationalisms or globalization. If nationalism is the problem, why would more nationalism be the solution? We need a better strategy. This may be the end of a certain kind of “Canadian” art history, but in another sense, perhaps our field, however fluid it might be, is just getting started. Because I don’t imagine the possibility of ridding ourselves of nationalism, nations, or states in our immediate future, I believe our strategies will necessarily be subversive and deconstructive rather than revolutionary. As someone who has worked within a variety of state-supported institutions responsible for “Canadian” art while never really believing in Canada as a national project, I suppose I do have something to say about how one might work within the reality of a state while actively resisting its ideologies. I have never been invested in the traditional definition of the nation-state, never believed the nationstate to arise as the essence of a people or the ideal of a system of thought. I have never believed in its borders, except as an unpleasant administrative fact of life. Yet I have worked in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Department of Canadian Art, where it was my responsibility, along with my colleagues, to begin the substantive inclusion of Indigenous art into the permanent collection and Canadian Wing galleries. While I suppose the institution saw this as the subsuming of Indigenous visual histories within the narrative of Canadian art history, I saw it as potentially a series of interruptions to that narrative, a challenge to its foundational mythologies and a clear expression of the lack of contiguity between Canadian and Indigenous geographic and temporal borders. At York University, where I teach, among other things, inherited courses like “Problems in Canadian Art: Focus on Canadian Painting” and “Moments in Canadian Art,” my project is more or less the same. In my research I am promiscuous in my interests and sources and work on topics from the local to the global. I follow my curiosity, which has no regard for nationality, except when it becomes an obstacle. I accept that I live within the administrative functions of a nation-state, Canada, that has made material many of its ideas through the creation of institutions and is not likely to go away. But I don’t believe in the nationstate as a semi-mystical essence, even when so many of its most important public buildings are modelled on the designs of temples and cathedrals.

Indigenous Peoples and Canadian Nationhood When you are an Indigenous person asked to write about the nationhood of a settlercolonial colony, as I often am in one form or another, there is an expectation and even an obligation to say certain things against the national narratives of the state and to point out, once again, the violence, theft, and exclusion of difference at the heart of its foundation.2 I’m willing to re-cover that ground here as a reminder of where I am coming from and just in case saying such things over and over again might eventually make a difference. But I also want eventually to ask some more difficult questions about the nationhood of First Nations and what I see as our untenable situation in relation to the neo-liberal democracy.

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From childhood I recall being aware that the idea of Canada was a fiction constructed against “Indians,” as we would have said back then. Whatever bit of colonial discourse found its way into our home (almost exclusively through the television) was subject to my mother’s critique (she was big on women’s liberation too, but that is a story I plan to tell elsewhere). We were constantly taught to be suspicious of the narratives that we received in school or from popular culture because these narratives were so obviously against us.3 I have since met Indigenous people who did not grow up feeling that way, but to me it seemed obvious that each story about Canada was a story against Indigenous sovereignty, that each celebration of Canada – even (perhaps especially) multicultural Canada – was a dance on the grave of that sovereignty. It is not the happiest way to grow up, but I think it is actually much better for one’s intellectual freedom and critical capacity than to be actively interpolated by a dominant national narrative and to live it as one’s own.

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As I have already implied, the fact that the nation-state is an ideological construct does not mean that it is “unreal” or that it does not, nevertheless, have profound material consequences. Indeed, the reciprocal process between the manipulation of material reality and ideology is intense, and, as Althusser argued, apparently benevolent institutions, large or small, are often the form in which ideology is materialized.4 Unify that which has no intrinsic unity? A railroad might work. Or, later, a national broadcaster. And then a catchy modern “folksong” celebrating the creation of the railroad that can be played by the national broadcaster. And so on. Eventually you do produce subjects with at least some commonality of experience, and the truth of your claim appears to be vindicated retroactively. As I said, I do not deny that we live within this administrative framework, or even that aspects of it are desirable, particularly those vestiges that are redistributive of resources, such as universal health care. I am just unwilling to believe in nationhood in the way that national narratives require. This means one cannot operate as though there is no nation of Canada, or people who passionately believe themselves to be Canadians, or, for that matter, no history of Canadian art, however concise. And I don’t believe that the nation-state has evaporated into unimportance in the face of globalization either, although it has always been, despite the occasional mobilizations of labour power, primarily the agent of capital. So I am willing to talk about Canada and Canadian art, but not exclusively and never entirely believing in them. My model for making sense of how to work within and around nation-states without signing up to their projects or internalizing the identities they offer has long been the artist Jimmie Durham. Durham, who is of Cherokee heritage, was an activist for Indigenous rights and sovereignty with the American Indian Movement (aim) in the latter half of the 1970s and became an internationally known artist in the late 1980s for his work around Indigenous representation. In aim and later in the art world, Durham was a fierce critic of the us’s foundational national narratives, but he was also witness to some of the darker aspects of ethnic nationalism that found their way into Indigenous activism and thought.

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In the early 1990s Durham left the us permanently and has been based in Europe ever since. His art and writing there occasionally touch on Indigenous issues but have primarily been concerned with the role of European architecture in materializing the narratives of nationstates. In 1994, around the time of his return to Europe, Durham wrote an essay, “A Friend of Mine Said That Art Is a European Invention,” exploring the problems either of maintaining a national identity or of being “international” when the very word itself contains within it the idea of nationhood, of interactions between representatives of various nations. “Or do we imagine us all,” he writes, “to be free cosmopolitan spirits? Even if we do, the authority in charge of permits imagines nothing, so the question remains.”5 His first move then is to remind us of the important distinction between nations and states that is so often elided, particularly in North America. The state is an administrative system, he argues, but “in most cases the state has taken over nationality, as others have said, by terrorism.”6 In this scheme nationalities, ethnicities, and culture are repressed or appropriated into state national culture, which is merely an effect of power and not a genuine culture. Reaction to state oppression by the oppressed often ends up channelled into ethnic-nationalist or religious fundamentalism of some sort, as Durham saw in the breakdown of the American Indian Movement, among other places. The states themselves create a competitive internationalism of their respective nations and internationalism can easily become a multicultural collection of nation-states. In this situation “there is no proper voice for anyone, whether one is an artist, a museum, or a nation.”7 I would add that while we humans need some form of administrative system in order to function socially not many people easily fall in love with administrative systems as such (although some try and Canadians are likely more susceptible than most: see Michael Ignatieff, for example, on civic nationalism).8 This is where the appropriative aspect of state nationalism comes in, stretching our genuine attachments over its own grotesque shape. Modern nation-statehood is a love story, and surely there is no more bizarre love than the fetishistic attachment that forms between a human being and a nation-state. Story is the right word though, because the relationship must constantly be narrated into existence. Of course we also imagine nations without states, and through these narratives we also articulate both our connectedness to people of our group and our difference from outsiders, real or imagined. These can be simple descriptive narratives – we are the people who live in a certain place, eat a certain food, share a common language, and so forth. But it is often a short trip from description to proscription; from discussions of identity to a certain kind of narrow identity politics. From saying: “we are the people who do x,” to “because you are one of our people, you must do x.” I suspect, however unfashionable it is to say in art circles where we prefer culture to rule, that there are deep evolutionary underpinnings to both the warm fellow feeling that arises from our connection to other people (which makes being human worthwhile) and our terrible tendency to gather in a pack and persecute or kill the outsider or the deviant within, create class distinctions, and so forth. I can see the survival value of such tendencies. But by this I do not mean that we are therefore biologically fated to always behave so, only that we need to be cautious and self-reflexive about some of the darker capacities that always seem so readily available to us, particularly given how effectively (I was

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going to say easily, but in fact it requires a great deal of ideological preparation) the modern nation-state has managed to appropriate those capacities for its own ends. The outcome has been that we end up true patriot loving our administrative system – the state – as though it was our dear, lifelong friend, a rather remarkable act of reification. It is this magic that the modern nation-states performed with such success against both “external” colonial subjects and internal dissidents. But what about that familiar Canadian exceptionalism that Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland are enacting in the quotation that begins this essay? Is our nationalism not a strategic essentialism against our nemesis the us? Don’t other countries love us because, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently said we, “have no history of colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them”?9 Of course the question of scale immediately comes to mind. One need not be of Indigenous heritage to look beyond our wilful national ignorance and see the many nations and communities still being colonized within the bosom of our state. This ignorance persists in part because the nation-state has so successfully positioned itself as the only legitimate unit of autonomous political organization. Among nations Canada may be the relative weakling, but there are plenty of us within the state against whom that nationalism is often turned to police dissent. Indeed, we might ask at what scale this effect might stop? I suspect we could make our way down to the level of the workplace or high-school clique and still not find a group so weak that they aren’t capable of finding a victim dissident upon whom to force their consensus. At an even more basic level, why nationalism at all? Why not be honest, rather than strategic, when short-term gains only set up the long-term perpetuation of these familiar forms of stupidity? Why do we have to fall in love? We know that love is wonderful, but also that it makes us stupid and blind. In whose interest is it that we behave stupidly and blindly in relation to the state? In his essay Durham tackles this question with a thought experiment to imagine the most benign form of a nation and proceeds to show how easily that institution might begin to work against its founding principles. He imagines a nation founded under ideal circumstances, in which people sharing the same language unite to create a nation prior to any particular power imbalance and with the intention of having an open conversation with one another. He speculates that shortly afterwards an unacceptable form of dissent will arise and the dissenter will be forced into exile, although they will be able to claim, with some justification, to be holding true to the original values of the nation. He then imagines how this exile might be taken up and celebrated in another community in which her taboo ideas are accepted as commonplace, although the new society will eventually grow bored once the exotic novelty wears off. At the same time, he continues, we might imagine that the exile has a sister in exile as well, who speaks out against an idea held to be true in the new society and is not welcomed but shunned a second time and therefore commits suicide. Given this, Durham asks, “What would be a possible excuse for my little nations? It could only be, it seems to me, their destruction. Destruction in the sense of continual change. One nation would exist only as a way of speaking to others, not amongst itself. Doesn’t communication have the idea of change within it?”10 From this

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point of view even the most benign nation is in danger of being caught up in the blind mimetic repetition of itself, rather than an engagement with circumstances as they arise, in part at least through communication with other nations. If we can get past “the bad histories and bad excuses,” the old and now often false divisions of self and other, we might be able to “by-pass nations,” treating “them as curiosities that lack compelling powers.” They may terrorize us still, but we will no longer be interpellated by their terrorism, but see it “as outside forces.”11 He concludes that “there is an art discourse that is always on the verge of being interesting. Almost a discourse. We cannot just interrupt it with a new discourse, we have to enter it; and each as ourselves with our own proper voices. Us who have neither selves nor proper voices.”12 I would argue that Durham has spent the past few decades engaged in that very project, speaking strategically and elusively, but never quite as the person his audience expects. In Europe Durham has positioned himself as a potential (but never fully actualized, since it is a heuristic fiction, rather than a real state) “homeless orphan.” He has argued, in effect, that there is no home to return to, saying, “People often think I’m in exile . I was born in exile. I was born under the State of Arkansas, I’m not from the us. The us is my enemy. I’m in a much less exiled position in Europe than I am in the us.”13 At the same time Durham insists that he has not moved to Europe, but to Eurasia, a continent so impossibly large that he need not sign up to the agenda of any of its particular states: “I can be Eurasian just by living on this continent.”14 Of course these are only a few of the many strategies that the artist has employed to keep his identity open while participating as fully in the many places he works as possible. As he puts it, “I think I’m personally quite lucky because I’m not an outsider or an insider and I still have the great privilege to talk … I’m not here to attack and I’m not here to join up either.”15 In proposing Durham as a model I don’t mean to imply that we ought all to move to Europe, but rather to examine our own situations to see what strategies might work in our own circumstances. Which leads me to my own unreconciled dilemma.

Annexing the Vacant Lot: Globalization and Up-to-Date Indian Hating Vacant lots are not really vacant. That’s propaganda on behalf of private property. They get used all the time. They are simply not being used or occupied in any of the ways the state recognizes or regulates, nor do the activities that occur in them generate capital. My friends and I availed ourselves of them as often as possible when I was young just because they lacked the organization, regulation, and surveillance that goes on in parks and other official “play areas.” For the past few decades I have lived in large, quickly expanding cities that have very few vacant lots. The real estate is simply too valuable to leave vacant. Many social critics on the left have noted that this is the way history has been moving, that space is being structured and regulated by being brought into capitalism, through the administration of the state, until there is very little “outside” left. The history of European empire and industrial modernity are histories of enclosure, of turning all space into property.

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I think this is at the heart of the terrible situation Indigenous peoples are in now. Because nation-statehood is the only game in town for those of us not in control of capital, there is pressure to imagine the achievement of Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood as a process of becoming more like nation-states ourselves. But in an essay from 2003 Durham provocatively offered an alternative interpretation of what it means to be Indigenous, arguing that it is less a being-here-firstness that unites us than a resistance, whether conscious or structural, to incorporation into the structure of the modern nationstate.16 It strikes me that this precisely characterizes the way in which Canadians hate Indians these days. Read any comments section of a Canadian news website featuring a story with an Indigenous subject and you will see a stream of vitriol as potent as anything from the nineteenth century, but in the majority of cases the hatred is not framed in nineteenth-century racist terms. The objection is, in one way or another, that the damned Indians are not doing their part to be included in the multicultural neo-liberal paradise that is Canada. They aren’t taking advantage of the opportunities Canada has placed before them. They aren’t working enough. They aren’t becoming educated enough to participate in the economy. The desire is to see Indians as just another “minority” within Canada waiting for the opportunity to be allowed in to share the joys of consumerism at the First World trough. I have even seen postings from people who identify themselves as new immigrants and write that they don’t see why they have to keep carrying the burden of looking after Indians when they had nothing to do with colonizing them. I met an “elder” a few years ago who works with street kids in a Canadian city. He told me that Inuit kids are the hardest to reach, because they’ve been so recently colonized that they have developed very few consumer desires. He is able to convince some of the Indian kids to straighten up and find employment with the lure of the consumer goods they will be able to buy with their wages, but he claimed Inuit he worked with were mostly immune. They just don’t want any of the stuff. I’m still not over being depressed by that story. Because what’s the alternative? In the world we live in now there are so very few vacant lots; one is either grit in the wheels of capitalism and ground up, or one goes with the flow. Why not just go with the capitalist flow? There are more Indigenous success stories every day – Indigenous entrepreneurs, Indigenous professionals (like me) who seem to have found a way to be oil, rather than grit, on the wheels of our economy. Each year there are more band administrators who have been through “leadership training” at places like the Banff Centre, where I’m sure they learn neo-liberal management strategies and philosophy. I assume this based on the number of aggressively pro-capitalist Indians I have been meeting recently, many of whom believe the way to autonomy is through private initiative. Who can fault this when the alternative seems to be abject poverty, government dependence, and the continuation of the social breakdown that began with colonization? I can imagine a future with a successful Indigenous middle class and even the preservation of certain traditions and ceremonies, while most of the Indigenous values that matter to me fall quietly away to be replaced by the ethos of capitalism. Because I think Marx was likely right in his assertion that at its deepest levels culture and cultural values emerge out of the sort of economy one lives within. Despite that, the only hope that I can see is intellectual; that we can find ways to maintain and extend a critical viewpoint,

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as Durham suggests. But how we do this in a culture that seems so effective at ensuring we don’t think about these things, I have no idea. With the homogeneity of globalization and the flattening generalizations of nationalism, there is more value than ever in the local, the specific, the out of the way and impractical. I want to remain attentive to these in the work I do. That, and to find a way to put some grit in the gears without getting ground up.

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1 From the catalogue True Patriot Love (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1971). Interview on folding sheet in pocket of inside back cover. Thanks to Wieland scholar Kristy A. Holmes for helping me find this quote. 2 My most recent effort, if you like that sort of thing, is “Too Silent to Be Real,” in Expanding Horizons, 98–103. 3 Jimmie Durham described a similar experience in an interview: “My family taught me to be a militant. Because we were against the us, the us is against us. So that was my first level of knowledge about the world, to be against the us. Then, when I got older, I could put it in more sophisticated terms.” S. Canning, “Jimmie Durham,” 32. 4 L. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, 155–6.

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5 J. Durham, “A Friend of Mine Said That Art Is a European Invention,” in Global Visions, 113. 6 Ibid., 113. 7 Ibid., 114. 8 M. Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging. 9 David Ljunggren, “Every G20 Nation Wants to Be Canada, Stephen Harper Insists.” 10 Durham, “A Friend of Mine Said That Art Is a European Invention,” 115. 11 Ibid., 116. 12 Ibid., 119. 13 J. Durham, “Situations,” transcript of lecture at the School of Chemistry, Bristol, in Contemporary Art, 178. 14 Durham, “A Friend of Mine Said That Art Is a European Invention,” 121. 15 Ibid., 183. 16 J. Durham, “Binnenlandse Zaken [Internal Affairs],” 86–93.

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PART THREE DISCONTIGUOUS DEPENDENCIES Kirsty Robertson

In December 2010, WikiLeaks released a list of “infrastructural sites deemed vital to the national security of the United States.”1 The document – a cable sent by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to overseas embassies – catalogued “critical dependencies” that if interrupted, destroyed, or exploited “would likely have an immediate and deleterious effect on the United States.”2 Locations, objects, institutions, and factories were included, among them a Danish manufacturer of smallpox vaccine, the Nadym Gas Pipeline junction in Russia (“the most critical gas facility in the world”), the Southern Cross undersea cable landing in Suva, Fiji, a “battery-grade” manganese mine in Gabon, Africa, the Straits of Malacca, Israeli ordnance manufacturers, Australian pharmaceutical corporations, German rabies vaccine suppliers, and Canadian hydroelectric dams.3 Although almost all of the entities included in the list are publicly known, the release of the cable sparked a frenzy of consternation – the extraterritorial stretch of the United States across other supposedly sovereign territories had been exposed, but so too had the state’s vulnerability and dependency.4 What the cable demonstrated was the frayed geographic edges of the nation-state. It revealed an intermingling of nations that belied the accord that has generally been granted between nation, citizenship, and territorial containment.5 As Geoff Manaugh wrote, “the flipside of a recognizable US border is this unwitting constellation: a defensive perimeter or outsourced inside, whereby the contiguous nation-state becomes fragmented into a discontiguous network-state, its points never in direct physical contact. It is thus not a constitutional entity in any recognized sense, but a coordinated infrastructural ensemble that spans whole continents at a time.”6 He concludes, “In identifying these outlying chinks in its armor, the United States has inadvertently made clear a spatial realization that the concept of the nation-state has changed so rapidly that nations themselves are having trouble keeping track of their own appendages.”7

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Manaugh’s definition of the network-state appears to suggest the growing irrelevance of defining a nation by its territorial boundaries. This goes hand in hand with the theory that under late capitalism power is amassed through the control of information and the annexation of markets rather than through the accession of territory (an idea made famous by Hardt and Negri’s text Empire).8 In the example of the WikiLeaks document, however, there remains something of the nation-state: the collection of sites of interest is still obviously related to the protection and positioning of the United States in a global constellation of competing states. Moving beyond the earthly realm, Lisa Parks offers another, less territorialized example. Parks shows how national communications infrastructures (the wires and transmission towers referred to by Jennifer VanderBurgh in her chapter in this section) are overlaid by an extraterrestrial sphere of transnational satellite and wireless sytems.9 Jostling for space in the ring around the earth, satellite territory is divided not into nations, but into small marketable packages that in turn beam signals back to earth, creating markets for communications and televisual technologies. On the one hand, though often broadcasting to specific national audiences or relaying information to specific government or military bodies, the organization of satellite territory offers an important way to re-evaluate the landscape of nation.10 On the other hand, as satellites become ever more important to the maintenance of communication networks, military technologies, and surveillance strategies, and as space becomes limited, one may again see the emergence of efforts to territorialize and nationalize space. The four chapters in this section play out some of the issues brought up in the two aforementioned examples. Each demonstrates how the nation is less a Westphalian entity than a geographically unbounded set of interests, stretching from beneath the ground to outer space, nevertheless coalescing in a particular time and space around a series of affects and closely defended semi-porous borders. All of the chapters read through and develop a tension between the material nation – the geographically bounded territorial state – and the immaterial nation – the set of ideas that create what Benedict Anderson referred to as the “imagined community,” and that we suggested in the Introduction might be seen as a part of a liberal order framework.11 Each essay also suggests that any easy relationship that might have been assumed between the material and the immaterial in creating the nation has been profoundly affected by contemporary communications, technologies, mobilities, and economies. The nation is simultaneously ravelled and unravelled, aggregated and disaggregated, imagined as unified, even as it emerges into the discontiguous and fragmented network-state that Manaugh describes above. The nation more closely resembles a flow chart than a geographically bounded entity, with the direction of flow often ideologically determined. Following the above interpretation, material and immaterial nations cross over, meld, retract, and disappear into one another such that nation appears to be a complex, fluid set of interchangeable and mutable “virtualities.”12 Nevertheless, these virtualities continue to have very real instrumentality and agency, and very real material needs and consequences. While this is not to suggest that nations were ever perfectly bounded or unaffected by trade and exchange, what the four essays in this section suggest is that changing technological landscapes have brought with them changing languages with

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which to describe the mutability of the nation-state: in war and conflict, in the relationship between territory and nation, in deterritorialized worlds online, and in the dream of a borderless world. In this foreword, I introduce the essays by looking at the complicated relationship between the national and the global. Here, I loosely follow Saskia Sassen, who notes that “the epochal transformation we call globalization is taking place inside the national to a far larger extent than is usually recognized.”13 As Sassen notes, globalization has not eclipsed or erased the nation (indeed “the national is … often one of the key enablers and enactors of the emergent global scale”).14 Instead, the nation-state has been, in Sassen’s words, “denationalized,” such that processes and bodies typically associated with the national (national legislatures and judiciaries, local, national, and transnational businesses, political parties, and so on) reorient themselves “toward global logics and away from historically shaped national logics.”15 At the end of the introductory essay, I turn to No Border initiatives as a way of briefly fleshing out radical activism that takes as its dream a nationless world, founded in diasporic mobilities and defining itself as a kind of emancipatory (and often anti-capitalist or anti-neo-liberal) corollary to the movement of goods that underlies the network-state that Manaugh identifies and Sassen expounds. A point to be made here is that while the liberal order project that resulted in the formation of the discipline of art history might appear far removed from twenty-firstcentury questions of globalization, Sassen’s argument begins to illustrate some of the continuities. The process of trade liberalization that seems to undermine the importance of the nation-state in fact simply extends its liberalizing project into the global. In other words, the nation itself was never as important as the liberal project of which it was an embodiment. It was nevertheless a powerful embodiment, such that the nation remains a central way of imagining and enacting sovereignty; it exists even as it is a mirage. In some ways, what is hardest to describe and name is that tension – the way in which nation is a constant process of aggregation/disaggregation. This (dis)aggregation, however, is simply another way of describing the same project, the same hegemonic positioning of the liberal nation-state; only now it appears somewhat discontiguous, somewhat dependent, and conjunctive with the global. Rob Shields notes in his chapter “The Aesthetics of the Territory-Nation-State and the ‘Canadian Problematique’” that “notions such as the nation and nationalism have ironically become the most globalized of concepts” (188). However, as Shields shows, the nation-state is never easily identified, though numerous attempts to brand or advertise countries as tourist destinations or places safe for foreign investment might suggest otherwise.16 Rather, Shields reads nation as a “distinctive” balance between nation, state, and territory; that is, between the immaterial idea of the nation and the material topography and geography, including less graspable elements such as climate (and climate change, nibbling away at coastlines, changing patterns of weather). In extreme environments one is particularly aware of this relationship; thus, even as the ideal of the nationstate appears most theoretical it is grounded – in climate, in geography, in terrain. While Shields uses his chapter to explore the relationship among nation, state, and territory, I’ve drawn out parts of his argument in order to link them back to the tension between the immaterial and material nation. A country is visible, he suggests, but a

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nation is made to appear. Nations are produced from their parts, in that what is seen is only ever a tiny fragment of the whole; they cannot be seen or even imagined in their totality. Shields writes, “What is possible are glimpses of bodies, activities, and local settings, which must be taken synecdochically as indices of a continuous whole. A God’s-eye view of the whole is unavailable” (189). The state is thus a virtuality, and as such is always partially invisible, partially inaccessible. Shields refers to this “as if” – the local/ locale is treated “as if” it represents the whole, the nation. “As if” is conjured through a careful curation – of visual culture and cultural products such as maps, flags, and songs – but also through a geopolitical gaze that renders certain landscapes as exemplary of ideological imaginings of nationhood; a view represents the whole even as it represents only one viewpoint. There is, notes Shields, an intractable relationship between site and sight in the production of the nation. But there is also a play through geography. Where the map captures surface, geography or topography runs deep through changing and ancient landscapes that if imagined through time render assumed borderlines nonsensical. “States as institutions” he concludes, “seek to ground themselves in the virtuality of nation but also depend on the materiality of territory” (193). Jennifer VanderBurgh opens her chapter, “Our Vacant Lot Is a Trailer Park,” with a landscape of a different sort – a trailer park populated with wheeled homes that “in theory could go anywhere, but by choice or circumstance stay in one location” (203). This landscape is certainly not the kind of landscape through which one might imagine “Canada” (though arguably trailer parks are found across the country and are as, if not more, common than the twisted trees and empty landscapes of the Group of Seven). VanderBurgh’s chapter might be seen as located where landscape ends and turf begins. Speaking specifically of the trailer park in the television show Trailer Park Boys, VanderBurgh notes, “It is at once a general microcosm of community and some place specific. It is a hellhole, a bastion of ignorance, and a (strange) microcosm of an ideal community where everyone knows each other, and love and loyalty do exist” (204). It is specific and universal at the same time, and it is, in terms of the show, both a creation of current labour conditions (the show is a multi-national co-production employing Canadian and foreign personnel) and also a product of Canadian cultural policy. VanderBurgh picks up from Shields’s notion of the territory-nation-state but approaches it from a slightly different angle, echoing Sassen and noting that even spaces that seem borderless can be contained and defined by the very absences and slippages of globalism. These spaces are often where the nation reasserts itself. The language in these two essays is very different: Shields’s is a theoretical inquiry; VanderBurgh’s explores that theory through a concrete, material example. But both together illustrate the manner in which material and immaterial notions of nation blend into each other. VanderBurgh’s essay also speaks to the expansion of discipline – the way that visual culture can no longer be contained (if it ever was) by the category of art history, which now spills over into the popular culture of television and film and the concomitant policies that imagine such visual culture(s) as both nation-building phenomena and internationally tradeable commodities.

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Turning from television to the Internet, VanderBurgh writes, “The rhetoric of a ‘digital universe,’ is a strangely intergalactic metaphor for a Web whose Internet is only earthbound or ‘worldwide’” (202). The Internet or “digital universe” is often assumed to supersede the nation-state, relegating it to the status of artifact in a new digital age. How absurd, she writes, “the claim that ‘these days’ the nation-state is irrelevant to the lived experience of Web-based culture” and the implication “that the state is benign” (203). VanderBurgh notes how state funding structures, copyright legislation, licensing agreements, and the law determine how the “digital universe” is created and received. Thus, while the Internet might appear to subsume the nation-state, effectively creating a post-national sphere, nation-bound cultural policy creates content for that boundless enterprise. VanderBurgh quotes Zoë Druick, who suggests that such practices “frame” “the location of the nation-state as a place that has the appearance of being a social or cultural fact” (206). VanderBurgh asks, “What was the purpose of this trade route that ‘joined’ the Canadian territory with an expensive and cumbersome mass of wires and towers determined to get to those hard to reach places? One answer, to borrow Erin Manning’s phrase, was to make the nation appear less ‘ephemeral’ than it actually is” (207). In the tense space between an apparently limitless online world and a contained funding structure sits the trailer park, demonstrating clearly the tangled relations between the local, the national, and the global. It also demonstrates the alienation that lies at the heart of many of these equations. Though a comedy, Trailer Park Boys is ultimately about getting by in an unfriendly world. Although nations may be ephemeral and in constant need of affirmation, that affirmation takes place through belonging, and often through defining an outside that is not part of that body. This is certainly true of Canadian cultural policy, which has often defined itself as protecting Canadian culture from US American mass culture. Canadian culture, in other words, is that which is not US American. Obviously, in a settler-colonial nation built through immigration and atop already extant Indigenous nations, any notion of purity is fantasy. However, an idea of what Eva Mackey calls a “Canadian-Canadian” centre against which others have been defined as “multicultural” has persisted, up through the latest wave of immigration.17 There are many scales of belonging here: the belonging that could claim a geopolitical and dominant gaze of the Canadian landscape, the belonging that could tie one to the community of the trailer park, the belonging that would define the “Canadian” position in international economic negotiations. But such easy notions of community slip from the grasp (as Shields hints they will), becoming ever more complicated. Irit Rogoff criticizes the cultural law of naturalised and essentialised heritages that assume that a place called France for example, is inhabited by French people who share a language, a historical culture, a shared set of assumptions and attitudes. What if a large part of the population is Francophone by coercion, if it lives out its life in France, in French but also in resistance and in resentment, if its complex allegiances are

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elsewhere and its presence in France is a legacy of colonial histories and of contemporary economic imperatives. Could the map of that internally split entity still be called by the overly simple term of “France,” still be coloured a uniform pink or yellow of whatever colour it is in the atlas, a colour that would over-ride all of the contradictory internal differences of which it is made up?18

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How does the country that is called Canada, laid atop Indigenous societies, geographic uncertainties (particularly in the Arctic), changing through immigration, maintain a seeming coherence? And how is this coherence maintained when “Canada” leaves its bounded geographic terrain – in tourism, in economic ventures, in conflict? Examining Canadian participation in the invasion of Afghanistan as part of the NATO organized International Security Assistance Force, Susan Cahill, in her chapter “The Art of Conflict: Liberal Development after Neo-liberalism,” argues that internal coherence can be maintained through participation in external conflict. Cahill discusses Canada’s participation in Afghanistan as part of an extraterritorial policing unit, and notes “Canada’s military activities are not defined simply by the decisions of an independent, sovereign nation, but, rather, as one element in a multinational global security team” (221). Cahill makes her argument through an analysis of changing sovereignty – suggesting that a shift away from the nation-state can be found in processes of war that constitute sovereign politics. Looking at the “Coalition of the Willing” in Iraq, Cahill notes that “the neo-liberal logic of militarization ideologically projects war as denationalized and deterritorialized, generating a political economy whereby all nation-states participate as either an ally or enemy” (226). War, Cahill suggests, both makes and unmakes the nation-state.36 She notes how artifacts from the conflict in Afghanistan, in this case war rugs (or rugs woven by Afghans depicting scenes or tools of war), are brought back and displayed in Canada as exemplary of Canadian participation in the conflict. The war rugs were displayed at the Textile Museum of Canada alongside a series of other exhibits that together created an institutional narrative of nationality, and specifically a narrative that played into the myth of Canada as a peacekeeping nation. The exhibition, The Battleground Project, could thus be inserted into a project of Canadian art history that in turn presented the nation to an already knowing public. The display of the war rugs, “normaliz[ed] visual depictions of military activities to the public” (224). As such, it fulfilled a triple purpose: first demonstrating the participation of Canada as a nation in the conflict, second, differentiating Canadian participation in the conflict from that of other countries (Canada is a peacekeeper), and third, actually undermining the first two purposes in showcasing the nation as a participant in transnational conflict and, as such, as part of a new global sovereignty enacted through war and security. In addition, the Afghan citizens who made the rugs play a certain role – they are the ones whom Canadian soldiers have been sent to help, even as they, as actual embodied citizens, remain unnamed and erased. In her chapter, Cahill notes the spread of war across the world and the creation of a new sovereignty through conflict. As war and conflict spread, so too do people. Conflict produces vast mobilizations of peoples for whom home or nation or other forms of belonging are no longer possible. Often it is these same people who experience borders as

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material realities and who come into contact with nations from the outside as a bordered and contained space in which they are not welcome. In turn, nationality is often imagined in the relationality created between those who are already part of the “imagined community.” Those who are not allowed in effectively create the belonging of those who are already there. As Fernandez et al. note, “controlling migration is a crucial indicator of national sovereignty.”19 In his chapter “Considering Sovereignty and Neo-liberalism within Indeterminate States and Self-Determined Spaces,” Peter Conlin argues for a more radical understanding of what he calls the lee spaces of post-sovereignty, that is the “self-organized area[s] of practice which attempt to create post-sovereign relations” (242). In his chapter, Conlin avoids inquiry into what remains of the nation, instead suggesting that the very questions brought up in this volume assume that there is something else – a certain coherency of the non-national. “How applicable is the global?” he asks. “Are there global cultures, is there even a global economy” (240)? Turning to Saskia Sassen, he notes that globalization often requires the architecture of the nation-state and the process of denationalization referred to at the outset of this introductory section. Conlin suggests: “We face a kind of post-national landscape in which the nation is still very apparent and active as it moves from being the overall frame to a central element among others” (236–7). But Conlin argues also that neo-liberal citizenship belongs more readily to those who can also participate in the kinds of labour demanded by neo-liberalism and that such equations have begun to eclipse the former importance of nationality as an organizational model. Thus, “neo-liberal power organizes according to entrepreneurialism and marketability, rather than solely on the basis of our membership to the nation-state. Those who have abilities and knowledge without market value can be denied citizenship, and those already with citizenship find themselves with a reduced claim to full participation” (245). As an example, immigration and mobility are open to some, but closed to others, and nationality can actually function as a trap. Conlin argues, “neo-liberalism is more about reconfiguring the nation-state according to a specific rationality or ideology than being synonymous with a borderless corporate globalism” (245). He asks also what emancipatory potentials are possible in this scenario and suggests that they lie in grassroots transnational forms and radical self-organization, including a broad range of practices encompassing the more autonomous moments in artist-run projects, cross-overs between art and activism, and social centres. In such informal networks, Conlin suggests, can be found the prefigurations of new sovereignties. Such projects are thus often co-opted by neo-liberalism, only to emerge in new forms, within the lee spaces created by what Conlin terms post-sovereignty. In Conlin’s argument all that can be taken for granted is a constancy of change and adaptation. Nations are often posited to be concrete, territorialized, and unchanging entities. The essays in this section and the premise of this book show this not to be the case. Nevertheless, the majority of the authors argue for the continued relevance of the nation-state (even if it is the nation-as-project). But what if the nation-state disappeared completely? As the movement of certain groups of people (refugees, those in exile, asylum seekers, unwelcome diasporic communities) has become increasingly fraught, one response has

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been a call for the removal of borders altogether. The No Border movement, for example, suggests that borders prevent equality and actively maintain global divisions between wealth and poverty. What would it mean to demand “unfettered mobility for individuals and collectives, the dissolution of all borders that separate, isolate, contain, limit, enable violent forms of extraction and injustice, and impede political imaginings and futures?”20 As the authors of this demand note, borders are about much more than defining boundaries between nations. Rather, despite the rhetoric of open markets and free trade, borders are essential to capitalism. “Without the border, there would be no differential zones of labour, no spaces to realize surplus capital through the dumping of overproduction, no way of patrolling surly populations that might want to resist proletarianization, no release valve for speculative access.”21 As these authors put it, “it is compulsory to develop a barrier against those who have nothing to trade.”22 The response to No Border initiatives, even from those who might support laxer immigration rules, tends to be largely disbelief. How could the world function without nations? Indeed, in order for a world without nations to exist, the nation would have to ratify itself into non-existence. Further, and perhaps more interesting, are left-nationalist responses that might posit the nation-state as the only place that can foster change. Were nations to disappear, the left-nationalist argument goes, the liberal-order project would reach its ultimate end, but so too would any chance for emancipation, progress, and unity (all of which are projects of liberalism). Is it the case though, that nations hold the key to change?23 The introductory examples of the network-state and the satellite space topography suggest that at least on the level of geography a world without nation-states is imaginable. So too, in activist responses to the spread of neo-liberal capitalism, transnational strategies have proven effective, the alter-globalization movement, the No Border network and No One Is Illegal providing cases in point. In practical terms, much No Border activism has focused on opening borders, changing legislation, and helping asylum seekers find safe places in already extant nations. But underlying their work is an idea that the unfettered movement of capital can also be applied to people. Such activism forms an important trend that could be, in Conlin’s phrase, predictive. To conclude, Irit Rogoff makes an argument about being “without.” “If nations, states, borders, and citizenships are not perceived as forms of belonging,” she writes, “or are not the naturalized relations of subjects to places, then they can be seen as active forms of unbelonging, or of being ‘without.’”24 For Rogoff, being “without” signifies a condition of awareness and of leaving behind certainties in order to explore the contingent elements of any given situation. Rogoff suggests possibilities for activism both within and without the nation-state – in the global lee space defined by Conlin, and in the continuing impact of a liberal order project of Canadian nation building. Rogoff’s theory supposes a space both inside and outside of the immaterial and material nations – it is a space of possibility and a new kind of imagination of (un)belonging. I have read the four chapters in this section against one another, examining the extension of immaterial borders in situations of conflict, satellite, and Internet communications, and the retraction and defence of constructed geographic borders, in terms

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of changing physical landscapes, immigration, and trade. On the surface, the essays seem to have little in common outside of overarching engagement with the questions of visual culture in Canada and liberalism raised by the original workshop. But in that very fact, their eclecticism showcases the multiplicity and uncontainedness of scholarship, the many ways that understanding Canada-as-project through its visual culture can be approached.

notes 1 G. Manaugh, “Open Source Design 02,” n.p. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 B. Pauker, “Massive List of Foreign Infrastructure Critical to the us Released,” n.p. 5 S. Sassen, “Towards Postnational and Denationalized Citizenship,” in Handbook of Citizenship Studies. 6 Manaugh, “Open Source Design 02,” n.p. 7 Ibid. 8 Hardt and Negri, Empire. By contrast, Ann Laura Stolar argues that this is not at all a new state of affairs. Stolar, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” 125–46. 9 L. Parks, “Postwar Footprints,” in B-Zone, 320. 10 L. Parks, Cultures in Orbit. 11 It should be noted that in his essay, Shields criticizes Anderson’s notion for taking the concept of community too literally, assuming that it is tangible or markable.

12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

See Rob Shields’s chapter in this volume. S. Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 1. Ibid. Ibid., 2. The immense investment in “soft diplomacy” or education via culture undertaken by the United States in the wake of 9/11 might be a case in point. E. Mackey, The House of Difference. I. Rogoff, “Engendering Terror,” n.p. C. Fernandez, M. Gill, I. Szeman, and J. Whyte, “Erasing the Line,” 473. Ibid., 466–7. Ibid., 467. Ibid. The inability of nations to work together at the cop15 Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in 2009 might suggest that nations cannot enact change. I. Rogoff and P. Phelan, “Without: A Conversation,” in Terra Infirma, 35–6.

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9 What does a nation or nation-state look like? The aim of this The Aesthetics of the paper is neither to present a taxonomy of works representing Territory-Nation-State Canada nor to define Canadian-ness through a category of creative work such as visual art. Rather, it is concerned with and the “Canadian the problem of the aesthetics of nation and how it is composed in relation and tension to the state on one hand and to Problematique” territory on the other. The nation-state is a familiar notion, but the solidarity of the state to a territorial ground tends not Rob Shields to be considered as a spatially constructed commons for a nation. This commons is realized at a number of geographical scales. This chapter answers the question of “why study Canada?” in terms of the aesthetic or relational specificity of this relation of territory-nation-state. It is a relation and aesthesis which will be further considered as a Canadian political problematique. Canada may have long involved a balance of these terms more in favour of a “territory-state” rather than a Westphalian “nation-state.” This will be presented as a way of recasting or respatializing our sense of Canadian identity – how and why it may not fit the received models of the dyadic nation-state. The chapter is thus a response to Ian McKay’s lament and deprecation that might be summarized thus: why study Canada, just another vacant lot? My answer is that we have accepted an abstraction (nation-state) without examining its reality and actuality in the case of Canada (territory-state) as a specific articulation of land, sovereignty, and co-locatedness. To do so, we will consider the virtuality or intangibility of “nation” and will require a framework for its visualicity – how can “Canada” be seen if it is in many senses invisible? What representations and visual practices lend it visibility and allow it to be spatialized or cast as a specific type of place, community, and state? Notions such as the nation and nationalism have ironically become the most globalized of concepts. However, this paper argues for a greater degree of specificity that cleaves

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individual nation-state-territories from the generalized ideal-type of the modernist, Westphalian nation-state as developed in international relations theory. In actuality, there are variations away from the abstract model. There is historicity to the notion; each country strikes a distinctive balance between the three terms: nation, state, and territory. The European ideal-type discussed by cultural and post-colonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha tends to overlook the role of topography and climate, which, taken up in social terms and spatialized as meaningful places, regions, and seasons, anchors people and states to the fate of particular environments. The nation-state ideal-type is as absent of materiality as any abstract political theory. Canada’s emphatic challenge of difficult terrain and climate foregrounds geography. Under such conditions could land become just as significant, or more significant, to the state than eager waves of migrant people? This might be characterized as involving a somewhat looser connection between statehood and a specific sense of nation or folk than between state and land. To some extent, this is part of the repertoire of any nation-state. All states must be linked to a territory, to some physical patch of ground, in order to be conceptually and juridically viable. Each national balance of these three elements can be conceived as a relational and thus aesthetic work which colours each nation-state (or territory-nation-state). It follows that nationalism is also distinctive and varies between countries, both over time and in space. Aesthetics is used here in its classical sense of aesthesis – something “experienced together,” a collective sensing – and in the Kantian sense of aesthetic judgments that rely on the perception of relationships and concern questions such as form and harmony rather than everyday utility or logical concepts. For Kant, aesthetics is governed by neither desire nor knowledge but is nonetheless a regime of intelligibility. This classical sense contrasts with the German romanticism of Abelard and Baumgarten, who formalized aesthetics as a discipline specific to art and to a social sphere separate from everyday life. If a country is visible, by contrast “nation” is something that must be made to appear, “brought to the stage” and inferred as what Todorov calls a “complex totality.”1 That is, nation and country are heterogeneous wholes whose makeup cannot be logically inferred from a local instance or sample; hence their complexity. This totality is always already deferred. What is possible are glimpses of bodies, activities, and local settings, which must be taken synecdochically as indices of a continuous whole. A God’s-eye view of the whole is unavailable. As a result one’s vision is always partial and perspectival. “One enlarges one element of space in order to make it play the role of a ‘more’ (of a totality) and substitute itself for that … the other, through elision creates a ‘less’ and makes gaps in the spatial continuum, retaining only selections or relics from it. Wholes are replaced by fragments (less in place of more); the other dissolves them by eliminating the conjunctive and consecutive (nothing in place of something).”2 This is a neighbourhood in a broader topological space and time. Only an abstractly imagined sovereign can achieve the godlike view of the whole state – what topology would refer to as the atlas. The “state” too must be shifted from a concept to a specific set of local relations of governance and then actualized in defining acts and sovereign gestures by its appointed agents that together create a sense of rule as an effect. We recognize the state as a virtuality; that is, not as an idealist concept but “as if” it were an object. It is

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real but not physically tangible. Since the decline of monarchies, the state has been accepted as such a “virtuality”; that is, it is separate from any given building, site, body, or symbol.3 No doubt a visual apparatus or formation makes nation-states appear to us through a range of techniques. Rogoff notes that practices and representations “circulate in the field of vision establishing visibilities (and policing invisibilities), stereotypes, power relations, the ability to know and to verify.”4 However, despite visual research within critical geopolitics, Campbell notes, “in neither Geography nor Politics/International Relations are there many studies concerned with the visual culture of contemporary geopolitics … and little research that takes documentary photography and photojournalism to be important technologies in the visual production of contemporary geopolitics.”5 The “aesthesis” or collective experience of territory-nation-state is not just an abstract concept but is represented in art and symbol. What we might call a “geopolitical gaze” includes representations such as maps that allow an abstracted diagram of a nation-state. Symbols such as flags are indexes of its relevance and even presence, associating a place with an overarching political regime. Cultural products, from folk songs and figures of speech to literature and painting are argued by collectors and academics to be evidence of a national character. There is an endless curation of the nation’s objects, achievements, and gestures in galleries and in the media. Iconic artworks, sports and technical achievements, and mannerisms are all offered as talismans of a nation or treasures of its constitutive regions: “The visual performance of the social field is enabled by and produces geopolitical discourses in which the relationship between site and sight is central.6 This calls attention to the role of visuality in the production of geographical imaginations, and how the relations of sight/site establish the conditions of possibility for a political response.”7 The visual needs to be understood along with the invisible as part of a broader realm of “visualicity.” To extend approaches to visual culture, theories of visualicity emphasize the constructed and learned quality of the visual as a social accomplishment rather than a natural and physiological outcome. Rather than just a metaphoric notion of a political “distribution of the sensible,”8 visualicity draws attention to the operational processes, techniques, and technologies that support visibility and invisibility in their everyday senses. Drawing on photographic practice, the methodological dimensions of visualicity emphasize a critical approach to focus, exposure, as the means and infrastructure of visibility. As part of this apparatus, a visual epistemology renders or aligns the materially visible – what is noticed and notable as indicative of invisible intangibles such as nation, community, ethnicity, and region. Such intangible “virtualities” are real but known only through their effects. We might understand visual epistemology as positioning viewers and their objects and articulating the seen to the known.9 However the significance of a visual apparatus is to also articulate the unseeable with the seen, allowing us to glimpse what is, stricto sensu, invisible or to “see” through and in conditions that obstruct vision, while rendering some things that are quite visible, invisible, obscure, or too easily overlooked. The strength of visualicity is that visual art and culture are full of examples of under-representation, of the invisible, repressed, not-represented, or implied in visual culture. This could be the apparatus backstage that supports a scene or the production and

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circulation of any given representation. Other simple examples are elements off-screen or a view that extends beyond the limits of a canvas. Even something as common as a horizon line must be assumed to continue past the limits of an image as part of the conventions and naturalism of a pictorial scene. Visual silences, such as purging certain elements of society or privileging certain moments of a social drama, reflect and perpetuate political effects and ideologies.

Staging the Nation Unlike a small group of people, “nations” are broader sets with more ephemeral limits. As “sets” they include not only bodies but cultural objects, national symbols, and even national plants and animals. They generally include an ambition to be open-ended in future time, and some nations may trace their founding moments to specific events. Nations are not concepts to be critiqued, as they draw on myths that blur together historical opportunity and trends to describe and legitimate emergent peoples as nations. In the nineteenth century, Herder offered “the folk”10 as a theoretical historical object which sustained the staging of nation as a consolidated political identity and eventually as a basis for state formation. Although it carried both historical weight and futurity, folk identity is couched in the idiomatic activities, language, and creative cultural forms of everyday life.11 Nation-states are “mythic,” but not only in the sense of being epic, functionalistic, foundational narratives which legitimize cultural predilections.12 That is, rather than their comparative literary qualities as myths among other myths, the nation’s narrative conceits are mythic in the sense of intersecting and stitching together the actual and the ideal in a mediated exchange. They treat material objects and sites as if they were texts, symbols, or embodied ideals – for example, where certain stones are (as if) sleeping ancestors or represent frozen values for a culture. The mythic recasts present activity within a narrative line couched in an epic past. This can be summarized as an “as if-ness” that performatively realizes abstracted conceptions. It is central to myth as a genre and a form of “the virtual.” Ontologically, the mythic is thus not a literary form but a virtuality, what an economist would recognize as an intangible, or what Lyotard calls the “immateriel.”13 The mythic is an ineffable staging of folk or nation as a virtuality.14 For example, a representation of one group or a tale of one set of actors or a small group in a situation is understood “as if” it were a representation of something broader such as the nation or a class. This is one example of what a nation might look like. Like other intangibles, the nation is precisely not specified in any given subset of members but only actualized as one instance, here and now. The mythic “as if-ness” of the virtual is in contrast to the dominant emphasis in much research on the abstractly ideal, for example Benedict Anderson’s argument that the modern nation is less a folk and more an “imagined community.”15 This has tended to be read as a cognitive and discursive approach that emphasizes abstract representation and “imagining” in a way that distracts from the virtuality of community as some thing that

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is real but not actual – a real but intangible thing that precedes rather than results from the abstracting work of imagination. Emphasizing the abstract and neglecting the virtual not only neglect the tendency of myth to be treated as a real past but tend to produce further abstractions and confusion. Anderson’s presentation relies on such intangible social objects and turns rhetorically on an assumption that community is somehow tangible and defined, despite the well-established lack of specifiability of communities which has led to a critical abandoning of the term in the social science literature since the late 1960s.

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Community is already the result of imagination and seeing “with the mind’s eye” what cannot typically be seen except in the smallest and most proximate of settled groups. The sense that one sees a community is an example of the operations of visualicity that tie the strictly invisible to the see-able and say-able. Nation is also a complex totality that stretches spatially beyond any local area. A “complex totality”16 can be represented and is manipulable but is rhizomatic and unmappable in a strict sense. It is not merely an idea but is a reality similar to a set of numbers: a virtuality. The “it-ness” of the set of the nation’s members is itself distinct from any actual member of the set. The result is that when one “sees” a community, nation, or a country, one never sees the whole but only a part which is taken for the whole. This logic of substitution doubles the slippage of performative actualizations of intangibles such as community, state, or nation. This is not synecdoche but asyndeton, wherein entire parts are omitted. The scene glimpsed and the available material must be read as evidence of a not necessarily absent but supplementary virtuality: a crowd is said to manifest the mood of a nation, a historical event, and a place to define the will of a state. In a similar vein, Flores argues: Performance is one way people “realize” their social world … the emerging social body evoked through performance, one that is remade with each new event, is never given, but is the locus of competing notions about the world and a site upon which social place is negotiated, constructed, and contested … cultural performance is linked to cultural citizenship: those enactments and practices that forge a sense of community and belonging, lead to renewed experiences of identity and provide a social space for the formation of collective practice and its concomitant forms of power.17 There is a dramaturgical quality to any actualization which, as Goffman has shown, depends on a “backstage” of less organized resources that we are invited to overlook (speaking from the vantage point of visualicity). These are rendered invisible or unstaged.18 Yet they are a central aspect of visualicity: they take place “under our noses” in support of the formal process and scene that are intended as the “focus” of events.19 The stage is not only a metaphor of performance but is also often a material site and infrastructure, one local area which is treated “as if” or as virtually the whole. Where part stands analogically for whole, landscape stands in for territory, suggesting their close

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entwinement and the possibility that they are not so different and reversible: landscape relations may stand in for territorial dispositions and vice versa. States as institutions seek to ground themselves in the virtuality of nation but also depend on the materiality of territory. Sovereignty must be actualized in material actions and bodies on solid ground, just as much as sovereignty is evoked as an abstract idea in political rhetoric. Writing at the close of the First World War, the sociologist Max Weber claimed that “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state.”20 At the very heart of modernity rests uncertain foundations that are constantly open to contention and struggle but which are also susceptible to the rationalization of the entire social world.21 By taking the full force of Weber’s concerns about the sociological uncertainties of modern forms of power and the possibilities of freedom in modernity into account, we can see that these relations do not form an either/or (i.e., nation-state vs. globalization, authority vs. freedom, or power vs. impotence and so on). On the contrary, they make room for theoretical and empirical considerations of everyday forms of social and political resistance to sovereign power and for forms of the nation-state and sovereignties in the plural.21 Hence our interest in how the triad of territory-nation-state opens up Weber’s fluid conceptual space of populations, powers, and sovereignty. Throughout the twentieth century, international relations theorists such as Morgenthau22 attempted to regularize sovereign and territorial practices by seeking justiciability and legitimacy in fact and in established practice. However, students of critical geopolitics and international studies have demonstrated the impossibility of escaping fully from discursive and narrative constructions whether in international law or in legislative or juridical practice.22 This opens the closure of the nation-state pair because of the slippage of intangibles and the irredeemably rhetorical quality of objects such as state and nation. The multiplication of new spaces of state action in which sovereignty must be asserted includes the Internet and globalized public spheres of information which circulate electronically. This challenges anew the capacities of the reign of states and any remaining assumptions that states are simply territorial, or that territory offers a guarantee of solid grounding untroubled by virtual but real constructions of material things.24

Territory and Landscape The appeal to territory strongly marks political understandings of the materiality and actuality of states and their monopoly of force within a defined territory. However, this areal, geometric conception of territory is not neutral but is itself a particular way of looking, a way of “casting” or spatializing a more complex time–space domain in quantitative terms. In his symptomatic reading of geopolitical texts, Gearóid Ó Tuathail argues that what Martin Jay calls “Cartesian perspectivalism” powerfully dominates thinking about the state.25 Geopolitics and this “geopolitical gaze” express a specific case of one dominant scopic regime of modernity in which the seeing eye/I is separated from object seen.26 This amounts to a flattened diagram which cannot be fully understood (and will

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not be the topic here) except as a topological projection of a much richer territory-nationstate space-time with many more dimensions. As a turn of phrase, however, the emphasis on the act of looking, the gaze, masks its dependence on a range of deliberate techniques of visualicity – selection, staging, and direction, as well as the performative dressage of vision: the interjection of glances cast, glimpses unremarked, sights caught, and horizons scanned. The rich language of everyday visualicity is lost in the theoretical hegemony of the gaze as a blinding rubric.27 Geopolitics’ covert visual neutralization not only is perspectival but involves a specific aesthetic, a clinical, diagrammatic mode of relating to the world of territory, bodies, and objects. It is not a rationalized anti-aesthetic but is more properly an “an-aesthetic”: a relational logic that excludes qualities and isolates the object of sovereignty law beyond the jurisdiction of other disciplines and agents. These perspectives are delegitimized. As Mitchell argues, “We have known since Ruskin that the appreciation of the landscape as an aesthetic object … must be the focus of a historical, political, and … aesthetic alertness to the violence and evil written on the land, projected there by the gazing eye … What we know now is that landscape itself is the medium by which this evil is veiled and naturalized.”28 The geopolitical gaze of Cartesian perspectivalism sees surfaces not depth. It envisions territory in a manner that conforms to maps and diagrams that are also two-dimensional. It does not see the subsurface substance and materiality of the earth that makes up territory. Nor does it comprehend the temporal dynamics of erosion and tectonic change. This is especially problematic in a time of sea-level rise and coastal innundations where the contour lines of territory cannot hold. One way of seeing “places” is as on the surface of maps: Samarkand is there, the United States of America (finger outlining a boundary) is here. But to escape from an imagination of space as a surface is to abandon also that view of place. If space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space.29 Even within historical time, territory conceals a set of aesthetic decisions as to what is significant and how phenomena are to be bounded in time as well as in space. The minimalism of a surveyor’s representations of “territory” masks numerous cartographic and visual decisions and conventions. These are aesthetic in the sense of relational judgments, decisions about composition and harmonious unities. To choose to see the surface, even if it is for reasons of mineral wealth underground, to understand territory as a map-like surface is an affinity to the cartographer’s eye, to the two-dimensional organization of activities and the edges of landscape features which then generate the practical and military problem of navigating difficult terrain, and also the pragmatic issues which demand a landscape painter’s eye for heights, vistas, and features. Territory, despite its geopolitical and cartographic “anaesthetization,” is a type of landscape. It is not a fixed stage or a pure geometry. Any shift away from cartographer and surveyor raises questions of representation and sovereignty, as seen in the case of sovereignty over the Arctic continental shelf, which has been defined in both cartographic and geological terms, raising debates between states about the status of the Lomonosov and other undersea ridges.30

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The Canadian Territory-State: The Tourist View from Quebec Changing spatializations radically shift the dimensions and power-geometries in which sovereignty is understood. That this is hardly novel for Canadians reinforces my point. Early explorers such as Thompson and Mackenzie struggled with the difficulty of judging distance in a foreign landscape.31 Since before Ruskin (above), the visualicity of landscape as conquered territory has been a significant motif, perhaps the cliché of Canadian history. Consider the Canadian case of tourist gazes at vistas such as the cliffs of Quebec City. From the early 1800s, as one of the major landmarks along the St Lawrence River, Quebec was a natural stopping-off place for shipboard passengers. As the site of the battle of the Plains of Abraham popularly (but incorrectly) credited with deciding the fate of North America, Quebec became an obligatory stop in the secular ritual of early organized tourism in the last half of the 1800s. The Canadian Pacific Railways’ 1926 Ancient City of Quebec guidebook puffs: “Here civilization first began to conquer savagery in this northern land, because here are the battlegrounds on which the best blood of Old France and Old England met in deadly combat and decided the fate of half a continent.”32 Travellers could climb the topography of a “wonder of the new world,” witness the site of historic decision and with (and often, implicitly as) the victors, savour the dominating view over the river and the surrounding francophone Quebecois countryside from the cliff-top promenade. From the Dufferin Terrace in front of the much-photographed Chateau Frontenac hotel, today one still has one of the greatest views in any city: Jutting out along the brink … 200 feet above the roofs of the quaint “Lower Town” of the old city, is [a] … promenade which takes rank with the Hove Lawns and Esplanade at Brighton, England as the resort of beauty and fashion, and far surpasses almost any promenade in the world in the tremendous panorama that it commands. At the eastern end of this promenade rises the beautiful pile of the Chateau Frontenac, which the western end is under the shadow of the grim fortress known as the Citadel from which flaps the Union Jack, symbol of Empire of which none are more proud than the people of Quebec [sic].33 One popular manner of sharing the spoils of history’s victors is to occupy, however momentarily, this position – literally and figuratively, “above” and “on top.” It renders the terrain of everyday life into a vast still-life panorama, a gesture which sees the land and inhabitants “laid out” for inspection in diagrammatic terms reminiscent of the objectives of the ordinance survey. The moment one sees the landscape as if it were a diagram or map, one occupies a geopolitical point of view. This geopolitical gaze is both spatially and temporally expanded in that time is virtually abolished. One does not easily discern detailed processes in the distance, while durable features are clear landmarks among which action flows timelessly, whether it be in the past, present, or future. The view was recommended to prospective tourists in sweeping terms that draw the geological past as mythic into the historical and material present for an effect of grandeur:

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Clustered on and around rocky and precipitous heights that resemble Gibraltar in their frowning impregnability, this wonderful old city commands a landscape that takes rank among the great show places of the world. The “Upper Town” looks away out over the mighty St. Lawrence to where bustling cliffs as high as its own are dotted with the houses of the town of Levis and crowned by the immense forts erected by the British Government. Far in the distance beyond are outlying spurs of the ancient Appalachian Mountains that extend 1300 miles to south and east. Looking in the other direction, the bold outlines of Cape Tourmente forty miles away on the north shore can be seen, while back from the north shore line the eye is carried to where the crests of the Laurentians, the oldest mountain range in the world, fade away in billow upon billow of wonderful blues and purples that melt imperceptibly into the azure of the sky. Beyond that horizon lies a vast unpeopled wilderness that stretches sheer to the Polar regions.34

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Despite the fact that this strategic view looks south across the river and farmland to an unmentioned us American rival neither north nor west to a “vast unpeopled wilderness,” the guidebook and Dufferin Terrace stage Canada as a landscape sight and as a territory for the taking. The two, landscape and territory, are fused – a hallmark gesture of sovereignty and its anaesthetic regime of visualicity. Command also of the sublime emphasizes power and the experience constitutes a kind of promissory note for the rest of Canada that the tourist/traveller/migrant will experience upriver and inland. The possessive Cartesian perspective of this narrative is geopolitical in intent and detail: “Mountains that extend 1300 miles,” “the houses of the town,” and “forts erected by the British Government.” The transfer of geographical and population knowledge and the visual information conferred by the geopolitical gaze is a ritual of tourist consumption. It virtually crowns the traveller, allowing him or her to momentarily occupy the position of sovereign in relation to land and people, space and time. The “virtual sovereign” is offered by planners and the cpr Company as a momentary frisson and privilege extra to citizenship and its subject positions. Clearly the counter-strategy, correctly deployed by Québécois nationalists, is to emphasize the passionate detail of everyday life as a foundation for a nation-state against the predominantly nation-less geopolitics of state and territory, the “territory-state.” How does Canada look? The view from Dufferin Terrace described in 1926 exemplifies one way of looking at Canada – the way Canada (nay Quebec) looks from the Terrace on a clear day – and one way that Canada still looks at itself. Regardless of the safety that might be sought in the diversity of perspectives and visual tactics, Dufferin Terrace represents a way of seeing that still attracts people for a momentary thrill of domination in the twenty-first century.

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The Canadian Problematique This landscape vision encapsulates only one point of view, a position that celebrates the experience of the country of Canada as a construction of a “territory-state” rather than a nation-state which claims territory. It is uncomfortable for it generates political challenges and is so acutely perspectival: it implies a secondary encounter with the social realities of contemporary Canada. For the traveller, this is displaced to some later disembarkation than Quebec City, at a place that will not offer a vista across a virgin land but perhaps an immigrant metropolis. Previous occupants and traces of occupation either disappear or appear improper, ill-placed, or even unnatural in the “erased spatialization” of the view from Dufferin Terrrace.35 Those with precedent on their side, whether longsettled Québécois, Acadians, Métis, or “First Nations” were dispossessed or became abject, repressed Others who were neither expelled and exiled, nor honoured, acknowledged, and respected. This is a harsh rebuke: it signals the need for remediation of the “territory-state” as a formation that is both lacking and is structured by absences and paradoxical inclusions: the absences of the vision of Canada as land but not people. Visual figures such as an unpeopled empty shore, inhospitable weather, and heroic gestures of mobility assimilate a colonizing and asocial tourist settler-subject to symbolic, institutional, and juridical domination. It is one way of visualizing the nation at the same time as it excludes “other Canadas” that have been more recently articulated as urban and diverse, non-anglophone and non-francophone, or that are in exile bifurcated with the preoccupations of other homelands, or are subtended as a distant legacy or “hotel state” of last resort by an overseas diaspora. The absence of nation or population in this virtual love triangle of territory-nationstate raises an attendant problem of “cultural title” to Canada-as-land which echoes unresolved Aboriginal claims to land title based on treaties signed with the settling Europeans. “Nation” is a transferrable asset, a prosthetic quality held by a multitude of people without a specific and narrow set of rules governing the relationship between actual bodies and the intangible body of the whole nation. This raises the question of Canadian anxieties around culture, language, Canadian racisms, and the symptomatic xenophobias of the “territory-state” towards its internal colonies of forebears and abjectly repressed Indigenes. These are distinct in the dynamics of the territory-state and suggest a work of theory which has not been accomplished by Canadian intellectuals. It cannot be accomplished by applying global and continental theory developed in a different context and that can only use capitalist terminology of property to see a “vacant lot” – as if gazing from an intellectual Dufferin Terrace. The “Canadian problematique” or ideological framework is uniquely defined by the struggle to insert nation in all its heterogeneity into a tight state-territory bond with both its strengths and failings. This is as true for Québécois separatists as it is for federalists and western ideologues. Political success in Canada is measured by the extent to which this is achieved. Ethical success is measured by the extent to which this is not accomplished by resorting to the geopolitical gaze and its seductive an-aesthesis of any political solidarity with those gazed upon.

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We have speculated that the significance of land is neither theoretical nor merely definitional (as in Max Weber’s work) but an important part of the aesthetic repertoire of the territory-nation-state in the case of Canada.36 If landscape and territory are less easily separable than the clinical an-aesthetic of the state is willing to admit, what would be the significance of following the Canadian experience and returning “territory” to the binary of nation-state? Polemically, might it not be useful to even consider the territory-state as an alternative axis which reorganizes the dogmas of geopolitical phenomenology? The balance of territory-nation-state is nonetheless an aesthetic – an an-aesthetic that blots out nation and populace and paints over the traces of social construction of the territory as a specific type of geopolitical and juridical landscaping. It is incommensurable with European cultural assumptions and outlook. It is a set of questions which arises from this problem of settling into a formation that stresses land and state. This chapter has sought to respond to the anomalies that beset thinking and looking at Canada as a national entity which conforms to Eurocentric political and Westphalian international relations models of nation-states. As land, as people, as institutions, and as juridical frameworks, the case of Canada suggests that we rethink the discourse of the nation-state in the direction of territory-state. What a nation-state “looks like” varies depending on how it is staged and seen as a complex totality. Because it must be seen “with the mind’s eye,” it is susceptible to being represented in different ways. However, its virtual status – the “mythic” qualities of “nation” – allows nation-state to function as a medium, linking together disparate entities and citizens. This elasticity also allows it to take on different guises depending on how one relates to it. Nation is ultimately not simply an abstraction to be imagined but a virtuality. Thus, nation departs from the requirements of consistency that one places on an abstract, logical construct. Instead nation is as much or even more a virtuality that must be staged and performed in order to be actualized at any given time and place. Visualicity stresses that in this staging a host of elements are left off-stage or nonvisible. The dematerialization of understandings of the nation-state make it difficult, even absurd, to ask the question we began with, “What does a nation look like?” The universality of the ideal type rests on a relational decision which has been argued in this chapter to entail an aesthetic judgment in favour of the ideal and abstract against the real and actual of land, or the real but ideal elements: virtualities – present or past – such as the nation. The decision to emphasize the brute materiality of land as simple area or extension (extensio not spatium) is itself a reductive form of landscaping, a minimalist aesthetic. This diagrammatic an-aesthetic resists forging solidarities, avoids relation, erases previous spatializations, previous inhabitings, to create an apparently blank canvas, an empty stage on which nation and state can be performed as a duet. The materiality of Canada becomes hard to glimpse in such a spatialization, even as the state seems historically engaged with territory, leaving nation less prominent in the love triangle of nation-state-territory. Aesthetics is a matter of the balance between parts and the whole; between heterodox elements such as the “folk” with idiomatic cultural traditions and a complex totality such as “Canada” that, strictly speaking, is unknowable if we demand a nominalist object that

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we could reach out and touch. Love triangles are well known for their tendency to resolve into couples. Hence the provocative notion of a Canadian “territory-state.” However, they do at least promise more complex visions, more holistic understandings, and a more compelling politics.

notes 1 T. Todorov, The Conquest of America. Concerning the lack of agreement on definitions and origins of the notion of “nation-state,” see V. Tishkov, “Forget the ‘Nation.’” I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Stephanie Bailey and the editors of this volume in preparing the final version of this chapter. As Ondine Park and Barret Weber reminded me, this is synecdochic, a topic Tvestan Todorov has had a long interest in (see Todorov, “Synecdoques,” 30). 2 M. de Certeau, “Practices of Space,” in On Signs, 137. 3 R. Shields, Spatial Questions; Shields, The Virtual; I Rogoff, Terra Infirma. 4 Rancière reminds us that this has been central to discussions of theatre understood as a “sensory constitution” – that is, an actualization of community which sees itself (as an audience) in a given time and space, a collective performing and experiencing social body. See J. Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” 3. 5 D. Campbell, “Geopolitics and Visuality,” 358. 6 J.M. Schwartz and J.R. Ryan, eds, Picturing Place. 7 Campbell, “Geopolitics and Visuality,” 361. 8 R. Shields, “Visualicity,” 23–6, contra Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator.” 9 R. Halle, “Visual Alterity Abroad,” 103–21. 10 J. Gottfried von Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. 11 A. Maliq Simone, “On the ‘Worlding’ of Cities in Africa”; M. Joseph, Nomadic Identities.

12 H. Blumenberg, On Myth. The notion of “mythic” builds on the work of Castoriadis by proposing the virtuality of the mythic against his vision of myth as abstract and as representational narrative. See Carlos Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society. 13 J.-F. Lyotard, Les immateriaux. 14 Shields, The Virtual. 15 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 16 Todorov, The Conquest of America. 17 W.V. Flores, “Aesthetic Process and Cultural Citizenship,” in Latino Cultural Citizenship. 18 E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Heidi Bickis has reminded me that Jean-François Lyotard’s work on the “trick” of staging as seeing and non-seeing is relevant here: see Lyotard, “Jewish Oedipus.” 19 Shields, “Visualicity.” 20 M. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber (emphasis in original), 78. 21 B. Weber and R. Shields, “The Virtual North,” 103–20; D. Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity; T. Maley, “The Politics of Time.” 22 Weber and Shields, “The Virtual North,” 2. 23 H.J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations. 24 J. Butler, Bodies That Matter; O. Jütersonke, “Hans J. Morgenthau.” 25 M. Jay, Downcast Eyes. 26 G.Ó. Tuathail and S. Dalby, “Critical Geopolitics,” 513–14; N. Smith, “Is a Critical Geopolitics Possible?” 365–71. 27 Here the glance is understood as a mobile, pragmatic, tactical sampling of a surrounding, immersive environment, with a fundamentally different temporality and

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spatialization than either the contemplative or searching gaze of a Cartesian subject on a defined and distanced object. W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power. D. Massey, For Space, 133. P.E. Steinberg, “Sovereignty, Territory, and the Mapping of Mobility,” 467–95. R. Shields, Places on the Margin.

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32 Canadian Pacific Railway, The Ancient City of Quebec: Canadian Pacific Guide. 33 Ibid., 12–13. 34 Ibid., 3–4. 35 R. Shields, “Imaginary Sites,” in Between Views, 22–6. 36 E. Manning, Ephemeral Territories.

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10 In their introduction to this volume, Jessup, Morton, and Our Vacant Lot Is Robertson advocate that Canadian visual culture “be studied a Trailer Park: as always already symptomatic of and always already productive of the kinds of political-cultural-economic aggregates Why English Canada’s that define the latest version of liberalism.” Interestingly, while the authors characterize this as a relatively new vantage Perpetual Threat of point for art history, it is a perspective that tends to characterize Canadian film and tv scholarship across a variety of Disappearing Keeps disciplines. This perspective, however, appears endangered as critics increasingly adopt the Web’s “post-national” converFilm and Television gence rhetoric, a vernacular that eclipses the actual, located Alive specificities used to incentivize and regulate the production and circulation of Canadian visual culture. While film studies in Canada has perhaps echoed art Jennifer VanderBurgh history in constructing both English-Canadian and Québécois auteurs (e.g., Cronenberg, Egoyan, Arcand, Pool, etc.), economies of scale specific to industrial film and tv production have meant that Canadian moving-image industries are not considered to have painterly Tom Thomson equivalents who produce work on their own which is later co-opted by the nation. Perhaps as a result, Canadian film and tv scholarship, ostensibly beginning in the 1970s, a full century and a half after the beginning of Canadian art history and in the midst of post-structuralist awareness of its identity politics, has generally taken into account the ways in which film and tv’s reliance on public funds, tax credits, and state policy/regulatory frameworks cultivates specificities that situate the work uncomfortably, yet predictably, within nationalism and liberalism. Indeed, while film and tv scholars have generally been skeptical about automatic conflations of what Robertson in her introduction to this section calls the “material nation” (“the geographically bounded territorial state”) and the “immaterial nation” (a presumably shared set of ideas/identity which Jessup, Morton, and Robertson argue is part

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of a liberal order framework), it is understood that without governmental belief in this conflation, there would be no state funding for/regulation of Canada’s moving-image industries. Indeed, production of visual culture in these areas owes a great debt to the perceived threat of cultural imperialism from the us, since as I suggest in my title, it is Canada’s perpetual threat of disappearing that has kept film and tv alive by adopting incentives and protectionist policies to enable its survival. It seems, however, that we might be losing sight of this perspective in a time when the Web’s post-national rhetoric and convergence of visual culture onto personal-screen platforms appears to eclipse the specificities of national production. The nation is still very much at the centre of visual culture production – a claim witnessed, as I will demonstrate in what follows, by the content of the texts themselves. The chapter title’s triple-barrelled metaphor gives me away as someone who thinks in images. So, apparently, do many of my students. Reading through essays recently on “online” and “offline” cultures, I was told consistently, with little variation in language, that “these days with a click of a button, the world is instantly at your fingertips.” How empowering, this rhetoric goes on to imply, that in an “online world” “we” can watch whatever and whenever we want, and for free. The students who wrote this attend university in Halifax, just across the bridge from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, the site of Mike Clattenberg’s television series Trailer Park Boys (2001–08). Meanwhile, a much younger scholar, my nine-year-old son, beside me on the couch with his laptop, wonders why on earth Blue Jays games are blacked out to him in Canada on (stupid) mlb.tv.1 The rhetoric of a “digital universe,” is a strangely intergalactic metaphor for a Web whose Internet is only earthbound or “worldwide.” Even then, the Web’s attendant rhetorics of global connectivity eclipse the pragmatic fact that “the world’s” participants are limited to those who have access to computers, service, and text-based literacy, none of which are “free,” and all of which challenge the taken-for-granted idea that the Web somehow circumvents the nation-state’s purview. For example, Clay Shirky’s case studies on the “revolutionary” impact of social media “behaviours” are used to support the claim that people can now circumvent governments and communicate “freely” across borders.2 Web-based social media platforms are “revolutionary,” claims Shirky, since for the first time in history, people who are physically distant from each other can engage in relatively simultaneous group “conversation.” Further still, these people might not “know” each other (or know how to communicate with one another) if not for having purchased devices, which are linked together in a digital matrix by social networking software.3 Shirky’s case studies offer compelling examples of new forms of communication practices, but they are often used as evidence to insinuate that in the presence of what social media enable people to do, the mechanism of the nation-state is becoming less able to suppress the voice of “the people.” “The people,” according to this argument, can now negotiate among themselves almost instantaneously, can watch what they want, when they want (presuming that it is available online), and share it with any and everyone. Aside from the problematic insinuation that places like China have “politics” and the “democratic potential” of the Web does not, these kinds of claims about Web-based social media platforms tend to characterize the nation-state as “old” in relation to “new” practices of digital culture. While the Web is busy being productive and changing the world,

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the nation-state is characterized as behind the times, slightly senile, slow to react but waiting with great anticipation for Social Media for Dummies to be released in paperback. The claim that “these days” the nation-state is irrelevant to the lived experience of Web-based culture implies that the state is benign. This is absurd in a country such as Canada where the nation-state is central in determining the policy and lived experience that lays the groundwork for the ways in which visual culture gets produced, distributed, received, and remembered. Even work produced and circulated “underground” or outside the system still operates in proximity and in relation to official practices, copyright legislation, licensing agreements, and the law. In this chapter I take the position that every time a film and media text is made or viewed in this country it is to some degree an artifact, a gesture, an expression of the nation-state asserting itself. This holds true of watching film and television from “elsewhere” and across multiple platforms including the Web, since the nation-state mediates those experiences as well. This is not to say that citizens and creators do not have agency within this framework, or that creators make a film or show with the intention of making national culture. Neither is it the case that people watch tv as an expression of national citizenship (most of the time they do not). The argument is that the architecture of what Ian McKay calls Canada’s “liberal order framework” has built something on this territory that continues to affect the lived experiences of this place, and how those of us who live here might express ourselves and engage with visual culture.4 There is a danger, I believe, in claiming that the organizing category of the nation-state is passé. We should be careful not to underestimate the specificities of the nation-state in determining what gets made and watched (or not) within its borders. To study the “case” of Canadian film and television in this way – to understand it as non-essentialist of national identity but expressive of state formation – is to agree on some level with McKay, that the production, distribution, and reception of visual artifacts within the nation-state of Canada are an expression and a result of an observable experiment, a “liberal order framework” in action. Indeed, it is due to the concept of nation building that state-funded and state-mediated communications networks exist in this country. It is also (calling back to my students) very much at the centre of the discourse and pragmatic regulation of global connectivity via the Web.

The Trailer Park A trailer park is a site composed of trailers without wheels. These are “vehicles” that in theory could go anywhere but by choice or circumstance stay in one location. As a metaphor of systemic immobility within conditions of economy and class, Mike Clattenburg’s Trailer Park Boys (TPB) defines its characters in relation to this site of amputated mobility. The opening title sequence begins like a mirage. Sepia-coloured footage, children scampering in slow motion, and heavily reverberating piano music suggest that what the viewer is “seeing” might not actually “be there” in the way that it initially appears. Even on first viewing, before the dream-like aesthetic is ruptured by the verité style of the show’s premise as a fake “documentary,” this sequence drips with irony. A trailer

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park, normally a signifier of lack of agency and mobility – a community that consists literally of vehicles (trailers) not going anywhere – is not within the cultural lexicon as a location of romantic idealism. That televisual location is normally a middle-class suburb like that found in Leave It to Beaver, a multi-storey “family” dwelling like The Cosby Show’s brownstone, or the upwardly mobile Friends’ urban apartments.5 A trailer park is a place where vehicles are stuck with no foundations. It is depicted as a place sitting on top of the land, not of the land. It is put there, not from there. Through the logic of the show’s diegetic world, the viewer comes to understand that the “place” featured in the establishing shot exists, but not in the nostalgic sense in which it is initially depicted. The space of TPB is full of such contradictions. It is at once a general microcosm of community and someplace specific. It is a hellhole, a bastion of ignorance, and a (strange) microcosm of an ideal community where everyone knows each other, and love and loyalty do exist. Often lost on critics with conservative politics is the fact that this show, full of swearing, sex, drugs, and drinking, ultimately rehearses “family values,” each episode a parable to love thy neighbour. The first episode of the series, for example, is a modern-day “return of the rightful king” narrative. The trailer park has fallen into disrepair during Ricky and Julian’s time in jail. Upon their release they find that Cyrus, a gun-wielding dope dealer who is not even “from the park,” has become the park dictator, squatting in Julian’s trailer, ruling the park by force. The episode resolves with Julian reclaiming his role as patriarch, a symbolic gesture achieved, notably and self-reflexively considering the venue, when he pitches Cyrus’s television out the window and watches it smash to bits on the ground. In the trailer park, as in this country, television is implicated in a turf war. For my purposes, TPB is contradictory as a fake documentary that is also an actual artifact of a lived experience of place within globalization and, as John McCullough has argued, an artifact of a “global media economy.” McCullough, whose reminder that “images are not independent of political economy,” makes an important point about Canadian television being a “symptom of contemporary capitalism.”6 This approach removes itself from the binary rhetoric that there is something in the water that either produces Canadian stories/art/images or subverts/disguises them. This is not an essentialist argument about the primacy of discernible Canadian qualities or ideologies. Rather, McCullough sees TPB as an example of “regional commoditization,” television set in “the regions” that reinforces globalization as it appears to critique it. While systemic problems of incarceration and violence are present from the Boys’ points of view, the mode of address is undercut on one level by ridiculing the aesthetic of “white trash” culture, mocking the lifestyle as alternately petty and pathetic. Survival, says McCullough, in the context of the show, is a triumph in itself and enables characters who can be “successful” without challenging existing hegemonic systems. Ultimately, he says, “stories tend to be played out as a comedy of errors, becoming quite ideologically harmless.”7 What results, according to this line of reasoning, is that “region” in the show becomes something to sell within the mechanism that is contributing to its systemic oppression. The region is dialectically sold and sold out. In McCullough’s words, “the globalization of media production is discernible in regionalist television, and regionalism and humanism in these shows serve to mask the imperialism and pointedly anti-humane character of globalization.”8 This practice hear-

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kens back to Rob Shields’s chapter in which he points to the use of individual locations symbolically within the nation “as if” they stood in for the whole. As films and television programs made in Canada such as TPB attempt to appeal to a so-called “global audience” in making edgy, artful, boutique programming for an international marketplace, they also consolidate public debate about the role the nation-state should play in funding projects, or whether it should play a role at all. Such was the case in 2006–07 when an amendment to the Income Tax Act (called the Censorship Bill by its opponents) was proposed and passed through Parliament then turned back to the House of Commons by Senate (2008). Prompted by lobbying on the part of the Canadian Family Action Coalition, it suggested that tax credits should be denied to any project that was, in the opinion of the Minister of Heritage, deemed offensive to the Canadian public. TPB was cited often in the debate as an example of the kind of “filth” produced with taxpayers’ money, as was the movie with the provocative title Young People Fucking (Martin Gero, 2007). The question of whether this was a censorship issue or the ethical responsibility of the nation-state accountable to its citizens and their tax dollars tended to eclipse the larger issue that in Canada the nation-state endows the film and television production industries. Without its support, these industries would not exist in their present form. Like the land turned into a trailer park in TPB , Canada’s film and television industry is the result of a history of political economy tied to the nation-state’s function within capitalist economies. In the context of what Toby Miller calls nicl (the new international division of cultural labour), the global redistribution of the labour conditions of media production once consolidated in Hollywood, the nation-state in Canada, I will go on to argue, does not become irrelevant.9 In Canada, the state continues to be right in the middle of things.

Making the Trailer Park The Canadian nation-state funds the development, production, and distribution of film, television, and new media, issues tax credits, and issues broadcast licences, part of which require broadcasters to air a certain amount of content made in Canada by Canadian citizens. Content determined to be “Canadian” by a point system administered by the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office (cavco), and evidence of a business plan that ensures that money and expenditures will remain mostly in Canada, gives potential film/television productions the ability to unlock funding support through Telefilm Canada. It also gives the project a “C number,” making it a vehicle to fulfill content obligations broadcasters have to the regulating body, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (crtc). While the design of Telefilm’s funding programs is prescriptive in that productions pitch projects to fit the programs, the organization’s public face as an unbiased cultural enabler is evidenced in its mission statement: By funding high-quality productions and strengthening its industry support to facilitate the transition to the new multiplatform environment, Telefilm Canada is aiming for the long-term viability and development of Canada’s audiovisual

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industry. Telefilm believes that the main measure of its success lies in the Canadian public’s appetite for the works and products it funds. A second measure concerns the capacity to have a vigorous, dynamic industry able to successfully develop, produce, and market the funded works.10

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Despite the fact that Canadians do not appear to have ever had an “appetite” in large numbers for Canadian film and television in practice, Telefilm defines its mission to “celebrate the telling of unique Canadian stories; Actively champion a sustainable Canadian audiovisual culture; Reward performance and encourage new thinking; Promote diversity in all its forms in programs and policies; Be open, transparent and accessible to stakeholders, the industry and the public; and, Deliver best value to Parliament and to the Canadian public.”11 If a film or television program in development is required to present a business plan to Telefilm that demonstrates a precedent for other such “sustainable” projects that have returned “value” in the marketplace, one wonders whether it would be possible to pitch a project that is “unique” or “new.” As a past script reader for Telefilm I can say that I was asked to include in my comments a list of comparable projects already in the marketplace as a way of speculating about its potential market value. Marc Raboy, for one, has commented that “cultural industry” is an oxymoron, since culture cannot be beholden to the marketplace, and vice versa.12 While Telefilm no doubt has an interest in ensuring the viability of the organization, “industry” and “culture” are red herrings for why the nation-state really supports the production and dissemination of film and television in this country. Rather, industry and culture make the nation-state appear viable and natural. This is not a new argument, but an important one to remember with respect to the concept of the “vacant lot.” Not only are the specificities of Canada’s cultural industries (and what they produce) artifacts and expressions of the liberal order framework that McKay describes, but they are there to account for the nation-state. This has long been the case in this land, but with respect to the support of film and television media, the story begins in the early twentieth century.

Marking Territory: Pissing in the Corners? From the first episode of the Trailer Park Boys: tyrone: Cyrus, man. j-roc: He all over this park, controlling all the liquor, sellin all the dope. You know what I’m sayin? Got a gun, runnin around? Actin hard with everybody.13 Once we take the “piss” out of national cultural policy rhetoric, it exists as an initiative to validate the primacy of the nation-state. Zoë Druick makes this point in an essay that traces the role of Canadian film policy in “framing” the location of the nation-state as a place that has the appearance of being a social or cultural fact. “The production of

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Geoffrey Farmer, The Last Two Million Years, 2007.

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Shié Kasai, Cabane à sucre, 2008.

Shié Kasai, Tim’s, 2008.

David McCallum,, Warbike, 2005–07. A sample of Warbike audio can be heard at http://sintheta.org/projects/warbike.html.

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Augustus John, Portrait of Vincent Massey, 1938.

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Liberté yogurt lid promoting Mexican Modern Art, 1900–1950.

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Kanaginak Pootoogook, The First Tourist, 1992.

Michael Massie, uni-tea, 2000.

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Opposite Afghan war rug, early twenty-first century.

On set of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, 2009.

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Reece Terris, Western Front Front: Another False Front (an architectural intervention/installation), 2010. Established in 1973, the Western Front is the oldest functioning artist-run centre in Canada.

An activist community space in a former employment centre in southeast London (UK).

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nationality in Canada,” she argues, “has long been a strategy of ‘locality’ in a global or international context.”14 The strategic use of location is reliant on the rhetoric that an understanding of “here” is defined as being “not there.” Location becomes conflated with cultural distinctions when the claim is made that “here” is “not like there.” Local identity, as a result, says Druick, “is formed into internationally expected configurations of uniqueness.”15 In Canada, state-sponsored visual culture from the turn of the twentieth century was first harnessed in service of the nation-state as a way of attracting immigrants to the country. Images were considered strategic and persuasive tools of nation building, which is why filmmakers working for the Canadian Pacific Railway (cpr) were told “not to take any winter scenes under any conditions”; “no snow or ice scenes.”16 As documented in the work by Peter Morris on early filmmaking in Canada, the cpr, the Government Motion Picture Bureau, and, later, the National Film Board of Canada used the medium as a colonizing tool in service of Canada’s nation-building project. While many of these films were made for export to other countries in order to target pools of skilled labour, there was also an effort to put them to use to claim territory in the service of the nationstate.17 The camera operators who rode the rails, who “captured” images of the nationstate’s territory, were essentially endorsed to do so on a mission to claim the land under the rubric of cultural nationalism. These early years of filmmaking in Canada present evidence of heralding an audience inscribed by national territory – what Peter Urquhart calls “pan-Canadianism.”18 Such evidence is also found in policy reviews such as the first full-scale cultural review published in the 1951 Massey Report. In its assessment of the arts, the Massey Report asks essentially the same question that McKay asks us to consider, although in the earlier case it’s rhetorical. Why study Canadian culture? Why not go to where the action is?19 The report reads: “If modern nations were marshaled in the order of the importance which they assign to those things with which this inquiry is concerned, Canada would be found far from the vanguard; she would even be near the end of the procession.”20 Among other notable suggestions like establishing the National Library and the Canada Council, the report recommended that the nation usher in a television broadcast system that would trade in programs indigenous to Canada. But as the Massey Report and McKay both ask, why bother? Why bother developing, for example, national broadcasting infrastructure to “connect” the living rooms of the nation as an Innisian communications pathway? What was the purpose of this trade route that “joined” the Canadian territory with an expensive and cumbersome mass of wires and towers determined to get to those hard-to-reach places? One answer, to borrow Erin Manning’s phrase, was to make the nation appear less “ephemeral” than it actually is.21 In the Massey Report, the commission was critical of the “sorry state” of facilities that existed for cultural performances in Canada.22 Television, at least in theory, had the potential to be a national stage. In constructing a state border via the airwaves, television programs (like radio before it) worked to naturalize the concept of the nation-state as an essential construct. Defence of the nation, its industries, its “stories,” would be and still is referred to as a reason to determine what gets produced on the inside, and what from

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“elsewhere” is kept out. The hope was twofold. First, it was to inoculate Canadian citizens against the us American ideology that was crossing the border in the form of television shows and received through the rabbit ears of televisions in Canadian border towns. The second was to give primacy to the nation-state as a social and cultural fact. Raymond Williams’s claim is important here, that strategy for developing infrastructure and conduits for the production and dissemination of “culture” is not just a common strategy of the nation-state but essential for its survival. In Druick’s interpretation, Williams “insists that means of communication are primary forms of social production, not secondary derivatives.”23 Druick also quotes Williams, who postulates: “If state-identifying peoples stopped the state-creating schools, newspapers, radio, television, films, sports, armies and police, most states would disappear within a short time.”24 The particular ways in which Canada has asserted and continues to assert its national communications/cultural infrastructure and policies are observable examples of liberalism asserting itself. Take for example the colonizing emphasis of the following slogans of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: “Television is cbc” (1966); “Bringing Canadians Together” (1977); “We Are the cbc” (1980); “Television to Call Our Own” (1995– 2001); “Canada’s Own” (2002–07); and “Canada Lives Here” (2007–).25 The significance of the final slogan works on two levels. From a cultural nationalist perspective, the cbc is a platform on which to share Canada’s vibrant cultural life. The cbc is framed as an incubator charged with keeping an idea of Canada alive. From the non-essentialist perspective of Canada as a vacant lot, the cbc is an abstraction of what is not actually possible. It is a “location” that makes coherent and gives life to what must be a frustrating concession from the perspective of the nation builders: that this place exists largely as an imagined and ephemeral community.

Why Study This Vacant Lot? Indeed, why study the texts that are produced in this vacant lot? Why not, as McKay says, go to where the action is? As long as the methods by which film and television texts are produced, distributed, and received in Canada is determined by state incentives, regulations, and policies, the nation-state is an inherent part of texts produced in this location. Our vacant lot is a trailer park filled with texts that have, in this sense, amputated mobility. By participating in a national industry, a text loses the agency to define itself. The lot may be empty of essentialist significance, but it is certainly full of itself. Films and television shows are “from the park” regardless of whether or not they want to be. A film produced with Telefilm money is considered a “Canadian” film. It is forbidden to disguise its location.26 The label is given rather than chosen. If a film or television show is produced with Telefilm money between two or more nations, it is not considered transnational or without national origin; rather, it is a hyphenated Canadian production – an international co-production. The primacy of the nation-state asserts itself even as film labour is distributed in the new ways under the practices of the new international distribution of cultural labour.27

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Canada persists as a useful organizing category for the study of film and television, since texts produced within the conditions of what McKay calls the liberal order framework are, however inadvertently they participate, artifacts of these conditions. Policy, economic, and industrial conditions, either established by the nation-state or generated in response to global conditions, determine the genres and kinds of texts that tend to get produced. The Department of Canadian Heritage, the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, and Telefilm Canada all have actual effects on the kinds of films and television programs that get produced. Building Canadian content quotas into broadcast licensing agreements, basing qualification for funding on a points system that quantifies the “Canadianness” of a production on citizenship, prescribes parameters for what constitutes “Canadian” production. That Canadian films and television programs can apply for funding in two official languages (not others) and must use Canadian locations (unless integral to the telling of a “Canadian story”) means that the liberal order framework sets the terms of engagement in pragmatic ways. Whether the state apparatus for film and television allows for expression of the range of “lived experiences” that take place in Canada is a vexing and often contentious issue in a state that defines itself (even peripherally) on its commitment to diversity. Filmmaker Deepa Mehta, for one, has been vocal about her inability to “fit” nicely into the prescribed frameworks of national production held by Canada or India. Atom Egoyan troubles the assumption of a “triangular reality” for Canadian film production (English, French, and Aboriginal) as “problematic,” preferring instead, Tom McSorley’s image of Canadian film as the mythological creature Hydra, “with multiple and rapidly multiplying heads.” The project of “Canadian” cinema, argues McSorley, is engagement “in the search for this newly forming, constantly shifting Canadian-ness in an open-ended set of narrative possibilities and cinematic expressions.”28 Perhaps the category of Canadian cinema/television is an inadvertent archive of negotiation within this “vacant lot.” I offer in what follows, a few examples.

The Text as Artifact of Negotiation (in the Vacant Lot) When Reginald Harkema’s film Monkey Warfare appeared at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, it was lauded for its expression of locatedness.29 The film’s “winning sense of authenticity,” shot on location in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, might initially appear to be undercut by Harkema’s assertions that he replicated shots and sequences directly from French New Wave filmmakers and intended to represent Toronto as a blend of East Vancouver and Amsterdam.30 Arguably, that Toronto shares an aesthetic in the film with other spaces in the process of gentrification does not render it inauthentic. On this point, Mary Jane Miller has argued with respect to Canadian television that there are ways that specificities can be “inflected” on generic “formulas” or conventions.31 According to this argument, a film or television show need not work outside of generic conventions to express local specificities.

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Not unrelated is the fact that Monkey Warfare’s aesthetic is a result of film policies at municipal, provincial, and federal levels, the effect of which dictate conventions such as insisting that Toronto appear as itself, but a self that is constructed with a mind towards its marketability for international distribution. In other words, the film should tell a story of locatedness while aiming for generic popularity. Monkey Warfare can therefore be considered an artifact of a set of production conditions set by policies of the nation-state. The aesthetic of Toronto in this film becomes about how authenticity is communicated, and how problematic it can be to read and evaluate. This is a central preoccupation of Linda, one of the film’s main characters, who finds discarded objects on the streets of Toronto and sells them on the Web’s “global”marketplace. She takes beautiful pictures, but refuses to accept compliments on her photography. “I can make anything look worth buying to a rich asshole,” she says, “it isn’t much of a talent.” But with respect to Canadian film and television, that is precisely the point.

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Negotiation with Air: Turf War in Virtual Space From the first episode of the Trailer Park Boys: tyrone: Cyrus ain’t from the park, you know what I mean? Around here, it’s all for all and one for one. j-roc: That’s right. M.F.s who ain’t from the park, they don’t understand the way shit goes down like the J to the R.O.C … if you come from outside the park, you’d better watch out because you’ll have a whole bunch of park hustlers on your jock. With the nation-state abstracted to the airwaves or cyberspace, the rhetoric used to frame broadcasting, satellite, and Internet technology in Canada has historically paralleled the rhetoric of space narratives from the 1950s and 60s American popular culture. They are characterized as either new frontiers for development, temporary autonomous zones that are not yet colonized by imperialism, or places where bad things lie in wait to attack.32 David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) is a self-reflexive and ironic take on the latter. The film is a science-fiction/horror story based on actual people and ideas. Marshall McLuhan’s theory and his status as media prophet are represented by the character Brian O’Blivion. The early days of Moses Znaimer’s Toronto-based Citytv and its use of softcore pornography – the Baby Blue Movies – is represented by station programmer Max Renn, who believes (initially) that tv content offers harmless catharsis. The Canadian nation-state’s anxiety about policing its virtual national borders, protecting citizens from invisible television signals from “elsewhere,” is also a prominent concern in the film. When Max’s assistant Harlan shows him a “foreign” television signal depicting graphic sex and violence, apparently with the help of a descrambler, its origin is a mystery. Abstracted from location via satellite, Max (and apparently Harlan) is/are unable to discern where the signal originates – perhaps from Pittsburg? Max, it turns out, has been double-crossed by Harlan. The television signal (actually a videotape)

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that causes a lethal brain tumour was manufactured locally with the purpose of targeting and eliminating men like Max. Part of the film’s horror in a Canadian context is derived from the thought that the airwaves (a public resource) could be used for such a thing. Whereas national television policy is premised on keeping “bad” or “harmful” influences out, Videodrome’s signal is produced and distributed domestically. In this film, there is a fine line between public television and social engineering. Watching television in the film is also an antidote to ailments caused by “lack of access to the cathode ray tube.”33 tv, in this sense, is characterized as an addiction. Reliance on tv is made even more troubling by Professor O’Blivion’s forecast that it will be the militarized space of the next millennium. He offers this cryptic warning, which locates North America’s ideological “battleground” as tv. This argument is reminiscent of Canada’s protectionist television policies. O’Blivion reasons: The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: the Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Cronenberg’s particular brand of horror tends to work by penetrating the internal physical human body with external objects such as technologies. This “horror,” in the actual case of tv or film production, is a claim upon which national cultural production in Canada is premised. The hope that a film or television text can generate (internal, personal) affective responses such as nationalism or identification with national culture is the raison d’être for the public support of Canadian cultural production. In Videodrome, tv is, in the words of the Professor’s daughter, Bianca O’Blivion, “the word made flesh.” While in the film tv is obviously dangerous when hijacked by groups with sinister motives, “evil” presumably is not an integral quality of the technology of television. Bianca, for one, holds faint hope for the potential of global connection through the television signal – of what might be achieved through the virtual space of the air. Her mission’s remedy is that “watching tv will help [the affected] patch back into the world’s mixing board.” The film, however, does not offer much hope that this remedy is plausible.

Negotiation with Lived Experience of Place I will briefly touch on two texts that (I think) offer sophisticated readings of contemporary moving image culture’s effects on the lived experiences of Canadian place. I mention these here for a couple of reasons. First, they both deal with a changing landscape in Canada that is partly due to inundation with media texts, in this case television content that is mostly produced in the United States. Second, they both witness (and deal with) postmodern anxiety about how authentic a self or place is under conditions of (in these two cases) satellite television when watching and sharing cultural texts appears to happen seamlessly across national borders.

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Twitch City (Bruce McDonald, Don McKellar, 1998–2000) is a television series that features Don McKellar (Curtis) as a television addict with agoraphobia, which prevents him from leaving his apartment. Curtis appears to exemplify Northrop Frye’s garrison mentality, except in reverse since he cloisters himself in his apartment with us American culture for company. Curtis is first introduced as unable to answer the doorbell for fear of missing a moment of his favourite talk show, although it is later revealed that the broadcast is a rerun and he has a tape of the original. While Curtis’s commitment to the ephemeral aura of broadcast tv initially appears ridiculous, the show jokingly deals with aura in the “real” diegetic world outside of Curtis’s apartment: Toronto’s Kensington Market. In the first episode, Al Waxman, star of the canonical Canadian television series King of Kensington (1975–80), plays a derelict who wanders the neighbourhood streets where his show was set. Curtis’s roommate, Nathan, inadvertently kills Waxman on the way home from the convenience store. When provoked, Nathan “kills the King” by knocking him on the head with a cat food can. The show’s self-reflexive gesture exorcises the narrative space of Kensington Market to make way for the new series and also serves as the incident that incites narrative action: Curtis puts the moves on Nathan’s girlfriend and the roommate spends the series in jail. The “real” spaces of lived experiences in this series are both televisual and actual. Both inflect each other. The aura of television is part of the authenticity of the actual lived experience of Kensington Market.

Figure 10.1 Production photo from Life Classes (William D. MacGillivray, 1987) of Earl’s truck bringing pirate satellite TV to Cape Breton. Photo: Eric Walker.

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In the film Life Classes (Bill MacGillivray, 1987), the arrival of satellite television to a rural village in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, exemplifies poet Ann Compton’s claim that it is less accurate to say that we leave home than to say that home leaves us (fig. 10.1).34 Critic Robin Wood identified the metaphor of television in the film as a trinket offered to compensate for globalization. He writes, “Within the rural context of an impoverished rural culture – the obliteration of its past [is] compensated for by nothing more fulfilling than supermarkets and television.”35 In the film’s assessment, economic depression has redistributed labour to the cities and, like the film’s protagonist, Mary, has forced people to leave home. Television may be poor compensation, and certainly seems an inadequate “babysitter” for Mary’s grandmother, who sits with her “stories” all day, since in the new economy, “no one has time for old ladies.” The film’s establishing shots of Cape Breton follow Earl’s pirate satellite dish in the back of a pickup truck, passing fishing boats and clapboard houses, the location’s markers of located authenticity. MacGillivray’s treatment of the dish in the film, however, is not a simple juxtaposition of the old ways and new technologies that herald global culture. While the island receives increased access to porn and hockey games via Earl’s bootleg satellite service, it also receives a monologue of Mary’s family secrets, intercepted on their way to New York City as part of an artist’s project. While the satellite ushers in a new (pirated) exposure to global culture, it also turns out to broadcast the location’s untold stories to itself and to the world.

Strategic Narratives Negotiating Territory From the first episode of the Trailer Park Boys: cory: There’s this guy named Cyrus. He just moved into here. There was nothing we could do about it. He has a gun and he’s nuts. cyrus: I’m the guy who’s in charge now. I’m running the Trailer Park. Anyone who doubts whether the nation still features in visual culture need look no further than the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics, where it is estimated that $40 million was spent on rehearsing a national narrative via television and the Internet.36 The opening ceremonies made particular use of “the land” as a key organizing framework for which to naturalize a history of cultural imperialism. One segment conceptualized Canada as a land of immigrants around a (rather confounding and problematic) aesthetic of “heritage” as groups of people dressed entirely in white costumes which coded in two categories, either vaguely Aboriginal or eastern European, trudged through the stadium to the sound of howling wind. The familiar trope, also seen in the cbc’s Canada: A People’s History (2000–01), that we are all immigrants to this land, whether from across the Bering Strait or from Europe is a strategic rhetoric that conflates “arrivals” across a period of 15,000 years in an attempt to mask Canada’s colonial past of the last few hundred years and excuse the treatment of the nation’s Aboriginal population over the last century as an evolutionary stage in nationhood. Here, the land quite literally figures strategically as a vacant lot in visual culture – as an even playing

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field, waiting to be populated, with no negotiation necessary among its constituents. Curiously, during the London 2012 Olympic games, a promotional ad commissioned by the government of Canada commemorating the War of 1812 (rhetorically constructed to be a “defence” against us invasion) ran incessantly on ctv’s television and Web platforms.37 While initially seeming incongruous with the co-operative spirit of the games, it ultimately reinforced the double-edged sword of national pride/national protectionism. Here, the televisual pastiche of program/commercial foregrounded reciprocal agreements between televisual events involving people who live in the material nation of Canada and formation narratives about the nation-state, a negotiation that tv coverage of the Olympics usually tries to smooth over. Telefilm’s fortieth anniversary promotional video also turned to “the land” as an organizing structure for a collection of films and television texts that dialectically and problematically connotes unity via diversity, everyone with equal claim to the land and rhetorically (thanks to Telefilm’s presence) to film as a storytelling medium.38 Alternating between Canada’s two official languages, so that French and English appear to work intuitively as two sides of the national brain, literally in this case completing each other’s sentences, the clip edits together juxtapositions from Canadian narrative cinema in an attempt to show a range of work whose connection is “imagined” (as in imagined community). “Imagine a land,” it asks the viewer, “where fish talk and mermaids sing.” “It is a place where hope springs eternal, even in winter.” Only this “imagined place,” apparently too good, too diverse, too far-fetched to be true, really exists, as evidenced by the visuals that accompany the outlandish claims of the voice-over dialogue. The metaphor of the land as unifier is conflated with territory, which is conflated with national identity via individual works and filmmakers. “It is a place where the snow has many names,” the clip tells us, “one of them Michael.” It is also a place with “one highway” (i.e., the Internet) where, oxymoronically, “our screens have no borders.” The Canadian nation-state uses actual money and actual turf in order to make claim to identity, which is an endangered understanding under the influence of the Web’s postnational rhetoric. Regulation architecture of the film and television industries as a way for the state to maintain “the border” determine what Canadians can produce and access and are as relevant in the age of the World Wide Web as ever before. While the idea of linking the “living rooms of the nation” through a national broadcasting system appears to my students to be a story of yore, the state is still essentially controlling the trailer park. In a time when culture is apparently “flowing” globally, film and television texts have represented lived experiences rooted in rhetorics of nationally derived reception of moving image culture. In the midst of a vernacular that tells us a global ethic is on the horizon because of the Web, that “everyone” can be a producer and “everything” can be accessible, federal funding was recently cut to a program in Halifax that gave Internet access to 35,000 local people. Eerie associations with Videodrome’s Cathode Ray Mission aside, perhaps the solution is not simply to “patch” people “back into the world’s mixing board” but to acknowledge the nation-state as a key player in connection, especially within the rhetoric of “global connectivity.”

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notes 1 The italics are mine. The “stupid” is not. 2 C. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody. Also Shirky’s ted talk, “How Social Media Can Make History.” 3 Shirky identifies social media as the fifth media revolution after the printing press, the telephone, photos/records, radio and tv broadcasting. Social media depart from these previous forms of media, says Shirky, because unlike these other forms, it creates conversations and groups at the same time. See Shirky, “How Social Media Can Make History.” 4 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework.” 5 Leave It to Beaver (1957–63), The Cosby Show (1984–92), Friends (1994–2004). 6 J. McCullough, “Imperialism, Regionalism, Humanism,” in Rain/Drizzle/Fog, 153. 7 Ibid., 157. 8 Ibid., 156. 9 Ibid., 153. Reference to nicl (new international division of cultural labour) from T. Miller, et al., Global Hollywood, 3. 10 This text was accessed on Telefilm Canada’s website, http://www.telefilm.gc.ca/en/?q=en (accessed 1 March 2010). 11 Ibid. 12 M. Raboy, “Public Television,” in The Cultural Industries in Canada, 178. 13 Episode one of Trailer Park Boys is titled “Take Your Little Gun and Get Out of My Trailer Park.” 14 Z. Druick, “Framing the Local,” in Canadian Cultural Poesis, 90. 15 Ibid. 16 P. Morris, Embattled Shadows, 33-34. 17 The nfb’s Montreal by Night (Jean Paladry, Arthur Burrows, 1947), for example, was apparently versioned to target Italian bricklayers.

18 Peter Urquhart’s phrase in his review of “Canadian National Cinema.” 19 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 618. 20 Ottawa, Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, 272. 21 E. Manning, Ephemeral Territories. 22 J.F. Vance, A History of Canadian Culture, 361. 23 Druick, “Framing the Local,” 90. 24 Ibid. 25 Wikipedia, “cbc Television.” 26 At the time of publication, this is a requirement found in Telefilm Canada, “Guidelines for the Feature Film Fund,” 7. 27 Miller et al., Global Hollywood, 3. 28 Atom Egoyan quotes McSorley in his “Preface,” to The Cinema of Canada, xiv–xv. 29 Vanessa Farquharson, “We [Heart] the Centre of the Universe.” For an expanded reading of Monkey Warfare’s aesthetic as policy artifact see VanderBurgh, “Toronto’s Aesthetic Turf War,” in Locating Migrating Media, 145–58. 30 Geoff Pevere, “Beautiful Haze in the Neighbourhood”; and Harkema interviewed by Ben Carrozza, “Politics, Paranoia and Parkdale.” 31 M.J. Miller, “Inflecting the Formula,” in The Beaver Bites Back, 104–22. 32 H. Bey, TAZ : Temporary Autonomous Zone. 33 Bianca O’Blivion in Videodrome. 34 Ann Compton, The Gallery Reading Series, Saint Mary’s University (Halifax), 24 March 2010. 35 R. Wood, “A Canadian (Inter)National Cinema,” in North of Everything, 235. 36 vanoc Communications, “Vancouver 2010 Opening Ceremony ‘To Inspire the World’ Thanks to Top Canadian Creative Talent

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and Financial Support from the Government of Canada.” 37 See Patricia Pearson, “Cut the 1812 Commercials. Like, Seriously. Now.”

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38 Available to view on YouTube, “Telefilm Canada,” http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=BjuN01FkJvQ (accessed 9 June 2010).

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11 This chapter examines the ways in which exhibitions and art The Art of Conflict: objects engaging with international conflict function to shape Liberal Development and reshape the category of “Canada” as a liberal project in the post–9/11 period. My purpose is to use such cultural after Neo-liberalism objects as entry points to question the why, how, and what now of Canadian art history and the ontological category of Susan Cahill nation situated at its disciplinary centre. To do this, I base my analysis on three main premises: (1) Art and cultural objects do not occupy a space “above” cultural politics, nor do they simply reflect such politics. Rather, these objects function to constitute, subvert, and resist the social world and, thus, are valuable entry points to examine the socio-political circumstances of a historical moment. (2) The production and reproduction of Canada as a project of the liberal order has been and continues to be inextricably linked to nation-based disciplines and their objects, specific to my discussion here, Canadian art history and exhibitions of war art. (3) In the present historical moment, which is inextricably linked to the neo-liberal logic of militarization, liberal nation-states such as Canada must consistently deploy representations of themselves in relation to military activities in order to participate in the global capitalist economy. Taken together, these strands intersect to highlight the relationship of cultural objects and the ongoing negotiation of Canada as a liberal project, and to study the implications of this relationship in a historical moment rooted in neo-liberal policies regarding transnational warfare. In other words, I am using exhibitions of “war art” to begin the process of what historian Ian McKay describes as the project of “rethinking Canada” by “probing the Canadian state’s logical and historical conditions of possibility as a specific project in a particular time and place.”1 Such a study challenges the national/ist rubric of Canadian art history, which depends on “Canada” as a static and homogeneous category.2

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The central case study on which I base my analysis is The Battleground Project, a 2008 exhibition held at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto. In particular, I am interested in its inclusion of Afghan “war rugs.”3 The production of these rugs dates to 1979, when Soviet troops first invaded Afghanistan, and continues today into the us-led and nato-supported “global war on terror,” rebranded in 2009 as “overseas contingency operation.” The war rugs combine weaving methods and formal styles historically associated with conventional Afghan textiles, but also include such unexpected images of war as artillery, tanks, helicopters, and military personnel (fig. 11.1).4 Since 2001, when Afghanistan once again became a site of global conflict, rugmakers have interwoven such scenes as the World Trade Center towers being struck by a plane, the dates 9/11, the us invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and war slogans (“War against Terrorists”) (fig. 11.2). Now most commonly made in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, the global circulation of these rugs has increased through popular Internet sites.5 The global online interest in Afghan war rugs is paralleled by the number of museum exhibitions dedicated to their display outside of Afghanistan. In the past decade, major exhibitions of Afghan war rugs have occurred in Italy, the United States, Australia, and Canada. Of these exhibition sites, the latter two examples strike me as particularly interesting because of the ways they have been staged to focus specifically on Australia’s and Canada’s military missions in Afghanistan. For instance, War without Boundaries: Australia and the “War against Terror” (2003) at the Australian War Memorial and The Battleground Project at the Textile Museum of Canada both frame the rugs as material evidence of the success of Australian and Canadian military efforts. While I have written about the connections between the Australian and Canadian exhibitions elsewhere,6 I am interested here in using Afghan war rugs to read the dominant narrative of Canadian art against itself, as a way of denaturalizing the ontology of nation that has historically been at its disciplinary core. Using the visual culture of conflict to question Canadian art history and its relationship to the current negotiation of Canada as liberal project is particularly important if we are to support Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s assertion that war is the key component in constituting and asserting the nation-state in the present historical moment.7 When cultural objects document and critique a state’s engagements with war, they might also be used as sites to examine war as a vehicle for liberal development and the redrawing of territorial boundaries under neo-liberalism. I focus on the Textile Museum of Canada’s The Battleground Project in order to think through these larger concerns regarding the unfolding of liberal development in war zones. While Afghan war rugs have a production context that is limited to local conflict, the fact that non-Afghan institutions such as the Textile Museum regularly collect and display them provides an important connection between conflict, liberalism, and development projects that are exercised in terms of nation. In particular, The Battleground Project demonstrates the ways in which objects of art and culture play a key role in negotiating claims to national sovereignty, including justifying the Canadian military presence in Afghanistan according to the familiar logic of liberal nation building. As a settler nation and as part of the British Commonwealth, Canada has marketed a very particular narrative in relation to its national/ist conflict history. Although Canada

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Figure 11.1 Afghan war rug, 2001–07.

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has played a role in the ongoing war in Afghanistan, it has also avoided the associations of the initial us-led and uk-supported invasion, “Operation Enduring Freedom,” by entering later into the conflict and as a supposedly peacekeeping, global middle power. Despite this peacekeeping narrative, which situates Canadian actions as disconnected from the aggressive armed military response of other nations, Canada is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato) and acted in Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance Force (isaf), an extraterritorial policing unit. Canada’s military activities are not defined simply by the decisions of an independent, sovereign nation, but, rather, as one element in a multinational global security team. These actions, then, are not independently national, but are part of a response defined by Merje Kuus as “cosmopolitan militarism,” which is “the framing of a military alliance in terms of cosmopolitan spaces that transcend national borders and ideological blocks to unite the whole globe.”8 Canada’s recent conflict history is inextricably linked to the military efforts of a number of other states, as well as the operations of several intergovernmental organizations. However, this “cosmopolitan militarism” does not eliminate the interest in demarcating the boundaries of the nation; although the role and identity of the nation are reconstituted as particular components such as war undergo denationalization, the nation does not disappear.9 Transnational alliances actually increase the desire of a nation such as Canada to assert itself as distinct and integral within the neo-liberal order. As such, probing which exhibitions and objects are mobilized to represent “Canada” in relation to global conflict can provide insight into what the liberal project of reconstituting Canada is within the present historical moment. Using The Battleground Project as my central case study, I ask why, how, and even what now of the study and display of art objects that use the national/ist rubric of Canadian art history and the relationship of such a rubric to the current liberal project of Canada. These three questions form the basic structure for my chapter. Why: in the first section, I question why the general theme of war in The Battleground Project is relevant to the production and reproduction of the Canadian nation-state. How: following this, in the second section, I focus on the inclusion of Afghan war rugs in this exhibition to study how Canadian art history subsumes particular objects and histories from previously marginalized groups into its dominant, national/ist narrative. What now: in the final section, I explore some possibilities of moving beyond the nationalist/ist rubric of Canadian art history as a preliminary attempt to redefine and reframe the study of art and culture in the Canadian context. I begin addressing these questions in this paper at the same place I first began asking them: in the exhibition space of a Canadian cultural institution. The exhibition The Battleground Project was displayed at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto from April 2008 to January 2009 and was curated by museum co-founder Max Allen. Featuring a variety of visual and material objects from a wide range of time

Opposite Figure 11.2 Afghan war rug, early twenty-first century.

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periods and geopolitical sites, the overarching theme of the exhibition was engagements and representations of the personal experience of conflict.10 Upon its opening, the exhibition was reviewed very positively by major Canadian newspapers, including the National Post, which was also the exhibition’s media sponsor, and the Globe and Mail. It was also declared to be one of the best visual arts shows of 2008 by the Toronto Star and Now Magazine and was praised as “the year’s strongest war-themed exhibition” for its ability to interweave “culture, materials, history and expression with rare and urgently necessary curatorial clarity.”11 The Battleground Project was divided into three smaller exhibitions, organized by artistic medium and arranged in separate but interconnected gallery spaces: “The Kandahar Journals of Richard Johnson,” “Patches: Military Uniform Insignia,” and “Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan.” The first display consisted of sketches composed by Richard Johnson, a National Post correspondent, while he was on assignment at a Canadian military base in Afghanistan in 2007. The drawings, many of them pencil sketches, were originally included in Johnson’s National Post online word and image diary entitled “Postings from Afghanistan: A Kandahar Journal.”12 Most of the images included in The Battleground Project depicted Canadian military personnel, with whom he was embedded, through individual portraits or daily activities. According to the pamphlet that accompanied the exhibition, Johnson’s “pictorial reports” recorded “military life and the relationship between Afghans and Canadians.”13 Notably, these drawings were the only objects presented in The Battleground Project that identified the producer by name. The second display in The Battleground Project, “Patches: Military Uniform Insignia,” incorporated a wide array of military patches from a variety of countries, time periods, and wars. These patches were a mixture of both official patches, which depicted the slogans and imagery associated with specific military units, and unofficial, or “off-duty,” patches, which reflected the personal desires and opinions of the person who commissioned each one (fig. 11.3). Arranged in display cases organized by conflict or nation, these patches were included in part because “their drawings of weaponry, are a key imagesource for the Afghan weavers, and can be seen in the war rugs exhibited in ‘Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan.’”14 In order to make the connections between the images on the patches and those on the rugs clearer, several display cases of patches were scattered throughout the display of Afghan war rugs. The main focus of The Battleground Project was the third and largest display, “Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan,” which is not surprising given the museum’s dedication to the representation of textiles (figs. 11.4 and 11.5). Presenting over 120 Afghan war rugs mounted as wall hangings, this display was arranged into eleven thematic subsections, such as Landmines, Crossfire, Minarets, Western Perspectives, and Symbolic Animals. None of the rugs was attributed to an identified maker; as Allen states in his curatorial essay for this exhibit, the rugs function as “eloquent anonymous documents of catastrophe.”15 The production dates of the rugs included in the exhibition ranged from 1979 to 2007. While the arrangement of the three displays contributed to the overall theme of battle, separating their arrangement into different spaces promoted a sense of discrete, nation-based histories of war. Although several cases of patches were displayed through-

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Figure 11.3 Military patch, USA, 2001.

out the Afghan war rugs section, this integration was meant to elucidate image source rather than illustrate cultural contact. This organization dislocated works from the actual lived experiences and global realities of the rugmakers and ignored the fluid boundaries and global interrelationality inherent to military conflict. The arrangement of The Battleground Project relied on the conventional art historical rhetoric of objects representing a static and universal meaning that is embedded in the object and can be communicated fully and unmediated to viewers. The problem with representations is that they refuse the dynamism and constitution of categories, particularly in relation to exhibiting cultural products associated with the nation. In The Battleground Project the objects – drawings, patches, and rugs – were positioned to stand for particular cultural and national identities, such as Canadian sketches, Russian military patch, or Afghan war rug. Also, using the nation as a descriptive qualifier presented cultural objects without contextualizing or elucidating their relationships to each other, as if their national/ist connections should reveal an inherent and homogeneous sense of nation and its citizens. Representing objects as exemplifying particular national characteristics disregarded the realities of dynamic, diverse, and antagonistic national populations.

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By asserting national categories as autonomous and fundamental units within past and present global conflict, the exhibition relied on an art historical rubric that frames “the nation” as a homogeneous, historically static, bounded unit. Such a rubric denies the multiplicities and dynamism of populations contained within the geopolitical space of nation. Rather than display objects as uncritically representative of categories such as Canadian, Russian, or Afghan, the exhibition needed to address the absence of bounded and unified collectivities that can be statically represented. As John Stratton and Ien Ang argue, the concept of nation needs to be recognized as “a contested terrain between historically specific ‘cultures’ structured in relations of dominance and subordination to each other.”16 Asserting that the category of nation cannot be represented or studied as a static entity shifts how “nation” is approached as a site of critical inquiry. This is not to say that the nation should be ignored as a point of analysis or a critical concept, but that the idea of nation has to function as a contingent and dynamic entity. Using national/ist categories to define all the objects in The Battleground Project also encouraged a hierarchy in relation to unequal levels of national/ist participation in global military conflict. These unequal relations to the dominant global narrative were created through the perceived agency of who spoke for the nation. While all the objects in the exhibition were united through a national engagement with the general theme of warfare, only Johnson’s drawings were associated with an identifiable person, time period, and a set narrative. The other cultural products (patches and rugs) were united through their production by non-Canadian, nameless individuals spanning a time period of approximately half a century. For the Afghan war rugs in particular, the juxtaposition with Johnson’s drawings echoes the binaries of art/craft, male/female, West/non-West, and active/ passive.17 In this arrangement, only Johnson’s figurative drawings represented the voice of an individual, arguably the figure of the liberal individual at the centre of the liberal nation and the artist-as-genius figure at the centre of conventional art history. In this way, the Canadian narrative found in Johnson’s drawings was developed as the active narrator of conflict history in the exhibition, with the narratives of the other objects playing supporting roles. In The Battleground Project Johnson’s narrative reinforced the Canadian state’s official narrative that connects Canadian foreign activities in conflict zones with peacekeeping and enabled this Canadian history to become the linchpin and culmination of the represented history of global conflict. The visual culture of conflict helps to naturalize and legitimate a military response as a necessary response. Militarization, which “refers to a multifaceted social process by which military approaches to social problems gain elite and popular acceptance,”18 is aided in large part by normalizing visual depictions of military activities to the public. The rhetoric of art history has conventionally relied on the category of nation as the central actor in its analysis and display of cultural objects; therefore visual culture that is displayed in conventional art historical spaces uses such national/ist rubrics as an exhibition

Figure 11.4 Opposite top Afghan war rug, ca 1990–2007. Figure 11.5 Opposite top Afghan war rug, early twenty-first century.

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strategy. The arrangement of cultural objects in an exhibition such as The Battleground Project, then, normalized processes of conflict and militarization and asserted the role of Canada as the central participant in these processes. This history of display is the result of the inextricable links between the formation of art history as a discipline and the development of liberalism as the dominant politico-economic logic, with the standard unit of the liberal nation-state as its fundamental building block. The positioning of Johnson’s, and by extension Canada’s, narrative at the centre and apex of a history of global conflict cannot be viewed as insignificant or accidental. In the period since 2001, the neo-liberal logic of militarization ideologically projects war as denationalized and deterritorialized, generating a political economy whereby all nationstates participate as either an ally or enemy. And not all nation-states are equally free to choose their labels as allies and enemies. This neo-liberal logic of militarization has no outside or inside; it has only different degrees of belonging.19 The ability to declare and engage with legitimate war has become a measure of that degree of belonging, or global status, within neo-liberalism. Within this formulation, war deemed legitimate is that which reacts to threats against the dominant global order of neo-liberal capitalism. War of this nature is framed in terms of security, which is juxtaposed with the global dangers of terrorism. As Giorgio Agamben writes, “While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an opening and globalisation … [such] measures of security can only function within a context of freedom, trade, and individual initiative.”20 Conflict framed as security, then, is mutually constitutive with neo-liberal globalization, and in order for a nation to legitimate itself within this global context, it must situate itself as a key actor on the global conflict stage. War and conflict are posited as central to a globalist security force and framed as necessary to resolving conflict and bringing peace and democracy to all areas contained within neo-liberal globalization, which is ideologically projected as unbounded.21 While Canada has a history of promoting its foreign activities as peacekeeping, in a moment when conflict is presented as a moral battle, associating Canada’s conflict approach as nonaggressive and humane gains particular momentum. Peacekeeping, then, becomes the most moral approach within a conflict framed as a moral battle. The ability to engage as a participant in the global military security force, on the correct side of moral values, becomes an indicator of “relative dominance within the hierarchies at the highest and lowest levels of the global system.”22 The arrangement and displays in The Battleground Project cannot be viewed as playfully engaging in the aesthetics or general themes of warfare, battle, or conflict. Rather, these representations must be contextualized as producing and legitimating the liberal project of Canada in relation to the current history of neo-liberal militarization. Asking why Canada is represented in such a particular way in a certain space and time illuminates the role cultural objects play in producing and reproducing the category of Canada, and the ways in which the liberal project of nation is negotiated in different socio-political circumstances. While I have discussed why an exhibition engaging with contemporary war art is important to discuss in relation to the category of Canada as a liberal project, I would here like to turn my attention to how this specific national/ist narrative is created, legitimated,

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and promoted. Focusing specifically on the history and mobilization of the art historical model, with a national/ist rubric at its foundation, I will examine how the display of Afghan war rugs in The Battleground Project operates within the dominant narrative of Canadian conflict history. To do this, I address the history of representation and the politics of inclusion that compose the central modes of knowledge production in the national/ist rubric of Canadian art history. Institutions of art history are inextricably linked to the installation of liberalism as a totalizing philosophy. The production of new systems of display and classification do not simply reflect pre-existing liberal principles; the space of the museum and the discipline of art history, while legitimating the concept of the liberal nation, also produce and refine this idea.23 The system of liberalism developed in different historical conditions, and, thus, developed unevenly. Canada’s liberal order is, therefore, different from that of other nations, such as the us’s or Australia’s, because of the historical circumstances of its development in Canada, as those who sought to establish a liberal hegemony had to deal with the particular historical circumstances of the nineteenth century in northern North America.24 Specific to the politics of the nation, disciplinary art history and museum spaces create and harness new meanings for new social purposes. The discipline of Canadian art history as advanced in the museum space, then, correlates with the political demands required of advancing and installing the liberal project of Canada. Within the rhetoric of art history and the space of the museum, works of art become part of the materiality of the nation, represented to citizens in order to constitute a visual national character as well as to civilize and modernize national subjects. Artworks are naturalized as historical documents that are believed to directly represent specific historical or national characteristics. This process masks the selective inclusion of works into an official art canon and ignores the exclusion of other works based on historically constructed social categories such as gender, race, and class. Promoting national identity as representative, ahistorical, and unchanging, the discipline provides a national/ist rubric as the historical basis from which current art historical projects continue. What constitutes this representation, however, constantly shifts according to the sociopolitical demands of historical circumstances. There is not one consistent cultural identity that can be associated with Canada; what produces the identity of nation shifts throughout time, as national/ist narratives use different cultural indicators based on different formations of the global context. As I discussed in the previous section, in the present historical moment, aligning Canada’s national/ist narrative with the dynamics of conflict is integral to participating in neo-liberalism. What cultural objects represent a nation, such as those associated with conflict, is predicated on an understanding that the dominant narrative of national identity is continually reconstituted in relation to neoliberal globalization. Visual and material culture made by marginalized groups, such as Afghan refugees, can be visually and culturally centralized within a dominant national/ist narrative without much renegotiation or loss to the dominant narrative itself; art history has in this way always been an additive, rather than a revisionist, project. Liberal entities can subsume other, competing, narratives without having to negotiate or diminish their own dominant history and position. The liberal entities, in this case, can be both the nation-state and the museum, as a liberal cultural institution. In relation

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to the Textile Museum of Canada as a dominant cultural institution, the staging of an exhibition such as The Battleground Project supported its very identity as a site of plenitude.25 Staging cultural difference through various nations under the banner of warfare and transnational conflict enabled the museum to perform “an act of lack,” whereby previously excluded histories – in this case, the viewpoint of the Afghan people subject to Canadian military invasion – could be suddenly included.26 Although meaning was produced through the interaction of various actors, the role of the museum in an exhibition such as The Battleground Project can be interpreted as an attempt to reify its identity as a site of plenitude. Through the inclusion of conventionally marginalized histories, the museum was acting under the principles inherent to its own identity, formulated at its inception in the nineteenth century, that it must function as a space able to represent all objects and cultures without having to re-evaluate its own position as a dominant cultural institution. In relation to the canon of art and the boundaries of the museum space, Lynda Jessup describes this type of inclusion as “soft inclusion,” whereby “the solution to the resulting problem of exclusions lies simply in ‘elevating’ previously excluded cultural forms to the status of ‘art,’ leaving intact (even legitimating) the hierarchies of race, gender, and class – the social relations – upon which such evaluations are based in the first place.”27 In The Battleground Project the exhibit re-presented the motivations for the creation of the visuals woven into the textiles to contribute specifically to the justification of Canadian involvement in Afghanistan as well as to the history of Canada’s conflict engagements. The seamless inclusion of these Afghan cultural products in Canadian institutions elucidated the problems with cultural marginalizations and museum representations, a process that is inextricably linked to the unequal exchange of cultural objects in the global marketplace. This inclusion also illustrated the use of culture and cultural objects within the postnational landscape. Although in The Battleground Project the Afghan war rugs were positioned to represent an ahistorical and homogeneous Afghan culture, the overall framing of the exhibition allied Afghan experience with Canadian national/ist narratives. However, this same “type” of cultural object was mobilized for an Australian national/ist narrative in a different exhibition, War without Boundaries: Australia and the “War against Terror” (2003) at the Australian War Memorial. Not only are particular cultural objects able to be subsumed into dominant liberal narratives, but, in fact, similar cultural objects can legitimate and produce different liberal narratives within the same time period. Objects do not have a predetermined, embedded meaning; the specific liberal context alters and negotiates how particular objects function and are “read.” Representations, such as those that are situated through the national/ist rubric of art history, are actually participating in a dialogic relationship between object and context, where the context, the nation, is a historically constituted liberal hegemony.28 The ease with which Afghan war rugs are subsumed into the dominant conflict narratives of liberal nations is reflective of the object categories and cultural hierarchies embedded within the national/ist rubric of art history. Although the rugs included in The Battleground Project were mounted on the walls to be consumed visually, these rugs are woven material objects. Such materiality of objects has a particular history within the

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lower-value hierarchies of disciplinary art history. Cultural products such as textiles are often categorized as folk art, or craft, with specific associations such as female, domestic, and apolitical. Presented as depicting the experience of anonymous Afghan weavers, these cultural objects functioned in The Battleground Project as cross-cultural, or global, folk art. The Afghan war rugs that have been produced over the past forty years were rehistoricized, re-politicized, and re-presented as a unified group of works without accounting for the major shifts that Afghanistan and its people have undergone during that time period. The images presented in the rugs were framed as biographical testimonials of Afghan weavers because such producers are presumed to talk only from their own experience and to be incapable of being political or consciously creative. In the circulation of Afghan war rugs and their absorption into different liberal contexts through national/ist exhibitions, the testimonial quality associated with Afghan war rugs relied on an unchanging and homogeneous representation of both Afghanistan and Afghan experiences of atemporal conflict. In The Battleground Project at the Textile Museum of Canada, relying on representation as the mode of communication and understanding enabled the colonizing of experiences, whereby the experiences of the makers were adapted and made into the experiences of the viewers. That is, the experience of conflict, and its subsequent feelings of trauma, represented by the Afghan war rugs were presumed to communicate this experience so directly that it also became the experience, and thus feelings, of the viewers. Such a process is particularly acute in relation to a discourse of nationalism whereby political and experiential affinities are supposedly produced by disparate, yet politically aligned, groups of people through their shared experience. The problem with such testimonial representation, where meaning or experience is directly communicated between maker and viewer, is that it presumes that art can register the true experience of conflict, violence, and trauma and it lays claim to an experience that is fundamentally owned by someone. Moreover, it invites a wider audience to partake directly in this experience in some way. As discussed by Jill Bennett, Bertolt Brecht describes this process of colonizing experience as “crude empathy,” “a feeling for another based on the assimilation of the other’s experience to the self.”29 With representation, experience is situated to be felt vicariously, rather than virtually. This over-identification, however, actually marks a fundamental lack of affinity. In a perversion of the early war cry by former us president George W. Bush, the arrangements of these exhibitions seek to be with, rather than against, “us.” The Afghan war rugs within The Battleground Project, I argue, were framed in order to provoke a political and emotional affinity in museum viewers, enacting a personal connection of conflict and trauma that supplanted the actual lived experience of the maker. This remapping of one history over that of another is part of the history of museums – as well as liberalism – whereby all narratives are subsumed and renegotiated in terms of the dominant culture or nation. Despite the actual reconstitution of the ways in which objects are framed in relation to liberal contexts, art historical representation relies on static meanings that are embedded in the object and, therefore, are positioned as unchanging within any context. This methodology lies at the very centre of the national/ist rubric of art history, whereby the cultural products of a nation can reveal permanent and unifying cultural truths specific to that nation. This perspective of nation, which embedded itself in art history at its formation as

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a discipline in the nineteenth century, promotes the sovereignty of the nation-state while also denying the mutually constitutive relationship between visual representation and neo-liberal globalization. In order for art history to develop as a revisionist, rather than additive, project, I suggest that the discipline must shift from positioning cultural objects as representative, which does not allow for the flexibility and the complexity of constitutive categories, such as nation, and move toward a more productive line of inquiry, such as affect. This leads me to the third section of this chapter, the what now of studying and displaying cultural objects in the Canadian context. With affect, I am suggesting a different mode of display and inquiry with potential to help redefine and reframe the study of art and culture in the Canadian context. Affect refers to senses and sensibility, and the force of encounter of bodies as the site of registration, or embodiment, with such sensations. Theories of affect encourage the formation of meanings and identities as not simply reflecting “dominant ideological schemes,” but also constituting and possibly resisting them. Affect allows movement and flux, rather than stasis and permanence, as both meanings and subjects are constantly in a state of becoming through their encounters with and within the world. Affect provides possibilities to challenge the “residual cultural Cartesianism” that disconnects the mind and body;30 this cultural Cartesianism has historically enabled those perceived as being capable of rationally overcoming their emotions, which has primarily been the self-possessed liberal individual, to generate the meanings of objects. In this way, meanings or identities are never static, and power of interpretation does not rest in the bodies of the few, but enables any-bodies and every-bodies to engage in the process of meaning making. I suggest affect as part of an approach to understanding the production of meanings through engagements with cultural objects that results from the dialogue between feelings-thoughts-circumstances. Using affect provides a process of engaging with visual narratives that moves beyond the field of representation to a form of analysis that avoids the tropes of unquestioned categories and removes the concept of nation as a central, static actor. This approach has the potential to transgress the problems with staid representation and to position understanding as a dynamic and interactive process. Affect as a form of embodied knowledges locates the interaction between viewers and cultural objects as productive, not simply reflective, of other elements. Focusing on the personal experience of viewing does not disconnect this interaction from the liberal context and unequal relationships of different bodies within neo-liberal globalization. In fact, David Harvey suggests that embodiment and globalization “operate at opposite ends of the spectrum in the scalar we might use to understand social and political life.”31 These micro and macro understandings of being in and of the world help better position the framing and interpretation of cultural objects, such as exhibitions dealing with conflict and Afghan war rugs, than the meanings provided by a static national/ist rubric. Rather than the visuals of a cultural product representing a specific and predetermined meaning, looking at visual culture through affect suggests that the visual sensation is not an end unto itself, but that the thoughts and feelings stimulated by this act of looking provide a stimulus for critical inquiry. The moment of engagement of a viewer with the visuals of conflict or trauma becomes the moment of origin for critical thought. Gilles

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Deleuze discusses the concept of “encountered sign” to describe, in the words of Jill Bennett, the sign that “is felt, rather than recognized or perceived through cognition.”32 In this way, art is never reflective of or confined to a particular understanding or representation, but is always productive of critical ideas that engage with the feelings and subjectivity of the viewer within a particular space and time. This necessary conjunction between visual culture, affect, and critical awareness provides a framework within which viewers can engage with visual narratives without the danger of colonizing the experience of the producer. Acknowledging the unbridgeable distance between those who produce and those who consume the image – particularly in instances of conflict narratives, whereby there is often a privilege allotted to the distant observer of events unfolding elsewhere – circumvents the liberal tendency to subsume othered histories into a dominant narrative. It also shifts certain bodies, those of liberal individuals, away from the centre of a narrative. Affect produces, as Bennett writes, an empathic vision that can “constitute the basis of an empathy grounded not in affinity (feeling for another insofar as we can imagine being that other) but on a feeling for another that entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible.”33 Empathic viewing, in this formulation, becomes a way of viewing marked by the recognition that, as a viewer, one inhabits an ambivalent and ambiguous zone of comprehension and incomprehension. In relation to beginning to engage with exhibitions such as The Battleground Project in this way, curators and viewers must understand that the presentation of Afghan war rugs does not lend itself to representing a particular identity or homogeneous experience of conflict that can be translated into being “owned.” The ownership here could be a claim to a personal or national/ist narrative. This new mode of art historical analysis requires comprehending that the experiences of conflict as they are conveyed in visual language are not direct communications, but are better understood as affective transactions. Afghan war rugs, then, cannot be framed simply as biographical testimonials that directly communicate conflict experiences unmediated by creativity or politics. As Bennett highlights, art “does not offer us a privileged view of the inner subject [of the producer]; rather, by giving trauma extension in space or lived place, it invites an awareness of different modes of inhabitation.”34 While viewers can feel “touched” by the images of the artworks, they cannot misunderstand that the visuals communicate the “essence” of that experience insofar as the viewer can inhabit that experience. Affect provides a method of recognizing the distance between viewer and producer and, therefore, can provide a way of engaging with cultural objects such as Afghan war rugs in a Canadian cultural institution that does not colonize the experiences of the producer. Simply engaging with objects at an embodied, empathic level is not enough to encourage the shift away from art historical representation and static categories. For affect to function not as a crude or colonizing empathy, but rather as an affective affinity, there needs to be a self-reflexive recognition of a loss in power and ownership by both Canadian viewers and Canadian cultural institutions. That is, the viewing-body and the exhibiting institutional-body must recognize themselves as sites of plenitude and accept a position of lack. The Battleground Project, however, while encouraging empathy in its viewers, relied too heavily on the conventional methods of disciplinary art history and

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used representation to position the Afghan war rugs as part of the dominant Canadian conflict by aligning a Canadian and Afghan shared experience of conflict. Through this process of representation, the exhibition granted immediate ownership of the Afghan experiences of war and trauma depicted in the objects to visitors in a Canadian cultural institution. This absorption of one history into another is part of the liberal project of art history; in The Battleground Project the experiences of war of the Afghan rugmakers were colonized as part of the Canadian national/ist experience of war. This idea of colonizing the experience of a previously peripheral culture into the dominant national/ist narrative is inextricably linked with the conditions of global politics. In relation to exhibitions that unite war and nation, the framing of this relationship shifts depending on how the dominant narrative of nation is related to conflict within a certain space and time. Canada asserts its relation to war – although as a peacekeeping, not military, power – in order to be recognized as an acknowledged player within global power relations. However, this assertion is carefully posited in order to situate Canada as a pacifist, not aggressive, nation. By colonizing the experience of the Afghan war rugs to suit the dominant national/ist identity, the exhibition sought to ally itself with a viewpoint that is framed as “what the Afghan people want.” Hal Foster suggests that the need to converge perspectives occurs when the aggressor becomes vilified – in this case, in recognition of and distancing from the militaristic overtones of the invasion of Afghanistan – and seeks to ally itself with the victim. As Foster notes, in order not to be included in the group defined as having performed a specific wrongdoing, one seeks to situate oneself in alliance with the victimized group.35 The exhibition, then, framed the Canadian and Afghan perspectives as united and cohesive in their attitudes toward war, justifying the Canadian presence in Afghanistan as a team effort against an outside, unnamed, evil force promoting battle. Unifying these narratives, Afghan and Canadian, further asserted the Canadian military approach as humane and non– aggressive, thereby continually building upon the national/ist narrative of peacekeeping. In asserting the connection of Canada to the imperial sovereignty of war – which ensures the nation is recognized on the world stage as an integral player – the exhibition carefully colonized specific experiences to ensure that this connection still maintained the dominant national/ist narrative of Canadian identity as peacekeeping. Arranging cultural objects as representative of static identities is encoded with the histories of liberal categories that are constructed as static concepts and ignores the current realities of the shifting, contingent, and dynamic interconnections of their constitution. This process ignores the interconnections between inside and outside museum space, and situates cultural products as divorced from the historical conditions of both their production and display. In order to move beyond these tropes, art history needs to shift to account for this ahistorical representative tendency by overtly situating different visual histories within larger contexts of global politics. The current project of Canadian art history, then, involves a call to action to those inside the cultural institutions themselves to rethink critically these inclusions and arrangements beyond representation.

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While the state of the nation changes under neo-liberal globalization, it does not disappear. Contrary to conventional perspectives, the category of nation is not static, predetermined, or ahistorical, but is constantly changing due to the internal and external pressures on the liberal nation-state, modifications that are particularly apparent in the present moment of conflict and neo-liberal globalization. The project of nation, then, adapts and is reconstituted based on the conditions and demands of a particular historical moment. The recognition of the contingent and dynamic nature of the nation-state provides a theoretical foundation for moving beyond art historical analyses that naturalize the ontology of nationhood as central to knowledge production. With this acknowledgment, I am not suggesting that the nation is irrelevant as a category of inquiry. Actually, quite the opposite. Framing the nation as a historically derived and conditional state demonstrates the need to examine the category of nation itself as a constituted concept. As Ian McKay suggests in relation to Canadian history, “the category of ‘Canada’ should henceforth denote a historically specific project of rule, rather than an essence we must define or an empty homogeneous space we must possess. Canada-asproject can be analyzed through the study of the implantation and expansion over a heterogeneous terrain of a certain politico-economic logic – to wit, liberalism.”36 By building upon the idea of nation as a continuing project of liberalism, I suggest the nation can be redefined as a critical point of inquiry to account for its continual reconstitution as an entity and concept within neo-liberal globalization. As part of building a revisionist, not additive, project of art history as a strategy to question and challenge dominant national/ist narratives, it is integral to interrogate the functions of the rhetoric and display of art and their institutionalization as imbricated in the continuing project of the liberal nation and neo-liberal globalization. Recognizing the nation as a contingent and constituted category is central to re-envisioning the project of Canadian visual history, where the category of Canada can no longer be used as a predetermined, ahistorical agent of analysis. The analysis of The Battleground Project in this chapter is my contribution to a larger, ongoing dialogue about the limitations and possibilities of Canadian art history as a disciplinary project in a particular historical moment. Beginning in June 2011, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper began withdrawing Canadian soldiers from Afghanistan, although several hundred Canadian Forces personnel will remain stationed in Afghanistan in order to provide training to the Afghan National Security Forces and the Afghan National Army.37 The reconstitution of the purposes of the mission in Afghanistan, as well as the changing roles of Canadian troops’ participation in it, will surely alter Canada’s self-identification and representation. Ian McKay and Jamie Swift have identified the transition of Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan as part of a rebranding of Canada from peacekeeping nation to warrior nation.38 The changing state of the nation in relation to neo-liberal militarization will surely mark another change in the project of Canada as a liberal nation, one that will be produced and reproduced, as well as challenged and resisted, by the exhibition and study of cultural objects.

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1 I. McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 621. 2 I use “national/ist” as a critical term to assert that the category of nation is constituted and to problematize the way the term “national” is often deployed to unproblematically describe nation-based narratives and cultural products. 3 The term “war rugs” is now commonly used by collectors, curators, and scholars to identify these objects, and it is one I have adopted as well, although I place the term “war rugs” in quotation marks in order to identify the label as empty and non-descriptive. The term was invented as a category to describe the material, aesthetics, and subject matter of a wide variety of objects which might otherwise remain unrelated. To have representational value and content, the term Afghan “war rugs” needs to be clarified through cultural, historical, and political contextualization. By questioning the term “war rugs,” I aim to illuminate the danger of categorizing cultural products. Categorization can subsume objects from one category to another within the modernist art canon. Individual works are then in danger of being transformed into examples of genres, as Susan Buck-Morss writes, which in the case of “political art” or “war art” effectively subordinates the specificity of each work’s political content to the generalized qualities of the category. This reduction of possible meanings into one ambiguous label then fails to accommodate the complexities involved in the politics and culture of conflict. Thus, certain meanings are mobilized in ways that legitimate and support dominant national/ist narratives, while other meanings and their political motivations are silenced. S. BuckMorss “Global Counter-culture?” in Thinking Past Terror, 70.

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4 For a more detailed description of the production and circulation of Afghan war rugs, see T. Bonyhady, “Out of Afghanistan,” in The Rugs of War, 4–18. 5 The Internet has acted as a fairly accessible vehicle for circulating both information about these rugs and the objects themselves. Online shopping sites, including eBay, offer these objects to anyone with computer access and a credit card, although the rugs’ availability has petered out in the last few years, as demand has increased or production has diminished, or both. Moreover, the websites devoted specifically to Afghan war rugs comprise both online shopping sites, including warrugs.com, and weblogs, including rugsofwar.wordpress.com, which offers extensive images and interpretations of these textiles. 6 S. Cahill, “Contested Terrains.” 7 M. Hardt and A. Negri, Reflections on Empire, 2. 8 M. Kuus, “Cosmopolitan Militarism?” 546. 9 S. Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 8. 10 To see images of the installation of and the objects included in The Battleground Project visit the official website of the Textile Museum of Canada at http://www.textile museum.ca/apps/index.cfm?page=exhibition. detail&exhId=271. 11 D. Jager, L. Sandals, and F. Schecter, “Year in Review: Top 10 Art Shows, 2008.” 12 Johnson’s original writings and drawings completed in his correspondence with the National Post are available online at http://news.nationalpost.com/tag/kandaharjournal/ (accessed 8 March 2013). The specific images by Johnson included in The Battleground Project can be found on the official website of the Textile Museum of Canada at http://www.textilemuseum. ca/apps/index.cfm?page=exhibition.detail &exhId=271.

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13 “Battleground,” pamphlet accompanying exhibition (Toronto: Textile Museum of Canada, 2008), n.p. 14 Ibid. 15 M. Allen, “Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan.” 16 J. Stratton and I. Ang, “On the Impossibility of a Global Cultural Studies,” in Stuart Hall, 367. 17 I use the term “West” here as a historical, not geographical, construct as well as a product of liberalism as a totalizing philosophy. While I use this term, I do not use it uncritically, but aim to situate it within my larger critical history of liberalism and museums. In fact, with its use I seek to problematize the notion of the West as a classification, homogenized image, standard of comparison, and criterion of evaluation. The West is then a historical term indicating the power to shape policy and representations, processes that reify ideological divisions between the non-West and West, Global South and Global North, and developed and developing contexts as if these were simply geographical distinctions. For more information, see Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest,” in Formations of Modernity, 275–331. 18 Kuus, “Cosmopolitan Militarism,” 547. 19 In reference to my statement about neo-liberal logic as having “no outside of inside,” I am not trying to suggest that neo-liberalism is solely a top-down, totalizing philosophy

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

without resistance or dissent. Rather, I am attempting to demonstrate the deterritorialized and unbounded reach of this globalizing system. My focus in this chapter is on the dominant narrative; therefore I am examining the processes of its dominance. G. Agamben, “Security and Terror,” n.p. Kuus, “Cosmopolitan Militarism,” 548. M. Hardt and A. Negri, Multitude, 4. For more information about the history of museums and the development of liberalism, see T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum. McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 617–45. I. Rogoff, “Hit and Run,” 63. Ibid., 64. L. Jessup, “Hard Inclusion,” in On Aboriginal Representation, xvii. McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 620–1. J. Bennett, Empathic Vision, 10. N. Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling,” 54. D. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 15. Bennett, Empathic Vision, 7. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 12. H. Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” 123. McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 620–1. cbc, “First Wave of Afghanistan Troop Withdrawal Arrives.” I. McKay and J. Swift, Warrior Nation.

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12 The starting point here is not to worry about a putative Considering emptiness at the core of the Canadian art historical project Sovereignty and which threatens to dissolve a nation-bound discipline into universal or global forces. Instead, I am focusing on gaps Neo-liberalism within and supposed loopholes which certain kinds of cultural practices – self-determined, independent, or merely aloof from Indeterminate States dominant institutional practices – have attempted to work out of, owing to the promise of undoing or escaping official and Self-Determined agendas and the false scarcity that underscores so much of contemporary art. Rather than considering vacancy as someSpaces thing fearful or as merely a neutral precondition contrived for development, zones of under-definition are seen as formPeter Conlin ative and vital, and promise a fecundity of cultural experience outside the terms of the traditional liberal project of the nation. At the most these blanks in the urban and national fabric might foster an exploration of post-sovereign concepts; however, I believe the potential of these lee spaces has changed in the context of the nation-state rearticulated by neo-liberal entrepreneurialism and new kinds of centre–periphery relations. In the face of this there appears to be two general responses: to forgo the charms and frustration of operating from socio-cultural gaps and attempt to participate in an enlightened consolidation of the national project, or to move from loophole to more oppositional relations with a commitment to alternative forms of sovereignty without and within the state. It is this latter direction which I will be exploring. In many ways this chapter is premised on the assertion that “the national as container of social process and power is cracked.”1 This is not to be misunderstood as saying we have reached the end of the nation-state, but rather, “that states are not the only or the most important strategic agents in the new emergent global institutional order.”2 This is combined with a neo-liberal emphasis on market-based competition as the prime organizational force that results in complex situations. We face a kind of post-national land-

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Figure 12.1 Reece Terris, Western Front Front: Another False Front (an architectural intervention/installation), 2010. Established in 1973, the Western Front is the oldest functioning artist-run centre in Canada.

scape in which the nation is still very apparent and active as it moves from being the overall frame to being a central element among others. However, this isn’t exactly emancipation. The question which I will engage in this chapter is what are the ways that visual culture is caught within a new normativity that is no longer embedded in what has been “the master normativity of modern times, raison d’état.”3 Instead, this new normativity comes from the world of private power yet installs itself in the public realm, and thus visual culture is not marked by national projects, even if it moves through local and national institutions, as much as it is active within the contours and valences of a particular form of neo-liberal capitalism. In keeping with this approach, this chapter references multiple sites and national contexts, and I will focus more specifically on the ways that a centrifugal force has hollowed out older centres of power. This has had the effect of both increasing the viability of informal politics and micro-structures, what I am referring to as loopholes and gaps, and subjecting hitherto peripheral sites to dominant power. Saskia Sassen sees this condition as nothing less than a reconstitution of sovereignty. Various forms of self-determination, “endogenous to the national,”4 alter sovereignty from the inside and reorient traditional national forces towards assemblages on a global level. The point for me is not only to understand a possible post-national condition and its effect on the discipline of Canadian visual history, but, with a political motivation, to ask what are the alternatives to repressive and exclusionary forces, whether they are nationbased cultural projects or modes of entrepreneurial governance. What is at stake here is culture’s role in bids for political sovereignty and prospects for “post-sovereignty,”5 which is a concept examined by Taiaiake Alfred in the context of Indigenous self-determination.

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Figure 12.2 Temporary School of Thought, event poster, 2009. Temporary School of Thought is a group of artists who organize experimental education events. This particular event ran for a week in an abandoned Georgian mansion in the west end of London (UK) in 2009. The building had been sold six times in the past few years, primarily by numbered companies based in the Bahamas.

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For Alfred self-determination is only really possible beyond existing European definitions of sovereign power as a supreme authority unlimited by any other in a “zero-sum contest for power.”6 Such a crucial and fundamental departure from traditional bids for sovereignty can be seen in various social struggles. The post-sovereign possibilities I am looking at lie in collective agency and the emergence of grassroots transnational forms. The aim of these is to destabilize existing formalized hierarchies of power and legitimacy and to enter into new “claim-making” practices, to use Sassen’s term. These are disjointed from the sites and subjectivities usually considered to be the proper domain of the political. I am giving heed to traditions of radical self-organization operating out of indeterminate cultural spaces, including a broad range of practices including the more defiant moments in artist-run projects, cross-overs between art and activism, and Infoshops and social centres. The very implausibility of putting post-sovereign politics in with cultural hijinks – informal organizations, groping attempts at collective action and neo-bohemian slackness – points directly to what is often missing in these projects. I would like to stress that this is a necessarily transdisciplinary area of cultural practice, wherein visual art, activism, music, and other cultural practices have uncertain and permeable boundaries; and it is this mixed space that I am looking at in relation to the confluence of neo-liberalism and the nation. However precarious or hapless these kinds of self-organization might be, they can all of a sudden become very institutional, profitable, or otherwise central to dominant power, which is to say they play a key role in the founding myth of creative economies and the cultural logic of our time. Informal organizations and networks emerge in struggles that at once can seem insignificant and yet can offer prefigurations of post-sovereignty in the sense of contesting monopolies of legitimation and practically directing circumstances, and they can both exemplify neo-liberal tendencies and also function as a key site of resistance. This is not just a case of fringe activities entering into quick and efficient processes of institutionalization; rather they are, as I will examine, “governmentalized” according to a neo-liberal ethos. As the neo-liberal project uses competition as its principle of organization, and is therefore antithetical to collective structures, the political potential of self-organized projects turns on the development of practices that avoid proprietary control and the ability to enact viable collective forms. I will engage these issues by first working through Sassen’s conception of the postnational as defined not by a national versus global opposition, but rather in their interdependencies, and also in the reshuffling of local, national, and international scales. As I am asserting that the normativity of the liberal project of the nation is being rearticulated through neo-liberalism, I will then define what I see as the main attributes of neoliberalism. Finally I will examine how, in a post-national context, a neo-liberal ethos impacts on informal cultural practices and attempts to operate from certain interstices. In fact, the encounter between neo-liberalism and the allure of informal cultural work is at the very heart of the “creative economy,” and I will consider some possible resistances to such encounters.

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This chapter explores possibilities rather than solely reflecting existing patterns and is supplemented by working through a few ciphers (appearing in italics) which both expand some theoretical and empirical observations and draw in personal insights (many of these coming from the experience of writing this while living outside of Canada). This approach does not always result in a direct, point-to-point analysis, and produces more yaw than pitch as a way to piece things together and open up complications.

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Consider the phenomenon of electro-magnetic pulse (EMP ) as an analogy for a pervasive cultural logic that operates through particular shifts and reversals. It also connotes a Cold War imaginary that still seems to underscore the dominance and volatility of nations and their cultural identities, whether through the rhetoric of the war on terror or in the unrelenting threat of clashes between superpowers, old or new, and their proxies. Nuclear detonations have a potent side-effect that is very different from the devastation caused by an explosion or by radioactivity. They emit an electro-magnetic pulse that causes all electronic-based equipment to fail. Aircraft, digital devices, most hospital instruments, cars, communication devices, and anything with a micro-processor will be temporarily disrupted. The more delicate and sophisticated the instrument is, the greater its susceptibility to EMP . Moving from side-effect to calculated direct effect, similar to Sildenafil’s passage from angina treatment to Viagra, a specific EMP bomb was designed and tested in the Starfish Prime detonation of 1962. Exploded at a very high altitude, the detonation was an experiment to see whether the bomb would effectively disrupt electrical function without inflicting physical damage. Shock without awe: no blast, no radiation, yet nothing works for a short, intense period, therein unleashing the confusion and destruction of mass malfunction. Starfish Prime was a complete success. Even as a relatively small atomic explosion, streetlights in Hawaii, 1,400 km away, were knocked out.7

Nation as Agent of Globalization To ask how relevant is the category of the nation or what we mean by nation in relation to that which operates beyond national contexts assumes a stability or at least coherence in non-national entities. As a way of entering into a reflection on these concepts, let’s reverse it – how applicable is the global? Are there global cultures? Is there even a global economy? Rather than wondering what we are trying to determine when we ask what is Canadian, Saskia Sassen has asked “what is it we are trying to name with the term globalization,”8 and where exactly is the global economy? Not surprisingly, the answer requires shifting the terms and distinctions to reveal a complex set of interdependencies between nation and the extra-national. Chief among these is that many of the processes of globalization occur within the architecture of the nation-state. There are a few actual global institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the War Crimes Tribunals,

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but these are “thin” when compared to what Sassen sees as the incredible complexity of the nation-state, which itself has become an agent for globalization. Sassen uses the term “denationalization,” which refers “not to the disappearance of traditional nation-state, but its profound transformation.”9 According to this approach, the tensions to examine are not those of the global versus the national, but, rather, the forces of an internal globalism that operates within local and national contexts. Consequently, we can ask how this condition alters bids for sovereignty and “national” cultural prospects. Multiple local and national processes, as well as variously positioned actors, are connected in transboundary networks and formations. This dynamic is not inherently progressive or dominant, and occurs within the organization of corporations and financial enterprise, as well as in the cross-border networks of human rights and environmental activists. Sassen asserts that monetary and fiscal policies critical to the constitution of global markets, as well as international human rights projects, are often implemented through national courts and legislative bodies. As well, global electronic trading markets are able to function through national and local infrastructures, such as state-sponsored rrsp programs and systems of trust tied to personal relations with local businesspeople and the council of friends. In addition to the institutions of the political economy, there are “non-cosmopolitan forms of global … imaginaries that remain deeply attached or focused on localized issues and struggles, yet are – knowingly or not – part of global lateral networks.”10 In this light, the tactics and strategies for resisting forms of domination cannot be based on predictable chains of action stretching from local, to regional, to national and then transnational per se, as these entities are now interdependent and are no longer nested cleanly within each other. Further, an important aspect in critically examining dominant power and the development of alternatives lies in decoding what has been (mis)identified as national, and, concomitantly, to unbundle globalization in terms of the multiple specialized cross-border circuits. Much of this task for Sassen comes down to issues of scale, specifically in what she refers to as “multi-scalar politics.” Although the traditional set of nested scales is still functional – as can be seen within the visual arts field with a clear hierarchy stretching from local scenes to international consecration – there are at the same time connections between actors, whether in the same local community or country or across borders, such as artists skipping local situations and immediately interfacing with global art world centres, or, in a different light, the networks and exchanges facilitated by self-organized entities. An idealistic example of this from the 1970s is the Eternal Network, which was meant to be “an alternative to notions of an avant-garde – if no one could, at this point, know what everyone everywhere was up to in the art world, there was no method or sense in seeking out the cutting edge. Something happens, and then something happens. In fact, something is always happening.”11 In a pre-Internet world this network involved various exchanges between artists face to face, by mail, or over the telephone. French artist Robert Filliou, who was active in Canada during this time, is closely associated with developing the Eternal Network ethos. A related slogan was “you are the centre of the art world,” which suggests that in an infinitely connected world, there can be no

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single centre, or conversely, everywhere is the centre. The Eternal Network gestures toward a set of radical equivalences not only between locations but also between different kinds of activities within and beyond artmaking. A more recent example is the “International Lunchtime Summit” project by 16 Beaver in 2003 (fig. 12.3). A series of questions exploring what people saw as the most crucial questions of the time were developed through an email chain involving various people and groups around the globe. The questions were then circulated to groups who organized simultaneous gatherings in various cities where people could have lunch and respond to these questions. Another example is the non-juried London Biennale, which unlike most art biennials is not organized around national groupings, has no corporate backing, and is open to anyone who desires to participate. What these all have in common is the potential for international connections from locale to locale, without seeking the legitimacy of a global centre of power. They seek an internationalism not based on representing and promoting a nation-state’s cultural and economic interests. Instead they can be seen as self-organized areas of practice which attempt to create post-sovereign relations. In this way, as Sassen puts it, “locally scaled practices and conditions [are] articulated within global dynamics,”12 which destabilizes older hierarchies of scale. “The history of the modern state can be read as the work of rendering national just about all crucial features of society: authority; identity; territory; security; law; and capital accumulation. Now, rescaling dynamics cut across institutional size and across the institutional encasement of territory produced by the formation of national states.”13

Figure 12.3 16 Beaver, International Lunch Summit, 2003.

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Given this, it no longer makes sense to consider power relations as being shaped exclusively by state-centred hierarchies; in the terms of this volume, unless this shuffling is taken into account then national categories will always be necessarily vacant. This does not mean that the old hierarchies disappear, but rather that rescaling emerges alongside older arrangements. Resistance to global capital through a reassertion of traditional national sovereignty and/or a search for a distinct national character, supported either by essentialist or contingent justifications, is misplaced as it relies on a scaled politics that is no longer fully functional. Such attempts exist like a “zombie category,” to use Ulrich Beck’s term referring to social concepts that continue to be enacted even after they have ceased to be a prime animating force.14

More Plaque than Flag (Into the Investors in People) If the condition we are in is at once national and global, then airport border facilities offer an appropriate vantage point. Moving between nations can offer a glimpse into ways the state renders space and experience as national, and the ways neo-liberalism inscribes itself through this rendering. Entry is contingent upon producing the right passport, for authorities to recognize one as a national. But what else is happening here, what other forms of recognition is our entry reliant upon? Airports have traditionally been harbingers, so in what way might they announce the future of the nation-state? I wouldn’t recommend looking too deeply into retina scanners or wing-tip designs for answers; it is actually right in front of you in what is normally overlooked – the post-national everyday.

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Figure 12.4 Detail of a Canadian passport.

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After spending a long time standing in the passport control line, in the process of entering the UK, I noticed a little plaque with the inscription “Investors in People.” I later realized every UK border facility has one of these plaques. It looks out of place, a little chintzy in the psychologically aseptic atmosphere. A border screening facility is a completely planned space that strives to be somewhere between a hospital hallway and a prison, with the stylish austerity of boutique and art gallery entrances. Once we are within these spaces it is hard to imagine how they appear from without. An airport cum border installation is, by this point, a place of voluntary incarceration in the midst of mall-like entities smashed together. Transportation, commercial activity, and state apparatus meld. The ineluctable allure of air-travel glamour becomes attenuated as we move into a “security clean zone” where humour is forbidden. This is a space that tries to manifest an unforgiving seamlessness in every way. In such a zone, the little wooden plaque with an engraved metal surface, just a few steps above a high school achievement award in production value, appears like a clue. I always assumed it was attached to some charity effort, as if to say, you are entering into a “We care for people” ethic of corporate responsibility elevated to the level of the nation-state. Or maybe it was an attempt to humanize a workplace based on forcibly expelling people and curtailing freedoms in the name of protecting the nation. I thought the plaque meant I was entering into a neo-liberal humanist zone – more a marker of an era than a territory. Investors in People (IIP ), as it turns out, is actually a “business improvement tool”15 administered by Investors in People UK and supported by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. IIP is the “UK ’s leading people management business improvement standard.” It is a standard for quality assurance, which really means a management system for organizational efficiency. It was developed through a partnership between the business world and the state, and applied to all manner of private, public, and thirdsector organizations including trade unions. It is similar to the ISO 9000 certification, which is often displayed on signs in front of buildings in industrial parks. In 1991, when Investors in People was launched, Michael Howard, cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher and then John Major, pronounced: “Investors in People is a standard designed by business, which will be met by business, because it is in the interests of business. This is why it will survive.”16 The plaque isn’t for you, the traveller. Nobody, especially in the “rest of the world” (i.e., non-EU ) line has any inkling of what it is supposed to mean. It’s an administrative badge and a geode. So this is what you are entering into – an administrative zone that considers a border as a business. It is indeed a marker of neo-liberalism, specifically a managerialism which involves a collapse of the business world and the state. You are entering into a particular instance of a rationality. Here we cross into an articulation of a political system more than into a nation-state, and for the Western traveller, probably not that different than the one which you’ve left. We should also consider the day when this plaque will appear in an obsessive collection, or in some quirky eBay auction as a novelty representation of the time when business was generalized to the level of the social. It could become as anachronistic as a DDR police badge in a Berlin flea market. Or more likely it would be an insignificant and

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unidentifiable item in a landfill. In such a field of debris it might be indistinguishable from “World’s Best Dad” trinkets and curling trophies.

Neo-liberalism in One Country17 I am arguing that the hitherto prominence of the nation-state has been in many ways subordinated to neo-liberalism through an “interactive mode of citizenship.”18 This occurs in the way neo-liberal power organizes according to entrepreneurialism and marketability, rather than solely on the basis of our membership to the nation-state. Those who have abilities and knowledge without market value can be denied citizenship, and those already with citizenship find themselves with a reduced claim to full participation. In this way marketability, working through the mechanism of the traditional nation-state, replaces raison d’état or liberal state functions. I will now outline the concept of entrepreneurialism through Foucault’s analysis of neo-liberal rationality, and then see how this impacts on culture in urban environments associated with creative economy initiatives. Neo-liberalism, similar to socialism, is often used as a shorthand term which can mean so many different things. I think it misses the point to make neo-liberalism synonymous with corporate globalization based on the core belief of “unfettered individualism and global markets,”19 with the ultimate goal of removing all vestiges of the nation-state, as this doesn’t really describe what we are up against. Instead, consistent with the dynamics I have outlined, neo-liberalism is most of all at work within national and local scales to the point where it makes more sense to understand the study of visual culture as specific neither to globalization nor to the traditional nation-state but instead to the neoliberal project. I am using the term neo-liberalism as referring to a specific set of characteristics belonging to a phase of capitalism and within a specific regime of knowledge and governance. Working through Michel Foucault’s analysis, developed explicitly in his 1979 lectures at the Collège de France and further developed in his “governmental” texts, the crux of neo-liberalism lies in a renewal of the concept of homo economicus that moves away from economics as primarily a matter of exchange – of goods or quantified labour power – between self-interested rational actors, to a view of the subject as centred on the cultivation of human capital. To reiterate, neo-liberalism is more about reconfiguring the nation-state according to a specific rationality or ideology than being synonymous with a borderless corporate globalism. Nevertheless, the neo-liberal model has proliferated around the globe and in this way is closer to liberalism in the sense of a set of universal assumptions articulated through nation-states. Carrying on from this, it is more productive to see the continuities between neo-liberalism, liberalism, and the state capitalism of the Keynesian period (as distinct from elements of public services shaped by popular movements) than to pit one term against the others. Also, by way of clarification, I am not contesting neo-liberalism as it has been defined in David Harvey’s work as a redistribution of wealth from working- and middle-class groups (often in the form of collective resources and public services) to a very small and

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ultra-wealthy stratum. Rather I am asserting that it would be a mistake to reduce neoliberalism to a set of policies and social consequences that fail to address what organizes these policies and outcomes: a political rationality. Without this, as Wendy Brown put it, “we will fail to see what is neo in neo-liberalism”20 and instead read events as a radical extension of the classic liberal political economy. As well, the term neo-liberalism, as it is often used by the left, addresses the restructuring of “the developing world”; however by looking at rationalities we can find a way into these dynamics within the “developed” world. The late 1990s and early 2000s in Canada, and much of the West, was a time of considerable prosperity, but the language with respect to public services was one of cutbacks and scarcity. Long before the austerity measures associated with the financial crisis, university fees had to triple, and social security programs were hollowed out and could only be saved through intense political pressure. A Foucauldian analysis of neoliberalism allows a way to understand how prosperity could be matched with the logic of austerity, and how a sense of powerlessness and inevitability was combined with a spirit of self-reliance and creativity. To consider culture in relation to neo-liberalism in a way that displaces the nation is not a case of economic reductionism as much as it is indicative of current forms of governance. Foucault’s analysis of neo-liberalism comes out of his genealogy of the modern state in its shift from discipline to governmentality. “The linking of governing (‘gouverner’) and modes of thought (‘mentalité’) indicates that it is not possible to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them.”21 Key here is a conception that goes well beyond more conventional assessments of the state or the government. Neo-liberalism is often seen as first and foremost an ideology based on the “belief that open, competitive, and unregulated markets, liberated from all forms of state interference, represent the optimal mechanism for economic development.”22 Foucault’s research, however, tracing the discourse of “Ordo-liberals” such as Friedrich von Hayek and the Chicago school economic theorists, contradicts or at least strongly refines the assumption that the state must recede in order to allow economic development. Contrary to classic liberalism, which saw competition and exchange as a natural condition and sought a laissez-faire relation to the state to allow these processes to develop, neo-liberal theorists saw market activity not as natural, but as something which required organization and development. Thus neo-liberalism is not anti-statist, but requires extensive state development in order to create the right conditions for the market, and this necessitates the development of governance practices. In this way “one must govern for the market, rather than because of the market.”23 Wendy Brown describes neo-liberalism in this sense as a “constructivist project,” wherein it is not founded on the ontological claims of the classical homo economicus but rather on producing normative assertions of the necessity of economic dynamics, and seeks the “development, dissemination, and institutionalization of such rationality.”24 The role of government is therefore to intervene not in the market but in society, “in its fabric and depth,”25 to foster the development of market activity. In this way neoliberalism is an institutionalization project, as much as it might also be seen as one of deregulation. The health and growth of the economy are the basis of state legitimacy.

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Thus the purpose of all the state’s activities – welfare, education, and health – is to enable economic activity. A key distinction between the liberal political economy and neoliberalism is that, for the latter, the economic extends and includes the personal lives of individuals. Classical formations, according to Foucault, saw a limit or a tension between individual morality and economic systems; neo-liberalism takes the interdependencies of these as its starting point.

Centre, Periphery, and Centrifugal Part of the “constructivist” project of neo-liberalism can be seen within a recasting of centre and periphery relations, where peripheral sites become central to powerful interests. Andrew Ross, in his 2009 examination of precarious labour, Nice Work If You Can Get It,26 identified a vital distinction linked to this reshuffling. Ross observes that in the 1930s precarious conditions were the result of a loss of control by the state, whereas current precarious conditions – the loss of employment security, deficient benefit systems, and so forth – are an exercise of the contemporary capitalist state’s control. One response to this is to strategically work with this condition “because it harbours the potential for pushing creative labour outside the orbit of disciplining institutions.”27 Ross sees this as a rejection of a “change from within” approach of the New Left focused on the long march through institutions. However, institutional boundaries are no longer clearly demarcated. “The outside is no longer extraneous, marginal or peripheral to the real decision making centres.”28 Ross identifies a centrifugal force that organizes current configurations of power, where key sites of dominant power have spiralled out. However, rather than seeing peripheral locations as merely co-opted, Ross sees the importance of contestation in these spaces, and identifies them as important sites of resistance and solidarity. Although Ross might be optimistic, the current reality of the former periphery is perplexing and pressures heterogeneous practices. As the Argentinean militant research group Collectivo Situationes described, addressing the inclusion of self-organized factories and peasant land movements into a mechanism of the neo-liberal state is about “the way counter-power and capitalist hegemony coexist, in promiscuous ways that are difficult to decipher.”29 Centre–periphery relations in this period have been altered, and dominant power can be seen to operate from these seeming peripheral sites. This often makes it difficult to identify clear victories or defeats, and makes clear alternatives while oppositional stances appear outmoded. Consequently we are left with an array of ”partnerships,” as seen in the proliferation of the third-sector organizations which comprise an important site of neo-liberal governance. This can result in a “capitalist realism,”30 as Mark Fisher has described it, where social diligence is predicated on the very loss of collective futurity. Instead, we are left with a mix of tedious credos that remain very active even after the financial crisis: “There is no alternative,” “Politics beyond ideology,” and the never-ending “End of history.” This condition is also connected to a confounding dynamic where margins supposedly no longer exist yet exclusion and inequalities have intensified, and where emergent forms seem to be immediately within the terrain of centralized power – “precorporated”31 in

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Fisher’s parlance. An example of this dynamic is the way in which aesthetic concerns have supposedly been generalized – in the society of the image, the proliferation of design, and the ubiquity of “creativity” – yet the boundaries of art-world institutions are in many ways more sharply inscribed than ever in what is an increasingly exclusionary field. Running down the list of artists in major contemporary exhibitions, one will find that almost all have attended about two dozen “name” schools.32 In the past I thought that we could look to lee spaces and gaps for a kind of reassuring cultural and political subversion, and even for the beginnings of alternative forms of sovereignty from within the liberal project of the nation-state. Leonard Cohen referred to Canada of the 1960s and 70s as something of a loophole nation. “It is those ambiguities about it that make it great. Those ambiguities about it create all kinds of loop-holes, wherein we can operate with a great deal of freedom.”33 This is part of the myth of Canada as a paradoxical nation-state: it shouldn’t be but it is; it doesn’t really do what nations are supposed to. This view made a lasting impression on me, and I used it as a working model to understand Canada in the classic formulation of “questioning identity as identity.” The pursuit of loophole assurances was for me within a post-structural project that sought points of difference and indeterminacy, rather than opposition and direct alternatives. Not a landscape of vacant lots per se, but, rather, aberrant spaces cunningly hollowed out of the modern state, affording the potential of indeterminate experience beyond exploitative relations and normative structures. Accordingly, one works with small zones of interference and difference within the existing terms, rather than constructing them anew. But how distressing to realize that these zones of ambiguity have in many ways been operationalized according to a neo-liberal rationality. Examples of this abound in so many different contexts, and particularly in “creative economy” projects where we see the (post)industrialization of bohemia and an enlisting of grassroots organizing. As Richard Florida, the prime theorist of the creative economy and an influential consultant to various levels of government, states: “I spent a lot of time talking with young cultural workers about grassroots, bottom-up efforts. Those are the people I most resonate with, and they’re the people who most desperately need to be heard. This idea of cities rebounding – it doesn’t happen from the top down. It’s almost all organic, community-based.”34 A particular example of instrumentalizing “loopholes” is artists’ uses of abandoned storefronts, which the mainstream press in the uk has labelled “the slack space movement.”35 In 2009 Arts Council England offered a program to fund these slack spaces within an overall anti-recession initiative. Behind the criterion of “artistic excellence,” the intention was to stabilize commercial rents and maintain the appearance of relative prosperity in economically depressed areas. These blanks in the urban landscape form part of a seemingly inevitable loop that runs from slack to taut and back again, otherwise known as the gentrification cycle; and the tedium of this cycle demonstrates what happens when you merely find slack spaces due to the accidental failures of capitalism. Breaking this loop, rather than looking for momentary gaps, surely involves a rejection of such a dubious notion of creativity and bottom-up agency, and is ultimately within the larger process of transforming social relations. The promise of self-organization in the long

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Figure 12.5 Lee Osborne, Oubliette Arthouse (former Mexican embassy in London squatted as a commercial art exhibition space organized by the group Oubliette), 2009.

aftermath of an economic crisis lies in challenging neo-liberalism, rather than merely seeking a silver lining to pursue opportunities. An example of this was the Toronto-based group Creative Class Struggle, who conducted various interventions into Richard Florida’s zone of influence and posited that an actual proliferation of creativity ought to be tied to making the city affordable and egalitarian. A group of anti-gentrification artists in Hamburg called “Not In Our Name” engaged a similar struggle. Their text “Jamming the Gentrification Machine: A Manifesto” asserts their refusal to participate in the project of the creative city: We, the music, djs, art, film and theatre people, the groovy-little-shop owners and anyone who represents a different quality of life, are supposed to function as a counterpoint to the “city of excellent underground parking.” We are meant to take care of the atmosphere, the aura and leisure quality, without which an urban

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Figure 12.6 An activist community space in a former employment centre in southeast London (UK ).

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location has little chance in the global competition. We are welcome. In a way. On the other, the blanket development of urban space means that we – the decoys – are moving out in droves, because it is getting increasingly impossible to afford space here … We say: Ouch, this is painful. Stop this shit. We won’t be taken for fools. Dear location politicians: we refuse to talk about this city in marketing categories … We say: A city is not a brand. A city is not a corporation. A city is a community. We ask the social question which, in cities today, is also about a battle for territory. This is about taking over and defending places that make life worth living in this city, which don’t belong to the target group of the “growing city.” We claim our right to the city – together with all the residents of Hamburg who refuse to be a location factor.36 This chapter began by addressing gaps within the liberal project of the nation-state that in the past held a certain promise of moving beyond existing norms. I examined how, through Saskia Sassen’s analysis, the nation-state has in many ways become an agent of globalization at the same time as it ceases to hold a monopoly on processes of sovereignty. At issue here is the rearticulation of the project of the nation within neo-liberalism. In such a context the whole undertaking of working with gaps in traditional structures of power changes dramatically. Instead of subversion and bits of indeterminate surplus, these lee spaces in the urban and national fabric have become centrifugally fused with dominant power and play an essential role in the creative destruction of neo-liberalism, especially as seen in creative economy initiatives. Because of this, the post-sovereign cultural practices I have addressed in this chapter must be rethought and, if they are to be viable, must be reoriented to an oppositional and defiant mode of self-determination.

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notes 1 Sassen, “The Repositioning of Citizenship,” in Empire’s New Clothes, 192. 2 Sassen, “Theoretical and Empirical Elements,” in Frontiers of Globalization Research, 288. 3 Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, 412. Raison d’état refers to an overriding national interest beyond personal, moral, or even legal concerns. The concept was originally developed in the seventeenth century and referred to a basis of action independent from religious or aristocratic modalities. 4 Sassen “Denationalized States and Global Assemblages,” 148. 5 T. Alfred, “Sovereignty,” in Sovereignty Matters, 42. 6 Ibid., 46. 7 W.C. Keel, The Sky at Einstein’s Feet, 126. 8 Sassen, “Globalization or Denationalization?” 3. 9 Sassen, “The Ideas Interview.” 10 Sassen, “Globalization or Denationalization?” 2. 11 R. Filliou, Robert Filliou, 8. 12 Sassen, “Globalization or Denationalization?” 18. 13 Ibid., 3. 14 U. Beck and E. Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, 203. 15 Investors in People, “Realising Business Ambitions through People in Times of Change,” 3. 16 Ibid.

17 Refers to the Stalinist policy of “socialism in one country” that saw socialism as ultimately an international and revolutionary movement, but pragmatically speaking the proletariat had to most of all make a total identification to the ussr. 18 A. Ong, Neo-liberalism as Exception, 296. 19 McKay “The Liberal Order Framework,” 645. 20 W. Brown, Edgework, 38. 21 T. Lemke, “The Birth of Bio-Politics,” 191. 22 N. Brenner and N. Theodore, Spaces of Neo-liberalism, 2. 23 M. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 120. 24 Brown, Edgework, 41. 25 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 145. 26 A. Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It. 27 Ibid., 51. 28 Ibid., 52. 29 Colectivo Situaciones, “Disquiet in the Impasse,” 23. 30 M. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 1. 31 Ibid., 9. 32 S. Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World, 78. 33 B. O’Riordan and B. Meyer, “Working for the World to Come,” 46. 34 M. Whyte, “Critics on the Left a Relief, Florida Says.” 35 R. Booth, “Artists’ Creative Use of Vacant Shops Brings Life to Desolate High Streets.” 36 Not in Our Name, “Jamming the Gentrification Machine,” 323–5.

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Contributors

s u sa n c a h i l l is assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art at the University of Calgary. Her research interests include new media and cultural theory, the art of war and surveillance, and feminist craft practices within neo-liberal capitalism. Her work has been published in Journal of Modern Craft, Reviews in Cultural Theory, and TOPIA : Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently, Cahill is working on a singleauthored book project, Contested Terrains: Visualizing the Nation in Conflict, which examines representations of Canadian military activities in the post-9/11 period. mark a. cheetham writes on art theory, art, and visual culture from ca. 1700 to the present. His major recent publications include Abstract Art against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the 60s (Cambridge up, 2006) and Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: The “Englishness” of English Art Theory since the Eighteenth Century (Ashgate, 2012). His 1991 book Remembering Postmodernism: Trends in Canadian Art, 1970–1990 appeared in a second edition with Oxford up in 2012. A Guggenheim Fellow in 1994, he received the Art Journal Award from the College Art Association of America in 2006 for “Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, & Now.” In 2008, he was awarded the Curatorial Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries for “The Transformative Abstraction of Robert Houle.” In 2011, he co-curated the exhibition Jack Chambers: The Light from the Darkness / Silver Paintings and Film, which was named an “exhibition of the year” by the oaag in 2011. Cheetham is a professor of art history at the University of Toronto. peter conlin is a graduate of the Humanities Doctoral Program at Concordia University and is currently a research fellow at the Institute for European and America Studies at Academia Sinica in Taipei. His research explores concepts of participation in art and activism, the visual culture of neo-liberalism, and questions of fashionability and outmodedness.

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annie gérin is a curator and associate professor of art history and art theory at the Université du Québec à Montréal (uqam). She was educated in Canada, Russia, and the uk. Her research interests encompass the areas of Soviet art, Canadian public art, and art on the World Wide Web. She is especially concerned with art encountered by nonspecialized publics, outside the gallery space. Her publications include Godless at the Workbench: Soviet Humoristic Antireligious Propaganda (2004) and the edited collections Canadian Cultural Poesis (2006), Public Art in Canada: Critical Perspectives (2009), and Oeuvres à la rue: pratiques et discours émergents en art public (2010). She is currently working on a manuscript on irony and parody in Soviet visual arts and propaganda.

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richard william hill is associate professor of art history at York University and an independent critic and curator. As a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario he oversaw the museum’s first substantial effort to include North American Aboriginal art and ideas in permanent collection galleries and also curated Kazuo Nakamura: A Human Measure, a survey of the artist’s work. In 2005 he co-curated, with Jimmie Durham, The American West at Compton Verney, England. His most recent curatorial project, The World Upside Down, originated at the Walter Philips Gallery and travelled to a number of Canadian venues. Hill’s essays on art have appeared in numerous books, exhibition catalogues, and periodicals. He has a long association with the Canadian art magazine Fuse, where he was a member of the board and editorial committee and remains a contributing editor. He is currently working on a book on the question of agency in the art of Jimmie Durham, the subject of his phd thesis. kr i s t y a . h o l me s is assistant professor of art history in the Department of Visual Arts at Lakehead University. Her research interests include the works of art and films of Joyce Wieland, modern and contemporary Canadian art, feminist art and visual culture, and critical and cultural theory. She has published essays in the exhibition catalogue Documentary Protocols / Protocoles Documentaires (Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2010), the interdisciplinary anthology The Sixties: Passion, Politics, Style (McGillQueen’s University Press, 2008), the Canadian Journal of Film Studies (Fall 2006), and Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review (Winter 2010). She is currently completing a book-length manuscript that critically examines the works of art and films of Joyce Wieland from 1968 to 1976. heather igloliorte is a curator of Indigenous art and an assistant professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal. Her teaching and research interests centre on Inuit and other Native North American visual and material culture, circumpolar art studies, the global exhibition of Indigenous arts and culture, and issues of colonization, sovereignty, resistance, and resilience. Some of her recent publications related to this work include chapters and catalogue essays in Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism (2012); Changing Hands: Art without Reservation 3 (2012); Curating Difficult Knowledge (2011); Native American Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art (2011); Inuit Modern (2010); Response, Responsibility, and Renewal: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey (2009).

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barbara jenkins is associate professor of communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research focuses on the intersections between visual culture, political economy, and cultural policy. She is the author of The Paradox of Continental Production (Cornell University Press) and various articles on the political economy of culture in journals such as International Journal of Cultural Policy, Canadian Journal of Communication, and Space and Culture. alice ming wai jim is an associate professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She is co-editor with Alexandra Chang (nyu) of the new scholarly journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Brill), to be launched in 2015. Her main fields of research are in contemporary Asian art and Asian Canadian art from a global perspective, with a particular interest in media arts, ethnocultural art histories, international art exhibitions, and curatorial studies. From 2003 to 2006, she was curator of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A). Recent publications include articles and chapters in Third Text, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, Amerasia Journal, Positions, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and Human Rights and the Arts: Essays on Global Asia (forthcoming). erin morton is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick. Her research broadly examines categories and experiences of art and culture as being determined by and determining liberal capitalist modernity. In particular, it uses the folk art category to explore the historical unfolding of cultural and material inequity in North America, paying particular attention to the regionalist dimensions of these processes. She is currently writing a book on this research, entitled Historical Presentism: The Place of Folk Art in Late Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. Her work has appeared in such journals as Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region, the Journal of Canadian Art History, and Utopian Studies, and in a number of edited collections. kirs ty robertson is an associate professor of contemporary art and museum studies at Western University, Canada. Her research focuses on activism, visual culture, and changing economies. She has published widely on the topic and is currently finishing her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: New Economies of Protest, Vision, and Culture in Canada. More recently, she has turned her attention to the study of wearable technologies, immersive environments, and the potential overlap(s) between textiles and technologies. She considers these issues within the framework of globalization, activism, and burgeoning “creative economies.” Her co-edited volume Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture, and Activism in Canada was released in 2011 and her co-written volume Putting Intellectual Property in its Place: Rights Discourses, Creative Labor, and the Everyday was released in 2013.

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rob s hields is the Henry Marshall Tory Research Chair and professor in the Departments of Sociology and Art and Design at the University of Alberta. He is also the Director of the City-Region Studies Centre at the University of Alberta. Shields is the founding editor of Space and Culture: International Journal of Social Spaces and Curb Magazine. His most recent book is Spatial Questions, published by Sage in 2012. sarah e .k. s mi th is the curator of contemporary art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario. She is also an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation, and affiliated faculty in the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University. Sarah’s research scope encompasses modern and contemporary visual and material culture, with specific interest in the relationship between culture, economics, and globalization. Her work has been published in exhibition catalogues, edited collections, and journals, including TOPIA : Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Canadian Studies, Sorting Daemons: Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control (2010), and Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada–US Border (2013). 278

imre szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and professor of English, film studies and sociology at the University of Alberta. His recent books include After Globalization (Blackwell, 2011, with Eric Cazdyn), Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012, co-ed.), and the third edition of Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (Nelson, 2012, with Susie O’Brien). j e n n i f e r va n d e r b u r g h teaches film and media in the Department of English at Saint Mary’s University. Her research investigates how media and media texts facilitate citizenship, memory, and everyday life. She has published in journals and edited collections on a diverse range of Canadian film, tv, and inter-medial texts, from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome to Don Messer’s Jubilee. Recent projects include research on the prescriptive effects of audiovisual archives as well as institutional and domestic analogue video recording/collections. Jennifer is currently working on a book project titled What Media Remember: Archives and Footprints of Television in Toronto, which argues that thinking television through the city (as opposed as the nation) helps us to understand the complex ways that viewers have always engaged with tv, as transnational citizens, fans, and consumers, well before cable, satellite, and Web-streamed tv.

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Index

9/11, 108, 134, 146, 187n16, 217, 218 Aboriginal peoples: art history, 78; and Canadian art, 15, 71, 75; and Canadian galleries, 87n18, 162, 169n42, 170n44; constitutional rights of, 160; in narratives of Canadian nationhood, 213; and racial oppression, 81; rights of, 79; and state liberalism, 159–60. See also First Nations; Indian Act; indigeneities; Indigenous peoples; land claims; residential schools; sovereignty Adorno, Theodor, 24 aesthetics, xvi, 52, 159, 189, 226, 234n3; Indigenous, 165; Inuit, 161–2; of nation, 188, 198–9; relational, 102–3 affect, 108–9, 230–2. See also visual (and material) culture affordances, 97, 101–4, 106n28. See also site specificity Afghanistan: Canada and, 184, 218–21, 232– 3, exhibition of art about, 222, 224, 228–9; “war rugs” of, 218–20, 223, 225, 230–1. See also exhibitions; International Security Assistance Force (isaf); Internet; war Alfred, Taiaiake, 237–9 alter-globalization, 24, 186 American Indian Movement (aim), 173–4 analogy: international, 25, 32, 38–9, 44;. See also Chambers, Jack; likening; Richter, Gerhard anti-globalization. See alter-globalization Arctic: art industry in, 157; Canadian borders of, 150, 184, 194; colonization of, 152–3, 155, 163, 167; evangelization of, 155, 165, 168n10; languages of, 168n3; sovereignty,

151, 156, 158, 169n20. See also Inuit; Inuit art; Canada Arendt, Hanna, 103, 106n40 art. See art history; art market; Canadian art; Canadian art history; contemporary art; craft; ethnocultural art; exhibitions; folk art; galleries; impressionism; Indigenous art; Inuit art; landscape art; museums; nation; non-Western art; political art; site-specificity; visual arts; visual (and material) culture art history: as academic discipline, 3–4, 9, 22, 26–8, 32, 44, 181, 182, 226, 231–2; and classification schemes, 16, 38; crisis of, 12– 14; ethno-nationalist discourses of, 66, 73–4, 81, 85–6; feminist, 26, 47; global, 66–7, 70, 75; Inuit, 160; and liberalism, 7, 28, 181, 201, 224, 227, 228–32; and nation, xvi, 4, 12, 24, 32, 38, 49–51, 67, 133, 144, 217, 224, 229–30, 236; and political ideology, 123; and post-colonialism, 73, 75–6, 153; revisionism, 230, 233; survey text, 87n11; university courses in, 73–8, 88n37, 89n44; world, 70, 75. See also artist-genius; Canadian art history; globalization; neo-liberalism; visual (and material) culture artist-genius, 7, 9, 15 art market: global, 157; and Inuit art, 159 Ashoona, Shuvinai, 164 Assembly of First Nations, 161 Australia, 179, 218, 228 Barbizon, 26, 33–4 Berlant, Lauren, 22, 25 borders: and activism, 181, 241; airport,

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243–4; of Canada, 172, 210; and capitalism, 185–6; and global networks, 241; and the Internet, 202, 214; and nafta, 145–6; of the nation-state, xvii, 51, 109, 130, 179–80, 184–5, 203, 207–8; and private property, 116; and television, 211, 214. See also Arctic; capitalism; free trade Bourdieu, Pierre: on culture, 119–20; on dialogue, 100–1, 104. See also conditions of possibility; cultural capital; habitus Bourriaud, Nicolas. See relational aesthetics Brazil, 91, 93, 96, 101 Britain, 34–5, 43; and the Commonwealth, 218–9; and global liberalism, 117, 118; influence on Canadian identity, 115–16, 157, 159; and museums history, 127; National Gallery of, 119; and North American colonies, 17n4, 18n11, 54. See also British Empire; cultural imperialism British Empire, 34, 35, 43, 74, 195; and Canadian art history, 76; exhibitions, 5 Brodeur, Stéphanie, 92, 95, 104 Burtynsky, Edward, 14, 15 Canada: as category, xv–xvi, 3–4, 32, 51, 53, 130, 209, 217, 226; as colonial nation, 51, 158, 183; and cosmopolitan world culture, 124, 128, 142; cultural policy of, 115–16, 126, 183; geography of, 189; and global art histories, 66, 75–8; in global context, 110, 207; and feminist art history, 47–8, 50, 53, 63; and identity, 54, 96–7, 99–100, 115–16, 188, 227, 232, 248; and liberal ordering, 6, 17n4, 17n6, 28; as liberal project, 3, 6, 29, 67, 130–3, 146, 150–1, 153, 187, 217, 221, 227, 233; and Mexico, 134–5; narratives of, 23, 53–4, 62, 100, 213; national project of, 154, 158–9, 167, 172–3; problematique of, 197–9; and Quebec, 77–9; and transnational liberal order, 115–16, 146; and visible minorities, 72–3, 87n24, 89n45; visual culture in, xv–xvii, 5, 16, 21–2, 54, 109, 111–12, 132–3, 203, 207; and war, 218–21, 226, 232–3. See also Arctic; borders; Canadian art; Canadian art history; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; Canadian film and television; Canadian history; Charter of Rights and Freedoms; cultural studies; ethnocultural art; globalization; immigration; Indian Act; Indigenous peoples; Inuit; Massey Commission; multiculturalism; museums; nation; National Gallery of Canada; nation building;

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nation-state; neo-liberalism; peacekeeping; political economy; post-nationalism; sovereignty; territory-state; visual arts; visual (and material) culture Canada Council, 87n16 Canadian art: and Aboriginal art, 15, 170n44; and artists, 7, 17n9, 31; as cultural practice, 51; definition of, 5; discourses of, 22; exhibitions of, 140; in global era, 100, 115, 128; institutions of, 45n6; as instructive, 127–8; liberal hegemony of, 11; narrative of, 11, 23, 26, 28, 47, 50–1, 87n16, 133, 218; and national culture, 110–11, 128, 173; national styles of; 150, 158; as product of nationalism, 53–4, 57, 77; study of, 51–2, 78, 104; as symbol of sovereignty, 158; university courses in, 172; and visual studies, 5. See also art; art history; Canadian art history; contemporary art; ethnocultural art; Indigenous art; Inuit art; Massey Commission; nation; site specificity; visual arts Canadian Art Club, 45n6 Canadian art history, xv–xvi, 4, 6, 11–12, 201; and Canadian identity, 96–7; in Canadian universities, 78; critique of, xv–xvi; 4–5; debates about, 23–4; as a discipline, 22, 32, 76, 130, 233; and identity, 133; and Indigenous visual histories, 172; as national/ist, 6, 23, 145, 221, 227; as national project, 134, 139, 145 184; neo-liberal context of, 131; relevance of, 22–3; state use of, 133; study of, 221; survey texts of, 18n10, 51; writing of, 4, 217. See also art; art history; Canadian art; Indigenous art; liberalism, liberal order (project); nation; nation building; site specificity; visual (and material) culture; war Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), 208 Canadian culture, 207; and international politics, 109–10; policy, 183. See also Canada; Canadian art; Canadian art history; Canadian film and television; Canadian history; exceptionalism; visual (and material) culture Canadian film and television: and authenticity, 211; and Canadian content rules, 205; and censorship, 205; as result of state formation, 203; and state sponsorship, 205–6; as symptom of capitalism, 204, 210. See also Canada; Canadian culture; television; visual art; visual (and material) culture Canadian Handicrafts Guild, Indian and Eskimo Committee of, 157

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Canadian history, 21, 61, 195; as academic discipline, 3, 49–50; and liberal order (project), 5–6, 17n4, 53–4, 114, 130, 151, 233; official narrative of, 224; and visual art, 51. See also Canada; Canadian art history; Canadian culture; colonialism; colony-tonation; Indian Act; liberal order (project) Canadian military. See Afghanistan; peacekeeping; war Canadian Museum of Civilization, 162 Canadian Museums Association, 161 Canadian Pacific Railway (cpr), 195, 207 Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (crtc), 205 Canadian television. See Canadian film and television capitalism: and art history, 29; and borders, 186; and Canadian television, 204; and creative industries, 23; and globalization, 16, 67, 117, 131; lee spaces of, 248; and neoliberalism, 108, 147n3, 226, 237, 245; and patriarchy, 26, 54, 62; post-Fordist, 12; and power, 177, 180; and space, 176. See also Canadian film and television; creative class; creative industries; cultural capitalism; cultural industry; cultureprenurialism; Fordism; globalization; liberalism Carnegie Corporation, 120–3; and support of Canadian culture, 124 Carr, Emily, 75 carving, 157, 159 Chambers, Jack, 25, 31–2, 37, 41, 42, 45n6; and Canadian art survey, 56–7; and likening, 32, 36, 38–9, 43–4. See also Chavanne, Purvis de; classicism; London, Ontario; photography; realism; Richter, Gerhard Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 89n48, 111 Chavannes, Puvis de, 25, 32, 36–8, 43–4. See also Chambers, Jack citizenship: Act, 74–5; and Canadian content quotas, 209; cultural, 192; and ethnic origin, 72; global, 85; liberal hierarchy of, 5, 60; and museums, 118–19, 126; and the nationstate, 173–6, 179, 196; neo-liberal, 185–6, 245; post-national, 67; Quebec, 79–80, 89n50. See also language; liberalism; nationalism; nation-state; neo-liberalism civilization: and art exhibitions, 142; cosmopolitan world view of, 115, 124; and museums, 119–23; non-Western, 88n37; and place, 102; survey of, 67, Western, 126. See also Massey Commission; museums

classicism, 36, 38–9, 44 Clattenberg, Mike, 202 Cold War, 107–8, 158, 240 College Art Association (caa), 12–13, 22 colonialism: and art historical canon, 28, 86n1, 160; in Canada, 128, 175; and Indigenous dispossession, 166; and Indigenous sovereignty, 111; United Nations and, 74, 81. See also Canada; colonization; colony-to-nation; First Nations; imperialism; Indian Act; Indigenous peoples; Inuit; sovereignty colonization, 24, 171, 160; of the Arctic, 150, 153–3; of art, 48, 75; de-, 88n35, 154; and Canada, 175; of experience, 231–2; of Indigenous peoples, 177; of the Inuit, 163–5, 177; and Quebec, 77. See also Canada; decolonization, imperialism colony-to-nation, 26, 51–4, 62. See also Canadian history community, 97; and belonging, 183, 204; as concept, 103–4, 106n40, 192; as intangible, 191–2, 199n4; in Inuit culture, 162; and nation-state, 188, 190, 193, 208. See also imagined community; site specificity Concordia University, 66, 73–4, 78, 89n44 Constable, John, 25–6, 31–2, 32–6, 43 contemporary art: Canadian, 24; as focus of visual cultural studies, 13; globalism of, 66–7, 86n1; and Jack Chambers, 36, 39; and narratives of Canadian art history, 52, 66; and place, 92, 104; teaching of, 27, 73. See also visual (culture) studies; visual (and material) culture cosmopolitan militarism, 221 craft: as category, xvi, 5, 229; Inuit, 157, 169n25; and Joyce Wieland, 60, 62; medium of, 54, 62, 224 creative cities, 12. See also Florida, Richard Creative Class Struggle, 249 creative economy: and informal cultural work, 239, 245, 248, 250 creative industries, 23. See also creative cities; creative economy; Florida, Richard Cronenberg, David, 201, 210–11. See also Videodrome cultural capital, 119–20, 126. See also Bourdieu, Pierre cultural capitalism, 22–3 cultural diplomacy, 135, 141–2. See also exhibitions; free trade; transnational cultural brokering cultural imperialism: British and us American,

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57; impact on Canadian television, 202, 213; impact on Inuit, 150, 156; in university courses, 88n35 cultural industry, 206 cultural nationalism: in Canada, 52–3; Joyce Wieland and, 26, 54–7, 60; and nation-state, 207. See also Massey Commission; territorynation-state cultural politics: and art, 217; in Canada, 116; and place specificity, 28 cultural studies, xviin4, 24, 29, 49; and Canada, 48. See also art history; Canadian art history; visual (culture) studies cultural turn, 23–4 culturepreneurialism, 14

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Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, 202 decolonization, 24, 88n35, 160, 167; and museums, 161–2. See also Aboriginal peoples; Canada; colonialism; colonization; Indigenous peoples; Inuit; visual (and material) culture Department of Indian Affairs, 156 Department of the Interior, 157 digital universe, 183, 202 Doon, Ontario, 31–5 Dufferin Terrace, 195–7 Durham, Jimmie, 112, 173–4, 178; on nationstatehood, 175–7 economy, 11, 104; Canadian, 5–6, 110, 117; and colonization of Indigenous peoples, 152, 156, 177; global liberal, 109, 117, 139, 143, 145, 185, 217, 241; North American, 133, 142, 146; post-industrial, 24, 213. See also creative economy; globalization; liberalism; nation-state; neo-liberalism ecosophical logic, 92 Egoyan, Atom, 201, 209 empire, 176, 180, 187n8. See also British Empire; Canada; Canadian history; colonialism; colonization; United States entrepreneurialism, 131, 185, 236, 245; and precarious labour, 14. See also creative economy; neo-liberalism equality: and ethnic diversity, 79, 82, 89n48; gender, 60; as liberal value, 18n11, 28, 116. See also liberalism Eternal Network, 241–2 ethnicity: and community, 103; and identity politics, 76–7, 78–9, 171; and liberalism, 81;

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and nationalism, 73, 171; as social category, 3 ethnic turn, 78–81, 85 ethnocultural art, 27–8, 70, 71–3, 80, 85. See also Canadian art; ethnicity; ethnocultural art histories; Indigenous art ethnocultural art histories, 66, 71, 73–5, 76, 78, 81, 85–6. See also Canadian art; Canadian art history; ethnocultural art ethnocultural communities, 71, 80 ethnohistory, 153 exceptionalism, 16, 175 exhibitions: and cultural diplomacy, 135–6, 139; and display tactics, 223; and feminist art practices, 53, 64n32; and Indigenous art, 167; and international trade, 134; of Inuit art, 158, 160, 161–3; and liberal discourse, 47–8, 228–9, 233; and national/ist rubrics, 52, 217, 224–6, 232; and neo-liberal politics, 139–46, 221, 230; organization of, 92; and transnational cultural brokering, 110– 11, 126, 133–4, 140–4; of “war rugs,” 218, 231. See also museums Expo ’67, 52, 56, 64n43 Farmer, Geoffrey, 66–7, 68, 70, 85 federalism, 60, 63n29 feminism, 48; and Canadian art history, 53; second-wave, 61. See also art history; Canada; Canadian art history; exhibitions; liberalism; visual arts; Wieland, Joyce Filliou, Robert, 241 film: in Canada, 182; 201–3, 209–10, 210–11, 213; and colonialism, 207; of Jack Chambers, 40–1; of Joyce Wieland, 61; state support for, 205–6, 208–9; of Victor Masaysva, 165–7; of Zacharias Kunuk, 165, 167. See also Canadian film and television First Nations: activism, 61, 166; and art exhibitions, 169n42; and Canadian nation building, 51; dispossession of, 197; and federal government, 156; and nationhood, 151, 172–3; of Quebec, 80; sovereignty, 155; teaching art of, 71, 74, 76, 78, 89n44. See also Aboriginal peoples; art; Assembly of First Nations; Canadian art; Canadian art history; colonialism; decolonization; Indian Act; Indigenous people; Inuit Florida, Richard, xv, 109, 145, 248–9. See also creative cities; creative economy; creative industries

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folk art, 229 Fordism, 107 formalism, 14, 57 Foucault, Michel: and concept of governmentality, 245–7 free trade, 117, 131; agreements, 132, 134–5; and global integration, 142, 144–5. See also borders; cultural diplomacy; neo-liberalism; transnational cultural brokering Free Trade Agreement (fta), 132. See also North American Free Trade Agreement Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa), 132; 140–1; 149n55. See also cultural diplomacy Front de libération du Québec (flq), 88n29 galleries: history of, 119–20; indigenous representation in, 162, 172; and nation, 190. See also Aboriginal peoples; art; Indigenous peoples; museums; National Gallery of Canada gender: as condition of possibility, 100, 104; and dominant narratives of art, 53, 227–8; equality, 60. See also equality; feminism; liberalism General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt), 132 gentrification, 104, 209, 248, 249 globalism, 92, 245; and art history, 67; and locality, 94, 182, 241. See also contemporary art; migrations; museums globalization: after, 12, 16, 108, 112; and art exhibitions, 144; and art history, xvi, 23, 73, 75, 110, 229–30; and Canada, 48, 114– 16; and Canadian television, 204, 213; and conflict/security, 226–7; corporate, xv, 4, 245; history of, 23; and Indigenous sovereignty, 152, 176–8; and locality, 28, 178, 204; and mobility, 91–2; and the nation, 67, 109, 115, 173, 181–5, 193, 233, 240–3, 241, 250; and nationalism, 171; neo-liberal, 28, 63, 107–8, 130–1, 133, 139, 147n3; and placelessness, 96, 171–2; and site-specificity, 96, 98; and transnationalism, 140. See also alter-globalization; capitalism; imperialism; nation-state; visual arts; visual (and material) culture Gramsci, Antonio, 115–18 Grierson, John, 115–16, 120, 121. See also Massey Commission Group of Seven: and Canadian art history, 4, 10–11, 74; and Canadian landscape art, 158, 182.

Guattari, Félix, 92, 98. See also ecosophical logic habitus, 100–1, 104, 106n23, 125. See also Bourdieu, Pierre; language Halifax, Nova Scotia, 23, 75, 202, 215 Hardt, Michael, 180, 218 Harkema, Reginald, 209 Harper, J. Russell, 7–8, 51–2. See also Canadian art history; colony-to-nation Harper, Stephen, 168n18, 175, 233 Harvey, David, 131, 147n3, 230. See also globalization; neo-liberalism hegemony. See liberal hegemony Hewitt, Darsha, 92, 95, 104 historicism, 22, 24, 25 historiography: of territory and identity, 98; of visual arts in Canada, 18n10, 21; of visual arts in Quebec, 19n25 Houston, James, 157 Hudson’s Bay Company, 155–7 Ignatieff, Michael, 174 imagined community, 86, 102, 169n37, 180, 191 immigration: Act, 75; and Canada, 183–4; and museums, 127; and the nation-state, 4, 146, 185; policy in Canada, 74, 127–8; and Quebec, 72. See also Canada; neo-liberalism impasto, 9, 14 imperialism: British, 57; Canadian, 150, 156, 164, 213; and globalization, 204; us American, 57, 115, 202. See also cultural imperialism impressionism, 8, 9 Indian Act, 81, 156 indigeneities, 153–4 Indigenous aesthetic, 165–7 Indigenous art: and Art Gallery of Ontario, 172; and discourses of nationalism and internationalism, 111, 124; exhibitions of, 169n42; 170n44; histories of, 75. See also Aboriginal peoples; art; Canadian art; Canadian art history; exhibitions; Indigenous peoples; museums; National Gallery of Canada; nationalism Indigenous peoples: and Canadian nationhood, 172–3, 177; First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, 71; in the liberal order, 5, 9, 160, 177; and nation-states, 177; and representation in art galleries and museums, 161–2;

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and sovereignties, 11, 173. See also Aboriginal peoples; Canada; Canadian art history; colonialism; decolonization; Indian Act; indigeneities; Indigenous art; land claims; liberal order (project); sovereignty individualism: in art history, 39; as liberal value, 3; and neo-liberalism, 12, 28, 245. See also liberalism Inness, George, 33 internationalism, 114, 171; aesthetic of, 124; of the Inuit, 112; liberal, 116; and national institutions, 125; and the nation-state, 174, 242; and self-organization, 242. See also Indigenous art; Massey Commission; nationalism; nationhood international liberal order, 110, 120; and Canada, 124; and “civilization,” 123; and culture, 118–26, 127; transnational consensus of, 125. See also globalization; internationalism; museums; transnationalism International Lunchtime Summit, 242 International Monetary Fund (imf), 17n7, 118 International Security Assistance Force (isaf), 184, 221. See also Afghanistan Internet: communications, 186, 214; and the nation-state, 4, 183, 193, 202, 210; and “war rugs,” 218, 234n5. See also borders; post-national landscape; World Wide Web Inuit: aajiiqatigiingniq, 151; and Canadian government, 150–2, 156; and disease, 168n13; film, 165–7; history of, 155–8; and missions, 155, 168n10; Pijitsirarniq, 151; piliriqatigiingniq, 151; Qaujimajatuqangit, 151, 155–60, 162, 163, 166; as visible minority in Canada, 72. See also aesthetics; art history; art market; colonialism; colonization; community; craft; cultural imperialism; decolonization; Indigenous peoples; internationalism; Inuit art; land claims; language; liberalism; liberal order (project); post-national landscape; Quebec; sovereignty; visual (and material) culture Inuit art: aesthetic, 165–6; appropriation of, 159; and cultural sovereignty, 161–7; industry, 157–8, 169n25; as national Canadian form, 158, 167, 169n37; Qaujimajatuqangit and liberalism, 155–60; visual culture, 111, 154, 166. See also art market; exhibitions; Indigenous art; Inuit Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, 153

Index

Investors in People (iip), 243–4 Iraq, 184, 218 Italy, 218 Jackson, A.Y., 9–11, 14 Japan, 118 Johnson, Richard, 222, 224, 226, 234n12 Kahlo, Frida, 135, 136, 144 Kasai, Shié, 66, 82, 84–5 Kunuk, Zacharias, 165, 167 Kuptana, Floyd, 164 labour: class, 126–7, 173, 182; cultural, 205, 208; immaterial, 14, 16; and liberalism, 28; and museums, 127; and neo-liberalism, 109, 185, 186, 245; precarious, 247. See also creative economy; entrepreneurialism land claims, 153, 154, 160. See also First Nations; Indigenous peoples; sovereignty landscape art, 6, 7, 52, 124; and Homer Watson, 35; and identity, 142–3; and Jack Chambers, 32; as map, 194; and nation, 158, 183, 194; and the “new” North America, 144–5; and site specificity, 97; and territory, 141, 196. See also Group of Seven language: categorization, 72; conditions of possibility in exchanges, 100–1, 103–4; Indigenous, 156; Inuit, 153, 160, 166; as marker of ethnic difference, 79, 158, 174, 197; and nation, 175, 183, 191; relationship to perpetual realism, 41; and translation, 100. See also Arctic; Quebec liberal hegemony, 5–6, 11, 14–15, 159, 247; in Canadian art history, 6, 26–8; and consent, 117–18; of the gaze, 194; historical contingency of, 227, of the nation, 228. See also Canadian art liberalism: and Canadian art history, 6, 13, 26, 28–9; and Canada-as-project, 3, 131, 150, 186, 227, 233; and colonialism, 151–4; international, 115, 118; Inuit and, 155–60; and museums, 229; and nation-state, 3–4, 15–16; as totalizing philosophy, 26, 29, 235n17; transnational, 126, 128; Trudeauvian, 61–2; values of, 18n11, 28,116, 246; and visual arts in Canada, 54; women and, 54, 60. See also Aboriginal peoples; art history; Canadian art history; Canadian film and television; ethnicity; individualism; Inuit art; liberal hegemony; liberal order (project);

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modernity; nation; nation building; neo-liberalism; Quebec; residential schools; transnationalism; visual (and material) culture liberal order (project): and art history, 12, 181; and Canadian art history, 5–6, 11, 26–9, 131, 203, 206, 218; and Canadian film and television, 209; framework, 9, 17n6, 180; and inclusion, 11, 27; international, 109–10, 116–17, 118–26; and the Inuit, 150–2, 154; as project of Canadian history, 5, 53–5, 60, 67, 146, 187, 217; and Quebec, 27–8; threats to, 159; and white women artists, 61–2. See also Canada; Canadian history; liberal hegemony; Indigenous peoples; liberalism; museums; neo-liberalism Life Classes, 213 likening, 25, 31, 34–6, 41, 43; and the preposterous, 38–9, 44 Lismer, Arthur, 31, 35 London Biennale, 242 London, Ontario, 32, 36, 39 London, uk, 34, 67, 119, 120, 238, 249–50; Olympics of, 214 Louvre Museum, 118–9, 124 Mackenzie King, William Lyon, 5 Martin, Thomas Mower, 33 Masayesva, Victor, 111, 165–7 Massey, Vincent, 122; and Canadian culture, 110; and Canadian culture in transnational context, 114–16, 123–4; as global citizen, 120. See also Massey Commission Massey Commission, 52, 111; on Canadian culture and world civilization, 120–6; and television, 207–8. See also civilization; internationalism; Massey, Vincent; United States Massie, Mike, 164 McCallum, David, 92, 94, 104 McGill University, 78 McKay, Ian. See liberal order (project) Mehta, Deepa, 209 Métis, 89–90, 155, 169n42, 197. See also ethnocultural communities; First Nations; Indigenous peoples; sovereignty; visible minorities Mexico: in nafta, 132–3; and North American integration, 110, 135, 140–5; and transnational cultural brokering, 134–40, 145. See also Canada; cultural diplomacy; exhibitions; museums; North American Free Trade Agreement

migration: and ethnocultural art histories, 71; and globalism in art, 67, 91–2; and neo-liberalism, 139; and sovereignty, 185. See also immigration modernism, 36, 158–9 modernity: and art history, 11–12, 16, 23–4; and colonization, 159, 161, 176; and liberalism, 3–4, 29; and the nation-state, 193 Monkey Warfare, 209–10 Montreal, 72, 77, 77–81, 82–4, 89n46, 90n56 Moorhouse, Shirley, 164 multiculturalism: Act, 74; Canadian policy of, 71, 75, 78, 111, 124; and critical pedagogy, 76–7, 81; post-national, 67, 152; and reasonable accommodation, 82. See also Canada; nationalism; Quebec; Trudeau, Pierre museology, 154, 161 museums: critical practices of, 110; cultural capital of, 22, 126; and disciplinarity, 19n41; and globalism, 22; and Indigenous art, 86n1, 161–3, 167, 169n42; and international liberal order, 118–20, 123; and politics of display and spectacle, 226–8, 229; and transnationalism, 128; and women artists, 53. See also Britain; citizenship; civilization; decolonization; exhibitions; immigration; Indigenous peoples; labour; liberalism; nation; United States of America; xenophilia nation: and academic discipline, 3–4, 16; and art, 110, 112; and the art museum, 119, 127, 224; Canada as, 4–5, 11, 54, 63n29, 124, 150, 173, 197–8, 248; as category of inquiry in visual culture, xv–xvi, 31–2, 38, 43–4, 109, 224, 233; and community, 103; as constantly changing entity, 111, 185; as contested entity, 224, 234n2; and cultural studies, xviin4; fiction of, 109, 175–6; historical study of, 50–2; and identity, 96–7, 158– 9, 176, 227; intangibility of, 188, 191–2; and the local, 48; material and immaterial, 109, 180–2, 182, 201; myths and narratives of, 184, 191, 232; as natural, 131, 143, 218, 230; priority ordering of, 44; as product of liberalism, 130, 227–8, 250; settler, 4, 74, 172, 183, 218; and territory, 180–2, 188–9, 193–4; and transnationalism, 145, 184, 221, 226; as virtuality, 191, 192–3, 198; visibility of, 189–90. See also aesthetics; analogy; art

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history; Canada; colonialism; colony-tonation; exhibitions; galleries; globalization; imagined community; landscape art; language; liberal hegemony; liberalism; Massey Commission; museums; nation-state; neoliberalism; post-nationalism; peacekeeping; sovereignty; territory-nation-state; visual arts; visual (and material) culture National Film Board (nfb), 120, 121, 207, 215n17 National Gallery, London, 119 National Gallery of Canada, 6, 11, 48–9, 139; and ethnocultural art, 71; and Indigenous art(ists) and curators, 14–15, 157, 170n44. See also exhibitions; museums nationalism, xvi, 143–4, 181, 188; in Canada, 61, 153, 161, 171–2, 174, 175; and Canadian art, 31–2, 51–3; and Canadian film and television, 201, 211; as colonial rhetoric, 151; and ethnicity in Canada, 73; ideology of, 152; and Indigenous art and culture, 111–12, 173; and internationalism, 115, 128; and knowledge classification schemes, 16; and locality, 96, 100, 178; and multiculturalism, 76; narratives of, 8, 54; as organizing category, 109; against post-nationalism, 139; in Quebec, 66, 78–9. See also Canadian art; cultural nationalism; ethnicity; globalization; imagined community; liberal order (project); nation; nation building; neo-liberalism; transnationalism; Watson, Homer; Wieland, Joyce nation building: and art history texts, 51; and communications, 203; and dominant narratives of Canadian art, 51–3; and ethnocultural arts, 77; and liberalism, 3–4, 187, 218; narratives of, 5. See also colony-to-nation; First Nations; liberal order (project); multiculturalism; visual arts; visual (and material) culture; visual history nationhood: and Canada, 43, 213; ideology of, 182; Indigenous, 151, 172, 173–4; and internationalism, 174; as natural, 233; and Quebec, 80. See also Aboriginal peoples; First Nations; Indigenous peoples; self-determination nation-state: and academic disciplines, 50; and competition, 180; and cultural industries, 205, 206, 207–8, 214; and daily life, 196, 203; denationalization of, 181, 184, 241; as fetish, 174–5; and globalization, 4, 17n7,

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50–1, 63, 173, 186, 193, 236, 240–2; as ideological construct, 152, 173; Indigenous critique of, resistance to, 112; and the individual citizen, 60, 67, 248, 250; as liberal construct, 3–4, 15, 226, 228, 230, 248; materiality of, 109, 172–3, 181, 189, 190; mutability of, 181, 233; as mythic entity, 172, 175; narratives of, 133, 191, 207, 214; as neo-colonial, 152; and network-state, 179; and oppression of minorities, 159; territory, 188–9, 197, 198–9; and transnational economy, 142, 145, 147n3, 181; and visual culture in Canada, 12, 54, 111, 131, 203; and war, 184, 218, 221; and Web-based culture, 183, 202–3. See also art; borders; Canadian art; Canadian film and television; citizenship; community; cultural nationalism; immigration; individualism; internationalism; Internet; liberalism; modernity; neo-liberalism; North American Free Trade Agreement; post-nationalism; sovereignty; television; territory-state; World Wide Web Native peoples, 75, 158. See also Aboriginal peoples; First Nations; Indigenous peoples nato, 184, 218, 221 Negri, Antonio, 4, 180, 218 neo-colonialism, 152 neo-liberalism: and art, 108–9; and art history, xvi, 12, 81, 133; and Canada, xv, 28, 114, 131; and culture, 130–1, 141–2, 146, 246; and governmentality, 246–7; and liberal nationalism, 143–4; and market-based economics, 147n3, 246; and militarization, 226; and the nation-state, 146, 239, 245–7, 250; resistance to, 248–9; and trade negotiations, 132; and war, 226. See also Canadian art history; capitalism; cultural capitalism; exhibitions; globalization; individualism; labour; migration; post-national landscape; property; transnationalism network-state, 179–81, 186; and war, 226. See also nation-state New York City, 34, 61, 97 No Border movement, 181, 186 non-Western art, 67, 74, 76, 86n1 No One Is Illegal, 82, 186 North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta): and art, 100–11; and Canada in North America, 133, 144; and the nationstate, 147n3; and neo-liberal economics, 117, 132; and North American integration,

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134, 142, 144, 145–6. See also borders; exhibitions; Mexico; transnational cultural brokering Nunatsiavut, 155 Nunavik, 153, 155 Nunavut, 151, 153, 168n3 Nunavut: Our Land, 165, 167 O’Brien, Lucius, 33 oecd, 118 Ontario Society of Artists, 32 Ottawa, 61, 92–4, 96, 104 Parti Québécois, 72, 79, 81 peacekeeping, 184, 221, 224, 226, 232–3. See also Afghanistan; cosmopolitan militarism; war photography, 39, 43, 190 photo-realism. See Chambers, Jack; Richter, Gerhard Piqtoukun, David Ruben, 164 Polanyi, Karl, 116–17 political art, 234n3 political economy: Canada as a part of global, 110, 114; and Canadian art, 115, 128; and culture, 29, 111, 118, 126, 131; as discipline, 116, 118, 246; liberal versus neoliberal, 247; and visual culture, 204, 205; and war, 184, 226 Pootoogook, Annie, 164 Pootoogook, Kanaginak, 163 Pootoogook, Napatchie, 163 post-colonialism: and nation, 189; and perspectives on art, 75, 76; and visual culture, 167. See also art history; Quebec post-colonial studies, 76, 153 post-national landscape, xv, 4, 17n7; and Canada, 152, 160, 185, 236–7; and the Internet, 201–2, 214; and Inuit visual culture, 150, 167; and neo-liberalism, 239. See also citizenship; Internet; multiculturalism; nationalism; World Wide Web property: as liberal value, 3, 6, 18n11, 27–9, 82, 116, 159, 197; and neo-liberalism, 131; private, 176. See also borders; individualism, liberalism Pudlo, Pudlat, 163 Quebec: art in, 19n25, 70, 82–4; and Canadian national narratives, 11; as colonized nation/territory, 77; and Charter of the French

Language (Bill 101), 72; and Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, 89n48; and “cultural communities,” 80, 90n53; and ethnicity, 72, 90n56; and French language, 72; Identity Act of, 79; and interculturalism, 78–80; and Inuit, 156; post-colonialism and, 77, 89n42; and reasonable accommodation debate, 89n48, 90n65, 79; teaching global art histories in, 27, 72–4, 77–8, 81, 85. See also Canada; citizenship; colonization; First Nations; historiography; immigration; liberal order (project); nationalism; nationhood; sovereignty; visual arts Quebec City, 195, 197, quilting, 54 realism: capitalist, 247; perceptual, 38, 40–2 regionalism, 38, 102, 204. See also affordances; site specificity Reid, Dennis, 24, 52–3, 56–7 relational aesthetics, 102–3 residential schools, 156, 164; and intergenerational trauma, 169n19. See also Aboriginal peoples; Canada; Canadian history; First Nations; Indian Act; Indigenous peoples Richter, Gerhard: and Jack Chambers, 38–41, and photo painting, 43–4. See also realism Rockefeller Foundation, 120–3; and support of Canadian culture, 124. See also internationalism; Massey Commission Rogoff, Irit, 13, 153, 183–4, 186, 190 Royal Canadian Academy, 33–4 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp), 155, 156, 169n20 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences. See Massey Commission Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 60, 70 Ruben, Abraham Anghik, 164 Sassen, Saskia, 4, 181–2, 185, 237, 239–42, 250 scumbling, 19n19 security: employment, 247; global, 221, 226; and the state, 242; United States, 179. See also 9/11; Afghanistan; borders; globalization; war self-determination, 111; and the arts, 154; Indigenous, 167–8, 237–9; and nationhood, 151, 153, 250. See also Indigenous peoples; sovereignty

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Serra, Richard, 97–9 site specificity, 91, 94, 96–8, 102, 104. See also globalization; landscape art; transnationalism slack space movement, 248–9 Snow, Michael, 49, 57, 171, 175 social media, 202, 203 sovereignty: alternative forms of, 248; and art history, 229–30; assertion of, 193–4; Canadian, 151, 154, 156, 158, 188; cultural, 161, 167; global, 184; First Nations and Métis, 155; imperial, 232; Indigenous, 112, 173, 177; Inuit, 111, 151–4, 160, 161–7; national, 67, 185, 218, 243; and nation-state, 181, 250; post-, 185, 237–9; Quebec, 50, 61, 78; state, xvi, 236; visualicity of, 196; and war, 184, 232. See also Aboriginal peoples; Arctic; Canada; Canadian art; decolonization; First Nations; globalization; Inuit art; migration; nation-state state. See nation-state Supreme Court of Canada, 156 Suzor-Coté, Marc-Aurèle de Foy: and Canadian art history, 16; and liberal order, 6–11, 14; technique of, 19n19. See also Canadian art history; liberal order (project); scumbling Telefilm Canada, 205–6, 208, 214. See also Canadian film and television television: and Canadian nation-state, 203–9, 210–11, 212, 213; colonial influence of, 164, 167, 173; 204; regulation of, 214. See also borders; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; Canadian film and television; capitalism; cultural imperialism; globalization; liberal order (project); Massey Commission; nationalism; visual (and material) culture territory-nation-state, 188–90, 193–4, 197, 198 territory-state: as alternative to nation-state, 198; Canada as, 188; 195–7, 199 Textile Museum of Canada, 184, 218, 221, 228–9 Toronto, 72, 87n24, 125–6, 145; on film, 209–10, 212 Trailer Park Boys, 182–3, 202–4, 206, 210, 213 transnational cultural brokering, 96, 135, 140, 146 transnationalism: art history, 66; and Canadian visual cultural, 131–2; and “civilization,” 123; communications, 180; conflict,

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184, 221, 228; cosmopolitan, 110, 115–16; and cultural consensus, 123–5; and ethnocultural art histories, 85, 89n44; historic bloc, 120, 126–28; institutions of, 118, 125–6; liberalism, 4, 116–18, 134; and neoliberalism, 109, 181; role of culture in, 118, 13–4; and site specificity, 94. See also globalization; museums; nation; war transnational warfare, 217, 228 Tremblay, Michel, 105n21 Trudeau, Pierre: arts and cultural policy of, 63n29; and Joyce Wieland, 61–2; government of, 60; and multiculturalism, 82. See also liberalism; multiculturalism; Wieland, Joyce Twitch City, 212 United Kingdom. See Britain United Nations (un), 17n7, 81 United States of America: and Canada as vacant lot, 3, 32; and Canadian cultural policy, 90n58, 128; extraterritorial reach of, 179; free trade with, 132–5, 141–2, 144; as hegemonic power, 117; and history of museums, 118–9; influence on Canada, 115–16, 158, 211; and Massey Commission, 120, 123; national security of, 179–80. See also cultural imperialism; security Universities Art Association of Canada (uaac), 22–3, 24, 88n33 Vallières, Pierre, 75 Vancouver, 72; anti-Asian riots in, 74–5 Victoria and Albert Museum, 127 Videodrome, 210–11, 214 Virtual Museum of Canada, 140–1 visible minorities, 71–2, 80. See also Canada visual arts: in Canada, 26, 56–7; and Canadian nation building, 51–3; and economy, 111; feminist frameworks of, 54; and globalization, 241; and the nation, 43, 109; and politics, 112, 140; and Quebec minority populations, 80; study of, 110, 131–2; and translation, 100. See also art history; Canadian art history; cultural nationalism; historiography; liberalism; nation; visual (and material) culture visual (and material) culture: and art history, 13, 182; and affect, 230–1; of Canada, xv– xvi, xvi–xvii, 4, 116, 131–2, 187; of conflict, 218, 224; and decolonization, 161; discourses of, 21; and the everyday, 12; and

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film and television, 182, 202–3, 213; and identity, 132, 140; Inuit, 111, 150–1, 154, 159, 161–7; and liberalism, 16, 201, 237; and the nation, 31, 38, 140, 207, 213, 227; and national storytelling, 133, 182; and neoliberal globalization, 131–2, 245; pedagogy of, 77; and the state, 130, 207; studies, 4, 24, 38, 112, 86n1, 110, 134–5, 153, 187, 190; and Vancouver Winter Olympics, 213 visual (culture) studies. See visual (and material) culture visual history: of Canada, xv–xvi, 5, 130, 233, 237; and nation building, 171. See also Canadian art history; Canadian history; historiography; visual arts; visual (and material) culture visualicity, 188, 190, 192, 194, 195–6, 198. See also sovereignty visual turn, 24 war: art, 217–18; and Canada, 232; denationalized and deterritorialized, 226; as security, 226; and the state, 180–1, 184; on terror, 218. See also 9/11; Afghanistan; Canada; cosmopolitan militarization; nation-state; neo-liberalism; network-state; peacekeeping; political economy; sovereignty; transnational warfare Warburg, Aby, 70 Watson, Homer, 25, 32–4; and Canada, 35–6; and Constable, 35; style of, 34; training, 35. See also Constable, John; likening

Watson, Robert, 92–3, 104 Whistler, James McNeill, 32–3 White, Hayden, 21 Wieland, Joyce, 49, 55–6, 58–9; and Canadian cultural nationalism, 57–60; and Canadian exceptionalism, 175; and feminist art history, 48, 50–1, 53–4, 56, 60, 62–3; inclusion in Canadian art narrative, 26–7, 47–8, 54, 56–7, 63; and liberalism, 62; and Pierre Trudeau, 60–2; and women artists in the museum, 71. See also Canadian art history; Canadian history; craft; cultural nationalism; feminism; film; liberalism; nationalism; Trudeau, Pierre WikiLeaks, 179–80 Wilde, Oscar: and Homer Watson, 31–4, 43, 45n9. See also likening World Bank, 118 World Trade Organization (wto), 17n7, 132, 240–1 World Wide Web (the Web), 201; and the nation-state 203, 210, 276; as post-national, 201–2, 214. See also Internet; post-nationalism xenophilia, 13 xenophobia, 197

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