A Monumental Undertaking

CRYSTAL MIGWANS

The ’s solo exhibition : Facing the Monumental is an elegant and arresting presentation that marks a victory in the struggle by Indigenous artists and curators to reclaim institutional space from which they have been systematically excluded. Rebecca Belmore is a performance and installation artist, recipient of the 2013 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts and the 2016 Gershon Iskowitz Prize, several times a representative of Canada at the Venice and Sydney Biennales, and an Anishinaabekwe of Lac Seul First Nation. Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental is the largest survey of the lauded artist’s work to date.

Installation view of Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental (Art Gallery of Ontario, , July 12-October 21, 2018). Left: Rebecca Belmore, Tower, 2018. Clay and Shopping carts. Right: Rebecca Belmore, tarpaulin, 2018. © Rebecca Belmore.

The soaring spaces of the fifth floor contemporary art galleries are well suited to the monumental character of Belmore’s wide oeuvre. A dark room and an intense sensory Migwans | A Monumental Undertaking 117

encounter with the waterfall projection Fountain (2005), followed by the towering clay- and-shopping-cart obelisk of Tower (2018) create a sense of the ‘monumental’ that is expected from the start. Tower and its neighbor tarpaulin (2018) are new works— dedicated to the homeless and landless, both sculptures are rendered in clay harvested from a site within Winnipeg. Belmore treats the clay, a new material for the artist, with caring attention, and the dense pattern of handprints at the base of Tower’s column of shopping carts testifies to the sheer physical work of its construction. This trace of the absent human is echoed eerily in tarpaulin, a ceramic blanket tented as though wrapped around a hunched figure but which, once confronted head-on, reveals only an empty space in the shape of a body. They are tributes to the displaced, constructed out of materials that constitute housing for many. Projected video is a strong feature of the exhibition, with four large multimedia installations. One is a media room with a video mosaic of documented performances and two viewing stations with headphones. Fountain and The Named and Unnamed (2002) are both signature video-based works, installed in rooms to themselves, which experiment with alternative screen surfaces. In Fountain, projected onto a screen of falling water, the artist’s struggles to bring a bucket of water from sea to shore culminate in her throwing its contents at the camera, the water hitting the lens transmuted into blood. In The Named and Unnamed, the artist calls out names, pulls a rose through her teeth in grief, nails her dress to a post, and then tears it away—a passionate performance projected onto a screen of lightbulbs. As someone who had previously seen both only through online media, I found the sensory presence of these ‘screens’ particularly interesting. Cool mist wafting from Fountain, Belmore’s contribution to the 2005 Venice Biennale, makes water a felt presence in the darkened room. The subtle heat of fifty light bulbs (representing fifty missing or murdered Indigenous women) in The Named and Unnamed likewise suggests bodily proximity. In the largest and second-to-last room of the exhibition, the viewer becomes caught in a snowy chase scene from two shifting perspectives. March 5, 1819 (2008) is a two-channel video projected on opposite walls which reenacts the historical flight of a Beothuk woman, Demasduit, from capture and murder by unseen settler pursuers. Here, too, one’s position in the wrenching struggle is ambiguous. Standing between these projections, the viewer is caught in the sightline of an empty, blood-topped chair. Blood in the Snow (2002) blankets a huge area of the floor with a soft white duvet. The vacant, red-stained chair emerges from the duvet’s center. On the wall nearby, a quote by the Oglala Lakota visionary Black Elk describes the sight of fallen Lakota women, children and elderly being buried in falling snow following the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. In an interview with Erica Commanda of Muskrat Magazine, Belmore noted that this piece was conceptualized in the year that Canada joined the American invasion of Afghanistan, and that struggles on the land globally and across time were on her mind.1 The chair suggests a witness to this violence.

1 Rebecca Belmore, quoted in Erica Commanda, “Rebecca Belmore Facing Monumental at the AGO,” Muskrat Magazine, June 26, 2018, http://muskratmagazine.com/belmore-facing-monumental-at-ago/. 118 SHIFT

Rebecca Belmore, Blood on the Snow, 2002. Fabric dye, cotton, feathers, chair, 240 5/32 x 240 5/32 x 42 1/8 in. Courtesy the Mendel Art Gallery collection at Remai Modern, purchased with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Mendel Art Gallery foundation, 2004. © Rebecca Belmore.

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Throughout the exhibition, the idea of the monumental seems self-evident in the sobering scale and often overwhelming presence of the installations. “Monumental” is an apt characterization of Belmore, her legacy, and the objects before us. It is only at the final stop on the fifth-floor exhibition route, however, that the artist’s use of this term becomes clear. There the viewer encounters the large-scale photographic work X series: The Artist (2014). In it the artist faces away from us, standing small and straight before a wide, blank wall, with the X of a construction vest on her back. This piece from the “X” series was originally printed for a billboard, such that the life-size artist would seem to be considering the enormous space before her. In this smaller incarnation the artist is at our eye level, and the under-construction space before her is the gallery wall. A quote by the artist beside this piece reads: “For decades / I have been working / as the artist amongst my people / calling to the past / witnessing the present / standing forward / facing the monumental.” Belmore positions herself as a labourer for her people, and it is the task before her that is monumental. The exhibition continues in various spaces throughout the AGO and Toronto. Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) (2017), Belmore’s contribution to documenta 14, sits at the entrance to the AGO’s Henry Moore Sculpture Center, a fitting site for a piece that in its original installation overlooked the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Marble quarried from the same source as the Parthenon takes on the form of the domed vinyl tent—a vernacular dwelling suggestive of Anishinaabe traditional homes. It is also a heavy reference to the makeshift shelters of millions of displaced migrants who during the project’s inception had landed on Greece’s shores. Belmore’s beaver dam gown Rising to the Occasion (1991) holds down a pivotal spot in the newly re-imagined Indigenous & Canadian Art galleries. Here, it is contextualized by beaded bandolier bags made by unknown Anishinaabe women and artist Kent Monkman’s The Academy (2008) —all important interventions in the Canadian Art canon. The dress itself was created on the occasion of a British royal visit to Canada in 1987, constructed out of colonial debris, “native” trappings and royal family kitsch. As I listened, a non-Native gallery guide struggled to explain its message to a group of schoolchildren, concluding finally that it was about a meeting of cultures. True. But what is missing from this explanation is how the dress was first worn during a protest by Belmore and others against the Federal Government’s imposition on Indigenous lives. There is a meeting of cultures here, and it is fraught with colonial violence. Co-starring in this monumental undertaking is the show’s curator Wanda Nanibush, who was named Curator of Indigenous Art at the AGO in 2017, one half of the newly restructured Department of Indigenous & Canadian Art. Nanibush has already spearheaded several decolonizing initiatives at the AGO, including the translation of wall text into Anishinaabemowin, English, and French, and the renaming of works on display that had been originally titled with language demeaning to Indigenous people. Both are bold interventions upon the gallery space and its legacies of erasure, and opportunities to observe how ‘decolonization’ within a large institution might edge toward or evade old-fashioned inclusion. For example, a common and troubling settler gloss of Indigenous nationhood is that it is “past and part-of” Canada—a 120 SHIFT

mischaracterization that still slips into every crack in the otherwise strong assertions of Indigenous sovereignty throughout these decolonized galleries. “This gallery […] honours Indigenous people as one of the founding nations—creating visible space in the wake of lost, stolen and confiscated land,” reads the introductory panel. It is so unexpected and so gratifying to see such a clear statement of the gallery’s role in addressing colonial histories that the issue of nation versus Nation status might seem like a minor quibble. But it is worth noting the slippage that occurs in the characterization of a generalized demographic (“Indigenous people”) as a “founding nation” (of what?), rather than speaking of specific, still-standing entities such as the Anishinaabeg Nation. It would be hard, of course, to list every single Nation upon whose territory Canada intrudes in the gallery title (Gallery of Canadian & Anishinaabeg & Haudenosaunee & Huron &...), and that’s why the differential in ethnically- versus territorially-defined nationhood (Indigenous & Canadian) is notable—it’s a matter of real estate all over, and Canada has not yet been made to cede supremacy in such institutions. Give Nanibush a few years.

Rebecca Belmore, Rising to the Occasion, 1987-1991. Mixed media. 78 3/4 x 47 1/4 x 39 3/8 in. Gift from the Junior Volunteer Committee, 1995. Art Gallery of Ontario. © Rebecca Belmore. Photo: Craig Boyko.

All of these things are nonetheless significant victories that have only come about after generations of work by Indigenous artists and curators like Belmore and Nanibush. Canadian art has long been something which pictures Indigenous people, rendering them Migwans | A Monumental Undertaking 121

as passive objects rather than active presences. Interventions like the integration of Indigenous art throughout the AGO, and wall texts that addresses an Indigenous reader are important experiments in disrupting the colonial mechanisms of erasure in the art museum. Those schoolchildren are perhaps now aware of Indigenous people not just as objects pictured and seen in art, but as artistic minds and viewing presences in the gallery among them. Hopefully the presence of an Indigenous artist in this lofty position means that not just non-Indigenous school children are being engaged here. The project of inclusion is always predicated on a performance of presence (is there a reader to go with those Anishinaabemowin panels? Is the Anishinaabe reader assumed to stand in for all Nations local to Ontario? Can these gestures truly address structural obstacles that continually remove the Native from this place?). Though Nanibush has firmly stated her intentions to resist Indigenous inclusion in an existing settler structure and instead lead an Indigenous occupation of it, the AGO is already proving how seamlessly settler institutions can enfold resistance into nationalism under the aegis of diversity. As an Anishinaabekwe myself, I found myself standing uneasily in a space that has been laboriously won by and for Anishinaabekwewag, struggling to read the panels with my limited Anishinaabemowin, and struggling to reconcile the placement of beadwork next to landscape paintings. I think that an uneasy stance is a useful one, though, and Belmore’s work provides a powerful example in this regard—cautious and critical, yet hopeful and humane. This solo exhibition, along with the aabaakwad symposium on Indigenous contemporary art organized in conjunction with it, are a solid foundation stone on which to build further interventions. As unresolved and experimental as these interventions are, there is no understating the monumental importance of having Belmore, beadwork, and long Anishinaabemowin text panels take up real estate on Bloor Street. It is a pleasure and a privilege to stand before these pieces, and critical that they have this platform from which to do their own decolonizing work.

Miigwech Nanibush miinawaa Belmore.

The exhibition Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental was on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, July 12 to October 21, 2018.

Crystal Migwans is an Anishinaabekwe of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory, hailing from the Mazhenahzing River. She is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Columbia University, currently undertaking her dissertation research on natural fiber weaving traditions in the Great Lakes.