Introduction

My interest in the Vancouver School began as a teenager aft er I enrolled in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the University of British Columbia in 1987 and signed up for two classes with Jeff Wall; a fi rst year studio class in photography and a required survey class in Art History. As a seventeen-year-old with very limited exposure to art history, criticism, or theory in high school I remember feeling surprised and challenged by Jeff Wall. At the beginning of the photography class he announced he would not be teaching us the mechanics of taking a photograph (camera, studio, or lab instruction); if we wanted to study fi lm processing and printing techniques we should join the camera club. Instead we would be discussing the ideas our photographs would evoke, and he didn’ t care if we had the photographs printed by a commercial lab. Th is was the beginning of my decades-long engagement with what I might today characterize as ‘conceptual practices.’ With one exception, most of the Art History class transpired in a blur, some of it no doubt embedded in my memory to be unlocked one day in graduate school discussions, but superfi cially forgotten in the daily activities of my life then as a young studio artist. Th e exception was a lecture Wall presented on Freud ’ s psychoanalytic interpretation of Leonardo Da Vinci’ s work, in particular Freud’ s discussion of the latent maternal and homosexual desires he read as embedded in Da Vinci ’ s Madonna and Child with St Anne (1503). I found the possibility of this sort of analysis of a historic artwork strange and fascinating, and while I was conscious that I was then ill-equipped academically to understand the nuances of Wall’ s lecture, I knew the importance of being exposed to a social critique of an artwork. I cite these formative experiences with Jeff Wall in my studio art education at the beginning of this book because in many ways they set the stage for the intellectual and creative struggle that has engaged me for most of my life: the attempt to reconcile the artist’ s initial work (understood as a material and formal manifestation of his/her ideas born from particular social entanglements) with the discursive framing that supports it in the art market, commercial art world, and if an artist is lucky, in the evolving art-historical canon. I have understood this problem intellectually through three factors: my training as

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a social art historian, my experience as a working artist, and through my identity as an American and Canadian female citizen born in the United States and raised in British Columbia. I have witnessed the remarkable physical transformation of Vancouver; its evolution from a seemingly aff ordable ‘regional’ city in the 1970s to its current status as one of the most expensive global hubs of fi nance capital and real estate on the Pacifi c Rim. Th e emergence of the Vancouver School as a global brand has also occurred during my lifetime, and its growth in stature has paralleled the rise of condominiums in the business and commercial centre or ‘downtown core’ aft er the world ’ s fair, Expo 86. Th e ‘Vancouver School’ or ‘Vancouver School of Photo-conceptualism’ began to be applied to a number of artists in Vancouver around 1990, always including Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, and sometimes including Ken Lum, Rodney Graham, Christos Dikeakos, Roy Arden, Arni Haraldsson, and Stan Douglas. It is diffi cult to pinpoint the exact origin and date of the use of the term(s), but it has since appeared in a number of catalogue essays and in relation to exhibitions curated around these Vancouver artists.1 Th e term oft en refers to a common critical sensibility towards subject matter, rather than one unifi ed through common formal attributes. While these artists also make video and sculpture, the Vancouver School as a contemporary brand is forever linked with Jeff Wall’ s pioneering use of photographic transparencies: large hyper-realistic photographs that compete with the size and grandeur of historical paintings found in museums, mounted on the surface of shallow boxes and illuminated from behind. European curators Bart De Baere and Dieter Roelstrate’ s 2005 char- acterization of Vancouver’ s art production is fairly typical: ‘state-of-the-art brand name, denoting such (artistic) qualities as intellectual rigour, stringent conceptual refi nement and precision, and most of all perhaps, a deeply critical commitment towards the politics of the image and image production.’ Th e origins of this critical ‘school’ came from the artists themselves who knew each other through their institutional affi liations at Simon Fraser University (Jeff Wall taught Rodney Graham and Ken Lum), the University of British Columbia (Ian Wallace taught Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham), and at Emily Carr College of Art + Design (formerly the Vancouver School of Art; Ian Wallace taught Stan Douglas, Roy Arden, and hired Jeff Wall). In 1988 Ian Wallace inadvertently set the defi ning characteristics of the Vancouver School brand in an essay for a catalogue on Canadian photography that he titled ‘Photoconceptual Art in Vancouver.’ 2 He situated the genealogies of Vancouver photo-conceptualism in the intellectual and text-based practices of conceptual art and the late-modernist aesthetics of abstract painting and Minimalism, which Wallace said he and others adopted along with a ‘postmodern’ dose of scepticism towards the modernist hegemony associated with Greenberg in the centres of the art world. Th is scepticism was enabled by the marginal location of Vancouver, which had no signifi cant art market for artists to aspire to

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participate in during the 1960s and 1970s, and was manifest in Vancouver artists’ commitment to engaging with regional themes and images while experimenting with a plurality of media. A few scholarly threads have prevailed in the growing historical narrative about Vancouver photo-conceptualism as it has developed since the late 1960s when Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace fi rst met: these artists ’ initial rejections of an image of an idealized local landscape in favour of an anti-theatrical image of Vancouver as a modern centre of industry in the late 1960s;3 artists’ introduction of photography and cinematography into the waning dominance of conceptual practices in the late 1970s; the intellectualism of highly educated Vancouver artists; and artists’ frequent references and writing about local and international history. Indeed, these discursive threads are nearly always repeated in relation to the historical context of the European and American avant-gardes, and Vancouver artists ’ vocal self-inclusion in that history beginning in the 1960s. Language supporting this self-conscious association can be found in much of their writing. In 1988, Jeff Wall spoke of his and Wallace ’ s work as a recovery of the radical possibilities of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, 4 and in 1991, he referred to Ken Lum’ s work as a counter-tradition to the ‘British, romantic, lyrical tradition’ of landscape painting that dominated cultural production in British Columbia up to the 1960s.5 Voicing similar concerns in a review of the 1981 exhibition Westkunst: Contemporary Art Since 1939 , a survey of western art that included more than 800 artworks by 200 European and American artists organized by the city of Cologne, Wallace critiqued the organizers’ omission of conceptual and language-based work made earlier in the 1970s (‘the missing 70s’) while focusing on market-friendly European and American neo-Expressionist paintings like those by Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel (‘the most brutally ugly work in the whole show’). 6 Wallace described the exhibition as evidence of ‘the fanatic indignation of a rejected and disappointed avant-garde,’ 7 referring to avant-gardes established prior to 1960 (he cites Warhol’ s 1963 Disaster series as the symbolic apogee of its end), movements with histories no longer evident in the majority of com- mercially friendly contemporary works he saw on display in Westkunst . Wallace, however, begins and ends his review by discussing his friend Jeff Wall’ s work Movie Audience (1979), which was included in the exhibition, and which for Wallace served as a rhetorical frame for the return of the avant-garde at the end of the 1970s. For Wallace, Wall’ s series of photographic portraits of everyday individuals looking upwards included content that critically addressed the spectator ’ s engagement with vision itself, and thus emerged ‘out of the discourse of the avant-garde.’8 At stake in Wallace’ s review was the recuperation of the avant-garde politics of the early twentieth century into the formal aspects of later twentieth-century modernism, a critical strategy he felt was needed in the context of rising

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consumerism and the increased infl uence on public life of capitalized visual spectacles. Th ese concerns, and the critical role photography as a medium is poised to play within them, has continued into the twenty-fi rst century, most recently and thoroughly argued in Michael Fried ’ s formalist valorization of photography, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before . Fried ’ s book identifi es Jeff Wall as one of several modern masters who have in recent decades rescued ‘issues of beholding’ and ‘anti-theatricality’ from the dustbin of art history aft er infl uential postmodern critiques of high modernism discredited such eff ects. Fried argues for the renewed importance of formalist art practices like large-scale photography that, through technique and material, demand recognition as a deliberately constructed artifi ce, while at the same time requiring the careful and attentive looking of a viewer. Although Fried is one of the best known art historians and critics to champion Wall’ s work, and is unique in his anti-theatricality argument, he is not alone in his praise. Th ierry de Duve, Dieter Roelstraete, Donald Kuspit, Kaja Silverman, and many other international art historians, critics, and curators have claimed that Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, and other artists associated with the Vancouver School of photo-conceptualism are important historically because they integrated fi guration and narrative into neo-avant-garde photographic practices at a time when such methods of image-making appeared moribund. Over thirty years, this cumulative acclaim has helped to move Jeff Wall and other Vancouver artists to the foreground of international discussions about the continued relevance of avant-garde art production and picture-making, and has established Vancouver as an integral node in a global network of critical art making. Yet, in doing so, most of the writing about these artists does not cover new ground about avant-garde art as a social process with global implications, but instead adds to a well-established art-historical lineage that connects Vancouver photo-conceptualism to the political motivations of early European avant-garde art movements and the formal developments of nineteenth-century French painting. Th is is well trodden territory. What other territories are adjacent or in play?

The defeatured landscape Vancouver artists ’ work have been positioned critically in relationship to shift ing approaches towards the depiction of Vancouver ’ s urban and natural landscape since the 1960s, and the historical framing of Vancouver artists as avant-garde is oft en articulated in relation to what physical or discursive location they occupy. Th e text-heavy catalogue that accompanies the 2005–06 exhibition Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen in Belgium demonstrates this in the curators’ assertion of a spatial turn within contemporary analyses of visual art. Curators Dieter Roelstraete and Scott Watson both stress aspects of regional location in their contextualizing

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of the Vancouver history of vanguard art production for an international audience in their catalogue contributions. Watson focuses on Vancouver artists’ long engagement with spatially oriented concerns: the infl uence of ‘Situationist- infl ected, documentary derives ,’ an interest in the ‘defeatured landscape,’ the demolition of historic Edwardian and Victorian buildings and whole neighbour- hoods in a fast-paced modernization strategy focused on high-rise condominium development, and the legacy of squatting in Vancouver’ s intertidal zones as counter-cultural protest.9 In their co-authored introduction De Baere and Roelstraete disparage what they see as the dominant criticism of curated exhibitions organized around specifi c geographies as ‘reactionary vestiges of a preglobal era of ardent regionalisms or worse still nationalisms,’ instead arguing for a ‘passionate interest in the relevance of “locally” produced and/ or conceived practices with regards to globally entertained “theoretical” issues.’ 10 ‘Why Vancouver?’ they ask, and answer: ‘Because of its insular location at the proverbial edge of the world . … [committed] towards the politics of image and image production in particular.’ 11 Th ey go on to characterize a ‘“Vancouver state-of-mind” – “Vancouver” here designating a “mental space,” more a landscape of the arts than a mere geographical oddity.’12 De Baere and Roelstraete ’ s concept of a mental-spatial-landscape-of-the-arts is emblematic of curators and scholars’ interest in the spatial aspects of discourse formation, and the geographical turn in the historiography of art. 13 As Miwon Kwon has summarized, conceptions of a site as a grounded and quantifi able space shift ed in the 1960s to a functional site considered as ‘a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and discursive fi liations and the bodies that move between them.’ 14 Kwon ’ s plea for a ‘relational specifi city’ that accounts for the social inequities of cultural producers in diff erent locations within high capitalism is a challenge to historians, who sometimes overlook the material conditions of regional art production in their eff orts to frame artistic outcomes in a global context. Th e superfi cial emphasis on geographical locations can defl ect attention away from the politics of the individual artist’ s labour, and instead locates meaning in particular places as global cultural destinations. 15 De Baere and Roelstraete’ s ‘Vancouver state-of- mind,’ is imagined as a ‘politics of image production’ at the ‘proverbial edge of the world.’ Such characterizations naturalize a discursive site-specifi city emptied of classed, raced or gendered social relations; a rhetorical framing that took root in early 1970s Vancouver with the idea of a ‘defeatured landscape’ that was initiated by male artists who wrote about each others ’ work. ‘Th e defeatured landscape’ was fi rst used to describe a new group sensibility by writer Dennis Wheeler in a June 1970 artscanada review of the Four Artists exhibition held at Fine Arts Gallery at the University of British Columbia in February 1970, curated by artist Christos Dikeakos, and including Vancouver artists Tom Burrows, Duane Lunden, Jeff Wall, and Ian Wallace. 16 Wheeler

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wrote about what he saw as a new ‘sense of landscape, a sudden heat for the mundane suburban city stretching horizontally across the map of America.’17 Th e words ‘defeatured landscape’ were used by Jeff Wall to reference the urban street scenes he photographed in his conceptual artwork Landscape Manual (1970), which was included in the show. Th e words were then adopted as an organizing concept by Wheeler in his review, who no doubt recognized in the works an affi nity with urban-themed artworks being produced by conceptual artists south of the border such as American Earthworks artist Robert Smithson. Wheeler had been spending a lot of time with Smithson in the months prior to the Four Artists exhibition, helping him with preparations for the large earthwork, Island of Broken Glass, that was to be sited on a nearby island.18 It ’ s likely that Smithson ’ s writing about New Jersey ’ s suburban developments infl uenced Wheeler, who opened his review by discussing Lunden, Wall, and Wallace ’ s earlier collaborative project, the booklet Free Media Bulletin . Th e latter was a photocopied collection of avant-garde texts assembled by Duane Lunden, Jeff Wall, and Ian Wallace, which included their own writing (Wall and Wallace) and photocopied artwork (Lunden) along with important texts written by Antonin Artaud, Alexander Trocchi, Jean Toche, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Huelsenbeck, and others. Wheeler cited it as a ‘precursor to this show … the attempt to establish a ground on which to build, an education in an envelope fi lled with socio-aesthetic documents vital to each of the three artists.’19 It is remarkable that in the introduction of Wheeler ’ s review, and in Free Media Bulletin before it, the artist-critic clearly declares his intention to establish a new avant-garde discourse in spatial terms: to build from the ground up, an ‘education in an envelope.’ It is important that this conscious intention to articulate an avant-garde discourse is made by the artists themselves, and is not an avant-garde ‘discovered’ and promoted through the authoritative voice of a supposedly objective art critic. In 1991, Vancouver curator Scott Watson followed the textual thread established by Wall and Wheeler by describing the ‘defeatured landscape[s]’ as examples of conceptual and minimalist artists’ ‘formation of an urban semiotic’ and interest in ‘totalizing systems,’ 20 while Ian Wallace would later use the term to refer to ‘innocuous suburban streets’ and ‘empty industrial zones’ on the ‘frontier of the avant-garde.’21 As Jeff Wall explained in 1991, the eff ort to create conceptually based urban landscapes refl ected young artists ’ conscious attempts to defi ne themselves as a ‘counter -tradition’ 22 to the established and popular regional history of Expres- sionist landscape painting, which was exemplifi ed in the legacy of Emily Carr as ‘the greatest painter in British Columbia ’ s history.’23 Quoting the painter and writer Robert Linsley, Wall described a ‘taboo against fi guring the real social and material landscape of the present,’ identifi ed by younger artists in older artists’ veneration of the local landscape in the 1950s and addressed as subject matter in their own art in the 1960s. 24 Emily Carr’ s paintings (aft er the late

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1920s) of fi gureless forests and abandoned First Nations villages remained the quintessential examples of what Jeff Wall, in keeping with Robert Linsley, would later call ‘the hegemonic inner landscape,’ meaning landscapes that are more refl ective of an artist ’ s desire to achieve a spiritual experience through art-making than they are representational or descriptive of actual places. 25 In relation to Carr ’ s work, Wall criticized a generation of British Columbian artists ’ romantic use of ‘the Image of the Native,’ to signal alternative and apolitical ways of imagining the forest outside of capitalist resource exploitation in the province. Instead Vancouver would be represented as an everyday place stripped of sentimentality and the ego of the artist, an image that ‘could as well be Chicago, Edmonton, Toronto, or anywhere.’ 26 Th e notion of suburban streets and empty industrial zones that look like any other city, is however, also a fantasy predicated on the evacuation of real or imagined people from the landscape, one naturalized through the documenta- tion of these artists ’ cameras. At this time in Vancouver there were in fact numerous fractious disagreements over how urban space should be used and who should have control over it, including the city’ s attempts, made over many years and oft en stymied by civic activism, to build a freeway through the city centre, evict residents from and then develop the important historic residential neighbourhood of Strathcona, and evict squatters living for free in the tidal zones of the city.27 In a landscape that has been ‘defeatured’ by artists, the physical territories of the city are framed and isolated by the artist ’ s vision, which in photo-documentary form may appear more ‘objective’ than the subjective vision of previous generations’ painted representations. Vancouver artists ’ early concentration on the built environment, void of social diff erence or apparent struggles for control, allowed their representations of the city of Vancouver to be received more broadly as universal expressions of an avant- garde art movement. As such, the image of the city could continue to be understood as the quintessential symbol of a rationalized capitalist society, the Weberian iron cage, which traps and ensnares an increasingly unfree individual.

New territories emerge out of the history of the avant-garde Vancouver artists’ vocal self-insertion into the history of the avant-garde vis-à-vis a practice initially centred on landscape thus requires a reckoning with the origins and ongoing assessments of the avant-garde as a discursive and spatial operation. In his 1967 account of the avant-garde, Donald Egbert credits the origin of the term to Henri Saint-Simon, the radical French thinker who fought for American independence with the French. For Saint-Simon, ‘avant-garde’ indicated a trinity of artists, engineers, and scientists working together to service progressive social change. 28 By the late 1800s, however, artists and

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writers infl uenced by Saint-Simon’ s progressive views adopted diff erent stances towards the relevance or usefulness of art in activating social change. As Egbert notes, Th éophile Gautier would advocate for an art-for-arts sake divorced from political utility in the preface to his 1835 novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, whereas fi ft een years later Gustave Courbet and Pierre Joseph Proudhon would publicly advocate that Realist painting like Courbet ’ s Stonebreakers (1850) could inspire a socialist insurrection. Charles Baudelaire, the French poet and critic whose work historians so oft en fi nd exemplary of a nineteenth-century avant-garde identity and methodol- ogy, was himself disdainful of the same avant-garde with which he was later associated. In 1862–64, while living in Belgium, he was contemptuous of the militaristic terminology used by artists who imagined themselves at the forefront of society: ‘[Belgian natures] that are not themselves militant, but are made for discipline – that is to say, for conformity – natures congenitally domestic … .’ 29 For Baudelaire the unquestioning discipline of the avant-garde was linked to the emerging threat of mass culture, understood then pejoratively as passive, docile, and stereotypically female. Th is association continued to be naturalized and internalized by critics well into the twentieth century along gendered lines. Recounting the development of the avant-garde Dadaists in 1920, for example, Richard Huelsenbeck condemned Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball’ s Galerie Dada in Zurich as ‘a manicure salon of fi ne arts, characterized by tea-drinking old ladies trying to revive their vanishing sexual powers with the help of “something mad”.’30 Twenty-six years later, Clement Greenberg lamented America ’ s inability to produce a home-grown avant-garde due to the pervasive infl uence of ‘the mid-brow, the credulous, the spinsters, and the outdated visionaries.’ 31 Th e middlebrow taste so despised by Greenberg that he continued to lament well into the 1960s, was at least in 1946, linked to the older childless woman – signifi cantly, one without any procreative power. Aft er Civil Rights and the widespread social protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, scholars could no longer ignore the gendered prejudices embedded in such documented polemics of the avant-garde. Consequently, poststructuralist analyses of the history of the avant-garde tend to highlight its existence as a discursive practice with an exclusionary methodology.32 In 1986 Andreas Huyssen analysed the process through which mass culture came to be associated with the feminine; ‘the fear of the masses in this age of declining liberalism is always also a fear of woman, a fear of nature out of control, a fear of the unconscious, of sexuality, of identity and loss of stable ego boundaries in the mass.’33 He reminds us that the rational order and secure subjectivity of individuals within the bourgeoisie was threatened by the new masses, an anxiety that is refl ected in the need of the modern artist and writer to defi ne their own autonomous art in contrast to that produced within mass culture. Th e heroic exploits of avant-garde artists are understood by Huyssen as not only

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pushing culture forward, conquering new territory, but simultaneously as a ‘reaction formation’: the will to exaggerate that which is most able of counteract- ing a perceived threat. Johanne Lamoureux describes the social process of avant-garde formation as one that maintains patriarchal privilege and power by situating women or others as oppositional to the mission of a self-selective male group identifi ca- tion. 34 It is this latter relationship that one fi nds replicated in the Vancouver vanguard of the late 1960s and 1970s: ambitious art practice is overtly articulated as being in opposition to the history of painting, expressionism, or ‘nature.’ Th is echoes what T.J. Clark once characterized as the ‘gambits’ of the avant-garde in mid-nineteenth Paris, an opportunity for artists of a certain class to distinguish themselves in a confusing fi eld of bourgeois and anti-bourgeois allegiances. 35 In this formulation, the avant-garde can be seen as part of a sequence of cultural moves, or counter-moves, necessarily responding to some social provocation, real or imagined. Griselda Pollock is one of the most forceful voices to reckon with this, arguing that women ’ s social roles exist as a central provocation within the bourgeois society that the avant-garde has historically positioned itself against. In relation to ‘the currently destabilized and shift ing conditions of contemporary globalizing consumer culture,’36 which is no longer aimed at a total transformation of society, but instead is oriented around facilitating specifi c consumer and capitalist needs and profi ts, Pollock hypoth- esizes the existence of fl exible and adaptive avant-garde ‘moments’ that emerge within this ‘liquid modernity.’ For Pollock, the 1970s feminist art movement is one important avant-garde moment within liquid modernity. Feminist art and feminist art history emerged because of the historical confl uence of the rise of the international women ’ s movement, the infl uence on image-makers of semiotic and psychoanalytically informed feminist fi lm theory, and growing knowledge about the omissions of the offi cial canon of art history. In Pollock ’ s account, the methodologies of exclusion that necessarily constitute the very practice of marking any avant-garde against its ‘others,’ were recognized and co-opted to advantage within feminist politics. 37 In productive relation to Pollock ’ s arguments it is instructive to consider how these discourses of exclusion and reaction formation play out in a regional context that is not the classic centre of European modernity. Because the formation of an avant-garde necessarily enacts new erasures in a new time and place, and because Vancouver photo-conceptualist artists have put themselves consciously at the centre of this historical discourse, it is crucial to ask, ‘Who or what has been excluded through the formation of the Vancouver School and its advance?’ And quite quickly, the invisible subject of the defeatured landscape comes into focus: women. Since the earliest incarnation of the Vancouver School of photo-conceptualists in the late 1960s, and through the 1970s continuing into the current day, no woman artist has

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consistently been acknowledged as belonging to the group. Why has it been that for over forty years Vancouver photo-conceptualism appears to have been dominated by male artists? Indeed, this book demonstrates how the process of avant-garde identity formation based on the development of the defeatured landscape resulted in the establishment of a masculinist discourse that erased women’ s participation and artistic labour, in part because at the time of its formation in the 1960s women were still associated with nature, home, and domesticity. Such associations were embedded in the earlier avant-gardes and unconsciously replicated by male artists in later decades. Even as late as 1969 and 1970, like the Surrealists before them, male artists in Vancouver would photo-document their forays into the ‘wilderness of the city grid’ (as Ian Wallace once called it) with peep-show-like pop-ups of naked or erotic female bodies as rewards in their psychological or physical travels: big breasts fl ash the patient viewer in the photo-tour of Vancouver ’ s industrial and commercial sites in N. E. Th ing Co. ’ s Portfolio of Piles (1968; Figures 9 and 10; Ingrid and Iain Baxter, hereaft er referred to as NETCO); and Jeff Wall’ s Landscape Manual includes leaving the streets of Vancouver for a quick tryst in a movie theatre, where the male fl âneur can imagine two women having sex in the bathroom stall. Public responses towards male artists and their female peers also diff ered signifi cantly in the 1960s and 1970s: Ingrid Baxter ’ s contributions to the infl uential conceptual art collaboration NETCO were ignored, while her partner and husband Iain Baxter’ s contributions were heralded – the latter described as a ‘man of the year in the world of art,’38 the former recognized as a helpful and ‘enterprising wife.’ 39 Similarly, conceptual artist Liz Magor would be framed as an eccentric ‘mother earth’ fi gure in relation to her sculptures that integrated materials found on local islands;40 and Marian Penner Bancroft ’ s photography of the late 1970s would not be discussed in avant-garde terms because it was imbued with personal biography and female subjectivity; content not easily reconciled with the project of the avant-garde as interpreted in Vancouver at that time as rational explorations of social alienation in the urban landscape. Th e frontlines of the avant-garde in late 1960s Vancouver were thus established on the ground of a defeatured landscape not so featureless aft er all, one instead haunted by its modern other(s): women; nature out of control; the unconscious; sexuality; and fear of the loss of male identity. Th at the social position of women haunts such male artists ’ work is evident in many of Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace ’ s photographs of the mid- to late 1970s, the decade most impacted by feminist critiques of representation that had been assimilated into the art world, and which Pollock identifi es as an avant- garde moment. Despite an apparent shift in form – large photographic prints of staged narrative scenes inspired by fi lmmaking and advertising, rather than the conceptual documents popular between 1968 to 1971 – the subject of

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modernism’ s primary Other, the bourgeois woman, continues to appear as content in Wall ’ s Th e Destroyed Room (1978: Figure 2), Picture for Women (1979; Figure 3), and Wallace’ s Th e Summer Script I and II (1973–74; Figures 25 and 26) and Image/Text (1979; Figure 29). While all of these works directly reference the 1970s women ’ s movement and 1970s feminist screen theory in form and content,41 the artists’ earlier framing of their work as motivated by the concerns of the historical avant-garde ensured that instead of dealing with the overt feminist content of the photographs, critics instead focused on particular images and their relationship to the eminent modern masters (Édouard Manet, Eugène Delacroix and Stéphane Mallarmé) who serve as genealogical precedents to the younger generation of vanguardists.

Vancouver avant-garde as settler colonial narrative Young photo-conceptualists working with urban landscape imagery looked suspiciously upon art that appeared self-consciously spiritual, that was based on some implied communion with nature, or that refl ected an artist’ s personal experience with non-urban locations. Because of their interest in the historical avant-garde, such artists stressed dialectical thinking, which was imagined as incompatible with emotional or personal identifi cations with the local landscape, identifi cations deemed ‘sentimental.’ 42 Th e city was an ‘urban semiotic,’ whereas the wilderness, a popular subject in much modern Canadian painting, appeared symptomatic of a ‘religion of art’ and ‘the genius loci, the indwelling spirit of the place painted.’43 Personal identifi cation with the landscape was not seen as suffi ciently dialectical, since in Jeff Wall’ s words, ‘reconciliation with nature as it is experienced in [Emily] Carr ’ s painting can be seen as the mark of a fantasied reconciliation with the economy, a means by which an acceptance of the actuality of forest-destruction is lived through and acquiesced to.’ Th e counter-tradition that Wall would go on to account for in the same essay, and which is exemplifi ed for Wall in Ian Wallace’ s work of the late 1960s and early 1970s, is ‘suspicious of the image of the artist as shaman,’ and ‘separates [itself] from the recuperation of lyricism.’ 44 In part, this suspicion was directed at the ‘back to the land’ lifestyle movement that many of Wall and Wallace’ s generation of artists were interested in pursuing in the 1970s. Th e counter-cultural aspirations of young people in the coastal regions of British Columbia were well documented and contextualized as creative practice in magazine features like artscanada ’ s 1971 issue titled ‘West Coast Artists: Life Styles.’ Th e fi rst article in the issue, ‘Emily Carr: Legend and Reality,’ was written by infl uential Vancouver Art Gallery curator Doris Shadbolt.45 A seventeen page photo-spread titled ‘Our Beautiful West Coast Th ing’ by Vancouver artist Gary-Lee Nova followed, which profi led seven artists living in intertidal zones, communes, and island destinations.46 Th ese

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editorial choices in one of Canada’ s most important art magazines helped align a new generation of back-to-the-landers with the older painter. To the young photo-conceptualists, such publicity must have helped to clarify Carr ’ s role as matriarch of an ongoing tradition of artists engaging directly with nature in the region. Th e discursive parameters of the defeatured landscape, drawn around an ‘urban semiotic,’ worked to exclude artists who appeared to have strong personal interactions or relationships with the local landscape. Th is was particularly detrimental to women artists, who, regardless of the actual work they produced, carried the burden of a sex once understood and naturalized by British Victorian society as one closer to nature and unfi t for public offi ce or responsibility. While the photo-conceptualists’ disavowal of artists’ experience with nature as inauthentically ‘shamanistic’ is problematic from a gendered perspective, it is also deeply troubling from the perspective of race. Although the latter is not the primary focus of this book, the implications of this are important to recognize: if empathic responses to natural or ‘wild’ landscapes are deemed insuffi ciently dialectical, such a discourse may foreclose on the possibility that Aboriginal Canadians have a viable modern living experience with landscape, and stereotype Aboriginal contemporary cultural production as romantic idealizations of the past. Such a dismissal implicitly asserts a settler colonial perspective that works in the realm of culture to disempower Aboriginal legal claims to land rights by imagining such responses as nostalgic, old-fashioned, or not critical enough. Since 2002, Bruce Braun, Andrea Smith, and Sherene Razack have contributed to a growing body of interdisciplinary work that shows how landscapes (discursive, physical, and legal) are constructed through hierarchal power relations that elevated and naturalized a white European subjectivity. 47 While such scholars are focused on issues of ecological confronta- tion (Braun), violence towards Aboriginal women (Smith), and the construction of racist laws through naturalized assumptions about ‘whiteness’ (Razack), and are not dealing with art, regional art production in the late 1960s nonetheless emerged out of the same Canadian historical framework of settler colonialism. 48 Th is historical and political context is especially important when considering art production that explicitly theorized and represented landscape, as the Vancouver School of photo-conceptualist artists did. It is not that specifi c male artists were consciously sexist or racist, but rather, in late 1960s Vancouver, the model for the development of an avant-garde was white male European in origin, a conceptual basis not signifi cantly altered by the context of late- modern Vancouver. Furthermore, the modus operandi of the avant-garde as a gambit that seeks to establish dominance in the fi eld of art and art history, parallels the narratives developed by settler colonial societies to retain control over diverse populations of ‘others’ that contest their legitimacy: indigenous populations, women, immigrants, and refugees.

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Th e subject of the social interactions and political negotiations of diverse populations living in colonial settler societies has inspired anthropologists’ analysis of how power has been and continues to be negotiated in specifi c geographies that are not easily theorized through colonial or post-colonial interpretations. Where colonialism is understood as a bilateral opposition between the colonizer and colonized, settler colonialism depends on the management of three groups: settlers, indigenous others, and exogenous others (in British Columbia these three groups would be British settlers and their off spring, Aboriginal peoples, and immigrants and refugees). 49 Th e settler collective originally comes from elsewhere, but because it is not planning on returning to its place of origin also sees itself as permanently situated. Lorenzo Veracini describes this state as ‘indigenous and exogenous at the same time,’ leading to ‘ambivalent emotional strategies relating to location and origin,’ which include the construction of numerous mythologies of belonging. On a national scale, such strategies can be identifi ed clearly in the history of early Canadian modern art. In the 1920s, Ontario ’ s Group of Seven painters travelled deep into the wilderness of the Canadian Shield to create landscape paintings that illustrated and originated a Canadian identity based on landscape (‘the true north strong and free’); one that allowed a settler colonial population then concerned about non-northern European foreign immigration to see themselves as indigenously tied to the land. 50 Th e latter example serves as a reminder that artworks dealing with landscape can be particularly eff ective representations of settlers’ beliefs in their right to belong in and on particular territories. In Vancouver between 1968 and 1978, this group of young male artists ’ ‘gambit’ was the development of an avant-garde that established diff erence from several infl uential models of cultural production that already existed in the region: the legacy of Expressionist landscape painting established by Emily Carr, hippies’ countercultural back-to-the-land lifestyles, and other conceptual artists working in the United States and Canada, and the nascent feminist avant-garde. Given that this occurred at a historical moment when women ’ s work in public space was still barely seen or acknowledged, and usually associated with domesticity, nature, and maternal caretaking, it is not surprising that female artistic labour would be assumed less ‘critical’ than their male peers ’ equivalent eff orts within the emerging discourse of the defeatured landscape, and thus could fi nd no viable place within it.

Art history as territory in play While this book is about artists and their work, the particularities of early Vancouver photo-conceptualism as a case study of avant-garde discourse formation is its focus, and so while this is a work of art history, it is also a work of critical discourse analysis. Th e latter, which crosses many disciplinary

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boundaries (such as sociolinguistics, sociology, psychology, gender studies, and other fi elds) and employs diff erent methodologies, has been described as scholarship ‘concerned with the connections between language use and dominance and the ways in which elite groups use language to exercise power in society.’ 51 Th e Vancouver photo-conceptualists formed a discourse community, which is defi ned as a group of people who share particular activities, goals, and values and have particular ways of communicating with each other, 52 and their early writings about the defeatured landscape operated collectively as an ‘initiator of discursive practice.’ 53 In What is an Author? Foucault described the ‘functional conditions of specifi c discursive practices,’ stating, ‘it is obvious that even within the realm of discourse a person can be the author of much more than a book – of a theory, for instance, of a tradition or a discipline within which new books and authors can proliferate.’54 Accordingly, initiators of discursive practice not only bring about analogous interpretations or studies, they also engender diff erences from their original ideas: ‘Th ey [clear] a space for the introduction of elements other than their own, which nevertheless, remain within the fi eld of discourse they initiated.’55 Th is is useful for separating out what Vancouver artists were driven to do, and the implicit or explicit eff ect that the discourse of avant-garde photography enabled by their art and writing has had on other artists working in Vancouver. Th e texts these artists produced are as important as their images. Conse- quently, their academic theses, critical essays, catalogue essays, and authored art reviews about each other ’ s work have been carefully considered. Journalists ’, critics’ , and curators’ public reception of their written and visual work has also been integral to tracking the evolution and ramifi cations of the Vancouver School ’ s initial discursive framing as it extended, tentacle-like, into the larger fi eld of contemporary art theory. Such an approach is warranted and necessary since the artists themselves understood that their artwork needed to be accompanied by writing if they were to be able to situate it successfully as a counter tradition to other regional artists and histories. Because of this meth- odological orientation, this book is primarily concerned with Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, the two original members of the Vancouver School and the two most prolifi c original authors of the relationship of their own work and their peers ’ to the history of the avant-garde. Wall and Wallace are the core discourse initiators, although their ideas have been promoted, disseminated, and repeated by many more artists, critics, curators, and art historians since the 1970s. Between 1968 and 1988, before they were as well known as they are today, these two artists were the most active critics of their work and their students ’ work in Vancouver, which they regularly discussed in the context of a renewed avant-garde within twentieth-century modernist art practices. Th e length of the book and the attention that needed to be focused on Wall and Wallace prohibited analysis of other artists subsequently associated with them as ‘Th e

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Vancouver School’ (Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, Roy Arden, and Arni Haralds- son), although such studies would have been useful. Future scholars may well take up the subject of how Ken Lum and Stan Douglas, in particular, might be argued to represent counter-traditions to the very counter-tradition they were initially included in. 56 Chapter 1 begins with an analysis of two of Jeff Wall ’ s most important early Cibachrome transparencies, Th e Destroyed Room (1978) and Picture for Women (1979), to highlight the fact that the subject matter contained therein can be understood as a male artist’ s control of what is imagined as female-gendered physical and theoretical space. Th e initiation and subsequent extension of this operation in European and American critical discourse about his work is discussed in relationship to anthropological research on settler colonial societies’ territorial confl icts; specifi cally settlers ’ need to develop cultural narratives that rationalize their control over other populations within a given geographic area. Such an approach contrasts with the prevailing commentaries by other critics, some of which are discussed at length (Donald Kuspit, Arielle Pélenc, Kaja Silverman, and Michael Fried). Th ese critics ’ analyses of Wall ’ s work downplay or ignore the feminist subject matter in the work, and instead concentrate on the images’ relationship to the avant-garde potential of technical reproduction or to the history of modern painting. By beginning with these photographs from 1978–79, this chapter defi nes the parameters for subsequent chapters that describe the diverse factors that led to Wall and Wallace initiating a discourse that structurally exemplifi es settler colonial control over space vis-à-vis landscape as ideological representation. Chapter 2 introduces readers to the importance of landscape painting in the formation of Canadian national identity in the early twentieth century, in particular the spiritual aspirations – the theosophical quest for the genius loci – of the Group of Seven painters in Ontario, and Emily Carr in British Columbia. Wall’ s published texts that describe both the infl uence of Carr on his peers ’ work, and their desire to work outside of the problematic of colonialism, necessitates this examination of the history of Canadian landscape painting. Historian Lorenzo Veracini’ s discussions of the many narratives developed and promoted by settler colonial societies in order to authenticate and then rationalize their rights to indigenous land are introduced in relationship to the discursive framing of texts that supported and documented Lawren Harris and Carr ’ s paintings. Th e national and regional legacy of spiritually infused landscape painting was antithetical to young artists and intellectuals like Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, who came to maturity in the late 1960s, and who were committed to revealing man’ s alienation from his industrial environment through Marxist-informed critiques of capitalism. Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace’ s rejection of ‘home’ and ‘homeland,’ and the primacy of the manifesto as an important polemical tool in framing one ’ s

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work, are explored in Chapter 3 in relation to Wall ’ s art history MA thesis on the Berlin Dada group, which established ‘myth’ as an anti-critical cultural practice that was broadly applied to much of the cultural activity then active in Vancouver. Vancouver’ s seeming ‘lack of history,’ the existence of back-to-the-land intentional communities living outside of the urban centre, the proliferation of other performance and media-based art groups, and the infl uence of visiting American artist Robert Smithson ’ s earthworks are all examined as cultural expressions deemed a-historical or romantic by photo-conceptualists. Chapter 4 recounts the emergence of the theory and practice of a ‘Defeatured Landscape,’ the name given in 1970 to a new urban semiotic that would constitute photo-conceptual artists ’ self-defi ned counter tradition to those cultural practices deemed uncritical, Expressionist, and mythical that were explored in the previous chapter. NETCO ’ s works Ruins (1968) and Portfolio of Piles (1968) are examined as important precursors to the defeatured landscape. Dennis Wheeler, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, and Christos Dikeakos ’ s art and writing are discussed as examples of defeatured landscapes in relation to their infl uences: American conceptual artist peers like Dan Graham, concrete poetry, awareness of the vehicular landscape, and Surrealism and its legacy in the psycho-geography and dérives of the Situationist International. Th is history is set against two contrasting examples: the real political confl icts of land development and associated fi nancial speculation going on at the same time in the city; and an accounting of the erotic female bodies who oft en populate the otherwise defeatured landscapes of the photo-conceptualists. Th ese examples show how the social politics of public space in Vancouver are left out of avant-garde representations of the city through the discursive framing of a landscape not so defeatured aft er all. Chapter 5 establishes that a concern with theatricality and the body of women links the defeatured landscapes of the 1968–1971 period with the development of large narrative photographs around 1977. Marcel Duchamp’ s readymades are important to this historical thread, as is the documented impact of his work Étant donnés: 1. La chute d/eau, 2. Le gaz d ’ éclairage (1946–66) on Jeff Wall ’ s transition towards the tableau format. Using Étant donnés as a fruitful formal and conceptual segue, the feminist content in several of Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace ’ s works from the mid- to late 1970s is analyzed to show how both artists actively integrated feminist theory and ideas into their visual work, even as they directed critical attention away from it by instead stressing their work’ s relationship to the history of European avant-garde critique within modernism. Th e international and local feminist avant-garde of the 1970s is discussed in Chapter 6, which demonstrates how women’ s rejection of canonical art history, their development of alternative distribution and exhibition systems for promoting artwork, and the psychoanalytic critique of the male gaze implicitly challenged the legitimacy of the theoretical and historical project

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of Vancouver photo-conceptualism, and so was selectively integrated into the new male-authored photography. Historical and contemporary critical responses to Marian Penner Bancroft and Liz Magor ’ s work are also analysed, which further establishes the male-gendered character of avant-garde discourse formation in Vancouver. Th e book concludes with the historical evidence of a backlash levied against the Vancouver Art Gallery and the perceived hegemony of the Vancouver School that reached a peak in 1989–90. Diverse groups of artists became critical of the very process of discourse formation that this book refl ects upon, and became much more vocal about demanding their inclusion in symposia, exhibitions, and critical writing. Unsurprisingly this backlash dovetails with the rise of foreign investment in condominium development and urban gentrifi cation called ‘Vancouverism’ aft er Expo 86. Th e discursive territory of Vancouver photo-conceptualism, built upon the image of a defeatured landscape, became ensconced as an international commercial success just as the public spaces of the city were opened up to the ‘global’ reach of neoliberal capitalism, ensuring that the actual features of the city would be less accessible and more expensive to live in for those artists living there. Retrospectively, it is not surprising that an avant-garde discourse formation should develop in tandem with the unceasing encroachment of capital on all social and physical territories. Art history is not immune to this. Indeed, when texts and artworks are studied together, art historians can more easily track how information originally included and forever embedded in the artwork has been excised over time through selective publication and the continued prioritization of established ideas. In this study, the exclusionary structure of a discourse of the avant-garde is revealed to parallel the exclusionary structure of settler colonial populations ’ need to control territory. Th is book ’ s primary contribution to understanding the dynamics of modern art production in Vancouver is that it off ers a structural explanation for why women have been excluded from the Vancouver School of photo-conceptualists as it was and continues to be historicized. Th e emergence of avant-garde photo-conceptual practices in 1970 at the ‘proverbial edge of the world,’ 57 demonstrates the tenacity of male European avant-garde tropes to replicate at the fringes of the colonial empires, reaffi rming hegemonic power relations even as they claimed to do otherwise.

Notes 1 For more on the use of the term(s), see William Wood, ‘Th e Insuffi ciency of the World,’ in Dieter Roelstraete and Scott Watson (eds), Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists (Antwerp: Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, 2005); Cliff ord S. Lauson, ‘In Vancouver as Elsewhere: Modernism and the So-Called “Vancouver School”’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University College London, 2009); Jeff Wall, ‘Traditions and

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Counter-Traditions in Vancouver Art: A Deeper Background for Ken Lum’ s Work,’ in Chris Dercon and Mat Verbekt (eds), Th e Lectures 1990 (Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 1991). 2 Ian Wallace, ‘Photoconceptual Art in Vancouver,’ in Martha Langford and Geoff rey James (eds), Th irteen Essays on Photography (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 1988), pp. 94–112. 3 Michael Fried has argued for Jeff Wall’ s importance as a photographer because of Wall ’ s use of the ‘absorptive’ mode in the staging of his subjects. Fried refers to the development of ‘anti-theatrical’ Realist painting in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century France, meaning the tendency for artists to create subjects ‘wholly unaware of anything other than the objects of their absorption,’ including any indication of a viewer or beholder of the artwork. For Fried, Jeff Wall’ s use of photography ‘come[s] to grips with the issue of beholding in ways that do not succumb to theatricality … .’ My use of the term ‘anti-theatrical’ recognizes Fried ’ s argument, and signals the historical and theoretical infl uence of both minimalism and painting on Wall and his peers ’ practice. See Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 43. Fried ’ s point of view is contested implicitly or explicitly in other scholars ’ work. See Rosalind Krauss, ‘“… And Th en Turn Away?” An Essay on James Coleman,’ October, 81 (Summer 1997), pp. 5–33; Tamara Trodd, ‘Th omas Demand, Jeff Wall and Sherrie Levine: Deforming “Pictures”,’ Art History , 32:5 (December 2009), pp. 954–76; Wolfgang Brückle, ‘Almost Merovingian, on Jeff Wall ’ s Relation to Nearly Everything,’ Art History, 32:5 (December 2009), pp. 977–95; Christine Conley, ‘Morning Cleaning: Jeff Wall and Th e Large Glass ,’ in Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen (eds), Photography Aft er Conceptual Art (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 130–92. 4 J e ff Wall, ‘La Mélancolie de la Rue: Idyll and Monochrome in the Work of Ian Wallace 1967–82,’ in Ian Wallace and Christos Dikeakos (eds), Ian Wallace: Selected Works 1970–1987 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1988), pp. 63–75: p. 63. 5 Wall, ‘Traditions and Counter-Traditions,’ p. 75. 6 Ian Wallace, ‘Revisionism and its Discontents,’ Vanguard , 10:7 (September 1981), pp. 12–19: p. 16. 7 Ibid ., p. 15. 8 Ibid ., p. 18. 9 Scott Watson, ‘Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos and Squats: Vancouver Art in the Sixties,’ in Roelstraete and Watson (eds), Intertidal: Vancouver , pp. 30–49: p. 35. Original emphasis. 10 Bart De Baere and Dieter Roelstraete, ‘Introducing Intertidal,’ in Roelstraete and Watson (eds), Intertidal: Vancouver , p. 8. 1 1 Ibid ., p. 10. Original emphasis. 1 2 Ibid ., pp. 10–11. 13 Since the 1980s the theoretical and practical intersections between art and geography have been growing. See Th omas Da Costa Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Harriet Hawkins, For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2014).

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1 4 M i w o n K w o n q u o t e s J a m e s M e y e r , ‘ Th e Functional Site,’ in Platzwechsel, exhibition catalogue (Zurich: Kunsthalle Zurich, 1995), p. 27. 15 Julian Stallabrass has argued that global neoliberal economic policies have negatively aff ected the real diversity of contemporary visual arts; in contrast Richard Florida argues for the economic benefi t of attracting artists to cities in his ‘creative city’ and ‘creative class’ theories. See Julian Stallabrass, ‘New World Order,’ Art Incorporated (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 29–72; Richard Florida, Th e Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’ s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 16 Dennis Wheeler, ‘Th e Limits of the Defeated Landscape: A Review of Four Artists,’ artscanada , 27:3 (June 1970), pp. 51–2: p. 51. It is widely assumed that artscanada misprinted the title of Wheeler ’ s article to read ‘defeated’ instead of ‘defeatured,’ since Wheeler makes a point of using the term ‘defeatured’ in the review. 1 7 Ibid. 18 See Robert Smithson, ‘Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,’ in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: Th e Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 196–233; Grant Arnold (ed.), Robert Smithson in Vancouver: A Fragment of a Greater Fragmentation, exhibition catalogue (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2004). 19 Duane Lunden, Jeff Wall, and Ian Wallace (eds), Free Media Bulletin, 1 (1969), n.p. 20 See Scott Watson, ‘Discovering the Defeatured Landscape,’ in Stan Douglas (ed.), Vancouver Anthology (2nd edn, Vancouver: Or Gallery and Talonbooks, 2011), pp. 257–75: p. 247; Watson, ‘Urban Renewal,’ p. 35. 2 1 I a n Wa l l a c e , ‘ Th e Frontier of the Avant-Garde,’ in Roelstraete and Watson (eds), Intertidal: Vancouver, pp. 51–61: pp. 56–7. 22 Wall, ‘Traditions and Counter-Traditions,’ p. 73. 2 3 R i c h a r d S i m m o n s , ‘ Th e Great Emily Carr,’ Province (14 May 1971), p. 3. 24 Wall, ‘Traditions and Counter-Traditions,’ p. 73. 2 5 Ibid. , p. 69. Also Robert Linsley, ‘Painting and the Social History of British Columbia,’ in Douglas (ed.), Vancouver Anthology , pp. 235–55. 2 6 W h e e l e r , ‘ Th e Limits of the Defeated Landscape,’ p. 51. 2 7 L e a h M o d i g l i a n i , ‘ Th e Vancouver Occupations of 1971,’ C Magazine , 115 (Autumn 2012), pp. 10–18. 2 8 D o n a l d D . E g b e r t , ‘ Th e Idea of “Avant-Garde” in Art and Politics,’ Th e American Historical Review, 73:2 (December 1967), pp. 339–66. 29 Quoted in Johanne Lamoureux, ‘Avant-Garde: A Historiography of a Critical Concept,’ in Amelia Jones (ed.), A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 191–211: p. 192. Th e original quote comes from Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare and Other Prose Writings , trans. Norman Cameron (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951), pp. 188–9. 30 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism,’ in Robert Motherwell (ed.), Th e Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (London and Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1951), pp. 21–47: p. 33. 31 Clement Greenberg, ‘L’ art américaine au XXe siècle,’ Les Temps Modernes , 11:11–12 (August–September 1946), pp. 340–52, quoted and translated in Lamoureux, ‘Avant- Garde,’ p. 200.

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32 Lamboureux, ‘Avant-Garde,’ pp. 191–211. 33 Andreas Huyssen, Aft er the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Th eories of Representation and Diff erence) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 52. 34 Griselda Pollock, ‘Moments and Temporalities of the Avant-Garde “in, of, and from the feminine,”’ New Literary History, 41:4 (Autumn 2010), pp. 795–820. Pollock’ s idea of liquid modernity is adapted from the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who theorized that contemporary social problems and uncertainties about the future (sometimes called postmodernity) are the result of the friction between modernism ’ s contradictory movements towards organized rational order and radical change that upsets that order. Liquid modernity refers to this process of instability and constant social change and consequent adaptation. See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 35 Discussed by Lamboureux in ‘Avant-Garde,’ p. 195; and found originally in T.J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London: Th ames & Hudson, 1973), p. 14. 36 Pollock, ‘Moments and Temporalities,’ p. 796. 37 Huyssen also marks the 1960s and 1970s women ’ s movement as the historical point where modernity ’ s lingering association of mass culture to the stereotypical feminine is no longer possible, and becomes severed. Huyssen, Aft er the Great Divide , pp. 58–62. Th e increasing number of female creative artists make the dialectic impossible to sustain. 38 Dennis Bell, Province (25 August 1967), n.p. 39 Marguerite Pinney, ‘Art,’ Vancouver Life, 3:7 (1968), p. 53. 4 0 A v i s L a n g R o s e n b e r g , ‘ L i z M a g o r : O u t fi tter for Odd Jobs,’ Vanguard, 6:6 (August– September 1977), pp. 7–9: p. 7. 41 As is widely acknowledged, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’ s writing and fi lms were extremely infl uential in the mid-1970s. See Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen , 16:3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 6–18. It is interesting that early in his career Jeff Wall was included in the Diff erence: On Representation and Sexuality exhibition at the New Museum, New York but since that time psycho- analytical or feminist-informed critiques or contextualizations of his work have been very rare. See Kate Linker, ‘Foreword and Acknowledgements,’ p. 5, and Peter Wollen, ‘Counter-Cinema and Sexual Diff erence,’ pp. 36–9: p. 37, in Max Almy, Ray Barrie, Judith Barrie, et al. (eds), Diff erence: On Representation and Sexuality (New York: New Museum, 1984). 4 2 W h e e l e r , ‘ Th e Limits of the Defeated Landscape,’ p. 51. 43 Wall, ‘Traditions and Counter-Traditions,’ p. 69. Original emphasis. 4 4 Ibid. , p. 75. 4 5 D o r i s S h a d b o l t , ‘ E m i l y C a r r : L e g e n d a n d R e a l i t y ,’ artscanada, 28:3 (June/July 1971), pp. 17–21. 46 Gary Lee-Nova, ‘West Coast Artists: Life Styles,’ artscanada , 28:3 (June/July 1971), pp. 22–38. Gary Lee Nova ’ s article profi led Godfrey Stephens, Victor Roehrich, Renée Poisson, Michael Sawyer, Tom Burrows, John Grayson, and Ron Podoworny.

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47 Bruce Braun, Th e Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada ’ s West Coast (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005); Sherene Razack (ed.), Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002). 4 8 Th e West ’ s singular ‘Imaginary Indian,’ the stereotype of Aboriginal subjectivity theorized by Marcia Crosby, was associated with spirituality and the natural world and served as ‘the negative space of the “positive” force of colonialist hegemony.’ See Marcia Crosby, ‘Construction of the Imaginary Indian,’ in Douglas (ed.), Vancouver Anthology , pp. 276–300. 49 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Th eoretical Overview (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 2–3. 50 Between 1865 and 1890 60 per cent of all immigrants were from Great Britain, but aft er 1890 the fi rst large wave of immigration arose to meet the labour needs of an expanding agricultural and industrial infrastructure. Th e new immigrants came from eastern, central, and southern Europe, China, Japan, and India. See Ninette Kelley and M.J. Trebilcock, Th e Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 113; and Radha Jhappan and Davia Stasiulis, ‘Th e Fractious Politics of a Settler Society: Canada,’ in Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis (eds), Unsettling Settler Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1995), pp. 95–131: p. 111. 51 Stephanie Taylor, What is Discourse Analysis? (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 1, 14. 5 2 B r i a n P a l t r i d g e , Discourse Analysis: An Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 24. 53 Michel Foucault, ‘Authorship: What is an Author?,’ Screen, 20:1 (Spring 1979), pp. 13–34. 5 4 Ibid ., pp. 14, 24. 5 5 Ibid. , pp. 25. 56 An astute analysis of how Ken Lum’ s work does not fi t the avant-garde rhetorical framing that his teacher Jeff Wall supplied for him in an important exhibition catalogue essay can be found in Trevor Mahovsky, ‘Placed Upon the Horizon, Casting Shadows’ (Apex Art, New York, 31 May 2000), www.apexart.org/residency/ mahovsky.php , accessed 21 February 2015. 57 Roelstraete and Watson (eds), Intertidal: Vancouver , p. 10.

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