Book Reviews 131

purposes. Most interesting in this approach is most apparent. While the section is Blackstock's comparison contrast between land-use plans, between the tree art's original purpose artists' reflections, and elders' stories and its "second journey of meaning," is sometimes jarring, the text proves which it has undertaken in recent years. that "Traditional Ecological Knowledge Interviews with elders provide a glimpse (TEK)" can be integrated into forestry into both these worlds: traditional practices. This is shown in how purposes and the little known but Blackstock uses TEK to bolster his new important role that these trees can play vision for a sustainable management in generating a renewed understanding plan. Faces in the Forest is a revealing of First Nations cultures and their text that discusses a little known art need to protect their lands. The final form, and it also offers scholars an chapter reflects on Blackstock's journey important model when attempting to and provides his vision for a new accord First Nations knowledge the forestry model, which includes an agency it deserves within academic artist's respect for the trees. It is here discourse. that Blackstock's multidisciplinary

All Amazed for Roy Kiyooka Edited by John O'Brian, Naomi Sawada, and Scott Watson : Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002. 160 pp. Illus., US$15.95/CND$I9.95 paper.

DAVID HOWARD Nova Scotia College of Art & Design

OY KlYOOKA is one of the most decades, beginning at Regina College important yet most under- in the late 1950s and ending with his R analyzed Canadian artists of retirement from the University of the postwar period. Kiyooka, who was British Columbia in 1991. However, born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in his career did not have the kind of 1926 and who died in Vancouver, spectacular visibility enjoyed by those British Columbia, in 1994 at the age artists associated with the Painters of sixty-eight was an accomplished Eleven or the . As Roy artist in a variety of media, including Miki, one of the contributors to All painting, performance, music, poetry, Amazed for Roy Kiyooka, notes: "Though sculpture, photography, and film. He a central figure in whatever artistic was also widely known as one of localisms he moved in - from the Canada's most important studio important Regina years of the late instructors, influencing generations of 1950s, to the initial Vancouver years of young Canadian artists during a the early 1960s, and through the teaching career that spanned over five Montreal years that led to the Expo 132 BC STUDIES

'70 assignment, to Halifax, and back the bankrupt pre-empting of critical to Vancouver - he always remained thought that such lazy categorizing is that singular figure, 'of but 'not of the prone to promote. In Sheryl Conkelton's artistic and literary movements that chapter, for example, the tensions and would eventually be identified as the continuities within Kiyooka's work, 'nation'-based cultural mainstream" especially between his earlier large (74). This book is one of the first to begin colour field paintings and his later the process of examining Kiyooka's photography, are explored in such a entire corpus. While, at 160 pages way that one can begin to see the series (composed primarily of four essays and of themes and lifelong aesthetic a conference transcript), the book is commitments that resonate through frustratingly short, it provides future his oeuvre. Rather than seeing his writers and researchers with numerous career as crudely divided into an earlier provocative and stimulating insights. modernist phase and a later post- Sadly, the book is the seventh and modernist phase, what one begins to last issue of a short-lived but remarkable see is a very complex critical attitude BC arts journal called Collapse, which towards modernity, whereby the very was an outgrowth of the Vancouver fragments and discontinuities in his Art Forum Society (founded in 1994). work and career become an interesting Published as a volume dedicated to the allegory of the relationship between remarkable career of Roy Kiyooka, its art and society at the end of the contents are drawn from a conference twentieth century. held in the artist's memory at the 's well-crafted chapter Emily Carr Institute of Art and explores the subtle interchange between Design from 1 to 2 October 1999. The the personal and historical specificities conference organizers emphasized the of Kiyooka's art, as made manifest in need to bring together the worlds of his poetic work and which remains poetry and art located within Kiyooka's "concealed," as Michael Ondaatje has work and, as a result, have combined noted, in the formal complexities of serious scholarly inquiry with transcripts his majestic abstract paintings. The of his poetry. This helps to highlight criticality of Kiyooka's art, especially the dialogue and rich interplay between his photography, is developed in a the different media that are central to fascinating chapter written by Scott a fuller understanding of Kiyooka's Taguri MacFarlane, who focuses upon work. Kiyooka, who abandoned painting his photographic project at Expo '70 as his primary form of expression in in Osaka, Japan. Finally, Henry 1969 because of "the fucken [sic] art Tsang's chapter focuses upon his game," could easily be subsumed under memories of participating in some of the over-simplistic rubric of the Kiyooka's studio classes at UBC in the disenchanted modernist who abandons 1980s. the co-opted forms of abstract formalism While Kiyooka's career has not for a more heterodox approach - one garnered the same public visibility as that seemingly points to a radical have the careers of some of the artists rupture between modernism and and groups with whom he associated postmodernism. over the course of his life and work, However, while a self-described his legacy may yet demonstrate that postmodern who turned his back on he was one of the most astute and "progress," Kiyooka was also averse to critical artist/intellectuals that Canada Book Reviews 133

has produced in the last half of the blishing the full breadth of Roy twentieth century. This book is both Kiyooka's contribution to Canadian a valuable research tool and an im- culture. portant stepping-stone towards esta-

Sights of Resistance: Approaches to Canadian Visual Culture Robert J. Belton : University of Calgary Press, 2001. 398 pp. $59.95 hardcover with interactive CD-ROM and website .

DAVID MILLAR University of Victoria

ELTON'S BOOK/CD is a invoke closure. The CD contains the significant step forward in whole book in hypertext, allowing B Canadian art history and instant cross-reference to pictures, pedagogy. Like his predecessors text, and any part of the scholarly (Russell Harper [1966], Barry Lord apparatus as well as to online dis- [1974], William Withrow [1972], Paul cussions at http://www.uofcpress.com/ Duval [1972], Douglas Fetherling Sights. This alone is a significant [1987], and Gerald McMaster [1992], achievement, but there is more. to name only a few), he provides a Structurally, Sights of Resistance sumptuously illustrated critical over- contains Belton's introduction to view. Unlike them, he covers a range visual poetics, explaining his peda- of art from fine to commercial, folk, gogical principles in exercises that help Native, and queer; architecture good one to discern form, content, and and bad, colonial and postmodern; context online at his website http:// photography, performance, and media www.arts.ouc.bc.ca/fiar/hndbkhom. (omitting only film and broadcast html), followed by a historical survey television). Unlike them, he claims no of Canadian visual culture, its chronology canonical status for his choices and from 5000 BC to 2000 AD, and a hundred allows the reader/student access to a case studies with full scholarly apparatus. diversity of competing critical theories In one of them, Shelley Niro's 1962 besides his own. T h e lavish illustrations photograph "Rebel," her fortyish (almost 100 in the colour section, Mohawk matron poses (mock-odalisque) indicated by a palette icon beside the on the trunk of a Nash. Belton com- text or monochrome reproduction) are ments that "'Rebel' also operates as a juxtaposed with italicized quotations verb, deriving from the Latin word from contemporaries of the artists as meaning 'renew the war.' The in- well as later theorists and Belton's own junction opens a site of'resistance' ... comments, which are based on decades The viewer is solicited, in effect, to of teaching and are intended to make war on white sexist oppression" provoke critical thought rather than to (296). Our White-man response to