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CONTEMPORARY ABORIGINAL ART TEXTS: INTERSECTIONS OF VISUAL CULTURE

ANDREA NAOMI WALSH

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fuifilhnent of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Programme in Social Anthropology York University North York, Ontario

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by Andrea Naomi WALSH

a dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

OOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

02000 Permission has been granted to the LIBRARY OF YORK UNIVERSITY to fend or seIl copies of this dissertation, to the NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA to microfilm this disserlation and to lend or seIl copies of the film, and to UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS to publish an abstract of this dissertation. The author reserves other publication rights, and neither the dissertation nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's written permission. ABSTRACT

This dissertation provides a textual analysis of the visual politics of production and reception of modem aboriginal art in Canada. Two predicvnents provide departure points for this analysis. The first concerns how Native artists in

Canada express their identity through visual art based on notions of 'space' and

'place.' The second concerns the consumption of the identities of these artists and their art via processes of interculturd spectatorship docurnented in art exhibition catalogues and artworld discourse.

The analysis is performed dong theinterdependent critical paths under the headings Citingkext, Sighting/subjectivity, and Siting/place. The chapters written under these headings chronicle slippage in ethnographie writing about aboriginal art that can be identified through processes of vision and visuality. In particular this slippage occurs through the formation of subjectivity, the critique of objectivity, the circulation of signs of aboriginality, alternative visuai strategies, the use of technology in art, and transnational flows of modem art and cultural property.

The discussion explores fields of written art texts, vision, and sense of place as they work on each other to produce cultural texts on aboriginal art. Such texts evoke representational as well as materialist practices in aboriginal art worlds. These modes of ethnographic inquiry explore multiple textualities focused

upon the production and reception of visual images and textuai signs.

This analysis of aboriginal art provokes questions about how visuai culture is

represented in modem ethnographic writing. The dissertation seeks to re-fashion the manner in which aboriginal modem art is represented, and reproduced,

through anthropological analysis. By taking this particuiar approach to textuai

analysis, I argue for new ways of reading cnticd texts about art and,

subsequently, seeing art us tex? as a valuable form of cultural critique. 1 would like to th& and acknowledge rny supervisor, Dr. Kenneth Littie, for the encouragement and patience he has show me over the years 1 have been his student. Ken's enthusiasrn for new ways of thinking about visual culture dways inspire me to press on with working out tough issues and questions. This skill I have been taught will transcend academic boundaries. 1 would also like to thank the members of my cornmittee, Naorni Adelson and Brenda Longfellow for their fnendly guidance and thoughtful cornments during the process of Mting this dissertation. Naomi was very helpful during my coursework by working on a reading course with me about modern art, which was essentially the start of the research for this dissertation. Brenda has show me that it is possible to make images and be a cntical thinker; her work as a filmmaker and as an academic has been particularly inspiring for me as an academic who is also trained in studio arts. This work would not have been possible, however, if it were not for the artists who graciously and generously gave me their time (and slides!) to taîk about their art and lives. To the artists, 1 Say thank you. niey are, in no particular order, Jeff Thomas, Shelley Niro, Dana Claxton, Marianne Nicolson, Mary Longman, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Ardiur Renwick, Greg Staats, Patricia Deadman, Edward Poitras, Robert Houle, Rebecca Baird, Francis Dick, and Frank Shebagaget. Special acknowledgement aiso goes to Dr. Gerald McMaster who has truly been a mentor for nearly ten years of my development in thinking about modem art and culture. 1 have benefited greatly fiom his tirne, patience, and inspiring conversations. I have had tremendous support fiom my family for doing this degree. 1 would particdarly say thank you for lots of Iaughter through the tougher parts of writing to my dad, Dr. William Walsh, for teaching me how to write a draft (again and again), my mother Keitha for it was her suggestion that 1 take Dr. Victoria Wyatt's History in Art course on Native art at the University of Victoria, which brought my attention to this subject, and my brother Shawn (a very talented artist himself) for his fnendship. A very warm and hedelt thank you goes to Gordon Fraser who provided me with al1 of life's cornforts while I wrote this dissertation and who has been an infinite source of support and fiiendship over the last five years. Of course I could not pass thanking rny furst family, Blackberry and S.panki, their presence always makes me a happy person. Many &ends and colleagues have helped me get to the point of writing this dissertation. Of these people, 1 want to mention in paticular Shelley Butler and Marisha Roman. "Cross country coffees" with Shelley kept me going for the last two yean. Marisha has been my oasis outside of school; she is a person who inspires me to think of life outside of the context of projects like this dissertation. Finaily, 1 could not have finished this dissertation in the way I have without the support and encouragement I have had firom the anthropology department at the University of Victoria where 1now teach. I want to mention in particular, Peter Stephenson, Eric Roth, and Quentin 'Bobo' Mackie (my 'uber-colleague' ), and Marie Page, ouadministrative assistant who was always there to organize my life when 1 most needed it! Finally, I would like to thank John Schofield, Dean of Social Sciences for the Research grant that enabled me to complete the lm leg of fieldwork during my fust year at UVic. This work was fhded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and York University Student fellowships. The monies 1 received were greatly appreciated and without which this project wouid have been difficult to complete.

Andrea Walsh September 2000.

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page ...... i Copyright Page ...... ***...~....*...... *...... *.*...... **,,...... 11..... Certificate Page ...... 111 Abstract ...... iv Acknowledgements ...... vi... Table of Contents ...... VIII List of Figures ...... ix Preface ...... xi

INTRODUCTION:

Chapter 1 : Intersecting Fields Of Culture: Vision, Place And Art ...... 1

Chapter 2: Reading Native Art Texts: Approach and Analysis in Anthropology and Art History ...... 33

Chapter 3: Active Vision in Artists' Penonal Narratives and Institutional Texts ...... 80

Chapter 4: From Lines and Light: Subjectivity and the Body in Photography and Film ...... 123

Chapter 5: Visuaiizing Place: RepresenthgReproducing the Northwest Coast in Modem Art ...... 185

CONCLUSION:

Chapter 6: Re-visioning and De-territonalizing First Nations Visual Culture ...... 233

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 23 7 APPENDIX: Artist Information ...... 250

viii List of Figures.

1. James Clifford's Art and Culture System...... 2 . Car1 Beam: Cyclical Temporal Adjustment . (1992) . Photo emulsion and acrylic on canvas, 2.1 X 2.7 m ...... 3 . Dana Claxton: I Want fo Know CVhy. (1994) . Hi-8 Video Recording with sound . 6:20 minutes ...... 4 . Jeff Thomas: INSURPNCE . (1997) . (Former Bank of Montreal Building,SterIing, Onho...... 5 . Jeff Thomas: Dream Emporium. Assembled 1986 ...... 6 . Eugene Atget: Rue des Nounains d'Hyères. (Collection of the J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California...... 7. Jeff Thomas: Staircuse . (1981). Buffalo, New York ...... 8. Jeff Thomas: Moved to 16 Allen (Abandoned Storefiotg). (1982) . Buffalo, New York ...... 9 . Jeff Thomas: Warrior Symbols (1 983) . Buffalo, New York ...... 10. Jeff Thomas: Graflti in Winnipeg Alleyway . (1 989) . Winnipeg, Manitoba ...... 1 1. Jeff Thomas: Kam Lee L4 UNDRY. (1 98 1). Buffalo, New York ...... 12 . Dana Claxton: Bufaio Bone China. (1997) . Hi-8 video recording with sound . 10 minutes ...... *...... 13. Dana Claxton: Tree of Comumption. (1994). Hi-8 video recording with soud* ...... 14. Shelley Niro: Mohuwks in Beehives . (1991) . Hand-tinted photograph . 19 X 24.5 cm ...... 15. Shelley Niro: Rebel . (199 1). Hmd-tinted photograph, 17 X 24 cm ...... 16. Shelley Niro: The 500 Year Itch . (detail) (199 1) ...... 17. Shelley Niro: This Land is Mime Land . (1992) . Three hand-tinted 1 1 X 4 inch photos mounted on a single mat ...... 18. Jeff Thomas: Meîamorphosis #I Pink Punther . (1983) ...... 19. Jeff Thomas: Richard Pocalpybitty. Cornanche-Omaha. (1 983)...... 20 . Jeff Thomas: Shadow Dancer . (1981)...... 2 1. Jeff Thomas: Jerry Hawpetoss. Menominee Traditional Damer . (1 984). Right Panel of Diptych...... 22 . Jeff Thomas: Portrait. (1 983)...... *...... 23 . Jeff Thomas: Culture Revolution (Bear with Basebal2 Cap, Two Moons) . (1984). Trent, Ontario...... 24 .Jeff Thomas: I don 't have to be a Cowboy. Triptych. (Assembled 1996)...... 25 . Jeff Thomas: lndian TreaS>No . 1. (1989) . Lower Fort Garry, Manitoba...... 26 . JeffThomas: Founder of the New World. (1988). Winnipeg, Manitoba ...... List of Figures (continued)

27 . Jeff Thomas: Indian Heads (General Store. Bear) . (1 994). Toronto. Ontario...... 177 28 . Jeff Thomas: Beur . (1955). Toronto. Ontario...... 178 29 . Greg Staats: Memories of a Collective Reality - Sour Springs . (1995) . 14 Silver Prints. each 50 X 40 cm ...... 179 30 . Greg Staats: Empathy. (1997) ...... 180 3 1. Greg Staats: Whnr 3 Left Behind . (1997) . Photographic Senes...... 181 32 . Patricia Deadman: Ice Views (Ice and Rock) . (1992). Black and White photograph in hancimade paper binding . Twig stand with twine ...... 182 33 . Patricia Deadman: Beyond Saddleback 111 . (1 99 1). Coiour photograph 60.9 X 50.8 cm ...... 183 34 . Arthur Renwick: Llndertow . (1996) . Photo Installation...... 220 35. Mary Anne Barkhouse: Reservoir . (1 997) . Installation...... 221 36 . Mary Anne Barkhouse: Reservoir (detail) (1997)...... 222 37 . Marianne Nicolson: Untitled Rock Painting . (1 999) Kingcorne Inlet, B .C. .... 223 38 . Marianne Nicolson: Llntitled Rock Painting . (in progress) (1 999) Kingcorne Inlet, B.C...... 224 39 . Marianne Nicolson: Lintitled Rock Painring . (detail) (1999) Kingcome Inlet. B.C...... 225 40 . Pictographs of Coppers near Kingcome Inlet . Photograph courtesy of Marianne Nicolson ...... 226 4 1. Arthur Renwick: Lrindmarks (1992)...... 227 42 . Arthur Renwick: Conduetor. (1996) ...... 228 43 . Arthur Renwick: Conductor. (detail) (1 996)...... 229 44 . Mary Anne Barkhouse: Waiver. (1995). Installation. 5 panels with cyano-type prints: 2 panels 2.13 X 0.6 m (approx); 3 panels 1.37 X .6m (approx)...... 230 45 . Marianne Nicolson: The Entrance to Heaven (1999). Acrylic paint on wood panelling...... 231 46 . Marianne Nicolson: Climbing the Tree of Lfe . (1999). Acrylic paint on wood panelling ...... 232 PREFACE

During the course of my research for this ethnography, the books 1 read by influentid academics and the very taiented artists with whom I spoke, contributed in dynamic ways to my thinking about visual culture, place, and identity.

However, the reai starting point for my consideration of the intersections of vision, place, and identity occurred well before 1 entered graduate school, even before 1 finished public school. If 1 could identifi a somewhat precise point in time when 1 started to think about place and identity in a meaningful way as it relates to this ethnography, it must be when I read the following text written by my matemal grandmother. She wrote:

Word rneanings change with the times and the language of the user. Why, 1 questioned, were ai1 the homes 1 knew as a child cailed "place?" The first settlers in our area referred to their new homes as their "place." "Home" meant back in the old country, so when identi@ing a home here one said Lorenzetta's place, Herrling's place, Murphy's place. Indians adopted this name too, and Jack Skookum's home was cailed "Jack's place." As the second and third generations grew up and left home, when they returned to their parents' place they called it "home." "Home"in the new world as "Place" in the nineteenth century. As the marched on the name "place" was changed to "home" in about the time of World War 1. There was so much taik about when would the boys be "home?" "Place," is a word of many meanings and is much hvolved in one's life. One of the desof being a good wife was, "a place for everythmg and everything in its place." Old-fashioned, but deeply regarded, was the expression "place" or "status" one held in society. Sports use the word "place" so many different ways, and I think everyone marks the "place" when reading a book. Modem slang uses "place" with reference to discipline, e.g. "1 put hirn in his 'place."' Also the query "What kind of 'place' does he operate?" rneaning is it legitimate or a durnp? Mer World Wars I and II, going "home" was every man's dream. and a "place" became "home." It seems there is a time and "place1' for everything. (Walsh l984:73).

My matemal grandmother, Rita Walsh, wrote this passage for a book she and other community histonans researched and wrote titled "Forging a New

Hope: Struggles and Dreams 1848-1948", published by the Hope Histoncai

Society in 1984. I was 16 at that time. However, I can recall that fiom a much younger age that surnrner visits with my grandmother meant nightiy gatherings of my brother, my cousins and me around the big fmtable at her family house at

Laidlaw in the Fraser Valley for a game of cards. During the card games she wodd recite repeatedly it seemed, the same stones about our family's history in the valley, and to whom we were related, and the stories of our "pioneer ancestors".

"This is a picture of your great, great, great grandfather Henry Hunter," she would say "he came here in 1849 as part of the Gold Rush". We learned about his daughters, Mary and Lucy; Mary is my great, great grandmother. We were told about their life stniggles and victories and what I wodd now cal1 the social landxape of their times. Stones Iike how while Mary was in her teens a group of

xii Chinese miners broke into the Hunterville store (that Henry Hunter owned) to steal the gold dust. "Mary's father, Henry, called for help and as Mary came to defend him the Chinese stabbed her with their long knives. Hunter, to Save himself and his daughter, smashed a coal-oil lantem and set fie to the store.

Terrified of the flarnes, the Chinese Bed. Hunter put out the fire by srnothering it with wool blankets from his stock. Being an ex-sailor, Hunter was trained in caring for wounds. He sewed up Mary's wounds with fishing-line, thereby saving hcr life" (Walsh 1984:203). While we were growing up, these nightly card games and stones were regular parts of our visits to the old famihouse and our visits with our grandrnother.

The part of these stories that my grandmother omitted, however, was

Henry Hunter's country marriage to a Nlaka'pamux (Thompson) woman; to whom he gave the Christian name, Mary Shawn (she is my brother Shawn's narnesake).

The two daughters Hunter had with Mary Shawn were my great, great grandmother and aunt, Mary and Lucy; mixed-blood women living at the time of the 'senlement' of the Fraser Valley in the late 1800s. To my grandmother, these women were pioneers. Henry Hunter registered them with the census as British.

His wife Mary Shawn, the Nlakafparnuxwoman is not registered with the census at dl. My father tells me that "she lefi Hunter for another man". 1 have a picture of her daughter Mary as a giri. She is standing with one hand on a prop chair and she is dressed in a stiff black dress; there is a gold cross hanging fiom her neck. When

xiii 1 look at her photograph sining on my desk as 1 write this text, 1 see an Indian woman in European clothing. How did Mary see herself? Pioneer? MetisMalf- breed? Siwash? How did she see herself, as a woman in a 'settler' Iandscape? Or, as a participant in the events that made up the stot-ies, my grandmother would tell us years later?

1recdl lying awake at night and in the early hours of rnoming light in the little back room of the farmhouse looking up into the rnountains that nse out of the valley floor bebd the house. Today in my mind's eye, 1 can stiil see each contour, crevasse and peak of the mountain range around Hope, B.C., which made the backdrop to our adventures on borrowed horsebacks, making 'forts' in the surrounding bush, and general goofing around "fishing" al1 dong the riverbank in fiont of the old house. The smells coming from the kitchen when my grandmother canned fhit for the coming winter and the silence of the valley at night also swface quickly when 1thhk about how I as a child understood the physical place of the Fraser Valley, "the fm," and my farnily's history and identity.

My embodied experiences of the Fraser Valley, in particular of the old farmhouse, and my understanding of the area's known, storied landscapes, greatly contributed to my childhood sense of tocality. This sense of place, derived fiom mine and other peoples' memones and experiences, was also influenced by my grandmother's desire for us to know that place in a particular way, as descendants of the 'pioneers' who 'settled the land', as seen through my grandmother's colonial interpretation of the geographic and social landscape. Despite my love for these stories and the many fond mernories that I associate with them, I know that they are but one version of events seen a particular way.

A significant part of the art that 1 discuss in this dissertation revolves around texts of vision, place, and experience (such as 1 have cited above). 1 consider how artists of abonginal ancestry create art that negotiates the terrain of visual politics associated with real and imagined places of human existence. At the sarne tirne, 1 am also interested in the visual politics of spectatorship

(performed by aboriginal and non-aboriginal agents) and reception of such art in cntical discourses. My focus on visual representations of reai and imaginary places and notions of spectatorship acknowledges that sense of place a.vision, are not only examinable through verbal narratives (cf. Rodman 1992; Feld and

Basso 1995; Hastrup and Olwig 1997).

1participated in my research for this dissertation kom my perspective as a visual anthropo logidvuriter with studio training in V isd Arts, specificall y p~tmaking.I believe that my hands-on training as an artist positioned me to speak with the artists 1 inte~ewedmore easily on topics concerning techniques, concepts, and the general making of art. 1 consider my cultural identity to be

Canadian, made up of a mixture of heritages. My ancestral background is mostly

Irish, English, and Scottish with histoncal aboriginal heritage. Though my family's aboriginal heritage is important to me, 1 do not identie myself as aboriginal in the way the artists with whom 1 have worked consider themselves. 1 feel that this distinction is important because my own life exemplifies in a particdar way, the argument 1draw on throughout the ethnography for the recognition of fiactured, multi-centered identities.

This ethnography is not an investigation into Native venus non-native art, or racialized vision, or sense of place. Rather, I am interested in how individual persons seelplace themselves in the processes of production, circulation and reception of abonginally produced art. 1 am not interested in identiming authentic cultural and/or racial determinates used by individuals in such instances. Rather 1 am most intrigued by predicaments of overlap, montage, and simultaneity that occur during the above-mentioned processes.

It is my intention that this text is read and experienced as a landscape of visual culture conversations. One may choose tu traverse the entve text, or, one rnay simply visit particular regions (in the form of chapters) in a sojoum like rnanner. Hence, the introductory chapter is not a rnap by which the reader need approach the ethnography' . Rather, each chapter is a distinct part of a larger whole, which 1 imagine as a sort of critical account of my travel through

Hal Foster wtites, " .. . reflexivity is essential, for, as Bourdieu wamed, ethnographie rnapping is predisposed to a Cartesian opposition that leads the observer to abstract the culnire of study. Such mapping rnay thus confimi rather than contest the authority of the mapper over site in a way that reduces the desired exchange of dialogical fieldworkn (Foster 1995: 190). This quote is important to me in my own research because of the expressly co-eval manner in which 1 have tried to write the following chapters and argued for a broader sense of vision than Cartesian perspectivalism atlows (see chapters 3 and 4).

xvi topographies of scholarship and art that I have found to be paaicularly engaging

over the last four years. CHAPTER 1: ENTERSECTING FIELDS OF CULTURE: VISION, PLACE

AND ART AS TEXT.

"The interesting moment occurs when persons and images meet."

Sometime during 1998 while I was doing fieldwork interviews for this dissertation, 1 casually wrote these words across the front page of my notebook.

The words describe a predicament that 1 have always found fascinating. Moments of visual encounter between spectators and art are the catalysts for my hting of this dissertation.

Issues and images as much people and places constitute the driving forces behind this ethnographic text about aboriginal art and spectatorship. This dissertation provides a textuai analysis of the visual politics of the production and reception of abonginal art in Canada. Two predicaments provide departue points for this dysis.The first concems how Native artists in Canada express their identity through visual art based on notions of space and place. The second concems the consumption of the identities of these artists and theû art via processes of intercultural spectatorship documented in art exhibition catalogues and artworld discourse.

1 perform my analysis of these predicaments dong three interdependent criticai paths under the headings Citing/text, Sighting/subjectivif~,and

SitinglpIace. These headings chronicle spaces of slippage in ethnographie writing about aboriginal art conceming theoretical analysis, opposition of subjectivity and objectivity, and the situatedness of aboriginal art and artists. The fields of written art texts, vision, and sense of place are significant to this dissertation; they work on each other to produce cultural texts about aboriginal art. 1propose these texts as my objects of study.' Such texts evoke representational as well as matenalist practices in aboriginal art worlds, thus exposing relations between the production and reception of art and images. The modes of ethnographic inquiry I follow throughout the dissertation explore multiple textualities focused upon the production and reception of visual images and textual signs.

My emphasis on disparate, but not necessarily mutually exclusive redms of text including witten te.* (citing), vision (sighting), and place (siting) in aboriginal art highlights the intersections of images and words fiom different departure points of contemporary anthropological interest2.

' These cultural texts include everythng caught up within discourse that is experienced as activity and production (cf. Barthes l986:57-68)in ~orlds.The three sections cntically discuss the involvement of art as part of culture systems of signifiers. My use of the concept of culture as text follows the work of Paul Ricoeur and Clifford Geertz as they attempted to understand the nature of these culture systems through the metaphor of text, that is, something to be read. However, in making this statement, I do not presume these texts to be static, given cultural devices. Rather, I implicitly consider these texts as active constructions created by the author's (artist's) intentions and the reader's (spectator's) response to them. Also, my argument for art as text does not deny that artworks have distinct physical and environmental presence and that theu uses may be embodied. A partial list of recent references conceming such points of anthropological interest would include: the critique of witing and interpreting ethnographic texts In his essay, From Work to Text, Barthes revels in the "mutation"

(1984: 169) of classification systems for objects of cultural andysis that is encouraged by the interdisciplinarity of contemporary scholarship. He writes that the new object of study is "obtained by [the] sliding or overtuming of former categories. That object is TEXT" (Barthes 1984: 170). Barthes explains that the

Text cannot be separated from its material conditions of production, in fact "[tlhe

Text is experienced only in an activity of production" (Barthes 1984: 170, italics in original). He wrîtes that text cannot be physically 'stopped' or 'fixed' because of its existence within language and the movement of discourse. Barthes also descnbes the movement of text as "cuttingacross" fields of production (Barthes 1984: 170) rather than following one line of production in particular. 1 have taken Barthes' thoughts on text into account in my methodology of seiecting multiple texts

(citing/sighting/siting) for analysis. The purpose of pulling together these specific and diverse fields of texts concerning aboriginal art and its production and reception is to track the crosscutting action of such texts in the manner to which

Barthes refers. In so doing, 1 am trying to bring another line to bear on discussions about the anthropology of texhiality as it has been discussed in the forms of

(Piting')by Clifford (1988), Marcus and Cushman (1982), Marcus and Clifford ( 19 86) Marcus and Fisher (1 987); the deof vision and visuality in cultural productions ('sighting')by Jay (1998, 1993, 1988), Chow (1 999, Devereaux and Hiliman (1999, Banks and Morphy (1 997), Jenks (1995); and, the role of place in cultural production ('siting') by Feld and Basso (1999, Gupta and Ferguson (1997), Olwig and Hastrup (1 W6), Rodman (1992). culture as text (Marcus and Cushman 1982; Marcus and CliEord 1986; Marcus and Fisher 1987) and art as text (Kelly 1984; Mitchell 1986).

By exploring the intersections of visuality and textuality, 1 hope to expand the purview of contemporary ethnographie representations of art objects as well. 1 also want to consider art objects (photographs, films, installation works) as visible texts in transnational flows. As art objects move through discounes of art texts, conditions of visuality, and discourses of place, they constantly defer the signified. Viewed as texts, art objects are, in Barthes words, "dilatory" (Barthes

1984: 171); their role as constant signifier dictates that they not be conceived as,

"the first stage of meaning" (Barthes 1984: 17 1). Rather, art objects, too, cut across multiple methodological fields for anaiysis and play various roles in the formation of texts. Hence, for the purpose ofthis project, my analysis of art objecu does not attempt to postdate deep metaphoric interpretations for their meanings. 1 am interested in the metonymic role of art in the creation of texts that bring to the fore culturai predicaments that contradict, overlap, and perpetually cross-reference other signifiers. As visible texts, art objects are inseparable fiom activity or process (recall Barthes' above noted statement that texts can only be experienced in an activity of production). This approach to anaiyzing art objects rnoves past rnodernist reflections on symbolic values of art as product.3

Speaking with the artists about my representation of their art was of paramount importance to me in this project. Many of the artists were very aware of histoncal In this text (that is, the dissertation), juxtaposing realms of aboriginal art, vision, and post-colonial place provide contexts in which one may consider how discursive texts and visual images interact in diverse arenas of intercultural spectatorship. How does a complementary consideration of visuality and texniality benefit ethnographic writing and research?

HaWig outlined my methodological reasons for writing this dissertation in the manner I have, I now want to draw attention toward my approach to the nuances, relations, contradictions, and simultaneous engagement of the concepts of place and vision in the production and reception of aboriginal art. Conceming the concept of place, 1 am interested in the representation of place in abonginal art by producen and spectators. How do artistic representations of relationships between First Nations artists and particular landscapes (re)produce their contemporary identities? How do aboriginal artists use landscapes to challenge .contemporary power relations within Canada via their art? 1 am also interested in the place of abonginal art in anthropological visuai culture studies. How have the representation of aboriginal art objects as 'ethnographic' and not as art objects circulating within as well as creating new cntical art texts that participants of modem artworlds engaged. Therefore, 1made an explicit point of detailing my interest in contemporary art theory as well as cultural theory to the artists (including my interest in culture as text and art as text). 1 then spoke about how 1 saw their work as part of these two bodies of literature. My approach of textual analysis of art objects is fairly new to anthropological studies and as such, is an experirnent in itself to expand the limits of representation when it cornes to modem aboriginal art. disciplines of anthropology, art history, and cultural studies placed aboriginal art and artists into critical discourses, and constnicted categones as objects of study?

My focus on the concept of vision revolves around issues of intersecting performances of spectatorship. On the one hand, I am interested in the performance of vision by aboriginal artists through complex acts of looking that culminate in the production of art based on notions of place. The art referenced in this dissertation takes into account aspects of place that include displacement, globalization, as well as multi-locality. There is a strong connection between this perspective of vision and my analysis ofplace in aboriginal art. On the other hanci, I am interested in specific textual expressions of vision by anthropologists, art critics, historians, and other artworld participants. How does the viewing public4 consume the art and identities of these artists? This aspect of my analysis conceming vision, art, and place is closely tied to my analysis of the place of

(abonginai) art in cntical art discourses.

By focusing on multiple interpretations and performances of the concepts place and vision as they intersect with the production and reception of art, I have put into practice a principle element of modernist ethnography according to

George Marcus: juxtaposition. He writes, "juxtaposition of quite disparate but

' In this dissertation, I consider this viewing public as curators, critics, art historians, anthropologists. The viewing public can be as widely interpreted as anyone other than the creating audience. related hgments of the past in mernory and of situated sites of social activity in space is a key technique of analysis" (Marcus l998:73).

The written structure of this dissertation is in the form of a series of conversations that evolved out of the results (and my expenences during the

course of) fieldwork research. My fieldwork was not premised upon a linear

narrative of traveling to and fiom "the field" and working with "a" group of

people. Rather, as I detail later in this chapter, 1 found myself traveling between

different Canadian cities to interview and work with artists of diverse hentages

and artistic backgrounds. 1 came away from this experience feeling like I had been

involved in many micro conversations about personal experience that related to

macro discussions on place (expressed by artists as land, landscape, "our mother")

and vision (expressed both as a physiognomic and/or spirituai practice).

1 see this dissertation situated within various conditions of modernity,

namely the collapse of macro-micro distinctions of cultural economies and the

primacy of vision in these processes. 1 concur with the following statement by

Martin Jay:

Whether we focus on the "mirror of nature" metaphor in philosophy with Richard Rorty or emphasize the prevalence of surveillance with Michel Foucault or bemoan the society of the spectacle with Guy Debord, we confront again and again the ubiquity of vision as the master sense of the modem era (Jay 1988:3).

As an ethnographic consideration of aboriginal art, place, and vision, this

text is cornposed of micro and macro elements of the artworlds in which artists, spectators, and objects circulate. 1 have tried to write about issues and images that

1see are "systematically related by a revealed logic of connections" (Marcus

1998:73). The juxtaposition of previously unrelated phenornena, events or objects, creates a form of analysis that employs "thickness with a difference" (Appadurai

199655) by premising suggestion, nuance, and subtlety rather than fixed staternents of judgement.

In spiîe of the attention 1 have given to such revisions of the ethnographie mandate, 1 have not abandoned writing about particularities, which I see to be still essential to ethnography (Feld and Basso 199794). 1 have attempted to recognize this quality of ethnography via my anaiysis of artworks and narratives by artists that hinge on particular notions, connections, digressions between temporal fiameworks and geographical places, technologies, industries, and even community and kinship (see chapter five in particular).

The art and the artist's statements that 1 have brought together for this text can not be used to make generalized statements conceming native artists in

Canada and their work. 1 have chosen particular artists because I think their work and discourse around their art addresses specific current social relations. In addition, 1 have not attempted to provide analyses of art institutions that exhibit art by these artists, nor will 1 make general equations about the movement of modem art within these venues. Although these points of inquiry are certainly very worthwhile, detailed consideration of them discourages the practice of spectatoehip at the level of the individual, which 1 argue for throughout the dissertation.

Appadurai's writing has been particularly influential to my consideration of art and culture and in my rasons for juxtaposing micro and macro elements of artworlds in new ways. Though Appadurai does not write specifically about visual culture or art, he does argue for a consideration of visual representations as producers of culture, rather than by-products of cultural processes. In sum, Appadurai cornments on the importance of recognizing expressive representations of lived experiences in ethnography as principle points of investigation. Appadurai writes:

The mega rhetoric of developmental modernization in many countries is still with us. But it is often punchiated, interrogated, and domesticated by the micronarratives of film, television, music and other expressive forms, which allow modemity to be re-written more as vemacular globdization and less as a concession to large-scaie national and international policies (Appadurai 1996: 10).

And also,

Many Iives are now inextricably linked with representations, and thus we need to incorporate the complexities of expressive representation (film, novels, travel accounts) into our ethnographies, not only as technical adjuncts but as primary materid with which to constnict and interrogate oui- own representations (Appadurai 1996:64).

The intersections of visuaiity and textuality throughout this text argue for a practice of looking at art and considering its production and reception in the production of culturai texts. I situate this textuai analysis at the heart of contemporary visual anthropology. Having said this, 1 feel I should comment on the ongoing reconsideration of constitutional criteria of this sub-discipline. 1 see the emerging criteria for visual anthropology as the study of 1) visual systems

(and here 1 include texts), 2) visual culnue (fields of production and reception) and, 3) visual material (images and abjects).

Until fairly recently, Visual Anthropology as a sub-discipline privileged the visual as technique (photographie or filmic representation). From this perspective, indexical qualities of images provide the ethnographer with 'data' rather than suggest arenas of relations, methods, and theories. This has meant that anthropologists who are interested in the visual have had to deny, to sorne extent, certain subjective conditions of aesthetics that 'pollute' images and their rneanings.

My analysis of art engages notions of contagion by chronicling the use of subjectivity by artists and their spectators as part of specific visual strategies in the production and reception of art (see chapter four in particular).

This study of aboriginal art collapses borders between commodified productions and fuie art, amateur and professional. It challenges the infinite number of 'visudizations of Indiamess' produced and consumed in ways that are temporally divided between past and present, traditional and modem. Finaily, 1 do not classi@ the art I discuss in this text according to particular media As Ruth

Phillips notes, aboriginal visual culture "embraces the full range of visuai representations in photography, film and video, television, joumalism, electroaic media, traditional fine art media, folk and popular crafts and scientific and technological imaging " (Phillips 1 999: 103).

Criticisms of dl-inclusive definitions of visual culture, like bat given by

Phillips, suggest that the term visual culture as a descriptive category is

"oxymoronic"(Phillipson 1995:2Oî)and "redundant" (Jenks: 1995: 16). The use of visuai culture as a category is, according to Jenks, "utterly substantive and, to a greater or lesser degree, locked within [the] materialist and reductivist conceptions of vision" (Jenks: 1995: 16). The broader focus on visual culture taken by Ienks is on "the social context of the 'seeing' and the 'seen' but also with the intentiondity of the practices that relate these nvo moments" (Jenks: 1995: 16).

It is here, where Jenks locates visual culture, that 1hook into the texts that provide the objects of my analysis.

Emergent criticai literature on visual culture does include specific writing focused on modem aboriginal art. Phillips notes three 'trends' in such writing since the mid-1980s in aboriginal art texts. They are " 1) the consolidation of a critique of the occularcentrim bias in Western culture that has for centuries privileged a strictly delimited fom of visual expenence, 2) movement to reposition art history within a new field of visual culture, and 3) strengthened engagement behveen anthropological and art historical discourses" (Phillips

1999:97). 1would add to this list the growing body of aboriginally written critiques conceming Western-based analyses of abonginal art. Margaret Dubin has also noted a tactical 're-grouping' by producers of critical art texts on abonginal art and artists. Her list of markers for the 'new art history' also includes more attention to social and politicai contexts, and more connections with other artworlds @ubin 1999: 154). In Dubin's observations, we see a connection to

Barthes' notion of the crosscutting nature of aboriginai artworld te- and to the metonymic qualities of the art as visible texts.

Clearly at this tirne, writers like myself are wading through an adjustment in theoreticaVmethodological paradigms conceming the andysis of visual culture.

In the case of aboriginai art and its spectatonhip, the blurring of disciplinary boundaries between anthropology and art history predominates recent critical art texts such as those 1 analyze in the Citinghext section of this dissertation. Of significant note is the shift in ernphasis away fiom an aesthetic anaiysis of the object to a cntical analysis of contexts of production (see chapter two in particuiar). According to Dubin, "this is no longer a battle between anthropologists and art historians.. .art history is becoming an anthropology of art, in method if not in result" (Dubin 1999:1 56 h.1 0). It is becoming increasingly acceptable to say that objects or images submitted as art do not fit into neat categories for analysis. Furthermore, notes lrit Rogoff, "neither the eye nor the psyche operates alone or recognizes such divisions" (Rogoff 1999: 16). The overlap of subjectivity and objectivity that has accompanied the breakdown of strict disciplinary or categoncal analysis has made the complex relations between performers and performances more visible, so to speak.

Throughout the dissertation, 1 use the terminology 'viewer' and 'spectator' in relation to visual fields. However, as Rosemary Betterton notes, "both tems imply a passive relationship, a disembodied eye (I), that disguises any active role for the viewer in making the meaning of the work (art)" (Betterton 1996: 192). In spite of this critique, it is ny intention to demonstrate the active participation by such agents in the visual field by discussing particular instances of vision and visuality in the foms of art production and reception (see chapter three in particda).

The complicated fields of visual culture, like those examined in this dissertation, have been brought into focus through cntical dialogue around the politics and theory comected to how people see art, rather than categorical object anaiysis. The broader interest exhibited by producers and consumers of visual culture -- in the contexts of 'seeing' and the 'seen' -- has been re-produced through the critique and analysis of occularcenûic approaches, or 'scopic regimes' (Martin

Jay via Christian Metz). The processes by which structures of spectatorship and narrativized politics of vision simultaneously Uiform, and sustain, or support one another, have become key determinates of critical art discourses in my analysis. My primary sources of information for writing this ethnography have been the interviews 1 conducted with nine artists between January 1998 and May

1999'. These artists are Dana Claxton, Jeff Thomas, Marianne Nicolson, Mary

Anne Barkhouse, Arthur Renwick, Shelley Niro, Greg Staats, and Patricia

Deadman. I would cd1 each of these established artists, as opposed to emerging artists. By this 1 mean to say, they have al1 committed their careers to making art.

Though some are obviously more nationally and intemationally recognized than others, ail of the artists I interviewed had exhibition records of several yean in length. In addition to these credentials, almost al1 of the artists have professional art training, or a university degree. Some like Shelley Niro, Arthur Renwick,

Dana Claxton and Marianne Nicolson have graduate level university degrees in art-based disciplines. Though I interviewed al1 of the artists in their capacity as artists, many of them are or have been professors of art, professionai photographen, and curators amongst other artworld occupations. These modem

Like many other graduate students writing up their research, I too discovered that during my fieldwork 1 had gathered much more information than 1 needed to complete a Ph.D. dissertation. In total, 1 interviewed 15 artists while researching for my dissertation. I plan to incorporate the matenal that does not appear in this document in a version of this dissertation revised for publication. The artists I have interviewed but not included in this document are Edward Poitras, Robert Houle, Rebecca Baird, Francis Dick, Frank Shebagaget, and Mary Longman. The chapters I will include for this other project are narrative film, a generai chapter on place-oriented art by aboriginal artists in Canada and a chapter on the global movement of aboriginal art and artists that focuses on the artist Mary Longman. Longman and 1 traveled to Australia together to work on an exhibition during the time 1 was in the field. artists work in a variety of media including photography, film and video, painting, mixed media, sculpture, and installation.

The ways in which I conducted my research with these artists is indicative of a mixed research methodology. Initially, I made contact with many of the artists by letter or by telephone. In both cases, 1 gave the same information about my research project. The information 1 supplied the artists included my background in the arts and how I came to be a Ph.D. student interested in researching modem abonginal art and sense of place. Approximately 75% of the artists 1 initially ined to make contact with responded positively to my request for an interview. However, as my research progressed, many artists referred the narnes of other artists to me to contact for interviews. Thus, the list of artists

became very organic and in the end included many artists that 1 did not know about when 1 started my fieldwork.

No two interviews 1 had with the artists were alike. Each interview consisted of a standard set of questions that 1 asked al1 the artists. Some sarnples

of these types of questions are "Are there particular landscapes, or places to which you especially relate?" "Do you think 'sense of place' plays a particular role in your work?" "Did you move around/travel a lot growing up? As an addt?" "Does

your work reference certain places? If so, why and how?" "Land is often said to

be timeless, but it can be such an important factor in our changing lives. How have the places in which you have been present changed? How have they changed you?"

1 followed up these general questions with specific questions that 1 had about the artist's work. Usually during these interviews, the artist would bring out slides of particular work for us to look at. Many of the images in this dissertation are fiom slides the artists dlowed me to duplicate. 1 made it a practice to make a second set of duplicate slides to give back to the artist in remfor their permission to make copies for myself. In general, the interviews went no longer than two hours and this usuaily included a meal or refreshment. 1 was able to visit most of the artists only once during my fieldwork. However, al1 the artists received copies of transcnpts from the interviews if 1 used a tape recorder, and they had the oppomuiity to correct speiling fiom my fieldnotes, or misunderstandings of text because of error in tape transcription.

The 'heteterews took place in the cities of Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, and

Victoria and the township of Haliburton, Ontario. 1 met aaists and conducted interviews in cafës, restaurants, artist's studios, and artist residences. In the case of my work with Marianne Nicolson, 1 also worked as her studio assistant and assisted her in with the installation of her work at the exhibition Reservation X at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in the summer of 1998.~In between my

1 also worked as a studio assistant for Mary Longman during an exhibition in Australia during February 1998. time interviewing artists, 1 did archivai research with modem art catalogues in galleries and museums as well as public and university libraries on previous exhibitions. 1 carried out much of this work in Hull, Quebec at the Canadian

Museum of Civilization and the Indian Art Centre during June of 1998. FinalIy, during the time of my research and writing for this ethnography 1 wrote three texts for art catalogues and exhibitions about artists and their work with which 1 was

Thus, in many ways, my role in and out the field was a rnixed one. 1 was a visual anthropologist conducting research on human culture, 1 was a studio assistant, and 1 was a writer producing the very kinds of text that 1 proposed to study in my research. As such, 1 think that my ethnography is very much situated in current writing that emphasizes intersections of subjectivity and objectivity (see

Chow 1991 and 1995). In my writing 1 have aspired to what Irit Rogoff describes as "'writing 'with' an artist's work rather than about it" (Rogoff l999:26). She explains that to do so heightens the awareness of writer agency by requiring the writer to form a practice that de-constructs any hierarchy for creating meaning about a piece of art. This is accomplished by having the writer assume her place in the cog of production, circulation and reception in which neither the artist,

7 These catalogues were written for Mary Anne Barkhouse and Michel Belmore (Lichen 1998), and Marianne Nicolson (text for the Eiteljorg Museum 1999). As well, 1 curated and wrote the exhibition text for Francis Dick's 15 year Retrospective (Maltwood Art Gallery and Museum, 2000). critic, histonan, "advertking copywriter, the commercial sponsor, the studio, [or] the director has the final word in detedning the rneaning of a work in visuai culture" (Rogoff 1999:26).

I chose to work only with individual aboriginal artists who do not work in recognizably tribal or nation-oriented styles. This choice was in part due to the way the artists told me how see themselves as individuais who are part of a cultural collective. Nevertheless, as a participantlspectator of the arts, 1 see them as individual people negotiating a multicultural artworld as artists, not representatives of a collective. When I spoke about the difference between aboriginal artist and an artist who is aboriginal with some of the artists, they expressed certain ambivalence toward such nuances of identity. Instead of finding this a concern, 1 view the artists' ambivalence toward their audiences' need for classification as proof of the elasticity and fragmentation of contemporary culturaYracial identity.

My interest in individual aaists is also tied to my interests in contemporary endeavors in ethnographie writing in general. My inquiry into the visual agency of aboriginal artists and their spectators at the level of the individual is not an alternative to addressing society or social relations; these two entities implicate one another (cf. Marcus 1998:64; Schneider 1996: 187). Recent writuig that theorizes the "artin as ethnographer" (Foster 1996, see aiso Schneider (1996)) brings to the attention of anthropological audiences, the "socially relevant" (Schneider 1996: 188) work of modern artists.

Identifjbg or classahg the artists whose work and words appear in this text with concepts of native-ness, individuality, or collectivity is slippery business because many of the artists' work crosscuts these categones8.Nevertheless, the artists and their work are caught up in processes of filiation (Barthes 1984).

Barthes argues that once the text is produced by the author, and it is read without his inscription, he becomes "like a character in his novel" (Barthes 1984: 173).

The author, Barthes writes, "is no longer privileged, paternal, aletheological, but ludic.. .his Iife is no longer the origin of his fictions, but a fiction contributing to his work; there is a reversion of the work on to the life (and no Longer the contrary)" (Barthes 1984: 173). 1 would argue that the same process occurs upon the viewing and interpretation of modem abonginal art by interculturai audiences.

Regardless of an artist's attempt to determine her or his identity in relation to their art practice, spectators will frame and consume the artist's identity in the way they view it as a contributing fiction to the art.

My focus on aboriginal artists and their multi-cultural audiences is part of a growing body of anthropological literature that does not engage with the topic

In his article on the artist as ethnographer, Hal Foster writes, the "danger of ideologicd patronage is not less for the artist identified as other than for the author identified as proletarian. In fact this danger may deepen then, for the artist of art and identity by examinhg bounded cultures, patterns of repetition and artistic production as part of magical-religious functions in small-scale societies

(cf. Schneider 1996; Foster 1996; Marcus and Myers 1995). By stahg this deparhue, 1 do not mean to imply that the artists I discuss in this ethnography now assume the roles of the autonomous Western artist in history . Rather, 1 hope to provide discussions for the reader that both evoke and demonstrate the deeply complex processes of art production and reception that continue to de& classification.

Recognizing this de-constructive quality of my research also made me reconsider the field as a place where anthropologists go to study and as a place where 1 would find artists and art. Similar to the manner in which I conceptualize my approach to place and art above, for me, the notion of the field must be constituted through multiple kagments of a larger conversation. in the case of my research, I considered the field to also be myfield ofvision and thefield of visual culture.

My research did take me to specific physical and geographical locations to conduct research. However, as I mentioned above, I did not focus on a particular geographic region or nation of aaists in Canada I conducted fieldwork in multiple major urban centres (Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Victoria) in Canada. As my may be asked to assume the roles of native and informant as well as ethnographer" (Foster 1998: 174). research progressed, 1 often found myself re-visiting the same cities to interview dinerent artists each tirne. Due to the traveling nature of many exhibitions, the art I snidy is mobile as are the artists who create it. This kind of travel puts into practice

Mary Des Chenets description of modem anthropologicai research. She writes that such research is "less fixed by and fixated on apriori definitions of locale, and more amenable to following cultural phenomena and political processes across both time and space" (Des Chene l997:76).

My depamire from traditional anthropological fieldwork of traveling to a place to be with o group of people is part of the ongoing re-visionllig/shift conceming how anthropologists do fieldwork, taking into account new objects of study (cf. Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Olwig and Hasmip 1996).

A partial list of the sites at which, or through which, 1 conducted rny research Uicluded physical surfaces like particular artworks (the objects themselves, wherever they were) and geographical places like art gallenes, museums, and art studios. In addition to these tangible sites 1 would add imaginary sitesfroutes of discursive networks and the diverse range of sites that were a combination of the tangible and intangible from which artists took their inspiration to make art (cf. Foster 1996: 1 84). Intangible sites of inspiration for the artists were often conditions or situations, for exarnple, displacement, hornelessness, eco-tourism, and muiti-national corporations' economic power. As Birgitte Sorenson writes, "[tlhe new philosophical mood perceives changes, inconsistencies, and paradoxes as a natural and integral part of peopies' reaiity. Personal identity, according to this view, is a complex sense of being, or belonging not derived from one local structure, but actively and strategically constructed in relation to multiple spaces and for a variety of purposes" (Sorenson

1997:146). The methodology 1 have proposed for a textual analysis of aboriginal art and spectatorship encompasses a diverse range of localities/sites. Thus, it provides an opportunity for ethnographic inquiry into various 'inconsistencies' and

'paradoxes' which artists must negotiate in the creation of their identities as individuals, artworld participants, and members of tribal collectives.

Contemporary anthropologicai witing mut respond to localized and non- localized sites of reference. To accomplish this, notions of locality must become

"relational and contextual rather than scdar or spatial" (Appadurai 1996: 178).

Al1 of these points I have ailuded to conceming different sites of contact as well as the travel to and from these places, surfaces, and conditions that make up the field are implicated in James Clifford's statement: "In tracking anthropology's changing relations with travel, we may find it useful to thhk of the

"field" as habitus, rather than as a place, a cluster of embodied dispositions and practices" (Clifford 1997:199). 1 hdthis quote particuiarly interesting in light of the way 1 consider the research field to include my own field of vision, and while I was at these different sites, 1 engaged my body in such different ways (both physically and rnentally) as 1participated in my own research.

As an ethnographer, 1 tried never to divorce myself fiom the geographical and irnaginary spaces in which 1 traveled during my research. 1 constantly saw myself as a participant, or as an active agent, whose presence afTected the results of my own inquiries. In so doing, 1 considered the embodied experiences of others, as I traveled/traversed these fields or sites of cultural production - these contact zones (Des Chene 1997). 1 have attempted to continue this kind of personal engagement throughout this text by writing fiom the perspective 1 had

(and have) of myself as a CO-evalparticipantkpectator in particular artworlds.

Writers like myself must re-think what we mean when we write about the concept of place, and use terms like locality to detail ethnographie aspects of knowledge or experience. In my experience of fieldwork, the notion of locdity became a slippery contextlconcept. For example, I would often travel to a particdar place to interview an artist; that place may or may not necessarily be closely associated with the artist or their work; the site could simply be one only of convenience (café, restaurant, etc.). In other instances, the locations of the interviews became essentiai to my engagement with the artists and their work

(their residence, studio, specific site of artwork, gallery, etc.). Locations and places of contact (gallenes, museums, studios, cafes, residences etc.) and methods of excbange (telephone, conversation, email, letter) between the artists and me and me became what 1 consider to be touch-down points, or contact zones of traveling bodies and information. Most ofien, these places existed as important places for the aNst and me for ody as long as the inte~ewlasted. They were in many ways momentary in-between places created expressly for the purpose of this research.

At this point, I want to retum to the structure of the three critical paths of discussion and their content, which developed through the course of my fieldwork and in subsequent episodes of writing.

The first section of the dissertation is titled CIT'NG/texts. In chapter two of this section, 1 examine the way in which anthropologists and art hidorians created the category of Indian art fiom their own notions of authenticity, context and content of artworks, as well as of the artists. Through specific examples of cntical art texts, this chapter analyzes the development of discourses and categories of analysis concerning abonginal art. in particular, 1 make the point that the texts (written between 1956 and 1986) are w-ritten fiom perspectives that deny CO-evainessbetween subject and object, between their writers and the artists who create the work about which they speak. I discuss in depth the development of Msud paradigms between anthropology and art history that contributed to the emergence of the discipline of ethnoaesthetics and, eventually, cross-cultural studies. The ideological premise of self verms other in these texts pervaded their scientific approach to the study of primitive art, versus Western Fine Art. A self- imposed critique of universai aesthetics used to understand such art followed these approaches to the critical analyses of aboriginal art. Analyses of art then focused on the rneaning of iconographie representations. Throughout the development of these cntical discourses that spanned the latter half of the twentieth century, the material object was the primary vehicle of rneaning in the aoalysis of aboriginal art. Despite this focus of attention on the art object itself, the basis of value for an object was its authenticity, and this was assured only through the pedigree of its maker.

Until the rnid-1980s, discourse and texts concerning aboriginal art focused aimost exclusively on the ascertainment and preservation of the authenticity of the object. Durùig the mid-1980s' new questions arose around issues of representation that were of critical relevance to anthropology's interest in art (the critique of the anthropologist as self at the center of academic knowledge, and anthropology's subject as others in marginal spaces, was central to this rupture in critical thought). Western categories of authenticity and colonial authonty prompted sûingent critiques of earlier studies of abonginal art which were iargely based upon a salvage paradigm of colonial anthropology and art history . Art discourses based on notions of authenticity, such as those I outline in chapter two, rose out of the tum of the twentieth cenniry salvage paradigm of anthropology and art history

(ClifTorcl 1987: 121). At this the, anthropologists and art historians felt a need to rescue 'authentic' cultural objects from what they viewed as their immanent destruction due to modernkation. For example, this kind of thinking led to the fiantic 'scramble for aaifacts' (Cole 1985) on the Northwest Coast of Canada for example, at the turn of the century.

Emerging critiques concemed with politics of representation about overly valorized cultural histones and objectified notions of cultural identity and location have denounced the manner in which EuroNorth Amencan 'experts' appropriated material culture of aboriginal peoples as part of their own history of conquest.

Such criticism has provided counter-discourses concerning the relationships, or politics of positioning that exist between Western and non-Western peoples in general (Dominguez 1987; Hart 1995). The shift or displacement from a panoptic central position held by figures such as anthropologists and art historians has radicdly fiected the study of non-Western art by both Western and non-Western academics. Concurrent with this cnsis in representation (if not a by-product of it) is the recognition of multiple new sites of analysis conceming abonginal art.

These sites emerge primarily out of a shif't in emphasis from a formai analysis of art objects (in which accompanying narratives contextualize the art), to a cultural critique of the socio-political narrative contexts in which the art is considered in terms ofprocess. Post-colonial narratives are important aspects of revisionkt strategies of representation and cnteria for modem art. The use of the term context in this chapter not only concerns the local relations between objects and aboriginal peoples/cultures, but also inherently includes global art worlds and systems.

The main question posed by anthropologists and art historians is no longer, 'What is art?' where emphasis is placed upon the object. Rather, contemporary questions concem the intersections of subjectivity, vision and visuality, post-coloniality, and new language/terminology. The resulting questions fiom these conversations are now 'How and why is an image or object thought of as art? and 'What is the purpose of the art?

In the second chapter of ClTNGi'texts, 1 take tirne to set up what 1 see as present day visual politics at play between aboriginal artists and their spectators.

To do this 1 discuss, through personal narratives by the artists Jeff Thomas and

Dana Claxton, a visual diaiogic 1 cal1 active vision. This visual strategy challenges the notion that aboriginal artists are 'retuniing the gaze' that the anthropologists and art historians (such as those I discuss in chapter two) use in their understanding of aboriginal art and artists. Rather, 1 argue that taking into account disruptions in rnodernist visual strategies, we need to focus on other visual strategies at work in amvorlds other than those based fiom within a Cartesian perspective. In this chapter I am particularly interested in Norman Bryson's suggestion of the glance as an accompanying visual strategy to that of the gaze.

Through an analysis of Columbus Quincentenary Art Exhibition texts, I adâress questions such as 'who Iooks at whom and how?'; 'Matare the power relationships, or visual politics that are at play in modem artworlds?'; and fïnally,

'what role does visibility of signs of abonginaiity play in the legitimacy of modem art?

In sum, the section CITING/exts focuses on the production and reception of different kinds of 'meanings' for modem art created throughout texts produced by the art galleries in which many of the artists that 1 interviewed exhibit their work. These texts include photographic and textuai documentation as well as cntical interpretations of art. The galleries that produce these texts are "pnmary sites of cultural exchange in the political economy of art" (Greenberg et al.1996:2), and it is within these spaces that meanings are "created, maintained or deconstmcted" (Greenberg et al. 1996:2). Art exhibition texts then, are the physical link between the tirne-lirnited art exhibit and public knowledge. These texts participate within a "discipline" of communication (Celant 1996; Kelly

1984) via their re-production of the art and artists for their viewing public. The cntical writing which highlights certain artists and their work provides much of the foundation for public recognition of native artists and their art in Canada.

The second discussion heading, SIGHTMG/subjectivity suggests the way in which vision and visuality are concephialized and practiced in the production and reception of aboriginal art. In chapter four, 1 have chosen mechanically reproduced images (photographic and filmic) that portray the human body to discuss the creation, representation, and possibly, reproduction of subjectivity through the Iens. Art by Jeff Thomas, Dana Claxton, Greg Staats, Patricia

Deadman, and Shelley Niro is discussed in this chapter. In my analysis, 1 argue that alongside visual strategies like Cartesianism, subjectivity cm be expenenced through recognition of other human bodies via viscerai human reaction to light, rather than relative positions in space. Metaphors of the fiagmenting and hcninng properties of light are highiy arnenable to my anaiysis of a.concemed as it is with the creation and dynamics of multiply centered, non-fixed subjectivities. This approach to analyzing subjectivity allows the ethnic, gendered spectator to see herself not as a representative of a fixed and bounded culture, but rather as a fiee roaming subject. The photographs I analyze in this chapter engage with the geographically-real places of the city, the mountains, and the plains, as well as the imaginary spaces of television and pop culture.

The third discussion heading, SITMG/place takes as its departure point the specific geographic region of the Northwest Coast. In chapter five, 1 analyze the production and reception of art by Arthur Renwick, Marianne Nicolson, and

Mary Anne Barkhouse. These artists of Northwest Coast nations create work that has been at times labeled political because of the manner in which it represents competing discourses over the use of space and colonial definitions of place. in these cases, art by aboriginal artists representing contemporary identity and ancestral place cornpetes with narratives of market econornies and economic progress. The important intersections here are the macro/global economies and the daily lives of individual people living on contested lands. The artists engage in diverse subject matter that includes the presence of multinational corporations like

Alcan Aluminum and the lumber giant Weyerhaeuser in First Nations' temtones, as well as smaller scale economic activities like eco-tourisrn in Johnstone Strait on the coast of British Columbia. 1 argue that the interpretation of this art as political or not is dependent upon the perspective of spectators and their own experiences and identifications with the subject matter of the art, rather than the object itself.

The art referenced in this dissertation crosscuts various culturally important locations (Gupta and Ferguson 1992), sites, or nodal points, where cultural phenomena and political processes aoss both time and space (Clifford

1997). This crosscutting action produces the texts that 1 have gathered for analysis. 1 am interested in the ambivalent as well as the paradoxical slippery moments of cultural production - for these artists in their artmaking and its reception. In other words, how do these individual people position themselves as modem artists who create art that adheres to aboriginally determined values, while they simultaneously respond to current social and political conflicts? Ho w does land, something perceived to be both permanent and timeless, become dynamic in the construction of these artists' lives and art?

Visible and invisible features of landscape that are associated with personal kinship connections as well as issues of community are central to anthropology's interest in what constitutes local knowledge. In their work, artists portray local knowledge through a combined awareness of their geographical position in a region or place, the reality of malleable culturai boundaries, and the personal experience of living at in-between places. These places are not considered to be home; rather, they are where one temporarily stays. Here, in this socidly constructeci and politically charged zone of in-between-ness, identities are to be understood as "nomadic subjectivities" (McMaster 1995:86). How these artists combine experieoces from the routes dong which they travel each day

(Clifford 1997), and the mots to which they refer in their art gives meanhg to contemporary landscapes of visual culture in Canada.

CWTER2: READING NATIVE ART TEXTS: APPROACH AND

ANALYSE IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND ART HISTORY.

"It's not primitive, it's not very old, can it even be called art?" read the headline of a fiont-page article of the Globe and Mail on September 3, 1999. The story, which followed the headline, announced the construction of a new $250- million dollar museum in Paris that will be dedicated to the abonginal art of

Afiica, Asia, and the Pacific and the Amencas. The new institution is to be part of the "political legacy" of French President Jacques Chirac, whose term ends in

2002. The article states that the "theme of the current Chirac presidency.. . has been to make France a haven for abonginai art threatened by the encroachment of modem civilization." The writer then asks the question, "is this an apt description of the work produced by Canada's Inuit?'in response, the article includes a summary of the contested history and current predicament of Inuit soapstone carving -- its introduction by Canadian artist James Houston in the late 1940s, the cornmerciai and rnonetary value of the carvings to Inuit carvers and residents of the north, and the acknowledgement by Jacques Chirac of his interest in the "arts of the First Nations" as a "question of sensibility and taste."

The cnix of the article lay in the criticism made by outside experts about the value of soapstone carving as art in light of its debated authenticity as an abonguial art fonn. With quotes fiom anthropologists, geographen, gallery curators, and directors, a sketch emerges of the present predicament of soapstone carving and its circulation as commodity in artworlds located outside of the northem landscape fiom which the carvings originate. Evidence suggesting the objects' inouthenticity is supported by arguments that the formal style of the art is strategically created for an 'outsider' aesthetic and made for a global tourist souvenir market (the least likely place to find soapstone carvings is in a carver's house, we are told), and that this fonn of carving was not a part of the naditional

Inuit culture (the Stone was too big and heavy to be carried around by these nomadic peoples and the present styles bear linle resemblance to the small bone or ivory cawings made during precontact periods). Yet, Diana Nemiroff of the

National Gallery of Canada is quoted as stating that it is precisely the hybnd nature of the carvùigs between "Modernist forrnalism" and the "remembered content of Inuit life" that "make them interesting".

The questions and critiques raised in this article about modem Inuit soapstone carving are paramount to my focus of this chapter, which is to analyze how written texts have contributed to, and indeed, constnicted something called aboriginal art. 1 have selected as resources for this critical malysis various publicly available w-ritten texts (such as the Globe and Mail article cited above), as well as critical acadernic texts, art exhibition catalogues and art reviews published from 1956 to 1999. My concentration in this chapter on written texts produced in response to art production is part of rny attempt to engage theoreticaliy and methodologically with a multi-sited notion of ethnographie inquiry. The kind of analysis 1 am proposing is siniated within a general interdisciplinary reassessment conceming the study of art; which is witnessing a shift fiom cross cultural aesthetics of 'traditional' materid culture (art) by Othee, to a multi-faceted study of different 'sites' of cultural production that fmd their foundation in the milieu of 'artworIds.' Arthur Danto established the use of the term 'artworld' when he descnbed "the institutional matrix in which ordinary objects are transfigured into 'art'" (Danto in Marcus and Myes 1 9953 9x139). 1 believe that art texts 1 cite in this chapter constitute a significant element of the institutional matrix to which Danto refers; they deserve our attention as a legitimating site in the analysis of cultural production pertaining to art.

The more specific reason for conducting this cntical exercise is to track the development of a discourse around aboriginal art in Canada that is arguably grounded within certain politics of vision. The history of such a politics of vision can initially be found in the deniai of CO-evahess(Fabian 1983:3 1) by authors of early cntical art texts. The so-cdled crisis in representation, which took hold of cultural writing during the mid to late 1980s, also affected the production of art te-; ultimately it produced a rupture in the discoune that exposed the existentid, political and rhetorical devices of early art writing. To varying degrees, allochronism (Fabian 1983 :3 1) between writers and artists has been addressed through innovative tactics that evolved out of artists' and writers' concems for cnsis in representation; however, 1 believe that an ambivalence toward the use of the(in Fabian's sense of the word) remains or is re-produced in much contemporary art writing. The continued disability of anthropologists and art historians/cntics ro 'capture' the native and allocate her into typological heworks has gone a long way to characterize the late 1990's style of art writing, as well as its object, as slippery and subversive.

This chapter details the relationship between anthropology and art history and their individual and combined approaches toward the creation of a category of art initially Iabeled 'primitive.' Debates over this terrninology provided a basis for studies in ethnoaestheticsl, which in nim stimulated the development of the symbolic analysis of non-Western art. The penod of analysis referred to in this chapter is roughly the rnid- 1950s through the mid- 1980s.

James Clifford provides a provocative model for theorizing the placement and movement of art and material culture as cornmodity (monetary or cultural) through public and pnvate domains via his "ART-CULTURE SYSTEM - A

Machine for Making Authenticity" (Clifford 1988:224) (Figure 1, p. 79). This model is a part of a larger effort on the part of Clifford to analyze the

"Predicament of Culture" conceming twentieth-century ethnography, Iiterature and art. His Art-Culture System is devised of four categories based on

' Ethnoaesthetics is a theoretical and methodological approach to studying the art of non-Western societies with respect to their own aesthetic and cultural systems. dichotomies of authentic versus inauthentic and the notion of masterpiece versus artifact. He notes. "(T)he system classifies objects and assigns them relative value. It establishes the 'contexts' in which they properly belong and between which they can circulate" (CliRord 1988:223). The values of objects increase as they move counter-clockwise around the diagram from the bottom categories (#3 and #4), which are classified as 'inauthentic' by present art-world standardddemands, toward the upper-level categories (#l and K2) in which objects are evaluated as 'authentic'. The upper level category #1 encompasses notions of 'comoisseurship', the art market, and the art museum, and category #2 encompasses history and folklore, the ethnographic museum, material culture and craft; these categories represent 'art' and 'culture' respectively. The purpose of thîs model is to visually demonstrate how Western art worlddmarkets construct or establish authenticity concerning matenai culture objects. As long as objects under evaluation remain within the contexts of categories #1 and #2, they are said to be 'authentic' via scientific (read: artifact) or aesthetic (read: art) arguments.

I argue that First Nations art in Canada has typically been moved back and forth between categories #1 and #2 of Clifford's model. Clifford's model of the

'predicarnent' of objects provides an interesthg departure point for my analysis in this chapter that concerns the relationship between visuality and textuality through cntical academic writing and art exhibition texts. My use of the tenn 'predicarnent' mimics Clifford's own use of the term with respect to the contemporary practice of writing ethnography. Increasingly it is acknowledged that the practice of writing culture, to use George Marcus' teminology, occurs at multiple symbolic intersections of difference, tradition, representation, rootlessness and diaspora, placement, and contested systems of meaning, to name but a few. The predicarnents or conditions that form these intersections are, more often than not, thernselves products of unstable or uneven conditions of power relations, rather than steps dong a continuous, transparent path of cultural evolution. In the wake or turbulence of such intersections,

Clifford argues that one does not find a "world as populated by endangered authenticities - pure products always going crazy" (19885). Rather, "in an intercomected world, one is always, to varying degrees, 'inauthentic': caught between cultures, implicated by others" (1988: 1 1). However, such 'impurity' as it were, does not equate to a homogeneously 'inauthentic' world. Instead, emerging notions of authenticity are constxucted and they sirnply replace one form of authenticity for another. The act of replacement has less to do with one autonomous whole superceding another, than it has to do with operations between overlapping cultural constructions of authenticity. In his attempt to represent this predicament of cultural production, Clifford notes, one is "perhaps condemned to oscillate between two meta-narratives: one of homogenization, the other of emergence; one of loss, the other of invention" (1988:17). Strategies for representing non-Western art and artists are inextricable fiorn narratives of ambivalence. The art texts cited in this chapter are products of such ambivalence.

Agents who study aboriginal art and artists (fiorn the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and art criticism) have demonstrated a shared desire to name and place (in the case of art, to categonze) the people and objects that exist outside their spatial and temporal frameworks (Fabian 1983). Strategies for representing nomWestern art and artists are inextricable fiom narratives of ambivalence (Bhabha 1984). The use of Western-based aesthetic judgements form much of the discussion concerning possible comprehension of meaning in non-

Western art objects in early-dated analyses of art. Yet, key elements fTom early art discourses continue to circulate. This is evident in the final quote kom Stephane

Martin (curator of the new rnuseurn in Paris) given in the Globe and Mail article detailed at the outset of this chapter. Martin said: "In the past, there has been a conflict between ethnographen and the primitive-art specialists, but that is over.

There is not an ethnographer who is not aware of the beauty of the objects he is studying, and no primitive art specidist ignores the context of the art." Contrary to Martin's belief, the confiict between ethnographers and the 'primitive-art specidists' as he descnbes them, is not over. The art texts that I analyze in this chapter provide some background to the quote fiom Martin about the current dynamics between anthropology and art history concernhg production and reception in the study of aboriginal art. Contrary to Martin's statement, 1 argue in this dissertation that through analyses of art as text, now more than ever, conflict, and contest over visual production and reception is rife in the study of aboriginal art.

In the following section of this chapter, 1 map out some initial approaches taken by the disciplines of anthropology and art history toward the study of non-

Western art. Throughout this analysis, 1 submit specific examples 60m North

Amencan aboriginal art texts to show how the theoretical ideas debated by these two disciplines produced in tum a more public discourse around abonginai art found within exhibition catalogues. For this exercise, 1 have used three aboriginal art exhibition texts and one academic tem. The art exhibition texts are People of the Potlatch - Native Arts and Cuhre of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Hawthorn

1%6), lndian Art in North Arnerica - Arts and Crafs (Dockstader 1 96 1 ), and

Sucred Circles - Two Thouîand Years of North Arnerican Indian Art (Coe 1 W6), and the scholarly text is Canadian Native Art - Arts and Crafts ofConadian

Indiam and Eskimos (Patterson 1973). In my anaiysis, 1 use the authon' names

(Hawthom, Dockstader, Coe, and Patterson) interchangeably with the titles of their texts.

Opinions have greatly differed amongst Western scholan conceming theu approach to the study of non-westem matenal cultural objects. Much of this discussion has taken place within and between the disciplines of Anthropology and Art History. As Toni Flores has stated, in the recent past, art qua art was studied by art historians, and art qua cultural symbol was studied by anthropologists (Flores 1985 :29). In 1957 at the Royal Anthropologicai Institute

Conference, the prospect of a cross-disciplinary exchange was deemed minimal.

Fifieen years later, Raymond Firth noted that "it has not been common for anthropologists to engage in sushed discussion with such other speciaiists on this topic.. . which was prepared to consider art in any social context." (Firth

1973:np).

At the time Firth wrote his observations, anthropological response to art histoncal models of study for non-Western art were genedly critical as indicated by the, respective, cornrnents of David Stout and Anthony Forge. Stout writes that the work of non-anthropologists has been to "approach and evduate primitive art with some rneasure of ignorance," and these other scholars ''judge and select examples of primitive art on the basis of. ..the forma1 aspect - and make their evaiuations according to what emotions are aroused or communicated by line, mas, colour and so forth" (Stout 1971:32). Forge disagrees with the methods of study by art historians who focused on art style as it related to European art history. He felt in some cases, this perspective %ad the unfortmate effect of intensifjhg the division between stylistic studies on the one hand and social anthropological concems with the society as a totd and existing system on the other" (Forge 1973:~). These criîiques are interesting when one considers the weight Franz Boas placed on stylistic analysis in his early relativist arguments concerning the shidy of non-Western art. Throughout Boas's research, he suggests that the anthropologicai analysis of non-Western art must include a study in meaning and fom. In fact, in his text, Primitive Art (1927), he heavily emphasizes the stylistic analysis of non-westem art in his consideration of symmetry, repetition, and decoration. The technical aspects of creating art and their relation to stylistic development are central to his observations on histoncai Northwest coast art.

Boas carries his argument as far as to Say that not al1 art caries with it meaning or emotion (1927:63) and that its aesthetic appeal may ovenide its iconic meaning or significance to its viewers.

Anthropologist Raymond Firth aiso critiques the lack of systematic analyses of art in cultural contexts by art historians. He argues that a strictly formal analysis of art by anthropologists "held back systematic inquiry into the intemal significance of the material culture" (Firth 1973:np). Cornments by Firth echo arguments by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss who saw art objects as mediated knowledge between signification and representation. For Levi-Strauss. the relevance of art is its transformation of a system of signs to reved the structure and fiinctioning of the human minci. UnIike Boas, who believed in the possibility of an individual 'creative genius,' Levi-Strauss believed that art operates only at the level of society, and its creation is dependent upon a limited number of devices known to the group as custom and style. In this way, he saw art as a communication device akin to language (but not a language); in its material fm,it formed a relation between signifier and signified (cf. Levi-Strauss

I982:3-14).

Three of four texts 1 analyze here either implicitly or explicitly identify their approach (content/context: anthropoIogy/art history) taken to the study of art. The exception is the earliest publication, People ofthe Potlatch - Native Arts und Culture of the Pacifc Northwesl Coast (Hawthorn 1 956). The authors do not explicitly mention particular disciplinary approaches, yet the Vancouver exhibition which took place at the University of British Columbia, was co- sponsored by the univenity's Museum of Anthropology and the Vancouver Art

Gallery. The two other exhibition texts, Indian Art in North America - Arts und

Crafs (Dockstader 196 1) and Sucred Circles - Two Thousand years of North

American Indian Art (Coe 1976) do explicitly note their position within disciplinary boundaries involving anthropology and art history. Indian Art in

North Arnerica attempts to show its viewers, art "through lndian eyes" and interpret "the aesthetic and ethnological qualities of the object which would have importance in the Indian's thinking" (Dockstader 196 1: 13, emphasis mine).

Although the author, Frederick Dockstader, makes no direct reference to a specific art histoncai approach to his subject matter, the following quote States in quite an overt manner, that he is not doing anthropology. There is no thought of hvestigating the deep psychological ramifications of human art expression in this volume, nor is it the writer's intention to attempt to analyze Indian character and thought through his art expression. This is much better left to the analyticai psychologist, or perhaps to the more imaginative social anthropologist. (Dockstader 196 1 :1 3).

The text of Sacred Circles (1 976), however, is very clear that the andysis of the art is based within art history. The introduction States: "It is one thing to accept

Indian culture as anthropology and quite another to apply it to the standards of aesthetic appreciation reserved, let us Say, for a Renaissance Bronze or a Han tomb sculpture" (Coe 1976:9).

Dockstader (1 96 1) and Patterson (1 973) contextualize the abonginal art displayed in their texts within frameworks of religion and magic in the same manner Firth suggested that art historians do. The following is a quote taken at length kom Dockstader, which exemplifies such religious contextualization of aboriginal art.

The aim of the Indian artist was not merely to establish a realistic record. He quickly realized that he could not draw a tree as perfectly as it was made by the Creator. So, with good sense, he did not try. hstead, he sought out the spirit, or essence of the tree, and represented it in his drawing. It is this semi-magical character, so common in Indian art, which is difficult for non-Indians to comprehend. Carvings, paintings, or 'realistic' portraits are not simply pictures ofpeople or objects; they ernbody the essence of that particular subject as well. The illustration captures the sou1 of the object, and is, in a manner of speaking a form of witchcraft.. .ritual was of equal, if not greater, importance than the artistic skill employed in finishing the object .. . To the Indian, such rituai was a vital and equal part of whatever he termed art. (Dockstader 1961: 18, emphasis in original).

Patterson (1 973) justifies her religious contextualization of aboriginal art by a rise in public interest about the art, and a respectful desire to connect with the spintual identity of the artist. Patterson writes, "Today there is a desire to recover the sense of the sacred which fills much native art: this art is no longer seen as the expression of a childish faith, but a mature spirituality" (Pattenon 1973:2). While she attempts to acknowledge a respectful change in attitude toward aboriginal people and their art, it is the publics' increase in desire for a spirituai experience of the Other which is relevant to this analysis.

The desire to expenence the Other is implicit in the introduction to Sacred

Circles where Coe discusses the concept of Indiamess. He writes: "The underlying logic is different from ours and the technology is of another order, so that we hanker after the aesthetic form and content of native American art - the harmony - without knowing how to achieve it" (Coe 1 976: 1 0). The object expressed by Coe and sought after by his readers as the "content of native

American art" is premised on profound notions of ambivalence which are at once produced by desire and derision (Bhabha 1984). The admittance by Coe of his inability to "know how to achieve" his object of desire partially fuels his project of interpreting aboriginal art. By representing the physical art object, professing knowledge of it, and making it visible in his text, Coe is able to control part of the art object, and appropnate those qualities of it which he may desire. Later in the text Coe writes, "Indian art evokes a living treasure: nature. Its aesthetic draws us closer to the earth" and ". .. the Indian did not destroy, he propitiated. He did not disturb the natural order" and finally, "The Indian lives within his land, not on it"

(Coe 1976: 1 1). He exposes his ambivalence toward his subject as he counters the qualities he finds desirable (treasure, natural order, and preservation) with the

'unpleasant' aspects of Amencan Indian culture. He writes, ". ..the romance inherent in contemplating American Indian culture, however, should not blind us to unpleasant facts. Indian hands are bloodstauied too; they knew hatred and had not mercy in raids or war. Women often handled the tomiring of captives.. .

Despite this no one can deny the strength of Indian culture and art or his mystical sense of union with nature" (Coe 1976:12).

In the study of non-Western arts, the compulsion felt by Western academics, and critics, to label art into categorically binding terms (including phenomena associated with the creation of the art [rnagic and religion] and the objects thernselves), has been a major part of both anthropological and art historicai projects. Both anthropologists and art historians have defended theïr use of the term 'primitive' in their discussions on art. Anthropologist Evelyn

* 1use the terni 'primitive art' within the context of this paper with strict reference to the Iiterature I am discussing for the purpose of analysis. It is a concept for criticism. In spite of arguments forwarded by the mentioned scholm the texm is Hatcher, and Art Historians, Robert Goldwater, and David Stout, al1 agree that the term does not refer to a lesser art fom -- conceming ski11 or technical or aesthetic crudity - but in fact is a term of "praise" (Goldwater 1973:25). According to

Goldwater, primitive art "refers to a wide variety of styles and sources, connected by a vitdity, intensity , and formal inventiveness..."( Goldwater 1973 :Z).

However, Stout acknowledges that arnongst the interpretations of primitive art offered by "aestheticians, philosophers, art historians and dilettantes," a great deal of thern have been inaccurate, and some "ridiculously ethnocentric" (Stout

1971 :3 1). Yet, he paradoxicaily volunteers in the same article, "four major methods" that 'primitive' artists use to "produce emotion and evoke aesthetic responses" (Stout 197 1:32) that mimic those used by Western artists to gain aesthetic effect.

Hatcher argues that since 1970 there has been a shift in emphasis toward the word art and away fiom the word primitive in the usage of the tenninology,

'primitive art' (Hatcher 19858). In her discussion, she considers whether the term is ethnocentric, and furthemore if its usage is appropriate given the fact that the

of neither descriptive nor categoncal use to contemporary anthropologists shidying non-Western art. Stout7sfour major methods artists use are: "1) employ symbols that have established emotional associations; 2) depict emotion-arousing events, persons, or supernaturai entities; 3) enlist the spectator's vicarious participation in the artîst's solution of his problems of design and technical execution; 4) employ particular combinations of line, mass, colour etc., that seem capable of arousing emotions in themselves." (Stout 197 1:32). art in discussion quite possibly onginates with peoples who may not even have term equivalent to art as it is understood in Western creative contexts. In ber sumrnation, she dismisses this argument by saying: "Confusion here lies in the fact that art is not a phenomenon but a concept. Being a concept it has no objective referent, and so one cannot Say what it is or is not, but only what the user means by the tem" (Hatcher 1985:8).

In Indiun Art in North America, Dockstader takes time to sift through the particulars of this debate/discussion on the use of the term primitive. He suggests several interpretations of the term primitive and then dismisses the validity of each of these interpretations. To begin, he says that the "flexibility" and Yack of homogeneity" in aboriginal art discredits the use of the tem as a category. Also, if the use of the term primitive is to regard the primacy of an art, then the various levels of custom, practice, and teaching rule out this definition; this also applies to the terni's connotation of untrained and less than well done. The only possible legitimate use of the term, says Dockstader, concems artists and diffe~glevels of literacy. However, he dso dismisses this suggestion by stating that many of the artists in his volume "have proven themselves most literate in print" (Dockstader

196 1:25).

Dockstader's ideas regarding the association of the term primitive with discourse on aboriginal art are most explicit when he hints at the effects created by the term's usage in a wider contexi than simple stylistic analysis. Indeed, how the category of primitive art confines aboriginal art and aboriginal artists is clearly his main concem. This kind of critical consideration involving the implications of the creation and use of a category like primitive art is not typical of the earlier literahire (1 950-1985) I reviewed on the subject. 1 quote Dockstader in detail below because 1 believe that his 196 1 publication foreshadows discussions that emerge some hirenty years later. These later discussions critique the existence of a category labeled aboriginal art, and the idea ernerges that such art, is but a situation (Townsend Gault 1992). Particularly relevant in the following quote is his concem for exclusionary exhibition tactics and low art/high art evaiuations; the paternalistic tone of hs writing remains. however, characteristic of the day.

According to Dockstader:

Categorizing Indian art as primitive has long denied the Indian artist a place in the contemporary white art world. He is forced to exhibit his work, if at dl, in shows which are limited in scope, or in speciaiized museums. He has not opportunity publicly to compete on equal tems with other artists, and he continually finds his work classified as something quaint - interesting perhaps, but hardly art. As a result, he rarely received stimulation or encouragement sufficient to make him really grow and improve his work to the point where it can successfully compete.. . At present, of course, he probably cannot so compete - both the mind-set of his audience and his own lack of cornpetitive experience indicate that. But it is impossible to prophesy what might corne in time, with suitable encouragement. There is a tremendous waste of latent talent under the present circurnstances, and the Indian artist undoubtedly has a great contribution to make, which may some day be realized (Dockstader 196 1 :25). The growing discornfort with the temiinology of primitive in aboriginal art discouse is noted ten years after Dockstader's publication in both Patterson

(1973) and Coe (1 976). Coe notes, "the day is over when American Indian art couid be dismissed as unartistic and provincial.. . the artistic evaluation is still in its infancy" (Coe 1976:g). Moreover, Patterson States explicitly that the continued use of the terni primitive has "touched off the fire" with its connotation of

"inferiority". Yet, she also notes that the term "is used for a reality" (Patterson

197 1:3). She never divulges what this reality may be, on1y to Say that, "[mlodems are becoming uncornfortable with ideas about 'European superiority,' and would like to find a new language to express new equaiity" (Patterson 197 1 :3).

The popularity of primitive art also entered mainstream culture through the work of modem artists fiom the West. Certain artists (Picasso, Gaugin, and

Dali) were inspired by various examples of 'exotic' art and were educating their own audiences about primitive art via their interpretation of the foreign work. As it were, this popular interest in the notion of the primitive occurred at a time when interest in art by 'objective' and 'scientific' anthropologists was at a low point

(Goldwater l973:27; cf. Errington 1994). Journals such as Anthropology Today

Both HoebelI(1985) and Forge (1973) mention a change in anthropological method concerning the impact of fieldwork on the study of the arts. At the tirne, art was considered a window to the past, and anthropologists were interested in culnual evolution; the forma1 dysisof art styles was believed to be a method by which such cuitural transfer could be studied. Franz Boas was a strong supporter of this school of analysis. He was one of the main people involved in the htic have fostered the dialogue between anthropological and art historical approaches to non-Western art by publishing discussions on non-Western art scholarship. The contributions to this particular anthropology journal were however, by art historians and not anthropologists (Mills 197 1:74). Over time as both disciplines becarne more specialized, anthropologist Adamson Hoebell suggests, the divide between them grew even wider simply because very few people felt they had the knowledge to exhibit competence in both areas (Hoebell 1985:vii).

In the early 1970s, when most of the discussions cited in the first part of this chapter took place, the location of most of the objects in question was the ethnological museurn. According to anthropologist Ronald Bemdt, museums were at that time somewhat of a taboo realm of study for anthropologists who prided themselves on their scientific approach to their work. He says:

Social anthropologists only occasionally turn their attention to art, and then usually with some uneasiness. There is a furking suggestion that this interest, however indirect, might on the one hand undermine their scientific approach, and on the other cal1 forth from their colleagues the current terms of disparagement: ethnologist or ethnographer, with rnuseum or 'cultural leanings' (Bemdt 1971 :99).

scramble for North Amencan aboriginal aaifacts at the hirn of the cenhiry; a time when many of the aboriginal cultures anthropologists were interested in studying, were believed to be 'vanishing.' Two decades later, as will be discussed in the second part of this chapter,

contemporary anthropologists who are interested in the study of art, openly suggest and support the cross-disciplinary discussion between anthropology and art history (Firth l973:Z).

Contrary to the belief of some scholars that research between art history and anthropology should be divided, J.C. Dark suggested that the dialogue between anthropology and art history may have a possible positive meeting point in the area of ethnoaesthetics (Dark 1 967: 1 32). Dark proposed the following two questions to the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the Amencan Ethnologicai society: How would an anthropologist know what in art rnay be cornmon to ail cultures? "What is art for culture A as opposed to culture B?" and, "What are the aenhetic values held which determine or delimit its fom and expression?" Dark aiso urged his colleagues to "seek to study arts still surviving in a state relatively untouched by patterns of the dominating ideologies which are gradually permeating the world" mark 1967: 14 1). A decade and a half later, Dark's cd1 for crosstdtural analysis was repeated by anthropologists Toni Flores and Evelyn

Hatcher. Individually, these latter scholars also sought to explore any regularities or generalizations of art that applied to many cultures (Flores 1985:3 1; Hatcher

l985:2). Their inquiries fkthered Dark's original agenda by asking how other cultures classi@ aesthetics in their art. The literature, which stems from this new line of inquiry focuses on intemal definitions of meaning and aesthetic sensibilities, and on notions of expenence or reaction, and quality as they pertain to the object. Despite the attempt to portray an emic perspective, the expenences, reactions, and quality assessments published are mainly those of the Westem researcher. Implicit in these discussions about cross-cultural aesthetics are arguments about universality versus reiativism and an emerging critique by some scholars concerning the implications of the use of temiinology like the word 'art' in the shidy of non-

Western materid culture.

The portrayai of aboriginal art in art texts almost exclusively acknowledges the high quaiity of the works they portray; how notions of quality and skill are determined, however, remains a contested matter. Such evaluation occurs (not always without question) within or upon Westem frameworks of experience that are then portrayed as universal. This was certainly tme for Coe, who wrote in Sacred Circles, "Americans and Canadians, having turned their eyes fkom Europe and Afkica to look inward at their own continent, are finding that the art of the Indian world, for so long geographically coexistent with their own, is of universal quality when at its best" (Coe 1976:9). The role of the aboriginal artist in society is also thought to be universai. Dockstader wrote in Indiun Art of North

America: "the basic role of the artist is the same in any culture: to arouse an emotional response in his audience. If he fails to do so, then to that audience, he is not an artist" (Dockstader 196 1: 17).

According to Hatcher, the anthropologicai approach to aesthetic anaiysis of art principally involves two issues. They are: 1) "universality versus relativism", and 2) "the relation of esthetic [sic] values to other aspects of culture and the hurnan condition" (Hatcher 1985: 199).' She argues that the area of aesthetics falls directly within the parameters of anthropology's main enterprise.

She asked: "In what way are al1 peoples aiike, in what ways are any people like some but not Iike others, and in what ways are they unique?" (Hatcher 1985: 199).

As rnentioned eariier, accepted methods of inquiry into non-western art started by questionhg human emotion as it was related to the expenence, reaction, and relevance of particular art foms by non-Western peoples. However, the result of such inquiry oflen spoke more about the researcher from outside of the culture who viewed the art, than it did about the art or the artist under analysis.

For instance, Dockstader attempts to make the art, habits and lifestyle of aboriginal artists farniliar to his readership, through analogies with his own and

Bemdt had said earlier that the two main aspects to snidying aesthetics were 1) the analysis of design and, 2) the communication of meaning through forms and symbols (Bemdt 1971 :99). The commonality between the two scholan is their search to understand how art figures into social Me. The difference between Bemdt's earlier comment on the analysis of design and Hatcher's comments on univend ideals indicates an earlier emphasis on 'objective' anaiysis, rather than a critique of Western interpretations of art by others. Hatcher hints at the latter in her commentary . his readership's Euro-American cultural background; in other words, he attempts to defme qualities of the Other that are different (read: dangerous) through qualities of the self that are the same (read: safe). The understanding and authority over the colonial Other is based on difference. By sening up the following examples, Dockstader attempts to maintain authonty over the definition and existence of objects that, in reality, continually de@ such classification. A closer reading of examples exposes the double portrait of Dockstader: straining not only to be the colonial authonty of the Other, but also equating women and abonginal peoples, he portrays himself as the dominant gender of the self. The following quotes by Dockstader refer to Pueblo pottery, Eskimo (now Inuit) carving, and

Noahwest Coast design elements, respectively.

Some women used plain bowls for food preparation, while others did the same chore in lovely polychrome ware. The Indian is not diflerent in his imponderables than a present-day housewife (Dockstader 196 1 :20).

Indeed, it may be said that the Eskimo was the rnost accomplished doodler in North America; houn were passed in the time-honored practice of working wood, ivory, and stone hto imaginative forms. Only a few centuries later, the Yankee fmer would sit around his living-room stove, whittiing on a stick of wood, telling stories, and passing the winter nights in much the same way (Dockstader 196 1 :32).

Many of this region's designs are of particdar interest to Europe-oriented students, for its inhabitants developed an astonishingly rich heraldic art. They employed momorphic motifs to designate lineage, position, and hentage in almost the same marner as the English peer of the same period. Just as the latter traced his ancestry through the families of Foxx, Wolfe, Drake, and Steere, so the Indian nobility reckon descent fiom Raven, Eagle, Owl, and Crane.. .These Northwest people lived in great manors, inhabited by many families, each according to his rank. Their homes boasted carved panelhg, coats-of-amis, servants, baronial robes, and crowns - the weaithy class lacked no regal splendor. They were the equivaient of a royal family group in the North Amencan Indian social structure, and the art they patronized gave birth to a tme golden age (Dockstader 196 1 :4 1).

Anthropologists have often included ordinary objects of non-Western cultures in their attempt to understand human senses of aesthetics, particularly if the acadernic has a "sense that some aesthetic element is involved" (Bemdt

197 1 : 100). For instance, anthropologist Raymond Firth maintains that in the decorative patterning of objects, the "skills in use of resources, and the ability to express an idea forcefully, with economy," (Firth 1973: 18) give an impression of authoritative control of the medium. The reaction or emotion that arises fiom exposure to these characteristics is what is referred to by Firth as "aesthetic sensibility" (Firth 1973 :1 8). The visual wealth of lndian peoples of North

Amerka, according to Dockstader, "made the very most of their varied nanual resources" and developed their art "far beyond the level of mere adequacy"

(Dockstader 196 1:4 1). He continues his praise by saying, "Indian artists achieved astonishing results in every medium they chose to employ, demonstrating a genuine feeling for form, texture, color and composition" (1 96 1:49). It would be incorrect, according to Firth, to perceive primitive painting and sculpture of so- catled exotic societies as a "product of imperfect vision, technical crudity, or blind adherence to tradition. Rather, they should be understood as works of art in their own right, to be judged as expressions of artists' original conceptions in the light of their cultural endowment" (Firth 1973: 1 9). The question remains, whose aesthetic sensibility is under analysis?

For Audrey Hawthom, author of the text for People ofthe Pot[atch (1 956)' it was the "vitality of the culture" (Hawthom l956:27) that captured her attention around the art produced by peoples living on the Northwest Coast. Her anaiysis notes that the artists' "sincerity of purpose" alone with "an emotional concem gives hem [the art objects] a living meaning to us now" (Hawthorn 1956:27).

This comment by Hawthorn denotes a timeless aesthetic quality premised on universai human ernotion. In his partial disagreement with these qualifiers.

Dockstader states, that "the Indian artist attempted more than simple embellishment and the evocation of an emotional response" (Dockstader

196 1: 19); rather, notions of quality were to be ascertained by considering to what degree ski11 dominated creativity (1 96 1:22).

Notions of quality are ofien discussed as being CO-dependentwith notions of creativity. To refer to the creativity of an individual Western artist is to acknowledge a sense of newness, originality or individuality about her work; it suggests a level of genius. The scholarly acceptance of this definition has implied a certain lack of creativity exhibited by non-Western actists, whose work may have more to do adherence to ûaditionai foms or collective production units. The rneanùig of the term traditional, used by anthropologists and art historians, oscillates between temporal Frameworks and methods by which tasks are accomplished. Regarding aboriginal art, Dockstader uses the term tradition to denote a custom established through tirne. Yet he suggests, "no one understands the ongins the tradition persists through convenience, laziness, or perhaps the fear of consequences if it is ignored" (Dockstader 1961:20). 1 can not critically evaluate this statement made by Dockstader conceming the fear of consequence by aboriginals, without taking into account the manner in which he places abonginal art within the contexts of religion and magic.

The widespread interest in aesthetics by anthropologists prompted anthropologist George Mills to set parameten for the anthropologists interested in the study of art (Mills 1971:76-83). Two of his main concems were: 1) the experience of the artist (what is the relation of the quality of the artistic experience to the final product - what is the artist's relationship with the medium with which he works - what role does the artist play in society?), and 2) the artist's level of skill (the manipulation of the medium). An essential part of Mill's inquiy is the questioning of the notion of 'the public object'. He proposes a research strategy that identifies the work as presented, (i.e. pertains to shapes, coloun, textures etc.) or suggested (mimetic, symbolic or contains unconscious associations). Mills also Iooks to style (abstract or representational) and the utility adorfùnction of the ~bject.~Fuially, he approaches the discussion of the appreciation of aesthetic knowledge. Here he indicates that two kinds of knowledge are purposefbl for the appreciation of art. They are knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by understanding; ultimately, he concedes, art takes the "quaiities of experience as its genus" (Mills 1971:84). He says: "The factor of qualitativeness refers to the immediacy of art - its presence, impact, sensuousness...( its) quality... we must insist on limiting ounelves to qualitative experiences that are relevant to the public object" (Mills 1971:84-85).

For both anthropologists and art historians interested in art, the importance placed upon the actual art object continues to be a central issue. According to

Kubler, the object itself "embodies ideas and feelings at least as much as it illustrates them ... and as such cannot be explained out of the other elements of that culture any more than they can be explained by ity' (Kubler in Goldwater

1973 :10). The argument supported at the tirne Kubler was writing, suggested the special nature of the aesthetic experience or response to art objects by artists and audience constituted culturally epiphenai moments for producers and consumers

(cf. Miils 1971 :8 1). A space for this kind of epiphany or discovery is opened by

Dockstader in his introduction to Indian Art of North America when he writes, "to

According to Mills, the utility of an object is marked with its entrance into 'action' and the fùnction of an object is marked by its entrance into 'awareness.' Thus, "function is essential to art, utility is not" (Mills 1971:80). the reader mut be lefi some of the thnll of aesthetic exploration" (Dockstader

Denis Dutton suggests that anthropologists need to look past what they immediately see in the art object in their search for non-Western aesthetic sensibilities. He suggests that many objects identified as art are wrapped within notions of play or religion and as such, they may be not easily recognized as art.'

He says:

That the primitive has no concept for art does not mean, however, that he cannot intentionally create it. He may describe what he is doing as 'making a pot' ... but this does not detract from the possibility of great aesthetic achievement in his activity ... his intention to create somethuig which we may correctiy descnbe as a work of art is implicit in the care. sensifivity, and intelligence which he bnngs to his task. These elements of ski11 and care are precisely what gives us reason to speak of his activity as 'artistic,' and the way they reveal themselves in thefinishedproduci jusiz~es us in cafling it a work of art @utton 1977:389, ernphasis mine).

Even before Dutton wrote this text, anthropologists like Anthony Forge cnticized the use of Westem terminology (such as the word, art) in the evaluation of non-

Westem matenal culture. Forge was most concemed how the use of modem art terms such as sculpture, painting, rnasks etc., reduce the work to categories of

The examples that Dutton uses are unusual in their perceived 'ordinary-ness.' Others such as Errington (1994), Hatcher (1 985) and Pnce (1 989) have ail pointed to the academic privileging of objects believed to be associated with religion or ritual. Infiequently is a bowl, just a bowl - more likely it is a 'ceremonial bowl.' Notions of Durkhernian splitting of the sacred and the secular are quite evident in the collection and analysis of 'primitive art' objects. which the makea of the objects do not use themselves. Despite their difference in approach, both Dutton and Forge are concemed with aesthetic experiences associated with a material object based on notions of quality. Forge specifically notes that despite the rigorously detailed descriptions, there is little theoretical advancement made from the usage of Western terminology (Forge 1973:~).

Western bias, which stems fiom qualitative judgments about the beauty and aesthetics of objects, is at the fore of Goldwater's critique of the use of

Westem terminology in the study of non-Western arts. He argues there is an implicit understanding of beauty in the use of the term aesthetics as it is used by anthropologists to describe art; specificaily, "aesthetic experience is taken to be awareness of forms and arrangements considered to be beautiful" (Goldwater

1973:8). Hence, the misleading usage of the word aesthetics renders it useless in ethnological shidy. The use of the terni aesthetics in the anthropological

discussion of art at this time (1 970s) is associated with abstract qualities of

artmaking such as those "having to do with the pleasing distribution of formai

elements" (Goldwater 19735). This bias, wams Goldwater, is one to which

anthropologists must pay utmost attention in their studies of non-western art.

Evidence of the debate over the usage of Western terminology in the

evaluation/description of non-Western art is seen almost a decade eariier in

Dockstader's text, which discusses issues of evaluation in aboriginal art. He

states the need to dismiss "preconceptions and judgments based on an evaluation of European art" (Dockstader 1 96 1: 17); they will doubtless be unsuccessful. Yet, on the following page he writes, "some of the examples in this volume are more pleasing than others - yet al1 can justifiably be classed as art." (Dockstader

196 1: 18). To stir the pot more, he answers his own question, "What is Indian art?'with the statement that the "comrnon bond held by these artists is their basic racial origin" (Dockstader 1 96 1 :1 8). Coe maintains that to appreciate North

Amencan Indian art, one must understand the following:

.. . overlapping concepts which cannot be rigidly defined.. . the Indian approach to nature and its relationship to man, to myth, to theand space, and fmally to the idea of an unseen 'presence' are al1 necessary components of the study of native Americans. This introduction is an attempt to define "Indiamess" (Coe 1976:10).

The evaluation/descnption/categorizationof aboriginal art is dependent upon ambivalence within European aesthetic judgrnent, nostalgia, and aitenty.

Hatcher furthers Goldwater's concems regarding the use of Western terminology, by stating that notions of beauty or aesthetics have complicated relationships with the terms/concepts of art and nature. Hatcher explains,

.. . it has become unfashionable to refer to beauty, because art is not always a representation of what is beautiful in nature, and so the terni confuses people. So we turn to the other great human values, the 'good', and the 'true' and use these for the more evaluative tenu for art... to combine Good and True and Beautifid, (is) to speak of the quality of life. (Hatcher 1985: 197- 198). Hatcher continues her critique referring to cross-cultural studies in art

(read: ethnoaesthetics), especially its inherent notions of art-for-art 's sake. For example, she hds terms like 'aesthetic value' udavorably based in Western notions of excellence. Perhaps her most important contribution is, the meaning derived fiom these aesthetic evduations is based as much on the imagination of the anthropologist/art historian as it is on ethnographie fact (Hatcher 1985:8).

The search for meaning through aesthetic analysis of art has focused almost exclusively on how groups of people see art as a meaningfûl part of their lives - from their point of view. Whether or not this meaning is verbdly explained or is unconsciously displayed in daily life, the desire of anthropologists to show how art is a physicai manifestation of relationrhips has been pararnount.

Examples of such relationships can take place amongst people themselves, between people and animals, or serve to express peoplesTworldview. Curiously, unlike the debate around the use of Westem art teminology, the critical issues brought up in the literahire pertaining to the symbolic understanding of art through aesthetic analysis do not question the imposition of Westem values or worldviews. Rather, they warn of the dangers of simple translation or interpretation of images to meaning on a one-to-one basis. In other words, there is a danger in placing too much emphasis on a strict iconographic interpretation in attempting to understand art made by non- Western peoples.8

Very early in the study of primitive art, scholars such as Franz Boas used comparative studies that enlisted mainly detailed descriptions of form, design, and style to analyze the relation of art to the realistic forms of the natural world. They studied how these conventions evolved and diffused through different populations; however, without an accompanying examination of the social relationships and societies in which the art was produced this mode of analysis faded from use (Firth 1973). The interpretation of meanings by anthropologists in the study of non-Western art has Iargely consisted of the description of anthropomorphic or zoomorphic foms in art. Of equal interest to these scholars were implicit rneanings associated with art - unconsciously represented by the people who have a relationship with the art being studied.

The following quote taken fiom Peoples of the Potlatch is an example of the kind of iconographic analysis, which 1 referred to above as "one-to-one".

The art of the Northwest Coast usually portrayed animal foms of legend and myth, each animal being characterized by distinctive feature of anatomy. The Killer-whale may berecognized by a dorsal fin, a bifurcated

The seminal text of critically reflexive anthropology written around the time that the Literature in this discussion was being produced was Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (ClifEord and Marcus 1986). Curiously, it does not contain an essay that draws attention to the problems of ethnographie writiag about the art of others. tail and a blow hole.. . whenever these characteristic symbols appear, the animal was intended (Hawthom 1956:29).

This kind of iconographie symbolic analysis is a major factor of public misunderstanding of aboriginal art according to Dockstader, who criticizes the willingness of the "uninitiated" to "believe anythmg he is told about the

'meaningo of art designs" (Dockstader 196 1 :23). This large-scale misunderstanding is not only prevalent in art that has religious connotations, but also in the symbolic interpretation of 'ordinary' objects. Dockstader explains,

In substance it can be said that a majority of Indian decorative designs used on non-religious objects have the same 'meaning' to the Indian artist or layman as designs of clothing do to the ordinary housewife. When she ventures downtown in a fiowered pnnt dress, she is certainly not trying to relate the story of her back-yard flower garden. These are, to her, merely attractive designs and colors employed in an attractive manner; so she regards hem, and so would her Indian counterpart (Dockstader 1961:23).

Although Dockstader intends to draw attention to his critical comrnentary on the consumption of aboriginal symbolism, to the contemporary reader his bias toward the social positioning of aboriginal people and women is more prevalent. With such a contemporary reading of this quote as an aside, Dockstader does attempt in this text to de-romanticize the symbolic nature of aboriginal art without simuitaneously de-valuing it. Through the ambivalence of this quote, one can see that Dockstader is focushg symbolic analysis around the relationships between people and images and the interpretation of their meanings. In Sacred Circles, Coe examines relationships that Uifom symbolic meanhg in aboriginal art through what he calls, "presence." Presence is the result of the "traditional amuiement" of the aboriginal artist and "his creator and his environment" (Coe 1976: 12), according to Coe. An object contains such presence due to the artist's "ability to project psychic intent or idea through design" (Coe

1976: 12). Presence as such, is not only represented iconographically (as per

Hawthom's analysis), but aiso through an aboriginal artist 's demonstration of "a high level of unconscious affinity with nature; for example the sparkling aspects of water.. .distilled into the beadwork of a Great Lakes bandoleer bag" (Coe

1976: 13).

Carol Jopling's critical anthology titled Art and Aesthefics in Primitive

Socieries (197 1) focuses on the "injustice" done to non-Western art by studies which oversimplify the work by simply identiming the objects and explainhg their rituai significance. Her intention, as she states it, is to "make clear the importance of art in tribal society" (Jopling 197 1 :xv). Jopling's intention to make significant the symbolic importance of art to society is echoed by Allm Memam who sees the arts as being symbolic in four ways: 1) the conveyance of direct meanings (art is representational), 2) arts are reflective of emotion and cultural meaning, 3) the arts reflect a certain behavior (i.e., political organizations) and, 4)

'the arts are symbolic in respect to deeper processes of human thought and behavior on a world-wide bais and not on the level of any particular culture" (Merriam 197 1 :10 1-103). In sum, Memarn argues that while the overt emphasis

of analysis is on the art object, ideally anthropologists shouid be aware of the fact that they have an opportunity to do more than create a mere description of the object; symbolic analysis of the object makes this possible.

Hatcher furthers Merriam's thoughts by indicating that symbolic analysis should necessarily examine iconography in an effort to explain "what the art represents beyond the immediate visual statement" (i.e. not just a bear, but the

Hamm's Bear), as well as iconology, which irnplies the theoretical interpretations of a particular symbolic system (Memam 197 1 :1 0 1- L 03). F inally , she adds the terms, 'metaphor' and 'ambiguity' to her list of ways in which to descnbe meaning in art. According to Hatcher, metaphor can be used in situations where there is a "relationship or quality of the visual form (that) is andogous to some relationship on quality in human experience"; ambiguity is used to describe the various, sometimes conflicting, meanings of different levels of an object

(Merriam 197 1: 10 1- 103). Anthropologist Levi-Strauss used similar parameten when he examined meaning in symbolic systems in his structuralist interpretation of Northwest Coast Masks in his seminal analysis, The Way of the Md(1982).

Multiple scholars have expressed the various symbolic capacities that art has had to offer the wider interests of anthropology. Yet, the propensity to equate imagelobject and meaning, or to jump fiom data to interpretation (Bemdt

1971: 123), tended to discourage scholars from the field of art and aesthetics. When Forge wrote in 1973, he believed there were two changes necessary to the smdy of aesthetics and symbolism/meaning in art. They were: 1) the recognition that what constituted art had widened to include naturai objects and man-rnade products and, 2) that the search for meaning was no longer a case of simple translation fiom a certain object to a certain meaning or story, etc. It had to be recognized that these objects were "rarely representations of anythg, rather they seem ro be about relationships" (Forge 1973:xviii (italics in original); cf.

Freedman in Flores l985:3 1).

A11 of the citations given above make it abundantly clear that the main struggle for anthropologists and art historians in their study of nomWestern art has corne to rest upon the relationship between content and context. The degree to which these two points of inquiry are inextricably connected is exernplified by

James Femandez's suggestion that "either aesthetic preference responds more than we reaiize to sociai structure or is itself the expression of an aesthetic preference" (Femandez in Flores 1985:36). Flores suggests that perhaps the customary neglect by anthropologists of forma1 elements such as line, texture, contrast, rhythm etc. is to ignore "vital principles of sociai organization"

(Femandez in Flores 1985:36; cf. Bemdt 1971: 105). This comment continues

An example of this is given by Berndt who explains that the "prohiberant 'phaliic' nose of the Sepik (New Guinea) may be regarded as a tangible manifestation of a dominant aesthetic value: that long-nosed persons are Bemdt's suggestion ten years pnor that, rneaning in art is denved as much fkom style as it is from content and it is meaningless to speak of one without the other

(Bemdt 197 1 :124). Literally, a polyphonie debate spanning multiple decades has taken place regarding the roles of content and context in the study of non-Western art.

Conclusion

The base of a modem Anthropology of Art stems from issues that have histoncally divided research between the disciplines of Art History and

Anthropology depending on whether the researcher's focus is the content or context of the art under analysis. Central to the developing area of study of non-

Westem arts was the creation of a category cdled primitive art. Out of the debates around theoretical and methodological rnodels of shidy ernerged the academic arena of ettinoaesthetics, for which the foci were aesthetic and emotionai experiences or responses to art. ïhe main critique of ethnoaesthetics centered on the mis-use of Westem art temiinology. This discussion was further complicated with the meaning of the terms art and aesthetics themselves; implied notions of beauty, excellence, and pleasure made the ethnographie use of the term problematic. Nonetheless, anthropologists did attempt to derive meaning from

physically attractive, and that this particular trait is linked with a number of desirable characteristics" (Bemdt 197 1 :107). aesthetic analyses of the arts in order to identifi ways in which the a. symbolized social relationships expenenced by the peuples from which the art came. Paramount to al1 of these discussions, regardless of their theoretical or disciplinary alliance, has been the art object.

Whether or not objects are designated art or artifact, their images and meanings are circulated and exchanged as cultural commodities via art texts, which purport to explain their existence to foreign audiences. It is clear that the re-production of these objects (photographie and textual) is for the benefit of the

Euro-Amencan viewers; Dockstader rnakes this very clear in his introduction, where he says:

.. . it is the author's hope that this volume will make Arnericans more farniliar with a part of their heritage which they may justly be proud. Perhaps they rnay also be inspired to explore that heritage more Mly (Dockstader 196 1 :14).

In order to convince his audience of the worthiness of this hopefd venture, it is imperative for Dockstader and his contemporaries to fix hi& levels of value upon the art O bjects in question. To accomplish this, the objects must be fixed into taxonomie or typological categories within which foreign audiences simultaneously experience similarity and difference. Art historians and anthropologists wrestled with this task in their discussions/debates over the classification of non-Western art as primitive. As noted above, for many academics this classification was an attempt to recognize universal human traits through art production, withùi a discourse of ethnoaesthetics. Whatever the category or classification produced for the identity of an object, it must be accepted by the public as authentic. Here 1 would retum to Clifford's mode! that 1 outlined at the onset of this chapter. Recall that he states, that to classi@ objects as authentic, they mut have the ability to fit neatly into essentialized definitions of art or artifact (categories # 1 and #2 respectively). This is an impossible task for authors of te- on abonginal art. First, the inability of anthropologists and art historians to agree on the primacy of content or context in the approach to their research places the objects in the middle of Clifford's diagram between art

(original) and artifact (collective). The precarious existence of the objects in this fissure constantly endangers them to sliding into the lower, inauthentic categories of Clifford's diagram which he classifies as either fakes or tourist art. Secondly, the presence of the objects in Westem institutional collections implicitly recognizes their complicated history (histoncal impurity evokes inauthenticity) as well as their contemporary existence which is locked in alterity (sites of struggle over classification).

The creation of a discourse of ethnoaesthetics, which fowsed on universal elements of art production and reception such as emotion, beauty, and quality and excellence, was an attempt to create authenticity based not on the object but on academic reasoning . Ultimately, ethnoaesthetics fe ll to the criticism that the use of Westem terminology by its practitioners biased their interpretation of non- Western art. A contemporary reading of this cntical development suggests that the use of Western art discourse in the interpretation of non-Western art contaminateci the authenticity, or the purity of the objects and their meaning.

The symbolic anaiysis of art objects, which also emerged from the rubble of ethnoaesthetics, look a step away fiom essentializing fomal evduations of the physical object. Instead, anthropologists and art histonans focused on the reiationships created and expenenced by producers and consumers of art objects.

Concurrent with the emergence of a symbolic analysis of art, a growing awareness of the politics of vision that would later dominate art texts of the twentieth century becarne evident. For instance? Patterson notes in Canadion

Native Art some of the growing issues around representation, which she acknowiedges form a part of her project of writing about aboriginal art. Patterson wri tes:

What we see is influenced to a great degree by what we expect to see. The visuai language of our own culture - the conventions of style at work in our own times - affects our abil@ to see what is before us, and the wqv in which we see it (Patterson 1973:3-4).

Despite the criticd awareness displayed by Patîerson, she betieves there still is a way to how this art, even if it is through Western eyes: "If there is a rescue fiom this dilemma (and perhaps only a Westemer could feel guilty about having a culture of his own), it lies at a level deeper than the part of us which makes aesthetic judgements, mord pronouncements, statements of opinion, and formulations of historical perspective or contexhial analysis" (Patterson 1973:3).

Here Patterson contradicts any critical reflexivity that she introduced in the previous quote which provided space for Clifford's mode1 that multiple inauthenticities overlap to forrn the predicarnent of the a.t? object. Instead, she falls prey to the trope of preceding discourses of universals based on impossible rhetorical devices of authenticity.

Both the exhibition texts and the academic texts attempt to convince their readership of the authenticity of their subject (non- Western art) and the authonty of their interpretation. In order to do so, they must create and maintain, if not authority over object classification, then over temporal devices of authoritative distance. In Fabian's terms, the authors participate in an allochronistic discourse

(Fabian 1983) which has as its principle signifier a denial of CO-evalness.This situation of denial, according to Fabian, is "a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse" (Fabian I983:3 1). The creation of temporal (as well as spatial) distance between the authors and their subject is constructed out of a need to establish duality between Our time (reality) and Other time (fantasy). This distance and these fiameworks allow for the establishment of an aura of mystification. The authors circumvent and preempt allochronism through their employment of cuItural relativity and taxonomy as foundations of their analyses (cf. Fabian 1983: 37-69). The denial of CO-evalnessallows these writers to create and maintain a fictitious objective distance from their objects of analysis. If she can do this, she is likely to believe that she is not implicated in the interpretation of the object's rneaning and its existence; she is able to carry out analyses based upon cultural relativity and taxonomic classification without question.

Dockstader is the oniy author who chooses to confiont his readership and their attitudes towards his subject matter. In a section titled, Apclthy and

Indfference, Dockstader questions, %th tremendous weaith of Indian art and craftwork in the larger museum collections and private homes, it is perhaps difficult to understand why there has been so little interest in the subject on the part of the general public. This apathy is the more remarkable when one considen the average person's fascination with the Indian of the past" (Dockstader

196 1 :30). It is interesting and important to make it clear at this point, that

Dockstader's use of the term indifference, is not the sarne as my usage of the term ambivalence. He never suggests how his audience is indifferent, and his discussion about apathy has more to do with a rdlying of the troops, than it does a theorizing of difference and interaction with the Other. He continues his discussion by suggesting reasons for apathy toward Indian art, among those are: language barriers, mutual hostility comected with race issues, mistrust, guilt, missionary activity, govemment vacillations and the non-art training of fieldworkes among aboriginal peoples, as well as the lack of education matter in state-nin schools. At the very end of his commentas. on the issues of aboriginal art, just before the photographie plates of art objects and minor descriptions start,

Dochtader provides a quote which speaks indirectly to the notions of ambivalence which 1 have focused on in my own analysis of the art texts. I will give the quote at length.

While it is certainly unfair to single out anyone in this instance, no one has quite made the point, or revealed much of the reason for this rnyopic attitude, so well as Catherine Drinker Bowen, in a quotation attributed to her by The New York Times: "1 have never liked to think about Amencan Indians. 1 am not proud of the way we have behaved toward them, and 1 would rather be reading about something else. John Adams, as 1 recall, did not (ike to think about Indians either." If such a point of view can be held by presumably intelligent, well-educated persons, how can one possibly hope to establish a sound democracy? How can one condemn public apathy, if those who would *te for that public shirk their responsibility, and remain unwilling to consider on any terms the existence of a minority group? How cm the attitude expressed by Mr. Adams a century ago (under quite different circumstances) justiQ that evasion today? . . .Perhaps this volume will aid not only in making Americans more farniliar with, and proud of their heritage - but will also get people more willing to diink about Amencan Indians (Dockstader 196 1 :49).

This quote from Dockstader provides an example of ambivalence in the reception of the aboriginal. Dockstader does not acknowledge himself as a performer in the same arena as Drinker Bowen. He believes that his writing of the text Indian Art in North America is a corrective action, or the right response to her apathy or indifference, as the last part of the guote indicates. Finally, 1 want to remto the statement 1quoted fiom Clifford near the outset of this chapter. He descnbes two meta-narratives that represent cultural predicaments which house discourses about abonginal art cnticism Iike those I have discussed. To reiterate, Clifford writes, the Westemized perspective is

"perhaps condemned to oscillate between two meta-narratives: one of homogenization, the other of emergence; one of loss, the other of invention"

(1 988: 17). The attempt by some art historians and anthropoiogists to represent abonginal art through a discourse of ethnoaesthetics was an attempt to homogenize not only abonginal cultural aesthetics, but also universal human aesthetics concerning art. However, emerging theories challenged and objected to representational meta-narratives that 'contarninated' their object with Western preference. The meta-narrative, in which the concept of 'loss' figures prominently, is evident throughout the texts 1 have discussed in this chapter. 1 have read these texts as evidence of their authors' desire to control the representation of knowledge of the past and the content of aboriginal art through written critique. This narrative of loss intersects with struggles by anthropologists/art hinorians to retain and preserve any remaining authenticity in aborigind art. Two questions arise out of these staternents. Cm these narratives suggested by Clifford represent dl spectatos' visual strategies to interpreting abonginal art? Does this mode1 of predicament place spectators of aborigind art

into one of two categories -- observer and observed? Clifford's mode1 assumes a homogeneous Western-based spectatorship that uses, to various degrees, the concept of the colonial gaze as their predominant visual strategy for interpreting abonginai art. Certainly, this visual strategy is evident in the texts 1 have cited in this chapter which are written from Western academic perspectives. These texts attempt to depict only 'objective' points of view from the ongin and direction of the gaze - that of the Western anthropologistdart historians.

In the next chapter, 1 move away from Clifford's binary predicament of aboriginal art spectatorship. 1 argue that the employment of the gaze, as a principle visual strategy used in the texts I have just andyzed (to make the Other visible and knowable via taxonomic categories and theories of cultural relativity -

- primitive art, ethnoaesthetics, symbolic analysis, etc.), is disrupted by a recognition in anthropology/art history of alternative visual strategies in use by native and non-native artworld participants. Of centrai import to this disruption is the mbjectivity of artists and spectators in relation to the role of vision in the production and reception of abonginal art. The focus on the relation between subjectivity and visuality deconstructs texts rooted in strict categones of 'us and them', 'observed and observer'. In the following section titled

Sightingisubjectivities, I explore various ways artists and their spectaton are subjectively looking at modem aboriginal art (produced after 1990). These visual strategies produce radically different texts of vision and visuality concerning the production and reception of aboriginal art. These new texts ernphasize art as process (visuai and textual), not as product. THE ART-CULTURE SISTEM A Machine for Making Authenlicity

(authentic)

1at.r inventms Wuna in.4 mmgditi~ itu museum of teut- 114 cum COII~iOn madpMü8l iM aMcUl utiictm

(inauthentic)

Figure 1: James ClBord's Art and Cultural System * CHAPTER 3: ACTIVE VISION IN ARTISTS9 PERSONAL NARRATIVES

AND INSTITUTIONAL TEXTS.

The act of looking is the starting point for critical analysis of art by writers. and it is vital to the production of art by artists. To narrate this visual experience spectators often use terminology like perspective and point of view.

These terms explicate subjective and objective positions within ontological discussions about art, artists, and their audiences. Spectatorship is the combination of the physical capability of human sight and the cultural understanding of that visual expenence. Spectatorship is an element of modem scopic regimes (Jay 1988). Scopic regimes are manifest through social power sûuctures which restnct or enhance physical and cultural processes of sight, and which operate in spaces of difference. These power structures manipulate and control "how we are able, ailowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein" (Foster 1988:ix) in everyday contexts. Spectatorship includes elements of both vision and visuality (Foster 1988). Yet, within modem scopic regimes, vision is not opposed to visuality "as mture to culture" (Foster

1988:ix); "Mision is social and historical" notes Foster, "and visuality involves the body and psyche" (Foster 1988:ix).

In artworlds, these dynamics determine a visual politic that exists between the arenas of production and reception of art. This visual politic is also at play in visual exchanges between artists and their audiences/spectators. In the specific case of aboriginal art, the politic that originates out of looking is inextricably bound to the complicity of art, representation, and racial identity made manifest through vision and visuality.

Thus, the role spectatonhip plays in andysis of modem art is indeed complex. Written consideration or accounts about art arnount to more than discursive or textual renditions of the visual images captured on the retina of the eye, they include social and historical expenences layered ont0 those visuals by the spectator. Rey Chow has recognized overlays of gender and racial identity in her work on ethnic spectatorship. She writes, "metaphon and apparatuses of seeing become overwhelmingly important ways of talking, simply because

'seeing' carries with it the connotation of a demarcation of ontological boundaries between 'self and 'other', whether racial, social or sexual" (Chow 199 1 :3).

At the end of the previous chapter, 1 stated that new texts about modem abonginai art emphasize art as process (visuai and discursive), and not as product.

In this chapter, I want to examine how vision and visuality contribute to texts that connote art as process via its production and reception by artists and spectators.

My discussion inoves through the fields of modem art texts and the production of art by individual artists. 1 begin this chapter with a focus on particuiar art texts fiom several Columbus Quincentenary decelebration exhibitions that took place in Canadian cultural institutions around 1992. In this portion of my discussion, I examine how different experiences of vision and visuality (as written about by native and non-native writers) contributed to the formation of highly contested representations of colonial history and aboriginal identity in mainstrearn institutions. The latter portion of my discussion explores how two artists, Dana

Claxton and Jeff Thomas,use vision and visuality as tools to create art about identity and place. The art that I have chosen for analysis by Claxton and Thomas evokes narratives fiom the artists' lives in major urban centres. I argue their art puts fonvard their point of view on contested contemporary and histoncal representations of aboriginai peoples, and their histones. As 1 move through these different fields of inquiry (institutional texts and individual artistic production), 1 employ a common line of questioning for discussion. How are aboriginal artists and writers chailenging and attempting to direct inter-cultural spectator vision and visuality? Do these strategies direct not ody, how spectators see art, but also whar they see in the art?

The narratives 1 cite in ths chapter from institutional texts and by individual artists deconstruct rnodernist and colonial texts that are founded upon dialectics of observer and observed that 1 analyzed in Chapter 2, and which make strategic use of the gaze (cf. Bryson 1983) by the observer as a primary tool of spectatorship. Some schoIars argue that abonginal artists and writers resist having themselves and their art perceived through such scopic regimes by retwning that gaze (Hill 1997). 1argue through my analysis of particular works of art and texts that this concept of retunllng the gaze ovenimplifies the visual politic of representation and identity between aboriginal artists, their art, and their spectators. In effect, it perpehiates the dialectic of observer/observed. Instead, I want to distinguish traces of alternative visual strategies tbat I identie as active vision. Active vision cm incorporate multiple ways of seeing, for exarnple, gazing andlor glancing; it involves producers and consumers of visuai culture who challenge the dialectic of

'seer' and 'seen.

1 now want to turn to my first discussion on the relation between spectatorship and revisionist strategies employed by artists and writee who participated in decelebration exhibitions around the quuicentenary of the arriva1 of

Cristobal Colon (Christopher Columbus) in the Americas. To reiterate, 1 am particularly interested in how these texts evoke differential vision and visuaiity as performed by artists and spectators and how these differences contributed to discussions about contested representations of colonial history and abonginal identity in art.

The story about the nautical error made by Columbus in 1492 and the ensuing legacy of coloniaiisrn is well known. For many abonginal people, the year 1492 marks the beginning of generations of oppression and displacement, while many non-tribal peoples in places like the United States continue to ceiebrate Columbus's inauguration of the Age of Discovery on October 10 of any given year. The year 1992 is specially marked in history because of its status as the 500" annivenary since the arrivai of Columbus and his ships to the Amencas.

It would be an understatement to Say that the public reaction to such celebrations was mixed. Indigenou peoples From Canada and the U.S.who protested against the 500 Year Celebration of the quincentenary did so under a comrnon banner of

500 Years of Resistance.

In Canada during 1992, the impetus and direction for sentiments of protest and decelebration around the Columbus Quincentenary largely came f?om native community groups and smaller pnvate organizations. There was little, if any at dl, public recognition of the quincentenary by municipal or provincial level govemrnents; public celebrations of the anniversary were conspicuous by their absence fiorn the agenda of the federal govemrnent.' Or were they?

In 1992 two of Canada's principal cultural institutions, the National Art

Gallery in Ottawa, Ontario and the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC hereafter) in Hull, Quebec exhibited for the first tirne, art exhibitions by exclusively native artists. Both of these shows were impressive in their size, the number of artists involved, and the extensive media (catalogue texts and

Despite the lack of Columbus Quincentenary celebrations in 1992, the Atlantic provinces, particularly Newfoundland made much of the "Cabot 500 Celebrations". Major corporate sponsors such as Air Canada and the Canadian Irnperiai Bank of Commerce participated as well as local and international music talent. Labeled Festival 500: the then Premier Brian Tobin amounced that the celebrations were a kick off for a new era in Atlantic tourism. documentation) budgets supported by the institutions. The exhibition titied Land,

Spirit, Power took place at the National Gallery, and was curated by Diana

Nemiroff (curator, National Art Gallery), Robert Houle (Saulteau- artist, curator, educator) and Charlotte Townsend Gauit (independent curator/writer). The exhibition Indigena took place at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Indigena was curated by Geraid McMaster (Plains Cree curator and artist) and Lee-AM

Martin (Mohawk curator).

Some spectators saw the Canadian governrnent sponsorship of these two exhibitions as the beginning of a public awareness conceming historical and contemporary predicarnents of aboriginal peoples. The exhibitions of modem art by aboriginal artists were to expose the public to certain aboriginal perspectives of colonial history that differed Crom mainstream narratives. However, there were also voices that opposed this hopeful scheme; they accused the sponsoring

institutions of t~kenisrn.~

In addition to the exhibitions Land. Spirit, Power and Indigena, my discussion includes three other decelebration exhibitions and their texts that

featured modem work by aboriginal artists. These other exhibitions are New

Territories 350/500 Years Afer (exhibited in various locations in Montreal and

Quebec City); Revisions (Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Alberta); and The

Critic Scott Watson cornmended the two galleries on their exhibitions but he added that it was ''too early for congratulations" (Watson 1993 34-43). Columbus Boat (solo exhibition by Car1 Beam at the Power Plant, Toronto,

Ontario). These exhibitions took place in smaller public art galleries that receive govemment monies andfor support.

In 1990, two years pior to the decelebration exhibitions of 1992, the event known as the Oka crisis took place between Kanien'kehaka warriors and the

Quebec Provincial Police. The conflict started with a dispute over land seen as sacred by the First Nations people and viewed as a potential site of a golf course by the town of Oka. This event, above al1 others in recent memory, heightened

Canadian awareness of the colliding perspectives and viewpoints of land ownership and representations of human history between themselves and those of

First Nations peoples. When the 1992 decelebration exhibitions concentrated on the subjects of identity, land and history, the events around Oka were still Fresh in the mincis of many of aboriginal artists, as well as those Canadian scholars, curators, and critics.

Part of the public reception and consumption of the 1992 exhibitions is recorded in the written essays, reviews, and monographs by the latterly identified groups of people. These written texts exist in the public domain as publications produced by the cultural institutions that sponsored the exhibitions, as well as articles published in readily available Canadian art joumais and magazines.3

Using this written documentation in the archival manner as 1 am, the exerciçe 1 have set out for myself becornes one of reading text to understand how others see art.

1 stated before that, until recently, the reception of art (manifest in critical analysis) by artworld spectators relied upon scopic regirnes that attempted to establish the authenticity or legitimacy of art by placing it into categories of meaning, purpose, and quality (see Chapter 2). Contrary to this earlier penod of art analysis where questions of authenticity revolved around abonginal art as a productlobject, reception of the 1992 exhibitions was centered around issues of the legitimacy (read: authenticity) of historicai narratives of European discovery.

In other words, a reversal of attention had occurred that shifted the quenion of authenticity away from the abonginally produced object to Euro-North Amencan spectatorship and beliefs. A principle aim of the art and writing by aboriginal artists and writers was the re-visioning of shared historicai records.

The racial and political contexts of the 1992 exhibitions created arenas of mdticultural observation in contested spaces. Spectator vision operated inside the physical exhibition spaces in gallenes, as well as outside of them in the intellectual spaces occupied by written art texts. These tangible and intangible

It was outside of the realm of my research at the time to gather data on other public forms of response, for example that of museum and gallery patrons who cultural venues became highly politicized arenas of representation of history and identity.

The written texts by abonginal and non-aboriginal spectators indicate that the ovemding concern in theù reception of the art on exhibition were the politics of viewing aboriginal people and art. Questions that emerge out of artist and spectator narratives concem the direction of intention and interpretation of spectatoship (who looks at whom, and how). The viewing dynamic presented through the texts gave me the impression that at any one time, a viewing subject couid be the observer, or she couid be under observation herself. In spite of the possibility of CO-evalnessin this visual dynarnic, both aboriginal and non- abonginal spectators wrote that they questioned whether the two groups have ever expetienced a shated sense of time and space.

In their introduction to Indigena, Geraid McMaster and Lee-Ann Martin differentiate between "Western time", which has an association with the date of

Columbus's anival of 1492, and "Indigenous time" which "will mark this year as any other since time immemorial" (McMaster and Martin 1992: 1 1). Furthemore, they argue that there has been "a five hundred year parallel history, Native and non-Native'' (McMaster and Martin 1992: 1 1). Charlotte Townsend-Gault also questions the histotical and contemporary interpretations of time and space in her essay for the exhibition Land, Spirit, Power. She writes: "These artists are making paid to see the exhibitions. interventions into some of the most daunting ethical and epistemological issues of our shared tirne and space, including whether our ideas of that time and space are in fact cornmensurate and therefore can be shared" (Townsend Gault 1992:82).

McMaster, Martin and Townsend-Gault suggest that there cm not be a uniform understanding of history; we al1 see things differently. The exhibition texts of 1992 surpassed discussions of self-contained notions of identity and particuiar understandings of history, to question the power dynamics that determine the visuaiization and remembrance of history. The fact that native and non-native peoples have experienced time and space differently also means they have committed to memory different histoncal narratives: processes of colonialism have made non-native narratives of North American human history dominant. The purpose of ail the decelebration exhibitions was to counter this dominant perspective and its renditions of history. However, in spite of this mutual revisionist agenda, spectator texts displayed different counter-hegemonic strategies of vision and visuality.

Aboriginal and non-aboriginal writers often repeated McMaster and

Martin's daim that representation of native narratives of history have too often been "silenced," and "appropnated" by non-native "experts" in anthropology, art history, and by politicai peaonalities (McMaster and Martin 1992). Alongside this shared cnticism, however, were strategies written exclusively by abonginal writers that aimed at shifting the power of the visual politic in favour of purely aboriginal perspectives of history and identity.

In their essays for the hdigena catalogue, Alfred Youngman and Loretta

Todd state that for any kind of meaningful visual exchange to take place between native and non-native peoples, the dominant perspective has to be dismantled, and room be made for aboriginal perspectives. I believe that Youngman's writing demonstrates some of the principles of active vision I outlined at the beginning of the chapter. He advises spectators of aboriginal art to "lem something about the arguments that rage around [the art]" (Youngman 1992:81). To understand the arguments that artists are making, according to Youngman, viewers have to

"becorne familiar with the North Amencan Native Perspective" (Youngman l992:8 1, itaiics in original). He Merexplains:

The native perspective requires that the dominant point of view -- the Western parochial, provincial, linear perspective -- be re-thought fiom the viewpoints of how North Amencan Indians perceive important questions of their culture, history, politics, religion, language, music, art and so forth (Youngman 1992: fh. 195).

Todd questions the "power relationship" (Todd l992:73) that exists between aboriginal art producers and their non-aboriginal audience/critics when the language and perspectives of the dominant Society are used to analyze aboriginal art. As an example, she cites the imposition of modernism's ideas of

"exclusion and hierarchy" as well as "reason and ratiooality" on aboriginal art discourses. Todd asks: "what of our own theones of art, our own philosophies of

life, our own purposes for representation?'(Todd 1992: 75).

Youngman and Todd ask spectators of aboriginal art to recognize the subjective intent of aboriginal artworld participants. How do aboriginal artists cntically view their own cultures? What do artists see fiom their points of view that becomes important to their artmaking? Through their texts, Youngman and

Todd suggest methods to control the power of vision via aboriginally predetemiined positions/iocations for viewing subjects. In the case of the subject

who can not view fiom the aboriginai perspective, their strategy still determines how spectators see aboriginal art. By controlling the operational conditions of

spectatorship, they also wield the power to determine what the spectator sees.

Youngman and Todd do not deflect the focus of spectatorship away fiom

abonginai artists and their art. Rather, they control the power of vision for their

purpose of re-telling histories and creating contemporary narratives fiom

aboriginal perspectives.

Non-native curators recognized this struggle over perspectives and points

of view by responding to aboriginal critics of histoncal representation and art in

two principle ways. The fust way was for the non-native curators to repeal or

explain in their words, the strategies undertaken by aboriginal people to shift the

balance of power in these scopic arenas. Ruth Phillips and Marion Jackson took

this approach in theu text for New Temitories 350/500 Years .4fier. They write that abonginal peoples are "reclaiming control over the processes of their own

representation" (Phillips and Jackson 1992:38). Phillips and Jackson identiQ this

struggle as taking place through sites of cultural production like "textbooks,

museum displays, journalism and television sitcoms" (Phillips and Jackson

1992:38). They substantiate their views with a quote fiom George Erasmus in

which he argues for the need to "'rewrite history' fiom a native point of view"

(Phillips and Jackson 1992:38) as part of his staternent to the Royal Commission

on Abonginal Issues.

The other way in which non-native curators deal with the very immediate

questions about representing native art, is to focus on how the art of the

exhibitions represented "new ways of looking" (Pakasaar 19925) and "re-

visioning" (Rhodes 1992:42). In her analysis of video work by Mike MacDonald

and Zacharias Kunuk for the Revisions catalogue text, Helga Pakasaar attempted

to reveai alternative visual tactics by the artists. For exarnple, she says the work

by these artists is "initially reminiscent of ethnographic documentary" (Pakasaar

1992:42), but that %ough different camera perspectives, editing techniques and

an emphasis on what is normally considered irrelevant detail, they ovenide these

conventions" (Pakasaar 1992:42).

The history of the genre of ethnographic documentary is Located squarely

in the middle of the anthropological scopic paradigm that aboriginal critics are

themselves questioning. Pakasaar's suggestion that the techniques with which the two specific aboriginal artists use their carneras to give a more significant (as opposed to irrelevant) picture of their cultures begs the question, what then is legitimate? Or as Charlotte Townsend Gault asks, "to what extent [dues]

'meaning ' depend on cultural difference?'('ïownsend-Gault 1992: 80). The relation between legitimacy and visibility becomes a fundamental part of the politic of seeing and representing native art.

Questions about signification and recognition (visual and otherwise) of cultural difference are answered via scales of perceived legitirnacy. Legitimate signs of aboriginal culture for non-aboriginal people have been recognized as such because they are "Iegible and repeatable" (Fisher 1992:39) to diat gmup of people. Though not interchangeable, legibility and visibility are both comected to the act of recognition which is what I am principally concemed with here.

Visuaily recognized signs of aboriginality are, according to Jean Fisher, "devoid of the proximity of incomprehensible and unpleasurable content and re-marked with the pleasurable distance of history and exoticism" (Fisher l992:39). The noble savage existing within the landscape as part of the ethnographie present as well as contemporary stereotypes of aboriginal peoples have been cited by both aboriginal and non-aboriginal spectators as fundamental markers of viewing by aboriginal by non-aboriginal peoples.

Both aboriginal and non-aboriginal critics, however, have demonstrated a desire to disrupt such apparatuses for particula.groups, and restrict self-controiled production of identity for others. The insertion into public spaces such as art galleries of signs other than those that are readily visible to mainseeam society spectators can be disruptive to dominant scopic regimes. The use of this visual strategy in the 1992 exhibitions made spaces in mainstrearn institutions that recognized aboriginal perspectives of colonial history.

Written reception of the exhibitions indicates that spectators consider the act of viewing art to be more complex and less transparent than previous written analyses have dernonstrated (see Chapter 2). The recognition of visual heteroglossia exemplifies a focus by spectators on not only what they see, but also on how they see it. and furthemore, how these processes change the way they see.

In his catalogue essay, Richard Rhodes, curator of Car1 Beam's solo show,

The Columbus Boat, explores the meanings of Beam's continual juxtaposition of seemingly disparate signs. In Beam's painting Cyclical Temporal Adjutment

(Figure 2, p. 1 19, Rhodes notes the juxtaposition of a sofiened portrait of

Columbus with a dominating image of Christ's crucifixion by Mantegna. He writes, "we see the image as an image of the spirihial world that Columbus brought to Arnenca. We then begin to reflect on the European 'discovery' not as a discovery but as an immigration, a transplantation of attitudes and expectations"

(Rhodes 1992:M). Rhodes interprets this painting in the following manner: As a whole, Temporal Cyclical A@stment [sic] seerns to take a position against the validity of its images. They corne to us as manipulations, nightmares and mistakes, greyed-down like ghosts under streams of white bleach that tum the entire surface of the painting into a metaphoric veil of tears (Rhodes l992:45).

This indicates that Rhodes' viewing of the painting does not maintain the distance, nor does it involve the exoticism that Jean Fisher identified as markers of non-aboriginal viewing; if anything, Rhodes expresses a discornfort, that stems fiom his gaze. Tnis contradiction suggests that the significance of this painting lay in not only the artist's intent, or the curator's interpretation, but also as the catalyst of active vision.

1 ask myself, of what relevance are the images of Christ and Columbus in this work? Why use these symbols of oppression? How does Beam's use of these symbols of Christianity and colonialism disempower the visual politic with which they are conventionally associated?

In her argument for an ethnic spectatorship, Rey Chow incorporates

Teresa de Lauretis's description of "illusion" as "falsehood" in feminist film analysis (de Lanietis in Chow 1991:22). De Lauretis writes that a "radical film practice can only constitue itself against the specification of that cinema, in counterpoint to it, and must set out to destroy the "satisfaction, pleasure and privilege" it afEords" (de Lauretis in Chow 1991:21). In his art, Car1 Beam uses visual strategies similar to those recognized by authors Iike Chow who are concemed with film theory. Beam recognizes the benefits of satisfaction and privilege that the images of Christ and colonialism

have given to the dominant body of spectators in Canada at the cost of aboriginal people. From the native perspective, these benefits are only possible because of an

illusory or false historical narrative of Christianity and colonialism; it is logicd

that Beam would want to destroy this visual pleasure based upon illusion.

Nevertheless, this still does not answer why Beam uses these particular images to

make the native perspective known. Why not respond to these images with visuaily powerful aboriginai images?

To understand why Beam uses these syrnbols, it is usehl to consider

Chow's suggestion that "'illusion' may be rnobilized or generalized for a departure from that Framework" (Chow 199 1 :2 1, emphasis in original). In the

case of the Beam painting, the frameworks are Christianity and coloniaiism. In

her discussion, Chow revisits Althusser's fomulation of ideology as "the

reproduction of the conditions of production" (Althusser in Chow 1991 :22,

emphasis in original). She interprets Althusser's use of the tenn "existing

relations'' of production as the "mental attitudes, wishes, sufferings, and fantasies

of the individuals involved in the processes of active production" (Chow

1991:22). Chow concludes that *any reception of culture" has a "responsive,

perfomative aspect" (Chow 199 1 :22). Chow quotes de Lauretis as stating that the articulation of "relations of the female subject to representation, meaning, and vision.. .is to constnict the terrns of another frame of reference, another measure of desire" (de Lauretis in Chow

199 1:23). 1 would argue that the intent of the collective project of the decelebration exhibitions of 1992 to recognize aboriginal perspectives of history as another frame of reference is analogous to what de Lauretis has argued conceming ferninist film practice. The relation between representation, meaning, and vision is fundamental to the creation of meaning within Beam's painting,

Cyclical Temporal A djustment.

The recognition of another £hune of reference, according to de Lauretis,

'%mot be done by destroying ail representational coherence, by denying 'the hold' of the image in order to prevent identification and subject reflection, by voiding the perception of any given or preconstmcted rneanings" (de Lauretis in

Chow 199 1 :23). Richard Rhodes alludes to this predicarnent in his analysis of

Beam's painting Cyclical Temporal Adjusmtenf; he says Beam is able "to reclaim the subject in spite of the image" (Rhodes W2:4 1).

Beam's subject is the intersection of Christianity and colonialism as part of an illusory and false representation of history as experienced (received) by aboriginal peoples. Using the imagery he does, Beam maintains representationai coherence for many of his spectators who subscribe to the dominant narratives of history that the images of Christ and Columbus represent. However, he interrupts the visibility (read: legibility) of these signs for his purpose of re-telling history, or presenting another framework, namely, his native perspective. Beam effectively denies mainstream viewing pleasure. Rhodes' description of the drips of white bleach that cover the images of Christ and Columbus as "a metaphonc veil of tears," symbolizes the "mental attitudes, wishes, sufferings, and fmtasies"

(Rhodes 1992:4 1) performed by abonginal peoples in their reception of Western culture. The intersecting points of production and reception between Car1 Beam and Richard Rhodes reveai multiple ways in which spectatonhips become sites of productive relations.

1 now want to tum my attention toward two artists 1 interviewed for this dissertation: filmmaker Dana Claxton and photographer Jeff Thomas. 1 begin my discussion about these two artists and their art by recounting parts of my interviews with each penon. I then use these texts to discuss the visual strategies I see Claxton and Thomas using in their work and my respowe to these tactics as a spectator. In this andysis, 1 continue my line of questioning conceming how aboriginal artists attempt to direct the spectatorship of their viewers, and if this affects what the viewer sees in art.

During the sumrner of 1998,I worked as a researcher at the Canadian

Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec. There, at an art opening, 1 met Jeff

Thomas, an Onondaga photographer living and working in Ottawa. 1 had seen

Thomas' photographs before we met. As a Canadian with some family history of NativeEuropean marnages, and as a visual anthropologist, I found intriguing that he integrated into iis photographs signs that 1 associate with the combined histories of aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples in Canada. Moreover, his photographed images, more than any other I know of, embody what has been called the return of the gaze (Hill 1997; McMaster 1996). However, I believe there is a much more cornplex, and interesting, visual politic at play in Thomas's production of the image and my reception of it, than a simple exchange of looks.

Inherent in such visual exchanges are processes of production and consumption, by artists and spectators, of visuai signs in art and the experiences that these agents associate with such activities. In my interview with Thomas, 1 wanted to explore how he made the relations he felt between sense of place and his identity visual through photography. 1 was interested in how he envisioned his

swroundings as both content and context for his photographs, and if his visuality became part of a visual strategy in his photography to direct the spectatorship of his images.

Ottawa, Ontario,Aupst 07, 1998. Jeff Thomas and 1 sat at the dining room table in his minimalin furnished space in downtown Ottawa. Black and white photographie images of diverse subject matter covered the walls of his apartment. We started our conversation taiking about the role of place in his work and almost immediately Thomas mentioned how the cities of Ottawa, Winnipeg, London (Ont.), and Buffalo (N.Y.) were important to his work and development

"How have the places in which you have lived changed, and how have they changed you?' 1 asked Thomas. He mentioned that his motivation to move to the city of Winnipeg was to leam more about the Pow Wow, because the focus of his photography at the time was Pow Wow dancers. However, it was the story he told me of how he started to take photographs in Buffalo, N.Y. that 1 found particularly interesting. Thomas said:

When 1 was living in Buffalo, 1 started photographing what 1 saw on the street. I was like a seeet photographer wandering around looking for interesting things, juxtapositions, old buildings, and signage. So 1 was working in the long tradition of photographers such as Atget in Paris. 1 like the idea of the calm landscape. So that is what 1 was looking for, it was not a peopled Iandscape. It was streets, it was the built environment, and it was without people.

As we tdked and Thomas spread more and more photographs out on the dining room table for us to look at, he mentioned his interest in "playing around with reading signs, kind of a semiotics" (Thomas 07/08/98). One particular photograph that depicted a painted Thunderbird on a wall portrayed this kind of play in his work. He described the photograph like this:

1photographed it [the Thunderbird] in such a way that you are aiso looking down Main street and moving dong the street, thinking about what is above that - the sky - Thunderbird - where does it corne fiom? 1 was thinking about fasting and vision quests and how you transform that idea of the vision quest and using urban symbols. So this is the product of those thoughts. My work is very much like that of an archaeologist. I go around and photograph things that 1 think are interesting without any conclusive ideas of how they fit together.. . 1am not re-constructing. 1 am connnicting .

Narratives constructed through visual experience, like that of the

Thunderbird image as told by Thomas above, corne fiom what he calls memory landscape. Simply, memory landscape evokes "the idea of the landscape and the mernories that it holds for us and how we then deal with that" (Thomas 07/08/98).

Mer considering Thomas' comment, 1 understand memory landscapes to incorporate differing temporal and geographical frameworks and places; they are about juxtaposition. construction, and practiced spaces and places (de Certeau

1984).

Two histoncall y famous photograp hers have inspired Jeff Thomas:

Edward Shenff Curtis (1 868- 1952) and Eugene Atget (1 856- 1927). Curtis photographed thousands of Native Amencans during his early 20" century career in his quest to document what he believed to be a vanishing race of people. Atget devoted his career to documenting the disappearing Parisian landscape of the 19" century, particularly public monuments. The desire of these two photographers to document people and objects in particular spaces and places (temporal and geographic), which they believed would soon exist only in memory, resonates with Jeff Thomas in his own work.

The photographs that Thomas claims as part of his memory landscape become visual devices that place the artist in historical moments of his own making. "The panorama of urban places becomes my property, so to speak," said

Thomas. nie memory landscape is a combination of tangible and intangible references. "Narratives for the images," said Thomas "only exist in my mind."

Yet, when expenenced together with the photographs that represent the memory landscape, the result is a "survival manual in a particular sense" (Thomas

The narratives Thomas recited as we were viewing his work provided me with much insight conceming his motivation for taking pictues, and his choice of certain imagery. In the following excerpt, he recounts the event during which the idea of a memory landscape emerged.

My grandparents moved to Buffalo fiom the reserve, which is why I cal1 myself a first generation urban Indian. They moved to the city iooking for work. On my father's side of the family, my grandfather spoke only broken English. He was raised in a traditional way as a traditional Longhouse person. So he came to the city and went through a lot of culture shock. But my grandmother was aiso a Mohawk, who carne from the upper end, so she was well to do and educated. My grandfather died a week before 1 was bom, and the story goes that he was trying to live long enough until 1 was bom. But he didn't make it. He did not make that connection. So I grew up with the ideal image of my grandfather, my family did not talk about hirn that much. When I started taking photographs downtown, I use to think he very well couid have been in this part of the city, because I'd look around and see a lot of old Manguys on the sûeet, etc. So 1 waiked around thinking what it would be like to bump into km,to know maybe he wasn't really dead. So one day, 1 took a photograph of what 1 thought was an abandoned building and 1 tumed away and I heard this old guy who said, "HEY WHAT ARE YOU DONG THERE?" So 1 said, "I'm just taking a photograph of this building, I thought it was interesthg and also abandoned." He said, "Well, it's not and the boss wants to see you." So 1 thought, okay. So we went inside and the door slammed shut and it buzzed, so 1 kuew it was Iocked. When 1 was inside there were al1 of these old guys sitting around reading racing forms. There was this old Italian guy who asked me what 1 was doing out there. So I explained what 1 was doing and I said, "Do you mind if I take your photograph?' He gnunbled, "The cops got enough photographs of me. We thought that you were a cop out there." 1 said, "No, I'm not a cop." So finally he said, "you can take picîures if the boys don't mind. Do you guys mind?" And they al1 said no, so I started shooting away. But the guy behind the counter selling cigarettes and the racing forms etc. was an Indian guy, so 1 finished and started talking to him. He said, "Who are you?" and he asked who was my father, but he did not recognize the name. So he said, "who was your grandfather?' So 1 told him, and he said, "Oh, I knew your grandfather." That was quite a moment for me, so we talked for a while and then 1 took a photograph of him, which I've never show... So this is where this idea of landscape and memory really began. 1 went looking for it, and 1 found it. (Thomas07/08/98).

AAer our interview at his residence, Thomas and 1 walked through the emptying streets of Ottawa's downtown core in search of a restaurant for dinner.

As we walked and chatted, I thought over his idea of the memory landscape. How did 1 see this city of Ottawa? 1thought about what 1 could physically see, and my experience of the city while 1 lived there during rny short-term research contract. 1 asked myself if I experienced what Thomas described as a memory landscape as 1 walked dong the historicaily significant streets of Ottawa. I concluded I that 1 could not.

Vancouver, B.C. March 03, 1998. Sitting amid the rooftop garden of the warehouse building that Dana Claxton calls her studio and home in Vancouver,

British Columbia, the panoramic view that stretched out before me was overwhelming. The downtown core of the city of Vancouver that formed a portion of the vista embodied my ideas of a postmodem city; its rails of Sky-train transit dnglike veins through a body of brick, wood, glass, and steel. Beyond this urban landscape extended the surroundhg North Shore Mountain ranges; like jagged dark grey and blue ribbons of colou, their tops were still heavily laden with white snowcaps half way through the month of March. Although 1 grew up on the Westcoast and this landscape was a familiar one, its impressiveness never ceases to arnaze me. With this visual backdrop to our conversation on art, 1 asked

Dana Claxton, a Lakota filmmaker and performance artist onginally fiom

Saskatchewan, about her life in this environment.

Her initial response was not about the landscape that so immediately and magnificently stretched out before us. She instead referred to how her "genetic memory" (Claxton 03/03/98) sets in when she visits certain "wide-open natural landscapes" in South Dakota and Saskatchewan where she grew up, and where her matemal relatives still reside. This feeling of farniliarity with the landscape

"fiom a long time ago," has been "effective" (Claxton 03/03/98) throughout her art. Claxton then spoke about her diree-year period of residency in New York City as an artist. It was during this tirne, she believes, that her consciousness was elevated concerning the connections between people and place. While in New

York she began to take note of the number of city buildings that had architecniral detail that depicted indigenous peoples in historical periods. Re-occuning questions for Claxton became: "where are the Indian people who iived here?" and "where are they represented histoncaily besides in the Srnithsonian and on buildings?' "You would never know," said Claxton "that at one point that was al1 an Indian community there.. .whenever 1 go travelling anywhere 1 think, who's place is this?" (Claxton 03/03/98).

I asked Claxton to continue talking about her thoughts on urban landscapes and she switched her focus to the view before us. She said that, similady to New York City, Vancouver has a lot of architecture that depicts indigenous peoples; "1 just found some at the Vancouver Hotel," she said enthusiasticaily. We taiked more about aboriginal representation in the city, and 1 asked how she experiences the city as an artist. Her response to this question was to talk about the "spirit of the land" and the "spirit of her ancestors" as having continuai presence in the city, albeit their "invisibleness" (Claxton 03/03/98).

Claxton iikened this visual condition of her ancestors to the people she sees everyday who occupy the skid row area just blocks fiom her warehouse. These people, said Claxton, "they idorm my work, fuel my work" (Claxton 03/03/98).

The occupants of this depressed area of the city are a very visible population; however, they simultaneously are "totally invisible" (Claxton 03/03/98) to urban dwellers without concern for social issues.

At the end the interview, Claxton gave me a copy of her video titled I

Wunt To Know Why (Figure 3, p. 116). As 1watched the video back at my own residence, 1 saw in her video visual traces of the ideas she conveyed to me earlier that day in conversation. The biack and white video moves in a staccato-like maMer through images of New York, Victoria, Hold the Kettle Indian Resewe in

Saskatchewan, and Ottawa In the urban spaces Claxton has filmed various pieces of architecture and monuments that depict aboriginal people; details from the

New York Police precinct, the Manhattan Savhgs Bank, the parliament buildings of Victoria and Ottawa and the mammoth wooden monument at Indian Head are in the video. Images of a teepee and its poles are juxtaposed with image of these urban structures. Also shown in the video is an image of Claxton's great grandmother, Mestijela. Starting slowly, soffly and then repeatedly with increasing volume Claxton's voice is heard alongside dl these images saying:

"Eli Goodtrack, my mother, O.D.'d at the age of 37.. . Pearl Goodtrack, my grandmother, died of alcohol poisoning in a skid row hotel room... Mistijela, my great grandmother, waiked to Canada with Sitting Bull STARVING AND I

WANT TO KNOW WHY!" The video ends with altemating images of Claxton's great grandmother's face and the face of the Statue of Liberty.

Mer ou.conversation that sunny March aftemoon, 1 waked to the

Vancouver Bus and Train Terminal about five city blocks fiom Claxton's studioIresidence. As I waiked north dom Main Street, the structures of the city eclipsed the majestic view of the rnountains, and the sun shone only through small spaces between buildings. The Central bus termind, where 1 was headed, is

Iocated at the edge of the skid row area to which Claxton had referred earlier in conversation. As I approached the terminal, I passed by some of the people that

Claxton had descnbed as visible, yet invisible. Some people were sitting in the

park across fiom the terminal; others were on their way to and fiom the bars in the

area; and still others were Iike me, walking quickly with purpose through this

space toward the terminal.

Al1 spectators experience vision through gendered and ethnic lenses

(Chow 1991, Mulvey 1988, de Lauretis 1984). Every aspect of spectatorship is

dynamic, and visuai exchanges between viewing agents perpehially challenge, dismantle, and re-constnict identity. The relation between vision and identity, and

seeing and self-fashioning in Claxton's and Thomas' work does not make their

work markedly different ftom the work of non-native artists interested in these

relationships. Their art becomes particular because of the visual politics around

spectatorship that each artist creates by integrating content and style with vision

and experience of aboriginal identity. The foundations of these politics of -

spectatorship lay in the shared coloniaVpostco1onial histories of native and non-

native peoples that have far reaching politicd/econornic/sociai implications for

the present. Each artist made reference to histoncal memory as it related to the displacement of aboriginal peoples and the legacy of colonialism on nations and

individuai families. Claxton asked where the aboriginal people are who

historically resided where New York City (and she referred to her own genetic

memory) and Thomas conternplated his grandfather's life as an urban aboriginal penon in the city of Buffalo (re-created in his images of memory landscape).

Narratives of colonial histories and the images used to re-circulate these

narratives and bting a line to bear on their contemporary relevance are present in

both of the artists' work. In Claxton's documentation of the expenences and

plight of the aboriginal women in her own family in her video, she includes

images of modem cities, reserves, and images of family. Thomas's memory

landscape photographs crosscut real and imagined spaces and places of his family

history; the lack of family imagery in the photographs works as a metaphor of

10s.

Claxton and Thomas use different visual strategies for engaging spectators

in an alternative didogic of active vision. Hence, my anaiysis for each artist's

work is differently focused. My interpretation for Claxton's video I Want ro Know

CYhy stems fiom my argument that she engages a particular visual politic via the

style in which she presents her images. My analysis of Thomas's work considen

the visual politic associated with the content of the imagery in his photographs.

Claxton refers to her own processes of looking or spectatorship in her

successfd search in urban Vancouver for architectural representations of

aboriginal peoples. This activity reveals an agency of intent (she is the initiator of

spectatorship) rather than reaction (read: returning another's gaze). In several

ways, the visual strategies used by Claxton to produce her art imply a mobility that 1 associate with the act of glancing. Glancing is understood opposed to guzing, which I interpret as a stationary acti~ity.~

In my conversation with Claxton, it becarne evident that her sense of vision and visuality contained multiple points of reference that she accessed via integrated moments of glancing and gazing. She spoke about the tangible and visible geography fiom the Plains to the architecture of New York City, as well as intangible and invisible aspects of the people, spaces and places of skid row.

These shifting points of view in her narrative provide evidence for the self- conscious manner in which Claxton, as a viewing body/subject, moves through these spaces.

How, then, does Claxton use this mobility and the acts of vision 1 have identified as glancing as a visuai strategy in her art to direct the spectatorship of her viewers? I will refer to my own viewing experience of Claxton's art in trying to answer this question. When I ,watched the video I Want to Know @%y,the staccato-like images (made more evident through her use of computer-aided

' Martin Jay has written that histoncal development of critical thinking about agency and vision begins with late Renaissance Cartesian perspectivalism (Jay 1988; 1993). Cartesian perspectivalism came to represent the reigning mode of vision as it combined the 'naturd' experience of sight or God's wili, substantiated by scientific evidence (Jay 1996:67). The investigation into the viewing eye epitomized the increasing knowledge and experimentation with vision and sight. The disembodied eye was unquestionably singdar (rather than binocular), immobile, and tranced in a fixed stare, as opposed to operating as a dynamic glance. The comprehension of sight in this manner provided a bais by which the study of vision focused upon the static gaze of the viewer. audio) never allowed me as the spectator to stop and gaze; any of my attempts at gazing were sabotaged by her editing techniques. In my own case, 1 did not feel that this prohibition prevented me from understanding the point of the video, however. Over the course of the video's play, 1 was able to read many of the images used by Claxton into a meaningful sequence. In the rapidly changing images, 1saw signifien of native identity (teepees, face paint on a damer, traces of traditional Plains singing in the audio track) as well as urban monuments and cityscapes (that I also identie with native identity). The juxtaposition of these diverse images by Claxton evoked a sense of rnovement or travel between physical places and cultural realities (historical dwelling in teepees and modem living in cities).

According to Norman Bryson, the act of glancing does not necessarily impede what subjects see; rather the act changes how they see it. He writes that subjects "gradually build up a conceptual version of the compositional structures"

(Bryson 1983 :12 1), which, Bryson says, "are not disclosed during the actual time of the glance, but exist on either side, before the glance and after it" (Bryson

1983 :12 1). Certainly, the rapid and juxtaposing manner by which Claxton presents her imagery forced me to follow, or attempt to keep up with the images. 1 contrast this expenence to a privileged viewpoint where 1 could dwell on the images an create my own narrative. The style of delivery created by Claxton directed how 1saw particular images, imposing her viewpoint on mine. Claxton's juxtaposition of signifiers of aboriginal identity and urban development were a crucial part of pulling me as a viewer into her narrative. My intrigue with her video was peaked not by the presence of certain images, but rather by the gaps between legible signs of Indiamess and those of mass culture 1 encountered with each change of image. Claxton's strategy of fiagmenting the screen to produce split and mirrored images creates a deeper level of narrative than one sirnply based upon viewer identification of signifiedsignified images. 1 argue that Claxton's division of the screen into rnicro-images connotes a similar hgmentation of the meta-narratives of colonialism, race, and gender to which her images refer.

Thomas's treatment of memory landscape represents his ambivalence toward overtly directing the viewer toward his point of view through the use of cultural signifiers in his work. It is true, that in images like iNSURANCE (Figure

4, p. 1 17) and Dream Emporium (Figure 5, p. 1 17), viewers may be able to suture

(Silverman 1983: 193-236) together narratives by relating the written text in the photographs to the content of the images. For example, for Thomas to successfully direct the spectatorship of his audience to the visual politic he creates based on image content in Dream Emporium, the viewer must recognize the links the artist conmucts between literal and symbolic signs of urban excess (the dream emporium), a young boy staring out of a mass transit vehicle in an urban setting, and the iconographie depiction of an eagle. In the photograph titied, NSURANCE, Thomas points to the irony created by the juxtaposition of a modem insurance Company sign against the backdrop of a historicai coat of arms that shows an aboriginal person embracing the shield as an equal counterpart to the European figure also depicted. For the viewer of this work who does not possess a knowledge of histoncal relations in Canada between native and non- native peoples, and the continued cynicism felt by many native peoples toward

Euro-North Amencan institutions, of which insurance agencies are a part, this photograph will not successfully change, or provoke difference in how the viewer sees the art, and furthemore, what they see in the art. Having said this, 1 do not believe that this is the point of Thomas's visual strategy for engaging his spectators. I remto his narrative where he stated that his inspiration for taking images of memory landscape came from the French photographer Eugene Atget who photographed the disappearing landscape of Paris at the last tum of the century (Figure 6' p. 1 18). Al1 of Thomas's narratives about place and identity had in common the fusion of native and non-native histones and experiences of

CO-dwellingin urban locations. He described his own childhood in Buffalo and his adult life in large cities in detail. Therefore, 1 argue that the images in his rnemory landscape like Staircare (Figure 7, p. 1 L 9), Moved tu 16 Allen (Figure 8, p. 119), Warrior Spbols (Figure 9, p. QO), Grafiti in Winnipeg Alleyway

(Figure 10, p. 120), and Kam Lee L4 WDRY(Figure 11, p. 121 ), are symbolic of his urban aboriginal identity. Yet, without the visual signifiers of Indiamess that Claxton's work portrays, Thomas' photographs deny their viewen the ability to recognize and consume an 'other' expenence. On the surface, Claxton's images allow the viewer to consume visible difference; however, Thomas denies that ability by offering images of sameness. My assmption in mahgthis statement is that these images are viewed in urban gallenes that are located in cities like those that Thomas portrays as his 'memory landscape'. Nevertheless, through his photographs, Thomas does offer his viewen a chance to change how they see the content of his images. In this respect, 1 argue that the visual strategies at play in

Thomas' work are much more subtle and complex than those at work in Claxton's video. Indeed, Thomas' art can change the way his viewers see in art. but it also changes what they see if they can avoid fiutration fiom the lack of imrnediately legible symbols of Indian identity. Thomas does direct the spectatorship of his viewers by offering them his point of view of shared urban environments. Finally,

1 believe that Thomas acknowledges his viewen' familiarity with the content of images. He knows his audience may easily dismiss the photographs if only ailowed to view them through the brevity of a glance. He thus allows the viewer the luxury and privilege of using the strategy of gaze in the& spectatorship and interpretation of his images by presenting the images one at a time in singular format. By allowing the viewer to ultimately determine the temporal duration of the visual exchange, 1see the spectatonhip of Thomas' photographs as a mediated or shared conversation. Conclusion

In this chapter, 1 have examined the production and reception of art as it is mediated through vision and visuality in two separate fields of text (institutional texts and individual pieces of art). In both cases, 1 anaiyzed the art as visual and textual process, not as a product. My reason for approaching my analysis in this rnanner was to explore how artists and writers (native and non-native) acknowledge and accommodate varying perspectives and points of view that arise from difierent experiences of shared histories of place and identity (narratives of de-celebration in Columbus de-celebration exhibitions and contemporary lives in urban spaces). Ail of the texts on vision and visuality 1 analyze in this chapter move away from a dialectic structure of observer/observed toward the multiple visual strategies which 1 identi@ under the rubric of active vision. Traces of the critique conceming authenticity, to which I referred in Chapter 2, are evident in these texts in the contest over the legitimacy/readability of signs of aboriginality in art. The focus has moved away fiom the object per se. The process of reading or exchanging cultural signs through art is the primary contributing factor to the level of satisfaction that viewers derive f?om spectatorship. nirough their participation in visual exchanges that deconstnict modernist dialectics of vision, artists and their spectators create texts that move away fiom Clifford's predicarnent of ody two meta-narratives (one of homogenization and one of Loss). These texts of active vision demonstrate that visual exchanges between artists and theh spectaton are not 'al1 or nothing' conversations or resistances, they are, as

Gerald Vizenor observes, "rnixed blood narrative forms" (Vizenor in Krupat

1992A19).

Figure 2. Car1 Beam: Cyclical Temporal A@ushnent. (1992). Photo emulsion and acrylic on canvas, 2.1 X 2.7 m.

Figure 4. (Upper) Jeff Thomas: INSURANCE. (1 997). (Former Bank of Montreal Building, Sterling, Ontario.

Figure 5. (Lower) Jeff Thomas: Dream Emporium. Assembled 1986. Figure 6. Eugene Atget: Rue des iVounains d'Hyères. (Collection of the J.Paul Ge- Museum, Los Angeles. California. Figure 7. (Upper) Jeff Thomas: Sraircase. (1981). Buffalo. New York.

Figure 8. (Lower) Jeff Thomas: Moved to 16 Allen (Abandoned Storefront). (1982). Buffalo, New York. Figure 9. (Upper) Jeff Thomas: Warrior Symbois (1 983). Buffalo, New York.

Figure 10. (Lower) Jeff Thomas: Graffti in Winnipeg Alleyway. (1989). Winnipeg, Manitoba Figure 1 1. Jeff Thomas: Kam Lee LA UVDRY.(1 98 1). Buffalo, New York. SIGHTINGIsubjectivity CHAPTER 4: FROM LLNES AND LIGFIT: SUBJECTMTY AND THE

BODY IN PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM.

Whether one takes a photograph or makes a film, both activities are ultimately concemed with human commun.ication. The conternporary roles of artists in the communication of subjectivity and identity cannot be overlooked in any analysis of visual culture. For many abonginal artists, photography and film cm portray cultural realities in unique ways. Photographer Jeff Thomas told me about the relationship between himself as an urban aboriginal artist who does not speak his language and his use of photography in experiencing his culture.

When 1 first started working at the archives they had a group of huit people come in with their elders, they wanted to Look at old photographs. I think it was kind of an exchange program where they had kids fiom here going up there. So they asked me if 1 would be willing to come in and speak to the group. So 1 did and 1 explained what 1 was doing at the archives, and some of them asked questions. In particular this one young girl asked, "do you speak your own language?kd 1 sad, "no, I've tried, but 1 don't." And she said, "well, how do you feel about that?" 1 said, "Well, photography is my language now, it's the way that 1 communicate and get these ideas across." 1 think that it was an important point for me to consider just how important al1 of this is. Because if you don? have your language, does that mean you're less than anyone else, than those people who do speak their language? I'm not sure that it does. But we are certainly moving to a time when those languages won't be there and there will be less for the most part, ceaainly in urban centres they won't be the. So how do we begin dealing with that? (Thomas 07/08/98}.'

1 Shelley Niro said something similar to me in my interview with her at her home in Brantford, Ontario. She said, "I'm not a traditionalist. And that shoddn't be This narrative by Jeff Thomas suggests that images can be viewed as

"reliable evidence open to analysis and interpretation as seen through the interrelationship of the photographer, subject and viewer" (Scherer 1992: 32). The discipline of Anthropology has historically engaged with photographic and filmic practice in this spirit of communication to a&m pre-existing orders of reality or influence their change. My analyses of modem photography and film by abonginai artists and its reception by spectaton explores sites of slippage in the relationship between recording and representation, or in other words between technology and subjectivity. The act of looking at photographs and film is not an innocent act of spectatoahip. In such an act notions of truth and power (Foucault l98O), objectification, and subjection intertwine to create contested meanings for the identity of the producer and the viewer. These processes of identification do not necessarily fail; rather, th:;. constantly slip and move between instances of suture (Silveman 1983) and loss, and presence and absence.

Demck Price writes, "we speak of taking photographs rather than making them, because the marks of their construction are not immediately visible" (Price

1997:95). Hence, we pay more attention to the mbject matter of images than we

considered a negative thuig. Sometimes we are made to feel badly that we do not know our language, we shouldn't feel this way. We are at a place where we can develop different ways of comrnunicating ideas, it will take the generosity of the viewer to realize this." (NKo 16/02/98). do their construction. How we understand or constmct meanings for pbotographed or filmed images as spectators is a matter of perception; diis process engages various dimensions of subjectivity.

In this chapter, I am interested in the creation and expression of subjectivity in photography and film by aboriginal artists as well as recognizing the subjectivity of spectators who view such images. Our common understanding of mediated images is aided by Cartesian concepts of the mirror and perspective, which are "culture acquisitions in the field of visual representation used to establish a sense of mastery by the subject?'(Iskin 199753). In the fmt part of my discussion, I consider how the concept of Zight may affect our perception and understanding of images in such ways that destabilize notions of Cartesian subjectivity based upon perspectivaiism.

Later in the chapter, while taking a theory of light as a metaphor for exarnining subjectivity, I examine the art of photographie and filrnic artists Dana

Claxton, Shelley Niro, Jeff Thomas, Greg Staats, and Patricia Deadman. My discussion concem how these artists express subjectivity through their incorporation of the human body in their art. What intersections exist between technologically -produced images of the body and visceraVtactile knowledge? Can photography and film express, transmit, and form fragments of embodied knowledge? Specificaily, how do changing perceptions of the relationship between vision and subjectivity (the effects of light andor the position of the subject on a perspectivd grid) affect the way in which we cm analyze and critique modem photographic work by abonginai artists?

Elizabeth Edwards writes, "the anthropological tradition has been to look inro culture and society whereas photographs have been looked at" (Edwards

1992: 14, emphasis added).l My analysis of subjectivity in photography and film seeks to overlap and make complex various concepts of vision, clarity, tactility, and knowledge that make up early anthropological analysis of culture and image production, as Edwards accurately observes. Moreover, I position my writing and my own sense of vision in a continuum of thought that tracks the release of objectivity in favour of the relationship between subjectivity and vision (Veye) in our examination of images as ways of expressing and articulating particdarity and difference.

The relationship between anthropology and photography became deeply rooted within the growing European fascination with the Other in the late 19" century and its use in this regard continued into the first two decades of the 20" century. Theories of race and colonial expansion both found use for photographic technology. The objective stance of photographers conceming their anthropologicd subjects, and the spectators of the subsequent picmes began to dissolve around the turn of the century and the discipline of anthropology moved toward a relativist paradigm of thought. Nonetheless, the analysis of photographs depicting images of the Other conthued within a spatiaUtempora1 framework of the ethnographic present.

The allochronic manner in which Fabian (1 983) descnbes tum of the century anthropologists denying co-eval temporal fIameworks in written ethnography holds true for the most part in the case of anthropological photographers. In written ethnography, the denial of temporal and spatial co- evalness is identified by a lack of a dialogue existing between the ethnographer and the subject, as well as the geographic primitivizhg of the subject according to distance between their spatial placement and the geographical centre of knowledge of the day (Europe). Photographs, too, can deny co-evalness in the sarne manner as these ethnographies by "denying time" (Edwards 1992: 7) through their regard as visual evidence of the timeless reality of the 'Other'.

Similar to the polluting effect believed by early ethnographers to be the downfall of subjective writing (i.e., published travel notes), photographers expressed reluctance and resistance to appear in their own photographs (Pinney l992:76).

Nonetheless, both early ethnographers and photographers carried out their work with the conviction that they were observing and recording, each in their own way

"The visual in Western culture is often associated with intuition, art and implicit knowledge, while the verbal is associated with reason, fact, and objective information" (Collier and Collier in Scherer 1992:32). (texts adorphotographs), their objective observations of the truth and reaiity of the Other.

Both anthropological photographers and spectators of their images based this visual economy of early 20" century upon formations of subjectivity via what

Martin Jay has termed Cartesian perspectivalism (Jay 1988; 1996); that is, renaissance notions of perspective coupled with philosophical notions of

Cartesian subjective rationality. Cartesian perspectivalism came to represent the reigning mode of vision as it combined the naturai expenence of sight or God's will, substantiated by scientific evidence (Jay 1996:67; cf. Nichols 198 1 :34). in this chapter 1 want to discuss ways of analyzing photographs and film that moves past dialectics of the kind that Cartesian perspectivalism sets up between the centered subject/non-centered subject, meaninghon-meaning, and fodcontent.

One way to do this 1 believe is to examine the intersections ofembodied knowledge and the constitution of subjectivity through light.

Ruth Iskin has noted that modem visual media (photographie, filmic and digital) "play a specialized role in the constitution of self and the socialized body"

(iskin 199752) if not also in "reconfiguring subjectivity" (Iskin 199758). If we are to consider light as a contributhg source to subjectivity (collaborating with lines of perspective), then we acknowledge tactile embodied ways of knowing. 1 concur with Steven Shaviro's statement: "Visceral fascination is thus a precondition for the cinematic construction of subjectivity. It is not the gaze that demands images, but images that solicit and sustain - while remaining indifferent to the gaze" (Shaviro 1993:20). In simple ternis, light allows us to see ourselves in perspective. We can not recognize the physical space in which to locate ou. sexualized/politicized bodies without it. We would exist so to speak, in the dark.

Supposing that it is light reflecting off objects that makes the viewer recognize herself in context rather than (or in addition to) perspective, we acknowledge what Michael Taussig calls "the diaiecticai image" (Taussig 1993:23). The diaiectical image is recognized not by the mind alone, rather, as Taussig writes

following Benjamin, it is recognized by the "embodied minci" (Taussig 1993:23).

Recognition of the diaiectical image is a precursor to acts of sympathetic magic created through the coaiescence of science and art @hotography/film), f?om which traces of embodied and tactile knowing emerge (Taussig 1993:24).

The two-layered character of mimesis implicates the reception of technologically produced images: contact and copy. Briefly, Taussig descnbes the act of contact to be like the rays of sun hitting the retinal rods of the human eye, and a copy is made via the nervous system to produce an image of the sun (Taussig 1993:21).

Taussig refers to the '"flashing' moment of mimetic comection", which he says is

"no less embodied than it is mindful, no less individual than it is social" (Taussig

1993:2 1). In such a situation, the viewing subject loses her sense of Cartesian mastery. She becomes a subject '%ho, rather than firmly anchored on the solid ground of geometric perspective, is attracted by the jewel-like dding light reflections floating on waves, solicited by their radiance" (Iskin 199758). While 1

agree with Iskin, 1 also believe both the producing and viewing abjects do strive to ground themselves, if only to fail in their efforts, and succumb to the slippage to which 1 referred at the outset of the chapter.

Contrary to the Cartesian subject who assumes a mastery of space via

scientific positioning, the subject who is constituted through light does not possess the assumed control of self-recognition. Rather, light has its own agenda and the subject reacts accordingly to being hi? by creations from sources of light, for example, in the form of photographs, films and retinal images. Light refiacts, reflects, floods, and fills space and objects. Unlike the linear gaze (and retum thereof) itzifiatedby the subject that serves to establish the self in perspective, light may corne fiom any direction, providing either enjoyment or disturbance to the subject. In this case, the "spatial certainty" of the Cartesian subject becomes

"prone to the uncertainties and arnbiguities of abstraction, solicitation, and disonentation" (Iskin 1997:57), thus disallowing the stability of the subject's position gained through perspective.

To discuss this kind of viscerd and subjective response to images, 1 want to look at and discuss Dana Claxton's video, Buffalo Bone Chino (Figure 12, p.

Taussig describes this process of corporeal understanding premised upon vision: "you don? so much see as be hit" (Taussig 1993:30). 164) which is part of an installation piece of the same title.4 1 will take a moment here to outhe the content of her video.

The opening sequences of Buffalo Bone China feature images of a herd of

Buffalo stampeding shown repeatedly in a slow staggered tempo. The black and white images range from close-up shots of individual Buffalo to wide-angle shots of the entire herd that includes young animais. The camera is positioned either dongside the dnganimals or over their heads. There are multiple overhead shots of the herd as the camera rushes up From behind the stampede. The grainy

4 Buf/o Bone China is part of a performance piece by Dana Claxton that she performed at Saskatoon's A.K.A. gallery (also sponsored by TRiBE) in 1997. The location of the performance in Saskatoon was important to Claxton because of the present-day city's location in the traditional temtory of the Buffalo. The performance piece begins with Claxton smashing Royal Albert China for 45 minutes while outfitted in protective clothing and a facemask. The gallery audience was 'shielded' from Claxton by a large see-through plastic tarp, which stopped flying shards of china fiom hining spectators. Upon completing the srnashing (process of reclamation) of the china, Claxton bundled the fragments into four metaphorical sacred bundles, and domed a red wool blanket and fnnged Buffalo headdress. She then waiked the bundles into the centre of the gallery and placed them inside an exhibition stantion. The stantion, says Claxton, served as a metaphor for the sacred circle. After being placed in such a manner, and having concluded her performance of reclamation, the china was transformed, so to speak, fiom metaphoncal bones to visual art. The performance and video are both informed by the land and for whom that land exists. As Claxton states, "it was first and foremost the Buffalo's land, then the Plains' peoples' land, but fmt of al1 the land belongs to the animal nations, it's theirs and then we came here." (Claxton 04/06/98). The intersection that Claxton rnakes clear in the video and performance is not between the BuffaIo animals and the Plains peoples; rather it is between the European colonizers and the First Nations peoples with regard to the two groups of peoples' differences in approach to their collective use of animai resources. Claxton likens colonialism and its consequences to a "global infestation". images connote archival footage and the accompanying soundtrack connotes the sound of a heartbeat. We hear the faint use of cyrnbals and synthesized sounds in combination with a man singing in a quiet chanting manner.

The Pace of the images then picks up and the soundtrack becomes louder in tempo with the visuals. Seemingly emerging through the visuals is the sound of a dnimbeat that is soft and constant. As the footage continues to gain speed, the music becomes chaotic and fast. The dnimming beats LOUD and HARD giving way to a sense of panic. We see alternathg shots of the herd starnpedingl an extreme close-up of an individual Buffalo's head in which its eye is in focus/ a head-shot image of a man taking aim at a target with a rifle, his eye too is in focus/ a fiontal view of a Buffalo skulV and then an Indian man...screamùig.

However, we do not hear his screarn - we see it. The images shift back and forth between the Buffalo skull and the head of an individual Buffalo in the panic of the herd, it appears to be stumbling and falling.

The images then switch to sweeping chaotic close-up shots of china on a table interspersed with stills of cups and plates. An inset/overlay of the skull we saw in previous fiames is juxtaposed on the china's image. The soundtrack is dominated by smashing percussion cyrnbals. A hand enters the fiame and beguis to caress the china (soothing the bones of the buffalo killed for their

manufacture?). The same male who we witnessed screaming at the time of the buffalo's death, screarns again. This screarn is different. If his image before

comoted panic and fear, this latter scream is filled with determination, reclarnation.

Moving images of long hair pulled across the China are shown. We hear the male voice fiom the beginning of the video again singing/chanting; the Pace of the images slows again, matching the soothing rhythm of his voice. Following this sequence, the man who we have seen throughout the video is pictured leaving a colonial looking building and descends its grandiose steps. He then walks out to an iron ivy-covered gate and opens it to walk confidently through. The soundtrack has returned to a low and steady dnim/heart beat.

The video ends with a video still of the head of a Buffalo that appears to remour gaze to look us in the eye. Fade to black. Final text appears that reads:

"And as you walk back fiom the mountain where al1 is lush and green. My great fnend, Buffâlo, 1 walk with you forever."

For the viewer, this work follows a visual narrative created by Claxton that has been made hmreproduced images. In the video, Claxton contemplates the ironic situation that while Plains nations were staning as a result of colonial processes and oppression in the late 1800s, certain European companies operating in North America under the protection of colonial authorities were manufacturing fine china derived fiom the Plains peoples principle food source, the buffalo

(Claxton 03/03/98). Following Shaviro, Taussig, and Iskin, 1 acknowledge the corporeai effects of light sensations that are pleasurable, painfil, stabilizing or disturbing. In spite of their immediacy, such perceptions are never unmediated (Shaviro

1993:26), nor is there a complete opposition between phenomenological understandings and signifying systems of meanhg (cf. Wright l998:27; Shaviro

1993 :28).

Watching Claxton's film, the viewer responds to images and sounds co~otativeof power (the rush of the stampede, the potency of the rifle), panic

(the rolling eyes of the buffdo, the screarn of the anonymous man), sense of peace

(the hands soothing the china, the hair flowing over the pieces) and resolution (the fuial screarn, the man's relaxed exit frorn the gated Stone building). Our response to this film is viscerai; we are "hit" with recognizable images and sounds, but they are disorienthg because they do not 'fit' with each other (we hear dmsand cymbals when we see buffaio).

As viewers, we experience a pleasure fiom the effects of the flashing of light off the screen, the disorientation produced by the images and audio. We

'blindly' follow the images; we become witnesses to Taussig's dialectical image; as viewing subjects our bodies integrate with the images in flashing moments of mimesis - al1 of which further compels us to continue looking. We are solicited by the technology that affords us the luxury of the repetitive loop of tape showing the buEdo stampede; the back and forth between the eyes of the buffalo and hunter; the overlay of images across the china. The question becomes, are we most effected by the notions of lack or of excess we associate with these Mages

(Shaviro 1993)?' We profit from our embodied knowledge of the commodified hurnan body. We do not hem the man scream, but we are able to imagine what it will sound like, because we understand what makes a body scream in such a way.

In the end, however, our visceral responses do nothing to rid ourselves of the gap that exists between viewer and spectacle. As viewers we try to suture

(Silveman 1983) our embodied or tactile knowledge to the image we see via subjective manipulation of signifien. We fight to bnng about an unrepeatable moment of fusion between stimulus and response, between copy and contact

a aussi^),^ thus bringing about personaYcoliective meaning to the image. Quoting from Deleuze (1986) Shaviro writes that, this unrealizable gap between viewer and response is "constitutive of but irreducible to subjectivity: it is the ungraspable non-perception that aione makes subjective perception possible"

(Shaviro 1993:5 1). Rosemary Betterton aiso acknowledges an in-between space

Steven Shaviro questions whether the fundamental characteristic of the cinematic image is one of lack (1993: 16). Furthemore, he asks, "is it really lack that makes images so dangerous and disturbing? What [theorists] fear is not the emptiness of the image, but its weird fidiness; not its impotence so much as its power.. .To the contrary: the problem for the cinema spectator is not that the object is missing, but that it is never quite lost, that it is never distant or absent enough" (1993 :1 7). Shaviro rightly points out that a subject's apprehension and comprehension of an image are two separate thuigs and the nrst does not reduce to the second (Shaviro where aaistic subjectivity lies (Betterton 1996:193). Betterton recognizes that for art to be accessible, desirable, or just interesting for spectators, the in-between space or subjective gap mut be readable "by others within their different social subjectivities and cultural locations" (Betterton 1996: 193); they must be able to perfonn suture on the images.

In another video by Dana Claxton, Tree of Consumpiion (Figure 13, p.

165), viewers suture the images on screen with signifiers of nature, power, and women's bodies to make up their own particular narratives about subjectivity and the consumption/value of women in society. In the beginning of the film, we see a tree trunk on a horizon at sunset (or sunrise?); it appears to be dead with few lirnbs. The soundtrack to the video is an electronically altered human voice that holds long monotone notes. Heard in combination with the images, it sounds like someone mourning, or meditating. The next images we see are of the trunk of a different tree. This tree appears to be in an urban area, its limbs severed and power lines run through those that remain next to the main trunk. The video cuts to images of what appears to be a clear-cut forest and we see close-up shots of the remaining stumps, cracked open fiom chain saws.

For the fust the, we see a human body, but it is a partial shot. We see only a close-up of a woman's neck and around it, there are twisted vines. As a viewer, 1 immediately thought of choking or strangulation. These images are

followed by a montage of close-up shots depicting hctured tree rings that tell the age of a tree at its death and spiit screen images of a woman's face. Unlike the harsh, jagged lines of the images of the severed tree trunks, the image of the woman is slightly bluned, we do not see lines on her face; her eyes are closed, and she appears peaceful.

Split-images are seen down the side of the screen and they shift between those of the woman and those of the tree. The woman appears again, but the image includes only her upper torso, arrns outstretched and head up to the sky, miming something that is thriving in the light; a healthy tree perhaps? In the latter shots of the video, we see the woman in several positions around the desecrated landscape. In one image in particular, she drapes herself over a tree trunk, and we cm not help but think of images of sacrifice. In the finai part of the video, the woman gracefidly moves her body while dressed in a gown that has the appearance of a tree tnink. From a seated position she rises, her arms slowly moving and waving outwards and upwards, and her hanas and fingen making gracefui swirls; the images and her movement connote growth.

Though she does not make any new statements with this video work, the way in which Claxton uses visual images to make the connection between nature, power, and women's bodies is unique. 1 took al1 of the images in the video to be signifien; the relationships between them did not produce simplified signifier/signified meanings for me. In her discussion of situated knowledge,

Donna Haraway recognizes a persistence of ernbodied vision (1998) that places ernphasis on partial, locatable and cntical knowledge that deconstnicts totalizing

strategies. Haraway argues that a subject cannot be something, for example,

colonized, woman, artist (Haraway 1998: 195). A state of being then, is a case of split~ingas it irnparts particular, "habituated physiognomic knowing" (Taussig

1993:25). For this reason perhaps, I did not feel that I was watching a video that

dealt with a specific topic such as aboriginal women's subjectivity. 1 visually

identified the wornan in the video to be of aboriginal heritage, but the images of

the power lines and the clear-cut trees connoted for me much larger issues of

global power and capitalism at the expense of human lives and resources.

If there is evidence for Claxton making a statement about women and

subjectivity it is not witnessed through the content of the images; rather I believe

we need to look at the techniques by which she presents them. We rarely see the

entire image of either the tree or the womanosbody. The eye of the viewer is led

by the camera dong the structure of the tree and the figure of the body to reveal

each in its infinite detail. However, it is the manner in which Claxton presents the

images in partial or fiagmented form that connotes concepts of fiagmented

identities. histories, and futures. What becomes of the tree when it becomes a

consunable commodity; its wholeness carved into parts of greater and lesser

value, graded for quaiity based on its purity? Can we Say that consumption of

women's bodies as commodity is part of the sarne conversation as our treatment

of the environment? If viewers create meaning fiom the video fiom the abonginality of the woman represented, her image may invoke for them narratives about how curio markets exploit images of aboriginal women through stereotyping them as 'earth mothers'. Through her use of repetitive images and split screen imagery, Claxton visually draws us Uito these various discussions of power and consurnption of the body and of the environment.

Udike the previous video, Bu@o Bone Chinu, there is no attempt by the artist to constnict a visual narrative. We do not corne away from the screen feeling a sense of resolution. Nevertheless, we do expenence the sarne visceral hit fiom the imagery that stems from our reaction to light and we negotiate our own subjectivity as viewers in the gap between ourselves and the spectacle (the flashing of the video images). Then, through that same process we layer our understanding of subjectivity onto the body of the woman shown in the video.

My argument is that subjects constitute thernselves through their reaction to the dynarnics of light found in the gap or in-between space between viewer and spectacle, and that these subjectivities are necessarily fractured.' Seen in this way, images of the body are not evidence for a holistic reality of the person.

Furthemore, they cm not be representative of a culture as they were in earlier ethnographie contexts. No longer can we look at bodies as bounded subjects in

' Ruth Iskin writes: ". ..more than rnerely fracturing the self, the regime of light utterly disperses its possibility" (Iskin 199757). geomeûic perspective, or simply in space and tirne; we have to consider their multiple, sirnultaneous, and fleeting qualities of existence. Finally, the

constitution of the spectator subjectivity according to light means that each

viewing is an individual reconstruction that need not be placed onto a

temporaUspatial grid used for creating and maintaining allochronic discourses

(Fabian 1983).

Shelley Niro is an artist who has explored the concept of subjectivity in

most of her work. Niro is well known for her popular series of photographs titîed

Mohavkr in Beehives (Figure 14, p. 166) in which she features her sisters and

mother in various activities fiom dancing in front of the Joseph Brant statue in

Brantford, Ontario to donning beehive hairdos and heavy makeup and then posing

with 'attitude.' In a photograph separate fiom this series she depicts her mother

laying across an AMC car called the "Rebel" (Figure 15, p. 166). In dl of these

photograpbs Niro subtly questions the nature of stereotyping the bodies of

abonginal women; however, in so doing she comments on other conditions of

cornmodification and visual images of women in general.8

Niro's work ranges fiom film shorts to mixed media installations in which

engages with the complex realities of being an aboriginal woman today, including

life in an urban centre and everyday relationships between family and fkiends to gender and racial stereotypes. Heavily infiuenced by pop culture and a strong sense of humor, Niro creates images that cross back and forth over boundaries of the real and the irnaginary. She fiequently appears in her photographs alongside female members of her own family, notably her sisters, mother, and daughter.

Niro's depiction of herself makes the historically separate bodies of the artist and subject interrelated and cornplex. Her photographs question how the body as subject and the body as artist is represented. A series of triptychs she exhibited as part of a show titled Sense of Selfin 1993 at the London Regionai Art Gallery in

Ontario incorporates these concepts. This on-going senes of photographie triptychs follows a formula: the first photograph depicts Niro in costume (she appears as a Star Trek person, Matilyn Monroe, the Statue of Liberty, a "Mohawk worker", Snow White and Elvis, among others), the second photograph is either a contemporary or historical image of a family member (usuaily female) and the third photograph is of the artist in plain clothing in various poses naturd to the human body (standing with arms on hips for example). The juxtaposition of Niro in pop culture costume, pictwes of her family and then Niro in plain clothing challenges her viewers to consider how subjectivity is constructed through private and public bodies.

------Niro's latest narrative film, Honey rnoccarin (1 998) a feature length comedy, specifically deals with the life and identity of a male character and his comrnunity . Ln the piece titled 500 Year Itch (Figure 16, p. 167), which features Niro costumed as Marilyn Monroe, the artist said her choice to use Monroe as a persona stemmed fiom how aboriginal women related to non-aboriginal Western icons. In the foilowing excerpt Niro talks about her choice of Monroe for this senes.

1was bringing out how Marilyn is always held up as the great beauty, and how the beauty she possessed is way beyond anythmg a lot of people 1 know could ever attain or even corne close to. Then, at the same the, 1 was thinking about some similarities, how my mother and Marilyn would have been the sarne age, and how they both Iived in North America, but at the sarne time they're so different that there's no comection there at dl. There's nothing there that draws a connecting line between Marilyn Monroe and my mother. So when 1 was working on that piece, 1 had ail these thoughts going through my head about the ideal of beauty and the place of wornen in society and then there's me, even Merremoved than my mother is (Abbott n.d. unp.)

The impact of 500 Year Ilch is greater if we consider it not in isolation, but as part of the series created by Niro. Viewed in singularity, each triptych has a shailow narrative of mis-recognized or misappropriated identity. Within these narratives are clever references by Niro to historical dilemrnas or events that may be linked if only metaphoricaily to interaction between abonginal and non- aboriginal peoples. Although each individual photograph has a story behind it, such as the exarnpie 1have quoted above (Niro also told me that she chose some costumes "just because they fity'(Niro 16/02/98)), a consideration of the entire series of tnptychs is suggestive of the many layers of identity that one individual can experience in their lifetime, nom public identities donned for particular roles at particular times to those experienced through the process of growing up and becoming old. Niro and her family appear in photographs that suggest multiple narratives for any number of life expenences. Niro's use of the body to connote changing subjectivity is prudent. If we look at the example of the piece, This Land is Mime Land (Figure 17, p. 168), we recognize Niro not only as a mime by her coshime but also by her body language (this is also evident in her Marilyn

Monroe pose). The second picture of the little girl shows a young child taking delight in having her photograph taken; her hands are clinched in front of her body, her shoulders raised as if the photographer caught her mid-giggle and clap.

The final photograph is of Niro again. This time she appears in casual contemporary clothing, her back facing the camera and her hands on her hips. Her body position evokes confidence, even slight defiance. For me, this Iast photograph is the most dangerous or slippery in the triptych.

The fim photographs of Niro in costume make us consider the notion of imposedfake identity. If we do not recognize the people in the second photographs, the photographs themselves remain at the level of document and the people remain meaningful to us only in this context. However, in spite of the fact that the third photographs Niro has taken of herself reproduce the body of the artist, they do not necessarily represent it. Niro has made it almost impossible for us to presume the constitution of herself as subject. Furthexmore, spectators may feel particularly reluctant to do so given her critical use of coshimed and real people next to these images of herself, and the awareness they have created for us conceming our own subjectivity and identity.

Jeff Thomas is another photographer who purposefully examines the creation of subjectivity through his photographie depiction of the body. For

Thomas, the body in the landscape is a starting point for most of his work. His early work focused on landscapes that were devoid of people. He identifies these photographs as weil as recent landscape images as memory Iandscape (see

Chapter 3). His reasons for not photographing people earlier in his career revolved around the historical relationship between anthropological pho tography and aboriginal peoples. As Thomas says, "1 wasn't cornfortable with the idea that photography came out of being able to look at people and make an image of them resulting in an object to look at, to hold, to possess" (Thomas 07/08/98).

Thomas' interest in photographing people developed out of his focus on different places and spaces interpreted as cultural landscapes. For example, his first works that looked at the body actually came out of a series of photographs initially meant to explore 'Vie Pow Wow grounds and the land that the dancers corne £ioomn (Thomas 07/08/98) (Figures 18-22, pp. 169-172). When 1 interviewed Thomas about this work, he said that there was one point in pdcuiar that made him consider his own relationship to the Pow Wow, and how he constnicted his subjectivity as a photographer and as an aboriginal person. From this point of contention, he set about redefining his relationship to the people he was photographing and the Pow Wow itself. It is worthwhile quoting at some length Thomas's description of these events.

1 had my first exhibition (of the Pow Wow photographs) in 1984, and I went to the opening in London, Ontario. There were reporters there and I was asked a question that I couldn't answer about the Pow Wow and 1 realized how little 1 knew about the Pow Wow, 1 was just reacting visually to it, which wasn't a bad thing. But 1 realized if I really wanted to photograph it, 1 had to know where it comes fiom. So when I had the oppomuiity to go to Winnipeg, that's why 1went; because 1 figured that 1 would photograph Pow Wows evenhially and redly get an understanding of what the impact of the landscape had on the event. The ksttirne 1 went to a Pow Wow on reserve I think it was Sioux Valley or Long Plains. You go on reserve, you approach the circle and you see al1 the campgrounds around the permanent circle and al1 the families that are there and basically no tourists at al1 - it really affects you. As opposed to Pow Wows in the east that are much commerciaiized. When i was there, 1reaiized that I was being energized fiom the energy that comes from the earth that perpetuates the dance itself. Just brfore I left in 1991,1 was working for the Abonginai Justice Inquiry, and they had a Pow Wow there at the time of the A.F.N. elections. I was photographing this Pow Wow, 1ended up on the dance floor, 1 was nght next to this dnun,and they extended this one Song. Every now and then one of the dancers would come up to the drum and blow his whistie over it. When they would come up, they would bmh by me, so when they would come up, 1 could hear the leather, smell it and hear the bustle. 1 don't know if 1 heard the bustle or not, but it sure felt like it. So being that close to them, 1 realized that 1had witnessed what I had come out to Manitoba for. And at that moment, I'd never had any ambition to be a damer, but 1 really got a sense of what it was about. (Thomas 07/08/98).

Here Jeff Thomas speaks directly to the relationship between his photographie practices and the subjective accumulation of experience, of embodied knowledge. Physically rnoving his own body fiom Buffalo, N.Y. to

Winnipeg, Manitoba and visuaily expenencing the Pow Wow in both places set

Thomas up for his epiphenai moment that combined what he saw through the viewfinder of his camera with the physical feeling of the dancers brushing by him and the smells and sounds that accompanied the whole event.

The images Thomas produces of Pow Wow dancers range fiom partial body shots that depict certain body parts or pieces of regalia, to complete body shots of the dancers both in and out of dance regalia.g According to Thomas, his depiction of the body in these ways developed over time and historieal Plains artwork influences his techniques. He explained this process to me in the following way:

In her senes titied Fringe Momentum, Patricia Deadman has used photography as the starting point of representing the dancers at a Pow Wow held on the Six Nations reserve in Ontario. She then takes the small sized photograph (10 x 15 cm) of the dancers and removes the emulsion fiom the photographie paper, eflectively rernoving the background images fiom that of the dancer. With a series of iayers of latex washes and coloured wax, Deadrnan rebuilds the surface of the photographs around the dancer with gesturai lines that evoke a sense of movement and momentum. These heavily manipulated, almost miniature pieces do not concentrate on Pow Wow dancers in the same way Seff Thomas' photographs focus on details. However, like Thomas, Deadman also chooses to only ailow reveal partial images of the dancers' bodies to the viewer. The purposeful blocking of the images with the swirls of paint may hstrate the viewer because of the lack of contexnial references for the image. Perhaps this is Deadman's point. For the viewer to undentand the entire dance takes much more tirne and experience than could ever be gained fiom looking at a photograph, no matter how accurate the image is. When I did start photographing people, 1 would never just take a pichue of part of them. If I did a series of somebody, 1 would aiways have to do a photograph of them full figure, so that their whole personality was seen. From that point, 1codd break it down and show a hand with a shield or half of a face or the torso, or some aspect of beadwork or omamentation. I was kind of superstitious in a way. As long as there was a full person to begin with, that was my priority. 1think that 1 actually read sometirne about the way these old Plains warriors used to use pictographic drawings and how everything about a person was represented in their drawings, it was ail there. They believed there was power in that. So, if you are going to be respecthl of the power of the person you are depicting, you show al1 of them.

The work of Edward Curtis is never very far fiom any conversation about

Jeff Thomas's photographs. This is because as a photographer Thomas engages with Edward Curtis on an intellectual level as well as an artistic/documentary one.

Despite this intersection, Thomas's photographs differ greatly fiorn those by

Curtis because of his depiction of bodies in their cultural and physicai landscapes, whereas Curtis took great pains to delete any reference to the modem surroundings of his subjects. Curtis often left large spaces of his photographs blank in such a way that there are large black or white spaces in the photographs.

In the manner that Curtis saw his subjects through a positivist lem of appreciation, the people in his photographs, not their surroundings were the most important part of the image. 1told Thomas 1 thought of spaces that surrounded

Curtis's subjects as negative space (the antithesis of the positive image of the subject). What, then, did that negative space of the photograph mean for Thomas in reference to the Unaged person's subjectivity? In his response to my question, Thomas referred to the way Curtis believed that aboriginal people themselves would not vanish, but that their customs would. He also pointed out how Curtis pondered the interaction between his photographs and future generations of aboriginal peoples. About his own interaction with the negative spaces in the work of Curtis, Thomas said,

I figure my responsibility is to corne back and fil1 in that space that he left empty or clear in his photographs. 1 also thought - when Curtis was taking to people and they were descnbing concepts of spirituaiity as Curtis says, the Great Spirit, or the Great Power - "how do you give that Spirit physical fom?'You can't. 1 think he attempted to get at that spintual element of the people he was photographïng. So 1 took that as a challenge conceming how to deai with that space. How do you deai with a negative that in this case, when you look at &le black, there is nothing there? What do you put on it? And what does that space then do? So the idea for me is that you begin to tell a story from that (Thomas 07/08/98).

1 would argue that the spintuality to which Thomas refers in the above quote is constitutive of subjectivity. The areas that Curtis leaves blank (or as 1 have said negative) around the subject are typicdly filled by Thomas with images of the landscape in which he photographs the body. These bodies in context provide visual departue poinb for Thomas's viewers, from which they may or may not be able to engage their own forms of embodied knowledge in their interpretation of the image. In the case of Thomas's partial images of the body, viewers rely on their ability to interpret the positive and negative spaces produced by the effects of light in the darkroom and the contact/copy process I described earlier.

The last series of work I want to discuss by Jeff Thomas as part of rny focus on subjectivity and the body is an ongoing body of work in which Thomas has documented his son Bear in different urban environrnents. This series is unique for a few reasons. Firstly, the vast majonty of modem photographs taken by abonginal photographers take adults as their subject~.'~The dynamic of these images between photographer and subject presumes adult consent and mutuai understanding of the purpose for the photograph. ' ' We can assume, for example. that Shelley Niro's sisters who pose for her Mohawks in Beehives series have their own reasons for going dong with Niro's ideas for taking the images. However, in the case of Jeff Thomas taking images of his son in different urban landscapes, we witness a process of a father transferthg his own ideas of subjectivity ont0 that of his son. Thomas told me, "1 use rny son as a way of putting myself into the

Iandscape. 1 am saying that there is nothing here that says that there were Indian people here before, or even that had been by there recently. 1 use Bear as a way to leave a mark on the landscape" (Thomas 07/08/98). Thomas' identity as an urban

'O Similar to Jeff Thomas, Shelley Niro has used her daughter in her images. Greg Staats has also focused on youth in his photographie work, but not at the level of documentary that Jeff Thomas has punued with his images of his son, Bear. '' Thomas told me that, on two occasions separated by a couple of years, while he was taking photographs of Bear, people either directly cornmented to him or Indian is a major part of his focus on creating photographs that document life as an aboriginal penon in an urban environment. The photographs are not ody a

way of recognizing only contemporary subjectivity but also embodied experiences of the landscape.

While heaiing after a major car accident as a young adult, Thomas contemplated his relationship to the traditionai longhouse cornrnunity of the Six

Nations reserve. He found himself disillusioned with what this community meant

to him and how he saw himself as, he says, "an urban Indian." The process by

which he confinneci for himself his urban identity has been crucial to his

photographie practice and is intrinsic to his motivation for having his son as the

subject for his work. It is worth quoting hm at length in his own words.

1 had been going around to different communities and talking to chiefs and bringing up issues like how do you ded with having these old time ideas in your mind and Iive in the modem world and how do you reconcile these two frameworks? 1 realized that after a certain point it's not about going back to that, it's about defining a new space. And of course, I'm a product of that evolution, of the urban Indian. 1 did not ask to be there, but 1have to deai with being bom and raised in the city. So what do 1 do? Do 1 have a constant fight with this my whole life or do I fmd a way to deal with these elements that make up who I am? So that's been the driving force behind the work. 1 want my son to look and see the process that 1 have gone through and hopefully it will help him deal with his life. Certainly his life is different fiom mine; he did not grow up around the same people 1 did. So the idea is not about staying in one place. It is always about moving and adapting. Cenainly, that has ken the

whispered under their breath comments to the effect that he was exploiting the child. history of First Nations peoples since Europeans mived. It has been about assimilating certain aspects and culture continues to grow onward. Certainly, the Iroquoian people in the 18" century were nothing like the ones Ui the 16" century. That is always how it has been. However, when you have this compartmentalized life, everythmg is shufned into these litiie areas and it is seemingly easily explained. 1just do not think that you can do that. It is the exploration of the new landscape that really determines how well we are going to survive it. We have to become explorers, and if you do not, you will vanish. (Thomas 07/08/98).

The collection of images Thomas has taken of his son resonates with several points made by the artist in the above quote. Certainly, the "new landscape" to which Thomas refers is the urban landscape within which we see

Bear. Take the photograph titled Culture Revolution (Figure 23, p. 173) that depicts Bear as a Iittle boy standing with a baseball hat that has on it a reproduction of Edward Curtis' photograph of the man called Two Moons. ïhis image urges us to consider the relationship between this cornpliant boy having his photograph taken with the deeply complex meaning of the word culture and the sheer power of the word revolution. These spray-painted words on the wall in front of which Bear stands are evidence of a previous act of defying order.

However, what does the body of Bear mean for the viewer of this photograph?

Innocence? Hope? Strength? Resistance? Does it orient or disonent the viewer conceming the elements of urban existence that partly make up the identity of Jeff

Thomas and, by extension, that of his son Bear? In terms of his own process of identity creation, Thomas notes how he tumed to the traditional longhouse community to reflect on his existence. In the photograph I Don 't Hove to be a Cowboy (Figure 24, p. 1 74) we see Bear's image jwtaposed with another set of identity oppositions - the cowboyflndian didectic of consumer culture. In between two images of Bear and a window featuring a mannequin wearing a cowboy outfit is an image of spray-painted -ti on a cernent structure. In viewing this photograph, we see what Thomas figures his son's greatest challenges are in creating his own identity and constituting his own subj ectivity : consumer culture, peer pressure, violence, stereotyping. By titling this photographie assemblage with a negative, Thomas leaves open possibilities for Bear to choose his own identity. Rather than saying what Thomas believes

Bear to be at present and what he may grow to be in the fiiture, he empowers the boy with choice.

In the images of Bear as a young child, we see him looking into the camera. Moreover, I would argue, the boy is looking directly at his father. As

Bear grows older into a confident young adult, he continues to look straight into the carnera lem showing little emotion and in the latter photographs his eyes are hidden by sunglasses; his agenda for hakg his photograph taken, hidden fiom us

as viewers.

The two photographs in which Thomas perhaps uses his son's body to

directly confiont the viewer of the photograph are Indian Treaty no. I (Figure 25, p. 175) and Founder of the New Wodd (Figure 26, p. 176). Both ofthese photographs take their titles fiom the text that appears in the images. These images document the tension between colonial history documented through anonymous text and images (i.e., Columbus), and embodied or tactile knowledge that cornes from living in the shadow of such history. Arguably we could Say that the boy in the image does not fully comprehend the social, political and economic facets of colonidism and settlement in Canada, but we can Say with certainty he understands his own Iife and himself as an active agent within this context. As such, these two images depart from the photographs of Bear as a small boy simply standing where his father tells him to do so. We assume, looking at the age of the boy, that he is beginning to develop his own subjectivity and this necessarily plays a role in his representation as the subject of the images.

Bear appears to share the joke with his father as he stands under ths

General Store image of a stereotypical Indian in the photograph Indian Heu&

(Figure 27, p. 177). In another portrait, simply titled Bear (Figure 28, p. 178), we see a young man with an ambivalent look about him. He has again covered his eyes with sunglasses and his amis characteristically hang to his side. He is against a black background.

In this latter photograph, Thomas has juxtaposed the landscape context taken fiom one of his earliest photographs of Bear (the scene of voyageurs in the untitied portrait) with the image of Bear as a young adult. We know that Bear as an aduit has not physically retumed to the spot where his portrait was taken many years ago. There is a recursive quality to the 1995 image that re-visits a landscape fiom the past travels of father and son. However, an analysis of the two images imparts a discussion more of discovery than it does of repetition. As Thomas said in the earlier quote, %e idea is not about staying in one place. It is aiways about moving and adapting. It is the exploration of the new landscape that really determines how well we are going to suMve it. We have to become explorers, and if you do not, you will vanish" (Thomas 07/08/98). The two images of Bear

(as a little boy and as an adult) juxtaposed against the imagery of the voyageurs document and record the attempt of a father and son to make their mark on the landscape, to impart to spectators visual fragments of embodied knowledge. The images of Bear Thomas taken by his father kff Thomas allude to a larger context of the body in history, but ultimately, they refer to a particular body with a particular history.

The photography of Greg Staats opens a conversation about the individual body as part of a collective realiv of remembrame and desire. Staats described the purpose of his photographie practice to me as the creation of icons, of visual metaphors that communkate ideas about human absence and presence, of longing and belonging within their landscapes. The most intriguing part of Staats's work is his constant reference to the human body, many times through its deliberate absence. "My photographs" said Staats, "are about retained traces of expenence. * About the desire of the body to belong. It has very littie to do with the rnind"

(Staats 11 /O2/98).

The photographic installation Memories ofa Collective Realiry - Sour

Springs (Figure 29, p. 179) refers directly to memory, the body, and the creation of subjectivity. The installation is composed of 14 black and white photographs that nins in a single row dong a gailery wail painted a mstic redhrown colour.

When I discussed this piece with Staats, he chose to read to me two quotes that he felt inspired him in his creation of the images. The first is by T.S. Elliot and the second by Martin Heidegger. l2 They read:

''We shall not cease fiom exploration. The end of ail our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

"If you were to experience your own being to the full, you would be experiencing the decay of that being toward death as a part of your experience."

These two quotes reference both loss and renewal. The images of place in the piece Mernories of a Collective Realiîy - Sour Springs, are fiom a place on the

Six Nations Reserve where Staats was born. Staats created the series upon a retum visit to Sour Springs in 1995, which for him is a physicd site that triggers memory of loss and renewal. Though he has placed only one photograph of himself in the heof images, he describes the entire 14 photograph piece as "a portrait of myself' (Staats 11/02/98). The other images portray the inside and outside of a house, the exterior landscape (close-up and distance shots). Although as spectaton we recognize the images for the objects they document, it is Staats' manipulation of the images based upon their visual seductiveness of tonality and

Iight that makes this piece particularly engaging. Whiie only two of the fourteen images contain hurnan bodies, the piece is an overall reference to the integration between the living and the dead in the landscape (loss and renewal). Looking at the house, we think of past lives in that space. The trees in the exterior shots are without leaves, but they appear in anticipation of a coming spring. The wind that moves Staats' hair in his photograph and the shadows that he uses throughout his pictures indicate this is a living natural landscape and on it, time is dynamically passing. But the images of Sour Springs also refer to human manipulation of that environment in search of creature cornforts (the house, the Iightpost, tiretracks). 1 wonder how the men pictured here see their lives progressing alongside of these modem signs of progress. How much do our human relationships depend upon this naturai and built environment?

These images are for Staats images of his own subjectivity, the subjectivity of his family members, of his Mohawk nation. They exist as such because of the pleasure he takes in recognizing the people and places in these

images. However, as Janet Clark writes about Staats's work, "This is a narrative

- l2 Staats read these two quotes frorn his artist sketchbook. Hence, 1 am not able to provide citations for these quotes. that is at once both specific and generic, extending beyond the immediate representation to layers of meaning in which others can share. It is, in effect, a collective reality that Staats is referencing, with the intention of communicating the idea of memory to others" (Clark 1995:unp). The meaning or realities presented in these images have as much to do with what our eyes see and minds interpret as they do with how our own bodies knowingly respond to such visuals.

In an assembled work like Empathy (Figure 3 0, p. 180) there is no linear narrative for us to follow. Staats has situated at the centre of his piece a photograph of an old house. Although this house is singular, it metaphorically belongs/relates to al1 the people represented in the photographs. The houe irnmediately imparts notions of dwelling and placement, but 1 would argue that al1 of the images, including those of people's bodies, connote dwelling and placement.'3 in his conversation with me, Staats constantly referred to tuidhg a balance, living well and achieving a state-of-mind based on a sense of imer peace with one's self. If this is the case, then our physical bodies become the ultimate place of dwelling for our selves as human beings. Subjectivity is constituted through the living body and its experiences, the images of houses, rooms, nanrral environments are simply settings for that subjectivity to develop.

l3 Staats' depiction of people only firom the waist up is purposefid in that he says this is what his human eye sees when he focuses on a person, so he replicates this vision with his carnera Iens. nie piece Khat 's Lej? Behind (Figure 3 1, p. 18 1) depicts objects such as cut and stacked tree branches, a nisting iron chair, the archaeological remains of a long house depression, a bedroom, a mess of electrical wires, and an open underground cella storage. All of the images bear the marks of lives lived.

However, Staats' intention is that we revisit these sites and objects as part of a process of loss and renewai; we are in fact experiencing our beings to the full (as

Staats quoted from Heidegger). Our recognition of the discarded, manipulated, constmcted and deconstructed qualities of objects in the images reflects our awareness of our own death as a part of our life expenence, our subjectivity.

The spaces Ieft biank around the images sabotage any linear reading of these images, and necessarily any repetition. Though placed in a row, each image exists in its space. One image relates only to the others via the layers of human experience placed upon it and the others by human beings; these agents cm be spectators of the images or participants in the lives of the objects represented. In the case of this photographie installation, the spectator's body replaces that of the initial perfonner's, and she can maneuver her self in that space.

The final body of work 1 want to discuss in this chapter is by Patricia

Deadman. Deadman's images, taken while she was hiking through various moutain ranges of Banff National Park in Alberta, are premier examples of how photography can be representative of embodied knowledge and experience while not visually portraying that body. Her series Ice Views (Figure 32, p. 182) is made up of small books with cover bindhgs made fiom handmade paper. The books consist of one abstracted image of rocks and ice displayed as a centerfold while the book is itself displayed on a twig stand. These books represent "artifacts of experience" (Deadrnan 02/04/98). She explained that they represent the need or desire for us as hurnan beings to remember our experience, 'Y0 prove we were there". Like souvenirs, the photographs represent the "physicality of the moment they were taken" (Deadrnan 02/04/98).

Deadman's Ice Views and her series Beyond SaddZeback (Figure 33, p.

183) examine experience and knowiedge obtained individually versus that gained via a collective. To what extent is experience singular such that it can not be reproduced? Patncia said to me, "while walking the triails and taking the pictures,

1 thought about how these trails have been there for thousands of years.

Thousands of people have walked dong those same trails, what makes each of our experiences different?14 I also wondered what would happen if 1 left the trail to venture out on my own. I wondered if 1 couid trust my sight, if I could get fkom where 1 was to where 1 wanted to go" (Deadman 02/04/98). Her photographie depictions of the Iandscape differ greatly fkom the likes of such photographers as

-- - '' During OUI conversation, Deadman told me that her father was a firefighter in his youth in British Columbia and that she had traveled to an area in which he had encountered a grizziy bear. The area had since experienced a natural forest fire thus visually changing the landscape fkom the one her father experienced. However, the fact that he had physically walked the ground made her experience more meaningfid and it added to her understanding of her self in that space. Ansel Adams, who sought out the pristine God-like landscapes that became conquered by his lem. Deadman's images are abstracted and blutred (through an agitation process in their printing) so that each viewer is challenged to explore the images starting fkom a different point in the image. In much the same way she wondered if she could explore the mountainous area in person via her own trails, not the established ones. These photographs inherently spark questions of survival, fear and desire, surveillance and control, economics and politics. How do we fashion ourselves to this kind of majestic landscape? It is necessarily a different kind of constitution of subjectivity than that created out of the urban landscapes of Jeff Thomas. Having said this, 1 would argue that the criteria 1 mentioned above for discussing the subject and wildemess necessarily hold tnie for the construction of subjectivity in the urban dissonance.

Conclusion

The examples of expression and exploration of subjectivity through photography and film by the artists I have discussed in this chapter move beyond a simplistic use of the fist peeon. Their art explores the construction of subjectivity within wider contexts of colonialism, environmentalism and cornmodification of women @ana Claxton's work), stereotyping and identity

(Shelley Niro's work), urban existence and survival (Jeff Thomas' work), memory and desire (Greg Staats's work) and individuaVcoliective recognition of embodied experience (Patricia Deadman's work). The intersections of technology

and subjectivity in these explorations are significant. From the use of repetition,

digital graphics and cornputer manipulation of images and sounds to the physical

act of taking a photograph amidst the movement of Pow Wow dancers, both

artists as produces as well as their spectators are as Taussig writes, "hit" by these

images.

The use of mechanicaily reproduced imagery by the artists pushes the

viewers' sense of vision away from points of clarity and absolute knowledge that

are associated with Cartesian subjectivity. However, 1 do not believe that the art they create is in direct opposition ro Cartesianism; the art points to slippages in

subjectivity created in part by visuality. 1 retum to Shaviro's comment that the gaze does not dernand images, rather images demand the gaze, and they solicit a tactile response. Al1 of the art in this chapter evokes what Rey Chow calls

"technologized visuality" (Chow 1995); the media of each artist's choice (film and/or photography) are not considered techniques of art production, but rather a technology for processes of vision, and of visuality. For example, in the work of

Niro, Thomas, Staats, and Claxton there is a constant tension between reproducing the human body and represenring it. As dominant modes of vision, these technologies are highly relevant forms of communication. Here 1 refer back to the narrative by Jeff Thomas at the outset of the chapter, in which he said photography becomes a presence in the void of his inability to speak his traditional language. The capabilities of the technologies also detemine the structure of the art. Claxton's techniques of hgmenting the screen and incorporating recursive loops of imagery mimic the breakdown of metanarratives of cultural text and the non-linear production of culture in daily iife. Specific to the relations between anthropology/photography/nativepeoples, is the challenge to the notion of the original (Benjamin 1973) that technologies present. The multiple reproductions of images, and the use of images in a repetitive fashion by the artists challenge concepts of authenticity and purity that were deeply rooted in early anthropological interest in the technologies of photography and film.

1 believe that analyses of slippage in contemporary cultural texts of art production and reception must include discussions, like the one initiated in this chapter, on intersections of subjectivity and technology. Of particular relevance to anthropological inqujr is the slippage between allochronic notions of time and space in the representation of the Other, and the re-calibration of tirne and space taking into account new reality-resources. In these texts, moments of fusion between stimulus and response and the speed of mirnetic faculties sit next to linear and chronological aspects of tirne. Texts based upon imaginary gaps and in- between spaces challenge notions of scientifically mapping spaces to understand

subject-formation. The exploration through photographic and filmic

reproduction/representation of contingent, light-constituted, mechanicaily mediated and fiagmented subjectivities attempts to re-think the creation of subjectivity as a process and construct of nomadic imaginations. Figure 12. Dana Claxton: Buffalo Bone China. (1997). Hi-8 video recording with sound. 10 minutes. Figure 13. Dana Clauton: Tree of Consumpfion.(1 994). Hi-8 video recording with sound. Figure 14. (Upper) Shelley Niro: Mohawks in Beehives. ( 199 1). Hand-tinted photo. 19 X 24.5 cm.

Figure 15. (Lower) Shelley Niro: Rebel. (199 1). Hand-tinted photograph, 1 7 X 24 cm. FigiIre 16. Shelley Niro: The 300 Year Itch. (detail) (1991). Figure 17. Shelley Niro: This Land is Mime Land. (1 992). Three hand-tinted 1 I X 4 inch photos mounted on a single mat. Figure 18. Jeff Thomas: Metamorphosis #I Pink Pcznther. (1 983). Figure 19. Jeff Thomas: Richard Poafpybitty, Cornanche-Omaha. (1983). Figure 20. JeB Thomas: Shadow Dancer. (1 98 1). Figure 2 1 .(Lefi) Jeff Thomas: Jerry Hawpetoss. lktenominee Traditional Damer. (1984). Right Panel of Diptych.

Figure 22. (Right) Jeff Thomas: Portrait. ( 1 983). Figure 23. Jeff Thomas: Culture Revolution (Beur with Baseball Cap, Two Moom$ (1984): Trent, Ontario. Figure 24. Jeff Thomas: I don 't have fo be a Cowboy. Triptych. (Assembled 1996).

174 Figure 25. Jeff Thomas: Indian Treaty No. 1. (1989). Lower Fort Garry. Manitoba Figure 26. Jeff Thomas: Founder of the New World. (1988). Winnipeg, Manitoba. Figure 27. Jeff Thomas: Indian Heads (Generd Store. Bear). ( 1994). Toronto, Ontario. Figure 28. Jeff Thomas: Bear. (1955). Toronto, Ontario. Figure 29. Greg Staats: Mernories of a Collective Reality - Sour Springs. (1995). 14 Silver Prints, each 50 X 40 cm. Figure 30. Greg Staats: Empathy. (1997). Figure 3 1. Greg Staats: ÇYhat 's Lefr Behind. (1 997). Photographie Series. Figure 32. Patricia Deadman: Ice Views (Ice and Rock). ( 1992). Black and White photograph in handmade paper binding. Twig stand with twine. Figure 33. Patricia Deadman: Beyond Saddeback III. ( 199 1). Colour photograph 60.9 X 50.8 cm.

CHAPTER 5: VISUALIZING PLACE: REPRESENTING/REPRODUCING

TmNORTHWl3ST COAST IN MODERN ART.

Within a short five-block stretch of Govemment Street in the heart of downtown Victoria, British Columbia, there are at lest a half dozen stores selling

Northwest coast Native art. In the window displays and interior showcases of these stores are aesthetic objects representing animals, birds and human beings created by aboriginal artists using Northwest coast form-line design elements.

Among these objects are serigraph prints, greeting cards, and carved or cast pieces of silver and gold jewelry and sculpted forms of wood, plastic and metal.

Popularized Northwest coast style images are also applied to domestic objects such as coffee mugs, tablemats, hotplates, ovenmits, t-shirts, bottle openers and shot glasses. To the largely non-native resident and tourist viewing public of

Victoria, these images and objects of materiai culture represent the existence of aboriginal cultures in the province of Bntish Columbia.

Govemment Street also passes by both the Royal British Columbia

Museum and the British Columbia Legislative buildings on the herHarbour. On special occasions such as an exhibit opening at the museum, or more recently, the signing of the Nisga'a treaty at the legislature, aboriginal people have attended these events dressed in ceremonid regalia that includes button blankets with crest designs, masks and/or headdresses, drums, and rattles created using the recognizable fom-line designs found on the objects in the tourist shops. The range in presentation of material culture fiom everyday cornmodity to symbolic regdia "marks out the contested field of British Columbia First Nations identity politics" (Townsend-Gault 1997: 1 32).

Charlotte Townsend-Gault writes that the meaningfulness of aboriginal material culture "lies at present in its challenge to colonial authority, its assertion of survival, its demand for response, its provocation to action" (Townsend-Gault

1997: 132). In the case of the aboriginal materiai culture for sale in stores and the regalia displayed at culturai and legai events at government institutions, the objects are neither solely commodities, nor readable oniy as signs of politicized aboriginal culture. The arenas of culture and politics, after dl, are complexly integrated. On one hand, objects that circulate as tourist collectibles are increasingly de-politicized by non-Native society in order to fit into dominant frameworks of cultural and economic power. The modes of distribution for such objects (availability in mass quantity in exchange for money in tourist shops and commercial galleries) and their contexts of display (merchandized storefionts) and use (popular, everyday) position them as part of the multicultural social and economic history of British Columbia. On the other hand, material culture, like ceremonid regalia represented in the contexts of cultural exhibits at museums, art galleries, and at gatherings over legal issues, are read by viewing publics in a politicized manner because of their purposeful representation of diference in

contested arenas of culture and economics '.

The comrnon element of these examples of circulation and consumption of

material culture are the visuul elements Northwest coast form-line design that act as signs of cultural deference as well as difference. Nevertheless, the degree to which viewing publics read Northwest coast aboriginal visual culture as political

does not rest solely on the presence of visual coding like form-line design. For

example, art by some modem Northwest coast artists is read as political, although

specific Northwest coast visual design elements are not always visually present in

their work. This is indeed the case concerning art by Marianne Nicolson, Mary

Anne Barkhouse, and Arthur Renwick. Their individual works of art span various

media such as photography, sculpture, painting, and installation art. At times the

art bhgs in elements of Northwest coast design and at others is completely

The public use of cultural objects, ritual, and knowledge in public arenas by aboriginal peoples is more complex than simply differentiating native and non- Native populations. As Marcia Crosby points out, aboriginal use of such cultural capital cm also be towards gathering indigenou peoples together. She writes, "a powerful tool for gathenng national support, for nation-building within a nation, has been to constnict common signs of Indiamess in binary opposition to the dominant - an image recognizable to a large and diverse aboriginal population. For exatnple, in the 1960s, when national Indian organizations were being fomed, leaders debated about whether to use a totem pole or a feathered headdress as their national symbol. These objects, which had cunency in the public sphere as essentialist representations of a de-politicized Indian subject, were then recuperated through the media by aboriginal leaders and reinvested with contemporq political meanings to both First Nations, Metis and non-Native publics" (Crosby lW7:îS) devoid of such syrnbolism. By bringing the art of Barkhouse, Nicolson, and

Renwick together for analysis, I am not trying to address the 'politicalness' of their art according to the visual impact of their work. Rather, I am interested in consumption of their art as politicized signifiers of the place of the Northwest coast as Native and non-Native peoples expenence it. How do these artists incorporate their persona1 local knowledge and experience fkom their sense of place about the Northwest coast to create the structural cnteria (cf. Townsend-

Gault 1999:117) for rnaking art?

1 want to consider their art and connected discourses as texts in the light of

Baudrillard's statement: "the consumption of art is not out of a productive mode1 but of an exchange of signs" (Baudnllard 1995: 1 13). Artists, then, are as much or more manipulaton of signs as they are producen of objects (cf. Foster 1985: 1 00).

Where the depamire poiiics ior interpreting artworks are their representations of place, one may argue, as art critic and theoridcian Hal Foster does, that the artist emerges in the text "as ethnographer" (Foster 1996).

The artworks that I discuss in this chapter by Barkhouse, Nicolson, and

Renwick serve as signifien for intersections of symbolized economies and commodified cultures. Looking at art by these artists reveals images and text conceming contemporary individuals' view/practice of the space (de Certeau

1984) of the Northwest coast. 1 argue that the artists do not only treat the

Northwest coast as 'a' physical place, but also as afield of relations (Clifford 1997), or as "networks of interrelations" (Hastmp and Olwig 19975). Viewed this way, art about the Northwest coast reads as texts that evoke diverse notions of multi-locality in the lives of their creators. In these fields and networks - constnicted fkom imagined and red spaces and places - art objects act as nodes, or touch-down points for texts that cut across cultural, geographical and temporal boundaries.

In the remainder of this chapter, I examine how particular artworks evoke diverse experiences/conditions of multi-locality, and circulate as signifiers of slippage in the akitanding of place between Native and non-Xattve peoples. 1 analyze these texts as they crosscut fields of materid culture, natural resources, and crûnternporary Songinal irlentity. Let me he& by ~xmmnuigmese artists' engagement with the field of abonginai material culture.

YATERIAL CULTURE

The Northwest coast has a lengthy and continuous history of commodification via cultural interpretation, artifact collection. and exhihik-,.

Material culture such as masks, poles, and pipes of the peoples of the Northwest coast has figured prominently in such endeavors. The (Western) histoncal beginning of the mass circulation of these objects as symbols and commodities of social relations took place during colonial expansion and later through academic dissemination. Presently, these objects circulate by way of various culhiral institutions around the globe. The initiation of procedures for repatriation of many of these objects by First Nations groups foreshadows the current mass neo- colonial rnovement of these material objects.

Perhaps the largest movement of these objects has been through the mass circulation of their reproduction. Reproductions of original objects have been created by many means including artistic, entertainment, academic, economic, political, and social ends. The use and presentation of reproductions figures prominentiy in the establishment of the importance of the objects to First Nations collectives. This is frequently the case with tribal groups attempting to repatriate cultural objects or establish their interest in them in the eyes of the public. Photos of chiefs in cultural regalia that visually connect that person with the sought-after histoncal culNial objects have become de rigeur at any important politicai event in British Columbia. These visuais are inculcated in the mincis of the viewing public as symbolic of tribai aboriginal identity and the contest over ownership of heritage and land in British Columbia.

Arthur Renwick and Mary Anne Barkhouse have used the circulation and consumption of 'original' cultural objects and their reproductions as inspiration for their respective pieces, Undertow (Figure 34, p. 220), and Reservoir (Figures 35 and 36, pp. 221,222). In both of these works, the artists have appropriated reproductions of the original objects to intentene in the meaning of the object as they came to it. The artists are not ûyhg to establish the meanhg of original objects; rather they make inquiry into the flow of the reproduced images and their constant re-interpretation. The point of their art, their engagement with these simulacra is not to question the imitation or reduplication of an original object, but to add their own stories to the chah of circulating signifiers of the real thing.

In Renwick's piece, Undertow, the vertical structure of the installation piece resembles that of a Northwest coast totem pole. Mounted on its flat front surface are (modem) photographic images of the Mernorial pole erected by

Nisga'a Eagle chief, Saga'wen, fiom the village of Gitiks on the Nass River in

1870. Renwick took the photopphs of chief Saga'wen's pole in the rotunda of the Royal Ontario Museum where it is (presently) located2. Through the middle ot this image Renwick has spliced a photographic reproduction of an 'original' photograph taken in 1929 by anthropologist Marius Barbeau. Barbeau took his photograph of chief Saga'wen's pole while it was being towed with five others down the Nass River to Prince Rupert en route to the museum. The anthropologist titled his photograph, Totem Poles in Tow. Renwick has reversed his reproduction of Barbeau's image for his installation piece, hence distorthg the written date of

1929 and Barbeau's signature that were legible on the original negative.

The pole is 24.5 metres in height and was erected in the rotunda of the Royal Ontario Museum in 193 3. Renwick's inspiration for Undertow was his own Haisla Nation's attempt to repaûiate a pole removed fiorn their Kitlope Valley, also in 1929. The pole removed from the Kitlope Valley is presently located at the Ethnographical

Museum in Stockholm, sweden3.

Renwick told me that in 199 1, Gerald Amos, a Haisla band council member, headed a group that traveled to Stockholm to see the pole and meet with museum officials. Amos, and the Haisla peoples who accompanied him, mived at the museum in full ceremonid regalia. The Haisla delegation met with the director of the Ethnological Museum and proposed to bring a master Haisla carver to Stockholm to cane a replica pole on site. This replica pole would replace the original pole held by the museum that the Haisla Nation was seeking to repatriate.

The Haisla delegation offered to perform for the museum a ceremony for the removal of the pole as well as a pole raising ceremony that would include the

A 1936 publication of Ethnos (vol. 1 no.6 pp.137-141) details the interpretation of this pole according to Mr. Iver Fougner who was then the Indian agent at Bella Coola, British Columbia. Mr. Olof Hanson, the Swedish Consul at Prince Rupert, B.C., collected the pole for the museurn in Stockholm after a reported ten-year effort to convince the Kitlope people to let hirn remove the pole. In a letter to the museum regarding his procurement of the pole Mr. Hanson wrote, "This provides another instance, among many of aged individuals of a disintegrating local civilization, as long as possible hanging on to the ancient customs and traditions, untii in the end they have to resign and give in" (Lindblom 1936:138). The short 1936 article is itself a document in the history of scholarship about Northwest coast art. The author implicitly suggests that the collecting of pieces like the Kitiope pole is important because of the perceived demise of First Nations cultures on the coast. telling of the pole's history and story for the museum's records. The details of this meeting made the front pages of local Stockholm newspapers, and the museurn experienced a significant increase in the nurnbers of visitos who came specifically to see the pole. The director said that he would consider the Haisla's offen, and that he would like to see the traditional temtory of the Haisla people and the original place of the pole before making any decisions.

Shortly after, the director of the museurn flew to Canada and visited the

Haisla community. According to Renwick:

He kept his word. He paid a visit, and they took him up to the Kitlope and he was just stunned by it and he was amazed that the culture was still vital and active. He got very excited and everyone just felt really good about it and thought that there was now way that this guy could say no (Renwick 02/15/98).

In the end, the officials at the Stockholm museum said that they would only repatriate the pole if the Haisla people themselves placed a replica of the pole in the Kitlope valley. Museum officials stipulated that the would-be repatriated pole fTom Stockholm be put on display in a local museurn. The Haisla people did not agree with these conditions. They wanted to retum the pole to its original place in the Kitlope vdley and let it stand and decay there naturaily.

Renwick's treatment of the images of the Nisga'a poles as found objects comotes art as cultural critique; his work defamiliarizes the known images and materials he uses to Merhis point of view. The piece alludes to the transnational circulation of contested objects and images via the Nass River and the Kitlope Valley in northern B.C., Toronto, Ontario and Stockholm, Sweden.

Added to the list are the numerous places in which Renwick's piece has been exhibited, including Ottawa, Montreai, and wherever else the piece will be exhibited. These multiple locations connect local and global in the contexts of

Renwick's own life, and they contribute to the critena he establishes for his art.

My interpretation of Undertow recognizes the intersections, or overlap, between contemporary events (repatriation, First Nations Self-determination,

International negotiations over repatriation of artlartifacts, Swedish collecting practices, reproductions of historical objects and imagery) and history

(photographie documentation of collected artifacts, ethnographie practice, colonial interpretations of aboriginal cultural property). Renwick's art amalgamates temporal fiameworks, geographic locations, and inter-cultural predicaments of history and identity. The inclusion of international travel, mass media, and global cultural politics in the text that is the piece Undertow, provides an argument for the diversity of sources from which notions of multi-locality coastnict local knowledge of sense of place on the Northwest Coast.

Though Undertow has many International references, I think that it is important to also acknowledge the text as part of transnational flows of Mages, objects, history, and identity. The importance of this distinction lay in the ciifference between international bodies such as the Swedish museum and Haisla Nation where individuals are corporate actors, and individuals and non- statehational groups (cf. Hannerz 1996:6) who also connect to the dynamics of multi-locale exchanges, but whose participation is at a personal level. Renwick's work is descriptive of such individual connections in his role as an artist. His reasons for juxtaposing the narrative of the Haisla pole and people with the images of the Nisga'a poles stems Born his persona1 experiences, mernories and desires, not from an agenda posed by the Haisla nation.

I asked Renwick to describe to me his persona1 relationship to this piece that evoked so many deparnire points of discussion about the reproduction of culture through images, objects, and people caught up in transnational flows. His response was to describe himself as a "displaced totem pole maker who has lost his tools to carve and uses the next best thing (photography)" (Renwick 02/15/98).

He also said:

In my artwork 1create the prirnary focus on my place of birth and the culture that 1 was bom into and the language that our community speaks and the food we eat. It is al1 intrinsic to myself as coming from the Haisla nation temtory as it relates to Kitamaat, British Columbia. And the work I do is dl placed within the history, my own history, as well as the history of the place that I corne Grom. And that becomes enfolded with inierpretationî, which reach into the history of photography and that medium's inherent relationship to documentary representation, as well as the history of anthropological uses of photography to document ethnographie [sic] and art or artifact collecting practices. The relationship 1 have to Kitamaat is a recurrhg theme and that is the primary muse and bane of my existence. 1 cannot Say that 1create this work to mermy community, but 1do refer to it on a regular basis. Maybe 1want to understand more about myself and my place in the world (Renwick 0%'15/98, emphasis mine). Though Renwick begins by connecting himself, his body, and its swival to his birthplace, traditional foods, and the Haisla language, his ongoing formation of identity that he expresses in his art engages sites that exist outside of specific

Haisla contexts. His discoune on his art hdicates points of slippage between his very localized sense of place and his very conscious choices, unapologetic justifications if you will, for the ways in which he re-invents and re-produces

Haisla culture in his art. His use of mechanical reproduction (photography) with its own histoncal narratives that crosscut the relationships of colonial anthropology, art and artifact collecting practices, and aboriginal peoples becomes essential in a paradoxical way to his representations of Haisla identity and history.

The paradox of using cultural images and objects as strategic essentialism is also at play in the installation titled Reservoir by Mary Anne Barkhouse. For this piece, she cast three portions of an original Kwakiutl house-post carved in the early 20" century by her great, great grandfather, Charlie .lames4. The 'original' house-post carved by Charlie James belonged to Chief Tsa-wee-nok of Kingcorne

Inlet and it depicted a Thunderbird on top of a GnPly bear holding a man in its paws. For Reservoir, Barkhouse cast the three pieces of this house-pst in sait and

4 Barkhouse created this installation with her artist partner Michael Belmore. The entire installation contained cast sait sculptures of various culturaily important objects to their Kwak'waka'wakw and Ojibway heriiages; a totem pole, a feather, and a sweet gras braid were among the objects re-created. polyester resin, and then sat them tilted back on large cedar platforms; cedar was the materid of the original ho~se-~ost~.

Barkhouse told me that she used sait as the medium in which to cast the objects because of its metaphoric link to preservation. In her essay for this installation by Barkhouse, curator Lynn Hill dso notes the tension created between the visuai impact of the pieces of the house-post as "fragments of the past," and their presentation in salt - a medium also used as "metaphor for culture. preservation and memory ." (Hill 1997:np).

When I asked Barkhouse to explain how this piece fit into her sense of place about the Northwest Coast, she drew upon examples fiom the animal world for her answer. She began her response by saying how porcupines often chew through brakelines in cars to access salt they need as an essential element in their diet. However, this necessary element becomes toxic to the animal when consumed in excess. This is the irony of Resentoir, that something so essential to life and swival is at one moment vital, and at another toxic. She drew a parallel between this example and the cultural health and wellness of First Nations peoples faced with the mass appropriation by dominant groups of their cultural symbols and objects. The ability of abonginal peoples to capitaiize on culture in

Each of the three cedar stands is seven and a half feet high and three to four feet in diameter. The salt casts themseives are four and a half feet high and weigh over two hundred pounds each. ways they see appropriate is threatened by the rise in popularity and rate of appropriation of cultural symbols and objects by non-abonginal peoples (cf. Hill

1997). The loss of such symbolic wealth contributes directly to the cultural instability experienced by many First Nations in the multinational global arena.

The multi-contextuai histories of cultural objects like Kwakiutl houe- posts and totem poles have been incredibly dynamic and diverse in the 1st 150 years. Included in the history of the house-post Barkhouse used to create

Reservoir is its appearance as a prop piece in Edward Curtis's now famous 19 14 film, "ln the Land of the Head ~untersl?When 1spoke to Barkhouse about this work, she talked about how such carved objects have gone fiom functioning objects in communities to tourist attractions (totem pole displays in Stanley Park and the Royal British Columbia Museum) to plastic tourist kitsch collectibles

(Ne those I described at the outset of this chapter). Now Batkhouse has reproduced the object of the post as an installation piece cast in sait.

NATURAL, RESOURCES

In British Columbia, there is a direct Iink between control over natural resources and political power. This predicarnent forms the base of politicai- economic relations between the provincial govemment and First Nations peoples.

Land and resources are essentid components in treaty negotiation processes underway in British Columbia at present. Factored into these negotiations are

"market and natural resource values; local needs; the arnount of available Crown land in the area; provincial, public and private interests, and the economic base of abonginal and neighbouring communitiesl' (Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs

2000a).

The field of relations that makes up this complex arena of negotiation is not created out of dichotomous camps of Native and non-Native interests. Take for example, the recent transfer of the Clayoquot Sound portion of a MacMillan

BIoedells tree farm licence 44 to Iisaak Forest Resources. Iisaak is a Company set up by the Nuu-ChahNdth Central Region First Nations, owned 5 1 per cent by

Ma Mook Naturai Resources Ltd. and 49 per cent by Weyerhaeuser, which recentiy purchased MacMillan Bloedel's assets. Aboriginal affairs minister Dale

Lovick has said, "with these new initiatives, First Nations and local communities will benefit fiom new economic development opportunities" (Ministry of

Aboriginal Affairs 2000b).

These two examples of the relations between abonginal and non- aboriginal peoples and economic interests are examples of readily available

6 This information is fiom excerpts of written correspondence between the author and Barkhouse. Somation for public consumption (accessed in newspapers, web-sites, and promotional literature). Brochures about economic progress are illustrated with pictures of aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples 'working together' on projects and at different sites. This kind of information is circuiated by govemment, pnvate and First Nations corporations and related businesses.

How does this macro-level of economics and poiicy-making affect the lives of individuals on an everyday bais? Art critic Lucy Lippard writes, "[alrtists can make connections visible.. .they cmexpose social agendas that have formed the land, bring out multiple readings of place.. .as envisionaries, artists should be able to provide a way to work against the dominant culture's rapacious view of nature, reinstate the mythicd and cultural dimensions of 'public' expenence, and at the same time become conscious of the ideological relationships and historicai constmctions of place" (Lippard 1997: 19).

The realities of Canada's colonial history continue to loom large in many small First Nations cornmunities. Many of these comrnunities in British Columbia tenuously exist alongside corporations that fuel the resource-driven provincial economy. Kingcome Inlet on the Northwest coast is one place where this reality has become part of daily life. Marianne Nicolson has made the small

Kwgkwgka'wakw community of Kingcome Inlet on the coast of British Columbia a dominant theme in her work. For Nicolson, the importance of Kingcome is compnsed of its physical location, her ancestral ties as a Kw-akw&alu.takw woman, and her relations to family members who reside there. Nicolson fiequently retums to her reserve/community of Kingcorne Met fiom her primary residence in the city of Victoria.

Specific to Nicolson's concems and her relationship to the land are the visible results of large-scale clear-cut logging operations. To honour the continued survival of the people of Kingcorne Inlet (the Dzawadg'enuy) on their traditional land Nicolson painted a massive 27 x 40 foot pictograph (untitied) on the side of a 120 foot cliff located at the mouth of Kingcorne River (Figures 37-

39, pp. 223-225). The painted image depicts a wolf within the shape of a copper.

The image of the wolf is a representation of the original ancestor of the

Dzawadg'enugw people.

According to Nicolson, "we continue to exist on this temtory despite attempts to remove us, and we will continue to exist here far into the future, we cannot be removed. The land is a part of us, and us a part of it" (Nicolson

03/10/98). Her rock painting stands as an act of resistance to such development. It is a bold statement of not only tradition, but of continuity.

Nicolson is not the first artist to use art to record the resistance efforts and continued presence of the Kw-&wgkalwakw people on their land. In 1921, another

Kwakwaka'wakw artist painted a series of smaller pictographs that were also in the shape of coppers (Figure 40, p. 226). These images are located in close proximity to the site of the painting by Nicolson. At the time these histonc copper pictographs were painted, federai law on the Noahwest Coast prohibited the potlatch. The intention of the artist who painted the pictographs of coppers in

192 1, was to record a potlatch that successfully took place in Kwakwaka'wakw- - temtory in spite of the oppressive colonial legisiation. Nicolson's 37-foot copper pictograph announces to those approaching Kingcorne Inlet: "We continue to exist on this temtory despite attempts to remove us. And, we will continue to exist here far into the future, we cannot be removed. The land is a part of us, and us a part of it." (Nicolson 03/10198). Concerning the relationship between resistance, her art, and non-First Nations development of traditional lands,

Nicolson said:

In that particuiar area, the loggers have marked pretty well every accessible piece of rock. They have put their names in paint there. It has always bothered me and nght across fiom Kingcome Inlet there is a clear- cut. I wanted to put something up there that would absolutely obliterate the loggers' marks. The loggers' marks have started to obliterate us. In fact, they had the nerve to corne and drill into the face of those 192 1 coppers. So if you're talking about affirmation or re-marking the landscape, 1 wanted to make that point. That's why it's so big (Nicolson OYI0198).

One of Nicolson's objectives in undertaking such a large project was a desire to involve her comrnunity. From elders to young people, community members acted as sources of knowledge, technical expertise, and physical labour.

After yean of boat travel dong the river to and fkom the village, Nicolson feels sheer admiration for the simple physicai presence of the cliE The painted pictograph by Nicolson with the help of her community is among many pieces that she has created for the viewing and use of her cornmunity only, rather than general gallery or museum audiences. The work is the culmination of an approximate three-year process that involved carefuf planning and consultation with as many community members as possible in order for Nicolson to be as she stated, "cdturally aware" and not "controversial" (Nicolson 03/10/98).Nicolson acknowledges that in the end a minority of community members did not agree with the intentions of the project. However, she remains fm in her belief that the rock painting represents al1 the Dzawadg'en~wpeople.

The completed rock painting is the product of two separate attempts by

Nicolson to paint the surface of the cliff. She halted her first attempt because of technical dificulties and equipment failure. However, Nicolson also believes that her initial attempt failed on a more spiritual level. In her words, "the land had its own rules and 1 had to work with it, not to fight it ... I had to adapt myself to the land ... Even the travel back and forth fiom the village was a big thing. Let aione getting up on the cliff when 1 got there" (Nicolson 03/10/98). Nicolson rasons that she was not properly prepared in a spiritual manner for painting the cliff. She erroneously placed too much emphasis on herself as an individual artist in her work with her community on the project. Upon her return to Victoria afler this first attempt, she reconsidered her relationship to the land as a Dzawad&env person who was part of an intricate web of connections between humans, animals and the landscape. It was because of this change in psychological and spintuai preparation that Nicolson believes her second attempt to paint the cliff was successfùl.

Although Nicolson States that gender issues did not enter the meaning of the painting, she concedes that men constitute a disproportionate number of

Native artists from the Northwest coast. Traditionaily it has been men who created monumental art on the coast (crest potes, house structures and ceremonial items, etc.). As such, it is significant that Nicoison produced such a monumental work with no histoncal precedence. However, given the importance Nicolson placed on her community's involvement in the project, the role of gender is of less significance to the community than it is to Western art histoncal frameworks. In response to this statement on gender, Nicolson said:

1 did what came to mind, what seemed logical. Initially there was a welcome pole at the mouth of the river and 1 have aiways felt badly that it was taken away. And 1 guess if 1 were a carver, I would have carved a welcome pole. But 1 am a painter, and 1 believe the painting serves the same purpose (Nicolson 0311 0198).

Farther up the coast fkom Kingcorne Inlet is the Haisla First Nation community of Kitamaat. Across the river hmthis comrnunity stands the smelter for the multinational corporation Aican AlUrninum. This industry giant has inforrned much of Arthur Renwick's photographie iostallation work. In his piece titled, Landmarks (Figure 4 1, p. 227), Renwick has reworked a promotional publication for the Alcan Aluninun company by altering both its text and images. The original publication features images of art fiom the permanent collection of Alcan Alurninurn displayed in its head office in Montreal. The original text focuses on Alcan's history of natural resource exploitation and the fbture potential for immense wealth gained through such exploits. Landmarks is

Renwick's re-working of this promotional publication to insert the missing history and presence of the Haisla people of Kitamaat, the People of the Snow. To accomplish this task, he adds photos of his own relations as well as those taken at community events. Alcan Alurninum's single acknowledgement to the Haisla people of Kitamaat is a larger than life sized snowflake made from aiuminum that sits at the entrance to the town of Kitimat. Complicating Renwick's personal relationship to the Alcan plant are his feelings of both dependence on the plant and concem for its impact on the cornmunity. His father worked at Alcan, as did he as a young adult. Says Renwick, "It has a huge presence in oucornmunity, it's had a very big impact, more so than people have reaiized. And it's not something I think is good. You just begin to accept the fact that it is there. 1 think it's important to redize the impact that it's having and to acknowledge it." (Renwick

02/15/98).

Ln his work titled, Conductor (Figure 42, p. 228), Renwick again focuses on this intersection between First Nations culture and industry and development. Like Undertow,this piece emulates a totem pole. Using a skewed perspective achieved by combinuig several photographs taken in a vertical panorama,

Renwick documents the hydro lines of the Alcan plant across the river from the shore of the Kitarnaat reserve. In this piece, Renwick uses aiuminum, copper, and cedar but he denies any intentional irony in the piece concerning the materials used. He states, "1 think that the irony is not so much, the fact that I'm using these materiais - both aiuminum and cedar - but I'm using it in as much as a Westcoast carver makes a totem pole as a statement of an historical event, it's a historical marker" (Renwick 02/15/98). The bottom panel shows some Kitarnaat chiefs in full regaiia at a feast, under a feast of lights supplied from energy produced by the

Aican plant (Figure 43, p. 229).

Issues of conservation and balance are paramount to the art of Mary Anne

Barkhouse. Her sculphiral and photographie installations deal with the conservation of nature and the conservation of culture, or balances in the natural world (between humans and wildlife), as well as cultural balances (the preservation of First Nations cultural identity against its appropriation by non-

Native popular culture).

Barkhouse's interests in conservation issues place her art within contentious debates around the growing indu- of eco-tourhm on the Northwest

Coast. In her piece titled Wuber (Figure 44, p. 230), she cornments on the reiatioaships between Fint Nations fishermen, eco-tourists, tourism operators, and the whales that inhabit the waters. In her own family, Barkhouse's grandfather was a fisheman from Alert Bay. While attending the Ontario College of Art,

Barkhouse traveled fiom Ontario to British Columbia during suerseasons to earn money for her education on her grandfather's boat. DuTing these summer seaçons, Barkhouse personally observed the tension created by the claims of both industry and First Nations to water-use rights in the areas where whales were present. "It's about the ownership of the whales, people bring their tourkt dollars which is good.. . I think it is also relevant to show people why it is good to Save these areas. But the fur really flies sometirnes between the Native fishennen and the people who run the eco-tours and the whale-watching boats" (Barkhouse

01/19/95). In Waiver, Barkhouse comrnents on what has been termed "Orca- mania". In 1997 there were an estimated 8 1,000 tourists from British Columbia and Washington State who paid four million dollars to see the Orca Whales in

Haro and Juan de Fuca Straits. In the 1960s and 1970s, fi@ whales in total were captured from the resident Orca pods of I, K, and L.

In the northem coastal waters near Alert Bay where Barkhouse's family resides, there were fewer Orca whales captured. Their curent population is approximately 209, up fiom 132 in 1975. Yet today, the lure of the northem

British Columbia waters and the opportunity to see the whales is no less intense.

Whdes sel1 excitement - and the tourists, some 50,000 a year, corne to Telegraph

Cove at the tip of northern Vancouver Island. The number of both private boas and charters operating in the Johnstone and Haro Straits has increased to the point that it is ofien too noisy for scientists to under-water record the whales in communication. For observers watching this ongoing situation, like Barkhouse, there is no sign that things will soon change. The three main questions asked in this debate over conservation and eco-tourism between industry and First Nations are: 1) who was here first? 2) who has owuership? and, 3) what are the rules?

Barkhouse is the first to admit that she does not have answers to these questions.

The images of the Orcas in Woiver carry a note of irony. The viewer cannot tell fiom the pint collages that the whales shown Iive are in captive environrnents. To alert her viewers to the predicament of the whaies, Barkhouse places, in the corner of some of the images, the label of the photographie corporation Kodak. Barkhouse includes this label to expose the irony of capturing the moment on film and capturing the animal in redity.' Barkhouse took the photographs fiom the location at the marine park identified as the Kodak Viewing

Area.

Five panels of cyanotype prints on canvas hang in the gallery with clear acrylic stones placed underneath. In the shailower waters at Robson Bight Marine

7 In a conversation 1 had with curator Lynn Hill about Barkhouse's work, she commented on Barkhouse's metaphoric use of animals in her consideration of the treatment and cornmodification of First Nations peoples and cultures. For example, the tum of the century World Fairs in which Aboriginal people were put Reserve, Orca whales rub themselves on srnail round rocks on the seabed.

Barkhouse used rocks similar to the size and shape of those found at Robson

Bight to cast the acrylic stones seen in the installation. Suspended within the

acrylic stones are real pieces of seaweed from the waters around her home at Alert

Bay, also known to local residents as home of the Killer Whale. Barkhouse

herself is a descendant of the Thunderbird and Killerwhale cIans.

CONTEMPORARY ABORIGNAL IDENTITY

Until this point, 1 have discussed artworks that comment on intersections

of tangible objects (material culture and land and resources) and historical and present conditions of place and space on the Northwest coast as experienced by

Nicolson, Barkhouse, and Renwick. The last field I want to anaiyze is contemporary identity. Narratives of contemporary idrntity interseet with multi-

locale notions of space and place as well as temporal frameworks in the last two

paintings 1 discuss by Marianne Nicolson. Of the art discussed in this chapter, 1

think these paintings are the most complex objects to anaiyze for a number of

reasons. First, Nicolson has only used Northwest coast fodine design in the

pieces, to most of her viewers (Native and nonoNative) they are indecipherable

-- on display for European "education and entertainment" are similar to the way in which animais are exhibited nowadays. except in their connotation of cultural difference (and deference). Second,

Nicolson creates the structural cnteria for the works from a variety of intangible sites that include history, teachings concerning supematural beings and her own contemporary experiences. For the artist, these paintings are part of an ongoing series of paintings that document her life as an aboriginal wornan living on the

Northwest coast at the tum of the centwy.

Throughout the larger body of Nicolson's artwork, which includes photographie installation as well as painting, she uses both traditional and innovative Kwakwgkg'wakw design forms to simultaneously reference historic and present circumstances. The knowledge that Nicolson uses as a foundation for her art includes extensive university training in modem art. Importantly, too, she credits her farnily for their generosity and patience conceming the cultural teachings she has received fiom them. One of these farnily members was her uncle, Ernie Peter Willie (Yah-Xath-Anees). The two paintings done on wood panels titied Entrance ro Heaven (Figure 45, p. 23 1) and Climbing the Tree of Life

(Figure 46, p. 232) are inspired by his knowledge and teachings of

Kwakwgkg'wakw culture that he shared with Nicolson during his lifetime.

The forma1 layout of the paintings refer to Button Blankets wom by Fint

Nations on the Northwest coast. Button Blankets are an integrai part of ceremonid regalia of an individual where the figura1 representation in the middle of the blanket identifies that person with a particular ancestor. The red border around the outside of the painting replicates the sewn-on borders of Button

Blankets. in these works, Nicolson has substituted the traditional buttons with dots of paint. Both paintings hzve Kwakwala text around the images that bear meaning. The text in Entrance ro Heaven reads: "Each night brings death, each moniing re-birth. 1 am travelling about the world, travelling fiom place to place."

Spirit and sou1 are represented in this piece by the human figure in the rniddle of the image, and the hole located near its belly speaks to human creativity. Finally, the Sisiutl hped around the image provides notions of balance between life's dualities. For Nicolson, the painting is a visual metaphor that alludes to relations between the human world and the supernaturai world.

In the context of the Kwakwgkg'wakw potlatch, ancestral relations with the supematural. or are presented through physical representations, for example in the fom of masks, dances, and songs. The representations, or , cm be physically expenenced (seen, heard. touched) and are the hereditary property of individuals andor families. These representations ( then, are the physical manifestations of histoncal interactions with supematural powers.

They are signifiers of the intangible connections between the human realm and the supernaturd world.

As objects made in and for secuiar environments, Nicolson's paintings do not exist in any supematural or spiritual realms associated with the potlatch. The only connections the paintings have to such worlds are the ceremonid button blankets wom at potlatches, fiom which the paintings take their inspiration. While they adopt some visual qualities of Kwakwgkg'wakw bunon blankets, the paintings are created as art objects that document Nicolson's referential contexts of personal and communal histones, as well as her sense of place. Despite the secular context for the creation and exhibition of these paintings, their interpretations overlap with the context of the supematural. The paintings allude to ancient ideas about human movement and travel between the physical and supematural. In Nicolson's worldview, movement, and travel of this kind blends temporal and spatial heworks, and is associated with both secular and supematural realities. Conceming these overlapping realities, Nicolson's paintings document her conternporary expenences and identity as she moves in and through the notions of tradition.

Both The Entrance to Heaven and CZimbing ihe Tree ofLife visually document Nicolson's growing awareness of self and of her place in her comrnunity and farnily. This growth necessarily jouneys at times to the fringes of the unknown, or the supernaturai. The paintings represent Nicolson's interactions with the supematural and her subsequent reflections on such encounters. Nicolson is quick however, to dismiss a direct connection between her paintings and the role of in Kwakw>wakw potiatches. She suggests that the paintings are Zike in that "they embody the supematural experience, that which is beyond the physical world. They are a gift and they come through openings like doonvays; those of which present themselves in many different forms and in many different places" (Nicolson 05/15/99). In the painting, The Entrance to Heaven a doorway appears as the structure through which the human figure ernerges. Doorways are symbolically represented in

Climbing the Tree of Life where things may come and go fiom this world to the other through the hollows of the coppers.

When 1 asked her what the images in the paintings specificdly documented, Nicolson responded: "experience". In sum, these two paintings visually represent a part of Nicolson's experience that stems fiom her existence as a contemporary fernale Kwakwgkg'wakw painter on the Northwest Coast.

According to Nicolson, the formal aesthetics of the images refer to the collective of her comrnunity and family, and the concepnial moments of creation behind the images are primarily documents of her identity as an individual.

Viewen of this painting might ask what, and how, do the images in these paintings document Nicolson's own travel, experience, and interaction with

, the supematural? The overlapping interpretive contexts of the paintings are metaphors of the contemporary conditions/experiences of many First Nations artists on the Northwest Coast today. As stated above, the rneanings behind the paintings exist between their references to the intangible world of the supematural associated with the potlatch, and their existence as created physicai objects to be publicly exhibited in the rnainstream art world. In Nicolson's own words: "There is contemporary life and there is tradition. These paintings are separate, completed outside of tradition, but there are threads that move back and forth"

(Nicolson 05/15/99).

The threads, to which Nicolson refers, represent the non-linear routes of cultural production made manifest through her everyday practice of artmaking of which her paintings are a part. Culhue, as practiced by human agents such as

Nicolson, cm be full of contradiction, digression, and recursive loops. Nicolson suggests these kinds of movernents through her simultaneous and recursive use of modem and historical visual and cultuml references in her paintings. The references she uses relate to her own life expenences, which may or may not echo those of her ancestors; they may be considered contradictory or digressive to earlier Kwakwgkg'wakw expenences. The paintings as interpreted by Nicolson provide valuable information about cultural production, created by particular knowledge that cornes fiom living in a simultaneous state of placement and displacement at the end of the twentieth century.

Nicolson's life combines beliefs and expenences held by her people, the

Dzawadg'enugu, since tirne immemorial, as well as the day-to-day business of being a working artist in an urban environment. Within her narratives about the paintings and her sense of vision reflected in them, Nicolson tells us that such a life indudes fmding a balance arnong several intangible notions of place -- cornm~ty,family and individuality . The painMgs address questions: as a modern artist, what images are connected to family and cornmunity that can be acceptably represented to outside viewers? How do you respect tradition and push through innovation? Such a life includes finding a balance between the physical localities where one decides to physically reside -- reserve life or urban existence.

How do you snike a balance between the demands of a professional urban/internationai artist and the responsibilities to those at home? Such a life

includes experiential processes witnessed since time immernorial by one's people

-- a search for a balance, to find a doonuay, between the known physical world and that of a world beyond. The two paintings by Nicolson discussed here visually represent such otherworldly moments of balance, fiom which fleeting moments of clarity slip through to the present.

Nicolson believes that before the colonial suppression of First Nations artistic production on the Northwest Coast around the last turn of the century, art was created out of the contemporary expenences of its maken and their comrnunities.

They (artists) were making great art, grand art in my opinion. Therefore they were able to take new materiais, ideas, they shaped things, and it was a high point of artistic production. And then there was the penod that oppression of out people was the greatest and artistic production fell off (Nicolson 05/15/99).

Accordingly, she says, the old works reflect artistic cornmitment to

community as well as to individual expression. Nicolson believes that during the artistic renaissance or revival of Northwest coast arûorms (1950~4960s) many artists were simply imitaring histoncal works. "What we were really doing" says

Nicolson, "waslooking back and we had this kind of rebuilding process. But really we were more or less imitating cultural expressions from the past and not in a language of cultural expression that was completely coming out of contemporary experiences" (Nicolson 0915/99). The intensive effort to revive the art was at the expense of representing the contemporary life experiences of the artists during this time-period.

Speaking about Kwakwgka'wakw- art production at the present tum of the century, Nicolson says:

1 think what is happening in contemporixy works now, is that we cm entertain the oppominity of conternporary expression without bastardizing tradition. Which means that we've actually sewn together the past and present and there is no longer that separation.. ..So my interest in the past is to literdly sew together, for me to understand our people and to feel Iiberated, expressive. 1 dont want to imitate but to emuiate their fieedom of expression and contemporary content (Nicolson 0511 5/99).

Grounded within the narratives that accompany Nicolson's art are overlapping conditions of history, tradition, innovation and the present moment.

These conditions are CO-existentin the contemporary life experiences fiom which

Nicoison draws her inspiration. The formai qualities of Nicolson's paintings dude to this composite reality; their images document contemporary events visually represented through Kwakwak#wakw- design forms used since thne inmernorial. Nicolson purposefully applies written Kwak'wala text in her paintings to affmi its continued use by Kwakwgkg'wakw peoples despite its endangered stahis. Yet, it is within this seeming fissure of cultural loss associated with the demise of language, that Nicolson locates cultural growth as well as continuity. Her art is rooted in these kinds of cultural interactions and tcachings that include moments of digression and contradiction as well as development and progress. Historically, artists from her nation have created art that tells the history of individual and family identity, hereditary rights, and privileges, which mark significant historicai moments. Viewed in this light, Nicolson's paintings and photographs, which document significant life events such as births and deaths in her own family, take their place in the continuum of Kwakwgkg'wakw art production.

CONCLUSION

1 have argued that art by Barkhouse, Nicolson, and Renwick circulate as texts to be interpreted not only fkom certain points of visuality (design elements that signiQ difference), but through exchanges of signs. The art is a signifier of the Northwest coast as expressed through each artist's sense of place. Read as fomof cultural critique, the various artworks attempt to de-familiarize the place of the Northwea coast by reproducing it through known images and objects

(Barkhouse and Renwick's art), or using specific culturaI codes (Nicolson's use of Northwest coast form line). The art connotes the roots/routes of activity and

presence these artists experience in diverse fields of social, political and economic

networks that are local and global, international and transnational.

The artists unapologetically aestheticize their expenences of multi-locality

by reproducing cultural objects and images as texts that crosscut the fields of

material culture, natural resources, and cultural identity. Each of the artists spoke

about their work as a signifier of themselves as individuals; none of the art

directly represented their communities or nations. This predicament is markedly

different from the examples of tourist objects or ceremonial regalia that 1 gave at

the outset of this chapter, where production and consumption of material culture

intersects with, respectively, processes of commodification and politicized group

ideotity (social relations). Udike tourkt objects, but akin to the purposehl display of ceremonial regalia by tribal groups, the art by Barkhouse, Nicolson,

and Renwick challenges post-colonial conditions/relations concerning Native and non-Native peoples. These challenges issued through the art suggest points of

slippage between competing social, political and economic discourses over the place of the Northwest coast.

The reproduction of aboriginal materiai culture and experience by

Barkhouse, Nicolson, and Renwick presents the Northwest coast as radically abstract. As texts that address sense of place, the artists' works question the reality

of a place called the Northwest coast by presenting their experiences through simdacra that are both celebratory and critical. Their art as cultural critique intersech with Murray Edelman's concept of "new realities"(Edeiman 199563) in modern art. He writes, such art is "neither description nor representation, but a powerfid influence toward visuaiizing issues and people in a particuiar way for reasons that need have no source at al1 in everyday life, though the art then shapes the meaning of everyday life" (Edelman l9%:63). Figure 34. Arthur Renwick: Underrow. ( 1996). Photo Installation. Figure 3 5. Mary Anne Barhouse: Reservoir. (1997). Installation. Figure 36. Mary Anne Barkhouse: Reservoir (detail) (1997). Figure 37. Marianne Nicolson: Cintitled Rock Painring. ( 1 999) Kingcorne Inlet. B.C. Figure 3 8. Marianne Nicolson: L'ntitled Rock Painting. (in progress) ( 1999) Kingcorne Met, B.C. Figure 39. Marianne Nicolson: Untirled Rock Painting. (detail) ( 1999) Kingcorne Inlet, B.C. Figure 40. Pictographs of Coppers near Kingcorne Inlet. Photograph courtesy of Marianne Nicolson. Figure 4 1. Arthur Renwick: Landmark. ( 1992). Figure 42. Arthur Renwick: Conductor. ( 1996). Figure 43. Arthur Renwick: Conducior. (detail) (1996). Figure 44. Mary Anne Barkhouse: Waiver. (1 995). Installation. 5 panels with cyano-type prints: 2 panels 2.1 3 X 0.6 m (approx); 3 panels 1.37 X .6m (approx). Figure 45. Marianne Nicolson: The Entrnnce ro Henven ( 1999). Acrylic paint on wood panelling . Figure 46. Marianne Nicolson: CZimbing the Tree of Life. ( 1999). Acrylic painr on wood panelling. CHAPTER 6: FU3VISIONING ABORIGINAL ART AND TEXTS.

In this dissertation, 1have conducted a texhial analysis around two predicarnents of vision and visuality in aboriginal art in Canada. The first concemed the production of identity by native artists through visual art based on notions of 'space' and 'place'. The second concemed the consumption/reception of these artists' identities and art through the documentation of intercultural spectatorship in art texts and artworld discourses. 1 structured my analysis by juvtaposing three interdependent cnticd paths of thought: Citingkext,

Sightinghubjectivity,and Siting/place. My intent in using these headings for discussion was to bring another line to bear on ethnographic writing about the

intersections of images and text conceming aboriginal art.

My focus on multiple textualities of production and reception concemhg

visuai images and textual signs examined the notion of intercultural spectatorship.

AAer discussing the various texts that informed my discussions about different

fields of vision and art, 1 believe that it is impossible to separate processes of textuality and visuality for the purpose of analysis. The projection between visual to text and back again is a simultaneous one that occun within a gap of

translation, and it is not the point to try to suture this gap between the two concepts. Rather, the point is to see whose interests and power structures are

served by that gap. Ln the texts that 1 dyzed for this dissertation, gaps of translation between images and texts exposed the power dynamics (politics of vision) between anthropologists and art historians concerning the authenticity of art objects (chapter two), between artists and their viewers conceming visual strategies for spectatorship (chapter three), the intersections of artidviewer subjectivity and technology (chapter four), and artists' stmggle to defme themselves agauist global economic processes and postmodem sirnulacra (chapter five).

My exploration into the representation of place in art by aboriginal artists focused on individual pieces of art as visible texts. These tems indicate place is a visually and textually negotiated concept; it is not simply a geographicai location.

Visual strategies used by artists and their spectators, like active vision, break down modemist dialectics of observer/observed while deconstnicting meta- narratives of colonial and post-colonial History to reveal multiple, shared histones.' The new realities, which emerge fiom the slippage that occurs between images of history, place, and contemporary aboriginal identity, structure art as text.

' Gerald McMaster uses this distinction in his article, Towarcis an AboriginaI Art History (1 999). McMaster notes that Thomas McEvilley onghally made the statement. Foiiowing McEvilley, McMaster writes that Eurocentric History (upper case) has been called into question, and its "dominant intellectual space is now coming into contact with, and being perforated by, other histories (lower case), especially by those which do not count Europe as part of their lineage" (McMaster 1999:82). The place of art as text in critical anthropological and art historical discourses has shifted dramaticaiiy in the last 50 years. As 1 chart through chapters two and three, art historians and anthropologists shared a modernist discourse on 'primitive' art yet, in generd, the two disciplines approached the art with opposing terms. Art historians focused upon 'universalism and style' and anthropologists were primarily concemed with 'particularism and context.' Both disciplines were entangled within issues of terminology for the art, and dilemmas over proper categorization that wouid later be critiqued as dlochronic. Notions of colonial authority and reductivism were prominent in these texts. My principle point about the early cntical analyses of art by scholars is that art was considered as a product, rather than as process. The shifi fiom the analysis of art as object to art as text, then, marks the departure point for cntical inquiry, which 1 have sought to engage in this dissertation. Hence, I take the last three chapters in this dissertation as indicative of modem art discourses on aboriginal art in which art cm be read as visible texts. In these three chapters, 1 looked at visual fields where

1 believe there is evidence of slippage in cultural and social reproduction that can be identified through processes of vision and visuality. In particular, these slippages occur through the formation of subjectivity, the critique of objectivity, the circulation of signs of aboriginality, alternative visual strategies (active vision), the use of technology in art, and individual lives and art as caught within transnational flows. The headings under which 1have wrïtten my discussions

(citing/sighting/siting) are intended to provoke questions about how culture (and visual culture in particular) is represented in contemporary ethnographie writing.

In this dissertation, I have sought to re-fashion the manner in which aboriginal modem art is represented, and reproduced, through anthropologicd analysis. By taking this particuiar approach to textual analysis, 1 hope to have made evident new ways of reading cntical texts about art and, subsequently, seeing art as tex? as a valuable form of cultural critique. Abbott, Larry Nd Time of Visions - Interview with Shelley Niro. Transcript.

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Arthur Renwick (b. 1965) Renwick is a member of the Kitamaat band of the Haisla Nation thtough his mother's family. Renwick grew up on the Kitimaat Reserve located on the Skeena River in northem British Columbia. He lefi the reserve in his early twenties to live in Vancouver and receive a professional training in art. His formal education hcludes a photography diploma from Emily Carr College of Art and Design and a Fine Arts diploma from Vancouver Comrnunity College as well as a Master of Fine Arts From Concordia University. He currently resides both in Elliot Lake, Ontario where he is a full-time professor at White Mountain Academy of Art, and Toronto, Ontario where he produces his own photography and works as an art curator.

Dana Claxton Claxton was born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan and is a member of the Huakpapa Lakota Nation. She is an interdisciplinary artist who works in film, video, photography and performance art. Her artwork has been shown in Canada and the United States and her installation work is held in the permanent collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her videos have been screened at a range of sites in Vancouver and Calgary, on WTN, at the Museum of Modem Art, New York and New View 95 in Columbia, South Carolina. She is an active member in the arts community and has curated exhibitions in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Ottawa. Recently she directed a docurnentary project for the National Film Board and CO-chairedan abonginal film and video festival in Vancouver. At present Claxton resides in Vancouver as an artist and is working towards an M.A. in Liberal Arts at Simon Fraser University.

Gree: S taats (b.1963) Staats was bom on the Six Nations Reserve in southwestern Ontario and is a member of the Mohawk Nation. He is a graduate of Sheridan College's Photography Program where he studied Applied Photography. In 1983 Greg was awarded the Professional Photographers of Ontario Student Award - First Pnze in Portraiture. Since his graduation in 1985, Staats' work has been included in a number of solo and group exhibitions across North American including: maui oo me - A Gathering of People, 00 Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia (1993); Mdtiplicity: A New Culturd Strategy, UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver BC 9 1993- 1994); Contemporary Carnem, Red Head Gallery, Toronto, Ontario (1993); The Submuloc Show, in collaboration with Robert Houle (traveling exhibition USA 1992- 1994); First Nations Art, Woodland Cultural Centre, Brantford, Ontario (muaIly since 1985). He shows regulariy at private galleries such as Gallery 44 in Toronto, Ontario on a fiequent bais. He has also worked with the Ontario Ministry of Education as a photographer. Staats photography is in the collections of: the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba; Canadian Museum of Civilization, Hull, Quebec; Department of ùidian and Northem Affairs, Ottawa, Ontario; and the Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, Ontario. Staats currently resides in Toronto.

Jeff Thomas (b.1956) Thomas is a member of the Onondaga Nation and was bom on the Six Nations Reserve in southwestem Ontario. He is a self-taught photographer. Thomas haç participated in several solo and group exhibitions including: Strong Hearts: the Traditional Pow Wow Dancer, Museum of Man and Nature, Winnipeg, Manitoba (1 991); The Photographs of Jeff Thomas, En Foco Gallery, Bronx, New York (199 1); Pow Wow Images: An Exhibition of photographs by Jeffiey Thomas, Thunder Bay National Exhibition Centre and Centre for Indian kt,Thunder Bay, Ontario (1985); From Icebergs to Ice Tea, Thunder Bay National Exhibition Centre (1994); The Art of Memory and Transformation, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Hull, Quebec (1 993); Our Land/Our Selves: American Indian Contemporary Artists, The University Art Gallery, State University of New York, Binghamton, New York (199 1); and the American Indian Photographer Show, Southern Plains Indian Museum, Anadarko, Oklahoma (1984). Recently he has had solo exhibitions at the Indian Art Centre in Ottawa, Ontario (1998); and at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba (2000). He is also the curator of Emergence fiorn the Shadow: First Peoples' Photographie Perspectives (2000) at the Fint Peoples Hall Gallery, Museum of Civilization, Hull, Quebec. Thomas cunently resides in Otiawa, Ontario.

Marianne Nicolson (b. 1969) Nicolson is a mernber of the Ddzawadij'eny band of the Kwgkwgka'wakw Nation. She spent her childhood on Vancouver Island. Nicolson obtained a Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts and Photography fiorn Emily Carr College of Art and Design and a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Victoria. She was awarded an Eiteijorg Fellowship for the year 1999. Nicolson's exhibition record includes Artropolis '93, Vancouver, B.C.;First Ladies - Native Women and Contemporary Art. A Space Gallery, Toronto, Ontario and the Pitt Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. (1993); Travelling Theory - An exhibition of Contemporary Canadian Artists, Macintosh Gallery, London, Ontario and Jordan National Gailery of Fine Arts, Amman, Jordan (1992); Memory and Desire: The Voices of Eleven Women of Culture, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. and Reservation X, Canadian Museum of Civilizatioa and the National Museum of the herican Indian, New York (1 998-2000). Nicolson's work is collected by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver B.C., the Indian Art Centre, Ottawa, Ontario, the Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana and numerous private collections. Nicolson currently resides in Victoria.

Mary Anne Barkhouse (b. 1961) Barkhouse is Kwakwaka'wakw and a member of the Nimpkish band fkom Alert Bay. She was bom in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 1991 she received an Honours degree in the New Media Program at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Barkhouse's multi-media work has been displayed in exhibitions across Canada including: Multiplicity: A New Cultural Strategy at the UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, in 1993; First Nations Art at the Woodland Cultural Center, Brantford, Ontario; Shades of Red, Pow Wow Gallery, Toronto, 199 1; and Exposed: native Women Photographers Group Show, Niroquois Gallery, Brantford in 199 1. Recently her work was selected dong with the work of her partner Michael Belmore for exhibition at Toronto's Sculpture Garden (1998). Her work is also represented in the collection of the Indian Art Centre in Ottawa. She currently works and resides out of her northem Ontario studio near the tom of Minden.

Patricia Deadman (b.1961) Deadrnan was born in Ohsweken, Ontario. She is Mohawk fiom Six Nations Ontario. She obtained her BFA hmthe University of Windsor in 1988. Solo exhibitions of her work include: Fringe Momenturn at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery; A Little Bit of Dance, The Photo Club, Philadelphia and This land Reserved at the Woodstock Art Gallery. Recent group exhibitions of Deadman's work include: The Young Contemporaries '96, London Regional Art and Histoncal Museum; Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices, The Smithsonian Institute; Alter Native: Native Photography, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; and Be it So It Remains in Our Minds, Oh Canada project at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her work is in numerous public collections including: the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Walter Phillips Gallery and the Indian Art Centre, Ottawa. She has also curated several exhibitions including Staking Land Claims at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Alberta.

Shelley Niro (b.1954) Niro was born in Niagara Falls, New York and is Mohawk firom the Six Nations Reserve. She received her BFA fiorn the University of Windsor in 1990. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts kom the University of Western Ontario. Her educational background also includes graphic design fiom the Graphics Program at Durham College, Oshawa. Niro has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, some of these include: The Border: The Contemporary Native Amencan Photo Art of Shelley Niro, Longyear Museum of Anthropology, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York (1997); The Femde Imaginary, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario (1 995); From Icebergs to Ice Tea, Thunder Bay Art Centre, Thunder Bay, Ontario (1994); Sense of Self, London Regiond Art and Historical Museum, London, Ontario (1994); Cultural Contrasts, Stamford Museum and Nature Centre, Stamford, Connecticut (1993); and Mohawks in Beehives and Other Works, Mercer Union, Toronto, Ontario (1992); and Reservation X, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Hull, Quebec (1998). Her Film productions are numerous and include moa recently, Honey Moccasin (1998). Niro currently resides in Brantford, Ontario.