Chapter 13 The New Figuration: From Pop to Postmodern ism Johanne Sloan In the 1960s, figuration made a comeback in or multimedia artists, but experimentation Canadian art. Artists set out to represent people, with a variety of media, materials, and visual places, and things, although this was not simply technologies soon became the norm. For instance, a matter of resurrecting the figurative art of the in the 1960s Greg Curnoe used collaged objects, past. For a new generation of artists intent on paper ephemera, written texts, and audio visually representing the world around them, the components to address questions of place and stakes had changed, not least because abstraction the politics of everyday life. During the 1970s and had become the dominant mode of modernism. 1980s General Idea developed an iconography By the mid- l 960s, however, many artists were of fanciful pavilions, pageants, and gay identity turning their attention to the mediatized and through a practice encompassing magazines, commercialized image-world that flourished posters, architectural plans, flags, video, and in the post-war era. This new figuration often performance. Beginning in the 1980s Jeff Wall borrowed its punchy visual appearance from described himself as a "painter of modern life,"1 the ephemeral products of pop culture, and was while photographing elaborately staged tableaux. likely to employ such non-traditional materials as Throughout the 1980s and 1990s such artists metallic paint or plastic. If the "high modernist" as Joanne Tod, Attila Richard Lukacs, Eleanor followers of American critic Clement Greenberg Bond, and Pierre Dorion continued to produce decreed that avant-garde art should remain paintings, but it can be argued that the brilliance uncontaminated by the demands of everyday of these artists lies in their abilities to bring life, the figurative art that came to prominence the language of paint into a dialogue with the from the 1960s onward overtly addressed war, expanded visual cultures and technologies of the nationalism, technology, sexuality, and other late twentieth century: the glamour of advertising, topical issues. the intimacy of the televisual, the conventional During this period, painting gradually poses of pornography, the unblinking gaze of lost its exclusive status as a medium for artistic surveillance cameras, and the digitized worlds of expression, and the careers of many artists show computer screens. this waning dependency. Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow are exemplary in this respect. Both were accomplished painters with a stake in The World Goes Pop abstraction and both deployed paint alongside film, photography, collage, and sculptural objects. The allure of commercialized pop culture is Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s some particularly evident in bodies of work by Joyce artists redefined themselves as inter-media Wieland and Greg Curnoe from the 1960s. Figure 13.1 Joyce Wieland, First Integrated Film with a Short on Sailing , 196 3 oil on canvas , 66 x 22.7 cm pr ivate co llection 258 Johanne Sloan Borrowing imagery, materials, colour schemes, (1960, private collection), for instance, which and forms of address from the commercial realms initially looks to be an abstract force field of of advertising, packaging, movies, and comics, moving shapes, also features a blue sphere and then translating them into more meaningful labelled "me," and various graffiti-like arrows cultural artifacts, this work forms the core of and phallic shapes that are spread across the Canada's abbreviated but influential Pop Art painting's surface. This image is not abstract, moment. In his 1971 essay "Lowbrow Highbrow, in other words; it instead functions as a quasi­ Highbrow Lowbrow," Umberto Eco stated that Duchampian diagram of sexual attraction. "in pop art kitsch is redeemed [and] raised by the Wieland moved to New York City in 1963-a artist into a new state of esthetic dignity." 2 Yet, it remarkably productive year during which is not clear whether artworks provide redemption she produced a large body of work that is from the netherworld of pop culture, proffer a inventive, funny, topical, and assertively Pop critique of commodification, or possibly fail to in its sensibility. The paintings Numbers ( 1963, do either and merely illustrate how twentieth­ private collection) and Stranger in Town (1963, century art succumbs to the logic of pop culture private collection) lack human figures but under capitalism, endlessly reproducing and include speech balloons, those white shapes that cannibalizing itself. At one level, Canadian artists suggest voice or language and that unmistakeably seemed to pay gleeful homage to the commercial derive from comic strips. Other paintings from realm to which all post-war North Americans that year are divided into geometric or gridded were exposed. Curnoe and Wieland's work sections: Brad's Bridge (private collection), often has brightly coloured, shiny surfaces, and The Battery (private collection), and March in a general way imitates the allure of the new on Washington (private collection) enclose commodities, with their promise of immediate letters, faces, flags, and dollar signs, as if these gratification. Something in these artworks, elements of the everyday urban environment however, interrupts or rechannels pop culture's were undergoing a transformation into signage. gratuitous flow of pleasure, entertainment, and Alongside this language-like fragmentation of consumption. Canadian art of this time thus the picture plane, numerous paintings copy the has much in common with American Pop Art as sequentiality of television, film, and animated well as such European art movements as Britain's cartoons. West 4th (private collection) and Independent Group or Germany's Capitalist First Integrated Film with a Short on Sailing Realism. The most compelling work to emerge (private collection; Figure 13.1), both of 1963, out of these movements depends on a shifting are vertical stacks of rectangular images, an love-hate relationship with pop culture, and this unusual format within the tradition of painting ambiguity provides a valuable aesthetic tension. but immediately recognizable as being like a As will be discussed in this chapter, some artists strip of film. A rudimentary narrative is then also sought to reframe the encounter between art suggested through the gradual "movement" of a and pop culture in distinctively Canadian terms. few motifs. Parting lips and a twitching cigarette Joyce Wieland's (1931-98) art practice suggest a sexy street-corner conversation, or a in the 1960s was emblematic of a generational far-off boat appears to sink beneath the surface change: her turn to figuration was a reaction of a watery expanse. Sometimes multiple against abstract art, involved the embrace stories (or rather, fragments of stories) unfold of multiple media and image sources, and simultaneously down or across the canvases. was embedded in the artist's countercultural Wieland used this narrative structure to politics. Even an early painting such as Redgasm showcase anxieties about sexuality, race, and From Pop to Postmodernism 259 Figure 13.2 Mary Pratt, Eviscerated Chickens, 1971 oil on m aso nite , 46 .5 x 61.2 cm Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador violence. With First Integrated Film with a Short showing the subtle variation of "pure" formal on Sailing we are shown three moments of an elements, the strong shapes in these compositions interracial kiss, something that was then virtually narrate cartoon-like disasters, while the taboo on the big and small screens of America, inevitable disappearance of the boat beneath the especially when the kiss in question suggested waves provides an emotional hook for the viewer. the moment of sublime reconciliation at the end As the artist herself remarked, these works of a Hollywood movie. A series of shipwreck partake of the sensationalist storytelling that is paintings also dates from 1963: Untitled (Sinking pervasive in the American media. In this sense Liner) (private collection), Sailboat Tragedy and they are akin to Andy Warhol's contemporaneous Spare Part (VAG), Boat: Homage to D. W Griffith disaster paintings . (private collection), and Sinking Liner (priva te Beginning in the mid-l 960s Wieland's collection). Here Wieland seems to offer an ironic exploration in paint of a pop idiom was largely commentary on modernist seriality. Instead of supplanted by other media, notably film and 260 Johanne Sloan multimedia assemblage. The content of these Curnoe often argued in favour of regionalism, works was more explicitly political, the semi­ which he opposed to mere provincialism: abstract accident scenes giving way to the full­ "Provincialism is what people do when they live, fledged catastrophe of a real war. Like many as they think, 'out in the sticks' and they try to artists of her generation, Wieland actively imitate what they think is hip in the big centres. protested the American war being waged in Regionalism is simply what people do when Vietnam: such works as N. U. C. ( 1966, private they are ... at ease with themselves in their own collection), War and Peace: 8 mm Home Movie environment.'' 3 Artworks such as Being Tickled (1966-67, private collection), Patriotism (1966, ( 1964, AGO) or Sheila and Bill at No Haven private collection), and Betsy Ross, Look What (1965, private collection) have a Pop aesthetic They've Done to the Flag You Made With Such by virtue of their ad-like design and exaggerated Care (1966, private collection) consist