McGill-Queen's University Press Blog

Beyond Wilderness reviewed in CHOICE

978-0-7735-3244-1  September 2007

This volume critically engages the tropes of a Canadian national identity that the Group of Seven Canadian Landscape Artists and their manipulators define as "northerness" and "wilderness."

Coming Out of the Wilderness: Book Addresses the myths and realities of Canadian art

What could be the most innovative and important book of the decade on contemporary Canadian art will be launched by its editors today in Calgary at the Trepanier Baer Gallery.

Why so important? Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art (McGill-Queen's University Press, 390 pages, $49.95) takes on a big subject, landscape art in Canada, that for decades was the bedrock of modernist culture in this country. In particular, the book addresses the most visible vehicle of the nation's mythology, the iconic Group of Seven landscape. examines how and for whom the myths of pure wilderness and true north, brave and free, were created. It challenges the mythology and the power structures behind it and considers its many implications.

As the book's editors, John O'Brian, a noted art historian at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Peter White, an independent curator and writer who lives in Montreal, have devised a multifaceted lens through which to examine this fascinating area of recent art history and cultural theory.

Their brilliantly structured book, which is revolutionary in its thinking and design, is a compilation of strongly linked art works and texts by 64 artists, curators and critical writers, which the editors have identified as key moments in an evolving discussion that has reinvented the idea, or rather, diverse ideas of the Canadian landscape.

One of the book's most innovative features is its presentation of art works and writings as equal partners in the construction of the discourse. Stand alone artists' pages are interleaved with writings related by themes. By compiling these diverse works, created over 30 years, for the first time, Beyond Wilderness not only presents the discourse, but gives it shape.

"It was an extremely dispersed discourse," says White, a former Glenbow Museum curator and former director of both the Dunlop and the Mendel art galleries.

"In the face of this powerful idea represented by the Group of Seven, a discussion had been taking place, but it was so dispersed that it hadn't been possible to recognize it. One of the things this book does is bring it together so that it can be seen in a way it's never been seen before."

The questions raised go to the roots of what it means to be Canadian. For as Beyond Wilderness points out repeatedly, it is important to remember that landscape is not the product of nature, but a construction of the mind, a product of culture.

Taking up where the Group left off, Beyond Wilderness leads into the country's social, technological, economic, political and geopolitical landscapes to present a clearer perspective on Canadian realities. Even as Tom Thomson, the Group's forerunner, was painting pristine Canadian wilderness in Algonquin Park, the North was the site of logging, mining and industrialization.

The point, however, is not to attack the Group, who believed their job was to create a national art for an emergent modern nation, but to examine the myths and rhetoric that grew out of interpretations of their vision and its place in the formation of the national identity. It was, after all, a populist rhetoric that in fact was exclusionary -- primarily that of establishment Protestant English Canada -- which erased the visibility of First Nations people, women, Quebecers, immigrants and visible minorities.

Moreover, it still exerts a powerful hold on the Canadian imagination. It was supported and institutionalized by powerful friends -- the National Gallery of Canada, the government, the school system, collectors and other agencies.

"Once these national images are formed in a world defined by nationhood they are very powerful."

"They circulate, and though they may be fomented by national institutions, they then are perpetuated through clubs, and organizations and advertising and all those kinds of things. They become part of popular culture and they are self-sustaining."

As a case in point, the mystical mountain peaks of Lawren Harris are now the backdrops for the slogan Absolut Seven in a famous Absolut vodka ad campaign.

"In my public school, there was a reproduction of Tom Thomson's Northern River in the main foyer," says White, now in his early 50s, who points out that institutions and markets are very slow to change. "But in the meantime, there is this paradox that Canadians remain very powerfully attached to it, and it was to try and unravel some of the reasons that we went about doing this book. And that unravelling, that questioning, that deconstruction really does begin in the 1960s."

Parallel investigations into the role of landscape in the formation of national identity, as well as the cultural role of landscape generally, have been taking place in Great Britain and the United States. Canada, however, has not been included in the several anthologies on landscape and ideology that have been published since the 1980s. An important incentive for Beyond Wilderness was to bring Canadians into the international discussion in which they have been largely invisible.

- Nancy Tousley, The Calgary Herald, January 12, 2008

Bordernotes - Border Crossings discusses Beyond Wilderness

PLAIN LANDSCAPE

by Meeka Walsh

A new Canadian art book has been published by McGill-Queen's University Press, Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art, edited by John O'Brian and Peter White. It's a fine book with new essays, as well as reprints of important commentary, essays and reviews published earlier. It struck me as something of a quietly brave book, quite Canadian actually, in the approach to its topic, having about it a certain doggedness. The impetus of the book was an exhibition mounted by the National Gallery of Canada in 1995 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Group of Seven's first exhibition. Called "The Group of Seven, Art for a Nation," by title alone it made some sweeping assumptions that prompted questions from a Canadian audience accustomed, at the end of the 20th century, to issues raised by a postmodern reading of art.

One example only, of many cited by Lynda Jessup in her 1996 review of the exhibition. She pointed out that the introductory panel stated, "The Group's goals were nationalist and their prime audience was English Canadian." Nowhere in the exhibition, she said, were the implications of this addressed. Now, in 2007, an entire book is doing just that. I found evidence of what I called the book's quiet courage in the fact of its issue more than a decade after the event. Here was a topic worth sticking to, dealing with, and the issues provoked by the exhibition and its singular view are still present, although perhaps in altered and modified forms, in Canadian power structures and distribution, and in governing institutions. The exhibition was mounted by the largest gallery in the nation and travelled to other major institutions: the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts -- a pan-Canadian tour. That's a formidable line of endorsation to question. To counter what was presented as a national perspective, i.e., how Canada was seen as a nation through the agency of the Group of Seven -- a single, unifying view, the editors of Beyond Wilderness have selected a panoply of artists and a multiplicity of voices.

Thinking about landscape sent me, not for the first time, to Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory, which opens with a quote from Thoreau. Here are the first lines: "It is vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such." Schama too says, in thinking about the foreign landscape pictures of his own childhood imaginings, "If a child's vision of nature can already be loaded with complicating memories, myths and meanings, how much more elaborately wrought is the frame through which our adult eyes survey the landscape ... Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind." He quotes Rene Magritte, who, in explaining his 1933 painting La Condition humaine, where one painting has been superimposed over the view it is depicting, said, "What lies beyond the windowpane of our apprehension needs a design before we can properly discern its form ... And it is culture, convention and cognition that makes that design; that invests a retinal impression with the quality we experience as beauty."

Painting in the style of the Post-Impressionists, the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson were championed as representing, in a unique and fitting manner, the true Canadian landscape, a ready and potent symbol of what Canada was. How more effectively to identify a country than by the way it looks? Here, in the first half of the 20th century, as John O'Brian and Peter White write in their book's introduction, was a wilderness painting movement that would produce the national art. The Group of Seven with their supporters -- private patrons and the National Gallery of Canada -- "Wished to develop an independent aesthetic -- homegrown, northern and free of foreign influence." They wrote, "National indentity was inseparable from the geography and climate of Canada's boreal landmass. For them, Canadianess was defined by way of northerness and wilderness."

A wild, windy, rugged, norther, craggy, rocky, cloud-tossed, bold, turbulent, pristine and uninhabited country. For whom, since the country appeared unpopulated, was this representation made? And since we are acknowledging that landscape is made, that the reading of it is constructed, that it's not an uninflected wild, whose noble but churlish landscape was that? It belonged to central Canada, which was white, male, Protestant and what is really referred to as establishment -- an independent country embracing progress and making its way, through the use of its abundant resources, in the 20th-century industrial world while holding itself, as an image, northern, apart and distinct.

This was the "brand" to be espoused by Canadians from the inside, and by others, elsewhere. A 1919 exhibition of the work of J.E.H. Macdonald, Lawren Harris, Frank H. Johnston and William Cruikshank was accompanied by a wall plaque that read, "The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our country." In the nation as depicted by the Group and in the exhibition and discussion that attended it ("The Group of Seven, Art for a Nation"), absent but not reported missing were First Nations people, women, Quebecers, racially visible immigrants and the masses of Canadians who lived in cities.

In the book of notes and essays by John Berger called And our faces my heart, brief as photos, which is as well thumbed in my library as some religious text ought to be but isn't, Berger is speaking about his favourite painter, Caravaggio. It was Berger's sense that the people he saw on the streets of Livorno after the war would have found themselves reflected in Caravaggio's canvases. In this poor city, Berger said he learned about the ingenuity of the dispossessed and about himself as well. "It was there too that I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power. This has turned out to be a lifelong aversion," he wrote.

I live on the prairies. It's not a landscape to which the Group of Seven and their patrons were drawn in seeking a visual representation of a nation. This is not a landscape to inspire an iconic narrative of a country. It's certainly not inhabited by visual evidence of power, nor is it a wilderness over which no one has cast an eye or vested with habitation. It's not wild and empty and therefore is not fair game for the taking.

I exit the city on level ground. I drive, for the most part, on an arrow-straight road heading north to a district called the Interlake, not for its stereotypically picturesque lake qualities but because it sits plain and resolute between two large, shallow lakes. Aeons ago, glaciers slid over the ground, raking and scouring it. They left behind, as they melted, endless flat fields covered in a thin layer of stubborn, unyielding soil, peppered throughout by small boulders and rocks that rise to the surface, heaved each spring by the annual thaw.  What had been the bed of the great lake Aggassiz is the Interlake, the lakes that remained: Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipeg. To write their names on a page is to hear seagulls, to see open wooden boats, lifted prows banging the waves, heading out to bring in nets filled with sweet bony fish and to count my great good luck in finding at the water's pebbled edges, occasional pieces of chipped, worked stone, fragments of arrowheads, drills and spearpoints, which, dated, go back to 4000 bc; to anticipate a thermometer of temperature changes registered at ankle height as the waters were tested with familiarity in every season but winter, daily as I was able, just to see how it was.

No one painted this landscape for reasons of national cohesion, this landscape so plain of flashy detail that every new fence is noted and which stand of poplars were knocked down to plant some canola, and which fields yielded hay twice a season, and where the palette -- except for a brief flaring in the summer -- is shades of brown, russet, grey and ochre.

This is a landscape that might resist habitation because it's not a comodious place in which to live -- not fertile, lush, or temperate. At the same time, it doesn't claim for itself rugged, pistine status. With its horizontal plane, it is the ideal candidate for the ideal reading of the perfect landscape painting, albiet not giving over to standard measures of beauty.

The American artist Robert Smithson described his projects, which were often located in the landscape where he worked with the natural materials of the site, as a dialectic between the site, which referred to the geographic location, and the non-site, which meant images, maps and other representations. The site and the non-site were never perfectly matched and the work of art, resided, then, in the dialectical relationship between what he identified as the two realms. He said, "Between the actual site ... and the non-site exists a space of metaphoric significance." If we're acknowledging that landscapes, as we see them in art, always represent mediated spaces, then we also recognize those spaces are metaphoric. Smithson insisted further, on the "primacy of the rectangle" as essential to the dialectical nature of an artwork. A contributor to the book Beyond Wilderness, Johanne Sloan, points out that Michael Snow, too, wrote about the "edifying dialogue between the rectangle and all its specifically human content." Landscape art, Johanne Sloan reminds us, because of its horizontal framing (and the acutal horizon line), is deeply rooted in conventions of Western art making.

Extending the rectangle and the horizontal picture frame to the medium of film, I think of the observations of noted Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin on the use of cinemascope in making a film that is set on the prairies. "When you think of it," he said, referring to Noam Gonick's film Hey, Happy!, "what could be better suited to it than the prairie? Cinemascope was invented for filming snakes, funerals and Winnipeg."

After returning home from a trip east, I always drive north. My eyes drink the horizontal flat prairie space with a real thirst and I'm happy to recognize that here, far from the seats of power, status and privilege, is the ideal landscape.

- Border Crossings, November 2007