何謂艾茉莉 卡爾?: 加拿大西岸藝術的共時代性

Transcription

1 藝術學研究 2014 年 9 月, 第十四期, 頁 何謂艾茉莉 卡爾?: 加拿大西岸藝術的共時代性 洪敏秀 本論文研究加拿大藝術家艾茉莉 卡爾 ( ) 崛起的創作背景, 並以同時代性一詞中 多時共在 的概念解釋她對加拿大西岸藝術的影響力 第一部分介紹卡爾成為加拿大圖像, 主要來自大量學術研究與文化複製, 包括溫哥華藝術館經常重複的卡爾展演 第二部分探討卡爾在加拿大西岸藝術歷史的可見性其實蘊藏不可見, 涵蓋諸如十九世紀末 二十世紀初多重社會 文化 歷史敘事等多時共在脈絡 卡爾穿梭其間, 她的書寫與畫作也都表現她與其時代或同儕的連結與斷裂關係 第三部分以當代加拿大西岸藝術代表人物勞倫斯 保羅 尤克斯威樂騰 (1957 ) 及其作品為例, 討論他的創作即在闡明卡爾影響下的歷史及其陰影, 而尤克斯威樂騰所批判的卡爾, 反而成為加拿大西岸藝術創作反覆出現的精神指標 本論文以卡爾為例所提出的共時代概念, 依舊影響該地區藝術家, 卻也是他們的創作持續推陳出新的力量 感謝兩位匿名審查人的寶貴意見與指正, 筆者受益良多 本論文是科技部 ( 原國科會 ) 專題研究計畫的部分研究成果 ( NSC H ; NSC H ), 最後定稿由茱莉 麥高尼果協助文字編修, 謹此一併致謝 國立中山大學外國語文學系副教授

2 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) 關鍵字 : 艾茉莉 卡爾 勞倫斯 保羅 尤克斯威樂騰 加拿大 西岸藝術 共時代性 160

3 Min-Hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada Min-Hsiou Hung The work of Emily Carr ( ), Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (b. 1957) and other contemporary artists of the West Coast of Canada reveals a relationship between past and present. While examining the relationship may not cultivate knowledge of the West Coastal art history of Canada for the viewer seeking to interpret the significance of Yuxweluptun s work, explicating the historical context in which Carr worked advances our understanding of the work of contemporary artists. Carr s artistic expressions of the West Coastal landscape of Canada should not be exclusively treated as reflections of the colonial past, but considered as manifestations of the context that her art recreated. The mutual relationship between past and present that Carr s work recreates reemerges in the innovative work of Yuxweluptun and his contemporaries. In this essay, the quality or state of being contemporary or contemporaneous designates heterogeneous modes of being in time. The author is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University.

4 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) The etymological origins of the terms from con- together with + temporaneus (from tempus, tempor- time ) 1 point to the interaction and co-existence of multiple yet disjointed temporal zones. Such co-existence involves the intersection of past and present art, artists and art historical discourses. In his pivotal study What Is Contemporary Art?, Terry Smith defines contemporary art in terms of the multiple temporalities shaping various works, cultures, styles and movements of art in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His analysis emphasizes the ways that the past of contemporaneity generates itself in art today: Most works of contemporary art, if they aspire beyond conformity or anachronism, are de facto suggestions as to what a work of contemporary art might be in circumstances such as these. 2 In elaborating the presence of history in the present of contemporaneity, Smith devises the concept of the cotemporal, which he defines as the coexistence of distinct temporalities, of different ways of being in relation to time. 3 For Smith, cotemporality is the strongest of the three conceptual dimensions of contemporaneity the other two being the immediate and the 1 See the definitions on contemporary and contemporaneous in Oxford Dictionaries: Language Matters. Oxford University Press, n.d. Web. < (accessed January 4, 2014). 2 Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p Ibid., p

5 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada contemporaneous. 4 In his view, the incongruous relationship between these dimensions offers a means to understand contemporaneity as it is practiced in art today: the immediate indicates the viewer s direct encounters with contemporary works of art; the contemporaneous designates interactions with other beings across time; and the cotemporal, the final but not terminal meaning of contemporary, focuses on the coexistence of different ways of being in relation to time. It is the latter that endows contemporaneity with its most philosophical and definitive features. The word contemporary, for Smith, is clearly much more complex than its everyday connotations of being up-to-date, simultaneous, or contemporaneous 5 suggest. The definitive quality of the contemporary, in his view, lies in an immediate interconnective way of being in time a means of cotemporally existing with others, or in Smith s phrase, a multiplicity of relationships between being and time. 6 This is the point that Smith 4 Ibid., pp The author also benefited from one of the anonymous reviewers comments regarding Smith s distinction between these meanings. 5 Ibid., p. 4. In his response to Questionnaire on The Contemporary Tom McDonough also elaborates the semantic evolution of the word contemporary over the past centuries. Like Smith, he asserts that an early usage appearing in the title of London s Contemporary Review in 1866 was not the first; the term contemporary meant a fusion of spatial and temporal indicators in the seventeenth century, and so was used to describe something or someone dating from the same time as another. See Tom McDonough, Response to Questionnaire on The Contemporary, October 130 (2009): Smith, p

6 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) wishes to make when he poses the crucial question: What is it to be with time? 7 For Smith, time is a concept of inherent multiplicity that invokes the coexistence of distinctive temporalities. Richard Meyer posits a dialectical force in the constitution of art history that shares Smith s emphasis on the coexistence of multiple temporalities. 8 Exploring exhibitions of early twentieth-century visual culture to examine what fusion that is, being together with and time is, Meyer argues that when artists tackle social, historical and cultural conditions, the grand narrative of history may have already been recounted but the past is no more settled or secure than the present. If his view of the diachronicity of a specific time period is juxtaposed with Smith s emphasis on the prefix con-, together with, then the contemporaneity of contemporary art is understood as a prevailing force that reconfigures and transforms the interpretations of a particular period or piece. Meyer clearly explains the temporal duality of historical art that is, its pastness and presentness: The challenges posed by contemporary art are not unique to the current moment or the immediate past. All works of art were once contemporary to the artist and culture that produced them. Part of the task of the art historian, then, is to 7 Ibid., p Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), p

7 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada retrieve a vivid sense of the world into which an artwork was introduced and so to measure the distance between its contemporary moment and the scholar s own. Our return to the past must acknowledge the impossibility of forging a comprehensive account of the artwork as it really was while nevertheless attending to the specificity and heft of history. 9 When contemporaneity, with its focus on the cotemporary, dialectical relationship between past and present, is employed to describe the work of the modern Canadian artist Emily Carr, it designates a challenging and occasionally incomprehensible concept for a general viewer with little knowledge of the art history of the West Coast of Canada. For such a viewer, the task of making sense out of Aboriginal cultural iconographical images is daunting in part because the late Victorian artist has already been, and is always, there to monopolistically define the art of the region. In encountering these challenges, we have to learn from the exhibitions of Carr s work, and accordingly know what West Coastal art of the early twentieth century was, and what the contemporaneity of West Coastal art is. It is this act of searching and transgressing Carr s time that has often rendered her contemporaries invisible but later artists visible. The texts under analysis in this essay visual and print, critical and historical that discuss Carr in relation to contemporaneity all 9 Ibid., p

8 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) construct her as a national and regional iconic figure in order to provide answers to the question they create who is Emily Carr? However, the constitution of Carr could be further examined by answering the question, What is Emily Carr with? or, from Tom McDonough s perspective, With what was Emily Carr contemporary? 10 Whereas the former question may well aim to identify the Canadian cultural icon s significant achievement of creating a fictional figure named Emily Carr, 11 the latter questions aim to reveal the historical, cultural and social context which the series of Carr s literary and artistic practices come from as well as create. This essay aims to describe the emergence of Carr as a Canadian icon and the rise of her contemporaneous influence on the West Coastal art of Canada. 10 Tom McDonough notes that in the case of art the term contemporary naturally leads to the question: contemporary with what? See McDonough, Response to Questionnaire on The Contemporary, p See Susan Huntley Elderkin, Recovering the Fictions of Emily Carr, Studies in Canadian Literature 2 (1992):

9 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada The exhibition description for In Dialogue with Carr: Douglas Coupland, Evan Lee, Liz Magor, Marianne Nicolson at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2010 stresses the connection between the Victoria-based Carr and the West Coastal art of Canada: 12 Emily Carr s images of the densely forested landscape of the West Coast and the totemic art of the First Nations peoples had an important effect on establishing a visual identity for the province [B. C.] and were deeply influential on both her contemporaries and subsequent generations of artists. (emphasis added) 13 Over the course of several decades, the Vancouver Art Gallery has presented a steady series of exhibitions that examine Carr s significance for the West Coastal Aboriginal art of Canada. The most recent exhibition emphasizes Carr s influence on four contemporary British Columbia (hereafter B.C.) artists Douglas Coupland (b. 1961), Evan Lee (b. 1975), Liz Magor (b. 1948), and Marianne 12 In Dialogue with Carr: Douglas Coupland, Evan Lee, Liz Magor, Marianne Nicolson, the seventh exhibition on and about Carr and her work in the past decade ( ), was curated by Daina Augaitis, chief curator/associate director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, and exhibited from July 1, 2010 to January 3, The selected contemporary artists have all turned away from more totem-based practices; nevertheless, their work still reflects Northwest Coastal art traditions. 13 See the online description in In Dialogue with Carr. Curated by Daina Augaitis, Vancouver Art Gallery, n.d. Web. < exhibit_in_dialogue_with_carr.html> (accessed January 4, 2014). 167

10 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) Nicolson (b. 1969). The exhibition reviews the landscape-driven works of Carr and other contemporary artists in the B.C. area and their connections. 14 Each of the new expressions of West Coastal art selectively refers back to Carr and is then presented in terms of how it reflects a visual identity that has already been well maintained in Carr s paintings of the forests. The brief exhibition description describes Carr s influence on both her contemporaries and subsequent generations of artists of the West Coast as among the more enduring legacies of Aboriginal totemic art. Curator Daina Augaitis is clearly seeking connections between Carr s legacy and other West Coastal artworks. In these works, four artists of Carr s subsequent generations, with their variety of exuberant perspectives on the West Coast, respond to Carr the artist as well as to her attitude toward the creation of art in the early twentieth century. 14 Among the annual exhibitions on Carr and her relations with other BC artists, Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon, a collaborative work of the National Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver Art Gallery, was particularly well-received. With exhibitions in Ottawa (2006), Vancouver (2007), Toronto (2007), Montreal (2007) and Calgary ( ), this coast-to-coast exhibition allowed Canadians to see the work of Carr, who was acclaimed as one of the country s finest painters, according to the Foreword of the accompanying book, Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon. The latest exhibition, In Dialogue with Carr: Gareth Moore, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery, June 29 to October 8, 2013, responds to Carr s travels to remote locations and her ceramic work. Curated by Grant Arnold, this exhibition features objects and materials collected and made by Vancouver-based artist Gareth Moore during his journeys to Europe, North America, and Asia. See In Dialogue with Carr: Gareth Moore: Allochthonous Window. 168

11 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada In Dialogue with Carr is not an unusual project. It may be seen as another reminder of the great historical interest of curators and art researchers of Carr in the preeminent Canadian icon. The exhibition leaves the impression that Carr continues to reign as the region s dominant artistic figure, thereby unintentionally marginalizing the work of her contemporaries, who might have worked on the proximate, if not same, historical and geographical site. Since the 1910s, Carr s reputation as the leading interpreter of Canada s West Coastal landscape has been secure, but this evaluation invites attention to the contemporaneity of her ubiquitous influence a quality of time that may have been largely ignored in the study of contemporary Aboriginal art. As an artist entering the California School of Design in San Francisco and the Westminster School of Art in London, traveling to the tribal villages in the Canadian West, and studying French artistic styles in Europe, Carr turned her interests to the indigenous themes that would profoundly influence the modern art of Canada. 15 The Aboriginal presence that infuses the colonial landscapes of her epoch advances a version of contemporaneity that is inadvertently compatible with the vision expressed in the work of the Group of Seven, Carr s contemporaries. 16 As an important bridge between 15 See Gerta Moray, Wilderness, Modernity and Aboriginality in the Paintings of Emily Carr, Journal of Canadian Studies 33.2 (1998): Consisting of Ontario-based painters and designers Lawren Harris ( ), J. E. H. MacDonald ( ), Tom Thomson ( ), Frank Carmichael 169

12 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) Euro-American art criticism and Aboriginal art forms, Carr incorporates contemporary qualities into her many artistic renderings of Aboriginal cultures to develop a contemporaneous perspective that she also deploys in her numerous paintings and writings. While Carr does not offer a systematic or testimonial account of her idea of contemporaneity, one of my aims in this essay is to draw together the important threads related to contemporaneity that are woven into Carr s works. In doing so, I demonstrate that the concept of contemporaneity can serve as a tool for situating Carr and her work in relation to other works by subsequent critics, historians and artists, instead of merely as a way to encapsulate her influence on Canadian art history. What brings all of the investigations of Carr s work together is an insistence that her contemporaneity manifests as a disjunctive connection in West Coastal art. This essay first examines the notion ( ), Frank Johnston ( ), Arthur Lismer ( ) and Fred Varley ( ), the Group set out in the early nineteenth century to depict the grim, desolate landscapes of Upper Canada, which were established realistically rather than through European-based artistic conventions. See Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting, 3rd ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp Its members offered what Anne Davis has termed a land-based nationalism drawn out of nineteenth-century American romanticism, especially the Hudson River school of painting and Walt Whitman s transcendental poetry. As a recent major National Gallery of Canada exhibition s title indicates, the group cultivated Art for a Nation. See Anne Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy: Canadian Mystical Painting, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p

13 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada of contemporaneity as practiced in Carr s living and painting the here and now in the tribal villages of the 1930s. In her written narrative of her experience, Carr conveys the artistic creativity that she generated in her depictions of the West Coastal landscape while she also describes her encounters with Aboriginal peoples; she speaks of her discovery in their art of the expression of a figural perspective, while advancing a consideration of her epoch an expression of the larger historical context that might have seemed, at first, to place them in a wrong time but continue to perpetuate West Coastal art. Following an introduction to Carr s representation of her time, this essay explores the steady series of repeating-but-changing exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The curators lay constant stress on Carr s interaction with the larger B.C. artistic world, situating her work in the historical tradition of West Coastal art while simultaneously producing a potentially new Carr. Carr s contemporaneity has been explored in repeated exhibitions that emphasize formal experimentation in representing the B.C. landscape. The exhibitions are symptomatic of a creative crisis within the region s art that is epitomized in the work of the Salish-Okanagan artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. In political and historical spheres, he demonstrates the disjointed yet simultaneously connected qualities of West Coastal contemporaneity initially expressed by Carr. 171

14 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) This essay suggests that Carr s artistic vision, as expressed in painting and writing, offers a departure point for the creativity in crisis exhibited in expressions of an artist s contemporary relationship with her epoch; in this respect, Carr continues to provide inspiration and invigoration for the renewal of contemporary North American Coastal art practices. I. Who Was Emily Carr? In keeping with a discussion of Carr as Canadian icon, which has accorded with the search of Canadian cultural nationalists for a national emblem, 17 this part focuses on her encounters with the West Coastal Aboriginal peoples and culture in the early twentieth century. Such encounters, however controversial, 18 which used to provoke debates between the aesthetic doctrine of modernism and notions of the Primitive, have indeed precluded Carr from being understood as a modernist or Aboriginal artist faithfully representing her time. However, her discordant, out-of-joint relationship with past and 17 Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), p Fully implicated in the contradiction between modernism and primitivism is the historical nexus of modernity. For an assessment of this complex element as one of the forces that connect modern art and aesthetic activities with aboriginal peoples, see Fred R. Myers, Introduction to Part One: Around and About Modernity: Some Comments on Themes of Primitivism and Modernism, in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity. Ed. Lynda Jessup (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p

15 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada present time may reveal Carr s contemporary influence. The significance of Carr s trips to Kwakiutl, Haida, and Tsimshian villages, which is emphasized in studies of Carr, lies in constructing the historical as well as contemporary context of her encounters to expand a sense of her worldview. While there are many voices and opinions in the debate over Carr s modernist turn or Aboriginal appropriation, what is clear is that Carr synthesizes modernism and primitivism into a disjunctive form in her artwork. As a matter of fact, Carr s West Coastal artistic identity results from other spheres of activity including the late-victorian English artist s unintended encounters with Aboriginal peoples and post-impressionist forms derived from France. 19 These transversal encounters may be seen as a form of building connections between people, and between people and art forms, but they highlight how the indigenous culture of the West Coastal forests and transformative French techniques intermingle to produce a self-defining work. In creating such contemporaneous work, Carr subverts the threshold between oppositional political ideologies, and her work of art becomes unfamiliar and innovative. In this way, Carr s work can best be understood as revealing the absolute creativity of experimental art. With her forest paintings such as Forest, British Columbia ( ) (Fig. 1), Carr is no longer wrestling with the critique of appropriation as a colonial artist. However, she employs deforming 19 Moray, pp

16 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) techniques that testify to the potency and openness of the colonial epoch. The sense of connection and disjuncture with the forest that she creates allows an alien but continually self-renewing response to a Canadian sense of an imminent modernist moment, and thus participates in a movement transcending the limits of Victorian approaches to the West Coast of Canada. Born in Victoria in 1871, Carr first sought an art education outside of British Columbia. She received a traditional education in the depiction of still life and landscapes when she attended the California School of Design in San Francisco from 1890 to 1893; she continued her art studies in England at the Westminster School of Art, and she learned the nineteenth-century British watercolor tradition from 1899 to 1904 in the private studios of a number of watercolorists. Her two years in France from 1910 to 1911, where she learned how to paint in a post-impressionist style with a Fauvist palette, proved inspiring. 20 Following this stay, she started to produce an impressive body of work in color and oil depicting house fronts, totem poles, and villages in central and northern British Columbia from 1912 to Scholarly studies of Carr s travels do not sufficiently address the depth of influence her travels had on 20 Johanne Lamoureux, The Other French Modernity of Emily Carr, in exhibition catalogue Emily Carr, Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2006), pp Maria Tippett, Emily Carr: A Biography (1979; Toronto: Anansi, 2006), pp

17 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada her paintings; rather critics are captivated by the phenomenon of a modernist artist living in an Aboriginal culture. Claiming that research on Carr has tended to interpret Carr s biographical accounts as the accumulation of narratives, and that Carr s iconic status was a construction of her own biographical image[-making], Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, for instance, proposes a critical model of the task of reviewing. 22 For most scholars, the apprehension of the myth of the vanishing Indian and the artist s efforts to preserve Aboriginal culture already involves historical conditions something even Carr s most loyal critic Doris Shadbolt cannot comprehend: Sweeping social and cultural changes since her time have brought about drastically different notions of the artist s role today, but that does not prevent us from recognizing the force of her vision or the totality of her commitment. 23 Carr s connection to Aboriginal peoples and cultures and its relation to her becoming a Canadian cultural icon has controversially interested and confused many critics who have analyzed the artist s work in an effort to understand her prestigious position. 22 Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, This Woman in Particular: Contexts for the Biographical Image of Emily Carr (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996), p Doris Shadbolt, Introduction, The Complete Writings of Emily Carr (Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1993), p

18 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) A detailed narrative of Carr s resistance of the status quo demands close examination. Carr planned to visit the tribal villages in northern British Columbia during the summer of 1913 when she had experienced technical breakthroughs that allowed her to give new forms to the totem poles and Aboriginal houses that surrounded her, but which apparently were soon to be gone. 24 Douglas Cole notes that Carr s task involved her in the salvage paradigm, a broad phenomenon that attracted anthropologists and museums frantic to collect the remnants of endangered Aboriginal communities and cultures. The practitioners in the salvage paradigm seemed to have been threatened by the fear that Aboriginal people were about to become extinct as a result of the overwhelming encroachment of civilization upon their traditional lands; in their view, civilization was destroying Aboriginal material culture and posed to extinguish the culture completely. 25 According to Cole s review of the difficult and almost impossible mission of salvage anthropologists such as Adolph Bastian, John Wesley Powell, and Franz Boas, the cultures of the Pacific Northwest were rapidly disappearing, and carrying out the work was becoming increasingly difficult from year to year. 26 Carr s work on Aboriginal culture became significant in this context. During a pleasant trip to Alaska in 1907, after visiting numerous 24 Tippett, p Douglas Cole, The Invented Indian/The Imagined Emily, BC Studies 125/126 (2000): Ibid., p

19 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada Indian villages, Carr was determined to preserve their supposedly vanishing cultures. In her posthumous autobiography Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr (1946), 27 she described her commitment to documenting Aboriginal cultures: The Indian people and their Art touched me deeply.... I was going to picture totem poles in their own village settings, as complete a collection of them as I could. 28 Later, from 1908 to 1910, with the objective of tracking a similar path trodden by the salvage anthropologists, she visited Aboriginal villages each summer during the time she taught in Vancouver. She describes her encounter with the indigenous art of the Canadian West Coast as a methodological and visual revelation: Indian Art broadened my seeing, loosened the formal tightness I had learned in England s schools. Its bigness and stark reality baffled my white man s understanding. I was as Canadian-born as the Indian but behind me were Old World heredity and ancestry as well as the Canadian environment. The new West called me, but my Old World heredity, the 27 Carr writes about her life in Victoria, San Francisco, London and Paris in this autobiography, which was completed at the age of seventy. While this work has been thought to show her joy of living with the aboriginal peoples and her frustration of being rejected by her Canadian art peers, her concept of life affirms her rebirth from daily struggles, and the book concludes with a quotation from Walt Whitman: We but level this lift to pass and continue beyond (italics original). See Emily Carr, Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr (1946; Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2005), p Carr, Growing Pains, p

20 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) flavor of my upbringing, pulled me back. I had been schooled to see outsides only, not struggle to pierce. 29 This decision to see beyond the outsides is incorporated into a retrospective vision. In a journal entry later collected in Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (1966), Carr poses self-conscious questions in an attempt to define the inexpressible longing that compels her artistic vision: 30 What is it you are struggling for? What is the vital thing the woods contain, possess, that you want? Why do you go back and back to the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there and not able to find it? 31 Carr s actual encounters with Aboriginal culture, which initiated a break with her late nineteenth-century Victorian upbringing as well as inspired her life s work, precede anthropological projects and reveal her understanding of her connections with, and disconnections from, her context that is, her contemporaneity in the West Coastal art tradition. 29 Ibid., pp In these posthumously published journals Carr narrates her life from 1927 to She was in her late fifties and had been painting for years. The first chapter is about her visit to the Ontario-based Group of Seven, a famous male artist circle, and how their evaluation of her work allows her art to be recognized as representative of the West Coast. As well as their meeting, she writes about her daily life and religious struggles in strangeness. 31 Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (1966; Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2006), p

21 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada Woods and skies became her sole concern for the next ten years, and painting her surroundings expressed what she felt contemporary with. Living among forests and totem poles, Carr experienced the visual shock of the Indian art. 32 Her urgent concern became how to interpret this alienation: What about this New Art Paris talked of? 33 Carr s struggle to pierce is the characteristically trenchant and brave work of this New Art in the forests, which is also a wish to carve the surface in search of the stark images and deep structures expressed by Aboriginal art. This notion of looking forward to the New refers to Carr s attempt to free herself from an English way of seeing to search for a bigger, broader way of seeing and indeed struggle to pierce despite the way her vision had been cultivated and confined by circumstance. It was during the late 1920s that she was elevated to the status of national icon and her work was recognized as an important cultural contribution. However, as Carr became a representative figure for British Columbia s native Indian culture and its powerful coastal landscape, among all the possible and potential influences on Carr, her sojourn to France, including her involvement in Fauvism and the modernist European art movement, proved most important, as much for its impact on her art as for its validation of her artistic ambitions. 34 Anne Collett and Dorothy 32 Carr, Growing Pains, p Ibid., p Angela Smith claims that Carr was not primarily politically, but rather culturally motivated, especially by the Fauvist affiliation of Post-Impressionism, which 179

22 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) Jones indicate that Carr s contact with the modernist movement in Europe was significant to Carr because she found in Fauvism an artistic form that would enable fresh seeing. 35 Moreover, Carr herself also claimed that the approach of the European modernists was particularly suited to Canadian artists: So we will have to make her [Canada] a dress of her own. Not that the art of the Old World is not great and glorious and beautiful, but what they have to express over there is not the same as we have to express over here.... European painters have sought to express Europe. Canadian painters must strive to express Canada.... Her great forests, wide spaces, and mighty mountains and the great feel of it all should produce courageous artists, seeing and feeling things in a fresh, creative way. 36 Here, freshness of vision is associated with the forests the Canadian West Coast with its imaginative effects and atmosphere of Aboriginal presences. The quality of new sight that marks Carr s Carr had acquired in Paris. See Angela Smith, Fauvism and Cultural Nationalism, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.1 (2001): Anne Collett and Dorothy Jones, Gendered Tree-scapes in the Art of Emily Carr and Judith Wright, Mosaic 42.3 (2009): 78. Fresh Seeing was originally the title of Carr s first public talk to the Victoria Women s Canadian Club in Victoria in March Later it became the title of a book of two lectures by Carr, Fresh Seeing (Toronto: Irwin, 1972). 36 Emily Carr, Fresh Seeing (Toronto: Irwin, 1972), p

23 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada work that is, the French influence as translated into an Indigenous cultural and environmental context was discernible during Carr s exhibition in Toronto and Ottawa seventeen years after her stay in France. At the opening of the 1927 exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern her work was shown alongside that of the Group of Seven. 37 It was on this occasion that Carr gained real public recognition and a sense of belonging to an artistic movement. However, if we recognize the salvage paradigm as a rescuing technology to revive West Coastal culture, then Carr s methodological understanding of what she encountered in art has to be construed as a generative process; her exploration demonstrates an artistic impulse to dispel pre-existing notions of the work of West Coast artists through a new form of expression that might be viewed as inseparable from modernist movement. 37 The exhibition, organized by Marius Barbeau and Eric Brown, opened at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa on December 2, According to Charles C. Hill, exhibited together were three hundred and fifteen objects by aboriginal artists from the West Coast of Canada as well as works of art by artists from Port Simpson, Victoria, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and New York who had worked in western Canada. For the promotion of Carr s position in this exhibition, see Charles C. Hill, Backgrounds in Canadian Art: The 1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern, in the exhibition catalogue Emily Carr, Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2006), pp For Carr s relation with the Group of Seven after this exhibition, also see Tippett, pp

24 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) Articulated with West Coastal practices of creation is Carr s experimental expression, and she would do her best to search for the reality of each object... its real and only beauty in recognizing her relationship with all life. 38 Her Forest, British Columbia ( ) amply illustrates how she identifies herself with the culture of the West Coast but offers a new view that takes up as well as moves beyond the art of Victorian primitivism. Forest, British Columbia is a work that both connects with and detaches from the forest of B. C. The painting features an obscure figure flattened across the canvas; or rather, it represents a flattened image as it might be seen on carved totem poles in the forest. For Carr, the journey into the forest to observe trees was a deeply religious experience she described it as going into the glory of the woods, and urged the viewers to see God in every particle of them expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection. 39 Aboriginal themes of birth, life, and death in the forest facilitate the work of spiritual connection something Carr could perceive from a religious perspective: it is a continuous process of the life, eternally changing yet eternally the same. See God in it all, enter into the life of the trees Carr, Hundreds and Thousands, p Ibid., p Ibid., p

25 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada For Carr, however, the spiritual experience is equal to the painterly manipulation of form and color, the depth of her life experience, and a communion with the divine as embodied in the natural world. She expresses the observation this way: It is splendidly wonderful the things that lie beyond that we try to capture with instruments or paint or words The complex task of making a Canadian modernist painting out of Fauvist forests pertains to an artist s realization of the darkness of her epoch. French Fauvism and the Group of Seven of Ontario presented the existing world from which Carr was estranged; however, the tree trunk images might have served a function outside of their status of objects to be painted. For Carr, trees provide a retreat from the disruptive influence of war: The maple tree leaning towards the uncurtained window has given me great joy.... The big flat leaves are brown, yellow and green. Through them you look up to the grey-green pine towering in dignified silence up in the sky.... And so I leave another camp and return.... Back to war rumours, sad wonderings, censored news. 42 While the trees beckon a world to come, the darkness, or what is unseen in Canadian Victoriana, 43 is simultaneously added to what 41 Carr, Hundreds and Thousands, p Ibid., pp The author thanks one of the reviewers for astutely pointing out that Carr might be under the superficial influence of a Canadian Victoriana though it might not affect the West Coast where potlatches dominated. On the potlatch culture and its

26 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) has been painted. This painting is indeed a surface, a flat canvas, with a particular vision of the future. However, to what extent is it a work to come? What is supposed to be seen? Two aspects of what might be seen should be examined. On the one hand, as a piece of art, Forest, British Columbia is an objective, concrete canvas, which presents the reality that is here and now. On the other hand, its denotative title indicates a certain forest in B.C.; yet, it is a picture of something and somewhere else. It expresses a world that has not yet been seen but will be seen in the future. This not-yet quality is its contemporary character. The processes of making this Forest capable of being seen and seeing the picture to come differ in character; the process of making entails representing the trees while that of seeing the picture deforms the trees. Here is the complex mechanism for Carr s practice: the painting performs and creates forestry by deformation or non-representation. Indeed, it is the deformation that constitutes Carr s style as a painter; her contemporaneity lies in her production of the imperceptible light and depth of forestry at this singular moment, and in the affect produced in the process of her practice. being later declared illegal under the Indian Act in 1884, see Moray, p. 86 and p

27 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada II. What Is Emily Carr With? While contemporaneity expresses a disjuncture in a not-yet-historicized combination of past and future, Forest, British Columbia becomes a flat landscape of composition rather than, say, a representation of the B.C. forests in which paint, or traces left by the movements of brushes, and canvas have passed into sensation. If primitivism has any use or sense here, it lies in describing this reciprocal encounter between Carr and viewers of her art (which is to say primitivism in this painting may not historically refer to the Native North Americans in the West Coast). Forest aesthetically expresses the B.C. forests, Carr, the Group of Seven, tribal villages, Paris, and so on. It is the primitive or the very unstable connection that Carr had with her time that might make the connection appear obscure and disjointed. For a long time Carr s role in making Aboriginal art for Canada (or Art for Nation ) was largely presented in modern art histories of Canada as well as in popular images of Carr as the isolated, misunderstood nonconformist. Maria Tippett describes the image in her Preface to the 1979 edition of the classic Emily Carr: A Biography: the lonely, struggling artist; the undaunted traveler; the endearing memoirist; the doughty eccentric. 44 Most of the critical reviews of Carr s unconventional life interpret her trips to the 44 Tippett, Preface, xv. 185

28 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) Aboriginal villages of the West Coast as a tribute to its tribal peoples, and many of the reviewers write as many words about her autobiographies as about her paintings. The aim of much of the scholarship about who Carr was, however, is to figure out what is behind Carr s make-believe legends. 45 The related research is often overshadowed by certain critical stances related to tribal aesthetics and European cultural histories that have been superimposed on the art of the West Coast in the early twentieth century. Almost every aspect of Carr s scholarship is caught up with the consequences of intricately tying together her life as an eccentric in late-victorian and early-modern society with her paintings on the West Coastal landscape and its Aboriginal culture, and her autobiographical writing and thinking. 46 At the same time, Carr s role in the art history of early Canada has been re-evaluated by cultural critics who inquire into the values posited and supported by exhibitions and publications on Carr, and into the roles and interests served in the construction and maintenance of her iconic status. For instance, Bruce Braun, who strongly contests Carr s position as the representative artist of the West of Canada, frames his examination by contesting her iconic status: Carr is BC; her ubiquitous presence 45 Titles of reviews such as Leslie Dawn s The Enigma of Emily Carr ( ), Douglas Cole s The Invented Indian/The Imagined Emily (2000) and Robert Thacker s Seeing Emily, Seeking Carr (1998) all indicate the complexity of her life and work. 46 See Peter Sanger, Finding D Sonoqua s Child: Myth, Truth and Lies in the Prose of Emily Carr, The Antigonish Review (1987):

29 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada needs no explanation, no supplementary text (emphasis original). 47 Braun s critical review asserts that visual B.C. is fundamentally constituted as a phenomenon out of Carr s work in landscape painting, as revealed in various exhibitions, publications, and collaborations over the course of decades. Certainly, Carr s efforts were not directed at replacing the work of the Group of Seven as her national prominence during the 1930s was unavoidably under the influence of the Group. 48 Rather, Carr kept a distant relationship with her birthplace, traveling to tribal villages in Alaska, as well as to San Francisco, London, Paris, and Toronto, while drawing upon multiple artistic forms and styles to contemporize her connection to the West Coast. Importantly, these geographical encounters did not bring about cultural displacement for Carr in a project of land-based nationalism ; rather, as Robert Thacker notes, Carr the English-speaking Canadian among British Columbians played a complementary role by representing her region, one far from the Group s central Canada. 49 Thacker locates this complementariness in the regional connections that Carr s work forges with the Cascadian forest. However, this regional affinity could also give way to her disconnection from the present of the 47 Bruce Braun, The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada s West Coast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p Reid, p Robert Thacker, Being on the Northwest Coast, Pacific Northwest Quarterly 90.4 (Fall 1999):

30 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) early twentieth century a sense of being an alien contemporary to supplement what had not yet been seen. Complaining of perceptions that she was an unfitting Canadian interpreter of the B.C. landscape, she wrote Eric Brown (the director of the National Gallery of Canada) to ridicule the National Gallery of Canada in 1934: If the work of an isolated little old woman on the edge of nowhere is too modern for the Canadian National Gallery, it seems it cannot be a very progressive institution (emphasis added). 50 By this account, Carr might be too western, coastal, and tribal for a nationalistic project of her time: her self-description as a figure located on the edge of nowhere is a way of positioning herself less as a complement to the Group of Seven than as a contemporary supplement to the artists she examines. As a contemporary supplement who always keeps a distance from her place of identification for the sake of art creation, Carr is regarded as someone who is unrecognizable, unfamiliar, and mystical; moreover, her work is at once Canadian, Californian, and French; as such, it is derived from nowhere and is a break with her British, Canadian, and even Cascadian environments. 50 See Emily Carr, The Complete Writings of Emily Carr (Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1993), p. 12, Note 4. The phrase on the edge of nowhere later gave the title, Emily Carr: On the Edge of Nowhere, to an exhibition at Art Gallery of Greater Victoria opening on June 30, Published with the same title is the exhibition catalogue by Kerry Louise Mason and the curator Mary Jo Hughes. 188

31 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada The case of Frederick Alexcee (c c. 1944) serves as a remarkable example of Carr s enigmatic connections with her time. Alexcee (also spelled Alexis, Allxcee, Alexix, Alexcie, Alexei, and Alexie) 51 is one among few Indian artists in Canadian art history who was identified by name prior to the end of the nineteenth century. Two journal articles on the recently retrieved Indian artist, one by Deidre Simmons and another by Ronald William Hawker, were both published in Simmons identifies Alexcee as a peripheral figure in the eye of collectors and critics in the early twentieth century, 52 whereas Hawker notes that Alexcee the Coast Tsimshian artist is not an artist noted for technical aptitude in either his conventional Coast Tsimshian or European-influenced work, but one whose work reveals particular circumstances and incidents significant to the Aboriginal history of West Canada. 53 Alexcee s work was included in the 1927 exhibition, West Coast Art: Native and Modern, which took place at the National Gallery of Canada. 54 However, while the successful exhibition eventually toured Toronto 51 Alexcee is the spelling appearing on the artist s work. See Deidre Simmons, Frederick Alexcee, Indian Artist (c to c. 1944), The Journal of Canadian Art History 14.2 (1991): 91, endnote 1. See also Ronald William Hawker, Frederick Alexie: European-Canadian Discussions of a First Nations Artist, Canadian Journal of Native Studies 11.2 (1991): Simmons, p Hawker, p This exhibition included a variety of artwork by anonymous West Coastal Aboriginal artists Paul Kane, Emily Carr, Lawren Harris, Edwin Holgate, A. Y. Jackson and two pieces of artwork by Alexcee. See Simmons, p

32 藝術學研究 第十四期 ( ) and marked a turning point for Carr, no mention is made in the reviews and media reports of the work by Alexcee. 55 Almost entirely ignored by art historians and eventually even absent from studies of Canadian First Nations art, Alexcee provides an elegiac figuration of history (Blair et al., xx), particularly in relation to the social and historical milieu in which Carr and other artists worked. Paul Hjartarson attributes Alexcee s invisibility to the absence of any systematic attempt to include his work in the nationalist canon of Canadian art. 56 In contrast to John Ralston Saul s characterization of the 1927 exhibition as a meeting of European and Aboriginal cultures that was foundational to Canada, 57 Hjartarson s scholarship draws attention to the fact that the catalogue to the exhibition describes Alexcee s work as primitive. Hjartarson explicates the exhibition as a cultural event by which the settler-invader society colonized West Coastal Aboriginal culture for Canada s nationalist agenda. 58 While noting that two paintings by Alexcee were included in the 1927 exhibition, he points out that Alexcee s paintings were not listed with Emily Carr, Lawren Harris, and others among the Works 55 Simmons, p See Paul Hjartarson, Wedding Native Culture to the Modern State: National Culture, Selective Tradition and the Politics of Recalling Early Canada, Recalling Early Canada: Reading the Political in Literary and Cultural Production. Ed. Jennifer Blair et al. (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005), p John Ralston Saul, Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century (Toronto: Viking, 1997), p Hjartarson, p

33 Min-hsiou Hung, What Is Emily Carr?: Contemporaneity in the West Coastal Art of Canada by Canadian Artists but among the artifacts of West Coast Indian Art. 59 Hjartarson s anthropological and historical reflections expose the colonialist ideology of Alexcee s and Carr s time. It is not Carr but Alexcee, he argues, who should be recognized as the source of the originality of the Canadian experiment. 60 An awareness of this problematic originality has also been a focus of the work of Bruce Braun and other art historians. Having studied Alexcee s work and reception during his active years, Deidre Simmons, for example, remarks that his work bridges the past and the present and adds a further dimension to our study of contemporary Indian art. 61 The task of recuperating Alexcee s work and providing a more inclusive perspective of the history of Canadian art throws into debate Carr s iconic status. Clearly, cultural critics such as Hjartarson still need to appeal to a consideration of the political in literary and cultural production in order to promote identification with Carr and her contemporaries as part of the project of recalling early Canada the title of the book collection in which Hjartarson s research appears. Perhaps this act of recollection can be accomplished. But the question remains: why is Carr important to the process of recalling early Canada as well as viewing the early West Coast? The repeated exhibitions and various discourses proclaiming 59 Ibid., p Ibid., p Simmons, p