Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art (Arts Insights Series)

The legacy of the Group of Seven and the reinvention of Canadian landscape art since the 1960s. Contents INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1 WILDERNESS MYTHS Out of the Woods Wild Art History CHAPTER 2 EXTENSIONS OF TECHNOLOGY Introduction Landscape Manual Technology and Environment La Région Centrale Plus Tard Amendments to Continental Refusal/Refus Continental View of Victoria Hospital, First Series, Nos. 1–6 Siting the Banal: The Expanded Landscapes of the N.E. Thing Company Landscape with Tree and 3 Cirrus Clouds Simulated Photo of the Moon’s “Sea of Tranquility” Filled with Water and the N.E. Thing Company’s Sign Placed Beside It, August 1969 Conceptual Landscape Art: Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow True Patriot Love Space at the Margins: Colonial Spatiality and Critical Theory after Innis Illuminated Ravine CHAPTER 3 POST-CENTENNIAL HISTORIES Introduction Introduction to The Group of Seven Preface to The Bush Garden Night Storm and Iceberg The Group of Seven: A National Landscape Art The Wembley Controversy in Canadian Art Artists, Patrons, and Public: An Enquiry into the Success of the Group of Seven CHAPTER 4 NORTHERN DEVELOPMENT Introduction Pharm@cology The Group of Seven and Northern Development Modernism and The Industrial Imagination: Copper Cliff and the Sudbury Basin “How Shall We Use These Gifts?” Imaging the Land in the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division Reflections on Being Born in a Group of Seven Canvas That Is Magically Transformed into a Sensuous Eleanor Bond Painting Later, Some Industrial Refugees from Communal Settlements in a Logged Valley in B.C. and The Women’s Park at Fish Lake Provides Hostels, Hotels and Housing CHAPTER 5 CONTEST AND CONTROVERSY Introduction National Gallery of Canada “Whiffs of Balsam, Pine, and Spruce”: Art Museums and the Production of a Canadian Aesthetic Establishing the Canon: Nationhood, Identity, and the National Gallery’s First Reproduction Programme of Canadian Art Art for a Nation? The Britishness of Canadian Art The McMichael Canadian Art Collection What Would the Group of Seven Say? Letter to the Editor Ding Ho/Group of 7 Graveyard and Giftshop: Fighting over the McMichael Canadian Art Collection Emily Carr Disfigured Nature: The Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape Construction of the Imaginary Indian The Trouble with Emily Emily Carr and the Traffic in Native Images CHAPTER 6 WHAT IS CANADIAN IN CANADIAN LANDSCAPE? Introduction The Myth of the Land in Canadian Nationalism Natural Range of Bur Oak, Natural Range of Canada Plum, Natural Range of Shagbark Hickory, Natural Range of White Oak Staging Antimodernism in the Age of High Capitalist Nationalism Canoe-Lake and a Figure in Mountain Landscape The Mystic North Cabin in the Snow The Myth – and Truth – of the True North Le Groupe des Sept The Terminal City and the Rhetoric of Utopia Nu·tka· Race, Wilderness, Territory, and the Origins of Modern Canadian Landscape Painting Premises for Self-Rule Defining Canada A Group of Sixty-Seven CHAPTER 7 THE EXPRESSION OF A DIFFERENCE Introduction Offensive/Defensive The Expression of a Difference: The Milieu of Quebec Art and the Group of Seven Interview with John O’Brian and Peter White Slough and Lake Reflecting Mountains Painting and the Social History of British Columbia Entering and Leaving St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1995 Lesbian National Parks and Services ch’e chée lmun and Wanuskewin Park, Mike Vitkowski’s Farm, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Jack Pine: Wilderness Sublime or the Erasure of the Aboriginal Presence from the Landscape Video and Location Stills Performing Memory: The Art of Storytelling in the Work of Rebecca Belmore Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to their Mother Yuxweluptun: A Philosophy of History Scorched Earth, Clear-Cut Logging on Native Sovereign Lands, Shaman Coming to Fix and Red Man Watching White Man Trying to Fix Hole in Sky Butterfly Garden Notes Bibliography Contributors Contemporary Art Pages Acknowledgments Image Credits Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Y Z "The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our own country" was the nationalist maxim motivating the Group of Seven's artistic project. The empty landscape paintings of the Group played a significant role in the nationalization of nature in Canada, particularly in the development of ideas about northernness, wilderness, and identity. In this book, John O'Brian and Peter White pick up where the Group of Seven left off. They demonstrate that since the 1960s a growing body of both art and critical writing has looked "beyond wilderness" to re-imagine landscape in a world of vastly altered political, technological, and environmental circumstances. By emphasizing social relationships, changing identity politics, and issues of colonial power and dispossession contemporary artists have produced landscape art that explores what was absent in the work of their predecessors. Beyond Wilderness expands the public understanding of Canadian landscape representation, tracing debates about the place of landscape in Canadian art and the national imagination through the twentieth century to the present. Critical writings from both contemporary and historically significant curators, historians, feminists, media theorists, and cultural critics and exactingly reproduced artworks by contemporary and historical artists are brought together in productive dialogue. Beyond Wilderness explains why landscape art in Canada had to be reinvented, and what forms the reinvention took. Contributors include Benedict Anderson (Cornell), Grant Arnold (Vancouver Art Gallery). Rebecca Belmore, Jody Berland (York), Eleanor Bond (Concordia), Jonathan Bordo (Trent), Douglas Cole, Marlene Creates, Marcia Crosby (Malaspina), Greg Curnoe, Ann Davis (Nickle Arts Museum), Leslie Dawn (Lethbridge), Shawna Dempsey, Christos Dikeakos, Peter Doig, Rosemary Donegan (OCAD), Stan Douglas, Paterson Ewen, Robert Fones, Northrop Frye, Robert Fulford, General Idea, Rodney Graham, Reesa Greenberg, Gu Xiong (British Columbia), Cole Harris (British Columbia), Richard William Hill (Middlesex), Robert Houle, Andrew Hunter (Waterloo), Lynda Jessup (Queen's), Zacharias Kunuk (Igloolik Isuma Productions), Johanne Lamoureux (Montreal), Robert Linsley (Waterloo), Barry Lord (Lord Cultural Resources), Marshall McLuhan, Mike MacDonald, Liz Magor (ECIAD), Lorri Millan, Gerta Moray (Guelph), Roald Nasgaard (Florida State), N.E. Thing Company, Carol Payne (Carleton), Edward Poitras, Dennis Reid (Art Gallery of Ontario), Michel Saulnier, Nancy Shaw (Simon Fraser), Johanne Sloan (Concordia), Michael Snow, Robert Stacey, David Thauberger, Loretta Todd, Esther Trepanier (Quebec), Dot Tuer (OCAD), Christopher Varley, Jeff Wall, Paul H. Walton (McMaster), Mel Watkins (Toronto), Scott Watson (British Columbia), Anne Whitelaw (Alberta), Joyce Wieland, Jin-me Yoon (Simon Fraser), Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, and Joyce Zemans (York). Attempts to expand the public understanding of Canadian landscape representation, tracing debates about the place of landscape in Canadian art and the national imagination through the twentieth century onwards. This book explains why landscape art in Canada had to be reinvented, and what forms the reinvention took.