Canvas Journal XVIII - Spring 2019

C A N VA S the McGill Journal of Art History and Communication Studies

volume xviii spring 2019 !1

 

C A N VA S the McGill Journal of Art History and Communication Studies volume xviii

spring 2019

editors-in-chief Gabby Marcuzzi Herie and Miray Eroglu editorial board Alexa van Abbema Catriona Reid Chloe Ducluzeau Clara Marchionini Greta Rainbow Lucia Bell-Epstein Nicholas Raffoul Tara Allen Flanagan cover photos Lucia Bell-Epstein

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Canvas is the undergraduate journal of McGill’s department of Art History and Communication Studies. We publish a collection of student essays in our print journal each spring, aiming to showcase the diverse and outstanding scholarship produced by undergraduate students within the department.

Funding for this journal was generously provided by the AUS Journal Fund.

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contents An Ambiguous Instant: Oiran, or Takahashi Yuichi’s Portrayal of a Plural Japan Lily-Cannelle Mathieu

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Transcending Common Understandings of Conceptual Art: An Analysis of Adrian Piper’s What Will Become of Me Nicholas Raffoul

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Furnishing History: Curating Authenticity at Versailles Margaux Shraiman

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What a City Remembers: Policy, Memory, and SettlerColonialism in Montreal’s Cité Mémoire Hannah Deskin

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Black Bodies in the Water: After the Deluge of Hurricane Katrina and the Middle Passage Emily Levine

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Perception and the Body in Vito Acconci’s Blinks Catriona Reid

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The Enchantment of Metapicture: Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas Karen Liu

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Cathedrals of Light: James Turrell and the Contemporary Spiritual Experience Catherine LaRivière

92

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editors’ note We are pleased to present to you this year’s eighteenth edition of Canvas.

The eight essays included in this volume of Canvas cover diverse artists, time periods, geographies, and art forms. Many of the authors deal with links between past and present.

In “Furnishing History,” Margaux Shraiman explores issues of authenticity and contemporary curatorial practice at the Palace of Versailles. Emily Levine looks at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in “Black Bodies in the Water,” putting news photographs of the natural disaster in dialogue with historical and contemporary art depicting the Middle Passage. Hannah Deskin’s “What a City Remembers” addresses the histories presented by Montreal’s publiclyfunded Cité Mémoire project. In “An Ambiguous Instant,” Lily-Cannelle Mathieu discusses history and the emergence of oil painting in Japan’s Meiji period, and “The Enchantment of Metapicture” by Karen Liu unpacks Velázquez’s enigmatic painting Las Hilanderas. Other papers, including “Cathedrals of Light” by Catherine LaRivière and “Perception and the Body”

by Catriona Reid, deal with embodied experiences of viewing and artmaking in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Nicholas Raffoul’s “Transcending Common Understandings of Conceptual Art” explores an ongoing work that brings the body of the artist into the gallery space.

We are proud to highlight these outstanding, creative, and incredibly diverse student essays, and thank the writers whose essays we have published in our print journal and online. We greatly appreciate continued support from the AHCSSA, AUS Journal Fund, and AUS Special Projects Fund. We give our heartfelt thanks to our dedicated and exceptional editorial board for the time, hard work, and passion they brought to Canvas this year. We also extend our gratitude to our professors and lecturers for inspiring us through their lectures and seminars and for their mentorship and guidance throughout our studies at McGill.

Gabby Marcuzzi Herie and Miray Eroglu

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An Ambiguous Instant: Oiran, or Takahashi Yuichi’s Portrayal of a Plural Japan written by Lily-Cannelle Mathieu edited by Miray Eroglu

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Takahashi Yuichi (1828-1894), a Japanese artist active in the early Meiji period (1868-1912), is known for having pioneered oil painting in Japan.1 Born to a low-ranking samurai family,2 he abandoned his military functions to attend the governmentally-sponsored Institute for Western Studies, where he studied ‘Western art’ before being tutored by Charles Wirgman, an English journalist and amateur artist living in Japan.3 In 1873, Takahashi opened a private school for training in the ‘Western art’ tradition, the Tenkai Gakusha,4 and became well-known for his artistic aptitudes in 1877, with the success of his painting Salmon [Fig. 2].

This work, together with Takahashi’s 1880 Portrait of

Emperor Meiji [Fig. 3], epitomizes the Meiji period Realist movement, 5 an artistic movement promoting a naturalism characterized by pictorial three-dimensionality and truthfulness rather than idealization. Interestingly, the evolution of Takahashi’s shifting identity, which evolved from a Tokugawa-period samurai into a Meiji-period Yōga [‘Western-style paintings’] artist, is representative of the political and cultural ambiguity that strived in Japan during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and is best exemplified by his earliest work known to the public: Oiran (1872) [Fig. 1].

Oiran, an enigmatic oil painting, is said to have been commissioned by a nostalgic gentleman desiring to own the portrait of an oiran [‘courtesan’] exhibiting a formerly fashionable hairstyle from Edo’s pleasure districts.6 In this essay, I consider Oiran through the lenses of social history, postcolonialism, feminism and intersectionality, and use the art historical tools of formalism and c o n n o i s s e u r s h i p ( i . e. v i s u a l Fig. 1: Takahashi Yuichi, Oiran (1872).

Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 55 cm. Tokyo University of Fine Art and Music Collection, Tokyo, Japan.

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evidence and archival research).

F i r s t , by l o o k i n g i n t o t h e artwork’s localized7 social history, I examine the Tokugawa-to-Meiji political transition and the fall of the ‘pleasure quarters’ as relating to the image, the painter, the work’s commissioner, and the model. Secondly, I analyze the painting’s globalized 8 history, considering post-colonial theories through an investigation of the work of art and its context as defined by both a sanctioned Western colonization of Japanese consciousness and an incipient Japanese imperialism. I therefore argue that Oiran depicts slippery identities and an ambiguous instant in Japanese history, thus demonstrating that the early Meiji period should be characterized by theoretical pluralisms rather than binaries.

At the outset of this historical study, I want to clarify that although I am trying to write from the point of view of the ‘peripherized,’9 I acknowledge my subject-position as a white, Canadian scholar, that possibly impedes my understanding of Japan’s social and colonial history.

However, I believe that the complicated per mutations resulting from the superposition of the Japanese object and the ‘Western’ scholar 10 might be necessar y to an inclusive

discussion – a complex whole made of subjective components – of an historical Japan flirting with international influences. Further, I do not intend to propose the objective meaning of the artwork, but rather my subjective and partial interpretation, and, in so doing, illuminate the work’s plurality.

I - Localized Social History The local historical setting to Takahashi’s painting is characterized by political and social upheavals, shifts, and deep transformations. In 1868, Emperor Meiji (1852-1912) and a coalition of daimyos [regional military lords] displaced t h e s h o g u n a t e [ m i l i t a r y government], that had ruled Japan through an ‘integral bureaucracy system’ analogous to centralized feudalism since 1615. 11 The emperor was re-instated as political head of state and established a constitutional monarchy that quickly (re)constructed the nation through its “aggressive modernization program.” 12 Before 1868, the Tokugawa shogunate had promoted and enforced a Neo-Confucian social hierarchy in which the samurai were held as morally superior to the commoners and, consequently, were construed as e n t i t l e d t o r u l e .13 I n t h i s hierarchical system, the merchants !8

came last, even if (or probably because) they were i n cre asi n gly we al thy. 14 The inhabitants of the ‘pleasure quarters’ – prostitutes, actors, entertainers, beggars, and the like – were cast outside this social scheme, as “non-humans.”15 The M e i j i E m p e r o r, h o w e v e r, integrated in his ‘new’ state a society organized around i n d u s t r i a l i z at i o n , c o n s u m e r capitalism, and individualism,16 thus overthrowing not only the Shogun, but the entire social and moral structure that had been officially enforced since the s e ve n t e e n t h c e n t u r y. 1 7 T h e

Fig. 2: Takahashi Yuichi, Salmon (1877).

Oil on canvas, 139 x 46.6 cm. Tokyo University of Arts Collection, Tokyo, Japan.

emperor and his government instated a multitude of social policies, such as the establishment of a national school system, military conscription, and the construction of Japan’s first railroad18 in the years immediately following the 1868 restoration.

Aside from this political and social revolution, the Japanese who lived through this era also coped with severe earthquakes in the 1850s, large-scale crop failures in the 1860s and cholera epidemics from the 1870s.19 To Takahashi Yuichi, who came f r o m a s a m u ra i f a m i ly, t h e governmental shift meant that he

Fig. 3: Takahashi Yuichi, Portrait of Emperor Meiji (1880). Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Imperial Collection, Tokyo, Japan.

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Fig. 4: Kikugawa Eizan, Twelve Hours in the Pleasure Quarters: Daytime, Hour of the Snake, Courtesan Tomoshie of the Daimonji (19th century). Ink and colour on paper, woodblock.

abruptly white neck and the slightly distorted face of the subject, reveal an ine xper t brush, which I interpret as becoming more adroit in the artist’s later paintings [Figs. 2 and 3], Oiran certainly addressed the imperial impetus for a new realism in Japanese art.

had to observe the new cultural policies conscientiously in order to be successful and maintain an acceptable standing within the new social hierarchy. The artist did so with Oiran, which he painted four years after the restoration as a response to the governmental interest in ‘new’ technologies of realistic, ‘scientific’ representation, 20 w h i c h r e p u d i at e d m e d i a reminiscent of the ancient regime21 by employing oil painting on canvas, the imported medium he had been studying since before t h e r e s t o r at i o n . 2 2 A l t h o u g h Takahashi’s 1872 painting is rendered in a certain flatness evocative of Japanese traditional images and although some formal details of the painting, such as the

The decision to use oil painting as a medium was most probably strategic to the work’s commissioner as well. Although there is not much information available about the commissioner, we can conjecture that due to the fact that he was wealthy enough to commission an original painting, he was probably a merchant who had made his fortune in Edo (present day Tokyo) during the Tokugawa period as, by midnineteenth century, most samurai were highly indebted and i m p ove r i s h e d . 2 3 Fr e e d f r o m Tokugawa period’s hierarchizing sumptuary rules and constant oppression of the merchant class, 24 the commissioner, considered to be a commoner, could finally display his wealth and power openly: how better could this have been done than by commissioning !10

Fig. 5: Kitagawa Utamaro, Karagoto of the Chōjiya Brothel in Edo-chō Nichōme, from the series A Comparison of Courtesan Flowers (1801). Ink and color on paper, woodblock print.

Honolulu Museum of Art Collection, Honolulu, Hawai’i.

one of the first – if not the first – Japanese oil painting However revolutionary was the painting’s medium to its Japanese contemporaries, its subject-matter, a high-r anking cour tesan, 25 conformed to the ukiyo-e26 tradition of representing idealized ‘beauties’ – prostitutes and courtesans raised to celebrity status within the ‘floating world,’ a segregated yet i n c r e a s i n g ly p o p u l a r w o r l d c h a r a c t e r i z e d by t h e “ r aw ” pleasures of sexuality and commoners’ arts.27 These prints, which had a romantic, often sexual character [Fig. 4], were “images of women as pleasure-givers [and conveyed] the requisite sense of surface delight.” 28 Thus, these images of women evoked the dichotomous existence of Edo prostitutes: non-humans, who were social outcasts from the NeoConfucian system, yet who were considered to be highly desirable a n d c e l e b r at e d f i g u r e s.29 Takahashi’s Oiran unequivocally refers to the printed ukiyo images of ‘beauties,’ [see Figs. 5 and 1 for a striking comparison], although in the 1872 painting, the

woman appears jaded, idiosyncratic and realist compared to the flirtatious, generic, and idealized women of the traditional ukiyo prints. This might be explained by the difficult way of life in 1850s-60s Edo, a city that was punctuated by earthquakes and epidemics, but I believe that the woman’s strained look30 has more to do with her inter sectional position as a courtesan in the collapsing world of mid-nineteenth century ‘pleasure quarters.’ Prostitution in the ‘floating world,’ even at its most sophisticated, was dark; and life in the ‘pleasure quarters,’ hard.

31 Further, as the Yoshiwara brothels32 suffered from a “loss of cultural significance by the early nineteenth century [caused by] competition from illegal !11

prostitutes, changes in type of patronage, and Yoshiwara’s own inflexibility in the face of progress in the outside world,” 33 the prostitutes and courtesans were forced to manage an increased workload and were inflicted by rising cruelty from their proprietors.34 The woman in the painting evokes the manner of life experienced under these ever-more strenuous conditions, the collapse of her world, and a probable anxiety concerning her postc o u r t e s a n n e a r - f u t u r e ( a s, compared to most courtesans who were expelled from the brothels in their twenties, she seems quite aged).35 Furthermore, in a postrestoration, changing world, her somewhat wistful expression and the ‘loss of former graciousness [and] charisma’ of her class as a whole36 is intelligible and, I would argue, predictable given these circumstances.

As the historical instant when the painting was produced was densely charged with political and social upheavals, notably the 1868 Meiji restoration and the gradual decline of the pleasure quarters in nineteenth-century Edo, the work of art carries and signifies multiple and ambiguous identity marker s, intentions, and moods. Oiran is characterized by a political strategy on the part of the painter, who was mediating

maladroitly but productively a new media; a power display from a commissioner conciliating n o s t a l g i a fo r t h e ‘ p l e a s u r e quarters’ and excitement about the new, more liberated social order as well as the perplexing attitude of a devitalized model over an unknown world, potentially unwelcoming and more obscure than her own.

II - Globalized History Part of the new government’s modernization program was an intensive ‘Westernization’ of the Japanese state, its culture, and its people, that was believed to be “the only path by which Japan could regain its [Classical] glory.”37 Meiji rulers, indeed, were eager to equal Wester n powers economically, militarily, and technologically38 so as to “meet Western expectation and to satisfy national dignity.”39 Oil painting, w h i c h h a d b e e n d i s c r e e t ly introduced to Japan by Portuguese traders and Catholic missionaries since the early decades of the seventeenth century,40 was thus not discovered in the midnineteenth century.The choice to promote it in that later period through governmental institutes41 was directly related to international politics. Abura-e [‘oil paintings’] 42 were part of a ‘protective mimicry’ program43 that set to import and master !12

Western technologies and skills in order to secure Japan’s position as a ‘moder n’ and industrious country, 44 and to secure its dominant position in the Asian seas, which were increasingly attractive to Western colonial powers. 45 In the first decade following the Meiji restoration, the governmentally-sanctioned aburae generated great enthusiasm as a technical instrument of moder nization, but was not immediately conceived as having an intrinsic aesthetic value. 46 Takahashi, who painted Oiran in 1872, is lauded today not only for e l evat i n g M e i j i Re a l i s m i n technique, but also for pioneering artistic expression in oil painting.47 Indeed, through the intense lighting illuminating the woman’s

face and the representation of her inner character, he grasped the theoretical foundation of modern Western art, that is, subjectivity.

The artist thus initiated an appreciation of Western art as not only a representational skill to acquire, as he adopted a definition of art, a set of aesthetic criteria, and a value system to emulate.48 Oiran embodied a new philosophy of art and forced, by importing the Western concept of ‘beauty’ to Japan, 49 a reconfiguration of knowledge. Marra discusses such i n c o r p o r at i o n o f ‘ We s t e r n ’ concepts into other cultures as an ‘her meneutical colonization,’ h o w e v e r, I w o u l d a r g u e that Oiran is the materialization of a colonization of consciousness.

50 Furthermore, Rimer observed that: even though Japan […] was not colonized, her artistic responses to the rapid shifts imposed by the West on her larger cultural and political spheres were mirrored in a series of sometimes contradictory responses that often resembled those of Asian

Fig. 6: Kuroda Seiki, Maiko (1893).

Oil on canvas, 80.4 x 65.3 cm. Tokyo National Museum Collection, Tokyo, Japan.

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Fig. 7: Kondo Shiiun, Comparison of New Ukiyo-e Beauties: June, Irises (c.

1918). Ink and colour on paper, woodblock print, 43.9 x 28.5 cm.

Scholten Japanese Art Collection, New York City, USA.

Japanese women had certainly been figuratively subjected to the male gaze in previous local artistic tr aditions, most notably in Tokugawa ukiyo prints [Fig. 4], but, by being painted in the yōga mode, they were now subjected to a foreign gaze and to (male) Westerners’ taste.

countries directly colonized

by Europeans.

Hence, although ‘Westernization’ was sanctioned by the Japanese government, I believe that the country’s ambiguous postrestoration artistic production reveals its (partial) cultural assimilation.

Additionally, as Br yson has pointed out, the for mally Westernized representations of Japanese women in yōga paintings, such as Kuroda’s Maiko [Fig. 6], which draws heavily on European impressionism, might allude to the exploitation of the female subject as an obligatory step in the journey to modernity, yet another ideological precept induced by the ar tistically ‘superior’ West.

However, some debates soon rose within Japan about the legitimacy of yōga paintings.51 By the 1880s, several voices were countering the radical Westernization program52 and argued that an “indiscriminate importing of things Western would erase Japan’s ‘national culture’.”53 Such dissidents of Meiji modernism called for an ‘authentic native expression’ in the arts that found its definition in nihonga (‘Japanese painting’), a visual arts movement drawing on ‘indigenous’ historical genres, such as yamato-e and ukiyo-e [see Fig. 7, a twentieth century ukiyo print].

Although yōga and nihonga were fervently opposed in nationalistic debates,54 they both exhibited a continuity in Japanese material culture, which had not yet been truly disrupted by Westernization.

As illustrated by the continued !14

wearing of kimonos well into the twentieth century,55 consumers often preferred ‘traditional’ goods both aesthetically and for their convenience, even though the imperial couple started appearing in Western clothes as early as the 1870s [Fig. 3]. Oiran, which was, as we have seen, following the government’s cultural policy of emulating Wester n art, still reveals a certain flatness in rendition typical of Japanese art up to that period, and, most importantly, a traditional local subject: a distinguished courtesan from Edo’s ‘floating world’ wearing a layered kimono and the s l i g h t ly o u t d at e d h a i r s t y l e reminiscent of the ‘pleasure quarters’ heyday. Were these local identity markers relics of Japanese ‘pre-modernity,’ or were they resolutely modern, partaking in a new romanticizing of local culture p r ovo ke d by a n i n c r e a s e d globalism? Conant argues that an emerging nationalism generated an “appreciation and expression of qualities that, though contemporary, were intrinsically Japanese,” for Japan had to articulate the value of its own arts in an increasingly international era. 56 This ‘rediscover y’ of Japanese culture, that would emerge in the 1880s, 57 was foreshadowed by Takahashi’s s o m e w h at n o s t a l g i c i m ag e :

the oiran, solidly standing, crowned by her golden hair pins, is dignified, and becomes an emblem of traditional conservatism and pride. Takahashi’s image refers to a burgeoning ultra-nationalism that resulted, according to Choi, from “a fusion of the unrestrained libido of capitalism and the traditional militancy formulated under the long predominance of the samurai class.”58 In fact, it is important to consider Japan’s own imperial project, that officially started in 1879 with the a n n e x at i o n o f t h e Ry u k y u kingdom and that included the conquest of Taiwan (1895), the R u s s o - J a p a n e s e Wa r o v e r Northern islands (1904-5), the colonization of Korea (1910), and, at its pinnacle, the annexation of some regions of China (1937), and of a few Micronesian and South Sea islands.59 This imperial project resulted from the “g rowing contempt for [Japan’s] East Asian neighbours, who had failed to adapt as well to the modern industrial world,” contempt that thrived from the 1870s on to the end of the Second World War.60 Takahashi’s Japan presented itself as the ‘defender against Western imperialism’61 and implemented its ‘Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ project first through culture, notably with an increasingly Japanese mediation of !15

modern arts in East Asia.62 This colonial enterprise, as well as the rise of nihonga painting, represent the refusal of a ‘West v. Rest’ binary opposition: Japan was strong, ambitious, and definitively a colonizer on its own, yet did not fit into the category of the ‘West’ as it proudly exhibited its unique East-Asian nationalism through a promoted ‘localness’ in its arts. In short, Takahashi’s Oiran reveals both a governmentally-sanctioned Wester n colonization of the Japanese consciousness by its use of ‘Western’ media (oil painting) and artistic philosophy (subjectivity and the exploitation of the female figure) and an incipient Japanese imperialism due to Takahashi’s representation of a dignified local subject, thus suggesting that early Meiji Japan stands in an ambiguous position in terms of post-colonial theory.

Conclusion This essay, a tentative application of a pluralistic art history, 63 demonstrates that Takahashi Yu i c h i ’ s O i ra n r e fl e c t s t h e equivocality of a specific moment in Japanese history. The work is heterogeneous and polysemous in its articulation of shifting politics and social identities, changing t a s t e s a n d i d e o l o g i e s, t h e empowerment and fall of social groups, the rise of individuality in the arts,64 through which it reveals

Japan’s colonial ambivalence. This last aspect of my analysis reveals that imperialism is plural, that it is not essentially ‘Western,’ and that it must be re-contextualized.65 As I suggest in this essay, the current post-colonial framework is reductive and inadequate to the study a multifaceted world due to foundational binary oppositions such as West/Rest, colonizer/ colonized, and perpetrator/victim.

As Choi has argued, “postcolonialism criticism generates its discursive Other” by silencing Latin American, East Asian, Eastern European, and other histories.

I therefore suggest a ‘globalized’ art history that includes, but is not limited to post-colonial theory. An art history that is not ‘global’, as claims of universality are hardly defendable, but ‘globalized,’ taking into account international flows of goods and ideas, yet being firmly grounded in local – or localized – histories. An art history that is inclusive, multi-faceted, an un(rather than de-) centralized, because the study of artworks such as Oiran, and indeed of all human production, should resist theoretical homogenization.

▫︎ Notes

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1. Emiko Yamanashi, “Western-Style Painting: Four Stages of Acceptance” In Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 2016, 19.

2. Penelope Mason, History of Japanese Art. Upper-Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall. 2005, 370.

3. Yamanashi, “Western-Style Painting: Four Stages of Acceptance,” 19.

4. Ellen P. Conant, “Japanese Painting from Edo to Meiji: Rhetoric and Reality,” In Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts,2016, 45.

5 . M i n o r u H a r a d a , M e i j i We s t e r n Painting, 1974, 21.

6. Harada, Meiji Western Painting, 24.

7. The artwork’s ‘locality’ being first Japan as a nation, and second Edo (present-day Tokyo)’s licensed ‘pleasure quarters’, a s p a c e f r e q u e n t e d b y t h e w o r k ’s commissioner and probably home to the portrayed courtesan.

8. I propose a ‘globalized’ history, that includes but is not limited to post-colonial theory, and that is not ‘global’ as it does not make any claim of universality, but rather includes global aspects and phenomena in local histories. For more on this discussion, see the conclusion of this essay.

9. I prefer the term ‘peripherized’ over ‘periphery’, as I believe that ‘periphery’ is a misleading adjective, whereas ‘peripherized’ legitimately implies that centralization is a process of subjective construction.

10. ShigemiInaga“Is Art History Globalizable? A Critical Commentary from a Far Eastern Point of View,” In Is Art History Global?, 2007, 5.

1 1 . E l i s e K . T i p t o n , “ To k u g a w a Background: The Ideal and the Real,” In Modern Japan: A Social and Political History, New-York: Routledge. 2008, 2-3.

12. Conant, “Japanese Painting from Edo to Meiji: Rhetoric and Reality,” 36.

13. H.D. Harootunian, “Cultural Politics in Tokugawa Japan,” In Undercurrents in the Floating World: Censorship and Japanese Prints.New-York: Asia Society Galleries.

1991, 202.

14. Michal Daliot-Bul, “Play as a Formative Element of Culture,” In License to Play. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. 2014, 27.

15. Tipton, “Tokugawa Background: The Ideal and the Real,” 5.

16. Gennifer Weisenfeld, “Western-Style Painting in Japan: Mimesis, Individualism, and Japanese Nationhood,” In Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.2013, 19.

17. Michael F.Marra “The Creation of the Vocabulary of Aesthetics in Meiji Japan,” In Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts.Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press Scholarship Online. 2016, 200.

18. Cecilia Segawa Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan. Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press. 1993, 222.

19. Susan B. Hanley, “The Material Culture: Stability in Transition,” In Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji, edited

by Jansen and Rozman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2014, 465-6.

20. Conant and Weisenfield.

21. Such as Tokugawa woodblock prints and traditional water-soluble pigments applied on scrolls and panels.

22. Bert W inther-Takami,“Yōga/The Western Painting, National Painting, and GlobalPainting of Japan,” In Review of Japanese Culture and Society, vol. 25.

Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2013, 128.

23. Harootunian, “Cultural Politics in Tokugawa Japan,” 198.

24. Harootunian, “Cultural Politics in Tokugawa Japan,”201.

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25. According to Seigle glossary, ‘oiran’ stands for the highest-ranking courtesans of Yoshiwara, Edo’s famous pleasure district. The term includes yobidashi chusan, chusan, and zashikimochi.

Courtesans, as opposed to regular prostitutes, were educated, required higher prices, and had more choice over patronage. (Seigle, 5).

26. ‘Ukiyo-e’ can be translated in many different ways (see Kita 2001, 27 and 31), but is generally understood and commonly used as ‘woodblock prints of the Tokugawa period’ or ‘pictures of the floating world.’

27. James T. Ulak. Japanese Prints: The Art Institute of Chicago. New-York: Abbeville Press.1995, 59.

28. Ulak, Japanese Prints: The Art Institute of Chicago, 60.

29. Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan, x-xii.

30. As I do not want to impose a foreigner’s qualitative judgment on the courtesan’s mood, I have interrogated my Japanese friend about the impressions this portrait left in her. She instantly answered that the oiran looks “weary,” thus confirming my own intuition.

However, I do not want to exclude the fact that the painting’s contemporary viewers might have had a different perspective on that matter.

31. Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan,9; Ulak, Japanese Prints: The Art Institute of Chicago,59; Daliot-Bul, “Play as a Formative Element of Culture,” 31.

32. Yoshiwara was Edo’s most famous ‘pleasure district,’ and house to multiple licensed prostitution houses.

33. Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan, 10.

34. Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan,12 and 211.

35. Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan,212.

36. Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan,206 and 218.

37. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 343.

38. Ulak, Japanese Prints: The Art Institute of Chicago, 8.

39. Inaga,“Is Art History Globalizable? A Critical Commentary from a Far Eastern Point of View,” 3.

40. Thomas J. Rimer, “Introduction,” In Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts. Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press Scholarship Online. 2016, 5.

41. Such as the Institute for Western Studies (Yōgakusho, later renamed Bansho Shirabesho), established in 1856 by the Tokugawa bafuku (shogunate), and the Technical Art School (Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō), established in 1876 (Conant 2016, 37).

42. Oil pantings were labeled abura-e before being categorized as yōga[‘Western paintings’] in the 1880s (Winther-Tamaki 2013, 128).

43. Norman Bryson.“Westernizing Bodies: Women, Art, and Power in Meiji Yōga,” In Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, edited by Mostow et al.

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

2003, 100.

44. Conant, “Japanese Painting from Edo to Meiji: Rhetoric and Reality,” 37.

45. Ulak, Japanese Prints: The Art Institute of Chicago,8.

46. Winther-Tamaki, “Yōga/The Western Painting, National Painting, and GlobalPainting of Japan,” 132; Conant, 37.

47. Harada, Meiji Western Painting, 23-24.

48. Yamanashi, “Western-Style Painting: Four Stages of Acceptance,” 23.

4 9 . M a r r a , “ T h e C re a t i o n o f t h e Vocabulary of Aesthetics in Meiji Japan,” 195.

50. I borrow this expression, which refers to ideological colonization through forced ‘translation’, from Comaroff’s discussion !18

(2008) of colonization processes in South Africa.

51.Winther-Tamaki, “Yōga/The Western Painting, National Painting, and GlobalPainting of Japan,” 130.

52. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 345 53. Weisenfeld, “Western-Style Painting in Japan: Mimesis, Individualism, and Japanese Nationhood,” 13.

54. Winther-Tamaki, “Yōga/The Western Painting, National Painting, and GlobalPainting of Japan,” 129.

55. Susan B. Hanley, “The Material Culture: Stability in Transition,” In Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji, edited by Jansen and Rozman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2014, 462.

56. Winther-Tamaki, “Yōga/The Western Painting, National Painting, and Global Painting of Japan,” 133.

57. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 344.

58. Jung-Bong Choi, “Mapping Japanese Imperialism onto Postcolonial Criticism,” In Social Identities, vol. 9 no. 3.

Abingdon: Carfax Publishing, 330.

59. Mason, History of Japanese Art,346; Choi, 326 and 335.

60. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 346.

61. Choi, “Mapping Japanese Imperialism onto Postcolonial Criticism,” 333.

62. Winther-Tamaki, “Yōga/The Western Painting, National Painting, and GlobalPainting of Japan,” 133.

63. Chino Kaori “Gender in Japanese Art,” In Gender and Power in the J a p a n e s e V i s u a l F i e l d , H o n o l u l u : University of Hawai’i Press. 2003, 19.

64. Rimer, 6.

65. Choi, “Mapping Japanese Imperialism onto Postcolonial Criticism,” 336.

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Transcending Common Understandings of Conceptual Art: An Analysis of Adrian Piper’s What Will Become of Me (1985, ongoing) written by Nicholas Raffoul edited by Catriona Reid

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Adrian Piper’s (b. 1948) works from the 1980s are often unevenly discussed in the literature of conceptual art, especially in comparison to her earlier recognizable works from the 1960s and 1970s. As a conceptual artist, Piper interrogates the power of institutions and her own place in the world, and she employs her own physical body as medium to do so. Piper’s What Will Become of Me (1985, ongoing) is a work that embodies this concept of the physical body as a means of rendering art related to the larger female African-American e xperience and institutional critique [fig. 1]. 1 The work consists of twelve honey jars filled with Piper’s hair, gathered from 1985 to the present day, showing the greying of her dark black hair over time. 2 Two smaller jars consist of her skin flakes and fingernail clippings which she adds to periodically.3 To the side of the shelf of jars is a framed “Statement of Intent” signed by Piper in 1989, four years after the start of the work stating that she will donate her cremated ashes to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where the piece is currently held, as the final addition to the work.4 Curator, writer, and art critic Lucy Lippard worked on multiple exhibitions displaying Adrian Piper’s work.5 Lippard and Piper

share the belief that institutional critique is a fundamental aspect of conceptual art, among other characteristics detailed by Lippard and John Chandler in their text, “The Dematerialization of Art.”6 Lippard and Chandler argue conceptual art is an “art that emphasizes the thinking process almost exclusively,” rejecting the “emotional/intuitive process of art-making,” which provokes a dematerialization of art, leading the end product to, “[become] wholly obsolete.” 7 Sol Lewitt, another theorist of the dematerialization of art, stresses that the most crucial feature of conceptual art is the idea of the work. He writes: The idea becomes a machine that makes the art…It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore…he would want it to be emotionally dry…Conceptual art is made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eyes or emotion.8

In relation to What Will Become of Me however, Piper transcends these definitions of conceptual art in several ways: the production and reception of the piece is highly emotional, and the work itself is arguably spiritual, quasi-diaristic, and partly memorializing. This essay argues that What Will Become of Me diverges from common !21

Fig. 1: Adrian Piper, What Will Become of Me (1985). Framed text, glass jars, hair, fingernails, and skin. The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, USA.

perceptions of conceptual art as presented by Lippard, Chandler, and Lewitt, demonstrating that Piper underwent an emotional process to create such a personal piece, thus extending the boundaries of what a conceptual work of art can be.

What Will Become of Me defies Lippard and Chandler’s rejection of an emotional creative process, a common quality of conceptual art.

A document detailing Piper’s personal hardships in 1985, the year of the creation of the piece, reveals her crumbling marriage, the death of her father, and her denial of tenure from the University of Michigan.9 At this point in her life, Piper fell into isolation, feeling the loss of aspects of her life she devoted most of her time to such as her family and her work. Through the

loss of these parts of her life she thought to be permanent, Piper quickly learned death is the only uncontested part of her future. At the inception of her piece, Piper came to the realization that her work will permanently exist despite the fact that she, eventually, will not. In addition, she will never know when her piece is truly complete: the work is only finished when her ashes are placed next to the jars. Piper’s piece compels her to continuously contemplate her future; a process of unsettlement that comes with a burden of exhausting emotional energy.

Due to the periodical nature of What Will Become of Me, Piper’s process includes having her consciously observe the physical changes in her hair from black to grey, from the conception of the work until the present day. As the !22

greying of hair is a common symbol of stress or aging, Piper was able to create a linear timeline of the progression of her life.

Deirdre Smith claims the power of “What Will Become of Me” derives in part from the fact that the items of the jars are witnesses to the events and changes that have shaped Piper’s personal life over the last thirty years.” Unlike artworks that do not use the human body as a medium, Piper’s twelve jars of hair show the artist’s physical development and aging. Once again, this could cause Piper emotional uneasiness, as she is forced to accept she will someday fill her last jar of hair.

Therefore, the work acts as a diary, or intimate record of Piper’s life, in which she connects physical changes to her body to key events she has experienced or remembers.

Her hair and skin become an index of her life, acting as material vessels of her emotions, worries, and changes.

Furthermore, Piper’s intentional d e ci s i on to u s e h on e y j ar s reiterates the thickness of both her curly hair and her life, attributing them to thick, sweet honey. Thus, Piper’s creative method is not merely a process of contemplation: What Will Become of Me is an allegory for her life.

For Piper, her final product is unique such that it represents and

reminds her of important stages of her life and youth. What Will Become of Me comprises work which is symbolic of Piper’s life.

As a result, she is unable to break away from emotionality in her artmaking process, fur ther complicating Lippard and Chandler’s definition of conceptual art.

Lippard, Chandler, and Lewitt’s interpretations of conceptual art detail a lack of emotional connection in the creation of a work of art, and that the piece ought to be solely mentallystimulating rather than emotionally appealing to its audience. The title of the piece uses the future tense (will), alluding to Piper’s imminent death.

Piper’s signed statement of intent to donate her cremated ashes upon her death implies the unfinished nature of the piece, but also confirms she is still alive. In that way, What Will Become of Me works as a self-memorialization of Piper’s life.

To viewers, the work is a strange form of mourning, in which the person they are asked to mourn is someone who is still currently alive. This raises an important concern for the viewer: when should someone be memorialized?

Is it possible to pay your respects to someone before they die? Such questions come with an immense !23

emotional burden, which causes the audience to reflect on their own life. Death is a concept all people are forced to unpack and ponder, bringing thoughts of loss, sadness, and frustrations which a c c o m p a n y t h e i n ab i l i t y t o comprehend one’s fate.

As such, I argue that What Will Become of Me constitutes a ‘difficult’ work. Jennifer Doyle uses ‘difficult’ as a descriptor of artworks that create dense fields of affect and emotional intensity for the viewer; art that “receives little or no institutional support— work that in most contexts is stubbornly uncollectible.”11 These issues often result from the work’s engagement with identity and controversy. Piper’s artwork is a collection of parts of her own physical body, transcending the nature of her work being an obsolete piece that holds sacred power.

Once her remains are donated to the MoMA, the work will be unboundedly connected to Piper’s body and soul, acting as a spiritual site to mourn her death. This elevates What Will Become of Me to a relic, no longer a mere shelf displaying lifeless objects. As the owners of Piper’s remains, the MoMA will face ethical issues handling the work as both a work of art and as a collection of human remains. Smith argues,

“The museum will have to negotiate two responsibilities: one to show respect to Piper’s memory in its curatorial and art handling practices, and the other to care for her remains as an object.”12 Piper’s chosen medium through which she showcases conceptions of life and death raises new problems for the MoMA as an institution, in which the museum is forced to react to her death: will the piece be renamed What Became of Me when Adrian Piper passes?

This dilemma alone illustrates the inability of categorizing Piper’s remains solely as an object that expresses a concept, as conceptual art is defined by Lewitt. Piper’s chosen medium of hair, skin, and f i n g e r n a i l s i s t o o s t r o n g ly connected to her body and experiences to be considered separate from her emotions, life, and creative processes. Piper blurs the line between artwork, quasidiary, and memorial in which the nature and progression of the work depends on what point of her life she is currently at.

Arguably, as time passes, the object of the work becomes more and more pertinent, quickly becoming both Piper’s memorial site, as well as an emotional experience for viewers of her work.

The audience of Piper’s piece becomes emotionally activated, as they are forced to consider their !24

own aging, and the aging of those around them. What Will Become of Me is quasi-memorialistic because of the parts of the body Piper has chosen to collect: in the eyes of the viewer, it could be anyone’s hair, skin, and ashes. Depending on one’s relationship with Piper, the viewer might have a very different emotional response, reflecting a layer of Piper’s work that Lippard and Lewitt are unable to address.

What Will Become of Me surpasses common criticism and literature on conceptual art, as exemplified by Lippard, Chandler, and Lewitt, defying the emotional boundaries and the obsolescence of the conceptual art object. Piper strategically uses parts of her body to challenge not only definitions of conceptual art, but what constitutes an artistic medium, adding an additional layer to the responsibility of a museum as an institution that commodifies and values art.

4. Deirdre Smith, “Death as Catalysis,” Good Measure 3, no. 1 (2016): 6.

5. John P. Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, G e n d e r, a n d E m b o d i m e n t ( D u k e University Press, 2011), 39.

6. Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 5 (1968).

7 . L i p p a r d a n d C h a n d l e r, “ T h e Dematerialization of Art,” 31.

8. Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (1967): 79-83.

9. Smith, “Death as Catalysis,” 6.

10. Smith, “Death as Catalysis,” 10.

11. Jennifer Doyle, Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Duke University Press: 2013), 6.

12. Smith, “Death as Catalysis,” 7.

▫︎

Notes 1. Adrian Piper, What Will Become of Me (1985, ongoing), framed text, glass jars, hair, fingernails, and skin, collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, USA. 2. What Will Become of Me,” MoMA (date of last access 2018) https:// www.moma.org/collection/works/153243 3. “What Will Become of Me” (date of last access 2018).

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Furnishing History: Curating Authenticity at Versailles written by Margaux Shraiman edited by Gabby Marcuzzi Herie

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In 2009, the respected antique dealers Laurent Kraemer and Bill Pallot sold a set of four medallion back chairs to the Palace of Versailles for €1.7 million, claiming they were Louis Delanois originals [see fig. 1].1 The palace’s spokespeople stated in a press release that the chairs are “national treasures” and were among a set of thirteen created for the private chambers of the countess du Barry, Louis XV’s last mistress. Over the last twenty years, the palace has acquired ten of the original chairs from the set, as well as a known nineteenth-century replica.2 The French art fraud office now suspects at least two of the chairs may be copies, due to a tip from another French antiques dealer, Charles Hooreman, an expert in eighteenth-century chairs, and has been investigating the pair since 2012.3 Because furnituremaking and carpentry techniques underwent very few changes up until World War II, it can be

difficult to differentiate true antiques from more recent pieces and from outright forgeries.4 The Kramer Gallery, which has been a mainstay in the antiques market since 1875, adamantly denied the accusations, saying they “have never have sold something we had doubts on.”5 Since 2012, this story has been propagated by the media throughout the world and caused public outrage. If these allegations prove tr ue, the ramifications could cause the ruin of France’s antique furniture market and could bring severe consequences to the careers of a string of museum curators and even government ministers.

The forgery scandal illuminates problems endemic to public art institutions, as well as the larger world of collecting and

Fig. 1 (right): A chair made by Louis Delanois for Louis XV’s mistress M a d a m e d u B a r r y. C o u r t e s y o f Versailles.

Fig. 4 (opposite): Thomas Garnier, “Madame Victoire’s Private Chamber.”

Château De Versailles, Versailles, France.

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Fig. 2: A suite of four Louis XVI giltwalnut armchairs stamped by Louis Delanois that sold at Christie's Paris in 2015.

connoisseurship. Interestingly however, even if these chairs prove authentic, the experience of history that visitors participate in at the palace is inherently inauthentic. The Palace as it can be seen today is a product of curation, and a very large portion of the decor found there today was never there during its use as a residence. The public’s visceral reaction to the forged chairs can be attributed to several factors, both economic and socio-political.

People clearly are rightfully upset due to the perceived misallocation of public funds. However, perhaps people are also upset because this shatters the illusion of Versailles–– because it changes t h e l og i c o f Ve r s a i l l e s t o something akin to fiction. This

scandal broke the bonds of trust between cultural institutions and the general public, for whom they are supposedly intended, and by whom they are funded.

The transformation of the residence into a museum starting in the nineteenth century has brought such questions to the forefront, especially those concerning the acquisition of art and decorative objects. These acquisitions have not always gone smoothly, and there have been instances of artifacts being historically inconsistent and even forgeries being acquired accidentally.

The problem with the terms “original” or “authentic” when discussing the furnishings and layout of the palace is that it was and still is continually evolving to accommodate its inhabitants.

Rooms changed functions and the decor was never permanent, sometimes even changing with the seasons. So how do we define “original” in reference to the decor of Versailles? Is it the decor during Louis XIV’s reign (1643-1715)? Louis XVI’s (1774– 92) ? Or is capturing other parts of history, such as the Revolution or the Napoleonic era, more valuable? Furthermore, why does authenticity matter? How do different visions of authenticity

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Fig. 3: Thomas Garnier, “View of the Palace from the Parterre.” Château De Versailles , Versailles, France.

change depending on context and on who is making the decision?

In my paper I will analyze the curatorial decisions made when curating a royal residence and political building. At Versailles, the problem is not just a historical one: political issues are at the heart of the curatorial process, dating back to the revolutionary rupture at the end of the eighteenth century. The curatorial problem of Versailles lies in cultural heritage: how does one present to the public of today, the history of the palace through its furnishings? I will explore the issues surrounding the term and concept of ‘authenticity’ in the Versailles context through the example of the forgery scandal of 2009. This paper will contend that the importance surrounding the authenticity of art and

artefacts in the specific case of Versailles is directly linked to its complex history and identity as a royal residence, seat of power, public institution, and museum. It is not supposed to be a reconstitution of history, but rather an authentic lieu de mémoire.

I will discuss what these forgeries reveal about the overall curatorial narrative of Versailles, which has its roots in the original transformation of the palace from residence to museum: the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution.

The Palace of Versailles: A Brief History Versailles is emblematic of French history: it has been the site of political intrigue, cultur al creation, r evo l u t i o n , a n d d i p l o m at i c negotiations [fig. 3]. It has withstood the test of time even as !29

dynasties, empires and revolutions have come and gone. Today it is a museum, and yet it still retains its symbolic power. The palace is a living breathing organism: even in the present it continues to grow and evolve. Its mazes of passages and rooms have been constantly in flux since the beginning. There is hardly a room which has retained its original function. As the palace exchanged hands and the estate changed in functionality, so did the rooms: bedrooms became sitting rooms, hallways became galleries, rooms were divided into two, new floors were added in order to accommodate increasing numbers of people and to improve the privacy of the royal family.

seat to a center of power and illuminated all of Europe with... [its] splendor...has left its imprint upon the current administration of the country in the principle of the centralization of sociopolitical and cultural activity.”7 The palace is still relevant to post-revolutionary and current French political projects because it not only serves to outwardly communicate French might as a nation, but also because it has continuously served as a political core. Still today the palace hosts significant political events such as meetings of the Assemblée nationale, and diplomatic gatherings, including a press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June of 2017.

A l t h o u g h Ve r s a i l l e s o n l y temporarily played a central role in the history of France, whereas Paris has consistently represented the political and cultural center of the country since the Middle Ages, this era of French history was so formative that the palace signifies more than merely a lieu de mémoire, or place of memory.

This concept, coined by French historian Pierre Nora, relates to “places, sites, causes—in three senses—material, symbolic and functional.” 6 Specifically, “the absolutist system of government introduced by Louis XIV which raised this insignificant country

The luxur y market is a fluctuating one––highly competitive and a source of substantial profits––yet it is fragile due to its intrinsic link to the ephemeral tastes of fashion.

Despite this, supported by the circulation of secondhand objects, the luxury market survived even the darkest days of the Terror (September 5, 1793 – July 28, 1794).8 The Revolution, far from encouraging market segmentation as promised by revolutionary rhetoric, actually increased the fluidity of the market due to “the disorganization of the market, auction sales, or even the violent !30

confiscation of goods.’”9 This is a fundamental paradox: a new regime that supposedly abolished the non egalitarian ideology of the old world order appears to have helped strengthen traditional values and luxury. At the height of the political crisis spanning from 1793 to 1794, sales of furniture and decoration soared.10 As the Revolution swept across the country, merchants and retailers continued to handle luxury goods, ones which were mainly confiscated from the aristocracy during the Terror.

Although the Parisian consumer market had changed with the emigration and decimation of its aristocratic clientele, luxury merchants now sold mainly to the new bourgeois revolutionary elite and, most importantly, to foreign collectors.11 Ironically, the new egalitarian political ideologies helped to maintain hierarchies and traditional consumption practices. The impacts from this period are still felt today as Versailles’ curatorial department struggles to track down and reacquire pieces from the palace’s pre-revolutionar y collection which were auctioned off around the globe or put in the custody of the Musée du Louvre, which was also transitioned into a museum during this period.

Versailles is an interesting case study because it was transitioned from its standing as a royal residence and seat of power into a cultural institution right on the cusp of the conception of the modern public museum. As such it reflects the evolution of museological thought. It retains vestiges of antiquated modes of thinking while simultaneously lying on the forefront of modern museological discourse, as it is one of France’s largest public cultural institutions alongside the Louvre. Upon his coronation in 1830, Louis Philippe, the Citizen King, never thought of taking up residence in Versailles. His decision in 1833 to transform the residential palace into a historical m u s e u m w e n t b e yo n d t h e previous revolutionary ambitions for the site which had simply envisioned the building as a monument to a bygone feudal era.

12

The conception of a museum that Louis Philippe implemented at Versailles is completely different from the modern understanding of such institutions. Louis’ novel vision was demonstrated in how "he sought to assemble events" instead of "simply [putting] valuable objects on public view"; this "selection and form of representation [was] surely subordinated to his political !31

intentions."13 The late eighteenth century conception of history differed from the one we have today, as “the past was not an object of research but rather...served as a political argument.” 14 The historical museum of Versailles was a lieu de mémoire in which past heroism were employed to uphold the current political program.

The transformation of Versailles into a museum, and its curation as such, since its inception under King Louis Philippe has been informed by, and manipulated to tell a par ticular historical narrative. This can be seen in the project of the Galerie des Batailles, effectuated between 1833-1837. The gallery, which occupies almost the entirety of the first floor of l’Aile du Midi, was constructed in the place of apartments which were occupied during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the likes of le duc d’Orl é ans, and la dauphine.15 The image of history that Louis Philippe conveyed in the galler y’s monumental painting series was designed to show the glory of the nation by showing its historical precedent.16 As the visitor approaches his museum, they are greeted with an inscription that reads “À toutes les gloires de la France”, “to all the glories of France”. The

sequence of paintings emphasize the close relationship between people and ruler in the history of France: specific past occurrences were selected and brought to view in particular ways in order to justify current political conditions.17 The history museum appealed to the citizens’ sense of community by portraying heroic leaders in the midst of their subjects: soldiers and common citizens alike. Even though the majority of citizens suffered during the Age of Absolutism, Versailles now belonged to everyone.

Versailles: A Symbol After the departure of of Louis XVI in spring of 1789, the palace was threatened with demolition.

However this initiative was very unpopular, because the edifice had become recognized by the people as a monument, due to its symbolic aura rather than its a r t i s t i c m e r i t . 1 8 Ve r s a i l l e s represents not only absolutism, but also its downfall, and the beginning of a new epoch. It is not just a commemorative site for royalists – it also functions as the site of the “oath of the tennis court”, the historical act which ushered in the new age of emancipation.19 To this day, the palace of Versailles embodies the epitome of human achievement and possibility for growth and !32

beauty. Yet it also exemplifies human g reed, violence and tyranny: a luxurious palace built in a country suffering from famines and epidemics.

Visiting Versailles today, we expect to be immersed in the lifestyle led by the Sun King and his successors. Yet, Versailles also draws its strength from the politicized history embodied in Louis Philippe’s museum which allows us to situate the July Monarchy in its historical context, even if it erased the older apartments located in that part of the palace in its construction. This illustrates that when discussing the curation of a building with such a rich and movemented history, older is not necessarily more authentic or valuable. When curating and preserving a building of such historical significance and complexity, it is impossible to preserve every aspect of its historicity. In order to display a physical room at a certain point in time, one has to erase all which preceded and succeeded it.

Versailles as an institution deals with this particular problem by exposing visitors to reconstitutions of the palace at various points in its history, through diver se mediums including architectural models

and illustrations, historical paintings, videos and more.

Curation: Then and Now In order to discuss the implications of forgery on the institution of the museum, specifically in such a historical and prestigious establishment as Versailles, it is important to consider the roles and limitations of the curators, and the French cultural bureaucracy which makes the acquisitional decisions. The curatorial profession in France is c u r r e n t ly u n d e r go i n g d e e p changes due to rapid expansion with an increase in both the number of available positions and the public funds dedicated to culture. Additionally there has been a widening of recruitment criteria since the creation of a ‘concours’ accessible to anyone with a university degree, as well as the traditional recruitment by the École du Louvre.20 Finally, there have been changes in the division of labour due to the increasing specialization of the various categories of curators.21 The role of a curator in France is characterized by discursivity: the ability to communicate the core ideas of an exhibition not only in t h e b r o c h u r e s, s i g n s a n d catalogues, but also in their own published research. Curators are confronted with the paradoxical dilemma of investing in selections !33

that are at once reflective of the curator’s own tastes and of collective values, as certified by formal procedures.22 Curatorial activities––including acquiring, circulating and exposing art or artefacts––carry inherent risk, which reinforces the tendency towards the erasure of the person in the post, in order to minimize the risk of error. They expose themselves and their work to public scrutiny either materially, by hanging, framing, and spatially organizing the work, or s y m b o l i c a l l y, t h r o u g h t h e d o c u m e n t at i o n , a n a ly s i s, cataloguing of art.23 Modern, universally accepted principles of good curatorial and conservation practice, and indeed much wider concepts of good museum policy and practice, were not instinctive, but rather began to be developed in early nineteenth century Europe. Much of what the museum profession worldwide today regards as fundamental truths concerning professional ethics and practice are the result o f d e b at e s c e n t r a l t o t h e Revolution and First Republic.24 For e xample, Jacques-Louis David’s organizational strategies in the Louvre pioneered the chronological and thematic organization of art historical collections.25

The palace as we see it today is the product of the work of generations of curators who pieced together collections of furniture which resemble, with as much accuracy as possible, those which stood there before the Revolution. Each room, from the curtains to the footstools, is the product of complex decisions taken to determine the era they seek to emulate––should the room appear as it was under Louis XIV or Louis XVI [fig. 4]? Even apparently simple decisions involve multiple and conflicting views on historical, aesthetic and pedagogical issues. Most visitors are not aware the large majority of artifacts present there today were not the original ones. Only a few objects such as King Louis XV’s famous cylinder desk and his astronomical clock were saved from the revolutionary auction block due to their pricelessness and historical significance.

The Multiple Publics of Versailles The reason why Ver sailles preserves its power of attraction is a nuanced due to its multiple publics. The splendour of the royal palace and the plethora of artistic treasures it contains are only part of the answer. For foreign visitors, the draw of Ve r s a i l l e s s t e m s f r o m i t s reputation as one of the most !34

luxurious and decadent courts of the world during the period of Louis XIV to Louis XVI. However, for the French public, which accounts for the vast majority of visitors to the palace, Versailles embodies more than just a tourist attraction. It represents to “each individual, in his own way, his own political conviction.”26 Another notable public at Ver sailles is the curatorial and scholarly elite.

These are the experts that make the decisions regarding acquisitions, exhibitions, and decor. They are in charge of the education and communications regarding the Palace’s history, architecture and collections with the public. The multiple publics of Versailles affect the curatorial decisions on everything from the signage and the acquisitions, to the contemporary art exhibitions held in order to maximize the appeal to people from each distinct group. However the Palace’s administration prioritizes the experience of the French public.

Defining Authenticity The Kraemer and Pallot scandal created a crisis of trust between the public and the scholarly ‘experts’. It is a clear conflict in the politics of expertise. How can the average taxpayer be assured their money is not going into the

pockets of crooks? What happens when the experts are wrong, or worse, deceitful? After all, it is impossible for anyone to tell the difference between an authentic and forged chair without being trained in the restoration of eighteenth century furniture.

How can we be sure any of the fur niture in the palace is authentic? Until the Second World War, most workshops used the same techniques, materials and tools as those of the time. If a piece of furniture was made properly, there is very little chance of being detected as fake.27 Expert forgers use eighteenthcentury tools and techniques and have easy access to eighteenthcentury wood. They are even “known to sprinkle dust from churches dating back to the right period to cover their tracks.”28 So what makes the authentic chairs more valuable than the forgeries?

Defining authenticity in this context is tricky: the word itself means real or actual, but when applied to the historical collection of Versailles, authenticity is partly comprised of approximations without detracting from its value. Not only are these chairs antique, as well valuable examples of fine craftsmanship, design and finesse, these specific chairs are more valuable than others made at the !35

Fig. 5: Christian Milet, “Galerie des Glaces: vue générale, torchères,” Château De Versailles, Versailles, France.

same time by similar artisans because these chairs are specific to a time and place in history that people are more attached to.

These are chairs that were sat in b y h i s t o r i c a l ly s i g n i f i c a n t characters during historically significant moments.

Since the Second World War, the scholarly discourse surrounding art history has largely shifted away from ‘authentication’ and instead focussed on ‘provenance’.

The aftermath of the Nazi pillaging of mainly Jewish art collections brought into question ideas concerning the ownership of art, especially regarding masterpieces of historical and cultural import. The process of seizing of cultural property d u r i n g t h e Revo l u t i o n i s comparable with the Nazi looting of Jewish effects, although our historical distance from those events shifts the discussion away

from ownership and towards h i s t o r i c i t y. I n b o t h c a s e s historians are still attempting to restore the cultural property where is ‘rightly’ belongs. This problem is complicated by the very terms of the debate, since ownership is itself is a “semitransient category, as well as a capitalist one.”29 In Versailles’ specific case, it is further tangled by the fact that the diaspora of its contents is due to a proletariat revolt against the tyranny and abuses committed by the aristocratic class. The French citizens took back what they saw as rightfully theirs: the luxurious products of their labour and tax dollars. Further more, when discussing the provenance of cultural artefacts, especially from centuries ago, the problem is the “difficulty of identifying the continuity from past to present that substantiates claims for o b j e c t s t o b e r e t u r n e d . ”30 Versailles’ curatorial acquisitions process thus requires obtaining artifacts through purchases as opposed to legal procedures to prove provenance.

Conclusion We have seen that the Palace of Versailles is a symbol, yet it goes beyond that: it is a historical reality. If it was just a symbol, then having inauthentic furniture w o u l d n o t b e p r o bl e m at i c, !36

s i m i l a r ly t o t h e h i s t o r i c a l reenactment tourist attractions like Colonial Williamsburg.

Colonial Williamsburg is a private ‘living-history museum’ in Virginia, USA, which presents exhibits of dozens of restored or replicated historical buildings from the colonial and Revolutionary era, and employees work and wear historical dress, sometimes even using colonial grammar. When visitors go into a place such as this, they do not have the same expectations of perfect authenticity as they do for Versailles due to its status as a lieu de mémoire. They accept the illusion. However, the majority is not aware that a large number of the items displayed at Versailles are either pieces created during the time period by artisans commissioned for similar objects which never actually belonged in the palace, but rather in other aristocratic edifices or they are replicas entirely. One notable example is that many of the famous artifacts on display in the galerie des glaces, or Hall of Mirrors, including many of the Torchères [fig. 6], are in fact replicas. However, the vast majority of the public is not aware of this, and as it is not an advertised fact, only experts are privy to this information. The public will not be able to tell the

difference without the aid of specialists. So how does this differ from acquiring forged chairs? It is primarily an economic question.

If the curators had been aware of their authenticity, their value would have been diminished for historical reasons. Replicas have a different value, they allow for access to historical reality but they are diminished in value because they are not the actual objects themselves. Curators used replicas in the Hall of Mirrors due to it being a highly trafficked zone, I myself shooed many children away from touching the furnishings before learning they were replicas.

In order to fully understand the implications of the forgery scandal and the questions of authenticity it elicits, it is important to understand the socio-political conte xt and symbolic nature of Versailles’ identity, in its simultaneous capacity as a for mer royal residence, a seat of power, a public institution and a cultural museum. This scandal is particularly problematic, due to and not in spite of the complex history and status of Versailles as a political symbol and a museum.

The central duties of a public cultural institution are acquiring, p r e s e r v i n g, e x h i b i t i n g a n d promoting the cultural heritage !37

a n d f u r t h e r i n g k n ow l e d g e.

Inherent in this, is public’s trust of both the museum's accessibility and responsible acquisitions. The forgery scandal called to question the authenticity of a lieu de mémoire central to the French national identity and broke the trust between cultural institutions and the experts who run them, and their public. ▫︎

Notes 1. Emmanuel Fansten, “Trafic D'art : Les Fausses Chaises Qui Valaient 3 Millions,” Libération.fr, September 2, 2016.

2. Sarah Cascone, “Chair Forgery Scandal Strikes Versailles,” Artnet News, October 17, 2016.

3. Cascone, “Chair Forgery.”

4. Cascone, “Chair Forgery.”

5. Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, “Gallery Pulls Out from Biennale Des Antiquaires.”

Artnet News, September 7, 2016.

6. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 14.

7. Nora, Realms of Memory, 161.

8. Yehuda Cohen, The French: Myths of Revolution (Brighton, England: Sussex Academic Press, 2011), 72.

9. Johanna Ilmakunnas, and Jon Stobart.

A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern E u ro p e : D i s p l a y, A c q u i s i t i o n a n d Boundaries (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 286.

10. Ilmakunnas and Stobart, A Taste for Luxury, 290.

11. Ilmakunnas and Stobart, A Taste for Luxury, 294.

12. Nora, Realms of Memory, 166 13. Nora, Realms of Memory, 168.

14. Nora, Realms of Memory, 164.

15. “La Galerie Des Batailles,” Le Château De Versailles, Accessed 30 Nov. 2017. www.chateauversailles.fr/decouvrir/ domaine/chateau/galerie-batailles 16. Nora, Realms of Memory, 167.

17. Nora, Realms of Memory, 168.

18. Nora, Realms of Memory, 163.

19. Nora, Realms of Memory, 166-167.

20. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne. Thinking About Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1996), 166.

21.Greenberg, Ferguson and Nairne, Thinking About Exhibitions, 166.

22. Greenberg, Ferguson and Nairne, Thinking About Exhibitions, 167 23. Greenberg, Ferguson and Nairne, Thinking About Exhibitions,167.

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24. Patrick J. Boylan, “Revolutionary France and the Foundation of Modern Museum Management and Curatorial Practice: Part II: David and Vicq D'Azyr, 1792–94,” Museum Management and Curatorship 15, no. 2 (1996): 143, Science Direct.

25. Boylan, “Revolutionary France,” 143.

26. Nora, Realms of Memory, 162.

27.

Henry Samuel, “Scandal Strikes Versailles Palace as Police Detain Two Top Art Dealers over 'Fake' Louis XV Chairs.”

T h e Te l e g r a p h , J u n e 9 , 2 0 1 6 . www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/09/ scandal-strikes-versailles-palace-as-policedetain -two-top-art-d/ 28. Samuel, “Scandal Strikes.”

29. Greenberg, Ferguson and Nairne, Thinking About Exhibitions, 145.

30.Greenberg, Ferguson and Nairne, Thinking About Exhibitions, 145.

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What a City Remembers: Policy, Memory, and SettlerColonialism in Montreal’s Cité Mémoire written by Hannah Deskin edited by Gabby Marcuzzi Herie

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Spectral shadows emerge from the bricks and cobbles of Montreal in Cité Mémoire, an immersive audiovisual tour created by local artists and Cirque du Soleil veterans, Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon, in collaboration with playwright Michel Marc Bouchard. Projected from the rooftops of over 80 buildings and spread across the Old Port and downtown Montreal, C i t é M é m o i r e ’ s 2 6 l i ve r e enactments are performed by a cur ated cast of historical characters who claim to imbue light and flickering movement into the defining moments of the city’s history.1 Extolled by city planners as a new way to engage the public in civic celebration, the project’s press release described that “The trees, buildings, and cobblestone streets will be lit with a series of

projections inspired by… the city.”2 Co-creator Victor Pilon subsequently explained in a CBC interview: “We’re talking about [the] people that created and dreamed Montreal. We’re telling their story. And we’re telling the story through these characters that sort of emerge through the stones.”3 While viewers are immersed into the lives of dozens of the city’s most famous citizens from first settlement to present day, it is significant that only two projections are chosen to represent the entirety of Indigenous history in Montreal. The first inclusion is a version of the Algonquin creation story, and the second is a fictional re-enactment of the “Great Peace of Montreal,”

Fig. 1: Michel Lemieux, Victor Pilon, and Michel Marc Bouchard, Cité Mémoire: The Great Peace of Montreal (2016). Digital projection, 4 storeys. Pointe-à-Callière Museum, Montreal, Quebec.

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famously negotiated by HuronWendat Chief Kondiaronk and French governor Louis Hector de Callière in 1701. Through this limited engagement, First Nations lived experiences are relegated to the margins of Cité Mémoire’s (and thereby potentially Montreal’s) h i s t o r i c a l m e m o r y. M o u n t e d respectively for Canada and M o n t r e a l ’ s 1 5 0th a n d 3 7 5th anniversary celebrations in 2017, Cité Mémoire’s publicly funded tableaux will continue to inform understandings of Montreal’s key historical moments until its finale in 2019.4 Through its organization and funding around a dual anniversary year, the following project seeks to clarify the ways in which the municipal, federal and provincial governments’ fiscal involvement has influenced the installation’s proportional lack of Indigenous histories. 5 Fir st, it will be important to critically engage with cultural policy trends and funding allocations to discer n the pedagogical and civic priorities that are clearly articulated in Cité Mémoire’s press releases and programming.6 This will lead to considerations of the emerging roles that immersive digital art installations play in identity formation and collective memory when presented publicly within settler-colonial states. To fully

explore this, I will use Cité M é m o i re ’s “ G r e at Pe a c e o f Montreal” tableau [fig. 1] as a primary case study. To support my reading, it will be helpful to compare Cité Mémoire to the examples of Expo 67’s celebrated “Canadian Pavilion” and the controversial “Indians of Canada Pavilion” in order to trace the evolution of settler-colonial narratives and memories that have been repeatedly offered during moments of civic celebration.7 To nuance the complicated realities of state cultural programming, I will also consider the de-colonial methodologies employed by contemporary Indigenous artists, who actively respond to these trends materially and discursively.

Through these enquiries, this essay ultimately aims to reveal Cité M é m o i r e ’s s e t t l e r - c o l o n i a l n a r r at i ve s, t e c h n i q u e s o f immer sion, and collective memories, which work together to actively normalize the state’s occupation of unceded K a n i e n ’ ke h á : k a ( M o h aw k ) territory, while mythologizing Indigenous existence within this shared space.

Methodology Before unpacking the specific case studies at hand, I would like to establish the parameters and potential limitations of this project. As a non-Indigenous !42

woman living in the city now known to settlers as Montreal, the artistic practices and visual cultures presented within this paper do not always reflect my own lived experiences. In fact, my familial heritage can be traced directly back to William Steeves, the Father of Confederation born and raised in Hillsborough, New Brunswick, whose involvement in the formation of the Canadian nation on unceded Indigenous territory contributed to some of the most harmful and problematic policies in its history. Through my scholarship, I endeavour to think critically about the past, present, and future of Canadian cultural policy, and the roles that my work might play in the reality of this space.

While I can never attempt to appropriate or fully understand the comple x and continuously evolving perspectives of the Indigenous peoples who resist the harmful state structures outlined in this paper, I repeatedly draw inspiration from the de-colonial methodologies of Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists. As a guide in my reading of Cité Mémoire, I draw on the words of visual artist Dion Kaszas, when upon discussing the appropriation of Indigenous imagery in settler tattoo art, pointed out that “…Our stories… which have been paid for

with blood, are used in a way that does not acknowledge our laws, c o n s t i t u t i o n s, r i g h t s a n d responsibilities.” 8 While this project draws attention to the acts of resurgence performed by contemporary Indigenous artists, who respond to programs and policies like Cité Mémoire, I am also reminded of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s cautions against decolonial research. As Tuhiwai Smith explains in Decolonizing Methodologies: It galls us that Wester n researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing… and then simultaneously reject the p e o p l e w h o c re a t e d a n d developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.9

While the perils outlined by Smith may be observed in projects like Cité Mémoire, in an attempt to avoid these harmful practices in my own contributions I do not claim to know all there is to know.

Nor do I attempt to extract or claim owner ship over the Indigenous lived experiences that I discuss, and I certainly do not wish to deny opportunities for the Indigenous creators who have !43

shared their works and opinions with me. Instead, I prioritize the voices of First Nations scholars, artists, and activists whenever possible to enable a balanced and collaborative approach, while avoiding an oversimplification of the subject through the use of hyper-local case studies geographically and culturally linked to Cité Mémoire.

Part I - Montréal En Histoire: Cité Mémoire Centennial Celebrations: Cultural Policy and Contemporary Funding Trends As one of the largest projects undertaken during Montreal’s p r o g r a m m i n g f o r i t s 3 7 5th anniversary, in tandem with Canada’s 150th bicentennial, Cité Mémoire’s budget of eighteen million dollars was allocated in large part from federal, provincial, and municipal funding sources.10 Service Quebec’s press release proudly introduces the project as a joint effort between multiple branches of government, with their ultimate aim to encourage Canadians and Montrealers “to travel through time to discover the rich history of the city and to renew their relationship with the past (translated from original French).” 11 As a joint effort, funding was disbursed primarily through: Quebec’s Ministry of

Culture and Communications, under its specific mandates for cultural development; The City of Montreal, under the programs of municipal improvement mandated by the city’s “2025 initiative”; and the Gover nment of Canada, through its Heritage and Economic Development branches.

12 In total, the governments of Canada and Quebec spent approximately 500 million and one billion dollars respectively on their anniversary celebrations.13 With Cité Mémoire as a primary example, governments at the federal, provincial and municipal l e v e l s c o n t i n u e t o i n vo l v e themselves in the cultural lives of Canadian citizens, as state-funded projects are often chosen on the basis of legislative perceptions of the public good, national and regional interests, and social benefits.14 In the chief audit of the Canadian government’s “Building Communities Through Arts and Heritage Program,” primarily delivered by Heritage Canada, “[The] main objective is to build stronger citizen engagement… through the performing and visual arts and in the e xpression, celebration and preservation of local historical heritage.”15 While it is difficult to discern exactly which funding sources were tapped within Heritage Canada for Cité Mémoire, it is likely that at least !44

part of the budget came from its “Community Historical Anniversaries Prog ramming” component, since its expressed mandates seem to perfectly fit Cité Mémoire’s description.16 With the government’s priorities and funding allocations in mind, current scholarship on the state’s promotion of new media art can be useful to the task of decoding Cité Mémoire. Citing emerging technologies as one of the main draws to the project, Service Quebec’s press release suggests that “[Cité Mémoire] demonstrates to the entire world Canada’s command of new technologies, and confirms Montreal’s status as a leader in multimedia on a global scale (translated from original French).” 17 Victor Pilon and Michel Lemieux were subsequently chosen for the project in recognition of their highly successful Montreal based production company, “Lemieux Pilon 4D Art,” through which the pair and their respective teams devise shows that use technologies of immersion to intensify the audience’s sensory and emotional experiences.18 While the pair have enlisted these technologies in numerous appearances since the 1980s, it is important to consider how their methodologies function w h e n c o m m i s s i o n e d by t h e government. Denise Meredyth and

Jeffrey Minson’s argument in Citizenship and Cultural Policy becomes particularly relevant in this case, as the authors insist that, We are in the midst of a new enthusiasm for active citizenship and civic education.

In the search for supplementary funds, cultural institutions are becoming increasingly market driven, seeking [new] ways of attracting… audiences.19

Since the only currency in public art is undivided attention, when over eleven million visitors arrived in 2017 to celebrate Montreal’s 3 7 5 t h a n n i ve r s a r y, c u l t u r a l programmers carefully considered what kinds of exhibitions would garner the most engagement (and therefore, as Minson and Meredyth suggest, the most f u n d i n g ) .20 T h r o u g h t h e i r enlistment of spectacle-laden immersive technologies, those who dreamt up (and paid for) the project have enjoyed an undeniable triumph. At last count in 2017, over 500,000 visitor s had interacted with Cité Mémoire’s 26 digital tableaux, while its accompanying smart phone app had been downloaded over 150,000 times.21 Technologies of Immersion and Collective Memory Since Service Quebec proudly lists Pilon and Lemieux’s command of new technologies as one of the primary reasons for Cité Mémoire’s !45

success, the role of immersive digital art in the formation of state encoded collective memories comes into focus. The theories suggested by Erica Lehrer and Cynthia Milton in their book, Curating Dif ficult Knowledge, perfectly epitomize Cité Mémoire’s immersive memory work. As the authors e xplain, “We are convinced that some of the most i n t e r e s t i n g p e r s p e c t i ve s o n memory work are emerging on the borders where academic and other spheres of cultural practice meet: the museum, the memorial site, [and] the heritage tour.” 22 Manipulating all of the loci cited

by Lehrer and Milton, Cité Mémoire performs a self-guided and visually arresting heritage tour that works to capture the imaginations and memories of all those who encounter it.

However, this capture is not without risk. Scholars have proven that collective memory often forms the root of nationalism. In p a r t i c u l a r, m e m o r y s c h o l a r Edward Said explains in Invention, Memory and Place: Memory and its representations touch very significantly upon q u e s t i o n s o f i d e n t i t y, o f nationalism, of power and authority. Far from being a neutral exercise in facts and basic truths, the study of history, which of course is the underpinning of memory… [is a] nationalist effort premised on

the need to construct a desirable loyalty to an insider's understanding of one's country, tradition, and faith. The invention of tradition is a method for using collective memory selectively by manipulating certain bits of the national past, suppressing others, elevating still others in an entirely functional way. Thus memory is not necessarily authentic, but rather useful.23

Through an embodied pilgrimage to memorial sites, and the largescale movement of projected images into physical space, Cité Mémoire allows its viewers to access collective memories through highly selective pedagogical acts.

Meanwhile, the immer sive qualities of Pilon and Lemieux’s digital artworks allow participants t o b e c o m e e ye w i t n e s s e s t o historical events. As Said confirms, this becomes an incredibly useful tool in elevating bits of the national past to create encoded u n d e r s t a n d i n g s o f n at i o n a l identity and the approved historical record.24 Drawing on these theories and methodologies, Pilon and Lemieux manifest their intentions to intensify the viewer’s emotional engagement, and in turn, their project and its espoused narrative becomes all the more convincing.

Directly linked to these issues of immersion and collective memory, it then becomes important to ask how the project’s technologically !46

driven state funding, allocated around celebratory anniversaries, has left room for potentially perilous omissions from its educational narratives. As May Chew urges in a forthcoming article: Cité Mémoire enlists technologies of immersion to rehearse stories about [the] nation. While it is undoubtedly important to think about the complicated ways that Quebec and Canadian nationalism(s) diverge and overlap, it is equally urgent to consider the ways that they converge around settler occupation…25

As Chew suggests, now more than ever, visitors to Montreal are being introduced to a curated cast of historical characters who each lend their identities to the project’s theme of nationalism.26 While the artists and facilitators celebrate benevolent icons like Marguerite d’Youville, who accepted and cared for unwed mothers and their children, the tableaux depicting “the Great Peace of 1701” is particularly revealing of the celebratory colonial cause that Quebec and Canadian funding sources have rallied around.

Located at the city’s monument for the treaty’s initial signing over 400 years ago (now the site of Montreal’s Pointe-à-Callière Archaeological Museum), programmers use site-specific technologies of immersion to

share with viewers their version of the historical record, at the material and discursive intersection of a state-funded museum and national monument.

Problematically, the placement of this tableau on the side of a museum space strengthens the state’s promotion of settlercolonial memories. Useful to the o b j e c t i ve s o f t h i s p r o j e c t , m u s e o l og i c a l s c h o l a r C a r o l Duncan’s approach to cultural displays insists that art and politics often merge.27 Building on her existing work on museums as ceremonial monuments and ritual spaces, in The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Duncan argues that the museum is not the neutral and transparent space that it is often positioned to be.28 Instead, the author suggests that such spaces repeatedly carry out specific political and ideological tasks.29 Duncan further suggests that museums function similarly to religious doctrines, acting as sources of universal knowledge, and essential in the process of forming collective memories.30 As such, positioned at this pivotal spatial intersection, “the Great Peace” tableau inevitably lulls its viewers into a perilously false sense of pedagogical security.

Education is embedded within the museum website from the outset, as it is explained that in the !47

Fig. 2: Bill Cotter Collection, Expo 67: Canadian Pavilion (1967). Photograph.

Montreal, Quebec.

summer of 1701 Montreal was the scene of a major historical event.31 As the Point-à-Callière museum website claims, This treaty put an end to several decades of conflict between the Iroquois, allies of the English, and the French and their allied Indigenous Peoples… For many, it marks the turning point in FrancoAmerindian relations, famously negotiated by governor Louis Hector de Callière (the namesake of the museum) and Kondiaronk, the Huron-Wendat Grand Chief.32

In the historical re-enactment imagined by Pilon, Lemieux, and Bouchard, projected on the physical space of the site where the meeting occurred, viewers see Kondiaronk wearing historicized tropes of primitive Indigenous clothing as he and an unnamed female character dance around a fire. These recognizable tropes have been repeatedly employed in settler imaginations of Indigenous life-ways for centuries, and

Fig. 3: National Film Board of Canada, Expo 67: Indians of Canada Pavilion (1967). Film still. Montreal, Quebec.

consumed voraciously on both sides of the Atlantic. 33 The colonial visual traditions expressed in this tableau have clear roots in the ethnographical drawings of artists like Theodor de Bry, who famously engraved partial nudity and imagined costumes onto the bodies of Indigenous peoples for travel publications. 34 Slightly closer to home, the ornamental marginalia of the maps of New France produced by Samuel de Champlain also include these imagined tropes.35 Implicit within these publications were the assimilative missions of colonial agents, upon which the colony’s economic and political ventures depended.36 In the space of the Cité Mémoire tableau, we are then introduced to one such colonial agent, who we can assume is Louis Hector de Callière. Wearing their respective garbs, the two historical figures engage in what can only be described as a larger than life !48

dance, demonstrating g rand gestures of honour through graceful bows and the eventual removal of Callière’s hat. As the tableau’s narrative progresses, the two historical figures defer to one another, as they take tur ns addressing the wampum (the device used to record treaty relationships).

Through these visual devices, the tableau imagines a peaceful and definitive end to the treaties that negotiated Montreal’s permanent settlement, while neglecting to allude to the decades of armed violence that necessitated this conference.37 While the treaty did usher in a short era of relative (and enforced) pacification, the tableau further disregards the current and historic failures of the gover nment to honour these treaties and the terms upon which they were originally negotiated.38 Current Indigenous perspectives concerning the settler-colonial occupation of Montreal remain firmly fixed upon these issues, and primary concerns include the unceded reality of Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) territory and resource sovereignty.39 Clearly, Indigenous perspectives are directly opposed to the peaceful historical teachings espoused by Pointe-à-Callière Museum and Cité Mémoire. As scholar Gerald Taiaiake Alfred

(Kanien’kehá:ka) explains in his article, Cultural Strength; The great intellectual and political rock that the activism of Canada’s native people has been built on is that we were originally recognised as sovereign nations through legal instruments in the Canadian and European legal context.

Those agreements have been infringed and degraded and put aside, but they exist historically. So the struggle of native people has not been to imagine a new relationship, to assert something that is outside the consciousness and historical experience of settler colonial society, but to say, ‘We’re asking you to uphold your own promises.’40

While the tableau does recall the specific moment that these promises were made, it fails to remember the injustices that preceded and followed it. Instead, “The Great Peace” is positioned to viewer as a valid and highly respected treaty that has continuously guided the state’s occupation of these contested territories. Like Alfred, First Nations scholars continue to urge settler s and gover nmental agencies to understand the ways that Indigenous stories continue to be manipulated, and how these systems fail to acknowledge I n d i g e n o u s l aw s, h i s t o r i e s, constitutions, and rights.41 As the only tableau to engage with historical narratives with a named !49

Fig. 4: National Film Board of Canada, Indian Memento/Mémoire Indienne (1967). Film still. Montreal, Quebec.

Indigenous figure, “the Great Peace” pacifies Indigenous activism and pushes their presence into the distant primitive past, despite the ongoing nature of this debate. As Kondiaronk fades into the darkness in the final scene of the 4 storey projection at Point-àCallière Museum, so too does Indigenous history fade from the programming of Cité Mémoire, and potentially from the collective memories of Montrealers and Canadians.

Part II – Expo 67 Imagined Indigeneity at The Canadian Pavilion With the problematics of Cité Mémoire in mind, it is also useful to trace earlier instances of the state’s reluctance to address Indigenous collective memories,

pedagogy, and histories of trauma.

The 1967 Inter national and Universal Exposition, or Expo 67, was a Category One World’s Fair held in Montreal from the 27th of April until October 29th, 1967.

Like Cité Mémoire, Expo 67 was organized around an anniversary year (this time, 100 years from Canada’s confederation), and featured state endowed funding structures that resemble Montreal 375 and Canada 150. 42 Fiscal priorities included technological innovation, urban improvement, groundbreaking artistic production, and state encoded educational displays.43 While there were numerous exhibitions of Canadian art across the fairgrounds, the nation’s prolific artists were particularly well-re presented within the Canadian pavilion itself.44 As the announcer for the 1967 CBC short film, Canadian Artists at Expo 67 explains, Canvases from [Cor nelius] Krieghoff to [Emily] Carr, and the very new pop artists on the Canadian scene are represented... [Curators were tasked] with giving the Canadian public a representation of Canadian art from its earliest stages up until the very contemporary… The p u b l i c re a c t i o n h a s b e e n phenomenal.45

Like Cité Mémoire , cultur al prog rammers for Expo 67 !50

attempted to cultivate celebratory collective memories regarding Canadian cultural patrimony, while endeavouring to trace future artistic trajectories through the display of technological ingenuities.

Through this expressed interest in the commemoration of the earliest stages of Canadian ar tistic production, the Canadian Pavilion also displayed numerous Indigenous references.46 Ancient Haida masks, a restaurant named La Toundra that offered tropes of Indigenous food, as well as an Inuit inspired main structure named Katimavik [fig. 2] all b e cam e ce n t r al t o v i s i t o r s ’ experiences.47 These inclusions of Indigeneity within the Canadian Pavilion were dreamt up by settler art historians and museum professionals, which lead to an almost entirely imagined representation of Indigenous lifeways.48 From the upside-down pyramid with an Inuktitut name, to the serving of Indigenous food, there existed a clear and deliberate appropriation of Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

Furthermore, through the addition of completely imagined “modernizations,” like the design of the pyramid in cutting-edge glass and steel, little room was left for accurate representations.

Interestingly, these displays of

Indigenous art and culture did not make it into the CBC’s 1967 film, with attention paid instead to prolific settler artists and the popularity of Canadian art in an increasingly global market.49 Through these references to an Indigenous past, visitors engaged with First Nations material, but only in a way that removed their presence from the contemporary context of Canadian cultural identity. As in Cité Mémoire, the Canadian Pavilion left few signs of the dynamic Indigenous groups that persist within this space.

Instead, positioned as relics of a bygone era and imagined as the precursors to a modern Canadian future, Indigenous identities and objects are folded into celebrations of settler-Canadian art history.

This directly recalls the aggressive colonial framework of the 1960s, with the harmful policies of the residential school system and the ‘60s scoop, which saw thousands of Indigenous children kidnapped from their homes and mandated to assimilate to Canadian cultural norms.50 Despite this, and again mirroring Cité Mémoire’s uncritical press releases, the CBC announcer eventually states that the public’s reaction to the Canadian Pavilion had been unbelievably phenomenal.

51

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Curating Difficult Knowledge at The Indians of Canada Pavilion While the Canadian Pavilion and Cité Mémoire have perceivably rendered Indigenous peoples out of place within Canada’s current cultural landscape, the Indians of Canada Pavilion [fig. 3] at Expo 67 provides an excellent foundation for the second portion of this project, which seeks to highlight Indigenous resistances to these issues. Throughout the following sections, I aim to reveal the ongoing need for de-colonial methodologies within Canadian c u l t u r a l p o l i c y, w h i c h w i l l inevitably trouble the espoused conclusions of the projects discussed thus far.

Fig. 5: Dolly Deals (in collaboration with Unceded Voices), Untitled (2017).

Mural. Montreal, Quebec.

While the segregation of the Indians of Canada Pavilion from the Canadian Pavilion lead to the problematic erasures and appropriations discussed above, this separation also created space for Indigenous peoples to independently assert their own perspectives within the cultural milieu of the Expo.52 Indigenous curators and historians were then able to present their lived experiences to a settler-Canadian and international public with increased jurisdiction and autonomy, enabling the pavilion to become one of the first displays of First Nations art and culture that was curated and organized by Indigenous collaborators.53 While Indigenous curators inevitably responded to the Expo’s cultural p r og r a m m i n g, t h e m at e r i a l infrastructure of the Expo itself was also a devastating point of contention for activists and artists.

54 Located a mere 15 kilometres from downtown Montreal, and visible from the fairgrounds, the neighbouring Kanien’kehá:ka communities of Kahnawá:ke and Akwesasne were impacted in ways that continue to have reverberating material affects. The construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway was especially calamitous, as its construction required a channel through Kahnawá:ke’s oldest residential area, made legal !52

by an Order-in-Council passed on 16 September 1955.55 The Orderin-Canada bill permitted the state to expropriate 1,260 acres of reserve land, displacing hundreds o f f a m i l i e s. 5 6 D e s p i t e t h e devastation felt in Kahnawá:ke, as one of the main urban projects designed by Expo facilitators, the seaway’s construction became a celebrated hallmark of the event’s technological advancements.

Gerald Taiaiake Alfred contrarily cites the St Lawrence Seaway as “the most significant of gover nment sur render s of Mohawk land in terms of both the sheer area involved and the longterm destructive impact on the Canada-Kahnawá:ke relationship.”57 C o n c u r r e n t l y, C a n a d a ’ s Department of Indian Affairs selected members for the pavilion’s Indian Advisory Council, which i n c l u d e d Wa l l a c e L ab i l l o i s, Howard Beebe, Chief Wilfred Bellegarde, Cornelius Bignell, Chief Baptiste Cazon, James Debassige, Chief Magella GrosLouis, and George Manuel.58 The selected members were regionally diverse community leaders, and many were also residential school s u r v i vo r s. 5 9 T h e Pav i l i o n ’ s resultant critical messaging emerged around four main themes: The Land (spirituality and connections to Indigenous

Fig. 6: Dolly Deals (in collaboration with Unceded Voices), Untitled (2017).

Wheat paste. Montreal, Quebec.

ancestral land); The Awakening of the People (the diversity of n at i o n s a n d a d a p t at i o n s t o environments); The Drum (pre-1812 European dependence on Indigenous peoples and subsequent collaborations); and The Future (which urged settlerCanadians and Indigenous peoples to learn about one another).60 As Expo scholar Jane Griffiths explains in her article One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians, “Neutrality could not be claimed at the Indians of Canada Pavilion, with its scathing anti-colonial critiques amidst celebrations of the country’s 100th birthday.”61 In addition the construction of the seaway and other injustices, many !53

Fig. 7: Chapters/Indigo Incorporated, The World Needs More Canada (2017).

Digital advertisement.

installations within the Indians of Canada Pavilion were heavily critical of the residential school system in particular [fig. 4].

These installations were directly triggered by the contemporaneous policies that lead to an increase in enrolment at the schools, and directly confronted the cultural irrelevance of settler education for Indigenous children.62 As one didactic panel within the pavilion clearly stated, An Indian Child begins school by learning a foreign tongue. The sun and the moon mark passing time in the Indian home. At school, minutes are important and we jump to the bell.63

The pavilion’s advocacy for policy change visually confronted viewers with the symbols of Indigenous cultural genocide. While it is perilous to suggest a direct cause and effect relationship between the

pavilion itself and material policy changes, only five years after the Indians of Canada Pavilion was displayed, the policy document Indian Control of Indian Education was published.64 Distributed by the National Indian Brotherhood and the Assembly of First Nations, Indian Control of Indian Education took up the issues of irrelevant school curricula, and proposed the removal of teaching materials that were viewed as “negative, biased or inaccurate.” 65 The manifesto further suggested that colonial didactic tools be replaced with curricula authored and offered by Indigenous educators.66 As Griffith convincingly explains, No greater overlap, though, existed between the pavilion’s education panels and Indian Control of Indian Education than in the following sentences: one panel stated, “The white !54

man’s school, and alien land for an Indian Child,” and Indian Control of Indian Education concluded five years later that “the present school system is culturally alien to native students.67

Through these displays and initiatives, it becomes important to understand what Milton and Lehrer position as discernible ruptures in collective memories regarding sites of trauma. As the authors ask, “What happens when the invisible is made visible, when knowledge relegated to society’s margins or swept under its carpet is suddenly inserted into the public domain?” 68 In this case, the pavilion’s pedagogical tasks that sought to inform audiences of these harmful policies often incited reactions that were resoundingly negative.69 Archival news sources that discussed the Indians of Canada Pavilion contrast starkly with the public’s “unbelievably phenomenal” reception to the celebratory Canadian Pavilion.70 Described as “horrible,” one informant from Montreal stated, “I’m not going to stay here,” while another explained, “[the pavilion] is a painful embarrassment to the C a n a d i a n g o v e r n m e n t . ”71 Subsequent accounts featured perspectives that vocalized how the government had perceivably spent its own money embarrassing itself, while some newspapers mentioned that Ottawa footed the

bill.72 Attention repeatedly landed on the federal government’s use of funds, with some going as far as to say that “the [Indians were] in their own little $500,000 teepee…”73 The controversy reached its pinnacle when the minister of Indian Affairs, Arthur Laing, threatened to shut the pavilion down over its critical messaging, stating that “[the Indians of Canada Pavilion] refutes the venerable doctrine of progress through assimilation inscribed by o f f i c i a l g ove r n m e n t p o l i c y, academic texts, and museum displays.”74 Clearly, the pavilion’s c h a l l e n g e t o s t at e e n c o d e d narratives reveals the fragility of selective memory work, as these s t at e m e n t s r eve a l e n d u r i n g anxieties regarding de-colonial perspectives included within cultural policy and public pedagogy.

Re tu r n i n g to th e cu l tu r al programming and memory work o f C i t é M é m o i re , G r i f f i t h ’ s argument continues to be incredibly pertinent. As the author s t at e s, “ I a r g u e t h at n o n Indigenous people during the Centennial were largely unable or unwilling to hear the lessons offered by the Indians of Canada Pavilion… because of the almost impenetrable colonialism of the Centennial.75 Building on Griffith’s !55

statement, the highly publicized outrage to the Indians of Canada Pavilion may have predicted the government’s unwillingness to engage with Indigenous memories and lived experiences in Cité Mémoire. While it is important to avoid a direct cause and affect argument, it remains rather likely that Cité Mémoire emerges from the same policy trends and colonial anxieties that precipitated the public denial of Indigenous perspectives at the same site fifty years earlier.

Part III - Contemporary Indigenous Perspectives Unceded Voices, Situational and Immersive Alternatives in Montreal While it is helpful to trace the origins of problematic cultural policies through projects like Cité Mémoire and Expo 67, it becomes essential to also consider instances of Indigenous resistance beyond the Indians of Canada Pavilion.

Ultimately, it becomes clear that these exclusionary programs do not simply result from a lack of opportunity to include Indigenous perspectives, but instead adhere to a set of colonial ideological tasks that reject alternative perspectives.

As a primar y e xample, the Montreal based mural collective Unceded Voices similarly responds to colonial cultural projects like

Cité Mémoire and Expo through large-scale interventions that challenge the state’s ownership of Montreal’s urban landscape.

Working as a group, the artists continuously draw on Indigenous memories, identities, and original place names to strengthen their position within this contested space.76 The artists themselves describe their mission as an attempt to initiate anticolonial dialogue within settler-oriented Montreal, but also site their work as a significant method for strengthening Indigenous identities and relationships from within. As the artists explain on their website, The goal of this convergence is three-fold: to develop a network of solidarity and support; to promote anticolonial resistance through diverse street art interventions; and to foster relationships and dialogue between the collective and the broader community… and express their demands, identities, and histories. We recognizes the importance of walls and structures as critical spaces to reclaim unceded Indigenous land and to aid Indigenous and WOC artists in their movement towards justice and healing for themselves and their cultures.77

Through this acknowledged importance of walls and urban structures as potential spaces to reclaim Indigenous life-ways, many artists working within !56

Unceded Voices chose to address the multi-generational traumas of the residential school system, which directly recalls the critical messaging of the Indians of Canada Pavilion fifty years earlier.

78 To this end, the collective’s 2017 convergence included an untitled work by Indigenous artist Dolly Deals, in which the artist inscribed the words “Some of us never came home from that school” onto a red, black, and white mural of children and ghosts lining up before a residential school doorway and its religious caretaker [fig. 5].

Created within months of Cité Mémoire’s opening, just several kilometres away from “The Great Peace” tableau, Deals similarly works with monumentally scaled immersive techniques to confront the year’s colonial ethos. Through the occupation of material urban structures, and therefore the space of the viewer, individuals are immersed within the memories and tr aumas of Indigenous residential school survivors and confronted with the ghosts of those who never made it home.

Deals’ mural is therefore spatially and pedagogically situated in direct opposition to the historical erasures and mythologized primitivisms that are presented throughout Cité Mémoire’s historical tour.

Powerfully asserting that such issues are far from resolved through words and visual representations, the artist also recognizes the traumas of landtheft and the unceded nature of Montreal in her wheat pastes [fig.

6]. Inscribed with the words “Unceded Indigenous Territory,” and pasted upon the facades of buildings across the city, Deals and her collaborators materially paint land-claims on the sites they aim to repossess. It then becomes clear that Deals’ perspectives epitomize Alfred’s calls to respect the treaties that negotiated such settlement, like the Great Peace of 1701.79 In addition to the theories of Alfred, the methodologies of Deals and Unceded Voices also recalls the work of de-colonial scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), who encourages activists, scholars, and artists to defy colonial erasures of Indigenous ways of knowing and being.80 As Simpson explains, We can also choose to continue to produce knowledge and theory in opposition to the academy as resistance...

However, the knowledge our bodies and our practices generate, that our theories and methodologies produce, has never been considered valid knowledge… and therefore often exists on the margins.81

T h r o u g h U n c e d e d Vo i c e s ’ incursions within highly visible !57

urban spaces, their potential for marginalization is mitigated and Indigenous collective memories are directly inserted within the settler consciousness.

Conclusion: While this paper has primarily asked, “what does a city remember as a result of cultural policy,” it clearly becomes just as essential to probe what a city forgets. Through the arguments presented thus far, it has become obvious that during moments of civic celebration, cultural programmers continuously hesitate to include material that makes “one feel horrible and not want to stay,” as one visitor to the Indians of Canada Pavilion claimed.82 In their discussion of collective memory and the curation of difficult knowledge at specific sites of atrocity, Lehrer and Milton have pointed out that cultur al programmers are beginning to include less celebratory content within public installations and museum displays.83 As the scholars note, “We are concerned… with cultural projects that animate attempts to draw attention to painful pasts.”84 However, it has become equally important to point out the serious pitfalls when programmers fail to do so. As a project that will last well beyond Canada 150 and Montreal 375, the s t a ke s o f C i t é M é m o i re ’s

pedagogical e xclusions of Indigenous perspectives are high.

As I have demonstrated through the material repercussions of Expo 67 and the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the fallout from policy decisions surrounding cultural projects can be d e va s t at i n g fo r I n d i g e n o u s communities and their respective relationships with the Canadian state. “The Great Peace of Montreal” tableau, positioned at Point-à-Callière museum on the e xact shores where the St. Lawrence Seaway was created fifty years earlier, forms a collective memor y that celebrates the erasures of Indigenous rights to land, cultural, and resource sovereignty. Artists like Dolly Deals, and those responsible for the Indians of Canada Pavilion, are therefore potentially barred from such projects as a result of their refusal to contribute to these colonial celebrations.

While this paper has primarily focused on the hyper-local effects of Canadian and Quebec cultural policies, future studies will need to consider the inter national pedagogies produced by these programs. Located at the heart of Montreal’s most internationally visited and gentrified neighbourhood (the Old Port), spatial priority is repeatedly given to projects like Cité Mémoire and !58

Expo. Through the placement of these celebratory displays in the well-trodden quartiers of international audiences, global notions of an unwaveringly morally sound Canadian identity are concretized. Putting its proverbial best foot forward in the spaces where it counts the most, such projects feed into marketing campaigns like Chapters/Indigo’s highly commercialized line of housewares, which was presented during Canada 150 under the slogan “the World Needs More Canada” [fig. 7].85 The same year that Chapters/Indigo launched its commercial scheme, Cité Mémoire lit up the walls and cobbles of Montreal’s most popular spots, and Unceded Voices’ occupied some of the city’s least internationally visited streets (for example, the northern tip of the ironically named Colonial Avenue in the Mile End). Moving forward in cultural policy, it has become essential to incorporate the voices of contemporary Indigenous artists into publicly funded and strategically located art projects, even if their collective memories make some people “not want to stay.”86

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Notes 1. May Chew, “Phantasmagoric City: Technologies of Immersion and Settler Histories in Montreal’s Cite Memoire,” Public 58 (Forthcoming, Fall 2018), 1.

2. Jeanette Kelly, “Cité Mémoire: History Comes Alive in Old Montreal.” CBC News, May 19, 2016, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ montreal/cite-memoire.

3. Kelly, “Cité Mémoire.”

4. “Cité Mémoire,” Montréal En Histoires. accessed October 04, 2018, http:// www.montrealenhistoires.com/en/ cite-memoire/.

5. Chew, “Phantasmagoric City,” 5.

6. “Legs du 375e anniversaire de Montréal – Inauguration de la creation immersive Cité Mémoire,” Service Quebec, accessed December 14, 2018. http://www.fili n f o r m a t i o n . g o u v. q c . c a / P a g e s / Article.aspx?idArticle=2405172412.

7. Jane Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” Journal of Canadian Studies 49, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 173.

8. Dion Kaszas, Nakkita Trimble Nahaan, Corey Bulpitt, and Dean Hunt, Body Language: Reawakening C u l t u r a l Ta t t o o i n g o f t h e Northwest (Vancouver: Bill Reid Gallery, 2018), 10.

9. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing M e t h o d o l o g i e s : R e s e a rc h a n d Indigenous Peoples (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 30.

10-12. Service Quebec, “Legs du 375e anniversaire de Montréal.”

13. Kelly, “Cité Mémoire.”

14. John Foote, “Country Profile: Canada,” Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe 12 (November, 2011): 2.

15. Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada, “Evaluation of the Building Communities Through Arts and Heritage Program,” Office of the Chief Audit and Evaluation Executive Services Directorate (December 2011): 1.

16. Service Quebec, “Legs du 375e anniversaire de Montréal.”

17. Service Quebec, “Legs du 375e anniversaire de Montréal.”

1 8 . L e m i e u x P i l o n 4 D A r t .

“Company.” Accessed December 14, 2018. http://4dart.com/en/company/ 19. Denise Meredyth and Jeffrey Minson, Citizenship and Cultural Policy (London: Sage Publications, 2010), 100.

20. Kelly, “Cité Mémoire.”

21. Chew, “Phantasmagoric City,” 3.

22. Erica Lehrer and Cynthia E. Milton, Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places.

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3.

23. Edward W. Said, “Invention, Memory and Place,” Critical Inquiry 26/2 (Winter, 2000): 179.

24. Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” 179.

25-26. Chew, “Phantasmagoric City,” 5.

27-31. Carole Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1994), 90.

32. Musée Pointe-à-Callière. “The Great Peace of Montreal.” Accessed, December 14, 2018. https:// pacmusee.qc.ca/en/stories-of-

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montreal/article/the-great-peace-ofmontreal/

60. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 176.

33-35. Raymonde Litalien, ed., Champlain: The Birth of French America (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014), 304.

61.Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 172.

36. Litalien, Champlain, 312.

64-66. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 177.

37-38. Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 146.

39-41. Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, “Cultural strength: Restoring the place of indigenous knowledge in practice and policy,” Australian Aboriginal Studies no. 1 (2015): 4.

42-43. Bill Cotter, Montreal’s Expo 67 (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2016), 8.

4 4 - 4 5 . C a n a d i a n B ro a d c a s t i n g Centre, “Canadian Artists at Expo 67,” filmed July 5, 1967 at Expo 67, Montreal, Quebec, https:// www.cbc.ca/player/play/1809471592 46-47. Jane Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” Journal of Canadian Studies 49, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 189.

4 8 - 4 9 . C a n a d i a n B ro a d c a s t i n g Centre, “Canadian Artists at Expo 67.”

50. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 174.

51. Canadian Broadcasting Centre, “Canadian Artists at Expo 67.”

52-54. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 175.

55-57. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 174.

58-59. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 175.

62-63. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 178.

67.Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 180.

68. Lehrer and Milton, Curating Difficult Knowledge, 3.

69. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 181.

70. Canadian Broadcasting Centre, “Canadian Artists at Expo 67.

71-73. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 181.

74. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 176.

75. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 174.

76. Unceded Voices, "About," July 14, 2017, accessed November 28, 2017, https:// decolonizingstreetart.com/about/ 77. Unceded Voices, “About.”

78. Unceded Voices, "Past Editions.”

79. Alfred, “Cultural strength, 4.

80. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 31.

81. Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 31.

82. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 181.

83-84. Lehrer and Milton, Curating Difficult Knowledge, 3.

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85. Chapters/Indigo, “The World Needs More Canada,” accessed, December 14, 2018, https:// www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/worldneeds-more-canada/ 86. Griffith, “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians,” 181.

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Black Bodies in the Water: After the Deluge of Hurricane Katrina and the Middle Passage written by Emily Levine edited by Gabby Marcuzzi Herie

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In the year following Hurricane Katrina, contemporary African American artist Kara Walker curated an exhibition titled After the Deluge (2006) for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Reacting to the controversial media coverage of the disaster, Walker was struck by the images of hurricane victims reduced to bodies and nothing more.1 The exhibition, in addition to the accompanying print book, is a self-described “rumination” on Hurricane Katrina structured in the form of what Walker refers to as a “visual essay.”2 She juxtaposes her own work with selected historical pieces from the nineteenth century to create a

“narrative of fluid symbols,” comprised of images and objects that relate to water, storms, trauma, and blackness.3 Among the works included in After the Deluge are J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) from 1840 [Fig. 1], Walker’s own Middle Passages series from 2004 [Figs. 2 & 3], and a photograph taken in New Orleans during the flood [Fig. 4]. With these three representations of black bodies in water, Walker puts the black experience of Hurricane Katrina in conversation with the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade.

Fig. 1: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840). Oil on canvas, 90.8 x 122.6 cm.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA.

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Fig. 2: Kara Walker, Middle Passages, (2004). Gouache, cut paper, and collage on board, 38.1 x 38.1 cm. One from a series of 5. Collection of Marc and Lisa Mills.

Fig. 3: : Kara Walker, Middle Passages, (2004). Gouache, cut paper, and collage on board, 38.1 x 38.1 cm. One from a series of 5. Collection of Marc and Lisa Mills.

In this essay, I trace the way artists represent trauma through images of black bodies in water. The enslaved Africans who crossed the Middle Passage and the victims of Katrina are connected not only through racial identity, but also through their shared experience of waterborne suffering and death.

While water is often symbolic of rebirth, renewal, purity, and cleanliness, in the contexts of the flooding in New Orleans and the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean, water was a cause of death and destruction. I analyze three works in After the Deluge which specifically show black bodies in the water, namely Turner’s Slave Ship, Walker’s Middle Passages, and a photograph of the flooding in New Orleans. I read each image in

the context of the Middle Passage or Katrina and e xplore the interconnectedness of Deluge, race, and trauma. I conclude with a discussion of Walker’s idea of “muck” as the central image in After the Deluge and connect the Middle Passage and Hurricane Katrina as historical events.

News media coverage of Katrina and its aftermath focused on images of suffering and abandoned black bodies in the city’s floodwaters.4 A 2006 study of post-K atrina news cover age detected a “clear racial bias” which tended to favour stereotypically n e gat i ve d e p i c t i o n s o f t h e survivors over more positive or generous ones.5 “It was black people in a state of life-or-death

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desperation, and ever ything corporeal was coming to the surface – water, e xcrement, sewage,” recalls Walker. “It was a re-inscription of all the stereotypes about the black body.”6 However, Walker insists that After the Deluge is “not simply about New Orleans or Katrina or waterborne disaster,” rather, “it is an attempt to understand the subconscious narratives at work when we talk about such an event.”7 Walker looks unflinchingly at the racial inequality in the United States and graphically por tr ays scenes from the antebellum South to explore politics of slavery, race, gender, and trauma.8 She installed her own life-size, cut-paper silhouettes directly on the Met’s gallery walls, mounted in the round to suggest a diorama.9 The arrangement of the pieces within the gallery space, and their order in the accompanying book, elicit a certain humour and irreverence that is often at the core of Walker’s work.10 The ambitious size asserts the exhibition’s authority within the space of the museum, and the human scale of the silhouettes causes spectators to feel engulfed by the scene, physically positioning them within the historical narrative. Art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw writes that “each spectator is prompted to face his or

her own potentially traumatic relationship to histor y and acknowledge whatever repressed guilt and sadomasochistic feelings one might have about one’s personal relationship to slavery.”11 In assembling the works for After the Deluge, Walker sought out James Mallord William Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Strategically placed directly after the prologue of the exhibition book and under the section titled “Deep-Rooted Traditions,” Slave Ship contextualizes the narrative of After the Deluge as historically connected to slavery. Walker locates the transatlantic slave trade “as the beginning point for a bad relationship with water, a bad relationship with inundation.”12 Slave Ship is set in the Atlantic Ocean along the Middle Passage — the part of the transatlantic slave trade whereby enslaved Africans were expropriated by the millions and brought on tightly packed slave ships from the west coast of Africa to the Americas.

On board the ship, the white captain and crew members turned enslaved people into commodities.

There, the violent process of creolization began, and the racial condition of blackness was constructed.13 Conditions on the !66

ship were hellish: Africans were held below deck without sufficient oxygen or sunlight, disease spread rapidly, and the dead and dying human cargo were routinely tossed overboard. Professor of Art History Charmaine Nelson identifies the Atlantic Ocean as a “siteless and sightless” mass u n m a r ke d g r ave14 f o r t h e estimated 1.8 million people who died along the Middle Passage.15 Painted in 1840,16 Turner’s Slave S h i p o f f e r s o n e at t e m p t at representing the atrocities of the Middle passage through careful depictions of the water, the storm, and the bodies in between [Fig. 1]. In his essay “The Irrecoverable: Representing the ‘Middle Passage’” (2000), Marcus Wood, a leading scholar of the visual culture of slavery, analyzes representations of the Middle Passage and raises questions relating to the depiction of trauma and cultural guilt.

Turner’s formalist oil painting shows enslaved human cargo thrown overboard, drowning among the turbulent ocean waves. He uses forces of nature — a fiery sky, looming storm clouds, ocean spray and tempestuous waves — to represent the suffering of the enslaved. Only limbs are visible above the water, flailing, shackled, and bloody. “In concentrating upon the physical processes of

drowning and dismemberment,” Wood writes, “Turner shows that the slaves are to be dissolved in the waters of the ocean, forever inextricably mixed with the element of their destruction.”17 However, the threat of death comes not only from the water but from the danger that lurks below: fish crowd at the bottom right corner of the canvas ready to devour a woman’s disembodied leg.

In Wood’s interpretation, the fish recast the narrative of death by drowning, instead becoming a metaphor for the destructive energy of the slave power. 18 Ultimately, it is the stormy sky and turbulent waters which constitute the core of the picture and metaphorically commemorate the drowning bodies. In Wood’s i n t e r p r e t at i o n o f T u r n e r ’ s painting, the ocean water is multiple and contradictory in its representation of trauma in relation to the black bodies which drown in it. The sea is not only the agent of death, but it “suffers with those who it makes suffer” as witness, executioner, victim, and tomb.19 Placed chronologically in the middle of the After the Deluge book, Walker’s Middle Passages series comprises multiple gouache and cut paper collages of the enslaved on their treacherous journey across the Atlantic. I focus !67

on two images that fill a two-page spread: a slave ship sails away to the left, tipping heavily to one side [Fig. 2], and a woman sits atop the trunk of an unexplained palm tree, watching the slave ship recede into the horizon [Fig. 3].

None of the figures in Walker’s M i d d l e Pa s s a g e s s e r i e s a r e submerged or drowning in the water. Though their condition is helpless, with no possibility of rescue or survival, the figures are alive and free from the hellish conditions of the slave ship. Their black silhouetted profiles exaggerate stereotypes about black features, such as full lips and natural hair, but their chins are raised and their gazes reach forwards. Compared to Walker’s other black and white silhouettes, which embrace a certain “familiar faux-nostalgic whimsy” of the antebellum South and lampoon the plantation aplomb,20 these images are far more somber, muddled, and stripped of the racially-coded mayhem typical of her other works. The Middle Passages series again establishes an explicit connection to the history of the Middle Passage and uses water as a site of trauma.

The only direct reference to Hurricane Katrina in After the Deluge, beyond what Walker writes in the preface, appears on page eight of the book. Taken by photographer Bill Haber during the flooding of New Orleans, a picture of a black woman wading through the water fills a whole page [Fig. 4]. Her shoulders and head are the only parts of her body visible above the murky water, which is covered in an incandescent sheen of oil. She clutches a small duffle bag in one hand, clearly too small to hold the possessions she had to leave behind, and in the other holds a twelve pack of bottled drinking water. Her movement disrupts the eerie stillness on the surface of the

Fig. 4: AP Images/Bill Haber (2005).

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water and ripples the rainbow in h e r w a ke . T h e o i l - s l i c ke d floodwaters stretch to every corner of the page, giving no evidence of refuge or safety and concealing what dangers may lie under neath. The water is a polluted, poisonous “toxic soup” which inundates the subject and soaks her body and belongings.21 Instead of choosing one of the abundant images of bloated corpses floating in the floodwaters, widely-circulated in the disaster’s news media coverage, Walker chose this image to stand as reference to Hurricane Katrina in After the Deluge. This image, like Turner’s Slave Ship and Walker’s own Middle Passages, emphasizes the horrendous, indecent, and racially-charged suffering of black people in water, but it does not do so at the expense of the dignity of the subject. From what we can see, the woman is stranded, alone, and submerged in the toxic water; however, she is also alive, and clothed, and her face is hidden f r o m t h e c a m e r a . Wa l k e r represents the flooding of Katrina and its traumatic effect on New Orleans’ poor and black population without compromising the subject’s dignity. Moreover, the image leaves room for a productive interpretation. In an essay about Walker’s rumination on Katrina, Michael Bibler posits that the

woman moves slowly through the polluted waters as she no doubt did through the racist pathologies of everyday American life. “And yet,” writes Bibler, “splayed across the entire surface of the water is [a] beautiful rainbow.”22 Disaster and promise are collapsed into a single frame as the toxic rainbow is relocated from the sky to the water itself. Bibler sees the rainbow as a symbol of the “potentially new and difficult birth” that this woman, now representative of the “Black subject,” might experience while mired in those racist pathologies.23 Unlike the black subjects in Turner’s painting or Walker’s silhouettes who are fated to drown, this woman has the potential to emerge from the deluge.

This photograph of a black woman navigating the murky floodwaters precisely embodies the c e n t r a l i m a g e o f Wa l ke r ’ s exhibition: “muck.” When After the Deluge was published in 2007, the narrative of Hurricane Katrina had shifted from a hyperreal horror show presented through live coverage to a diplomatic tale of “security failures” and “the questions of race and poverty.”24 In the prologue titled “Murky,” Walker explains that she is particularly interested in the “puddle” that is always left at the end of these narratives, “a murky, !69

unnavigable space that is overcrowded with intangibles: shame, remorse, vanity, morbidity, silence.”25 In the flood photograph the toxic water is the “muck,” which symbolizes the racist pathologies that the woman must wade through. The rainbow captured on the surface of the flood waters brings in notions of survival and endurance. Bibler writes that “if the promise of new life is a component of the flood itself, rather than something far away in the sky, then the woman’s salvation lies in her ability to negotiate the muck, to keep swimming.”26 Walker ends the prologue with an assertion that the murky, toxic waters “become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth.”27 Walker’s discussion of the muck’s fertile possibilities repaints this colourful sludge as a potential source of tr ansfor mation, maybe even salvation.28 Katrina revealed the racial “muck” that is still a problem in America, even 140 years after emancipation and 40 years after the Civil Rights movement. Black Americans are still fatally subject to the racist pathologies of the nation, inundated and drowned in it as their ancestors drowned in the Atlantic ocean.29 But, instead of “sitting very still, ‘staying Black,’ and waiting to die” amongst the toxic, murky waters,

Walker asks the figures in After the Deluge “to take a step beyond [their] borders to connect a series of thoughts together related to fl u i d i t y a n d t h e f a i l u r e o f containment.”30 There are clear parallels between images of the enslaved Africans thrown from slave ships to die along the Middle Passage and the images of the bodies left to sink or swim in the mostly poor and black neighbourhoods of New Orleans.

However, to argue that, by Walkers’ inclusion of Turner’s Slave Ship in After the Deluge, the horrors that occurred during and after Katrina were just like the horrors of the Middle Passage and slaver y would be a clumsy comparison. The juxtaposition between the Middle Passage and Hurricane Katrina highlights Walker’s observation that “despite all the advances in civil rights in the United States, the same pathologies of racism and violence that are most clearly encapsulated in the Middle Passage continue to shape twenty-first-century life.”31 As succinctly stated by Michael P. Bibler: As we recognize how the dead bodies in New Orleans resemble and are historically linked to the bodies thrown overboard during the Middle Passage, we should also quickly recognize that such a comparison diminishes the u n s p e a k a b l e a t ro c i t i e s o f !70

African slavery and ignores the specificity of twenty-firstcentury racism and poverty.32

Walker’s inclusion of Turner’s Slave Ship and her own Middle Passages series, alongside an image from Katrina and in the political context of After the Deluge, prompts viewers to ponder what is familiar and what is new about Katrina. Walker situates Katrina within a longer lineage of representation of black life and death extending back to slavery, and prompts a wider debate about the ways in which black trauma is represented and mediated through the “muck.”

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Notes 1. David D’Arcy, “The Eyes of the Storm,” Modern Painters (2006), n.p.

2. Kara Elizabeth Walker, Kara Walker: After the Deluge, (New York: Rizzoli, 2007): p. 7.

3. Walker, After the Deluge, p. 9.

4. Henry A. Giroux, “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability.” College Literature, vol. 33, no. 3 (2006). Also evident in coverage from The Guardian article titled “America’s Ordeal” published on 4 September 2005.

5. Sommers, et al, “Race and Media Coverage of Hurricane Katrina: Analysis, Implications, and Future Research Questions,” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, vol. 6, no. 1, (2006).

6. Walker quoted in D’Arcy, “The Eyes of the Storm,” p. 56.

7. Walker, After the Deluge, 9.

8. D’Arcy, “The Eyes of the Storm”; Paige McGinley, “Floods of Memory (a PostKatrina Soundtrack),” Perfor mance Research, vol. 12, no. 2 (2007); Emma Rutherford, Silhouette. (New York: Rizzoli, 2009); Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “Tracing Race and Representation,” Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

9. Rutherford, Silhouette.

10. D’Arcy, “The Eyes of the Storm.”

1 1 . S h a w, “ Tr a c i n g R a c e a n d Representation,” p. 182.

12. Walker quoted in D’Arcy, “The Eyes of the Storm,” p. 58.

13. Marcus Rediker, “Introduction,” The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin Books, 2008).

14. Charmaine A. Nelson, “The Middle Passage: Of Tr a u m a and Commemoration” McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Lecture given Friday, 28 September 2018.

15. Rediker, “Introduction.” This number does not include those who died on their way to the slave ships, or who died of disease after they reached their destination.

16. The slave trade was abolished in the British empire and America in 1807 and 1808, respectively.

Slavery was not completely abolished in the British empire until 1834, and for America in 1865.

17. Marcus Wood, “The Irrecoverable: Representing the ‘Middle Passage’,” in Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000): p. 45.

18. Wood, “The Irrecoverable,” p. 53.

19. Wood, “The Irrecoverable,” p. 63.

20. D’Arcy, “The Eyes of the Storm,” p.

56.

21. Nicole R. Fleetwood, “Failing Narratives, Initiating Technologies: Hurricane Katrina and the Production of a Weather Media Event,”American Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 3 (2006): p. 777.

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22. Michael P. Bibler, “The Flood Last Time: “Muck” and the Uses of History in Kara Walker's “Rumination” on Katrina, ” Journal of American Studies, vol. 44, no. 3 (2010): p. 507.

23. Bibler, “The Flood Last Time,” p. 507.

24. Walker, After the Deluge, p. 7.

25. Walker, After the Deluge, p. 7.

26. Bibler, “The Flood Last Time,” p. 511.

27. Walker, After the Deluge, p. 9.

28. Bibler, “The Flood Last Time.”

29. Bibler, “The Flood Last Time.”

30. Walker, After the Deluge, p. 9.

31. Bibler, “The Flood Last Time,” p. 504.

32. Bibler, “The Flood Last Time,’ p. 509.

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Perception and the Body in Vito Acconci’s Blinks written by Catriona Reid edited by Nicholas Raffoul

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In her seminal book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Lucy R. Lippard defines Conceptual art as “work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary… and/or dematerialized.”1 During the 1960s, the attention once given to medium, form, and aesthetic appearance in a work became refocused on the idea and processes behind the artwork’s conception. By prioritizing thought over material, Lippard claims the Conceptual artist’s studio reverts back into the study.2 Sol LeWitt, artist and close friend of Lippard provides another definition of Conceptual art, i l l u m i n at i n g t h e d i f f e r e n c e between (lowercase) “conceptual” art, which refers to his own work and maintains a focus on materiality while stemming from an original idea and the category of (uppercase) “Conceptual” art, which classifies the work of “anyone who wanted to belong to a movement.”3 Lippard and LeWitt’s complementary definitions emphasize the importance of the idea in the production of “ultraconceptual” art.4 Vito Acconci’s 1969 works are “ C o n c e p t u a l ” b y L i p p a r d ’ s definition in the sense that his activities such as Blinks and Following Piece abide

by protocols which result in the performance of an idea conceived by the artist alone. These works do not end with the creation of an aesthetic object, rather the artistic goal is the very process of p e r fo r m i n g t h e s e a c t i o n s.

Therefore, although Acconci does not refute Lippard’s definition e n t i r e ly, h e d o e s, h oweve r, complicate it through the use of his body in his performances, suggesting a supplementary clause be made to Lippard’s definition to categorize Acconci’s artworks as Conceptual art. Using Lippard’s definition of Conceptual art as a foundation to build from, I will a r g u e t h at w h i l e A c c o n c i ’ s Blinks emphasizes idea over materiality, the importance of the body and his use of the camera as a “prosthetic,” resulting in a material product pushes against the confines of Lippard’s definition.5 For Acconci, both the idea in action and the material object are vital.

Blinks [fig. 1] is an activity which took place on a street in New York City in November, 1969. The work is recorded as a collection of twelve black and white “photoworks,” captured using a Kodak Instamatic 124 with black and white film.6 Acconci recorded his work through note-taking and photography like many of the activities he performed in 1969. !74

Fig. 1: Vito Acconci, Blinks, afternoon, November 13, 1969, Kodak Instamatic 124, B&W film.

The work is presented as a balanced composite layout; the strip of photographs is central and flanked by copies of Acconci’s personal notes which are written on legal pad or using a typewriter. His protocol is as follows: “Holding a camera, aimed away from me and ready to shoot, while walking a continuous line down a city street. Try not to blink. Each time I blink: snap a photo.”7 Forcing himself to refrain from blinking as he walks, Acconci produces a series of photographs of what he cannot see while his eyes are closed.

Acconci’s infatuation with the body is evident in his book, Diary of a Body, in which he often employs

his body in the performance of lengthy and imposing activities.

Not only does Acconci use a camera to document his activities, as many Conceptual artists choose

Fig. 2: Vito Acconci, Following Piece, from “Street Works”, October 3-29, 1969, activity.

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to do, but in Blinks the camera becomes an extension of his body, resulting in a series of photog r aphs which ser ve a purpose more complex than mere documentation.

Blinks complicates Lippard’s definition of Conceptual art in the following ways: first, the artist’s body is the singular performing agent — it is Acconci himself who executes the task based on his own need to blink. Therefore, the body becomes just as important as the idea of performing the activity.

Second, not only is Acconci’s body a crucial element of the work, but he also utilizes the camera as an extension of his body, allowing him to mimic his sense of vision during the moment his eyes shut.

Lastly, the materiality of the work is not subordinate to the conception, but rather a product of it.

Much of Acconci’s oeuvre involves the exploration of his own body.

The conception of Blinks is evident in the title: an exploration of the physical act of blinking, the artist asks: what is it to blink? What is eliminated in the process? Though the idea to analyze the act of blinking comes first, blinking is fundamental, if not equal in value, to the idea when producing the work. It might also be argued that Acconci’s body, the site where the act of blinking occurs, exceeds the

idea in importance. Acconci’s need to blink becomes the catalyst for the rest of the work. Once he blinks he must click the shutter of his camera, resulting in a photograph of what his eyes fail to capture. Furthermore, the movement forward, produced through the act of walking, results in incremental advancements visible in each of the twelve photographs. Thus, Lippard’s definition acknowledges the importance of the idea in the production of Conceptual art, however Acconci’s Blinks suggests the body is just as crucial in creating such a work of art.

Not all of Acconci’s works e x e m p l i f y t h e s a m e b o d i ly a w a r e n e s s a s B l i n k s .

Although Following Piece [fig. 2] also involves the fundamental use of the artist’s body, Acconci’s bodily agency fades throughout the artistic process. The work involves the “daily scheme” of stalking strangers through the streets of New York until they enter a private space, such as a home or an office, in which the artist cannot enter. 8 Acconci performed this work over 23 days for varying lengths of time, from a few minutes to several hours.

Through his obsessive modus operandi, Acconci questions where to situate his body in relation to public and private space. When !76

discussing this work, Acconci notably claimed, “I am almost not an ‘I’ anymore. I put myself in the service of this scheme.”9 His surrendering to the compulsiveness of the activity, and the pursuit of others in activities unrelated to his own needs, ultimately results in a dissociation from himself. Though Acconci initiates the self-imposed protocol of following individuals until he no longer can, he concedes to the path of each stranger, allowing his agency to slip away.

In contrast, the instructions of Blinks are actively obeyed by the artist who must hold his eyes open with force. Pressing the camera shutter while blinking is an unnatural act, as pushing down and blinking must be consciously synchronized. Although the afternoon period during which Blinks was performed is minimal in relation to the 23-day duration of Following Piece, the artist’s agency differs significantly in both works.

While the body is crucial in Blinks, Acconci’s use of the camera as a bodily extension sheds light on an area Lippard’s definition does not.

In his brief description of the work, Acconci calls the camera a “prosthetic,” suggesting it serves as a technological extension of his optical capabilities.10 The presence of the body is acknowledged in the

title, Blinks, and in the artist’s conceived idea, but the body is not visible in the twelve documenting photog raphs. Instead, bodily presence is implied through the camera, acting as the artist’s supplementary method of sight. In his notes, Acconci writes, “… camera as a means to ‘keep seeing’— when I blink I can’t see.”11 The camera becomes a perceptive tool, elemental not only to the documentation of Acconci’s performance of the work, but as an additional form of human perception. Therefore, the role of camera and the body become equal in importance to the idea of the work.

Illustrating the notion of the dematerialization of art, Lippard claims “If Minimalism formally expressed ‘less is more,’ Conceptual art was about saying more with less.”12 The movement away from the concrete art object t o w a r d t h e i n t a n g i bl e w a s expressed through the performance of activities. Such Conceptual works were often documented through the mediums of text, video, or photography, which Lippard calls “unintimidating” media, implying they are conventional and plain.13 In many Conceptual works documentation through conventional mediums is crucial, providing evidence that the works !77

took place.

Though Acconci’s Blinks may appear to be in accordance with Lippard’s “dematerialization” claim because it minimizes material creation, the photographs and the notes are in fact the product of the work.

Anne Wagner on Following Piece writes: “Tailing, he is tailed by a photographer, Betsy Jackson…the two recognized parties to the piece become three.”14 In contrast to the singular active ar tist/agent in Blinks, Acconci hires another actor to consciously document the processes of Following Piece.

Third-person documentation is not present in Blinks. While it is evident Acconci is familiar with the use of documentary methods, he chooses to document Blinks through a firstperson perspective.

In Blinks, taking photographs is not a task performed retrospectively or by another documenting assistant. The photographs are taken by Acconci himself, during the process in response to his own blinking. The relationship between the act of blinking and the act of capturing an image assign the photograph a dual significance: as both documentation and final product.

Because Acconci’s photographs hold more value than mere proof the activity took place, this work

refutes Lippard’s claim that “highly conceptual art…upsets detractors because there is ‘not enough to look at.’”15 The twelve photographs are crucial visual aids which narrate Acconci’s movements, and offer a diaristic approach which must be studied in order to comprehend the work.

Acconci’s notes provide further evidence of his intention to produce a material product. He writes: “artwork as the result of bodily processes (my blink ‘causes,’ produces, a picture).”16 The act of pressing the camera shutter defies the act of blinking. Blinking is reductive, inhibits the eye from seeing, obscures perception, and blacks out all images from sight.

But for a split second, the shutter of the camera opens while the eye shuts. The protocol of Acconci’s work requires the creation of a tangible product, contradicting Lippard’s claim that Conceptual art moves away from materiality.

Blinks simultaneously is and is not a Lippardian Conceptual work.

The idea does not supersede the body and the camera, it simply precedes them. The camer a facilitates the enactment of the idea, conflating with Acconci’s body. As both his eye and his memory, the camera and the body become intertwined. All three blur together. Acconci complies with !78

Lippard’s notion of prioritizing the idea, but produces a fundamental material object, demanding the expansion of Lippard’s definition of Conceptual art to include the process of production and the elements necessary to create a final material work.

▫︎

www.vitoacconci.org/portfolio_page/ blinks-1969/ 12. Lippard, Six Years, xiii.

1 3 . L i p p a r d a n d C h a n d l e r, “ T h e Dematerialization of Art,” 46; Lippard, Six Years, xi.

14. Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” 63.

1 5 . L i p p a r d a n d C h a n d l e r, “ T h e Dematerialization of Art,” 46.

16. Acconci, Basta, and Ricciardi, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973, 114.

Notes 1 . L u c y L i p p a r d , S i x Ye a r s : T h e Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), vii; Lucy R. Lippard a n d J o h n C h a n d l e r, “ T h e Dematerialization of Art,” Art International, vol. 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 46, http://cast.b-ap.net/arc619f11/ wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2011/09/ lippard-theDematerializationofArt.pdf 2. Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years, x.

3. Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years, vii-viii.

4. Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” in Art International 12, no. 2 (1968): 46.

5. Vito Acconci, Sarina Basta, and Garrett Ricciardi, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973, (Milano: Charta, 2006), 114.

6. Kate Linker and Vito Acconci, Vito Acconci (New York: Rizzoli, 1994), 14; Acconci, Basta, and Ricciardi, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973, 114.

7. Acconci, Basta, and Ricciardi, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973, 114.

8. Anne Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91 (2000): 62.

9. Linker and Acconci, Vito Acconci, 20.

10. Acconci, Basta, and Ricciardi, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973, 114.

11. “Blinks (1969),” Vitoacconci.org, accessed November 4, 2018. http://

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The Enchantment of Metapicture: Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas written by Karen Liu edited by Miray Eroglu & Catriona Reid

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Diego Velázquez is an artist known for his paintings with complex compositions, as seen in his early bodegones and his most renowned work Las Meninas (1656). Velázquez’s picture-withina-picture structures function as a means of bridging art with religious and philosophical concepts, which has in tur n extended the discussion of his art beyond the confines of the canvas.

These complex paintings are what W. J. T. Mitchell defines as metapictures—“pictures about pictures—that is, pictures that refer to themselves or to other pictures, pictures that are used to show what a picture is.”1 They do

not merely represent the painted subjects on their surfaces, but their self-referentiality also leads to paradoxes and variable interpretations, thereby turning the viewer’s attention to the nature of art and image-making. Las Hilanderas (“The Spinners”), or The Fable of Arachne (1657) [Fig. 1], is one such work of metapictorial quality in Velázquez’s oeuvre that has been cast in a mysterious aura for decades, an image that has been interpreted time and time again, yet still remains an enigma.

When writing about Las Hilanderas, scholars tend to refer to Las Meninas for comparison,

Fig. 1: Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, The Spinners, or The Fable of Arachne (without later additions). (1655-1660). Oil on canvas, 167 × 252 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

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since both works were produced during the final decade of Velázquez’s career and exemplify the metapictorial trait of nested str uctures. The unusual composition of Las Hilanderas has long eluded the scholars as well, hence the two titles with conflicting implications: Las Hiladeras describes the genre scene taking place in the foreground, whereas The Fable of Arachne denotes the mythological story s h ow n i n t h e b ac k g r o u n d . 2 Although the painting’s central n a r r at i ve i s n ow g e n e r a l ly accepted as a mythological subject in the guise of a genre painting, a range of theories have been devised since the mid-twentieth century regarding Velázquez’ intentions and coded moral messages within the image. In light of Mitchell’s metapicture theory, I argue the enchantment of Las Hilanderas originates in its infinite references to itself and images outside it. The mystery surrounding this artwork does not necessarily pose an obstacle to making sense of the image; rather, it intrigues us, propels us to decipher its composition, and t h r o u g h t h e s e i n n u m e r abl e interpretations Velázquez’s artistic brilliance is materialized.

infinitely reflects on or duplicates itself, such as Saul Steinberg’s The Spiral [fig. 2]; (2) the picture that contains another picture of a different kind, and thus re-frames the inner picture as nested inside of a larger picture; and (3) the picture that is framed not inside another picture, but within a discourse that reflects on it or uses it to illustrate a larger concept related to “picturality.” 3 The author discusses Velázquez’ Las Meninas extensively in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, asserting it as “a classical representation of classical representation” after Foucault and a m e t ap i ct u r e “ i n i t s m o s t complex, articulate, and exalted

Mitchell outlines three different kinds of metapictures: (1) the mise en abyme picture that explicitly and

Fig. 2: Saul Steinberg, The Spiral, from New World series (1961). Ink on paper, 37 × 29 cm.

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Fig. 3: Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, The Spinners, or The Fable of Arachne (with later additions) (1655-1660). Oil on canvas, 220 × 289 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

status.”4 Similarly, Las Hilanderas —almost always discussed in comparison to, and perhaps overshadowed by the canonical masterpiece—is another e xemplar y metapicture that encompasses the characteristics of all three categories.

L a s H i l a n d e ra s o f f e r s a n unobstructed view of a weaving workshop in the foreg round against the backdrop of a room with tapestry glimpsed through its doorway. The spatial distinction between the two areas is clear: the workshop is crowded and painted in muted tones, whereas the tapestry room is airy and filled

with light. The craftswomen in the foreground are all engaged in

Fig. 4: Titian, Rape of Europa (1562).

Oil on canvas, 178 × 205 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, USA. !83

Fig. 5: Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape o f E u ro p a ( c o p y a f t e r T i t i a n ) (1628-1629). 182.5 × 201.5 cm.

Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

various stages of producing yarn, their bodies rendered in a brushy manner, and their faces turned away from the viewer or obscured by shadows. Other supporting objects, such as the red curtain, the ladder, and the interior space are painted with more details and depth. This painterly depiction of the figures seems particularly unusual, considering how Velázquez was a court painter praised for his rigorously precise royal portraits. But his loose, visible br ushstrokes on the women’s clothing indeed complement their relaxed gestures, emphasizing the fleeting movement of their arms and legs.

The liveliness and immediacy in the fore g round capture the viewer’s attention at their first glance, and then hold their gaze

Fig. 6: Peter Paul Rubens, Pallas and Arachne (primary Title) (1636-1637).

Oil on wood, 26.67 × 38.1 cm.

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, USA.

while they attempt to interpret the scene. In contrast, the tapestry room imparts less motion but more stillness, through Velázquez’s depiction of a group of five well-dressed women before a l a r g e t a p e s t r y, p o s s i b l y inspecting the finished product of the workers in the front. The lady on the far right turns her head towards the viewer; she is the only person who pays attention to the outside of the painted space, yet her facial features are indiscernible.

Her vaguely implied gaze engages with the viewer in some capacity but still keeps them at a distance from the group. It is therefore not surprising that for many years the background had not been examined closely, and the work had been regarded as a genre painting representing female

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workers in the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Isabel.5 The painting was altered in the eighteenth century, enlarged by four strips of canvas attached to its sides [Fig. 3].6 The added arc above the doorway may have caused the two figures standing directly before the tapestry appear as if they were part of the pattern on the fabric, hence affecting the reading of the work’s original content. In the mid-twentieth century, however, various scholars and critics identified the woman wearing a helmet and the woman with her arm lowered in the background as Pallas Athene and Arachne, and recognized the scene depicted on the tapestry as a direct copy of Titian’s Rape of Europa [Fig. 4].7 Their speculations were later confirmed by the discovery of an inventory document of the seventeenth-centur y Spanish courtier Don Pedro de Arce’s property, written in 1664, which mentions a “Fable of Arachne by Velázquez” whose dimensions are almost identical to the original content of Las Hilanderas without the added areas.8 Although the work is still more commonly referred to as The Spinners, it is now accepted as a mythological painting with its central narrative borrowed from the Fable of Arachne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses located in the background.

The well-known myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells the story of Arachne, a mortal woman gifted with remarkable talent in weaving, who repeatedly challenges the deity goddess of weavers Pallas into a weaving contest to prove her superior skill. In this story, Pallas composes a tapestry with images illustrating the power of the gods over humans and the harsh punishments to those mortals who dare challenge the divine authority, warning Arachne of the consequence of her audacity.

Showing no repentance, Arachne weaves a series of images of gods deceiving humans, beginning with Europa being carried off by Jupiter in the form of a bull. Las Hilanderas depicts the moment after the contest: when Arachne is declared as the winner and her skill recognized as equal, or possibly superior to that of the goddess, Pallas, who is in turn i n f u r i at e d . Pa l l a s t e a r s u p Arachne’s work and hits Arachne on the forehead with her shuttle.

Arachne suffers so much pain that she attempts to hang herself, but Pallas finally has pity on her and tur ns her into a spider for punishment.9 As previously mentioned, some details on the tapestry, namely the flying putti on the left, the head of a bull and the floating drapery on the lower right corner have been !85

identified as resembling components in Titian’s Rape of Europa—a work painted for Philip II in 1562 and a treasured piece in the Spanish Royal collection during the seventeenth century.10 The over all composition of Las Hilanderas and the internal image of Titian’s painting on the tapestry therefore constitute what Mitchell describes as “the firstand second-order representation, on which the whole concept of ‘meta-’ is based.”11 By reframing Titian’s work inside his own, Ve l á z q u e z c o m p l e t e s t h e iconography of the Fable of Arachne and pays his tribute to the Venetian master, also declaring his ambition to surpass his p r e d e c e s s o r m e t a p h o r i c a l ly.

However, Velázquez was not the f i r s t t o e m u l at e T i t i a n by reinterpreting Rape of Europa, and the reading of Las Hilanderas would be much less complicated if it were the only visual quotation contained in this work. Rubens, the eminent Flemish artist who became acquainted with Velázquez during his visit in Madrid in 1628, made an exact copy of Rape of Europa [Fig. 5] among many other Titian’s paintings while he was in Spain, and he also painted his own version of Pallas and Arachne as part of a series on Ovidian themes. Ruben’s work has

since been lost but an oil sketch survives (1636-37) [fig. 6]. His original painting would have been known to Velázquez, as a copy m a d e b y M a z o, Ve l á z q u e z ’ assistant, is seen hanging on the wall in the background of Las Meninas.12 The surface of Las Hilanderas may be viewed as a representation of two separate spaces on a physical level, but its composition consists of at least three distinct layers of images: Velázquez’ own original work in the foreground, a reference to Ruben’s Pallas and Arachne, and a nod to both Titian’s and Ruben’s Rape of Europa. Las Hilanderas thus evidently belongs to Mitchell’s second category of metapicture in the most intricate sense, as it refers to two Roman fables that have already become iconographic traditions in art and recontextualizes such images made by two other great artists.

Now that the mythological narrative and its references have been decoded, another question arises: who are the other three women standing next to Pallas and Arachne? They might be the Lydian women observing the contest as mentioned in the fable, or carry some other allegorical meanings. 13 But is there any significance of their position being on the threshold between the mythological realm and the !86

workshop? Why are they dressed in courtly gowns? Sira Dambe’s, in her Faucouldian reading of Las Hilanderas, argues: The ladies embody the gaze that will behold and judge the artwork and thus, importantly, authorize its existence as recipient of the public gaze.

One might be inclined to think that, as viewers placed inside the canvas, the ladies function as an extension of the onlooker situated outside it. On the contrary, there occurs here an unexpected, and deliberate, inversion: because the ladies focus upon the brilliantly lit alcove and turn their backs to t h e w o r k s h o p , f ro m t h e i r perspective the latter becomes the background and the former the foreground. The outside viewer is thus relegated to the ‘background’ and is drawn into the closed, darkened space of the workshop, fixed there by the unwavering gaze of the lady on the far right.14

Dambe’s refutation of the notion that the ladies “function as an extension of the onlooker” outside the picture may hold true for the modern-day viewer, but not for the painting’s originally intended audience. Indeed, Dambe and many other authors situate the ladies in the contempor ar y seventeenth century based on their clothing, despite differing opinions on the figures’ identities or iconographical origins. 15 The seventeenth-century viewer of Las Hilanderas may have not be able to

explain the presence of the ladies either, but they would have surely recognized these women as their contemporaries because of the clothing the women wear. This ambiguity only proves that these figures’ function in the composition is to act as a proxy for the early modern viewer, especially considering how the lady on the far right is the only person in the painting mediating a connection between the inside and the outside.

Since no one knows who these women are, they can stand in place of anyone.

On the other hand, the “deliberate inversion” provides an adequate e xplanation for Velázque z’s unexpected arrangement of the two scenes, i.e. the primary narrative being placed in the background, whereas the secondary in the foreground. It is through the ladies’ presence that the painting is turned inside out, and the two levels of representation become interchangeable. What we see as an accessory—the tapestry—they see as the total picture, whereas we as viewers, who supposedly occupy the most powerful position in the viewing relation, are merely part of the background negligible to them. If we were to reposition ourselves in their perspective, the image that was previously furthest away from us is now the closest— !87

in fact, the tapestry becomes the only thing we could see in front of us. We would then come to the realization that the tapestry is the focal point of the painting, both compositionally and thematically, and the rest—the Fable of Arachne and the workshop—are just framing devices to provide c o n t e x t f o r Ve l á z q u e z ’ s interpretation of Rape of Europa.

The implication here is that Las Hilanderas also embodies the first kind of metapicture, a recursive loop of images wherein it is impossible to distinguish the beginning from the end. It is also possible to draw a parallel between Velázquez’s complex structure of layered images to the simple sketch The Spiral [Fig. 2] discussed in M i t c h e l l ’ s b o o k . I m ag i n i n g Steinberg drawing the man in the center, drawing his pen, and then drawing the outward spiral that starts from the man’s hand to fill the page,16 in Las Hilanderas there is a similar process: the painting starts with Titian’s Rape of Europa on the tapestry, re-contextualized in the reference to Ruben’s Pallas and Arachne, then framed inside the everyday scene of a tapestry factory in the foreground. Or, read clockwise, the line in Steinberg’s drawing starts from the landscape feature at the bottom, spiralling inward, and ends at the tip of the draughtsman’s pen. In Las

Hilanderas, then, could it be that the labor of the craftswomen in the front is a metaphor for Velázque z’s creative process behind the painting, and the court ladies also act as a stand-in for the artist himself, who is replicating Rubens’s copy of Titian’s Rape of Europa, an image copied after Ovid’s written story?

Turning to the foreground, the scene is even more perplexing: who are those women in the workshop? How are they related to the narrative in the background?

The lack of interaction between the figures in the front and those at the back, combined with the structure of nested images, sets a clear distinction between the two episodes happening inside the same frame. Nevertheless, putting them parallel with each other is at the same time diminishing the b o u n d a r y, p r o v i d e d t h a t a connection between them can be dr awn. A consensus among scholars is that the central theme of Las Hilanderas is, at its core, a celebration of art and artists, considering the historical context of seventeenth-century Spanish painters struggling to elevate their social status; Velázquez himself was conducting a campaign to prove his worthiness to be a knight of the Order of Santiago.17 But almost every art historian who has written on this painting explains !88

the juxtaposition of the two scenes differently, thereby continuously reframing Las Hilanderas inside a discourse wherein it is used to illustrate the nature of images.

Some authors identify the woman spinning in the left foreground as Pallas in the guise of an old lady, and the woman on the right winding the wool as Arachne.

They maintain that the foreground represents the contest between the two, and therefore, the painting depicts both the beginning and the end of the fable.18 Other scholars tend to disagree, such as Richard Stapleford and John Potter who suggest that the figures in the foreground all have allegorical origins from sources such as Ripa, Cartari, and Aristotle that are thematically related to, but independent of, the myth of Arachne. The multiplicity of allegories and Velázquez’s own ar tistic invention combined amount to a complex network of symbols that “identify the durable world of art and the mutable world of human existence.”19 Or, it is what the women are doing, rather than who they supposedly represent, that plays a more important part in our understanding of the overall composition. As Aneta Georgievska-Shine argues, the juxtaposition of the labor in the workshop and finished tapestry is

an assimilation of the process of production to painting that serves to illuminate the non-finite process of the making of an artwork.20 All these attempts to elucidate Velázquez’s composition only seem to mystify the painting even more, as each author’s conclusion always raises more questions and opens up new discussions. But one important aspect seems to remain true across their various stances: the unity of the two episodes is only achieved through the viewer’s perception, because only they can see both scenes at the same time.21 In other words, since there is visually no interaction between the craftswomen in the foreground and the Fable of Arachne, it is the viewer’s task to establish a connection—however they choose to define it, otherwise the “firstand second-order representation” cannot be synthesized into one coherent image. To Mitchell, this is exactly how a metapicture operates. Las Hilanderas constantly demands the viewer’s attention and thereby generates discussions, and, in the process of being repeatedly examined, the picture has the potential of becoming a site of theoretical discourse itself, not merely a passive object awaiting to be explained.22 Velázquez’s eighteenth-century biographer Antonio Palomino recounted an anecdote where !89

Velázquez was criticized by his rivals that “all his skill can be reduced to knowing how to paint a h e a d . ”23 W h e r e a s i n L a s Hilanderas, Velázquez seems to have successfully proved his ability to paint anything besides heads, by rendering an elaborate picture full of figures, yet none of them with a legible face. Through the action of the lady on the left foreground pulling back the curtain, this pictorial space becomes completely open to the viewer, as if Velázquez is inviting us to be the judge of his competition with Titian and Rubens. At the same time, in acknowledging the images created by his predecessors and framing them inside such an unconventional composition, Velázquez’s work simultaneously symbolizes a continuation of history and a defiance of tradition.

As Alfred Gell writes, artworks that embody the artists’ technical virtuosity have the power of “casting a spell over us so that we see the real world in an enchanted f o r m . ”24 T h e v i e w e r s e e s Velázquez’s mastery of techniques in his meticulously executed portraits and narrative paintings, but it is only through his complex c o m p o s i t i o n s, s u c h a s L a s Hilanderas , that his ar tistic virtuosity is utterly manifested.

Thus, Las Hilanderas seen as a metapicture that “casts a spell” on

its viewer by constantly challenging perceptions and interpretations of the painting, thereby establishing itself as a site of discourse, an unsolvable puzzle that continues to incite discussions even today.

▫︎ Notes 1. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 35.

2. Richard Stapleford and John Potter, “Velázquez’ Las Hilanderas,” Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 8, No. 15 (1987): 159.

3. Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes, “Images and their Incarnations: An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell, ” in W. J. T. Mitchell’s Image Theory: Living Pictures, ed. Krešimir Purgar (Florence: Taylor and Francis), 184.

See also Mitchell, Picture Theory, 38-42 for his discussion on The Spiral.

4. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 62.

5. Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, “Velázquez and His Art,” in Velázquez, ed. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, and Julián Gállego (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 49.

6. Stapleford and Potter, “Las Hilanderas, ” 159.

7. Enriqueta Harris is credited as the first scholar who identified the Fable of Arachne as the subject of this painting in 1940, and Diego Angulo Iniguez further elaborated this idea in 1948. See Stapleford and Potter, “Las Hilanderas, ” 179n1.

8. Stapleford and Potter, “Las Hilanderas, ” 159.

9. Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. Madeleine Forey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 173-178.

10. Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982), 160.

11. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 42.

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12. Harris, Velázquez, 160.

13. Stapleford and Potter believe the three ladies are meant to represent Three Graces (“Las Hilanderas, ” 173.), whereas Madlyn Millner Kahr proposes that the painting be read as a depiction of two episodes in the story of Lucretia. Kahr identifies the figure in armour as Sextus Tarquinius, the figure with lowered arm as Lucretia, and the other three ladies as wives of the Roman officers mentioned in Livy’s fable. See Madlyn Millner Kahr, “Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas: A New Interpretation,” The Art Bulletin 62, no. 3 (1980): 37.

14. Sira Dambe, “ ‘Enslaved sovereign’: Aesthetics of power in Foucault, Velázquez and Ovid,” Journal of Literary Studies 22, (December 2016): 248.

15. For instances, Dambe: “Placing a helmeted goddess and her victim in the midst of contemporary court ladies creates an unsettling incongruity…” (“Enslaved sovereign,” 247); and Stapleford and Potter: “…three carefully coifed women dressed in contemporary aristocratic gown…” (“Las Hilanderas,”160).

1997), 13-15. In his discussion of Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, Stoichita cites a letter from French poet Jean Chapelain and remarks, “it is the spectator’s ‘surprised eye’ that must establish ‘the necessary dependence’ between the two levels of the painting.” (15).

22. Grønstad and Vågnes, “Images,” 184.

23. Acisclo Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, El museo pictórico y escala óptica, Vol. 3, El Parnaso español pintoresco laureado, (Madrid, 1724), quoted in Sánchez, “Velázquez,” 32.

24. Alfred Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” in Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, ed. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 44.

16. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 40.

17. Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 151.

18. See, for instances, J. F. Moffitt,“Painting, Music and Poetry in Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas," in Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History 54 (1985), 77-90; and Richard P y m , “ I n t e r d i c t i o n o f c l o s u r e i n Velázquez’ Fable of Arachne,” in Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 5 (1999), 189-199.

19. Stappleford and Potter, “Las Hilanderas,” 178.

20. Aneta Georgievska-Shine, “ ‘I Repair My Work That Was Left …’: Velázquez and the Unfinished Story of Arachne” in Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, ed. Alexander Nagel (Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2017), 188.

21. Victor Ieronim Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern MetaPainting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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Cathedrals of Light: James Turrell and the Contemporary Spiritual Experience written by Catherine LaRivière edited by Chloe Ducluzeau

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“Let there be light: and there was light.”

due to their lack of explicit connections to the divine.

-Genesis 1:3

The works of James Turrell blur this line between spiritual and contemporar y dematerialized abstract art. A major figure in the Califor nia Light and Space movement, Turrell’s works are immersive light installations that surround and saturate their viewers with pure light and colour.

Many have described the experience of these spaces created

by Turrell in ways that mirror how divine encounters were described centuries ago, despite their for mal simplicity that seemingly stands at the opposite end to the ornament of early modern altarpieces and their abundance of religious signifiers.

It should be noted that spirituality and religiosity are not used interchangeably in this context; the latter relates to an organized religion, while the former is a broader term referring to the divine without religious association. Turrell’s works are thus much more religiously ambiguous due to their dematerialized nature; using only lights and constructed rooms of varying sizes and shapes, Turrell creates spaces in which c o n t e m p o r a r y, r e l i g i o u s l y ambiguous spirituality in the globalized context can be experienced and explored.

The opening lines from the Ju daeo-Chri stian tr adition’ s primary texts demonstrate the p r i m a c y, e l e m e n t a l i t y, a n d materiality of light and its tangible presence that ultimately catalyzed life itself through divine will. Over the course of the history of art, light has been a constant consideration through a variety of methods, beginning with divine connotations and becoming increasingly considered in its scientific contexts from the Enlightenment period onwards. In the contemporary era, the scientific understanding of light has resulted in its use in various abstracted forms through i n c r e a s i n g ly d e m at e r i a l i z e d mediums, such as in the work of Dan Flavin, Yayoi Kusama, Bruce Nauman, and the California Light and Space movement. This shift can be seen as following the decrease to eventual end of religious patronage of art in the West and the increase in the availability of consumer electronics and artificial light through consumer capitalism.1 As such, these contemporary artworks can be interpreted as being areligious and non-spiritual

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Turrell has many themes in which he works, but for the sake of this paper, the two largest in scale will be discussed: Ganzfelds and Skyspaces, both of which engage w i t h v i ewe r s s p i r i t u a l ly i n different ways with some similarities. The Ganzfeld genre of his oeuvre is perhaps the better known one thanks to Drake’s “Hotline Bling” video and the consequent rise in visibility Turrell received in popular culture because of it. The name Ganzfeld comes from an effect in perceptual psychology, which Turrell studied at Pomona College until 1965, wherein the brain begins to look for missing visual signals when exposed to an unstructured field

of stimulus, usually described as when pilots try to search for objects while navigating through dense fog. For his Ganzfeld series, Turrell creates large-scale uniform spaces filled with coloured light.

Amrta (2011) [fig. 1] is one such example, featuring a central staircase with illuminated sides in a room cloaked in differently coloured light that changes over time. Wide Out (1998) [fig. 2] is a large room with a central platform lit up by a large screen. Amrta invites viewers to climb the stairs and experience the light from different heights and the slow shift in colours is made to disorient viewers, while Wide Out does the same by plunging viewers in an uninterrupted space of blue that is so deeply saturated it seems infinite. Both of these works are exemplary in how the Ganzfeld series essentially creates substance from void; by utilizing the otherwise intangible substance of light and projecting it densely and brightly in uninterrupted spaces, Turrell gives light shape and makes it occupy space to then be perceived by the viewer in a similar way to how they would perceive the shape of a sculpture.2

Fig. 1: James Turrell, Amrta, (2011).

Multimedia installation.

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same sky they normally see, only now they are in a dedicated space to observe nothing but it. In the same vein, Skyspaces bring the sky down to its viewers through their openings in the ceiling, allowing the light from outside to seep inside.3 Fig. 2: James Turrell, Wide Out (1998).

Multimedia installation.

The Skyspace genre is equally perceptually-stimulating, bringing viewers in close contact with the light and sky directly above them.

Space That Sees (1992) [fig. 3] is an installation at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem consisting of a cubeshaped spaced with blank white walls whose ceiling has a large rectangle cut out of it, revealing the sky above and allowing its light to filter through the aperture in the ceiling and fill up the space below. Benches invite viewers to sit and watch as the shadows of clouds go by and the hues of the sky change as the day goes on.

Meeting (1980-86/2016) [fig. 4] is a similar set-up, this time displayed at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York, where the noise of the city joins forces with the serenity of the blue sky to create a simple yet profound spatial experience for its viewers. The Skyspaces invite viewers to look up and admire the colour above them in its elementality and purity; it is the

At the centre of both of these genres is light, but not just as a means of making things visible; light is presented as a tangible substance which can be just as easily manipulated as paint. In a sense, these genres of Turrell’s work both create substance from void by saturating empty space

Fig. 3: James Turrell, Space that Sees (1992). Site-specific installation. Israel Museum of Art, Jerusalem. !95

with nothing but light and the viewers that will perceive it.4 The role of the senses is crucial in how the spiritual engagement of these works is made possible. Turrell’s works specifically deal with human perception, both as an optic and somatic experience. The nature of both the Ganzfelds and Skyspaces thus creates an environment in which phenomenology and the sublime can interact. Simon Morley posits that Turrell’s works intensify the sublime experience through the creation of immersive spaces of light that evoke spatial immensity, which is ultimately done by combining a number of modes of sublime experience with an emphasis on transcendence.5 Turrell also draws on both his background in perceptual psychology and theories from Merleau-Ponty for the theoretical framework of his works.6 Like M e r l e a u - Po n t y ’ s s t o n e a n d shadow, Turrell’s work are initially disorienting and require viewers to re-sense their own senses to break the illusion of what they are seeing, in this case it is the illusion of an infinite space of saturated light.7 This is done via sensory deprivation, overwhelming the audience with stimuli (in this case bright light – both natural and fluorescent – and nothing else) which then demands patience from them in turn, forcing them to wait

in order to grasp the whole experience of the work and return t o t h e m s e l v e s. 8 W i t h t h i s framework operating the Skyspaces and Ganzfelds, the solicitation of spiritual and religious e xperiences comes naturally to Turrell’s works as they demand their audiences to wait, to think deeply, to re-assess their position within space and within themselves, and even invite them to transcend in the end.

Turrell’s Quaker upbringing has a had a notable effect on his artistic development, as both he and writer s/critics have noted. 9 T h e o l og i c a l ly - s p e a k i n g, t h e Quakers are anti-idolatrous and find art to be a vanity that only favours the temptation of worldly attachments.10 As such, Turrell’s works could never be materialistic celebr ations of consumer capitalism like Koons, Murakami, or even unusable objects like those made by his Minimalist compatriots like Morris and Judd.

Detailing the combination of Turrell’s religious and artistic growth, Thomas Crow writes that ceramics were initially how Turrell got around this issue of idolatry and art as a worldly and unusable object.11 Wanting to expand his practice, Turrell then found another loophole: ceramics were a way of making nonidolatrous objects, but using light !96

and creating spaces circumvented the issue of idolatrous objects by not even making objects at all.12 This not only made his works more difficult to sell and commodify (as he actively wanted them to be), but they also allowed for a Quaker-style of spiritual engagement by using light as their medium.13 The central tenet of the Quaker sect is that all humans possess God’s light within them, and Turrell’s works bring them in direct contact with exactly that.

Through Skyspaces, he literally makes a connection with the sky to allow the light in, whereas with Ganzfelds, he does this by creating spaces dedicated to nothing but light.

There is also an undeniably cosmic and mystic element to Turrell’s works that interweaves with the religious aspects and furthers the spiritual experience of them, particularly in his Skyspaces. In describing how his Skyspaces work in an interview, Turrell remarked that “it is not so much observing the events but obser ving something that happens inside the space.”14 As such, his Skyspaces and the light within them are m e a n t t o b e o b s e r ve d l i ke astronomical phenomena, with no two experiences being alike due to the ever-changing nature of the cosmos. He later goes on to compare his role as an artist in the twentieth century to that of a

F i g . 4 : J a m e s Tu r re l l , M e e t i n g (1980-86/2016). Site-specific installation. MoMA PS1, Queens, NY, USA.

Fig. 5: The Comares Hall, Alhambra Palace (1310). Granada, Spain.

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Fig. 6: Notre-Dame Cathedral (1163-1345). Paris, France.

shaman, shifting people’s perspectives by exposing them to a different way of considering the world around them.15 Daniela Ber tol compares works like Turrell’s Skyspaces to obser vatories, positing that because of the advancement of science and technolog y in astronomy, art has become a new platform in which humans beings can connect to and explore the c o s m o s. 1 6 M a r k C . T a y l o r describes his e xperience of visiting Turrell’s Roden Crater in Flagstaff, Arizona as a kind of pilgrimage, going on at length about how each tunnel and portal elicited different kinds of perceptual experiences. 17 He describes the keyhole tunnels connecting the main portals as disorienting. Their stark darkness leading to the bright light of the sky is pur posely jar ring, a “Gestalt-shift” that was brought

Fig. 7: James Turrell, One Accord (2000). Live Oak Friends Meeting House. Site-specific installation.

Houston, USA.

on by Turrell and his desire to play visual tricks on his audience.18 He goes on to investigate the local Indigenous Hopi tribe’s religious vision with that of Turrell’s artistic vision, finding many similarities between the two and citing Turrell’s inspiration from them in the creation of Roden Creater, identifying links between their views of the cosmos as mapped on the land.19 As such, Turrell’s Skyspaces and their primordial and direct link to the sky appeal to a much larger variety of spiritual views, not just theological.

Turrell’s light installations operate in a similar fashion to medieval and early modern cathedrals in their existence as large singular spaces filled with light. Religiosity is thus simultaneously present and absent in Turrell’s works; the materiality of light in them !98

Fig. 8: Plans for Catholic Church (1977). Collection Giuseppe Panza di Biumo.

suggests a tangible presence, but the lack of signifiers make it equally areligious – they are o p e n ly a m b i g u o u s i n t h e i r r e l at i o n s h i p t o t h e d i v i n e .

N o n e t h e l e s s, t h e h i s t o r i c a l consideration of light as divine presence as well as Turrell’s own views allow for these works to contain an inherent pull towards r e l i g i o s i t y. T h e r e l i g i o u s ambiguity comes into play here thanks to the globalized nature of the contemporary period; with such instant access to information about cultures spread out all over the globe, audiences can make a broader array of connections, and vice versa, artists can appeal to broader audiences. 20 Valerie Gonzalez made the case for this kind of connection by exploring the aesthetic relationship between Turrell’s Space That Sees from 1992 in Jer usalem and the Comares Hall in the Alhambra from the medieval Islamic age in Spain in 1310 [fig. 5]. She describes Space That Sees as “an object in connection with other objects” by dr awing for mal parallels between the focus on the ceilings of both the Hall and Turrell’s work: both are large open cube spaces with elements that

recall the heavens, with the Comares Hall making its relation to Islam more obvious by being decorated with excerpts from the Qur’an on its walls.21 She goes on to compare the aesthetic e xperience of both from a perceptual phenomenological perspective, describing how the ornament of the Comares Hall interplayed with the architecture of the space to get viewers to stare up and around at their surroundings and launch their imagination through the integrated didactic elements, and Turrell’s work does the same but instead of having ornamental inscriptions to gaze at, there is just saturated light to get lost in.22 Similarly, visual comparisons can be drawn between cathedrals and the work of Turrell, with Notre Dame in Paris [fig. 6] being a popular example. Linda Herbert described the experience of !99

entering a Turrell work like how a person would enter a cathedral; the light from outside being suddenly stopped by darkness, then overtaken by the colourful light of stained glass pouring through. 23 Turrell has cited inspiration from cathedrals, noting how the light alone made him feel better connected “with the fullness or oneness of the universe.”24 Turrell’s Skyspaces consequently gives viewers access to the heavens through an aperture in the ceiling and the consequent natur al manipulation of light from this literally brings the heavens down to the viewer’s level, while his Ganzfelds are spaces devoted to light that seem removed and otherworldly, yet equally wholly connected through their spatial uniformity. Both series invite contemplation and patience from the viewer – a meditative-like state that rewards them by showing them the beauty of the world through light.25 These works thus operate in the same way the Comares Hall did – with its ceilings and walls painted with heavenly signifiers alongside quotes from poetry and the Qur’an – and the same way cathedrals and their ornamental windows do, allowing heavenly light to pour i n t o t h e s p a c e .26 T h e dematerialized and abstracted nature of Turrell’s works are

ultimately what makes these c o m p a r i s o n s s o va r i e d a n d abundant; by not having any explicit signifiers to any one religion, they can be seen through lenses of many of them.

Perhaps the perfect example for this idea of spirituality as facilitated by a lack of materiality would be a church constructed by Turrell. The artist had designed and built a Meeting House for the Live Oak Quaker community in 2000 [fig. 7], with a centralized Skyspace in the middle that has a retractable roof and light tubing which fills the area with blue light when it is not open to the sky.

Additionally, Giuseppe Panza di Biumo did work with Turrell to plan out a Catholic church in 1977 [fig. 8], but it was never built.27 It was designed in the shape of a Catholic cross, with a Ganzfeld dome in the central crossing and Skyspaces at the end of each arm.

Turrell’s blending of his series would have been fitting; the Ganzfeld dome would have formally recalled the domes of famous cathedrals around the world while imbuing the space with a surreal, divine-like tangible light. The Skyspaces would have furthered the dome’s impact by giving entry to the divine light of the heavens outside to seep into the main areas of the church. This same principle about his Skyspaces !100

guided Turrell in his decision to design the Live Oak Meeting House. Both of these works lack the typically overt religious signifiers despite their very overtly religious locations, save the shape of the cross for the Panza commission. As such, contemporar y viewers can approach the rest of Turrell’s works from a variety of backgrounds and experience them in an equally fulfilling spiritual way, something facilitated both by the globalized nature of contemporary audiences and the dematerialized nature of Turrell’s works.

▫︎

Notes 1. Thomas Crow, No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art, (Sydney: Power Publications, 2017), 12-13.

2. Craig E. Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space, (California: University of California Press, 1990), 217.

3. Mark C. Taylor, Refiguring the spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 104.

4. Lynn M. Herbert, James Turrell: spirit and light, (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1998), 14.

5. Simon Morley, The sublime, (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010), 13, 20. He describes contemporary art and its version of sublime experiences as stemming from a combination of the theories of Longinus (transcendence via heroic act), Burke (experience of shock and awe and destabilizing force), Kant (revealing a fundamentally indeterminate reality), and Schiller (ecstatic experience).

6. Adcock, The art of light and space, 215.

7. Robin Clark, and Michael Auping, Phenomenal: California light, space, surface, (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2011), 116.

8. Clark and Auping, Phenomenal, 121.

9. Crow, No Idols, 107.

10. Crow, No Idols, 108.

11. Crow, No Idols, 111.

12. Crow, No Idols, 112.

13. Crow, No Idols, 113.

14. Janet Saad-Cook, and James Turrell, “Touching the Sky: Artworks Using Natural Phenomena, Earth, Sky and Connections to Astronomy.” Leonardo vol. 21, no. 2 (1988): 129.

15. Saad-Cook and Turrell, “Touching the Sky,” 131.

16. Daniela Bertol, “Framing the Land and Sky: Art Meets Cosmology in a Sustainable Environment.” Leonardo vol.

39, no. 2 (2006): 125-126.

17. Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual, 107.

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18. Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual, 111.

19. Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual, 117.

20. Grabar as quoted in Valerie Gonzalez, “The Comares Hall in the Alhambra and James Turrell’s Space That Sees: A Comparison of Aesthetic Phenomenology.” Muqarnas, Vol. 20 (2003): 253.

21. Gonzalez, “The Comares Hall in the Alhambra,” 255.

22. Gonzalez, “The Comares Hall in the Alhambra,” 260-261.

23. Herbert, Spirit and Light, 15.

24. Herbert, Spirit and Light, 15.

25. Herbert, Spirit and Light, 16-17.

26. Gonzalez, “A Comparison of Aesthetic Phenomenology,” 255; Herbert, Spirit and Light, 15.

27. Herbert, Spirit and Light, 15-17.

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authors Lily-Cannelle Mathieu is a third year Joint Honours Anthropology and Art History student and is also completing a minor in East Asian Studies. She was part of Canvas' editorial team in 2017-2018 and is proud to publish her work in this year's edition! Lily-Cannelle is particularly interested in heritage management and in Asian arts and architecture.

Nicholas Raffoul is in his second year at McGill and he’s majoring in Art History with a minor in International Development Studies. He is most passionate about contemporary art, with his research interests touching on postcolonial theory, Orientalism and its social effects, and identity politics.

Margaux Shraiman is in her final year at McGill University majoring in Honours Art History and minoring in Marketing and Italian. Margaux's primary research interests include Northern European art--from Flemish Renaissance painting, to German Expressionism to contemporary Scandinavian Art. Her recent scholarship focuses on embodiment, affect and participation in contemporary art. After graduation, she hopes to pursue a career in curation or museum administration.

Hannah Deskin is a graduating honours art history student and intern at McGill’s Visual Arts Collection. Interested in the intersections of art, government, and de-colonial theory, she hopes to obtain a masters degree in art history as well as a law degree in the future.

Emily Levine is in her fourth and final year at McGill University, majoring in Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies and minoring in International Development and Art History. Emily’s research interests include critical disability theory, universal design, reproductive health, and feminist recuperations in art history. Post-grad, Emily hopes to pursue a masters degree in some field related to counseling and social justice work.

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Catriona Reid is a fourth year Art History student minoring in French and Sociology. She is interested in the work of inter-war period artists and the urban fabric of early modern cities. Catriona comes from a background in fine arts and feeds her creative impulse through film photography and painting. She loves west-coast beaches, word games, and sailing.

Karen Liu is in her fourth year at McGill majoring in Art History and minoring in Computer Science and Communication Studies. She grew up in Chongqing, China, and has lived in Canada for seven years. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, watching YouTube, going to art exhibitions, and exploring the Montreal food scene.

Catherine LaRivière is a McGill Art History Honours alumna who graduated in May of 2018. She has a keen interest in museum history and theory, institutional critique, art therapy, and the viewer dynamics of contemporary installation art. She currently works at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, with plans to attend graduate school in arts management and art history soon.

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editors Alexa van Abbema is in her fourth year at McGill majoring in Cultural Studies and minoring in Communications. She is interested in topics concerning estrangement, individuation, collectivity, and art in cognitive capitalism. And the effects of these transformations on human/non-human consciousness. Currently, she is studying Media en Cultuur at the University of Amsterdam and working for Amsterdam-based denim brand Hardeman.

Catriona Reid is a fourth year Art History student minoring in French and Sociology. She is interested in the work of inter-war period artists and the urban fabric of early modern cities. Catriona comes from a background in fine arts and feeds her creative impulse through film photography and painting. She loves west-coast beaches, word games, and sailing.

Chloe Ducluzeau is a fourth year student double majoring in Art History and Political Science. She is particularly interested in early modern Counter-Reformation art and the period’s politics of profanity and devotion in religious works. Other research interests involve classical political theory and the relationships between Canadian art institutions and Indigenous communities. She spends her spare time obsessively listening to podcasts, consuming copious amounts of tea, reading, dogspotting, and practicing yoga.

Clara Marchionini is a fourth year Political Science, Communication Studies, and Economics student. She grew up mainly in the South of France, but has also lived in Arizona and Germany. She is particularly interested in political and feminist theory. She also loves Russian literature, Kurt Vile, listening to podcasts in the morning with her coffee, and exploring the Montreal food scene. She is looking forward to working with the Canvas team!

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Gabby Marcuzzi Herie is a fourth year honours student in Art History and Anthropology. She is interested in contemporary art that engages with unsettling affects, haunting, and the uncanny. Other research interests include the relationship between people and the lands they inhabit. Next year, she will be at the University of Toronto pursuing an MA in Art History.

She spends her spare time listening to podcasts and weaving. She’s officially an Aries but is a Taurus at heart.

Greta Rainbow is a fourth-year English-Cultural Studies and Art History student. She is passionate about Monday crosswords, clementines, and freeform radio. In her studies, she is interested in counter culture and art that leads political revolution.

Lucia Bell-Epstein is in her third year at McGill majoring in Art History and minoring in Communications and Islamic Studies. She grew up in New York City, but has also lived in Berlin and Rome. In her spare time, she enjoys oil painting, film photography, and visiting galleries and museums.

Her favourite contemporary artist at the moment is Shirin Neshat, an Iranian visual artist based in film and photography.

Miray Eroglu is in her final year at McGill majoring in Honours Art History and minoring in French and Medieval Studies. She adores discovering new places, and last year, studied abroad in Switzerland at the University of Geneva. She has enjoyed being a part of the Canvas editorial board for the past three years. This fall, Miray will pursue her Masters in Art History in graduate school where she hopes to specialize in the arts of the Middle East, guided by her interest in Ottoman and Safavid painting and her love for Istanbul.

Nicholas Raffoul is in his second year at McGill and he’s majoring in Art History with a minor in International Development Studies. He is most passionate about contemporary art, with his research interests touching on postcolonial theory, Orientalism and its social effects, and identity politics.

Tara Allen Flanagan is a fourth-year student with a double major in English Literature and Art History. Her academic interests lie in the history of cosmetics, female beauty standards in advertisements, and the gender politics of art. She enjoys beekeeping and rock climbing in her spare time.

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