Canvas Journal XIX - Spring 2020

CANVAS

VOLUME XIX 1

McGill's Art History and Communications Studies Journal

Volume XIX

Winter 2020 2

CANVAS McGill’s Art History and Communication Studies Journal

Volume XIX

Winter 2020

Editors-in-Chief Lucia Bell-Epstein and Nicholas Raffoul Editorial Board Ellie Finkelstein Sarah Holley-Carney Sophia Kamps Madeleine Mitchell Sam Perelmuter Will Schumer Zein Djilani Trabelsi Alicia Wilson Yue Zeng

Layout Design Yue Zeng Cover Image Lucia Bell-Epstein

Canvas is the Art History and Communication Studies Undergraduate Journal of McGill University. In an effort to showcase the exemplary research and writing conducted at the undergraduate level, we publish academic essays written by students in this department and field both in an annual print journal and online at canvasmcgill.ca. We additionally host the annual Canvas Undergraduate Colloquium every spring.

Cover image by Lucia Bell, featuring Levitated Mass by Michael Heizer at LACMA, Los Angeles, photographed in 2016.

Funding for this journal has been generously provided by the Art History and Communication Studies Student Association, the AUS Journal Fund, the Dean of Arts Development Fund.

ISSN 2369-839X

CONTENTS A Note to the Reader

5

The Warning Within Zach Blas’ Facial Weaponization Suite Sam Perelmuter

7

Hype Williams as Cultural Animator: The 90s Hip-Hop Music Video as Eye-Witness to Conspicuous Consumption and New Modalities of Globalized Tastemaking Aimée Tian For Everyone an Isolated Garden Alice Lemay

17

31

The Wendyverse as Resistance: A Doubleweave Reading of Wendy’s Revenge Rosalind Sweeney-McCabe

43

Fashion Exhibitions as Participants to the Participatory: A Study of Mugler’s “Couturissime” Denisa Marginean

55

To Make and Destroy: Sculptures of Anne Whitney Simone Cambridge

71

Behind the Lens: Contextualizing Hannah Maynard’s Photography Surrounding Indigenous Peoples Sarah Ford

83

Influential Liminality: Eunuch Participation in Northern Song Dynasty Artistic Production and Collecting Practices Davin Luce

97

Authors Editors

110 112

A Note to the Reader In many ways, the 2017-2018 school year has seen great change, in both our department at McGill and society at large. In the Fall and Winter semesters, the department of Art History and Communication Studies created new positions for professors of Global Contemporary Art and Indigenous Art & Media respectively. Meanwhile, in the world of communications, social media continues to be a conduit to sweeping socio-cultural moments - the headlining movement of recent months being the feminist-minded #MeToo movement.

The essays of this seventeenth edition of Canvas, McGill’s Undergraduate Journal of Art History and Communication Studies is a reflection of the growing awareness in areas of globality, Indigenous culture and activism, and intersectional feminism. We kick off with an analysis of hip-hop artist Princess Nokia and the cultural politics of sound, then rewind to reconsider the subtle femininity and eroticism of twentieth century British painter Vanessa Bell, followed by a deconstruction of the marginalization of craft in the Western canon. The last three essays each tackle the notion of the global contemporary, from public art in Montreal to works of Indigenous re-imaginings of the mapped world to fictional monuments by 2017 Turner prize winner, Lubaina Himid.

The dedicated efforts of many have gone into Canvas this year. At the heart of Canvas is the extraordinary editorial board, who have collectively reviewed thousands of pages of writing; edited and published seventeen essays on our online platform and eight in this printed volume; and organized our second annual Canvas Undergraduate Colloquium and journal launch. Special thanks to Gabby Marcuzzi-Herie and Lucia Epstein-Bell for their help in event-planning, Lucia once more for providing our cover image, and last but most definitely not least, the illustrious Josie Spalla for her incredible design work on this journal and all of our marketing materials. To our phenomenal authors, online and in print, we are honoured to be able to share your insightful, witty, occasionally irreverent, and unfailingly verbose research projects with the world. Thank you to our friends in the Art History and Communication Studies Student Association for your continued support, and to the AUS Journal Fund, Dean of Arts Development Fund, and AUS Special Projects Fund for their generosity in funding Canvas. Finally, we offer our sincere gratitude to the professors and lecturers of this department, who continue to inspire and guide us both in and outside the poorly lit lecture hall of ARTS W-215.

Aimée Tian and Muhan Zhang Editors-in-Chief

HYPE WILLIAMS AS CULTURAL ANIMATOR: THE 90S HIP-HOP MUSIC VIDEO AS EYE-WITNESS TO CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION WRITTEN BY AIMÉE TIAN EDITED BY SAM PERELMUTER AND SOPHIA KAMPS

6

!"#$%&'(#)%"* The emergence of the hip-hop music genre from the underground and into the mainstream did not occur until the late 1980s, when its focus shifted greatly from one of production to one of consumption.1 What emerged as a mode of political resistance out of the Bronx in the 1970s has now become a largely commercialized enterprise in late capitalism.

This shift in attitude stemmed from—in large part—the neoliberalist desires to reconstruct and repackage hip-hop culture into a more tolerable field of consumption, and thus marketable to a wider range of audiences: namely, the young and white buying audience.2 Within the constructs of this current millennial age, mainstream hiphop sensibilities have since become almost entirely emancipated from the struggles of disenfranchised inner-city black and Latinx youth who pioneered the movement by rapping about their lived experiences and the socio-economic divide in the South Bronx. Today, hip-hop culture is increasingly defined by the successful marketing of a certain ‘lifestyle,’ an accentuation of elitist ideologies, with a market emphasis placed on the purchase and acquisition of luxury products and commodities to connote self-worth and elevated subjectivity. Building off of the previous scholarship of hip-hop theorists Krista Thompson, Murray Forman, and Jeff Chang, my paper will explore the ways in which African-American director and producer Hype Williams’ mobilization of the 90s music video sought to elevate both hip-hop sensibilities and the status of the black body as a whole.

The 90s music video emerged at a rather critical juncture; as a suitable medium for the widespread dissemination of the hip-hop genre into the mainstream. Acting as a vehicle largely responsible for the integration of ‘bling culture’ into hip-hop sensibilities, it also connoted a turn toward the procurement of luxury objects as an extension of the self.

In performing a comparative analysis of Afrofuturism to Retrofuturism, I will examine five media products realized by Hype Williams as a conduit for communicating these cultural exchanges. It is my assertion that through establishing a signature directorial style rooted in subversive tastemaking, Williams sought to challenge and destabilize the Western hegemony of power-as-taste through his creative output.

7

The Birth of Hip-Hop Studies The field of Hip-Hop Studies as an academic discipline is still relatively new. In the second edition of That’s the Joint!, editors Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (2012, 2) reflect on their introduction of the term in the first iteration of the book, noting that they brought in this new terminology “with full awareness that no such designation or discipline actually existed within the academy.”3 Today, although it continues to present a pointed challenge to higher academia, Hip-Hop Studies has emerged as a helpful new modality for examining contemporary cultural production. It is important that we recognize the cultural impact of hip-hop as a key influence in contemporary North American technocultures, for “when we consider hip hop’s origins and purpose, we understand it is a revolutionary cultural force that was intended to challenge the status quo and the greater American culture.”4 At its core, the field of Hip-Hop Studies draws from a rhetoric in scholarship (and criticism) that is incredibly interdisciplinary and intersectional.

Here, I approach the term ‘intersectionality’ following Patricia Hill Collins, who defines it as an analytical framework for thinking through the multiple axes of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity and age, and how they might equally contribute to a person’s experience.5 In this regard, Hip-Hop Studies provides an interesting segue in thinking about the praxis of intersecting identities and bodies that are often umbrellaed under the unifying scope of hip-hop cultural production.

A Restructuring of Western Cultural Hegemonies of Taste/Tastemaking?

As Pierre Bourdieu posits in his 1979 study Distinction, “aesthetic disposition and consumer preference are means of expressing, impressing, and maintaining cultural dominance.”6 Rooted in access, exposure, and education, this framework works to function under classist systems of social hierarchy and cultural dominance. Such hegemonic structures of elitism often “depend on sustaining the notion of taste as self-evident,”7 marking anyone who does not fit into this framework as ‘uneducated,’ and consequently—‘distasteful.’ To further unpack this theory, what Bourdieu is saying is that notions of ‘taste’ are constructed through the possession of power and capital. The ruling class become ‘tastemakers’ by establishing a set of value-judgements that are then accepted and absorbed by mass society. The imposition of taste, while promoting the 8

cultural values of some, inevitably silences the practices of others—a staging of class warfare through ‘symbolic violence.’8 In America, class hierarchies are inextricably tied up with racial hierarchies, and thus, hiphop culture has frequently been disregarded or diminished in the past because of its close alignment with African-American and Latinx communities.

In the context of the twenty-first century, however, Bourdieu’s observations are not so clear-cut. Insofar that hip-hop music was inaugurated by ‘the streets’ and the ‘urban underclass,’“some of the most popular rappers are now part of the ‘leisure class’ and serve as tastemakers for the entire globe.”9 The ability to influence, to lead, and to eventually shape the public opinion becomes conflated with the ability to purchase, to acquire, and to consume. This observation functions as a testament to the economic restructuring that has since occurred in the post-industrial economy, whereby the black working class has been left with littleto-no options for social mobility, yet the Western cultural imperative for shopping has continued to escalate.10In this vein, “the ideology of black capitalism as a solution to black poverty has resurged,” writes sociologist Margaret Hunter. What has since emerged as a politics of representation is one that is completely stipulated through market exchange. North American popular culture routinely focuses on the definition and/or construction of identity through consumption and the harvesting of luxury lifestyle products and brands. As Krista Thompson observes: In the 1980s, as hip-hop gained visibility and commercial success nationally and globally, rappers increasingly turned their attention from politics to pleasure and focused on earthly and bodily gratification, hedonism, and even nihilism […] [H]ip-hop artists in the postsoul period unabashedly celebrated materialism or a ‘radical consumerism,’ draping themselves in symbols of wealth from gold chains and medallions to all manner of brand-name goods.11 More than ever, hip-hop music videos began to zero in on its focus of pushing “mass consumerism on people as a form of escapism from socioeconomic reality.”12 In the context of the twenty-first century, mainstream rap has become more or less a “performance of worthiness that can be read through hip-hop artists’ alignment with luxury.”13 In another lens, however, hip-hop music can also be regarded as a site for ‘mass distraction,’14 harnessed and exploited by “larger external cor9

porate entities operating outside of hip-hop’s proximate spheres,” and also “deliberately merged with the larger industrial operations of the media and fashion institutions by hip-hop-savvy entrepreneurs, many of whom were themselves participants and fans.”15 The appropriation of hip-hop from a mode of resistance to a product of commercialized mass media is indicative of a greater social problem: the global ‘white-washing’ of hip-hop, so to speak. This troubling practice predicates the question of whether racialized peoples’ continued efforts to self-fashion and self-determine can really make a lasting impact on the greater hegemonic structures of society, especially when those efforts are constantly being rewritten and appropriated by outside communities. The performance of worthiness, in itself, conflicts with establishing a degree of separation between the self and the overarching hegemony-of-taste.

The Commodity Status of Blackness in Late Capitalism: ‘Bling’ as Subversive Taste in the Global Contemporary Marketplace The more recent trend of hyper-commodification within the visual culture of hip-hop signifies a turn towards conspicuous consumption, whereby both bodies of producer and consumer are bound up with the acquisition and display of material objects to signify wealth and success. In observing this now-prolific habit of expenditure, hip-hop culture becomes closely associated to bling culture in accentuating the commodity status of blackness and black bodies.16 ‘Bling’ is used here to signify the flashy, ostentatious, and often elaborate physical accoutrement and accessories that are used, worn, or carried by performers in hip-hop culture. Such examples might include the use of bejeweled tooth caps or ‘grills,’ diamond earrings, chain necklaces, or other forms of ‘rap jewelry.’ The American rapper B.G. is credited as one of the first to coin the ideophone, defining it as “the imaginary sound produced when light reflects off a diamond.”17 Bling cultures also connote a state “between hypervisibility and blinding invisibility, between visual surplus and disappearance. Bling signifies the physiological—even painful—limits of vision. Bling also illuminates an approach to visibility, in which optical and blinding effect has its own representational value.”18 The use of ‘bling’ within mainstream contemporary hip-hop culture can be observed under two functionalities: both as subversive representation, and as a mediation of object-relations in lieu of subject-relations, realized through consumption and power.

10

Author Greg Tate writes in Flyboy in the Buttermilk that “perhaps the supreme irony of black American existence is how broadly black people debate the question of cultural identity among themselves while getting branded as a cultural monolith by those who would deny [them] the complexity and complexion of a community, let alone a nation.”19 Desires to adorn the self with bling and ‘heavy metal jewelry’ arguably come from underlying motivations of African-Americans to assert the self, to self-aggrandize, and self-fashion within a system that constantly disavowals their very existence.20 Hip-hop jewelry, then, came to be indicative of a (re-)picturing of power under representational attempts of remixing, or ‘racing’ art history.21 I argue that the incorporation of bling into hip-hop visuality envisions a form of ‘seeing unto the self’ as ‘being/ becoming a new self.’

Afrofuturist Aesthetic as a New Apparatus for Representation The ontological relationship between ‘seeing’ and ‘being’ necessitates a deeper understanding of alternative or non-normative modes of representation, rooted in practices that oppose the dominant regime. One way of subverting the harmful and pervasive cultural apparatuses of colonial America is to re-imagine a future (or past) that allows for marginalized voices to reverberate and make an impact—in this case, through a mode of self-representation grounded in the 90s music video production. Here, my argument turns toward a study of Afrofuturist aesthetics, engaging with Kodwo Eshun’s idea of producing counter-histories to normative history.22 Thereorist Mark Dery defines the term ‘Afrofuturism’ as a practice of “African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.”23 The cultural aesthetic of Afrofuturism serves as a productive methodology for rewriting and disrupting the systems of cultural dominance and symbolic violences enacted onto the bodies of African-American and Latinx individuals.

While Erik Steinskog’s introduction to his book Afrofuturisms and Black Sound Studies serves as a rather apt tool in developing a deeper understanding of this cultural phenomena, my own use of this literature will extend beyond just a sonic lens, to encompass the techno-visual.

I am cognizant that while I will be in large part drawing from literature on sound studies, I do not wish to conflate or reduce African-American identity to merely genealogies of sound. As the cultural critic Michele Wallace has warned, “drawing parallels or alignments between Af11

ro-American music and everything else cultural among Afro-Americans, stifles and represses most of the potential for understanding the visual in Afro-American culture.”24 Thus, my successive analysis on the work of American director Hype Williams will be, in large part, grounded in the visual—in particular, his use of light and cinematography to play off of the ‘bling’ and ornamentation worn by his subjects.

The Rise of New Black Technocultures? Hype Williams and the 90s Music Video As Krista Scott has observed, “hip-hop came of age as music television reached [maturation].”25 Through the ubiquity of globalized digital consumption (moderated by channels such as MTV and BET) (fig. 1 and fig. 2), the hip-hop music video rose to prominence in the 1990s. This medium of representation allowed for the formation of new black professions and spaces, where personal and social narratives could be recrafted and retold outside of the narrow lenses of neocolonialist ideology.26 One outstanding name within this field is the American music video director Hype Williams, whose cinematic style is emblematic of the 90s saturation of R&B and hip-hop into the mainstream, defining an entire era of popular culture during the turn of the new millennium.

Above: Figure 1. MTV’s Yo! MTV Raps, (1988-95) Below: Figure 2. BET’s Rap City, (1989-08)

12

Born Harold Williams in the Hollis, Queens neighbourhood of New York City to working-class parents, Hype Williams grew up aspiring to follow after fellow New York legacies Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.27 During his youth, he frequented as a graffiti artist, adopting the name ‘Hype’ as his chosen moniker. In the late 80s, he attended Adelphi University to study film, and thus marked his turn to videography as his medium of choice.28 His production company, Big Dog Films, was born in 1993, and in 1994, he made his first big directorial debut with the WuTang Clan’s “Can It All Be So Simple.”29 Williams quickly rose to fame and garnered widespread media acclaim, taking home the 1996 Billboard Music Video Award for Best Director of the Year, the 1997 NAACP Image Award, and the 1998 MTV Video Music Award for Best Rap Video, among many others.

His prolific curriculum vitae is composed of collaborations with some of hip-hop’s most notable names, including (but certainly not limited to) Missy Elliott, Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G., Aaliyah, and Kanye West. Williams’ work has frequently been characterized as visionary and avant-garde; commended for his cinematic acumen and use of “fish-eye lenses, wide ratio shots, tracking shots, and starkly contrasting colour palettes.”30 His music videos provide sleek, cinematic and stylized visuals, often engaging with the cultural aesthetics of Afrofuturism.31 There is a distinct presence of robotics and non-human entities in his short fantasias, and his prismatic choice of neon colour palettes and manipulation of light help produce a ‘dazzling shine’ that further frames the black bodies of his subjects with new ontologies of representation. In Williams’ music videos, light-play is frequently juxtaposed against bling, pointing to “how light and its visual effect have informed notions of value, of social worth, and of power and prestige.”32 Through his directorial work and beyond, Williams takes on the identity of the new global tastemaker, by surfacing desires to deconstruct the lineation between high and low, bridging the perceived gap between the streets and the art space. The dexterity of his storytelling lies in his chosen techniques of cinematography, grounded in aesthetic choice. Williams’ artistic production helps encourage the new hip-hop generation to develop a non-conforming sense of self-hood that is continuously remixed, and always expanding.

13

The ‘Auteurship’ of Hype Williams: Bling and Spectacularity Bling, unlike normalized disembodied and monocular modes of specularity, highlights other bodily forms of perception and the blinding limits of visibility.33 —Krista Thompson, “The Sound of Light”

Belly (1998) In 1998, Williams released his first feature-length film, a dark Scorsese-esque crime drama entitled Belly. Starring rappers DMX and Nas, alongside Method Man, Taral Hicks and R&B singer T-Boz, the film was said to be “visually compelling, but did not make a lot of logical sense.”34 It was panned by critics and cast off as a “by-the-numbers story about the fall and possible redemption of two longtime friends and drug dealers,”35 while Williams himself was knocked for his incapability of “barely [staging] a coherent scene.”36 Despite its negative criticisms, however, Belly has amassed a noteworthy cult following, spurring a multitude of discussions online on the considerable cultural contributions it left behind.

For the supervision of Belly’s costume design, Williams commissioned long-time friend and collaborator, stylist June Ambrose, who has been commended for her visionary contributions to the world of fashion. For many, Belly’s cultural capital was imminent. As one blogger explains: “[the film] is valuable because it captured so much of the ethos of the time [...It is] a product of the environment and time and culture.”37 Digital fashion platforms Grailed, SSENSE and Complex have all since produced retrospective feature editorials on the costuming and cinematography of Belly, applauding the film for being “precisely of its time and ahead of it all at once.”38 The opening sequence to the film reads like that of a 90s music video, and is soundtracked to Soul II Soul’s classic anthem “Back To Life.” In this scene, Williams conceives a slow-motion armed robbery and shooting under ultraviolet lights. DMX and Nas are shown arriving at a strip club, their coloured contacts reflecting like cat eyes under the glare of the blacklight (fig. 3). The film’s visual design is also somewhat reminiscent of neo-noir art cinematography: its dazzling optics are paramount to the actual storyline itself. This pairing—of luxury merchandise against 14

prominent figures of the hip-hop scene—is captured by the gaze of Williams’ camera and metamorphoses into a stunningly cohesive visual language. Here, bling and celebrity are wielded as powerful tools in connoting the virtuous status of the black body.

In the title sequence, Williams uses a series of juxtaposing overhead shots, low-angle shots, pan-up shots and wide-angle lenses to make the figures on the screen appear bigger-than-life. Williams specifically zooms in to the dancing strippers, who fill the screen with their bodies and command the gaze of the viewer. Filmed at the legendary New York City nightclub Tunnel,39 the flashing strobe lights act as a suitable companion to the dangerous and exciting lifestyles of drug dealers and trappers who frequented the location. Here, the role of the strip club is key in shaping the audience’s viewing pleasure, derived from the experience of visually consuming the glamour and excitement of the scene.

The locality of Tunnel is portrayed as a muse, chosen with intentions that are two-fold: for its close affiliations with luxury and fame, and as a site of consumption and sexual exchange.

Figure 3. Belly (1998), Dir. Hype Williams.

15

Missy Elliott, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” (1997) Williams’ use of wide-angle and fish-eye lens is most notably evidenced in the 1997 music video for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).” In this work, Missy ‘Misdemeanor’ Elliott appears to be attacking the camera due to filming techniques that evoke optical illusion. This video has also been held in high regard for its innovative fashions: Elliott wears black lipstick paired with what appears to be an inflatable black trash bag, which functions to both magnify her size and defy the standards of Western beauty ideals for women (fig. 4). The voluptuous garment is accentuated by the large gold hoops worn by Elliott, along with an elaborate headpiece that is embellished with gold detailing. The video is also presented against various conceptual and futuristic stage sets, including a hemispherical silver vortex, a black canvas eclipsed by a dark circular form, and an anamorphic warehouse-esque space decked out with heavy, swinging mechanical pendulums, all while brightly saturated lights play off of the different monochromatic shapes. None of the settings are geographically identifiable, and thus, Supa Dupa Fly is catapulted out of the rational, linear world of reality and into the semi-ambiguous, cognitively estranged world of science-fiction.

Figure 4. Missy Elliott, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” (1997)

16

Here, I argue that Williams’ arrangement of the female rapper in a post-industrial, post-conceptual setting not only borrows from Afrofuturist aesthetics but can be interpreted in line with the doctrine of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. The reframing of Elliott’s body as ‘cyborg’ allows for it to become a creature in a technological, post-gender world free of traditional western stereotypes towards race and gender.40 Attention then shifts away from the consumption of her body as a sexual entity and to the stakes of her performative talent. In this video, Williams also employs water/rain to make the black skin of Elliott and her backup dancers appear luminous, while further highlighting the gleam of her various bodily adornments.

Kanye West feat. Rihanna and Kid Cudi, “All of the Lights” (2011) In 2011, Williams directed “All Of The Lights,” a collaborative track off of Kanye West’s fifth studio album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, featuring the acclaimed Bajan songstress Rihanna and rapper Kid Cudi.

Much like the elements from Missy Elliott’s video for “The Rain,” the song’s lyrics point directly to the visibility or (invisibility) of the black subject’s body, communicated through the visual language of light: Turn up the lights in here baby Extra bright, I want y’all to see this Turn up the lights in here, baby You know what I need Want you to see everything Want you to see all of the lights The accompanying music video to this song makes use of extremely animated flashing lights and is premised with a discretionary warning, stating that it has the potential to “trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy.”41 The first minute of the video is shot in black-andwhite and features a young girl walking around New York City, set to Kanye’s “All Of The Lights (Interlude)”. Piano and violin accompaniment underscore the video with a nostalgic and sentimental tonality. At 1:05, Williams floods the screen with monochromatic filters of various colours, and the music video quickly shifts to flashing lyric titles (fig. 5).

This procession has been thereafter critiqued for being extremely similar to the title sequence of French director Gaspar Noé’s 2009 film Enter the Void, in which names of the production staff flashed rapidly in many different graphical styles (fig. 6).42 On the matter of Williams’ supposed 17

Figure 5. Opening sequence. Kanye West feat. Rihanna and Kid Cudi, “All of the Lights” (2011)

18

Above: Figure 6. Opening sequence. Enter the Void (2009) Dir. Gaspar Noé.

Middle: Figure 7. Kanye. Kanye West feat. Rihanna and Kid Cudi, “All of the Lights” (2011) Below: Figure 8. Rihanna. Kanye West feat. Rihanna and Kid Cudi, “All of the Lights” (2011)

19

plagiarism, Noé had the following to say: “if you put the idea out there that’s kind of flashy, you’ll have many, many people that are going to be copying it. This happens if you do movies, paintings, or music.”43 The cross-cultural exchange of styles over various media products/platforms appears to be somewhat imminent in the age of ubiquitous media production. One approach in resolving the case of Noé v. Williams is to regard the latter’s interpretation as a (re-)appropriation of past visual aesthetics: as in, an envisioning of a new Black visual aesthetic rooted in hip-hop sensibilities.

In “All of the Lights,” Kanye himself does not appear in the video until the 2:04 mark, when Williams reintroduces the procession of monochromatic narrative shots, interchangeably juxtaposed against an intensely illuminated footage of West rapping against a black backdrop (fig.

7). This simulation mimics the effects of flash photography and recalls the moment of being seen: caught by “the blinding flashes of visibility, the sound of being bathed in light.”44 Here, Williams returns to his fascination with slick cityscapes, whilst depicting the hyper-illuminated figures of West, Rihanna and Kid Cudi silhouetted against monotonal backdrops (fig. 8). The performers are all adorned with gold chains and various bling-y accessories: in particular, West’s gold grills are reflected against a sequence of colours resembling the palette of pixelated blocks that appear when a television faces connectivity issues. Arguably, “All Of The Lights” is set in the shared techno-cultural, cosmopolitan imaginary of Hype Williams and Kanye West, delineated from the ordinance of the real world.

Decades of Difference? From Afrofuturism to Retrofuturism: A Comparison of Blackstreet feat. Dr. Dre & Queen Pen, “No Diggity” (1996) to Travis Scott feat. Kacy Hill, “90210” (2016) Although Hype Williams has significantly slowed down the volume of his video production in the last decade, his film techniques and visual aesthetics have continued to influence videographers and directors to present day. In some of Williams’ more recent work, it is evident that the director has taken a heightened interest in revisiting his use of Afrofuturist cinematography. His film style often harnesses the power of coloured filters to produce an atmospheric quality evocative of the 1990s, and today, Williams reflects back on past cultural production in an effort to revive this nostalgia. I argue that Williams’ twenty-first century revisitation of the Afrofuturist aesthetics found in his earlier works can also 20

be read as a form of ‘Retrofuturism,’ or, “a distanced interest in past versions of the future.”45 Williams’ penchant for 90s nostalgia is manifested through the continuation of past themes and motifs. For instance, his use of puppetry in the 1996 music video for Blackstreet’s standout track “No Diggity” would reappear twenty years later, when he envisioned the music video for Travis Scott’s “90210.”

Figure 4. Missy Elliott, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” (1997)

In comparing the two music videos, it is perhaps useful to first identify the fact that the production of “No Diggity” in 1996 signified a milestone moment for Hype Williams—this video really concretized the development of his signature visual style. The use of low, wide-angle shots distorted the figures of Blackstreet, while brightly saturated neon lights were reflected off of slick city streets (fig. 9). Additionally, the song features lyrics call upon the new consumerist mentality of the black capitalist class, revealing the implications of conspicuous consumption. Once again, light becomes conflated with structures of wealth and power.

The name-dropping of brands like Cartier, along with the group’s access and ability to board first-class airplanes are understood to be indicative of their rising social capital: ‘Cause that’s my peeps and we rolls deep Flyin’ first class from New York City to Blackstreet What you know about me? Not a motherfuckin’ thing Cartier wooden frames sported by my shorty As for me, icy gleaming pinkie diamond ring We be’s the baddest clique up on the scene Ain’t you getting bored with these fake ass broads?

I shows and proves, no doubt, how predictably so Please excuse, if I come across rude, that’s just me 21

“No Diggity” contains no shortage of luxury cars, beautiful women, and flashy jewelry. This flaunting of wealth serves as a way to “outwardly explore and express one’s capital and mobility economically, socially, and culturally.”46

Figure 10. Puppet. Blackstreet featuring Dr. Dre & Queen Pen, "No Diggity” (1996)

This video was also one of the first in which Williams worked with overtly non-human entities. Here, the director installed a piano-playing marionette (fig. 10) and an older, guitar-strumming counterpart to accompany the rap group, again motioning to the staging of the fantastic—a narrative that is rooted in a world distanced from reality (re: Afrofuturism). These puppets act both as an adjunct to the members of Blackstreet, and work to dissociate the scene from reality—and in turn—the hegemonic structures imposed by the dominant regime.

Twenty years later, Williams would revisit his doll and puppet fascination in Travis Scott’s “90210,” one of the leading tracks on the artist’s debut studio album Rodeo. In the “90210” visual, Scott is depicted as an action figure in a stop-motion world. The rapper is transformed into the same doll-like figurine from his album cover, and the video traces his nighttime adventures with an anonymous lover, whom he courts in a rather blasé manner. In an opposing storyline, Scott is rendered as a giant robot, storming the city and angrily kicking over buildings. The same neo-noir aesthetics present in Belly are reinvented in “90210” as technoir, along with Williams’ classic use of flared lenses and slick cityscapes (fig. 11). In this song, Scott struggles to cope with his two identities, as Jacques Webster (his name by birth) and Travis Scott (his stage name).

22

Figure 11. City. Travis Scott feat. Kacy Hill, “90210” (2016)

The song’s melancholic timbre, coupled with its self-referential title,47 reads like a nocturnal ode to Scott’s ascension to fame. It is sentimental, introspective, and pictures the coming together of the rapper’s two conflicting (yet at-times complementary) identities. The fragmented quality of Scott’s body, along with his two duelling identities, could function as a visual metaphor alluding to the mechanical and isolating life he faces as a consequence to his newfound fame. The artificiality of the video can therefore be read as a stand-in for the superficiality of relationships built on the values of late capitalism. In “90210,” Scott reminisces on lost friends and fraudulent exchanges constructed on the basis of money and economic worth: What happened? Now my daddy happy, mama called me up That money coming and she love me, I done made it now I done found life’s meaning now, all them days of heartbreak Her heart out of pieces now, friends turning into fraud ni**as *** Whole crew, I swear they counting on me Gold chains, gold rings, I got an island on me Houses on me, he got them ounces on him Holy father, come save these ni**as, I’m styling on ‘em Good lord, I see my good fortune in all these horses I’m driving too fast to stop, so all these signs, I ignore them The video is also replete with evidence of bling/ice: found in the reflec23

tion of lights in the city’s buildings, the heavy gold chains worn by the action figures, and in the glossy luxury vehicles that line the streets.

When the two figures (Webster/Scott) finally meet, they do so in a flowering garden (fig. 12). The abundant growth of the plants are reflective of Travis’ own internal growth as a person. Ultimately, however, the video concludes with a lone Scott walking into the night by himself. I argue that this vague ending might speak to the contemporary consumer’s inability to find true fulfillment from the hyper-commercialized nature of mainstream hip-hop. Whereas Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” was an optimistic reflection on the ‘high life’ enjoyed by rappers in the 1990s, “90210” is the twenty-first century’s response: revealing the sometimes painful act of self-fashioning as ‘worthy enough,’ or ‘tasteful enough.’ This discrepancy lies in black body’s continued struggle with transgressing into the dominant class of ‘high-culture.’ Williams, then, uses the aesthetic of Retrofuturism (in reflecting on his past works) to iterate a continuous storyline that haunts the contemporary consumer, who will endlessly seek out material objects to fill the void left by conspicuous consumption.

Conclusion When the hip-hop music video first rose to the forefront in the 1990s, it served as a critical channel of communication in advertising the new corporatized identity of hip-hop culture. As one of the leading figures of this movement, the American director Hype Williams mobilized the power of this mass mediatization, presenting a counterculture to the world “while simultaneously shaping that culture’s way of life.”48 Accredited as a ‘gatekeeper’ of the new hip-hop, Williams can be consid24

ered a cultural animator of the times on two accounts. First, through his videography, Williams wielded the juxtaposition of bright lights against luxury commodities, emphasizing the sheer size and extravagance of these heavy metals. Framed against the bodies of his black subjects, these objects were instrumentalized to aggressively take up space, demanding to be noticed and recognized. If we consider ‘bling culture’ as taking on a ‘valence of agency and expression,’49 then the site of the black body constructed under mainstream hip-hop sensibilities effectively demonstrates its anti-imperialist goals. In doing so, ‘bling’ helps assert the physical presence of its bearer, defying the traditional modes of representation that have spurred out of neocolonialist ideologies.

Williams, however, was also critical of the new turn towards hyper-consumption. In employing the visual effects of Afrofuturism (and later, Retrofuturism), the director moved the geopolitical setting of his productions out of the linear rationality of the physical world (the real world), and constructed an alternate realm for marginalized bodies to exist, devoid of past stereotypes and denigrated identities. As Eshun writes, “the field of Afrofuturism does not seek to deny the tradition of countermemory. Rather, it aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective.”50 Retrofuturism, in turn, functions as a revisiting of the past; as an undoing or redoing of the present narrative.

Since the onset of the twenty-first century, the cultural realm of mainstream hip-hop music has significantly detoured both sonically and visually from its foundational roots in the ’hood of the South Bronx.

The evolution of its growth has come to encompass a wider breadth of socio-cultural impact, emergent as a considerable contender in the dominant cultural regime. Through the aid of technological innovation, as well as worldwide media distribution systems, “hip-hop is more than ever situated within the global-local nexus and what might be defined as the contemporary hip-hop industrial complex.”51 Williams has exemplified, through his prolific portfolio of music video production, that hip-hop music (and its incumbent cultural figures), have undeniably emerged as a useful apparatus for challenging ideas about taste/tastemaking in the cultural terrain of global hierarchy.

25

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Margaret Hunter, "Shake It, Baby, Shake It: Consumption and the New Gender Relation in Hip-Hop," Sociological Perspectives 54, no. 1 (2011): 15-16.

Hunter, "Shake It, Baby, Shake It: Consumption and the New Gender Relation in Hip-Hop," 16.

Murray Forman, “General Introduction,” in That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, eds. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 2.

M.K. Asante Jr., It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 8. Quoted in Murray Forman, “General Introduction,” 2.

Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1998), 108.

Isabel Flower and Marcel Rosa-Solas, “Say My Name: Nameplate Jewelry and the Politics of Taste,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4, no. 3 (2017): 121.

Ibid.

Flower and Rosa-Solas, “Say My Name: Nameplate Jewelry and the Politics of Taste,” 121.

Hunter, 18.

Ibid.

Krista Thompson, “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop,” in Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015), 221.

Emphasis mine. A roundtable curated

by Erik K. Arnold, with Rachel Raimist, Kevin Epps, and Michael Wanguhu, “Put Your Camera Where My Eyes Can See: Hip-Hop Video, Film, and Documentary” in Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, ed. Jeff Chang (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 310.

Rikki Byrd, “In Search of the Good Life: Toward a Discourse on Reading the Black Body in Hip-Hop and Luxury Fashion,” in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 183.

Jeff Chang, “Introduction, Hip-Hop Arts: Our Expanding Universe,” in Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, ed.

Jeff Chang (New York: Basic Books, 2008), xi.

Murray Forman, “Growing an Industry:

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

The Corporate Expansion of Hip Hop,” in The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop, (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 107.

Thompson, “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop,” 269.

Quoted in Thompson, 222.

Ibid, 223.

Quoted in Robin D.G. Kelley, “Lookin’ for the ‘Real’ Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto,” in That’s the Joint!

The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, eds. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 135.

Flower and Rosa-Solas, “Say My Name: Nameplate Jewelry and the Politics of Taste,” 117.

To be all-encompassing: this term could be modified to the ‘racing [of ] visual culture,’ in general.

Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 287-302.

Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse on Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 180.

Quoted in Thompson, 217. hompson, 221.

Davarian L. Baldwin, “Black Empires, White Desires,” in That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, eds. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2012).

Melvin Donalson, “Keeping it Real (Reel): Black Dramatic Visions,” in Black Directors in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 172.

Vyce Victus, “In Defense of ‘Belly’,” Birth.

Movies.Death, August 22, 2014.

Donalson, “Keeping it Real (Reel): Black Dramatic Visions,” 172.

Victus, “In Defense of ‘Belly’.”

Desiree, “Hype Williams: Defining a Genre,” Medium, October 26, 2016.

Thompson, 255. hompson, 269.

VFiles, “90s Music Videos Wouldn’t Exist Without Hype Williams,” YouTube video, August 15, 2016.

Michael Dequina, “Belly,” The Movie Report Archive 41, no. 165, November 5, 1998.

26

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

27

Owen Gleiberman, “Belly (Movie - 1998),” Entertainment Weekly, November 20, 1998.

“Belly: You Don’t Realize How Good This Movie Actually Is,” Words About Sounds (blog), January 27, 2013.

Adam Wray, “Belly: Hype Williams’ Advanced Time Capsule,” SSENSE, January 9, 2017.

Tunnel was located at 220 Twelfth Avenue, in the Chelsea neighbourhood of Manhattan, New York City. The space has since been shut down, but the nightclub operated from 1986 until 2001.

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

Kanye West, “All Of The Lights,” YouTube video, February 18, 2011.

VFiles. “90s Music Videos Wouldn’t Exist Without Hype Williams.”

Quoted in VFiles.

Thompson, 215.

Susan Sharp, “Nostalgia for the Future: Retrofuturism in Enterprise,” Science Fiction Film and Television 4, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 25.

Byrd, “In Search of the Good Life: Toward a Discourse on Reading the Black Body in Hip-Hop and Luxury Fashion,” 183.

‘90210’ is the primary ZIP code of the affluent city of Beverly Hills, California.

Bonsu Thompson, “All Hail Hype Williams, The Director Whose ‘Videos Just Looked Like Money’,” Mass Appeal, September 18, 2017.

Flower and Rosa-Solas, 118.

Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” 289.

Murray Forman, “Epilogue,” in The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 342.

28

TO MAKE AND DESTROY: SCULPTURES OF ANNE WHITNEY

WRITTEN BY SIMONE CAMBRIDGE EDITED BY NICHOLAS RAFFOUL & LUCIA BELL-EPSTEIN

29

In the nineteenth century, artists often struggled with depicting the newly emancipated population of blacks in America. Anne Whitney (1821-1915) was one such artist, a female neoclassical sculptor who often depicted narratives concerning contemporary issues. Whitney struggled to depict race in her works Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God or Africa (1862-1864) and Toussaint L’Ouverture in Prison (1869-1871). The sculptures were created during shifting concepts of racial difference and gender. The artist, challenged and restricted by Victorian norms, eventually destroyed both works. Luckily, scholars today have access to these works through studio photographs. This paper will discuss these two artworks analysing Whitney’s artistic process, thematic strategy and reasons for destruction. Both sculptures reference America’s newly emancipated black population in subject and the artist draws on the work of other nineteenth century sculptors. I argue that Whitney destroys Ethiopia and L’Ouverture because of the complex changing representational politics and criticism surrounding her work.

In Boston and later abroad in Rome, Anne Whitney was very involved in politics. Her interests included the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, and women’s rights. Whitney was a part of several Boston abolitionist groups that were under the influence of local newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison. The condition of the black enslaved woman was essential to Garrison’s cause. He radically argued that true emancipation must allow freedom from slavery and chattel-like marriage.

Denouncing these institutions, Garrison welcomed women into his group like Whitney and fellow sculptor, Edmonia Lewis. She also maintained friendships with radical abolitionists including Wendell Phillips and Angelina Grimké. After a career in poetry, Whitney turned to sculpture and immediately began creating works that expressed her political interests. Ethiopia (Fig. 1) and Toussaint L’Ouverture (Fig. 2) were direct results of her abolitionist leanings and contemporary political theory influences their theme and form. In 1863 while working on Ethiopia, Whitney attended so many abolitionist meetings that she felt her attendance was leaving her less time for sculpture. The artist’s sculptures reflect her passion for politics but also reflect the complexities of the “normal gaze” in neoclassical sculpture.

During a political period where America’s history of almost 400 years of slavery was coming to an end, artists were tasked with using visual tools to imagine a new black, free population. Many sculptors chose 30

Figure 1: Anne Whitney, Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God, or Africa (1862-64), plaster, destroyed, Photograph courtesy of the Wellesley College Archives, Papers of Anne Whitney.

Figure 2. : Anne Whitney, Toussaint L’Ouverture in Prison, (1869-1871), plaster, destroyed, Photograph courtesy of the Wellesley College Archives, Papers of Anne Whitney.

31

to grapple with the issue of slavery including Whitney’s contemporaries William Wetmore Story and Edmonia Lewis. Whitney sculpted a number of black figures, with one commentator noting “I know no artist who has dared to treat the negro as proper subject for art; but Whitney has done it over and over again.” Like other sculptors, Whitney was challenged to form a way to visually understand the black body within neoclassicism. A figure’s social status and narrative were to be revealed by visual signs of gender, sex, class, and race during the process of viewing sculpture. This visual vocabulary was still being created for black bodies in sculpture as they began to be considered figures worthy of high art. Aesthetic constraints of the period shaped how Whitney envisioned Ethiopia and Toussaint L’Ouverture as part of the American visual landscape.

Ethiopia was created in response to the Emancipation Proclamation that had been recently drafted by President Lincoln in 1862. Ethiopia was modelled to affirm the importance of the moment and its meaning to the formerly enslaved in the consciences of the American people. The life-sized sculpture is an allegory of emancipation represented through the body of a mixed-race woman. The nude woman symbolises black America, blinded by the brightness of emancipated life. Her body reclines slightly as if she has just awoken to the realisation of an important moment in history. Whitney takes her inspiration from Psalms 68:31 that reads “Princes shall come out of Egypt and Ethiopia shall soon stretch out forth her hands unto God.” This often quoted Bible passage was interpreted by black Americans and abolitionists as evidence for prosperous ancient African civilisations and used to refute white supremacy. Ethiopia was modelled in clay, then cast in plaster in 1863, but a marble completed version was never made. The sculpture was exhibited in 1864 at a Boston gallery to raise money for the Union in the Civil War and in 1865 at the New York Nation Academy of Design.

Whitney uses a visual vocabulary in Ethiopia that attempts to resist popular racial stereotypes. Whitney borrows from William Wetmore Story’s Libyan Sibyl (1861) and Cleopatra (1869) of which both depict figures representative of black Americans. Story depicts black women with facial features indictive of Africa, while avoiding the “grotesque” physiognomy of the “Congo.” Like Story, Whitney uses allegory and history to situate black Americans in the neoclassic ideal, normally reserved for white bodies. The Libyan Sibyl as a “pre-Christian prophetess” symbolises Africa seeing its future of slavery while Cleopatra, 32

in contemplation of her later suicide, represents the struggle of black people under the status of enslaved. Whitney draws on Libyan Sibyl’s theme of seeing the fate of black America in Ethiopia. The Libyan Sibyl looks “out of her black eyes into futurity and sees the terrible fate of her race,” whereas Whitney’s Ethiopia sees the present period of post-emancipation.

Unlike Story’s Libyan Sibyl, Ethiopia is represented as a mixed-race woman, a mulatta with one black parent and one white parent. Whitney uses the racial category of mulatta to place black womanhood in the neoclassical aesthetic where the white female nude took precedence. Whitney used a white nineteen-year-old upper-class New England woman, Elizabeth Howard Bartol, as her model and it is likely that she stylised the sculpture’s hair based on Harriet Tubman. Her use of a white model exposes Whitney’s intentions to situate Ethiopia in proximity of the white female nude. Although a black female figure, Ethiopia is modelled after the white female nude because of its status as the standard of beauty for the nineteenth century neoclassical aesthetic. The mulatta was an extension of the white female nude through miscegenation and the mixed-race body was considered more acceptable and more visually appealing for white audiences, displacing the “full-blooded Negro” female nude. Whitney struggles to depict Ethiopia’s black facial features because of this racial tension.

Some viewers praised Whitney’s Ethiopia celebrating the sculpture’s “bold magnificence, a wild abandonment, and at the same time a yearning aspiration in the expression of the face that both astonishes and excites a deeper sentiment of admiration.” The commentator further claimed that Ethiopia “positively offends by a voluptuousness amounting almost to a coarseness.” Another positive review of the sculpture commended the wonderful fusing of “African and Egyptian type of features…without bordering on the more vulgar and broader developments of the African peculiarity.” Others criticized her use of allegory and representation of black physiognomy. The National Academy of Design considered Ethiopia to be too safe, stating “Miss Whitney has only half dared, and between realism and idealism has made a woeful fall.” The white abolitionist commander of the first southern black regiment, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, privately encouraged Whitney to add more “Africanized features” to Ethiopia, arguing that “it is nothing for her to rise and abnegate her own features in rising; she must rise as God made her or not at all.” Higginson even recommended a new black model to improve the work.

33

In response, Whitney remodelled the facial features, hands and feet of Ethiopia from 1865-1866. She gave Ethiopia fuller lips, a wider nose and broader cheekbones in an attempt to depict an appropriate level of blackness (Figs. 3 and 4). Before ultimately destroying the figure in dissatisfaction, she wrote in 1866 “I am not satisfied with the face of the woman. What it has gained in strength of feature, it has lost in feeling and expression.” Whitney destroyed Ethiopia sometime after 1874 but still considered the work to be “one of the best things [she] ever did.”

Toussaint L’Ouverture in Prison (Fig. 2) was created after Anne Whitney had modelled and exhibited Ethiopia, while she was trying to launch her public career in Rome. In the sculpture, revolutionary leader of Saint Domingue, Toussaint L’Ouverture, is seated, eyes confronting the viewer. The general is barefoot, indicating his status as an enslaved man, and his bulging muscles suggest a strong, powerful body. Unlike Ethiopia, L’Ouverture’s African decent was made more visually apparent by his tightly curled hair, broad nose, and full lips. The figure is crouched with one hand behind his knee and his other pointing to the ground. The position suggests that L’Ouverture intends to rise or stand up at a moment’s notice. The sculpture was produced in Rome and exhibited in Boston by 1873.

L’Ouverture was a repeated figure in Anne Whitney’s work. Whitney had written about Toussaint L’Ouverture in The Prisoner of St. Joux from her 1859 published Poems and likely returned to the subject in sculpture during her reflections on Ethiopia’s features. Instead of catering to the demand for “Africanized features” in an original allegory, Whitney turned to a male historical figure to avoid the restrictive aesthetic conventions of the mixed-race female nude. Writing privately, Whitney “It is impossible, I think in art, thus to generalize, or to make an abstract of all possible African types. I should have sought to do the best with what I know of the negro.” Instead of attempting to merge black physiognomy with the neoclassical white female aesthetic through a half-black, half-white body, Whitney moved to sculpt a “full-bodied Negro” black male body. Whitney’s friend, Wendell Phillips, also had given a speech praising Toussaint L’Ouverture in December 1861, in front of large a Boston crowd. The artist was likely in attendance as the event was promoted in her abolitionist circle and was further inspired to create the sculpture. Nevertheless, the sculpture is never mentioned in Whitney’s letters, but scholars speculate 34

Figure 3: Anne Whitney, Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God, or Africa (1862-64), plaster, destroyed, Photograph courtesy of the Wellesley College Archives, Papers of Anne Whitney.

Figure 4: Anne Whitney, Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God, or Africa (reworked 1865– 66), detail of the head, plaster, destroyed, Photograph courtesy of the Wellesley College Archives, Papers of Anne Whitney.

35

that letters were discarded to hide from her family the fact that she was sculpting a half nude black man.

In sculpting Toussaint L’Ouverture, Whitney did not face the same difficultly situating the black male nude in neoclassicism as during the modelling of Ethiopia. The black male nude had begun to enter American public sculpture in the 1860s, although considered dangerous and racially inferior under dominating norms of white supremacy. The physique of the ideal black male nude became synonymous with the Emancipation Proclamation, conferring on the black man the status of freedom through the masculine body. Whitney draws from John Quincy Adams Ward’s The Freedman (1863), which symbolises black Americans rising to the status of full citizenship. L’Ouverture shares The Freedman’s (Fig. 5) seated pose, black physiognomy, and “kinky” hair. Whitney’s figure, however, does not look away from the viewer, wears a pair of trousers, and is slightly touching the ground. Whitney likely knew of The Freedman through her friend, American critic and art collector James Jackson Jarves who was enthusiastic about Ward’s depiction of American history. Despite using the historical figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the sculpture was never completed due to nineteenth century political and social tensions.

Unlike depictions of powerful black women, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s power as a figure from recent history could not be safely contained by death or allegory due to the appropriation of Haiti’s narrative in contemporary politics. Many Americans considered abolitionists in the 1830s and 1840s to be threats to the fabric of racial order. Toussaint L’Ouverture originally was celebrated by abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison as a fearless leader who brought positive change to Saint Domingo by overthrowing ruling white planters. L’Ouverture’s leadership was used as a tool to convince Northern leaders to allow African American soldiers to fight in the American Civil War. Whitney’s L’Ouverture, in his confronting gaze addressing the audience, is suggestive of the revolutionary fervor of 1860s. L’Ouverture is anxious to take his freedom whereas Ward’s Freedman sits in contemplation after his shackles are broken by someone else.

Both bodies are powerful, but Whitney’s figure eventually would have been considered a dangerous visual statement and a threat to white authority in its ability to inspire black Americans. Later during the Civil War, L’Ouverture was used by abolitionists to convince the American 36

Figure 5: John Quincy Adams Ward, The Freedman, (1863), Bronze, 49.8 cm, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio.

37

public of the necessity of emancipation. While black enslaved people could become courageous and patriotic, they also were capable of being violent and rebellious. Toussaint L’Ouverture eventually became synonymous with the complete overthrow of white supremacy and ruling social order. After emancipation, L’Ouverture’s narrative was further appropriated to justify a racially oppressive labour system that contributed to the failure of Reconstruction. Whitney’s knowledge of these political changes, through her involvement in the Boston abolitionist community, would have led her to ultimately destroy the sculpture.

There was also the issue of Whitney sculpting the black male enslaved body as a white upper-class woman. The sculpture meant that Whitney participated in the viewing of the body of a partially exposed black male. This would have been socially inappropriate for Anne Whitney as a white upper-class woman in the context of Northern United States.

The artist herself may have felt comfortable sculpting a nude black male, but others would have felt differently. Shortly after sculpting Toussaint L’Ouverture, in 1874 Whitney won a contest for her depiction of Charles Sumner, a New England abolitionist senator. The committee, however, did not think it appropriate for a woman to model a man’s legs and the commission was ultimately awarded to Thomas Ball. Whitney’s figure, although seated and dressed in contemporary trousers, still required knowledge of male anatomy. The sculptor expressed her disagreement to family and friends with the committee’s decision and nevertheless continued to sculpt white men. The sculptor, however, may have been made more aware of the restrictive gender dynamics that still existed with neoclassicism, as she had been made more sensitive to racialized physiognomy while working on Ethiopia. By sculpting Toussaint L’Ouverture, Whitney’s work was not just indexed by gender but also the social politics surrounding the population of newly emancipated black Americans. Thus, Toussaint L’Ouverture in Prison was eventually destroyed by the artist.

Anne Whitney, a female American neoclassical sculptor, struggled with the changing nineteenth century politics of representation and criticism surrounding her works Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God or Africa (1862-1864) and Toussaint L’Ouverture in Prison (1869-1871). She depicts contemporary issues that attempt to provide a visual vocabulary for newly emancipated black Americans. In Ethiopia and L’Ouverture, the artist is challenged and restricted by artistic 38

and societal norms. Her frustration with the limits of Victorian society ultimately leads to the destruction of both works that scholars today recover through photographs. Nevertheless, Whitney contributes to the American visual landscape during a period where black people in America were increasingly emerging as the subjects of high art.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Margaret Farrand Thorp, “The White, Marmorean Flock,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2 (1959), p.159.

Melissa Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteeth-Century Rome, (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014) p.157.

Melissa Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2006), p.84.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.86.

Whitney’s Lady Godiva was sculpted in 1962 as a feminist response to accusations of female sculptors being unable to sculpt their own work. See Elizabeth Rogers Payne, “Anne Whitney: Art and Social Justice,” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 12, no. 2, (Spring 1971), p.245-260.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.86.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.89.

Charmaine A. Nelson, “Introduction: Toward a Black Feminist Art History,” The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p.xiii.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.89.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.89.

Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., “Art of the Antislavery Movement,” Courage and conscience: Black & white abolitionists in Boston, ed.

Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington, Indiana: For the Boston Athenaeum by Indiana University Press, 1993), p.47.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.90.

Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.157.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.86.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.88.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.88 Charmaine A. Nelson, “Racing the Body: Reading Blackness in William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra,” The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p.143-158.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.87.

Charmaine A. Nelson, “’So Pure and Celestial a Light’: Sculpture, Marble, and Whiteness as a Privileged Racial Signifier,”

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p.68-72.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.89; Payne, “Anne Whitney,” p.245-260.

Nelson, “’So Pure and Celestial a Light,’” p.68-72.

Charmaine A. Nelson, “The Color of Slavery: Degrees of Blackness and the Bodies of Female Slaves,” The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p.127; Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.165-166.

Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.160; Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.9092 Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.162; Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.92.

Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.162; Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.92.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.92; Nelson, “The Color of Slavery,” p.129 Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” 162; Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.92.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.89; Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.157.

Nancy J. Scott, “‘Dear Home’: a sculptor's view from Rome, 1867-71: the unpublished letters of Anne Whitney.,” Sculpture Journal, vol. 17, no. 1, p.19.

Scott, “‘Dear Home,’” p.32.

Anne Whitney, “Prisoner of St. Joux,” Poems, (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1906); Scott, “‘Dear Home,’” p.32 Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.162; Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.9294 Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.162; Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.92.

Nelson, “The Color of Slavery,” p.127.

“Wendell Phillips: Dear Home, The Letters of Anne Whitney,” Wellesley College Archives (date of late access 15 April 2019) http://omeka.wellesley.edu/whitneytranscribe/collections/show/65 Matthew J. Clavin, “A Second Haitian Revolution,” Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War : The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p.77-82.

Scott, “‘Dear Home,’” p.32 Michael Hatt, “‘Making a Man of Him’:

40

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

41

Masculinity and the Black Body in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 15, non. 1, (March 1992), p.25-29.

Hatt, “‘Making a Man of Him,’” p.30.

Nelson, “The Color of Slavery,” p.127.

Scott, “‘Dear Home,’” p.31; Hatt, “‘Making a Man of Him,’” p.30.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.87.

Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.85.

Clavin, “A Second Haitian Revolution,” p.77-85.

Clavin, “A Second Haitian Revolution,” p.99-111.

Clavin, “A Second Haitian Revolution,” p.116.

Eleanor Tufts, “An American Victorian Dilemma, 1875: Should a Woman Be Allowed to Sculpt a Man?,” Art Journal, vol.

51, no. 1, (Spring 1992), p.51-55.

Janet A. Headley, “Anne Whitney’s ‘Leif Eriksson’: A Brahmin Response to Christopher Columbus,” American Art, vol. 17, no. 2 (Summer 2003), p.40-59.

Tufts, “An American Victorian Dilemma,” p.51-55.

BEHIND THE LENS: CONTEXTUALIZING HANNAH MAYNARD’S PHOTOGRAPHY SURROUNDING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

WRITTEN BY SARAH FORD EDITED BY ELLIE FINKELSTEIN

42

The imagery surrounding Indigenous peoples can provide remarkable insight into the often extremely flawed ideologies and perspectives belonging to the people creating these images. Through capturing images of Indigenous peoples, photographers indirectly showcase their attitudes and feelings towards Indigenous sitters. Hannah Maynard’s photographs of Indigenous people in the mid- to late-19th century reinforce the Noble Savage paradigm, reflect power ineq-uity between photographer and subject, and showcase a lack of understanding of Indigenous culture reflective of the surrounding historical context. By situating these images amongst other photographs surrounding Indigenous subjects in British Columbia and Quebec, as well as the po-litical conditions surrounding Indigenous peoples, it becomes clear that photographs like Maynard’s reflect and assist in facilitating the oppression of Indigenous peoples.

Hannah Maynard was born in Cornwall, England in 1834, married Richard Maynard at the age of eighteen and, shortly thereafter, settled in Bowmanville, in present day Ontario. They quickly had four children before Richard temporarily left his family in pursuit of British Colum-bia gold. During his absence, Maynard began to study photography, possibly under the R. and H. O’Hara photography, insurance and bookseller’s firm. After her husband’s return, Maynard and her family relocated to Victoria where she set up her own photographic studio in 1862, becoming the first professional female photographer in British Columbia. She became a prolific, varied and successful photographer, with newspapers hailing her as “industrious” and “persevering,” and naming her a “leading photographer of Victoria.” Throughout her career, Maynard’s work reflected technological and aesthetic innovation, as she experimented with composite images, multiple exposures and other new techniques.

Despite this aesthetic progressiveness, the content of Maynard’s work, particularly during her early career, reflect and reinforce problematic ideologies, which become most apparent in her creation of cartes-devisite of Indigenous sitters.

Cartes-de-visite are small, 4” by 2½” photos mounted on calling cards, which became extremely popular in mid-19th century Europe and North-America. The popularity of these cartes along with the low production cost made the sale of these pieces a lucrative business. These products sold between $1.50 and $4.00 per dozen, representing a substantial cost considering that during this time, the male store clerk only earned eight dollars per week. Therefore, these cartes became status 43

symbols of the prosperous middle class. In Victoria, they were sold mostly to tourists as keepsakes of their visit. Generally, cartes-de-visite displayed various subject matter from family members to celebrities, but in Victoria, cartes-de-visite of Indigenous people were the most commonly produced and sold. The British Columbia Provincial Museum, and the British Columbia Provincial Archives, have preserved 143 images of this nature created by at least five photographers in Victoria. Of these, Maynard produced forty-two, making her one of the most prolific creators of these images at the time. She positioned herself in an ideal place to make profit off these images, as they began to gain popularity the year she established her studio in 1862, and remained a lucrative business until the 1870s.

Of the many ways that Maynard’s images are problematic, the perpetuation of stereotypes surrounding Indigenous peoples is especially prominent. Maynard was one of the first photogra-phers to isolate Indigenous sitters in studio images, and then re-photograph them onto photos of landscapes or Indigenous villages (figs. 1 and 2). The resulting image portrayed a single Indige-nous person often imposed on a vast landscape. Most prolific in this re-photography technique surrounding Indigenous subjects was Maynard’s contemporary, Benjamin Leeson.

Leeson was a photographer in British Columbia in the late 19th and early 20th century. Working around the same time and in the same location as Maynard, their meeting would not be unlikely, and since they shared the same technique, they were certainly aware of each other’s work. Producing many images of this kind, Leeson’s photographs often included vast landscapes with a single Indige-nous person, and a trace of the village, producing a feeling of isolation with the Indigenous person seeming to contemplate their disappearance. These images are in direct alignment with the Noble Savage myth present in various forms of art.

The Noble Savage myth was a popular artistic motif showcasing Indigenous peoples’ calmness in the face of a supposedly “inevitable and pre-destined” decline of their culture as a result of the “superior” white settler culture. One example directly adopting this ideology, “The Sunset of his Race” by Leeson, showcases an Indigenous man imposed on a vast landscape watching the sunset and appearing to contemplate the demise of his peoples (fig. 3). The title re-inforces this representation, shedding light on Leeson’s intentional incorporation of this myth. The Noble Savage myth facilitated the forgetting of violence against Indig44

Above: Figure 1. Hannah Maynard, Haida Washerwoman (1865-66), Photograph, Provincial Archives of British Columbia, Canada.

Below: Figure 2. Hannah Maynard, Haida Mary (1865-66), Photograph, Provincial Archives of British Columbia, Canada.

45

Figure 3. Benjamin Leeson, The Sunset of His Race (1913), Photograph, City of Vancouver Archives, Canada.

46

47

enous peoples, and enforced the myth of their “logically inevitable disappearance.” Not only did these images re-flect the Romanticism of the Noble Savage myth pre-existent in other art, but their popularity assisted in solidifying this idea as emblematic of Western Canada. Since these images were of-ten sold to tourists as cartes-de-visite, they became symbols of the West when presented as proof of a visit to this territory.

Not only did the content of cartes-de-visite reinforce stereotypical ideas of Indigenous peoples, but the conditions of production further contributed to the deeply unequal power dy-namic that existed between Indigenous sitter and white photographer. Indigenous sitters posing for cartes-de-visite were usually paid a small amount or offered goods in a barter exchange. However, Indigenous peoples were not the patrons of these images, and therefore, had no control over how they were being represented. Moreover, this payment was often seen as an annoyance to white photographers. Leeson complained that this payment was a hindrance, placing a damper “upon the enthusiasm that might otherwise lead me to make a great many more exposures than I do.”

This attitude informs the context under which Maynard’s photos were likely created.

The subordination of Indigenous sitters is further highlighted in the way in which sitters were photographed. While white patrons in studio portraits most often stood or sat on a chair, twenty percent of the 143 preserved carte-de-visite images contain Indigenous peoples sitting on the studio floor, further highlighting the marginal status given to Indigenous peoples. One example is Maynard’s image of Indigenous workers, who had likely been selling products on the street outside the studio, allowing Maynard to easily access this kind of portrayal (fig. 4). In this image, the high angle and the seated position of the Indigenous subjects render them small and subordinate. More, scholars suggest that there was not very much interaction between the subjects and the photographer, and very little information is recorded to shed light on the identi-ties of the subjects.

The lack of agency of Indigenous peoples over their own representation presents a power structure that is further complicated by the market for these photographs. As mentioned, white, middle-class tourists sought out these images as status symbols which were meant to be shared and presented to others as calling cards. Presenting an image of an Indigenous person as a symbol of one’s own wealth showcases a dehuman48

Figure 4. Benjamin Leeson, The Sunset of His Race (1913), Photograph, City of Vancouver Archives, Canada.

49

ization of Indigenous individuals. These images would communicate to other white people not only that the owner had enough money to travel to British Columbia, a land characterized by its supposed savageness, but to own a keepsake of a member of its “dying race.” Through these photos, imagery of Indigenous peoples was commercialized, further reinforcing power inequality as Indigenous people were reduced to symbols for white tourists to purchase.

Furthermore, as a result of the lack of Indigenous agency over representation, cartes-de-visite images present a blatant lack of understanding and respect surrounding Indigenous culture. Maynard had a preference for Haida imagery, often re-photographing the images on top of Haida villages without regard for the actual tribe the Indigenous subjects belonged to. The disregard for the specificity of this individual and tribe becomes very apparent in this process, as the diver-sity of Indigenous culture was ignored. This lack of understanding of, and respect for, Indige-nous culture was not isolated in British Columbia, but also reflected elsewhere in Canada.

Indigenous culture was not only simplified through photography, but this art form was also implicated in appropriation. William Notman, a prominent photographer in Montreal during the mid- to late-19th century, photographed many white sitters wearing Indigenous clothing and accessories. This appropriation of Indigenous clothing not only demonstrates a lack of understanding and respect for Indigenous culture, but it further illustrates another phenomenon: the creation of Canadian identity through this imagery, and through the “othering” of Indigenous peoples. An advertisement for the Notman studio illustrates the adoption of Indigenous imagery into the Canadian identity, stating that Indigenous props had the, “additional advantage of affording to friends at a distance an excellent idea of our Canadian winters, and of the following Canadian sports and outdoor amusements.” By utilizing Indigenous imagery and activities as Canadian signifiers, Notman’s images further shed light on how Indigenous peoples were reduced to ideology, which white people were able to pick and choose from in order to assist in constructing Canadian identity.

While no evidence has been found to suggest Maynard photographed white sitters in Indigenous clothing, an attitude of appropriation and “othering” of Indigenous peoples is present in her work. The ideal of the Noble Savage was adopted by white tourists and became emblematic 50

of Western Canadian ideology, while the specificity of Indigenous peoples was ignored. There-fore, Maynard’s images highlight an idealization and commodification of Indigenous peoples and culture in order to make profit while rejecting the individual.

The white colonial gaze surrounding images of Indigenous persons is further highlighted by ethnographic efforts of the time. Again, it is highly likely that Maynard was aware of these efforts, considering she subscribed to four separate photography journals. While she did not directly adopt this practice, it surely informed her attitude towards Indigenous peoples as sub-jects and types. Photographs of Indigenous people also served the purpose of documenting racial “types.” While no evidence has been found to suggest Maynard’s works directly and intentionally served this purpose, another photographer of Victoria demonstrates this initiative. George Dawson was a prolific photographer in British Columbia in the 19th century, and his main pur-pose was to conduct ethnographic surveys of Indigenous peoples. Even going as far as unearthing graves to recover head shapes, Dawson’s pseudo-scientific work illustrates another power dynamic, establishing white settlers as students and Indigenous people as objects to be studied. These images reflect the exotification of Indigenous peoples, as well as the salvage paradigm of documenting a dying race on this territory.

Cartes-de-visite began to decrease in popularity in the 1870s, as larger photographs became more popular. Maynard accommodated to local markets, and moved towards landscape photography and on-site Indigenous documentation. It would have been considered remarkably inappropriate and dangerous for a woman at this time to enter the wilderness of Victoria without being accompanied by a man. Therefore, after teaching her husband photography, Maynard accompanied him on his photography expeditions around British Columbia. Despite the change in photographic processes, these images were still bathed in flawed assumptions about Indigenous peoples. In her journal, Maynard’s notes illustrate how these trips were not void of problematic Indigenous stereotyping. She writes, “3 indians came up with nothing on but a piece of old blanket. However they did not kill me. We took three negatives [sic].” This description exposes the conditions and attitudes under which these images were taken. The photographs taken of Indige-nous people on-site follow similar conventions as the carte-de-visite, often propagating the Noble Savage myth, and recording little information on photographic subjects.

51

Concomitant to the Noble Savage ideology in photography depicting Indigenous subjects was the idea of the terra nullius in landscape photography. Maynard, along with her husband became an avid landscape photographer. Further, analysis of this form of photography is crucial to an understanding of the relations to, and perspectives of, Indigenous populations. This style gained Maynard transnational praise, and one 1878 article in Seattle’s Weekly Pacific Tribune stated that, “people wanting views of British Columbia will do well to patronize Mrs. Maynard.”

Despite this praise, these images propagated problematic ideologies surrounding Indigenous peoples. The development of photography in British Columbia was closely linked to land, as many photographers at the time were hired for surveying. The land of British Columbia was relatively undeveloped, and the Western Canadian ideology of an untamed, wild territory was often propagated in these images. Landscape images were also used to attract tourists, since images of “empty” and “untouched” landscapes were popular and in demand. The images contributed to the reinforcement of the idea of terra nullius, ignoring that the land belongs to In-digenous peoples. These images encode the notion that the land was ready for the taking, and full of untapped potential.

Traces of the Canadian Pacific Railway are often included to sug-gest the beginning of a civilization. These photographs shed light on the conditions that facilitated the appropriation of Indigenous lands, and the oppression of Indigenous peoples.

These images do not exist within a vacuum, but are surrounded by political and historical context surrounding Indigenous peoples. In 1876, the Indian Act was established, deeming Indigenous people wards of the state, and banning their cultural practices among other methods of controlling and suppressing Indigenous lives. This government-sanctioned oppression of Indigenous peoples sheds light on the context surrounding the mentioned images. Not only do these images reflect the extreme subordination of Indigenous peoples, but their popularity assisted in promoting false ideals that aided in forgetting a history of colonial violence and disregarding the humanity and specificity of Indigenous persons.

Despite this overwhelming negative representation of Indigenous peoples in the photographs of white settlers, it is important to mention that other perspectives were available from Indigenous persons themselves.

Benjamin A Haldane, a Tsimshian photographer from Metlakata-la, Alaska traveled the coast of British Columbia during the late 19th century.

52

In his studio, he photographed Indigenous peoples, whom were often the patrons of these images, with conven-tions similar to the photography of white sitters (fig. 5). His photographs demonstrated Indige-nous peoples as prospering, wearing expensive clothing and surrounded by lush fabrics. More, the name and occupation of the subjects was fully documented. The idea of Indigenous people as thriving sharply contrasts the photos discussed prior, and would have opposed the dominant notion of an inferior, dying race. Haldane’s presence in British Columbia provides crucial con-text to how the white gaze was being opposed and how alternatives were presented.

Nevertheless, photographs like those taken by Maynard, and her contemporaries, Leeson and Dawson, were the most popular and prominently displayed and distributed. These were the images and ideals that were most prevalent and accessible, adding to their power in reinforcing and solidifying the flawed narratives they represented. The myths of the Noble Savage and terra nullius presented a land ready for colonization, whose inhabitants were already inevitably disap-pearing.

This perspective supports the surrounding ideological and historical context, showcas-ing photography’s abilities to reflect and contribute to disseminating false ideals.

Figure 5. Benjamin A Haldane, Frederick Ridley

53

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, “Colonial Encounters at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: “Unsettling” the Personal Photograph Albums of Andrew Onderdonk and Benjamin Leeson,” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 49, no. 2 (Spring 2015), p. 228.

Petra Rigby Watson, “Hannah Maynard’s Multiple Exposures,” History of Photography, vol. 20, no. 2 (1996), p.

155.

More research is required to assess how Maynard was able to run a business while caring for her children; Jennifer Salahub, “Hannah Maynard: Crefting Professional Identity,” Rethinking Professionalism, eds.

Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), p. 140.

Cathy Converse, Mainstays: Women Who Shaped B.C, (Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2000), p. 66.

Converse, Mainstays, p. 64.

“Editorial Chit Chat,” The St. Louis Practical Photographer, 9 Sept ,1879.

“A Woman Photographer,” The Weekly Pacific Tribune (Seattle), 29 May, 1878.

Converse, Mainstays, p. 68.

Alan Thomas, “Photography of the Indian: Concept and Practice on the Northwest Coast,” BC Studies, no. 52 (Winter 1981-82), p. 65.

Gillian Poulter, Becoming Native in a Foreign Land: Sport, Visual Culture, & Identity in Montreal, 1840-85, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), p. 89.

Poulter, Becoming Native, p. 89.

Poulter, Becoming Native, p. 90.

Carol Williams, “Beyond Illustration: Illuminations of the Photographic ‘Frontier,’” JOW, vol. 46, no. 2 (Spring 2007), p. 30.

Margaret B. Blackman, “Studio Indians: Cartes de Visite of Native People in British Columbia, 1862-1872,” Archivaria, no. 21 (Winter 1985-86), p.

68.

This amount is only a fraction of the cartes-de-visite photographs taken at this period; Blackman, “Studio Indi-ans.”, p. 68.

Blackman, “Studio Indians.”, p. 71.

Blackman, “Studio Indians.”, p. 68.

Keri J. Cronin, “Photographic Memory: Image, Identity and the ‘Imaginary Indian’

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

in Three Recent Canadian Exhibitions,” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 80 (Fall 2003), p. 99.

Thomas, “Photography of the Indian,” p. 77.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 227.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 229.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 227.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 229.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 227.

Converse, Mainstays, p. 68.

Thomas, “Photography of the Indian,” p. 65.

Williams, “Beyond Illustration”, p. 30.

Williams, “Beyond Illustration”, p. 30.

Margaret B. Blackman, “‘Copying People’: Northwest Coast Native Response to Early Photography,” BC Stud-ies, no. 52 (Winter 1981-82), p. 88.

Margaret B. Blackman, “The Northern and Kaigani Haida: A Photographic Ethnography,” (Ohio: PhD Educa-tion, Ohio State University, 1973), p. 123.

Blackman, “The Northern and Kaigani Haida,” p. 123.

Blackman, “Studio Indians.”, p. 69.

Thomas, “Photography of the Indian,” p. 74.

Blackman, “Studio Indians.”, p. 69.

Poulter, Becoming Native, p. 89.

Blackman, “‘Copying People’,”, p. 88.

The Haida are one Indigenous tribe of British Columbia; Blackman, “‘Copying People’,”, p. 88.

Poulter, Becoming Native, p. 58.

Poulter, Becoming Native, p. 58.

Gillian Poulter, “Embodying Nation: Indigenous Sports in Montreal, 1860-1885,” Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History, eds. Patrizia Gentile and Jane Nicholas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), p. 76.

Poulter, “Embodying Nation,”, p. 76.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 229.

Williams, “Economic Necessity,” p. 35.

James William Grek Martin, “Making Settler Space: George Dawson, the Geological Survey of Canada and the Colonization of the Canadian West in the Late 19th Century,” (Kingston, Ontario: PhD Education, Queen’s University, 2009), p. 13.

Martin, “Making Settler Space,” p. 3.

Martin, “Making Settler Space,” p. 246.

Cronin, “Photographic Memory,” p. 99.

Blackman, “Studio Indians,” p. 68.

54

63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

78.

79.

80.

81.

82.

83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

89.

90.

55

Williams, “Beyond Illustration,”p. 30.

Williams, “Beyond Illustration,” p. 31.

Converse, Mainstays, p. 66.

David Mattison, “Richard Maynard: Photographer of Victoria, B.C.,” History of Photography, vol. 9, no. 2 (1985), p. 121.

Mattison, “Richard Maynard,” p. 121.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 240.

Jennifer Salahub, “Hannah Maynard: Crefting Professional Identity,” Rethinking Professionalism, eds. Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), p. 252.

Williams, Carol, “Economic Necessity, Political Incentive, and International Entrepreneurialism: The ‘Frontier’ Photography of Hannah Maynard,” The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada, eds. Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), p. 33.

Mattison, “Richard Maynard,” p. 121.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 241.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 241.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 241.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 233.

Stephen Marquardt, “The Aboriginal Peoples of Canada and their Rights under Canadian Constitutional Law,” Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America, vol. 22, no. 3 (1989), p. 253.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 233.

Morgan F. Bell, “Some Thought on ‘Taking’ Pictures: Imaging ‘Indians’ and the Counter-Narratives of Visual Sovereignty,” Great Plains Quarterly, vol 31, no. 3 (Spring 2011), p. 95.

Very little secondary scholarship has been found on Haldane, but more research should be done to shed light on the conditions of his training and work, and how he was able to attain and maintain his own studio; Bell, “Some Thought,” p. 95.

Bell, “Some Thought,” p. 96.

Bell, “Some Thought,” p. 96.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 241.

Bell, “Some Thought,” p. 95.

Blackman, “Studio Indians,” p. 69.

Hurst, “Colonial Encounters,” p. 241

56

FOR EVERYONE AN ISOLATED GARDEN: MOSHE SAFDIE'S HABITAT 67

WRITTEN BY ALICE LEMAY EDITED BY MADELEINE MITCHELL

57

The years following the Second World War are perpetually portrayed as picture-perfect cocktail parties, the baby boom, and urbanization.

At the time, it was customary for the wives of neighboring households to alternate hosting duties after a tiresome week at work for their husbands.1 Neighbours would gather at one house to enjoy barbeques and drinks in the backyard or living room while the children ran off to play wherever they pleased.2 The architecture of middle class houses facilitated the common social gatherings of the time and incorporated generous spaces to accommodate guests comfortably. Meredith Dixon’s “Terrace Door” captures a cocktail party being hosted on the patio of a Habitat apartment (Fig. 1).6 This image exposes the attempt to incorporate the social scene of the sixties into an urbanized context and its shortcomings. The many subtle constraints exposed in this photograph motivate the argument of this paper.

In 1967, Montreal hosted Expo 67, igniting a change in the city that was fueled by its international exposure and the desire to achieve recognition.3 What had once been accepted as modern was now re-evaluated, including transportation and housing. Features such as escalators were used in pavilions, with the new intention of forcing visitors to slowly browse and amplify their role as consumers. An elevated train track was

Figure 1. “Terrace Door” Meredith Dixon Slide CollectionCounty Museum of Art.

58

implemented for children and their parents to see the fair from above, with the Expo 67 theme song playing on repeat to stick in people’s heads. Factors like these complemented new architectural styles to put on display new techniques, which architects, engineers and designers were experimenting with at the time. Moshe Safdie was one of the people pushing for change in terms of architecture, considering people’s previous needs in a contemporary context. With his strong beliefs in the value of urban living in combination with nature, Safdie was selected to build a housing complex based on his thesis from the McGill University Architecture Masters program.4 The young architect uses the motto “For everyone a garden” to describe Habitat 67 as an urbanized version of the suburban house lifestyle.[5] His structure communicates with nature through its open corridors and generous sunlight exposure to integrate the sense of living in an individual household within the city. Transferring the quantity of space per suburban household to an urban setting seems implausible, yet Safdie claims Habitat 67 does just that. His structure consists of multiple alterations of concrete boxes stacked on top of one another, generating a massive, porous stack made up of heavy, brutalist elements.

Indoor spaces played a crucial role in suburban communities’ weekly gatherings all throughout the year. More precisely, I will be comparing Habitat units to suburban houses and evaluating how they accommodate the lifestyle of typical middle-class inhabitants of the 1960s. To that effect, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 fails to adequately create an urban replication of the experience of Montreal’s middle-income family homes that bordered the city in the late sixties through its insufficient outdoor living spaces and isolated location. This is demonstrated through the lack of exterior spaces to host events and cocktail parties popular in the sixties, the isolated balconies depriving children of their freedom to go from one backyard to the next and the incomplete urban experience due to the difficult city access from Habitat’s location.

The middle class of the 1960s will be defined according to yearly income during that time. In those years, the middle class made up the majority of the population and thus average statistics can be safely associated to this particular social group. In Canada, the average annual income in 1960 was $3,192.7 In this essay, the middle class corresponds to people who earned approximately this much per year.

59

Safdie’s Habitat 67 does not provide middle-class families with sufficient outdoor space to host the same expected events as in the suburbs. It seems as though the 1960s were filled with expectations and implied guidelines for all realms of lifestyle. In order for something to be considered proper, it had to conform to corresponding societal rules. Along with men working to support the family and women fulfilling their wifely duties, expectations were put on things as specific as how to host a successful cocktail party.8 Mary Grosvenor Ellsworth’s “The Golden Touch of Hospitality, To the Hostess – a Word About Today’s Parties” outlines the preparation required to ensure the comfort of the guests and to avoid any chaos that could risk disrupting the ambiance. The author also stresses the importance of planning the flow of traffic in three aisles of circulation: one for food and drinks, one for those in charge of replenishing and cleaning out the serving station, and one for the late-comers’ self-service bar. It is also crucial for the hostess to make sure none of these lines cross.9 From this chapter, it becomes clear that a minimum amount of room is required to attain all these requirements. Although it may seem unfeasible, most middle-class houses of the 1960s did have sufficient space to enable this flowing circulation.10 I had the chance to interview Huguette Fontaine, a French-Canadian wife and mother whose family inhabited a small Montreal-West duplex and then later moved to Repentigny, a suburb bordering the city. She was 28 when she visited Expo 67 with her three children and husband, who had worked on the landfill for the fair’s artificial islands, an ambitious project that almost delayed Expo 67 entirely11 Figures 1 and 2 are typical examples of events that took place amongst neighbouring households. Figure 1 illustrates a 1960s party with couples dancing and Figure 2 lays out the typical dinner scene with on family hosting another. Mrs. Fontaine spoke about the social life in suburban neighborhoods and recalled how “it was really about the community.”14 They would reunite for the Saint-Jean-Baptiste, birthdays, and holidays.

Everything was cause for celebration: We also had picnics in a backyard where we would bring our blankets and the gin. The husbands had some. It was mainly the men [who drank], the women barely drank because they were with the children.

They took care of the candy, the desserts, the chips…during the weekends and on weekdays when it was nice outside, [neighbours would 60

Above: Figure 2. Huguette Fontaine and her husband dancing at a neighbourhood house, Repentigny, 1972.12 Below: Figure 3. Patty Hearst (Unknown).

61

Figure 4. Typical bungalow in Toronto, Ontario by architect J. L. Blatherwick, 1960.18

Figure 5. Grouping of houses from Housing Design Part I, Ottawa, 195219

Figure 6. Habitat 67 Unit Configuration Plans23

62

meet up] between six and eight in the evening.

Huguette Fontaine explained how these neighbouring relationships were present in Montreal-West, in Repentigny and at her sister’s house in Laval. Hence, the strong sense of community was very important at the time. She also stated there were at least 40 people at these events because the whole street would attend.

The guide to a perfect cocktail party and Mrs. Fontaine’s memories of the sixties set the tone for typical events that occurred in the middle-class of those years. Observing archived bungalow plans from suburbs in various Canadian provinces reveals a noticeable consistency in backyards’ surface areas. According to a Master’s Thesis from the Université du Québec in Montréal, they measure from 40’-0” by 30’-0” to 40’0” by 100’-0” on average.17 Figures 4 and 5 exemplify the typical size of backyards in the sixties. Without analyzing specific measurements, the generous amount of space allocated to these exterior spaces is visible in both the individual and neighbourhood plans. Logically, 40 by 30 to 100 feet is realistic because the yards’ widths run along the house’s rear façade and extend to the fence, which is normally set between 30 and 100 feet away from that point.

Relating the previous plans (Fig. 4, 5) to the Habitat 67 plans (Fig. 6) demonstrates the difference in outdoor spaces. Habitat’s units often have two balconies measuring 37’-0” by 17’-0”, giving a total surface area of 629 squared feet.20 Therefore, if one were to host a typical party as they did in the 1960s suburbs, assuming there were forty guests on one balcony,21 there would only be 7.9 squared feet per person. According to Ellsworth’s guide,22 this space is a little too restrained, especially when compared to the 65 squared feet per person available in the average suburban backyard.

Recalling “The Golden Touch of Hospitality” once again, three different traffic lanes are required to host a successful evening.24 In Meredith Dixon’s photograph (Fig. 1), the door leading from the interior to the terrace of the Habitat 67 apartment proves itself to be quite limited. It is difficult to imagine how three separate and uncrossing aisles can coexist on these balconies, let alone fit through the units’ inadequate doors.

All the cocktail parties and social events taking place in the backyard were vital to suburban middle-class culture. Though these celebrations mainly included adults, families also had many children in those years 63

which have not yet been taken into consideration. They were greatly influenced by suburban planning and architecture and practically lived a life of their own, making use of connected backyards to run around from one lot to the next.

In fact, Huguette Fontaine mentioned how children would run across all the lots along the street freely as if there were no barriers at all.[26] Her Montreal-West duplex had an alley behind it, where the same effect was created: an interconnection amongst all separate properties of the community. At her Repentigny home, she describes how “in the winter, there was one who made an ice rink, the other one had a tractor and made small hills of snow for the kids to slide on.” Needless to say, the families shared their backyards to the point verging on becoming public spaces for the community (Fig. 7).

As for apartment living, since units are built one on top of the other, there are no individual lots that can be shared. Although Habitat 67 incorporates an urbanized version of lots, children cannot climb from one terrace to the other, thus the suburban effect is not recreated in this regard. Pia Teichman, a resident in Habitat 67 since 1973, speaks in an interview with the National Gallery of Canada, “Habitat is very, very private. There are people but I don’t see them. We just don’t see other tenants for days or weeks at times.”27 Contrary to suburban life, Habitat’s architecture does not include a connectedness between properties and in turn, residents’ paths do not coincide nearly as much as neighbours’ do in the suburbs.

Moshe Safdie did, however, attempt to build shared spaces taking into consideration the children’s needs. In a 1967 interview, he presents his Habitat project to CBC news. The young architect states that “there are two playgrounds where the children can play within the structure.”28 However, looking at the aerial view (Fig. 8), these playgrounds are not very significant. If Habitat were properly accommodating to middle-class families with an average of four to five children, it would require a much greater play space to better replicate the suburban experience.29 To summarize, as much as the suburban house layout helped adults fulfill their weekly social endeavors, it was also tremendously favourable to the children. The kids were used to running around freely and learning along the way. Habitat’s isolated terraces and limited commu64

Figure 7. Huguette Fontaine’s backyard in Repentigny with children and friends, 196726

Figure 8. Aerial View of Habitat 67 circling children’s playgrounds30

65

nal playgrounds are insufficient in replacing suburban neighbourhood backyards. Huguette Fontaine had a pianist friend who lived in Habitat and having visited the building several times stated that “there is simply not enough room for kids in there.”31 Safdie’s goal of bringing the suburban lifestyle to the city may have been incompatible with the specific realms of social life and children’s freedom, however the general attempt to build within a city may have failed in itself. Most people who live in the suburbs get to enjoy spacious lots and larger houses, while sacrificing time in long commutes to the city. An average commute into Montreal today is between 40 minutes and 1.5 hours.33 In the 1960s, at a time when there was less traffic, it may have been shorter but nonetheless remains a negative factor associated with living outside the city. Habitat 67 was technically built a few kilometers across from downtown. If a path connected both locations directly with no traffic, it could be considered an ideal location.

Although in reality, the river separating the apartment complex and the central city increases that distance significantly. Figure 10 exposes the few paths available to reach the general downtown area from the Habitat 67 location.

Figure 10. Expo 67 Map including Habitat 67 (circled in red), the general downtown area (circled in white) and the highways available to reach the city from the island.34

66

Pia Teichman, the Habitat resident, says the bus ride into the city is approximately 45 minutes.35 Before the grocery store was built near Habitat, it was otherwise somewhat deserted and residents still had to make the commute, just as they did in the suburbs.36 In an interview with CBC, Mr. and Mrs. Robin Randall spoke about life in Habitat during Expo. Mrs. Robin Randall stated that if one needed a loaf of bread, “you have to go into Montreal…onto the buses...to buy a loaf of bread or whatever and then all the way back again.”37 It is important to recall at this time, that Habitat 67’s main attraction is its “city location.” Whether it replaces the suburban middle-class house successfully or not is another part of the equation, but its initial goal was to be in the city. Is “technically” living in the city worth moving to Habitat if the commute is still a prominent factor?

As mentioned in the start of this paper, the middle-class of the sixties is defined as earning $3,192 per year.[38] Habitat’s rent in the beginning ranged from $350 to $750 per month, an amount that is simply unaffordable to the middle class of the time.[39] Safdie’s argument is that, just like any prototype, costs run much higher than the estimated ones to account for the production of molds and issues that may arise.He explains how “one third of the construction budget [was] for equipment.

But when it is reproduced in quantity, it would be competitive with conventional structure.”40 This means if it were hypothetically recreated, since the molds would already exist, the price of construction would be much lower and consequentially, so would the rent. However, it is rare that cities have pieces of land like Habitat’s as it was artificially erected. Therefore, future projects like this would probably lie in the heart of the city. If that were the case, it would entail much less free space for the construction site. The location where Habitat is situated allows for a wide sprawl of equipment, like tractors and cranes, while downtown Montreal only has restricted spaces. In fact, the factory where the boxes were made stood 300 meters away from Habitat.41 Boxes were carried whole to the site, which was located next door. This type of proximity between the construction site and its factory is unthinkable in the city’s core.42 It would entail a much steeper cost of construction. Safdie’s initial statement of reduced cost post-prototype is proven unguaranteed because with new projects comes new constraints. This concludes that Habitat 67 did not stay true to its urban vision and even if it had wanted to, it had almost no chance of being in the real city and remaining affordable to the middle-class of the sixties.

67

To conclude, Habitat 67’s actuality does not hold true to Safdie’s initial purpose for the project. Substantial differences create a fracture in the transition from suburban middle-class houses to these urban apartments. More specifically, neighbourhoods outside the city encouraged social events through their generous backyard spaces, children’s freedom with their connected yards, and isolation from the city. Habitat attempts to recreate these phenomena within the city. The collected research in this paper demonstrates how the effects did not translate and Habitat’s remaining advantage of urban location had the same consequences of the suburban commute. Huguette Fontaine answers the question of whether Habitat corresponds to the suburban home by saying “not at all. It corresponded to single adults, to people with financial means; not at all to the middle class.”43 In the end, Safdie’s concept was not a failure, but was rather ahead of its time. Intrinsically, Habitat 67 foreshadowed society’s desires today; those of urban life, independence and isolation.

68

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

69

Grosvener Ellsworth, “The Golden Touch of Hospitality,” 1953, 40.

“Birth of the Suburbs,” 2001.

Chodan, “Editor’s Note: Expo 67 Front Page Brings Back Happy Memories,” 2017.

“The Moshe Safdie Archive,” Biography, 1998.

Safdie, “For everyone a garden.,” 1974.

Expo 67 Dixon Slide Collection Website, http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/expo-67/ search/slideSearch.php Statistics Canada, « Les Générations Au Canada. » Grosvener Ellsworth, “The Golden Touch of Hospitality,” 1953 1-48.

Grosvener Ellsworth, “The Golden Touch of Hospitality,” 1953, 40.

Ibid.

Huguette Fontaine’s interview was originally in French. For the purpose of coherence, the quotes have been translated to English. Original quotes will be included in the footnotes.

Source: Huguette Fontaine personal collection.

Ibid.

Original citation: « C’était vraiment le voisinage. » Original citation: « On faisait des piqueniques sur un terrain, on apportait nos couvertes et le gin. Les maris en prenaient. C’était surtout les hommes, les femmes ne buvaient pas beaucoup parce qu’elles étaient avec les enfants. Les femmes étaient en charge des bonbons, des desserts, des chips… » Original citation : « Les fins de semaines ou les semaines quand il faisait beau entre six et huit heures. Huit heures, tout le monde était couché. Mais ça ne buvait pas dans la semaine. » Lachance, “L’architecture des bungalows de la SCHL: 1946-1974,” 2009, 54-72.

Blatherwick, “There’s Lots to Learn from these Small House Plans from the ‘60s,” 1960, 91. (Note: Backyard is cut off in plan) Lachance, “L’architecture des bungalows de la SCHL: 1946-1974,” 2009, 167. (Note: Backyards are not cut off in plan) Stanton, “Habitat 67,” 1997, 4.

Reference to Huguette Fontaine’s interview Grosvener Ellsworth, “The Golden Touch of Hospitality,” 1953, 40.

Stanton, “Habitat 67,” 1997, 4.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

Ibid.

Reference to Huguette Lafontaine’s interview Source: Huguette Fontaine personal collection.

National Gallery of Canada, “Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie.

Interview with a Resident of Habitat ’67,” 2010, 3:30-3:39.

CBC Archives, “Little Boxes: Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ’67,” 1967, 1:25-1:29.

Statistics Canada, “Les générations au Canada,” 2015, 4.

Westmount Magazine, “Habitat 67: The Shape of Things to Come,” 2017.

Original Citation: « Il n’y avait simplement pas assez de place pour des enfants là-dedans. » Riga, “Montreal’s Exercise in Frustration: A Commute That’s Longer than Ever,” 2016.

Ville de Montréal, “Un plan directeur évolutif,” 2015.

National Gallery of Canada, “Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie.

Interview with a Resident of Habitat ’67,” 2010, 3:18-3:22.

National Gallery of Canada, “Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie.

Interview with a Resident of Habitat ’67,” 2010, 3:12-3:15.

CBC Archives, “Living in Habitat ’67,” 1967, 5:38-5:50.

Statistics Canada, « Les Générations Au Canada. » Stanton, “Habitat 67,” 1997, 3-5.

CBC Archives, “Little Boxes: Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ’67,” 1967, 3:35-3:47. « Partie II Le Secteur De La Cité Du Havre: Étude Patrimoniale Sur Les Témoins Matériels De L'Expo 67, » 2.

Ibid.

Original citation : « Ça ne correspondait pas du tout. Ça correspondait aux adultes célibataires, assez en moyens, pas du tout à la classe moyenne. »

THE WARNING WITHIN ZACH BLAS’S FACIAL WEAPONIZATION SUITE WRITTEN BY SAM PERELMUTEDITED BY LUCIA BELL-EPSTEIN

71

The history of art and visual culture is deeply intertwined with the history of colonialism. Nineteenth-century artist-ethnographers such as Charles Henri Joseph Cordier relied upon scientific racism, which then dominated the human sciences, in order to inform the physical depictions of non-white subjects in their sculptures. In turn, these same sculptures served to confirm and reinforce the racist, heteronormative colonial discourses of nineteenth-century human sciences. Artist, activist, and writer Zach Blas is keenly aware of a resurgence of racist nineteenth-century pseudoscientific beliefs in the Human Sciences today, and identifies these same beliefs as the fundamental underpinning in contemporary biometric science and technology, specifically in biometric facial recognition technology. Blas’s 2011-14 Facial Weaponization Suite responds to this regression in contemporary scientific discourse through community workshops and the production of masks, (Figure 1) which do not register as a face when scanned by biometric facial recognition technologies. In doing so, Blas’s work highlights nineteenth-century colonialist scientific thought as the fundamental underpinning for biometric facial recognition technology.

Nineteenth-century colonialism relied upon the intersection of the human sciences and the visual arts, manifesting largely through sculpture, in order to normalize colonial ideals of race (blackness), gender, and sexuality. These ideals positioned the white male body as the pinnacle of a racial hierarchy and asserted that racial identity was inherent within the body. The Human Sciences were relied upon as knowledge that reified ideals of white supremacy and defined ‘black’ and ‘white’ as separate species. As separate species, ‘black’ and ‘white’ were viewed as stable, unchanging categories fundamental to one’s identity, which in turn dictated the moral, intellectual, and psychological capacities of the individual. Establishing a separation and hierarchy of racial types that privileged the white male body over others, specifically over black bodies, provided justification for colonial pursuits, as well as American justification for chattel slavery. If ‘black’ people were morally, intellectually, and psychologically inferior to ‘whites’, as “proven” by “science”, it followed that they should be the ones doing menial and manual labour. So-called ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ did not exist before colonial thought invaded the human sciences and visual arts; they are the products of this regulatory ideal.

Within this racist, pseudoscientific colonial discourse on biology and race, sculpture was called upon to provide visual proof of race as 72

biological truth by depicting differences as anatomical elements in their renderings of the human body. The Human Sciences easily drew upon pervading notions of the ideal body, as well as the material and aesthetic processes of nineteenth-century Neo-Classical sculpture in order to provide concrete evidence of biological, racial difference, instilling the white male body at the top of a prejudiced hierarchy. As such, the sculptures of artist-ethnographers like Charles Henri Joseph Cordier functioned as objective “scientific” evidence of biological racial difference, implying the inferiority of non-whites in their support of biologically rationalized colonization and slavery.

Cordier was commissioned by the French government to create ethnographic busts of different racial types, which would be placed in an ethnographic museum, a request tied to fears concerning miscegenation, racial mixing, and the “extinction” of different racial types.

Cordier’s project was based in racial essentialism, and he travelled throughout France’s Northern African colonies assembling sculptural busts of the different racial types he encountered (Figures. 2, 3, 4).

Cordier had a specific method in the assemblage of his ethnographic busts, in which he would work with multiple models in order to identify the “common characteristics” of a racial type. From there, he would combine the multiple individuals he observed into a composite bust—

Figure 1. Zach Blas, Facial Weaponization Suite, Fag Face Mask, 2011.

73

fig. 2

fig. 3

Figure 2. Charles Henri Joseph Cordier, Vénus Africaine, Cast c. 1855-1900.

Figure 3. Charles Henri Joseph Cordier, Abyssinian Girl, 1866.

fig. 4

Figure 4. Charles Henri Joseph Cordier, The Algerian, c. 1850-57.

74

an ideal type that was meant to accurately depict the defining characteristics of its race, through a single individual. As a white French man, Cordier’s problematic understanding of ideal “types” and beauty would have been shaped by his own idea of what “common characteristics” were. Additionally, his personal understanding of beauty would have been heavily informed by the dominant colonial discourse of the time, further influencing his perception. Cordier’s strategy of selecting and combining physical features to produce ideal racial types validated the racist pseudoscientific beliefs of nineteenth-century human sciences. It is clear how Cordier’s ethnographic busts helped to legitimize the claims of the human sciences while also drawing credibility from these same “scientific” claims, resulting in a discursive echo-chamber that legitimizes white supremacy.

It has been over 200 years since the start of the nineteenth century and much progress has been made both socially and technologically.

Western society would like to think that it has rejected colonial discourses and greatly distanced itself from the racist pseudoscientific beliefs and practices so prevalent throughout the nineteenth-century.

Though there truly has been advances in social and scientific arenas in this regard, our rejection of and distance from these practices have been overstated. Contemporary science has seen a resurgence of thought based on the same racist pseudoscientific beliefs that corralled nineteenth-century Human Sciences’ support of colonialism and slavery. This resurgence can be seen in works such as Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which uses IQ tests to establish ethnic differences in cognitive abilities. The Bell Curve argues that the white population generally has higher cognitive abilities than that of the black population on the basis that “the average white person tests higher [on an IQ test] than about 84 percent of the population of blacks.”

The IQ test has been widely criticized for its sociocultural, economic, and racial/ethnic minority biases, with further arguments being made that reliance on these inaccurate test scores perpetuates social and economic injustices against said minority groups. There is also ample evidence that intelligence test scores are affected by personal and motivational factors that have little or no relation to cognitive ability or performance. Writers such as Frederick Douglass, and many more since, have devoted significant time and effort refuting nine75

teenth-century theories of black intellectual inferiority, yet these same colonial theories are finding validation in works such as The Bell Curve.

Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady’s 2008 study tested whether participants could accurately judge “the sexual orientation of faces presented for 50 ms, 100 ms, 6500 ms, 10,000 ms, and at a self-paced rate (averaging 1500 ms),” concluding that participants accurately identified the sexual orientation of a given face at “above-chance levels with no decrease in accuracy for briefer exposures.” This entire study is founded upon nineteenth-century desires to read true identity from the body. We may also see colonial ideals masquerading as a contemporary scientific thought in the arguments drawing on recent genetic research put forth by evolutionary biologists, geneticists, biological anthropologists and medical researchers in order to dispute the notion that race is a socially constructed concept rather than a biological truth.

It was Rule and Ambady’s study, as well as a similar one from the University of Washington in 2012, which served as the motivation behind Zach Blas’s 2011-14 Facial Weaponization Suite. As Blas explains in his article Queer Escape, studies such as these “[parse] us into categories that will be used against us [and] gives us a visibility that only controls us, and makes us easily knowable to those in power.” It is, however, the Biometric Sciences and biometric facial recognition technology in particular that Blas identifies as fertile ground for the reintegration of white supremacist, heteronormative, colonial ideals under the guise of scientific and technological progress.

Biometrics, as explained by Shoshana Magnet, is “the application of modern statistical techniques to measure the human body and is defined as the science of using biological information for the purposes of identification.” It quickly becomes clear how Biometrics could lend itself to supporting problematic colonial ideals of white supremacy and heteronormativity. While the biometric industry claims that by letting objective machines sort through biometric processes, thereby eliminating human subjectivity, it is important to remember that those objective machines are coded by human beings with their own set of beliefs and biases. As Andreas Ekström explains: “behind every algorithm is always a person, a person with a set of personal beliefs that no code can ever completely eradicate.” Ekström underscores that personal biases and ideologies may be inserted into supposedly objective functions. Individual and sociocultural biases are thus funda76

mentally programmed into biometric technologies, specifically facial recognition technologies.

An important goal of biometric science, and the facial recognition technologies it produces, is to quickly and correctly identify large numbers of people who pass through biometric scanners. A quick and efficient way of speeding up identification processes is to reduce the size of the database with which an individual face is compared, a process which relies on “soft biometrics”. Soft biometrics are used to quickly eliminate large sections of a database which clearly would not match with the scanned face, and do so by referencing categories of race and gender. Ironically, biometric identification technologies have been observed to routinely struggle in identifying gender and particularly struggle in identifying race. When these patterns of failure are considered in tandem with the fact that soft biometrics explicitly draw on categories of race and gender, which themselves stem from racist nineteenth-century pseudoscience, we see a dissonance between the proposed objectivity and the subjective results of biometric facial recognition technologies. As Magnet explains, “biometric science consistently fails to examine existing literature on the complexity of bodily identities as well as theory on the interpretation of scientific images.”

As a result, biometrics fundamentally rely upon notions of the human body and identity as “stable” and “unchanging”— the same language used in ninteenth-century justification of colonialism and chattel slavery.

In studying the failures of biometric identification technologies we may see new identities being formed which Magnet refers to as “biometrifiable” and “unbiometrifiable” bodies. Biometric identification failures include: difficulty scanning the hands of Asian women, iris scanners excluding those with visual impairments or in wheelchairs, egregious issues in correctly identifying races other than white, and the inability to identify long-haired metrosexual men as men or women wearing ties as women. Magnet keenly notes that these technologies “regularly overtarget, fail to identify, and exclude particular communities,” and in doing so produce the binary of biometrifiable versus unbiometrifiable bodies.

It is important to note that biometric failures regularly occur in the identification of minority groups. Due to the inherent reliance on white supremacist, heteronormative, colonial ideals of race and gender programmed into it, the failures of biometric recognition technologies 77

illuminate the biometrifiable body as the classical white male body, while all ‘other’ bodies are unbiometrifiable. The further individuals move from the white male body, the more they merge or diverge from traditional markers of race, gender, and sexuality, the more unbiometrifiable they become. This binary has material consequences, as unbiometrifiable bodies are regularly denied access to basic human rights, such as mobility, employment, food, and housing; Magnet’s work further illuminates the ways in which “state institutions deploy biometrics to enact institutionalized forms of state power upon vulnerable populations.” The deployment of biometric technologies by state institutions in order to enact institutionalized power on ‘othered’ minority groups casts biometric failures in an insidiously productive light— the binary of biometrifiable and unbiometrifiable bodies works to include some bodies as part of the nation-state (biometrifiable), while excluding other bodies (unbiometrifiable). This “productive” failing of biometric identification technologies, which results in an oppositional binary of identity, both draws upon and parallels the creation and usage of the white/black binary in the nineteenth-century.

Charmaine Nelson explains the ways in which the narration of the black body allowed artists to represent black subjects as racially “other” within the arena of Neo-Classical sculpture. In much the same way, biometric science allows for non-white people to be inscribed, rather than simply depicted, as racially other within the “objective” fields of biometric and genetic sciences. Furthermore, just as the material and aesthetic practices of nineteenth-century Neo-Classical sculpture lent themselves to supporting racist pseudoscientific colonial ideals, biometric technologies and their failures are perfectly suited to contemporary neo-colonial practices in the human sciences. These practices reinforce, validate, and extend a similar racial binary to that created in the nineteenth-century.

Zach Blas’s 2011-14 Facial Weaponization Suite consisted of community workshops in which Blas discussed biometrics and queer theory, followed by the production of a collective mask by the workshop participants. Initially conceived in response to the previously mentioned 2008 and 2012 studies on the ability to identify sexual orientation from the face, Blas’s first mask, the Fag Face Mask [Fig. 1], was made by compiling the facial data of homosexual workshop participants with a Microsoft Kinect. Uploading this data to a 3D modelling software, Blas and the workshop participants do not create a facial composite in 78

Fig. 6: Zach Blas, Facial Weaponization Suite, Fag Face Mask, 2011.

Fig. 7: Zach Blas, Facial Weaponization Suite, Fag Face Mask, 2011.

Figures. 5, 6, 7: Zach Blas, Facial Weaponization Suite, Fag Face Mask, 2011.

79

the manner of Cordier, but rather aggregate and manipulate the facial data until it becomes an amorphous blob that is utterly unrecognizable as a face to biometric facial recognition technologies [Figs. 5, 6, 7]. This format remained the same for each subsequent workshop and mask, which focused on biometrics in relation to issues of race, feminism’s relations to concealment and imperceptibility, and the US-Mexico border.

Central to the production of Cordier’s ethnographic busts was the use of the white gaze as an ‘objective’ tool of scrutiny, perpetuating racist and heteronormative ideals. The method of production of Blas’s masks is quite similar to the method employed by Cordier in the production of his ethnographic busts [Figs. 2, 3, 4], notable distinctions being that Blas does not amalgamate the participants faces into a single composite, and the resulting work is not recognizable as a human face. In not amalgamating the participants faces into a single composite, Blas rejects Cordier’s reliance on the white gaze which perpetuates white supremacist, heteronormative, colonial ideals. Blas further identifies this white gaze as a fundamental basis for biometric science; by producing a mask that is wholly unrecognizable as a face, Blas invokes the habitual failures of biometric identification technologies in order to expose the inequalities that emerge when normative categories are forced upon non-normative populations.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks renewed racial fears in America, and it is no coincidence that the prevalence and popularity of biometric identification technologies rapidly grew in its wake. Presently, we see biometric identification technologies increasingly related to notions of safety, security, and surveillance, while being simultaneously integrated into commercial settings. Biometric identification technologies have been increasingly used to enforce border security, while also being found in car ignition switches and personalized advertisements marketed to individuals based on their gender, race, and physical and behavioural traits. These types of identification technologies are becoming inescapable in almost every aspect of our lives.

In response, Zach Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite highlights the analogical functions of biometrics and nineteenth-century pseudoscientific discourse in creating oppositional binary identities. Blas’s work shows how this binary supports traditional white supremacist, heteronormative, colonial ideals, and takes steps to combat this. Specifical80

ly, his community workshops are important first steps in addressing who does and does not participate in discussions concerning the expansion and development of biometric studies and identification technologies. By producing masks that are unidentifiable as individual faces by biometric facial recognition technologies, Blas exposes a contemporary binary of “biometrifiable” versus “unbiometrifiable” bodies; this binary defines biometrifiable bodies as whites bodies in opposition to those unbiometrifiable bodies, which are then necessarily non-white. Facial Weaponization Suite forces us to directly confront the failings of biometric identification technologies, and the discursive effects they produce.

81

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Charmaine A. Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) p. XXX. Charmaine A Nelson, “Venus Africaine: Race, Beauty and African-ness,” Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800-1900, eds. Jan March (Aldershot, Hampshire: Lund Humphries, 2005) p. 50.

Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XIX. Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XXVII. Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p.

XXXIII-XXXIV. Charmaine A. Nelson, “Lecture” ARTH 354B Introduction to Nineteenth Century Sculpture, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 7 February 2019.

Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XIX. Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XXX. Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XXX. Nelson, “Lecture,” 7 February 2019.

Nelson, “Venus Africaine,” p. 53.

Nelson, “Venus Africaine,” p. 55.

Nelson, “Venus Africaine,” p. 55.

Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, (London: Free Press, 1996), p. 269.

Richard A. Weinberg, “Intelligence and IQ: Landmark issues and great debates,” American Psychologist, vol. 44, no. 2 (February 1989), np.

Edward Zigler and Victoria Seitz, “Social Policy and Intelligence,” Handbook of Human Intelligence, eds. Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 597-599.

Charmaine A. Nelson, “Lecture” ARTH 354B Introduction to Nineteenth Century Sculpture, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 31 January 2019 Ambady, Nalini and Nicholas O. Rule, “Brief exposures: Male sexual orientation is accurately perceived at 50 ms,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 44 (2008), p. 1100.

Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Straw Men and Their Followers: The return of biological race,” Is Race Real? A web forum organized by the Social Science Research Council, Jun 07, 2006, (date of last access April 10 2019), http://raceandgenomics. ssrc.org/Hammonds/, np.

Zach Blas, “Facial Weaponization Suite,” Zach Blas, (date of last access 10 April

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

2019) http://www.zachblas.info/works/ facial-weaponization-suite/, np.

Zach Blas, “Weapons for Queer Escape,” Schlossplatz³, Issue 10: Identity (Crisis), vol. 10, (Spring 2011), p. 24.

Shoshana Amielle Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 8.

Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 11.

Andreas Ekström, “The Moral Bias Behind Your Search Results,” TEDxOslo, Oslo, January 2015, (date of last access 10 April 2019), https://www.ted.com/talks/ andreas_ekstrom_the_moral_bias_behind_your_search_results?language=en, 8:15.

Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 14.

Zach Blas, “Escaping the Face: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Facial Weaponization Suite,” Media-N, CAA Conference Edition, vol. 9, no. 2 (Summer 2013), np.

Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 153, 154.

Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 154.

Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 5.

Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 5, pp.

153-154.

Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 5.

Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 9, 150.

Nelson, “The Color of Stone,” p. XXXI. Zach Blas, and Jacob Gaboury, “Biometrics and Opacity: A Conversation,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, vol. 31, no. 2_92 (2016), pp.

157-158.

Blas, “Facial Weaponization Suite,” (date of last access 10 April 2019), np.

Nelson, “Venus Africaine,” p. 53.

Magnet, “When Biometrics Fail,” p. 9.

82

83

INFLUENTIAL LIMINALITY: EUNUCH PARTICIPATION IN NORTHERN SONG DYNASTY ARTISTIC PRODUCTION AND COLLECTING PRACTICES WRITTEN BY DAVIN LUCE EDITED BY WILL SCHUMER

84

The Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) is often characterised as a period in which artistic production flourished. The final emperor of the Northern Song, Huizong (r. 1100-1126), is not only known for his own artistic practice, but also his accumulation of artworks. During his reign, Huizong prompted a survey of his collection and the compilation of the Xuanhe huapu (Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings), hereafter Xuanhe Catalogue.1 In Accumulating Culture, cultural and gender historian Patricia Buckley Ebrey suggests that the practice of collecting is “fundamental to the ways knowledge is created, transmitted, and contested.”

2 Historians tend to emphasize Huizong as the active force behind the imperial collection and catalogue. Art historian Amy McNair notes, however, that in the Xuanhe Catalogue the emperor is only present as a trace. In the catalogue’s entirety there are only three instances where the emperor is present, but he “never utters direct speech.” 3 Considering McNair’s observation and Ebrey’s claim, individuals who participated in the compilation and those who contributed works to the Xuanhe Catalogue must also be considered. My intention is not to disregard Huizong’s role as collector, but rather add nuance to the subject through proposing another potential actor in this construction of knowledge: the imperial court eunuch.

What follows will act as an incubator for identifying the possibilities of how eunuchs may have affected the production and collection of artworks during the reign of Emperor Huizong. I will begin by locating the court eunuchs within the contemporaneous Chinese sociopolitical milieu and define them as liminal figures to demonstrate how their unique position provided them access to power and influence. Case studies of eunuchs will be considered throughout this essay in two capacities; firstly, eunuchs as patrons, collectors and donors featuring court eunuchs Liang Shicheng and Liu Yuan. These two case studies will demonstrate how eunuchs participated in the shift of stylistic interests of the period. The second category, eunuchs as painters, will feature Liu Yuan and Feng Jin to demonstrate how eunuchs were able to participate in contemporaneous political ideological debates through artistic production. While the categories I have proposed are not mutually exclusive, this loose framework will help to illuminate potential ways in which eunuch officials influenced the visual culture of the Northern Song dynasty.

Eunuchs are defined as “a castrated person[s] of the male sex”4 and have been in the employ of the rulers of China since the Shang dy85

nasty (1600-1046 BCE). During certain historical periods, such as the Tang (618-907 CE) and the Ming (1368-1644 CE) dynasties, eunuchs were able to gain considerable political power and cultural influence.

Located between these two dynasties, the Northern Song period marks an important transitional moment through which we can gain insight into the understanding of eunuchism’s sociopolitical and cultural significance. During the Northern Song, a eunuch’s ability to gain such power was severely limited in comparison to earlier and later eras. Historian Jennifer W. Jay points out that “living in an age so closely after the Tang, where eunuchs enthroned and dethroned emperors at will and dominated political and military arenas,”5 eunuchs were regarded with fear and anxiety by imperial bureaucratic officials.

This fear inspired by eunuchs was further elaborated in Xin Wudaishi (Historical Record of the Five Dynasties [907-960]) by Northern Song scholar-official Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072). 6 Ouyang wrote that “[f ]rom antiquity eunuchs have created havoc to the state; the source (of their threat) is more entrenched than that of the clamity [sic] of women.

As for women, that is merely lust. The harm caused by eunuchs is not confined to merely one area.” The ostensible harm was, in part, due to eunuchs’ close proximity to imperial figures. Jay suggests that this close proximity was a source of anxiety because it bolstered their ability to gain the emperors trust and thus potentially “usurp the imperial prerogatives.” To theorize the unique social position of eunuchs in the Northern Song, I will now turn to the concept of liminality.

Liminality The reasons for the anxieties discussed above reflects a eunuch’s unique position and identity within the imperial court. I argue that this unique situation was because eunuchs were liminal figures.

Furthermore, I will argue that eunuchs were not simply liminal, but perpetually liminal social actors. The concept of liminality was first developed by French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in The Rites of Passage (1909). Van Gennep conceptualized a tripartite classification of rites of passage in ritual: rites of separation (pre-liminal), rites of transition (liminal), and rites of incorporation (post-liminal).9 For van Gennep, the liminal phase occurred after crossing a threshold and was irreversible. This process is most apparent in his section on initiation rites, and more specifically puberty rites. Van Gennep suggests that rites of a sexual nature move an individual from an asexual world and incorporate them into a sexual one which is separated into groups by 86

sex.10 Rather than experiencing an initiation rite, I argue that eunuchs experienced a rite of expulsion. After castration, the eunuch was not reincorporated into society-at-large; instead, they were stuck in the liminal zone between the asexual and sexual worlds. Eunuchs were expelled from the larger social framework and yet were initiated into their own kind of community. As discussed above, however, this community’s standing in society was tainted by anxiety and fear.

Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner further developed liminality in The Ritual Process (1969). Turner defined liminal entities or people as “necessarily ambiguous…neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”11 Jennifer W. Jay suggests even though eunuchs were castrati, their gender identity “remained unquestionably male.”

12 The removal of the genitals, however, especially when voluntary, “contradicted the basis of Confucian society,” filial piety, “which held that the greatest crimes were to leave no heir and to harm the body given by parents.”13 As such, I suggest that even if eunuchs did not necessarily self-identify as liminal beings they remained betwixt and between Chinese customs and social conventions. Without the possibility of reincorporation into the larger social framework, the eunuch occupied a liminal social zone.

In their article ‘Transitional and Perpetual Liminality: An Identity Practice Perspective,’ published in Anthropology Southern Africa (2011), social anthropologists Sierk Ybema, Nie Beech, and Nick Ellis define ‘perpetually liminal’ as “manifesting when social actors occupy social positions which they experience as persistently ambiguous or ‘inbetween’.”14 As eunuchs were unable to incorporate (van Gennep’s post-liminal phase), their position is indeed persistent and permanent.

Ybema, Beech and Ellis further elaborate on their theory stating that this perpetual position “entails being ‘drawn into extended circles of loyalty’ and ‘dwelling’ in liminal spaces,”14 and existing ‘“at the limits of existing structures.’”15 As I will argue below, eunuchs imagined and created extended circles of loyalty and existed at the limit of China’s existing social and political structures. As such, I propose that eunuchs in Imperial China were such perpetually liminal social actors. This unique social position was one of the defining factors which provided space for their participation in the production of art and collection building.

87

Political climate of the Northern Song Dynasty Having established eunuchs as perpetually liminal social actors, I will now undertake a brief political history of the Northern Song to illuminate discourses surrounding emperor-literati relations. Literati, or scholar-officials, were members of the imperial bureaucracy who acted as advisors to the emperor and headed various government offices and posts. During the Northern Song, literati were beginning to gain more political influence. As advisors to the throne, their lack of support for policy could cause frustration to the emperor and other literati.

Patricia Ebrey notes that scholar-officials could “exert pressure on emperors by prolonged resistance to appointments and policies,” so while China was an autocracy “Song emperors were often frustrated by their inability to get their officials to comply with their wishes.” The relations between emperor-literati have important implications on the ways in which eunuchs participated in the imperial system, but also impacted how art was conceived and perceived in the Northern Song dynasty.

The first century of the Northern Song dynasty is characterized by the promotion of scholarly pursuits. After Emperor Taizu (r. 960-976) seized the throne from the Zhou dynasty (951-960), he placed non-military men into governmental posts, thus beginning the shift from wu (military power) to wen (culture).17 The following two emperors continued the trend of expanding educational opportunities which led to the rise of the scholar-official class. Historian and sinologist Peter Bol suggests that the early emperors of the Northern Song favoured scholar-officials over the military men because they “were willing subordinates, without independent power, who depended on a superior authority for their political position, and who brought to their duties a commitment to the civil culture invaluable to the institutionalization of central authority,.” For Bol, the rise of scholar-officials reflects an “imperial desire to use men with ability but without a power base.” The final emperor of the first century of the Northern Song, Renzong (r. 1022-1063) , was a notable patron of Confucian education who also nurtured a system of government criticism known as the Censorate. Ebrey points out that the “old office of the Censorate and the Bureau of Policy Criticism became under Renzong major organs through which literati could challenge and ultimately alter government policies and personnel.”

Following the first century of the dynasty, an era of reforms began under Emperor Shenzong (r. 1067-1085). These reforms led to factional 88

politics which persisted through the remainder of the period. It was within this factional political milieu that the powerful court eunuch Liang Shicheng (ca. 1063–1126) was able to gain substantial political and cultural influence at the court of Huizong. Liang began as an assistant in the Calligraphy Bureau and after the death of his superior, he was given charge of the imperial document storehouse. This position made him responsible for documents destined for the emperor and those leaving the emperor’s quarters. As Patricia Ebrey notes “Liang Shicheng so impressed Huizong that he awarded him a jinshi degree in the civil service examinations in 1109.” Liang would later be appointed the supervisor of the Palace Library, a position of significant prestige.

From about 1113 or 1114, Liang even performed tasks which had traditionally been reserved for chief ministers. Liang’s rise to prominence in the imperial court system thus arose from his close contact with the emperor.

Liang’s lengthy period of imperial favor was rooted in reforms instigated by Shenzong between 1069-1073 known as the New Policies.

These policies were “a program of fiscal, agricultural, educational, civil, and military policy initiatives promulgated by Wang Anshi [10211086].” Many conservative scholar-officials, such as Su Shi (1036-1101), vehemently opposed Wang Anshi’s New Policies. They saw these policies as benefitting the state while ignoring public welfare. As art historian and curator Leong Ping Foong points out, prior to the New Policies the emperor received much of his power from his role of “arbiter between dissenting camps of scholar officials.” Shenzong’s removal of the “principle of policy consensus system, wherein top officials were appointed based on their concurring positions” essentially eliminated the system of “checks and balances achieved through dissenting views in the central government.” Shenzong also divested the Censorate of its function and as a result “dissenting members were accused of obstructionism and dismissed.” The system set out by Shenzong continued into Huizong’s reign and is largely responsible for Liang’s rise to prominence; he was the imperial favorite who garnered unshakable trust from Emperor Huizong.

The New Policies led to several imperial-sanctioned and self-imposed exiles. One literatus who experienced both forms of exile in his lifetime was Su Shi. The life and literature of Su Shi would have a lasting effect on Liang Shicheng and by extension the visual and literary cultural of the Northern Song. Su was an anti-reformist scholar-official who was 89

appointed a member of the Censorate when Shenzong was introducing the New Policies. As a member of the Censorate, Su wrote many criticisms of imperial policy. Unhappy with the Emperor’s repeated lack of response to his criticisms, Su asked for reassignment to the provinces in 1070. Later in the 1070s, Su Shi was arrested for slanderous poems against the imperial regime and was forbade to “speak out on government matters.” Rather than dampening Su Shi’s already prominent reputation, this event bolstered Su’s fame.

When Huizong ascended the throne, he inherited a deeply divided political landscape. His policies tended towards supporting the reforms set out by Shenzong and Wang Anshi, but he had attempted to reconcile the two factions during the first year of his reign. Eventually Huizong failed and sided with the reformist faction. In 1101, the emperor issued demotions to high-ranking conservative officials associated with the Yuanyou period (1086-1093). These demotions were both posthumous and imposed on those still living, such as Su Shi. After a second series of demotion which again included Su Shi in 1102 , imperial orders were given in 1103 to destroy woodblock prints of Su Shi’s collected works. It is within this divided political system that Liang Shicheng commissioned a handscroll painting of one of Su Shi’s most celebrated works.

The Eunuch as Patron, Collector and Donor The following section will consider Liang Shicheng’s participation in the creation of Illustrations to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff (Hou chibifu tu) (fig. 1) by Qiao Zhongchang (active 1120’s) which was the earliest illustration of Su Shi’s poem of the same name. I will argue that it is due to his perpetual liminal position, which allowed him unprecedented access to Emperor Huizong, that Liang was able to navigate the very political circumstances which surrounded Su Shi. By utilizing art historian Lei Xue’s article “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial: The Nelson-Atkin’s Red Cliff Handscroll Revisited,” I will demonstrate that Liang Shicheng was likely the patron of the painting and that he was influential in the loosening of the restriction on Su Shi’s literary work.

The Red Cliff scroll was created in the monochrome baimiao style (‘plainline drawing’) of the painter Li Gonglin (1049-1106) but utilizes a more calligraphic and animated sensibility that much of Li’s oeuvre.

90

Figure. 1: Qiao Zhongchang, Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff, Northern Son dynasty. Handscroll, ink on paper, 30.48 x 1224.28 cm. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.

91

Li Gonglin is an interesting artistic model for the handscroll due to his politically liminal position; Li was close friends the political rivals Su Shi and Wang Anshi. Perhaps Li’s political liminality resonated with Liang Shicheng, making Li an influential model for Liang’s self-fashioning. Li Gonglin was also one of the originators of the literati style of painting.

Literati painting can be loosely defined as an amateur field of painting which was calligraphic in nature, most often used monochrome ink, featured unmodulated lines, had a sparse composition and was done in a more spontaneous manner. Rather than seeking verisimilitude or “virtuosic execution” associated with court-style painting, literati painting instead turned “toward the intellectual integrity of the piece.”

Members of the literati favored the merit of the “executor, perhaps untrained in picture making but distinguished as a gentleman…his virtue, they argued, would be manifest in his spontaneous brushwork and its formal qualities.” In addition, literati works often included poetic or literary references. While many scholars point out that any stark definition or conceptual divide between literati and court aesthetic is not as distinct as originally thought, discourses surrounding the subtle distinction did exist at the time.

As Lei Xue points out, it was not just the style of the painting which the artist of the Red Cliff handscroll referenced. Qiao also referenced Li Gonglin’s narrative structure and formal qualities of the “hierarchically scaled figures and formulized drawing of houses,” which “Li often employed to distinguish his works from the realism of contemporary court paintings.” A section of Qiao’s handscroll (Figs. 2 and 3) demonstrates these methods. As Xue argues, however, this illustration “differs greatly from Li Gonglin’s literary illustrations.” Rather than following Li Gonglin’s “poetic intent” which was highly appreciated by literati painters , this work was a memorial painting. Whereas typical literati landscapes tend to depict a generic or imagined landscape and the individuals who inhabit them as ‘types,’ Qiao’s painting depicts the Lin’gao Pavilion where “Su Shi spent the most meaningful years of his career.” The reference to a specific place and person in Qiao’s Red Cliff painting points to the memorial nature of the work.

An avid collector of art and antiquities, Liang Shicheng accumulated a collection which included many works by both Li Gonglin and Su Shi. As previously mentioned, at this time Su Shi’s literary works were supressed by the imperial court. The colophon attached to Qiao’s painting was completed only one month after a second imperial edict 92

Figures 2 & 3. Details from Qiao Zhongchang’s Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff.

93

to destroy the printing blocks of Su Shi’s collected works. The ability to patronize an artwork so closely related to Su Shi at this period in history is extraordinary. As I will suggest below, it was Liang’s close relationship with the Emperor which allowed him to be so bold; a relationship which was afforded to Liang through his perpetually liminal position in the imperial court. Another important point to note is Liang’s official biography in the Song shi (History of the Song). It states that Liang was Su Shi’s ‘expelled son’ who complained to the Emperor about the suppression of Su’s work. According to the Song shi, after this occurrence Su’s writings “gradually came out,” emphasizing Liang’s influence at court. In a conversation featuring Liang which was reproduced in the Song shi as part of his biography, Liang also refers to Su as ‘late minister’ (xianchen). As Lei Xue suggests, this indicates that Su Shi was Liang’s late father. Furthermore, ‘late minister’ coupled with the phrase ‘expelled son’ denotes that Liang was an illegitimate son of Su Shi. Another important factor in attributing the commission of this work to Liang is the placement of his seals. As Xue notes, the placement of Liang’s seals is consistent; they are all found on the joins of the sheets of paper. This, combined with the absence of earlier seals , suggests that the process was carefully planned and executed. The placement of the seals and the paintings memorial nature (a memorial painting was often not considered a commodity to be circulated) indicates that this work was likely commissioned by Liang Shicheng in person.

Liang’s choice of the artist Qiao Zhongchang, who quoted from the politically liminal Li Gonglin, combined with Liang’s insistence on a familial connection to the highly politicized Su Shi is highly suggestive.

I postulate that Liang closely related his identity to figures who found themselves in ambiguous positions, caught betwixt and between. Furthermore, I argue that the fact that Emperor Huizong awarded Liang with a jinshi degree suggests that Liang made a concerted effort to self-fashion as a highly educated member of the literati class. As suggested by Ybema, Beech and Ellis’, perpetually liminal figures are often drawn into extended circles of loyalty. Perhaps due to Liang Shicheng’s liminality, he felt the need to create an imagined extended circle by connecting himself to Su Shi and the greater literati class.

Lei Xue ultimately argues that Liang Shicheng “played an important role in mediating, if not determining, the adoption of literati art, namely that of Li Gonglin, into court painting production.” Liang not only 94

commissioned works in the style of Li Gonglin, he also coveted the originals. Quoting from the now lost epitaph of Li Gonglin, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) scholar-official Zhou Bida (1126-1204) wrote that the “‘official version’ of a Mountain Villa picture in the imperial collection was stolen by the eunuch official Liang Shicheng.”’ Liang may have also acquired works by Li Gonglin for the imperial collection.

While there are no contemporary records of this, a Southern Song writer wrote that Li’s Mountain Villa (Figs. 4 and 5) which was “the model for the Red Cliff painting, was ‘acquired by the eunuch Liang Shicheng.’”

As Xue notes, Mountain Villa is included in the Xuanhe Catalogue, which could suggest “Liang’s direct participation in accumulating Li Gonglin works at court.” So, as Xue postulates, the role of eunuchs in the shift to a scholar-official sensibility in Chinese art production “might have been as important as that of emperor, and painters in the late Northern Song court.”

Above: Figure 4. Li Gonglin, Mountain Villa, Northern Song dynasty. Handscroll, ink on paper, 28.9 x 364.6 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan.

Below: Figure 5. Detail from Mountain Villa by Li Gonglin

95

Like Liang Shicheng, other eunuchs also collected important artworks, some of which were donated to the imperial collection and included in the Xuanhe Catalogue. As Amy McNair points out, eunuch official Liu Yuan (act. before 1093-d. after 1112) may have donated three famous antique works to Huizong’s collection: Gu Kaizhi’s Admonitions of the Court Instructress, Lu Hong’s Thatched Cottage, and The Night Outing of Lady Guoguo by Zhang Xuan. Yuan’s adoptive father, eunuch official Liu Youfang (act. Ca. 1067-1077), had “served as an advisor on art matters to Emperor Shenzong,” and was a renowned collector. Youfang was known to have owned these three paintings, but their placement in the Xuanhe Catalogue suggests that they were added to the collection after 1100. As such, McNair postulates they were likely donated

by Yuan, or his adoptive eunuch son. The donation of these important works not only functioned to preserve cultural heritage, but also made them available for copying by court painters.

The notion of copying artworks in the Chinese context does not carry the same negative connotations as it does in the modern western imagination. While the act of copying famous works has created problems for modern art historians, copying work was contemporaneously viewed as a positive and educational act. In addition, as Patricia Ebrey notes, these copies were often highly collectible. If the copyist was a prominent or famous individual, their copies could become as coveted as the originals. Of the three paintings donated by Liu Yuan, Emperor Huizong himself copied Zhang Xuan’s Lady Guoguo. Additionally, Li Gonglin is known to have copied of Lu Hong’s Thatched Roof, but the exact date when he completed the copy is unknown. Ebrey also notes that Palace Library official, Dong You (fl. 1100-1130), referred to copies being made by court painters and library staff on several occasions.

Amy McNair hypothesizes that Li Gonglin, a scholar-official at court, could have created copies of famous antique works owned by the palace during his tenure at the imperial court by request to the emperor.

This suggests that while special permission may have been required to access the palace collection, it may have been available to more than just court painters for creating copies.

Li Gonglin is also known for his copy of Gu Kaizhi’s Admonitions (fig.

6) now at the Palace Museum in Beijing. The oldest surviving copy of Admonitions (fig. 7) from the Tang period, now at the British Museum, bears a colophon by Emperor Huizong which suggests it was the version in the palace collection and the Xuanhe Catalogue. Comparing 96

Above: Figure 6. Detail, Li Gonglin after Gu Kaizhi, Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies, Northern Song dynasty. Handscroll, ink on paper, 27.9 × 600.5 cm. National Palace Museum, Beijing.

Below: Figure 7. Detail from Mountain Villa by Li Gonglin

97

the two works, it is clear that Li Gonglin reinterpreted the Tang copy in a modern, literati mode. Copies done by well-known artist were often also copied by others, such as Li Gonglin’s version of Thatched Roof which was later copied by Lin Yanxiang (act. 1131-1162). As the instigator of the donation of these important works, the Liu Yuan not only contributed to the preservation of important cultural heritage, but also, by extension, facilitated the ‘modern’ interpretation of ancient works which impacted the visual culture of the Northern Song dynasty.

Eunuch as painter Having established that eunuchs were implicated in the patronage and donation of art, I will now turn to eunuchs as painters. Of the 231 painters included in the Xuanhe Catalogue, fourteen were eunuch officials.

Most of the paintings by palace eunuchs have been lost through history, but textual evidence from the Xuanhe Catalogue combined with a close reading of one extant painting will provide a productive lens through which to consider eunuchs as painters. The donor Liu Yuan, discussed above, was also a painter. His biography in the Xuanhe Catalogue states that Liu worked in the landscape genre in an untrammeled manner. Untrammeled denotes a sense of freedom, non-restriction and spontaneity; all qualities greatly appreciated and practiced by the literati class. Of the nine works listed in his entry in the catalogue, I will consider the first: ‘After Li Cheng’s Small Wintry Forest.’ The connection to Li Cheng presents an interesting paradox which will be discussed in further detail below.

Tenth-century painter Li Cheng (919-967) painted landscape and tree-and-rock paintings. As Leong Ping Foong notes, “for scholars, ink landscapes and the tree-and-rock subjects were vehicles for expressing eremitic sentiments,» which since at least the Han dynasty (206 BCE-226 CE) denoted a “resolute refusal to take public office and serve a corrupt government.” Even with these connotations, however, the imperial court eventually adopted Li Cheng’s style for their own purposes. Many of Li Cheng’s one hundred fifty-nine paintings in the Xuanhe Catalogue reference a wintry forest scene. A work attributed to Li Cheng entitled Tall Pines in a Level View (fig. 8) is representative of Li’s “primary subject matter – a level distance with ‘wintry trees’ – one that Li Cheng invented.” An anonymous painting in the style of Li Cheng entitled A Small Wintry Grove (fig. 9) also depicts a similar subject matter. While neither of these specific titles appear in the Xuanhe Catalogue, several similarly titled works do. I postulate that works such 98

Above: Figure 8. Attributed to Li Cheng, Tall Pines in a Level View, Five Dynasties or Early Northern Song. Hanging scroll, ink on silk, 126.1 x 205.6 cm, Chokaido Museum, Mie, Japan Below: Figure 9. Anonymous (Song dynasty), in the style of Li Cheng, A Small Wintry Grove, Northern Song Dynasty. Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on silk 42.2 x 49.2 cam. National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan.

99

as Tall Pines and Small Wintry Grove may have acted as models for Liu Yuan’s painting. As Tall Pines is attributed to Li Cheng and not an anonymous painting in his style, I will utilize it in the consideration of Liu Yuan’s painting.

Tall Pines is rendered in layered ink washes and depicts a rather barren landscape with two large pines in the left foreground. Between two rocky outcroppings in the foreground we see another distant pine tree in the center. The background depicts a rolling mountainous landscape with no sign of human habitation. The visual qualities of the work suggest the eremitic sentiment addressed above. This style, however, would become a favoured court aesthetic. The imperial court appropriated Li’s style to portray imperial power and authority through its ability to act “as visual representations of right to rule and good government.” As Foong puts it, Li Cheng was the “progenitor of a courtly artistic legacy to which Guo Xi [after 1000-ca.1090] was the natural heir.” The favored painter of Emperor Shenzong, Guo Xi, saw landscape paintings as analogous to cosmic power, imperial power, and benevolent governance.” Guo’s painting Early Spring (fig.10), similar to Li Cheng’s Tall Pines, utilizes the symbol of the pine and mountainous landscape. In Guo’s depiction, however, the mountain (representative of the emperor’s authority) takes precedent while the pines (representative of Confucian scholars) are dwarfed. In this reading of the image, the power of the emperor clearly overrules that of the Confucian scholar.

As briefly mentioned above, considering Liu Yuan within this discourse presents an interesting paradox: A eunuch official who painted in an untrammeled manner to represent a subject which originally represented scholarly eremitism. The style, however, had by this point been appropriated to represent imperial authority and benevolence. If tall pines came to represent Confucian scholars, then Li Cheng’s painting emphasizes their prominence and hardiness. For a eunuch to place so much focus on wintry pines is noteworthy. As a liminal figure, the eunuch painter Liu Yuan depicted a sort of liminal representation which could have dualistic connotations. I suggest it was Liu Yuan’s perpetually liminal identity which informed this representation. Like Liang Shicheng, Liu identifies with scholar-officials through his manner of painting and his choice of subject matter. Due to his liminal position, however, Liu’s painting avoids negative reception and repercussion.

This is evident through the paintings inclusion in the Xuanhe Cata100

Figure 10. Guo Xi, Early Spring, 1072. Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on silk, 158.3 x 108.1 cm, National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan.

101

logue. Had the painting not been well received, I postulate it would not have been included in the catalogue. Liu’s close proximity to the emperor and imperial court, provided through his liminal status, perhaps allowed him to explore potentially transgressive subject matter.

To further explore this avenue, I will now turn to the eunuch painter Feng Jin (dates unknown). In the Xuanhe Catalogue, Feng is described as being skillful at “lookouts in forest groves,” and able to provoke auditory experiences through his paintings, especially in Myriad Pipings of the Autumn Wind. Describing this work, the author(s) of the catalogue wrote “[t]he imagination shown in this picture is profound, almost comparable to ‘Rhapsody on the Sounds of Autumn,’” a poem by the scholar-official Ouyang Xiu. This comparison is interesting considering Ouyang’s statement in Xin Wudaishi, discussed above, where he suggests the that the havoc and “harm caused by eunuchs is not confined to merely one area.” Ouyang Xiu was a prominent scholar-official whose works would likely have been known to Feng Jin. With the current available scholarship, it is impossible to prove that Feng Jin based his painting on Ouyang Xiu’s poem. I would postulate, however, that due to the very similar subject manner and the overt comparison by the author(s) of the Xuanhe Catalogue, it is possible Feng Jin painted Myriad Pipings of the Autumn Wind with the poem in mind. By referencing a prominent scholar-official, even one vehemently against eunuchs, Feng Jin may have been asserting his status as a cultured and learned individual. Through asserting this status, Feng Jin could have been equating his identity with that of the literati and creating imagined extended circles of loyalty like Liang Shicheng.

An extant painting attributed to Feng Jin entitled Watermill Under the Willows (figs. 11 and 12) is now at the Princeton University Art Museum. While this work is not listed in the Xuanhe Catalogue, it will provide an interesting comparison to another notable and roughly contemporaneous watermill painting now at the Shanghai Museum entitled The Water Mill previously attributed to Wei Xian. Feng Jin’s Watermill depicts a rather rudimentary watermill system in a forest grove with one individual and ox. The painting is rendered in a courtstyle sensibility with layered ink washes, colours and sense of planned execution. Art historian Heping Liu suggests that Shanghai Museum handscroll depicts a state-run watermill which is rendered in a style assigned to architectural subject matter known as jiehua style. A section of the handscroll (fig. 13) shows the highly detailed, intricate and 102

Figure 11. Attributed to Feng Jin, Watermill Under the Willows, Song Dynasty. Round fan mounted as album leaf, ink and color on silk, 24 x 25.8 cm. The Arthur M. Sackler Collection, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey.

Figure 12. Detail of Feng Jin’s Watermill Under the Willows Figure 13. Unknown artist, Section of The Water Mill, ca. 970s. Handscroll, ink and color on silk, 53.3 X 119.2 cm. Shanghai Museum

103

large watermill. The contrast between the size and context of these watermills requires further consideration. While watermills had been in use for over a thousand years by the Northern Song dynasty, Heping Liu points out that they had previously been private enterprises. This contrast between Feng Jin’s painting and the Shanghai Museum painting thus had potential political implications.

The interest in watermills began with Emperor Taizu, who established watermill agencies as state institutions for economic purposes. As Liu points out, these agencies were intended to “operate commercial watermills; to exhibit the imperial patronage of science and technology; and to exert bureaucratic control over the growing and profitable industry.” State interference in this previously private industry led to tension between the state and individuals. As Liu suggests the “water mill came to personify the ideal Confucian government of efficiency and benevolence as a consequence” of this tension. Part of the reformist agenda in the New Policies was intended to restore the governments hold on industry after the loosening of the states hold between Taizu and Shenzong’s reigns. Conservative scholar-official and brother of Su Shi, Su Zhe (1039-1112), “fought for a more limited government, opposing the state’s active economic involvement at the cost of private interest.” So, another tension between the conservative faction of scholar-officials and the emperor is brought to light. I argue this tension is at play in Feng Jin’s depiction of a private watermill.

Conservative scholar-officials not only attempted to oppose these government policies; they also wrote poetry about the plight of the common watermill owner. The prominent scholar-official and good friend of Su Shi, Wen Tong (1018-1079), wrote a poem of this nature.

An excerpt of ‘The Water Mill (Shuiwei).’ demonstrates the effects of state interference on the individual: Despite toil and risk, the owner earns only a thin profit, For generations his family made its living by the riverbank; Now the Sovereign is sending his men to supervise Water conservancy.

Alas, what will the fate of these horizontal and vertical water wheels be?

The devaluation of the individual in the state-run economy mirrors the 104

fate of conservative scholar-officials whose influence waned between Shenzong to Huizong’s reign. This poem demonstrates that the conservative faction’s clear interest in private industry and opposition to state intervention was a method to counter the autocratic power of the emperor. Considering the earlier conversation regarding the self-fashioning of eunuch officials as literati, I argue that Feng Jin’s painting has potential to be read as an institutional critique on the part of a eunuch painter. The connection to the circle of Su Shi and Ouyang Xiu demonstrates the notion of expanding one’s imagined circle of loyalty while residing on the edge of existing social and political structures.

Feng’s watermill painting acts as a sort of double image that simultaneously belongs to the state through its stylistic mode, but echoes literati economic and social ideologies. In this way, Feng Jin’s Watermill is a liminal image produced by a perpetually liminal figure.

Conclusion The goal of the current study has been to determine to what extent the eunuch affected the visual culture of the Northern Song dynasty. In this paper I have demonstrated that court eunuchs, in large part due to their perpetually liminal identity, do demonstrate potential influence on and contribution to Northern Song collecting practices and art production. I began by locating the eunuch within the larger sociopolitical context of the period, namely the expansion of the bureaucratic civil examination system led to an increased scholar-official class.

Subsequently, factional political groups emerged later in the dynasty. I argued that this factional political milieu had implications on eunuchs participation in the visual culture but also on the art produced in the era. I suggested that eunuchs were able to gain cultural capital and influence during the Northern Song period largely due to their liminal position and that this position affected ways in which they selffashioned.

The case study of Liang Shicheng demonstrated that eunuch patrons and collectors aided the adoption of a literati sensibility not only in art but also in literature. I suggested that the commission of Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff by Qiao Zhongchang, who used the politically liminal Li Gonglin as a reference, and Liang’s insistence on his familial connection to Su Shi not only reflected an attempt to self-fashion as a member of the literati; it also mirrored the marginalization Su Shi and Liang Shicheng shared. By doing so, I argued that 105

Liang Shicheng created an imagined extended circle of loyalty while existing on the edge of social structures. Liu Yuan, as collector and donor, not only participated in the preservation cultural heritage, but also facilitated modern interpretations of antique paintings which were highly collectible objects in their own right.

The case studies of eunuch painters, while not exhaustive, put forth the idea that eunuch painters moved more fluidly between literati and court sensibilities in their works. By citing Li Cheng, Liu Yuan not only referenced an originally literati mode, but he also referenced the contemporary imperial ideology. The mixture of these two modes is suggestive of a distinct ability to avoid criticism from the court which I argued was afforded by his liminal identity, but also pointed to his self-fashioning as a member of the literati. In addition, the mixture of styles points to the liminal status of the image itself. In the case study of eunuch painter Feng Jin, I postulated that the comparison between Feng Jin’s painting and Ouyang Xiu’s poem in the Xuanhe Catalogue is suggestive that Feng Jin had Ouyang’s poem in mind when creating his painting Myriad Pipings of the Autumn Wind. By doing so, Feng Jin, like Liang Shicheng and Liu Yuan, self-identified as a kind of literatus.

The comparison between Feng’s painting Watermill Under the Willows and the Shanghai Museum’s painting The Water Mill acted to assert that Feng Jin was potentially participating in the debate surrounding state intervention on industry and the economy. By extension, I argued that Feng was making an institutional critique and expanding his imagined circles of loyalty while existing on the edge of social structures.

As discussed in the introduction, Patricia Ebrey noted that collecting participates in the construction of knowledge. With each of these case studies I have attempted to show how the eunuch did just that.

Through their participation in constructing the imperial collection, they impacted the outcome. These case studies point to a common theme. Each of the eunuchs discussed seemed to be attempting to diminish the lacuna between their liminal identity and broader society by positing themselves as cultured and educated. Their perpetually liminal identity acted in two common ways. Firstly, their access to important individuals allowed them to take part in processes of collecting due to their ability to move around the palace freely. This aided their participation especially in commissioning works and acting as connoisseurs. Secondly, their liminal identity gave them a unique position from which they could explore motifs and themes which could have put them at risk for imperial backlash. Yet, they did so without 106

such backlash. Thus, their liminal identity played a sort of doubled role, multiplying the potential for participation in and influence on collecting practices and art production of the Northern Song dynasty.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

107

The catalogue was completed in 1120.

See Amy McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings: An Annotated Translation with Introduction (Ithaca, New York: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2019), 1.

Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 3.

McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue, 4.

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed (1989), s.v. “eunuch.”

Jennifer W. Jay, “Song Confucian Views on Eunuchs,” Chinese Culture: A Quarterly Review 35, no. 3 (1994): 46.

The Five Dynasties was a period of disunion between the Tang and Northern Song.

Ouyang Xiu, Xin Wudaishi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 38.406 quoted in Jay, “Song Confucian Views on Eunuchs,” 48.

Jay, “Song Confucian Views on Eunuchs,” 48.

Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 11. van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 67.

Victor W, Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), 95.

Jennifer W. Jay, “Another Side of Chinese Eunuch History: Castration, Marriage, Adoption, and Burial,” Canadian Journal of History/Annales Canadiennes d’Histoire 28, no. 3 (1993): 465.

Jay, “Another Side of Chinese Eunuch History,” 466.

Sierk Ybema, Nie Beech, and Nick Ellis, “Transitional and Perpetual Liminality: An Identity Practice Perspective,” Anthropology Southern Africa 34, no. 1–2 (2011): 24.

Ybema, Beech, and Ellis, “Transitional and Perpetual Liminality,” 24.

Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 42.

Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 23.

Taizong (r. 976-997) expanded the civil examination system, passing more individuals in one exam than Taizu had

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

done in his whole reign. Zhenzong (r.

997-1022) favoured officials with literary talent and drew many scholars into the examination system from the south of China. See Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 22-29.

Peter Kees Bol, "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in Tang and Sung China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 52.

Bol, "This Culture of Ours," 52.

Renzong was a child when he ascended the throne. His reign-proper began in 1033. See Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 27-29.

In 1043, he opened a school which admitted students regardless of the status of their father. See Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 29.

Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 30.

Ebrey, Emperor Huizong (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 338.

Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 132.

Ebrey, Emperor Huizong, 341.

Leong Ping Foong, The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), 58.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 59.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 59.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 59.

Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 51. Su Shi was banished to Huangzhou.

Su Shi had received fame for passing the decree examination for “direct speech and full admonition” in 1061. He had received the highest score of the dynasty.

See Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 50.

Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 52-53.

The Yuanyou period (1086-1093) began when Empress Dowager Gao (1032– 1093) seized the throne and promoted the conservative values of anti-reformist officials such as Sima Guang and Su Shi. Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 58.

Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 60.

Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 63.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

Lei Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial: The Nelson-Atkins’s Red Cliff Handscroll Revisited” Archives of Asian Art 66, no.1 (2016): 25.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 25.

An-yi Pan, “Painting and Friendship, Political and Private Life: The Case of Li Gonglin,” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, no.

30 (2000): 97–98.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 4.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 4.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 4.

Art historian Jerome Silbergeld argues this simplistic binary is far more complex.

Painting practice and scholarly values during the Song dynasty varied greatly, creating a near impossibility of considering a singular ‘literati style’ or ‘literati theory.’ Silbergeld writes “Song court and scholar-painters shared interests and stimulated each other with their creative innovations.” see Jerome Silbergeld, “On the Origins of Literati Painting in the Song Dynasty” in A Companion to Chinese Art, eds. Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang (Chicester: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2015), 491. Patricia Ebrey also notes that any attempt to create a clear distinction between literati and court painting “was entirely on the literati side; the court and its painters valued versatility and were open to adopting new styles. The court took to collecting paintings by literati, as it long had collected their calligraphy.” See Patricia Ebrey, “Court Painting,” in A Companion to Chinese Art, eds. Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang (Chicester: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2015), 32.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 25.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 26.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 25.

Art historian Alfreda Murck suggests that “[w]hen a scholar-official communicated through the mute medium of landscape painting, he relied on a shared experience and knowledge of literature.

The function, metaphors, and conventions of poetry informed and influenced the art of painting.” See Alfreda Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent (Cambridge, Mass.:

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2000), 51.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 26.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 31.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 32.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 26. See also Ebrey, Emperor Huizong, 118 where Ebrey notes that “In the seventh month of 1123, one source reports, an edict ordered the destruction of the printing blocks for the collected works of Su Shi and Sima Guang, which someone in Fujian had had the audacity to have carved.”

Song shi (History of the Song), juan 468, 13663 quoted in Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 34. Jennifer W. Jay also points this out. She writes “In fact when Su Shi was disgraced, the eunuch Laing Shicheng defended him and reversed the official proscription of his writings.” See Jay, “Song Confucian Views on Eunuchs,” 47.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 35.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 33.

Seals were often impressed on paintings as a marker of ownership used by collectors. As works change hands, they accumulate seals by each owner.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 36.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 36.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 37.

McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue, 186.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 37.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 37.

Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial,” 39.

McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue, 22.

McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue, 22.

Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 273-274.

Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 273.

Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 273.

Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 272.

McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue, 20.

Ankeney Weitz, Zhou Mi’s Record of Clouds and Mist Passing before One’s Eyes:

108

72.

73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

78.

79.

80.

81.

82.

83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

89.

90.

91.

92.

93.

94.

109

An Annotated Translation (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 224.

Weitz, Zhou Mi’s Record of Clouds, 156.

McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue, 4. It is important to note that Ebrey suggests only nine eunuch painters. See Ebrey Accumulating Culture, 301. McNair’s monograph is the first full translation into English which she spent the last fourteen years translating. As such I will follow McNair’s count.

McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue, 278.

Chu-Tsing Li, “Trends in Modern Chinese Painting: (The C.A. Drenowatz Collection).” Artibus Asiae. Supplementum 36 (1979): 4.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 21.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 23.

McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue, 244.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 120.

McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue, 245-246.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 6.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 113.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 5.

Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 9.

McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue, 281.

McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue, 281.

McNair, Xuanhe Catalogue, 281 n49.

Ouyang Xiu, Xin Wudaishi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 38.406 quoted in Jay, “Song Confucian Views,” 48.

Heping Liu, “‘The Water Mill’ and Northern Song Imperial Patronage of Art, Commerce, and Science,” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (2002): 566.

Liu, “‘The Water Mill,’” 573.

Liu, “‘The Water Mill,’” 574.

Liu, “‘The Water Mill,’” 576.

Liu, “‘The Water Mill,’” 576.

Liu, “‘The Water Mill,’” 577.

110

THE WENDY-VERSE AS RESISTANCE: A DOUBLEWEAVE READING OF WENDY’S REVENGE WRITTEN BY ROSALIND SWEENEY-MCCABE

EDITED BY SARAH HOLLEY-CARNEY

111

The focus of this paper will be the graphic novel Wendy’s Revenge, the sequel of Wendy, by Kahnawake-born artist, Walter Scott. Using the humorous paradoxes of the “Wendy-verse” (Wendy’s world) and various characters, Scott is able to express an intricate conception of Indigenous identity to a broad audience. Engaging Qwo-Li Driskill’s Indigenous Two-Spirit theory of doubleweaving, their response to contemporary queer theory, this paper will examine how both the narrative and form of Wendy’s Revenge work to communicate complex ideas of identity. First, the Wendy narrative, the Wendy-verse, and the medium of the graphic novel will be introduced. Qwo-Li Driskill’s doubleweaving theory will then be used as a lens to analyze Wendy’s Revenge: the characters within the narrative and the visual form of the work. It will be shown using Driskill’s theory how the medium of the graphic novel and Scott’s narrative structure function in Wendy’s Revenge to create a work that’s both accessible and intricate, allowing for the communication of resistance to a broad audience.

Wendy’s Revenge, released in 2016, is a continuation of the graphic novel Wendy, released two years prior by artist Walter Scott. Both works are situated in the Wendy-verse, and follow the reality of Wendy and her friends while they navigate the Montreal art/punk scene, expanding to Los Angeles, Toronto, Winona’s reservation, Tokyo and Vancouver in Wendy’s Revenge. The main characters are Wendy, the namesake of the works and an artist; Winona, an Indigenous artist and friend of Wendy; and Screamo, another friend who is drawn like a ghost. The panels of Wendy’s revenge follow the characters in situations which explore how they negotiate their own identities and experiences, both in their art and in the art world which surrounds it. A striking component of what made Wendy and subsequently Wendy’s Revenge so popular with such a broad audience is Scott’s comedic commentary on contemporary culture and the art world (fig. 1) throughout the narrative. These moments are the ever “relatable” vignettes of the negotiation of self-love, care and awareness within a pretentious art and music scene familiar to many 20 somethings living in urban centres. Though Wendy’s Revenge is populated by many moments like this, the narrative takes place in more varying geographic locations with longer periods devoted to the characters individually. This garners more space for development, and a nuanced view of identity. While all the characters are presented separately in the space, the exploration of Scott’s own identity moves fluidly throughout the characters, in an interview with Canadian Art:

112

Figure 1. Scott, Walter. Wendy's Revenge. Toronto, ON: Koyoma Press, 2016.

113

‘My characters shapeshift a bit. They’re all prisms coming out of me, and there are different versions of me in each of them. I grew up in Kahnawake with an understanding that people just change their forms. It’s part of our culture; people can turn into animals, stuff like that. It was very natural for me to create characters that are neither human nor non-human. Screamo is a spirit who almost exists but doesn’t.’

Around the comedic pretense of the Wendy-verse, Scott is able explore various problems of identity, describing it in the same interview as a ‘Trojan horse’ vehicle to communicate harsher political realities to a wide readership.

Before further discussing Walter Scott’s Wendy’s Revenge, the format of the ‘graphic novel’ will be defined. The medium is characterized by a mixture of images and text to present a complete narrative for the reader/viewer. Aesthetically, graphic novels share much with comic books.

Their difference is length: the graphic novel is a complete narrative whereas the comic is one instalment within a broader narrative. While both genres share a mixture of image and text to present narratives, using the cue of length as definition, Wendy’s Revenge will be referred to as a graphic novel. The term graphic novel is also helpful as it situates Wendy within a genre with other works that have found the graphic novel a successful medium for explaining complex political situations.

In ‘Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies,’ Qwo-Li Driskill conceptualizes doubleweaving as a means of introducing Two-Spirit critiques into queer studies. Driskill sees this critique as necessary within the field as they observed that contemporary queer studies, while more inclusive than it has previously been, has included Indigenous experience now only marginally, if at all.

Driskill identifies Two-Spirit as: ‘a word that is intentionally complex. It is meant to be an umbrella term for Native GLBTQ people as well as a term for people who use words and concepts from their specific traditions to describe themselves. Like other umbrella terms — including queer—it risks erasing difference. But also like queer, it is meant to be inclusive, ambiguous, and fluid.’

Using this term, Driskill also is able to conceptualize outside of a colonial framework by avoiding settler-colonial language, and instead works within an Indigenous tradition. Two-Spirit is a way of speaking 114

about identity outside of a settler-colonial vernacular and imagination.

This is especially pressing to Driskill as they do not situate their theory as post-colonial, quoting ‘Aborigine activist Bobbi Sykes, who asked at an academic conference on post-colonialism, “What? Post-colonialism?

Have they left?”’ The critique is not limited to theory, Driskill utilizes the metaphor and language of Cherokee doubleweaving basketry to explain how various splints (theories and practices) can be woven together in order to create an approach composed of various intersections.

Thus, Driskill argues that Two-Spirit critiques ‘through theory, arts, and activism—are a part of larger radical decolonial movements.’ Doubleweaving as a Two-Spirit critique within theory and practice can then be applied within works not necessarily identified within a Two-Spirit narrative or created by an Indigenous artist who identifies as Two-Spirit, ‘Native Two-Spirit/queer people are already participating in several Native activists, artistic, and academic movements. These movements, even if not “Two-Spirit,” are part of the splints that doubleweave Two-Spirit resistance.’ Doubleweaving theory is an understanding of identity which is independent of settler-colonial forms, and whose practice is a form of resistance.

Walter Scott’s examination of identity throughout Wendy’s Revenge is an illustration of Driskill’s conception of doubleweaving in practice. The use of different characters – Screamo, Wendy, Winona – to express one fluid idea of identity is parallel to the metaphor of the physical act of doubleweaving. To begin the explanation of their theory, Driskill quotes Sarah Hill: ‘One of the oldest and most difficult traditions in basketry is a technique called doubleweave. A doubleweave basket is actually two complete baskets, one woven.’ By using different parts of different characters, Scott is able to insert a more nuanced and forthright expression of Indigenous identity. Just as Driskill conceives the practice of their theory as a political tactic, so does Scott, observing that ‘you’re able to slip in more direct references to an Indigenous experience that can grow in this garden you’ve already cultivated, by using or understanding what possibility and what privilege can allow’. Wendy’s Revenge, through the use of various characters, is able to weave together a more complex presentation of identity which does not assume separate experiences.

While a reader could interpret Wendy’s Revenge simply as a humorous account of individual characters, the narrative can be understood as one of resistance when read through Driskill’s theory and Scott’s intentions. Fluidity in identity throughout Wendy’s Revenge furthers a narrative of resistance as it sits explicitly outside settler-colonial expectations 115

in narrative. In this way, Scott’s narratives of identity in Wendy’s Revenge become a Two-Spirit critique.

Wendy’s Revenge typically employs minimal text, usually a maximum of two text bubbles within a panel. This places more of a focus on Scott’s drawings of the characters, as well the changes in the layout of his panels. In a fantasy or dream sequence, for example, Scott will use wavy dividing lines around panels, or will use different colours or panel backgrounds to delineate different sections of the graphic novel (see figs.

1 – 4). In the ‘graphic novel’ section of Krazy! Art and Seth Spiegelman discuss the emotional value behind various panel arrangements. To use their discussion of Chester Brown’s Louis Riel to contrast, Seth and Spiegelman discuss Brown’s minimal change in layout and perspective as Brown minimizing emotional influence on the reader. Unlike Louis Riel, the panel sizes, layout and perspectives of Wendy’s Revenge change constantly to reflect the emotional state of the characters. The emotional dialogue of the characters as at the centre of the narrative of Wendy’s Revenge become reflected in Scott’s visual arrangements. In this way, Scott is able to further the reader’s emotional understanding of the characters.

Walter Scott uses selective translation in the Tokyo residency of Wendy’s Revenge. Scott, who originally made this section as a part of his own artist residency in Tokyo, chose not to remove the original Japanese, and instead added on an English translation on the adjoining page (see fig.

2). For the reader this creates a certain amount of distance that had not been experienced up until this point. With this device, Scott removes the immediate ability to relate to characters of the Wendy-verse. The division of panels and translation places a slight obstacle in the ability to understand or connect. This distance is furthered in the section when Winona is talking to her aunt on the computer (see fig. 3), where the Kanien’kéha they are exchanging in is not translated for the reader. It affirms the distance in understanding implied previously, and connects a lack of translation directly to Indigenous experience. In Sarah Henzi’s article, “A Necessary Antidote”: Graphic Novels, Comics, and Indigenous Writing, she discusses the linguistic possibilities of the graphic novel: ‘because of the importance given to the visual aspect, they are essential tools towards bridging linguistic and intergenerational gaps’. The untranslated text, then, is a political tool Scott is able to employ to force his more privileged readership to acknowledge their distance and perspective. Scott stated that “I was thinking about our language. I wanted 116

Figure 2. Scott, Walter. Wendy's Revenge. Toronto, ON: Koyoma Press, 2016.

117

Figure 2. Christi Belcourt, Goodland, 2014, mixed media on canvas.

118

people who read Wendy and feel like it’s theirs to get a sense of how that feels – to feel like something is yours but it isn’t – you feel a kinship to it, but you don’t understand”. Using the medium of graphic novel Scott is able to manipulate the distance between various demographics of readers and the Wendy-verse.

Winona, Wendy and Screamo’s vulnerable emotional states, as a catalyst for narrative throughout Wendy’s Revenge, are what bring a lot of humour to the work. Humour out of vulnerability is an aspect of the Wendy-verse which Scott has identified as key to what makes the graphic novel effective. The Wendy-verse can also be seen as a satire in the way it comments on political situations through humour. An example of this is the section entitled ‘Princess Leia starring in: Scene Hair’. In this section Winona invites ‘Princess Leia’ over as she thinks, ‘She’s had a pretty interesting life. We have the same interest in identity…’ and Wendy is skeptical because, ‘Isn’t she like super rich? I thought you said rich people are annoying.’ Wendy is pointing out Princess Leia’s privilege, the panels go on to show the character, Leia, ranting about how her culture’s hairstyle was misrepresented by George Lucas while cutting Winona off every time she tries to speak to her own experience. While the situation is obviously humorous because ‘Princess Leia’ is from Star Wars and it’s not a real culture, the political implications of the conversation are poignant.

As Princess Leia goes on about her culture’s misrepresentation from her pre-established place of privilege, Winona’s experience is shut out (see fig. 4). This disregard of Winona’s perspective echoes Qwo-Li Driskill’s critique of Indigenous experience being left out of contemporary queer theory, but does so using humour within a platform which has the ability to communicate differently from an article in an academic journal.

Scott has described the genre of graphic novel’s capability of satire as an ability to, ‘get away with saying a lot more than if I were writing a critical text for a magazine, because that has its own restrictions’. Scott is able to communicate a nuanced political commentary, as in Driskill’s article, to a different audience using the satirical ability of the graphic novel genre.

Walter Scott is able to utilize the genre of the graphic novel to elicit various emotional connections with the reader: through form, selective translation and satire. Because the graphic novel is able to harness all of these aspects, through both visuals and text, the form itself becomes a manifestation of Driskill’s doubleweave Two-Spirit critique. The graphic novel is able to practice Driskill’s theory because it is able to include 119

Figure 3. Scott, Walter. Wendy's Revenge. Toronto, ON: Koyoma Press, 2016.

120

Figure 4. Scott, Walter. Wendy's Revenge. Toronto, ON: Koyoma Press, 2016.

121

‘part of the splints that doubleweave Two-Spirit resistance’. The graphic novel as a medium in Wendy’s Revenge employs various tactics to communicate a highly emotionally detailed idea of Indigenous identity, and in this way it becomes an embodiment of Driskill’s Two-Spirit theory.

Wendy’s Revenge by Walter Scott is a statement of Indigenous identity which, in its form and narrative, exemplifies Qwo-Li Driskill’s Two-Spirit critique of doubleweaving. The blending of character and the application of various visual and textual techniques allow Scott to express a contemporary and self-determined conception of Indigenous identity.

This work answers the call for a ‘more expansive representation of fierce feminist, gender-variant and sexually diverse realities within Indigenous art’. Because of how Scott has formatted the Wendy-verse, his narrative is able to reach a large and diverse audience, who would not normally be inclined to expose themselves to a work which explores Indigenous identity so intently. In the preface to The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book, author Gord Hill concisely sums up the strength of the graphic novel/comic book genre to communicate the complex histories and experiences of Indigenous peoples: ‘The strength of the comic book is that it uses minimal text with graphic art to tell the story. This format is useful in reaching children, youth and adults who have a hard time reading books or lengthy articles.’ Within the medium of graphic novel, the combination of accessibility and intricacy in the Wendy-verse’s narrative structure, Walter Scott creates a space of resistance.

122

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

123

Walter Scott, “Walter Scott on Life in the Wendy-Verse”, interview by David Balzer Canadian Art, 1 Apr. 2015.

Walter Scott, “Walter Scott on Life in the Wendy-Verse”.

Ibid Grenville, Bruce, Tim Johnson, Will Wright, Kiyoshi Kusumi, Seth, Art Spielgelman, and Toshiya Ueno. Krazy!: the delirious world of anime comics video games art. Vancouver, B.C.: Douglas & McIntyre, 2008., p. 21 Some examples that first come to mind are the aforementioned Louis Riel by Chester Brown, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco.

Driskill, Qwo-Li. "Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1-2 (2010): 69-92. p. 70 Ibid, p. 72 Ibid Ibid, p. 70 Ibid, p. 74 Ibid, p. 69 Ibid, p. 84 Ibid, p. 74 Walter Scott, “Walter Scott on Life in the Wendy-Verse” Grenville, Bruce, Tim Johnson, Will Wright, Kiyoshi Kusumi, Seth, Art Spielgelman, and Toshiya Ueno. Krazy!: the delirious world of anime comics video games art. Vancouver, B.C.: Douglas & McIntyre, 2008., p. 82 Walter Scott, "Book review: Wendy is back, with a real townie vengeance", interview by Jessica Deer, The Eastern Door.

November 09, 2016. Accessed December 04, 2017. http://www.easterndoor. com/2016/11/09/book-review-wendy-isback-with-a-real-townie-vengeance/.

Henzi, Sarah. "“A Necessary Antidote”: Graphic Novels, Comics, and Indigenous Writing." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 43, no. 1 (March 2016): 23-38. doi:10.1353/crc.2016.0005.

Walter Scott, "Book review: Wendy is back, with a real townie vengeance" Walter Scott, “Walter Scott on Life in the Wendy-Verse” Scott, Walter. Wendy's Revenge. Toronto, ON: Koyoma Press, 2016. No page number available, in the 'Wendy: Critical

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

Reader' section.

Driskill, Qwo-Li. "Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies." p. 70 Walter Scott, “Walter Scott on Life in the Wendy-Verse” Driskill, Qwo-Li. "Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies.", p. 84 Nixon, Lindsay. "Making Space in Indigenous Art for Bull Dykes and Gender Weirdos." Canadian Art, April 20, 2017.

Hill, Gord. The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010, p. 6

124

FASHION EXHIBITIONS AS PARTICIPANTS TO THE PARTICIPATORY: A STUDY OF MUGLER’S “COUTURISSIME”

WRITTEN BY DENISA MARGINEAN EDITED BY ÉMILIE PERRING

125

The act of collecting dress in western society has existed since the late-nineteenth century as an educational study of historic costume.

In the twentieth century, dresses that were exhibited to the public were associated with tradition and longevity, while fashion was seen as transitory and modern. Fashion exhibitions still face a lot of critical backlash in the twenty-first century. They are seen as a “fashion” themselves: a trendy and separate endeavour to bring money into the museum, which reflects the vulgar commerciality of the present. I want to complicate this perception as more than simply negative or positive. I argue that the “Thierry Mugler: Couturissime” of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is a participant to the participatory turn, a vital condition of the present time because it intensifies the aspects of the body, provocation, and multidimensionality that qualify the concept itself. In a broader sense, my goal is to demonstrate how fashion exhibitions nourish the participatory and are not separate from the wider museology shift.

Section IA: Defining the Exhibition The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts held an exhibition on French designer Thierry Mugler from March 2nd to September 8th, 2019. The name of the exhibition, “Couturissime,” refers to the central theme of the show as “a total work of art from a sculpting couturier.” This is also a reference to the phrase haute couture, a handmade manufacturing technique. In actuality, Mugler’s work did involve careful tailoring, but the majority of the garments in the exhibition would technically be classified as ready-to-wear designs, rather than haute couture, meaning that they use standard measurements or were factory-made. The show was curated by Thierry-Maxime Loriot, a previously unknown name in the world of curation until the MMFA’s Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition in 2011. The Mugler exhibition drew close to 300,000 people at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which makes it the sixth most popular in the museum’s history. Although its display is over at the MMFA, it is now bound for an international tour in Rotterdam and Munich.

Seven rooms were part of the experience; each one was an access into one of the designer’s worlds. The show displayed a total of 150 garments, both women and menswear, that were made between 1973 and 2001. These garments were intermixed thematically on mannequins, as well as in photographs, projections, and videos. The first room presented Mugler’s Macbeth costumes that were created in 1985 (figure 1). The Shakespearian costumes were put behind glass 126

Fig. 1: Acte 1: Macbeth and the Scottish Lady (2019), Mugler Exhibition “Couturissime,” Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada.

Fig. 2 : Acte 2: Stars & Sparkles: Staging Fashion (2019), Mugler Exhibition “Couturissime,” Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada.

127

on each side of the large, horizontal room, with a significant piece (the First Witch) emphasizing its center. Dark colours, melted latex, and metal studs linked each costume together in a twisted revisiting of the renaissance-inspired style. Behind the centerpiece, there also was a 4D artwork projection by Michel Lemieux where Lady Macbeth’s dress slowly disintegrates resulting in her own body’s evaporation.

The following room is “Act 2: Stars & Sparkles: Staging Fashion,” which was organized under the theme of celebrity endorsement, and names like David Bowie, Céline Dion, and Lady Gaga were summoned (figure 2). Unlike the first room, the space was organized around an elongated platform that evoked a catwalk podium. There was no glass that separated the viewer from the mannequins anymore. On the end wall, a large screen played a video compilation of music videos and awards ceremonies of celebrities wearing Mugler designs.

Then, there was the Helmut Newton documentation of the black-andwhite power dressing (figure 3). Similar to the second act, the walls were covered with photographs, but the room figured mainly one particular artist that collaborated with Mugler: photographer Helmut Newton. The connection between the two men was made by the inclusion of the only photographs of Thierry Mugler in the show taken

by Helmut Newton.

The viewers continued to the room displaying the fetish style of Mugler (figure 4). The garments in this room had an undeniable sexual connotation that was linked to power dynamics and violence. Dresses were attached to the nipples of the mannequins, and some even had whips as accessories.

“Act V: Metamorphosis: Fantasy Bestiary” is one of the most distinct rooms in the show, distinct from all the previous spatial organizations.

The theme was the animalistic inspiration of Mugler’s designs (figure 5). The room was navigated as a circular labyrinth. Mannequins were clustered together on multiple mounted elevated levels, in a method that required movement from the viewer to see every piece correctly.

Instead of photographs, the exhibition’s walls reflected projections of both marine and jungle life. The room even had sounds echoing the environment. One of the display structures also rotated, as to stop the movement that was previously required from the viewer thus complicating the viewing act.

128

Figure 3. Helmut Lang & Black-and-White Power Dressing (2019), Mugler Exhibition “Couturissime,” Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada.

Figure 4. Fetish Style (2019), Mugler Exhibition “Couturissime,” Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada.

Figure 5. Acte V: Metamorphosis:Fantasy Bestiary (2019), Mugler Exhibition “Couturissime,” Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada.

129

The final room “Act VI: Futuristic and Fembot Couture” represented the cyborg (figure 6), a theme reflected in its metallic walls. Only the end wall had groupings of models, contained behind glass. Half-robotic and half-human, the cyborg presented a fitting finale to the show with implications of the future. Art Historian Julia Skelly states that the exhibition can be conceived as a fashion opera, with every room beginning a different act of the spectacle. Therefore, understanding the spatial composition of the exhibition is critical for the study of the participatory in the exhibition.

Section IB: Defining the Participatory The first author that I am using to define the participatory is museum director Nina Simon. Her extensive book The Participatory Museum, one of the most referenced texts in participatory museology, and also one that clearly outlines the condition’s goals. In The Participatory Museum, Simon argues that in response to dwindling audiences attendance at museums and the predominantly older and whit demographic of this audience, museums can reconnect with the public by actively engaging them as cultural participants and not as passive consumers.

She highlights three fundamental theories in the technique: first, the idea of an audience-centered institution that is relevant and accessible, just like a “shopping mall.” Second, that visitors construct their own meaning from the experiences, and third, the idea that users’ voices can inform and invigorate project design and public-facing programs.

The terms I want to highlight are audience, relevancy and experience; three aspects that are at the base of my understanding of participation in relation to fashion.

Beforehand, I want to broaden the term participatory and look at the word in usage in other academic fields. The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age is a useful source in investigating the concept through a transdisciplinary method. The multi-authored text argues that participation has been an aspect of everyday life in all of human history from the moment we decided to live and act together. Participation is essentially about being involved in doing something with others.

However, in the present context, participation is not just an aspect of everyday life; it is a priority. This is linked to the popularization of digital media and its “spreadability,” which assumes that anything relevant will circulate through any channel possible. The book defines participation as the promise and even expectation that someone can be actively involved in the decision-making process that affects society 130

Figure 6. Acte VI: Futuristic and Fembot Couture (2019), Mugler Exhibition “Couturissime,” Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada.

with media technologies facilitating this condition. The importance given to digital media in this process is crucial to note.

Section IIA: The Body From its conception, “Thierry Mugler: Couturissime” is different than most blockbuster exhibitions at the MMFA. This is not because of its enormousness, but rather through its emphasis on the body: the body of the audience, and the body of the model. In all three aspects of Simon’s theory, the focus is on the audience’s presence. Even the technique itself has the goal of bringing more diverse bodies into the museum space.

First, fashion is attached to the human body since the created object’s function is to be worn. Clothing plays a significant role in someone’s conception of the bodily self as the limits of the body seem to be extended or limited by clothing. In other words, the garments displayed prompts the viewer to think about the body, both the presented silhouette of the apparel in front of them and their own body in relation to it. Unlike with a vase or a painting, the viewer imagines themselves wearing the displayed object themselves. Writer and cultural critic Alisson Bancroft argues that fashion goes beyond just identity, trends, and 131

branding; its primary concern is innovation by decorating the surface of the body, thus making the wearing and the act of wearing central to fashion. Fashion exists only in the process of being worn, which is why when garments are not being worn there is something rather unpleasant and even unappealing to the viewer.

Additionally, the model’s body makes the viewer conscious that the garments need to be put on in order to fulfill their primary function as fashion. Some exhibitions such as “Jean-Claude Poitras: Fashion and Inspiration” at the McCord Museum display garments without a mannequin. Without any corporal relation, the garment seems to be floating which creates a ghostly sentiment that verges on the uncanny. The presence of mannequins in the Mugler Exhibition, to the point of even employing high-end company Hans Boodt Mannequins in the process, is noteworthy. It is a conscious decision by the curation team.

The Chimera gown displayed in Act V is a suitable case study (figure 7). In the photographic documentation of the runaway show, the human model dramatically raises her right-hand. This imagery figures on the majority of the posters for the Mugler exhibition and the photograph was even displayed alongside the gown (figure 8). While curators will sometimes choose a headless structure to emphasize the design, the Chimera mannequin has distinct facial features that echo the colour pattern of the gown. The life-like quality does not end there, the mannequin is also on a rotary device that makes any viewer in the room able to see her from any angle imaginable. While Chimera is an extreme case of life-likeness, other mannequins have accentuated lips, and dramatic poses, a central characteristic of the Mugler runway shows.

The relationship between the model and the viewer cannot be investigated without looking at their differentiation. On the one hand, some might not see the two bodies as in opposition; the viewer can easily imagine themselves as the model that wears the garment. Yet, the body of the model is noticeably separated from the viewer. It is on a literal pedestal and a symbolic one. The body of the model is associated with the body of a celebrity. If Mugler is wearable art, then the art is exclusive to specific bodies (e. g., Kim Kardashian). Going back to Chimera, the facial features of the mannequin imply the facial features of the model that was famously photographed. Adriana Sklenarikova had highlighted lips and cheek bones: features particular to the 1990s.

These elements are also present in the mannequin’s head (figure 7).

132

Figure 7. Acte VI: Futuristic and Fembot Couture (2019), Mugler Exhibition “Couturissime,” Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada.

Figure 8. Alan Strutt, Thierry-Mugler: La Chimière collection (1997), photograph, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada

133

Many photographs and videos in the exhibition showed celebrities in the act of wearing Mugler; specifically, in the second room “Act 2: Stars & Sparkles: Staging Fashion,” where even the didactic panels of many gowns refer to the celebrity that wore said garment.

With the rise of fast and capable consumer culture, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai states that luxury had to strengthen and complicate the ideas of what authenticity is in order to legitimize itself and, most importantly, to stay “luxurious.” The designs presented in the Mugler exhibition were part of the luxury market and the fashion system.

Gowns were worth thousands of dollars, the people with access to Mugler designs in the 1980s and 1990s were part of the elite. German sociologist Georg Simmel states that fashion is a class-based system.

As soon as the lower classes adopt a particular fashion and “destroy” the distinction between ranks, the members of the elite then abandon their clothes and put on new styles in order to retain differentiation, and the game of social evolution ‘simply goes on.’ Simmel’s account is a radical explanation of the fashion system. Nonetheless, we need to consider how exclusivity is an implied aspect of the experience of the Mugler exhibition.

However, the difference between the model and the viewer can be brought back to the initial idea of the viewer as included in exclusivity. French philosopher Giles Deleuze states that the body is an event, not one side of a binary opposition. It connects two multiplicities and includes a difference that goes beyond identity and representation. Thus, the “body is the expression of this sense of difference, of the being of sense itself.” What we can apply from the complexity of Deleuze is that difference is vital for the simple experience of being. It can be seen as more than just negative. Difference is also essential for the Mugler exhibition since the designer was seen as a radical opposition to the fairly conservative fashion system at the time. Exclusivity can ultimately be apprehended through French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s conception. As Rancière famously stated, aesthetics is about a distribution of the sensible, which is a system of self-evident facts that simultaneously disclose the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define its exclusive parts. There will always be someone excluded in any process, but in the Mugler exhibition the viewer, aware of the body, no longer needs to be able to afford the designs in order to interact with them.

134

Section IIB: Provocation In Simon’s first theory, the author uses the word relevant. Relevance, which is the quality of being appropriate to the current time, comes from the Latin phrase relevare, meaning raising up. Although not explicit in her definition, raising up does imply a provocation to do so; especially since museums who embrace the new practice of audience participation also introduce “hot topics” as exhibitions themes. As scholar Britta Tondborg argues in her article “The Dangerous Museum,” the use of hot topics, that is, controversial subject matters, is a means to reach out and engage with visitors. Tondborg explores different publications on the topic, and the linking feature between all is the notion that the use of hot topics makes the museum into a forum where issues relevant to society can be debated.

Initiating dialogue is something that Simon also mentions in The Participatory Museum. By being a place to share, where visitors discuss, take home, and redistribute what they saw and what they made of it, the institution can be participatory. What I am proposing is not that the Mugler Exhibition is successful in being a place of “democratic discussion” that many theorists are striving for, but rather that the Mugler exhibition provides the foundation for debate. The simple inclusion of fashion, which is still not widely accepted in the museum space makes the viewer question what art even is. Moreover, the choice of Mugler as the subject matter sparks controversy in the audience. Mugler is a designer whose sexualized designs have always been a debate in both popular culture and academia. Art historian Linda Nochlin’s statement that Mugler is “so extreme that these women are not sex objects, they’re sex subjects” is included on the exhibition wall in the Fetish exploration room.

The presence of the fetish style complicates the negative connotation of exclusivity, which is a restriction to a certain group. The fetish style is difficult to define. Anyone in Western culture knows what a fetish is, the mere mention of the word suggests sexuality and a subversive underground practice. Although the word comes with dark associations, a fetish is essentially a venerated object, a performance, or even a narrative that stands for complex meanings and desires that are pulled from the imaginary into reality. There is the obsessed fanatic custom, and there is also the sadomasochistic performance that the word fetish implies. Fetish and fashion are closely associated because they are 135

both performances that rely on “costumes.” Fashion is also arguably a fetish since it is an obsessive behaviour that is dependent on the desire it can convey.

The fourth room of the Mugler exhibition is an exploration of the fetish style. Fetishism belongs largely to masochism. As philosopher Deleuze argues, the sadist and the masochist reach their full significance when they act directly on the senses. Words are not enough to deliver; it must affect the body. Masochism is more than just experiencing pleasure in pain; it is a victim in search of education, persuasion, and concluding an alliance with a torturer. Deleuze continues by stating that although humiliation is an important aspect, it is an insufficient term to define it. Instead, the masochist is like everyone else who finds pleasure where others do; the difference is that pain, punishment, humiliation are necessary for them to obtain gratification.

In the Mugler exhibition, the viewer is confronted with celebrity exclusivity, but this can also be a pleasurable moment comparable to the experience of the masochist. Since the model is separated from the viewer by luxury garments and a pedestal, there is a certain level of humiliation. To humiliate, which in the simpler sense means to reduce someone to a lower position, does not have to be a drastic action, it can be subtle. The aspect of pain is introduced when the viewer faces the impossibility of themselves actually wearing Mugler garments or simply when they are faced with the whips and piercings of the mannequin.

The masochist experience is also an education between both the masochist and the torturer. The Mugler exhibition presents an alternative method of enactment in regards to clothing; it displays the performative element of celebrity. With the photograph of Chimera in mind, the concept of celebrity is something that can be replicated through eccentricity and bodily movements. Exclusivity is something constructed, and experiencing the Mugler exhibition helps to deconstruct it.

Especially since the viewer also obtains access to the designer’s many fabricated worlds. The study of masochism is a useful tool in observing the intricacy of exclusivity, and it can principally be summed up in one sentence: there is pleasure in being dominated. Exclusivity should not be limited as mere condemnation. It is just as complex as the audience entering the space.

136

The use of hot topics to make the museum into a forum where issues relevant for society can be debated is also noticeable by the presence of feminist art historian Linda Nochlin’s words on the fourth room’s wall. The statement “the models are so extreme they are sex subjects” was present to ask the viewer if they agree or not, and to spark conversation among the visitors. Of course, dialogue is rarely between people who do not already know each other. At the end of the exhibition space, there was an activity room where viewers could design garments by putting different materials onto the bodies of dolls. Although some minor interactions between strangers may have occurred, the most explicit space of conversation between people is social media.

On the video-sharing platform, YouTube, strangers’ ideas can interact with others. The simple act of typing “Mugler Exhibition” provides multiple vlogs. Audience members shared their ideas on the show to people who in turn comment. In The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age, digital media is an important facet of the participatory turn, which is also evident here. The Mugler exhibition demonstrates how a show can be affected by “spreadability,” and the prominence of digital media in provoking dialogue between people. Provocation through the inclusion of fashion, the fetish style, and a feminist statement is a property of the Mugler exhibition that is in correlation with the desire of relevancy in participatory museology.

Section IIC: Multidimensionality In the case of Simon’s second point in her theory (i. e., the audience constructs their own meanings from the experience), of particular importance is her usage of the word experience. Museums are performances, “pedagogical and political in nature – whose practitioners are centrally invested in the activity of making the visible legible.” Yet, when the museum visitor “no longer needs (art) historical knowledge to appreciate the displays,” the experience is different. The word multidimensional means that it relates to multiple dimensions (i. e., spatial extensions). The Mugler exhibition is multidimensional in different ways. First, I would argue that it is multidimensional because it uses immersion as its driving factor.

In Shivers Down Your Spine, film scholar Alison Griffiths defines immersion as a sensation of entering a space that is instantly recognized as separate from the world. This space denies traditional modes of

spectatorship and replaces it with more bodily participation in the experience. This allows the spectator to move freely around the viewing space. Spatial relations in the immersive are complex and often (chaotically) improvised. The spectator feels that they are enveloped by the space and strangely affected by a strong sense of otherness. This complicates the sense of temporality as the viewer is not fully lost nor completely in the here and now. Griffiths also brings forth art historian Oliver Grau’s definition, which states that immersion is mentally absorbing and a process of change from one mental state to another; it is characterized by shrinking the distance between the viewer and what is displayed and by simultaneously increasing emotional involvement.

Immersion is something different from everyday life, it is a different spatial dimension altogether.

The Mugler exhibition is an immersion. When the viewer entered by passing through large dark curtains, heard sounds of a chanting woman, and saw Shakespearian costumes, the space was instantaneously separate from the rest of the viewer’s world. Remarkably Mugler did not have a linear chronology to frame the exhibition; any sense of temporality was stopped. The exhibition was organized thematically, and the inclusion of recent events like Cardi B wearing Mugler complicated the understanding of temporality. Objects in the museum are often understood as cultural items frozen in time. The exhibition did feature Mugler designs from 1973 to 2001, but their usage does not end there.

They appear in popular culture and on human bodies in the contemporary moment.

However, it is also crucial to note that the functional aspect of the act of wearing is also what complicates fashion’s position as art. The category of art called upon objects that were not utilitarian; this came from the Kantian ideology that believed functionality constrained the intellectual and aesthetic expression of the artist. Fine art was understood as non-utilitarian, which is why any medium of art that was useful was instantly met with critique throughout modern western history. Yet, in Mugler’s case, the utility feature, that is clothing that was worn and can still be worn, makes the exhibition go beyond a rigid temporality, and is in turn an important factor of immersion.

Otherness, an aspect of immersion is also manifested by the presence of the catwalk in the show’s second room. The spatial organization is based upon a large rectangular platform, and the room plays catwalk 138

videos on a loop. The live moment of the catwalk is rarely recreated in the museum, even though it is an essential part of the creation of fashion codes, and a live event subject to media obsession. Being in the catwalk universe that is rarely offered in fashion curation is an immersion. Otherness can also be taken further by Mugler’s association with radicalism and sexuality themes.

While immersion pulls you in, social media, an essential aspect of the participatory, pushes the exhibition beyond the walls of the museum space and into another dimension altogether. Fashion is often associated with the superficiality of social media. The Mugler exhibition also relies on this digital realm for the show’s promotion and dialogue. The display creates an instagrammable space because it allows non-flash photography, includes provocative “hot topics,” and has reflexive surfaces. The experience can easily be photographed and shared online.

Something instagrammable is something deemed worthy and attractive enough to be shared on the social media platform Instagram, and is an official word added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2019.

This addition shows how immensely crucial social media is to current popular culture. Moreover, sharing on social media is not limited to any social groups. Celebrities might have a higher degree of engagement with the public, but anyone can share aspects of their experience.

At the beginning of the exhibition, before any garment is presented, there is a fluorescent display of lights highlighting the name Mugler.

The red carpet iconography enticed a large number of people to photograph themselves and shared it on social media. The Mugler exhibition instantly went beyond the museum’s walls. By including intimate immersive spaces and expanding beyond them at the same time, the Mugler exhibition was a multidimensional event, and more broadly participatory.

To conclude, the Mugler exhibition “Couturissime at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has convincing features of body, provocation and multidimensionality, which reflects the participatory condition of the present time. Fashion is concerned with the body, but also the mind.

It is a bodily experience but also one that provokes a self-questioning of the nature of art, class and sexuality. As philosophy scholar Alva Noe claims, the value of art, like the value of a joke, consists of the opportunity to get it. Framing it in the museum can take away from the chance to understand. However, in the case of fashion exhibitions where it is still being contested, then the opportunity to get it is still 139

there because it still has proper opposition. The participatory is also something that is challenged and viewed with restraint because of the expectation to participate. Fashion exhibitions offer the possibility of being participatory without having the audience being hyper-aware of it. Most importantly, fashion exhibitions are not separate from the broader museological shift to being collection-centered to community-centered, which moves the museum beyond the physical structure of the building itself, and the Mugler exhibition is a distinctive example of that.

140

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

141

Valerie Steele, “Museum Quality: Rise of the Fashion Exhibition,” in Fashion Theory 12, no. 1 (21 April 2015): 9-10.

Hazel Clark and Annamari Vänskä, Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond, (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 3.

Clark and Vänskä, “Fashion Curating,” p. 3.

Although I have been to the exhibition myself many times, I am also writing many months after I experienced the exhibition. Éric Clément, “Thierry Mugler: Couturissime, l’Art Total d’un Couturier Sculpteur,” La Presse, (date of last access 20 November 2019) https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/ arts-visuels/201902/27/01-5216308-thierry-mugler-couturissime-lart-total-dun-couturier-sculpteur. php Mugler did produced haute couture garment but only starting in 1992, see Suzy Menkes, “Turbulance Continues off High Fashion’s Runways: Mugler Sets Couture Line,” The New York Times, (date of last access 20 November 2019) https:// www.nytimes.com/1992/02/04/style/IHTturbulence-continues-off-high-fashionsrunways-mugler-sets-couture.html The monetary value of the show is not specified but with 20 canadian dollars a ticket, the exhibition would have drawn a grand amount of 600,000 dollars. “Close to 300,000 Visitors to the MMFA’s Exhibition ‘Thierry Mugler: Couturissime’,” MBAM (date of last access 2 November 2019) https://www.mbam. qc.ca/en/news/close-to-300000-visitors-to-the-mmfas-exhibition-thierry-mugler-couturissime/ There is also talk of the exhibition going to the United States as well.

“Thierry Mugler: Couturissime,” MBAM (date of last access 2 November 2019) https://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/ shop-online/exhibition-tickets/thierry-mugler-couturissime/7862/ Some sources say it was 140, others say 150. Julia Skelly, “The Phantasmagoric World of Thierry Mugler,” Fashion Studies (date of last access 2 November 2019) https://www.fashionstudies.ca/phantasmagoric-world-thierry-mugler Skelly, “The Phantasmagoric World,” (date of last access 2 November 2019).

These are part of the collection in the

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

Centre National du Costume de Scène in Moulins. Skelly, “The Phantasmagoric World,” (date of last access 2 November 2019).

Helmut Newton was a prolific fashion photographer closely associated with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Not only did he photograph models with an amplified sense of sexuality, there is also a sense of violence in the work, earning the nickname the “King of Kink.” See Jesse McKinley, “Helmut Newton, Fashion Photographer, 83,” The New York Times, (date of last access 20 November 2019) https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/24/ nyregion/helmut-newton-fashion-photographer-83.html Like Julia Skeely, I also believe that a lot of didactic information was missing from the show, especially concerning issues of race and representation that was a part of Mugler’s designs and present in many rooms of the show, see Skelly, “The Phantasmagoric World,” (date of last access 2 November 2019).

Skelly, “The Phantasmagoric World,” (date of last access 2 November 2019).

Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum, (Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010), p. ii.

Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne, and Tamar Tembeck, “The Participatory Condition: An Introduction,” in The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2016), pp. vii-viii.

Barney, Coleman, Ross, Sterne, and Tembeck, “The Participatory Condition,” p. viii.

Mary Shaw Ryan, Clothing: A Study in Human Behaviour, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 83.

Bancroft, “Fashion and Psychoanalysis,” p. 2.

The uncanny is a psychological experience as something strange and familiar with a high degree of mystery attached to it. Bancroft, “Fashion and Psychoanalysis,” p. 3.

Chimera is a reference to Greek mythology. As a fire-breathing monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail, the emphasis is on the composition of incompatible parts. The word is also used to imply an illusion of the mind, which is an excellent reflection of the Mugler exhibition as a whole. “Chimera,”

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

Merriam-Webster, (date of last access 20 November 2019) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chimera Benjamin Hammond, “The New Exhibition Chronicling Thierry Mugler’s Wildest Most Radical Looks,” Dazed Digital, (date of last access 20 November 2019) https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/ article/43605/1/new-exhibition-thierry-mugler-couturissime-montreal-museum-cardi-b-solange Christine Long, “Thierry Mugler’s Wearable Art Collection ‘Couturissime’ on display at the MMFA in March,” CTV News, (date of last access 20 November 2019) https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/ thierry-mugler-s-wearable-art-collectioncouturissime-on-display-at-mmfa-inmarch-1.4298259 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986): 44-45 George Simmel quoted in Frenchy Lunning, Fetish Style, (London: Bloomsbury: 2013), p. 108.

Nathan Widder, “Matter as Simulacrum; Thought as Phantasm; Body as Event,” Deleuze and the Body, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University: 2011), p. 111.

Noreen Flanagan, “An Exclusive Interview with Fashion’s OG Bad Boy, the Mysterious Manfred Thierry Mugler,” Fashion Magazine, (date of last access 25 November 2019) https://fashionmagazine.com/ fashion/thierry-mugler-archives-couturissime/ Jacques Rancière, “The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics,” in The Politics of Aesthetics (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 7.

“Relevant,” Oxford Dictionaries, (date of last access 20 November 2019) http://english.oxforddictionaries.com/relevant Bretta Tondborg, “The Dangerous Museum: Participatory Practices and Controversy in Museums Today,” Nordisk Museologi 2 (2013), p. 3-16.

The experience of every single visitor is diverse, the success of democratic discussion is therefore very hard to examine, unless specific research is initiated.

Skelly, “The Phantasmagoric World,” (date of last access 2 November 2019).

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

Frenchy Lunning, Fetish Style, (London: Bloomsbury: 2013), p. 1.

Lunning, “Fetish Style,” p. 108.

Lunning, “Fetish Style,” p. 2.

Giles Deleuze, and Leopold Sacher-Masoch, Masochism, (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 32.

This is fairly similar to the bodily participation present in the immersion and the participatory. Deleuze, and Sacher-Masoch, “Masochism,” p. 17.

Deleuze, and Sacher-Masoch, “Masochism,” p. 20.

Deleuze, and Sacher-Masoch, “Masochism,” p. 71.

“Humiliate,” Merriam-Webster, (date of last access 20 November 2019) https:// www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ humiliate Many feminists note that there is an inspiring moment of power that comes from seeing Mugler’s models wearing bondage and leather whips as accessories.

A video recording of someone’s thoughts and experiences and published on the internet. “Vlog,” Cambridge Dictionary, (date of last access 20 November 2019) https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/vlog The top videos found on YouTube by typing Mugler exhibition are not from official broadcasting news channels but rather personal vlogs. Even on the official news channels’ videos, there are many comments posted by community members disregarding the show as perverse.

Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Pub, 2004), p. 5.

Tondborg, “The Dangerous Museum,” Nordisk Museologi 2 (2013), p. 11.

Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 4-5.

Griffiths, “Shivers Down your Spine,” p.-5.

In my personal experience each time I would exit the space, I did not know if 5 hours or 25 minutes had passed.

Preziosi and Farago, “Grasping the World,” p. 5.

Ruth B. Phillips, “A Proper Place or the Proper Arts of Place,” On Aboriginal Rep-

142

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

143

resentation in the Gallery, (Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization), p. 46.

Case for Feminist Approaches to Fashion Curation,” in Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond, (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 162.

Katy Steinmetz, “Instagram is now officially a Verb, According to Merriam-Webster,” Time, (date of last access 28 November 2019) https://time.com/5386603/ instagram-verb-merriam-webster/ The process of immersion is also noticeable in other collection displays at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, like the nineteenth-century Belle-époque room that implies the Salon style. This makes the viewer enter an imitative rendering of a previous century.

Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015), p. 110.

Arnold Vermeeren, Licia Calvi, Amalia Sabiescu, Raffaella Trocchianesi, Dagny Stuedahl, Elisa Giaccardi, and Sara Radice, Museum Experience Design: Crowds, Ecosystems and Novel Technologies, (London: Springer, 2018), p. 1.

AUTHORS Alexa van Abbema is a U3 student majoring in Cultural Studies and completing a double minor in and Communications and Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies. Alexa works with various local organizations such as: African Rainbow and the Prisoner Correspondence Project. Forging the multiple relations between theory and praxis, Alexa is particularly interested in questions of the body – or embodiment – located in the emerging discourses surrounding new materialism(s), critical race theory, and queer theory.

Laurence Charlebois is a recent graduate from McGill University with a major in Art History and a minor in Hispanic Studies. Born and raised on the South Shore of Montreal, she loves exploring museums, galleries, cafés and restaurants around the city. As of next Fall, Laurence will begin her MA in art history, attempting to combine her interests for contemporary art and Latin America.

Hannah Deskin is a U3 undergraduate pursuing an honours degree in Art History along with a minor in Anthropology. Hannah also works as a curatorial intern at the McGill Visual Arts Collection where she helps to manage over 2,500 artworks across 90 buildings and several campuses. Her research interests include the globalisation of the art market, contemporary de-colonisation movements and the intersections of art and law. After she graduates, she hopes to either pursue a Masters degree in Art History or attend law school.

Jacqueline Hampshire graduates in June having completed a major in Art History and a minor in Geography and Urban Systems. Her areas of interest include site-specificity, memory, architecture and urban design. Jacqueline also enjoys printmaking and papermaking in her spare time.

Erin Havens is a Computer Science and Art History student in her final year at McGill. Erin is always interested in discussing conceptual foundations of the unexpected, which explains her keen interests in art movements such as Minimalist Art and Pop Surrealism. Outside of her studies, she has experience with robotics, startups, and venture capital. Erin is looking forward to a future working with the conceptual nature behind how emerging technology can be crafted into beautifully-designed experiences.

From Philadelphia, Erika Kindsfather recently graduated with a First Class Honors major in Art History and a minor in German Language. Her research interests include approaching the study of fibre arts from a queer feminist theoretical perspective, cyber- and post-cyber-feminist themes in contemporary art practices, and the intersections of architectural spaces and structures of power.

144

Her recent scholarship focuses on embodiment and emotion in intermedia contemporary art practices. She hopes to pursue post-graduate studies focusing on new media and intersectional feminist theory.

Thomas Macdonald is a fourth-year in honours English literature with a double minor in Art History and German language. Originally from Boston, he hopes to go into urban planning and policy.

Luke Sarabia is a U2 Cultural Studies major and Art History Minor from Toronto.

He is currently on a semester abroad at Trinity College Dublin. He has also been published in The Channel and is a contributing writer for The McGill Tribune.

Luke’s primary academic interests include American contemporary art and film and the intersection of these media with social and class politics. He spends most of his free time trying to pick his favourite Coen Brothers movie.

Tara Allen-Flanagan is a third 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.

Lucia Bell-Epstein is in her second year at McGill majoring in Art History 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, making banana bread, and visiting galleries and museums. Her favourite contemporary 145

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

Miray Eroglu is in her third year at McGill majoring in Art History and minoring in French and Medieval Studies. She loves traveling, painting, writing and visiting museums and galleries in her free time. She spent the fall semester studying abroad in Switzerland at the University of Geneva and has enjoyed editing for Canvas this year!

Gabby Marcuzzi Herie is in her third year majoring in honours Art History and minoring in Anthropology. She was born in Toronto and likes to spend her spare time listening to podcasts and embroidering. She is still trying to reduce a wide range of art history-related interests including contemporary feminist art, textiles, taxidermy, and crystals into one focus. She’s officially an Aries but is a Taurus at heart.

Lily-Cannelle Mathieu is in her second year of her joint honours B.A. in Art History and Anthropology. She was thrilled to join both Canvas and Orientations this year! Her research interests are ever-expanding, but she is particularly curious about cultural politics in museums and the art world. She loves watching plants grow, learning, visiting exhibitions, and eating mochi! Émilie Perring is a third year student doing an honours in Art History and a minor in History. She enjoys painting, drawing, playing piano, skiing, getting lost in a book, and spending her summers traveling. She is also a proud crazy cat lady and would have eggs benedict for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if she could. She is particularly interested in the French Romanticism of the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century and hopes to pursue her studies in this area in grad school.

Greta Rainbow is in her third year studying English-Cultural Studies and Art History. She is passionate about magic realism, Monday crosswords, and public art that engages with all citizens, regardless of their background in the art historical canon. Greta is interested in the ways in which art opens conversations of difference, and she is excited about the role of Canvas in highlighting unseen voices and stories.

Mallory Rappaport is a fourth year International Development major, with minors in Communications and Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies. She is thrilled to have joined Canvas this year. Her academic interests range in topics, but often form at the intersections of race, class, and gender. She is an unabashed Aries, pineapple pizza lover, and avid to-do list maker.

Josephine Spalla is a fourth year at McGill in Joint Honours Art History & Asian 146

Religion. Her research interests lie in Southeast Asian art, particularly the transmission of aesthetic manifestations of Buddhist devotional practice across the region. Additionally, she once wrote a paper on the history of the cashew in a first year history course, however the project did not gain widespread academic acclaim.

Aimée Tian is a fourth year student pursuing her B.A. in Art History, Communications Studies and Economics. Her interests lie in all realms of arts and culture, but she is particularly fascinated by urban/public art, the de-commodification of art, racial politics and identity, and streetwear fashion. During her undergrad, she has written on various topics including textile art, camgirling, the language of light, and Cardi B (not all at once, that would be a bit of a stretch).

Muhan Zhang is in her fourth and final year in Joint Honours Art History and East Asian Studies. Her honours thesis is a comparative case study of the installation works of contemporary Chinese Canadian artists, Gu Xiong and Karen Tam. She has been an editor of both Canvas and Orientations Journals at McGill for the past three years.

147

149