Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada

]>

Contents

Cover

Title

Contents

List of Figures

Half-title

Cultural Studies Series

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Imagining Resistance: An Introduction KIRSTY ROBERTSON AND J. KERI CRONIN

Refus Global

Speaking Pie to Power: Can We Resist the Historic Compromise of Neoliberal Art? GREGORY SHOLETTE

Canadian Artists’ Representation and Copyright

John and Yoko’s Media War for Peace LOUIS KAPLAN

Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge: A Living Culture Needs a Living Wage

Monumental Inter ventions: Jeff Thomas Seizes Commemorative Space CLAUDETTE LAUZON

General Idea and AIDS

Resistant Performers and Engaged/ing Public(s) JESSICA WYMAN

The Named and the Unnamed: Gendering the Canadian Art Scene

Borders in the City AYESHA HAMEED

Crisis of Representation: Multiculturalism, Minquon Panchyat, and the The Lands Within Me

Bread and Five-Ring Circuses: Art, Activism, and the Olympic Games in Vancouver and London KIRSTEN FORKERT

Aboriginal Representation and the Canadian Art World

APEC at the Museum of Anthropology: The Politics of Site and the Poetics of Sight Bite RUTH B. PHILLIPS

Culture Jamming

Titanium Motherships of the New Economy: Museums, Neoliberalism, and Resistance KIRSTY ROBERTSON

Anarchy

Behind the Mask/I Am the Other: Solidarity and Struggle in The Fourth World War DAVID JEFFERESS

Gentrification

Toward a Conclusion: A Focus on the Visual Culture of Activism J. KERI CRONIN

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Back cover

]>

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Gerry Deiter, All We Are Saying

Fig. 5.2 Gerry Deiter, The Bed-In—Longshot

Fig. 5.3 Gerry Deiter, Confrontation

Fig. 5.4 John Lennon and Yoko Ono with Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau

Fig. 5.5 John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Crowd

Fig. 5.6 Allan de Souza and Yong Soon Min, Will **** for Peace

Fig. 6.1 Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge, Detail from Theatre of Operations

Fig. 7.1 Jeff Thomas, Indian Man from Nepean Point

Fig. 7.2 Jeff Thomas, F.B.I.

Fig. 7.3 Jeff Thomas, Why Do the Indians Always Have to Move?

Fig. 7.4 Jeff Thomas, My Brave Indian

Fig. 7.5 Jeff Thomas, Seize the Space

Fig. 8.1 General Idea, Imagevirus

Fig. 11.1 Ayesha Hameed and Anita Schoepp, Remembering and Forgetting

Fig. 11.2 Ayesha Hameed and Anita Schoepp, 902 Days and Counting

Fig. 11.3 Ayesha Hameed and Anita Schoepp, 902 Days and Counting

Fig. 11.4 Ayesha Hameed and Anita Schoepp, 902 Days and Counting

Fig. 11.5 Ayesha Hameed and Anita Schoepp, Papers Please!

Fig. 11.6 Ayesha Hameed and Anita Schoepp, Papers Please!

Fig. 11.7 Ayesha Hameed and Anita Schoepp, Papers Please!

Fig. 13.1 Anti-Poverty Committee, Homes Not Games sticker

Fig. 13.2 Reporters Without Borders, Olympic Handcuffs

Fig. 13.3 Native Youth Movement Logo

Fig. 13.4 Kirsten Forkert, List of corporate sponsors on fence surrounding London 2012 Olympics site

Fig. 13.5 Kirsten Forkert, Bus used for I love £2.3 billion tour, prior to the start of the tour

Fig.13.6 Kirsten Forkert, Martin Slavin of Gamesmonitor, dressed as a construction worker on I love £2.3 billion tour

Fig. 13.7 We Are Bad, Poster from We Are Bad

Fig. 16.1 Sonny Assu, Kwakwaka’wakw Salmon Loops

Fig. 17.1 The Weston family wing and the Michael Lee-Chin building at the Royal Ontario Museum

Fig. 20.1 Germaine Koh, Overflow (at Centre A Gallery)

]>

]>

Cultural Studies Series

Cultural Studies is the multi- and inter-disciplinary study of culture, defined anthropologically as a way of life, performatively as symbolic practice, and ideologically as the collective product of varied media and cultural industries. Although Cultural Studies is a relative newcomer to the humanities and social sciences, in less than half a century it has taken interdisciplinary scholarship to a new level of sophistication, reinvigorating the liberal arts curriculum with new theories, topics, and forms of intellectual partnership.

Wilfrid Laurier University Press invites submissions of manuscripts concerned with critical discussions on power relations concerning gender, class, sexual preference, ethnicity, and other macro and micro sites of political struggle.

For more information, please contact:

Lisa Quinn

Acquisitions Editor

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

75 University Avenue West

Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5

Canada

Phone: 519-884-0710 ext. 2843

Fax: 519-725-1399

Email: quinn@press.wlu.ca

]>

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Imagining resistance: visual culture and activism in Canada / J. Keri Cronin and Kirsty

Robertson, editors.

(Cultural studies series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Also available in electronic format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-257-0

1. Art—Political aspects—Canada. 2. Politics in art—Canada. I. Cronin, J. Keri (Jennifer Keri), 1973– II. Robertson, Kirsty, 1976– III. Series: Cultural studies series (Waterloo, Ont.)

N72. P6I432011 701'.030971 C2010-905171-8

Electronic format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-311-9 (PDF), 978-1-55458-347-8 (EPUB)

1. Art—Political aspects—Canada. 2. Politics in art—Canada. I. Cronin, J. Keri (Jennifer Keri), 1973– II. Robertson, Kirsty, 1976– III. Series: Cultural studies series (Waterloo, Ont.: Online)

N72. P6I432011a 701'.030971 C2010-905172-6

© 2011 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Cover design by Blakeley Words+Pictures. Cover image: 902 Days and Counting. Photo by Anita Schoepp. Text design by Brenda Prangley.

]>

Acknowledgements

The idea for Imagining Resistance was first hatched in 2003 at the Universities Art Association of Canada conference at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. As the conference drew to a close, we found ourselves chatting excitedly about the potential for bringing together scholars who explore the visual in activism. The first manifestation of this idea was a conference panel, called (Image) ining Resistance, at the 2005 Canadian Association of Cultural Studies conference held at the University of Alberta. The two-part panel helped begin many of the dialogues that have informed the current project.

Since that cold November day at the UAAC conference in Kingston, this project has undergone many transformations and we have many people to thank, including above all the scholars who have contributed their work to the book. We would also like to recognize the support we have received over the years from the faculty members we worked with at Queen’s University, in particular Lynda Jessup, Susan Lord, and Clive Robertson. Kirsty would also like to thank Janis Jefferies, Kelly Thompson, and Susan Kelly from Goldsmiths for all the encouragement they offered while she was a post-doctoral fellow there. Thanks are also due to Janine Marchessault, Cate Sandilands, Imre Szeman, and Anne Whitelaw for their continued support, friendship, and mentoring.

We would like to acknowledge the support of our colleagues at Brock University and at the University of Western Ontario, especially Catherine Heard, Leah Knight, Patrick Mahon, Margaret de Rosia, Christine Sprengler, Katharine T. von Stackelberg, Linda Steer, and Kelly Wood. Kirsty would also like to thank participants in a graduate seminar at UWO on the economization of culture for their careful consideration of and lively debates over some of the issues present in this book. Those seminar participants include: Jennifer Orpana, Jamie Quail, Stephanie Radu, Kevin Rodgers, Jonathan Sarma, Josh Schwebel, and Matthew Smith.

Lastly, we would like to acknowledge our friends and family, the people who have supported us and made us smile through the duration of this and many other projects: Alex Boutros, Bill & Ruthie Casey, Nikki Cormier, Duncan Cowie, Scott Cronin, Mario deGiglio-Bellemare, Kit Dobson, Anna Lepine, Amish Morrell, Laurie Morrison, Erin Morton, Timothy Pearson and the extended Pearson family, Jasmine Rault, Fraser Robertson, Chris Robertson, Sarah Smith, Elizabeth Stec, Kaarla Sundstrom, Kim Wahl, and Tamara Vukov.

]>

Imagining Resistance:

An Introduction

KIRSTY ROBERTSON AND J. KERI CRONIN

W hen we began Imagining Resistance, our aim was to gather a series of essays exploring the role of art and visual culture in activism in Canada. Although this might sound straightforward enough, what became almost immediately apparent is that the topic is a fraught one, cut across with complexities, disagreements, and debate. The porosity of overloaded categories such as art and activism tends to encourage highly contested discussions and arguments not only over the efficacy of artistic forms of resistance but also over the very nature of what defines art and what defines resistance.1 If it can be agreed that there is such a thing as activist art and that it does have some sort of political role to play, does it belong in the art gallery? Does it belong in the streets? If it is art can it be activism? If it is activism can it be art? Although our original aim seemed simple, it actually covered more than a century of rich deliberation and a highly complex history of production, performance, circulation, and scholarship that have not allowed for easy categorization of activist art within political movements or within the discipline of art history (or any other discipline for that matter). That is apparent even before one tries to disentangle the differences between political art, activist art, oppositional art, subversive art, resistant art, tactical media, interventionist art, and so on and so forth.2

One might point out, however, that this cacophony of disagreement nevertheless signifies a profound and sustained engagement with the potential for an art of resistance, an unwillingness to completely forsake its possibility, often coupled with utopian imaginings of novel visual and perfomative interventions. The essays in Imagining Resistance examine both the use of a series of diverse artistic practices to activate oppositional politics and the multifarious attempts at co-option that unsettle any easy theorization of the role (s) played by vision, imagery, or performance in resistance. They range from considerations of the spectacle of public protest to the role of local grassroots involvement in the picturing and politics of dissent, and from case studies of specific performances, films, and art works to wide-ranging theoretical discussions of the role of oppositional visual culture in contemporary society.

Our decision to focus on Canada brought up a further series of complications. Why Canada? Arguably, an intense and vibrant history of activist, oppositional, and subversive art practice, combined with Canada’s recent role in the international construction and spread of neoliberal economic globalization, makes it a productive and under-considered site of analysis. The depiction (both internal and external) of Canada as a peace-loving and peacekeeping nation contrasts strongly with events past and present—its participation in military conflict internationally and nationally, violent crackdowns on strikers in Winnipeg in 1919 and Vancouver in 1932, and the surveillance of oppositional activities stretching back to and beyond the First World War. More recently one might point to the treatment of alter-globalization protesters in Vancouver, Quebec City, Calgary, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, the Security Certificate internment of the so-called Secret Trial Five, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s possible role in the deportation and torture of Maher Arar, the international outcry at the taser-induced death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport, recent allegations of threat and coercion in the Ontario Provincial Police’s shutting down of Mohawk-led blockades, and Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan (alongside extensive arms manufacturing for the U. S.-led incursion in Iraq). These events counter any deeply held myth of a peaceful nation. Rather, the prevalence of such actions suggests that these instances are not anomalies but are instead indications of a deep commitment to the politics of control concomitant with the spread of the disciplinary tactics of neoliberalism.3 Resistance is equally present, however, from strikes to anti-Vietnam War actions and support for draft dodgers through to massive protests in 2003 against the possible invasion of Iraq and continued efforts on the part of indigenous peoples to secure land claims and other rights. These contradictions suggest it is past time to bring projects together that have contested and resisted the imposition of disciplinary structures and to draw out the opposition to actions such as those mentioned above.4

A second and more complex question might be, why now, when analysis of the nation state is often eclipsed by the global? Within these pages, any idea of Canada or even of the nation is treated with ambivalence—the authors in Imagining Resistance acknowledge the ongoing importance of the nation state as an epistemic framework of organization while also recognizing the impossibility (and indeed ill-advisedness) of focusing on a single-national entity in a world in which the global seems to predominate. As has been repeatedly pointed out, globalization erases some borders even as it creates others.5 Although borders dissolve for the circulation of goods (something that has led to calls for post-national critiques), they are strengthened against the passage of people—particularly those without official documentation. Thus, the nation-state, open to some, closed to others, remains a significant category for investigation, particularly in Canada, where, in the early 1990s, a perceived crisis of national identity overshadowed the growing importance of the global.

Many of the examples in Imagining Resistance are specific to Canada, focusing on Canadian institutions, artists, and activists, but the theoretical frameworks are not. Jessica Wyman’s chapter focuses on performance art in Canada, Claudette Lauzon’s research addresses a series of work by Aboriginal photographer Jeff Thomas, and Ayesha Hameed’s contribution centres on her own interventionist work in Montreal. Other authors, such as David Jefferess, have read international case studies (the activist film Fourth World War) from their positions as scholars working in Canadian institutions. Still others have drawn Canada into transnational contexts. Gregory Sholette touches lightly on Canada in his analysis of the international rise of mockstitutions as resistant artistic practice, incorporating Canadian cases into a plethora of global examples. Other examples include Ruth Phillips’s writings on the APEC protests at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, Louis Kaplan’s discussion of the anti-war campaign of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Montreal and Toronto, Kirsty Robertson’s take on activist exhibitions in starchitect-designed museums and galleries, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Kirsten Forkert’s consideration of activism against spectacles such as the Vancouver Olympics. It is our hope that the chapters and case studies in Imagining Resistance will transcend national discourse and have a voice far beyond the borders of the nation-state, particularly given the increasingly post-national framework within which many protests take place.

In an effort to capture and contextualize this moment, we have included a series of case studies that document examples of art activist practice that has taken place in Canada over the past sixty years. The examples are organized loosely chronologically, with the goal of tracing a meta-narrative of the evolution of activist art (and, by proxy, critical scholarship) through the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Generally speaking, these examples are included to demonstrate not only a rich history of resistance in Canada but also the changing nature of revolutionary praxis and of activism itself. For this reason, they are not encyclopaedic, but echo (sometimes obviously, sometimes obliquely) the content of the chapters. As the decades progress, critiques of conservative social norms are replaced by critiques of the state, which in turn are supplemented by interest in representation, identity, and belonging in the 1980s and 1990s. Almost always, (unstable) national identity forms a subcurrent. As theorists elsewhere posited the end of the nation state in the 1990s, questions about a crisis of national identity, Aboriginal representation, and Quebec sovereignty underlie much of the critical theory and radical art in Canada. Such perspectives did not disappear at the turn of the century but rather were folded into actions focused on the globalization of neoliberal capitalism, gentrification, exile, the environment, precarity, and labour. In all, one finds a meta-narrative that follows Irit Rogoff ’s trajectory from criticism, to critique, to criticality.6

From the incendiary rhetoric of the Refus Global in late 1940s Quebec, and the formation of the Canadian Artists Representation (a still functioning artists’ union), the case studies move through Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge’s Marxist-inspired labour-oriented work of the late 1960s to performances and art works concerned with indigenous identity, representation, and rights, illustrated by Rebecca Belmore’s 1988 performance Artifact #671B, and the infamous 1992 INDIGENA exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. 1990s AIDS activism is represented through General Idea’s renowned reworking of Robert Indiana’s LOVE paintings into an AIDS logo. We have also included a number of case studies dealing with identity politics and resistance to and subversion of systemic discrimination against women and people of colour—both within and outside of the art world. In the latter half of Imagining Resistance readers will find case studies addressing the effects of post-Fordist capitalism, Adbusters magazine, and the anti-gentrification and anarchist-inspired work of artists and architects such as Adrian Blackwell and Luis Jacob.

Although the case studies do not go into great detail, their intent is to demonstrate the longevity of many of these projects, their continued impact, and the manner in which they both reflect and surpass the temporal frameworks in which they were created and circulated. Arguably, many of these projects exacted fundamental change. Works such as those of Rebecca Belmore were important for opening up Canadian authoritative museums and galleries to interpretations that challenged mainstream art history and deeply affected the making, display, and teaching of Canadian art (history). In turn, such projects also contributed to political change related to land claims, gentrification, and social inequality.

Though many artists and activists continue to struggle with the themes addressed in these case studies, to suggest the inefficacy of any of the projects would be disingenuous and counterproductive. It would be equally disingenuous to suggest that political art projects are always successful, or that they take place in autonomous spaces, disconnected from wider economic and political currents. Theorist Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out that, to be successful, activist art must have some currency within the art world, but having this risks lessening art’s impact in the wider social sphere. She writes, the institutionalized canon of the work of political artists threatens to become just another art genre, robbed of any political import.7 The dilemma presented by the dual positioning of activist art both outside of and also within the systems it seeks to critique forms the focus of this introduction, particularly as such debates have been written and mapped by the discipline of art history.

This introduction takes the moment in which Imagining Resistance was created and reads through that a historical trajectory of writing about art and activism that brings us to the present day and the often-confused politics surrounding the scholarship on and production of activist art. Imagining Resistance calls strongly for new ways of writing about and engaging with activism. We argue for interdisciplinary projects that refuse the positioning associated with writing about activist art within the confining disciplinary boundaries of art history. We call for scholarly writing that deeply engages with current politics—local, national, and global. Finally, in our conclusion, we turn to the politics of image making, so that the volume does not consider simply the process of making and circulating protest or political art, but self-reflexively considers the very process of making art and imagery as one with very real material and geopolitical consequences.

Setting the Stage

What does it mean to study, write about, and resist through the visual? Can art even be political? These questions are fraught ones, and when political art is written about it is often to dismiss it, to analyze its co-option or to suggest its complicity with the system it seeks to critique. One of the problems with art that attempts to make statements… it gets assimilated, dismissively wrote Guardian art critic Adrian Searle in 2006.8 Sure enough, in the history of Western activist art and cultural production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there is a fairly obvious path from radicalism to co-option that tends to result in a dismissal of political art. From anti-institutional Dadaist work now gracing the front entrance of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York to the much-cited use of the lyrics to John Lennon’s Instant Karma in a Nike advertisement, this path seems almost inevitable, whether the end stage of incorporation be the authoritative art gallery or advertising for the multinational corporation. Protest movements themselves can be co-opted, as was seen when the huge creative outpouring found in the streets of Seattle in alter-globalization protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 found its way into the production of the feature film Battle in Seattle. Released in 2008, Battle in Seattle starred actress Charlize Theron and centred on the plight of a police officer, a group of activists, and a pregnant bystander caught in the protests. The film clearly turned political action into entertainment.9

Even before protest art is assimilated or co-opted, it is often dismissed as ineffective. Writing about a general lack of response to the U. S.-led war in Iraq, Susan Buck-Morss noted, In terms of visual effectiveness, even Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks have had more success than the professional artists. The culture industry (which employs hundreds of creative people behind every star or show) ends up being more progressive than the supposed alternative of serious art.10 If this isn’t enough, political art is often seen to be not just easily co-opted but also deeply connected with the capital and power it might seek to transcend or critique. Julian Stallabrass, for instance, draws a compelling parallel between the free market and free art or the apparently free play granted to contemporary artists dealing with political matter (so long as it is contained by the art world). Whereas art perhaps played a role in bringing to attention issues of representation during the so-called Culture Wars in the United States (and by extension Canada) in the 1980s and 1990s, now, argues Stallabrass, corporate culture has thoroughly assimilated the discourse of a tamed postmodernism. As in mass culture, art’s very lack of convention has become entirely conventional. Ubiquitous and insistent voices urge consumers to express themselves, be creative, be different, break the rules, stand out from the crowd, even rebel, but these are no longer the words of radical agitators but of business.11

Postmodernism, in other words, has faced challenges in the academy but has flourished in the neoliberal marketplace. Here, calls for more diverse representation in syllabi, hiring practices, and popular culture come back through a plethora of advertising campaigns and middle-management hiring strategies that privilege an image of diversity over true equality. What if, write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in the book Empire (itself closely linked with much of the theory surrounding activism at the turn of the millennium), a new paradigm of power, a postmodern sovereignty, has come to replace the modern paradigm and rule through differential hierarchies of the hybrid and fragmentary subjectivities that these theorists celebrate?12 What if the critical project that was identity politics opened doors to the deterritorialized operation of an authority without borders, a power that positively revels in representation, niche markets, and a move of control from relations between subjects and objects to relations between bodies, spaces, and circulation? Where difference is absorbed into a discourse of postmodern fragmentation, master narratives are in turn consumed in order to create new, celebratory, master narratives of fragmentation.13 In these circumstances, vision and imagery are folded into the expansion of capitalism while formerly critical paradigms, such as the feminist critique of the art canon or of the museum, have developed an authority and calcification of their own.

Gregory Sholette, Kirsten Forkert, and Kirsty Robertson all take up these issues in their chapters in this volume, as does Brian Holmes, who notes that postmodern capitalism clearly recycled subversion back into the discourse of innovation and change that characterized the flexible, immaterial labour underpinning the New Economy of the 1990s-on.14 Of late, this relationship is increasingly evident, as development around creativity, innovation, and knowledge production have become key factors in expanding the capitalist economy. Initiatives that seemed to privilege the cultural workers who tended to be on the outside of neoliberal economic policy resulted arguably in symbolic support and actual precarity, brought on by a labour system that favoured flexible employment with a lack of benefits, security, or the ability to organize. As Holmes outlines, the relationship between resistance and capitalism works in the following way: It is known that contemporary labor involves linguistic creativity, the expression of affects, spontaneous cooperation. These are the sources of innovation, indispensable for cognitive capitalism. But no boss can command creativity, expressivity, cooperation—these things cannot be submitted to any disciplinary regime. On the contrary, a certain kind of insubordination must be actively encouraged, in the very interest of productivity.15

In other words, according to Holmes, Sholette, and numerous others, the art world has combined with creative economies and creative economics to encourage a heady mixture of art and capitalism. Although such theories might find precedent in the work of the Frankfurt School on the cultural economy and in the 1960s writings of the Situationists, particularly those concerned with the spectacular, what is different for these authors is the extent of co-option and the vast horizontal spread of control across the social plane.

Looked at from this perspective, the fact that any sort of oppositional art exists at all should be seen as noteworthy. But it does exist. In spite of even the most egregious instances of co-option (the overuse of Che Guevara’s iconic portrait is a case in point), and in spite of the increasingly predictable dismissal of protest, political, or activist art, the calls for art to be used within oppositional culture have not abated. In spite of the dismissal of earlier forms of protest art, in spite of the assimilation of the avant-garde, in the margins (and even mainstream) of the art world, and in the concatenation of other visual industries—film, advertisement, performance—a vibrant and committed activist practice continues. Indeed, the crisis of confidence affecting the production and reception of political art has been countered by a number of theorists and artists. Arundhati Roy, for example, famously noted in 2003 that "our strategy should be not only to confront empire,