The Great Canadian Art Exportation: Oh, Canada and The Myth of The White North

[En anglais]

Maple syrup, hockey, poutine, caribou, and Timbits: this is the stuff of Denise Markonish’s Canada.1 1  -  In the introductory essay of the Oh, Canada catalogue, Markonish mentions these among other quintessentially “Canadian” tokens to introduce the topic of Canadian culture. Markonish, a curator at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), recently organized a monumental survey exhibition of Canadian art, aptly titled Oh, Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America. The exhibit held a strong roster of Canadian artists and myriad works engaging with diverse topics; its attempt to relay an affect of “Canadianness” begs varied and imploring questions regarding curatorial methods, the state of regionalized contemporary art in an increasingly globalized market, and art’s irresolute relationship with nationalism. The cultural implications of Oh, Canada conflate issues of curatorial authorship, institutional mandate, and the affective potential of the exhibition as medium, among many other variables. Here, disrupting such conflation, both the curatorial impetus and the exhibition as medium will be used to query the conditions that comprise Canadian identity, a fictive or perhaps mythical entity, and its vexed relationship with contemporary art.

Oh, Canada, whichtook place from May 2012 to April 2013, sprawled across the expanse of several rooms and corridors on the first and second floors of MASS MoCA’s formidable exhibition space.² 2 - MASS MoCA is housed within a converted nineteenth-century factory space in North Adams, MA. With over a hundred thousand square feet of exhibition space, it markets itself as, “the largest center for contemporary arts in the United States.” http://www.massmoca.org/facts.php. Some larger rooms contained several works, often in different media, while other spaces were smaller, more intimate, and showcased one artist or one large work.³ 3 - A lengthier investigation could query the relationship between the exhibition installation and the organization of the catalogue. Throughout this article I address the exhibition itself as a medium — it should be noted that the catalogue is also a related yet distinct medium. There exists an overlap between the two, however: the physical installation of the exhibition did not correspond to the thematic groupings proposed in the catalogue, and the resulting dissonance speaks to a distinction in mediums and suggests certain shortcomings in exhibition design. Including artworks from more than sixty artists, collectives, and collaboratives, hailing from every province and most territories, Oh, Canada — and Markonish as its curator — attempted to speak to the profusion of artistic practices inherent in Canada’s contemporary art landscape. Internationally known artists, including Michael Snow, Shary Boyle, Marcel Dzama, Michel de Broin, and Douglas Coupland were exhibited alongside artists akin to Amelie Atkins, Eryn Foster, Craig Leonard, and Clint Neufeld, whose practices, while locally acclaimed, have yet to gain exposure internationally. The exhibition layout eschewed any adherence to topical, chronological, or geographically specific organization, relying instead on the art’s implicit Canadianness as the overarching organizational mechanism.⁴ 4 - While the exhibition did include artists from all provinces and nearly every territory, the cultural specificity of particular regions within Canada was left unaddressed. Complex and nuanced culturally specific regions of art, such as those found in Quebec for example, were homogenized within the greater trope of “Canadianness” in the exhibition. With an overarching theme of identity, particularly Canadian identity, the absence of regional art that addresses cultural specificity further compounds the issue of a national cultural art landscape. What then is Canadian art and what does it look like?