- Canadian Cultural Policy: A Metaphysical Problem
by Ken Lum
A quip from former Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King
contends that too much geography rather than too little
history afflict Canada. Add to this the racial and ethnic
diversity of the Canadian population and the problem of
how to forge and project Canadian culture becomes especially
difficult. Also this is a problem rooted in paradox because
the multi-cultural composition of Canada's population was
to a significant degree a consequence of its social engineering
of culture that began in full force immediately after the
Second World War and that developed in two principal stages.
The first stage was marked by the establishment of the
Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters
and Sciences, better known as the Massey-Lévesque
Commission, in 1949. Massey-Lévesque was a massive
two-year inquiry that had as its purpose the setting of
Canadian cultural policy, including the principles of governance
upon communications, film, television and arts agencies.
It was instrumental in the establishment of many of Canada's
now sacrosanct institutions including the National Library,
the National Film Board and The Canada Council for the
Arts. While Massey-Lévesque's report was liberally
sprinkled with praise for Canada's "variety and richness
of Canadian life" that "promises a healthy resistance to
the standardisation which is so great a peril to modern
civilisation", it was in fact a document of the intellectual
anxieties of Canada's ruling Anglophone elite worried about
the ascending signs of regional discontent to which they
believed themselves historically designated to resolve.
Despite the constituting, albeit racially problematic,
principle of Canada as a nation founded by two peoples,
the English and the French, the Canadian federation has
traditionally been a compact between the centre and the
regions. The centre is represented by the ruling Anglophone
elite of Ontario along with a number of appointed Quebecois
aide de camps, and the regions would comprise the rest
of Canada including Québec. The task of the commission
as it defined it was a difficult one, how to construct
an identity for a nation that was comprised of isolated
regions of diverse histories and to which the threat of
American influences was always present.
The second stage was represented by the formal adoption
in 1971 of the Multiculturalism Policy and its attendant
Canadian Multicultural Act. The federal multicultural program
formalised support for the idea of Canadian identity as
constituted in its diversity of cultures, an idea that
was only implicit in Massey-LŽvesque. Multicultural diversity
was designed to be the basis of the cultural pillar of
Canada's foreign and domestic policy. In many ways, its
logic is the inverse of Massey-Lévesque. The aim
of Massey-Lévesque was about building institutions
that would unify a compartmentalised nation and about underlining
Canada's historical roots in Europe, primarily Britain
and France, as a means to deflect Canadians from the pernicious
influences of American culture. Multiculturalism, on the
other hand, is about supervising Canada's compartmentalised
character by diluting the primacy of Canada's English and
French roots as a means to inflect a more congenial and
less materialistic version of America culture. The point
that Canadian society has become over time increasingly
like American society was made profusely clear during the
1992 George Bush versus Bill Clinton U.S. presidential
campaign. When then President Bush made a plea to Americans
for a kinder, gentler America, political wags in both the
United States and Canada were quick to reply that Canada
is that kinder, gentler America.
Multiculturalism came to parallel Canada's multi-lateralist
voice on the international stage of politics; the former
would strengthen the legitimacy of the latter. Hand in
hand, a multicultural domestic policy and a multi-lateral
international policy would ensure Canadian influence through
a wide spectrum of forums such as the United Nations, the
Arctic Council, NATO, La Francophonie, The British Commonwealth
and various Asia-Pacific organizations. Canada would be
the primary habitus of the enlightened, democratic state,
a respected and credible mediator between entities of power
and entities on the margins. Multiculturalism would represent
the triumph of the discourse of the citizen and demonstrate
to the world the true cosmopolitanism of Canada. Domestically,
it represented a political accommodation of the old Anglophone
elite to an emerging francophone elite. Conveniently, the
country would continue to be led and administered by the
perspectives of the old Anglophone elite, after all, multiculturalism
was their idea!
Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, aggressively promoted
the idea of a national culture constituted by its cultural
pluralism. He argued that: "Uniformity is neither desirable
nor possible in a country the size of Canada. We should
not even be able to agree upon the kind of Canadian to
choose as a model, let alone persuade most people to emulate
it." To those who argue that multiculturalism is a dangerous
recipe for a fractiously decentralised state, Trudeau's
response was to make a virtue of the paradox. In 1970,
to the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Press, Trudeau argued "Canada
has often been called a mosaic but I prefer the image of
a tapestry, with its many threads and colours, its beautiful
shapes, its intricate subtlety. If you go behind a tapestry,
all you see is a mass of complicated knots. We have tied
ourselves in knots, you might say. Too many Canadians only
look at the tapestry of Canada that way. But if they would
see it as others do, they would see what a beautiful, harmonious
thing it really is."
By no means were debates about multiculturalism solely
a Canadian concern. According to the late French social
philosopher Michel de Certeau, the idea of giving voice
to minority cultures was a salient feature of the events
of May 68. De Certeau believed in the 'exemplary value'
of the immigrant to the French State. In language with
striking parallels to the Canadian Multiculturalism Act,
he said in his seminal book The Capture of Speech: "By
becoming more open and more tolerant with regard to immigrants,
we would also learn how to relativise our codes of conduct,
our way of understanding 'high culture,' and this would
allow us to confer on anonymous inventions the arts of
practical creation and everyday culture, and on what is
made by practitioners of everyday life their own cultural
role." De Certeau also argued for public assistance and
regional endowments to minoritarian and regional cultures,
again in language similar to officially ratified policy
in Canada.
Canadian intellectuals beginning in the post Second World
War administration of Louis St. Laurent and continuing
through to that of Pierre Trudeau theorised that Canada's
own cultural landscape would develop to resemble what inevitably
the global cultural landscape would become. As such, Canada
would occupy the high ground of the world's future. What
is more is that multiculturalism would have the political
advantage of an idea born out of difference with the United
States. In lieu of America's melting pot, Canada advanced
the image of the Canadian mosaic. Rather than a culture
rooted in individual sameness, Canada's society would be
rooted in consensus from difference. Or at least that was
the idea. What Canada did not anticipate was a world in
which nations would redefine their particular cultural
and foreign interests in fundamental ways. It did not anticipate
a world in which private actors would become such a threat
to public functions, nor did it anticipate the resurgence
of the United States in monopolising the world's foreign
policy. Lastly, Canada did not anticipate that its agenda
of multiculturalism would be resisted by the turns of history
itself as concerns about demographic balance have deepened
rather than abated.
The critical socio-historical period of time during which
the contemporary discourse of Canadian culture was produced
spans from the 1950s through to the beginning of the 1970s.
Undoubtedly there were many formative events in the history
of Canadian culture predating this period that can be cited;
for example, the founding of Canada's first public radio
broadcasting in 1932. But the twenty years of the 1950s
and 1960s represented two decades in which an unprecedented
number of cultural propositions passed into legislation
with the mandate of fostering, promoting and defending
Canadian cultural production and services. During this
period the federal government of Canada passed the National
Film Act, the recommendations of the Royal Commission on
National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences,
the Broadcasting Act, the Canada Council Act, the recommendations
of the Report of the Royal Commission on Publications,
the Canadian Film Development Corporation Act and the Telesat
Canada Act, which established a crown corporation to exclusively
provide satellite communications services to Canadians.
Canada has the ambiguous fortune of sharing its border
with the United States of America, the world's largest
producer of cultural commodities. The high standard of
living enjoyed by most Canadians is a consequence of Canada's
vassal economic relationship with its southern neighbour.
In matters of culture, Canada cannot make decisions without
looking over its shoulder, as Canadians are ever conscious
of the imperatives of their geopolitical location. In the
immortal words of former Canadian Member of Parliament
Robert Thompson: "The Americans are our best friends—whether
we like it not."
To American eyes, cultural sovereignty is little more
than another thorny issue in the litigious world of economic
and trade negotiations. The degree to which cultural issues
are entangled with trade issues that in turn spill into
questions of national sovereignty can be illustrated with
a recent ruling by the World Trade Organization against
the European Community in favour of the United States on
the matter of bananas. Americans cited the victory as it
sought punitive actions against Canada for its legislation
against so-called "split-run" magazines that siphon off
advertising revenue from smaller Canadian publications
by satellite printing twice an issue of, say, Time magazine
to accommodate advertisements from Canadian sources. Canada
objects to "split-run" magazines because they undermine
the viability of Canada's publications industry while catering
mostly exclusively to American or foreign editorial content.7
Canadian cultural policy, from its inception, was guided
by many elements of the Old Left's criticism of America's
society of unfettered capitalism. Canada has always been
socially democratic in its organization of its capitalist
economy. Canadian intellectuals have traditionally worked
in concert with the national government to formulate an
intermediary position for Canada between left and right
ideologies, first and third worlds. As a contiguous neighbour
of the United States, it was necessary for Canada to define
its liberalism deftly, with an incomplete character. It
was an ascending view that by the late 1960s conventional
Left/Right divisions and definitions had been displaced
by the idea of global conquest by one or the other superpower.
This was a political view shared by many countries including
communist ones, the most important being China, a country
Canada formally recognized during the Trudeau administration
to the then consternation of the United States and well
in advance of the same decision later adopted by many Western
nations. The formulation for Canadian cultural policy,
therefore, both in its domestic and external uses, had
to be a metaphysical formulation without direct reference
to specific political resolution or commitment.
Under these paradoxical conditions in which the level
of general wealth to Canadians is assured by its highly
interlocked economy with the United States but at the expense
of a deep moral compromise to Canada's cultural integrity,
Canada devised to constitute itself heterogeneously. Such
a metaphysical response to the moral hankering of nationalism
owed much to the spryly articulated ideas of Canadian thinkers
such as Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. During the two
decades immediately following the Second World War, Innis
and McLuhan propelled Canada to a leadership role in transportation
and communications theory. Both were intellectually indebted
to the liberal–pragmatist perspectives of John Dewey,
Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. In the case of McLuhan, there
was never a glint of despair and foreboding in his views
about Canada's place in a technologically revolutionising
world, at least, not until the end of the 1960s, when the
project of developing a new cultural infrastructure was
fully in place.8<
McLuhan's thoughts about a future Global Village of electronically
rendered synchronic relations and about the degree to which
reality is shaped by the effects of media have proven brilliantly
prescient. While cautious about the possible dangers posed
by changing technologies, McLuhan was generally positive
in his outlook of its applications. He wrote in 1961 that: "The
compressional, implosive nature of the new electric technology
is retrogressing Western man back from the open plateaus
of literate values and into the heart of tribal darkness,
into what Joseph Conrad termed 'the Africa within'."9 Such
an idea was taken as a directive by Canadian policymakers
to ensure that Canada maintained a position of mediation
between an increasingly communications-based modernity
that signalled the advent of what has come to be known
as globalisation and fundamentalist reactions which could
lead to the return of ultra-nationalist sentiments. Presaging
such a role for Canada and the implementation of multiculturalism
as a policy of state, McLuhan said: "Individual talents
and perspectives don't have to shrivel within a detribalised
society; they merely interact within a group consciousness
that has the potential for releasing far more creativity
than the old atomised culture. Literate man is alienated,
impoverished man; detribalised man can lead a far richer
and more fulfilling life—not the life of a mindless
drone but of the participant in a seamless web of interdependence
and harmony."10 Also in 1961, McLuhan predicted during
an address to the Humanities Association of Canada, that
the arts and sciences in Canada would experience an era
of unprecedented accomplishment.11 Many Canadians, including
the burgeoning numbers of separatist nationalists in Québec
shared McLuhan's optimism albeit with different objectives
in mind.
That same year saw the publication of Jane Jacobs' seminal
book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
one of the most influential books in the history of urban
studies.12 Her indictment of the failure of urban life
in America, which she attributed to a general moral failure
in American society as a whole, was a case lesson for Canadians
who by and large lived in far safer and cleaner cities.
Many of the problems confronting the United States seemed
to elude Canada. While the razing of Pruitt-Igoe, the poster
child of America's failed housing projects, evoked the
twin scourges of poverty and racism, Canada showed off
Habitat at Expo 67, an innovative and supposedly inexpensive
housing solution for the world.13 McLuhan's complaint that
'Canada is a bore' seemed a small price to pay in exchange
for a sense of smug superiority over Canada's superpower
neighbour. Canadians felt prideful of their country and
of their Prime Minister Lester Pearson who had won a Nobel
Peace Prize in 1957 for his role in mediating the end of
the Suez Crisis. The Pearson achievement was taught to
Canadian schoolchildren as an example of the manner to
which Canada should seek self-definition, through support
for multi-lateralism in its outward voice and multiculturalism
in its domestic voice.
The apogee of Canadian self-confidence came in 1967 in
Montréal during Expo 67 with its utopian theme of
Man and His World. In the centenary year of Canada's founding,
a world class exposition took place that projected a remarkable
range of ideas on improving the future of humanity through
the use of new and emerging electronic advances. The spirit
of Canadians McLuhan, Innis, Glenn Gould, Moshe Safdie
and Lester Pearson permeated the fair, not to mention Americans
Buckminster Fuller, Alvin Toffler and Lewis Mumford, of
whom the National Film Board of Canada had produced six
films based on his ideas about the history of urbanity.
By 1967, McLuhan was in monthly consultations with Lester
Pearson to which Pierre Trudeau was an important member
of Pearson's inner cabinet.14 The optimism of the centennial
celebrations carried over into 1968 with the election of
the youthful and worldly Trudeau while the conclusion of
the "love year" of 1967 in the United States ushered in
one of the most violently radicalised and apocalyptic years
in American history. It became a Canadian cliché of
1968 to mention the stories of Canadians watching American
cities burn from the comforts of their homes just across
the border. That same year, Jane Jacobs would herself make
the move to Canada, settling in Toronto, a city she has
consistently praised for its urban fabric. To Canadians,
the future could not seem brighter. This applied to Québec
as well where the future seemed assured despite often divisive
and vigorous debates among that province's intelligentsia
about how best to fulfil Québec's rendezvous with
destiny.15
In difference to Canada today, passenger train travel
was still important in 1967 and many Canadians travelled
by rail to the Montréal exposition. For those who
could not visit the fair, the fair would come to them.
An important adjunct to Expo 67 was several so-called Confederation
Trains that traversed the nation in every direction that
the cross-continental railway tracks would lead them. The
bridging of the Canadian expanse by train is an important
symbol of almost mythical dimension in the narrative of
Canada. The Confederation Trains, redolent in mythical
connotations of Canadiana, were in essence an updated version
of the Agit-Prop trains of the early Soviet period. Symbolically,
they presaged the establishment of a nationwide network
of art collectivities emanating from the centre and extending
to the farthest margins. They also issued the hope of a
future released from regional tensions, including regional
nationalism, through a horizontally syndicated state that
could respond to all parts of the country and all minority
groups within it in non-hierarchical and non-conforming
ways.
The operating framework for art in Canada was developed,
in part, as a critique of the American art system. At precisely
the time when the infrastructure for Canada's publicly
funded artists' gallery network was nearing completion
in the early 1970s, there was much concurrent debate about
the collapse of art in a social environment which blamed
modernist concepts and rationalisations for the many failings
in America's urban life. In art, the early 1970s heralded
the arrival of high modernism's point of reductio ad absurdum.
Conceptual Art's iconoclastic aesthetic politics was as
much a critical response to the mounting phenomenon of
globalisation and its pressures to disperse previously
concentrated cultural discourses as it was a symbol of
what Jean-François Lyotard has referred to as "universal
finality."16
The idea of the end of art or, at least, of the old system
of art, appealed to those Canadians who saw this as an
historical occasion for Canada to advance a better model,
one in which Canadian art and culture could be appreciated
through domestically developed criteria. Paradoxically,
the Canadian model could serve as an example to the world.
Certain nationalists of Canada have expressed the hope
that within such an indigenously produced model, aesthetic
formalism would cease to be of significant interest to
Canadian artists, citing it as an asocial characteristic
endemic to contemporary American art. In language that
unwittingly echo the justification for socialist realism,
Canadian writer Tom Henighan has argued that art–for–art's
sake movements would be of less importance in the absence
of a flagrantly materialist environment and a powerful
elite of private patrons. Canada's art system would encourage
the development of aesthetic heterogeneity and cultural
diversity. Canadian art would escape the contradictions
of foreign developed ideas of high culture and the 'social
corruption of capitalism.'17
In 1969, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in
Halifax emerged as the most important art education institution
in Canada with a reputation that transcended into the international
art arena. Its program was deeply supportive of Conceptual
art and the school kept a residency studio in New York
City.18 In terms of national identity, it was a time of
supreme self-confidence among Canadian artists who were
generally open to those features of the new American and
European art that could proffer lessons for Canadian art.
On the other side of the country that same year, Image
Bank was founded in Vancouver. Again, its development was
a response to an American model, namely Ray Johnson's New
York Correspondence School.19 Again, Canadian artists would
take from American art what offered useful lessons for
Canadian art. It is important to be reminded here just
how late was the idea of modern and contemporary art in
arriving and establishing a modicum of national consciousness
in Canada. Prior to the 1950s, artistic modernity in Canada
still meant an attachment to landscape painting and other
traditional cultural norms of art.
Image Bank borrowed its title from a statement by Claude
Levi-Strauss: "The decision that everything must be taken
account of facilitates the question of an image bank."20
Its spirit consistent with André Malraux's concept
of a museum without walls, sans Malraux's standard bearer
framing of high culture, Image Bank sought to extend art
through the postal and other communications systems such
as the Telex. It stated its goals in almost Baudrillardian
terms sans the double meanings: "As artists we are information,
resource, image banks concerned with data covering the
spectrum from cultural awareness to professional knowledge…understanding
the overall image into potential has enabled us to develop
formats which allow maximum involvement while remaining
impartial to the specific kinds of information in process,
creating a valid information economy."21
What is noteworthy here is the parallelism between national
artistic development and national economic policy, a conflation
that has never met with much concern among Canadian artists,
all too eager to accept government largesse without critical
reflection of its possible constraints on artistic independence.
The American artist Vito Acconci has written that: "The
electronic age redefines public as a composite of privates." Acconci
worried about the dystopian side of the promise of communications,
the image and the spectacle. He worried about the electronic
age taking control out of individual hands and placing
it: "in the will of the other, whether that other is called
God or Magic or The Corporation or The Government."22 In
Canada, the conventional view among most artists, with
regard to the question of art and culture, is that the
government is good.
And why not? Canadian artists knew a good thing when they
saw it. The first artist run centre opened in Toronto in
1971 and within a decade expanded to nearly every part
of the country. Almost entirely assisted by public funds,
these venues from their inception would highlight multi-media
art, performance, installation art, some feminist and racially
based art and other art with a socially critical point
of view.23 Many were endowed with the most advance video
and computing equipment of the time. Canadian artists would
be drawn to these centres in lieu of private galleries
which were few in number and generally conservative in
what they exhibited.
In a perfect cradle to coffin scenario, a Canadian artist
in 1980 could conceivably receive a financial grant from
the government to produce work, which could then be shown
in an artist run space from which the artist would receive
an exhibition fee and perhaps a residency stipend. The
artist could get to the place of exhibition with assistance
from a Travel Grant. Afterwards, the artist could make
a submission to the Canada Council Art Bank to purchase
the exhibited art. A jury comprised of other artists, each
representative of a region in Canada, would make a decision
about purchase. If at some future time, the artist would
like to repurchase work sold to the Art Bank, he or she
need only pay the original purchase price plus a supplementary
charge for storage, maintenance and administration for
the period the work was kept in the Art Bank. The important
point is that at every stage of this hypothetical but highly
possible scenario, Canadian artists are the ones to don
the hats of the curator, the critic and the collector.
In the name of a non-hierarchical system of artistic measurement,
Canadian artists would be evaluated first and foremost
by Canadian artists, peer groups in effect, without the
need to rely on expert opinions from non-artists. An adverse
effect of all of this intended or otherwise, has been a
concomitant weakness in terms of the quality, size and
dedication of Canada's corps of curators and art critics.
To wit, the complete absence of any book that critically
and theoretically addresses in a historically comprehensive
manner developments in Canadian art over the last thirty
years.24
No one has understood the complexities of the contemporary
art situation in Canada more than General Idea has. If
good art must express an understanding to the life and
times of the environment from which it emerged, then General
Idea is perhaps the most important Canadian artist of the
multicultural era. The art of General Idea has been a consistent
expression of all the best and worst characteristics of
Canadian artistic culture, including its bureaucratic proclivities.
With the utmost in self–conscious aplomb and grant
writing skills, the art activities of General Idea have
mirrored the logic of the Canadian cultural infrastructure
in all its branches from publications to art production
centre. Bureaucracy loves nothing better than to see its
own image extended, even if the terms of that extension
include mockery. Fittingly, for all its attributes, General
Idea always remained but a conception, an invented cultural
corporation that in many ways does not exist and never
did exist. The same might be said of Toronto, Canada's
de facto art centre. Speaking in praise of the artistic
culture in his home base of Toronto, AA Bronson, a member
of General Idea stated: "As for Toronto's diversity, it
is clear that Toronto has no specific regional characteristics.
It is rather a mosaic of regional characteristics from
other parts of the country, here thrust into discontinuous
disarray. Toronto is the only Canadian city in which the
art scene is continually fracturing, and thrives by that
fracturing."25 Bronson's malapropism is a testament to
what Canadian historian Jack Granatstein has quoted from
Gad Horowitz as "Multiculturalism is the masochistic celebration
of Canadian nothingness."26 In difference to Trinh T. Minh
Ha's notion of "the Centre is a Margin", Canada's artistic
centre is neither a centre nor a margin; it is but a centrifuge,
a study for specialists in chaos theory.27
Today, Canadian culture is beleaguered and everything
from multiculturalism to foreign aid and to public support
for cultural institutions such as the venerable Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation is up and readied for dismantling,
reduced by funding cuts to skeletal frames. Worse is the
bankruptcy of ideas regarding a retort and a new raison
d'être that could provide discursive weight to countering
the attacks and not merely defending from them.28 Defenders
of the old status quo err in the belief that the re–establishment
of former levels of funding would solve all woes. For example,
the temporary reprieve from further funding cuts of institutions
such as the Canada Council has not meant that the ideological
wars against such institutions have gone away. Global multi–culturalism
has become a global marketplace of culture, a point perpetuated
constantly by Hollywood, Disney and McDonald's, and despite
good intentions, it is a development Canada alone can not
stand against.
Why this is happening has much to do with the logic of
capitalist developments and the collapse of a credible
left voice in the world scene. But perhaps it also has
something to do with the contradictions in Canadian cultural
policy, contradictions that can no longer withstand the
weight of the Realpolitik of globalisation. The numerous
official acts and legislation involved in the development
and defence of Canadian cultural services were intended
as a bulwark against what Canadians perceived as the dangerous
mass appeal and marketing prowess of American perspectives.
The majority of Canadians saw support for federally assisted
cultural entities as indispensable services that assured
the protection of their cultural interests. Even more impressive
is the fact that there has not been a single Canadian artist
of consequence in the last thirty years who has not benefited
significantly from Canadian government financial assistance
in one manner or another, not a single one. Of course,
en contrapartie, this is also a measure of the degree of
insinuation by the government into cultural affairs.
In a world in which cultural issues are increasingly arbitrated
under the rules of the World Trade Organization or economic
pacts such as the North American Free Trade Agreement,
Canada's insistence on the right to exert sovereignty over
cultural matters is now viewed with ascendant objection
by laissez-faire economists as a line-in-the-sand against
global free trade. In addition, by revoking the hegemonic
assumptions of Canada's two founding nations document,
that is, as a country founded by the English and the French,
multiculturalism was intuitively counter–discursive.
Multiculturalism as a national policy is inherently hostile
to the idea of 'nation' while paradoxically it sponsors
an idea of essential differences between cultural groups.
Franz Fanon has written extensively about the dialectical
linkage between nation and culture, that the absence of
the former necessarily leads to the emaciation of the latter.29
As a result, Canadian cultural actions have become increasingly
defensive and paralysed, philosophically confused about
how best to escape the textual traps set by not only the
discourses inscribed in the GATT, the WTO and other trade
and economic contracts but by its own historical and rhetorical
contradictions. Que faire? For one thing, recognize the
problem of non–identity between cultural politics
and social conditions. In 1965, in the midst of rising
Canadian triumphalism regarding Canada's cultural and intellectual
identity, John Porter published his seminal book The
Vertical Mosaic.30 Porter's book was a sweeping and
highly detailed analysis of social and economic inequality
in Canada; it has since become the primer for subsequent
Canadian sociological studies. As implied by the book's
title, Canada's official rhetoric of a cultural mosaic
masks the pernicious degree to which Canadian society is
vertically conceived and administered, from the top down.
As a somewhat inverted but analogous comparison, the organizational
functioning of Canadian art and culture appears non-hierarchical
and horizontally efficacious but what is masked is the
protean and assimilative character of its Officialdom.
Lawrence Meir Friedman has decried the rootless and atomised
character of American life in terms of a "horizontal society" in
extremis.31 The anomie of contemporary American life is
linked to a visual culture dominated by the corporate ethos,
a connection that Friedman repeatedly points out but is
unable to blame. As Canadian society evolves to bare greater
resemblance to the social detachment of American society,
Canadian art and culture continues to not only play out
but to assertively defend, on behalf of the State, the
old rhetoric of an increasingly phlegmatic and false Canadian
polity.32
1. The Royal Commission on National Development in the
Arts, Letters and Sciences, Chapter II: The Forces of
Geography, Government of Canada 1949-1951, Section
11.
2. P.E.Trudeau, The Essential Trudeau, Toronto, McClelland & Stewart,
1998, p. 146. The full passage is: "Uniformity is neither desirable nor possible
in a country the size of Canada. We should not even be able to agree upon
the kind of Canadian to choose as a model, let alone persuade most people
to emulate it. There are surely few policies potentially more disastrous
for Canada than to tell all Canadians that they must be alike. There is no
such thing as a model or ideal Canadian. What could be more absurd than the
concept of an "all Canadian" boy or girl? A society that emphasises uniformity
is one which creates intolerance and hate. A society which eulogises the
average citizen is one which breeds mediocrity. What the world should be
seeking, and what we in Canada must continue to cherish, are not concepts
of uniformity but human values: compassion, love, and understanding."
3. Ibid. p. 177.
4. M. de Certeau, The Capture of Speech, Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 135. Much of de Certeau's book is an analysis of
the events of May 68 with the central perspective that the events represented
a collective demand for personal emancipations extending to previously unheard
or unrecognised voices, a development that would lead to what he hoped would
be a new culture in France.
5. National Library of Canada website at www.nlc-bnc.ca.
6. J. Granatstein, York University Faculty of Arts Research Fiches at website:
huma.yorku.ca. For an historical accounting of Canadian anti-Americanism,
see: "Yankee Go Home?" HarperCollins, Toronto, 1996.
7. "Foreign Publisher Advertising Services Act," in Hansard, Parliament
of Canada, No. 140, October 22, 1998.
8. Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, Vintage
Canada, Toronto, 1989, p. 219. Marchand here discusses McLuhan's thinking
that television may not "cool" people down but may exacerbate social tensions
by its tendency to imbue images with iconic significance.
9. M. McLuhan, The Essential McLuhan, (edited by E. McLuhan and F.
Zingrone), House of Anansi Press, Toronto, 1995, p 258. This quote is from
McLuhan's famous 1961 interview in Playboy magazine in which he discusses
many of the social issues afflicting Western society including racism, U.S.
politics, changing sexual mores, social unrest and violence.
10. Ibid, p. 259.
11. Ibid. P. Marchand, p. 159.
12. J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Vintage
Books, New York, 1993.
13. For an exclusively semiotic analysis of the controversy surrounding the
Igor-Pruitt housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, see Charles Jenck's 1977
book, The Language of Post–Modern Architecture, 5th edition,
New York: Rizzoli, 1987. Jenck's argues that the failure of Igor–Pruitt
is owed to a problem of non–identity between the poor inhabitants of
the project and the erudite architects. Elizabeth Birmingham, Lee Rainwater
and others have criticised Jenck arguing that structural racism was a central
issue for its failure. For more, see E. Birmingham's excellent text "Reframing
the Ruins: Pruitt–Igoe, Structural Racism, and African American Rhetoric
as a Space for Cultural Critique," published in Positions, 1998, No.
2.
14. Ibid. P. Marchand, p. 196.
15. See Pierre Berton's 1967: Canada's Turning Point, Toronto: Seal
Books, 1997 for a discussion of Québec nationalist sentiments erupting
during the controversial visit of French President Charles De Gaulle to Expo
67 and his exhortation of "Vive le QuŽbec libre!" Equally agitational was
the publication of Pierre ValliÂres manuscript White Niggers of America.
Vallières' text was another clarion cry for the separation of Québec
from Canada. It garnered significant sympathy from independence groups the
world over, including many voices from non–aligned countries.
16. J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Translated by G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984.
17. T. Henighan, The Presumption of Culture, Vancouver: Raincoast
Books, 1996, pp. 10-11, 63, 120-121.
18. AA Bronson, From Sea to Shining Sea. Toronto: The Power Plant
Gallery for Contemporary Art, 1987, p. 42. Noted visitors to NSCAD include
Joseph Kosuth, Michael Asher, Dan Graham, Jan Dibbets, John Baldessari, Jackie
Winsor and others.
19. Ibid. Bronson, p.41.
20. Ibid. Bronson, p. 41.
21. Ibid. Bronson, p. 41.
22. W.J.T. Mitchell, Art and the Public Sphere, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 172-73.
23. As such, there was a particular look or at least approach to Canadian
Art predicated on the idea of aesthetic dissemination, technical literacy
and social concerns, primarily issues of identity through space and time.
Somewhat ironically, as the New York and European Art World loses some of
its drawing power due to dissemination of contemporary art interest in the
rest of the world, it still retains its influence through a more horizontally
conceived syndication of its structure. This contradiction, somewhat Canadian
in character, has resulted in another irony. International Art now looks
very much like Canadian Art has looked since the 1970s and 1980s, adopting
many of the formal strategies long developed and employed by Canadian artists.
24. Dennis Reid's A Concise History of Canadian Painting of 1973 is
the last useful book to examine comprehensively an important component of
Canadian art, that of painting. It does not cover developments in Canadian
painting beyond 1965.
25. Ibid. Bronson, p. 12.
26. J. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? Toronto: HarperPerennial,
1998, p. 108.
27. Trinh T. Minh Ha, "No Master Territories," published in The Post-Colonial
Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 215-218.
28. See Tony Manera's A Dream Betrayed: The Battle for the CBC, for
a measure of the incapacity of many of Canada's cultural mandarins to respond
effectively to downsizing pressures. Tony Manera was the former head of the
CBC. Also see Tom Henighan's The Presumption of Culture for an analysis
of Donna Scott' s "indifferent" and "ineffectual" response to threats to
the Art Bank. Donna Scott was head of the Canada Council Art Bank.
29. F. Fanon. Chapter entitled "On National Culture" reprinted in Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994, pp 50-52.
30. J. Porter. The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power
in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965.
31. L.M. Friedman, The Horizontal Society. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1999.
32. For an interesting analysis of the cooptation of Canadian culture by
administration, see Krysztof Wodiczko's presentation of June 14, 1983 to
a Toronto art audience and later published in the April/May 1994 issue of Parallelgramme,
the official journal of Canada's alternative gallery network.
©1999 Ken Lum
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