NORTHWEST COAST ART: At a crossroads
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"Double Tri-Neg"
Robert Davidson, "Double Tri-Neg," 2001, red cedar and acrylic, 119 cm x 58.4 cm x 4.3 cm. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Soren Pedersen.
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"First Dawn"
Philip Gray (Tsimshian/Cree), "First Dawn," at the Lattimer Gallery in Vancouver. This three-foot panel in red cedar is painted and carved, revealing a contemporary interpretation of the "raven and the light", one of the many recurring themes found in the complex cosmology of the Northwest Coast.
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"Crying Woman"
Terry Horn (Coast Salish), "Crying Woman," at Spirits of the North Gallery. The yellow cedar mask is the artist’s contemporary rendition of a traditional mourning story about a woman who has lost her children. Of particular note are the detailed carved teardrops falling down the face.
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"Eagle Bracelet"
Corey Moraes (Tsimshian), "Eagle Bracelet," at the Douglas Reynolds Gallery. A traditional eagle motif is executed in a modern brushed sterling silver to give a contemporary brushed stainless steel look.
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"Merge Wall Panel 1 – Eagle and Whale"
Sabina Hill (Caucasian) with Steve Smith (Kwakwaka’wakw), "Merge Wall Panel 1 – Eagle and Whale," at the Inuit Gallery in Vancouver. Merging modern and traditional materials (stainless steel and Douglas Fir), cultures and motifs, the two artists produced this contemporary art piece.
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"Bear Chief Mask"
Wayne Young (Nisga’a/Haida), "Bear Chief Mask," from Alcheringa Gallery in Victoria, now in a private collection. Based on a traditional story, this mask incorporates the artist’s personal vision and more sculptural elements than normally found in a mask.
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"Green"
Robert Davidson, "Green," 2002, red cedar and acrylic, 58.4 cm x 94 cm x 4.3 cm. Collection of E. and A. Claggett. These pieces appear in Robert Davidson: The Abstract Edge, an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Davidson that explores the expanding boundaries of Haida art.
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"Double Tri-Neg"
Robert Davidson, "Double Tri-Neg," 2001, red cedar and acrylic, 119 cm x 58.4 cm x 4.3 cm. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Soren Pedersen.
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"Eagle, Raven & Moon, Bear & Human"
Clarence Mills (Haida), "Eagle, Raven & Moon, Bear & Human," at the Coastal Peoples Fine Art Gallery in Vancouver. Using a non-traditional material like glass for this totem illustrates the interplay between tradition and innovation. TOP LEFT: Bear Chief
NORTHWEST COAST ART: At a crossroads
Haida artist Robert Davidson talks with curator Karen Duffek about his vision of tradition-based Northwest Coast Art and modern ideas of Contemporary Art.
By Karen Duffek
The following article is excerpted from an essay by Karen Duffek, “The Present Moment: Conversations with guud san glans, Robert Davidson,” published in the exhibition catalogue Robert Davidson: The Abstract Edge (UBC Museum of Anthropology, 2004). The exhibition, The Abstract Edge, organized by the Museum of Anthropology and circulated by the National Gallery of Canada, next opens at the Kelowna Art Gallery (November 26, 2005, to January 29, 2006), and then continues its tour to the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, McCord Museum, Montreal, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
My visits to Robert Davidson at his studio in Semiahmoo Village, on the Salish reserve in White Rock, British Columbia, begin with a knock on the door of his spacious carving shed. A muffled “Come in!” welcomes me inside. There, the artist might be hunched over his jeweller’s block, engraving a gold pendant. Sometimes, he’s searching among his shelves and racks of shaped knives and carving tools, looking for the one that will help him define the precise edge he desires on a cedar sculpture. Occasionally, there will be a small group of friends and assistant carvers gathered around a current project, trading jokes and opinions; more often, Davidson is alone, expecting punctuality from his interviewer just as he does from his apprentices, eyeing his work in progress and contemplating the dialogue between a line he has formed and the space it created.
Directing his energies toward his exhibition The Abstract Edge was a major focus for Davidson these past few years. Equally engaging were the simultaneous preparations necessary for the naming potlatch and celebration that he and the t’sa.ahl ’laanaas clan held in their home community of Old Massett on Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands), on November 1, 2003. Linked by the intense commitment required by each event, the exhibit and potlatch make it vividly clear that his practice — like that of many other First Nations artists — straddles a number of apparent dualities: community function and international art market; collective and personal expression; tradition and modernity; past and present. But the notion that these dualities comprise opposing values is countered by the challenges that Davidson sets for both himself and his audiences, and by the circulation of his work among studio, museum, gallery, and feast hall.
RD: There’s this amazing movement now to reclaim cultural knowledge. As we reclaim that knowledge — reclaim the names, the songs, the dances, the crests, the clans, the place of chiefs in Haida villages — it’s gone the whole gamut to reclaiming the land. They’re all one. We’re continually rehashing what we know about our culture and what the names of our territories are all about. In doing that, we’re able to solidify our knowledge and be more confident. And as we gain confidence there, it becomes more than just the art and the artists. I’m increasingly realizing that I cannot work in a vacuum of art. For a while, we artists enjoyed all the glory and all the attention. But now there’s a bigger picture.
My passion is reconnecting with my ancestors’ knowledge. The philosophy is what bred the art, and now the art has become the catalyst for us to explore the philosophy. I’m fortunate that I had a grandmother named Florence Davidson who challenged me, in her own subtle way, to learn more about our culture, and who also challenged me in the art. When I go outside the Haida boundaries, I am challenged, too — I want the art to be recognized as a high art form. I feel it is up to the artists to bring it into that arena, to challenge the art world’s blinders of “curio” that still define how our art is seen.
Parallel to the regalia and performances based in traditional dance and ceremony are paintings and sculptures clearly oriented toward the art museum or gallery setting. Their encounter with modernist ideas and values seems obvious: their media, their intended abstraction, their apparent separateness from community function, their individualistic style, their play with isolated forms and scale, their ability to “stand alone” as autonomous works of art. But there are additional intersections represented here. Questions about how Davidson’s recent work may — or may appear to — engage in modernist inquiries, or subvert them, or ignore them altogether, keep pushing at the edges of his carefully carved and painted forms. So, too, do questions about how the recovery of First Nations visual strategies may disturb the categories by which modern art is understood.
There is an uneasiness that still seems to exist between prevailing tenets of modernism, with their assumptions of universal criteria, and art that expresses continuity with local and inherited cultural practice. Indeed, modernist discourse may be seen as denying a place for “tradition-based” Native art within modernity itself, other than as a representation of its opposite: a kind of anti-modern curio, a form of nostalgia, a reversal of the idea of artistic progress. Critiques of tradition-based works created by Northwest Coast artists often assume a disjuncture between that which belongs to the present and that which is considered insufficiently detached from the past it is thought to represent. The perpetuation of the subjects and forms of Native art styles are read as evidence of artists’ reluctance or refusal to take a critical position toward the current context for their work: its relations of production and its historical dispossession, as well as the actual political and social landscape — rather than the mythological one — in which it is situated.
Robert Davidson — whose personal iconography has come to be characterized by fragmented forms, abstraction, and ambiguity — states very clearly that he will not create his art outside the formal language of Haida visual expression. Indeed, the distancing or stripping of historical and cultural associations that “abstracting” often implies is met in his broader cultural practice by the opposite of detachment, the opposite of self-referencing modernity, the opposite of the autonomous work of art. The modernist tenet does not fully extend into the cultural and political work of which his paintings are a part.
How, then, can we talk about this art in terms that are not solely based on a duality of contemporary and traditional but that encompass alternative ways of being present in modernity? What would it mean to create integrated understandings about First Nations and Western art traditions, in which indigenous philosophies and knowledge contribute to an evolving discourse on contemporary art?
RD: I’m at a crossroads right now where I’ve recycled the ideas of my teachers, of the old pieces, of the old examples I’ve been studying. My challenge is to go beyond those recycled ideas and create a new vocabulary for myself. At first, I thought I was pushing the art form. But I feel that’s presumptuous — it’s not up to me to say I’m doing that. I have years and years of experience in the art form, and now I’m experimenting to see how far I can push my own understanding.
Once I learned the vocabulary of the art, it became my privilege and responsibility to create within those boundaries and to challenge them within the language. I draw on Haida images to express the present moment, and the present moment encompasses the past. That’s true for all generations. My paintings are from an ancient language, but they still speak of today.
The creative freedom that Davidson grants himself has grown most directly from his experience in helping to restore the place of ceremony within his community — and with it the understanding that “culture” can be both inherited and newly imagined.
The songs, dances, and protocols that Davidson and other Haida people are beginning to re-establish within current practice have become some of the primary sources from which he is attempting to “make progress” in his own art. He observes that a new vocabulary of ideas is emerging from the study of songs and narratives that have survived in memory, recordings and text, and from rebuilding and translating this cultural knowledge. Working toward defining a deeper, more complex, and historically specific understanding of Haida philosophy and visual expression is critical to Davidson’s attempts to strengthen what he calls “the pool of knowledge”: the foundation from which new forms and meanings may be negotiated.
RD: If we look back over the past two hundred years of Haida history, we can see a definite progression in the art form. Who knows where the art will go from here? The limitation is really up to the artist in the present moment.
-Karen Duffek is Curator of Art at the University of British Columbia Museum
of Anthropology.
Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia
6393 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2
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