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This article was originally published in Nancy Campbell's Annie Pootoogook, published
by Illingworth Kerr Gallery in Calgary and Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown in 2007.
It is reprinted with permission.
Inuit Art and the Limits of Authenticity
by Debora Root
Several years ago I purchased a print by Cape Dorset Pudlo Pudlat
entitled Imposed Migration (1986). In this image three animals
dangle by their necks as they are carried away by a military helicopter.
As I gazed at the polar bear ensnared by the noose around its neck, the
gallerist explained that Inuit work depicting contemporary objects, such
as snowmobiles or helicopters, was very much a minority taste. Most
buyers preferred the sublime images of the natural world and traditional
ways of life that Southerners have come to associate with Inuit art, she
said, because there are more authentically and recognizably "Inuit." For
such buyers, authenticity resides in what is sometimes termed the
"ethnographic present," a timeless place untainted by modernity.
Twenty years later, there would seem to be more openness to the
contemporary images explored by some Inuit artists. Exhibitions of Annie
Pootoogook's work at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Documenta in Kassel,
Germany and The Power Plant, Toronto, and her recent 2006 Sobey Art
Award, suggests that Inuit art is beginning to be understood as a vital
aesthetic practice rather than a static, culturally determined artifact.
That the pace of Inuit art within the art world remains a topic of
discussion indicates the persistence of older ideas of what this work is
or should be. And many Southerners continue to believe that images of a
pristine Arctic are somehow more authentically Inuit than Pudlat's
machines or Pootoogook's video games.
Within a contemporary art paradigm, however, "authenticity" means
something rather different. Here, disturbing images tend to be seen as
more "real" than beautiful ones, in part because the artist's job is to
strip away the dishonesty and pretension of modern society. Think of
Warhol's car crashes; think of all the recent work that seeks to shock
the viewer into a different way of apprehending the world.
"Authenticity" is a floating category, able to migrate and legitimize
or de-legitimize certain kinds of images. If some consider Inuit art
inauthentic when it includes recognizably Southern elements, others have
suggested that the art is itself inauthentic because it is a constructed
tradition. No art market existed in the North prior to James Houston's
efforts to create one in the 1950s and 60s. The argument can be reduced
to something like this: white impresario travels North with a plan; the
work is marketed in the south as "authentic," even if there was no
pre-contact tradition of large-scale sculpture or printmaking. The work
is purchased primarily by those seeking an idealized representation of
First Nations experience. Meanwhile, colonialist structures and
institutions remain, masked by images of a pristine past.[1]
Of course, what is missing from this formulation is the work itself.
In this view, Inuit art cannot be an "authentic" expression of an
artist's aesthetic vision because it is market-created (unlike the New
York art world, one assumes). It is bad enough that a concept of
inauthenticity is sometimes used to de-legitimate Northern art
practices, but we would do well to remember that this category has also
been employed within the Canadian and U.S. legal systems to undermine
Fist Nations' land claims. At times the authentic is used to denote a
traditional way of life or quality than someone thinks should be
retained, and at other times it is used to suggest a gritty contemporary
quality. The question always remains of who is deciding what is
genuine.
The history of the Inuit image-making, and its reception in the
South, thus raises questions about what kinds of images come to be
valorized in the Southern marketplace, and about the cultural and
aesthetic expectations n the part of consumers. Printmaking and
soapstone carving originally were designed to bring Northern communities
into a cash economy, and to generate images that would stand for the
Canadian identity in the international area. Because Southern buyers
wanted access to another world, traditional images sold well.
In this sense it is true that Inuit art is a constructed tradition.
Yet Inuit drawing, printmaking and soapstone carving quickly exceeded
the bare fact of their origins, and became conduits through which
Northern artists could express aesthetic and social concerns in new and
meaningful ways. The constructed traditional became real through the
lived experiences and aesthetic practices of the artists. And because
Northern society exists in the present, some Northern artists make
images of contemporary realities.
But the reception of Inuit art in the South has been slower to
transform. Until very recently, Inuit art remained in a category by
itself, a subset of First Nations art, not quite traditional, not quite
modern, and rarely understood as contemporary. Southern buyers of Inuit
art tended not to follow contemporary art; similarly, those interested
in contemporary art were relatively indifferent to Inuit art. Inuit art
was a separate market, firmly sited in an anteroom of Canadiana and
rarely stressed in Canadian art history curricula. Although artists such
as Annie Pootoogook are breaking through these categorical strictures,
many of the old assumptions remain.
Even if nearly everyone can appreciate the beauty of such work as
Kenojuak's iconic Enchanted Owl (1960), there has been a tendency
in contemporary are circles to dismiss Inuit art as something akin to
tourist art. I used to feel slightly sheepish about liking Inuit art; it
was something for corporate offices, or Canadian embassies in Europe. I
can also understand why many might be disturbed by the mechanized
intrusion of Pudlat's helicopter into the natural world. But, as a
contemporary image maker, Pudlat had something to say about the fantasy
of an untouched landscape and the reality of Canadian government
policies. And utilizing a difficult image to unmask received ideas is
something we would expect to encounter from a non-Inuit contemporary
artist.
A recent text asserts:
Producing art has enabled many Inuit to pursue a relatively
traditional lifestyle . . .. While Inuit artists have been prompted and
influenced to produce art by southerners and southern institutions, they
have nonetheless managed to imbue their art with traditional values and
memories of life as it once was . . ..[2]
In one sense there is nothing wrong with these remarks. But, written
in 1998, they draw the reader's attention away from the contemporary
context of Inuit image production and towards the past. The reiteration
of a notion of the "traditional," which in fact does not exist in the
way many Southerners imagine, becomes a way of manipulating the viewer's
expectations.
Native communities have often been presented, in films and ad copy,
as existing in an eternal past or, if attempting to negotiate the
present, as somehow more firmly tied to or affected by the past than
non-Native communities. Each community has a particular relation to
history, and colonial histories in Cape Dorset will differ from those in
Toronto, but these specificities ought not be dependent on an unexamined
notion of a timeless past. This brings us back to the category of
authenticity, and how perceptions and expectations of a traditional,
unchanging North are structured.
Part of the problem lies in the way the cultural difference of Inuit
society functions to assuage anxieties about change in Southern
cultures. If, in the case of the North, "authentic" is believed to mean
the pre-contact world depicted in Inuit art, this concept serves to
eliminate social space; politics disappear, so there is no necessity for
excavating history, there is no responsibility for righting injustices
or supporting land rights. There is no guilt. The Southerner can mourn
the loss of a pristine natural world without thinking about why this has
happened, and without examining how and why similar losses have occurred
in the South, and the costs of these for everyone. Within the art works,
certain images have come to stand for this cultural difference—a seal
hunt, a shaman, a dancing polar bear—which in turn stand for a
generalized authenticity. In fact what is being consumed is
authenticity, and the consequence of this simulacrum of difference is
that we need not ask why these are the images we want to see. But if
something is deemed "authentic," something else must necessarily be
inauthentic by comparison.
It is long past time to call into question the familiar, overarching
categories that structure our understanding of art, such as Inuit art,
outsider art, Northwest Coast art, tourist art, Canadian art, Western
art. If we wish to classify art practices, different criteria might be
more to the point, in particular a notion of "school," which suggests a
group of artists addressing similar concerns and styles in their work. A
contemporary landscape school might encompass works from several
origins; what holds the category together is the approach to a subject,
not the ethnicity of the artist.
As a category, "Inuit art" is simply too broad, and too culturally
determinant, implying a unified aesthetic vision that does not exist
even within work that takes traditional life as its subject. For
example, the minimalist, early drawings of Luke Anguhdluq utilize white
space to convey bareness in the Northern environment, while Simon
Tookoomee's highly colored images burst forth in an exuberant vision of
the spirit world. And "Inuit art" is too restrictive a category for the
work of Annie Pootoogook, whose contemporary vision transcends older
limitations.
The inadequacy of "Inuit art" as a category is apparent in the unease
artists such as Pudlat or Pootoogook provoke when they address
contemporary issues. In reality, Inuit art has always crossed many
categories; at once a pricey souvenir of a visit to Canada and a
nationalist symbol in embassies, it often exceeds both these limited
expectations. A whiff of the ethnographic remains in some images, but
even so, such work rarely falls into kitsch, even in pieces one sees in
hotel gift shops. The fact is that Inuit art is often very good, and at
times extraordinary, something most of us do not expect from tourist
art. The range of the work reminds us that there is no such thing as a
pure state of cultural authenticity. Culture has always been mixed,
contradictory, difficult.
Pootoogook's work illuminates many of these issues, reminding us
again that one of the reasons people make images is to exemplify the
world they inhabit, and to show how this world works in new and
unexpected ways. Contemplating Pootoogook's images of Northern life, the
viewer sees that the old, discrete categories "Inuit art" and
"contemporary art" are no longer relevant.
As in much contemporary art, there is something profoundly disturbing
about her images of the everyday, where the figures seem to float in
space as they go about their business. One looks not only because of a
fascination with the mix of Northern and Southern elements, but because
the images oscillate between anomie and community as they interrogate
the individual's relation to material culture. Some viewers understand
Pootoogook's work as exemplifying a "culture clash" between North and
South. For me, this does not quite ring true. Rather than a portrayal of
Northern and Southern cultures as separate, isolated entities, what we
see in Pootoogook's images is an integration of elements, an integration
characteristic of lived experience. Her work presents culture as a fluid
entity, and makes it very clear that Southern elements are being taken
up and interpreted actively, rather than by passive recipients or
victims of colonialism. Yet that history is there, situated in the
sometimes difficult lived culture she depicts, yet by no means
ethnographic. And sometimes her vision is ironic, sometimes not.
Contemplating Pootoogook's images of video games, television, and
anxieties about monthly bills, the non-Inuit viewer is confronted with
his or her assumptions about life in the North. If those of us who live
in the South wish to imagine the North as an essentially natural world, we
find it difficult to accept that Inuit societies are in fact modern.
Yes, we might recognize that Northerners have Ski-doos and perhaps some
canned goods, but when we think of the unspoiled Arctic, Jerry Springer
is not what we have in mind. I can't help but feel that what is at stake
is old, colonialist belief in the so-called benefits of civilization.
Images of pure, unmediated space allow us to maintain that fiction.
Pootoogook reminds us that everyone enjoys pop culture, and in doing
so refuses to allow a paternalistic understanding of life in Cape
Dorset. Yet her work also manifests an oscillating unease with the
relations between pop culture and the community, the family and the
individual, the natural world and machines, and the reality of social
problems in the North.
There is a moment near the end of Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn's
film The Journal of Knud Rasmussen (2006) when shaman Avva says
goodbye to his spirit helpers. The spirits trudge across the ice,
weeping and wailing as they go. Avva has been forced to repudiate the
old ways because his starving family will be given food only if they
become Christian, which means breaking the taboos that allow spirits to
share space. We all feel Avva's loss, of the past, of an alternative to
capitalism, of other possibilities. We want to retain the idea of a
place where time stands still, where people live close to the land and
remain conversant with a magical world.
Most Southerners encounter Inuit culture through Inuit art, and
through the images of traditional hunting, old stories, and shamanism.
This is one reason why Avva's traditional family seems more "real" than
the Christian characters with their imperfect English, more authentic,
if you will, than the Inuit who have taken on Southern elements. And
this brings us back to what we imagine we are consuming when we refuse
to accept certain artists' productions as wholly contemporary, simply
because they are made by Inuit.
The Journal of Knud Rasmussen was set in the early 1920s, in a
past that from this distance can only be imaginary. Even in Avva's
family, Southern culture was present in the form of made items, and the
presence of the Danish anthropologists imply that many of the old ways
were already on their way out.[3]
As in the South, Inuit communities have changed and continue to
change, and this is reflected in the kinds of images produced by
Pootoogook, whose subject matter differs from earlier generations of
artists, such as her mother Napatchie Pootoogook and grandmother
Pitseolak. Inuit communities have engaged with Southern influences for a
long time. The idyllic images of hunting and other traditional ways
depicted in the first Inuit artworks available in the South exemplified
a world that was already under extreme pressure, in many ways no longer
existing as it once had even twenty years earlier. It seems likely that
a nostalgia for an older way of life was present on all sides, from the
artists to the collectors, and there are several reasons why government
officials and Southern collectors might wish to see images without
political unpleasantness.
But the point is not that the North has changed, but rather that the
South must be willing to see in a different way, and to begin to accept
Inuit artists as artists, without expectation of particular kinds of
images or a pre-determined cultural authenticity. If we delegate the
loss of the natural world to Avva, or to the past, or to Inuit artists
who are supposed to heal us with sublime images of nature, then we are
dooming ourselves to a false relation to the world. It seems evident
that contemporary art is almost by definition a hybrid form, whether the
artist comes from Toronto or Cape Dorset. The Illingworth Kerr Gallery's
presentation of Annie Pootoogook's work marks an important beginning of
this shift in perception.
Endnotes
1. See, for example, Kristen K. Potter, "James
Houston, Armchair Tourism, and the Marketing of Inuit Art," Native
American Art in the Twentieth Century, ed. W. Jackson Rushing III,
(London: Routledge, 1999). [Return to text]
2. Ingo Hessel, Inuit Art: An Introduction,
(Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre,1998), 11. [Return to text]
3. For a history of the Arctic, see Alootook
Ipellie, "The Colonization of the Artic," Indigena Contemporary Native
Perspectives, ed Gerald McMaster and Lee-Ann Martin, (Vancouver: Doughs
and McIntyre, 1992), 39-58. [Return to text]
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