Goes to Show

Canada Day, 1971: The National Gallery of Canada opens a new exhibition, True Patriot Love. It is the museum’s first major show by a living female artist, and it boasts drawings, sculptures, quilted hangings, film screenings, and dozens of ducks cordoned off by knee-high acrylic walls.

As the biographer Jane Lind once put it, traditionalists at the time did not consider art “a site for an irreverent sense of humour, and they did not want their concept of art shattered, especially not by live ducks being cared for by gallery staff in rubber boots.” Birds aside, the exhibition revealed Joyce Wieland as a visionary whose gifts of colour were considered too ethereal by some and too out of sync by others. Yet her imagination conjured images that Canadians needed to see. “As a young woman, she set out to create a mythology for herself and to write the script for her own life,” Lind said of the artist. “From the beginning of her career, Joyce did not try to paint like a man, even at a time when mainly men’s work was considered authentic art.”

It is useful to keep Lind’s summative remarks in mind while immersing oneself in Joyce Wieland: Heart On, a gorgeously thick, richly attractive coffee-table book that takes its title from a retrospective, organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario, honouring Wieland’s five-decade, eclectic body of work. Divided into ten expansive chapters, covering such fields as her cultural activism, plastics, quilts, nationalism, ecology, politics, aesthetic practice, and experiments with life, the lavish publication integrates colour reproductions and expert commentary by the likes of Leila Sujir, Shannon Stride, Renée van der Avoird, Adam Welch, Tobi Bruce, Vincent Bonin, Alicia Boutilier, Jim Shedden, Eo Sharp, Sarah Parsons, and Wieland herself, along with several others. Smartly edited by Anne Grace and Georgiana Uhlyarik, it also includes a succinct chronology compiled by Rhiannon Vogl. The commemorative book strives to give Wieland “her rightful place on the international stage as a groundbreaking figure of twentieth-century art and film,” and it certainly covers her unorthodox approaches to materials, especially text and photo collage, film, plastic, and fabric.

Wieland’s artist contemporaries included Michael Snow (her husband for many years), Jack Chambers, Graham Coughtry, Greg Curnoe, Helen Frankenthaler, Doris McCarthy (one of her early teachers), Jonas Mekas, the Kuchar brothers, Hollis Frampton, Maya Deren, and Shirley Clarke. Her biggest influences in painting, in particular, were the biomorphic shapes and meandering lines of Joan Miró, the abstract expressionism of Willem de Kooning, and the rococo narratives of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

Grace and Uhlyarik subscribe to the well-entrenched view of Wieland as a transformative artist, whose “intelligence, wit, and audacity, along with her passion for history and literature, underpinned her artistic vision” and allowed her, as the critic Susan Crean has noted, to take the serious lightly and the lighthearted seriously. Wieland’s humour challenged dominant ideologies. Her paintings and films often satirize male power with crudely rendered phalluses, and much of her work has sloppy draftsmanship, if not what I would call simply undergraduate humour — as with the cartoon penis in various states of arousal in Flick Pics #4 and West 4th (1963) as well as the pale blue smear, bringing to mind chewing gum, on a green background in The Kiss (1960). The most vivid example of her whimsy is Celebration (1987), her last major commission. Created for the Pantages Theatre in Toronto, it is notable for its “irreverent cartoon playfulness, political subtext, sexuality and Bollywood-like dancing deities whose romances and pleasure play out in various narratives,” as Barbara Steinman observes, all caught up “in the swirl of illusion” and varnished by “bravado and orgasmic, unrestrained energy.”

Some of Wieland’s humour was absurdist, as when she channelled a Dadaist impulse to collapse art and banal life. The Clothes of Love (1961) is a mounted open box with fabric, some painted, mimicking a miniature clothesline. Pretentious critics could see affinities between her “multipart sculptures” and those of Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, and Kurt Schwitters, but the more common interpretation is of an artist practising a female impulse to limit things, to place aspects of reality into boxes. There is certainly evidence of gender celebration in her 1960s quilts (the actual stitching and embroidering were done by Joan Stewart, her older sister). By lucky coincidence, she was on the cusp of a North American craze — or, to put it another way, she was honouring women’s work long before Judy Chicago. Perhaps her most suasive work is The Spirit of Canada Suckles the French and English Beavers (1970–71), which “blends two sculptural traditions: dainty European figurines that once adorned banquet spreads in the eighteenth century; and grand classical statuary anthropomorphizing continents, ideals, and gods.” Uhlyarik further argues that Wieland’s bronzes “transgress their lineage by infusing the pastoral and the allegorical with a jolt of convivial interspecies relations, producing a fauna-centric origin story of her country.” I wonder if she is aware of Marianne Moore: “Ecstasy affords / the occasion and expediency determines the form.”

Wieland’s experimental films (1965–73) span most of the years when she and Snow lived and worked in New York City. Their value is summarized by Vincent Bonin: “Without taking the path of the documentary genre, she merged her political concerns (her feminism and anti-imperialist nationalism) with cinematic self-reflexivity.” Water Sark (1965) and Handtinting (1967) are possibly the best of these. Wieland described the former as “a desperate self-portrait,” cleverly constructed by erotic and sensual images to reveal some of the damage or corrosion that “twisted me into the category called female”; the critic Laura Mulvey considers the latter, with its subtle silences, to be “a pioneering work of avant-garde feminist film praxis.” Other productions were not as accomplished. Bill’s Hat (1967) is essentially a multi-media performance that one reviewer described as stretching “perceptions to just below the pain threshold.” Wieland’s idiosyncratic take on Tom Thomson, The Far Shore (1976), was a critical and box-office dud. Her exceptional other success was Pierre Vallières (1972), which Mekas called one of the most effective political films he had ever seen. Despite that filmmaker and critic’s assessment, Wieland was excluded from the Essential Cinema collection of the Anthology Film Archives, whose selection committee was all male.

Anne Grace’s essay “Activiste Culturelle” echoes the position of other scholars about the significance of feminism in ennobling modes of artmaking, spectatorship, and theoretical discourses. Grace underscores an academic assumption that ethics became the touchstone of Wieland’s art. But surely that displaces the primacy of aesthetics by failing to consider the limitations of the art itself. Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits were far more revelatory and symbolic than Wieland’s, and Georgia O’Keeffe said more about women through her flower paintings than Wieland’s distorted phalluses said about either sex. Although considered a photorealist, Mary Pratt made paintings whose surfaces suggest hidden depths. Her art was also far more sophisticated technically, with brushwork transcending formal rigour. Many of Wieland’s paintings have a slapdash quality.

Wieland’s art is preponderantly textual in the sense that many of her pieces can literally be read, for they make use of words, clauses, epigrams, and poetic quotation within the compositions. Take, for example, the bubble letters spelling “Defend the Earth” (in English and French) in the 1972 quilt of the same name; the English and Inuktitut text in True Patriot Love (1971); and the word “Solidarity” superimposed at the centre of the screen in the 1973 film with that title. To put it differently, Wieland was boldly declarative. “Since 1967,” she once said, “all of my work has been about Canada, a country which has been largely sold out to the U.S. multi-national corporations, by visible and invisible Canadians.” Her titles declare her messages: War Memories, Laura Secord Saves Upper Canada, Sailboat Sinking, The Death of Love, and so on. Her passionate nationalism is abundantly articulated in the chapter “Flag Arrangement,” which offers into evidence I Love Canada J’aime le Canada (1970), where the words “Death to U.S. Technological Imperialism” are embroidered in delicate, cursive bilingual script. Another example is Flag Arrangement (1970–71), where the Maple Leaf is knitted in wool in a four-part sequence, squeezed and stretched vertically and horizontally, causing the national emblem to look, oddly enough, more like the American eagle. The most celebrated piece, from 1968, is La raison avant la passion, with its counterpart Reason over Passion, because it focuses on Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s personal motto. Her enthusiasm for the prime minister waned when she saw (perhaps earlier than Margaret Trudeau) that in his case the pre-eminence of “reason” subjugated feelings and compassion to the instruments of oppression. Margaret recalled in her first memoir, ironically titled Beyond Reason, how she pulled Wieland’s quilt from their wall, wrenching off the letters and hurling them at Pierre as if to signal an inversion of his motto, thereby promoting passion above reason.

As new technologies were introduced to the art world (helped by eager acceptance of conceptualism), Wieland’s Artemis (1983) replaced the lithography stone of O Canada (1970) and the photocopier glass plate of Facing North–Self Impression (1973) with ten coloured Xerox frames for a self-portrait that owed debts to Botticelli’s Primavera. Here Wieland represents her mid-fifties self while, as Boutilier comments, “reinventing the goddess’s tenets: vegetation, birth, the hunt, the wild.” Artemis is not the only deity in Wieland’s oeuvre. Venus is given several avatars, first in a flower garden — Venus of Scarborough (1982) — where she is shaped on her back in a grassy clearing at Toronto’s Guild Inn. “Her hair unfurled in profuse beds of orange and yellow chrysanthemums,” van der Avoird writes, and begonias, aster, and sweet alyssum “formed the low relief.” The most technically seductive goddess avatars occur in The Bloom of Matter (1979–81), a series rendered in graphite and coloured pencil on wove paper. These are possibly her most exquisitely detailed and luminous drawings. Influenced by Tiepolo, they focus, as Leila Sujir aptly notes, “on the sensual and the sexual: matter blooms, things touch and grow out of one another, angels (not fairies — note the wings) and goddesses preside, the mythical comes together with the particular.” And what a rich store of particulars: the birth of Newfoundland, the women of Kapuskasing, Chopin, snapdragons, sex, birth, love, loss, death! All consolidating a language of emotions within episodic moments that don’t omit the grotesque — as in the drawing of a bloody pig’s head with a daffodil in its mouth.

When genius infused Joyce Wieland’s art, the results were truly stunning. Take the precise, delicate pointillism in Crepuscule for Two (1985) or the suggestions of an ominous backstory in Early One Morning (1986). Then there are masterworks: Hallucination (1961) is a large deep blue and green aqueous scene that combines her colour field with graffiti and cartooning, text fragments, and filmic sequencing. The Bloom of Matter series is the epitome of luminous projection via coloured pencils. And the self-portrait Artist on Fire (1983) brings history and mythology together in an intriguing balance. These works have a spontaneous virtuosity that intensifies and widens the viewer’s scope of seeing. They belong to a higher echelon of art than merely playful or saliently feministic or nationalistic creations.