E-Book Overview
'The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our own country' was the nationalist maxim motivating the Group of Seven's artistic project. The empty landscape paintings of the Group played a significant role in the nationalization of nature in Canada, particularly in the development of ideas about northernness, wilderness, and identity. In this book, John O'Brian and Peter White pick up where the Group of Seven left off. They demonstrate that since the 1960s a growing body of both art and critical writing has looked 'beyond wilderness' to re-imagine landscape in a world of vastly altered political, technological, and environmental circumstances. By emphasizing social relationships, changing identity politics, and issues of colonial power and dispossession contemporary artists have produced landscape art that explores what was absent in the work of their predecessors. "Beyond Wilderness" expands the public understanding of Canadian landscape representation, tracing debates about the place of landscape in Canadian art and the national imagination through the twentieth century to the present. Critical writings from both contemporary and historically significant curators, historians, feminists, media theorists, and cultural critics and exactingly reproduced artworks by contemporary and historical artists are brought together in productive dialogue. "Beyond Wilderness" explains why landscape art in Canada had to be reinvented, and what forms the reinvention took
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beyond wilderness This page intentionally left blank Edited by John O’Brian & Peter White Beyond Wilderness The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art McGill-Queen’s University Press | Montreal and Kingston Contents introduction © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007 isbn 978-0-7735-3244-1 3 John O’Brian & Peter White Legal deposit third quarter 2007 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Chapter 1 wilderness myths Printed in Singapore This book is supported by grants from the Canada Council for the Arts Millennium Arts Fund and Visual and Literary Arts sections, and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities. library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Beyond wilderness : the Group of Seven, Canadian identity, and contemporary art / edited by John O’Brian and Peter White. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3244-1 1. Landscape painting, Canadian--20th century. 2. Canada--In art. 3. Nature in art. i. O’Brian, John ii. White, Peter nd1352.c3b49 2007 758’.1710904 c2007-902375-4 Set in Dolly by the Underware type foundry, nl (body) and Mustardo (headings) by the Fountain type foundry, Sweden. book design & typesetting Zab Design & Typography, Winnipeg cover image Michael Snow, Plus Tard, 1977 (detail) 11 21 Peter White Out of the Woods John O’Brian Wild Art History Chapter 2 Extensions of Technology 40 Introduction 42 Jeff Wall Landscape Manual 47 Marshall McLuhan Technology and Environment 51 Michael Snow La Région Centrale 52 Michael Snow Plus Tard 57 Greg Curnoe Amendments to Continental Refusal/Refus Continental 59 Greg Curnoe View of Victoria Hospital, First Series, Nos. 1–6 63 Nancy Shaw Siting the Banal: The Expanded Landscapes of the N.E. Thing Company 69 Iain Baxter Landscape with Tree and 3 Cirrus Clouds 69 N.E. Thi