SATURDAY,OCTOBER19,2019 | THEGLOBEANDMAILO ARTS| R5
V
isual art provokes so many
responses. One that has
struck me, encountering
several exhibitions in Vancouver
this month, has been the way art
can un-numb us. How it can
make us pay attention and con-
template things so familiar that
they prompt almost no response.
Water. Colours. Flowers. Norman
Rockwell. Video games. (I have
an 11-year-old son; these are very
familiar.) Or they incite a visceral
response completely tied to our
past experience that goes un-
checked as we go about our con-
temporary lives.
Rockwell’s work is ingrained
in our visual vocabulary. I say
Norman Rockwell, you see an im-
age in your brain. What do those
familiar folksy scenes with their
humorous little captions awake
in you? Is it nostalgia for a by-
gone age: for childhood visits to
the doctor or an old-fashioned
diner?
For all of his skill, Rockwell’s
work has always struck me as a
bit creepy – too whitewashed,
sanitized, folksy American balo-
ney. So it was with fascination
and glee that I encountered
Christopher Ando’s A Guiding
Handseries at the Vancouver Art
Gallery’s exhibition Transits and
Returns. The show, co-curated by
five Indigenous women, features
work by 21 Indigenous artists
from Canada, the United States,
Australia and New Zealand.
It includes an installation of 36
works fromA Guiding Hand. An-
do, an Alutiiq, Hungarian and
Norwegian artist based in Califor-
nia, cut up Rockwell prints and
re-assembled them in new con-
figurations – each new work a
sort of cubist collage of the origi-
nal. The meticulous process itself
is a reference to practices of map-
ping and allotment that divide
Indigenous territories – frag-
mented, nonsensical. The results
highlight the sinister undertones
of that nostalgia. Who is missing
from Rockwell’s depiction of
American life?
Each work retains its original
title and two dates – Rockwell’s
and Ando’s. InMissing the Dance
(Jan 23, 1937),Sept. 4 2017 – Rock-
well’s sad white girl in a blue robe
in bed with a cold becomes a sea
of white with a blue almost
whale-like figure at the bottom,
the girl’s face reconstructed as its
tail. (The show runs until Feb.
23.)
A missing Indigenous narra-
tive is also at the heart of the
Western Front’s Regeneration:
Breaking Time with Indigenous
Video Games. For a few days,
people are invited into the gal-
lery to play video games created
by Indigenous artists.
The show, guest curated by To-
ronto-born, B.C.-raised and Mon-
treal-based Maize Longboat,
serves as a public launch for his
videogameTerra Nova. The two-
player game is about a futuristic
contact, in which an Indigenous
elder, Terra, and a settler youth,
Nova, need to work together.
“I feel like the game in a lot of
ways is an embodiment of me
and my identity,” says Longboat,
25, who is Mohawk from Six Na-
tions in Ontario on his father’s
side and French-Canadian on his
mother’s side. He grew up play-
ing video games, but did not see
Indigenous people – himself, es-
sentially – properly reflected in
them. There is power in that ex-
clusion.
Western Front’s media arts cu-
rator Allison Collins says a com-
mon thread in the games pre-
sented atRegenerationis a coun-
ter-narrative to those these art-
ists may have grown up playing,
such asOregon Trail. Once consid-
ered an educational tool about
the pioneer experience, it pre-
sented the navigation of the Ore-
gon Trail from a settler view-
point. At Regeneration,When
Rivers Were Trails, is played from
the perspective of an 1890s An-
ishinaabeg who is displaced from
his land. The educational game,
by Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishi-
naabe/Métis), Nichlas Emmons
(Miami/Shawnee) and Weshoyot
Alvitre (Tongva), can be seen as a
corrective toOregon Trail. I can’t
wait to play it. (Show runs until
Oct. 22.)
In North Vancouver, B.C., at
the Polygon Gallery, Egyptian art-
ist Wael Shawky’s exhibition is
built around his filmAl Araba Al
Madfuna III. The third of a trilogy,
it is based on Mohamed Musta-
gab’s short story Sunflowers,
where a community comes to be-
lieve that sunflowers are respon-
sible for all sorts of healing – for
everything from infant mortality
to loneliness.
The work is filmed in negative- giving it a spooky, but beautiful,
ambience – and shot in ancient
Egyptian temples. Children are
cast as adults, so we see a boy in a
robe and almost comically fake
moustache tell the story, but hear
a man’s voice reading it in mellif-
luous, confident Arabic. (There
are English subtitles.)
Shawky, who recently made
The Guardian’s list of Best Art of
the 21st Century, asks difficult
questions: What do we choose to
believe in, to worship? What val-
ue does that belief bestow upon
the object? And can interven-
tions stemming from that belief
become dangerous to the natural
order? (Show runs until Jan. 12.)
Consider the interventions hu-
mans have imposed on water.
Spill, a serendipitously timed
show at the Morris and Helen
Belkin Art Gallery at the Univer-
sity of British Columbia, examin-
es human interventions on conti-
nental waters. The exhibition
happened to coincide with last
month’s climate strike; thou-
sands of students have visited.
From Oct. 16-23 the space is being
animated withSpill:Response,a
live component involving per-
formance artists and educators.
Before seeing the show, I had
no idea what an alluvial fan was,
although I have seen countless
such phenomena in nature. They
are, simplistically, mountain-
shaped deposits of silt created by
flowing water interacting with
the earth. B.C. artist Genevieve
Robertson’sAlluvial Fan,2019isa
sort of sculptural “painting” on
paper, her paint being silt. She
collected samples from reser-
voirs along the Columbia River,
then ground them down to a very
fine grain. In her silt-paint trick-
ling down the sheets of white pa-
per, you notice different shades
and can see the glint of mineral
deposits and organic material.
Robertson is concerned about
the way silt is affected by dam-
ming projects and the environ-
mental disruption and destruc-
tion this causes on coastlines. Ev-
erything is related. (Spill runs un-
til Dec. 1.)As withSpillandAl Araba Al
Madfuna III, the central installa-
tion in Christina Mackie’s first so-
lo show at Catriona Jeffries’s new
East Vancouver gallery reminds
us of the impact interventions
have on the environment.Colour
Dropfeels as if it was made for
this vast new space in a former
industrial marine workshop. (It
is in fact a 2014 work, originally
installed in Chicago.)
Three large conical nets – two
of them silk, one nylon – con-
nected to the very high ceiling
and walls by ropes, pulleys and
weights, cascade down into tubs
of dye. They have previouslybeen lowered further down into
the vats; we see evidence of that
by their colours – a vibrant red, a
deep yellow, a pale blue. They are
inspired by plankton nets Mackie
observed as a child; she was
raised in Western Canada with
her marine biologist parents.
The nets weigh only a few
ounces, but are heavy with
meaning. What’s there to begin
with (a net) is changed by what it
is exposed to; what we see has
been filtered. The liquids in the
vats crystalize as they dry; our
perceptions solidify.
Every 30 minutes you can hear
the sound work – Mackie’s first –
installed in the courtyard.
2TRACKSwas made using audio
recordings of the train crossing
next to Jeffries’s space. So you
aren’t sure: Are you hearing the
train or the artwork (which was,
originally, the train)?
The outcome of that visit was
to make me more aware of every-
thing – sound, colour, material. I
felt more present, a welcome
pause from the crazy mind-race
we all experience in our busy
day-to-day. Visual art makes the
world more meaningful, beauti-
ful and still. I recommend it.Christina Mackie is at
Catriona Jeffries until Nov. 2.Artthatcanjaryououtofaslumber
SeveralB.C.exhibits
arechallenging
visitorstorethink
theworldaroundthem
MARSHALEDERMANVANCOUVER
Spill,above,attheMorrisandHelenBelkinArtGalleryattheUniversityofBritishColumbia,examineshuman
interventionsoncontinentalwaters.AstillfromWaelShawky’sfilmshotinnegative,AlArabaAlMadfunaIII,
below,askspeopletothinkaboutwhattheyworship.MaizeLongboat’svideogameTerraNova,bottom,isa
two-playergameaboutafuturisticcontact,inwhichanIndigenouselder,Terra,andasettleryouth,Nova,need
toworktogether.The Massacre of the Innocentsis the
reason the AGO (collaborating
with the Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco) has organized this
exhibition devoted to Rubens’s
work from the period when he re-
turned from studies in Italy to his
hometown, Antwerp, in what is
now Belgium. The painting, pur-
chased for the AGO by collector
Ken Thomson in 2002 and donat-
ed as the cornerstone of the
Thomson collection expansion
that opened in 2008, gives the gal-
lery the curatorial pull to gather
the loans that make the exhibi-
tion possible.
The Massacre of the Innocents,
for example, travelled to Ant-
werp’s Rubens House last year;
now the city returns the favour as
Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine
Arts lends the Michielsen Trip-
tych, a fragile folding panel that
seldom travels. Known asChrist
on the Straw,it features a grue-
some depiction of the dead Christ
after the descent from the cross.
Meanwhile, the National Gallery
of Art in Washington, has parted
with one of its most popular
paintings:Daniel in the Lions’ Den,
showing the Jewish hero sur-
rounded by a pride of beasts both
snarling and sleepy. (Rubens ob-
served them in the Antwerp zoo
and the stagey painting is a study
in leonine physiognomy.) For
their part, San Francisco’s Fine
Art Museums bringThe Tribute
Money, in which Christ faces a
gathering of elders both amazed
and skeptical, as well as a pair of
dark and detailed portraits of a
wealthy Antwerp silk merchant
and his wife.
All this provides context for
The Massacre of the Innocents,inan
exhibition curated by Sasha Suda,
(the AGO’s former European cu-
rator, now director of the Nation-
al Gallery of Canada), with Kirk
Nickel of San Francisco and beau-
tifully executed by interpretive
planner Gillian McIntyre. The ex-
hibition argues that, on Rubens’s
return to Antwerp, he applied all
that he had learned in Italy to his
new roles as both court painter to
the Archduke Albert in Brussels
and church painter in a region
where Protestant iconoclasts had
actually destroyed religious art.
In a section on printing, it dem-
onstrates how he built a personal
brand by maintaining a large stu-
dio in Antwerp with many assist-
ants, and by establishing rela-
tions with publishers who could
reproduce his work in books. It of-
fers the Breviarium Romanum
prayer book on loan from the
New York Public Library as an in-
triguing example of these engrav-
ings. And finally, it demonstrates
how he embraced the high style
of the Italian Baroque and made
it his own with bold colours anddramatic compositions, using as
particularly compelling evidence
The Annunciationfrom Vienna’s
Kunsthistorisches Museum, in
which a shaken Mary retreats
from an erupting angel.
How intensely alive these fig-
ures appear. The portraits reach
their apogee with a delightfully
intimate depiction of Rubens’s
first wife, Isabella Brandt. With
her saucy smile, deep dimples
and the slight cast to one eye, she
appears idiosyncratic, energetic
and amused. Her rosy cheeks and
hint of a bosom prophesize the
healthy (and wealthy) corpu-
lence of Rubens’s later figures – of
which this show, featuring early
work and more biblical than
mythical subjects, is mercifully
unencumbered. Most of all, Isa-
bella appears as a real individual.
So, too do all the figures inThe
Tribute Money, suggesting a series
of specific reactions to Christ’s
clever deflection of the question
about whether Jews need pay tax-
es, “Render to Caesar, the things
that are Caesar’s ...”
And yet, how uncomfortable
that intensity becomes when ap-
plied to less pleasant subjects. Ru-
bens’s father was a Calvinist sym-
pathiser, but his mother returned
to Catholicism after her hus-
band’s death, whether for reasons
of conviction or convenience is
unclear. The artist’s attitude is
complex: He is simultaneously amessenger of the Counter-Refor-
mation and a liberal humanist. If
his religious art is archetypal, it is
partly because of the technical
virtuosity with which he handled
the theatrical Baroque style:
Christ on the Straw, which portrays
the dead Christ with mottled skin
and gaping wounds, uses an ac-
tual three-dimensional crust of
paint to represent the blood emit-
ting from his nose. And if his art is
unique, it is partly because of the
way Rubens tied the bible stories
to approachable humanity: On
the left panel of the triptych, the
Christ Child observing his own fu-
ture is a chubby little lad of Flan-
ders.
This exhibition talks about Ru-
bens “complicating the narra-
tive” as it examinesLot and his
Daughters, perhaps the most po-
litically difficult painting here
from a contemporary perspec-
tive. In the Bible, Lot and his fam-
ily are banished from the corrupt-
ed Sodom – Rubens’s version of
that scene is also included – but
his daughters realize their race
will die out if their father does not
impregnate them. Rubens views
that episode, so often the pretext
for a senile seduction fantasy,
with troubling ambivalence. Lot
is supine, drunkenly raising a
lecherous eye towards the naked
daughter who pours him another
draught while the other, still
clothed, leans in conspiratorially,the Ghislaine Maxwell of her day.
So who is seducing whom?
In an interesting catalogue es-
say, Nickel argues that the way
these paintings lay a heavy bur-
den of interpretation on the view-
er is typical of Rubens. HisAnnun-
ciationdepicts a flushed Mary re-
coiling rather than submitting;
his histrionicMedusadares to ac-
tually imagine the swarm of
snakes and arteries that would
have exploded from the mythical
figure’s decapitation. And finally
The Massacre of the Innocentsde-
lights in its rendering of male
musculature and female flesh
even as it forces the images of
dead babies with bluing skin and
blood-spattered faces on to the
viewer. Are we horrified or are we
compelled?
Neither Baroque nor Rubenes-
que are adjectives that I would of-
ten deploy as compliments, but
even for those allergic to both the
fervid religiosity of Counter-Ref-
ormation art and to Rubens’s
pink-hued eroticism, this exhibi-
tion is testament to the painter’s
technical virtuosity and thematic
complexity, neatly fitting those
qualities into the context of his
times. Whether a contemporary
audience thrills to its lessons, or
merely groans, Early Rubens is
solid art history.EarlyRubenscontinuestoJan.5,
2020,attheArtGalleryofOntario.Rubens:Exhibitionistestamenttopainter’stechnicalvirtuosityandcomplexity
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