...I Shed No Tears
“...I Shed No Tears” by Daniel Baird from Canadian Art Winter 2009 pp. 104–108
It is a hot, muggy summer night at The Local, an Irish bar and music venue on Toronto’s west side. On the back wall is a huge mural of Phil Lynott, tragic founding member of the Irish rock band Thin Lizzy. There are just a few people slinking low in their chairs across from the narrow stage. Onstage is a gnomish mandolin player with a grey goatee, an electric-guitar player with a tough, pocked face and a bright turquoise head scarf and the lead man, standing there with his beautiful Dobro guitar, sweat beading on his forehead, tennis shoe tapping beside a full pint of beer. The band launches into a slow, smouldering, bluesy groove that has the menacingly sexual vibe of Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker.
“Hi, my name is Arthur Renwick, and I’m here to entertain you,” he says chirpily, then immediately rips into a Bob Dylan cover, channelling Dylan’s unique hybrid of barely sublimated anger, contempt, irony and heartbroken longing: “She’s got everything she needs/She’s an artist and she don’t look back/She takes the dark out of the night-time/And paints the daytime black.” And that is what characterizes Renwick’s own songs. He can open by saying, “Here’s a little ditty I wrote years ago,” and then descend into a brooding song with lyrics like “Don’t give me no whisky/No gin, no beer, no wine/I’m sick of getting high/Just to have a good time.”
But while Arthur Renwick is a serious musician, he is increasingly acknowledged internationally as a First Nations artist whose conceptually dense photographs combine a classical sense of beauty and form with a reflective and evocative politics. Renwick was born on a Haisla reserve in Kitimat, British Columbia, and has mounted recent exhibits in Brazil, France, Toronto and Montreal. Up next is a group show at the George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York: Renwick’s career is on the rise.
“I was always interested in art,” he tells me, sitting in his Toronto studio, the latest pieces in his Mask series pinned to the wall. “My high school had excellent darkroom facilities. When I moved to Vancouver and went to college there, I took five studio classes and an art-history class. We studied prehistoric art, like the Altamira and Lascaux caves, and we were asked to write an exam on them. I thought, ‘There are thousands of years of Indian art here; why aren’t we studying that?’ When I went into the exam, I was really angry and I didn’t turn in the paper; I just walked out with it. Later, I called my professor at home and told him I had the exam paper. We met for coffee and I told him I wanted to read it to him. When I finished reading, he asked me if I’d ever been in jail and I said no. He asked me if I’d ever seen a psychiatrist. I said no. Then he advised me to see the school counsellors and I realized he thought I was insane. That’s when I decided to go to Emily Carr.”
By then Renwick was already an accomplished photorealist draftsman, and when he applied to Emily Carr’s photography program, his interviewers there were baffled. “‘Are you sure? Why do you want to go into photography?’ they asked me. And I said, ‘Look, it takes me eight hours to make a drawing of a shirt, and with a camera I can do the same thing in a few seconds.’”
The beautiful Delegates: Chiefs of the Earth and Sky series of 2004, shot in the austere plains of South Dakota, marked the arrival of Renwick’s mature work. The “delegates” are the First Nations chiefs, like Red Cloud, who went to Washington, D.C., on diplomatic missions in the 1870s only to be betrayed by the government when they returned to their communities. They are bleakly formal images: Red Cloud’s hands cover his abdomen, his dark hair cascades over his shoulders, his face is weathered and brooding. Renwick’s series engages this history indirectly through landscape, but also by incorporating the syntax of the ill-fated treaties the chiefs signed, but never fully understood. Tashunka-Witko (Crazy Horse) features a dense, dark stand of trees; up above the razor’s edge of the horizon, in the empty, washed-out sky, is a single quotation mark, cut through the photograph’s aluminum surface into its copper base as though the land itself were in quotation marks. In I-A-Wi-Ca-Ka (The One Who Tells the Truth), a dark semicolon is punched into the pale, metallic sky above a curving stretch of prairies. “I was thinking a lot about Dee Brown [author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee] when I did this series, since what he talks about happened where I was shooting this project,” Renwick says. “Most of his book is just quotes from people, and I realized he was giving a voice back to Indian people, and in a way that’s what I wanted to do.” The Delegates series, one might say, gives a voice back to the land.
“Delegates was really labour-intensive,” Renwick says. “I wanted to do something a little lighter next.” His Totem Hysteria series, which includes work made between 2001 and 2004, consists of diptychs: a photograph of one of the many totem poles that can be found in the Kitimat region where Renwick grew up alongside a smaller image of a road sign in which the word “totem” appears. Shot in black-and-white using classical compositions, these photographs are reminiscent of American documentary photography of the 1940s and 1950s. Their dry humour—the series title is from the writing of Claude Lévi-Strauss—is inflected with a drab sadness. In Totem: Café (2001), for instance, a totem pole topped by an eagle is set against steep, snow-flecked mountains, the sky low and misty; the accompanying photograph contains a cruciform sign displaying an eagle to advertise one Totem Café, a diner on an otherwise empty street. In Ford Lincoln Totem (2004), a narrow, regal pole sits in the centre of the frame along a road, hills visible in the distance; its complement is the towering signage of a Ford Lincoln Totem dealership, shot low over the shining hoods of new cars. Renwick’s images of totem poles, unlike those painted by Emily Carr in the 1920s, are without romanticism or sentimentality, but are rather matter of fact. And the sharp ironies of their kitschy counterparts suggest a slow degeneration—those empty small-town street corners, those vacant diners and bingo parlours and car dealerships.
Renwick’s colour photographs of First Nations churches in British Columbia, which were on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2007 at the same time as an Emily Carr retrospective, are an extension of the documentary impulse and subtle political engagement of the Totem photographs. Nlaka’pamux (2005), for instance, shows a simple log-cabin church with an elegantly peaked roof and whitewashed bell tower, set on a flat, brown landscape, the horizon line high and the sky above it radiantly blue. Secwepemc (2005), on the other hand, is an image of a narrow clapboard structure fronted by a tower; half the church is cloaked in shadow and half shines in clean sunlight. Renwick’s churches have the pristine beauty of Shaker architecture and suggest a humble, intense spirituality.
Renwick’s ongoing Mask series, which he began in 2006, is perhaps his most important body of work to date. It marks a departure from the dominance of landscape in his work and a movement toward a kind of portraiture. “My brother is a really successful carver,” Renwick tells me, “and I was struck by the way his masks look like him, how most carvers’ masks look like them.” The Mask series, in fact, consists of close-ups of Native artists, writers and intellectuals creating masks out of their own faces. For instance, in Carla (2006), a young woman uses her thumbs and index fingers to push her lips out and pull them sideways, her eyes gazing out at the viewer with a combination of bemusement and contempt. In Tom (2006), a man pushes his plentiful jowls down in an exaggerated way, his eyebrows raised and eyes rolling back into his head; Michael (2006) has one hand in his mouth and the other pushing at his eyebrows, tongue just starting to poke out, eyes demon-possessed whites. And in three stunning prints I saw pinned to Renwick’s studio wall, the performance artist Rebecca Belmore has twisted and pulled her face into seemingly impossible and intensely disturbing shapes.
In a review of “Remix,” an exhibit of aboriginal art held at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2009, Sarah Milroy provocatively asked: “Are we past the age of an aboriginal art show?” Given that an international figure like Brian Jungen is working within a contemporary idiom and an established set of aesthetic allusions, what does it mean to think of his work as aboriginal art? Is there, finally, such a thing as aboriginal art that is not simply a throwback to traditional practices? Renwick provides a means of negotiating these issues. The Mask series indisputably references pivotal moments in contemporary art, like Bruce Nauman’s self-portraits (in which he uses his face as a malleable, sculptural material), but Renwick’s photographs do not distance themselves from Native American art and history; rather, they penetrate Native people’s relationship to the ways they have been represented, and explore the uncomfortable relationship between Native and non-Native people.
“I asked the people I photographed to look into the lens and think about the history of the camera and its relationship to the stereotype of the Indian, then make a facial gesture,” says Renwick. “When I first showed these images at Leo Kamen Gallery, you could tell that people were really uncomfortable, all these larger-than-life Indians staring at them with distorted faces.”
He adds, “I like to write music because I can tell stories and tap into the oral storytelling tradition in a way I can’t in photography.” This rings true: while the work of an artist like Jeff Wall at least in part dramatizes a narrative, Renwick’s exists in a concentrated and continuous formal present. Still, Renwick’s musical side has become increasingly prominent—he performed at his shows in Brazil and Paris. “People Google my name, see that I’m a musician and ask me to play. In Paris, the curators actually suggested having an anthropologist there to interpret me for the audience!” But for Renwick’s performance at The Local, no one needed an acolyte of Claude Lévi-Strauss to interpret songs like “I Toe the Line.” Slipping back into low, acid-blues riffs, Renwick tells the story of a childhood friend from Kitimat with whom he used to spend long evenings sitting in a little park, dreaming about what it would be like when they moved to the big city—they thought they could get away with anything and never get caught. But when his friend moved to the city he robbed a convenience store and went to jail. “I ran into him a few years ago, this beautiful brown-skinned Indian man,” Renwick says. “‘How are you?’ I said. ‘I’m alive, I’m free,’ he said. ‘What do you want to do?’ ‘I want to be a singer in a band.’” And then, taking on his friend’s voice, just one among many voiceless, Renwick belts out, “I bottled all my courage/I swallowed all my fear/I burned many bridges/But I shed no tears.”
See more photos by Arthur Renwick at canadianart.ca/renwick
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