This Issue
"This Issue" by Richard Rhodes, Winter 2009, p. 12
History anchors to its writing, and in this issue we present a series of features that open onto different aspects of the history of Canadian art, from the early 20th century to now. In the past, we’ve on occasion made the case that it’s time to unseat the Group of Seven as the ultimate icons of Canadian art-making: all those men, all that wilderness, all that paint. However, we are proud to publish an excerpt from Ross King’s forthcoming book on the Group, Modern Spirits. Those who know King’s books—Brunelleschi’s Dome, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling and The Judgment of Paris, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction in 2006—know his astounding command of fact and chronology: his books read like page-turning novels. In this excerpt, the protagonists are J. E. H. MacDonald and Tom Thomson, forced to face up to the realities of the home front in Ontario while the First World War consumes Europe. By scripting a global context for a provincial story, King reinvents our understanding of the Group and writes a human history as much as an art history. Elsewhere in the issue, Gillian MacKay brings us a story on the installation theatre of Iris Häussler, whose creative fictions revolve around the making of a hidden, surreptitious art beyond the boundaries of the conventional art world. E. C. Woodley restores our awareness of one of the last living Automatistes—Fernand Leduc, who has left a legacy of advanced monochrome painting and continues to make art at the age of 93. Daniel Baird engages the Mask portraits of Arthur Renwick, who takes photos of contemporary First Nations cultural figures confronting stereotypes of the Indian through the camera lens. Sara Mameni, winner of the inaugural Canadian Art Writing Prize, presents the Vancouver artist Denise Oleksijczuk, who has revisited a film by the French New Wave director Robert Bresson. These are artists and writers reimagining the present in terms of the past, making new history by rewriting history. Philip Monk, the Toronto curator and critic, should have the last word. In his story on General Idea’s founding of FILE magazine, he issues a challenge for us all: “Write me a really good history. A story that people want to read, that makes them feel part of a scene. A great Canadian story. Our story.”
Richard Rhodes, Editor
Contributors
ROSS KING is the bestselling author of Brunelleschi’s Dome, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism and the novels Ex-Libris and Domino. His new book, Modern Spirits: The European Adventures of the Group of Seven, will be published by Douglas & McIntyre in fall 2010. Born and raised in Canada, King now lives near Oxford, England.
GILLIAN MACKAY is a Toronto-based arts writer and editor. She is currently working on an essay for a forthcoming publication on the Jack Chambers collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. For past issues of Canadian Art, she has written about Shelley Adler, Jane Ash Poitras, Liz Magor, Gina Rorai, Barbara Steinman and Shirley Wiitasalo—diverse female artists who are remarkable for their passion, individuality and commitment. In this issue she profiles the German-born, Toronto-based artist Iris Häussler.
E. C. WOODLEY is a composer, artist and critic who lives in Toronto and Amsterdam. He is a regular contributor to Canadian Art and Border Crossings, and his music has been lauded in publications such as the New York Times, the Globe and Mail and Variety. Woodley has written music for numerous films, including Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. He recently won a Dora Award for his sound and music work for a recent production of the shorter plays of Samuel Beckett.
SARA MAMENI was born in Tabriz, Iran, in 1977, and in 1988 moved to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. She moved to Vancouver in 1997 and later enrolled at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In 2008, she graduated from the University of British Columbia with a master’s degree in art history; she is currently at the University of California, San Diego, where she has just begun a doctoral degree in contemporary art. She is the winner of the inaugural Canadian Art Writing Prize.
PATRICK HOWLETT is a visual artist who spent part of 2009 in London and Berlin. Before that, he taught art in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He has shown his work across Canada and internationally and in 2008 was a semifinalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. He exhibits his work at Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto and currently lives in London, Ontario.
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