At Dazibao is the first solo exhibition in Montréal of work by Lori Blondeau, the winner of the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. It features a selection of works originally curated by Nasrin Himad. Blondeau is a Cree/Saulteaux/Métis artist, an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Art at the University of Manitoba School of Art, and an art bureaucrat.
The curation biographs her as follows:
Since the 1990s, Lori Blondeau’s artistic practice in the fields of performance, photography and installation, along with her curatorial work and activities as co-founder and Executive Director of the Indigenous art collective TRIBE, has proved decisive to the ever-increasing centrality of Indigenous art and knowledge production in Canada.
The first work, Grace (2006), consists of 14 head-shots spread at a right angle across two walls. These images were extracted from a performance involving friends, family, etc. performing as an abstracted self. The face is not visible but occluded by hands, which vary between palms out and in. The wall text claims these function as talismanic symbols and that the work concerns the performance of “‘self’ in community,” the minimal gestures seeking to repel the capture of her personhood.
The next work, States of Grace (2007), is a video of a performance she did on several occasions, including the Venice Biennale, where the performance was the demonstration of a “coping strategy” utilizing the “imposed” meanings of the term “grace.” This station of the exhibition includes a work in golden text that reproduces a dictionary definition of the term.
The central station of the exhibition is a twenty-minute video, COSMOSQUAW (1998), that features her performing as Betty Daybird, a pseudo-vaudeville routine skewering Indian stereotypes (although it far more convincingly can be viewed as a skewering of the aesthetics of burlesque or drag). This technique is carried over from the Belle Sauvage persona she also dons on occasion, which does similar skewering playing on old postcards. The wall text suggests that “By using squaw with cosmo, Blondeau positions Indigenous women within the ethereal beauty of stars and the cosmos.” This projection is the corollary to strategies that allowed the personas to function as “means to critically unpack and reverse the power that stereotypes had on the Indigenous identity.”
Next to these is another video recording, Sisters (2006), in which she performs a series of domestic actions, shown primarily in a close-up of hands and objects, that put on display “the matrilineal knowledge and traditions held within her family” and these are intended to stand as “symbolic cultural communication [that] mediates, sustains, and instigates decolonial Indigenous ways of being.”
Vaudeville, burlesque, and the Wild West show (she blurs them) all co-evolved with the early years of anthropology, often directly appropriating and parodying its logic, consciously and deliberately undermining its notions of objective representation and demeaning the quality of reference. If the burlesque was a demonstration of the absurdity of sexuality through the stripping away of cultural semiology, what Blondeau does is effectively a kind of anti-burlesque, relying on an ironic encoding through a game of mastery in which an authentic “self” or “culture” is always mystically alluded to and protected from critique but which appears as just another stereotype. Her performative function as the “Indigenous,” the central feature that she’s exploited for her career like a vaudeville comedian’s central routine or gag.
The video works are primarily static, single-shot takes that seem to assume an authenticating indexical function of recording through the impoverishment of its basic artistic capabilities. There’s a level of Camp indifference and technical incompetence that seems forced and rote. There is a stark contrast between the frequently evoked sentimental genres of “lived experience” or “tradition” etc. supposedly relayed by performance and the flat deadness of their rendering in the forms of photos and videos that goes completely unaddressed.
The wall texts of the exhibition do not merely supplement the archival imagery, they are what define them and without this anthropology museum logic imposed, the works would make very little sense in their setting. What seems central to the various strategies is a horror of the autonomization of meaning and art and this is central to its moral codification expressed primarily through the deployment of pseudo-scientific therapeutic language, “cultural” modeling, and vague narrative framing, all of which becomes central to the accompanying essay.
Blondeau's most renowned pieces come off like a BFA student running through a list of badly digested Contemporary Art clichés. Lonely Surfer Squaw expresses this logic the most succinctly. The work
originated from a found generic, American pop-cultural postcard image of a California-esque beach surfer model. This piece is part of a series of light box works and postcards the artist recreated using the same image. She inserts herself into that iconography as a 60s surfer pin-up except, as she has remarked, “I’m an Indian woman standing on the prairies in the middle of winter”. Blondeau stares cheekily at the camera in her faux fur bikini and boots, cradling her oversized soft pink surfer board while standing in the snow. She takes on this surfer babe archetype and destabilizes the voyeuristic and objectifying intents embedded in such images through her own satirical flair. Although done in irreverence, this performative act subverts the gaze of ubiquitous media that undermines and reduces Indigenous women, like herself, and in landscapes such as the one she poses against.
Left out of this account is the fact that the techniques and attitudes expressed in this rationalization are as generic as the things they set out to mock. Leaving aside that there is a long (if minor) history of depictions of nude and underwear-clad models in the snow, the gesture comes off less as defiance than disappointment at not being privileged in more generic imagery. There is nothing about this image that “subverts the gaze,” on the contrary it explicitly functions (to the degree that it does) by teasing and arousing it while exploiting the spectre of “Indigenous women” that she stereotypes through the performance herself. It takes a great deal more than the irony of intentions to “subvert” anything. The tropes of subversion and appropriation are just props for the routine.
The gestures of Lonely Surfer Squaw are generalizable to her body of work which functions along much the same lines, implicating an authentic realm beyond the image that demands moral recognition. This is where the desire for glamour displayed in a “repressed” and defensive form in COSMOSQUAW is clearly at play.
More notable about the exhibition than the weakness of the works themselves is how much difficulty their curation has in dealing with them.
In the 90’s to 00’s, Indigenous cultural production was, and can still be, written about in a way that centres the power of the work in its capacity to educate non-Indigenous viewers. In particular, the threads or translations focus on strategies of humour and ‘contemporaneity’ with the end goal of deconstructing stereotypes, rather than probing the deeper layers of the conceptual framework that are specific to Indigenous folks’ community or lived experience.
In terms of her professional career, Blondeau encapsulates the artist as functionary, naturalizing the mythology of “culture,” operating as a “cultural mediator” and exemplar of “marginality” that utilizes interdisciplinary practices to stress participation and social significance entirely in keeping with the ideology of the Canadian state. It is about as reactionary as Contemporary Art is capable of being.
If the point of the work is not subversive, and the point can not really be said to be education since there is almost no educational content in the work, what’s interesting about the exhibition is finally how it lethargically self-destructs.