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Heart On is a retrospective of the work of Toronto artist Joyce Wieland. It was co-produced by Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Art Gallery of Ontario and is the first retrospective of the artist’s work in several decades. The last, nearly 40 years ago, contained much of the same work.
The museum’s ad text (most of which is duplicated at the entrance to the exhibit) informs us that:
This ambitious career retrospective … is also the most comprehensive, and positions Wieland as a critical international figure of 20th-century art and film. […] Spotlighting the concerns that informed Wieland’s creative output, namely her engagement with feminism, social justice and ecology, this exhibition explores her unique approach to art-making and the enduring relevance of her oeuvre to contemporary issues.
The current retrospective cleverly opens with Wieland’s oil painting Time Machine Series (1961), which, typical for that period of her work, combines abstract imagery with vibrant colours and some organic suggestiveness, introducing the viewer to these facets of her work before they walk through the chronology of her life. The exhibition was curated by Anne Grace and Georgiana Uhlyarik. The works selected do not contain many surprises (aside from only showcasing her weakest film works). This will not be a review of the works, but of the way they have been curated.
While coverage in Le Devoir and La Presse suggest that Wieland is no longer well-known, she has the dubious honour of being one of Canada’s most written about artists and most consistently misunderstood. Everything that made her unique and interesting is usually what goes missing when her work is exhibited and when she has the misfortune of being discussed by art historians. Three major aspects have been constant in how she’s discussed: her nationalism, her sex, and her concerns with ecology.
Purely by coincidence, this exhibition comes at a time when nationalism in the country is in flux, not because of opposition between the liberal and Tory ideas of the fate of America, but due more to the significantly less noble issue of tariffs (although this has hardly been an unusual issue behind the surges in the country’s nationalism over the past hundred years or more).
After more than a decade of being explicitly post-nationalist, the Liberal regime in Ottawa has, at least symbolically (and pragmatically), become “nationalist,” although what that implies concretely is still uncertain beyond some trade policies (internationally and inter-provincially, it currently sits around 80% vs 20%, respectively). Even the National Bank of Canada now recognizes that there has been a full decade of no growth, and the population is far in excess of what the economy can reasonably support. The fantasy of Canada that stretched from the post-NAFTA period to the Canadian Century initiatives may be dying, if not dead. However, given how zombified the country is, what that means is difficult to gauge.
On a more symbolic level, a recent ad produced by the government of Canada and widely circulating on television seems to suggest a few things. Visually, it is a quick moving montage of historic sporting events, war footage, shopping districts, Pride and Canadian flags, farms, (primarily Indigenous) folk traditions, tourist landscapes, and figures like Terry Fox. The voice-over (presumably subtitled to suit the receptive norms of zoomers) declares that Canada is “more than a place on a map. We’re an attitude. One with more empathy than ego. More unity than division. More grit, go, and we got this. [The more Canadians are their] maple-leaf buying, local adventuring selves, the more we are the True North, unbreakable, strong…”
For any student of Canadian art history, it is hard not to notice the major transition from the country as presented in this propaganda advertisement versus the controversies over how it was interpreted during Wieland’s peak period. At that time, and in the ambience of the country’s centennial, the chief question about Canada, and one that made it somewhat unique, was that it was about place more than persons, that Canada was a question of where and what more than who. The question of identity was less about the familiar than the uncanny; it was disturbing, alien, and an identity that could not identify.
To the degree that there was an Anglo-Canadian nationalism in Wieland’s era, it was notoriously pessimistic and even anti-social. It was the recurrence of a perennially marginal phenomenon. Historian Ramsay Cook once pointed out that while patriotism was about loving your country, nationalism was about hating it, and this was nowhere more the case than in English Canada. Unlike the more traditional variations of nationalism that evolved in Québec, it was one of the most peculiar variants of nationalism you can find, which may be why it has almost always been written about badly by scholars. (One exception is Jeffrey Cormier’s good The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success (2004)).
Being a nationalist in the arts was unpopular unless it involved getting money. For a few months, however, it became marginally fashionable. The Canadianization movement, which at the time was primarily restricted to a few university campuses and some cultural advocacy groups, was generally denigrated by the mainstream (more continentalist) media, which gave it a rebellious reputation and its severely limited and momentary cachet. In practical terms, it tended to be entrepreneurial, demanding funding and status, and the expulsion of foreign-born (primarily British and American) scholars, professors, and curators. As leading (socialist) Canadianist Robin Mathews put it, if Canada was to be liberated, it had to be liberated from liberals of all stripes, something echoed in the fractious arguments that nearly destroyed the NDP at the time. This was brought home by the substantial influx of Americans fleeing their country during the 1960s and 70s and infiltrating Canada’s institutions while importing the activist fantasies of the American Left. Wieland was widely (and not inaccurately) denigrated for having an Americanized fetish fantasy about Canada that had little to do with what the country actually was.
If nationalism was exploited as part of a battle against “American Imperialism” (or “branch plant capitalism”) — whether that was taken to be its imported cultural products (as well as styles like pop art and camp) and the corruption of the Liberals and NDP — it happened when Robert Fulford was declaring that Canadian art was dead, Margaret Atwood famously characterized it as consisting of little more than relics and losers, George Grant was insisting the country had no future, and Scott Symons declared it a psychic concentration camp run by glib liberals. It was hard not to doubt this given how popular advocacy for annexation was (something now largely forgotten) and given that media consumption was erasing any consciousness of actual Canadian history and replacing it with an image of a generically “American” idea of “humanity.” It was within this broad context that Wieland was calling artists the “shamen” of their society.
With the first Trudeau regime, there was an explicitly anti-nationalist, functionalist technocracy that stressed biculturalism and then multiculturalism as means for disciplinary control. These ideas stretched (and still stretch) to how cultural funding was dispersed, how museums were organized, and so on. Much of these innovations remain basic parts of the architecture of the culture industry and the federal government that Wieland would refer to, without much explanation, as fascist. Not that such epithets were uncommon to the New Left rhetorical clichés that she often employed. Even Conservative MPs were known to refer to Trudeau as “Hitler” in Parliament while he referred to his opponents as “idiots,” “nobodies” and would tell them to fuck themselves when they questioned him.
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When Wieland returned to Canada from her period in New York, she was greeted with intense hostility by the country’s artistic nationalists as a traitor, a jingoist, and degrader of the country (even CARFAC denounced and picketed her). This extended not only to her ties to the Liberal regime — she declared herself Trudeau’s propagandist and then tried to rebrand it — but more to her style. She then spent years trying to make up for that with some of the most overtly nationalist art produced in the country’s history, for which she was still attacked by both nationalists and non-nationalists and then misinterpreted by different strains of feminism for decades. The critical divisions over her work also tended to be a familiar Toronto vs. everywhere else one. (She was a hometown girl who had received recognition in New York, even if that recognition was pretty minimal).
This (and the New York scene she was marginally involved with) was the context of most of the work on the exhibition, but you would never guess that by visiting Heart On. The exhibition spans seven rooms. The central space includes one large wall work and a chronological chart of her life that primarily highlights various major exhibitions and has a video of how her work was restored by the museum to be shown again. (Most of it was already falling apart 50 years ago because the craft quality was so low). The rooms run chronologically, from her drawings, to her paintings and films, to her soft sculptures and fibre works, her book work, prints and finally ends with more drawings and paintings. It roves from crude figurative drawings and experiments with abstraction to works inspired by comics and films, works inspired by the history of textiles and dealing with ecological themes before ending in her kitsch rococo phase.
Some walls are painted in colours (blues, pink, green), and there are usually two brief wall texts to a room as well as some quotations floating near the top of the walls. At the centre of the spaces are either vitrines in which sketches or books are laid out or there are partial walls, usually used to break the works down into different media. While themes recur in the works (the near omnipresence of sex and nationalism), sometimes the curators stress media or craft rather than content. For instance, works about Trudeau and separatist radical Pierre Vallières sit in the same room under the heading of “Craft politics,” sheltered from one another by various display devices, but the conflict between these two nationalisms seems entirely contained and downplayed. No context is provided to make any of this remotely meaningful, and it seems deliberately muzzled by the curation. The relationship between the polemic form of the Vallières film and the polemics appropriated for the “craft” works (and they are very different) is not really investigated by the curation.
Wieland presents Vallières in language borrowed from absurdism (there are clear Beckett references) and gleefully talked of displaying him like an animal. Although her mention of desiring to present him like a Théodore Géricault work is printed on the wall, is the average viewer going to take away from that that she is presenting him as a psychotic or a cadaver? This was also related to the bestiality fantasy that was common to her work. (Two of her bestiality figurines are set in the wall beside the film, but no relation is clearly implied). Male figures, in particular, were usually presented either as animals to be copulated with (and occasionally consumed), as mechanical, puppet-like figures, or as toys. Some feminist critics might cite this attitude as “critique,” but that is as patronizing and asinine as saying it was about her anxiety surrounding husband Michael Snow’s well-known affairs.
As a historical exhibition, it is almost completely uninformative. As a biographical exhibition, it provides little insight. This could be forgiven if the exhibition stressed her formal considerations or treated her work in the “Proustian” or shut-in phantasmagorical terms she would sometimes use herself. It does not do this. It stresses theme, media, and subjective expression as activism. Not only is the entire thing conducted in the most dull and traditional way possible (chronological biography), but to the degree that it positions her beyond artistic solipsism, it is mostly misleading. Wieland was part of a generation of Canadian artists who (correctly) complained that they and the public were painfully ignorant of the country’s history and art. This is also where the significant problems with the exhibition arise.
Her work fit squarely in the tiny clusterfuck that constituted the Toronto artworld for decades (and of which you get only the slightest scent in a vague wall text). One of the major deficits of both Wieland scholarship and showings of her work is that they tend to place her in a context she was marginal to and divorce her from where her work actually historically existed. This exhibition is no exception.
The recurrent curatorial thematization is to tie Wieland to broadly international feminist art (something carried on in the framing catalogue essays). This is mostly done by stressing her highlighting of traditional craft arts while not acknowledging how she appropriated them and to what ends. (The acrimonious debates between feminist and Women’s art, two often irreconcilable, artistic phenomena in the 1960s and 70s, are also erased). The use of fabric art, after all, was not controversially received because it was “Women’s art” but because it was seen as degrading Women’s art. Moreover, given the general tone of when most of these works were made, the ways she showed them and framed them, they read far more persuasively as mockeries of Women’s art and the fad for civil rights quilts in the US that occurred shortly before them.
Rather incongruously, the exhibition also tries to tie her to Indigenous art and includes a lithograph of Cape Dorset’s Surusilutu Ashoona in a double move to make her both an ally of the community and a fellow female artist. To her credit, Wieland collected female artists she came across on her travels, something you can readily see in her archives. But there is no acknowledgement of the fact that the female artist Wieland admired the most, and spoke of the most often as the exemplar par excellence of feminine art, was Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. The aesthetics of Triumph of the Will are as central to her notion of the feminine as quilt making (which was also a hyper-abstracting, rigorous formalism predicated on the conservation of tradition). In terms of her statements, Wieland’s feminism never amounted to more than the most reductive sexual essentialism possible (I am a woman, I make art; therefore, I make women’s art). While she got along with female artists, she did not generally get along with feminist artists and infamously referred to them as fascists and sex haters.
Whatever you could accuse Wieland of, being tasteful would not likely make the list. (Which is appropriate given that she worked with the Kuchars). A lot of this has to do with tone. When it suited her, she would claim she was being ironic. When it did not suit her to be ironic, she would claim to be sincere. The formal logic and tone of the work itself did not alter much regardless of what stylistic devices she appropriated (her feature film The Far Shore (1976) is a notable exception and likely the weakest thing she ever did), but the way that her authorial claims shifted tended to determine how people have allowed themselves to read them. That is part of why her reception has been plagued by either being reduced to intentional or (naively transparent) political readings. Neither work convincingly because she was (mostly) coherent artistically but not intellectually. It is that friction in part that gives her work whatever staying power it has.
You do not get the impression from the exhibition that this was someone who produced a perfume (Sweet Beaver) that jokingly combined pornographic suggestiveness and a marketing scam with a way to make the National Gallery of Canada smell like the rotting asshole of a dead beaver to the point that viewers were physically ill. (Toronto artists referred to her shows as barnyard art because they were so musky). You do not get the impression of someone who presented the “sacred” Arctic as a luxurious rotting cake strewn with scenes of cannibalism and animal rape in a giddy spectacle that does not sit that comfortably with common notions of “ecological concern.” The arctic, like “ecology” in general in her work, tends to be treated as a sterile, boil-in-a-bag world, the chief value of which, like perfume, is its essential artificiality.
Works like those just mentioned — with their many layers of undecidable significance which stressed art as an ephemeral and decomposing operation — were most of what her practice amounted to before she became, through the magic of her PR statements, unironically “engaged” with (rather than objectified) “feminism, social justice and ecology” as the museum brands it. This may go back to the change in her persona that came after she was so heavily attacked when returning to the country. Wieland is an interesting case study in how the more overtly politically committed an artist becomes, the weaker their work becomes. When she settled back in Canada, the artistic value of her work declined significantly, something that the chronological structure of the exhibition makes almost cruelly obvious.
