Loss, Grief, Art, Criticism

Loss begets grief. Someone we know -- or someone we don't know but have formed an attachment to -- goes to spirit and a complex range of emotional, intellectual and physical processes are activated. If that someone is murdered, the murderer enters the mix, and we are haunted by the murderer -- and his or her life -- for as long as we live our own.

When I first heard of Colten Boushie -- a fire keeper of the Cree Red Pheasant First Nation -- it was not of his passing but of the situation that led to it. The more I learned about the situation, the more I paid attention. This attention included the trial of the man accused of murdering Boushie -- the Gerald Stanley Trial.

The acquittal of Gerald Stanley on the charge of Second Degree Murder had a profound effect on many Canadians -- myself included. Stanley's acquittal represents a loss (of justice), and I am not the same person I was prior to hearing the news of Stanley's acquittal.

Shortly after Stanley's acquittal a GoFundMe campaign was established in support of Stanley and his family. In response I posted something on my blog. The post was concerned with cycles of violence in smaller communities and was based not so much on the verdict or the arguments Stanley's lawyer made in court, but on what was known (and was not known) by all parties -- from the moment Boushie and his friends came onto Stanley's farm to the moment Boushie was shot in the back of the head at close range by Stanley.

Within two hours of my post I received over 4500 page hits. Some of these visitors left comments reminding me that I wasn’t there, that I didn't know what I was talking about, that my responses are typical of a fiction writer, etc. All of these responses missed the point, which again concerns cycles of violence that exist -- and are often condoned -- in smaller communities. Gerald Stanley's son attacked the vehicle carrying Boushie and his friends with a framing hammer while his father, Gerald Stanley, retrieved a pistol, fired "warning shots,” before shooting a sleeping or groggy Colten Boushie in the back of the head.

In her grief, Haudenosaunee writer Alicia Elliott published an essay in Hazlitt (March 27) on the effect the acquittals of Gerald Stanley and Tina Fontaine murderer Raymond Cormier have had on her and her family. Entitled “Dark Matters”, the piece opens with the historic "discovery" of dark matter, which Elliott uses as a metaphor throughout her powerful and heartfelt essay.

Elliott is a young, well-respected writer who has published a number of essays that concern BIPOC and LGBTQQIP2SAA realities in a white supremacist patriarchal Canada "founded" on the theft, commodification and unequal (re-)distribution of Turtle Island. I rely on Elliott's voice as both a writer and a social (media) commentator to help me negotiate my way through a Canada that I, in my privilege as a middle-aged white male settler, have both benefitted from and am humiliated by, and I am grateful that this important writer is both present and active in the contemporary conversation.

That said, there is a paragraph in Elliott's essay that troubles me. The paragraph in question is the third paragraph, and I would like to go through it carefully, respectful of both its author and of that to which its author refers (see below).

"There’s never a good time to get news that breaks you, but sitting in a Starbucks with your family in the midst of a vacation seems particularly inopportune. My husband and child were visiting Vancouver while I was on a fellowship at a major university. We’d visited the Contemporary Art Gallery that day. The main exhibit, “Two Scores,” was split between rooms. In the first room were Vancouver artist Brent Wadden’s giant woven blankets, which he apparently insists on calling “paintings.” They lacked the artistry of the Squamish weavings we’d seen a few days before at the Museum of Anthropology. The gallery write-up, however, spun this messiness into a positive, describing Wadden’s self-taught weavings as “exploratory… purposely naïve”—even if they were “often inefficient… [and] would confound a traditionally-trained practitioner.” I wondered whether this artist, who lived and worked on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory, had any idea of the Squamish history of weaving. I wondered if he’d care that Squamish blankets were placed in an anthropology museum while his were given a solo exhibit in a respected art gallery."

The "news" to which Elliott refers in the first sentence was revealed to the reader in the previous sentence: a tweet that signaled the acquittal of Gerald Stanley. However, the same cannot be said of the second sentence, for nowhere in her essay does it say that the "major university" from which Elliott received her fellowship was the University of British Columbia, and that it was UBC's Creative Writing Program who announced it. Anyone familiar with Elliott's social media presence would know this.

Why Elliott chose not to mention UBC by name when she is attentive to proper nouns like Starbucks (and the next place she visits -- the Contemporary Art Gallery) stuck to me like a bur. Was it the spectre of the Galloway Affair and the controversial "due process" petition it generated? Surely it was not based on a negative experience at UBC, given Elliott’s generally positive social media responses to the students she met with during her fellowship. Is it possible that the editors of Hazlitt removed any reference to UBC? Or does Elliott believe that the written world of social media and the written world of traditional journalism (Hazlitt is funded by Penguin Random House Canada) exist apart from one another, and that by not mentioning UBC, maybe she is happy to keep it that way?

This separation of worlds is alluded to again in the next sentence, when Elliott writes of her family’s visit to the Contemporary Art Gallery, where they took in Brent Wadden's Two Scores exhibition. Though its title implies that the exhibition occupies two worlds (or “Scores”), it is the world of the literary writer and the world of the visual artist that comes to mind -- in particular, that a writer can use creative strategies to make a work (Elliott's essay), but a visual artist somehow cannot (Wadden's exhibition).

The creative strategy Elliot employed in her essay is, as I mentioned earlier, the recurrence of the dark matter metaphor. Wadden's creative strategy is based on the histories of modern (Hard Edge) painting -- evidence of which should be apparent to those who know something of those histories, but is also supported by the gallery through didactics and supplementary information. Whether Elliott is aware of these histories is unclear. But one thing that is clear is that the language Elliott uses to describe Wadden’s project (“which he apparently insists on calling ‘paintings’”) indicates not an appreciation of artistic strategy, but an ambivalence toward it. This is most apparent in the following sentence, where she compares the “artistry” of Wadden’s work to Musqueam Salish weavings (Elliott identifies them as Squamish Salish weavings) that she and her family saw days before at the Museum of Anthropology. Without any qualifying details, she declares only that his work “lacked” that which the latter has -- as if an apple can be blamed for not being an orange.

As for the CAG, Elliott appears equally ambivalent. What was initially an exhibition of art that “lacked the artistry of the Squamish weavings” is now a “messiness” that needed to be justified by the gallery. Rather than quote a larger, more contextual passage from the gallery “write-up,” Elliott cuts into it, adding ellipses, an em-dash and square parentheses -- transforming a lucid and generous curatorial text into another form of “messiness.”

Elliott’s approach to criticism is reminiscent of an earlier nineteenth century form of judgement favoured by the wealthy connoisseur. Although this approach never entirely went away, to see evidence of it in the work of a writer known for her care and consideration is unsettling -- especially when writing on the work of another artist for whom care and consideration are hallmarks of his practice, an artist who is, he tells me, aware of whose land he is on, aware of Salish weaving, aware that he is white and a man and of the privileges that that status affords him.

As for the Museum of Anthropology, while it might be said to occupy another world in the cultural ecology of Vancouver, it too is a “respected art gallery” that belongs as much to the Musqueam people as it does to UBC, a museum that has worked hard to live down the accusation thrown at it years ago by Coast Salish/Okanagan artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, who referred to it as a “morgue” -- until it proved itself otherwise as a site in which to mount his Unceded Territories retrospective in 2016.

I would never be so bold as to suggest Alicia Elliott apologize to the MOA. But if there is something in her paragraph that should be addressed (besides the correct authorship of those weavings), it is her implication that the MOA is a lesser institution. If Elliott were to devote time to learning how this museum has transformed itself from a “morgue” to a relational space co-authored by settlers and indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, she might be more hopeful of its potential, in addition to implying, through her grief, its historic failings.