Learning to See Yourself

John Ralston Saul

Let’s start with the self-evident. Great art is almost always a statement of truth
and deception, revelations and hypocrisy, profound emotional release and an artistic game. Great representational art is always abstract, just as abstract art is representational. I often think of the assertions from Borduas and Riopelle that they had finally exorcised nature from Canadian painting through abstraction. Take another look at their paintings. All you can see is nature. Van Gogh painted evident irises. Self-evident irises. Much later, these canvases sold for tens of millions to people who thought they wanted irises. I have stood in the walled garden of the mental asylum on the edge of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, staring at the bed of irises which inspired Van Gogh, and it is clear that he did not paint irises. What did he paint? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he created a painting which is not at all what it appears to be.

When you look at Kent Monkman’s Four Continents you may pass from startled silence to an embarrassed giggle to an honest laugh, only to find yourself feeling uncomfortable, then confused, then moved, wondering what he has done to you.

Good painters do things to us. The better they are the more they do. At first the Monkman contradictions seem obvious, then unclear. And then there is somehow a frightening ease of style — apparently in one manner or another — until you realize that he has turned all of these manners into something of his own. Morphing would be the wrong term because he continually re-adjusts the mix to produce a sequence of destabilizing styles. I guess you could say he has the trickster in him.

This is a concept non-Indigenous Canadians once knew, then forgot, and now are learning again. It is easily talked of in mythology and theatre and fiction. But it belongs as much, if not more, in art. Is this part of the discourse of formal Western art history? No. Even though it would have been a good concept for art in general. The thing is that today we can see the role of the trickster in art in Canada. And
we begin to understand that the apparently comic nature of the trickster is a serious business. And Kent Monkman is a leader in this conceiving of how art functions for both the artist and the viewer.

Perhaps Tiepolo’s creative game was much the same. After all, he had never seen three of the four continents portrayed in his great Würzburg frescos. What was he offering to his patron who, by the way, was one of those strange creatures of the late Holy Roman Empire: a German Prince Bishop, Karl Philipp von Greiffenclau. Only the Holy Roman Empire could so effortlessly produce mixtures of authority which paid reverence to the Roman Empire, the Papacy, Luther and medieval German political structures. What did the Prince Bishop think about those continents? Before the frescos or after? Or what did he want to think? What did the people wandering through the palace of this important but provincial figure want to imagine about the rest of the world — they who lived in the deep recesses of Catholic Bavaria? They certainly were not looking for troubling images or thoughts. They certainly expected their leader — who was supposed to represent a local version of the inheritance of two thousand years of Roman and European destiny — to reassure them that they were somehow part and parcel of God’s plan for their legitimate leadership of the world.

Was Tiepolo therefore simply echoing European prejudices and a continent’s sense
of superiority? Not entirely, since in the first half of the eighteenth century, to which he belonged, Asia was still a source of culture for Europe, richer and more august than Europeans could possibly imagine. Their idea of luxury came from Asia, Persia and the Ottomans. Silks, porcelain, tea, armour, architectural features. And the Enlightenment thinkers of exactly this period kept referring back to an idealized Asian or Persian, Turkish or Arab sophistication when they wanted to criticize their own self-destructive system. Of course these thinkers also were pretty ignorant. They had not seen these mysterious places. But they had studied everything there was to study. And let’s not forget that Voltaire constantly described the great European aristocrats, the leaders of their civilization, people like the Bishop Prince Karl Philipp von Greiffenclau of Würzburg, as illiterate and ignorant, caught up in the surface of their grandeur. Voltaire was also the single most famous man in all of Europe. Tiepolo would have read him. Voltaire’s excoriating social criticisms were being read and read out loud for wide public consumption at exactly that time. Zadig was published in 1747, three years before Tiepolo began the Würzburg frescos. And Candide came shortly after.

In other words, Tiepolo travelled from the highly sophisticated Republic of Venice to provincial Bavaria in order to make good money on a big contract. And even if the Prince Bishop was a dignified gentleman of ancient lineage, and/or an honest cleric, he operated in a time of easy money for those at the top; a time when the concept of the 1% we talk so much about today, would probably have been a half a percent or a quarter of a percent. For most of them, whether they were part of the old Nobility of the Sword or the impossibly nouveau riche Nobility of the Robe (ie merchants on the make who more or less bought their titles), they were all in the business of architectural and artistic self-aggrandisement. And the class system of rich versus poor funnelled money in their direction. It was this mid-eighteenth-century self-absorption which brought on the French Revolution and the catastrophe of Napoleonic grandeur. So Tiepolo, the child of Venice, which was then an aging, tired trading city, came to Würzburg with a different creative point of view. Venice, after all, had been open to the world for more than half a millennium in a way that the rest of Europe could not imagine. It was built on the importing of goods and images from Africa, Persia, the Ottoman Empire and Asia.

But it was also terrified of thought — of any idea that might endanger the authority of this dictatorship of traders. So Tiepolo would have carried with him to Würzburg a strange culture of mixed images, architecture, opulent materials and music to fulfill his German contract. But not ideas! Venice and ideas, a contradiction in terms.

His would have been an urbane elegance in which nothing intellectually disturbing would be said. And there he was with the mandate to paint images of the world in a minor German capital prospering in the last years of the Holy Roman Empire. The wonderful, creaky Holy Roman Empire, Europe’s last and almost genuine link to the greatest Western Empire of all time. So yes, this fresco of the state of the world could not help but be charged with complexity.

There are a lot of differences between what I have described and the reality of Kent Monkman. He is not avoiding ideas. Better still he is hiding them in images which at some level Tiepolo and the Prince Bishop would have thought they recognized. And Tiepolo at least would have loved the irony and the cheeky, flagrant contradictions. Perhaps not his patron. But the Prince Bishop would have known how to pretend that he had not noticed the irony. That is one of the requirements of authority divorced from ethics. And yet, both would have been deeply troubled by this using or misusing — from their point of view — of the European iconography. They would have wanted to say, wait a minute, we decide on the implications of our mixing of the sacred with Greek paganism; and we shape the imagining of distant cultures. You don’t get to imagine us. But they would have not said a word.

The real discomfort would have come from their incapacity to recognize the mythological line which has allowed Kent Monkman to do what he has done with what they thought were their images. And there lies the core of Monkman’s narrative. He feels free to use the mythological narrative of other cultures in order to create a quite different sense of images and of what they might mean or do to us.

Let me ask the almost naïve question — is there a point of view, a world view in Tiepolo’s frescoes of the four continents? Of course there is. But we don’t really know what people saw or felt or imagined when confronted by these images. Or whether they could express or wanted to express what they saw and felt. After all, what did people feel when they saw Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1652, in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome? What we see today is an orgasm and a masterpiece. Were people confused about the difference between religious ecstasy and sex? Did they think there was a difference? Did the possibility of similarity or difference matter to them? Were the fluttering opulent robes of the saint a symbol of sacred or corporal pleasure? Or both? What about the thousands of paintings of Christ on the cross or being brought down from the cross, in which we are experiencing the political eroticism of Christ’s passion. Miss Chief would certainly have some thoughts on all of that.

Of course, many great paintings of the crucifixion do not confuse the passion of
the Saviour with images of a young, athletic male, almost naked, a bit of cloth threatening to fall away, grieving, in pain. More than physical pain, or what we think of as pain. But at least as many crucifixion scenes do present this mixed message. In fact, as the Renaissance rolled on, most sophisticated portraits of Christ’s passion happily confuse the religious and the corporal passion. What did viewers say or think? Apparently not much. Think of all those virginal nuns and supposedly chaste priests, unmarried girls and horny male worshippers staring at the sculpture of Theresa and those essentially erotic images of Christ.

How did they combine these images with their religious expectations and their own physical feelings? Did they consciously think about these contradictions? Through most of our history we have not tried to express such contradictory feelings or to consciously dissect them. What have we done? Well, we have lived with them. After all, we are naturally unconscious beings, scarcely aware of how our emotions and thoughts crash up against each other causing various sorts of catastrophes. Take a minor local example — not so very long ago, Canada was led by a man clearly not in touch with the relationship between emotion and action — or with his incapacity to deal with the relationship between emotion and the effect of emotion on his actions. So these sorts of unconscious contradictions don’t go away. They are part of the human condition. We must constantly struggle against them. Monkman is certainly trying to help us.

Equally important, there have been moments from time to time when art did find ways to clearly state our state of being. Running through the middle ages there were all those great frescos of judgement day. Buffalmacco’s the Last Judgement and Hell, 1335–40, in Pisa is a perfect example of this. In these images of good and evil every citizen could see a precise breakdown of life — their own lives — and its consequences. Or there was the clarity of Bruegel. Or more recently, the expressionism of the 1930s coming out of the almost unconscious slaughter of the First World War.

And then there is Kent Monkman. He falls into that very line of clarity — the sort of painter who forces the viewer to consider their own contradictions. He seems to have an endless supply of artistic tricks up his sleeve, but one of the most devastating is that of turning European imagery against itself. Even in his use of light colours and tones he is playing havoc with the conventions of how we should imagine images. After all, one of the great dreams of European global superiority was that of dominating the colonial imagination. And part of that domination was an insistence on European conventions of light, tone and colour. When people turn their backs with disdain on movements such as the Group of Seven in Canada or their equivalents in Australia, Latin America or the United States, they forget just how hard the battle was to reimagine the hue of art, to eject the European conventions; conventions which were fair expressions of their European geography and light. But no more. These were the wonderful and provincial conventions of little islands like Britain or various small nation states on the continent.

But these imperial European conventions, which defined Western art, made any rejection by those trying to reinvent the form and the narrative of imagery in enormous territories elsewhere astonishingly difficult. The forces of tradition, conservatism and the need for European concepts of superiority made it almost impossible. After all, truth already existed and it was a truth of colour and movement. And so none of this fundamental reinvention of the image happened until the early twentieth century, when artists found ways within their own imaginations to produce tones true to their own place, which in turn opened up whole new possibilities for the image and the imagination.

Of course, a great deal has happened since then. But much of it has been confused in the idea of global movements of art. Monkman, on the other hand, takes these conventions of light, tone and colour a step further by intentionally confusing them all as a way of undermining the self-confidence of both the old world and the new.

The ultimate revenge is his turning of the euro-racial card on its head — the centuries of self-assurance, declared cultural superiority, the parsing of qualities of blood, the misuse of Darwin to claim ownership of a false idea of racial progress, the religious assertions used to justify every form of base exploitation. In Monkman’s Four Continents he tumbles out the junk and carcasses of the European/American project, the strange vicious anarchy of elegant culture mixed with mass murder, disposable technology and cheap romantic nationalism. Here is the wreckage of the rational project, so carefully presented over a half millennium as an intellectual vision of truth that justified the power of European empires. Monkman plays with it, tortures it with its own logic of superiority. This is the trickster at his best and at his least forgiving. And yet in the irony there is a form of forgiveness or perhaps of indulgence. This is a very different vision of a possible artistic project today. And out of that tumbling morass Monkman has produced the confusing clarity in which he specialises.

What does this tell us about Indigenous culture in the twenty-first century? Well, first that culture without the ability to laugh at itself while it cries is a dead culture. And second, that this creative energy, which has survived so many attacks, has the self-confidence to use whatever tools are available. I have a strange feeling that Tiepolo, gazing upon Monkman’s Four Continents, no longer his, would have laughed to himself; been amazed, strangely moved — if a Venetian can be moved — and then confused.