Jana Sterbak: States of Being, Corps à Corps

Virgil Hammock is president of the Canadian section of the International
Association of Art Critics and Chairman of the Department of Fine Arts
at Mount Allison University.

This is the catalogue of a 1991 National Gallery of Canada (NGC)
exhibition that showcased the work of Czech-born Canadian artist Jana
Sterbak. The exhibit achieved considerable notoriety during its run at
the NGC because of one work. Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino
Anorectic was a dress made from sewn-together flank steaks. It provided
a wonderful opportunity for politicians of all stripes to demonstrate
their artistic stupidity and for spokespersons from food banks to
publicly worry about good food going to waste. Both groups clearly
missed the point of the work—that women are regarded as pieces of
meat.

Although Sterback came to this country from Prague in 1968 (when she
was only 13) and all of her formal art education has taken place in
Canada, her sensibilities remain more Central European than Canadian.
There is a sense of irony in her work that is generally missing from
Canadian art. She makes very strange objects that can be difficult to
understand if you don’t have a grasp of where she is coming from: the
Czechoslovakia of Kafka, Capek, Hasek, and Kundera.

I seriously doubt that her case has been helped by the catalogue essay
by Diana Nemiroff. Nemiroff, a senior NGC curator and the exhibition’s
organizer, seems more interested in demonstrating her own erudition than
in explaining the work and ideas of the artist. There is, however, an
interesting interview by Milena Kalinovska with Sterbak that does give
some clues to the artist’s thinking. This catalogue is a worthwhile
addition to the literature of Canadian art.