Sights of Resistance: Approaches to Canadian Visual Culture

Kathy E. Zimon is a fine arts librarian (emerita) at the University of
Calgary. She is the author of Alberta Society of Artists: The First 70
Years and co-editor of Art Documentation Bulletin of the Art Libraries
Society of North America.

Sights of Resistance features numerous black-and-white and color
illustrations, notes, an extensive glossary, a bibliography, an index,
and a CD-ROM that reproduces the book—the whole functioning like a
searchable Web site (www.uofc press.com/Sights/) that encourages
dialogue with the author and other readers. Other books by Robert
Belton, acting dean of arts at Okanagan College in Kelowna, are The
Beribboned Bomb (1995) and The Theatre of the Self (1999).

The book intends to be an alternative to the familiar, chronological
approaches to Western art history like Gardner’s Art Through the Ages.
It discusses the elements of visual culture; provides a detailed, yet
brief, survey of visual culture in Canada, with timelines for Canadian
history and visual culture; and, in the last chapter (fully two-thirds
of the book), provides over 100 case studies, each consisting of an
illustration of a painting, building, or other visual artifact, analyzed
from a variety of perspectives. True to its intent, the survey gives as
much importance to photography or the influence of commercial printing
as to painting, sculpture, or architecture. And the case studies are
inclusive; Okanagan applecrate labels, Notman photographs, anonymous
Aboriginal artifacts, fraktur, paintings by David Milne, sculpture by
Alfred Laliberté, and video installations by Jan Peacock are all
treated to analyses without prejudice. The case studies are the most
valuable, although their utility as pedagogical exercises is uneven; an
analysis of La France apportant la foi aux Hurons, attributed to Frиre
Luc, with references to semiotics, leaves one mystified, while the
formal analysis of a photograph by Harold Frederick Kells is
illuminating. Similar comments apply to the glossary; some terms are
explained, others point in so many directions that no clarification
results.

Sights of Resistance is an important book that challenges the way
Canadian art history (a.k.a. Canadian visual culture) is taught. It is
provocative, poses more questions than it answers, and cannot be ignored
at the postsecondary level.