Other Conundrums: Race, Culture, and Canadian Art

Patricia Whitney, former coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at
the University of Prince Edward Island, is the Bank of Montreal Visiting
Scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa.

This collection of articles, essays, letters, and reviews, accompanied
by brilliant color plates and black-and-white illustrations, inscribes
the presence of aboriginal peoples and persons of color as among the
most exciting creators of visual art in Canada today. Monika Kin Gagnon
has a political purpose in assembling this material, but she is equally
conscious of formal considerations. She does state flatly, though, that
“this book is about race.” Indeed, it is about the struggle, first
undertaken by feminist art makers in the 1970s and then embraced by gay,
lesbian, and queer artists, to make spaces and build networks to create,
display, and validate artistic productions that challenge the male,
heterosexist domination of the culture.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the period examined in this book, the project,
while maintaining feminist and queer practices, shifts to art-making by
aboriginal persons and people of color. This movement is “engaging a
cultural race politics” to, among other objectives, banish bland terms
such as “multiculturalism” and “acknowledge the contradictory ways
on which race and identity figure in our cultural landscape.” This
riddle or paradox is suggested in the “conundrums” of the book’s
title.

Among the artists featured in the collection is Shani Mootoo.
Recognized for her novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1998), Mootoo is also a
visual artist. Gagnon focuses on a 1994 one-woman show of Mootoo’s
Xerox works and videos, showing her comfort with text and image play
applied to the serious issue of racialized identity.

Paul Wong’s video art, some of which has been installed at the
National Gallery of Canada, both acknowledges the search for identity
implicit in the art project of the 1990s and demonstrates the
“constant changeability of that process.” Henry Tsang’s
site-specific work, Utter Jargon, is a text-based revival of Chinook
Jargon, an intercultural trade language of the Pacific Northwest. Art
makers of equal importance crowd this book and receive Gagnon’s
scholarly attention to good effect.

This valuable collection includes a bibliography and a
filmography/videography.