Facing the Monumental

Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s visceral work is politically potent but also brims with poetic humanity. A show at the Art Gallery of Ontario includes many of her greatest hits.

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There was a moment, as I sat at the Art Gallery of Ontario watching Rebecca Belmore’s The Named and the Unnamed, a video installation of her 2002 performance on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside brought on by the growing list of women missing from those rough streets, when the paradox of Belmore’s oeuvre came home to roost.

On screen, Belmore, hair buzzed in a crew cut, her wiry frame outlined sharply in a tight white undershirt, had just torn herself from a telephone pole, scraps of her red dress dangling from nails she had pounded into its hide. Standing on the sidewalk, barefoot in her underwear, sweat beaded on her face, she wailed slowly through a list of names scrawled in black marker on her arms: “Angela! “Kellie! Laura!” Without another word, Belmore slipped into a waiting pickup truck and slumped, exhausted into the passenger seat. James Brown’s It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World blared into the street, and her eyes closed. Spent.

Somewhere along the way, Belmore herself had slipped into the gallery and sat down beside me. She watched patiently, politely, as her onscreen self stripped almost bare, bleeding angst and fury. The Named and the Unnamed presents Belmore at her visceral finest – vulnerable, indignant and righteous, politically potent, but with a brimming, poetic humanity. Sitting not an arm’s length away, Belmore herself, petite and unassuming, her salt-and-pepper hair angled in a stylish bob, seemed almost demure; when she spoke, it was quietly, often with a soft laugh.

Belmore wouldn’t be the first artist to choose to let her work do the talking, but it was, nonetheless, an aha moment. Over almost three decades, Belmore, who is Anishinaabe, has built her reputation on a particularly fiery brand of performance, hurling herself, for the most part, at the colonial structures that govern Indigenous lives against their will. The Named and the Unnamed was her response to the RCMP task force that finally compiled a list of missing women, acknowledging, at last, a likely serial crime.

Sometimes lost in all the shouting, though, is the deep, thoughtful, almost meditative process behind much of what Belmore does. Angry energy makes an impact and leaves a mark; but I don’t think Belmore would be quite the icon she is had she not underpinned her work with something more.

The AGO survey, Facing the Monumental, on view until Oct. 21, makes clear what she’s been up against all these years: An unforgiving power structure that makes some people invisible, their vanishing unnoticed. If that’s not reason for complaint, I don’t know what is. But Belmore’s work has never veered into agitprop. You can see it as almost a means to an end: As she slips into character, she’s also setting a stage where broader conversations can emerge through the gash she tears open.

The show, curated by Wanda Nanibush, the AGO’s curator of Indigenous art, pushes back at the notion of Belmore as a gladiator for Indigenous rights, though she’s certainly that. The works, however, re-situate her in a broader context. “I don’t represent my people,” she told me, a little coyly. “I’m not a chief. I’m an artist. But there is a responsibility there and one I take very seriously.” She smiled. “I don’t mind being an Indigenous artist and a non-Indigenous artist.”

The exhibition isn’t shy about greatest hits – Fountain, a roiling video performance made for the 2005 Venice Biennale, fills the exhibition space with the sound of water churning and Belmore’s howling struggle within it – but it also leans towards the new. Just inside the entrance, Tower, a pillar of shopping carts stacked high around a clay column, looms over another piece, tarpaulin, a grimy blanket-sized swatch draped over a ghostly human form. There’s an implicit nod, I think, to the naive purity of high Modernism – you can’t look at a stack of repeating forms (nor make one) without thinking of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. But Belmore fastens it to the cold, hard ground: Shopping carts, she told me, are essential tools for the homeless, whose population has exploded amid skyrocketing housing costs during her time in Vancouver; and tarps are maybe their most important means of survival. Both pieces were made in 2018.

Your mind jumps, I suppose, to what this means for Belmore’s “people,” and while it’s true that Indigenous people are radically, disproportionately poor and homeless compared to the larger population, that’s also you projecting. Belmore doesn’t align these works by race; hers is a greater social concern about broader inequities. Nearby, in the small space with The Named and the Unnamed, look again: Performed in 2002, the piece wasn’t a response to the national inquiry on missing and murdered Indigenous women, which wouldn’t be established for years. It was a burst of outrage regarding violence against women, period – #metoo before its time. James Brown’s throaty snarl at its end should make that clear.

Surely, the show anchors Belmore in her culture: A favourite work of mine Fuckin Indian/Fuckin Artist, in which a figure kneels and bends low, dark hair spilling to the ground from a dark hoodie, showcases Belmore’s black humour at having doubled-down for disdain in the world at large. Pelican Falls, a new work, brings it all together. It’s drawn from a 1950s’ snapshot of a group of boys ogling a passing fisherman as they perch above a northern lake.

The boys, dressed in identical blue denim jumpsuits despite the sweltering summer day, look almost like prisoners – which, as residential school students, they more or less were. Belmore took the scene and transformed it into a river of indigo denim bunched into ripples of fast-moving water, with a ghostly figure – suggested by the form of a disembodied denim shirt – emerging from the churn. A nearby video shows a boy, his back turned, cupping water over his head, again and again, almost as a cleansing ritual.

The photo presents an irresistible narrative, one very much of the moment. Where Belmore chose to steer it is what sets her apart: It says nothing so much as hope. ■

Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental is on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from July 12 to Oct. 21, 2018. It will be exhibited at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon from Feb. 1 to May 5, 2019.

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