The Good, the Bad, and... (Sointula, Malcolm Island, BC, photo by Sarah Swan)
My mind is overwrought. My frontal cortex feels like a swamp over which hovers a fog, a consequence of trying to wrap my head around our ongoing culture wars. Our fractured and polarized world was made even more fractured and polarized by Covid, by Trump, and now by Israel vs. Hamas. “Even as hope and change sputter, fear and loathing proceed,” wrote Ezra Klein in his 2020 book, Why We’re Polarized. Whenever I see an old rained-on couch or mattress left on the side of the road, I identify with it. My springs are shot, too. There I am, I say to the air. That’s me. That’s all of us, really.
I’ve been holing up on Malcolm Island, off the northeast shore of Vancouver Island. Its roots are utopian. Finnish immigrants started Sointula, an ill-fated commune, here in 1902. Free love. No police. As with all failed utopias, there’s an air of dejection about the place, and immense natural beauty. I’m here to stare at the ocean and to visit my parents. They manage a small hotel, the kind with permanent tenants, storied old men with epic beards who moved to this remote place, once upon a time, to lose touch with the world. I respect their agenda.
I’m an art person. For most of my life I’ve been consoled by art, drawn to its ability to resist definition. At university in 1999, my professor began each critique by saying “I reserve the right to contradict myself.” Art taught me what ambiguity meant, how ambiguity felt. It was the only subject where there was no “right” answer. But it feels like there is a right answer now. Our art world has become increasingly moral, and I’m wondering what effect the weight of this morality has on my ability to love and appreciate its art. In these polarized times, I find myself more in need of art that lies beyond its borders.
Last year, for example, my family travelled to Porto, Portugal. We took a boat tour of the Duomo River’s famous bridges and views. Whenever we glided under a bridge, the air grew musty and our skin cooled as we were cast into shadow. Panoplies of intricate, angular scripts appeared above us, fresh fonts layered over old. Graffiti. The other tourists didn’t see the art, except to cluck in dismay. (“Such a shame! Historic monuments, vandalized!”) But I was aware that this was a second version of the city, the underside of a world that was just as visually impressive as the overside. Each spray-painted arch was evidence of a win in the struggle to express individuality in a mainstream world.
Art taught me what ambiguity meant, how ambiguity felt. It was the only subject where there was no “right” answer.
Identity politics have totally renovated the landscape. The art world is now more diverse, with more equitable representation. This is good. The flip side is that the art world has become greatly concerned with the behaviours and beliefs of its members. We’re now subject to complicated social mores and imperatives. When we consume art, we must not only assess the art itself, we must also judge whether or not its creators, and the host gallery or institution, are correct in their views. And then others must assess our views of those views etc. When we talk about art, we become aware of something in the air, something that could ignite at any second, a noxious whiff of moral intimidation. This is purity politics. It’s exhausting work, this constant vigilance. Graffiti feels freer, so direct and so much less mediated. Sharpie on bathroom stall, especially.
The American art critic Dave Hickey first wrote on art and morality in 1997. The belief in art’s essential goodness, he said, is political fiction. Hickey suggested that if we art people would only admit that art is frivolous, in the way that rock ’n’ roll and sports are frivolous, we’d feel a great “burden of hypocrisy” lift off our shoulders. “If we could stop insisting that art is a ‘good thing’ in and of itself, stop pretending that it is a good thing to do and stop recruiting the good, serious, well-educated children of the mercantile and professional classes to do it … we could reconceive ourselves as the needy, disconsolate, and desiring creatures that we are.” By the time he died in 2021, Hickey had legions of fans and enemies — enemies because he was a white male chauvinist, fans because he said stuff like this: “There’s no difference between the highest art and the lowest art except for the audience it appeals to. Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.”
If we could stop insisting that art is a ‘good thing’ in and of itself, stop pretending that it is a good thing to do and stop recruiting the good, serious, well-educated children of the mercantile and professional classes to do it … we could reconceive ourselves as the needy, disconsolate, and desiring creatures that we are.
But Dave, I say. This is revolution! We are struggling to rid the art world of the terrible dominance of whiteness. This is a good war. A righteous cause. Maybe moral intimidation is necessary for change? For #MeToo it certainly was. For the first time, men in positions of power were held accountable. Terrible abuses were exposed. Maybe ruthless shaming is the new, metaphorical blood, blood that must refresh the tree of liberty? Every real revolution requires blood. Right? Does weaponized shame engender productive discomfort?
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Hotel Paradiso (Sointula, Malcolm Island, BC, photo by Sarah Swan)
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Brain Cleanser (Sointula, Malcolm Island, BC, photo by Sarah Swan)
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What Tangled Webs We Weave (Sointula, Malcolm Island, BC, photo by Sarah Swan)
In trying to think through these questions, I read numerous articles addressing the excesses of the left. Most offered the perspective that it had become cannibalistic, was punching down. But an article with the opposite perspective stayed with me. “I’m a Black Muslim woman, and because of social media, marginalized people like myself can express ourselves in a way that was not possible before,” wrote Sarah Hagi for Time. People who can’t handle the cultural shift use phrases like “cancel culture,” she continued, to delegitimize the criticism. “They’d prefer I was powerless against my own oppression.”
That last sentence landed in my chest with the weight of a bowling ball. Identity politics have given us this muchness, these numerous perspectives, one for every unique intersection of discrimination and privilege. I’m now more aware of the lives of the differently abled, of racism’s deep existence within systems, within myself. But the pushback has given us lots to think about too. Far from productive discomfort, opponents say, identity politics have driven us further apart. In 2016, The New Yorker published an article detailing how Oberlin College students would only hang out with other students of the same race. The notion of “safe spaces” had taken hold, and the idea that someone at one intersection of identities can never understand the experience of someone at another. Sympathy and empathy had begun to disappear.
I often use up my mental energy, pushing my thinking into the middle of the road, trying to understand people on the left and on the right, their motivations, ideals, fears. The middle of the road is where dead skunks are found. It’s the best place to get run over by progressive bandwagons and freedom trucks alike. But to paraphrase Eisenhower, the middle of the road is where the usable space is. We choose sides by voting. The middle of the road is where we think. I wanted to detach from stalemate political positions and combine the best ideas into a beautifully glowing tapestry. Oh, the hubris.
Deanna Bowen, The Black Canadians (after Cooke), 2023, installed at the National Gallery of Canada, 2023. (© Deanna Bowen. Photo by NGC)
A 2023 poll by Leger for the Association for Canadian Studies found that most Canadians are politically moderate. The National Gallery of Canada, however, and indeed most art institutions, have been shaped by the left. Last year, I stopped reading about ideological battles taking place over decolonization at the NGC. Each skirmish and retaliation made me dizzier. By the time artist and professor of intersectional and decolonial image-making, Deanna Bowen, erected a giant mural on the gallery’s exterior last July, I could barely focus. The mural depicts a white supremacist sitting at the same table as members of the Group of Seven. The piece feels like a cheap shot at an easy target, but the conservative moral outrage, and the progressive outrage against that outrage, was so predictable. It almost sounded canned. I believe the artist, that she made the piece to work through intergenerational trauma and to start conversations. I just couldn’t muster the energy to converse.
The trouble is that moderacy stopped working. I was wandering around the usable space, feeling lost. How was it that my avowed socialist friends turned so aggressively against the working class during the Freedom Convoy? What philosophical loophole had allowed trans-feminist author Camille Paglia to earn the respect of Christian evangelicals? Who held the higher view of language — people who overuse the word fascist, thereby stripping it of potency, or the people who underuse it, calling actual fascists “bad apples?” Attempting to think my way through tangled positional knots did not result in a feeling of balance, but in a feeling of being stretched apart, of mental wholeness wearing dangerously thin. No one perspective or political view is enough to contain the entirety of a situation. And no one mind can hold that entirety either. If I didn’t allow for some mess, inconsistency, or deficiency in my own thinking, I was going to lose it.
There’s a trio of homeless guys in Yellowknife who hang around the liquor store. They always look fantastic. One wears a torn puffer jacket over a T-shirt that says “Kiss me I’m Irish.” (He is not Irish, but Dene). Another wears a 1970s sheepskin coat as creased and thin as a paper bag, and two different sneakers, one red and one dirty-white. Their leader wears a cowboy hat. He saunters in a straight line as the other two lurch along behind. On a hot day last July, I saw them in front of the grocery store. The two handicapped parking spots had been given a fresh coat of sky-blue paint. It was really something — the glow of those perfect rectangles and the trio in a row, just looking. Then Sneakers lined his feet up on the edge of the blue, placed his palms together, and pretended to dive into a pool. The others broke into raucous laughter. Puffer Jacket then pretended to teeter on the pool’s edge, churning his arms in the air like a windmill. Even Cowboy joined in, miming a front crawl. It was one of the most lighthearted things I’d ever seen, all the more pure and light against the density of their existence, against their dinged-up noses and alcohol-swollen skin.
It was so complex, this performance, because of the power imbalances between us. I tried a few months earlier to be friendly to these men, to say hello. But my overtures put me in physical danger. It felt wrong to admire “homeless chic” and to act as bourgeoise audience to their ragged little play. But what these men unknowingly gave me was the ambiguous, incorrect, non-answer my spirit was looking for and not finding in art world art.
Listening to Metallica provides the same feeling. The material of thrash metal, that blue-black emotional sludge dug from the base of the skull, is such an antidote to the moral primness of current art discourse. Metallica’s album St. Anger was severely panned for being too “Nu Metal,” but sometimes I need its drums that bash like garbage can lids. Thrash metal allows me to forgo correctness. “Not only do I not know the answer, I don’t even know what the question is,” screams James Hetfield on “My World.” Am I devolving into adolescence? No. Bad taste is real taste.
Rap too, is so vital and robust. The variety of voices! The nasal sneer of Lil Wayne, the deranged yelping of Kanye, the bratty urgency of Eminem, the sweetness of Young Thug. I’m fed by rap’s smart word play and deep sense of justice, by the rhythmic rattle of diction down a train-track, clackity clack. Much of it is misogynistic. Most of it is nowhere near moral. All of it is lyrically inventive, so opposite to art world monotone.
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Paul Zacharias, “Toppled Monument,” (detail) 2023 (courtesy Plugin ICA, photo by Karen Asher)
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Paul Zacharias, “Toppled Monument,” (detail) 2023 (courtesy Plugin ICA, photo by Karen Asher)
By moral primness, I mean the moralizing verbiage that flattens the meanings of art. Paul Zacharias, based in Winnipeg, recently installed his statue of a golden cowboy in a Portage Avenue storefront. The figure was broken — torso severed from legs, head rolled some distance away. Only two golden boots were standing on the plinth. Titled Toppled Monument, the piece was part of Plug In ICA’s STAGES series. I loved it at first sight. It encompassed the vindicative jubilation felt when watching monuments of oppressors get pulled down in the wake of Black Lives Matter.
Yet it provoked visceral discomfort too, for the simple reason that it is hard not to imagine tortured bronze or stone as actual human flesh. This is the strange power of effigies. To me, Zacharias’ cowboy was the toppled monument of masculinity itself, of the romance of the wild west — things enlightened culture doesn’t believe in anymore. Even though I knew it was wrong, I felt a pang of loss. Then I read the gallery text. “Toppled Monument is a literal interpretation of the Hollywood, white supremacist ideology,” it read, praising the artist for challenging colonial histories and tearing down white saviours. This is a true albeit reductive interpretation that misses the work’s strongest aspect: its emotionally conflicted nature.
The western genre is still popular for a reason. Despite racist cowboy vs. Indian stereotypes, cowboys are loved for their lasso tricks and shoot-outs, for chaps and spurs, for how they evade the sheriff, cheat at cards, live by their own rules and eat beans from a can.
I was pleased, though, to hear this sentence in Zacharias’ artist talk. “The cowboy is my muse, my seductive, abusive, sexist, alter ego, super ego.” There it was, the honest rub, the kind of admission poet Robert Browning once made: “Our interest is on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.”
A great trick of literature and film is how they get us to sympathize with a character we’d not like or agree with in real life. There’s potential in all of us for corruption, for redemption. When the art world demands we scrutinize its objects with one correct, self-righteous lens, every landscape by a white settler equals a conquering colonial gaze. But sometimes trees are just trees. And when treescapes are painted by a colonizer, they can still be beautiful. Art can handle these contradictions. But it feels too late for this openness, doesn’t it? This is war. There’s too much at stake.
Opponents of moderacy say it is weak. I’ve come to agree. I do feel weak. Maybe though, it’s not too late to allow into the art world a little grace, a little defeat, a little reprieve. Utopias always fail. Why is the art world so insistent on raising one?
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Ghosts are Chillin' (Sointula, Malcolm Island, BC, photo by Sarah Swan)
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Found Shelter (Sointula, Malcolm Island, BC, photo by Sarah Swan)
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End of the Road (Sointula, Malcolm Island, BC, photo by Sarah Swan)
On Malcolm Island, the ground is spongey, welcoming anything that just can’t stay on top of things anymore — fences and the bodies of old Ford Pintos. Wind and water slap the sides of things continuously, but it’s temperate, almost half-hearted. In the deepest parts of the forest, the cabins of draft dodgers can be glimpsed between cedars of huge girth, smoke from wood stoves clinging to the middle-distance. Sunlight slants in where it can. Failed utopias don’t need to pretend anymore, like the rest of us do. No one bothers with upkeep. Everything is left to dilapidate, to fade out. It’s all very honest that way. Restful.
The forest comes to an abrupt end on the beach. I step out of its darkness to see the ocean heaving its entrails on the shore — masses of bull kelp, thicker than rope. The air smells of salt and rotting seaweed. I run my hand through the air and wisps of fog, like cold, moist dryer lint, collect on my fingers. Such extreme physicality is a solace, after too much thinking. I scrape my knees on the bark of a fallen tree and feel relief. The blood on my knees — real, non-metaphorical blood — feels wonderful. ■
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