Art Gallery of Mississauga's exhibition,
in partnership with the Homer Watson House and Gallery
Beyond the Pines
Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape
September 24, 2016 - January 1, 2016
Background wall:
Various paintings by Homer Watson
Foreground Sculpture:
Reinhard Reitzenstein
Thrust
2015
Bronze, granite
63” x 48” x 28”
Olga oppler Gallery
[Photo By: KPA]
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Last year, I attended a panel discussion on the exhibition
Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape at the Art Gallery Mississauga. The exhibition of the same title was going on at the same time and I had visited it numerous times to go through Watson's work one by one, to study his technique, his evolution as an artist, his views, his concerns, and his Canada.
The exhibition also displayed works by contemporary Canadian artists to bring this pine "narrative" to the fore. Some were reasonably good, but none reached the overall skill and beauty of Watson's paintings.
Watson's talent as a painter was recognized by a friend who initially advised him:
...to quit the nonsense of going in for art in a country like Canada. "Quit it and come into the office and become a business man.”[1]
Watson continues with the story:
...on nearing home [some weeks after he had submitted the painting to the Canadian Academy exhibition] I saw this gentleman on the road in front of his establishment reading the Toronto Globe. Seeing me he advanced waving the paper and putting out his hand he exclaimed, “I take it all back. Go ahead and paint. Look here,” and there it was in flaming headlines in the Globe, “Country boy paints picture bought by Princess Louise.” So that was that...
Below is the painting that gave Watson his faith in his art.
Homer Watson,
The Pioneer Mill, 1880,
Oil on canvas,
86 × 127 cm,
Royal Collection Trust.
(Photo: © hm Queen Elizabeth II)
Homer Watson was born in 1855 in Doon, Ontario (now Kitchener). He started to paint as a young child encouraged by his father and his aunt. He never received any formal art training, but acquired his skill and artistic sense through various mentors he sought as he developed his talent. He moved to Toronto and worked at a photographic studio and met some of the prominent Canadian artists of the time. One of which was the British-born landscape painter Thomas Mower Martin, who emigrated to Canada to take advantage of free land for settlers under the Free Grant and Homestead Act. Watson traveled to New York at the Hudson River School, and was influenced by the work he encountered there. He spent two years in Europe living in England and in Scotland. His brief visit to France introduced him to landscape painting through the Barbizon school. He "developed a landscape style marked by honesty of purpose and a focus on the moods of nature."
While in Toronto, he met and sought the counsel of other artists such as the landscape painter Lucius O'Brien, who was the first president of the Canadian painters' society, the Royal Canadian Academy, which formed in 1880. Watson would follow O'Brien's footsteps as president of the society from 1918-22.
Watson was called "the Canadian Constable," and “the man who first saw Canada as Canada, rather than as dreamy blurred pastiches of European painting,” While he holds these noble acclamations, he has nonetheless been overshadowed by the more forceful Group of Seven artists who along with their art had a mission to accomplish. Watson simply showed us the curiously singular southern Canadian landscape, amidst its farms and homesteads, as a civilized part of northern America, as a uniquely separate and independent country. He is the first nationalist Canadian painter.
Part of
Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape's purpose was to present Watson's landscapes as though they were infused with ephemeral supernatural beings. The AGM's curators obtained this notion of "spirits" from one aspect of Watson's life: his questions regarding his deceased sister and whether she could be "visiting" him. “Could it have been? Or was it a delusion?” he asks of a "vision."
Nothing is defined about Watson's belief in spirits, but it makes for an interesting exhibition.
The exhibition's other, more subtle, agenda was to place Watson in the background of Canadian art, albeit discreetly, and carefully, as an artist who no longer represents contemporary Canadians and Canada, and reflects only the past, colonial English heritage. Watson can be admired through an historical "prism" who has little relevance in the current Canada. The AGM was ready to give some artistic legacy to Watson, but from a cultural and historical distance.
This second agenda was less easy to discern since the exhibition had many works by Watson and was titled after him, suggesting the presentation was in his honor. But in reality, as the panel discussion proved, and as the carefully worded exhibition title "Beyond the Pines" elucidates, the interest was not in Watson's work - after all, there are endless exhibitions and museums showcasing the English/Western/Colonial art of Canada - but rather in what came to Canada when the English heritage started to wane and a multicultural ethos began to develop in the country.
The gallery's curators were using a phrase full of political innuendos. "Beyond the Pines" is a reference to Canada's Group of Seven painters who ventured out to northern wildernesses, further even beyond those pines, to discover a more rugged and wild Canada as a way to define Canada's identity separate from Britain's and from America's.
Part of going "beyond" is also reaching territory that even these adventurous men wouldn't or couldn't reach. It is part physical and part psychic. It is the land of the "natives" those aboriginals whose spirits are infused n
Kendra Ainsworth, the AGM's curator for contemporary art, and curator of this exhibition, says:
"Contemporary Canadian artists looking at our landscape must also get to the ‘truth’ of their subject. One that is not only strongly represented in our national artistic history, but also one that is both deeply political and personal. Placing contemporary works by emerging and established artists alongside Watson’s speaks to our timeless quest to appreciate and capture the essence of the Canadian landscapes we live in.”
But the "pine" imagery (or mythology) predates this rugged group of painters. "Beyond the Pines" is infused with Canadian aboriginal mythology:
The pine tree is a symbol of longevity to the Algonquian tribes of the north east, and to the Great Lakes tribes such as the Anishnabe and the Potawatomi pine trees represent wisdom and harmony with nature.
And "Beyond the Pines" didn't correctly identify Watson's works since Watson, who was from southern Ontario, painted few pines and mostly depicted the oak, elm, chestnut, and walnut of the region.
Canada has not been this territory of impenetrable wilderness and inhospitable glaciers for generations now, including during Homer's and the Group of Seven's lifetimes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This Canada was already a nation of defined European, and mostly British, communities with houses, gardens, farmland, forests of many types of trees.
And, more importantly, these pines of this northern country were associated, at least in the eyes of cultural and social historians, both Canadian and American, more with a land of wilderness and glaciers, sparsely inhabited by groups of aboriginal tribes. Pine forests, and glaciers and wilderness, were much further north than Watson's Doon.
The gallery's website explicitly tells us:
The Art Gallery of Mississauga (AGM) would like to acknowledge and give thanks to the land on which we work. The AGM has the privilege of operating in the territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation and traditional homeland of the Wendat, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nations. We are thankful to the many First Nations, Inuit, Métis and global Indigenous peoples who call this region home.
The AGM is committed to recognizing and incorporating diverse Indigenous perspectives within exhibitions and programming, and highlighting the numerous Indigenous artists who have contributed to this gallery. The AGM is dedicated to providing a platform for contemporary Indigenous art and curatorial practices, and hosts events and programs that reflect various cultural topics and identities. [4]
And
that is the other "narrative." We are on the land of the Natives.
As this notification from the AGM website informs us:
The Art Gallery of Mississauga’s recently hired Director and Head Curator Mandy Salter this morning made a pair of announcements - both geared towards First Nations inclusion as an essential part of her populist mandate for the AGM.[5]
"Beyond the Pines," besides a geographical description was also a spiritual territory.
There was only one "First Nations" piece, which was a short - looped - video of two men (aboriginals who looked white) walking around barren land ready to "hunt," as a protest against the hunting permits that they, and all hunters, are required to obtain. This is Native land, which has its own laws and regulations. And Salter wants us to watch, powerless, their protests as an expiation for our sins of "colonizers."
Still from Video: Modest Living
By Brian Junger and Duane Linklater
Art Gallery of Mississauga
Beyond the Pines
A group of eight contemporary artists were also part of this exhibition. None made any explicit references to Watson or his era, rather focussing on the exhibition's general themes of the natural and spiritual. But it was Jennifer Carvalho and Reinhard Reitzenstein who most skillfully combined these spiritual and natural worlds in their pieces.
Carvalho studied at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design where she would have obtained some foundational training in the arts. She later went on to obtain her MFA from the University of Guelph. She paints skillfully and confidently. Her trees are in the traditional painting methods skillfully using chiaroscuro techniques. And Reitzenstein works in difficult bronze to tease out intricate trees, although traditional Western bronze works were figurative, using the human body (and animals) rather than the plant world as references.
Carvalho's
Unexpected Connectionscraftly renders the pine forest into some kind of impenetrable ghostly space where we're likely to encounter "unexpected" beings:
Its opaqueness sets a tone of exacting anxiety[2a].
At the same time, the trees point up to an open sky with a sun or a moon hidden behind mottled clouds, suggesting some kind of light trying to brighten the darkness, and escape from this ghostly space.
Jennifer Carvalho
Unexpected Connections
Oil on canvas, 22”x28”, 2015
For Jennifer Carvalho the Anthropocene [the “human age”] is not an endgame. “It’s an in-between time,” she says. “I’m not trying to emphasize an end but a line of thought that leads away from ourselves. What does it mean if the world has a will of its own and what is our relationship to that? What would the world look like without us?”
...the mix of olive green and blue in Unexpected Connections produces a colour close to an impenetrable black. Its opaqueness sets a tone of exacting anxiety. [2]
Carvalho's "spirit" connection is rendered urgently apocalyptic with an End Times landscape of burnt trees whose haze of purple fumes envelope the barren land like the devil's burning sulfur whose activity is discernible in the fumes wafting through the background.
Carvalho's
Unexpected Connections reminds us of Emily Carr's skyward swirling pines of
Metchosinc, although Carr's brighter forest spirits seem more benign and the celestial destination, with the small band of illuminated blue at the top of the painting, more possible[4a].
Emily Carr
Metchosin, c. 1935
Oil on canvas
50.7 x 58.7 cm
Although Carr lived at the other side of Canada in British Columbia, it is not surprising that the Toronto-based Carvalho is influenced by her works, having studied at the prestigious Emily Carr University in Vancouver. And despite her West-coast location, Carr had been allowed into the prestigious and exclusive company of the eastern Canada's Group of Seven based in Ontario, a group of artists to which
Beyond the Pines makes references [4b].
While Carvalho's trees appear grand and majestic, Reitzenstein shows us only one tree at the AGM exhibition, which is reduced to a tiny spike at the top of a sinewy vine that winds down and pulls us toward a fungi base.
Reitzenstein's tree makes one of its first appearances not as the bronze-sculpted piece sitting in a gallery but outside in the natural landscape. In 1987, he tells us of his idol worship of the tree in a piece he calls:
Tree-Cantations where he has uprooted grown, tall trees and re-planted them upside down. He is not looking heaven-ward for the presence of God instead but digs deep down within the roots the fungi.
No Title
1987
In this subversive work, it is not only spiritual grievance that he is presenting but a cultural one as well. As he explains his title "No Title":
No Title was installed on Topsail Island in the St. Mary’s River between Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada and Sault Ste. Marie Michigan, U.S.A. It was part of a sculpture symposium called Sans Demarcations. The project refers to the titling of land and ownership. It was realized with the cooperation of chief Dan Pine of the Garden River reserve near the Sault. He helped me site and dedicate the project to the cause of respectful resolution for land claims made by the indigenous nations of this continent generally and his community specifically. The circle of inverted trees draws the viewers’ attention to the state of inverted priorities of the dominant colonial cultures that have stolen native lands and suppressed indigenous cultures on a global scale. No Title also supported the Garden River people in their claim to land now under water, flooded by the process of building locks in the St.Mary’s River and drowning thousands of acres of their ancestral lands.
"Indigenous nations" has been a theme of Reitzenstein's art, and continues to be. He uses it to portray, as does Carvalho, both spiritual and cultural themes. As he usurps the Western traditions, its God and its art, he supplants it with something else: the "forsaken" other. For the time being, it is those "indigenous" groups. I predict that in his next major work, he will betray these natives and he will embark on ethnic immigrants. Perhaps it will be an ode to the Syrian "refugees'. Hs painterly theme will be of those who are subjugated to the colonial racism of the West even as they leave their forsaken homes and come to this land of plenty. His native betrayal will be callous and opportunistic as all his art has been. His "No Title" shows no empathy for natives, the environment, or even those trees which he seems to admire so much. Syrian refugees, like Native Canadians, will be just another issue to take on and to force onto his art. He is not merely an artist, he is also a self-proclaimed saviour! He has no interest in gods or in God except as imagery for his ever-changing idols. He calls out to mother nature only when he needs to form another of his naked bronze trees.
He gave us a glimpse of this dystopia in "A Destructivist performance" where
Gary Nickard and Reinhard Reitzenstein with sound support from Buffalo's legendary 1970's era Post-Punk band The Vores featuring Biff Henrich as well as additional Friends.
"In a 1919 essay, Wyndham Lewis posited Nature and Design as the antipodes of representation. Excessive concern with Nature leads to pure content, to allow Design to dominate is to force the work to surrender to pure form. As he describes it, the artist devours, or conversely, is devoured, as one monster struggling against an equivalent monster.
"Acknowledging a debt to both Raphael Montanez-Ortiz and Richard Hulsenbeck, Monsters is a duet of ritualized violence and stifled catharsis emerging from the dying shrieks of two sacrificial pianos, set against a starkly jagged swirl of throbbing guitar feedback and pulsing percussion. The resulting sound sculpture presents a darkly ceremonial existentialist confrontation that underscores the dissensus of the current historical moment."
"Acknowledging a debt to both Raphael Montanez-Ortiz and Richard Hulsenbeck, Monsters is a duet of ritualized violence and stifled catharsis emerging from the dying shrieks of two sacrificial pianos, set against a starkly jagged swirl of throbbing guitar feedback and pulsing percussion. The resulting sound sculpture presents a darkly ceremonial existentialist confrontation that underscores the dissensus of the current historical moment."
His tree has become even more metaphorical in his 2012 installation piece
Hanna's Cabinet in St. Anne's Anglican Church in Toronto, where a twig strewn on the floor becomes the sinewy serpent. In this piece, which he presented as his first exhibition work with the Netherworld collective after it re-grouped following a 20-year hiatus (he was one of the group's original members), he shifts ever more farther away away from God, sacrilegiously displaying his collection of idols which this blasphemous church allows him to do so. Where God has been discarded, other spirits rush to intervene. The serpent has made its entrance.
But Reitzenstein's adoration is for is the whole earth Gaia to whom he makes his incantations with these forlorn objects, his most cherished being his tree branches.
Reinhard Reitzenstein
Hanna's Cabinet, 2012
Materials: wood bronze flowers oil ceramic petals
St. Anne's Anglican Church, Toronto
Hanna's Cabinet, depicts a space that speculates on the question I asked myself, where would St. Anne (Hanna) go to be a lone and find solice [sic] and refuge? What would the space look like. In St. Anne's Church there was a tiny secluded space under the stairs which felt like the right site to prepare such an environment.
At a recent exhibition at the Netherworld collective were he presented work he titled
Parasite, he
populates the gallery’s walls, corners and columns with realistically rendered fungi made from beeswax.
Collectively titled Parasite, the pieces evoke multiple metaphorical associations that could apply to art — art as sustenance, art as fermentation agent, art as medicine, art as hallucinogenic. The link between fungi and art might also include magic and spiritual enlightenment in the realm of ceremony and ritual. And true to the inverted nature of the pieces (netherworlds...). Reitzenstein uses the beeswax as the main sculptural material, whereas it is traditionally used as a mold for the enduring bronze. Beeswax s also "degradable" which is the man theme, whether explicitly presented or suggested, in all of Reitzenstein's pieces.
...the pieces evoke multiple metaphorical associations that could apply to art - art as sustenance, art as fermentation agent, art as medicine, art as hallucinogenic. The link between fungi and art might also include magic and spiritual enlightenment in the realm of ceremony and ritual.
Left: Artist Reinhard Reitzenstein filled some of the gallery walls
with realistic-looking fungi made from beeswax.
The pieces are collectively called Parasite.
Right: Catherine Heard’s Grave consists of
a grouping of small skulls, which is also
accompanied with a video animation
projected on the wall to make it look like some
kind of scanning device such as a ultrasound or MRI
Reitzenstein never shies away from telling us his true beliefs.
+++
One of hs earliest pieces with the Nether Mind Collective in 1991,
Reminiscent of a ...Cell Series, shows twigs and branches with rounded brass balls at their ends suggesting some kind of bomb:
Reitzenstein is represented by his Reminiscent of a ....Cell series, large bronzes in wh9ch a rod or branch sprouts out of an initial ball, suggesting tension between growth and proliferation...
...Nether Mind purposefully sought out a basement space for its work, seeing there a metaphor for the internal world of which their art speaks.
Kate Taylor Globe and Mail May 10, 1991
511 King Street West Basement
511 King Street West, a run-down building in 1991, is now a posh yuppie's destination where these former starving artists such as the Nether Mdn collective's members now have become wealthy to reside.
He finally puts together his Gaia environmentalist shout out in a piece at the Indigo Art Gallery in Buffalo titled
Socorro.
Socorro
From the exhibition Tree-Cantations
Indigo Art Gallery
September 2-October 2, 2016
Buffalo, NY
The art gallery's catalogue describes this exhibition thus:
Professor Reinhard Reitzenstein’s work explores the interconnection between nature, culture, and technology. In Tree-cantations, Reitzenstein, a self-described dendrophilliac (lover of trees), features a selection of drawings and sculpture, which are more like portraits in their representation. They celebrate the grace, fragility and strength found in nature, reminding us of our responsibility to respect and protect all living forms.
There is a thin line between a dendrophile and a worshiper of inanimate objects.
"Socorro" means:
...help, relief in Spanish. It is taken from the title of the Virgin Mary María del Socorro meaning "Mary of Perpetual Succour".
Skywards is reaching out for God. Reitzenstein’s tiny shrub of a tree in his AGM piece
Thrust may be trying to pull us upwards to the heavens but the fungal forces are stronger and we are being dragged into some netherworld from which even that "thrusting" shrub of a tree cannot save us. We are in the realm of the hallucinogenic fungi, of ritualistic magic, and of the paranormal. We are asked to participate in Reitzenstein's quest to reach the netherworld. It is a communal journey in which the artist alone would be bereft of company. Where God is denied, other supernatural spirits take over.
Reitzenstein’s particular spirit is the earth. His fungi pieces are his cry for the earth. But his mother nature incantations have no respect for the environment that he purports to represent and promises to save. In an extraordinary "Environmental Art" in Topsail Island near Sault Ste. Marie in northern Ontario, in a piece he titled - unimaginatively - "No Title," Reitzenstein:
...upended eight fifty-foot-tall trees, planting them upside down in the ground. The sixty-foot-diameter circle configuration that resulted again refers to the native cosmology, but the circle is likewise a Christian symbol.
Reitzenstein explains in an interview;
The circle is a universal form. This piece, called No Title, referred to the titling of land. I worked in collaboration with Dan Pine, an eighty-eight-year-old medicine chief from the local reserve here, to create a site where the appropriation of land, the ownership of place could be discussed. By inverting the trees and placing their topsoil in the ground I tried to address the inversion of priorities...
When did Reitzenstein realize that "Topsoil" would make an deal location for his dendrophlic work? If he weren't so deep in the deeply serious Gaia world, I would say that he had a sense of humor. But he inhabits a world of ideological dogmas, and while Gaia may be one of them, a recurring theme in his art is the "Native" perspective. The main idea behind
No Title is the "Native" connection and land appropriation. He dismisses the Christian symbol of the cross which the interviewer brought up (did he even know about it?) and replaced it with the spiritualism that makes up all of his art. This is the usual arrogant position of all environmentalists, where for the sake of conveying their message, they are willing to dig up the roots of trees, and communities, and civilizations.
His inability to give this piece any title may be a reference to the "voiceless" Natives, but it is more of his subconscious realization of the enormity of his arrogance and hypocrisy where he cannot give a name to these destroyed, dead trees.He has reached a creative block, which is the mind's way of tuning out things he doesn't want to acknowledge.
20 ways to overcome creative block announces this psychology advice:
01. Tap into your unconscious
Strange things happen in a semi-sleep state, when your unconscious takes over," says Shotopop's Casper Franken. "Wake up and write down whatever was happening before you forget it."
Reitzenstein must continually tap into his unconscious, which is why he delves so readily into the "spiritual." The ghosts have taken over to provide the antidote for his "no title." Then the titles and the pieces come to Reitzenstein in droves. He has a prolific portfolio of spirits.
But on the "spiritual" level, which Reitzenstein has made an intricate part of his works, his rejection of Christianity and adherence to the netherworld is made apparent by the skyward-projecting roots of the trees, as though he were taunting God with this world he has turned upside down.
In his 1992 piece
Memory Phantom Reitzenstein. continues with his glorification of trees but this time as a commentary on civilization. Hs dead sinewy strands of a tree (or trees?) are curled around a grand piano and in a home full of wood, from the beautifully designed marquetry of the floor to the grand staircase, and of course the piano.
He would rather the primitiveness of nature take over thousands of years of human civilization.
What would he do without his camera and the smart SUV he drives around to get to these project locations?
As the catalogue for the exhibition informs us:
Contemporary Canadian artists looking at landscape must also find a way to access the ‘truth’ of a subject that is not only strongly represented in our national artistic history, but one that is both deeply political and personal. Placing contemporary work by emerging and established artists alongside that of Watson illustrates the universality of the quest to appreciate and capture the landscape in which we live.
"Truth" becomes a subjective quest with a subjective importance placed on one truth above another. The AGM's agenda was bigger than dismissing geographical and cultural truth. What they wanted to do was to dismantle it, destroy it, and replace it with something other than this White European man's vision and depiction of his country.
Beyond the Pines is an ambitious project attempting to encompass, and to unite, several themes of Canada art. This was partly responsible for its failure: trying to be everything to everyone, from European-influenced landscape painting, to spirit-influenced Canadian art and finally to Native Canadians' contributions to the Canadian identity.
Its other failure, although it would be more accurate to say that rather than a failure it is the ideological direction the curators took to present the exhibition, produced a collection of work which was not convincing in presenting its original idea of "moving forward" from the Watson "narrative" to a more "inclusive" multicultural art, where Homer Watson can be slowly and subtly removed from the fore of Canadian artistic tradition
Art Gallery of Mississauga's exhibition,
in partnership with the Homer Watson House and Gallery
Beyond the Pines
Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape
September 24, 2015 - January 1, 2016
Homer Watson
Cows in Grand River
Oil on Board
Collection of Robert Tattersall
[Photo By: KPA]
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