Abstracts
Abstract
This article offers a qualitative and quantitive analysis of the critical reception of two exhibitions, Sakahàn:International Indigenous Art (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 2013) and Beat Nation: Art, Hip-Hop and Aboriginial Culture (organised and circulated by the Vancouver Art Gallery, 2013-2014). The study treats articles which appeared between 2012 and 2015 in English and French visual-arts publications. The comparative analysis intends to highlight general trends, in order to identify challenges that contemporary Indigenous arts pose for art criticism. A review of the texts shows that all commentators, whether francophone or anglophone, indigenous or non-Indigenous, have welcomed these two exhibitions warmly. The discrepancy between the number of essays in French and those in English reflects the demographic weight of these two linguistic communities and the geographic distribution of First Nations in Canada. This will qualify, without denying, the hypothesis of Quebec's tardiness on the indigenous question. The authors largely recognize the necessity of initiating indigenization of the museum and emphasize the movement to internationalize contemporary indigenous art. Yet many commentators, particulary Indigenous people, dispute the efficacity of the concept of "strategic essentialism" put forward by the commissioners of the Sakahàn catalog. Despite both a real interest in these two major exhibitions and the quality of the commentary, in the end, for events of such a scale few texts have been published on the subject. The criteria for appreciation rooted in the institutional sociology of art endeavour to fully take into account the challenges posed by certain central aspects of the approach of several Indigenous creators, such as the intangible dimensions of their civic engagement, the dissolution of particular outside venues and the sisterhood of certain projects.
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Appendices
Note biographique
Édith-Anne Pageot est professeure au Département d’histoire de l’art de l’Université du Québec à Montréal, membre régulier de l’Institut de recherches et d’études féministes (IREF) et du Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la littérature et la culture québécoises du (CRILCQ). Elle est également professeure auxiliaire et membre de la Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales de l’Université d’Ottawa où elle fut lauréate du Prix d’excellence en enseignement en 2013. Spécialiste des modernités au Québec et au Canada, elle s’intéresse aux politiques de l’identité et à ses formes complexes. Elle s’interroge sur les manières dont les images et les dispositifs de médiation culturelle façonnent les concepts de genre, de territoire, de nation et de collectivité. Elle dirige actuellement le projet de recherche, La culture artistique au Collège Manitou : agentivité et stratégies d’autodétermination (CRSH 2017-2019). Parmi ses plus récentes publications, mentionnons : « Postcolonial Territorial Landmarks within Canada’s Multiculturalism : The Myth of Virility». Wilfrid Laurier Press (2017) et « Figure de l’indiscipline. Domingo Cisneros, un parcours artistique atypique » RACAR Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 42.1 (2017)