From Snoopy to soda pop, this Feature offers a compelling look at how artists explore the intersections of popular culture.
During the 1950s, the Pop art movement emerged as a response to the saturation of consumerist imagery across mainstream media. Today, these forces still play a role in shaping the culture of North America, including its northern most points. In this Feature, a filmmaker, curator and writer explores the emergence of popular icons—from Batman to Barney—in contemporary works from Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Nunavut and beyond to reveal the sophisticated, humorous ways Inuit artists negotiate, import and adapt the increasing presence of southern culture.
Four large birds in profile. A seal and a walrus facing off. Strange bird-like humans with comically elongated noses alongside railway cars and tracks, creating a five-pointed swirling entity. A miniature northern village, overlooking the ocean and framed in the centre. All of these elements are expected in the bold, dynamic and flattened compositions of graphic artist Qavavau Manumie, who faithfully recreates landscapes, tools and buildings of the North alongside more fantastical imagery of people, hybrid animals and birds. Yet, pan up slightly and you will find Donald Duck, captured in a threequarter profile, staring back at you. Upon further inspection, the Walt Disney character’s three nephews—Huey, Dewey and Louie— float within tiny thought bubbles around their uncle’s head. This aptly titled drawing, Donald Duck (c. 2010), raises the question: What are these four anamorphic white ducks dressed in sailor uniforms doing here? Unlike fellow Kinngait (Cape Dorset), NU, artists Kananginak Pootoogook, RCA (1935–2010) or Itee Pootoogook (1951–2014), who captured the changing material culture of their community, Manumie is not a documentarian. There is a deeper desire to engage and explore the contemporary forces shaping Inuit culture.
Like it or not, our daily lives are inescapably filled with products, ads and media made for our consumption. These objects have not only permeated our culture, but have become markers of it, to sometimes positive, but more often questionable, results. While Inuit have a rich history and tradition to draw upon, they do not inhabit a vacuum, oblivious to what is happening thousands of miles away. The expansion of telecommunications across Inuit Nunangat has compressed the once great geographical expanses between communities. Now, a child in Kinngait can watch Duck Tales on TV, the same as children in Vancouver and Halifax. Artists like Manumie are using icons of Western popular culture as a bridge to explore the points of intersection and negotiation that exist daily for Inuit living in present-day Canada. If southern popular culture permeates everyday life across the circumpolar North, why shouldn’t Donald Duck appear in Inuit art?
Emerging from the mass consumerism of the mid-twentieth century, Pop art attempted to democratize the art world, while turning a critical eye toward popular culture. Seeking to create art that could be immediately understood by the masses, artists created a visual lexicon using images imported directly from television, movies, cartoons, comics, advertisements, brand name products and other media. Together, these works highlighted the tension in mainstream media’s collapse of elite and quotidian social spheres. When applied to today’s contemporary Inuit art, it illustrates a collision of two different cultures, similar to the negotiations between traditional Inuit life and the increasing presence of southern culture through television, comics and branded commodities.
Through imagery, iconography, popular tropes and wit, Inuit pop art illustrates the sophisticated ways that Inuit life simultaneously partakes in and rejects southern culture—collapsing the divide between the two. The work by these artists conveys the refusal to blindly accept the mass media of the South as well as the complex negations that exist in the importing and exporting of culture.
While carvings of walruses, polar bears, inuksuit (human-made stone landmarks) and shamans occupy ample space in the popular imagination of Inuit art, both past and present, contemporary artists challenge these preconceived notions concerning Inuit life and art by inversely appropriating Western popular culture through timehonoured Inuit materials and art forms. Talurjuaq (Taloyoak)-based Abe Ukuqtunnuaq’s Inuk Batman (c. 2002) employs traditional stone carving to reimagine the iconic DC Comics caped-crusader Batman if he were Inuit, instead of the wealthy philanthropist Bruce Wayne.
Ukuqtunnuaq has faithfully represented Batman and his trademark mask in stone. However, it comes with a few stylistic choices that make this piece more than a mere copy of the comic book hero. Ukuqtunnuaq has carved a pronounced lip that points downward and his eyes are etched in a minimal representation. The body is suggested by an amorphous shape, which highlights the natural properties of the stone—a common strategy employed in carving. Here, Batman is not simply Batman but an Inuit Batman— a Batman that is part of the same culture and traditions and shares the same physical characteristics of the people he protects—illustrating that Inuit Nunangat is far from a cultural void.
Ukuqtunnuaq is not the only one to notice the connection between Inuit culture and the fictitious world of heroic defenders. This spring the Marvel Universe unveiled their newest member of The Champions, Panniqtuuq (Pangnirtung)-based Inuit teen Amka Aliyak, known by her superhero name Snowguard. Her contemporary amauti (woman’s parka) and traditional tattoos illustrate the
importation of Inuit culture into the Marvel Universe, in addition to her particular superpowers, imbued with the Inuit spirit and life force Sila, who grants her shape-shifting abilities. A focus on hybridity, morality and suspended belief in reality are all hallmarks of the superhero genre as well as Inuit traditional storytelling. Perhaps then Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Batman can be seen through the lens of a shamanic transformation, which results in a hybrid condition akin to Ukuqtunnuaq’s creation. Here, pop culture permeates but does not completely overtake the Inuit way of life.
This point is echoed in Ruth Annaqtuusi Tulurialik’s Barney Visits a Winter Camp (c. 1994), a busy coloured-pencil drawing illustrating a typical winter camp. The scene is filled with adults and children, all in their parkas and rain boots, fishing, hunting and dancing, as various birds, an owl and the sun watch on. In the middle of the crowd, and much larger in scale, is a smiling Barney, the friendly purple Tyrannosaurus Rex from the popular American children’s TV program. Tulurialik has consciously imported the character, placing Barney into a scene of traditional Inuit life, being led by a small, mitten-clad child into the heart of the camp. Instead of attempting to fit her Inuit cast into the playground that Barney inhabits, Tulurialik transposes Barney. While she keeps the dinosaur’s signature purple and green colours, the artist also stays true to her unique graphic style by bestowing the character with a slimmer physique and rounder, yellow eyes that lie more centrally on his face.
Similarly, Floyd Kuptana’s Untitled (Snoopy on an Igloo) (2016), a collaboration with artist Eron Boyd, shows another popular American icon viewed through a distinctly Inuit lens. Gestural strokes of yellow, green and various shades of purple and blue give depth to the evening atmosphere that highlights the igloo where Snoopy, the classic Peanuts comic character, is lying. Kuptana has made pains
to depict Snoopy lying in the exact same way that he is famously pictured in the comics—on top of his red doghouse—replacing the wooden structure with its northern equivalent. He has also interpreted the cartoon character in a wholly unique fashion: Snoopy is rendered with rather short ears sticking out of his head as opposed to his signature drooping, black teardrop forms and his eye has been coloured green and exaggerated in size to directly confront the viewer.
For both Tulurialik and Kuptana, placing these beloved cartoon characters in an Inuit context illustrates the pliability of fictional characters, as they seem to be as much at home in a winter camp or seated atop an igloo as they would in their own playground or doghouse. This calls into question the importance of place within these cultural markers for southern audiences, while providing an opportunity for Inuit to see themselves reflected in the media they consume on a daily basis. This also leads us to question the inspiration behind these cartoons, as talking animals have been a part of Inuit oral history, as well as Indigenous oral tradition more broadly, for centuries and predate Snoopy (1950) and Barney (1987). Barney finds himself situated in a scene where the sun has eyes and birds are equal in size to humans, so the only uncanny element is the fact that he comes from a Western children’s TV program. The cross-cultural exercise required to make sense of this image mirrors the complicated dance that Inuit continue to carry out as they navigate between the two cultures in which they partake daily.
By representing popular goods in addition to media figures, Inuit artists reveal how they have embraced aspects of North American culture into their lives, on their own terms. Though most known for her flat-plane drawings of everyday scenes, animals and mythological figures plucked straight from traditional Inuit stories, Kinngaitbased Ningiukulu Teevee humorously depicts a raven casually kicking off its rubber boots in You Know You’re Inuk When (2016). One boot remains on, with a thin yellow band peaking out the top, and the other is just about to hit the ground, revealing the bird has lined its boots with the trademark yellow plastic bags from the Canadian retail store Home Hardware. The quotidian scene of the raven— revered for its ability to adapt and survive in the Arctic winters while other birds have flown south—relays the pragmatic culture of the North, where nothing is wasted, even plastic bags. Branded objects gathered from chain stores are inserted, integrated and adapted due to their usefulness in supporting Inuit culture and not the other way around.
The effectiveness of Pop art’s reliance on consumerist imagery— from Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) to Roy Lichtenstein’s
Drowning Girl (1963)—was its capacity to build upon an assumed, shared visual language and vocabulary across North America. In comparison, Inuit find themselves able to access the culture of Canada, without completely identifying with or partaking in it. Salliq (Coal Harbour)-born, Saskatoon-based artist Tarralik Duffy explores this shared language by using traditional food as a way to express how Inuit have borrowed from southern consumerism to reimagine and literally re-package it. Her article “Caribou Head Soup for the Soul,” penned for the June 2016 issue of Up Here magazine, describes the importance of not only traditional foods, but also the ceremony surrounding its preparation and sharing, which strengthens familial and community bonds. Borrowing the title from the book series Chicken Soup for the Soul and the collection of inspirational stories within, Duffy’s wry word play combines traditional Inuit knowledge exchanges with the prevalence of contemporary media platforms.
In the drawing Cow of the Sea (2015), she simultaneously plays on the well-known tuna brand Chicken of the Sea, the Canadian government’s experimentation with canned marine mammals and the infamous scene from MTV’s reality series Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica (2003–5) where Jessica Simpson mindlessly questions if the same brand was chicken or fish. Duffy has reimagined the canned fish with an Inuit staple: seal. She has taken care to recreate even the tiniest details from the branded can: the little red heart in the top corner, a symbol for the presence of healthy omega-3 fatty acids; the gold ribbon on the bottom of the can, proudly pronouncing that the seal is the “solid red” variety; and below that, in smaller letters, it lets the consumer know that it is “seal in fat” (a play on “tuna in
Whether importing southern media and goods or exporting their own into mainstream Canada, Inuit artists are conscientiously participating in a culture that is still not completely theirs. —
water”). The last bit of comedic genius comes from replacing the Chicken of the Sea mermaid with a tiny grey seal, a few black spots dotted down its back, a small smile beneath its black whiskers and the trademark mermaid’s gold scepter nestled between its front flippers. The success in her faithful representation of these small details of the Chicken of the Sea brand lies in its ubiquity within North American homes. Whether consciously or not, each of us has a vague recollection of the can’s appearance, and Duffy’s small symbols trigger this memory, while speaking to a shared collective culture as well as a distinctly Inuit experience.
While the same brand of canned tuna may appear in homes throughout the country, its use, centrality and importance to Inuit is drastically different than the average non-Indigenous Canadian. In another article, “Don’t Cry over Spilled Beads,” Duffy describes her grandmother’s house as filled with “goose, walrus, seal or caribou stewed on the stove. . . . Mustard pickles to go with stewed seal, Heinz 57 to go with boiled maataq [whale blubber and skin], soya sauce to go with frozen Arctic char. The little signs of colliding cultures and colonialism all around us.” As food security is a central issue in northern communities, brand name foods that are easily manufactured and distributed are often widely available in Inuit communities. Duffy reveals how her family has adapted and utilized these southern condiments alongside other pantry items to make them part of their kitchen to accompany abundant, local traditional foods. The presence of these condiments in the pantry are testaments to the adaptability of Inuit culture, always willing to embrace something new to enhance longstanding traditions.
It is, then, interesting to consider the significance of the seal meat inside a tin can in Duffy’s work—negating the need for the laying down of cardboard on the ground and the gathering of women with their uluit (women’s knives) to prepare the meat. The tin can eliminates the treasured ceremony yet offers immediacy and convenience. As an Inuit extension of the Pop art movement, the image is filled with irony and humour. Yet, it is up to the viewer to decipher the complexities within it and those subtle signs of colliding cultures.
As evidenced by these works, Inuit culture is not passively ingesting Western media. It is in many ways an active and contributing member of North American popular culture. Whether importing southern media and goods or exporting their own into mainstream Canada, Inuit artists are conscientiously participating in a culture that is still not completely theirs. It can be unsettling to find this popular imagery in Inuit art, due to the aesthetics imposed on it by southern audiences and largely predicated on a dated, colonial idea of what life in the North is like and what is worth reflecting. Yet, numerous devices, like talking, humanoid animals and shape-shifting, otherworldly beings, borrowed from mainstream media, appear easily translatable into the realm of Inuit legend, which is at times just as fantastic as a superhero like Batman or a talking Tyrannosaurus Rex.
With markers not traditionally associated with Inuit life, or fine art for that matter, Inuit pop art collapses the perceived divide between northern and southern culture. Therefore, Snoopy can appear on television in Toronto, ON, and also atop an igloo in Paulatuk, NT. More commercial elements of popular culture, such as food, clothing and branded commodities, like tuna fish or shopping bags, can be implemented only when it benefits the community on a practical level. “A person can only put into his art what he has seen or heard,” Simon Tookoome (1934–2010) once remarked. “I want you to know that the Inuit culture is not threatened when we incorporate modern experiences into our work and when we try new things.” It is this pragmatic way of life that has allowed Inuit to adapt and survive—an innate cultural characteristic told through art. NOTES Inuit have a long and unique relationship with the proximity of the arts and consumerism. From first contact with fur trappers and traders in the 1500s, who wanted stone carvings to take home as souvenirs, to the 1950s when Inuit art was seen as a money-making endeavor for galleries in the South, Inuit artists have always been aware that their work was consumed by a non-Inuit audience and hence adjusted it accordingly. See Ingo Hessel,
Inuit Art: An Introduction (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2002), 13–27.