Late Works, New Visions: Picturing Kananginak Pootoogook
Late Works, New Visions: Picturing Kananginak Pootoogook
In the last few years of his life, Pootoogook created a host of community and self-portraits that depict life caught between tradition and modernity. These images continue to resonate both nationally and internationally, and have lead to the late artist’s work being celebrated far beyond his home in Kinngait, NU. Here, these vivid depictions are revisited to address the continuities and shifts in his practice.
by Robert Kardosh
In 2017 Kananginak Pootoogook, RCA (1935–2010) became the first Inuit artist in history to have his work shown at the Venice Biennale. His drawn and printed portraits of a culture caught between traditional and modern influences challenged southern stereotypes about the North, expanding the concept of what Inuit art could be. With his drawings, many of them produced during the last two years of his life, Pootoogook left a significant archive of expression from an era that saw him produce some of his most ambitious—and most personal—artistic statements, and their relevance is still felt today.
In an artistic career that spanned five decades, Kananginak Pootoogook produced a vital and important body of work. An original member of the small cadre of Inuit printmakers who were instrumental in starting the first northern print shop in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), NU, in the late 1950s, Pootoogook became one of northern Canada’s most important artists, pioneering a style of graphic narrative realism that differed markedly from the more abstract fantastical modes practiced by the majority of the community’s early drawers. Although never the subject of a retrospective at a major Canadian institution, his prints and drawings have been featured in numerous survey exhibitions of Inuit art since the 1960s, and many public institutions in Canada have collected his work over the years and decades.
In 2017 Pootoogook became the first Inuit artist to be featured at the Venice Biennale, arguably the world’s most important contemporary art event. 1 Many of the works that were selected for the exhibition Viva Arte Viva were drawings that Pootoogook had produced within the last two years of his life when his practice had undergone something of a transformation. During this time, Pootoogook gave new expression to themes that had long been a central concern in his work, producing fresh twists on familiar motifs alongside more current interests. In some of these works, Pootoogook began picturing a world much closer in time to the present—one that included terrestrial and marine transportation as well as tender community and self-portraits.
One of his most impressive drawings is a work from 2009 that bears the inscribed title “Successful walrus hunt.” Pootoogook appended explanatory inscriptions in syllabics to the bottom edges of all of his drawings. Measuring two and a half metres in length, the coloured pencil image pictures a group of Inuit hunters in a wooden boat viewed from above against a multicoloured background of sea and sky. One man sits in the stern, his left hand placed on the tiller, while the right one holds a pipe to his lips. Another kneels in the bow, blowing into an inflatable sealskin float, and a third man sits aft of midship, taking a rest and sipping tea, a metal kettle visible at his side. A fourth crew member is busy cutting up large pieces of walrus meat, while a fifth man leans over the boat’s edge to examine something. With this remarkable drawing, Pootoogook reprised his familiar role as cultural historian and documentarian on a monumental scale, presenting an iconic image of Inuit culture in a transitional phase.
In a second similarly scaled drawing, Pootoogook has turned his attention to the present day, portraying a group of boaters pursuing some surfacing bowhead whales over an open stretch of calm sea. The aluminum boats, with their modern steering wheels, glass windscreens and outboard motors, are clearly contemporary in design, as is the brightly coloured gear worn by the men on board. The image features many of the artist’s most recognizable formal trademarks. These include the darkened silhouettes of the boats and their crews ranged out toward the distant horizon and their abstract reflections on the water’s shimmering surface. Audaciously, Pootoogook presents the scene as a vast cross section, allowing the viewer to see both above and below the ocean’s surface.
Masterfully rendered and conceived, this work was inspired by the first legal bowhead whale hunt to take place in a hundred years, near Kinngait in 2009.2 Significantly, Pootoogook’s drawing doesn’t actually focus on the hunting activity itself. Spears and harpoons are visible in the hands of some of the participants, but instead our attention is directed to a figure on the foredeck of the boat nearest to us, in whose right hand appears not a weapon, but a digital camcorder. Reinforcing the point, the penciled inscription reads “Taking pictures of the bowhead whale.” Pootoogook’s interest in representing the role of photographic media in the North is here expressed in a colossally enlarged format, simultaneously recording and memorializing a culturally affirming moment in his community’s contemporary collective life as well as its digital documentation.
Along with several other works from this late period, these two drawings were first shown publically in a solo exhibition at the Marion Scott Gallery, during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
Pootoogook’s interest in representing the role of photographic media in the North is here re-expressed in a colossally enlarged format, simultaneously recording and memorializing a culturally affirming moment in his community’s contemporary collective life as well as its digital documentation.
In 2015 Untitled (Successful walrus hunt) was installed at the Brooklyn Museum in New York as part of Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas, an exhibition that featured a range of contemporary and pre-historic Indigenous works from North and South America. It was here that Christine Macel, Chief Curator of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France, and the Artistic Director of the 2017 Venice Biennale, encountered Pootoogook’s expression for the first time.
“What impressed me was the point of view from above, quite unusual,” Macel recalls. “And the documentary style of the drawing in such a big scale, which reminded me of Bruegel the Elder, with so many details about the everyday life of Inuit.” Macel decided then and there to include Pootoogook’s work in the upcoming show. “Pootoogook’s drawings are a testimony, without judgment, of a turning point, about the quick changes in lifestyle and balance in the Inuit community.” For Macel, the profound changes Pootoogook documents in his drawings, while specific to Inuit culture, speak to a global condition in which Indigenous societies around the world have been subjected to the disruptive and threatening pressures of colonialism. This expression made a similar impression on Fiona Parry, the Senior Curator at the Turner Contemporary in Kent, England, who, after seeing the shown in Venice, made arrangements to borrow three of the works for the exhibition Animals & Us (2016). Pootoogook’s posthumous success, played out on a global stage, is giving his vision a lasting and much deserved audience, adding to his already substantial legacy.
Another drawing from 2009 shows a man on a Ski-Doo, erecting it on its runners, presumably for protection against the bumpy ride. Although the rider wears traditionally styled garments, including kamiik (boots) and fur pants, the machine he drives is clearly contemporary in make and design, quite unlike the vintage models pictured in some of the artist’s earlier mechanical drawings. The inscription below states, “He has a caribou’s hind leg and he’s afraid of losing it.”
Another shows a man sitting beside his red four-wheeler ATV. In contrast to the dynamism of the first image, the action here has come to a forced standstill. The man’s expression is one of tired dejection. The artist tells us why: “He thinks he has run out of gas, but the engine is shot.” What makes these images so engaging is the way they express Pootoogook’s particular manner of observing human behaviour, which often reflects a kind of amused detachment. That the drawing of the man with his stalled ATV, an image of modern mechanical failure, is also likely a self-portrait only heightens the effect, with the artist chuckling at his own misfortune and helplessness.
In a later series of portraits produced in 2010, the artist pictures himself and his wife Shooyoo in the present or recent past. One image shows the couple standing together and smiling. We know from the framed print of one of Pootoogook’s own images hanging in the otherwise featureless background that they are indoors, yet their matching manufactured winter clothing and Pootoogook’s baseball cap imply that they are either just returning from an outing or preparing to leave. In another, he depicts them sitting happily together on a couch, looking out at the viewer as though they might be posing for a photo. Another drawing in the series features the couple sipping mugs of tea on the ground, while enjoying some country food, and one shows Shooyoo laying alone on a grassy slope, eating crackers and drinking tea, the grass beneath and the scarf tied over her head both caught in the breeze.
These are all moving artworks. Here, the artist’s main purpose is to express his affectionate devotion to his life partner, showing us moments in which they are simply enjoying each other’s company. It is the identities of the individuals that matter most in these images, more so than whatever they happen to be doing (or not doing, as the case may be). A quality of Pootoogook’s work that is reinforced by the heightened realism in his subject’s faces, revealing a more subtle use of modelling than in his earlier drawings.
In his effort to document the influence of colonization and of the intruders in their midst, Pootoogook made several drawings that portray outsiders taking pictures and videos of Inuit subjects. In two portraits from 2010, the artist returns to this theme, this time documenting the adoption of photographic technology by Inuit themselves as opposed to its prevalence among southern visitors. In one, a figure presses a small camera to his face, pointing the lens at a large black-and-yellow bumblebee in the foreground, who is taking
That these works are being seen and appreciated in places far from his Arctic homeland is a testament both to their expressive power and the artist’s ability to speak to the central issues of our time. —
nourishment from a small cluster of flowers. The companion drawing depicts a man in a white parka lying on some vegetated ground and signaling with one hand to a standing figure, whom we see only through the mirrored reflection in the first figure’s sunglasses. In front of him, an arrangement of colourful flowers with large petals is spread before us. One of the most curious works in his oeuvre, Pootoogook explained that he got the idea for the flowers from a printed floral pattern on a box of Kleenex.
Pootoogook’s most revolutionary self-portrait is a drawing from 2009, in which the artist is pictured putting the finishing touches on a drawing of either a dog or a wolf. All we see of Pootoogook is the top his head, seen from the back, and his hands, one of which holds a pen, while the other holds the paper in place. As an image of the artist at work, the spare drawing, with its innovative cropping and dramatic perspective, cleverly documents Pootoogook’s lifelong vocation as a draughtsman. At the same time, this sophisticated image of a drawing within a drawing is resonant with contemporary investigations into the nature and role of artistic representation, highlighting the relevance of Pootoogook’s practice and his ability to contribute to multiple debates in a single work.
The shift in Pootoogook’s work toward reflecting a more contemporary version of Inuit culture may have been inspired by the impact of his younger relatives: his nephew Itee Pootoogook (1951–2014) and his niece Annie Pootoogook (1969–2016). According to William Ritchie, the current Studio Manager at the print shop in Kinngait, Pootoogook had recently resumed drawing in the studio alongside some of the younger artists after several years of working almost exclusively from home. “He enjoyed being part of the new scene,” Ritchie says. Moreover, he was probably simply ready for a new challenge. As the artist himself once declared, “I get tired doing the same thing all the time.” In the case of his portraits of Shooyoo and himself, Jimmy Manning, the artist’s close friend and former Studio Manager during much of Pootoogook’s career, believes that something else was also at play. “I think he must have known at the time that he was starting to get sick, and that his time was limited,” Manning says. 4 “He was becoming aware of his own mortality, and he was thinking fondly of his wife and the people around him.” Seen in this light, these images attain an even deeper poignancy.
That these works are being seen and appreciated in places far from his Arctic homeland is a testament both to their expressive power and to the artist’s ability to speak to the central issues of our time. Pootoogook stated in a 2010 interview, “Today I feel more capable as an artist than I ever was.” 5 At the same time, as his selfportraits and portraits attest, Pootoogook did not always feel the need to make art that principally illustrated a culture or way of life. Pootoogook did what all great artists do: he made art about a range of subjects that he found interesting and that mattered to him. This freedom to create exactly what he wanted, unconstrained by any narrow definitions of Inuit art, may prove to be his most important and enduring legacy.