Robert Houle comes home to the AGO
Aboriginal artist returns to familiar ground with Seven Grandfathers exhibit
At the Art Gallery of Ontario this month, there’s the sense of a circle closing or at least its arc being more fully drawn.
It may not strike you immediately as you walk into Walker Court, the museum’s neoclassical central atrium, but look up: between the soaring arches, near the crown mouldings, a set of seven discs festooned with colourful abstractions preside over the space, quietly in command.
They’re works by Robert Houle, one of the country’s pre-eminent contemporary artists and quiet isn’t his traditional mode. Houle, a Salteaux Indian, has made a sturdy career out of vociferous works overtly critical of the ruling colonial structures and the museums they spawned alike.
Seven Grandfathers, the name of the works now ringing Walker Court, are generous and peaceable things: each corresponds to an animal spirit revered by Houle’s people, imparting sacred teachings like respect, love, courage and humility (the work was commissioned to coincide with the AGO’s exhibition of Anishinaabe culture).
Whatever else it may be, Seven Grandfathers is something of a homecoming. Houle, based in Toronto, has taken command of Walker Court before but in decidedly more confrontational fashion.
This takes a little history, though, and the first strokes of the arc that Seven Grandfathers looks, obliquely, to close.
It starts in 1984, when the gallery invited the German artist Lothar Baumgarten to make a work for the space. His piece, Monument for the Native People of Ontario, was an elegiac, nostalgic homage to eight aboriginal nations of the province, festooning Walker Court with their names in large Roman text.
Houle appreciated Baumgarten’s gesture for its well-meaning earnestness but wasn’t impressed by his re- search. Names were misspelled, and linguistic groups, regions, tribes and bands were intermingled without distinction.
His first reaction, made the same year, was a pale painting that listed, alphabetically (and spelled properly) the names of seven extinct tribes. He called it The Only Good Indians I Ever Saw Were Dead and its redress to Baumgarten’s weepily patronizing vision of local aboriginal culture was as cheeky as it was biting.
Naming, Houle reasoned, was an inherent part of the colonial project way back when, stripping agency from Aboriginal Peoples in an attempt to categorize them neatly for the new arrivals’ convenience. (“Ojibwa,” one of Baumgarten’s eight, was the name Europeans gave to Houle’s branch of the Anishinaabe people, who are clustered around the Great Lakes).
Houle let that simmer for years before getting another crack. This time, in 1992, he was invited by the gallery itself and given the opportunity to reclaim the space from Baumgarten’s homage (writing about it that same year, Houle referred to the work as “romantic anthropology”). Houle renamed the space “Anishinaabe Walker Court” and recopied Baumgarten’s eight names on the walls, letter for letter, but in lowercase and in quotation marks. It wasn’t hard to see what Houle had made of Baumgarten’s grandiose gesture, both minimizing it and gently mocking its false authenticity. Baumgarten never saw it, but he knew about it, if obliquely; that same year, at the Guggenheim, where Baumgarten displayed an expanded version of his AGO piece, with aboriginal tribal names from the breadth of South and North America, Houle bumped into the artist while trying to take a picture of the word “Ojibwa” emblazoned on the museum’s spiral staircase (in an ab- surd twist, he was prevented from taking the photo by museum security, the reason being that Baumgarten owned the copyright). Recognizing him, Houle approached but didn’t identity himself. When he said he was from Toronto, Baumgarten stiffened a little, saying that he had heard of an artist from there who had called him a romantic anthropologist. Houle, impish to the last, gamely took credit and the two artists began acorrespondence that would continue, on and off, for years. Times change, though, and Houle’s presence here is just one of the things that signal it. Nearby, a fullblown exhibition of works by Anishinaabe artists — the name ringingly correct and specific this time — is on full display. Houle is part of it and, proudly, one of many. The show is uneven and overreaches, though in moments it sings. Here in Walker Court, though, Houle’s Seven Grandfathers is clarifying and precise. Houle’s mode has often been as an inculcation of the colonial structure, appropriating its forms just as colonialism took his people’s identity from them (Baumgarten’s gesture, of good-intentioned malfeasance, being the runoff of generations of ill will).
Houle’s seven works are ceremonial drums, each corresponding to an animal epitomized by the spiritual grandfathers he cites. Using abstraction, Houle takes hold of a distinctly colonial language, as he’s often done in the past. But here the gesture is less confrontational and more peacemaking: an offering, almost, and a way forward.
Walker Court has been many things to Houle over the past three decades, but a place of reconciliation isn’t one of them.
The AGO wants to start a new conversation about aboriginal art and its place within its walls.