Visceral but POETIC
AGO traces Rebecca Belmore’s career as perhaps Canada’s most renowned Indigenous artist
There’s a moment during the informal walk-through of her new exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Facing the Monumental, when a talked-out Rebecca Belmore has a moment to herself.
As the group shuffles forward and she pauses for a breath, I ask her what, exactly, to call this outsized display of her storied career. Retrospective isn’t it. “I’m not old enough for that yet!” she blurts, with an easy laugh. “Let’s just call it a survey, I think.”
Belmore, at 58, would be just arriving at what the art world calls mid-career: solidly established and ready to build further on a hard-earned reputation as perhaps the country’s most renowned Indigenous artist — whether of her generation or any other. At the same time, for those embedded in the Canadian art world, it can feel like Belmore has always been there, with her singular voice of visceral dissent demanding to be heard.
That’s as much testament to the power of her work as her longevity. Indigenous art, now a central part of the country’s cultural identity, might never have found its way from the margins without Belmore to lead it forward.
Belmore, who is Anishinaabe from the Lac Seul First Nation, would surely acquiesce, deflecting credit to trailblazers such as Carl Beam, Daphne Odjig and Robert Houle, whose own work threw down a gauntlet for recognition and respect that others, like her, have picked up and carried on. But Belmore, as an Indigenous woman working mostly in performance, has carved a uniquely provocative space. Almost always present, most often under strain, Belmore embodies struggle, quite literally, in a way a painting or an installation simply cannot.
It gives her work a presence riveting in its discomforts. Facing the Monumental crackles with such moments. Fountain, a video piece made for the 2005 Venice Biennale, where Belmore was Canada’s flag bearer (a term, I have no doubt, she’d find amusing), fills the fifthfloor galleries with turbulent sound, gushing out from its own space and into the entire exhibition, filling it with angry waters and turbulent wailing as Belmore, onscreen, struggles and flails in a black-watered lake.
Sounds of strain erupt, too, from the small space housing The Named and Unnamed, the 2007 video installation made from her 2002 performance on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside; Belmore begins by scrubbing clean a patch of street on her hands and knees before donning a red dress that, scrap by scrap, she shreds by nailing it to a telephone pole, yanking herself free. Each nail stood in for a missing woman listed on the RCMP’s task force list of the time; compiled, finally, once the serial nature of the disappearances were acknowledged. Belmore calls out their names — each one an unearthly, pain-riven howl — before slumping, sweaty and spent, against a pickup truck.
This is the Belmore we know, certainly, her first fiery performances in the late 1980s forming the foundation of her long career, many of which are included on a pair of monitors here, allowing you to pick and choose. What Facing the Monumental does, and powerfully, is resituate Belmore less in the visceral and more broadly in the poetic, tracing the long arc of a career that’s as often oblique and evocative as it has been frank, visceral and intense.
I was struck by a recent work, Pelican Falls, in which Belmore, captivated by a collection of snapshots taken in the 1950s of agroup of boys from the Pelican Lake residential school, was moved to a poetic gesture.
The boys, dressed head to toe in heavy denim jumpsuits despite the summer heat, huddle on an outcrop over the lake. With their school uniforms resembling prison wear, Belmore veered from outrage to what I read as hope: a vast flow of indigo denim ripples like a fastmoving stream along a narrow gallery corridor, the form of a child rising up from its midst. Nearby, a video screen completes, for me, the picture: a boy, seen from behind, dousing his head with water, over and over, as though a purification rite: from the ugliest of horrors, something truly beautiful, transformation despite the trauma.
It’s just one instance of Belmore using a particular narrative to craft a piece that transcends the specific, a subtle defiance, carefully plied, that shifts mere idea into that magical realm we call art. Indeed, despite her fiery reputation, Facing the Monumental forms a cogent argument about how open-ended, and non-pedantic, Belmore’s work has always been.
It also clarifies the breadth of Belmore’s interest. A pair of new pieces, Tower — a stack of shopping carts tipped on end, 20 feet high, supported by a column of clay — and Tarpaulin — a ragged canvas stiffened, ghostly, to appear draped over a kneeling figure — were made on a recent return to Vancouver, Belmore’s home for a dozen years. Struck by the widening rift between rich and poor and the exploding homelessness crisis, she made the two pieces both as tribute and complaint.
It brings into view a complication in the recent focus on Indigenous contemporary art. “It always struck me as strange when people assume that Indigenous artists are only speaking about Indigenous things,” Belmore said, her lips curling slightly into a wry grin.
“Or that Indigenous issues aren’t universal issues,” added Wanda Nanibush, the show’s curator and Belmore’s longtime collaborator.
When asked if she felt the world had finally caught up with her, Belmore told a story about speaking recently to a class at the University of Victoria.
“One of the students asked me, ‘Don’t you get tired of always representing your people?’” she laughed. “I don’t represent my people. I’m not a chief. I’m an artist. But there is a responsibility there and one I take very seriously.
“I don’t mind being an Indigenous artist and a non-Indigenous artist.”
Indeed, Belmore, as an Indigenous person, need not look far to find kinship, especially now. In 2017, Belmore was invited to make a piece for Documenta 14, the once-in-five-years international art exhibition widely regarded to the world’s most significant. Taking place concurrently in Kassel, Germany, its long-time home, and in Athens, Greece, Belmore fastened on to the moment. In the port, she observed, amid the luxury cruise liners, were long piers crammed shoulder to shoulder with tents to receive the boatloads of migrants now constantly drifting into Greek waters.
Her gesture was simple and poignant: a tent, now a symbol of the landless and the dispossessed, carved from Greek marble extracted from the same quarries used to build the Acropolis. Belmore’s work, Biinjiya’iing Onji ( From Inside) was installed on a hill outside the city, facing the Acropolis itself.
It’s an easy read, I suppose, at least at first glance: for millennia of European old-guard thinking, an ancient symbol of human achievement, civilization at its peak, viewed from afar by the contemporary world’s most commonplace image of transience and dispossession.
What matters, I think, is its weight: just as permanent and steadfast, viewing old-guard privilege from afar while refusing to look away.
Rebecca Belmore has been facing such monuments all her career, staring them down with poetic determination all the while. This is how old monuments crumble and new ones are made.