Decolonizing the Story of Art in Canada: A Storied Approach to Art for an Intercultural, More-Than-Human World
The master narrative dominating the field of Canadian art history has continually privileged Eurocentric, colonialist ways of knowing. Many art historians and critics have called for a new story, but nothing to date has been proposed. This dissertation marks the first attempt at re-envisioning the story of art in Canada. It enacts a broader and deeper context of cross-cultural and social-ecological relationships for our art encounters. I discuss conventional cross-cultural approaches to art in Canada and then develop a new approach that I call the storied approach. This approach acknowledges that our art and how we talk about it is, and occurs first within the context of, a story. The storied approach takes seriously that stories animate our lives. It recognizes the performative power of art, and not just its representational quality. It recognizes the phenomenological root of art and story not as the social world alone, but as our more-than-human world within which we circulate. And it draws on the most salient features of postcolonial criticism, while also acknowledging contributions from our colonial past (and present). In this vein, I interweave story and other voices complementing that of the conventional art historian’s/critic’s while, first, bringing the storied approach to bear on the art and criticism of Lucius O’Brien, Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, and Paul-Émile Borduas. This is not because I consider these three to be the most important artists in Canada, but because these artists have already been privileged as central figures in the current story of Canadian art. Second, I open up the discussion further by attending to the art experiences of various members of an art audience. This allows the stories unfurling through our artworks to breathe in everyday life—the ultimate “story” of art in Canada—from the ground up, here. This larger, living story, we find, is and always has been an indigenously oriented one. European art practices and ideologies have been and are animated by, and nested within, this indigenously oriented story of here, not the other way around.
Art History, History--Canadian, Native American Studies
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