“Art is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone will have their own interpretation,” author E. A. Bucchianeri said.
Not long ago, most people would have accepted Bucchianeri’s aphorism as a self-evident truth rooted in individual variation and free will.
Today, the idea that “art is in the eye of the beholder” is dismissed as a malevolent notion by woke gatekeepers zealously telling the rest of us what to believe and what to see.
No better example of this pernicious process is the University of Manitoba’s feverish “decolonizing (of) its art collection, replacing problematic paintings and sculptures with contemporary Indigenous art,” part of a much larger truth and reconciliation framework to “Make UM an institution enriched by Indigenous knowledges and perspectives.”
Why is this taking place? Because “the university is ultimately a colonial institution that is designed to serve white people … and that needs to change,” said C.W. Brooks-Ip, registrar and preparator of the University of Manitoba art collection, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Great Britain voluntarily ended colonialism in 1867 by uniting four of its colonies, namely Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario.
“We have had artwork that is by a white settler that depicts Indigenous folks in not really an accurate way, in sort of the mythologized way, that in some ways glorifies the white settlers — or at least reinforces their white supremacy,” Brooks-Ip complained.
Translation: Now is the time for Indigenous supremacy instead.
Brooks-Ip created the Indigenous Student Led Indigenous Art Purchase Program, a two-year pilot project that aims to fight against this alleged white colonial settler supremacy. The Indigenous students meet with artists and curators, visit studios, and recommend artwork to purchase.
The committee has received $30,000 from the school’s Office of the Vice-President (Indigenous). It’s submitted 24 proposals for paintings, prints, physical pieces and an etching by artists including Kent Monkman.
One of the “problematic paintings” removed from display was taken from the university president’s office and placed in storage. It was a work by Lionel Stephenson, a prolific artist who lived in Winnipeg between 1885 and 1892.
His evocative but “problematic” painting found here shows Upper Fort Garry on one side of the Red River, with an Indigenous person sitting outside a teepee on the other shore.
“It’s kind of depicting a ‘We’re over here and they’re over there’ type situation,” Thomas said. “It’s not showing community and togetherness.”
This is a rather curious criticism in an age when “community and togetherness,” otherwise known as assimilation, is under non-stop attack by Indigenous activists on and off campus.
As for purchasing a Kent Monkman painting, good luck doing that with a tiny budget of $30,000. Monkman is a well-known artist of Cree ancestry who attended various Canadian and U.S. art schools and other institutions, including the Banff Centre, the Sundance Institute, and Oakville’s Sheridan College, where he studied classical European artistic techniques.
He has had many solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in Canada, the United States, and Europe and has achieved international recognition for colourful and richly detailed works that combine established Western genre conventions to recast historical narratives. Monkman’s work is available for sale through art galleries and public auctions with prices of $100,000 to $250,000.
Monkman deals with subversive, satirical, and comic themes, which are generally expressed in a transparently European fashion.
His two best-known paintings – Hanky Panky and The Scream – plainly express such themes.
Hanky Panky depicts the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, restrained and on all fours with his pants down as Monkman’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, approaches him from behind holding up a red sex toy in the shape of praying hands. Monkman generated controversy by suggesting that the rape scene was a consensual act but later apologized for “any harm that was caused by the work.”
The Scream is equally based on Monkman’s overwrought imagination. There is no evidence that RCMP officers, Roman Catholic priests, and nuns were employed to seize children from their loving parents so they could be forced to attend an Indian Residential School or other institution.
More importantly, as the two paintings show, Monkman is a workmanlike artist with a vivid imagination. Still, despite his Indigeneity, he excels in using Western styles, materials, and themes to craft rebellious depictions of his version of historical and contemporary anti-Indigenous oppression. How is that not cultural appropriation itself?
If the University of Manitoba is determined to “decolonize” its art collection, it needs to recognize how problematic that will be. There are scores of Indigenous artists like Monkman employing “colonial” technology and styles, even as they focus on aboriginal themes, an inevitable result of 500 years of intimate culture contact and the exchange of ideas.
Conversely, a vast inventory of Indigenous-themed art has been produced by generations of sympathetic and highly gifted non-Indigenous artists who have brilliantly succeeded in capturing Aboriginal understandings and experiences in their work.
The goal of “an institution enriched by Indigenous knowledges and perspectives” by hyper-privileging the art of Indigenous painters is a foolishly chimerical one.
Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report, a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba, and a senior fellow, Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
