Genius loci, eh? A review of Penny Cousineau-Levine.

FAKING DEATH: CANADIAN ART PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE CANADIAN IMAGINATION

Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003/324 pp./$49.95

Canada's ongoing collective identity crisis provides their patchwork country with somewhat of a distracting parlor game and source of never-ending introspection, academic conference material, moral self-righteousness, pillow talk and gossip. Especially when discussing themselves as living within the eclipsing penumbra of their neighbor to the south, many Canadians are apt to refer to their supposedly distinctive approaches to bilingualism, multiculturalism, federalism, or respect for individual freedoms and rights. All this supports a steady, if not spectacular, cottage industry for the Canadian intelligentsia. Like helpless relatives of a family member with a chronic terminal illness, Canada has watched the systematic wasting away and amputation of its onceproud cultural infrastructure of government-sponsored or protected film and TV production, music broadcasting and recording, print publishing and telecommunications.

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As the old joke has it, Canada should be an ideal country: French culture, British government and American technology. Instead, it inherited French government, American culture and British technology. Neither fish nor fowl (ni poisson ni poulet) as a modern nation-state, Canada's multiple personality disorder began in the seventeenth century. Unlike the United States, the landed squires of the original French and British colonies never rebelled against their imperialist masters, and clung to holdings that served as a bloody frontier battleground between the last of I'ancient regime and the neuropathic scion of the House of Hanover. Decades before the rag-tag Americans settled the British army's hash, the decisive battle of the Seven Years War in North America took place on the Plains of Abraham, just outside Quebec City. The battle site is still visited, like a shrine, by those Quebecquois nationalists who harken back to "les good old days" of an autonomous New France. The battle itself was additionally notable because both opposing generals, Wolfe and Montcalm, received mortal wounds. This no doubt pleased those in the ranks but left a legacy of commingled blood to curse at least seven subsequent generations. The victorious British, not powerful or bloodyminded enough to either exterminate or assimilate the French and having not yet invented the term synergy, fostered the growth of a comprador class of bankers, merchants, politicians and clergy which quickly got down to the business of exploiting its own underclass as well as the indigenous Cree and Assiniboine.

Fast forward to 1867: after a series of political clashes, uprisings and armed insurrections on part of the dissatisfied French and English proles and the native populations, accommodations hardened into institutions. The business of exploiting indigenous peoples and newer immigrants had now become an industrial-strength, three-ocean-coastline policy habit. England, somewhat tired of policing this troublesome potage but firmly intent on skimming off its profits, passed the British North America Act (BNA). This formally established the Canadian federal system (Parliament, provinces, police) but left the new confederation's foreign policies (especially trade) and major constitutional powers firmly in Whitehall's hands and the British monarch at its sovereign head. Now a self-administering unit within the British Dominion, with the French pacified under a form of protectorate, Canada largely continued to export primary resources and import them back as finished and more expensive products.

World War One demonstrated that Canada's ethnic fissures remained as deep as tectonic plates. While Anglo leaders urged entrance into the war under the slogan "For King and Country," they also saw a timely opportunity to extract further political concessions from a beleaguered Britain. The French, for their part, would have none of it and talk of conscription nearly precipitated a constitutional crisis. But just as Canada began toddling away from Britain, the emergence of the United States as an international power hobbled its first steps. At a post-war conference to allocate electromagnetic frequencies, Canada received the smallest and weakest part of the radio spectrum. This and wattage restrictions meant that American programming could easily penetrate cross-border markets and create national audience networks. In the same era, Hollywood bought up and swamped Canadian theatrical outlets with its own products, monopolized raw film sales and photofinishing, and drew top cinematic talent into its own orbit. Similar incursions resulted in American dominance over newspaper and magazine publishing, advertising, textbook authorship, music recording and other cultural industries. British and American media barons battled it out, with television broadcasting and production representing the modern Plains of Abraham and the Yanks acting as unrepentant victors. Government sponsored and subsidized media such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the National Film Board of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and, eventually, the Canadian Film Development Corporation did attempt to maintain some vestiges of national self-consciousness. Despite an official arms-length distance between themselves and Parliament, their content was often criticized by the government of the day.

Meanwhile French nationalism, also stifling under post-WWII Catholic revivalism, saw ownership of high capital simply change hands and prayed, "Un jour, maitre chez nous." When the Quebec independence movement finally emerged in the late 1960s, one of the leaders of a terrorist cell identified his people as the "white niggers of North America." The language barrier, which had isolated the French from full economic and political power, also insulated their culture and society from ready assimilation into the American sphere of influence. It is often said that the movement for Quebec independence depended upon one politician, four journalists and twenty French-speaking folk musicians. Province-wide Francophone radio and television networks did establish themselves as arguably the most important carriers of any distinctively Canadian culture after World War II. Nevertheless, it is reputed that North America's best-attended Elvis impersonation contests took place in Quebec. And when students at McGill University in Montreal were asked to rename their student union building after the most important alumnus of their distinguished institution, they overwhelmingly chose William Shatner, better known as Star Trek captain James T. Kirk, an American television icon.

Thus pressed and oppressed between the great colonizing powers of Great Britain first, and then America, Canada did enjoy a brief efflorescence of feel-good patriotism personalized by the leadership of a charismatic Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Under his auspices Canada repatriated its own constitution from England, attempted to ratify a Charter of Human Rights, fended off a separatist referendum in Quebec, practically nationalized Alberta's oil fields, and encouraged major universities to establish Canadian Studies programs and hire their own graduates. During a heady era of global anticolonial ferment Canada served as a sanctuary for Third World political refugees as well as American war resisters. Agencies such as the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Film Board, laws that demanded that media carry requisite amounts of "Canadian content," and ministries which promoted exhibits and shows of Canadian artists abroad, all created an exhilarating atmosphere, or at least one about as exhilarating as Canadians ever allow themselves to feel. This era also coincided with the ascendency of the photography fine art market, and the deskilling of photographic apparatus to the point where amateurs became capable of producing commercial-quality images. The ideas of photography, self-expression, populist democracy and harmless patriotism met in a magical albeit brief harmonic convergence.

Of course, NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement) is readily identified as the major dragon that finally swallowed and digested this tender, promising youth. In essence, the multinational corporations and banks that once required national boundaries in order to secure economic protectionism now found that those same borders impeded the free flow of capital, and occasionally gave the populace unruly ideas about the ownership of natural resources such as air, water, lumber and salmon. Under NAFTA, the token facade of respect once given by British and American governments to a branch-plant economy has tarnished and crumbled. Within this unapologetic ravenousness, modestly scaled galleries remain among the few institutions that offer the hope of artistic refuge, drawing in enough of the locals to support a token sense of regionalism.

Penny Cousineau-Levine's recent Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination attempts to resurrect some sense of a shared nationalism, or at least come to terms with its convolutions, through an earnest exploration of thematic and stylistic consistencies in the work of several prominent Canadian photo artists. While the title invites any number of comments on faking le petit morte and other forms of ersatz eroticism, this book is a serious work. It is well produced and illustrated, although some images seem unnecessarily reproduced both in monotone and color. Strangely enough, an image referred to as "the ultimate Canadian photograph" (p.175) fails to make any appearance. Yet against all odds, the author takes on an ambitious and typically Canadian task, that of finding unity within the bewildering diversity of motifs, subjects, styles and media used by Canadian photographers.

Cousineau-Levine spends her first five chapters rummaging through the portfolios of an extensive list of Canadian photo artists who have exhibited from 1952 onwards. Here she develops the first part of her thesis, namely that while American image makers benefit from the influence of a well articulated Transcendentalism, their counterparts above the forty-ninth parallel struggle with the "psychological malaise" of a bifurcated national identity, one split along the fault lines of language, religion, ethnicity, and the overwhelming sense of Otherness vis a vis America's super-power status. "Subconscious Canada," as Cousineau-Levine puts it, emerges in camera-based imagery that rejects the medium's nominal literalism but also evidences "a preoccupation with death, bondage, and entrapment, particularly of animals and women" (p.147). To her eye, Canadian photographs characteristically abound in doors and windows which split the frame, people who stand apart and estranged from their immediate environments, and deserted landscapes. Above all, she notes "a world in which the feminine dimension is martyred or absent and children are abandoned, and where the feminine is also perceived as something from which it is necessary to take flight" (ibid.).

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Up to this point, Cousineau-Levine's musings are informed by, and largely converge with those of other cultural commentators, notably Margaret Atwood, Patricia Smart, Linda Hutcheon and Leon Surette, all of whom note the extent to which Canadian literature is replete with paradoxes, contradictions, dualism, doubles-and despair. Lacking any foundation myths such as those surrounding the American Revolution, the visual imagination of Canada's derivative government as found on its currency, postage stamps, seals and military insignias depicts little more than allusions to the great outdoors, and symbols of the crown's overriding authority such as the Queen or her horse-mounted military constabulary. It got so bad that in 1970 Canada established a Federal Identity Program that created the country's official but little-used "wordmark" or logo. Instead of icons of patriotic fervor, Canada has settled for bureaucratized name branding.

Cousineau-Levine looks at all this and takes on the role of cultural clinician, arguing that the plethora of ignored children, crucified women, glass coffins and gagged bodies in photographers' portfolios arise out of the national equivalent of anorexia, derived from "Canada's inability to separate from uncaring, colonizing 'parents'" (p.150). This line of argumentation is extended to incorporate standard, even liturgical references to the primal scene, private ritualization and "thwarted rites of passage." Cousineau-Levine reaches the conclusion that "recurring characteristics of Canadian photography that appear to have been without signification fall into place, and reveal themselves as indications both of a way through a stalled rite of initiation and of the mature role that awaits us as a nation" (p.270). The book's final section entirely lets go of both aesthetic and social theory in favor of Jungian analysis, replete with references to the omphalos, initiation into the Eleusian Mysteries, Sumerian myth, female menstrual cycles, shamanism, alchemy, and psychopomps. All this in a personal journey from viewing Canadian photographs as "only pathological, the cries of helplessness," to "a move toward freedom from metaphysical confinement" (p.269). In the end, "In dozens of guises Canadian photography presents one over-riding imperative ...: reach for some definitive monolithic self, for the finality of 'maturity,' for a 'real' identity, but then refuse it, and hold out instead for [a] state of always becoming that ... so many Canadian photographs describe so compellingly and so well" (p.271).

Clearly, where domestic cultural policy has failed, Cousineau-Levine hopes that depth psychology will succeed, namely in providing this multitude of alienated images of fragmented, tortured, decontextualized selves with an overarching framework for understanding. Yet wedded to the clinician's perspective, Cousineau-Levine envisions nationhood as a set of collective personality traits or disorders, rather than a framework within which artists and audiences work out issues of relevance, aesthetics and the political economy of art. Where nineteenth century nationalism inevitably rested on some version of mystical, racialist ideas about Blut, Volk und Erde, or Manifest Destiny, "Faking Death" looks towards retinal manifestations of the collective unconscious, a concept that Jung himself, during his Nazi collaborationist days, had certainly favored. This is a perspective that restricts artists to the task of recreating historical archetypes rather than creating new possibilities for experience and meaning.

Cousineau-Levine's attempt to contrast Canadian and American art photography also rests on several questionable assumptions. First, she overstates the case that the Purist aesthetic which emerged in the 1920s, enchanted with "the thing in itself" and enamored of a certain visual literalism, dominates American photography. This argument can only be made if one ignores the entirety of the Pictorialist movement, the infusion of Surrealism (to the point where it has become the house style of most advertising agencies), and the emergence of second-generation "straight" photographers such as Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Paul Caponegro, and Minor White. They pushed the medium into the realm of what Cousineau-Levine describes as "symbolic and metaphysical" during the period under question. Secondly, Cousineau-Levine's sample population carries restrictions of its own. Among the inexplicably missing are important teachers including David Heath, Randy Bradley and Jim Bruekleman and Roy Kiyooka, photographers David Barbour, Iain Baxter, Cheryl Lean, David Pickering, Tom Knott, Hugh Hohn and Robertson Wood, and photographic magazine publishers Gary Wilcox and Gail Fisher-Taylor. Moreover, Cousineau-Levine engages in a bit of forced conscription herself, admitting that even an individual photographer's "conscious decision to reject nationalism" would not exclude their work from advancing her thesis.

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As for anorexia and longing, sure, Canadian artists undoubtedly feel hungry. As another old joke has it, inside every overweight American is a thin Canadian screaming to get in. For art photographers "in" means the permanent collection at the MOMA, or Beaumont Newhall's canon-creating The History of Photography, or at least Naomi Rosenblum's A World History of Photography, even though the latter lumps Canada together with Latin America and mentions only four artists and one curator (1). And rather than anorexia, why not the more apt diagnosis of borderline personality disorder?

The basic question of Canadian distinctiveness certainly merits pensive discussion, even in this postmodern era where digitized images flow through fiber optic cables and the air waves in ways that make physical borders largely irrelevant. Cousineau-Levine deserves credit for raising the issue but one does get the sense of a game that has been rigged by the anticipated conclusion. By the time she gets to matters such as the anima and animus well, de spiritus like de gustibus non disputum est. If anything, her book raises the question of why progressive intellectuals turn inwards, especially towards psychoanalysis, at times of their own estrangement from popular social movements and culture. Cases in point include the Frankfurt School's active interest in Freud as Hitler came to power, or the excursions of Victor Burgin and members of the Cultural Studies movement into Lacanian twists of semiotic theory during the heydays of Thatcherism (2). Such close self-examination, sometimes to the point of self-absorption, often appears to take place in lieu of perceived possibilities for engagement in effective political action--psychoanalysis as the opiate of the intellectuals struggling with their own ghettoization. For those Canadian artists and intellectuals who could not defend themselves, or rally others to defend against the cultural imperialism exemplified by NAFTA, no place can feel like a sovereign home because the ground--and all its mineral rights--has literally been sold out from underneath their feet. If this situation does produce bodies of work consistent in their disconnectedness from the world, no one should find that particularly "subconscious" or surprising.

NOTES

1. Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, third edition, N.Y.: Abbeville Press, 1997, pp.543-4.

2. See, for example, Victor Burgin, "Photography, Phantasy, Function" in V. Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography, London: MacMillan Education, 1982, pp.177-216.

Peter Wollheim, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and the Canadian Studies program at Boise State University.