Cecil Foster

A ship
and its cargo

The world-famous critic and curator wanted to create the correct mood for the fifty-two of us in the lecture theatre of the Art Gallery of Ontario. "How many of you here are scholars and academics?" Mieke Bal asked. A few hands went up.

"How many of you are connected to this gallery or some such institution?" asked the cultural historian, perhaps best known for her work on challenging cultural biases. More hands went up.

"All of that is just to show there is no such thing as a general audience," she said. Indeed, in a multicultural country like Canada, it is hard to think of a more fitting introduction to a slide show and discussion on re-framing the aesthetic. In this case, Bal was talking about the new insights she wanted to raise for visitors to an Amsterdam museum where she recently mounted the exhibition, Lady Killers. This title was a deliberate play on two words to start a discussion on how we make sense of life by constantly framing and re-framing the world (and words) around us. Do we put the emphasis on lady, on killers or emphasize neither? Do we then see men killing women? Women who kill? Or maybe men who love-them-and-leave-them?

The answer depends on how we view the world and our perspective comes informed and coloured by our expectations and experiences. Indeed, it is a product of our history and culture. Bal's example was even more informative when we consider that she was framing this discussion with the 1605 Gerrit Pietersz Sweelinck's painting Judith Shows Holophernes's Head to the People of Bethulia. This painting is based on the biblical story of a woman, Judith, who used her feminine wiles to beguile an enemy of Israel. When Holophernes was intoxicated with too much wine and lust, she chopped off his head, thereby saving the day for her people. Viewed almost 400 years after it was painted, the composition, a living work, challenges all our tropes of what is female, what is male, what is good and why your Judith is different from my Delilah. It is also a work that can reinforce a culture, for it can be interpreted as based solely on Judeo-Christian texts and icons. This prompted Bal, as a warning, to offer that "I don't want to be too biblical" with her inferences. Indeed. Such interpretation might have been accepted once, but not in an age of girl power, gynocentrism and the much-proclaimed death of God.

The Art Gallery of Ontario reminds me of a ship. You enter it the way people walk off a gangplank and then find your place in the ship either above or below deck. Aesthetically, what you see above deck is only part of the story. The more interesting parts might be below deck, hidden from view but providing the assumptions and expectations on which everything in the gallery, or galley, is based. Below deck lies not only the foundation but the superstructure, the established order that dictates how every artifact is interpreted, how the world beyond the AGO must fit into a perfect order within the AGO.

But the AGO is like a ship in two other ways. First, it is strategically located at the crossroads of Toronto's teeming cultures, like a vessel tied to the moorings at the mouth of several streams that now form a pond, lake or ocean. In this sense, the AGO stands out as a bastion of another time and place. Somehow, the AGO seems culturally out of place, as if caught in a cultural and time warp. The surroundings have changed, but the old bastion to the glory of another time and dominant culture remains. It is the institution that imposes order, hierarchy and valorizes which cultures are worthy of collection and worship. It is a cruise ship with lavish accommodations for the elite and those deemed worthy, with the immigrants and other cultural undesirables in crowded quarters below deck, safely out of sight ­ if they are even present at all.

This point is most apparent when you walk up the gangplank and enter this ship. The people on the inside ­ visitors and workers alike ­ are mostly of the same ethnicity, culture and class. There is precious little multicultural in an institution strategically placed in one of the most multicultural areas of the city, in one of the most multicultural cities in one of the world's most multicultural countries, where even the street signs around the AGO are in different languages. On the inside, time stops. So does multiculturalism. The dominant images are framed and re-framed, but only according to a time and ethic already gone from the Canadian scene. Several peoples and cultures that are the picture on the outside are not only framed out of the pictures on the inside, but are actually erased. Perhaps, this was the thought that struck Bal when she entered the AGO, what prompted her to comment that there is never a general audience. We all come as individuals, with our own cultural frameworks.

But the AGO is like a ship in another sense: it should allow all of us to visit cultures other than our own. Each stop, each level, each deck, each exhibit should be the equivalent of a new port of call. These should be ports of the world, to help us understand the bigger picture that is our global village, but also of the inlets and bays that exist culturally in Canada. So that we should be able to see prominently displayed cultural exhibits from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, South, Central and North America instead of a preponderance of western European art and lifestyles. We should also find exhibits and cultures that explain the diverse cultures of our fellow Canadians: more about the First Nations peoples, more about the Chinese culture that is flourishing on the doorsteps of the AGO, more about the Canadian Black culture, more about the real and changing Canada that mirrors a world that is much more than Western Europe or an elevated religion. An AGO in which we are all culturally equal citizens.

What I am arguing for is a ship that gives a meaningful journey along the waterways of an emerging Canadian aesthetic that has long ceased to be the handmaiden of the old Canada, even if this lady killer still funds national arts and artists, and which, alas, still dominates the AGO. We live in a multicultural country that argues that no culture has a dominant position in civil society. When we go to places like the AGO, we, as Bal suggests, are not some general amorphous group, but are individuals with our own tastes and expectations. We should be able to look at old established works and reframe them, challenge their underlying assumptions, bring new interpretations the same way that a Bal challenges us to view with different eyes the painting of a woman called Judith holding a man's head. And we need to cast aside, if not all valorizing aspects of our religion, at least that of any religion, that forces us to expect people to worship as we do, to have the same icons. For, as Bal suggests, we may not want to be too biblical. Neither do we want to substitute any other holy book for the Bible, but simply to place them all on the same shelf, with the same prominence.

Culture, like so many gods of old, will die unless we breathe new breath into it. We must recreate daily, hourly. And we have to use the clay, water and air around us. The AGO, as one of our holiest cultural temples, must be part of this creation. It, too, must recognize that in the midst of creation it is also being recreated. It should speak to, and of, the dynamic multicultural society that is Canada. A Canada where all the peoples of the world meet, where they are not forced to drop their cultural baggage at the portals, but where they are encouraged to view all exhibits as recreation of life, a life in which each individual is the sole master. It should be a place where we sing praises to the living. The AGO should become a site where we define in a more meaningful way the lived experience of being Canadian by, as Bal suggests, joining two words. For the Canadian context, these words should be citizen and ship.