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Art Within the Arctic Circle LUCY R. LIPPARD "Art Within the Arctic Circle", The Hudson Review, February 1970, p. 665-674. September 24: From New York to Edmonton, Alberta, with Lawrence Weiner, artist, to meet Bill Kirby, Director of the Edmonton Art Gallery and the N. E. Thing Company (Vancouver artist Iain Baxter and his wife Elaine), and then fly to somewhere within the Arctic Circle, where Weiner, NETCo and Harry Savage, an artist from Edmonton, will execute works of art proposed for that location. Virgil Hammock, an Edmonton journalist and professor, and I will document the proceedings. The trip is sponsored by the Art Gallery as part of their "Place and Process" exhibition, featuring outdoor and temporary work; the show itself will consist primarily of film and photographic documentation of works done in Edmonton and other parts of the world by the participating artists (place ranges from the Sahara to the Arctic Circle to New York, process from an inane cornflake-spreading piece to the rather more provocative contributions of artists such as Richard Long, Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Morris). The Arctic expedition arose from Weiner's piece, conceived before the exhibition: "An abridgement of an abutment to on near or about the Arctic Circle." 1 September 25: Spent night in Edmonton and set out on the 1200 mile flight to Inuvik, Northwest Territory, free passes courtesy of the Pacific Western Airlines. The distances involved are impressive. Edmonton itself is about 2400 miles from New York, near the 55th parallel; Inuvik is some 60 miles within the Circle, almost to the 70th parallel, in the delta of the great Mackenzie River, main thoroughfare to the North (all provisions go up by barge, or plane, since the gravel highway goes only as far as Yellowknife), and a short distance from Beaufort Sea—the relatively "warm" section of the Arctic Ocean. The land mass of the Canadian North is immense, the barren spaces awesome. The placid geometrically furrowed fields of central Alberta give way to huge forests; halfway through the trip the land begins to crumble into water—innumerable lakes, ponds and rivers. The first stop, Hay River, on the southern edge of the Great Slave Lake, is bleak but spotted with brilliant yellow birches. Yellowknife, on the northern edge, is blue water, black muskeg bogs and ledges that are gray from the ground but pinkish from above. In the hour and a half we have there we see the old part of this goldmining town (dirt roads, shacks, tarpaper and log cabins, Indian children, huge black ravens and lots of dogs, boats, seaplanes) and Larry does one installment of a work that is being done all over the world: "A natural water course diverted reduced or displaced"—here a small stone dam across a stream running into the lake. One more stop at Norman Wells, an oil town set on the broad green-brown river between white mountain ranges, then to Inuvik, the prospect bleaker and bleaker with low, even hills, all alike, dotted with scrub pine, like poles with brief, cold-stunted branches sticking out the sides. These are vestiges of the taiga forest alternating with tundra—spongy hummocks of lichen, mosses, tiny plants, over a layer of permafrost (frozen ice and soil) that never melts and extends across the whole Canadian North, making oil leakage particularly dangerous since it would spread across the water table instead of being absorbed into the earth. The landscape is not so exotic as I had expected; it is still not winter here, though temperatures are around 15°; there is some snow, lots of ice, and the ground is frozen. What makes it so impressive, and so uninteresting to describe, is the space, and the infinite sameness of the terrain, the very subtle color range illuminated by a sharp, even light which has a terrible clarity. We arrive at 6:30 p.m. into the eerie red glow of a curiously diffused sunset edged by dense blue skies. Inuvik is a new town, begun in 1954; it is a new, and deplorable, type of town, owned by the government and oil companies, built as a "showplace" to replace the dying Fort towns, or trading posts. In this case it replaced Aklavik, whose native peoples were virtually ordered to move on to Inuvik, though they resisted in part and Akiavik still subsists. As Farley Mowat has pointed out, "Inuvik was designed purely as a white administrative center" in which Indians and Eskimos are on the wrong side of the tracks—off the Utilidor (a sprawling "tin lizard" or metal overground tunnel connecting all the "good" houses in town and providing them with heat, water and sewers). The result is "one of Canada's newest slums"—West Inuvik, or "Happy Valley," a "transitional area," as a pompous government administrator blithely called it when Larry said he had visited this miserable conglomeration of leantos, tents and shacks. Inuvik is a redneck town with an overnight population of well-dressed businessmen (many of them German and American) who come in to set up further exploitation plans. It is unexpected to come out of such a trip so preoccupied with social ills. We were in Inuvik 39 1/2 hours. Long enough to get mad. "Why Go North? It's Mostly Because of the Money" reads a headline in the September McLean's Magazine. The money is not going to the natives. Canada has done as badly in many respects by her native population as we have. We stay at the misnamed Eskimo Inn, brand new jerry-built plywood structure simulating the last word in North American motel architecture, but the steps are open, raw wood; the building stands on tall, rough wooden pilings; the main street is mud; it's a sow's ear that refused transformation. ("The Eskimo Inn is not for Eskimos," a young native girl commented bitterly on the night of its Grand Opening, after she and friends had been evicted from the public bathroom.) September 26: We borrow a truck from the Research Station, buy some wool caps at the Hudson's Bay Company (since fur-trading died out, simply another Sears or Grant's). The N. E. Thing Company sets out on its walking piece, which takes all morning; the rest of us go to the banks of the Mackenzie, not yet ice, though the mud is frozen, cracking eerily over large areas when stepped on. Larry does a second and third installment of "A natural water course diverted reduced or displaced"—a curved channel and a straight one, through which the broad river is indeed diverted—a gesture both absurd and touchingly grand. Nearby Harry fills a long strand of clear plastic wiener casings with water and lays it out in a slightly undulating line, about 20'. This "ice worm" begins to freeze immediately. (When we come back later it is almost solid, though some lumber has been unloaded from a barge onto one end of it.) Then Harry lies on a sheet of yellow blue-print paper, light-sensitive, and creates a temporary silhouette. Out to a kind of gravel pit in the bush, where Larry makes "An abridgement of an abutment to on near or about the Arctic Circle." Using whatever is at hand, in this case a cigarette package, he leans it against a broken pile of dirt. The piece is donated to the Edmonton Art Gallery, received by Bill Kirby, and will be registered as such by a lawyer. After lunch, the Baxters now holed up in the Canadian National telegraph office, the rest of us go to "Slim" Semmler's general store (antlers over the door, run-down interior crowded with rubbers, long johns, rabbit pelts, canned foods, fur animals and bead pins, "eskimo" belts made in Japan); Bill digs out a few pieces of marvelous eskimo sculpture by an Eastern Arctic eskimo named Charlie Kooghealook. Back in the bush, Larry creases a rock with several shots of a .22 ("The Arctic Circle shattered"). This piece belongs to me and I'm especially excited to see it executed. Harry tries to fly a plastic kite but the Arctic wind is too strong and it breaks. Larry, exploring, discovers another running water course and does a fourth and very beautiful diversion by making a semidam of sticks and sheets of ice in a little waterfall. On the way back through town, Harry creates a spontaneous event which is one of the trip's high points. He still has a lot of these long sausage casings, which come rolled up in sticks. He goes over to a ravine where a bunch of children are playing and fiddles around conspicuously with the stick; they ask, of course, what it is, he gives it to them, and they inflate huge lengths of it, wind it around themselves, pull it, throw it, jump over it, and have a general field day while the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) watch suspiciously from a car. To the bar for hot rum. An Indian nearby beckons to Larry and buys him a drink. I go off with Bill and the Baxters. Find out later that the Indian's first, just conversational, question is "Are you a tucking hippie?" He accepted Larry's "No" and said the priests had warned them against hippies who "would ruin everybody because they don't drink." More drinks and talk led to Larry's being taken by another Indian, a truck driver, to the "settlement" slum. The truck driver wanted to buy his boots. Pointed toes are stylish in Inuvik, where everyone dresses in high style, for the 1950's, but the Indians have wide feet. On the other side of town with Bill and NETCo. Having spent the morning concentrating on Larry's pieces, I am struck again by the difference between him and Iain. They represent opposite poles of the non-object tendency. They hadn't met before this trip, though knew of each other. Yesterday they were talking about work they have done and have thought about doing and the congruence is strange. They have often hit independently on similar ideas (a can of paint poured into a hole in the ground; nails driven into the earth; Arctic into Artic). Yet their heads are entirely different, Iain's rapidly alighting on one idea after another, often contradictory, usually well McLuhanized and with far-reaching implications; Larry working slowly, with total seriousness, within a clear self-defined framework, a basically poetic expression, that defines his art. The all-embracing, Dada element in Iain disturbs him, as does the idea that art can be entertainment, which he finds debasing and ultimately injurious to art-as-art, but they get along well. Baxter is little interested in Art per se and NETCo has no "style"; different departments deal with different areas of "Visual Sensitivity Information." This trip deals with Arctic V.S.I, and ranges, typically and exuberantly, all over the place; from communications pieces dependent upon electronic technology (see below), to the walking piece (Iain and Elaine circled Inuvik wearing a pedometer and step-counting device—some 314 miles, 10,314 steps) which recorded the experience of a town (and a circuitous pun in distance); a piece by a Vancouver friend—George Sawchuk—consisting of the insertion of a padlocked bolt into the Northern part of a tree trunk, titled "Locked Up North" (maybe a commentary on Canada's reluctance to deal with her Northern territories), and the works executed that afternoon alone: Elaine did a water exchange between the Seymour River, B. C., and the Mackenzie, adding the first, subtracting the second; we placed a large black and white sign reading "You Are Now in the Middle of an N. E. Thing Co. Landscape" in the taiga-tundra; I took a quarter-mile walk due North through the bush, compass in hand; Iain sprayed an East-West white paint line in the tundra parallel to the latitudes, Elaine sprayed a tiny tree white (early snow) and, having discovered, by comparing the Rand-McNally Star Chart with the map of Inuvik's few miles of road, that the road to the airport bore the same configuration as that of the constellation "Sculptor," NETCo marked that section of the road with four round mirrors laid concave side up in the bush at the angle turns, simulating the stars. The day we left, the Baxters did an "ecological" project in which areas of the tundra were turned over (I haven't the details on this). Baxter's interest in ecology predates that of most artists who have picked up on it during the last year or so. As a zoology major in college and later an illustrator of nature books, he became interested in the intricate balances of organisms and their environments and has since plugged this into information theory so that many of NETCo's pieces quietly draw attention to that relationship (for example—an erosion fountain, slow motion flow; various ice and snow and skiing pieces in which natural processes are formalized within a small area). As an artist, of course, he also enjoys manipulating that relationship; last year he proposed a controlled grazing project by which concentric squares of different lengths of grass would be formed, and a "formal snow storm" in the Nevada desert where a snow configuration would be retained after the thaw by inset cooling coils. He has projects that deal with grafting of trees, artificially created and controlled oases, change of ecology within an area and then restoration to normal state. The Arctic seems an appropriate place for such studies because its ecology is extraordinarily delicate and vitally important to the future of the area. Starving, we return to the hotel to find there is no place to eat in town tonight and we are forced to attend the Eskimo Inn's grand opening to take advantage of pink alcoholic punch and soggy hors d'oeuvres. The whole town was invited and a few natives were there; a band played a fast rhythmic jigging music for Eskimo "step dancing" but few were interested in performing. The bored gentry of the town expected more. One of the overdressed ladies was overheard complaining, "We gave them drinks and now they won't even dance." Indians sat in one area, government and businessmen in another. Some glasses were smashed. Around midnight we go out again to do Harry's last piece. Back into the gravel pit where we light fifty red flares over a large area. Spectacular sights, especially all that hot mobile light set against the clear Arctic stars and pale full moon, made all the more bluish by contrast. We leave before the flares go out and see it from a distance too. Wonder if anyone else has seen it, then pass an RCMP car going out to the site. Just as they turn in, the last flare flickers out. September 27: Back on the plane, Larry and I beginning another 24-hour trip back to New York City. Talking it over we are 1) very satisfied with the trip, 2) appalled by our reactions to social conditions in Inuvik, 3) I find that my strongest impression is of the work done, though the Arctic environment was in part responsible for the art's memorability. * The kind of space dealt with by Weiner's art and some of Baxter's is not the traditional occupied or conquered space in which an object exists. It is a space partially dependent upon the receiver's experience of space and of words, and greatly dependent upon time. Weiner read somewhere about a custom of, I think, the Great Barrens Eskimos, who measure their emotions in actual space/time. When a man is angry he walks the anger out of his system in a straight line, stopping when the anger is gone and planting there an "anger stick" which will for some time bear witness to the length (therefore strength) of that emotion. The physical, esthetic and emotional beauty of such a gesture appeals to Weiner, whereas Baxter utilizes the oral tradition within the network of technological media. For example, three of the latter's pieces from the Circle were: a telegram reading "This statement will be is being has been sent from inside to outside the Arctic Circle" (the language a conscious nod to Weiner); a message sent by ham radio from the Arctic to the Antarctic (contact may take six months to be acknowledged and it will be only the second time it has been attempted, according to the Inuvik operator); a piece executed by NETCo in the Circle and friends in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Vancouver where each one looked to the North for a certain period of time, thereby "drawing" convergent sight lines in space and forming a triangle. Before he became a painter, Weiner was a poet. He no longer writes, but his book, Statements, published by Seth Siegelaub in 1968, presents his work in a form generally associated with poetry—a single phrase per page, with blank facing page, no punctuation, and such eccentric, non-hyphenated word breaks as f/rom, st/andard, pressur/e. The work itself, however, deals essentially with a visual image which, when carried out, attains a poignant and insistent concreteness. As far as Weiner is concerned, the work exists as validly on paper as it would after being made or done; some works are "freehold" or can be "collected" by any "receiver" who cares to own or execute them during a given period of time. In Siegelaub's semi-immaterial, semi-invisible January 5-31, 1969 show, the freehold work was "One standard Air Force dye marker thrown into the sea." Weiner's catalogue statement read: 1) The artist may consruct the piece 2) The piece may be fabricated 3) The piece need not be built Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership. Siegelaub's March show (which existed as a calendar-catalogue and took place or did not take place all over the world, one piece each day of the month) included Weiner's "An object tossed from one country to another" which NETCo "extended" by answering, ",and back again." (Baxter later executed this piece and filmed it; the object, tossed from America to Canada, and back again, was the movie camera.) This was a generalized piece which became specific only when Baxter executed it. Others are more fundamentally specific. For the Summer show (these geographically scattered exhibitions have no titles aside from the dates of their duration), Weiner executed the following: "A rubber ball thrown into the American Falls Niagara Falls / a rubber ball thrown into the Canadian Falls Niagara Falls." It was photographically documented by filmmaker Hollis Frampton, though for the most part Weiner does not encourage photographs of the works themselves, considering it immaterial (or nobody else's business) whether or not he has actually made the pieces or whether he has just gone to the site and stood around (I suspect they get made). The pieces made in the Arctic Circle are typical of Weiner's more recent work, about to be published in a second book, in their examination of the relationship between language and act and visual experience. The 1968 pieces were essentially descriptions of possible objects, however dematerialized ("a series of stakes set in the ground at regular intervals to form a rectangle/twine strung from stake to stake to demark a grid"), or descriptions of acts often resulting in impermanent visual residue: ("A field cratered by structured simultaneous TNT explosions," "One aerosol can of enamel sprayed to conclusion directly upon the floor"). The more recent work often focuses on place as material, and action and place are often delimited by prepositions. Objects thrown on the sea, in the sea and at the sea are three different pieces. He is also concerned with the change inherent in physical boundaries (several pieces deal with international borders), theoretical boundaries ("art" and "life") and accordingly provides his own linguistic boundaries (subtle distinctions in the wordings of the work that affect or do not affect their physical presence if executed). The choice of words is very precise even when the choice of place or materials is wholly open or arbitrary. Weiner doesn't like to have to go outside of the situation for materials; even borrowing a rifle for the shattering piece was an annoyance. He shares with Carl Andre and others a distant and perhaps unwitting debt to Duchamp's esthetic of the found object, the temporary act. But Weiner is above all a purist in that he is interested in art, art alone, art that is "received" by people but not necessarily possessed by them. He and several other unfortunately dubbed "conceptual" artists seem to be fusing what once appeared to be the two diametrically opposing mainstreams of modern art: the acceptive and the rejective, or Dada-Surrealist and abstract-formalist, life and art, messy and clean aspects. They share with the so-called "minimalists" a dislike of the extraneous and the anecdotal, but they have taken an additional step toward divorcing art from luxury decoration by abolishing or at least deemphasizing its object aspect. Many of Weiner's pieces concern "removal," an idea explored in 1960 with a "cratering piece" in Mill Valley, California, and in later niched monotonal canvases. His visible contribution to the January show was a "36" X 36" removal to the lathing or support wall of plaster or wallboard from a wall." He disavows interest in the "process" (a fashionable concept in the art world at the moment) of removal, but finds "the idea of removal is just as—if not more— interesting than the intrusion of a fabricated object into a space, as sculpture is." He also refuses to be called a "materialist," which "implies a primary involvement in materials, but I am primarily concerned with art. One could say the subject matter is materials, but its reason to be goes way beyond the materials to something else, that something else being art ... If I were to choose the condition of the piece [fabrication or non-fabrication], that would be an art decision which would lend unnecessary and unjustified weight to what amounts to presentation—and that has very little to do with art" (interview by Arthur Rose, Arts, February 1969). Though Weiner showed paintings in 1964 and 1965, the wandering, impermanent and geographical basis of much of his current work has its roots in years spent hitchhiking across the country, herding sheep, working with a forest ranger, with explosives, on the docks, at sea, when he would make sculptures in the woods or fields and simply leave them there to be found or not found by a chance "receiver." At the moment he is following up his particular affinity for the North by a trip to the Norwegian Arctic to make a glacier piece. Northern spaces are grand, bleak, infinite, and reject autonomous, man-made objects almost by definition. Vilhjálmur Stefánsson has written of scale-deception in the Arctic: One sees things under circumstances that give one no idea of the distance, and consequently one has no scale for comparison. The marmot at twenty yards occupies as large a visual angle as a grizzly bear at several hundred, and it you suppose the marmot to be several hundred yards away you naturally take him for a bear. There is, under certain conditions of hazy Arctic light, nothing to give you a measure of the distance, nothing to furnish a scale to determine size by comparison. [My Life with the Eskimo, p. 78] Under such conditions, imposed somewhat differently by the endless rolling tundra and a flat snow landscape, a work of art has no scale, or rather no relative scale, and does not compete with nature, partly because few people will see it, partly because it need be compared to no other art, partly because it is impermanent anyway. The natural water courses were diverted, displaced or reduced only temporarily. The rock creased by bullets resulting from "The Arctic Circle Shattered" is an artifact but it is not the work of art. I may own it on paper but the residents of Inuvik who come to the gravel pit in the tundra where the rock is located "own" the artifact, the five people who were present at its execution are "receivers" of the act, and anyone who reads it is an equally direct recipient. The property values accruing to most art are absent, and the work itself either reverts to a primitive, pre-ownership natural state or else is available as a post-capitalist communally owned work of art. It is not wholly coincidental that Weiner's esthetic agrees with that of the Eskimos who were once the masters of the land where Inuvik stands2. The Eskimo language contains no words for measurement of space or time. The fact that in the winter the arctic landscape is constantly changing under the influence of storms and temperature alterations, and his nomadic life-style, give the eskimo a curious (for us) attitude toward property, toward form, toward permanence. "Where we think of art as possession, and possession to us means control, means to do with as we like, art to them is a way of revealing" (Carpenter). "The eskimo conception of individuality belongs in the same category of conceptions as that of unity and entirety, the whole and the all; and the distinction between spirit in general and individual spirit possesses not nearly so much power over their minds as over ours" (Riesman). Their language contains no verb "to be" but all words (there is little distinction between verb and noun) are forms of to be: Eskimo is not a nominal language; it does not simply name things which already exist, but rather brings both things and actions (nouns and verbs) into being as it goes along. . . . To Western minds, the "monotony" of snow, ice and darkness can often be depressing, even frightening. Nothing in particular stands out; there is no scenery in the sense that we use the term. But the eskimos are not interested in scenery, but in action, existence. . . . Theirs is a world which has to be conquered with each act and statement. . . . Man is the force that reveals form. He is the force which ultimately cancels nothingness. (Carpenter) The eye is subservient to the ear, and possessions, even their own art of ivory carving, are treated carelessly, as acts like songs rather than objects to be coveted: The essential feature of sound is not its location, but that it be, that it fill space. . . . Auditory space has no favored focus. It is a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions, moment by moment. It has no fixed boundaries. The eye focuses, pinpoints, abstracts, locating each object in physical space, against a background; the ear favors sound from any direction. (Carpenter) Weiner has done his best work since he moved out of the pictorial boundaries of painting and the static boundaries of sculpture into the extremely complex realm of the indeterminate in relation to the determinate. His pieces are highly abstract because they can be "made" with whatever "materials" the reader-receiver "has in mind" or any materials the receiver-executor has in reach. While they are eminently out there in "life," to be experienced almost at random when they exist outside of museum-gallery-collection circumstances, they are also very much art—non-functional, expressive, sensorially stimulating, raising new questions in situ or out of sight. 1 I shall concentrate here on Weiner's work since I recently discussed Baxter's at length (Artscanada, June 1969) and am not acquainted with Savage's outside of that discussed here. 2 Here I depend heavily on the following articles and books: Edmund Carpenter, "Image Making in Arctic Art" and Paul Riesman, "The Eskimo Discovery of Man's Place in the Universe," both in Gyorgy Kepes, ed., Sign, Image, Symbol (New York, 1966); Parley Mowat, Canada North (Toronto, 1967), and People of the Deer (New York, 1968); Vilhjálmur Stefánsson, My Life with the Eskimo (New York, 1962). |