Expanding the Circle: Robert Davidson and the Ancient Language of Haida Art
February 11th to May 28th, 2017, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, Ontario.
Robert Davidson, Xyaalang (Dancing). Acrylic on canvas, 2013. Photo: Kenji Naga
The new Robert Davidson show at the Art Gallery of Hamilton is called Expanding the Circle: Robert Davidson and the Ancient Language of Haida Art. Careful attention should be paid to that subtitle, as there is more Haida art than there is Davidson work, and by sheer numbers, much of the work is tourist carvings from the McCord collection. If one was expecting something similar to the big retrospective of Davidson’s paintings at the Seattle Art Gallery a few years ago — an exhibition which positioned him as a significant modernist figure whose formalism re-aestheticized a complicated set of Haida/Tlingit narrative traditions — they would be disappointed.
In Expanding the Circle, figuring out what is traditional work, what is work intended for indigenous audiences, what is tourist work, and what is work inspired by these traditions but updated are unresolved questions. The Seattle retrospective made the argument that Davidson updated Haida tradition in an abstracted, European sense. The ongoing problem of what indigeneity means visually is complicated in this space but is less interesting than the show in Seattle, or the recent exhibition of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ Haida Manga at the Glenbow in Calgary, or Beat Nation, the Indigenous hip hop show that was shown at both the Power Plant in Toronto and Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal. Each of those made arguments about tradition and history; Expanding the Circle does less of this contextualizing.
Haida work from the 19th century was absorbed by tourists. From that point onward, the intersection between work intended for western audiences and work intended for the Haida could never really be sorted out cleanly: the colours, the anthropomorphized sweetness of the shapes, the fleshy curve of spoon or bentwood box, the overwhelming size of the totem pole. Haida and Tlingit work was sometimes made for white audiences, and sometimes made for use in indigenous circles. Sometimes it was intended as a ritual object, and sometimes it was intended as a tchotchke for settler consumption. The stone carvings of totem poles when intended as tourist pieces were not intended to be read as ritual objects, as opposed to the large poles made from cedar which were taught as a kind of narrative. Often these totem poles were torn down by white settlers. Some of their ritual practices, including potlatches, were forbidden by law. Children were sent to residential schools. Coastal first peoples were encouraged to make tat for tourist trades. Finding a clear route between all of these ways of creation continues to be confusing — about what is art and what is ceremonial, or which work is intended for white audiences and which audiences are intended elsewhere. The ambivalence of all of this is made especially murky when considering contemporary Haida work— work that can be seen as possible abstractions of abstractions.
Davidson’s absorption of a visual style, in the second or third generation after 19th century settler encounters, could be seen as an attempt to make these complicated aesthetic discussions more precise, to list the rules of the games being played, and to formalise a flirtation with western sources.
Davidson is a fourth-generation Haida/Tlingit ritual artist: he carves, paints, and draws. His work is very much about the revision of ritualized potential. Davidson makes clear that the shapes he uses are their own kind of language, such as how the circle of the moon and the oval of an Orca’s eyes could translate across media: in cedar, bronze, acrylic on canvas, or argillite. This is especially true in 2006’s Red, a cedar carving slightly larger than a piece of foolscap, where two eyes are painted on a rectangular board. The board curves and buckles, so both the circle of the eye, and the whorl in the wood have a mutually-reinforcing formal relationship. That Red is installed next to a bronze statue of an Orca tail, which plays with a similar kind of encircling flatness, suggests a curatorial rigour.
However, the rigour often fails. The show has too many small pieces in too many small rooms. There are works intended for ritual practice such as spoons and baskets, a simple bent wood box and an excellent mask, but also a variety of tourist pieces, including dozens of models of totem poles. The show came from the McCord in Montreal, and unlike the aforementioned retrospective in Seattle, the absence of quality material is clear. The exhibition includes too many tourist pieces, too few masks, and could have featured more of Davidson’s signature prints. Even including the work of Haida artists a generation post-Davidson, such as Sonny Assu’s billboard-sized commission for Supercrawl last year (an ironic graffiti reclaimation of Emily Carr’s westernized Haida forms) might have provided a path into Expanding the Circle, which has too much to see, and not enough to analyse.
Anthony Easton is a writer, artist, and theologian. They are interested in class, sex, gender and the west. They have been published in Spin, The Atlantic, Pitchfork, Globe and Mail, and others. They have presented at conferences throughout North America, and in Europe. Their art has been shown in Toronto, New York, Chicago, and is in the collection of the library of the National Gallery of Canada. They will start a PhD at the University of Aberdeen in 2017.
