By Robin Mathews
February 2018
“The major task of a Colonial Scribe is to avoid the truth
without ever telling outright lies.” (Anonymous)
The role of “Canada’s
National Newspaper”, the Globe and Mail, is to appear to cover the most
important Canadian matters while, in fact, avoiding them. Chief among its activities is to torture
information revealing the country’s ignominious colonialism into some kinds of
human interest stories without deeper implications. Thus we get Kate Taylor’s “The outsiders who got in” –
a revelation that the essential forelock-tugging abasement of Canada’s artistic
controllers has not changed a whit since the battles of the 1960s and 1970s
(Globe and Mail, Feb. 2, 2018, R1 and R6).
Kate Taylor reveals that
major Canadian policy makers and administrators in Canada’s Art and Culture
field are still recruited from the former or the present Imperial Power to head
(for instance, recently) the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario,
the McMichael Art Collection, Luminato, and the Shaw Festival. More Imperial appointees will soon
follow: No Canadians Need Apply….
In a reasonably wealthy
colony one of the problems in the Arts and Culture fields is
“containment”. How – put simply – can an
expansion of artistic effort (publicly encouraged) be made possible at the same
time as the deeply colonial nature of the overall community is maintained as
the “normal” condition? How, in effect,
can artistic, cultural, creative forces be unleashed and publicly encouraged at
the same time as a rigid subservience to Colonial Values is maintained …
without the risk of creative activists demanding real social, artistic,
cultural, political, economic, and military independence?
One way is to appoint ‘imperial
masters’ to guide policy and to shape program. And to assure that artistic language
does not become an instrument of change.
Wholly ignored by Kate Taylor
– the 1960s and 1970s produced a major drive for independence for Canada and
for the appointment of Canadians to all major positions in arts, culture,
education, and more…. Those years produced
the chaining (in protest) at the AGO. They produced the invasion (by legitimate
members) of the AGO annual general meeting to bring about change. The Chair of
that painfully colonial-minded organization had gathered hundreds of “proxies”
to hold off Canadian takeover and to back any policy of the Colonials – however
repressive. (Kate Taylor forgets, ignores, or is ignorant of all that.)
And so, apparently, is Gail
(Dexter) Lord, consulted for Kate Taylor’s article. “Toronto-based international museum
consultant” Gail Lord [Lord Cultural Resources] was an activist battler for
Canadian independence and for wholly Canadian-staffed positions throughout the
artistic and cultural community in those earlier, heady years. She, too … does not (it seems) remember even
her own biography, having contracted (apparently) CMS, the Colonial Memory
Syndrome, which is the tendency to forget history involving resistance to
imperial domination by those winning or seeking significant place in Canada’s
Arts, Culture, and Creative Community.
Astonishingly, the Guardians
of Canada-as-a-U.S. Colony have never been removed – even though the struggles
of the 1960s and 1970s produced the Canadian Artists Registry (CARFAC), the
Writers Union of Canada, the League of Canadian Poets, the Association for (the
study of) Canadian and Quebec Literatures, the Canadian Liberation Movement,
the Committee for an Independent Canada, the ‘Independence and Socialism’
movement in the NDP nicknamed “the Waffle”… and many more organizations of
anti-colonial expression and conviction. [see, to begin, “The Canadianization
Movement”, Wikipedia].
The Canadianizing
organizations that survived have mostly changed themselves into ‘guilds’
without nobler ambitions than to weasel from the Guardians of Canada-as-a-U.S.
Colony enough Hush Money to keep them neutered and docile. In fact, not one Canadian
Independence/anti-imperialist work has been recorded in visual arts, theatre,
music, poetry or prose for forty years at least. The few created are hidden behind The Great
Wall of Denial (as this article will also be).
The Canada Council for the
Arts has become beautifully sensitive to the need of funding for indigenous
thought, feeling, and creative expression.
But it has not released a cent for anti-imperialist artists seeking the
independence of Canada. Spokespersons
for the Council will doubtless say: “But we have had no applications for any
such kinds of work”. And they will be
correct in that statement, for bribery, brainwash, and repressive tolerance
have made their statement (almost) perfectly true.
Indeed, even beyond Arts and
Culture the brain-washing has been astonishingly complete. Just for instance, the bold and tireless
workers fighting the U.S. Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion being built to
assure the pollution of Canada’s Pacific Coast, the destruction of the Salmon
Fishery there – and much, much more that is evil - will carry any poster but one that reads
“Yankee Go Home”. That anti-imperialist
slogan has been erased from the possibility of thought in Canada.
Some Canadians may battle (in
fact) against U.S. Imperialism … but true to colonial rules … they may not call
it U.S. Imperialism. They may not write:
“Yankee Go Home”. The Canadian State and its partner, Kinder Morgan, know the
organizing and activating power of language, and with Orwellian effectiveness
control it – without those resisting knowing they are being effectively
neutered.
Kate Taylor makes reference
to the Banff Centre for Art and Creativity and to the U.S. “expert” there
teaching Arts Leadership. Pretending to
need a U.S. “expert” to teach Arts Leadership to Canadians describes both the
disease called The Banff Centre and its importance to the chain of cultural
colonial-mindedness among Arts Administrators in Canada. Indeed, Principal of
Rubenstein Associates, Rosalyn Rubenstein writes in a subsequent Globe and Mail
article (“How to change arts leadership in Canada: an insider’s perspective”,
Globe and Mail, Feb. 20, 2018, A16) a long plea to encourage the
preparation of Canadians for top Canadian Arts and Culture positions.
Still avoiding the core issue
(or she wouldn’t be published by the Globe and Mail) Ms. Rubenstein asks, “why
aren’t there more Canadian faculty on the new leadership program at Banff?” Ms.
Rubenstein’s heart is halfway to being in the right place. But calling a spade a spade is obviously not
her vocation … and so she pleads for de-colonization without daring to use the
word.
Put in the very simplest
terms, the Banff Centre is an integral part of the U.S. Arts Circuit. It is not
the Centre and a major part of a Canadian Arts and Culture system. For those who have doubts … request the
statistics from the Banff Centre of the citizenship of senior
artists-in-residence, “experts” invited in, and other “star” visitors, as well
as faculty there over the last forty years.
Statistics will reveal, I have no doubt, a controlling portion of
foreign – mostly U.S. – people at Banff.
And that is only a symptom of the Colonial Disease there.
In that vein, Kate Taylor is
unwise enough to cite U.S.-produced Kathleen Bartels, director of the Vancouver
Art Gallery since 2001 as one of those imperials who “figure the differences
out, adapt well, and stay put”. There is
not the slightest doubt in the world that Ms. Bartels has ‘stayed put’. But many aware people in Vancouver believe
she has adapted so badly she has hatched a Monster in the New Gallery plan,
intended for an idiotic location, and using - of course - a foreign architect possessing giddy and inappropriate
ideas of architecture for Canada’s West Coast.
Indeed when Ms. Bartels was
drumming for her empire-building project (how suitable from one appearing from
the present Imperial power) she ran a sort of ‘peoples’ referendum’ on the idea
of a new gallery building on a board in the foyer of the present VAG. Supporting comments written on the board were
preserved; those that were opposed to her gallery project were immediately
erased by attendants.
Even in colonies, repressive
tolerance is usually a little more subtle.
Ms. Bartel’s every action in
and around the present historical, attractive, and central site has been – to
far from a few Canadians – alienating, insensitive, condescending, patronizing
… in a word: ‘imperialistic’.
The failure of Kate Taylor to
report the real history and condition of Imperial Appointments (and the resistance
to them) involving top positions in Canadian Arts and Culture is both
regrettable and wholly normal for a Colonial Scribe. As is the obvious
determination by the Globe and Mail’s ‘controllers’ that the real story of
Canada’s struggle for independent artistic and cultural freedom will never be
reported (by that newspaper) to Canadian readers.
Contact:
Robin Mathews
