Ottawa 2: Uuturautiit

The first exhibition we saw yesterday was titled Uuturautiit: Cape Dorset Celebrates 50 Years of Printmaking. I've been interested in Inuit art for a long time, long before moving to Canada. My brother-in-law has collected early prints and sculptures from the Cape Dorset community since the years when he was a student at McGill, and being able to study the artworks (and books about them) closely in his house and visit galleries with him has been a shared pleasure. J. and I own one print, a gift from my brother-in-law and sister-in-law on the occasion of our twentieth wedding anniversary, and I've often considered buying others but with wall space at a premium now, it's probably just as well I haven't!

Uuturautiit (“oo-to-raw-tee”) is the Inuktitut term used in Cape Dorset for proofing a print, "the crucial, creative and experimental stage before the print is finalized. It means 'to try different things'."

From the exhibition description:

This year, Cape Dorset, Nunavut, celebrates 50 years of making prints. Initial experiments in linocut, stonecut, and stencil begun in the late 1950s culminated in the inaugural collection of 1959, the first catalogued prints to be made by Inuit artists.

This significant exhibition pays tribute to the anniversary and continued dynamism of Cape Dorset artists by pairing recent and innovative work, including prints from the Fall 2009 release, with the 1959 collection, being shown for perhaps the first time in five decades.

Over the 50 years since the first artworks were brought back from Nunavut (and the communities there began to be encouraged to do lithographs and stone carving for export to the south) the work has changed considerably - to my mind, not always for the better. The early works, like this man with raised arms at left, are mostly black-and-white, and seem to exemplify the strength and expressiveness that can be achieved in a simple graphic print. As a graphic designer, the use of positive and negative space in these works, as well as their simplicity and powerfulness, has always appealed to me, and seeing the entire Cape Dorset collection of 1959 was a revelation. I was moved by the closeness of the artists to their subjects, whether they were depictions of Inuit life or of the animals whose world they shared. The mystery of the Inuit relationship to nature was often part of the images, but there was also a lot of humor about the people themselves - in one print, a man runs after a bounding caribou, and the title reads something like "Excited Man Runs but Has Forgotten His Weapon." The print at left is called "Joyfully I See Ten Caribou." Another shows a man and various birds in flight, all touching, as if cut out of a sheet of paper, and is titled "Man Carried to the Moon by Birds."

While I was stunned by the beauty of the 2009 loon image (detail above) that was chosen to be the icon of the exhibition, I'm generally not keen on what's happened to Inuit work in recent decades. Two factors have affected the art: first, a large market was created, both for cheaper works for tourists and more expensive ones for collectors, and this encouraged repetition. You can go into galleries in Montreal and see dancing bears carved in soapstone, in ten different sizes and nearly identical postures: they're still more pricey than your average souvenir, but they're a far cry from the original carvings. The other factor has been increasing contact with the outside world. The last room of the exhibition was filled with drawings and prints, most in full color and in a naive colored-pencil style, showing aspects of modern Inuit life: a view, for instance, of an airplane console and the landscape beyond. There's a busy-ness to these images that probably accurately reflects day-to-day life, but the uniqueness of the 1959 images - that starkness that rose out of isolation and closeness to the black-and-white world of the Arctic, its creatures, and the native myths and spiritual life surrounding them, seems all but lost except in the hands of the most talented artists, who - though they can't possibly live the same way as their counterparts 50 years ago -  do "get" what made their predecessors' work special, and still seem capable of setting themselves apart in order to observe, think, and create.

We can observe the same phenomenon, I'm sure, in African art, and write about it in deploring tones, as white westerners always manage to do. It's OK, I think, to use words like exploitation; by the same token, this source of income is desired and welcome on Cape Dorset and in the other Arctic communities who produce art for export. The native communities have also suffered tremendously because of contact - they've been exposed to devastating diseases, children have been removed from families and then abused in church-run schools, there has been prejudice against the people, lands taken, resources exploited, and now their way of life is on the verge of extinction because of climate change.

There's no way to put the magic sea goddess back in the bottle. Perhaps for that reason, it was a poignant and special opportunity to see so many of these early prints together, because it allowed me to re-enter that earlier world in its starkness and simplicity, and, as an artist, to consider once again the process of observation, consideration, and reduction-to-essence that's necessary for this type of comment on nature, whether it's in a graphic image or in a poem.

Comments

[Marja-Leena]

A very thoughtful and understanding review, Beth! How wonderful to see such a large collection at once, and with your long understanding and appreciation, to be able to compare the older works with the new. I fully agree with what you say about the changes that have happened, both in the work itself because of the market and the effect of the outside world on the Inuit lifestyle. I would have loved the opportunity to see this exhibition. One of my art professors was an early collector, researcher and writer of Inuit sculpture and that was my first exposure to their work.

[Dave]

I feel about Inuit artists making uninspired, mass-market commodities the same way I feel about 90% of the vendors at the huge annual "arts" festival in State College, PA: it may not be my cup of tea, but I'm glad they can support themselves doing it. There's a place for middlebrow art. Some of the southwest Pueblos also get significant income from art and craft production, as do some Australian Aborigenes. More power to 'em. I do wish the kind of people who buy this stuff and drive the market didn't have such conventional taste, but what can you do?