prairie landscapes

Greg Hardy. Distant Rain Across the Marsh, 2008. Acrylic on Canvas, 32" x 64"That carving out a little corner of the wilderness in which to live, seen in colliery and garrison towns and which Margaret Atwood's Survival, her thematic examination of Canadian literature, discusses in depth, has never really been how Canadian prairie artists have seen the landscape and their part in it. 
Perhaps this is because settlement of the prairies, much later than that of eastern Canada, was facilitated by the CPR which didn't carve out settlements, but rather overlaid the great plains with the Dominion Survey Grid, charting the land with a system that made everything equal in importance. 
The land, indifferent as ever to ill-prepared settlers, was, by virtue of its abstract delineation, made to seem disinterested in the people living on it.  The relationship between town and land was not precise: the Homestead Act clustered services at the grain elevator and around the railway tracks.  The land was simply the surface upon which such things occurred. 

Compare this Greg Hardy 2008 painting with the 1962 L S Lowry painting, Hillside in Wales.  Lowry is looking at the land and human occupation, Hardy is looking at the weather.  Lowry's horizon is up near the top of the frame, Hardy's is at the bottom.  This is what I mean about the indifference of the land on the prairies to our little struggles: it floods, it dries out, it freezes, it is hailed upon— all these things would happen whether we were there or not.  Yet the mindset of the early immigrants to the Canadian west had developed in the impacted landscapes of Britain, where centuries of manipulation of the landscape had occurred.  One is constantly driving over surprising hills that turn out to be fragments of Hadrian's Wall or some such thousand year old installation.  People and their activities, their material culture, their animal husbandry, their system of fields, crops, stone walls and complex hedgerow cultivation – all that was irrelevant here.  Wind-scoured fields hundreds of acres square was how the prairies were farmed, and how they are still painted.


Marilyn Bowering

Marilyn Bowering. Visible Worlds.  Harper Collins 1997
Paterson Ewen.  Halley's Comet as seen by Giotto, 1979.

Most memorable image of this book is of a woman skiing over the North Pole from Russia to Canada.There are twins, in a Winnipeg immigrant family, one joins the Nazis in Germany, the other is locked in a struggle with something – I'm not sure – but he does think a lot.  And then there is Nathaniel Bone.  This is a book in the wide-ranging tradition of Canadian literature where the story covers an enormously complex world of multiply connected and layered stories.
Bowering is a poet, first, and her writing although prose is a long, beautiful extended poem where time and narrative are endlessly fluid.  Meanwhile Fika checks her bearings and moves on after chipping ice from her skis.  She is the background, her epic journey, to everyone else's complex histories of emigration, loss and displacement.
Richard Bingham, the cover designer, but a Paterson Ewen painting on the cover.  Ewen is a strange fellow, most of his very large paintings are made by grinding lines in sheets of plywood with a router, then painting over the sheet, routing a few more lines, adding some paint.  They are like huge wood blocks after much printing.  The work is passionate and muscular, magical and haunting.  It is a good tough accompaniment to Bowering's poetic, detailed complexity.

After-War. Kristina Norman

Terker

Kristina Norman is a visual artist and documentary filmmaker in Tallinn, Estonia.  Her 2009 video, After-War, which was part of a larger installation shown at the 2009 Venice Biennale, revolves around a Soviet WWII memorial, Monument to the Liberators of Tallinn (from Nazi Germany).

In  2007, Soviet soldiers' graves were exhumed and, with the large bronze Soviet soldier in the monument, taken from their original location in the centre of Tallinn to a cemetery on the outskirts of the city.  

With the collapse of the USSR, the former eastern block countries that had acted as a buffer between Russia and the west, including the Baltic countries – Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, embarked on a program of de-Russification.  In the construction of a postcolonial identity including language, customs and political structures the former occupiers are either expelled or demonised.  Of course this is very difficult, much intermarriage and cultural hybridisation has occurred and identities and allegiances become hotly politicised.  For seventy years Russians had been relocated to all the Soviet republics, occupying the top levels of bureaucracy and power.  Just as Zimbabwean white farmers cry, 'But we've farmed here for generations; this is our land, our country', so do Russian Estonians.  The removal of the heroic statue of a Russian soldier to the margins of Tallinn and the periphery of history caused riots, now known as Bronze Night.

After-War documents this divide between nationalist Estonians and Russian-speaking Estonians.  It is available on her website www.kristinanorman.com  Scroll to the bottom, it is about 10 minutes long.  It helps if one spoke Estonian of course, which I don't.  However, it is so clearly an interrogation of the politicisation of war memorials.

Is there any generosity in the postcolonial state that would herald any kind of reconciliation of the past?  There must be sometimes, otherwise the whole world would be full of Rwandan-like massacres, or the bloody and painful battle for borders and ethnicity in the former Yugoslavia.  South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for all its faults, still stands as a model.  Kristina Norman's video is humorous, moving, troubled.  Her art tackles the problems of reconstructing a national identity by taking the statue as a kind of tragic monolith, mute, clumsy and vulnerable to appropriation by political interests.

Kristina Norman, After-War. Golden replica of the bronze soldier Image Kristina Norman, © Courtesy Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia

For a really nasty example of what Kristina Norman is mediating with After-War, try this video from EstonianTV.  Yes it is a riot, yes it stems from the removal of the Soviet war memorial, but the commentary, so anti-Russian, is shocking in its racism and violence.  Clearly the bronze statue was a match to the tinder of post-USSR ethnic resentment.  Surprising too how many references there are to WWII, and the Soviet liberation of Estonia from Nazi occupation.  WWII continues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg8329uIKcw