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Mackenzie

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Workman 1

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La Bande 1

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Plural

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Review

**Noor Bhangu** is an emerging curator and scholar of South Asian descent, currently based between Winnipeg, Treaty 1 and Tkaronto/Toronto.

The first time I learned about linguistic empathy— the practice of listening to someone else in the absence of a shared language— I was attending Winnipeg-based artist Hassaan Ashraf’s presentation at the 2018 Conference of the Universities Art Association of Canada, held at the University of Waterloo, and Ashok Mathur was reflecting. Ashraf was sharing his recent body of work, _Saadi Saqafat (Our Culture)_, in which he produced Urdu transliterations of English texts addressing epistemic and systemic violence, in the attempt to illustrate the paradox of experiencing racism in the settler colonial state of Canada, while being complicit in it. From where I stood, I saw in this work a slow cancellation of both English and Urdu readers and everyone else as aimless recruits in the decolonial project. However, Mathur articulated a profound extension of Ashraf’s work and an exit out of this bind; here, I’m paraphrasing, and adding my own inflection: “If linguistic difference can be used to alienate groups from each other, then it could also be re-mediated to bring them closer to the surface, to empathize.” I have since wondered what forms such surfacing might take, especially if it was activated between groups that have been simultaneously marginalized by the colonial state, and find myself looking to Indigenous artists and curators to understand the ways in which they have negotiated enforced linguistic suppression within and amongst their communities. 

This search eventually brought me to a collection-based group exhibition, _ᐃ_, curated by Jaimie Isaac and Jocelyn Piirainen, which brings together sculptural works by First Nations and Inuit artists. This exhibition was exciting, not least because it was one of the few in Canada to explicitly curate under the banner of 2019 as the United Nations’ designated International Year of Indigenous Languages. Naming the research and exhibition project _ᐃ_ is significant in that it is a symbol that translates to “I,” in both Inuktitut and Anishininiwak syllabics, thus appropriate for negotiating the ways in which both linguistic groups have endeavoured to practice self-determination for themselves and in solidarity. 

_ᐃ_ is presented in the vestibule of the Muriel Richardson Auditorium at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG). Bringing event attendees and gallerygoers alike through its neon hail is _ᓂᓄᐦᑌ ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐘᐣ (ninohtēnēhiyawān)_ (2017) by Joi T. Arcand, produced for the landmark _Insurgence/Resurgence_ exhibition, curated by Julie Nagam and Jaimie Isaac in 2017, and recently acquired for the WAG’s permanent collection. Translating to “I want to speak Cree,” Arcand’s is the only contemporary work in the exhibition and quite literally sheds light on the selection of historical stone carvings produced by The Ministic Sculpture Co-operative in Garden Hill First Nation, Manitoba, and clay sculptures from the Rankin Inlet Co-operative in Nunavut. 

While the didactics for this exhibition are brief, thus pointing to the amount of scholarly work still needed to be done on these two Indigenous art collectives, they still provide some historical insight on their artistic and educational overlaps. The Ministic Sculpture Co-op travelled to Rankin Inlet in 1968 to learn about Inuit stone carving and also to understand the ways in which Arctic arts co-ops organized themselves and advocated for their practices. Unbeknownst to the Ministic group, it was also at this time that a ceramics program was introduced to the Rankin Inlet artists by the federal government’s Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. Through the use of textbooks and samples, artists were educated about the methods, forms and aesthetics of Indigenous pottery from southern Canada. The result of this confluence between the two groups at this particular time was an ambitious production of stone and clay sculptures, only a small grouping displayed here, drifting between Abstraction, Surrealism and Zoomorphism. 

Walking through the curators’ imaginative reconstruction of this period of high artistic experimentation and exchange, it becomes difficult to discern what might be attributed to artists from the North, and what might characterize the stamp of the South. Experimental in their own right, the curators brought together such diversity not by isolating or providing verbose descriptions, but by creating aesthetic or affective overlaps between the two collections. For example, in one vitrine, a natural affinity is drawn between four arthropodal sculptures produced by Dwight Keno, Peter Inukshuk, Nick Beardy and George Arlook. The creatures are sculpted in the round and in semi-relief, their shared playfulness moving beyond the surface of representation to animate the joys of their makers, breaking rules of both form and material previously fixed upon them. Because, according to Isaac and Piirainen, there is little archival evidence of these groups’ activities both together and apart, we are left to imagine what Beardy, from Manitoba, would have seen in the work of Arlook, from Nunavut, or if their simultaneous attempts to borrow from each other’s methods would have given them a common visual language with which to speak to one another, and be understood. The joy of this exhibition comes from revelling in this cross-pollination, and speculating about its effects on the parties involved. 

The Ministic sculptures have been in the WAG’s custody since the 1960s, whereas the Inuit clay sculptures entered the collection in 2016 as a result of a long-term loan from the Government of Nunavut to support the gallery’s ongoing curation of Inuit art. In creating this seemingly unprecedented encounter, the curators join a global discussion on the responsibility to indigenize and decolonize Western museum collections, and share a unique historical exchange. In re-positioning the work of First Nations and Inuit artists around Arcand’s contemporary plea, “I want to speak Cree,” the curators tug at a collective desire to use language as a means to transcend limitations placed on Indigenous culture, historically, and build cross-cultural empathies. _ᐃ_ brings me to the surface and holds me there, as if to spell out the vastness of this decolonial universe.

Writer

Criticism, Again

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Indigenous

Noor Bhangu reviews _ᐃ_ at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, featuring Joi T. Arcand, George Arlook, Pierre Aupilardjuk, Esaias Beardy, Nick Beardy, Elizabeth Flett, Phillip Hakuluk, Jeremiah Harper, Stanley Houle, Peter Inukshuk, ToonaIquliq, Octave Tigumiak Kappi, David Keno, Dwight Keno,Jacob Keno, Nelson Keno, Saunders Keno, Jonas Little, Anthony Manernaluk, Paul McKay, John Pangnark, Yvo Samgushak, Robert Tatty and unidentified artists (November 8, 2019–ongoing).

ᐃ: Joi T. Arcand, George Arlook, Pierre Aupilardjuk, Esaias Beardy, Nick Beardy, Elizabeth Flett, Philip Hakuluk, Jeremiah Harper, Stanley Houle, Peter Inukshuk, Toona Iquliq, Octave Tigumiak Kappi, David Keno, Dwight Keno, Jacob Keno, Nelson Keno, Saunde

**David Balzer** is a writer, editor and educator living in Tkaronto/Toronto. He is the author of the short-fiction collection _Contrivances_ and the nonfiction study _Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else_. 

The gist of Benjamin Moser’s recent 800-page biography of Susan Sontag is that there were two of her: the “Susan” and the “Sontag.” If this has been a common dilemma of the celebrity who is now anyone with access to a camera phone—the projected persona and the private, vulnerable person, guarded close—it has also been a queer passing thing. Traits are turned on and off according to when and where it feels most safe to do so. The hand on the switch is generally thought to be the brain, the conscious mind. And so, another dilemma of Susan Sontag’s in this very queer biography by a queer author: disembodiment, and the question, if I don’t have my brain, what do I have? 

In this way, _Sontag_ makes a paradox of its subject’s lifelong critical analysis of how thinking in metaphors can be vulgar, reductive, violent, unsatisfactory. Why not, Sontag asked in works such as “Against Interpretation” (1966) and _Illness as Metaphor_ (1978), focus on what is rather than what _is like_? Sontag’s closeted desire for women scrambled this conviction (she never wrote about being gay, and was terrified of being outed by the media). So did her self-awareness as a public intellectual, a girl of the zeitgeist dependent on what she published to represent her, only to dismiss it months or years later like last season’s slacks. (In 1973, _The Harvard Crimson_ wrote of Sontag, “When the cultural wind shifts, she rustles in the breeze.”) What Sontag eventually demanded of her life, Moser suggests, became the opposite of what she demanded in her criticism: take me for what I am like, for what I aspire to, for whatever I choose to give you. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Consequently, a reader splashes through _Sontag_’s first half and feels cold, creeping shadows in its second. The utopia of queer ambition; the apocalypse of its praxis. 

It is indeed thrilling to read a biography that focuses so vibrantly on the formative development of a queer intellect. At _Sontag_’s start, nothing feels tragic even when it should. Susan’s remote alcoholic mother, Mildred (“the queen of denial”), sips vodka on ice from a tall glass while asking guests if they’d also like some water. (Moser compares her, and later Susan, to Joan Crawford.) When Susan’s family moves to Tucson, Susan is so pleased with the minimalist desert landscape that she hugs a cactus. Susan is desperate to become popular, and succeeds. (Of the bunk beds she shares with her sister Judith: “Susan inevitably was on top.”) Moser’s description of Susan’s high school years in Sherman Oaks, California—“bleak and intellectually starved”—recalls Rosalind Russell’s Auntie Mame, who dictates flamboyantly to her memoirist, “how bleak was my puberty.” 

Sontag’s queerness is Moser’s chief fixation. She wanted to abolish “distinction\[s\],” he writes, “not because she was Jewish. Because she was gay.” In a chapter entitled “The Color of Shame,” Moser includes the key, queer lines from _Reborn_ (2008), the first published volume of Sontag’s journals: “the incipient guilt I have always felt about my lesbianism—making me ugly to myself,” and, from a later entry, Sontag’s resolve to use writing as a weapon, because “my desire to write is connected with my homosexuality.” Moser stresses Sontag’s reading of Djuna Barnes’s cult-classic lesbian novel _Nightwood_ (1936), whose decadent characters blur what is and what is like. Sontag’s first girlfriend, Harriet Sohmers, would use “Have you read _Nightwood_?” as a pickup line. (Hot.) Sontag slept with 36 people in her second year at Berkeley, the lovers’ names listed in her journal under the title “The Bi’s Progress.” 

When Moser tells of 17-year-old Sontag marrying 27-year-old academic Philip Rieff after knowing him for a week, things take a turn. What is like becomes horrific: Sontag reads _Middlemarch_ (1872) during this time and realizes she is exactly like George Eliot’s heroine, Dorothea Brooke, who marries the feckless, musty intellectual Edward Casaubon. What is becomes unfathomable: Sontag gets pregnant but ignores her body, thinking, when her water breaks, that she has peed the bed. Sontag’s intellectual identity is severed: she ghostwrites the book still attributed to Rieff, _Freud: The Mind of the Moralist_ (1959). Few Sontag studies dwell on this book as Sontag’s official first, and Moser’s use of the phrase “she writes” while quoting from it feels defiant. 

Among the subsequent stories about post-divorce, Bright Young Thing Sontag, the queer encounters stand out: playwright María Irene Fornés (she “could make a rock come,” says Sohmers), the duchess Carlotta del Pezzo (Garbo-esque in her druggy indolence), Cocteau star Nicole Stéphane (she and Carlotta were two of the “four hundred lesbians in Europe,” according to Sontag), Camille Paglia (who did not fuck Sontag but named her as rival, trying unsuccessfully to start a “trashy literary \[feud\]”). Sontag had passionless sex with Warren Beatty and Robert Kennedy, and her first male-induced orgasm with John F. Kennedy aide Dick Goodwin (yes, his real name). “Oh shit,” Sontag recalled of the orgasm. “Now I’m just like everybody else.” 

She most certainly was not. In fact, it’s always been a sport to try to cut Sontag down to size, and though Moser acknowledges this, he does it too, in passages that can feel extraneous, competitive and bitchy. (One rarely goes to a biography for in-depth negative criticism of the subject’s body of work.) Sontag’s musings on the Cuban revolution are, Moser writes, “fuzzy, unsubstantiated.” Like a bad editor, Moser chastises Sontag for what makes her herself—her shoot-from-the-hip, epigrammatic style. Sontag may have been a dilettante in Vietnam, but at least she had the courage to go, and to write, in 1967’s “What’s Happening in America,” that “the white race _is_”—italics hers—“the cancer of human history.” (As a cancer survivor, Sontag would later apologize for the metaphor, nothing else.) Moser also jabs at Sontag’s body and its functions, recalling David Plante’s pseudo-misogynist characterization of Germaine Greer in _Difficult Women_ (1983). Sontag loved “excremental food,” such as chicken feet (she’d chase down the dim sum cart for them), and had difficulty bathing regularly (probably due to her lifelong struggle with depression, a connection Moser doesn’t make). 

Sontag’s exceptionalism was her own undoing. In no uncertain terms, her later-in-life relationship with photographer Annie Leibovitz was abusive, and though Leibovitz would take Sontag’s merciless criticisms about not being smart enough in valiant stride, Moser makes them painful to visit. “They were the worst couple I’ve ever seen in terms of unkindness, inability to be nice, held resentments,” Sontag’s son, David Rieff, is quoted as saying. “I said to \[Susan\] more than once, ‘Look, either be nicer to her or leave her.’” When Sontag had her last, fatal bout with cancer, Rieff would, at times, refuse to come to her bedside. After her negative prognosis, Sontag would claim to a doctor’s assistant to have “no spiritual values” and “no friends.” (On her deathbed, she preferred watching Old Hollywood musicals to Bergman films.) 

Terry Castle’s 2005 _London Review of Books_ essay “Desperately Seeking Susan” is a loving lampoon of a sometime lover. Castle writes of how Sontag told her about being in Sarajevo, where Sontag put on a production of Samuel Beckett’s _Waiting for Godot_ during the Bosnian War. In Palo Alto, Sontag conveys to Castle what it’s like to dodge sniper fire, ducking in and around Restoration Hardware in her drapey “intellectual diva outfit.” But Moser’s depiction of what Sontag did in Sarajevo is not funny, not camp. In Sarajevo, the distinction between what is and what is like had to dissolve for Sontag, not only because of the brutality of war, but also because of the imperative to relate. Risking one’s life to uphold the humanizing aspects of art and culture, seeing art and culture as sustenance itself when everything else falls away—that is a queer thing, too. 

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David Balzer reviews Houston-born writer Benjamin Moser’s portrait of American intellectual Susan Sontag, published by Ecco in 2019.

Sontag: Her Life and Work: Benjamin Moser

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Sontag: Her Life and Work: Benjamin Moser

ᐃ: Joi T. Arcand, George Arlook, Pierre Aupilardjuk, Esaias Beardy, Nick Beardy, Elizabeth Flett, Philip Hakuluk, Jeremiah Harper, Stanley Houle, Peter Inukshuk, Toona Iquliq, Octave Tigumiak Kappi, David Keno, Dwight Keno, Jacob Keno, Nelson Keno, Saunde

Truth to Material: Krista Belle Stewart

On Venus: Patrick Staff