Chapter 13 Flashcards
Canada’s 1960s &70s & Development of Canadian Art
- Great Depression
- many gave through depression
- 1950s creation of welfare state
- government policies implemented to give security to Canadians
- programs that give guaranteed minimum income
- public education
- employment creation/insurance
- medical insurance - didn’t exist before war
The Perfect Wife
- during the War Canadian women filled the gap
worked on farms factories offices
- when was was over, assumed women would go back to home
- 1950s was a transformation period as women dont want to go back
Baby Boomers
those born between 1946 - 1951
explosion in births
youth culture in 1960s
rock n roll in premarital sex drugs etc
women movement late 1960s
Canadian women start to form organizations
feminism becomes one of the most witnessed social movements in Canada
Expo 67
two islands
67 countries came
celebrated Canada
largest world fairs
helped bolster national pride
- emphasized modernism cosmopolitanism youth and futurity.
Pop Culture
- commercialized pop culture is evident in bodies of work by Joyce Wieland and Greg Curnoe from he 1960s.
- borrowing imagery, materials, colour schemes and forms of address from the commercial realms of advertising, packaging, movies and comics and then translates them into more meaningful cultural artifacts.
- Canadian art of this time thus has much in common with American Pop Art
POP ART (U.S.) ANDY WARHOL. LEFT: CAMPBELL’S SOUP CANS, 1962; RIGHT: GREEN COCA-COLA BOTTLES, 1962
repetitions of Campbell soup cans
trained artists in NY
was making a comment consumerisms significant in 1960 - lots of money
money was going into unis & artistic institutions
pop art
GREEN COCA-COLA BOTTLES, 1962ANDY WARHOL
POP ART U.S>
Joyce Wieland 1931 - 98
- wife of Michael Snow
- under appreciated female artist in 1900
- in husband’s shadow
- a lot of sexual imagery & humour
- wasn’t taken as seriously with her art
- concerned with feminism & national issues
- involved in film making worked in a variety of media
Wieland 2
- 1960s her turn to figuration was a reaction against abstract art
- Sometimes multiple stories unfold simultaneously down or across the canvases.
- Wieland used this narrative structure to showcase anxieties about sexuality race and violence.
- beginning in the mid 1960s Wieland’s exploration in paint of a pop idiom was largely replaced by other media, film and multimedia collection.
Wieland 3
- Wieland actively protested the Amercan war being waged in Vietnam
- such works N.U.C. Patriotism etc
- Plastic was a eye catching material symbolizing the consumerist ethos of American society.
- her solo exhibition was politicized artmaking,
- the artworks featured stichery embroidery handwriting and quilting
- the flag, anthem, and other symbols and signs of Canadianess thus appeared as every handmade objects that corresponded to Wieland’s left wing feminist and ecological view of what the nation might become.
JOYCE WIELAND, FIRST INTEGRATED FILM WITH A SHORT ON SAILING, 1963, OIL ON CANVAS, 66 X 22.7 CM.
- we are shown three moments of an interracial kiss something that was then virtually taboo on the big and small screens of America.
JOYCE WIELAND , TIME MACHINE SERIES, 1961, OIL ON CANVAS, 203.2 X 269.9 CM.
JOYCE WIELAND, MARCH ON WASHINGTON, 1963
JOYCE WIELAND,
O CANADA, 1970
JOYCE WIELAND, RAT LIFE AND DIET IN NORTH AMERICA, 1968, FILM STILL
produced landscapes in the form of cloth assemblages photographs, and films (rat life) characterized the Canadian natural environment as lush organic and naturally sympathetic to peaceniks.
GREG CURNOE (1936-1992)
–from London Ontario
- studied at the Doon School of Art and the Ontario College of Art
- dissatisfied with what he saw as a contradiction between the perpetuation of High Art Culture and Popular Culture
- -interest in the writings and action of the Dada movement
- returned to London in 1960 and set up his own studio
Curnoe 2
- in this quote, he distinguishes between regionalism and provincialism
- regionalism is the reality of individual and collective living
- provincialism is the uncritical acceptance of imported cultural values
- in his art he works with his own lived experience, his surroundings, his interests, his observations, his family and friends
, BOWERING WESTMOUNT #5, 1967,
- COLLAGE
- dense, paper
- the selections are of local (London) brands –that locate the work within a specific time and place
- comment on consumerism
- but specific to his home town
- this is the artist’s own world
- it involves the rejection of outside values
- was anti-American – against American foreign policies – especially the Vietnam War
GREG CURNOE, HOMAGE TO THE R-34, 1968, (COMMISSIONED FOR MONTREAL’S DORVAL AIRPORT)
- R34, became the first aircraft to make an east to west transatlantic flight in July 1919
- this was the time of EXPO 67
- was controversial because many Americans were arriving in Montreal
- the image contains controversial comments on American foreign policy
- airport officials and the Federal and provincial governments wanted it removed
- hidden away in the vaults of the National Gallery – not displayed again until 2003