Straight Timber
Post 26: Léo Doiron, Stephen May, William Commanda, Ian Lumsden, Shirley Thomson
In June 2000, having completed my doctorate in Montreal, I returned to New Brunswick as founding Executive Director of the New Brunswick Arts Board (ArtsNB).
Léo Doiron. Politician. Veteran. Real Estate Agent. (10 April 2000, Shediac.) Premier Bernard Lord’s first campaign manager. Perennial candidate under multiple party banners for various levels of government. Knows everyone in Shediac but is new to real estate. Lost the last federal Liberal nomination to a resourceful opponent who bussed in children from up north—a pizza slice per vote. Well, how that scheme fizzled when Angela Vautour took the seat for the NDP and then defected to the Tories! Says he’ll help me out should I take the Arts Board offer. The Moody Blues play loudly on an under-dash-mounted eight-track. Léo is good company, highly persuasive, nudging me toward the Primrose beach property, which in fact is the most interesting possibility.
Stephen May. Painter. (undated, ca. 2001, Fredericton.) Stephen cornered me today, rejecting-on-principle any grant funding sourced from government lotteries. Until that moment I felt chuffed for having unlocked, through delicate interventions with the Deputy Minister of Finance, more than a million dollars of unallocated lottery funds earmarked for the arts. Stephen’s repudiation has left me a little crestfallen. Apparently, my windfall is no better than a tobacco sponsorship.
Lotteries are vile, yes, but let’s try a thought experiment: a draw is established to raise funds to buy a Stephen May for the provincial art bank. People play this lottery knowing it supports to the arts. Should they be denied that opportunity?
I’ve selected one of Stephen’s large works (an Art Bank purchase) to hang beside my door in the Arts Board’s offices near the legislature. We’ve set up here with the help of the kindly owner, Mr. DiGiacinto, who has opened a major wall to create an airy and bright jury room with large windows. The jury table commissioned from Bruce Gray, a talented woodworker upriver in Douglas, was milled from a majestic ash taken down outside Albert St. Junior High. The Art Bank’s paintings and sculptures bring the old brick bus terminal to life—an uplifting office environment. (I’m certain that New Brunswick’s long tradition of exceptional painters one day will be ‘discovered’ by curators from away.)
It is a favourite May painting, this toy goat on the armrest of a wicker chair, more in focus than his habitual Bonnard-like haziness. I met Stephen at nineteen, Ernest Bauer’s roommate at Mount Allison. They acted in a credible student production of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. From Ottawa and elsewhere I’ve watched him evolve as a painter.
His objection is but the artist’s jab at the salaried cultural worker. But it gnaws. I think of Alex Colville’s ‘Ocean Limited’ painting: a man strides east across the Tantramar marshland, ignoring the train speeding towards him, headed to central Canada.
Stephen’s choice has been to resist compromise, to remain in the Maritimes, unsalaried, to strive for independence as an artist. This set against the stasis, insularity, and deference necessary to subsistence as a painter in this out-of-the-way place. His introspective subject matter draws from domestic minutiae, the still life. Perhaps in me he discerns a picaresque contrast between “one who leaves” versus “one who stays.” Mine hasn’t by any means been a still life; neither could I say less sovereign.
William Commanda. Algonquin Elder. (2 December 2000, Ottawa.) As New Brunswick delegates to the first World Summit of the Arts, organized by the Canada Council, Richard Hornsby and I mingle in the Chateau Laurier with visitors from around the globe. With everyone believing that arm’s-length arts councils offer the preferred “peer reviewed” method for state funding, there is little friction of opinion. Algonquin Elder, William Commanda, aged eighty-six, next to me at a lunch in the Ballroom, is youthful, jovial, a twinkle in his eyes.
The tall dangerously thin African across the table, impeccably dressed, aloof, is suffering HIV-AIDS. Finally, he smiles when William produces a small root from his pocket. “Chew on this,” he says. “It is one of our medicines.” William has about him an air of the ‘open’ that brings the artistic and creative spirit into play. We are listening to Heritage Minister Sheila Copps read her speech from a spongy riser when the spindly pole holding up the Canadian flag unfortunately topples over behind her.
…Jean Chrétien sweeps into the Adam Room with his entourage, flushed from winning a third majority government. Clearly not briefed on the international ambit of the conference, he knows it concerns the arts. “I’m sure not one of you voted for me,” he chuckles, gesturing expansively. “But, you know, I support you anyway!” The mystified delegates applaud, indulging the PM’s fine mood.
Shirley Thomson, the Canada Council’s Director, along with its Chair, veteran actor Jean-Louis Roux, are pioneering this assembly with the aim of creating a world secretariat of arts councils. Their vision of arts bureaucratization—a kind of clubby UNESCO perquisite model—is not so interested in art as a self-organizing force. It is at one with the era’s benign autocratic complacency.
Ian Lumsden. Gallery Director. (5 June 2010, Paris.) Lucian Freud is his grandfather’s grandson, to be sure; there is much conscious/unconscious play in his work. A seminal Freud retrospective at the Pompidou traverses his long career, his preoccupations starting in the 1940s with time, the body, its aura, an astonishing chiasma lurking within the figurative. A sly slow seer.
The introductory text facing his earliest painted image discusses how a body alters the space it occupies, how its ‘aura’ has an impact, how a candle differs from an electric light-source, how these qualities converge in the portraits. I notice that each painting is illuminated by two fixtures, a short tubular fluorescent with a diffuser to wash the wall, and a projector framed precisely on the painted canvas, set to the maximum allowable lumens. The electric light and the candle; fluorescent and incandescent; Freud’s works neither ‘float’ nor are they ‘flattened’; rather their aura stands forth.
In the accompanying video Freud says simply that art must have ‘force’, mere cleverness is not enough. For such force to be transmitted the conditions must be right—as the lighting is here. The difficulty for Freud, being very much his grandfather’s grandson, is that the auras of his subjects (whose “flesh becomes paint,” he asserts) seem displaced by the painter’s own aura. In fact, the transference seems proportional to the ultra-long sittings that can last for years. The painter’s displacement into his subjects—their relative anonymity here works against them—borders on megalomania.
Whose flesh is immanent in this paint? Freud’s. Like flies caught in his totalizing web, the portrait subjects betray more-or-less friendly captivity narratives, re-staged again and again in his bright yet gloomy studio. Studying these thickly built-up surfaces, Freud’s premise that their flesh becomes paint seems disingenuous.
An early realistic Freud that I know well, growing up viewing the Beaverbrook collection in Fredericton, influences this reading: the despair of Freud’s then wife curled on the hotel room bed; the icy self-possession of the artist standing behind her, looking away. I recall the Beaverbrook’s atmosphere under Ian Lumsden’s long directorship: Freudian, in the Lucian sense.
…Lunch with Kyrie and Léa at Le Dome du Marais, an eighteenth-century salon tucked behind a façade on Rue Rambuteau. Our table beneath the centre of the dome provides panoptic coverage of these French businesspeople at their déjeuner. The décor is ‘faded-theatrical’ as opposed to ‘heritage’, yet the restaurant emanates an old-world charm. We savour small-bird salad, raie on a bed of greens, cheeses and exquisite small desserts, with a Cahors wine. At each course our very formal waiter brushes up crumbs and wishes us bon continuation.
Onward to the Musée d’Orsay driven by a Cayman Islander whose enthusiasm is infectious. Masterpieces, casually exposed, occupy the ground floor during this period of renovation. The old gare truly is a treasure house. One work strikes me, a, 1869 Van Gogh self-portrait. Here, the auto-portrait obviates the artist-subject dichotomy that Lucian Freud resolves in his own favour. The aura of Van Gogh as both artist and subject fuses in an intensity that somehow lifts this practically indigent and arguably suicidal figure to become the undisputed leader of this assemblage of great masters. There is absolutely no false consciousness.
I compare it with the poster image for Freud’s retrospective, a self-portrait seen from below, with the artist glaring downwards at the viewer, a hanging lamp above him. Even super-sized in the huge banner on the top of the Pompidou the Englishman must defer to Van Gogh’s thinly pigmented self-portrait. Where Freud positions himself above us, hierarchically, the interrogator’s bright light behind him, Van Gogh’s eyes gaze horizontally into ours—straight on.
Vincent’s direct gaze hints ominously at a different captivity narrative: ‘the status of the artist’ (that we must help him/never can help him). In contrast, Freud’s aura freely takes up space in the world, a larger more ‘successful’ space; we are cued to respect his power as a magus showing us how we are to see the body. Ultimately, though, Vincent’s paint is flesh, and Vincent’s flesh is paint, and it is as if this was what the universe needed to know.
...Today I read of Ian Lumsden’s passing. When I assumed leadership of the NB Arts Board, he was my counterpart at the Beaverbrook Gallery. He’d been there since 1969 and had no interest in my desire to bring forward a provincial cultural policy. A difficult man, really; ingrown in his situation. He made astonishing comments to CBC about Nazi-looted art that cost him his position shortly afterwards. At least he was direct with me about the Beaverbrook being, in its essence, a private gallery not a public one. For that reason, he told me he wouldn’t accept an annual budget subsidy, or formal status for the Beaverbrook as the ‘provincial art gallery.’
Shirley Thomson. Arts administrator. (11 February 2012, Ottawa.) In writing about ‘first architecture’ it occurs to me that ‘Valhalla’ surely must count as last architecture. The heroes have, at Wotan’s order, cut and stacked the cords of ash against the palace on high, awaiting its immolation. The governing motif in Robert Lepage’s Met Ring Cycle is a stump with many rings. This astute visual metaphor for origins/endings suggests that the seed already contains all that follows. The sapling remains embedded deep in the ancient World Ash, whose demise initiates the twilight of the gods.
In Lepage’s stage projections the wood grains warp, evoking Kant—the timber of humanity never did run straight. It is as though, even in first architecture, from that most marvellous instant of creation, an imperceptible bias from the true diverges over time.
Ten years ago, at a Canada Council meeting with provincial and territorial Arts Council directors, Shirley Thomson cited Kant’s crooked timber aphorism, thereby intellectualizing and sublimating a difficult unspoken situation lying between us. “No, Shirley,” I objected. “Arts councils should be straight timber.” Other directors looked on uneasily. Straight timber, I repeated pointedly, not at that moment thinking of ArtsNB’s flowing jury table, its two divergent slabs of stately ash.