Visual Arts Thematic Residency, The Banff Centre
May 10 - June 18, 2010
Faculty: Silke Otto-Knapp
Guest Faculty: Geoffrey Farmer, Stefan Kalmár, Tom McDonough, Jan Verwoert

I assumed the Figure in a Mountain Landscape (Reprise) residency at The Banff Centre would be based on outdated concerns toward contemporary art practice; filled with artists who uncritically support landscape art as a relevant thematic. My approach is cynical, as someone having moved from Toronto to a small rural situation, in asking: who cares about landscape in the critical contemporary art world? Considering that The Banff Centre is located in a national park, it is the default to expect that the environment would prove to be a prevalent subject matter in people's work because of the overpowering presence of nature at every turn. When I think nature art, I think realistic depictions, lamentations of the detrimental effects of oil spills, deforestation, etc., discussions of constructed environments, or explorations of the dichotomy of urban vs. rural. It turns out that the interpretation of nature is much looser than I would have expected. All the residencies at The Banff Centre, including FIAML, are rather self-directed and contextually (content-ually) discursive. Even while operating within an overall thematic, different artists and their practices are equally accommodated and encouraged. One artist I spoke with at the beginning of the FIAML residency assumed he would end up painting watercolour mountainscapes before he arrived at the Centre -thinking "well, what else is there to do?", or maybe also considering my question "what else could possibly be expected?" During his time in the residency he continued with his own practice and supplemented it with hikes, trees trunk sculptures and on-site audio recordings in the woods that all informed his ongoing work. The very name of this residency implies a comfortable home within the Rocky Mountain setting; you wouldn't find this residency in an urban environment because it couldn't fulfil its own expectations.

FIAML was also a painting residency, in that all participants founded their practice in this medium on their applications - a priori intentions, possibly based on their pre-conceptions of the tradition of landscape art. The majority of the participating artists did paint, although many ended up with work that was much more multi-media and multi-disciplinary by the end of the six weeks. This shift occurs regularly at the Centre and is indicative of these residents being located in an institution that can accommodate sculpture, print-making, ceramics, metal casting, and anything else their hearts desire. Because of this, artists either broaden or dilute, to both successful and, well, diluted ends. After talking to many artists within this residency and in others residencies, their initial, pre-proposals were often something distant from what they ended up accomplishing during their weeks at the Centre.

What FIAML concluded for me is that the participating artists within the residency were supporting the Centre's legacy by following institutionally prompted interests in nature, landscape, a concept of 'place' as far as urban vs. rural, the emboldening of landscape art, and the dis/replacement of the figure in art. The Banff Centre's visual arts' legacy, since its foundation in 1933, is tied to its facilitation of artist practices that are invested in representing the grandeur of nature and our relationship with it. Within an institution that has built its identity in direct connection to its contextual environment, visual arts residencies that are associated and premised on a 'return to nature' will inevitably continue to be supported, despite some deviations. Everyone comes from both rural and urban communities at any given time during their travels, and not to give concession to the urban over the local or vice versa, but what can one expect from an arts centre located deep within a Canadian national park, except this exact ideological privilege?

My consideration of landscape painting as anachronistic is based in undergraduate Canadian art history courses where I was beaten over the head with the long standing tradition of landscape painting. Since European contact in the 15th century, we can trace the development from map making, to territory marking, to recording Westward pioneer progress, to the Group of Seven as the pinnacle of many people's understanding of Canadian art. Although rather dull and normalized, is not something to be easily dismissed. Recently, I was reading a catalogue essay on the work of Iain Baxter&, Products, Place & Phenomenon, where his work is compared to that of Gerard Richter in relation to both artists' approaches to landscape as a critical foundation to modernity. Curator Robert McKaskell quotes Richter in defence of his landscape work, saying "...though these pictures are motivated by the dream of a classical order and a pristine world - by nostalgia, in other words - the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality." This makes sense when considering a re-evaluation of landscape painting in a contemporary art context, which is possibly the goal of The Banff Centre by continuing to host a painting and landscape residency; nostalgia mixed with the establishment of a subversive turn through maintaining a vice grip on a tradition that is essentially being yawned at. Within the same breathe, McKaskell quotes critic Nancy Shaw who describes Baxter&'s work as "reflecting the industry of landscape." A consideration of landscape painting as a significant component of Canadian cultural economy explains its persistence at the Centre: beating a dead horse that continues to bleed money.

This art residency theme persists because of its cachet and because of its employ of subversiveness grown out of its inability to quit, despite shifts in outside opinions and trajectories. This can be compared with a belief in the nobility of painters who continue in a medium that has been considered deceased at one point or another. These artists are participating in a longstanding and agreeable theme that at the same time must be defended. Nature means being somewhere different than you are normally, recalling opposition and otherness. This comes out of the Romanticist period when artists depicted nature as sublime, spiritual and pure in order to counter the burgeoning industrialization and hustle and bustle of cities. For artists nowadays, particularly younger artists, they are required to work in a city and be connected to a community - dealers, shows, curators, other artists - in order to establish themselves by continuing to exhibit and make additions to their resumes. The Banff Centre, promoted as an escape to nature, is a break from the standard/urbanized art world. Truth is, people consider it as a break from the other aspects of their lives too, taking the opportunity to indulge in drinking, drugs and sex, which could also be considered as a sort of return to primal or natural behaviour. Often considered as a subversive lifestyle (the artist vs. the conservative), it has now become also a bit outdated. The residencies are not retreats, but continuations of other predictable traditions.

From these conditions, assuming one is relieved from normal responsibilities during one's time at The Banff Centre, I believe that the resident artists (me included) have a perverted conception of what this form of nature and isolation is supposed to mean. What can nature mean to people who are trapped in perpetual and overpowering urban existences? Because our contemporary sense of irony trumps our feelings of nostalgia, observed from my own experience and from others', the continuation of residencies on the themes of a nature retreat and landscape art have to be re-evaluated. Although landscape art has a legacy of being the normalized popular theme in Canadian art history, it is now something that can be considered as politically oppositional to the mainstream. I don't think that landscape painting is the new radical, but that it requires continued focus through a method that doesn't continue to consider it as a staple of Canadian art practice; retreat or no retreat.

Reference: McKaskell, Robert. Iain Baxter: Products, Place, Phenomenon. Art Gallery of Windsor, 1998.