Maybe the photographer is saying: it's not about your bodies, but everything in between.
Did artist Paul-Émile Borduas change his mind?
Two women whose spines have been pushed forward by age, as if to bring their noses closer to the truth of the world, tell me a robot will paint a mural at the upcoming festival. It’s something about a gambling game, oil cans, spraying hearts – they’re not fans. I’m standing on pavement in a sauna-esque tent in a heatwave. I’ve lugged art to four markets just this week, all across the Fraser Valley. I’m so tired.
In my undergraduate degree, all the arts students had to take grammar classes but no linguistics student was required to take art. I’m tired because poetry is always optional, and people genuinely think they can let their imaginations run feral with no consequences. Because when I said, how is this beautiful? my ex said: truth isn’t always beautiful.
I’m tired of fitting into someone else’s world, mental or otherwise. “Do you identify as white?” a very white philosophy major asked me at the New West Craft market. It was bakingly hot, sun glinting off the Fraser River next to us, children pulling their parents past my art and straight to the ice cream inside. “I’ve been told my whole life I’m white,” I said. “And I learned pretty quickly that colour isn’t something we get to change, no matter how much we might want to.”
“But do you identify as white?” she asked again. And there I was, building a bridge between what she wanted me to answer (whatever that was) and how I wanted to answer. “There’s a lot of shame and guilt associated with being white,” I said, honestly. “I’m still writing about that. The more I look into my heritage, both in religion and in culture, the more painful it can be. But there are also good things there. And we’re a new generation. We get to change things. What we can’t change is where we come from.”
She wasn’t convinced. She would, perhaps, have liked the work of Paul-Émile Borduas. I find his oil on canvas Blanc et Noir (1958) in the Vancouver Art Gallery. Borduas apprenticed in church decoration in Quebec but then, after traveling to France, he joined the Quiet Revolution (displacing the church in Quebec). Borduas was pressured out of Quebec for these views and painted Blanc et Noir in France. “The growing chasm between spiritual and rational powers,” Borduas’ manifesto says, “is stretched almost to the breaking point.”
Borduas joined with other artists to publish this manifesto, Refus global, ten years before painting Blanc et Noir. I read the whole thing. “How can we not be nauseated by our own cowardice, our helplessness, our weakness, our lack of understanding?” the manifesto asks. It’s scathing in its review of the church’s ties to a “sacred” old Spain, long gone, the committer of atrocities beyond belief. “Although we must acknowledge the past as the birthplace of the future, it is far from sacred. We owe it nothing.”
Did Borduas, ten years after this manifesto and exiled to France, still draw the world in such stern categories? “For Borduas,” the museum note next to Blanc et Noir says, “it was important that the painting not be read as black on white or the reverse, but rather reveal a sense of movement or play between the white and black marks.”
Honestly, his canvas was a relief in an exhibition given over to political art entirely done in one colour or the other – all white, all yellow, all blue, all black. It’s a kindness to slow things down, pare back on colour, but when they’re too still? It’s ominous. You can’t hear the heartbeat. You’re in someone else’s mind. An eternal stillness. Borduas’ painting, with the small mercy of allowing a dialogue between two sets of marks, is a doorway.
Outside the gallery hangs an enormous banner. On it is Blanc et Noir – faded but recognizable – and the exhibition title: “Black & White & Everything in between”.
Underneath the banner a young couple lean against a stone lion. Their photographer gestures wide, wider. The man is pinning the woman to the lion with his back. Or she is holding him there. Maybe the photographer is saying: it is not about your bodies, but everything in between. The woman moves her head and the light strikes a silver earring. It is a shower of sparks. The man keeps his eyes on the photographer. She side-steps up the stone in glittering heels and they turn away from each other. The photographer raises his camera, snaps the sharp angles. •
“I’m tired because poetry is always optional” ooof so good.
I also love the quote about the past not being sacred and not owing it anything!