Out of Place
Saelan Twerdy
I have to confess that I have never been much of an outdoors person. On my family’s many camping trips as a child, I could invariably be found sequestered in the car – or at best, in a tent or next to a body of water – reading a book. As an adult, I pretty categorically do not camp. I identify as a city person, which is not to say I am totally insensitive to the pleasures of nature. Growing up in “Super, Natural British Columbia,” propaganda for the sublimity of the province’s mountains, ocean, and vast acres of conifer forest was hard to avoid, and I did not fail to be wowed by the Rockies on road trips to the interior, or by orcas spotted from the deck of a ferry in the Georgia Strait. Living in Vancouver in my twenties, I took it for granted that the mountain vistas and the proximity to the Pacific were great and wonderful things, if personally only to be enjoyed passively and aesthetically, since I was in no way keen to participate in the city’s Mountain Equipment Co-op-supplied penchant for hiking, mountaineering, kayaking, mountain biking, and other such uncomfortable and expensive pursuits. I was proud to be a sedentary ectomorph.
Moreover, the beauty of British Columbia never struck me as particularly hospitable to human habitation. I found the landscape of my youth mostly alienating and depressing, hemmed in as it was by craggy peaks and crowded by dour, rain-bowed pines. On trips by plane, it was hard to pick out human settlements amid the primeval heavings of tree-crusted rock. Despite regular sightings of clear-cutting, it was hard to imagine that humans could make any significant dent in the seemingly inexhaustible forest (they can and have). It was that Canadian Gothic feeling of being somehow menaced by the enormity of the wilderness, which, especially from a plane, looks endless and empty. That aerial view, embodied in maps before it was accessible to airplane passengers, is of course a settler colonial perspective par excellence in that it allows for seeing the land as both other and unoccupied (handily effacing the presence of Indigenous peoples), open to the calculation of exploitable profit at the same time as the earth becomes an antagonist resisting the efforts of resource extractors – though all this was something I’d only become cognizant of much later. Still, I remember my first time flying over Ontario and Quebec and being astonished at the difference in topography: so flat, and so riddled with lakes. At the time, it seemed like a less hostile countryside, though visions of mosquitoes buzzing above stagnant water sprung to mind.
All of this is to say that “the wilderness” has always been something at the outside edges of my awareness but never a matter of central concern for me. Indeed, the question of national identity itself – which is, in Canada, inextricable from representations of the wilderness, especially those inherited from painters like Emily Carr and the Group of Seven – seemed largely extraneous to me for most of my life. More accurately, nationalism and landscape painting seemed equally dated and uncool. Much more desirable (at least apparently) was the aspiration to be cosmopolitan and post-national, especially for someone involved with the highly mobile art world, in which being based in a single city, rather than “between” two or more of them, seemed like a handicap.
This ideology of nomadism, though still pretty dominant today, was primarily a product of the globalizing 1990s. After the post-9/11 resurgence of nationalisms and fundamentalisms, however, the previously utopian prospect of a world spanned by diverse, frictionless flows has been both physically constricted and theoretically challenged from numerous quarters. What travels most freely, it turns out, is money, and the people and practices most able to function like currency: modular, exchangeable entities not tied to any piece of land or burdened by commitments or obligations of too pressing a nature[a1] (debts, political convictions, citizenship, bonds of family, ethnicity, or love). Corporations are the obvious villains of globalization, but these conditions also force artists into a conflicted position – they are called upon to testify to the discontents of global capitalism while, at the same time, they are idealized as liberated from the constraints of any conventional ties or loyalties.[i] Nevertheless, a modicum of identity is always called for to differentiate oneself on the international stage – the difference that nationality represents can always be capitalized upon, even if the artist is an expat living a great distance from the wellspring of local particularity they draw upon.
Which partly explains why I spent my first Wild Bush residency working on an off-topic essay about a Canadian artist living abroad who, when I mentioned the project’s theme of wilderness and its relation to national identity and the history of landscape art, reacted with something resembling both caution and distaste.[ii] Such themes uncomfortably evoke the unglamorous ground level of artistic production above which the high-flying global contemporary art scene supposedly soars: the world of stubborn regionalism and local history, of community arts and public funding with all its attendant bureaucracy, of uninformed or nonexistent audiences, and especially of civic and state agendas with regard to art and culture. For artists actually working in Canada, contact (and conflict) with these agendas and the funding bodies they support are all but inevitable, and part of the impetus of the Wild Bush seemed to be an interest in the various forms of communalist, DIY, and off-the-radar initiatives that artists have developed to make up for the shortcomings of existing institutions.
In other words, if we don’t want to be forced into “professionalized precarity” (a term I’m borrowing from Jackie Maybe) forever, we need to think about the material infrastructures that support our endeavours, and how we can develop and nurture them – preferably without having to either yoke ourselves to the state or drop out altogether, like the wilderness communalists of the Sixties – and this means investing in a specific place and what it means for people to share it. In Canada, it’s impossible to think about space and land without the history of colonialism and Indigenous struggle, or without resource extraction and looming environmental crisis. How this country has been imagined in the minds of people here and elsewhere matters, and so the Wild Bush has been, in part, about finding new ways to imagine our relationship to landscape.
Mainly, I’d say we had fun. At Lac Paquin in 2013, a group of mostly non-outdoorsy people made art – paintings, photographs, performances, props, and in one case, a floating, mobile sculpture – that functioned as a slightly comic pantomime of stereotypical outdoorsy pursuits. Later that summer, in Switzerland, the primary difference was that all of the artists actually seemed fit, athletic, and perfectly at home in the wild. When they went hiking up the side of mountains, they went with proper footwear and extremely detailed maps. In other words, while the Swiss projects that came out of the residency in Amden weren’t humourless, the idea of a nature trek wasn’t inherently ridiculous to the Swiss artists. They had a level of comfort and familiarity with the outdoors that (surprisingly enough) the Canadians lacked. It was a different context. It was also a good opportunity for me to reflect on how parochial my disinvestment in Canadian identity actually seemed as soon as I was outside of Canada, where my main pursuit became the cataloguing of differences in national habits. Most of what I knew about the worldliness of the art world was gleaned from magazines anyway, since I was in fact not at all well traveled. So both my first and second Wild Bush tours turned out to be principally vacations. One, a weekend in cottage country, and the other, an opportunity to embrace the clichés of the North American tourist in Europe – an opportunity which I seized with vigour, as photos of me dragging Amber through the various crowded sights of Paris, the Swiss Alps, and Italy will attest.
While it remains to be seen, my feeling is that this summer’s installment is meant to be the “serious” Wild Bush. Previous iterations resulted in mostly ephemeral products – experiences, connections, studies, sketches, and experiments – which a forthcoming publication[a2] will render more concrete. Gathering writers together is a way of making the residency’s knowledge-producing function a little more formal. As before, I’m honoured to be included even if I feel a little out of place.
[i] Part of the artist’s economic role, it would seem, is to make precarious freelancing look like a glamorous lifestyle choice instead of the crippling necessity it is for so many.
[ii] It is a nice coincidence that the text in question was commissioned by Rosemary Heather who also spurred Jacob Wren’s first forays into art writing.
[a1]Is this a pun?
[a2]This would be a weird line to include in said forthcoming publication…