Art and Cold Cash

Everyone reading this, as well as the one writing it, lives within the horizon of a world-historical event so profound that we hardly have words to describe it.
Specialists speak of it as the disappearance of hunter-gatherer societies, or the final knitting of all humankind into the single market economy of metropolitan capitalism. But this disinterested language cannot express the loss we feel when we ponder the imminent vanishing of the earth’s last Palaeolithic cultures. Critics on both the left and right advise us not to “romanticize” these cultures; and, indeed, those who are victors in this vast scenario of destruction have been all too ready to lapse into easy pathos and self-satisfied nostalgia about the “primitives” whom industrialized civilization is displacing and eradicating. Yet for anyone who has read even a little of the vast library of poetry, narrative and ritual collected from diminishing Palaeolithic people over the last two centuries, the extinction of these universes of human experience, beauty and knowledge of the divine can hardly seem like anything other than catastrophe.
The work of the Art and Cold Cash collective, based in London, Ontario, and Baker Lake, Nunavut, has been made on one frontier of this disaster, as it is now being undergone by one ancient people, the Inuit of Canada’s Arctic. But I do not want to put words in their mouths. The MOCCA exhibition of drawings and videos made by the collective and friends--artists Jack Butler, Sheila Butler, Patrick Mahon, William Noah, Myra Kukiiyaut, writer Ruby Arngna'naaq, and others--takes as its official topic, its “key factor” (according to a wall text), the quite recent transition from barter to market economies among the Inuit of Baker Lake. The approach to this matter, says the collective’s website (http://www.artcoldcash.ca), is “investigative.” And, in fact, the documentary videos, especially, do offer the viewer critical insight into the contemporary Inuit experience of modernization, which the people of Baker Lake appear to be taking in stride, however bemused they may be by its novelty and energetic consumerism.
The drawings in this show are meant to be similarly investigative in character, and, to a degree, they serve as memorials to the disjunctures that civilization has introduced into the north. A monumentally scaled acrylic work on paper by Inuit artist William Noah, for example, juxtaposes a bush plane with an Inuk in traditional garb and goggles for winter hunting--a bold, simple statement, with no commentary needed or wanted, of the contrast between the fast and new, and the old, slow and patient.
But the drawings also take us well beyond the stated agenda of the collective, into the scene of the deeper cultural emergency. The graphite pictographic sketches and the poems of Myra Kukiiyaut are subtle, delicately painful evocations of her daily life among the contradictions and alienations that have been visited upon her. To one drawing, she has attached the following text:
helicopter
this is useful
this is flour
this is baking powder
this is very costly
this is very expensive
this is what is on their minds
this land is far away
Kukiiyaut has become preoccupied with the list of things that are “on their minds,” things that are now on everyone’s mind, whether in the north or south: the cost of newly necessary commodities, the inescapable facts of rational, mechanized civilization bearing down, like attack helicopters, on whatever is personal, secret, mythic within us. And, in the process, she has been distanced from the land that once supported her amply, and supplied her with the food of story, without which everyone withers and perishes. In these lines and in Kikliyaut’s poignant drawings, we sense the passing away of a world, and its replacement by weightless anxiety.
The dread of modernity, though not so finely stated as in Kikiiyaut’s work, also pervades the drawings of the southern Canadian artists in this show. In Sheila Butler’s large, loosely worked pieces on paper, the north’s newfound capitalism is depicted as a version of what southerners presumably experience all the time: a vicious circulation of industrial and consumer products--helicopters, television sets--accompanied by the incessant spectacle of money changing hands. Someone at a drafting table sketches a bag of money at the end of a rainbow: a dispiriting icon of the artist in capitalist culture, whose ultimate subject in both life and art (so it is represented here) is the endless quest for ever-elusive cash. As things are in the south, we are told by these angry works, so are they in the north, with cash exchange dissolving everything into an image of itself.
Three of Jack Butler’s four furiously painted gouaches in red and black--the most involving works in this exhibition--are, like Sheila Butler’s drawings, urgent essays on the self-consumption of art in capitalist culture. “What becomes precious?” one exasperated painting asks, in English and in Inuit syllabics. The answer, at least in sensible societies (or so I gather from this complex, agitated picture) is a tool or a person, not the abstract dollar signs whispering all around us.
But not every work by Jack Butler is so directly polemical. In the provocative gouache entitled this one thing I know--a line from Gavin Bryars’ haunting 1971 musical composition Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet--Butler skips free of all narrative constraint, and delivers up a phantasmal vision of the ancient, myth-making mind at the end of its tether. A snake with an engorged penis and the head of a gasping or screaming man springs from the painterly turmoil of this work, toward a floating foetus. Joined are two primordial emblems of transfiguration and renewal--the serpent, the unborn child--yet the pair here are mere potentialities stuck in permanent unfulfillment: the snake doomed never to mate and reproduce, the child fated never to be born.
In Jack Butler’s drawing, we glimpse the destiny of the brilliant Palaeolithic imagination in our time: to be recalled a little while longer--for one final sunset moment--in the beautiful tales and poems garnered by ethnographers and in carvings and drawings of the kind created for the southern market at Baker Lake, then to vanish from human consciousness, without issue, and without hope of resurrection. Though the collective does not intend it to be so, the work of Art and Cold Cash is a witness made in the dusk, an act of mourning for something infinitely valuable that humankind is losing forever.

Art and Cold Cash, with work by the Art and Cold Cash collective and Myra Kukiiyaut. The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen Street West, 3 February to 11 March 2007.