‘Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories’

by Karen Duffek and Tania Willard

“Unceded Territories,” Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s recent 30-year survey exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), drew record numbers of visitors, both to its thronging opening and through its spectacular run. The companion publication, extensively illustrated with Yuxweluptun’s brilliant and distinctive paintings, has met with equal success. It sold out almost immediately and is now well into its second printing. It also won the 2016 Vancouver Book Award for its principal authors, Karen Duffek and Tania Willard, who curated the show. These are astonishing signs of affirmation and admiration from a public largely composed of the demographic that Yuxweluptun skewers in his work. “I give society what it gives me,” he has said, “and it’s not a pretty picture.”

Based in Vancouver, of Cowichan and Okanagan descent, Yuxweluptun has used his paintings to call out the legacy of colonialism, including systemic racism and continuing injustices to the Indigenous peoples of British Columbia. His subjects include the Indian Act, the reserve system, cultural genocide and residential school abuses, the failures of the land claims process, and the need for cultural and geographic sovereignty. He also spotlights environmental degradation, whose impact is felt not only by First Nations peoples, their lives and livelihoods dependent upon the lands and waters of this place, but also by the rest of us British Columbians. Oil spills, clear-cuts, mine disasters, climate change, declining fish stocks and imperilled marine mammals all have been targeted in this artist’s large, powerful and frequently sardonic canvases, which Yuxweluptun describes as “history paintings.” In contradistinction to his otherwise relentless inventory of societal wrongs, political perfidy and corporate greed (a recent series, titled “Super Predators,” takes aim at politicians, corporate bosses, globalized control of local resources and the privileged 1 per cent) is his faith in Indigenous cultural sovereignty, the power of the land and the personal healing possibilities of his people’s spiritual life. The latter is articulated in paintings and drawings of sacred dances and secret ceremonies within fire-lit Coast Salish longhouses.

The book’s texts, anchored by what are essentially two intertwined essays in the form of a dialogue between Duffek and Willard, includes a no-holds-barred artist’s statement and contributions by Glenn Alteen, Marcia Crosby, Jimmie Durham, Larry Grant, Lucy R Lippard and Michael Turner. Most of the contributors probe and contextualize the historic and contemporary issues addressed by Yuxweluptun’s art. (Crosby’s “photo essay”—a scholarly paper accompanied by historic photographs—brings to light “public cultural practices” by Salish people in the early decades of the 20th century.) They also examine his strategic use of modernist art techniques, from surrealism to hard-edge abstraction, his brilliant and sometimes “acrid” palette, his monumental scale and his highly innovative deployment of the forms and motifs of the “traditional” painting of the northern Northwest Coast, originally seen on such things as dance screens, house fronts and wooden chests. His Aboriginal figures are constructed out of U-forms and ovoids, and their heads take the shape of generalized ceremonial masks. (Politicians and government bureaucrats, wearing dark suits and carrying briefcases, are represented more naturalistically, although again may be masked.) Landscape features such as trees, rivers and mountains may be similarly composed, with mask-like faces that convey the belief that the natural environment is alive, “enspirited.” Yuxweluptun calls his style “visionism” and says, “The symbolic forms are interchangeable, based on my needs when I make a painting. The symbolism transforms into landscape and other forms to create a vision.”

Yuxweluptun’s issue-driven practice, which is dominated by painting but has also included sorties into performance, video and new media art, may strike viewers as furious, provocative, “inflammatory.” Grant, a Musqueam Elder and adjunct professor with the UBC First Nations Language Program, describes it as an expression of “anger and anguish.” Yuxweluptun, however, tells curators and journalists that he is not angry, that he is simply telling it like it is. His paintings are a way, he says, of “taking possession of history”—history past and present. Yuxweluptun’s art is also, Willard and Duffek point out, a means of folding modernism’s primitivist impulse back upon itself.

Yuxweluptun, who studied at Emily Carr Institute (now University) of Art and Design, frequently declares that he is “not a traditionalist,” and has very deliberately refused to communicate his themes through longestablished Northwest Coast First Nations art forms such as masks and poles carved in cedar. (He poses the provocative question of how it would be possible to use a totem pole to depict residential school children being sexually abused by priests.) Lippard recounts that “for decades, a simmering dilemma for contemporary Native artists has been [whether] to claim ethnicity or to downplay and even ignore ethnicity.” Yuxweluptun very clearly identifies himself as First Nations, but as clearly states, “I’m not making Native art…. My work is for the world.”

Such declarations make it all the more paradoxical that, after years of showing his art in dominant culture museums of “high art,” he agreed to having this ambitious 30-year survey mounted at MOA, an institution he has long called “The Morgue.” (He has also spoken with disparaging humour about having to shake off all the anthropologists “humping his leg” over the course of his career.) His assessment of MOA suggests he sees it as a place in which Indigenous art has been separated from its social cultural functions, rendering it dead, its complex meanings defunct. It also suggests that it’s a place where Indigenous cultures are frozen in time, alienated from their living histories and their evolving futures. (Certainly, anthropology seems to locate non-Western art in a condition of otherness.) Most of the book’s writers take up this subject, but they all happily conclude that MOA’s role is itself expanding and evolving, that as an institution it is questioning conventional processes of classification and curation and opening itself up to new ways of representing world cultures. Willard, an uncompromising visual artist as well as an independent curator and a member of the Secwepemc Nation, declares that museums “can be places of conversation, sharing, respect, celebration and laughter.”

When I interviewed Yuxweluptun last fall, shortly before “Unceded Territories” opened, he said that he had reached a point in his career in which he could exhibit at MOA without feeling compromised. “I never needed to be validated by the institution,” he told me. “If I do show there, they’re just validating themselves.” Still, he did not appear entirely resolved about the situation, adding, “It is a strange thing to be a modernist artist in an anthropological museum.” ❚

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories, Karen Duffek and Tania Willard, with contributions by Glenn Alteen, Marcia Crosby, Jimmie Durham et al., Figure 1 Publishing and Museum of Anthropology at UBC, 182 pages, hardcover, $45.00.

Robin Laurence is a Vancouver-based writer, curator and contributing editor to Border Crossings.