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Framed by History

Framed by History The National Gallery was attempting to avoid controversy with their Group of Seven show Art for a Nation, a conservative reconstruction of the Group's annual exhibits. The exhibit and catalogue strove to be straightforward presentations of history, to offer the facts as if given, avoiding the complications which come with interpretation. The catalogue documents: beyond a history of the group constructed from correspondence and critical notices, it makes little attempt to comment on the work's meaning or the legacy of the Group's project. The paintings are presented as facts, as given objects within a determined, and determining, context. Viewed as auto - constructing objects, they constitute for themselves an empirical meaning which grounds itself in the Group's project, itself grounded in their connection to the land. The context of the exhibit seeks to erase itself. Such re - creation, such insistence on the historical as the natural context of the work strives towards transparency. The re - creation, in assuming and insisting on the given ground of historical facts, presents itself not as interpretation, but as a transparent medium for perceiving the meaning inherent in the work. This attempt at transparency is rendered highly visible when Art for a Nation becomes inscribed within the OH! Canada Project. The imposition of an additional frame around the exhibit provides a ground against which the figure of the National Gallery's conceptual framework stands out. It is as if the conservativeness of the National Gallery's attempts at contextualisation were unassimilatable by the AGO, which felt the need to eliminate the irritation caused by this foreign body and so surrounded it with the AGO'S own accretions of meaning. The additional framework exposed the way in which the initial contextualisation, in its attempt to naturalize itself, established limits for interpreting the work. However, in exposing the limitations of the National Gallery's contextualisation, the AGO only further inscribed them: the AGO'S rewriting of the exhibit as the OH! Canada Project accepted the limits of Art for a Nation as its starting point. The show sat in the center of its framings, surrounded on one side by the advertising, the ticket booths and the projections enticing us up the ramp (OH! OH! OH!), and on the other by an exhibit of more contemporary artistic statements on the state of the nation in conversation with video kiosks featuring "contemporary" Canadians on this topic. The Group's inscription as "history," as past, as the past, is intensified by the addition of this supplement which defines itself as the current and the contemporary. The Group and their project are positioned in the conversation as those who ceased talking a long time ago. In the staging of the exhibit we thus witness the attempt to preserve, to restore to the original state, to capture the original, "true," meaning. To so insist on the inscription of the works in a replica of their original context suggests that they are unable to go beyond it. If the primary importance of the works is to be found in the controversy they provoked and the surrounding atmosphere, the implication is that they (and we) have not travelled beyond that moment. It suggests that in order to understand the works one must see them in their proper context, but this moment of preservation removes them from their present context in order to preserve their meaning. Like any attempt at framing it asserts that it knows what is extrinsic and what is intrinsic, what is proper to the work and what is extraneous. Here it is useful to cite Derrida's problematization of Kant's conception of the frame and its relation to an understanding of art as historical. If one were to consider the physis/tekhne opposition to be irreducible, if one were to accredit so hastily its translation as nature/art or nature/technique, one would easily commit oneself to thinking that art, being no longer nature, is history. …