The Entangled Aesthetics of Alex Janvier.

摘要

Dene abstract painter Alex Janvier (b. 1935-) is a canonical figure in Native American art history due to his pioneering engagement with modernism and his role in shifting the reception of Native art in Canada from a craft to fine arts status. While his historical consequence is respected, however, the formal and critical content of his work is little understood. That content adapts the Bauhaus pursuit of an abstract grammar to Dene conceptions of mapping land through hunter's dreams, producing a richly entangled cartography of Janvier's traditional homeland, the present-day Cold Lake Air Weapons Range in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. It also appropriates popular imagery of Plains Native Americans, deploying that pictorial iconography in provocatively ambiguous ways that blur the boundaries of Native identity. Both Janvier's pictorialism and abstraction present a conceptual and formal aesthetic of cultural and personal entanglement, generating a complex, postcolonial ambivalence not widely recognized in the work of first generation Native modernists. This close study reopens Janvier's modernist oeuvre to consider its conflicted as well as triumphant elements, and to argue that their uncanny synthesis in his work constitutes his defining contribution to modern art.