Hiding the Audience: Viewing Arts and Arts Institutions on the Prairies (review)

This book can read like polemic: 'Theatre, like sculpture, has an important role to play in decentring the narrative of conquest and victimization that has mostly marked the dominant culture representations of the relationship between Euro-North American and Native North American peoples.' Nevertheless, this is an essential book for anyone interested in Canadian culture and cultural practices west of Toronto. Frances W. Kaye unravels our cultural foibles, the extent of our blindness and general stumbling around. She also shows that even within institutions changes can be made, stereotypes abandoned, or at least modified, and new ways of looking, and even healing, embraced. As a focal point of her narrative she follows Aboriginal author Thomas King's lead. He too remodelled classic myths, choosing some of the larger ones to execute or at least undermine along the way.

Kaye focuses on the one about the vanishing Indian, whose numbers were in fact increasing at the same time that the Native and the Native way of life were being declared dead and his cultural objects of the present deemed less artful than those he had produced in the past. None of this is particularly newsworthy, but Kaye presents her story effectively, marshalling new evidence while telling important and extended stories that are impressive in their minutiae. As the pieces of her larger story fall into place, we are left with a clearer picture of western Canadian cultural practices and initiatives than more conventional narratives might have provided. That said, Kaye's failure to discuss the Winnipeg Art Gallery, its unique history and broadly based community creation story, is a significant omission from this history of western Canadian cultural initiatives which would have added important settler lines to her palimpsest while offering an interesting contrast to Alberta institutions which came about differently.

Instead Kaye's focus is on three other public arts institutions, two in Alberta and one in Saskatoon: the Banff Centre, Calgary's Glenbow Alberta Institute, and the Saskatoon Twenty-Fifth Street House Theatre. Alongside these discussions are intertwined an examination of Aboriginal novelist Thomas King, who writes about western Canadian Natives, and a detailed treatment of public sculpture initiatives in Saskatchewan and Manitoba to honour Louis Riel. Individually the stories are fascinating. Together they form a convincing critique of Euro-North American difficulties in knowing how to treat their Native peoples or, despite often good intentions, how to be anything but condescending from the first get go. Saskatchewan officials' attempts to honour Louis Riel reveal not only the often dubious intentions behind public monuments but also the insecurities underlying settler culture. That organizers of the Riel monument project in Saskatchewan thought that it would be appropriate to commission that purveyor of international modernism, New York art critic Clement Greenberg, to purchase a Riel monument in the eastern US is one of the humdingers of her discussion. Kaye's portrayal of the Twenty-Fifth Street Theatre project gives faces to the word 'heartland' as artists actually talked to people about their lives before writing and performing their play, unabashedly entitled Paper Wheat. This is a particularly successful chapter in the book, as it honours both players and audience alike and the often shunned but still enduring practices and traditions of prairie regionalism.

A book on western Canadian cultural practices would not be complete without a discussion of the exhibition The Spirit Sings. This exhibition grew out of the Glenbow's attempts to honour indigenous art at the time of the 1988 Olympics. What started as a project designed to bring pre-contact indigenous art to Canada and Calgary for public display became a major public relations nightmare. It also revealed how cultural institutions without political savvy might end up compromised by moneyed interests while waving flags of academic integrity and other equally good intentions. As Kaye notes in her final chapter, as a result of this: 'No longer is the museum a static and objective...