In the Field of Visibility: Cadieux, Houle, Lukacs

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 3, summer 2002 SUSAN DOUGLAS In the Field of Visibility: Cadieux, Houle, Lukacs A number of contemporary artists in some way represent both a specific geographical context and a certain definition of the nation, by default, as the local, refused. This decentred figuration of the national raises interesting questions about the processes of selection that construct culture. Some of the most vital currents of Canadian art spring from such a concern with interchangeable local, national, and international cultural references. And, in many works of the 1980s and 1990s, a fascination with notions of transportation, translation and/or transformation suggests traversing and blurring of categories as a specific goal. I can think of two examples immediately . Jana Sterbak=s mixed-media work brings contemporary and historical references together, and Betty Goodwin=s work uses the notion of transport to refer the viewer to a metaphysical dimension. Practices such as these suggest that members of the art world inhabit a border zone with the failures of communication that this may often imply. This domain is a place of potential cross-cultural dialogue and possibility. This area of blurred categories paradoxically provides the focus for our current sense of a national aesthetic sharing a common vocabulary in vision and visuality. These terms >vision= and >visuality= refer to sight as an optical fact and as a perceptual and historical phenomenon, respectively. Art writers are involved in investigating vision and visuality in a double sense. On one hand, they refer to seeing as represented in and constructed by works of art, and on the other hand to the critical economy of reading and looking through presupposed intellectual categories and habits. The >visibility =of artworks therefore touches on the problem of representation according to the work=s contexts and the artist=s situation and the critic=s predilections. Sight is also a means of self-scrutiny, or self-reflexivity. There exists a parallel of sorts between the object=s formulation within the social formations of gender, class, race, and sexual difference operating through the artist, and the viewer=s perception of the object. The work of practitioners in the visual arts makes a discursive space for vision and visuality, and tends to proceed by mapping out a discontinuous space for a series of negotiable aesthetic, social, and cultural encounters. There is still another sense in which vision and visuality are important. The address to the eye implicit in the artist=s work binds form to a range of u questions centring on the presupposition of the absoluteness of vision. Theories of vision and visuality have for some time now also been gathering momentum in the form of an ever-expanding number of revisions, so to speak, of the founding claims of >the Gaze.= Artists, intellectual historians, philosophers, art historians, and others have referred to the gaze strategically and deliberately.1 One thing that becomes clear from theories of vision and visuality in critical debates is that it maps a complex terrain of inquiry. As a discourse, the field of vision and visuality does not attempt to reach conclusive resolutions about the making of meaning, but is rather a terrain of play, or an opening that brings theoretically necessary propositions into focus. One thing that scholars pay attention to is the idea that an innocent, >objective= eye belonging to an unsituated viewer emanates from a neutral undifferentiated visual field. The role the subject plays in sustaining the myth that vision is transparent becomes important, since to be able to reformulate the operations of the field of knowledge means to take account of political and cultural reality and experience. It directs us to the matter of distribution among artist and audience, who, arguably, both depend on a shared system of representation. Where this presumed shared system is not in fact shared, then the meaning is determined by the visual impressions bound to the values of the privileged viewing subject. Because subjects are neither racially nor sexually undifferentiated in the culture, there is no such thing as an >innocent eye.= What is actually or potentially available in terms of the making of meaning is a constantly evolving translation process growing out of...