Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant's Fiction by Lesley D. Clement (review)

humanities 539 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 the 1980s. Odjig is lauded as a role model who led First Nations artists to artistic freedom and Canadian recognition. In the foreword, Toronto gallery owner Phillip Gevik describes his personal relationship with the artist. Since Gevik represents Odjig, I wonder whether this is a gallery publication made to promote and sell Odjig=s work. More a coffee table book than a scholarly endeavour, this account of the creation of the New Woodland School with Norval Morrisseau presents little that is new, although it serves as an excellent teaching tool for the uninformed. Like that of Blackstock, Odjig=s work moves beyond expected borders. Odjig refused to be limited by her status as First Nations or female, innovatively amalgamating her First Nations spirituality with modernism. Odjig stated in 1993: >I feel the time is long overdue to slow down the manufacturing of so many little cultural boxes into which we stuff creative art, which professed experts decide isn=t mainstream. Let=s not continue forever the obsession to relegate or assign creative art to narrow ethnic stereotypes.= Odjig combined the Anishinabe midewewin belief system with Picasso=s cubist vocabulary, thus resisting the expectations of the Western art world to be either all >authentic Indian= or all >modern artist.= In fact, Boyer points out how Odjig=s work was ahead of its time as she explored pluralism twenty years before it became the focus for postmodern artists. It is ironic that while Podedworny describes Odjig as a self-taught artist who promotes >art without borders; vision without blinders; ideas without restrictions,= she still defines Odjig by her artistic style B the >New Woodland aesthetic= confined to >linear determinatives= and >lyrical formline.= Also, I get the impression that Odjig, often characterized as modest and humble, might not like having the mantle of >important cultural spokesperson= and >cultural activist= thrust upon her. Odjig appears to deflect an emphasis on her Native politics, and instead refers us to her paintings, which are beyond labels. One quote of hers even states: >I am uncomfortable with words B my paintings are perhaps my most honest and legitimate statement.= Certainly, Odjig=s paintings stimulate the viewer=s visual and aesthetic senses, but seem strangely free-floating from the book=s texts. Whether either of these books is effective at promoting fresh vision is up to each reader to decide. (JENNIFER KRAMER) Lesley D. Clement. Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant=s Fiction McGill-Queen=s University Press. xii, 294. $65.00 Mavis Gallant=s writing has drawn the attention of some of Canada=s finest scholars. Lesley D. Clement certainly adds to this work. Usefully following Gallant=s career-length engagement with the visual arts, this study will significantly influence the way Gallant=s fiction will be read in the future. Learning to Look contains truly innovative scholarship, a careful treatment of 540 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 both visual arts theory and various philosophies of visuality, and gifted literary exegesis. In an effort to be faithful to Gallant=s dazzling complexity, Clement offers intimately attentive and original readings; my only misgiving is that this meticulous approach sometimes results in so much textual citation that the study=s analytical drive occasionally bogs down in local detail. Clement persuasively demonstrates that knowledge of the techniques and theoretical postulates of twentieth-century visual representation B from kineticism to film and cartography B allows the reader to discern Gallant=s often oblique formal experimentation. Integrating art theory with Gallant=s journalism, essays, and interviews, Clement alerts us to the vigorous aesthetic dynamic taking place in the fiction=s unobtrusive fragmentation and subdued surrealism, its >enigmatic and distorted quality= of collapsing background with foreground. Most important for Clement, these formal intricacies become strategic explorations of epistemological and ethical dilemmas. Gallant=s characters are enmeshed within the social and existential politics of visual perception, most often to the detriment of their own well-being. To exist in the present, Clement argues, means to be gazed upon by unrelenting forces of memory, a situation that is made...