Confederation: 150 Years, 23 Prime Ministers by Mora Dianne O'Neill (review)

There was no merchandise for the Confederation show in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia's shop: no pictures of prime ministers on t-shirts, no prime minister bobblehead figures or finger puppets, not even any respectful portrait reproductions in tasteful postcard format or copies of Michael Bliss's Right Honourable Mentemporarily in stock. Without "merch," was this a real art exhibit? Yes, it was real, but it was decidedly minor. Assembled out of works from the gallery's permanent collections, supplemented by a few local loans, the show earnestly attempted to get with the sesquicentennial program. Standing at its entrance, I could feel the lure of the Canadian paintings gallery next door. There was a tantalizing glimpse of the glowing red toques and springtime snow and maple trees in Adam Sherriff Scott's luscious Old Time Sugaring Party. Pictures of prime ministers had some stiff competition for gallery-goers' eyes.

Curated by Mora Dianne O'Neill, the gallery's long-serving and scholarly associate curator for historical prints and drawings, the exhibit was attractively presented on navy blue walls in the long, narrow historical prints and drawings gallery. For each prime minister, O'Neill provided an identifying interpretive text that was two or three sentences long, about fifty words, in easily readable twenty-four-point type, hung somewhere near eye level. Each text was wrapped around a thumbnail reproduction of each prime minister's official portrait. With so little text, this was not an exhibit for readers.

The texts were quiz-show material–the youngest prime minister, the longest serving, the only woman, the sponsor of this or that landmark measure. Louis St Laurent's great claim to fame is that he over-saw the admission of Newfoundland and Labrador to Confederation. R.B. Bennett failed to "off-set the effects of the Great Depression" and died as the only prime minister who was "elevated to the British peerage." John A. Macdonald gets "chief architect of Confederation," the Pacific scandal, and disliked for his "attitude to First Nations and Métis." Because this is Nova Scotia, the exhibit's context-setting remarks note that six of the twenty-three prime ministers had connections–birth, education, or constituency–to the province. But there is no political or social history narrative here, just a set of "fun-fact" hooks to snag the gallery-goer's curiosity.

So was the show about how the history of visual culture helps us to understand changing representations of Canada or politics through our leaders? O'Neill's brief curatorial essay (about 320 words) makes some observations about the various genres in which prime ministers have been pictured: political cartoons, mass print, sculpture (both folk and fine art), and official portraits, whether on the currency or postage stamps or hanging in the House of Commons. A bigger show, properly funded, with less of the "make-do" about it, might have traced some changes in one or several of these genres. Here, however, we get an assortment of happenstance, some of it beautiful, some of it informative.

Colour lithograph portraits of Alexander Mackenzie and John Abbott from mass-circulation, illustrated newspapers were neither informative nor beautiful. They give us the starchy statesman in all his uninteresting public perfection, as does William Lyon Mackenzie King's visage on the $50 bill (framed on the wall in this show) and Arthur Meighen's face looking vaguely Warholian in the multiples of a 1961 mint sheet of 5 cent stamps. These public faces tell us only that such interesting men could become forgettable, regardless of their struggles and importance. Lester Pearson, Stephen Harper, and Jean Chrétien seem more obviously interesting because of hilarious depictions by a few of our country's best cartoonists, present in this show because of their Nova Scotia links.

And then by pure accident, it seems, the curator had two sculptures by Saskatchewan's Joe Fafard to work with. One is Fafard's delightful [End...