Authority is an Attribute … Revisited

Abstract

As we drove down the Red Squirrel Road to attend the conference that gave rise to this issue, the foliage was lush. I hadn't been down this road for a long time. I had expected everything to be the same, but it was different. A knot formed in my stomach. This puzzled me. I stretched to see traces of the former clear-cuts. Occasionally, I detected a barren area about 20 feet in. On an earlier trip, I had photographed a collection of three-year-old pines planted in gravel not too far from the road. Those pines struggled to attach themselves to the rock. I still have the photographs; but the pines are gone, and poplars have grown in. famous Red Squirrel Road....Certainly the events of the Red Squirrel Road blockades and the Bear Island land claim had extended the direction of my art work. blending of my art and my activism became my means of support for the Red Squirrel Road blockades. During the blockades, the local and provincial governments negotiated to ensure the manifestation was a peaceful one. It appeared that strategies used by the empowered had significantly changed since my involvement with civil disobedience in the 1960s and 1970s. But, was this the case or, rather, had the violence of authority been hidden behind a charade of negotiation, as in Chief Justice McEachern's ruling on the Gitksan/Wet'suweten land claim in British Columbia? And perhaps here, with the irregular prosecution of demonstrators on the Red Squirrel Road blockades? I wanted to know more, how and why. As in the past, I am able to research my questions and experiences by means of making art.The original exhibition, Authority is an Attribute [Part 1], investigated the dynamics of power versus authority relationships. It failed, however, to scrutinize the complexities and complicities of this theme beyond the expressive, knee-jerk polarities of victim and exploiter. collaboration was an opportunity to develop these concepts more thoroughly, at the same time as bringing their cause to the gallery-going public. Authority is an Attribute ... Part II, explored the concept of authority as it extends into power relations and gamesmanship-like strategies. To represent this visually, I designed the installation to provoke tension between three major components: Cautioned Homes and Gardens, The Game Players and Authority is an Attribute of Power Relations. work went through many stages before it arrived at this form, however, and became a collaboration with the Teme-Augama Anishnabai.My initial gesture was simple, and perhaps naive. I photographed models (my urban friends) dressed as they would appear for work. They were directed to look at the camera through a large pair of binoculars. It was important for them to look benign in every way, as I wanted them to represent an ordinary range of the general public. binoculars would re-position the reading of the commonplace to include connotations of desire and scrutiny. These images were printed life-sized and placed along the logging road to be photographed. I also photographed them in the forests and the clear- cuts. As I trundled though dense bush with an armament of photographic equipment and armloads of stand-up photos, my friends from Bear Island alternated between laughing at the city chick and using those life-sized figures to act out their frustration with the Ontario government. As I watched and listened, I began to hear the stories not printed in the Globe and Mail or in the literature from the Temagami Wilderness Society.These animated sessions with friends and the cut-out photo-figures was where the collaboration really began to extend beyond the agit- prop gesture into the newer forms of documentary photography. I knew that the Temagami issue was not just a clash between logging and conservation. Yet at the time that was the perception of the Toronto public, stripped of its braided historical relationship to aboriginal rights, forestry policies and tourism. …