In the mid twentieth century the Canadian Federal and Territorial
governments acted in concert to link Arctic art production to
cold cash. Bringing a North/South view to bear on this history,
the Art and Cold Cash collective is involved in producing art
in the southern Canadian cities of Toronto and London, Ontario,
and at the same time in a social site in the Canadian Arctic,
the community of Baker Lake, Nunavut. The contemporary context
of Baker Lake is characterized by the existence of imported Western
notions of art operating in tandem with the introduction of capitalist
exchange. In an investigative mode, Canadian artists Jack Butler,
Sheila Butler and Patrick Mahon are working closely with writer,
Ruby Arngna'naaq, and artist, William Noah, Inuit members of the
collective who have lived through the change from barter economy
to capitalism. The work of the Art and Cold Cash collective highlights
an important contradiction, in that Northern artists are encouraged
today, as over the past fifty years, to produce art and to market
their own culture as a means of survival, while Southern Canadian
artists regularly take jobs to subsidize their practices.
Examining Inuit art in the context of the introduction of capitalism
into the Canadian Arctic is the primary concern in the exhibition
project Art and Cold Cash. This project is unique in that it brings
for the first time three senior Canadian artists, who have lived
and worked in the Arctic, together in collaboration with an Inuit
artist and an Inuit writer/curator. Central to this process of
engagement is the Collective's plan to mount a series of exhibitions
in airports in northern and southern Canada over a period of a
year or longer, featuring individual works by Jack Butler, Sheila
Butler, Patrick Mahon, William Noah and Myra Kukiiyaut, writing
by Ruby Arngna'naaq and video documentation of artistic/creative
events created on-site in Baker Lake.
It is clear that in southern urban Canada as well as in the Arctic,
in the wake of European nineteenth and twentieth century art history,
art works as commodities occupy troubled ground. The project Art
and Cold Cash effectively problematizes some of the many assumptions
that inhere in the collecting of art in contemporary southern
urban sites, in addition to bringing a new template for critical
analysis to art produced for export in Baker Lake. The project
team is committed to thinking of collective art making and analysis
as culturally necessary and creatively expansive at this time
of increasing globalization.
A key factor in Art and Cold Cash is the history of twentieth
century Inuit art production as concurrent with the introduction
of capitalist exchange in the Canadian Arctic. In the mid twentieth
century the Canadian Federal and Territorial governments acted
in concert to link Arctic art production to cold cash. At that
time, widespread introduction of firearms for hunting led to increasing
dependence on trade, and that, coupled with the introduction of
tuberculosis and other factors, brought an end to thousands of
years of a nomadic way of life. Settlements were established by
Canadian Federal and Territorial governments and small, formerly
nomadic Inuit groups gradually accepted a more sedentary existence,
relying far less on hunting and trapping for subsistence. Soon,
government funded arts and crafts production projects were founded
in several Arctic communities as an intervention intended to provide
gainful employment for displaced Inuit. Contacts, mediated by
government Crafts Officers, were made with southern urban art
dealers and some Inuit producers became known as artists (in the
sense that the dominant culture uses that term). These artists
earned money for their labour and became players in global capitalism
as both producers and consumers. Art that in pre-European contact
times served as decoration and religious fetish mutated into art
as commodity, and also served as the cultural voice and image
of the Canadian Arctic. Paradoxically, art as the bearer of intangible
meanings nevertheless has distinct social import. In this context,
Inuit traditional cultural values that prioritized the good of
the collective compelled a response, albeit unevenly, to the capitalist
system's emphasis on the good of the individual.
