Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau by Carmen L. Robertson

Author:Carmen L. Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
Published: 2016-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

1980s: An Unruly International Art Star

[Morrisseau] lived life in epic proportions ... great drunks, long absences from work, dramatic trances and probably recurring fits of suspicion of the giant he had unleashed and the giant powers of the art market ... he had become a star of the fickle, fast-moving popular art market which set life at a pace and made demands that he could not temperamentally cope with.1

Grace Inglis, Hamilton Spectator, 1982

The 1980s was a time when Morrisseau was continually linked to the terms magic, magician, and shaman. Beginning in 1981 with a headline that stated that Morrisseau was exploring “Magic Forests of the Mind,” reporters began to use the term “magic” in both laudatory (as in this case) and derisive ways. After a series of negative stories in May 1987, a Globe and Mail piece began with a quote by Morrisseau, who also uses “magical” to describe his art: “ ‘Now Is the Magical Moment. I Start Again.’ No Regrets, No Booze for Norval Morrisseau.”2 Whether noting that Morrisseau’s magic was drained or labelling Morrisseau a magician, art critics, reporters, and curators used the term to either reinforce his shamanic powers or belittle him as little more than a flim-flam artist—all smoke and mirrors. At the end of the decade he appeared in an important international art exhibition in Paris, France, to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. The exhibition, titled Magiciens de la Terre, framed him and other artists from around the globe as magicians. Firmly established as a shaman artist, Morrisseau’s mythical identity gels as a magician, though this part of his myth did not endure beyond the 1990s.

The main events that cropped up in papers during this decade highlight the ongoing bifurcation of the artist and the Imaginary Indian, except that in the 1980s the highs reached much higher and the lows found depths much lower than had otherwise been publicly reported. Morrisseau was both feted and dismissed in competing narratives. One example of dismissal of Morrisseau’s significance occurred in an art review in 1980. Art Perry, writing in the Vancouver Province about an exhibition of Morrisseau’s art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, lamented that the art had not remained authentically aligned with pre-contact Woodland traditions, which he characterized as a “once sincere art form.”3 The provocative headline, “It’s Sham Rather than Shamanism,” inspired the title of Blundell and Phillips’s 1983 essay on media analysis and Morrisseau’s art.4 Perry finds fault with Morrisseau’s art and image as a shaman because the artist refused to maintain a frozen-in-time image the reviewer valued.5

As in the 1970s, Morrisseau was compared to other Indigenous artists and for the most part, he lost out to educated artists like Janvier and Houle. Carl Beam now took the place of Alex Janvier as an artistic comparison for Morrisseau in the press, perhaps because he was also Anishinaabe and from northwestern Ontario. Beam’s art practice was radically different from Morrisseau’s and prompted stark judgements. Described in a 1981 news story

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