Canadian postmodern art: Deconstructing the North -Identity, Irony, and the Canadian Postmodern Landscape

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Deconstructing the North: Identity, Irony, and the Canadian Postmodern Landscape

Canadian postmodern art, emerging with full force in the late 1970s and flourishing through the end of the twentieth century, represents a complex and critical departure from the modernist quest for purity and universal truth. Instead of a cohesive style, postmodernism in Canada was a set of attitudes—a skeptical, playful, and often subversive re-examination of the images, narratives, and structures that shape our reality. It turned its focus to the politics of representation, questioning the authority of history, challenging fixed notions of identity, and employing strategies like appropriation, parody, and pastiche to dismantle and critique the very idea of a single, monolithic Canadian culture. Through this process, Canadian artists did not reject identity but rather explored it as a multifaceted, contested, and constructed space.

Image by: By User:Oto – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32415207

The End of the Grand Narrative: Challenging History and Myth

A central tenet of postmodern thought is incredulity toward “metanarratives”—the overarching stories societies tell about themselves to legitimize power structures and cultural norms. Canadian artists took aim at these narratives, particularly those surrounding history, nationalism, and the myth of the wilderness.

• Deconstructing History: Artists like Ken Lum drew attention to the construction of historical memory. His photo-text works, such as those juxtaposing portraits with conflicting captions, expose how history is written from specific viewpoints, often erasing or marginalizing certain voices. Similarly, Jeff Wall, in his large-scale, cinematic lightboxes, often reconstructed historical moments or social types to reveal the fragility and subjectivity of our understanding of the past.
• The Ironic Landscape: The Group of Seven’s romantic, sublime vision of an empty, untamed land was a powerful national myth. Postmodern artists confronted this directly. General Idea (AA Bronson, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal) used pop art aesthetics and camp irony to critique the art world and media-saturated society, but their work also parodied Canadian symbols. Michael Snow’s seminal film La Région Centrale (1971) used a mechanized camera to create a dizzying, 360-degree portrait of a Quebec landscape, not to evoke sublime wonder but to deconstruct the very act of looking and representing nature through technology.

Appropriation and the Image World: Sampling a Media-Saturated Culture

Living in an increasingly media-driven world, postmodern artists adopted appropriation—the direct lifting of existing images from art history, advertising, and mass media—as a primary strategy. This was not mere copying; it was a critical tool to examine how meaning is created and circulated.

• The Copy as Critique: Colin Campbell used video to appropriate the language of television, creating ironic and often humorous narratives that explored gender roles and personal identity. Robin Collyer sculpturally replicated mundane commercial packaging and architectural forms, stripping them of their function to question the aesthetics of consumerism and the branded environment.
• Re-framing the Familiar: Photographers like Lynne Cohen captured eerily empty interior spaces—classrooms, lobbies, firing ranges—that felt both familiar and alienating. Her work appropriated the cool, detached style of documentary photography to highlight the bizarre and often sinister nature of institutional and social spaces.

The Constructed Self: Identity as Performance

If postmodernism asserts that there is no essential, stable self, then identity becomes a performance shaped by social, political, and cultural forces. This was a particularly potent area of exploration for artists focused on gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism.

• Performing Gender and Sexuality: General Idea’s entire persona was a performance of artistic identity. Their most famous work, FILE Megazine (1972-1989), parodied LIFE Magazine, inserting themselves and their art world circle into the glamorous language of mass media. This work, along with their ongoing AIDS Project, used appropriation and performance to tackle urgent social issues and critique media sensationalism.
• The Multicultural Portrait: Jamelie Hassan and Stan Douglas explored the complexities of multicultural identity and the legacy of colonialism. Douglas’s photographic work often re-staged historical moments to reveal the tensions and contradictions within urban social landscapes, particularly in his native Vancouver. These works challenged the official narrative of Canadian multiculturalism as a peaceful, seamless mosaic, pointing instead to its fractures and complexities.

Conclusion: A Legacy of Critical Inquiry

Canadian postmodern art was never about rejecting Canadian themes outright. Instead, it was about asking harder, more critical questions of them: Whose history is being told? Whose landscape is being represented? Who is included in the national identity, and who is excluded? By employing irony, appropriation, and deconstruction, artists of this period broke down the dominant narratives of the past to create a space for a more fragmented, diverse, and questioning contemporary dialogue. Their legacy is a Canadian art scene that is self-aware, critically engaged, and relentlessly skeptical of easy answers—a vibrant and necessary evolution from the myths that preceded it. The postmodern moment taught us that identity is not found, but made, and that process of making is the very subject of art itself.