On Bertram Brooker.

Glamour of the Underfolk.

"There is so much heat in my heart, that Humanity cannot escape being scorched, no man shall escape the heat of my heart. [...] I am the overflowing scourge whom God has sent down to chasten the earth. [...] I am the champion of the Underfolk." (Brooker, 155-156)

Unlike the majority of Canadian artists working in the first half of the twentieth century, Bertram Brooker wrote voluminously about his own work and that of his contemporaries, expounding and elaborating his aesthetic theories in different milieus. His attempt to articulate a peculiarly Canadian form of Modernism that could respond to the demands of his adopted nation frequently involved a mildly antagonistic engagement with the specifically English strains of Modernism, embodied, at least in his mind, by Wyndham Lewis, who he refers to as a pessimistic and reactionary humanist (Brooker, 215). And while the influence of Vorticism is clearly present in much of his work, and the critique of the Time Cult is also echoed, Brooker's answer to the issues which Lewis raised were very much his own.

Ruth B. Phillips: Piety and Propaganda.

For Ruth B. Phillips, the museum functions as a 'diagnostic' device for 'Western modernity' as it progressively displaces the religious sphere as the domain of art.¹ In its place is erected a monument to secularism, the establishment of the nation state and the domination of indigenous people. This is the backdrop she draws for her polemical article "A Proper Place for Art or the Proper Arts of Place? Native North American Objects and the Hierarchies of Art, Craft, and Souvenir." From her first sentences, Phillips spells out the ideological claim she's staking. Note that she uncritically naturalizes 'indigenous systems of spirituality, expressive culture, and value' while insisting on the artificial quality of 'idealist notions of art and scientific paradigms of objecthood'.² In effect, 'Western' could be understood in her lexicon as artifice, variously regarded as a 'mystification' and 'commoditization' process. Therefore, when she comes to speak of cultural hybridization, a substantial part of what she is insisting on is the entrance of a previously non-capitalist culture into the international market. What her article struggles with is the nature of this reterritorialization.