The North is very much on our collective minds lately – especially in the wake of recent news that TransCanada has suspended its application procedure to build the 1200-mile Keystone-XL pipeline to transport tar sands-extracted oil across the U.S. Plains states to the Gulf of Mexico – at least temporarily sparing Alberta’s boreal forests from degradation and probable destruction. (Picture here Oz’s ‘Good Witch of the North’ waving her wand – representing the ‘invisible hand’ of market capitalism, of course – over the Canadian Northwest.) In the meantime, the President, perhaps awakening to the fact in advance of the Paris climate negotiations that the Earth is dying, has thrown another wrinkle into these maneuvers by announcing his administration will come to a definitive decision regarding the pipeline before his term in office expires. [BREAKING NEWS: While this post is going up, the President is announcing the State Department’s rejection of the Trans-Canada’s Keystone-XL pipeline application.] Then there are all the Americans in the Southwest and Western states contemplating their own transmigrations northward – if not to Canada exactly, certainly in some convenient proximity to the border. (I wonder occasionally if it’s more the idea of life we’re preoccupied with lately; we’re surrounded by so much death.) Northern light, northern life – here in the most perverse city on earth, we’re preoccupied with all of it right now, sunbeaten and exhausted under a not-so-sheltering sky with clean water disappearing all around us (its ubiquitous appearance in plastic bottles a signature perversity).

I felt the first surge of joy in months when I saw the Hammer Museum’s initial announcement of The Idea of North exhibition. (I think my body temperature may have actually dropped a degree Fahrenheit.) I knew next to nothing about Lawren Harris, but melting glaciers suddenly advanced in my imagination as I contemplated the possibilities. Setting aside my nordic heredity (and some might say temperament), I go way back with The Idea of North. No one needed to tell me the title was inspired by Glenn Gould’s radio play/documentary and essay of the same name. I was well acquainted with both since around 1969. (It probably helped a bit that, like millions of amateur pianists and Baroque freaks, I was a rabid fan of Glenn Gould since childhood.) To listen to the play/documentary (I would not call it merely a documentary – it is clearly orchestrated, harmonized, dramatized by that master of counterpoint himself), is to be transported, rhapsodized to places closely observed, abstracted, imagined, lived – interactions on multiple levels simultaneously that make their own improvisational music. (I’ve always felt that the NPR radio program, RadioLab produced by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, was strongly influenced by Gould’s radio-documentary style.)  

I’m not going to comment at length on the Harris show. I thought Christopher Knight’s Los Angeles Times review was a pretty thorough (and accurate) assessment of its limited strengths and pre-set limitations. There were any number of people who pretty much shared the same opinion. A friend and colleague who, like me, was transported at the mere thought of the show, was also less than rapturous about the actual exhibition. I’m not sure if I’d call it a ‘one-note’ show – but maybe one chord. (Oh … yeah. Tonic C-major triad, C above middle C – ‘kay? I think my pal and I were looking for something on the order of sixths and fourths….) The show is handsomely hung and I enjoyed walking through it; though it occurred to me on the particularly miserable day I previewed it, that my first impressions (and those of some of my peers) were enhanced simply by the relief we all felt escaping from the heat into an air-conditioned space hung with these pictorial icebergs. The Symbolist connection immediately occurred to me, too (and I have a special fondness for Symbolism); but I agree with Knight that the work is in no way in the same class as, say, Arthur Dove or Hartley. But speaking of ideas, tonalities, harmonies, counterpoint, there were so many opportunities lost here to move beyond Harris and towards a real idea. What about the entire Canadian Group of Seven, especially A. Y. Jackson (it was Gould’s essay that first led me to his work)? Or for that matter, other American, especially New York/Hudson River School, artists influenced by it? And – excuse me for getting a bit feminist here – but what about a woman?? And yes, of course before the seven male artists had ever confabbed, Emily Carr had been producing striking landscape work in her native Victoria and Vancouver, visibly influenced by the French Symbolists and Post-Impressionists, in the early years of the century. To his credit, Harris became a leading supporter of her work in the late 1920s after her participation in a major 1927 show at Ottawa’s National Museum.

What is lost here is something crucial: beyond the focus on Harris, or for that matter the entire Group of Seven, the notion of a specific terrain as an ideational screen; the fascination of geography, human tools and metrics; the human approach (variously purposeful, predatory, abstracted, distracted) to habitat; the peculiarly human capacity for projecting the universal into the particular. One thing notable about the Harris paintings: the absence of the human figure. (For that matter, there’s not a lot of vegetation to speak of, either.) Looking at some of these paintings, you’re sort of paralyzed between serenity and sterility. And, as the aborted TransCanada boondoggle demonstrates, the species seems determined hell and high-water, to sterilize the terrain until even its last fossilized remains have been consumed to destroy the atmosphere that once sheltered us from more than just solar radiation. The Hammer has taken the initiative through its public programs over the last year or so to seriously address the problems of drought and water/irrigation, climate change and environmental degradation. The Harris exhibition could have been an excellent portal for any number of such programs or conversations. These are conversations we need to have: there will soon be a lot of people for whom ‘the north’ will be much more than simply an idea.